Nor were these the worst of their miseries, for there were the _Tchinovniks_--or government officials--who could mete out any punishment they pleased, could order a whole community to be flogged, or at any moment invoke the aid of a military force or even lend it to private individuals for the subjugation of refractory peasants.
And this was what they had been waiting and hoping for, for two centuries and a half! But with touching loyalty not one of them thought of blaming the Tsar.

Their "Little Father," if he only knew about it, would make everything right.

It was the nobility, the wicked nobility, that had brought all this misery upon them and cheated them out of their happiness! They hated the nobility for stealing from them their freedom and their land; and the nobility hated them for not being prosperous and happy, and for bringing famine and misery into the state, which had been so kind and had emancipated them.
As these conditions became year after year more aggravated acute minds in Russia were employed in trying to solve the great social problems they presented.

In a land in which the associative principle was indigenous, _Socialism_ was a natural and inevitable growth.

Then, exasperated by the increasing miseries of the peasantry, maddened by the sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there came into existence that word of dire significance in Russia--_Nihilism_, and following quickly upon that, its logical sequence--_Anarchism_, which, if it could, would destroy all the fruits of civilization.
It was Turguenief who first applied the ancient term "Nihilist" to a certain class of radical thinkers in Russia, whose theory of society, like that of the eighteenth-century philosophers in France, was based upon a negation of the principle of authority.