The Icon and the Axe

By the 1890's, however, a new generation of reform-minded intel- j lectuals was once more viewing Chicherin as a timid conservative* just as | Herzen had forty years earlier. The major spokesman for this new, more radical liberalism was another professor, Paul_Mjliukov, the learned and encyclopedic historian of Russian thought and culture. Miliukov's interpretation of Russian culture generally followed the line sketched out by Alexander Pypin, an Anglophile and positivist whose learned articles in The Herald of Europe had really begun the dispassionate, analytical study of the development of Russian thought. In the unfriendly atmosphere of the populist age, he took refuge in exhaustive studies of Russian thought and culture-a path which Miliukov was to follow on several occasions. Though a cousin of Chernyshevsky, Pypin opposed all extremism and sought to continue the tradition of the liberal Westernizers of the forties.

Miliukov translated this wish into practical political activity at the turn? of the century. He fortified his liberal, constitutional convictions with extensive travel in France, England, and America and was influential in steering the amorphous liberal movement into a clear-cut program for "the political liberation of Russia." The older aristocratic idea of increased local autonomy and personal liberty was subordinated in the program of the Union of Liberation to the abolition of autocracy. Miliukov urged the ¦ 'immediate convention of a legislative assembly during the war and upheaval of 1904-5; and the_Cadft patty^of which he was a leading spokesman, consistently sought to extend the authority of the consultative dumas which technically acquired legislative rights in August of 1905.

By identifying themselves psychologically with a still distant and idealized America even more than with England and France, the new Rus4 sian liberals were able to think of themselves as apostles of progress rather than apologists for bourgeois self-interest. Miliukov was only the first of a series of Russians to lecture widely in America and write for American journals; and the writings of Woodrow Wilson were known in Russia even before he entered the political arena in the United States. The introduction to a 1905 Russian translation of Wilson's The State, by Maxim Kov-alevsky, a long-time government official from one of Russia's most learned families, is as urbanely insistent on the rational rule of law (whether through constitutional monarchy or representative republicanism) as any contemporary Western essay. Two years earlier, Paul Vinogradoff, an emigre Russian veteran of the zemstvo constitutional movement, had climaxed his career as an authority on English constitutional law by his appointment to the Corpus chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford. Miliukov,