A Herzen Reader

Herzen is mocking the Easter exclamation and response exchanged by Orthodox believers: "Christ is risen!" "Verily He is risen!" This is supposedly uttered by three high government officials and the Moscow metropolitan. Annenkov-Tversky was chief of the St. Petersburg police, and Prince Gagarin was a reactionary member of several state committees.

Herzen: "Unfortunately, we received it not before July ist."

Will manage them itself.

Louis A. Blanqui (i805-i88i), a French utopian revolutionary, participated in the i830 and i848 uprisings.

Karl Moor is the hero of Schiller's The Robbers. Fran5ois-Noёl Babeuf (i760-i797) was a French political activist and journalist whose nickname comes from his use of Ro­man democratic models and claim to be a true tribune of the people and enemy of the bourgeois; he was executed in i797.

The latiklave was a broad purple band worn on a tunic by senators. Vladimir A. Ob- ruchev (i836-i9i2) was arrested in i86i for distributing the proclamation "Great Rus"; to make the greatest possible impression on the public, his civil execution (breaking a sword over the head before being sent to Siberia) took place right after the May i862 fires in St. Petersburg.

The Bell, No. i4i, August i5, i862. Herzen develops ideas previously raised in "The Can­non Fodder of Liberation" (Doc. 42). He retains some faint hope that the tsarist regime can distance itself from the support of the elite and meet more of the people's needs, and that socialism can be achieved through a nonviolent process. Ivan Aksakov wrote a response to the ideas expressed in "Journalists and Terrorists," but its publication in The Day was blocked by the censorship (Let 3:436).

Journalists and Terrorists [1862]

[. . .] One of the oddest of all the oddities in the war being waged against us is that "Aging Russia" accuses us of a thirst for explosions, violent revolu­tions, terrorist impulses, and just about accuses us of arson, and, at the same time, "Young Russia" scolds us for having lost our revolutionary fer­vor and for having lost "all faith in violent revolutions."

Until unforeseen circumstances change, we will not answer "Aging Rus­sia." What could you use to convince people who talk about chair a canon¹ after "the sacrificial offerings to liberation"? What can you say to people, who naively declare that if we were to scold those people and learn to love these ones, that everything would be fine? What can be done about the fact that an impertinent child who throws a stone at a street lamp is less repul­sive to us than the self-satisfied lymphatic bedbug who reprimands him.

Why do we address "Young Russia"? They think that "we have lost all faith in violent revolutions."

We have not lost our faith in them, but our love for them. Violent revolu­tions can be unavoidable, and maybe that is how it will be with us; it is a desperate measure, the ultima ratio² of peoples and of tsars, and one must be ready for this, but to call for it at the beginning of the working day, not having made a single effort, not having exhausted any means, to settle on this seems to us as juvenile and immature as it is improvident and harmful to use it as a threat.

Those who are familiar with the maturing of ideas and expressions will recognize in the bloody words of "Young Russia" the age of the people say­ing them. Revolutionary terror with its threatening atmosphere and its scaf­folds appeals to the young, the way that the terror in fairy tales with their sorcerers and monsters appeals to children.

Terror is easy and quick, much easier than labor [. . .] it liberates through despotism and convinces by means of the guillotine. Terror gives free rein to the passions, cleansing them by means of the common good and the absence of individual views. That's why it appeals to more people than does self-restraint on behalf of the cause. [. . .]

We long ago ceased to love either chalice full of blood, both the civil and the military, and in like manner do not wish to drink from the skull of our enemies in battle, nor see the head of the Duchess of Lamballe on a pike³. Whatever blood is flowing, tears are flowing somewhere, and if sometimes it is necessary to cross this threshold, then let it be done without blood­thirsty mockery, but with a melancholy, anxious feeling of a terrible duty and a tragic necessity.

Moreover, the May of death, like the May of life, flowers only once und nicht wieder.⁴ The terror of the nineties will not be repeated; it had a kind of naive purity of ignorance, an unconditional faith in its innocence and suc­cess, which the terror that follows it will not have. [. . .]