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This contrast between Russia as part of Europe andRussia as a world to herself, with different values anddifferent roots, became all the more acute by the end ofthe nineteenth century, when the educated minority wasdeeply divided within itself and the basis of civilizedrule as earlier understood, i.e. European absolutism, wasbeing more and more heavily attacked. Tsarism, as asystem of bureaucratic absolutist rule, with all its darkevils, represented none the less Europe; for its enemiesthe Europe of reaction or a Europe alien to the best pastand the true genius of the Russian people.In the eighteenth century the situation had beencompletely different. Then tsarism and Europeancivilization on the whole went hand in hand with theprivileged upper class. Despite the opposition to Peterthe Great and continued xenophobia, the eighteenthcentury, viewed in the large, meant the europeanizingof the bulk of the upper class. Since the culture of 'theage of enlightenment' was in the main based on privilegeand absolutism, or at least aristocracy, Europe in thisrespect did not bring Russia much that need fundamentallydivide the educated minority. 'Enlightened despotism'after a time found a ready soil in Russia because therewere no radically divergent views as to what constitutedEuropean civilization.The effects of the French Revolution and the IndustrialRevolution altered the balance. New European valuesand ideals appealed to some sections of the educatedminority in Russia; but one section of it, the governmentand bureaucracy, for the most part clung to the oldEurope, and became more and more divided from therest of educated opinion, by whom it was regarded as"official Russia, the parade-Tsardom, the Byzantine-German government,'' Thus, educated opinion in thehalf-century following i860 became divided, broadlyspeaking, between supporters of the government, moderateprogressives or liberals (the left wing of the zemstva, theleft-centre of the Duma, the men of the ProvisionalGovernment of 1917), and, thirdly, the socialists andrevolutionaries of various schools (cf. pp. 72-74 and 370).In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the situation325