A Herzen Reader

The Bell, No. i2i, February i, i862. Herzen revived an idea he raised most famously in From the Other Shore, that for theorists of all political stripes, the popular masses serve as inert, experimental material, sacrificial offerings on the altar of one or another abstract idea (Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii, 257). Isaiah Berlin discussed Herzen's views on this subject in a number of essays, emphasizing that Herzen developed this thesis early on and never altered his position. "No distant ends, no appeals to overriding principles or abstract nouns can justify the suppression of liberty, or fraud, violence and tyranny." Berlin calls this message "Herzen's ultimate sermon" (Russian Thinkers, Ю3, i97).

Herzen demands that theorists stop and listen to the people; by this he does not only mean revolutionaries like Chernyshevsky, who believe that the people are too backward to lead themselves. It is a sign of Herzen's evolution from the time when he saw a pos­sibility for change in the efforts of the enlightened gentry and a well-intentioned tsar. The article below was influenced by Herzen's correspondence with the Slavophile Yuri F. Samarin in which Herzen rejected the charge that he saw revolution as a goal in itself, and he recalled his frequent printed statements in French, German, and Russian on this subject. "The Cannon Fodder of Liberation" is also a response to criticism in Fatherland Notes over Herzen's support for the revolutionary ideas of the younger generation.

The Cannon Fodder of Liberation [1862]

[. . . ] Many times we have heard the reproach: why, instead of a critique of the present, we have no program for the future; why, instead of disapprov­ing of what exists, we do not lecture about what should happen. In a word, why do we tear down without building up. We have indirectly answered these attacks several times and were not at all prepared to speak about them now. But the reproaches have traveled abroad. [. . .]¹

We did not pay particular attention to this, not because we did not value opinion in the West, but because we were convinced that the journalists knew nothing about Russia and did not seriously want to know anything.² Besides, we have interests that are much closer and dearer to us than the desire to justify ourselves to them.

When Paris, and Cologne, and the rustle of oaks Were still very new to us,³

and when public opinion rustled in printed sheets, imagining that our call­ing was to teach Russia, we did answer.

Helas, ce temps n'est plus, Il reviendra peut-etre, En attendant.⁴

we will speak with and for our own people and for them we will begin our speech. The traveling reproach quickly returned home from Paris, having increased its strength tenfold. [. . .] In deflecting this ricochet effect we de­cided to say a few words.

First of all, this reproach is unjust: you have before you the two-volume work After Five Years, before you is The Bell for last year, and they do not contain legal dissertations or doctrinaire scholasticism, but you will find in them our opinion of what is needed by the people, the military, the land­owners, and so forth.

"But that is not the same thing. Why didn't you simply propose a com­plete legal code, or, at the very least, the criminal statutes of a Code Penal?"

"We would have loved to do that, but we know nothing about either of those things."

"Well, if you do not know, then do not criticize the existing ones; sixty million people cannot live without institutions, without a court, in expecta­tion of future blessings."

[. . .] No, gentlemen, stop representing yourselves as throwers of thun­derbolts and as Moses, calling down noise and lightning through the will of God, stop presenting yourselves as the wise shepherds of human herds! The methods of enlightenment and liberation thought up behind the backs of the people and constricting their inalienable rights and their well-being by means of the axe and the whip were already exhausted by Peter I and the French Terror.

Manna does not fall from heaven—that is a child's fairy tale—it grows in the soil; summon it, learn to listen to how grass grows, and do not lecture the mature grain, but help it develop, remove the obstacles in its way. That's all that a person can do, and that is evidently sufficient. One should be more modest, and stop trying to educate entire peoples, stop boasting about your enlightened mind and abstract understanding. Did France accomplish very much with its decrees on equality and liberty, and did Germany accomplish very much with its a priori structured state and doctrinaire legal dogmatism?