A Herzen Reader

One of the most difficult moments for a person investigating a criminal act is that moment when he enters a room where an evil deed has taken place: everything is quiet and peaceful. the drops of blood, the broken furniture, an overturned chair, broken glass. noise can be heard from outside where wheels are creaking, a barrel organ is playing, children laugh, and peddlers shout—while just a few hours earlier, here, in this place, muffled blows, a howl, swearing, moaning, and a heavy fall could be heard. and inside you experience a hysterical tremor. Meanwhile there is no choice, the investi­gation must be carried out while the tracks are fresh. If only one can find sufficient peace of mind to avoid heaping on the shoulders of the criminal even more guilt than he in fact ought to be carrying.

We are those investigators.

Before us sadly stand massive buildings that have lost their significance, cold, empty auditoriums, mute lecterns: a senseless force passed through here, blindly crushed young lives, then unrepentantly quieted down, and everything went back to its old routine, only there are no students and there is no learning.

Who is to blame? Where are the guilty parties? The good-humored em­peror or the soulless Putyatin? Shuvalov or Stroganov? The Moscow police or those from the Preobrazhensky district?

Everyone is guilty, they all played the role of voluntary executioners, cruel executioners; but with that they enjoy the benefits connected with the title of masters of the rod: they are only responsible for carrying out the sen­tence. Let their conscience torment them, let society's contempt torment them. Finally, let them be punished on the same basis on which in England beasts that cause a person's death are punished. To hell with them. Neither their guilt nor their punishment explains the matter.

The university incident is not an accident, not a whim, but the beginning of an inevitable battle. This battle must arise in one place or another, and it arose on the most natural soil. The contradictions that lie at the basis of our political life have moved so far apart that [. . .] either the established order in Petersburg will perish or Russia will perish.

That feverish feeling of being not quite right, which has taken control of all Russia—above, below, in the peasant hut and in the Winter Palace itself, directly reveals how the organism works and by what means it seeks to get rid of something dead, something poisonous and rotting.

The battle will come out one way or another, but eliminating the battle is impossible. The inhuman efforts made by Nicholas delayed its discovery for thirty years.

[. . .] For the Petrine empire, which survived, there remained one liv­ing matter, and with this matter it can redeem the past, heal the wounds suffered by the people, and be revitalized—with this matter it tied a rope around its neck. "You cannot force anyone to be saved," said Marshal Bugeaud to Louis Philippe.¹

First there was a loss of strength, and then of sense. The optical illu­sion of indestructibility dispersed along with the smoke of Sevastopol as everyone saw that this was the scenery of power, but not power itself.² The government was horrified by its own insignificance and its own absurdity; that accounts for its frantic readiness to change everything, to do repairs and restructuring, and, together with this, to desperately defend itself by every possible means—the shooting of peasants, the bayoneting of wor­shippers, the Preobrazhensky rifle butts, by gendarmes dressed like peas­ants, by the police use of public women. this is a sick person's internal fear of death, the overwhelming realization that there is insufficient reason for his existence. That is why they rush in one direction then another, that is why there is this uneasy feeling. that is why the empress prays at night before a Byzantine icon and reads the story of Marie Antoinette, that is why they tremble for their dynasty when hundreds of young people do not want to submit to wearing humiliating uniforms, that is why they hold onto their Preobrazhensky troops and their gendarmes, like a loaded revolver under a pillow. They know—and this is the worst thing that a person can know—that they are no longer needed!