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THE  SOCIALISM  OF  TO-DAY.

When  Alexander  II.  decreed  the  abolition  of  serfdom  in
1861,  Bakunin  was  in  hopes  that  he  was  going  to  be  the  Tsar
of  the  peasants,  Zemsky  Tsar,  a  name  which  he  gave  him  in
the  Kolokol.  Alexander  was  to  break  with  the  traditions  of
Peter  the  Great,  who  had  introduced  into  holy  Russia  the
hateful  institutions  of  the  West,  and  to  substitute  for  them  the
equal  laws  of  the  Slavs.  “  Unhappily,”  said  he,  “  Alexander
is  German,  and  as  such  he  will  never  understand  the  Russia
of  the  peasants,  Zemskuiu  Rossiu.”  In  a  pamphlet  entitled
Romanoff,  Pugatcheff,  or  Pestel  (1862),  he  says,  “Whom  shall
we  follow?  Romanoff,  that  is  to  say,  Alexander  II.;  Pugatcheff,
that  is  to  say,  a  military  chief,  such  as  he  who  directed  the
insurrection  of  the  Cossacks  against  Catherine  ;  or  Pestel,  that
is  to  say,  a  conspirator  who  would  have  killed  the  Emperor  ?  ”
Pestel  was  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  conspiracy  against
Nicholas  I.,  in  1825.  He  was  arrested  and  hung.  Bakunin
explains  with  savage  enthusiasm  the  programme  of  Panslavism.
“  Oh  !  war  against  the  Germans,”  he  cries,  “  is  a  good  work
and  one  indispensable  for  the  Slavs.  We  must  restore  liberty
to  our  brothers  of  Poland,  of  Lithuania,  and  of  the  Ukraine,
and  march  in  a  body  to  the  deliverance  of  the  Slavs,  who  groan
under  the  yoke  of  Teutons  and  Turks.  Alliance  with  Italy,
Hungary,  Roumania,  and  Greece  against  Prussia,  Austria,  and
Turkey.  Realization  of  the  cherished  dream  of  all  Slavs  :  the
constitution  of  the  grand  free  Panslavic  Federation.”  At  this
time  Bakunin  was  still  imbued  with  the  narrow  idea  of
nationalities.  It  was  afterwards  that  he  rose  to  the  higher
conception  of  the  suppression  of  States,  to  be  henceforth  replaced ­
  by  the  amorphism  of  federal  autonomous  Communes.
Still  hatred  for  the  Germans  was,  so  to  speak,  in  his  blood.
It  was  never  extinguished,  and,  in  particular,  it  disclosed  itself,
bitter  and  implacable,  in  the  struggle  with  Marx.  It  was
Bakunin  who  took  the  lead  in  the  International  from  1870,  and
when  it  lost  all  its  influence,  through  the  divisions  of  parties,  it
was  the  Bakunist  Alliance  that  organized  in  Europe  the  propaganda ­
  of  revolutionary  Socialism.
It  is  in  the  two  countries  where  the  working  classes  are  best
organized  for  the  struggle,  England  and  Germany,  that  the