A Herzen Reader

Oprichniki, a term that has come into English usage, referred originally to a special administrative elite set up by Ivan the Terrible and responsible for a reign of terror in sixteenth-century Russia. D. D. Golokhvastov, in a speech to the Moscow Noble As­sembly in January 1865, used the word oprichniki to characterize the highest levels of Russian government officials.

Paul I was killed in his new palace on the night of March 12, 1801.

♦ 69 *

The Bell, No. 197, May 25, 1865. After the great success of The Bell between the years 1859 and 1862, increased police activity made it more difficult to send correspondence to London and to distribute the publication in Russia. Switzerland was a stopping- off point for Russians going to and from Italy and France and the residence of a growing number of expatriates. When the great reforms proved to be narrow and incomplete, Herzen turned his attention to finding ways to help the Russian masses voice their concerns. This issue also contained one of Herzen's occasional theoreti­cal articles in the form of a "letter to a traveler." The addressee may have been Vasily

Bodisko (i826-i873), a cousin of Granovsky, who had worked in the Russian embassy in Washington.

To Our Readers [1865]

We have moved our printing press to Switzerland, and from May 25 on, The Bell will be published in Geneva. Our move will not bring any internal changes to our publication. We stand on the same ground, more firmly than ever. We see no need in defining it and expressing our profession de foi on the occasion of this geographical move. The basis of our outlook has been known to you since the foundation of the first Russian free press in London. You knew them even before that, but know them even better from The Bell. For eight years it has been tolling one and the same thing; the tasks to which it summons you have changed, but the religion and the spirit have remained the same.

Now it is time to call people to a Council, an egalitarian assembly of the land. Our ringing will reach someone's ears and set people thinking about it. If we believed that it was fruitless, we would have just folded our arms.

Many of our ardent, secret wishes were made flesh and came true—and if it happened awkwardly and incompletely, it still happened.

Ten years ago serfdom stood firm, jealously guarded as the foundation of the empire. From Avacha¹ to Odessa the Russian people were beaten with a court and without one, in barracks and front hallways, in private homes and in barns. The slightest murmur, a word of indignation, or a sign of the cross made with two fingers, was punished more severely than theft or robbery. and we said to the heir of Nicholas when he ascended the throne: "Do away with serfdom, give land to the Russian peasant, free the word from censorship, the Russian's back from the stick, open the courtroom doors, and grant freedom of conscience."²

.We spoke these words and repeated them in various ways for years on end. And everything that we touched began to sway.

Serfdom collapsed and barely hung onto the land.

Corporal punishment was eliminated for those judged guilty by a court, and one would think that soon they will stop beating and whipping the innocent.³

The closed doors of the courts are opening, and judicial reform—of some sort—is a direct acknowledgment on the part of the government of the unsuitability of the previous harsh punishments.⁴

The censorship cracked and has remained as more of a permitted evil than a defensible necessity.⁵

The two-fingered sign of the cross is no longer punished as if it were murder, and the government has placed the Old Believers in a comparable position to prostitutes—they are not so much permitted as tolerated.⁶

We are not saying that our bell summoned these initiatives, but they were carried out not without it—it anticipated them, it called for them, and it was the first to loudly and repeatedly discuss them. What the bell's share was in the actual substance of events, how it was changed by them and how it also effected change—who can capture that, who can retrace and measure it, and to what purpose?