A Herzen Reader

We command all Our subjects to believe only Our royal words. If troops, deceived by their commanders, if generals, governors, and intermediaries dare to oppose with force this manifesto, then each person should rise up to defend the freedom given by Me, and, not sparing your life, enter into battle with all who dare to oppose this Our will.

May the Almighty Lord bless our undertakings!

God is with us! Come to your senses, heathens, and submit, for God is with us!

Issued in Moscow, on the thirty-first day of March, in the one thousand eight hundred and sixty-third year since the birth of Christ, and the ninth year of Our reign.

In the original copy signed by HRH

Alexander

Printed in St. Petersburg under the auspices of the senate.

The authors of such an appeal take a great responsibility upon themselves. This is a dangerous path: the people will stop believing in the printed word.

We are confident that the Land and Liberty group, who as a rule dis­miss such isolated actions, have nothing to do with the composition of this manifesto.⁴ We do not doubt that this appeal was made by people who are decent, but who, meanwhile, do not understand that it maintains the old, unfortunate notion that the tsar wishes to bestow genuine liberty, but is always being prevented from doing so, while it is clear that not only are oth­ers hindering the tsar but he is hindering himself, because he himself does not wish to bestow genuine liberty.

If this manifesto was published by a particular circle, then they and oth­ers must be advised to join together with the main society and then act with a unified plan.

It is very nice for the government, who for the distribution of some kind of leaflet that involves no action of any kind, to have given all Russia and all Russians over to the caprice of provincial authorities, i.e., terrible governors like Perm's Lashkarev.⁵ "Such crimes cannot remain unpunished, even if the goal toward which they were directed was unattainable. Provincial of­ficials have been given the duty on the highest authority to subject the dis­tributors of the false manifesto and other provocative appeals to the military courts on the same principle⁶ on which in the previous year military courts were ordered in the matter of the arsonists."

Notes

Source: "Volzhskii manifest i Rossiia v osadnom polozhenii," Kolokol, l. i66, June 20, i863; i7:i98-200, 433-35.

In April i863, members of a pro-Polish group and students linked to the Kazan branch of Land and Liberty made attempts to distribute the manifesto in the Kazan, Nizhegorodsky, Tambov, and Vyatsk districts.

Volost', the smallest administrative division in tsarist Russia.

The Russian is "v. i v." (velikoe imperatorskoe velichestvo).

Herzen was correct in believing that the document was not the work of the Land and Liberty leadership. It was initiated by a Polish committee whose members decided to make use of strong feelings about land allotments for their own purposes, and com­posed in Moscow by member of Land and Liberty without the leaders' knowledge, then printed in Vilna (Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 3Ю, mentions another theory about it be­ing printed in Norway and spirited into the empire through Finland), and given to the provincial Polish group for distribution in the volatile Volga region. When the Land and Liberty central committee learned of the false manifesto's imminent appearance, they rushed to issue their own proclamation to neutralize its effects.

Major-General Alexander G. Lashkarevich (i823-i898) was governor of Perm from i86i to i865. The quotation that follows is from an order given by Alexander II and published in the Northern Post newspaper on May i8, i863.

6. Herzen notes here that this means to shoot without justification, as had occurred with an unfortunate Jew in Odessa convicted of arson two years earlier. In the case of the Kazan group linked to the false manifesto, arrests were made in April and May Й63 and the accused were handed over to a military court; four ringleaders were executed in i864, one more in i865, while other participants were sentenced to hard labor.

57 *