‘Despotism or socialism – there is no other choice’, wrote Alexander Herzen early in the 1850s. To the twentieth–century reader Herzen's words inevitably have a prophetic ring. The Russian autocracy, after all, took on an increasingly reactionary character from the middle of the 1860s. At the same period there began to develop vigorous revolutionary groups dedicated to the transformation of the old society and, from the late 1870s, to the destruction of the autocracy. Political middle ground was difficult to occupy, especially since Russia lacked a coherent bourgeoisie which might have had a vested interest in defending such ground against the supporters of the established order, on the one hand, and the vociferous champions of the masses, on the other. That is not to say that the majority of Herzen's contemporaries perceived their political options in such stark terms as Herzen himself. On the contrary, many of them, and in particular the thinkers who are the subjects of this study, did seek a middle course in the 1840s and 1850s. They desired a freer and more just society than that which they saw around them in mid–nineteenth–century Russia, but not a society in which social and moral distinctions would be more or less completely obliterated. And yet the choice of which Herzen spoke could not easily be avoided in a country lacking any tradition of free political discussion or any history of gradual reform.