Russian nihilism a form of nihilism, a phenomenon mainly of Russia in the 1860s, which, in contrast to the general cultural nihilism that Nietzsche later criticized (in the 1880s) as a ‘dead-end’ devaluing of all values, was futureoriented and ‘instrumental,’ exalting possibility over actuality. Russian nihilists urged the ‘annihilation’ – figurative and literal – of the past and present, i.e., of realized social and cultural values and of such values in process of realization, in the name of the future, i.e., for the sake of social and cultural values yet to be realized. Bakunin, as early as 1842, had stated the basic nihilist theme: ‘the negation of what exist. . . for the benefit of the future which does not yet exist.’ The bestknown literary exemplar of nihilism in Russia is the character Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Its most articulate spokesman was Dmitri Pisarev (1840–68), who shared Bazarov’s cultural anti-Romanticism, philosophical anti-idealism, and unquestioned trust in the power of natural science to solve social and moral problems. Pisarev proclaimed, ‘It is precisely in the [spread-eagled, laboratory] frog that the salvatio. . . of the Russian people is to be found.’ And he formulated what may serve as the manifesto of Russian nihilism: ‘What can be broken should be broken; what will stand the blow is fit to live; what breaks into smithereens is rubbish; in any case, strike right and left, it will not and cannot do any harm.’ See also RUSSIAN PHILOSOPH. G.L.K.