ABSTRACT
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville saw that America and Russia were "marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe". Earlier influences on Russia, after the Byzantine imprint and the Russian Orthodox Church had been the German culture and the French Enlightenment, the Enlightenment exploding into the French Revolution. An intellectual form of resistance to the regime, calling itself vaguely Populism, was articulated by Alexander Herzen. A superb writer, wealthy scion of a great lord, Herzen was able to publish his ideas in a newspaper safely situated in the West and smuggled into Russia. Dostoevsky doubled his Nechaev into two protagonists, the intriguer Peter Verkhovensky and the straight-arrow officer Nicolai Stavrogin. Verkhovensky organizes a conspiracy among reform-minded friends of his liberal father and inspires the murder of a group member in the Nechaev manner. Lenin found like-minded persons and entered the life of a labor activist and revolutionary while functioning formally as a lawyer.
