A Herzen Reader

Herzen compares Moscow liberals, who find the emancipation a source of new hope for Russia, with the righteous Simeon, called in Russian bogopriimets (the God- Receiver), of whom prophecy said that he would not die until he had seen the Christ child, which, according to Luke, is what indeed took place.

Old Russian boyars (member of the hereditary nobility, whose origins could be traced back to Kievan and Muscovite Russia).

♦ 47 *

The Bell, No. i4i, August i5, i862. The Tver arbitrators (mirovyeposredniki) mentioned in the letter are thirteen members of the nobility who addressed the tsar in writing about the inadequacies of the emancipation and the need for peasants to receive an allotment of land along with their freedom. This address was published in The Bell on March 22, i862. They also requested the convening of an assembly of representatives of all the Russian people. Alexander II's answer was to send General Nikolay Annenkov to Tver, where everyone who had signed the document was arrested. The Tver case was men­tioned in another Herzen article, "To the Senators and Secret Advisors for Journalism," in the April 22, i862, issue of The Bell. The prisoners were released, but were forbidden to enter government service or participate in any future elections.

A Chronicle of Terror [1862]

We received a long letter from Petersburg. The terror is not abating; con­stant arrests, prizes for the informers, gratitude to men of letters who tram­ple people in the dirt, the bribery of soldiers. all the ugliness of fear that is not inhibited by anything—the fear of a young ignoramus and Nero put together.

Here are excerpts from the letter:

The zeal in searching out incendiaries is not slackening and the Third Department recently started a rumor that the government has in its possession the handwritten proclamations of Russian publishers and arsonists living abroad.¹

Every day one hears about new detentions. Every person return­ing from abroad is searched at the border, shoes and stockings are removed. On Saturday, July 7/19 Chernyshevsky and Serno- Solovyovich were arrested.² There are two active commissions in St. Petersburg: one concerning the arson, whose composition has been known for a while; the other concerning the distribution of the proclamation, under the chairmanship of Prince Golitsyn. Here the members are Gedda, a senior Senate official, aide-de-camp Sleptsov, and the former governor of Perm Ogaryov, a harmful and empty man.

During the first days of July (between the 1st and the 8th), the case of the Tver arbitrators was decided. Their sentence was an­nounced and drawn up so absurdly, in such a repulsively foolish way, that one can't remember anything even vaguely approaching this level of stupidity for a very long time. The senators, for no reason at all, in a completely distorted way, doing the best they could, relied on article 319 of the "Sentencing Code." The Tver arbitrators were accused of spreading works whose goal was to make unlawful judgments about the government; they were sentenced to two and a half years con­finement, with some loss of class privileges. Suvorov³ was struck by the absurdity of the senate's conclusions, and, it is said, has already asked the sovereign that this sentence not be carried out. [. . .]

While in residence in Peterhof, the sovereign requested a list of all the residents of Peterhof; finding on it two students, he ordered that their parents be obliged, by signed statements, to remove these stu­dents from Peterhof. "This is a joke," said one government supporter,⁴

"could this really be possible?" Allow us to supply the names of the students: Meshchersky and Nabokov. [. . .]

Notes

Source: "Khronika terrora," Kolokol, l. 141, August 15, 1862; 16:227-28, 425-26.

Herzen: "Is it really necessary to say that this is a despicable slander and a foul lie?"

Nikolay G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) was editor of The Contemporary and a well- known progressive journalist; after this arrest he spent his time in jail writing What Is to Be Done?, which, after being published through an oversight, became a bible of the Rus­sian revolutionaries and Lenin's favorite literary work. Chernyshevsky spent the rest of his life in prison and exile. Nikolay A. Serno-Solovyovich worked for The Contemporary and helped organize "Land and Liberty."

Prince Alexander Suvorov was at this time the military governor-general of St. Petersburg.