With these words, Engels hits right on the target of the _obshchina_ problem--eighteen years before the publication of Nikolayon's principal work. If Nikolayon subsequently with renewed courage again conjured up the ghost of the _obshchina_, it was a bad historical anachronism inasmuch as about a decade later the _obshchina_ was given an official burial by the state. The absolutist government which had for financial reasons tried during half a century artificially to keep the machinery of the rural community going was compelled to give up this thankless task on its own accord. The agrarian problem soon made it clear how far the old 'populist' delusion was lagging behind the actual course of economic events, and conversely, how powerfully capitalist development in Russia, mourned and cursed as still-born, could demonstrate with lightning and thunder its capacity to live and to multiply. Once again, and for the last time, this turn of events demonstrates in quite a different historical setting how a social critique of capitalism, which begins by doubting its capacity for development, must by a deadly logic lead to a reactionary Utopianism--both in the France of 1819 and in the Russia of 1893.[291] FOOTNOTES: [288] Cf. _Outlines of Our Social Economy_, in particular pp. 202-5, 338-41. [289] Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] has given detailed proof of the striking similarity between the position of the Russian 'populists' and the views of Sismondi in his essay _On the Characteristics of Economic Romanticism_ (1897).