These are Nikolayon's general views.[288] He knows his Marx, we see, and has turned the two first volumes of _Capital_ to excellent use. And still, the whole trend of his argument is genuinely Sismondian. It is capitalism itself which brings about a shrinking home market since it impoverishes the masses; every calamity of modern society is due to the destruction of the 'populist' mode of production, that is to say the destruction of small-scale enterprise. That is his main theme. More openly even than Sismondi, Nikolayon sets the tenor of his critique by an apotheosis of small-scale enterprise, this sole approach to grace.[289] The aggregate capitalist product cannot, in the end, be realised within the society, this can only be done with recourse to outside markets. Nikolayon here comes to the same conclusion as Vorontsov, in spite of a quite different theoretical point of departure. Applied to Russia, it is the economic scientific ground for a sceptical attitude towards capitalism. Capitalist development in Russia has been without access to foreign markets from the first, it could only show its worst aspects--it has impoverished the masses of the people. In consequence, it was a 'fatal mistake' to promote capitalism in Russia. On this point, Nikolayon fulminates like a prophet of the Old Testament: 'Instead of keeping to the tradition of centuries, instead of developing our old inherited principle of a close connection between the immediate producer and his means of production, instead of usefully applying the scientific achievements of W. Europe to their forms of production based on the peasants' ownership of their means of production, instead of increasing their productivity by concentrating the means of production in their hands, instead of benefiting, not by the forms of production in W. Europe, but by its organisation, its powerful co-operation, its division of labour, its machinery, etc., etc.--instead of developing the fundamental principle of a landowning peasantry and applying it to the cultivation of the land by the peasants, instead of making science and its application widely accessible to the peasants--instead of all this, we have taken the opposite turning. We have failed to prevent the development of capitalist forms of production, although they are based on the expropriation of the peasants; on the contrary, we have promoted with all our might the upsetting of our entire economic life which resulted in the famine of 1891.' Though the evil is much advanced, it is not too late even now to retrace our steps. On the contrary, a complete reform of economic policy is just as urgently needed for Russia in view of the threatening proletarisation and collapse, as Alexander's reforms after the Crimean war were necessary in their time.