Nihilist movement: Encyclopedia II - Nihilist movement - Historical context

Nihilist movement - Historical context

After more than a century of Westernization that began with the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), a Russian national consciousness evolved slowly throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, reflected in the development of a uniquely Russian literature (by authors such as Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov). But despite this growing national identity, European thought continued to exert considerable influence on Russia’s dominant political and cultural institutions: Russian troops brought back Western ideas while fighting in the Napoleonic wars (1805-12), and

During the 1820s and 1830s Russian thought was influenced powerfully by several waves of German Romantic idealism and then the philosophy of Hegel, both of which raised to Russian consciousness the concept of distinct national identity and of “inevitable” historical progress... (Wasiolek, 3)

In this time of European-influenced thought, Russian reformers tended to advocate change from within existing political institutions. However, after the Crimean War (1853-56), attitudes towards change themselves began to shift as nihilism spread. The nihilists of the 1850s and 1860s set themselves against the German-influenced liberals of the 1830s-1840s generation as they pushed for greater political freedoms and new social norms, decrying previous reforms as ineffective. Both of these types of reformers conflicted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that the solution to Russia's social ills lay in Russia's traditional spirituality and cultural institutions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Historical context", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki