The German autocracy is the result of the conscious effort of highly capable men who built and organized a system with thoughtful and intelligent deliberation. With a deep knowledge of human psychology and the conditions about them, they have guided their efforts with extreme intelligence, knowing when to grant concessions, knowing how to hold power without being oppressive. The Russian autocracy was a survival of a former age, already growing obsolete, rarely able to adapt itself to changing conditions, blindly fighting to maintain itself in its complete integrity against them. Change of any sort was undesirable to those controlling its machinery, even though the change might indirectly benefit it. It had been crystallized in a previous epoch, even as the tenets of its church were the crystallized superstitions of a barbaric age. It was, in fact, a venerable institution which certain men wished to perpetuate not so much from self-interest as from a blind veneration for its age and traditions. To them even the interests of the people were of far less importance than the maintenance of this anachronism in its absoluteness. Where the German rulers had the intelligence to divert opposing forces and even to utilize them to their own benefit, the Russian autocrats fought them and attempted to suppress them. The chief of those forces which oppose autocracies are, naturally, the growing intelligence of the people and the resulting knowledge of conditions in other countries which they acquire. Realizing this fact, at least, the Russian rulers were bitterly opposed to popular education and made every effort to suppress the craving of the common people for knowledge of any kind. These facts considered, it is not surprising that the first revolutionary movements in Russia should have been generated among the educated classes, even among the aristocracy itself. As far back as a century ago a revolutionary society was formed among the young army officers who had participated in the Napoleonic Wars, and who, in their contact with the French, imbibed some of the latters' democratic ideas, though they were then fighting them. Failing in their efforts to impregnate these ideas among the czar and his ruling clique, they finally, in 1825, resorted to armed violence, with disastrous results. Nicholas I had just ascended the throne, and with furious energy he set about stamping out the disaffection which these officers had spread in his army, and for the time being he was successful. CHAPTER LXXI THE RISE OF NIHILISM