A Herzen Reader

The circle of intellectual activity at that time was outside the government, which was completely backward, and outside the people, who were silent in their estrangement; it was located in the book and the lecture hall, in theoretical argument and the scholar's study. And, actually, it was only in literature and the universities that the government still had to keep things in check; only there did life try to emerge from behind the cramped shores of censorship and surveillance, and only there could resilience still be felt. Literature and educational institutions were the only civically valiant, hon­est spheres of activity in the unyielding Russia of that time.

The Senate and the Synod, the civilian departments and the military au­thorities, the assemblies of the nobility and the beau monde feared not only the opposition, but any originality; they feared that a suspicion of having opinions might fall upon them. Respectable people watched with inner hor­ror the courage of N. S. Mordvinov, who dared to not only have but to voice opinions. Nicholas was barely able to contain his rage against the imperti­nent old man.¹³

Only literature, only the lecture halls, protested constantly, protested as much as they could, with silence and absences when a word was not possi­ble; with forbidden verses that passed from person to person, and hints that slipped through the censor's fingers. The current corruption of literature and educational institutions dates from the present reign. Paid-off journal­ists and police-professors, preaching a philosophy of slavery and writing denunciations of entire conferences, are entirely new phenomena.¹⁴ During the entire Nicholaevan era, there was no lecture hall that would have lis­tened with sympathy to the doctrine of blind obedience; conservative youth and fans of the government did not exist at all then. For the development of this kind of moral rickets, which is spreading far and wide, we are very much obliged to the teaching and journalism of recent years.

Thus, we are not the ones who assigned historical importance to the academic-literary quarrel of the thirties in the intellectual development of Russia—that is the way it actually was. We will not enlarge on the quarrel itself, so much has been written about it. We will only remind the reader that one side sought to continue the Petrine coup in a revolutionary sense, acquiring for Russia everything that had been worked out by other nations since i789, bringing to our soil English institutions, French ideas, and Ger­man metaphysics. In rating Western forms of civic life more highly than the hatchet job of Peter and his successors, they were entirely correct, but in accepting them as the sole life-saving human forms, appropriate to every way of life, they fell into the eternal error of the French revolutionaries. Their opponents objected that the forms developed for Western life may have had a universal development, but, along with them, one must also preserve particular national elements. [. . .]

Neither one nor the other came to a clear understanding, but along the way many questions were raised; the February revolution arrived when this argument was in full swing. [. . .]

The persecution against the printed word and academia that began after the revolution of i848 exceeded all limits of what was stupid and vile; it was nasty, ridiculous, and it reduced literature to a gloomy silence, but it did not get it to speak in the tone of Nicholaevan conservatism. The same thing hap­pened in academia; stifled outwardly, it remained true within to its sacred mission of advocacy and humanization. And if professors in the capitals were at times constrained by the tiresome surveillance and denunciations, teaching went on as it had in provincial universities, gymnasia, seminar­ies, military schools, etc. This decentralization of education is extremely important [. . .] it infiltrated more deeply and disappeared at the very limits of literacy. The government's efforts came to nothing.

Pedagogy withstood what was in its own way a chef d'oeuvre—Rostov- tsev's instructions to the teachers of military-training establishments.¹⁵

Who was able to do this?

This was done by a new formation of people, who had risen below and who introduced by degrees their new elements into the intellectual life of Russia. This group assumed more and more rights of citizenship during this time, as Nicholas knocked off the elite and with coarse strokes muti­lated the nervously developed hothouse organizations.

The renegades of all social groups, these new people, these moral razno- chintsy, made up not a social class, but a milieu, in which in the foreground were teachers and literary men—working literary men, and not dilettantes— students who had graduated and those who had not finished their course of study, lower-level officials from the universities and from the seminaries, the lower gentry, the children of officers, officers who had graduated from military schools, et al. New people, humble people—they were not as no­ticeable but just as morally liberated as those who came before them, just as constrained in a material way. Poverty lends its own kind of circumspect strength and structure.

The Rus of gentry manor houses, in which, up till then, intellectual and literary development had been primarily concentrated, was, apart from persecution, in a false position. It could not advance a single idea without crossing over the barrier that protected its class privileges. Connected by its education to the forms of European life, it was connected by serfdom to the Petersburg regime; it had to renounce its exclusive rights or to unwittingly introduce a contradiction into every issue. For it, as a social group, there was only one future—to limit the supreme power of the tsar with an oli­garchic Duma, but they did not have the material strength to do this. They lacked the moral strength to leave their class. This type of Anglophile and liberal gentry, stopped on their headlong path to parliamentary freedom by the emancipation of the serfs with land, will remain on the tombstone of Russia's noble gentry like gargoyles, which medieval architects used to decorate the tops of church pillars.

Aristocratic Russia retreated to a supporting role, and its voice began to grow weak; maybe, like Nicholas, it was embarrassed by the events of i848. In order to remain popular in literature, it had to abandon urban life, take up a hunting rifle and slaughter, on the ground and on the wing, the wild­fowl of serfdom.¹⁶

Another force came to relieve them, another group took the place of the exhausted leaders and soldiers.

The sound of Chaadaev's funeral oration still sounded in people's ears; while stirring much in one's breast, it gave nothing but consolation in the other world, some kind of distant future [. . .] but already in hackneyed journalism, boring in Moscow and dissipated in Petersburg, features were being engraved of a real representative of young Russia, a genuine revolu­tionary in our literature.

Belinsky was an unusually free person, and nothing inhibited him: nei­ther the prejudices of scholasticism nor the prejudices of his surround­ings. He appeared, full of questions and in search of solutions, not playing around with conclusions and not fearing them. He openly made mistakes and sincerely looked for another solution; he had one truth in his sights and nothing except for that. Belinsky came on the stage without a crest, without a banner, without a diploma; he belonged to no church and no social class, he was bound by nothing and had sworn no one an oath. Nothing would be spared by him, but for that reason he could sympathize with everyone. The first moment when, bitten by the serpent of German philosophy, he was attracted by the rationality of all that existed, he fearlessly wrote his Borodino essay.¹⁷ What frightening purity must you possess, what an original kind of independence and limitless freedom, to write something on the order of a justification for Nicholas at the beginning of the forties! [. . .]

In Belinsky we encountered that impressive aloofness from the latest ideas and authorities, which is the distinguishing feature and strength of Russian genius, something that Chaadaev vaguely foresaw, and about which we have said a great deal.

Maybe this aloofness, this inner freedom in the presence of outward slavery, deprived our life of many warm moments, many attachments, maybe it introduced an aching that manifested itself in the predominance of irony. But it gave us a terrible feeling of independence. Like children who knew neither father nor mother, we were poorer, but more free; our mother and our father were ideals, and therefore did not hinder us, and we infused them with our own purified image and likeness.

Belinsky's ideal, and our ideal, our church and parental home, in which our first thoughts and sympathies were nurtured, was the Western world with its scholarship and its revolution, with its respect for the individual, with its political freedom, with its artistic treasures and its unshakeable hope.

The ideal for Khomyakov¹⁸ and his friends lay in the past of the Russian people, their everyday existence, transformed into an unbelievable purity. But its apotheosis, however exaggerated, was, in its principal features, true. A saint's life is required for every canonization, and in the ideal of the Slavs, who had preserved the everyday features of our people, there was a great prophecy that they saw as a memory.

Which of these ideals had to be overcome? Or on what point could they be reconciled and go forth arm in arm?

The revolution of 1848 and its consequences brought with it elements of a resolution of this question.

At the very least, since that time the argument about which we have been speaking has changed.

It seemed that everything had abandoned the Russian development that had begun, it seemed that it would disappear like an unsuccessful experi­ment, and would plunge into a new millennium of serfdom, barbarity, and byzantinism.

The light from Europe that had entered through the cracks of our prison walls began to fade, and it was difficult to make anything out. In the West only dark clouds drifted by, jostling each other. [. . .] Russia grew silent. Hav­ing put up with it for a long time and seeing no way out, Granovsky, weary, worn out, blessed the fate of the deceased Belinsky and envied him his death!..¹⁹ Then he who passionately loved Russia asked if some sort of posi­tion could be found for him in Belgium, because while he had the strength to die for Russia, he did not have the strength to live there any longer.

But life went on.

Russian life is tenacious—all the adversity, all the blows missed their mark. Why? Isn't it because they did not apply the blows in the places on which the life and growth of this strange organism depended?

At the very height of despotism and persecution in Russia and reaction in Europe, the dominant turn of mind in Moscow and Petersburg began to worry about other issues. Khomyakov, K. Aksakov, and their circle gave particular attention to the Russian rural commune and the communal owner­ship of land. The Petrashevsky circle in Petersburg made the study of social- economic theory their program of study.

In this way the Slavophiles abandoned archeology.

With the Petrashevsky circle, a retrospective movement began, which of necessity had gained control of minds after the 14th of December. A practi­cal move, which had become bookish, rushed once more out of the book and into practical activity. The Petrashevsky circle formed a society, and the government took it to be a conspiracy. There was no conspiracy, but Liprandi, like a truffle hunter, sniffed it out.²⁰

The Petrashevtsy were led out onto the square, the maneuvers for execu­tion were performed, and they were led off in shackles to "houses of the dead," and hard labor; but their ideas fermented, and were expressed in private arguments and discussions.²¹

One thing horrified everyone—the force majeure of imperial power. All human aspirations struck uselessly against an impregnable, granite barrier.

Faith in the impregnable power of Nicholas himself saved Russia—it brought the fleet of Sir Charles Napier to the Gulf of Bothnia.

Nicholas went to take a look at it and returned with aged eyes and a sunken face.²²

He understood the calamity. the magic disappeared.

With every salvo in the Crimea the echo shook Petersburg; the walls of the Winter Palace cracked. Everyone began to suspect that only the outside layer was granite, and that inside was filler. Given the historically bureau­cratic construction of the Russian imperial state, as with all government construction, some quartermasters had indulged in theft.

Nicholas understood that it was impossible to cover this up; wandering sleeplessly like a specter through the halls of his palace and making the sen­tries kneel and pray for victory, he began to think about betrayal, the betrayal of all that he held sacred, for which he had trampled his own human heart and ruined two or three young generations.

He wanted to issue a call to the Slavs, to restore the hated Poland and to get Hungary, which he had recently crushed, back on its feet, if only to once again have the Winter Palace unshakeable and threatening, to have the granite covering once again taken for a solid cliff, to not see any more the oscillating masts of Sir Charles Napier, and to not hear the echo of the Sevastopol thunder. Let the peasants arm themselves; let military units choose their own officers!

This was the end of the dark Petersburg reign. [. . .] The dismally suppressed dissatisfaction raised its head, and the whis­pering was replaced by a murmur: "What is this? After the blood, after the money, after being deprived of all human rights, they cannot defend the land from an enemy who lives at the other end of the world and sailed here on ships." This could not be printed—manuscript notebooks passed from person to person, were read aloud, because the former fear was gone. He is dead—what is there to fear? Everyone forgot that another he is alive. And through the burst dam rushed a cloudy foaming stream of liberal and con­servative slops, carrying with it all kinds of things: shards of philosophical systems, the debris of social ideas, the corpses of drowned economic doc­trines, the skeletons of constitutions, in a word, everything that had come up against the wall of censorship and had lain there for years rose to the surface in its old clothes, covered in slime and moss. This made respectable people angry because they wanted Russia to leave the embraces of Nicholas and emerge like Minerva, with an owl, a globe, and a compass. [. . .]

As soon as a person sees the possibility of taking part, of acting, action becomes a physiological necessity for him. It may be premature, not well thought out, even false, but it cannot fail to take place. No religion, no social theory can reach its full consciousness before the beginning of its imple­mentation. [. . .]

The nonsense that rose to the surface floated away, but the movement of the waves remains. The habit of participating and declaring one's will and ideas—that will not pass away. [. . .]

Freeing ourselves surreptitiously from the idol worship of autocracy, without noticing it we came upon the path to another church, to another form of idol worship, but in it we did not find faith in ourselves. For every Western people the transition from a theological monarchy to a theologi­cally liberal orthodoxy was easy. Our happiness and unhappiness lie in the fact that we are satisfied with less than they were, but demand much more. If you give us Protestantism, we will become spirit wrestlers.²³ If you touch serfdom, we will demand the land as well. Our senses tell us, who have lagged behind, who are slaves, that the social religion that has outstripped us is not ours. What is surprising about the fact that it was all expressed awk­wardly, chaotically, with desperate nihilism and hopeless Orthodoxy? The idea made itself understood with all the extremes of going from an infantile state of instinct to the possibility of consciousness.

Whether or not the results were correct, whether there was in them more maturity than seeds, or the other way around, of one thing there can be no doubt: this was a new movement of life, a new splashing of a liberated wave; while remaining in the same fetters, under the same bolts, we became freer people.

In confirmation of this I introduce the following fact, to which little at­tention was paid. Alongside the corrupted literature, with journals on gov­ernment contracts, and with the Third Department at university lecterns, there was an extraordinary rise in social morality. The courage of one's convictions, which was completely lost in the previous reign, appeared once again, unafraid of the consequences.

Along with the Decembrists, our civic valor disappeared. The heroic period of opposition ends with the struggle ofthese conquered—but not dethroned— titans. During Nicholas's entire reign the tone of political defendants was evasive and based on denial. Society's indifference killed off futile bravery.

That has changed recently.

Once more, a man who was persecuted for his opinions and his words stood proudly before the court; he sensed the sympathy of the choir on the other side of the wall, he knew that his words were listened to avidly, he knew that his example would be a mighty homily.

Sadly, but firmly, Mikhailov appeared before the Senate.²⁴ The alms­house of old men who judged him were stupefied and listened with their mouths open; during their long military and civilian service they had never heard anything like it. The zealous Buturlin demanded the death sentence because of the insolence of the accused.²⁵

Calmly and steadfastly stood the three youths—Arngoldt, Slivetsky, and Rostovsky—before the military authorities, who had been ordered to sen­tence them to death.

"Did you write this unsigned letter to Liders?" Arngoldt was asked.

"I did," answered Arngoldt, "but I didn't have a chance to complete it," and he took a pen and signed his name.

And these are not isolated examples, not exceptions; they have become the norm. Other officers behaved this way, Obruchev, for example. [. . . ]²⁶

"I am publishing my project under my own name; it is time for us to stop being afraid, and if we want them to stop treating us like children, we have to stop acting in a juvenile manner. A person who desires truth and justice must be able to fearlessly stand up for them."

When I read these lines in the brochure by Serno-Solovyovich, it seemed to me that I—that we—had grown up.²⁷ Such words, such expressions, did not exist in Nicholavean times; this was a milestone in our history by which one could measure how far we had traveled from that unforgettable stage. [. . .]

These words, these answers before a court of executioners, in sight of loaded rifles, in sight of hard labor—the younger generation can place these on scales. Better than anything else they justify the children against the fa­thers, if the fathers have in fact attacked them.²⁸ With this they can easily atone for the awkwardness of forms and the arrogant language.

This morally valiant attitude, which declared itself strongly in Russian society, not only did not allow it to choose between the tsar and Poland, but between silence and speech. The beaten-down, flustered man, who kept silent about everything, could remain silent and covered with innocent blood. But after Mikhailov and "Great Rus," and after the executed officers [. . .] when all of Russia sees the need for an Assembly of the Land in order to take charge of a government that was inept and evil as well, we cannot remain silent in the face of the murder of an entire nation, in the face of this mur­der, which is taking place with our hands, our money, our obedience. [. . .]

Make haste to speak out!

Make haste to untie your boat in time from the imperial barque and to raise your own private flag. Make haste to defend the Russian people. Make haste to protest against the despicable and corrupt state institutions com­pelling Russian soldiers to exterminate Poles, and let their dishonorable speech be drowned out by your cry of indignation.

We are awaiting you! Land and Liberty has set an example.

Notes

Source: "1831-1863," Kolokol, l. 160, April 1, 1863; 17:92-111, 388-92.

This is Herzen's version of lines from Macbeth, act 5, scene 1. These remarks are actually both made by Lady Macbeth.

A reference to Banquo in act 3, scene 4 of Macbeth.

In his discussions with Alexander I, the historian Nikolay M. Karamzin argued that the independence of Poland was incompatible with the greatness (velichie) and security of the Russian state.

After the revolution of July 1830 that overthrew the Bourbons and brought Louis Philippe to the throne as king of France, Nicholas declared him a usurper and moved to break diplomatic relations, but his failure to put together a coalition of like-minded rul­ers forced him to back off from this measure, and he confined himself to simply failing to observe the usual formalities and signs of respect between rulers in their subsequent correspondence.

In Russian: samoderzhavie, pravoslavie, narodnost'.

Wellington was British prime minister in 1830; Metternich was Austrian foreign minister; Sebastiani was the French foreign minister, and Perier was head of the French Palace of Deputies.

"To the Slanderers of Russia."

Stuart (1803-1854) was a British politician who strongly supported Polish inde­pendence.

Pecherin was a poet and professor of Greek philology at Moscow University; in 1836 he emigrated and converted to Catholicism. Alexander I. Polezhaev (1804-1838) was a poet whose tragic story was recounted by Herzen in Past and Thoughts.

Chaadaev, a political philosopher famous for one published and other circulated manuscripts, was subjected to a yearlong house arrest by Nicholas I. Herzen describes Chaadaev's impact on Russia in his memoirs.

Karl Sand (1795-1820) was a radical Prussian student executed for his murder of the conservative writer Kotzebue. The Italian province of Calabria was very poor and full of bandits.

Herzen: "In 1835, during my exile to the province of Vyatka, I found in the town of Sarapul a wonderfully organized library, which received all the new books and journals in Russian. Members could take books home and there was a reading room. All this was set up with incredible effort, sacrifices, and great persistence by the district physician, who had graduated from Moscow University. His name, I think, was Chudnovsky."

Admiral Nikolay S. Mordvinov (1754-1845) served as a senator, member of the State Council, and, from 1823 to 1840, as head of the Free Economic Society. Mordvi­nov submitted his opinions and proposals to the State Council under Alexander I and Nicholas I, and they also circulated widely in society. He believed that the economic development of Russia depended on a strengthening of the rule of law and the educa­tional system.

This is a criticism of Moscow University professor B. N. Chicherin, among others.

General Rostovtsev (1803-1860) was put in charge of all military schools in 1835. In an 1849 letter to Herzen, Granovsky described the new instructions as something that Jesuits would envy.

A reference to Ivan Turgenev's collection of stories called Notes of a Hunter (Za- piski okhotnika, 1852).

The article "The Anniversary of Borodino" appeared in Fatherland Notes (Oteche- stvennye zapiski) in October 1839, while Belinsky was under the influence of Hegel. The idea of reconciliation with reality was advanced in this and other Belinsky articles in 1839 and 1840.

Alexey Khomyakov (i8o4-i86o) was an influential Slavophile essayist.

In June i849, Granovsky wrote to Herzen that the situation was getting worse daily, with any attraction to the West stifled, and denunciations multiplying rapidly. There was every reason to go mad, and Belinsky had picked the right time to die.

Major-General Ivan P. Liprandi (i790-i88o) led the Interior Ministry's yearlong surveillance of the Petrashevtsy and compiled a list of everyone who could be linked to the group.

A reference to Dostoevsky's prison memoir Notes from the House of the Dead (Za- piski iz mertvogo doma, i86o-62).

Admiral Charles Napier (i786-i86o) commanded the British fleet in the Baltic during the Crimean War. On July 25, i854, Nicholas visited Kronshtadt.

Spirit wrestlers (dukhobortsy or dukhobory) are one of the many sects that arose in Russia in the eighteenth century; three decades after this essay was written, Leo Tolstoy helped the Dukhobors to immigrate to Canada in order to avoid further persecution by the tsarist government.

Mikhailov took responsibility for the pamphlet and its distribution upon himself and was sentenced to hard labor. In the May i, i862, issue of The Bell, Herzen described "Milhailov's Answers" to the Senate.

General Alexey P. Buturlin (i8o2-i863) helped to suppress the Polish uprising in i83i and peasant disorders in i84i, and served as a governor for fifteen years; he became a senator in i86i.

Arngoldt, Slivetsky, and Rostovsky were officers serving with the Russian army in Poland who were shot in June i862 for spreading revolutionary pamphlets and harmful ideas among the Russian forces. General Liders was the tsar's deputy in Poland. Ob- ruchev was a retired military officer who worked at The Contemporary, was arrested in i86i, and sentenced to hard labor for distributing the "Velikorus" proclamation.

Nikolay Serno-Solovyovich (i834-i866) was one of the organizers of "Land and Liberty" in i86i (not to be confused with a second, more radical, movement of the same name in the i87os), met with Herzen in London, was arrested in July i862, and sen­tenced to hard labor. His brochure, "The Final Resolution of the Peasant Question," came out in Berlin in i86i.

Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, which had appeared in i862, stimulated a vigorous debate over the political portrayal of the generations.

55 *

The Bell, No. i63, May i5, i863. This polemic against Katkov and The Moscow Gazette (Moskovskie vedomosti) displays the familiar ironic style of Herzen's journalism, espe­cially with its abundance of rhetorical questions and punning.

What Kind of Government Does Russia Have?

[1863]

The Morning Post suddenly, without warning, reveals that the government in Russia is despotic.¹

Do you hear that? In Russia the government is despotic? What kind of lunacy is this!

So Paul I was a despot?

So Nicholas I was a despot?

So even Alexander II is a despot? It is true that since we have begun to forget the unforgettable one, the form of government has not changed.

No, these Jacobins do not understand the Russian government. [. . .]

If Poland rebelled, that is because the Russian autocracy had little free­dom to operate, being very much constrained by free institutions. If officers were shot, this is no despotism but Liders's doing.² If people are held in jails and exiled for their words, without a trial, well, it's all legal and according to the code of laws. chapter and verse, and not despotism. It was clear that The Moscow Gazette could not tolerate such an affront, despite the fact that it was written in the English alphabet, on English paper, in England. The head of The Moscow Gazette quite rightly says that he cannot say "just how painful it is for a Russian person to hear that a serious organ of public opinion in Europe feels it has the right to call our form of government despotic."³

Surely if Palmerston's paper had been more thoughtful, they would not have made this mistake and it would not be "painful for a Russian person."⁴ The head of The Moscow Gazette "had distinguished himself" by preaching with a schoolboy's bitterness—following Gneist⁵ and other Germans—the English constitution, the English court, a bicameral legislature, the power of wealth, equality in the face of hunger—in a word, everything up to and including English medical plasters and English salt, and now, with even greater bitterness, defends the government which has entrusted him with such an important job. From that he concludes that the government he defends is parliamentary, free, and not despotic. [. . .]

Notes

Source: "Kakoe upravlenie v Rossii?" Kolokol, l. i63, May i5, Й63; iy:i45-46, 4i3-i4.

An editorial to this effect was published on April 9, i863.

The commander of the army in Poland was adjutant-general Count A. N. Liders (i790-i874), who had helped suppress the earlier rebellion in i83i and the Hungarian revolution in i849. Herzen mentioned the execution of the three officers—Arngoldt, Slivitsky, and Rostovsky—on June i6, i862, in several articles (see Docs. 54 and 72).

This is from a response published in The Moscow Gazette on April 5, 1863.

The Liberal Palmerston was at that time prime minister.

Rudolf von Gneist (1816-1895) was a jurist, legal reformer, and political theorist.

♦ 56 *

The Bell, No. 166, June 20, 1863. Herzen was well informed on activities in the Rus­sian provinces; he saw the hand of some organization other than Land and Liberty in the appearance of a fake proclamation from the tsar to the serfs, and he felt a duty to criticize the ideological position and tactics of any group who, supposedly in Alexander II's name, summoned peasants to confiscate private and government-held lands. This kind of deception became an even more widespread tactic by the end of the 1860s. De­spite Herzen's stand, Valuev believed that the manifesto was the work of "Herzen and Company" (Let 3:503).

The Volga Manifesto and Russia in a State of Siege

[1863]

Here is the text of a manifesto that was distributed in villages along the banks of the Volga.¹ We are taking it from a printed copy.

By the grace of God, We, Alexander the Second, etc.

In Our unceasing concern for the well-being of all Our subjects, We, by an edict of the 19th of February 1861, acknowledged the desir­ability of removing the bonds of serfdom from the rural population of the Russia that has been entrusted to Us by God.

Yielding to the entreaties of the landowners, We, however heavily it weighed on our royal heart, ordered all serfs to remain in complete subservience to their former owners for a period of two years, that is, until the 19th of February of the current year, 1863.

Now, having called upon the Almighty for aid, We declare in this manifesto the complete freedom of all of Our subjects, no matter to which rank or status they belonged. Henceforth freedom to believe and practice one's faith will be the right of every person.

To all former serfs, both private and state, We give a fixed amount of land without any payment for it either to the landowners or to the state, for their full, inalienable, hereditary use.

Relying on the loyalty of our people and recognizing the benefit to the country of abolishing Our army, We, from this day forward and forever, free Our beloved subjects from every kind of recruiting and military obligations; for that reason, We are ordering the soldiers in Our army to return to their native regions.

The payment of poll tax for the purpose of maintaining such a vast army, from the day this Manifesto is published onward, is abolished. We command that all soldiers returning from service, as well as all house serfs, factory workers, and urban dwellers be given without any charge an allotment of land from the public holdings of our vast empire.

In every region,² as in every town, the people will choose four people who enjoy their confidence, who, after meeting in a district center, will choose in common the district representative and other district authorities, four from each district; in the provincial capital, they will choose a provincial representative and other provincial au­thorities. Deputies from every province, summoned to Moscow, will compose the State Council, which, with Our assistance, will govern the entire Russian land.

That is Our royal will.

Anyone who declares the contrary and does not fulfill this Our royal will is Our enemy. We trust that the devotion of the people will protect Our throne from the attacks of ill-intentioned people who do not justify Our royal trust.

We command all Our subjects to believe only Our royal words. If troops, deceived by their commanders, if generals, governors, and intermediaries dare to oppose with force this manifesto, then each person should rise up to defend the freedom given by Me, and, not sparing your life, enter into battle with all who dare to oppose this Our will.

May the Almighty Lord bless our undertakings!

God is with us! Come to your senses, heathens, and submit, for God is with us!

Issued in Moscow, on the thirty-first day of March, in the one thousand eight hundred and sixty-third year since the birth of Christ, and the ninth year of Our reign.

In the original copy signed by HRH

Alexander

Printed in St. Petersburg under the auspices of the senate.

The authors of such an appeal take a great responsibility upon themselves. This is a dangerous path: the people will stop believing in the printed word.

We are confident that the Land and Liberty group, who as a rule dis­miss such isolated actions, have nothing to do with the composition of this manifesto.⁴ We do not doubt that this appeal was made by people who are decent, but who, meanwhile, do not understand that it maintains the old, unfortunate notion that the tsar wishes to bestow genuine liberty, but is always being prevented from doing so, while it is clear that not only are oth­ers hindering the tsar but he is hindering himself, because he himself does not wish to bestow genuine liberty.

If this manifesto was published by a particular circle, then they and oth­ers must be advised to join together with the main society and then act with a unified plan.

It is very nice for the government, who for the distribution of some kind of leaflet that involves no action of any kind, to have given all Russia and all Russians over to the caprice of provincial authorities, i.e., terrible governors like Perm's Lashkarev.⁵ "Such crimes cannot remain unpunished, even if the goal toward which they were directed was unattainable. Provincial of­ficials have been given the duty on the highest authority to subject the dis­tributors of the false manifesto and other provocative appeals to the military courts on the same principle⁶ on which in the previous year military courts were ordered in the matter of the arsonists."

Notes

Source: "Volzhskii manifest i Rossiia v osadnom polozhenii," Kolokol, l. i66, June 20, i863; i7:i98-200, 433-35.

In April i863, members of a pro-Polish group and students linked to the Kazan branch of Land and Liberty made attempts to distribute the manifesto in the Kazan, Nizhegorodsky, Tambov, and Vyatsk districts.

Volost', the smallest administrative division in tsarist Russia.

The Russian is "v. i v." (velikoe imperatorskoe velichestvo).

Herzen was correct in believing that the document was not the work of the Land and Liberty leadership. It was initiated by a Polish committee whose members decided to make use of strong feelings about land allotments for their own purposes, and com­posed in Moscow by member of Land and Liberty without the leaders' knowledge, then printed in Vilna (Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 3Ю, mentions another theory about it be­ing printed in Norway and spirited into the empire through Finland), and given to the provincial Polish group for distribution in the volatile Volga region. When the Land and Liberty central committee learned of the false manifesto's imminent appearance, they rushed to issue their own proclamation to neutralize its effects.

Major-General Alexander G. Lashkarevich (i823-i898) was governor of Perm from i86i to i865. The quotation that follows is from an order given by Alexander II and published in the Northern Post newspaper on May i8, i863.

6. Herzen notes here that this means to shoot without justification, as had occurred with an unfortunate Jew in Odessa convicted of arson two years earlier. In the case of the Kazan group linked to the false manifesto, arrests were made in April and May Й63 and the accused were handed over to a military court; four ringleaders were executed in i864, one more in i865, while other participants were sentenced to hard labor.

57 *

The Bell, No. i69, August i5, i863. Ivan I. Kelsiev (i84i-i864) was an auditor at Moscow University and an active participant in the student demonstrations of October i86i that included a march to the home of Governor-General Tuchkov. As one of a three-student delegation hoping to negotiate with Tuchkov, Kelsiev was arrested, exiled to Perm, then arrested once more on suspicion of involvement in revolutionary propaganda, includ­ing articles intended for publication in The Bell. Held in a private dwelling in Moscow while awaiting sentencing, Kelsiev escaped to Constantinople with the help of Land and Liberty, only to die the following year. Nikolay I. Utin (i84i-i883), leader of the student movement at St. Petersburg University, was arrested in fall i86i and held for several months. After his father successfully lobbied for his release, Utin joined Land and Lib­erty in i862, but escaped to London when he learned that the police planned to arrest him again; after a search of his apartment, he was tried and sentenced to death in absen­tia. He later served as secretary for the Russian section of the First International. In this article, Herzen frequently employs puns in referring to jails and to Russia as a whole.

I. Kelsiev and N. Utin [1863]

Two energetic representatives of university youth—from two very different sides—have been saved from the St. Petersburg government's persecution.

I. Kelsiev, the brother of the publisher of Old Believer anthologies, was arrested in connection with the Moscow student affair and sent to Verkho- ture. From there he was sent for questioning in the matter of Argiropulo and Zaichnevsky.¹ Argiropulo died in prison, and Zaichnevsky was sen­tenced to hard labor. Kelsiev was sentenced to six months of incarceration, after which he was to continue his exile in Verkhoture. [. . .] He preferred— and very wisely—to leave the private dwelling in which he was held, and then the common prison in which the whole of Russia is confined. He is now abroad.

N. Utin was at St. Petersburg University, and his name, like that of Kel­siev, is well known to our readers. He was among the instigators of the

Petersburg University demonstrations, was held in the Peter Paul Fortress and, when faced with a new arrest, decided to leave Russia. We enthusiastically welcome them to Europe.

Note

Source: "I. Kel'siev i N. Utin," Kolokol, l. 169, August 15, 1863; 17:234, 446-47.

1. Perakl E. Argiropulo and Petr G. Zaichnevsky were student leaders in Moscow, arrested in 1861 along with other students, on suspicion of illegally printing forbid­den texts and revolutionary decrees. Argiropulo died in a prison hospital in 1862; Zaichnevsky was sent to hard labor for a year, and then into Siberian exile.

♦ 58 *

The Bell, No. 169, August 15, 1863. Herzen cannot rest while journalism in Russia is supporting the bloody work of the state. He wrote to Bakunin that "however vile the government was, journalism and society were even more vile" with dinners and toasts for the worst of the lot, Muravyov and Katkov (Let 3:532).

Gallows and Journals [1863]

We will no longer take note of political killings carried out by the Russian government, nor provide excerpts from Russian newspapers. Executions have become part of the daily routine in our country. Since Peter I practiced doing this with his own hands, there has been nothing like it in Russia, even in the time of Biron¹ or Paul I. We turn away in shame and sorrow from the gallows and their daily lists.

The year 1863 will remain noteworthy in the history of Russian journal­ism and in the history of our development as a whole. The heroic era of our literature² has ended. Since the university events and the Petersburg fire, it has taken a new turn: it has become official and officious,³ denuncia­tions have appeared along with demands for unheard of punishments, etc. The government, while winning over and encouraging favorable journals by all available means, has, in the French manner, banned all independent organs. Police literature took advantage of this and expressed itself without restraint, since no one in Russia could object. Of the independent journals with a political direction only The Day has held on; its Great Russian patri­otism has placed it in a special position. We know the direction of The Day, but, speaking frankly, if anyone had said a year ago that The Day would call honest adversaries who are fighting for the independence of their home­land bandits, and the Polish authorities—who organized the uprising and are steering their entire nation between life and death—a den of thieves and hangmen, we would not have believed it, just as we would not have believed that to the question of what to do with insurgents in the provinces, that same journal would have answered: of course, execute them, and this with­out any need since they would have been executed anyway, but just to show sympathy and approval.

This patriotic frenzy brought to the surface everything of the Tartar, land­owner, and sergeant that in a sleepy and half-forgotten way was fermenting in us; we now know how much Arakcheev⁴ there is in our veins and how much Nicholas in our brain. This will cause many to think carefully and many to submit. Evidently educated Russia had not run that far away when faced with the government. Neither the French language in days of old, nor philosophy from Berlin, nor England according to Gneist did much of anything. While speaking in a pure Parisian dialect we beat our serfs in the house and field; while discussing Gneist, we demand confiscations by mili­tary authorities and executions by secret courts. The Slavophiles have much over which to rejoice: the national, pre-Petrine foundation⁵ has not changed, at least in our savage exceptionalism, in hatred toward anything foreign, and in the indiscriminate use of courts and harsh punishments. [. . .]

What kind of excerpts and arguments can one have in this case? Hav­ing sadly escorted an old acquaintance to the madhouse, we will await his recovery, visiting now and then, and having faith in a healthy organism that can endure anything. The patriotic fury is too fierce to prevail for very long.

Those who have defiled our language will pay for it. Conscience will be awakened—if not theirs, then that of the younger generation, not those noticed by Moscow professors or by the court in Petersburg; they will re­coil with horror from those who sings psalms to the hangmen, from the fawning admirers of Muravyov, from all these Kotzebues⁶ and journalistic Arakcheevs. We do not doubt this and for that reason we will leave them to rage on and finish their unhealthy intellectual ferment.

August 5, 1863

Notes

Source: "Viselitsy i zhurnaly," Kolokol, l. 169, August 15, 1863; 17:235-37, 447-48.

1. Ernst Biron (1690-1772) was close to Empress Anna and the de facto ruler of Rus­sia from 1730 to 1740, a gloomy era that was later referred to as the bironovshchina.

By literature, Herzen clearly means journalism as well as other more artistic writing.

The word ofitsioznyi refers to a morally reprehensible degree of support for govern­ment activities, with an eye to currying favor.

Count Alexey A. Arakcheev (1769-1834), a general who served the governments of both Alexander I and Nicholas I, was tasked with organizing military colonies; his influ­ence on the governance of Russia is marked by the use of the word arakcheevshchina to refer to the years during which he was most influential.

Herzen used the French word fond.

General Pavel E. Kotzebue (1801-1884), head of the army general staff until 1862, then governor-general of Novorossiisk and Bessarabia from 1862 to 1874.

♦ 59 *

The Bell, No. 170, September 1, 1863. This essay continues Herzen's polemic with reform-era liberals, especially those like M. N. Katkov, N. F. Pavlov, and B. N. Chicherin who had begun to craft a kind of liberal conservatism, which included strong nationalist sentiments. Herzen saw this as a new stage in Russia's ideological development, which manifested itself in a number of ways, including increased attacks on him, a declining interest in his London publications, and greater difficulty in successfully sending them to Russia. "Literature" for Herzen includes journalism.

At This Stage [1863]

They are kicking us. by the weakness and shape of the hooves it is not dif­ficult to guess what kind of beast is rushing to keep up with police horses of the same color and water-carrying patriotic nags who are frankly convinced that the peasant world will stop eating oats and will lose all the virtues of a stable if they were to remove the fatherland's yoke.¹ Their zeal and their en­terprising and cavalier spirit demonstrate clearly that we are out of favor not only with the Winter Palace, but with the majority of the readers in Russia.

We have become accustomed to disfavor, we were always in the minor­ity, otherwise, we would not have wound up in London. Up till this point it was state power that persecuted us, but now a chorus has joined them.

The alliance against us of police and ideologues, Westernizers and Slavo­philes is a kind of negative affirmation of our "moral citizenship" in Russia. Behind the genuine neighborhood policeman and the fake homespun coat, all that is weak and unsteady, neither one thing nor the other, has pushed away from us—those poor in spirit and weakened in body, hangers-on from literary circles, patients living off crumbs at the tables of ideologues—they have all gone over to the other side and transferred over there the optical illusion of their existence. They represent a false strength: you think those are muscles, but it is really a tumor; that is dangerous during a struggle, which is why they did a good thing by leaving. We candidly admit that we absolutely do not fear being left in the minority, not even in a completely empty room.

Fifteen years ago we were in the same position with European reaction­aries; we did not yield an iota, and, having said all that we thought, we with­drew, conscious that truth is on our side.²

This time we will not withdraw and will not keep silent—in the Russian case the realization that we are right is not enough, we want to participate. It is developing in a misshapen, crazy, criminal fashion, but it is taking its course.

We do not know whether or not Western man will free himself. The process drags on and is far from being finished. In any case the task is a difficult one; the threads are strong, the knots are tangled, and all of it has not only entered the body but has grown into it.

We are not at all in that position; our life has not taken on a definitive form. There is a great deal that is bad in its instability and contradictions, but that is not the point. The point is that we have not joined the conserva­tive era of our existence—for us conservatism is either police resistance, or ideological imitation of the West. [. . .]

The uncertainty and disorder of Russian life, leading it, on the one hand, to ugly extremes and contradictions, to an anxious tracking down of prin­ciples and a foolish grasping at everything in the world, and, on the other hand, our national life's elementary strength and endurance, its indiffer­ence to experimental reforms and improvements—all this demonstrates clearly that our life has not taken on a definitive form, has not run across forms that are appropriate to it, and has not developed them from its own existence. It cannot find itself in other people's homes; it cannot settle down, and lives like a nomad.

The first time that the two ways of life, the two Russias, met in this bor­derland, the first time that the question occupying them was not resolved with a whip, it was resolved not in a Western manner. It is impossible to even pose this question in a Western manner. Since the day when the govern­ment indirectly admitted the peasant's right to land, when literature began to discuss whether the serfs should be freed with or without land, and if with land, then how to own it, collectively or individually, the first serious compromise began between the Russian national way of life and the ideal of Western civilization. That is why the peasant, silent for centuries, began to talk, and began to talk sense.

Now, after this first and maybe most important step, now we need a great deal of coming together, freedom of thought, border posts open on all sides and, most of all, with the beams removed, discarded models whose originals had turned out to be unsuited for the West. And now, at the right time, "traitors" have turned up, who preach a west-east conservatism of Petersburg puppet shows.³

That which a civilizing empire did not accomplish is being attempted by doctrinaire civilizers.

The cords with which the government entangled us are easy to sever; it is a matter of muscles, and not conscience, as in the West. The literary Mu- ravyovs want to tighten the noose, while still assuring us that it is all for our good; they want not only to overwhelm us with their power and corrupt us with their conviction. Now, at a time when we must lay out our plan and erect signposts, they want to narrow our thinking. [. . .] cultivate in us the conservative senility of Europe and wind up just cultivating its chronic dis­eases. [. . .] They themselves can easily do without free institutions, without freedom to publish, and congratulate themselves with their victory over the revolution of i862 in Petersburg, of which none of us has heard.

This unnecessary, boring page from our textbook must be torn out. We were drilled sufficiently during the Petrine era, and there is no need, while abolishing corporal punishments, to introduce ones that are spiritual.

For our part, however, much strength remains [. . .] we will keep the mandarin-spiders from weaving us into this web, we will oppose this sec­ond and superfluous German invasion. The fact that they will try to stop us with the hindquarters of their police horses, to the accompaniment of the approving neighs and brotherly help of their imitators, will not stop us. It is a shame, though, that prior to kicking they did not wipe off their hooves because there is already a lot of mud, but a la guerre comme a la guerre.

August 20,1863

POST SCRIPTUM

It is impossible to go any further, without glancing at the path we have traveled since the previous stage.

While we trudged along, laying down a modest road to our printing press, events moved on and came to some kind of turning point; the shad­ows obviously are falling in a different direction.

Ten years ago Russia was silent, and we faced a single enemy—the gov­ernment. It did not have defenders in literature and fierce partisans in so­ciety. Literature kept silent about it and society feared it. Literature—with the exception of police organs that were despised by everyone—was in op­position. Society was not in opposition: indifferent and sleepy, it had no opinion, and amused itself under the shelter of autocracy.

Then society split: one part hated the government for the emancipation of the serfs, while the other loved it for the same reason. On this issue, all literature stood with the government, and, once that had happened, backed the government on a few other issues. Men of letters for the first time saw the possibility and pleasure of keeping all the advantages of liberalism with­out any of the disadvantages of being in opposition. In that way, by degrees there began a system of hopes and expectations on the part of literature and a system of a little bit ofgood at a time (gradualness with the chronic delay of prog­ress) on the part of the government. Russia lived in a kind of optical illusion: the government did not yield a bit, while literature and a portion of society were convinced that they were getting everything. Even those trifles that the government allowed were not made law and could always be taken back. Literature, enjoying some openness and temporarily relaxed censorship, imagined that we were on the eve of radical change, that a constitution was being written, that freedom of the press est garantie, that only a few formali­ties remained, but the main business was already taken care of. The jour­nals which had come to believe this immediately took on an extraordinarily European character—a bit conservative, but not at all against progress; they began to speak about political parties, opposition pamphlets—democratic, federal, socialist—forgetting that we have a great many policemen and very few rights, that censorship really existed, and the court system existed only in a formal sense, making significantly easier, in that way, the work of the Third Department.

Journalism and the government during this honeymoon of government- sponsored liberalism behaved on terms of the most delicate civility. The journals displayed the greatest faith in a reforming government, while the government said how badly it felt that it could not improve and correct all institutions as fast as it would like, and it spoke of its love for open discus­sion and its hatred for monopolies.

They resembled two honorable people, competing with each other in politeness—one, in demanding a debt, said that he fully appreciates that his debtor intends to pay; the other puts it off, assuring him that he is making a sacrifice in postponing the delight of payment.

This has become annoying, and not without reason, especially to the government. No matter what crack it is that the light shines through, it lights up something indecent, in no matter how distorted a form freedom of expression is given, it gets to the point. The government frowned, and

awaited some kind of disturbances in order to have a pretext; there were no disturbances, so it was necessary to take decisive measures. They came up with student lists and Putyatin, packed the Peter Paul Fortress with stu­dents, lured the students themselves onto Tverskaya Square in Moscow, but it did not work. The public opinion that had begun to develop was not in favor of such persecution, and journalism, still holding on to some sense of shame, displayed neither love for the students, nor tenderness toward Putyatin, nor approval of street battles with unarmed people, and young la­dies had no wish to dance with the conquering Preobrazhensky victors. The persecutions did not succeed; the government, in order to cover up its mis­take, got rid of Putyatin and Ignatiev. Revolution in Petersburg (according to The Moscow Gazette) continued, the terror continued, the government did not know what to fabricate next, what new lists of students. fortunately the fires came to their aid. There's a reason the Russian people love arson.

In 1812 Moscow saved the nation from foreign captivity with a fire, and fifty years later Petersburg with the same means freed imperial power of the yoke of liberalism and many commentators of the constraints of pre­tending to be honorable people.

The revolution and terror were defeated. The storm clouds hanging over their heads went away, and the stone lying on their chests was transformed into an order of Stanislav of the first degree. Frightened public opinion drew closer to the government and journalism supported it. At that time the first attempts at denunciations appeared in print, the first demands for energetic measures, i.e., executions. The government, seeing this mood, made use of it.

What would our unforgettable Chichikov⁴ say if he were to see how— on the ruins of make-believe barricades and on the ashes of the flea mar­ket—Golovnin and Valuev⁵ set up open markets at which "dead souls" of the literary world were bought up? Remount officers were sent to Moscow, where there had not been a living soul since the death of Granovsky, and, consequently, countless multitudes of dead souls. [. . .]

A confused society did not know where to turn; the fires had frightened them, but they weren't there and the government refrained from any ex­planation of this matter and began to explore the possibility of death sen­tences, and hard labor. Once again the grumbling began, but luckily for the government Poland rebelled. The gentry, which had shied away from the government because of the emancipation of the serfs, passionately dashed toward it at the first news of the enslavement of Poland and an­nounced its readiness to take part in this.

And now there are before us, instead of a single Nicholas, three enemies: the government, journalists, and the gentry—the sovereign, Katkov, and Sobakevich.⁶

Notes

Source: "V etape," Kolokol, l. i7o, September i, i863; i7:244-5i, 449-52.

The word used here is duga, or "shaft-bow," a wooden bar arching above an ani­mal's neck as it holds together two shafts and the harness.

Herzen is referring to From the Other Shore.

The Russian word used here is balagan, a temporary fair booth with room for a stage and benches for spectators, erected for performances during Shrovetide and other holiday seasons.

Chichikov is the picaresque hero of Nikolay Gogol's novel Dead Souls (Й42).

Alexander V. Golovnin (i82i-i886) was minister of education from i86i to i866.

Katkov edited The Moscow Gazette; Sobakevich is a character in Gogol's Dead Souls.

* 60 *

The Bell, No. i7i, October i, i863. Herzen composed this tribute after hearing about the death of Shchepkin in August i863. Born into serfdom, Mikhail Shchepkin became one of the most famous Russian actors of his day, and a prominent figure in Russian society. Because of his humble background, his successes took on a political resonance as Russia moved toward emancipation. The celebration of his fiftieth anniversary on the stage in Й55, and his election to the English Club in Moscow in i857, the first actor and the first ex-serf allowed to join, were events of more than personal significance, a fact duly noted by the Third Department. Shchepkin was friendly with both Slavophile and Westernizer circles, including the Moscow circle that gathered around Timofey Granovsky, and was a much-loved and much-respected figure in an age of strong friend­ships and even stronger antipathies. Herzen evaluates Shchepkin's gifts against the background of the Russian theater—where his chief rival for several decades was Pavel Mochalov (i8oo-i848)—and the European stage, with which Herzen was familiar. This article recounts the actor's visit to London in i853, the first visit to Herzen by one of his old Russian circle after the series of family tragedies he had suffered. That Shchepkin turned out to be an emissary from his Moscow acquaintances was an early warning to Herzen that even the liberals of his generation were turning conservative.

Mikhail Semyonovich Shchepkin [1863]

Moscow grows empty. and the patriarchal face of Shchepkin has disap­peared.. And it was firmly intertwined with all the memories of our Mos­cow circle. A quarter-century our senior, he was on very good terms with us, more like an uncle or an older brother. Everyone loved him madly: la­dies and students, elderly people and young girls. His appearance intro­duced calm, his good-natured reproach brought nasty quarrels to an end, his meek smile of an affectionate old man caused others to smile, and his limitless ability to forgive another person, to find extenuating reasons, was a school for humane behavior.

And with that he was a great performer, a performer by vocation and by his labor. He created moral truth¹ on the Russian stage, and he was the first to become untheatrical in the theater. His performances lacked false phrases, affectations, and caricatures; the characters he created were like figures from the paintings of Teniers and Ostade.²

Shchepkin and Mochalov, are, without doubt, the two greatest actors of all I have seen during the course of thirty-five years and across the expanse of Europe. They are both hints of the inner strength and potential of the Russian nature, which make our faith in Russia's future unshakeable.

We will not go into an analysis of Shchepkin's talent and significance on the stage; we will merely note that he did not at all resemble Mochalov. Mochalov was a man of impulse and of an inspiration that was not made obedient or structured; his gifts did not obey him, rather, he obeyed them. Mochalov did not work; he knew that at some point he would be visited by a spirit that would turn him into Hamlet, Lear, or Karl Moor, and he waited for that. and if the spirit did not come, he remained an actor who knew his role poorly. Endowed with unusual sensitivity and a keen understand­ing of all the shades of a role, Shchepkin, in contrast, worked terribly hard and never left anything to the arbitrary nature of a moment's inspiration. But his role was not the result of study alone. [. . .] Shchepkin's style from cover to cover was suffused with warmth, naivete, and his study of the part did not inhibit a single sound or gesture, but gave them firm support and a firm foundation.

However, it is likely that much will be written in Russia about his talent and his significance. I would like to write about my last meeting with him.

In Autumn i853 I received a letter from M. K. in Paris, saying that on a certain date Shchepkin would be arriving in London from Boulogne. The joy I felt frightened me. In the image of that radiant old man my early years looked out from behind the graves, the entire Moscow period. and at such a time. I have spoken about the terrible years between i850 and i855, about that five-year-long bleak ordeal in a populous wilderness. I was completely alone in a crowd of strangers and slight acquaintances. At that time Russians did less traveling abroad and were all the more afraid of me. The heightened terror that continued until the end of the Hungarian War³ turned into a uniform oppression, which plunged everyone into a hopeless despair. And the first Russian traveling to London who was not afraid to shake my hand was Mikhail Shchepkin.

I couldn't wait and the morning of his arrival I took an express train to Folkstone.

"What will he tell me, what news will he bring, whose greetings will he relay, what details, whose jokes, or speeches?" At that time there were still many people whom I loved in Moscow.

When the steamer docked, I could make out the plump figure of Shchep­kin with a gray hat and a stout walking stick; I waved a handkerchief and rushed down. A policeman did not let me through but I pushed him aside, seeing with amusement that Shchepkin looked on merrily and nodded his head, and I ran onto the deck and threw my arms around the old man. He was the very same as when I left him: with the same good-natured appear­ance, his vest and the lapels of his coat covered with spots, as if he had just left the Troitsky restaurant on his way to Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov's place.⁴ "What got into you to come such a distance to meet me!" he said to me through his tears.

We traveled together to London; I quizzed him about all the details, all the trifles about our friends, trifles without which people cease to be alive and remain in our memories in broad outlines, in profile. He talked of non­sensical things and we laughed with tears in our voices.

When my nerves had settled, little by little I noticed something sad, as if some sort of hidden thought was tormenting the honest expression on his face. And, in fact, the next day little by little the conversation turned to the press; Shchepkin began to talk about the troubled feelings with which Mos­cow accepted my emigration, then the brochure "Du developpement des idees revolutionnaires." and, finally, the London printing-house. "What use can come of your publishing? With the one or two leaflets that get through, you will accomplish nothing, but the Third Department will read them and make a note of it, and you will destroy a huge number of people, you will destroy your friends."

"But, M. S., up till now God has spared us, and no one has been caught because of me."

"Do you know that after your praise for Belinsky, it is forbidden to men­tion his name in print?"

"Along with everything else. However, I have doubts about my part in this. You know what role Belinsky's letter to Gogol played in the Petra­shevsky case.⁵ Death spared Belinsky—I was not afraid of compromising the dead."

"But Kavelin, it seems, is not dead?"

"What happened to him?"

"Well, after the publication of your book where you talk about his article on the ancestral principle and the quarrel with Samarin, he was summoned to Rostovtsev."⁶

"Well!"

"What do you want? Rostovtsev told him to be more careful in the future."

"Mikhail Semyonovich, do you really consider that a martyrdom—to suf­fer the tetrarch Yakov⁷ to advise him to be more careful?"

The conversation continued in this manner, and I could see that this was not only Shchepkin's personal opinion; if that were the case, his words would not have taken such an imperative tone.

This conversation was noteworthy for me, because in it were the first sounds ofMoscow conservatism, not in the circles of Prince Sergey Mikhailo- vich Golitsyn,⁸ of frivolous landowners, or frivolous officials, but in a circle of educated people, men of letters, actors, and professors. For the first time I heard this opinion expressed in such a clear manner; it struck me, al­though at the time I was at too great a distance to understand that from it would develop that stubbornly conservative direction that turned Moscow into Kitay-gorod.⁹

At this time it was still just weariness, a broken spirit, the consciousness of one's own powerlessness and a maternal fear for one's children. Now Moscow insolently and bravely drinks the health of Muravyov.¹⁰

"A. I.," said Shchepkin, as he stood up and paced back and forth uneas­ily, "you know how much I love you and how all of our group loves you. In my old age, not speaking a word of English, I came to see you in London. I would get down on my aged knees before you to ask you to stop while there is still time."

"Mikhail Semyonovich, what is it that you and your friends want from me?"

"I speak only for myself and I will say directly: in my opinion, go to America, write nothing, let them forget about you, and then in a year or two or three we can begin to work on getting you permission to return to Russia."

I was extremely sad; I tried to hide the pain that these words caused me out of pity for the old man, who had tears in his eyes. He continued to de­velop this alluring picture of happiness—to live once again under the mer­ciful scepter of Nicholas. However, seeing that I did not answer, he asked: "Isn't it possible, A. I.?"

"No it is not, Mikhail Semyonovich. I know that you love me and wish me the best. It is painful for me to upset you, but I cannot deceive you: let our friends say what they will, but I will not shut down the printing press. The time will come when they will look differently on the mechanism I have set up on English soil. I will continue to print, and will print without stop­ping. If our friends do not value my activities, it will cause me great pain, but it will not stop me; others will value it, the younger generation, the next generation."

"So neither the love of friends nor the fate of your children matter?"

I took him by the hand and said:

"Mikhail Semyonovich, why do you wish to spoil for me the festive oc­casion of our meeting—I am not going to America, and under the present state of affairs I am not going to Russia either; I will be printing because it is the only way of doing something for Russia, the only means of maintain­ing a living connection with it. If what I print is bad, then tell our friends to send manuscripts—they must feel the lack of free speech."

"No one will send anything," said the already irritated old man; my words had really upset him, he felt a rush of blood to his head and wanted to send for a doctor and leeches.

We did not return to this conversation. Only just before his departure he said sadly, shaking his head:

"You have taken so much joy from me with your stubbornness."

"M. S., let us each follow our own path, and maybe one of them will lead somewhere."

He left, but his unsuccessful mission still fermented inside him, and he, who loved powerfully also angered powerfully, and as he left Paris he sent me a stern letter.¹¹ I read it with the same degree of love with which I threw my arms around him in Folkstone, and followed my own path.

Five years had passed since my meeting with Shchepkin when the Rus­sian press in London again crossed his path. The management of the Mos­cow theaters withheld money from the budget that was due to the actors. That was an age of making claims, and the actors chose Shchepkin as their intercessor in Petersburg. The director at that time was the well-known Gedeonov. Gedeonov began by flatly refusing to issue the past payments, saying that the books had been checked and it was impossible to alter previ­ously made arrangements.

The conversation became more insistent on Shchepkin's part, and, of course, bolder on the side of the director.

"I will have to see the minister," said the actor.

"It's good that you told me. I will report to him about this matter and you will be refused."

"In that case I will submit an appeal to the sovereign."

"You dare take such garbage and push your way to his imperial high­ness? As your superior, I forbid you."

"Your excellency," Shchepkin said, bowing, "you agree that the money belongs to the poor actors. They entrusted me with obtaining it; you have refused and promised a refusal from the minister. I wish to ask the sover­eign, and, as my superior, you have forbidden me. I have only one means left—I will relate the entire matter to The Bell."

"You have lost your mind," shouted Gedeonov. "I wonder whether you understand what you are saying—I will order your arrest. Listen, I will ex­cuse you only because you said this in the heat of the moment. You should be ashamed of making such a commotion over these trifles. Come to the office tomorrow and I will see what can be done."

The following day the money was allocated for the actors, and Shchepkin went home.¹² [. . .]

September 10, 1863

Notes

Source: "Mikhail Semenovich Shchepkin," Kolokol, l. i7i, October i, i863; i7:268-74, 458-6i.

Herzen uses the word pravda.

Seventeenth-century Flemish painters.

The Russian army intervened in Hungary in i849 and helped to crush the revolu­tionary movement.

Shchepkin was in the party that accompanied Herzen and his family on the first stage of their journey out of Moscow in i847. Sergey T. Aksakov (i79i-i859) was a writer, theater critic, and the father of two prominent Slavophiles, Konstantin and Ivan, and was deeply respected by Herzen. It was safe to mention the father's name in The Bell since he had also passed away.

A reference to the arrest (April Й49) and trial of a progressive Petersburg circle in the wake of the i848 upheavals in Europe that so frightened Nicholas I; Dostoevsky was accused of having read Belinsky's letter to others in the group. The letter the critic had written to Gogol criticized what Belinsky saw as fawning praise for a repressive regime in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (i847).

Konstantin D. Kavelin (i8i8-i885) was a law professor and writer, and, briefly, tutor to Grand Duke Nikolay Alexandrovich. In i847 his article on legal practices in pre- Petrine Russia appeared in The Contemporary, stimulating the Slavophile Yury Samarin to write a response. Without mentioning names, Herzen described this polemic in his book. Kavelin, who in ^50-53 served in the administration of the military academies, was subsequently summoned by its director, General Rostovtsev.

Herzen ironically compares Yakov Rostovtsev to the Tetrarch Herod in the gospel according to Matthew (chap. i4).

Sergey Golitsyn (i774-i859) served as trustee of the Moscow educational district from i830 to i835.

Kitay-gorod is one of the oldest areas of Moscow, located not far from the Kremlin.

General Mikhail N. Muravyov (i796-i866) was known as "the hangman" for his harsh suppression of the Polish rebellions of i830 and Й63.

In the letter, Shchepkin advised Herzen to let the world develop according to its natural laws and to confine himself to assisting in humanity's moral development, to spread ideas but not violence. Herzen considered Shchepkin to have been worn down by the age in which he lived.

Herzen: "This anecdote, which we heard at the time from a direct source, we did not print for obvious reasons." One source was Turgenev, who wrote to Herzen soon after the incident (Let 2:390).

The Bell, No. 177, January 15, 1864. This article is related to ongoing commentary in The Bell about the behavior of Russian liberals. It criticizes the fashion for repentance, especially by a gray-haired "Magdalene" (Ivan Turgenev), who submitted to questioning by the Russian government at the Paris Embassy in March 1863. Turgenev reportedly explained at some length his political differences with Herzen, Ogaryov, and Bakunin. The writer was summoned back to St. Petersburg to testify before the State Senate in January 1864; soon after that he was allowed to return to France. Herzen was also criti­cal of Turgenev's behavior in connection with the "Trial of the 32" (discussed in Doc. 70). Turgenev wrote to Herzen on April 2, 1864, about these remarks, saying that he expected as much from Bakunin but not from such an old friend as Herzen.

Scandal, Soot, a Candle Snuffer, etc.

[1864]

After the New Year, we received several letters from Russia and from Rus­sians abroad. The general impression was awful, although the signs of a turning point are not only continuing, but are clearly intensifying. Far- sighted cowards are beginning to abandon the camp of the reds (i.e., of the butchers, as the word "reds" is used in one of their letters). We are asked not to print the details so as not to threaten the purity of the sinners who have repented.

But then repentance of all kinds is the fashion—evidently, the end of times is upon us. Not only are reds repenting, but the blues, the skewbald, and those of no color whatsoever are repenting of everything that was in their thoughts and dreams, things in the distant past and those that have not yet happened, all sorts of different sins, even those that neither have nor ever could have anything to do with them.

Our correspondent tells of a certain gray-haired Magdalene (of the male sex), who wrote to the tsar of losing sleep and appetite, peace of mind, white hair and teeth, tormented that the tsar still does not understand the heart­felt repentance, as a result of which "all ties have been broken with youthful friends."

[. . .] The terror cannot be appeased—otherwise it would not be terror— and one cannot stop halfway. One will not be saved by lyrical exclamations about the might and great expanse of Russia, in the manner of Gogol,¹ or by constantly berating the Poles; it is necessary to offer denunciations, and to dishonor oneself. Rhetorical spasms of love for the people are not needed; rather, one must despise the people in the name of a strong state, and demand executions for the glory and strength of the Petersburg administration.

Note

Source: "Spletni, kopot', nagar i pr.," Kolokol, l. 177, January 15, 1864; 18:35-36, 543-45. 1. Herzen has in mind the final pages of Gogol's Dead Souls.

♦ 62 *

The Bell, No. 177, January 15, 1864. Herzen introduces the image of the three winged goddesses of classical mythology, who pursued sinners with a vengeance.

The Furies [1864]

The January 10 issue of Le Siecle,¹ speaking about a charming address to Mu­ravyov by Petersburg ladies, asks with astonishment: "Don't these mothers, wives, and sisters have sons, husbands, and brothers?" etc. O naive Siecle! Don't they know what kind of beast is the female Russian landowner from Saltychikha²—jailed in chains by Catherine II—up to. here's one, for ex­ample: an Englishman, very well known and much respected, told the story in London that he was recently at a grand dinner in Moscow and sat next to an old maid (he said her name, which is from a minor princely family), who, displeased with the Polish uprising, said to him, an Englishman: "With all my heart and soul I wish they would string up every single Pole!"

It goes without saying that there are many exceptions, but the general type of the charming sex from our democratic nobility, the Russian lady landowner, is a kind of she-wolf who gobbles up ten or twenty chamber­maids and servants without the slightest regret, tirelessly, and without rest.

There is no way these Furies would have changed in the space of two years. The only thing new in the old maid's remark is cynicism. In the past they duped foreigners with humane sentiments, but now boast in their presence of energetic measures and homespun patriotism.

Here is a job for all the Old Maids and Baba-Yagas³ of our beau monde— to greet in Moscow and Petersburg, with garlands and bouquets, Muravyov,

who, it is said, is coming to preside over a new commission for the extinction and destruction of Poland⁴. [. . .]

Notes

Source: "Furii," Kolokol, l. i77, January i5, Й64; i8:37, 545.

Le Siecle was a politically liberal Parisian daily.

Darya N. Saltykova (i73o-i8oi), known by her nickname "Saltychikha," was a fa­mously cruel serf owner, whose i768 sentence included an hour in the pillory, after which she spent the rest of her life confined to a convent.

Baba Yaga is a well-known and fearsome character in Russian fairy tales.

At the beginning of January Й64, a committee of five was formed, under the chair­manship of Alexander II, to prepare a land reform plan for Poland.

* 63 *

The Bell, No. i79, February i5, Й64. Herzen carried on an emotional polemic with Ivan Aksakov's The Day, revealing a much harsher opinion of him than did Ogaryov.

They've Gone Completely Out of Their Minds [1864]

In several Russian newspapers (The Siberian Gazette, The Northern Bee) there is a description of an execution that took place on January 5 in the town of Ostrov. Felix Ambrozhinsky was accused of being a gendarme in the Polish service, executing someone (no name was given), and "providing food supplies to the rebels." None of this is surprising any more. But listen further: "Along with the troops, Ambrozhinsky's accomplices were present, gendarmes like him (whose crimes had not yet been investigated), who had to play the role of executioners. After the reading of the sentence, the criminal kneeled, kissed a cross that was held by the priest, said: 'Forgive me,' and stood up. The men—accomplices of the criminal—led him to the scaffold [. . .] and performed a task probably familiar to them with the noose."

We address all honest people. We address, yes, we address, for exam­ple, you, Mr. Aksakov, publisher of The Day [. . .] yes, we turn to you—you bear a pure and honest name, a name that we are accustomed to respect in your father and to love in your brother—take care with whom you stand and what kind of energetic actions you praise. People whose crimes had not yet been uncovered, were forced to kill their comrade! [. . .]

Words fail, for language cannot supply sufficient reprimands and swear­words for this evil deed. Take care, Mr. Aksakov, that in supporting, for your own important political reasons, this unleashing of blood and brutal measures of such refined artistry, you have accumulated, instead of aid for the Bosnyaks, Croats, and Dalmatians, terrible remorse. You felt badly for us in The Day¹ and we feel badly for you in The Bell.

Note

Source: "Oni sovsem soshli s uma," Kolokol, l. i79, February i5, i864; ^49-50, 548-49.

i. Ivan Aksakov said that he regretted that Herzen was friends with Bakunin, who had betrayed the Russian people through his support for the Й63 Polish uprising. While he had never respected Bakunin, from Herzen he still hoped for repentance.

64 ♦

The Bell, No. i86, June i5, i864. This essay, full of respect and concern for a famous prisoner of the tsar, was reprinted in French soon after it appeared in The Bell. Ironi­cally, during his trial Chernyshevsky had used the fact of Herzen's previous attacks on him in "VERY DANGEROUS!!!" (Doc. 22) and other essays as proof of the distance and mutual dislike between the two men (Let 3:283). The sentence handed down by the State Senate was published on May 9, Й64, in The St. Petersburg Gazette, and on May i8 The Stock Market Gazette announced that the "civil execution" would take place the following day on Mytinskaya Square. Herzen had previously commented on the Chernyshevsky case; here he includes eyewitness accounts of the public spectacle favored by the Rus­sian government. The lack of support shown Chernyshevsky by Russian liberals was a particular irritant. K. D. Kavelin had written Herzen on August 6, i862, that he was not especially upset by the wave of arrests. "This is war, and one of them will win out over the other" (Eto voina: kto kogo odoleet). Kavelin saw each side as permitting itself any and all means to achieve its end. Chernyshevsky's propaganda had drawn a line between "young Russia" and a Russia that was "a little liberal, slightly bureaucratic, with a whiff of the serf owner" (Ivanova, A. I. Gertsen, i88), and that distinction became clearer as the i860s progressed.

N. G. Chernyshevsky [1864]

Chernyshevsky has been sentenced to seven years of hard labor and perma­nent exile.¹ May this boundless villainy fall like a curse upon the govern­ment, upon society, and upon the despicable, corrupt journalism that called for this persecution, and exaggerated the case for personal reasons. They schooled the government in the murder of prisoners of war in Poland, and the affirmation of sentences in Russia by preposterous ignoramuses in the Senate and the gray-haired villains of the State Council. [. . .]

The Invalid recently asked where was the new Russia to which Garibaldi had offered a toast.² Evidently, it is not entirely "beyond the Dnepr" as one victim falls after another. How can one reconcile the government's terrible executions, the terrible acts of retribution, and confidence in the restful serenity of its hack writers? What does the editor of The Invalid think about a government that, without any real danger, without any reason, shoots young officers, exiles Mikhailov, Obruchev, Martyanov, Krasovsky, Truve- lier,³ and twenty others, and finally condemns Chernyshevsky to hard labor.

And this is the reign that we greeted ten years ago!

Isk—r.

P.S. These lines had already been written when we read the following in a letter from an eyewitness to the civil execution: "Chernyshevsky had greatly changed, his pale face was swollen and bore the signs of scurvy. They made him kneel, broke the sword, and displayed him for a quarter hour at the pil­lory. A young woman threw a wreath into Chernyshevsky's carriage—and they arrested her. The well-known man of letters P. Yakushin shouted out to him 'Farewell!' and they arrested him. When Mikhailov and Obruchev were exiled, they were taken out at 4 in the morning, but now it is done in broad daylight!... "

We congratulate all the various Katkovs—they have triumphed over this enemy! Well, do they feel good about it?

You placed Chernyshevsky at the pillory for a quarter-hour⁴—how long will you, Russia, remain tied to it?

Damnation to you, damnation—and, if possible, vengeance!

Notes

Source: "N. G. Chernyshevskii," Kolokol, l. 186, June 15, 1864; 18:221-22, 578-79.

Chernyshevsky was first sentenced by the Senate to fourteen years of hard labor, which was confirmed by the State Council but cut in half by the tsar.

During a visit by Garibaldi and Mazzini to Herzen in London on April 17, 1864, the latter toasted a new, democratic Russia. The reactionary newspaper The Russian Invalid made fun of this new Russia that had been educated by Herzen, whom they character­ized as "our emigre from beyond the Dnepr" (579).

These men were arrested for distributing radical literature and were sentenced to varying terms of hard labor and exile.

Herzen: "Will none of our Russian artists paint a picture of Chernyshevsky at the pillory? This denunciatory canvas will be an icon for future generations and will in­crease the exposure of the dim-witted scoundrels who have bound human thought to the criminals' pillory, making him a companion on the cross."

The Bell, No. 187, July 15, 1864. Herzen summarizes the evolution of the Russian liberal gentry. The radical emigre Nikolay Utin (1841-1883), a member of the first Land and Liberty group who continued his radical work abroad, wrote to Ogaryov that this was the kind of categorical statement that Herzen should continue to write after the move to Geneva and the transfer of other work to younger revolutionaries (Let 4:23).

VII Years [1864]

Seven years ago, in July 1857, the first issue of The Bell appeared. Since that time we have often stopped to check our path against events, and have asked ourselves whether we are moving in the right direction and in the right way. Our goal, our fundamental beliefs were unaltered; our problem remained the same, but the means of solving it had to change. Whether a stream is small or large, its path depends not on itself, but on the general slopes and inclines of the land.

However, approaching the seventh anniversary, we were occupied with another question, namely, ought we in general continue or to come to a halt and await outbursts from the absurd forces of reaction?

Russia has clearly left the path on which it landed in 1855, and for the third year is rushing along with a series of crimes and absurdities toward a series of disasters, which may exhaust it, but for which, at any rate, it will pay.

The howl, the wail, the hissing sound of the person being executed—and of fierce patriotism—drown out all human speech. Educated Russia turned out to be much more barbarian than peasant Russia. Because of this bar­barity, terrible deeds and terrible words became possible: executions in Po­land, penal servitude in Russia [. . .] Chernyshevsky, placed in the pillory in broad daylight, and all the other savage acts of the government and society.

While this "addiction" to drinking blood continues, what is the point of our speech? Who is there for us to talk to, for whom would we write and publish?

If it were not so painful to be silent, we would have done it. To be silent means to turn away, to forget for a while, and that is beyond our strength. [. . .]

The past places obligations on us. We had sufficient opinions and daring to begin to speak. we continued amidst applause from above and below— we had to have the courage to continue speaking while the drunks sobered up. We had to continue so that the last word of protest did not fall silent, so the pangs of conscience did not subside, so that it would not be doubly shameful afterward. [. . .]

And so our ringing will, as before, summon the living until they come or until we convince ourselves that they no longer exist.

When we began our propaganda we never expected that such a terrible time would come that we would have to say something like this—but did anyone expect it?

In i855 and i857 an awakening Russia lay before us. Its tombstone was removed and carried to the Peter Paul Fortress.¹ There were signs of the new age everywhere—in the government, in literature, in society, and in the people. Much of it was awkward, insincere, and vague, but everyone sensed that we had made a start, we had set off and would continue moving along. A mute nation became accustomed to speech, a nation of official se­crecy got used to openness, a nation of serf slavery—to grumble about their chains. [. . .] The party of fools and the party of old men were in despair as serf owners pretended to be constitutional liberals.

In the second half of i862, the wind shifted direction. The incomplete emancipation of the serfs had exhausted the strength of the government and society, and the machine put the brakes on and began moving backward.

We ask every public figure who appeared after the death of Nicholas [. . .] let them put hand on heart and say whether any of them foresaw the bloody filth into which Russia has been mired thanks to a coachman like Mu- ravyov, and lackeys who urge him on, like Katkov?

Did they foresee that the death penalty would become for us an ordinary, everyday matter, that prisoners of war would be shot, that the wounded would be hung, and that on a single day as many as six people would be executed on the orders of a worthless general?

That for a secretly printed leaflet,² full of youthful dreams and theoretical utopias, honest, pure young people would be sent away for hard labor and permanent exile, irrespective of their talent and good name? [. . .]

That among us a literature of denunciations would develop, and that it would become the literature of the day, that the language of journalists would descend to the language of quarreling policemen, and that, when opening the newspaper, we would enter the lobby of the Third Department and the office of a police station? [. . .]

No one could have foreseen this. Horrors that made your heart bleed and took your breath away happened all the time under Nicholas. A downtrod­den and cowardly society was silent, displayed no concern, lied to them­selves about empathizing, but they did not applaud. Self-interested officials became cold executioners. Now, society applauds, and the executioners punish with enthusiasm, becoming virtuosos as they exceed their orders.

We cannot accustom ourselves to this terrible, bloody, disgraceful, inhu­man, insolent Russia, to a literature of informers, to butchers in generals' epaulets, to policemen at university lecterns. [. . .]

.Why, Russia, why must your history, having already gone through ter­rible misfortunes and the dead of night, continue to travel along the drain­pipes? Why didn't you, on the day after the emancipation, when, for the first time since your birth, you could have shown to the world, with a joy­ously raised head, what a golden fleece you had preserved while poor, while under the landowner's rod, the policeman's stick, and the tsarist whip— why did you allow yourself to be dragged into this ditch, into this cesspool? Be patient now, Russian people. [. . .] You alone will emerge from this in a pure state. Lacking the leisure time for thought, you are not guilty of the path chosen by them; you were forced to shave your heads, forced to take up a rifle, and you set off, obeying unthinkingly, to kill and steal out of hunger. Just do not boast about it—on the same basis, the sea is right in having drowned a ship and the wolf in having killed a traveler.

But you non-people, who support the current order of things, sons of the fatherland, the intelligentsia, civilization, sound interests, the democratic gentry, commanders and teachers. you do not deserve the fate of the pris­oner, you really cannot manage anything and will remain as you are. [. . .]

What have you achieved after a century and a half of training, paid for with the sweat, hunger, and cold of an entire people, with the scars on their backs?.. And wasn't even that taught to you by Germans, academies, military schools, lycees, institutes, Smolny Monasteries, tutors, and governesses? Isn't it clear that the stable in your parents' home was a more eloquent teacher, and that the nature of a lackey-slaveholder is not so easily tucked behind a sash of French grammar? I offer my congratulations—your day has come, only it will be a very short one. You do not even understand that you went toward one room but wound up in another.³ You don't know to whom you have given your hand—you never were very discriminating, just arrogant. [. . .] You will perish in the abyss that you are digging together with the police. [. . .]

And as for you, for goodness sake do not think that we pity you. Please, it is time for you to leave the stage, you have done what you were going to do. You did it reluctantly and for that you deserve no respect; you did it thinking only of yourself and for that deserve no thanks. You were that frivolous milieu, that transparent conduit, by means of which the light of Western science illuminated our ignorant life—the deed is done and life will advance without you. [. . .]

Why should you be pitied? Because Ivan the Terrible tortured you and you sang psalms to him? [. . .] Because your grandfathers in the time of Nicholas danced at his coronation, while their sons, in shackles, went on their way to penal servitude? Because of those sons?

For them, for our great guides, one could indeed forgive their predeces­sors a great deal.

But what can one say about their sons?

They had no real sons, but they did have adopted children, to whom they left a legacy. They bequeathed them the milieu in which would emerge and grow toward the light a New Russia, well fitted-out for the difficult jour­ney, tempered by need, grief, and degradation, its life firmly bound to the people, to learning, and to science. It received only insults from above and mistrust from below. It inherited the great task of developing national life from its badly organized elements—with a mature way of thinking and the experience of foreigners. It had to save the Russian people from the emperor's autocracy and from itself. It possessed neither ancestral property nor ancestral memory, had little capital, and virtually no attachment to what currently exists. It is free of obligations and the chains of history. [. . .]

A milieu that is diverse and chaotic, a milieu for intellectual ferment and personal development, it is composed of everything on earth—of raznochintsy, and the children of priests, of gentry-proletarians, of urban and rural priests, of military-school cadets, students, teachers, and artists; infantrymen and the occasional child of a military family, clerks, young merchants, and stewards. in it there were examples and fragments of ev­erything in Russia that was floating above the popular mixture. [. . .]

Blow after blow struck this milieu, and its head was smashed, but its cause was not damaged, it was less damaged than on December i4, and the plow went further and deeper. [. . .]

We want to write for this new milieu and add the words of distant pil­grims to what is taught them by Chernyshevsky from the heights of the tsarist pillory, to what underground voices from the imperial storerooms tell them, to what the tsarist fortress preaches day and night—our sacred dwell­ing place, our melancholy Peter and Paul Monastery on the Neva.

In the midst of the horrors that surround us, in the midst of the pain and degradation, we want to repeat again and again that we are on their side, that our spirit lives. and we no longer desire to correct the incorrigible, or cure the incurable, but to work with them on searching for the paths of Russian development, and the explanation of Russian questions.

June 1, 1864

Notes

Source: "VII let," Kolokol, l. 187, July 15, 1864; 18:238-45, 584-86.

In referring to the death of Nicholas I, who was buried in the cathedral in the for­tress, Herzen uses an image from Matthew 28 of the stone removed from the tomb of Christ as a sign of the resurrection.

"To the Young Generation," by N. V. Shchelgunov and M. L. Mikhailov.

A paraphrase of a remark made by Sofya in act 1, scene 4 of Griboedov's Woe from Wit.

♦ 66 *

The Bell, No. 190, October 15, 1864. Herzen exposes the manipulations of both govern­ment officials and the writers who backed them with his satirical, punning subtitles. Katkov attacked Herzen in almost every issue of The Moscow Gazette for seeking the destruction of Russia. After completing this article, Herzen hoped to go to Nice to see the monument he had ordered for his wife's grave, but was prevented from doing so by the arrival there of the empress, Alexandra Fyodorovna (Let 4:40-41).

Government Agitation and Journalistic Police [1864]

herr katoff—le grand

Had Katkov not been spattered with Muravyov and with blood, had poison from his ink not fallen on sentences for penal servitude, he would have been the most amusing fool of our times. His foolish side is completely serious, completely naive, and for that reason has such an irresistible effect on one's nerves.

A terrible professor, he abandoned the lectern, taking from his scholastic activity a teacher's tone, an oppressive pedantry, a pompous arrogance, and, with all this, set off to preach constitutional liberalism.¹ After the death of Nicholas, this was a novelty in the Russian press, and people began to read him. As soon as he realized this, he ceased writing, and began in a paternal way to suggest or in an imperious manner to upbraid. It was easy to guess that if some daring fellow did not take heed, the teacher would go to the authorities, i.e., with a denunciation, which is exactly what he did after the Petersburg fires.

That fire was the happiest day in Katkov's life. This is where his govern­ment career began. The government and society needed someone to blame for these fires, and Katkov accused his literary enemies. Such a brave man was a real treasure for the government.

The liberal publicist, promoted from the third or fourth rows to the very stage, began by throwing his liberalism, constitutionalism, worship of Eu­rope, etc. overboard, and suddenly felt himself to be a frenzied patriot, a frenzied support of autocracy, and a terrorist, and started to preach Mu- ravyov, Russification, and confiscation.

[. . .] And with this came the crude flattery of the former serf owners. [. . .] Katkov, a demagogue in his criticism of the Polish gentry, felt himself to be a hereditary grandee and became a defender of the Russian landowners against the rabble.

All of this taken together drove him mad. He began [. . .] to use "we" when speaking of the empire and posed as Godunov, having relinquished the throne. [. . .]

But fame has its drawbacks. Katkov's fame resounded throughout the world, everyone looked at him, everyone asked who was higher than the pyramids, eclipsing Alexander and illuminating Mikhail?² The Germans wrote brochures about him, Belgium published books about him ... his modesty suffered and our journalistic Saul took up his pen in a fury and wrote in issue No. i95 of The Moscow Gazette:

We must at last inform our readers about a very interesting phe­nomenon that has arisen on the political landscape of Europe—that phenomenon is us. For a while we have been a subject of attention, study, and agitation, open and secret, a subject of correspondence and editorials in the foreign press, and finally, the subject of books. Remarkable legends have appeared about us in serious foreign journals; the European public has been informed, for example, that in far-off, frozen Russia a dragon has been born, whose name is Herr Katkoff, and that he sits in Moscow and from there devises his devas­tating raids, that an entire nation languishes under his iron yoke and tearfully prays for deliverance from this constriction and let a Saint George appear from beyond the seas to strike down this monster for the pleasure and exultation of the Russian people. Readers might think that we are joking; we solemnly assure them that such legends have appeared in foreign journals. [. . .]

Brilliant. Why didn't he send this inspired article to The Bell? No one has written anything more vicious about him than this and no one ever will.

Notes

Source: "Pravitel'stvennaia agitatsiia i zhurnal'naia politsiia," Kolokol, l. i90, October i5, i864; I8:269-73, 598-99.

From i845 to i85i Mikhail Katkov was an adjunct professor of philosophy at Moscow University. In January Й56, Katkov began to publish Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald), in which he printed a series of articles calling for the kind of broad self-government that existed in England.

The pyramid metaphor comes from Horace's poem "A Monument." Mikhail Niko- laevich was the tsar's brother and a prominent general.

67 ♦

The Bell, No. i93, January i, Й65. Herzen wrote this on the eve of a gathering of younger emigres in Geneva, as a public answer to their proposal to turn The Bell into an outlet for the radical Russian emigres, which would fundamentally alter a role that Herzen had defined as "words, advice, analysis, denunciation of evil [oblichenie], and theory" (Let 4:68). Nikolay Utin had written to Herzen in July i864, urging him to provide this crucial center for all the forces of change, which would prepare "missionaries" to carry out agitation amongst the people. For this to be effective, the publishing enterprise would have to move to Switzerland, where the majority of young revolutionaries were now located. Herzen had long been in favor of such a move, but did not agree with other suggestions in Utin's correspondence; a meeting was organized in Geneva to discuss these issues in late i864. Even before Herzen's arrival, a platform had been drawn up which insisted that the program of The Bell must be clearly defined, and that it must no longer consist of a random assortment of articles, arranged according to the tastes of Herzen and Ogaryov. Herzen offered to transfer the press to Switzerland, to include work by younger expatriates in The Bell, and to provide them some financial support, but he insisted that the main work of propaganda could take place only in Russia itself. In addition, he was loathe to turn over what had been a very literary journal to people who did not read literature. In a January 4, i865, letter to Ogaryov, Herzen said that he was terribly bored in this company where "no one is learning anything or reading anything" (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 28:9). While Ogaryov generally was more supportive of this group, he co-signed the article "i865" in solidarity with Herzen.

1865 [1865]

In view of the difficult events of the past two years, we have had to express our opinions on more than one occasion, and, as we embark on a new year, we consider it unnecessary to repeat our creed and our protest.¹ We are continuing our path, and not embarking on another.

The Bell will remain what it has been—an organ for the social development of Russia. As before, it will be against everything that hinders that develop­ment, and for everything that furthers it.

It is hindered by: military-bureaucratic governance, class-based laws, the ruling clergy, the ignorance of educated people, contradictory ideas, and idolatry of the government to whom everything is sacrificed—the welfare of individuals and the masses, and one's mind and heart. All of this taken together does not smash those foundations, deeply embedded in the life of the people, on which our hope is based. They were not smashed by Tatars, by Germans, by Moscow, or by Petersburg, no matter how much devel­opment was hindered, no matter how much it was distorted, sullying the people with unnecessary blood and undeserved filth.

Against these dark forces, which rely on the ignorance of some and the self-interest of others, we will fight as we did before, and, even more than before, we will issue a call for assistance.

It is time to concentrate our thought and our strength, to clarify our goals and take stock of our means.

It is clear that propaganda is splitting in two. On the one hand, there are words, advice, analysis, denunciation, and theory; on the other hand, there is the formation of circles, the organization of communications, and internal and external relations. We will dedicate all our activity, and all our devotion to the first of these. The second cannot take place abroad. It is something we await in the very near future.

Note

Source: "1865," Kolokol, l. 193, January 1, 1865; 18:313, 607-9.

1. For "creed" Herzen uses the ecclesiastical term simvol very.

* 68 ♦

The Bell, No. 197, May 25, 1865, was the first issue published in Geneva, where the Free Press had moved from London. The letter below was written after the death in April of the heir to the throne, Nikolay Alexandrovich. By the time the presses were set up in Switzerland, the shocking news of Lincoln's assassination had also reached Herzen. The more radical Russian emigres disapproved of any conciliatory gesture towards the imperial family, even though Ogaryov assured them it was not in any way an endorse­ment of the tsar and his current policies. The radicals were adamant about any future changes coming from below, making any direct address to the sovereign irrelevant. In his private correspondence, Herzen characterized the Romanov dynasty as having "come to nothing" (Let 4:121-22, 133-34). Alexander Nikitenko said in his diary that Herzen was in a bad mood because he had not been able to rouse the people with his Bell, and that the public letter was "the height of indecency" and not even very clever (Let 4:187).

A Letter to Emperor Alexander II [1865]

Sovereign, fate has touched you inexorably, dreadfully. It has reminded you in a formidable way that, despite the anointing, neither you nor your family are exempt from the general law, but are subject to it. Twice it has taken note of your family, once with the cutting edge of the scythe and once more with its dull side—the death of your son and the strange rumors concern­ing his brother.¹

To the limitless number of Polish families who have been subjected to the deepest grief, having lost their sons, can be added one more family in mourning—your family, Sovereign. Your family is more fortunate than theirs, since no one will insult your grief. Among those of us who oppose your power, not one heartless scoundrel can be found who would accom­pany your son's casket with insults, who would wish to rip the mourning veils from his mother or sister, or who would remove the body and the tombstone in the presence of the tearful parents. all things that Muravyov has done and is still doing in Poland.

In the life of man there are moments of terrible solemnity, in which a person awakens from his daily cares, stands at full height, shakes off the dust, and is renewed. A believer does this with prayer, and a non-believer with thought. These moments are rare and irretrievable. Woe to the per­son who lets them go absentmindedly and without a trace! You are living in such a moment, Sovereign—seize it. Stop under the full weight of this blow, with the fresh wound on your chest, and think—without the Senate and the Synod, without ministers and the General Staff—think about what has happened, and where you are heading.

If the death of your son cannot rouse you and wrench you from the spec­tral environment in which your birth placed you, then what could possibly arouse you? Only being deprived of the throne, i.e., with the emptiness and melancholy leisure that inevitably accompanies a loss of this kind. How­ever, such a late awakening might be good for you, but would be of no use for others. And these others, when one is speaking of you, are the entire Russian people. This is what compelled me to persist in writing to you once more.

My first letter to you was not written in vain.² An involuntary shout of joy, torn from the depths of voluntary exile, had an effect on you. For a mo­ment you forgot that by rank I had no right to speak with you.

The language of a free man was something new for you. In its sharp words you understood its sincerity and love for Russia—at that point you had not sent utopias off to hard labor, and were not tying human thought to a pillory. This was the honeymoon of your reign, and it concluded with the greatest act of your entire dynasty—the emancipation of the serfs.

The conquering Galilean, you were unable to make use of your victory. You didn't know how to stand firm on that height, on which the manifesto of February i9 had placed you. Your hesitancy was noticed, bad people sur­rounded you, and you were distracted. and you left your pedestal by the light of some sort of burning marketplace, placing your reliance on the secret police and an obviously corrupted journalism.³ Believing the absurd slander, you took fright, not suspecting that this was just slander, even when your inquisition and inquisitors, working up a sweat for an entire year, with a breadth of resources and the irresponsibility enjoyed by the Russian police, did not come up with even one guilty person.

You were frightened by a couple of printed leaflets in which the unfet­tered word, after a silence of thirty years, evaded the censorship.⁴ [. . .] You began a struggle with the younger generation—a struggle of brute power, bayonets, and prisons—against enthusiastic ideas and inspired words. Your predecessor fought children in Poland, and you will do battle in Russia with young people and adolescents, who have tried to convince you and your government that a new era has begun in Russia.

With the dying glow of this unfortunate fire even you turned pale, you became flustered, and you retreated to the background, and in your place a system familiar to us was set up—of repulsion and oppression, the ar­bitrary behavior of individuals and the unlawfulness of the courts—your father's system with the addition of rhetoric and blood.

Russian blood, first of all.

What a black day it was for Russia and what a great sin you took upon your soul when, under the influence of panicky fear and the slander of your minions, you allowed there to be blood, and, even worse, you vested your generals with the authority to shed it, as if you didn't know what kind of people they were.

Is it possible that you slept peacefully when first Anton Petrov, then Arn- goldt, Slivitsky, et al., were felled by bullets. Is it possible that you didn't freeze in horror when they shot people in Nizhny on mere suspicion, and in Kiev for fighting and rude responses?⁵ [. . .]

You cannot bring back the dead. Atone for your sin before the living, and, standing at your son's grave, renounce bloody reprisals. Give us back our pride in the fact that, in spite of our underdeveloped legal system, there was no death penalty, and an executioner ascended a scaffold, frightening everyone with his unlawful appearance, once or twice a century.

. Just think, how your situation has changed since you first sat on the throne. Then you had only to freely make a move, to lead, and you emancipated the serfs. Everyone expected something good, something fine from you—at that time you buried the past.. Now it is gloomy all around you, matters have gotten bogged down, there's no money, an entire region is getting beaten up, young people are being sent off to hard labor, the people's teachers are being sent off to hard labor, on fortress embank­ments they are hanging and shooting people, and you are burying your future.

Sovereign, the moment has come when you must decide on which path you will continue. Your son's gravestone stands as a road sign and a ter­rible reminder.

Decide now, do not await a second blow—by then it may be too late, and the blow may be too strong.

You can see clearly—and it would be difficult to hide—that the rusty and creaking old mechanism constructed by Peter in the German manner, and adjusted by the Germans for Russia, is no longer suitable. You can see that it is no longer possible to direct a population of seventy million as if it were a military division. The front will no longer remain "at attention." People are talking, thinking, dissatisfied, having guessed in the Crimea that the command structure is poor. [. . .] You lived through and endured all this—do you think that by replacing tax farming with excise duties, and the Assembly of the Land with district councils, you have met Russia's needs?

If you think this, it is because you do not know what Russia suffers from nor what it desires. And how would you know? The press is not free, and you do not read very much anyway. You see only servants who depend on you and tell lies in your presence! You punish free people who raise their voices. [. . .] There was a peasant who believed in you, seeing in you his "earthly tsar," an enraptured fanatic; he openly and passionately wrote you a letter in which he spoke of the people's needs. He wrote you from London and put himself into your hands, and you sent him to the mines.⁶ With un­paralleled ferocity you convicted the only remarkable publicist to have ap­peared in your time. Do you even know what Chernyshevsky wrote? What his point of view was? What was the danger, what was his crime? Can you answer this question on your own? You would not be able to understand anything from the absurd Senate records.

It is clear that louder and more powerful voices are needed to shout down the trumpets and drums that surround you, so that the words would reach beyond the horse-guards and the "oprichniki," as they were recently called.⁷ Why are you pushing away the truth, why are you deceiving your­self that you—against popular advice and free speech—can take Peter's little wooden boat from the rocks back out to a deep channel?

Do as you wish, shoot people or give them a medal, send them to hard labor or to a lucrative post, take the side of Muravyov and his Russian execu­tioners, or the side of the Germans and their Baltic civilizers—you won't be able to preserve or revive autocracy in its Nicholaevan innocence and purity.

You are stronger than your predecessors, but you are stronger by virtue of the emancipation. Your union with the people should not distract you. In the wreaths woven of grain and rural flowers that village elders have brought you there are thorns and the seeds of plants that are dangerous to those in power. You drew close to them not in the name of a conservative idea, but in the name of a revolutionary principle, in the name of a demo­cratic leveling of the gentry and the acknowledgment of the agrarian prin­ciple in the land allotment. The decrepit Petrine robes were strengthened with a lining made from Pugachev's kaftan.

Take a clear and simple look from the Mont Blanc on which fate has placed you, chasing away the flocks of jackdaws and ravens who have access to the court, and you will see that you won't go far by maneuvering between official government-issue progress and reactionary police. [. . .]

Wouldn't it be better and more valorous to resolve common issues with common strength and summon from all corners of Russia, from all levels of society, chosen people? Among them you will hear severe judgments and free speech, but it will be less dangerous than it was for your grandfather, surrounded by moats, walls, and the lances of the horse-guards in the ser­vile silence of the Mikhailovsky Palace?⁸

Fate, in extending the cold hand of death to your family, has restrained you—take advantage of that. You intended to continue on the terrible path you have followed since the second half of 1862. From the funeral of your son, turn back to your previous path. Repentance is never easier and cleans­ing more complete than at the foot of a coffin of one dear to us. It is essen­tial in order to prepare for great earthly tasks.

. But first of all stop the hand of the executioner, bring back the exiles and banish the illegal judges, to whom you entrusted the tsar's vengeance and illegal persecution.

Forgiveness is not needed for your innocent victims or the suffering martyrs. It is necessary for you. You cannot go forward in a humane way without an amnesty from them.

Sovereign, be worthy of it!

Iskander

Geneva, Boissiere, May 2/April 20, 1865

Notes

Source: "Pis'mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru II," Kolokol, l. 197, May 25, 1865; 18:337-41, 622-23.

Nikolay Alexandrovich died on April 12, 1865, in Nice at age twenty-two from men­ingitis. His brother Alexander, who succeeded him as heir, was rumored to be of limited intelligence.

Dated March 10, 1855, on the occasion of Alexander II's ascension to the throne, and calling for a free press, and land and freedom for the Russian peasants. See Doc. 5.

A fire broke out in St. Petersburg's Apraksin Dvor on May 28, 1862, destroying hundreds of stalls in the flea market. This and other fires in 1862 were blamed on revo­lutionary youth.

A number of revolutionary pamphlets, including "Young Russia," were secretly printed and distributed in St. Petersburg between 1861 and 1863. (See Doc. 45)

Anton Petrov was shot in April 1861 for spreading word of a different emancipation document among peasants and leading an uprising in Bezdna; Arngoldt, Slivitsky, and Rostkovsky were executed in June 1862 for propaganda among soldiers; in August 1863 a military court in Nizhny condemned a man on suspicion of robbery; in Kiev a Jewish soldier was killed for ripping off an officer's shoulder straps in a fight, and for muttering curses instead of giving answers at his trial.

Petr Alexeevich Martyanov (1834-1865), the freed son of a serf, made Herzen's acquaintance in London while there on business matters; he expressed his utopian ideas to the tsar in 1862, a letter which was published in The Bell, and was arrested upon his return the following year and sentenced to hard labor and perpetual exile. Martyanov had also expounded on his theories in a pamphlet, "The People and the Government," which was published by the Free Russian Press. Herzen wrote about Martyanov in the January 1, 1864, issue (No. 176) of The Bell.

Oprichniki, a term that has come into English usage, referred originally to a special administrative elite set up by Ivan the Terrible and responsible for a reign of terror in sixteenth-century Russia. D. D. Golokhvastov, in a speech to the Moscow Noble As­sembly in January 1865, used the word oprichniki to characterize the highest levels of Russian government officials.

Paul I was killed in his new palace on the night of March 12, 1801.

♦ 69 *

The Bell, No. 197, May 25, 1865. After the great success of The Bell between the years 1859 and 1862, increased police activity made it more difficult to send correspondence to London and to distribute the publication in Russia. Switzerland was a stopping- off point for Russians going to and from Italy and France and the residence of a growing number of expatriates. When the great reforms proved to be narrow and incomplete, Herzen turned his attention to finding ways to help the Russian masses voice their concerns. This issue also contained one of Herzen's occasional theoreti­cal articles in the form of a "letter to a traveler." The addressee may have been Vasily

Bodisko (i826-i873), a cousin of Granovsky, who had worked in the Russian embassy in Washington.

To Our Readers [1865]

We have moved our printing press to Switzerland, and from May 25 on, The Bell will be published in Geneva. Our move will not bring any internal changes to our publication. We stand on the same ground, more firmly than ever. We see no need in defining it and expressing our profession de foi on the occasion of this geographical move. The basis of our outlook has been known to you since the foundation of the first Russian free press in London. You knew them even before that, but know them even better from The Bell. For eight years it has been tolling one and the same thing; the tasks to which it summons you have changed, but the religion and the spirit have remained the same.

Now it is time to call people to a Council, an egalitarian assembly of the land. Our ringing will reach someone's ears and set people thinking about it. If we believed that it was fruitless, we would have just folded our arms.

Many of our ardent, secret wishes were made flesh and came true—and if it happened awkwardly and incompletely, it still happened.

Ten years ago serfdom stood firm, jealously guarded as the foundation of the empire. From Avacha¹ to Odessa the Russian people were beaten with a court and without one, in barracks and front hallways, in private homes and in barns. The slightest murmur, a word of indignation, or a sign of the cross made with two fingers, was punished more severely than theft or robbery. and we said to the heir of Nicholas when he ascended the throne: "Do away with serfdom, give land to the Russian peasant, free the word from censorship, the Russian's back from the stick, open the courtroom doors, and grant freedom of conscience."²

.We spoke these words and repeated them in various ways for years on end. And everything that we touched began to sway.

Serfdom collapsed and barely hung onto the land.

Corporal punishment was eliminated for those judged guilty by a court, and one would think that soon they will stop beating and whipping the innocent.³

The closed doors of the courts are opening, and judicial reform—of some sort—is a direct acknowledgment on the part of the government of the unsuitability of the previous harsh punishments.⁴

The censorship cracked and has remained as more of a permitted evil than a defensible necessity.⁵

The two-fingered sign of the cross is no longer punished as if it were murder, and the government has placed the Old Believers in a comparable position to prostitutes—they are not so much permitted as tolerated.⁶

We are not saying that our bell summoned these initiatives, but they were carried out not without it—it anticipated them, it called for them, and it was the first to loudly and repeatedly discuss them. What the bell's share was in the actual substance of events, how it was changed by them and how it also effected change—who can capture that, who can retrace and measure it, and to what purpose?

[. . .] The reforms carried out by the government are unsatisfactory. They are all unfinished, lack openness, are oblique, and all have the quality of a temporary deal, something for the time being, done offhandedly, faute de mieux.⁷ Their real importance is as an initiative and an involuntary rejection of the existing state of affairs. But in all this, only the government spoke and acted while we listened and accepted it mutely, without even having the right to refuse. That the time has come for us to say our piece is so obvious, that the government itself constantly stops and listens (like the notorious police chief of Moscow)⁸ to the silence. and if anyone takes it into his head to say something that rubs them the wrong way, he gets sentenced to a prison cell or hard labor. Such a doubly absurd situation must end, and the voice of the people must receive the rights of citizenship. For that reason an Assembly of the Land is Russia's most immediate and pressing need.

Along with this, there is a growing necessity for an explanation of the social, economic, civic, and judicial issues which are pressing their way for­ward in the contemporary movement of Russian thought and Russian life. The assembly must not catch us off guard.

We would also like, as far as possible, to take part in this explanation of issues, and—while sticking to our previous critique of official plans and our expose of official planners—to put forward the principles of a possible new system. This compels us to broaden the scope of our publication.

We no longer exclude either purely theoretical articles or historical monographs, as long as they have a direct correlation to our Russian social and civic development. If there are a lot of them, or they are too long for The Bell, we will once again start up The Polestar. Send us articles that you cannot publish in Russia even under the current situation of freedom of the press with censorship.⁹

And since we have already asked you for articles, we will mention in conclusion another requirement of ours. Despite all our efforts, despite all our editorials, we cannot make The Bell a living Russian organ without cor­respondence from the regions. During there past two years there has been very little of this. We are announcing this to you. We do not have to plead for correspondence; open discussion abroad is your business as much as ours, and your conscience should decide for itself what must be done. There are no serious problems in delivering letters to us.

The next issue of The Bell, No. 198, will appear on June 15. The price is fifty centimes. Booksellers outside of Russia have no right to raise the price.¹⁰

Notes

Source: "Nashim chitateliam," Kolokol, l. 197, May 25, 1865; 18:386-89, 637-40.

A river on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East.

This quote is a paraphrase of what Herzen wrote publicly to the tsar in 1855; see Doc. 5 in this collection.

Alexander II signed an order ending corporal punishment on April 17, 1863, but significant exceptions were made for peasants condemned by their local courts, for sol­diers in disciplinary battalions, and repeat offenders in exile and at hard labor.

On November 20, 1864, the new judicial system was signed into law by Alexan­der II after two years of discussion.

"Temporary Rules on the Press" were published April 6, 1865, which were in effect until the Revolution of 1905. Preliminary censorship was waived for certain publications not intended for a mass readership, but since the penalties for anticipating incorrectly the reaction of the authorities were high, Herzen saw this as yet another unsatisfying reform.

Alexander lifted some restrictions in 1855, and in August 1864 an order was issued which allowed freedom in matters of faith for the "less harmful sects," setting up a com­mission, which worked very slowly. Herzen and Ogaryov cultivated the Old Believers as a source of anti-government sentiment, but were for the most part disappointed in the response.

For lack of a better alternative.

General Alexander L. Potapov (1818-1876), police chief of Moscow and then direc­tor of the Third Department.

Herzen: "Such works demand a lot of time and reference works, and not everyone can work for free. We invite those who wish to be paid for articles placed in The Bell or The Polestar to write to us on this subject."

Herzen lists the names and addresses of booksellers in fifteen European cities where issues of The Bell will be available.

* 70 +

The Bell, No. 200, July 15, 1865. Nikolay A. Serno-Solovyovich was one of the found­ers, along with his brother Alexander, of the first "Land and Liberty" group (1861-62), which "had sprung up so casually from the first network of correspondents and readers of Kolokol or the ideas preached by the Sovremennik" (Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 268, 278). He was arrested on July 7, 1862, the same day as Chernyshevsky. An agent of the Third Department had sent word from London that someone would be crossing the Russian border in July 1862 with letters from Herzen, Bakunin, and others; once the courier was seized, the police were able to arrest thirty-two people, fundamentally weak­ening Land and Liberty (Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 263). Herzen reacted painfully to the arrest, calling it a "wound on the heart" (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 18:644). Serno-Solovyovich was a key figure in the "Trial of the 32," and was admired for the dignified way he conducted himself. He said that while he loved his country, he would never be forced to act against his conscience, and saw no obligation to inform the gov­ernment about his conversations abroad in i860 with Herzen and others. Although his sentence was reduced from hard labor to exile, his health rapidly declined and he died in 1866. Alexander Serno-Solovyovich lived in exile abroad and wrote critical articles on the evolution of The Bell's politics, and quoted another Russia radical to the effect that "Herzen's only use now would be to get himself killed on the barricades, but in any case he will never go near them" (Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 279).

The Serno-Solovyovich Case [1865]

One of the most noble and pure people in Russia, N. A. Serno-Solevyovich has been sent into permanent exile. "A wise government," said one mem­ber of the State Council, "would be better off trying to get such people on its side"—yes!.. a wise government!

We implore our friends to send us in extenso the Senate record for this case.¹ This sentence, with its colossal absurdity, its absence of any unity, and so carelessly done (there was no time to rewrite it properly!) abandons the judicial masks with which tsarist vengeance had covered itself. For al­most three years people were held in prison cells, and at rare intervals there were rumors of the significance of the case. The herd in the Senate sen­tenced them to hard labor, then, seeing that they had exceeded all limits, stepped back.² What is the case about? It's about the fact that there is no case. [. . .] Serno-Solovyovich was acquainted with the London propagandists, read their publications, gave them to others to read, and met with a judicial rar­ity of the first magnitude (who did not become acquainted with them?)—the unconvicted state criminal Kelsiev, who is portrayed from afar as some sort of Tamerlane,³ who shook up the Russian Empire...

[. . .] The guilt ofVetoshnikov, Vladimirov, and others who received lesser sentences is, obviously, less significant.⁴ Here the sentence is distinguished by a remarkable casuistry. Serno-Solovyovich is being punished for the dis­tribution of foreign works their criminal content (there isn't even the correct

punctuation), while Vetoshnikov and Vladimirov only for the distribution of criminal works (without content?). This is followed by one bit of nonsense after another: Lyalin was sentenced for suspicion of correspondence with Bakunin. The English citizen Arthur Bennie was convicted of not inform­ing the government of Kelsiev's arrival in Petersburg. [. . .] We do not know which treaty obliges English citizens to do such a favor for the Russian police, and we ask the Foreign Office to look into this question. The young lady Marya Chelishchev was accused of having in her possession forbidden publications and illustrations, and was kept under arrest for ten days. In the worst days of the fury of our unforgettable Saul,⁵ there was nothing fouler than this. The failure to denounce—a criminal offense!⁶

[. . .] The fate of Serno-Solovyovich and his comrades has been mitigated. The sentence was deliberately published following the burial of the heir, with whom he has so little in common. [. . .] They wanted the Sovereign in his distress to suspect that he had eased the lot of the condemned . [. . .] But in the lessening of the sentence of Serno-Solovyovich and the others he took no part. They were defended by one member of the State Council⁷ who had been struck by the nobility, frankness, and strength of Serno-Solovyovich's responses; he looked into the case, and, surprised by its inquisitorial and, along with that, obtuse police characteristics, defended Serno-Solovyovich as best he could. [. . .]

There is nothing surprising in the fact that Serno-Solovyovich's re­sponses impressed a decent man. Serno-Solovyovich belonged to those vessels who are chosen to provide a great example, those faces which are anointed ahead of time for martyrdom, who peacefully travel their path and clearly look enraged judges in the eye. Before such people power fails and that is why it is reluctant to raise its hand to them. Unlike the instructive example of Tiberius, one cannot defile them in prison in order to render them worthy of punishment. Such a person was Granovsky, and Nicholas left him alone. The merciful Alexander II, and Prince Orlov—who kissed Serno-Solovyovich on the lips⁸—are unable to make such distinctions.

Notes

Source: "Delo Serno-Solov'evicha," Kolokol, l. 200, July i5, Й65; ^395-97, 644-47.

This statement is attributed to Prince Alexander A. Suvorov (i8o4-i882), who was close to the Decembrists in his youth. From i86i to i866 he was governor-general of St. Petersburg and a member of the State Council. Suvorov had met N. Serno-Solovyovich and was impressed by his charm and education.

The State Council followed the Senate's lead in softening the harsh sentence, al­though the civil execution was still carried out.

Tamerlane (i336-i405) was a Central Asian military leader who sought to restore the empire of Genghis Khan. Vasily I. Kelsiev (Й35-Й72), who emigrated in Й59, re­turned to Russia illegally in March i862 with Turkish citizenship papers and the goal of establishing links with Old Believers and distributing publications of the Free Russian Press. Expelled from Russia, he returned in Й67, saying that he repented of past acts.

Pavel A. Vetoshnikov was employed by a trading company and Nikolay M. Vladi- mirov worked for a Petersburg export firm; both were accused of transporting forbidden publications back to Russia and were exiled to Siberia.

Nicholas I.

In Stalinist Russia, beginning in the 1930s, this crime (nedonositel'stvo) was en­shrined in law.

Nazimov, former governor of the Vilna, Grodno, Minsk, and Kovno provinces was removed for using insufficient force in putting down the Poles.

In i858, Serno-Solovyovich, while serving as a clerk for the Main Committee on emancipation, approached the tsar with a letter revealing the deceit and red tape that was harming the preparations for the peasant reforms, and the alarming situation in the country. Alexander sent the note to Prince Orlov, chairman of the State Council, saying that Orlov should summon the young man, inform him that the tsar was not angry at his boldness, but thankful for his information. Orlov is said to have kissed the young man in the tsar's name.

71 +

The Bell, No. 200, July i5, i865. This unsigned piece is attributed to Herzen because of the subject matter, in which he was deeply interested, and the style.

Russia Is Still Burning [1865]

There are fires in twenty provinces! And all of them arson, according to The Moscow Gazette. But who is committing this arson? Is it possible that not once have the police ever gotten their hands on a genuinely guilty person, except for some holy fools and juveniles, from whom you could not get a sensible word? Isn't it time to sack such a police force, with all its special and general officers, and the civilian and military governors and governor- generals? If there are no arsonists or if they are a great rarity, then isn't it time to get rid of all the worthless journalistic alarmists, all those moral poisoners of public opinion?

Notes

Source: "Vse eshche gorit Rossiia," Kolokol, l. 200, July i5, i865; i8:398, 647.

The Bell, No. 209, December 1, 1865 (Part I); No. 210, December 15, 1865 (Part II). Her- zen wrote this essay in answer to criticism from radical democratic (young emigres and Bakunin), "court liberal" (Chicherin), and conservative (M. P. Pogodin) circles. It covers not just 1865, but the line taken by The Bell during the past few years. To those on his left and right, Herzen declares his unchanged views on Russia's path toward liberation. He saw the period that began in 1862 as one of harsh reprisals, the corruption of Rus­sian journalism, and the movement of a confused society to the right. Herzen defends his complex attitude toward Alexander II, and affirms his faith in the powerful legacy of the peasant commune. Bakunin was not satisfied with the tone of this document, noting that Herzen still felt sad about the decline of Russian liberalism and his disappointed hopes in the tsar. According to Bakunin, what was needed was an end to the commune and a popular uprising (Let 4:283).

As the Year Comes to an End [1865]

I

We are surviving the year 1865, as we survived 1863 and 1864.

After delirium tremens lasting two years, the tedious period of recovery has come—slow, concealed, with continuing flashes of heat and the return of delirious episodes. A clear turning point, in which the old doctors be­lieved, did not happen, but the attacks of rage have apparently weakened, and, taking everything into account, things are not getting worse.

For us, it's even demonstrably better.

Since last spring our ringing has again begun to reach Russia, has again begun to rouse some people and upset others. We are being scolded more often, more people are writing to us, and we have more and more corre­spondence and readers. And we are traveling along our very same path and have no intention at all of changing it, that is, the path itself—we do not answer for the tone and the coverage, because they depend on events and not on us, and we have said this many times.¹

To travel one's own path under the circumstances under which we trav­eled for the past three years was difficult, and we would never say—given the prevailing confusion of ideas and passions, and the streams rushing in opposite directions—that we were not from time to time carried to one side, but we were not dislodged from the main line either by the frenzied abuse of independent or government-supported enemies, or by the advice of stub­born friends.

The Bell has remained what it was, has remained itself; it represented the same line of thought and did not represent any coterie. Abandoned by almost everyone, it did not rush either into the patriotic camp or toward the democratic alarmists. [. . .]

We know and see that our enemies followed a different road and took nine-tenths of our friends with them. What we do not know or see is whether the Russian reading public, the only people for whom we write, will follow them for very long. We were unable to follow our enemies along the path of bloody and crude patriotism; to the extent that this will cool down and resistance grow to The Moscow Gazette and Muravyov's actions, to that extent readers will return to us.

That personally strong people and lively talents, full of youthful fresh­ness, not only can but should overtake us—we not only know this but re­joice in it, like any person who has cleared a path and takes pleasure when people walk further along it.² However, we do not know and seriously doubt that public opinion in Russia has outstripped our propaganda. [. . .]

Neither abstract thought, nor far-off ideals, nor logical severity, nor a sharp consistency, in and of themselves, will help the work of everyday propaganda, if they are unable to grasp close-range ideals, today's strivings, and the doubts of the masses. The town square and the club, the audito­riums and every sort of gathering differ from the closed circle of school friends, in that the former pay attention while the latter were engaged in study, or were supposed to be studying.

It wasn't easy to follow from afar the changing stream of opinions, es­pecially from a public so young, unbridled, and only partly free. We trusted our instinct, and steered as best we could through the dark and stormy night between opposing beacons, even losing our ballast.

However, we do not blame ourselves for that. There is only so much co­ordination with the direction of society possible; any further and it becomes a betrayal. The sounds of The Bell were lost, and caused rage and indigna­tion to the degree that the popularity of Muravyov and The Moscow Gazette grew. Muravyov was cast aside, The Moscow Gazette passed its apogee and will likely begin to fade, we have survived the worst period, and soon our prodigal children, with gray hair or without any hair at all, will once again appear when we ring out, back from the patriotic herd where they did not graze but were tended. [. . .]

We return now to our difficult path with precipices on either side. No as­cetic monk in the wilderness was so persecuted, so tempted from the right and from the left sides.

This did not begin just yesterday. When CH attacked us in i858 with his doctrinaire-administrative indictment, we already possessed several purple- red letters,³ accusing us of moderation,⁴ and there was a lot of abuse for socialism, Jacobinism, various kinds of disrespect, impertinence, etc. Since that time, some people have consistently regarded us as anarchists, others—as pro-bureaucracy, [. . .] some—as bloodthirsty terrorists, others—as gradualist progressives,

some have said in horror: "They summon people to use axes and write appeals!"

others say while gnashing their teeth: "They do not call people to use axes and write not only to the emperor but to the empress as well."

We received two letters recently, one from an old friend and the other from an old enemy.⁵ "You're exhausted," writes the friend, "you are perish­ing, you have run aground because you lack the courage to go full sail; you think that development should follow a peaceful path, but it will not follow a peaceful path; in this unhappy eleventh hour you still place your hopes in the government, but it can only do harm; you have stumbled on the Rus­sian hut, which itself has stumbled and has stood for centuries in oriental immobility, with its insistence on the right to land; summon people, gather them together, issue a call, a great time is approaching, it is near."

"You are drowning," writes the enemy, "in some kind of mud, and I pity you. At times a Promethean howl bursts forth from you, but all the same you sink further and further into your abyss. You should change the atmo­sphere and forget the past, revive and restore yourself, and acquire a differ­ent language. At present it is difficult for us Russians to read your speech, because we do not hear a single kind word from you. You do not encounter in our homeland even the slightest positive trait, as if Russians are some kind of nation of outcasts. Twenty-five million private serfs and twenty million owned by the government are receiving freedom and land. Members of the landowning class are enduring their privation with patience and calm, while free voices are heard in the councils, the landed assemblies, and in the press. The troops are unrecognizable. The clergy is undergoing a renewal. does none of this find any response in the soul of one who truly loves the fatherland? No, your Bell has cracked, you cannot spread good news, and it is a crime to spread bad tidings. Ring out the De Profundis and write an epilogue."

In reading this, you so much want to sprinkle ash on your head and go off to the Solovetsky Monastery, and then hand yourself over to the worldly authorities. [. . .]

We were tormented by the knowledge that a great transformation was "so close, so possible,"⁶ and was for no reason slipping out of our hands. We pursued the emperor, we grabbed at his coat, we stood in his path with The Bell hidden in our jacket (at that point he was still reading us), and pointed out to him briefly and boldly, pleading and growing irritated, that he was turning off the path. [. . .]

We felt sorry for him. We did not represent any systematic opposition, nor a demagogic, forced hatred; we were the first to greet him with a free Russian word when he ascended the throne, and, together with the old world's exiles and the leaders of European revolution, we wanted to drink to the liberator of the serfs, and we would certainly have done that, if the terrible news of April i0, i86i, from Warsaw had not filled our glasses and vessels with Polish blood.

We grew thoughtful over this blood and sadly asked ourselves: "In the end, who is he and where is he going?" Of course, the Polish question had become urgent, and they feared Poland. All the same, to tease them with promises and then shoot unarmed people. that is too much!

Suddenly there was a shot from a different direction—Anton Petrov fell, executed, on a pile of dead peasants.

Could a mistake or fear really lead to this?.. He was deceived—this was the slander of serf owners, their revenge.

There was another flash of lightning—Arngoldt, Slivitsky, Rostovsky. This was no longer a mistake, but a crime.

And so it went, one incident after another. the case of Mikhailov, Ob- ruchev,⁷ the students, the persecution of journals, the support for corrupt literature. No, none of this was a mistake, but some kind of absurd and immoral conspiracy.

"Yes, but what about i862!"

"What really happened during that notorious i793 on the Neva?⁸ Four years have passed since then, and it is time for people who closed their eyes in fear to open them and blush. One would need all the nasty spite of a pedant laughed at by young people, all the vindictiveness of puffed- up mediocrity, raised by unfortunate events to the level of the police and the out-of-control prosecutor, to persuade anyone that the government and society were treading on an underground constructed by "Young Russia," and that two more days and a handful of students along with a couple of officers would proclaim—on Admiralty Square—a republic circumscribed by nihilism and Pugachevism.⁹

The government put on a frightened face—it wanted to be frightened. It had begun to be disturbed by free speech, it had toyed with liberalism but the joke had begun to wear off, and, seizing upon the fire, which had noth­ing to do with the secretly printed leaflet, organized a general investigation.

[. . .] No matter how closely we looked and scrutinized the situation, we did not see in the Russia of 1862 a single element that was sufficiently strong and mature, nor a single topic sufficiently elaborated and of gen­eral importance, that one could—in its name—amass power, and sufficient power, to throw down the gauntlet to the government. [. . .]

Of all the problems that had been raised, not a single one was elaborated or generalized or clarified in a way that would allow it to serve as a banner. A purely political question was not of interest. The question of peasant land allotment and the commune did not coincide with the exotic socialism in literature or with gentry liberalism—it went against both one and the other. The government was imperceptibly shaky, in the absence of any kind of firm attributes. [. . .] It attacked the younger generation and would have col­lapsed if not for the help of its most vicious, most legitimate, and ancient enemy—a Polish insurrection.

A Polish insurrection, relying on Europe, halted in an instant the in­tellectual ferment and the growth of forces eating away at the dilapidated organism of the Russian imperial government, and gave the government a rallying point and a justification.

The opinion of The Bell about Poland and the Polish question had been expressed in a series of letters (1859-1860), and we never changed it one iota: Poland is fully entitled to an independent state, and no person of good conscience can have any doubt of that. They can trample Poland, kill it, trans­port it to Siberia, and force it in to Europe—all that depends on force. [. . .]

But in recognizing Poland's right, the question remains whether the claim was made at the best time. We think and we thought that they could not have picked a worse moment. [. . .]

We knew the kind of beast that had roused and teased the Poles with its demonstrations and gunshots, and we trembled for them and for Russia and pleaded to the very end with them to stop. We told them that in Rus­sia everything was in preparation and yet nothing was prepared. That the movement that they observed was sincere and deep, but far from being the "organization" they dreamed about, and we repeated a hundred times that Europe would not lift a finger to save them, and that all the sympathy and big talk was just an "exercise in style." We said that the participation by Russian officers was negative more than anything else—they didn't want to be executioners. We knew this and together with them we implored the government and Konstantin Nikolaevich to spare Russian blood and Rus­sian honor, and not tempt officers to go against duty and conscience. That was what we said on the eve of the Belopolsky conference, and by the next day blood was flowing in the Kingdom of Poland. [. . .]

The trouble erupted at full strength. villages and small towns burned, soldiers looted and killed, their superiors looted and executed, the Poles began to seek revenge, the Russian people were roused with rumors of another i8i2. Muravyov—hated by all Russia—went to Vilnius and society applauded his appointment. [. . .]

We protested, that is, we did everything that one person can do in the face of savage force, we added our voice so that in the future it would bear witness to the fact that such a perversion of public opinion and civic speech could not happen without resistance, without a weak, isolated, lost, but in­delible veto.

There were moments when we wished to be silent, but neither the slan­der nor the constant repetition of these terrible crimes left us in peace. The insolence grew, and to submit to it was beyond our strength. [. . .]

And with all this it was absolutely impossible to keep silent. Along with the despair, another powerful voice stated loudly that our future would find its way out of this filth and blood.

II

[. . .] The vestiges of our servitude are shameful and striking, like the marks left by a birch rod, and like those marks, remain on the surface.

Neither the government, nor the gentry, nor the serfs, nor the clergy, nor the senate, nor the synod—no one in essence believes in the truth of their power or powerlessness. That is why everyone is afraid of everything. [. . .] And for all that, a printed leaflet from a secret press, a warehouse that unexpectedly goes up in flames horrifies them, and every young person who looks forward like a free human being, causes trepidations. They're afraid of Mikhailov, they're afraid of Chernyshevsky. Orlov-Davydov re­quests a constitution to ward off Buckle and Buntzen, while Bezobrazov publicly thanks Katkov for saving the fatherland and for trampling The Bell.¹⁰

The government, as if rejoicing at the Polish rebellion and the fires, from the end of i862 on began to lay siege on all fronts and all issues. Since that time it continuously fusses, crushes, shouts, erects barriers, fights, kills, forces the people back with its chest and a horse's rear end, i.e., the secret police and The Moscow Gazette. Obviously no one gets in its way and noth­ing moves backward—it just keeps vacillating, going first to the right and then to the left.

If each step in this chaos were not covered in blood, accompanied by executions, prison, hard labor, then the spectacle that Russia now presents would have been performed with comedy and irony on a world-historical scale, which not a single divine or demonic comedy had ever achieved. It is a kind of Babylonian chaos, an orgy, a geological cataclysm applied to the strata of civic life. Everything is strange, massive, and confused. The government is violently wringing its hands, the liberal gentry is becoming a painful obstruction to any solution, and the only conservative element is agrarian communism—all of this mixture is under the observation of the police, who do not interfere in anything, but ask "who should be beaten?" and then beat them.

It's a terrible muddle.

Yes, gentlemen, and long may it live! Let us give thanks for the blind man's bluff that we are playing. In this chaos, in this ferment, in this lime pit, new forms will solidify, different foundations will crystallize, those which are close to our heart and which would have greater difficulty break­ing through with fixed conceptions, established procedures, and the belief that a soldier by rights draws a line in the sand.

In the West, reactionaries have unity and meaning.

[. . .] It is clear that we cannot have any proper kind of reactionary move­ment, because there is no actual necessity for it. And as soon as reactionary activity is meaningless, then it must carry that meaningless character that it has among us. Accidental causes, accidental measures, whims, incompre­hension, state power unrestrained by reason and not fearing accountability, Asian customs and a barracks upbringing, with no kind of plan and no kind of system. The main resistance always concentrated on the external, the word and not the deed. In half of the cases of persecution, the coward­ice of an uneasy conscience and government touchiness are mixed in. The model of Petersburg measures remains the shaving of beards, the cutting off of hair, the return of an official document from an office because it was not signed according to regulations. Nicholas himself, who for thirty years de­fended Russia from any progress and any revolution, limited himself to the system's fagade, not order, but the appearance of order. In exiling Polezhaev and Sokolovsky¹¹ for their bold verses, removing the words "liberty" and "civic spirit" from print, he let Belinsky, Granovsky, and Gogol slip through his fingers, putting the censor in jail for empty hints, not having noticed that literature from two directions rapidly drifted toward socialism.

Embarking once again on the path of resistance and reaction, the gov­ernment of "emancipation and reform" demonstrated that it had not gotten any wiser.

It ruined a huge number of people, which would have horrified any Ben- kendorf or Dubelt¹²—that's that. The movement was not stopped, it was not even driven underground, like it was under Nicholas.

Meanwhile, the government had never been more powerful. Everything served its purpose—the good and the bad, Sevastopol and the Peace of Paris, the emancipation of the serfs and the Polish insurrection, Europe's empty threats and the long-awaited reforms. Literature had changed and the journals turned into observation towers for the Third Department, while university departments turned into sentry booths for the police, the gentry paralyzed themselves with nostalgia for serfdom, and the peasants continued to expect genuine freedom from the tsar.

The government, in the way that it was set up, could have produced posi­tive and negative miracles. What did it actually do?

Constantly frightened and on its guard, it punished and continues to punish on the right and on the left, which governments never do when they feel the earth firmly beneath their feet. They executed Poles, having already defeated them with weapons. They executed arsonists, later announcing that the arson about which their literary spies had written so extensively didn't exist at all; they alluded to appeals, to letters that had been inter­cepted, to the reading of The Bell, and beat indiscriminately every person who stood out not according to the wishes of the authorities and not in an acceptable way. The peasant Martyanov returned from abroad with a poetic faith in the earthly tsar, and with trust that would have moved not just an anointed ruler but a painted African king—and Martyanov is grabbed, hit in the head with a club, and sent off to hard labor.

And at the same time other forces were growing alongside it, both far away and close by, and were outstripping the official power that lived in the Winter Palace. Even those forces that the Winter Palace had itself sum­moned, bought, trained, and rewarded, turned out to be serpents who had warmed themselves on its breast.

The government unleashed crude declarations of patriotism, stirred up popular hatred and religious intolerance with the libel in its journals, which summons the people to act as judges. Like i8i2, before the occupation of Moscow by the French, when Count Rostopchin led Vereshchagin¹³ out into the square and handed him over to the savage crowd, our open¹⁴ govern­ment has been handing over its opponents to a pack of dirty hack writers, applying censorship to every justification and every defense. The popular assemblies, the open discussion of the land question, the declaration of their support for government officials and measures, the political banquets, demagogic toasts, and terrorist icons—everything was permitted. The wise statesmen rubbed their hands together and could not get over how they had "splendidly lit up" public opinion and how nasty were the bloodthirsty agents of the literary-police gang that they had unleashed. These profound psychologists with portfolios imagined that, having become accustomed to the groans of human beings and human blood, their creatures, like Kry- lov's mongrels, would howl and then quiet down, as soon as their masters whistled—but that did not happen.

Two and a half years had not gone by before the government—which had changed in a real sense—wanted to lasso its pack of hounds, but could not do it. One minister was badly bitten, and others found their undergarments in shreds. And not just the ministers, especially the civilians! Konstantin Niko- laevich himself was not spared. The Moscow Gazette even pestered him.¹⁵ [. . .]

The government, dumbfounded, to this very day sees before it an un­familiar power, which it wishes—because of changed circumstances—to banish, but which is not going anywhere. Why did it have to get mixed up in a family concert of unauthorized musicians?

The comic single combat of the minister of enlightenment with an of­ficial leaflet—published in opposition to him by one of the institutions un­der his jurisdiction—will pass away.¹⁶ The vile state of public opinion—on which a vile newspaper relies—will also pass away, but the realization of what a journal may do when public opinion is on its side, will remain.

We see the same thing in another sphere, which is closer to the matter at hand.

The patriotic banquets have ceased, no one is singing to Muravyov any more either in person or by telegraph, no one is sending affectionate ad­dresses to the sovereign, and the day when one will blush in recalling this excess of servility is not far off. But the custom of gatherings, with collective discussion and abasement, continues. The address by the Moscow nobil­ity, in which they desire not only to love the sovereign, but to speak with him without witnesses, without guardians, and to speak precisely about the disgraceful behavior of bureaucrats, will become the foundation stone of constitutional agitation, which will engulf all Russia and in its turn will stir up another kind of agitation than that dreamed of by the Bezobrazovs and Davydov-Orlovs. If Alexander II, governed by the example of his father, had not silently crushed the Poles and silently sent off to hard labor his own people, the question would not have been raised so soon of establishing some control over the autocracy.

Ne reveillez pas le chat qui dort!.}¹ Only unfortunately, to wake the cat or not does not depend on personal will as much as it might seem. And there is no fatalism in this, but simply embryogenesis, certain phases of organic development. Yesterday, the fruit was not ripe and the cat slept soundly, today it is riper. and the cat sleeps innocently, but to make things worse everyone keeps trying to wake it.

The thing is, our pear is ripening rapidly, and for that reason everyone is trying to rouse us—the emperor Alexander and "Young Russia," the Mos­cow nobility and the Petersburg nihilists, privileges and hard labor, fair weather and foul. It is time for us to be convinced of this and act according to our convictions.

We will certainly reach the place toward which we are traveling without compass or sextant, if our strength—new and unexpected—does not fail us; consciousness will light the way and prevent aimless wandering from one side to the other, steps taken backward in confusion, and crude errors. [. . .]

Notes

Source: "K kontsu goda," Kolokol, l. 209, December i, Й65; i8:45i-69, 673-76.

Herzen: "Whether a stream is small or large, its path depends not on itself, but on the general slopes and inclines of the land" (The Bell, Й64).

Herzen most likely has in mind the young revolutionary democrats, followers of Chernyshevsky.

Herzen uses the word Cherv, the Old Slavic name for the letter that begins the name of his frequent adversary, Boris N. Chicherin (i828-i904), a proponent of what Herzen called "administrative progress." Cherv also means "worm," and the word for "purple- red" is the similar-sounding chervonnyi.

Moderantisme is a term for the party program of moderate republicans during the French Revolution.

The friend is M. A. Bakunin; the enemy is M. P. Pogodin.

A paraphrase from Eugene Onegin, chap. 8.

Vladimir Obruchev (i836-i9i2), on the staff of The Contemporary, was arrested in i86i for the distribution of the "Velikoruss" proclamation and sentenced to hard labor and Siberian exile. The other names mentioned here have appeared in previous docu­ments in this collection.

Herzen compares the revolutionary dictatorship's terror of i793 with the tsarist regime's repression of i862.

The i862 proclamation "Young Russia," with its calls for violence against the exist­ing order, was seen by liberals and even some to the left of them as having gone too far by provoking a strong reaction by the government (Doc. 45).

Vladimir P. Orlov-Davydov (i809-i882) and Nikolay A. Bezobrazov (i8i6-i867) were leaders of the nobility in the Petersburg region. The work of Henry Buckle, the English historian, had been translated into Russian; Christian Buntzen was a Prussian official and the author of theological works. Bezobrazov, who advocated a noble assem­bly, praised Katkov more for his attacks on The Bell than for other services to Russia, a fact which convinced Herzen that The Bell was a force to be considered, and that the sound of The Bell would outlast that of Katkov's Moscow Gazette. Orlov-Davydov and Bezobrazov are discussed in "Corrections and Additions" ("Popravki i dopolneniia"), The Bell, No. i96, April i, i865 (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, i8:327-3i).

Polezhaev was arrested in i826 for his student lampoons. The poet Vladimir I. Sokolovsky (i808-i839) was arrested in Й34 for his part in a group that sang "libelous" verses. Both were sent to the Caucasus. Herzen was also implicated in the Sokolovsky case and imprisoned for the first time. Polezhaev and Sokolovsky are discussed in Her- zen's memoirs.

Count Alexander Khr. Benkendorf (1783-1844) became head of the political police and the Third Department in 1826; Leonty V. Dubelt (1792-1862) was the head of the Third Department from 1839 to 1856.

Count Fyodor V. Rostopchin (1763-1826) was the governor-general in charge of Moscow in 1812; Mikhail N. Vereshchagin (1789-1812), a merchant's son and transla­tor, was accused of treason and killed by a mob at the instigation of Rostopchin.

At the beginning of his reign, Alexander II had embraced the policy of glasnost' (openness), to which Herzen makes a sarcastic reference.

Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich (1827-1892) was chair of the State Council from 1865 to 1881; Katkov spoke out against his liberalism.

Katkov's Moscow Gazette was published by Moscow University. Alexander Nikitenko recalls this episode in his memoirs.

Don't wake a sleeping cat!

* 73 +

Our Future Peers and Our Former Anglomaniacs

[1865]

Le Nord¹ relates how a deputation from the English Club (we await with impatience to learn whether there will be a deputation from the Troitsky inn and the Krasny tavern) asked the governor-general of Moscow to ban Potekhin's play A Cut-off Piece, because it comes down hard on serf own­ers.² The governor-general refused, and rightly so, but the "imperial theater and the imperial actors got a dressing-down" from the ex-Anglomaniacs, who have paid for rights to The Moscow Gazette.³

It's just as well that Fonvizin⁴ was able in good time to get his barnyard of wild landowners on the stage, and Gogol was able to publish his grave­yard of Dead Souls. It is also fortunate that Turgenev, without going over to the fathers, narrated how when he was still a son, he used to go hunting. [. . .]

Notes

Source: "Nashi budushchie pery i nashi proshedshie anglomany," Kolokol, l. 209, De­cember 1, 1865; 18:471, 677-78.

Le Nord was a political newspaper, published first in Brussels (1855-62, 1865-92) and Paris (1863-64, 1894-1907), and subsidized by the Russian government.

Alexey Potekhin's comedy was published in the October 1865 issue of The Con­temporary. Nominated for the Uvarov literary prize, it was declared by Nikitenko to be subversive.

Mikhail Katkov and classics professor Pavel M. Leontiev (i822-i874) paid Moscow University for the right to run The Moscow Gazette. Katkov and Leontiev also edited The Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik), a monthly, that over its fifty-year run (i856-i906), moved between liberal, conservative, and reactionary profiles.

The plays of Denis I. Fonvizin ^745^792) include The Brigadier and The Minor.

74 ♦

Nicholas the Orator [1865]

In the August issue of The Russian Herald there is an article about "Events in the Province of Novgorod During the First Cholera Epidemic."¹ After a description of the unbelievably stupid and awkward measures taken by authorities in Novgorod province during the cholera epidemic of i830, and several episodes from the sad account of old Russian revenge by military settlers in i83i,² the author, a witness to these events, includes a short, but eloquent speech given by Nicholas to the assembled settlers. The speech was such a chef d'oeuvre that we cannot refuse ourselves the pleasure of relat­ing it in full. This is the real Nicholas, sincere, naive, natural, just as his mother bore him and the riding school raised him. "What are you doing, you fools? Where did you get the idea that you were being poisoned? This is God's punishment. On your knees, blockheads! Pray to God! I'll show you!" What sort of matchless line from Corneille is this "I'll show you!"

The artless eyewitness adds: "The military settlers were tried by a mili­tary court and all received worthy retribution for their deeds," however, he forgets that before the retribution they had received the tsar's forgiveness, but after their amnesty the guilty were forced to run the gauntlet.

We did not think that the Russian Herald would be the one to throw this heavy stone at the grave of Nicholas. On n'est trahi que par les siens!³

Notes

Source: "Nikolai kak orator," Kolokol, l. 209, December i, Й65; i8:472, 678.

The reference is to an article by staff writer G. F. Sokolov, who identifies himself as an eyewitness. Herzen's version of the title is essentially, if not completely, correct.

Military settlements existed in Russia between i8i0 and i857. They brought mar­ried soldiers and their families together with state peasants in newly constructed vil­lages, so that the soldiers, when free, could help with farm work and the peasants could

help relieve the government of costs associated with the military. The misuse of power by officers and commanders and the difficulty of fulfilling both military and agricultural needs led to uprisings, low military readiness, and high costs. 3. One is only betrayed by one's friends.

♦ 75 ♦

The Bell, No. 210, December 15, 1865. This is Herzen's response to the government's repression of literature and journalism in November 1865, only two months after the introduction of new regulations on periodicals, which freed them from pre-publication censorship. The main target of the government's actions was The Contemporary.

The First Ban, the First Warning, the First Trial!

[1865]

I. The Ban on Potekhin's Play

A Cut-off Piece has been banned all the same! Long live the English Club! What a thoroughly dissolute government—there is neither self-control nor unity. It is like the drunken sailor whom Suvorov made to walk "the plank," but who, in his zeal, walked two of them.

II. The First Warning

Instructions from the Minister of the Interior, November 10, 1865. Taking into consideration:

that in the article "Modern Times," placed in the August issue of The Contemporary, especially on pp. 376, 383-4, the principle of the marital union is offended;²

that in the article "Notes of a Contemporary," appearing in the same issue, especially on pp. 308-2i, there is an indirect negation of the principle of private property as applied to capitalists, who supposedly unfairly appropriate for themselves the savings of the working class;

that in an article of the same name in the September issue of the same journal, in the section entitled "How Can One Measure the Approximate Debt of the Civilized Classes to the People?", especially on pp. 93-5, the principle of private property is directly subjected to dispute and negation, and

that in the same article, especially on pp. 97, 98, 103-12, there is a stirring-up of enmity toward the upper classes, particularly property owners, who, by the very principle of their existence, are immoral and harmful to the popular well-being,

the minister of the interior, on the basis of articles 29, 31, and 33, approved of at the highest level on the 6th of April of the current year by the State Council, and in accordance with the conclusion of the Council of the main department on publishing issues has deter­mined: to announce a first warning to the journal The Contemporary, in the person of its publisher-editor Nikolai Nekrasov, and member of the landowning class, and its editor Alexander Pypin, who holds a civil rank in the VII class.³

Finally we can see with our own eyes the game of "warnings," this French disease of an unfree freedom of the press. [. . .]

The Contemporary has been doomed for a long time. Two more of Va- luev's "warnings" and the chronicle will be finished.⁴ We can neither harm nor help him; the edge of his clothing didn't get tangled up in the wheel of the Petersburg machinery just now, and this is not the case of Potiphar's wife—you can't escape her with a piece of your robe.⁵ On the day when Chernyshevsky was taken without any judicial basis, having been freed by the Senate from accusations made by the State Council, when he, com­pletely innocent, was placed in the stocks and then sent into exile—without the government considering it necessary or even possible to tell its loyal subject what the case was about—on that day the fate of The Contemporary was decided. Valuev wanted to amuse himself with "warnings." It was a new toy, and a Parisian one at that, something liberal, legal, literal—but the end will be the same: they will decide the fate of The Contemporary without a trial.⁶

The cause for which the warning was issued is also quite remarkable.

The Russian minister of the interior is turning into the minister for a moribund civilization—that is the way the liberal Kolnishche Zeitung under­stood it. [. . .]

One can apply the considerants⁷ for Valuev's warning not just to The Contemporary but to just about all of contemporary Russia. Many people avoided a ministerial dressing-down only because they published their ar­ticle before the lifting of censorship.

If we had freedom of the press in i86i,⁸ we would have undoubtedly read that the "minister of the interior,

Taking into consideration: that in the 'Statutes,' printed separately and in the publication of the Ed­iting Commission, there is an insult to the principles of the serf agreement, there is an indirect negation of private property as applied to landowners, as if they had unjustly appropriated the labor of serfs and peasants;

that in the same 'Statutes' the principle of land ownership is directly contested, and a careless distinction is made between property and its utili- zation—a distinction inevitably leading to enmity between property owners and users—

the minister of the interior, on the basis of article 29 et cetera, has de­cided to announce the first warning to the Editing Commission and the publisher of the 'Statutes' in the august person of our currently reigning sovereign, the emperor Alexander Nikolaevich." [. . .]

III. The First Trial⁹

On November i9 (December i) in the St. Petersburg criminal court sev­eral cases were heard publicly "concerning crimes against the press laws. At first there was a report given behind closed doors about Blyummer,¹⁰ who was handed over to the court for the publication abroad of the journals Free Speech and The European. Blyummer was under arrest and from the cham­bers was taken back to prison."

Following this gloomy and mysterious incident behind closed doors, the doors opened, but it was not the beneficiary Bibikov, "called to account for the publication of the book Critical Studies," who walked through them. Despite the fact the Bibikov did not appear, the court took up a discussion of John Stuart Mill, Darwin, Fourier, and the rest.¹¹ "Two salient points" were discovered in Bibikov's book (according to The St. P. Gazette): first, that he sympathizes with Fourier's desire to equalize the rights of women and men; second, he does not sympathize with the petty bourgeois Kras- nov, who kills (fortunately in Ostrovsky's comedy, and not in real life) his wife—the "report" would like to see in Bibikov particular sympathy for the murderous philistine. The "Report" sees in this Bibikov's desire to under­mine the strength of the marital union, not realizing that the murder of a wife to a certain degree in fact does undermine that union's strength.

The family affairs of the Krasnovs caused the compilers of the "Report" to have doubts about Bibikov's conduct, and here we see a very successful and purely Russian addition to European laws on the press: instead of judging the book, the speakers went off to gossip with and interrogate Bibikov's friends, and even under oath to ask about his conduct. It turned out that Bibikov behaved like a "good citizen." And, in addition, "during a search of Bibikov's apartment, nothing suspicious was found." Excellent!

What was also wonderful was the reference to article i356 in the Law Code, which begins with the words: "If anyone in secret from the censorship or in some other fashion publishes something". but censorship has been lifted! "Whether there has been a decision or whether it has been put off until another session—is unknown."¹²

Notes

Source: "Pervoe zapreshchenie, pervoe predosterezhenie, pervyi sud!" Kolokol, l. 2i0, December i5, i865; i8:473-77, 678-80.

News of the ban was announced in The St. Petersburg Gazette on November ii, i865, and the document below was published there the following day.

This was the translation of an article by M. Conway that originally appeared in the Fortnightly Review about social reform advocated and practiced by a community in New York.

Alexander N. Pypin (i833-i904), a cousin of Chernyshevsky, was coeditor with Nekrasov of The Contemporary from i865 to i866. After that he contributed to The Her­ald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), and became a well-known literary historian and ethnogra­pher, and a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Herzen paraphrases a comment by the monk Pimen from the drama Boris Godunov.

This is a somewhat incorrect reference to the biblical story (in Genesis) of Joseph's escape from the advances of Potiphar's wife; the fact that his cloak was left behind is what condemned him to prison.

On December 4, Й65, a second warning was issued to the journal and punitive measures against it—closure—were already being discussed.

The motivation.

Herzen fantasizes about how the current post-publication censorship might have been applied to the manifesto announcing the emancipation of the serfs.

Description of the official investigation of Petr A. Bibikov's book Critical Studies appeared in The St. Petersburg Gazette on November 20, i865. Using this material, Her­zen offers his own ironic account. Bibikov (i832-i875) was a commentator on current affairs (publitsist) and a translator.

Leonid P. Blyummer (i840-i888), identified in the article as having a graduate degree, was a journalist who worked in Berlin, Brussels, and Dresden between i86i and i865.

Of the seven essays in Bibikov's book, three were deemed subject to prosecution: the essay on Fourier's teaching, on Mill's logic, and on Darwin's theory.

Bibikov was sentenced to seven days in the guardhouse.

The Bell, No. 211, January 1, 1866. The behavior of unrepentant serf owners serves as a continuing source of material for Herzen.

Serf Owners [1866]

Wake up, sleeping beauty!¹

We do not know whether Russia will enter the New Year on its right or left leg; we think it is more likely to be on its left leg, but whatever happens, every step will be exceptionally interesting.

The dead, half-decayed, will leave their graves, not wishing to remain in the earth if it is to be turned over to the peasants.

The government foolishly lashes out at social theories, while serf owners stroll about with unfurled banners.

We have heard that just before death, scars from the whip show up on the prisoner, but we have never heard that they showed up on the executioners.

A year ago, Katkov himself, soiled with every kind of filth, having inso­lently smiled when he was called an "informer," rejected the accusation of serf ownership.

Now, completely to the contrary, an entire band of former slave own­ers openly weep over their lost serf rights. The 19th of February 1861 is remembered as a day of great misfortune, the way the French republicans remember the 2nd of December.² We do not doubt that they always had these feelings, but they were hiding them. What has untied their tongues?

Two years of terror, of tsarist demagogy, awash in blood and violence, two years of paid-for slander and official journalism.

This is the first fruit of that corruption of public opinion—so masterfully carried out by the government—of that bloodthirsty mood which the gov­ernment's defenders had stirred up since the year 1862. These are the first laurels from the Polish victories, from the pillories in St. Petersburg, from the exiles, executions, torture.

The lack of ceremony with which serf owner reaction has appeared in our midst is rarely met with in history. Those who weep for the past ordi­narily give it the appearance of a revered relic, a moral sense, and throw a cover over its disgraceful wounds and filthy nakedness. Nothing of the kind happened with our neo-serf owners: they regret their rights to the labor of others, and are angry at the obstacles in their way, as thieves are angry at the arm of the law that prevents them from stealing. In our time only one country achieved these Hercules columns of depravity of thought and word—these are the American southerners, who appeared in churches and journals to defend slavery. Birds of a feather flock together.

What calamities await Russia, if it can produce such poison and is not able to get rid of it? The rotten emaciation we inherited from entire gen­erations who were born into the depravity of slaveholding ferments in our veins, deadening our heart, clouding our mind, and bringing sorrow for the loss of unjust gain to the point of a daring protest—as if mere passion for unearned profit could lead us out of our apathetic drowsiness and passive obedience.

The jubilee of the Free Economic Society afforded an occasion for our neo-serf owners. Everyone knows what this Free society really is, and anyone who does not know should read the account by V. Bezobrazov.³ This is one of those unskillful bits of window dressing with which Catherine II deceived Europe, like the cardboard villages with which Potemkin deceived her. Empty, frivolous, and lifeless, it lasted a hundred years with the same usefulness as parrots and ravens that live as long. Knowing with whom they were dealing, the government allowed the hundred-year-old free society to gather from all corners of Russia rural proprietors,⁴ to consult with them, and, if necessary, to make statements, i.e., the government gave them the right to organize a congress on the most important issue of national life and gave them the right of petition, which they had denied to the Moscow nobility.⁵

This conclave, this convention of rural masters, wanted to demonstrate that it was an active force, and it decided. what do you think?.. Guess!

Our dear drones, disguised as bees, decided to disturb the government. On the passing of legal measures promoting the collapse of the rural commune. The chairman of this division was himself ashamed, and he remarked to these utter slaves that these matters may be judged and debated, but that one does not request such arrangements from the government.⁶

Fortunately, there was a man in the auditorium who could not stand it and defended the commune. Mr. Panaev⁷ concluded his speech (which the Petersburg newspapers were careless enough to relate briefly) by saying that it would be unjust to decide the question about finding ways to destroy the commune at a meeting of representatives of capital without any repre­sentations of labor present. "Mr. Panaev himself sees the commune as the best resolution to the question of the relationship of capital and labor— a great principle, found only in our midst. This principle is the right of a person to land. 'The right to land is the same as the infamous right to work!' noted Mr. Bushen."⁸

With this hint the matter was not concluded, but only begun, a bouquet having been prepared by Mr. Skaryatin,⁹ the editor of The News: "Boldly, clearly and smugly he gave a long speech. in defense of serfdom. [. . .] Serfdom was a great productive force, said Mr. Skaryatin, enumerating the blessings of serfdom, which consist of the fact that the landowner kept an eye on the peasant's work and helped him, encouraging the hard-working peasants and reforming the careless ones. He concluded by saying that: 'Everyone benefited from this order of things, and this entire order collapsed on February 19, 1861.' The commune could not take its place, and therefore— given the proliferation of farm laborers—it made sense to dissolve it."

[. . .] What has happened to all the zealous, experienced friends and the defenders of their younger brothers, of the commune, and of communal landholding?..

Where is Ivan Aksakov?

Where is Yury Samarin?

Wouldn't it be better that in place of the spiritual "Day" to publish a worldly "Day" and to do battle over our right to the land than to spend un­bearably dull pages answering some sort of Father Martynov,¹⁰ whose let­ters no one has or will read?

Wake up, Brutus! While you celebrated victory over the Poles and oc­cupied yourself with the destruction of the Jesuits, look how the class of Orthodox landowners has raised its ugly head.

Notes

Source: "Krepostniki," Kolokol, l. 2ii, January i, i866; i9:7-i2, 365-67.

"Tu te reveilles, belle endormie!" This is the first line of a song by Charles Dufresny, which Pushkin quotes in the fifth chapter of Eugene Onegin.

On the night of December 2, i85i, Louis Bonaparte, president of the French Repub­lic, dissolved the Parliament and the State Council and arrested leaders of all opposition parties.

The Free Economic Society was created in ^65, with the approval of Catherine II, and lasted, except for a brief closure in i900, until i9i9, when the Bolsheviks finally abolished it. Despite Herzen's disapproval, it is considered to have been a fairly liberal group, interested in acquiring the best machinery from abroad for the improvement of agriculture, and in stimulating new ideas about farm management and the peas­antry through numerous essay contests on subjects of vital national interest. In the months after the emancipation, the Free Economic Society organized a literacy commit­tee. A survey of the society's first century of activity was prepared by A. I. Khodnev (not Bezobrazov, as Herzen believed), and was published in The Northern Post in i865 (nos. 237-239). For more on the Free Economic Society, see Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia.

The meeting dedicated to the centenary of the Free Economic Society was ceremo­nially opened on October 3i, Й65, and went on for six days in the hall of the Petersburg Assembly of the Nobility.

On January ii, Й65, the Moscow nobility presented an "address" to Alexander II in which they asked permission to summon "a general assembly of chosen people from the Russian land to judge the needs common to the entire state." The text of this address and a report on meetings of the noble assembly was published in The News (Vest') on January i4, which led to the newspaper being closed down for eight months, while its editor was taken to court.

Herzen makes use of an account of the fourth meeting day, which was published in the November 7, Й65, issue of The St. Petersburg Gazette. At this meeting the resolution by some members to get the authorities to weaken the peasant communes was proposed by a government statistician and editor, Artur B. Bushen, and opposed by professor of economics Ivan V. Vernadsky (the chair mentioned by Herzen). The Bell goes on to dis­cuss speeches by others present that day.

Valerian A. Panaev (i824-i899) was a railway engineer, a commentator, and the au­thor of a plan to free the serfs that was published in the i858 collection Voices from Russia.

Herzen notes that he is citing The St. Petersburg Gazette.

Vladimir D. Skaryatin was an arch-conservative nobleman, one of whose family members had participated in the assassination of Paul I.

Ivan M. Martynov was a Russian emigrant and Jesuit whose letter published in the March 4, i864, issue of The Day was an answer to an article criticizing the Jesuits. The answer by the prominent Slavophile writer Yury Samarin, as abstract as Martynov's, was spread over four issues and also published separately. Herzen's own published political criticisms of material in The Day remained unanswered.

^ 77 ^

The Bell, No. 2i2, January i5, i866. Herzen's interest in the Decembrists dates back to i825; the uprising was without doubt one of the most decisive influences in his life. He used the Free Russian Press to publish materials by and about the Decembrists, and the title Polestar was a tribute to the five martyrs. For all these reasons, to speak with a survivor was an exciting and deeply moving experience. After being released from exile in i856, the Decembrist Sergey Volkonsky traveled abroad for his health, meeting with Herzen in Paris in late June-early July i86i. The two got along very well and met on several occasions, allowing Herzen to learn a great deal more about the Decembrists. He found Volkonsky an admirable and fascinating figure, an example of righteousness and resilience in a progressive cause; one witness to their meetings said that Herzen's affection for Volkonsky was that of a son (Let 3:224-26). Friends and family members of the last prince were not entirely happy with the tribute below, which they claimed was a "distorted view" of the old prince, who was highly unlikely to have revealed so much information in the presence of strangers. The Decembrist legacy was problematic for the prince's son, M. S. Volkonsky, a rising figure in government service in the 1860s, and for grandson S. M. Volkonsky, who in spring 1917 was horrified by the thought that Decembrist memoirs might wind up in a museum of the revolution (Eidel'man, Svobodnoe slovo, 390-91).

In Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes adds substantially (72-146) to the biographical details presented in the document below. Volkonsky's ancestors include the fourteenth-century prince Mikhail Chernigorsky, whose service to Muscovy against the Mongols led to his canonization. By Alexander I's reign, this ancient family was closer than any other to the tsar, with more than a few Volkonskys serving at court, including the young Sergey Grigorevich, who was awarded the right to enter the emperor's private apartments unannounced. He even spent time with the much younger Nikolay Pavlovich—the future Nicholas I—playing with toy soldiers. Af­ter more than fifty real-life battles, including Borodino, and the triumphal march to Paris and Vienna, Sergey Volkonsky returned to Russia convinced of two things: Russia could not realize its potential without civil rights, and the serfs had shown beyond any doubt the depth of their patriotism. As a member of the Union of Welfare, Volkonsky was asked to recruit Pushkin, a close friend of his wife's family, but refrained from doing so. Once he was convicted, his mother's influence at court spared him a death sentence, but he lost his title, rank, and battlefield medals, and was sent to hard labor and exile by the tsar he had entertained, and by chief of police Benkendorf, an old friend from school and service.

During three decades in Siberia, Volkonsky rejected aristocratic ways and embraced peasant life, including the commune, although it is said that he retained his impressive conversational skills in French. Released by Alexander II, Volkonsky found in European Russia servility, hypocrisy, and a lack of dignity, which he deplored in his memoirs. The tsar finally returned the general's war medals in 1864, and in 1903 his portrait found its place again among the Hermitage's heroes of 1812 at the request of his nephew, who was at that time the gallery's director. In Volkonsky, Herzen found a perfect hero.

Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky [1866]

The great martyrs of the Nicholaevan era, our fathers in spirit and in free­dom, the heroes of Russia's first awakening, participants in the great war of 1812 and the great protest of 1825, are going to their graves. It is becoming empty...and petty without them.

Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky died the 28th of November (the 10th of December).

With pride and tender emotion we remember our meeting with the ven­erable old man in 1861. Speaking about it in The Bell (No. 186, 1864), we were afraid to name him.¹

". The venerable old man, the stately old man, eighty years old, with a long silver beard and white hair that fell to his shoulders, told me about those times, about his people, about Pestel, the solitary prison cell, hard la­bor, to which he was sent as a brilliant young man and from which he re­turned gray, old, still more brilliant, but from another world.