A Herzen Reader

Yeshovsky was a professor of general history in Kazan and from 1858 to 1865 in Moscow; Isakov was an official at court and a trustee of the Moscow educational district from 1859 to 1863.

Lents was a senior official in the Senate; Nikitenko, born into serfdom, was a lit­erary historian, memoirist, professor, and censor; Babst was a political economist in Kazan and Moscow.

Sukhodolsky was a Moscow student; N. F. Pavlov was a writer and newspaper editor.

♦ 45 ♦

The Bell, No. 139, July 15, 1862. This is a polemic against positions taken by authors of the radical proclamation "Young Russia," which was generated by a group of Moscow University students and widely distributed in mid-May 1862 in Moscow, Petersburg, and provincial Russia. The pamphlet, written by Petr G. Zaichnevsky (1842-1896) while he was under arrest for anti-government propaganda, began with the declaration that Russia had entered the revolutionary phase of its development and that society had split into two enemy camps. It called for a seizure of power and the establishment of a minor­ity dictatorship and a new social structure, with the agricultural commune as its foun­dation. It dismissed liberalism and declared itself in opposition to The Bell, accusing Herzen of having retreated from radical positions after the upheaval of 1848. "Young

Russia" shocked many progressive voices in Russia, and, coinciding with a higher in­cidence of arson, gave the government ample reason to increase repressive measures.

Herzen wrote "in a mood of despairing sarcasm," as he witnessed—albeit from afar—the suppression of journals, arrests, printing houses placed under Ministry of Interior control, and all lectures and meetings subject to authorization by the Interior Ministry and the Third Department (Lampert, Sons Against Fathers, 47). He was discour­aged, but defiant, declaring that if Sunday literacy instruction for peasants was banned "I will become the Sunday school" (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. i, 243-44).

In the same issue of The Bell, Herzen included news of an attempt on the life of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich by an "ultra-Catholic." Although it was the Russian government that brought people to this madness, Herzen said that he hated "any kind of bloody retaliation," a point that he would make even more forcefully after Karakozov's attempt on the tsar's life in i866.

Young and Old Russia [1862]

In Petersburg there is terror, the most dangerous and senseless of all its manifestations, the terror of dumbfounded cowardice, not leonine terror, but calf-like terror,¹ terror in which a government—poisoned by fumes, not knowing where the danger comes from, knowing neither its strength nor its weaknesses and therefore prepared to fight to no purpose—gives aid to society, to literature, to the people, to progress and regress...

The Day has been banned, The Contemporary and The Russian Word have been banned, Sunday schools are closed, the chess club is closed,² reading rooms are closed, money intended for needy students has been taken away, printing presses are under extra surveillance, two ministers and the Third Department must agree to the reading of public lectures. There are con­tinual arrests, officers, aides-de-camp in prison cells, the inquisitor Golit­syn (called "junior" in an earlier time) is summoned to the Winter Palace together with Liprandi ... who was pushed away with loathing by the same Alexander II three years ago.³

[. . .] Evidently Nicholaevism was buried alive and is now rising up from the damp earth in a shroud-uniform, all buttoned up—and the State Coun­cil, the archdeacon Panin, Annenkov-Tversky, Pavel Gagarin, and Filaret with a birch rod are rushing round the corner to sing out: "Nicholas is risen!"⁴

"Verily he is risen!"—even we say this to the undead corpse. It's a holi­day on your street, only your street leads not from the grave but toward the grave.

"Excuse me, excuse me—and who's guilty in this matter? On the one hand, the Shchukin yard is burning, and on the other hand, there is 'Young Russia'."

"And when in Russia wasn't something or other burning? [. . .] Arson in our country is as infectious as the plague. [. . .]"

"Okay, fine, we know that arson has always been around, but 'Young Russia'?"

"What is this 'Young Russia'?" we asked with unease.⁵

"Oh, it is a terrible Russia! You know—the rejection of everything, where nothing is sacred, nothing at all: neither power, nor property, nor the fam­ily, nor any kind of authority. For them, 'Great Rus' hasn't gone much be­yond The Northern Bee, and you are a backward commentator."

Finally, this document, which horrified the government and the literary realm, the progressives and the reactionaries, civilized supporters of a par­liament, and civilizing bureaucrats, reached even us.