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manner which simple country people adopted when speaking to their empress.

A powerful factor in the peasant's monarchist sentiments was the firm belief that the tsar wished them to have all the land, that his desire was frustrated by the landlords, but that some day he would overcome this resistance. Serf emancipation of 1861 transformed this belief into firm conviction. The socialist-revolutionary propagandists of the 1870s were driven to desperation by the peasants' unshakeable faith that the 'tsar will give' (tsar' dast).*1

Hence the chaos which enveloped Russia after the sudden abdication of Nicholas 11; hence, too, Lenin's haste to have the tsar and his family murdered once communist authority seemed endangered and Nicholas could have served as a rallying-point for the opposition; hence the constant efforts of the communist regime to fill the vacuum which the demise of the imperial dynasty had created in the minds of the masses by mammoth state-sponsored cults of party leaders.

The imperial government attached great importance to the monarchist sentiments of the peasantry, and many of its policies, such as hesitation to industrialize or to build railroads and indifference to mass education, were inspired by the wish to keep the muzhik exactly as he was, simple and loyal. Belief in the monarchist loyalties of the peasant was one of the cornerstones of imperial policy in the nineteenth century. Correct up to a point, the government misconstrued the peasant's attitude. The peasant's loyalty was a personal loyalty to the idealized image of a distant ruler whom he saw as his terrestrial father and protector. It was not loyalty to the institution of the monarchy as such, and certainly not to its agents, whether dvoriane or chinovniki. The peasant had no reason whatever to feel attachment to the state, which took from him with both hands and gave nothing in return. To the peasant, authority was at best a fact of life which one had to bear like disease, old age, or death, but which could never be 'good' and whose clutches one had every right to escape whenever given a chance. Loyalty to the tsar entailed no acceptance of civic responsibility of any kind, and indeed concealed a profound revulsion against political institutions and processes. The personalization of all human relations, so characteristic of the Russian peasant, produced a superficial monarchism which appeared conservative but was in fact thoroughly anarchist. Beginning with the latter part of the eighteenth century it was becoming apparent to an increasing number of Russians that serfdom was not compatible with Russia's claim to being either a civilized country or a great power. Both Alexander 1 and Nicholas 1 had serious reservations about this institution, and so did their leading counsellors. Public