Now a social reform as advocated by Nikolayon is completely Utopian. His attitude exhibits an even more blatant petty-bourgeois and reactionary bias than Sismondi's ever did, considering that the Russian 'populist' writes after a lapse of seventy years. For in his opinion, the old _obshchina_, the rural community founded on the communal ownership of the soil, is the raft to deliver Russia from the flood of capitalism. On it, the discoveries of modern big industry and scientific technique are to be grafted by measures which remain his own secret--so that it can serve as the basis of a 'socialised' higher form of production. Russia can choose no other alternative: either she turns her back upon capitalist development, or she must resign herself to death and decay.[290] After a crushing criticism of capitalism Nikolayon thus ends up with the same old 'populist' panacea which had as early as the fifties, though at that time with greater justification, been hailed as the 'peculiarly Russian' guarantee of a higher social development, although its reactionary character as a lifeless relic of ancient institutions had been exposed in Engels' _Fluechtlingsliteratur_ in _Volksstaat_ (1875). Engels wrote at the time: 'A further development of Russia on bourgeois lines would gradually destroy communal property there too, quite apart from any interference of the Russian government "with the knout and with bayonets" (as the revolutionary populists imagined). Under the pressure of taxes and usury, communal landownership is no longer a privilege, it becomes an irksome chain. The peasants frequently run away from it, either with or without their families, to seek their living as itinerant labourers, and leave the land behind. We see that communal ownership in Russia has long since passed its flower and there is every indication that its decay is approaching.'