A Herzen Reader

Young boys were playing on the banks of the Thames; I called them to my gate and told them that we were celebrating the death of their enemy and ours. I tossed them a handful of silver coins to get beer and candy, and they cried out "Hurrah! Hurrah! Impernikel is dead! Impernikel is dead!" The guests also began to throw sixpences and three pence pieces; the boys brought ale, pies, and cakes, and a barrel organ, and began to play it and dance. After that, for as long as I lived in Twickenham, every time they saw me on the street, the boys would lift their caps and shout: "Impernikel is dead! Hurrah!"

The death of Nicholas increased our strength and our hopes tenfold. I immediately wrote a letter to the emperor Alexander—which was later printed—and I decided to publish The Polestar. [. . .]

The beginning of Alexander II's reign was a joyous period. All of Russia breathed more easily, raised up its head, and, were they able to, would have shouted wholeheartedly along with the Twickenham boys: "Impernikel is dead! Hurray!"

Under the influence of the spring thaw, people even took a more af­fectionate view of our printing press in London. Finally, we were noticed. There was demand for dozens of copies of The Polestar and in Russia it was being sold for the fabulous price of i5 to 20 silver rubles. The banner of The Polestar, the demands that it made, coincided with the desire of the entire Russian people, and that is why it began to gain sympathy. And, when I ad­dressed the newly enthroned sovereign, I repeated to him: "Grant freedom to the Russian word, our minds are constricted by the fetters of censorship; grant freedom and land to the peasants and wipe away from us the shameful stain of serfdom; grant us an open court system and do away with the of­ficial secrecy about our fate!" When I added to this simple demand: "Hurry up so that you can save the people from bloodshed!" I felt and I knew that this was not at all my personal opinion, but an idea that was in the Rus­sian air, exciting every mind and every heart—the mind and heart of the tsar and of the serf, of the young officer just out of military school and the student, no matter what university he attended. No matter how they un­derstood the question and what side they took, they all saw that the Petrine autocracy had lived out its days, that it had reached a limit, after which the government had to either be regenerated or the people would perish. If there were exceptions, then they were only in the mercenary circles of rich scoundrels or on the sleepy summits of members of the gentry who had lost their minds.

Half of our program was carried out by the tsar himself. But—and this was the Russian in him—he stopped at the very introduction and came up with a transition period, the brakes of gradualness, and thought that every­thing had been accomplished.

With the same candor with which the Russian printing press in London addressed the sovereign in i855, a few years later it addressed the people and said to its readers: "You see, the government has acknowledged the fair­ness of your demands, but it cannot carry out what it has acknowledged, it cannot break out of the rut of the barracks-like order and the bureaucratic uniforms. It has reached the end of its understanding and is moving back­ward. [. . .] It is losing its head, behaving cruelly, making mistakes, and is clearly afraid. Fear, combined with power, provokes a bitter rebuff—a rebuff without respect and without deliberation. From there it is one step to a rebellion. There is no point in waiting any longer for the government's own recognition of the rightness of what is being asked. [. . .]"

And in saying this we feel that this is not a personal opinion—the idea of an Assembly of the Land is in the Russian air. The Milyutins and Valuevs¹⁰ exchange it for small provincial dumas; the assemblies of the nobility keep silent about it; but, even nameless, the Assembly of the Land, like Marie An­toinette in the matter of the necklace, is greatly implied.¹¹ The merchantry and the people speak about it, and the military insist that it be summoned.

No, the living tie between Russia and its small vedeta¹² in London has not been broken. and the very abuse of the greyhounds and the second- rate hunting dog journalists who work for the Third Department, which the dwarfs of enlightenment and roues of internal affairs use to hunt us down, convinces us even more that our printing press is not alienated from

Russia.¹³

Let us return to it.

The demand for The Polestar hardly extended to the books we printed in the past. Only Prison and Exile somehow sold out, as well as some small brochures like "Baptized Property" and "Humor."