Many think, that the chief woe of Russia is in this, that Russian society is insufficiently liberal or radical, and they expect much from a turnabout of our society leftwards in the traditional sense of this word. And in this opinion there is evoked for us the fatal power of words and formal concepts. Our society -- is liberal and of a leftist bent, but this liberalism and this leftism -- is powerless and is expressed primarily in an oppositional mindset or else indignation. The chief woe of Russia -- is not in any insufficiency of leftism, which can grow even without any essential changes for Russian society, but in a poor societal fabric, in an insufficiency of authentic people, such as history could summon forth for a real and genuinely radical transformation of Russia, it is in the weakness of the Russian will, in the insufficiency of societal self-nourishment and self-discipline. For Russian society there is an insufficiency of character, of the ability to define oneself from with