A Herzen Reader

The conquering Galilean, you were unable to make use of your victory. You didn't know how to stand firm on that height, on which the manifesto of February i9 had placed you. Your hesitancy was noticed, bad people sur­rounded you, and you were distracted. and you left your pedestal by the light of some sort of burning marketplace, placing your reliance on the secret police and an obviously corrupted journalism.³ Believing the absurd slander, you took fright, not suspecting that this was just slander, even when your inquisition and inquisitors, working up a sweat for an entire year, with a breadth of resources and the irresponsibility enjoyed by the Russian police, did not come up with even one guilty person.

You were frightened by a couple of printed leaflets in which the unfet­tered word, after a silence of thirty years, evaded the censorship.⁴ [. . .] You began a struggle with the younger generation—a struggle of brute power, bayonets, and prisons—against enthusiastic ideas and inspired words. Your predecessor fought children in Poland, and you will do battle in Russia with young people and adolescents, who have tried to convince you and your government that a new era has begun in Russia.

With the dying glow of this unfortunate fire even you turned pale, you became flustered, and you retreated to the background, and in your place a system familiar to us was set up—of repulsion and oppression, the ar­bitrary behavior of individuals and the unlawfulness of the courts—your father's system with the addition of rhetoric and blood.

Russian blood, first of all.

What a black day it was for Russia and what a great sin you took upon your soul when, under the influence of panicky fear and the slander of your minions, you allowed there to be blood, and, even worse, you vested your generals with the authority to shed it, as if you didn't know what kind of people they were.

Is it possible that you slept peacefully when first Anton Petrov, then Arn- goldt, Slivitsky, et al., were felled by bullets. Is it possible that you didn't freeze in horror when they shot people in Nizhny on mere suspicion, and in Kiev for fighting and rude responses?⁵ [. . .]

You cannot bring back the dead. Atone for your sin before the living, and, standing at your son's grave, renounce bloody reprisals. Give us back our pride in the fact that, in spite of our underdeveloped legal system, there was no death penalty, and an executioner ascended a scaffold, frightening everyone with his unlawful appearance, once or twice a century.

. Just think, how your situation has changed since you first sat on the throne. Then you had only to freely make a move, to lead, and you emancipated the serfs. Everyone expected something good, something fine from you—at that time you buried the past.. Now it is gloomy all around you, matters have gotten bogged down, there's no money, an entire region is getting beaten up, young people are being sent off to hard labor, the people's teachers are being sent off to hard labor, on fortress embank­ments they are hanging and shooting people, and you are burying your future.

Sovereign, the moment has come when you must decide on which path you will continue. Your son's gravestone stands as a road sign and a ter­rible reminder.

Decide now, do not await a second blow—by then it may be too late, and the blow may be too strong.

You can see clearly—and it would be difficult to hide—that the rusty and creaking old mechanism constructed by Peter in the German manner, and adjusted by the Germans for Russia, is no longer suitable. You can see that it is no longer possible to direct a population of seventy million as if it were a military division. The front will no longer remain "at attention." People are talking, thinking, dissatisfied, having guessed in the Crimea that the command structure is poor. [. . .] You lived through and endured all this—do you think that by replacing tax farming with excise duties, and the Assembly of the Land with district councils, you have met Russia's needs?

If you think this, it is because you do not know what Russia suffers from nor what it desires. And how would you know? The press is not free, and you do not read very much anyway. You see only servants who depend on you and tell lies in your presence! You punish free people who raise their voices. [. . .] There was a peasant who believed in you, seeing in you his "earthly tsar," an enraptured fanatic; he openly and passionately wrote you a letter in which he spoke of the people's needs. He wrote you from London and put himself into your hands, and you sent him to the mines.⁶ With un­paralleled ferocity you convicted the only remarkable publicist to have ap­peared in your time. Do you even know what Chernyshevsky wrote? What his point of view was? What was the danger, what was his crime? Can you answer this question on your own? You would not be able to understand anything from the absurd Senate records.