A Herzen Reader

It is clear that louder and more powerful voices are needed to shout down the trumpets and drums that surround you, so that the words would reach beyond the horse-guards and the "oprichniki," as they were recently called.⁷ Why are you pushing away the truth, why are you deceiving your­self that you—against popular advice and free speech—can take Peter's little wooden boat from the rocks back out to a deep channel?

Do as you wish, shoot people or give them a medal, send them to hard labor or to a lucrative post, take the side of Muravyov and his Russian execu­tioners, or the side of the Germans and their Baltic civilizers—you won't be able to preserve or revive autocracy in its Nicholaevan innocence and purity.

You are stronger than your predecessors, but you are stronger by virtue of the emancipation. Your union with the people should not distract you. In the wreaths woven of grain and rural flowers that village elders have brought you there are thorns and the seeds of plants that are dangerous to those in power. You drew close to them not in the name of a conservative idea, but in the name of a revolutionary principle, in the name of a demo­cratic leveling of the gentry and the acknowledgment of the agrarian prin­ciple in the land allotment. The decrepit Petrine robes were strengthened with a lining made from Pugachev's kaftan.

Take a clear and simple look from the Mont Blanc on which fate has placed you, chasing away the flocks of jackdaws and ravens who have access to the court, and you will see that you won't go far by maneuvering between official government-issue progress and reactionary police. [. . .]

Wouldn't it be better and more valorous to resolve common issues with common strength and summon from all corners of Russia, from all levels of society, chosen people? Among them you will hear severe judgments and free speech, but it will be less dangerous than it was for your grandfather, surrounded by moats, walls, and the lances of the horse-guards in the ser­vile silence of the Mikhailovsky Palace?⁸

Fate, in extending the cold hand of death to your family, has restrained you—take advantage of that. You intended to continue on the terrible path you have followed since the second half of 1862. From the funeral of your son, turn back to your previous path. Repentance is never easier and cleans­ing more complete than at the foot of a coffin of one dear to us. It is essen­tial in order to prepare for great earthly tasks.

. But first of all stop the hand of the executioner, bring back the exiles and banish the illegal judges, to whom you entrusted the tsar's vengeance and illegal persecution.

Forgiveness is not needed for your innocent victims or the suffering martyrs. It is necessary for you. You cannot go forward in a humane way without an amnesty from them.

Sovereign, be worthy of it!

Iskander

Geneva, Boissiere, May 2/April 20, 1865

Notes

Source: "Pis'mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru II," Kolokol, l. 197, May 25, 1865; 18:337-41, 622-23.

Nikolay Alexandrovich died on April 12, 1865, in Nice at age twenty-two from men­ingitis. His brother Alexander, who succeeded him as heir, was rumored to be of limited intelligence.

Dated March 10, 1855, on the occasion of Alexander II's ascension to the throne, and calling for a free press, and land and freedom for the Russian peasants. See Doc. 5.

A fire broke out in St. Petersburg's Apraksin Dvor on May 28, 1862, destroying hundreds of stalls in the flea market. This and other fires in 1862 were blamed on revo­lutionary youth.

A number of revolutionary pamphlets, including "Young Russia," were secretly printed and distributed in St. Petersburg between 1861 and 1863. (See Doc. 45)

Anton Petrov was shot in April 1861 for spreading word of a different emancipation document among peasants and leading an uprising in Bezdna; Arngoldt, Slivitsky, and Rostkovsky were executed in June 1862 for propaganda among soldiers; in August 1863 a military court in Nizhny condemned a man on suspicion of robbery; in Kiev a Jewish soldier was killed for ripping off an officer's shoulder straps in a fight, and for muttering curses instead of giving answers at his trial.

Petr Alexeevich Martyanov (1834-1865), the freed son of a serf, made Herzen's acquaintance in London while there on business matters; he expressed his utopian ideas to the tsar in 1862, a letter which was published in The Bell, and was arrested upon his return the following year and sentenced to hard labor and perpetual exile. Martyanov had also expounded on his theories in a pamphlet, "The People and the Government," which was published by the Free Russian Press. Herzen wrote about Martyanov in the January 1, 1864, issue (No. 176) of The Bell.