A Herzen Reader

Eight or ten years ago I preached to a frightened Europe, which gazed at the gloomy figure of an emperor in jackboots and the uniform of a cavalry guards officer, who stood like some kind of snowy scarecrow on the other side of the Baltic ice floes, and were horrified that this snow was melting, that the Petersburg throne was not at all as strong as people thought, that it had outlived its reason for being and had not had anything creative or construc­tive going for it since the war of i8i2, that Nicholas, from an instinct of self- preservation, had gathered all his forces together for a single negative move against the foundations of a new life that were arising.

No one believed me—it was before the Crimean War.

It's an old story, that people are convinced only by piles of corpses, captured burial mounds, and burnt cities. MacMahon was more fortunate than me.³

But it was not only Europe that saw the light due to the Crimean War; Nicholas also saw the light and, when he looked about him and saw the chaos and emptiness he had nurtured, his lungs ceased to breathe.

His entire reign was a mistake. A despot of limited abilities, uneducated, he didn't know Europe and he didn't know Russia. More ferocious than clever, he ruled with only the police, with only oppression. Frightened by December i4th, he recoiled from the nobility, from the single milieu linked in life and death to the Petersburg throne by the criminal mutual surety of serf law. He wanted to crush those simple, necessary strivings toward civil rights on which every Prussian and Austrian crown had yielded, at no loss to themselves. But, while surreptitiously untying the imperial barge from the landowners' raft, he did nothing for the people. He would have liked to take away serfdom from the gentry in order to weaken that class without giving freedom to the peasants. He saw them from an ordinary officer's point of view and was not afraid of them, because the people didn't know the word "constitution," did not demand rights, and considered only the land that was due to them; in any case it was easy to control them and the mute masses could be crushed noiselessly, without an echo.

The successor to Nicholas received a difficult inheritance: an unneces­sary and inglorious war, shattered finances, widespread theft, grumbling, mistrust, and expectation. Before him—as in our fairy tales—lay three roads: to give genuine rights to the nobility and begin to resolve with them the lunar freedom of representative government; to free the serfs with land and begin a new era of popular and economic freedom; or, instead of one or the other of these, to continue trampling every manifestation of life until the muscles of the one who is trampling or the one who is being trampled are exhausted. What road did our Ivan Tsarevich travel?⁴

All three.

This unsteadiness, this uncertainty of a man only half-awake is the dis­tinguishing feature of the new reign. In it there is something weak-willed, feeble, lisping, and—by virtue of that—compromising on everything, be­traying everything. Literature, the nobility, the universities are all given some privileges, but not real ones. The serfs are given freedom, but without land. Poland is given back its national identity, but without any autonomy. [. . .]

The story of the universities is a common occurrence, in which that same blundering, dissolute government thinking is expressed at full strength; they treated the young people the same way as the Poles, and the same way as the peasants, and the same way they will behave another ten times, if this foolish government is free to do its will.

Does experience really teach us nothing? Should we really wait for a fourth and fifth bloodletting?.. If we do nothing we will end up with terrible misfortunes: a single knife in the hands of a lunatic could cause terrible harm—what about five hundred thousand bayonets in the hands of a fright­ened and foolish government?.. The salvation of society, the salvation of the people, demands that the government must not be allowed to do its will, it demands that it be restrained.

Well—swing the lasso!

Notes

Source: "Po povodu studenskikh izbienii," Kolokol, l. H3, November 22, i86i; i5:i95-99, 409-i0.

This popular saying was used by Herzen in several articles; it was uttered when the enraged Marshal Bugeaud was refused permission by King Louis Philippe to bomb the Faubourg St. Antoine in Й48.

Tsarist Russia suffered an embarrassing defeat in the Й53-56 Crimean War.

French Marshal Patrice MacMahon (i808-i893) distinguished himself in the Crimean War with the taking of the Malakhov burial mound at the cost of many lives during the siege of Sevastopol. He served as president of the Third Republic from i873 to i879.

A frequent hero of Russian fairy tales is Ivan the Tsar's Son (Ivan Tsarevich).

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