Petr Chaadaev's First Philosophic Letter (Pervoe filosoficheskoe pis'mo) was published in September (Old Style) 1836, in the fifteenth issue of Teleskop, the mediocre magazine owned and edited by Nikolai Nadezhdin. The Letter, probably the most celebrated article in the country's history, dispraised Russia in her past and present as an exception to the universal laws of humanity, despaired of her future, deplored her Orthodoxy, described her as a pariah among the nations of both East and West, and denied that she possessed a true civilization; the essay had a strong providentialist, chiliastic, and Catholic flavor.

Chaadaev thus defined the terrain, the terms, and even the tone for the public debate—the first of its kind in Russia—between Slavophiles and Westernizers in the 1830s and 1840s, and he can be said to have inaugurated that debate. Chaadaev opened the discussion of the destiny of Russia on a note of attack.

Lenin selected from the "populist heritage" and praised at various times those points which might strengthen his attempt to make a revolution, and condemned whatever parts did not relate well to a particular phase of his program. Wielders of Soviet power since Lenin have continued to demonstrate this artificial ideological flexibility in their efforts to perpetuate the victory of 1917. As political and national requirements have changed, the regime has demanded that interpretations of the revolutionary populist movement complement these developments.

In 1846, the Orenburg Provincial Gazette carried a brief account of the recent baptism of over 800 Mari pagans in a “distant corner” of Birsk district. As the newspaper reported, District Chief N. Bludarov, accompanied by his assistants and a priest, “by gradually gaining the trust of the Cheremis [Maris], finally succeeded in shaking their obdurate superstition by means of persuasion. At first only a few, then a large number, and finally by whole villages, [Cheremis] decided to accept the Christian faith, and in 1845, on the clergy’s lists, there appeared up to 900 new Christians.“ Since the mid-eighteenth century, baptisms on such a scale had been rare in the Volga-Kama region, and virtually none had occurred in northwestern Orenburg province, where the population was predominantly Muslim and “pagan.“ On the surface, therefore, these baptisms appeared to be a “happy beginning” of the Christianization of local Maris and a foothold for Orthodoxy in a heavily non-Christian area.3 In fact, matters were not quite so simple.

Two hundred years ago, the Polish government was preparing another biennial meeting of the sejm, their parliament, by organizing a confederation to raise troops to fight with Russia against the Turks. In a startling switch of political alignments, the opposition to King Stanistaw August Poniatowski seized control of the parliament, threw off the Russian alliance, and undertook a major governmental reform that culminated, after the reconciliation of the king with progressive members of the opposition, in the enactment of the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The major import of Polish reform was to increase the size of the ludicrously small Polish army and to regain full independence from supervision by the partition powers, particularly Russia.