This philosophy existed long in the national or social mind before it was crystallized into public doctrines, and exists even yet largely in its more primitive unworded or instinctive form, although it was Peter the Great who unconsciously awoke the latent and then unexpressed Slavophilic feelings and moralities when he, like a civilizing Pied Piper, charmed the chieftains of industry of Western Europe to follow his trail into Muscovy, his "Empire of Little Villages," and there regenerate them.
Therefore at about the end of the seventeenth century in Russia, the "dumb silent centuries" gradually became articulate in expressing their opposition to all things western. This is the heart of Slavophilism, and no one can truly fathom the Russian soul before understanding its philosophy. It is the Muscovite theory of the simple life, still crying out against the Great Peter's work and recalling the devotees of western culture to its idealization of medieval, theocratic, autocratic Russia.
Despite this reaction, however, it has a great meaning, a tender beauty, and a message of depth and power for our western world. Primarily Russia is a peasant and an agricultural land, and there is a colorless monotony in her vast plains. Indeed land and people are alike; as in the average peasant there is patience, resignation and submission, so there is in the very land itself. Open and prostrate it lies beneath the torrid sun of the south, and the arctic winds of the north; subdued and downtrodden for centuries, it and its people have always been at the mercy of ruthless men and rainless winds.
Thus passive endurance has become one of the saving qualities of the Russian's soul. The peasant's nature is one that has few wants and little rebellious power. The Greek church of the simple gospel is his and a government of the Czar's will. His power of self renunciation is one which in Slavophilic thought gives him true liberty. Therefore ask the followers of this doctrine, what need is there of the constitutional liberties of the west, or its republics or limited monarchies, or its differences in ecclesiastical faith and structure? Slavophilism declares that Russia has the only true freedom, faith and brotherhood, which other lands sadly lack. In addition she has the ancient and splendid heritage of the communal land system, wherein the inherent justice of the Russian peasant's heart is shown by his voluntary division and re-division of the land among his brothers at stated times.
What need therefore, Slavophilism asks, for the degenerate justice of the west? None! Away with Europe then!—the Europe of competition and gruesome factories! The Europe of destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by the ties of affection, brotherhood and communal interest, but only by money and greed, and where free thinkers, atheists and materialists abound, whose lives and thoughts would unsettle the holy, orthodox feelings of Russia, disturb her ancient conscience and poison her humility with murmurings of discontent and rebellion.
Away with the books of the west, too! And its agricultural implements! Wooden ploughs instead of chilled steel! Outdoor work and not indoor prisons called factories! Peasants working for centuries beneath the uncanopied sun, and on the floors without walls, will not let doors and brickwork thumbscrew their souls in confinement thus! Indoors awhile in winter will they labor, but spring airs shatter the moralities of the time-clock and away to the fields they rush; in the spring to sow and sing, in the summer to sing again and at the harvest time too, and then to plait the bearded stalks into wreaths and crown the maidens with sheaths of corn; the hymns for the "death of winter" and the "birth of spring," marriage songs and funeral dirges and chants of olden times well intermingled with the labor of their hands.
Herein the poetry of agricultural, peaceable Russia clashes with the prosaic efficiency of the west, the efficiency of commercial wars, strikes and class struggles which peasant Muscovy has known so little.
And again, Slavophilism, with its theory of successive civilizations, culled perhaps from the philosophy of Hegel, each civilization superior to its forerunner, comes to show us a vision: the gradual displacement of one type of society by another, but continuing what is best in the preceding until nothing except what is good remains and universal peace results, thus portraying the displacement of national civilizations by universal ones, from which ultimately an idealistic world policy will result, and the federation and peace of men.
Some Slavophiles saw even in Peter's work a process of progressing from nationality to universality. In his time there was the same yearning toward its peaceful ideal. The "Old Russia" party wanted Peter to renounce war and conquest. Alexis, his own murdered son, worked with this element which was very largely representative of the nation. To them, St. Petersburg, then a new and growing capitol, was typical of change, unrest and falsity; Moscow was in their hearts the only capital, typical of Russia's old comfort and quiet. Many nobles antagonized Peter, but he swept them aside, imprisoning them or sending them to the gallows. Like Russia's slight resistance to Rurik and others, and to the Tartars, so was her feebleness before Peter the Great, who was himself, however, by no means an accomplished military leader, but an enlightened barbarian, dealing with a people whom writers and observers declare to be endowed with conspicuous traits of humility, scarcely found in the Christian nations of the western world.
Russian fiction represents its people in the same way. Unaggressive characters, who talk and think but do not act, fill its novels; they dream of the great age of the "Universal Idea" that shall come for all and regenerate the "rotten west," where "rationalism is the original sin"; the typical west that Slavophilism condemns—the west of the struggles between the rulers and the ruled; between Scripture and tradition and the upper and lower classes. The Slavophile idea, in theory at least, leaves no room for this. Christian love and humility and peasant communes, where rationalism, strife and rebellion are unknown, must be instituted in the west; then the "Universal Idea" of Russia will create Millennial times. This was the "Messianic hope of Slavophilism," and perhaps is yet to a great degree destined in the minds of its devotees to give the last feature to the development of the world, so that the love and feeling of the east would appease the discord of the west, diluting its discipline and its logic with true religious intuition and humility, and eventually the idealized relationship of autocracy for the Czar and self-government for the people—the old system so rudely strained by Peter the Great—would permeate the ruled and rulers of the world.