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Sure, I'd be glad to.

Leftism gained ground in Russia partly because the nobility were in the practice of sending their offspring to France for education, and at the time leftism was growing in France. So among the intelligentsia, more and more tended to favor the political and economic left, even if it was only because it was the fashionable thing to do at the time. And although many of these people were the gentry, at the same time it did help to spread the ideas to Russia.

The 1865 Emancipation of the Serfs was similar to the Emancipation Proclamation which abolished slavery in the US in that it did not create true equality, far from it actually. Now you had a new class of landless peasants who wanted something more. The peasants wanted to be able to farm their own land, but they were never given any. So ideas of redistribution were rather appealing.

And literature of the late 1800s greatly reflects these trends. Turgenev's hero of his novel "Fathers and Sons", for instance, was a young nihilist, and the novel dealt with the reconciling of beliefs between the old generation and the new. Dostoyevsky spoke openly of socialism, albeit to criticize it, but recognized the way that the ideas were gaining ground. Even Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina mentioned Oblonsky reading a liberal newspaper, because it was the thing to do at the time.

no it was becuase the bourgeoisie were growing in economic importance and wanted a share or the political pie. so the asked, if rather timidly, for democracy, as long as there was a property qualification.


actually, most of these people, most notably, lenin and trotsky, were educated in the russian gymnazia and universitys.
they were radicalised by the repression by the tsarist state and bureaucracy.


just a little clarification, the proclamation emancipated the slaves from slavery, nothing more, the emancipation of the serfs ended their serfhood, which, while economicaly, not important, it led a great deal to their radicalisation, as they saw that it was not their bondage holding them back, but the very economic system itself.


no, most people here like him, ok, i mean all except me.
why? becuase at the transformation of cuba into a deformed workers state, che LED raids on trotskyist printing houses, destroying the plates for numerous books, most telling was that one of the books was the revolution betrayed by trotsky, a book dealing with the rise of the stalinist reaction and basicaly, how stalin was not communist and in fact betrayed the revolution.

so yeah, great communist isnt he...

you do not think in dialectics do you?



only insofar as it was too impotent to do anything itself.

no, this was a result of the russian soldiers occupying paris after the defeat of napoleon. they were radicalised by ideas of democracy, so the went home and did some stuff, they were the decemberists, all russian revolutionary tradition stems from them, except the marxists.
the marxists generaly came into contact with marxism while exiled, or through former exiles.



you forgot trotsky, he was exiled as well.
the teachers who fostered "liberal learning environments" were usually natives, like lenins father. he was a minor bureaucrat for the educationa department, granting the right to have shcools in peoples first language in the area, teaching european liberalism, amd he never left russia, why was he like this? was it contact with people outsid? no, it was the fact that he wanted a european russia, free of tsarist barbarism.



what were they hmm?


no, it gave them the freedom needed to realise that it wasnt serfdom in itself that caused them such misery, it was the very system of property.
if they were still serfs, they would have just kept thinking, if only we were free, all would be better. but once they were free, they thought, hey, im free, why isnt anything better?