The contribution to the twentieth-century Russian revolution made by the condition of Russia in the mid-nineteenth century is all the more clearly revealed as the character of the society which the revolution has established becomes increasingly certain and perceptible. Even a generation ago the institutions of tsarist Russia, like the efforts of the autocracy to conserve them, could appear no more than obstacles or incentives to its overthrow in favour of the liberal democracy which was often still regarded as the world-wide objective of political reform. Similarly the tendencies towards spiritual collectivism, indeed social absolutism, shared so generally by Russian reformers of distinct and even opposed schools long before the advent of Marxism in Russia, could still be counted as aberrations from the course of liberal development. But by now we can perceive that the tsarist autocracy and the movements of opposition to it provided many of the moulds of post-revolutionary government and political thought. A historical revision is therefore gaining ground in the West in which the evidence of survival and recurrence in Russian institutions and thought is a directing factor.

Such evidence is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the tradition of absolute centralised government at one extreme, co-existent with a village collectivism reputedly, if not in fact, traditional at the other. But the western interpreter will also observe, as did his more acute predecessors at the time, the association of political authority with bureaucratic or military rank rather than private, local, or hereditary status, a common indifference to western conceptions of liberty for either moral or economic ends, an obsession with Russia's historical status, the sense of national exclusivism linked with a sense of supra-national, indeed universal mission, the confidence in a manifest destiny in Asia owed to a new dispensation distinct from that of the older maritime trading empires, the reluctant debt to Germany for the principle of national economics, and for models of militarism and technology—besides the education of German philosophy which the Russian intelligentsia digested and transformed.