>>24554491
> It's not like he's criticising liberalism as a whole
Except, he is. The whole basis of Dostoyevsky's ideology is that liberalism/nihilism is a gateway drug to terror, muder and lawlessness (he got the details of what bolshevism would look like wrong, but I can't blame him for that), and that liberals are "useful idiots" who will secure a foothold for tyrants and dictators to come. This is a general proposition, and it is consistent throughout his writing.
I disagree because I think Dostoyevsky is too focused on his distaste for liberal atheism and arrogance to recognize that the problem is more general. Any time your society is undergoing rapid change, there is a danger for a "strongman" figure to come and take over. Same how when you're operating on someone's body and slicing them open to stitch them up later, the risk for infection is much higher. This doesn't mean that operating on someone is never to be done - whether the infection does occur or not has to do with the specifics of how it was conducted, and whether the surgeons sterilized their equipment properly or not. Revolutions sometimes result in this, and sometimes don't - for example, not every post-soviet country slid back into dictatorship. Similarly, Russia was not condemned to tyranny the moment the first revolutionary movements started brewing. It did pan out this way, though.

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I've in the first few chapters of picrelated and it's currently the same old Dostoevsky fare, a bunch of hysterical basedjak-esque ranting…