Tsarist Russia 713Germany. Likewise, Bulgarian nationalists would increasingly feel that they
had been cheated out of land in Macedonia that they believed Bulgaria had
been promised by Russia.
Alexander II then turned his attention toward Central Asia and the Mid
dle East. Russian armies conquered Turkistan in 1859-1860, annexed
Tashkent in 1866, and then reached Afghanistan. The wars that subdued
the Muslim mountain people of the Caucasus ended in 1860. The expan
sion added about 5 million Muslims to the empire. Russian expansion now
seemed to impinge upon British interests near India, the gem of its empire.
The British army invaded Afghanistan, and in 1881 put a puppet ruler on
the throne. In the Far East, Russian forces moved across Siberia, where
the discovery of gold in the 1830s had attracted tens of thousands of set
tlers, to go with the ever-expanding convict population, giving the Russian
navy access to the Pacific Ocean at Vladivostok.
The Russian Empire now included about one-seventh of the world’s land
mass. This eastward expansion eventually brought conflict with China. The
Chinese emperors would be powerless in the face of Russian demands, as
they were when confronted by those of Britain. Surprisingly, Japan, which
emerged from centuries of isolation following the Meiji Restoration in
1868, would prove to be a far tougher adversary for Russia.
Nihilists and Populists
Revolutionaries replaced the conscience-stricken gentry of the 1830s and
1840s as the principal critics of the Russian autocracy. They were drawn
from a variety of social backgrounds, including the sons and daughters of
nobles, merchants, peasants, and Orthodox priests. Convinced that one
spark might ignite a wave of rebellion, they struck out on their own or in
very small groups.
Some Russian revolutionaries found the old debates between the West
ernizers and Slavophiles irrelevant. Nihilists accepted no dogmas, but above
all rejected the materialist doctrines of the West. They also disavowed many
Russian traditions, and thus repudiated the Slavophiles. Some of them
viewed the Orthodox Church as an institution of oppression, whereas oth
ers remained fervent believers.
Nihilists saw in the Russian masses an untapped revolutionary force,
believing that the emancipation of the serfs had aided their cause by creat
ing an independent peasantry, which might be more likely to rise up against
its oppressors. Like the conscience-stricken gentry before them, the nihilists
believed in the power of literature to effect change. In 1863, Nikolay
Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), a former seminarian, published What Is to Be
Done?, a novel that had an enormous impact on several generations of intel
lectuals. Chernyshevsky described committed people of action as “rational
egoists” who would form a disciplined vanguard of change. Because nihilists
did not feel bound by moral codes, they believed they could take whatever