A Herzen Reader

No one could have foreseen this. Horrors that made your heart bleed and took your breath away happened all the time under Nicholas. A downtrod­den and cowardly society was silent, displayed no concern, lied to them­selves about empathizing, but they did not applaud. Self-interested officials became cold executioners. Now, society applauds, and the executioners punish with enthusiasm, becoming virtuosos as they exceed their orders.

We cannot accustom ourselves to this terrible, bloody, disgraceful, inhu­man, insolent Russia, to a literature of informers, to butchers in generals' epaulets, to policemen at university lecterns. [. . .]

.Why, Russia, why must your history, having already gone through ter­rible misfortunes and the dead of night, continue to travel along the drain­pipes? Why didn't you, on the day after the emancipation, when, for the first time since your birth, you could have shown to the world, with a joy­ously raised head, what a golden fleece you had preserved while poor, while under the landowner's rod, the policeman's stick, and the tsarist whip— why did you allow yourself to be dragged into this ditch, into this cesspool? Be patient now, Russian people. [. . .] You alone will emerge from this in a pure state. Lacking the leisure time for thought, you are not guilty of the path chosen by them; you were forced to shave your heads, forced to take up a rifle, and you set off, obeying unthinkingly, to kill and steal out of hunger. Just do not boast about it—on the same basis, the sea is right in having drowned a ship and the wolf in having killed a traveler.

But you non-people, who support the current order of things, sons of the fatherland, the intelligentsia, civilization, sound interests, the democratic gentry, commanders and teachers. you do not deserve the fate of the pris­oner, you really cannot manage anything and will remain as you are. [. . .]

What have you achieved after a century and a half of training, paid for with the sweat, hunger, and cold of an entire people, with the scars on their backs?.. And wasn't even that taught to you by Germans, academies, military schools, lycees, institutes, Smolny Monasteries, tutors, and governesses? Isn't it clear that the stable in your parents' home was a more eloquent teacher, and that the nature of a lackey-slaveholder is not so easily tucked behind a sash of French grammar? I offer my congratulations—your day has come, only it will be a very short one. You do not even understand that you went toward one room but wound up in another.³ You don't know to whom you have given your hand—you never were very discriminating, just arrogant. [. . .] You will perish in the abyss that you are digging together with the police. [. . .]

And as for you, for goodness sake do not think that we pity you. Please, it is time for you to leave the stage, you have done what you were going to do. You did it reluctantly and for that you deserve no respect; you did it thinking only of yourself and for that deserve no thanks. You were that frivolous milieu, that transparent conduit, by means of which the light of Western science illuminated our ignorant life—the deed is done and life will advance without you. [. . .]

Why should you be pitied? Because Ivan the Terrible tortured you and you sang psalms to him? [. . .] Because your grandfathers in the time of Nicholas danced at his coronation, while their sons, in shackles, went on their way to penal servitude? Because of those sons?

For them, for our great guides, one could indeed forgive their predeces­sors a great deal.

But what can one say about their sons?

They had no real sons, but they did have adopted children, to whom they left a legacy. They bequeathed them the milieu in which would emerge and grow toward the light a New Russia, well fitted-out for the difficult jour­ney, tempered by need, grief, and degradation, its life firmly bound to the people, to learning, and to science. It received only insults from above and mistrust from below. It inherited the great task of developing national life from its badly organized elements—with a mature way of thinking and the experience of foreigners. It had to save the Russian people from the emperor's autocracy and from itself. It possessed neither ancestral property nor ancestral memory, had little capital, and virtually no attachment to what currently exists. It is free of obligations and the chains of history. [. . .]