A Herzen Reader

Could a mistake or fear really lead to this?.. He was deceived—this was the slander of serf owners, their revenge.

There was another flash of lightning—Arngoldt, Slivitsky, Rostovsky. This was no longer a mistake, but a crime.

And so it went, one incident after another. the case of Mikhailov, Ob- ruchev,⁷ the students, the persecution of journals, the support for corrupt literature. No, none of this was a mistake, but some kind of absurd and immoral conspiracy.

"Yes, but what about i862!"

"What really happened during that notorious i793 on the Neva?⁸ Four years have passed since then, and it is time for people who closed their eyes in fear to open them and blush. One would need all the nasty spite of a pedant laughed at by young people, all the vindictiveness of puffed- up mediocrity, raised by unfortunate events to the level of the police and the out-of-control prosecutor, to persuade anyone that the government and society were treading on an underground constructed by "Young Russia," and that two more days and a handful of students along with a couple of officers would proclaim—on Admiralty Square—a republic circumscribed by nihilism and Pugachevism.⁹

The government put on a frightened face—it wanted to be frightened. It had begun to be disturbed by free speech, it had toyed with liberalism but the joke had begun to wear off, and, seizing upon the fire, which had noth­ing to do with the secretly printed leaflet, organized a general investigation.

[. . .] No matter how closely we looked and scrutinized the situation, we did not see in the Russia of 1862 a single element that was sufficiently strong and mature, nor a single topic sufficiently elaborated and of gen­eral importance, that one could—in its name—amass power, and sufficient power, to throw down the gauntlet to the government. [. . .]

Of all the problems that had been raised, not a single one was elaborated or generalized or clarified in a way that would allow it to serve as a banner. A purely political question was not of interest. The question of peasant land allotment and the commune did not coincide with the exotic socialism in literature or with gentry liberalism—it went against both one and the other. The government was imperceptibly shaky, in the absence of any kind of firm attributes. [. . .] It attacked the younger generation and would have col­lapsed if not for the help of its most vicious, most legitimate, and ancient enemy—a Polish insurrection.

A Polish insurrection, relying on Europe, halted in an instant the in­tellectual ferment and the growth of forces eating away at the dilapidated organism of the Russian imperial government, and gave the government a rallying point and a justification.

The opinion of The Bell about Poland and the Polish question had been expressed in a series of letters (1859-1860), and we never changed it one iota: Poland is fully entitled to an independent state, and no person of good conscience can have any doubt of that. They can trample Poland, kill it, trans­port it to Siberia, and force it in to Europe—all that depends on force. [. . .]

But in recognizing Poland's right, the question remains whether the claim was made at the best time. We think and we thought that they could not have picked a worse moment. [. . .]

We knew the kind of beast that had roused and teased the Poles with its demonstrations and gunshots, and we trembled for them and for Russia and pleaded to the very end with them to stop. We told them that in Rus­sia everything was in preparation and yet nothing was prepared. That the movement that they observed was sincere and deep, but far from being the "organization" they dreamed about, and we repeated a hundred times that Europe would not lift a finger to save them, and that all the sympathy and big talk was just an "exercise in style." We said that the participation by Russian officers was negative more than anything else—they didn't want to be executioners. We knew this and together with them we implored the government and Konstantin Nikolaevich to spare Russian blood and Rus­sian honor, and not tempt officers to go against duty and conscience. That was what we said on the eve of the Belopolsky conference, and by the next day blood was flowing in the Kingdom of Poland. [. . .]

The trouble erupted at full strength. villages and small towns burned, soldiers looted and killed, their superiors looted and executed, the Poles began to seek revenge, the Russian people were roused with rumors of another i8i2. Muravyov—hated by all Russia—went to Vilnius and society applauded his appointment. [. . .]

We protested, that is, we did everything that one person can do in the face of savage force, we added our voice so that in the future it would bear witness to the fact that such a perversion of public opinion and civic speech could not happen without resistance, without a weak, isolated, lost, but in­delible veto.