A Herzen Reader

There were moments when we wished to be silent, but neither the slan­der nor the constant repetition of these terrible crimes left us in peace. The insolence grew, and to submit to it was beyond our strength. [. . .]

And with all this it was absolutely impossible to keep silent. Along with the despair, another powerful voice stated loudly that our future would find its way out of this filth and blood.

II

[. . .] The vestiges of our servitude are shameful and striking, like the marks left by a birch rod, and like those marks, remain on the surface.

Neither the government, nor the gentry, nor the serfs, nor the clergy, nor the senate, nor the synod—no one in essence believes in the truth of their power or powerlessness. That is why everyone is afraid of everything. [. . .] And for all that, a printed leaflet from a secret press, a warehouse that unexpectedly goes up in flames horrifies them, and every young person who looks forward like a free human being, causes trepidations. They're afraid of Mikhailov, they're afraid of Chernyshevsky. Orlov-Davydov re­quests a constitution to ward off Buckle and Buntzen, while Bezobrazov publicly thanks Katkov for saving the fatherland and for trampling The Bell.¹⁰

The government, as if rejoicing at the Polish rebellion and the fires, from the end of i862 on began to lay siege on all fronts and all issues. Since that time it continuously fusses, crushes, shouts, erects barriers, fights, kills, forces the people back with its chest and a horse's rear end, i.e., the secret police and The Moscow Gazette. Obviously no one gets in its way and noth­ing moves backward—it just keeps vacillating, going first to the right and then to the left.

If each step in this chaos were not covered in blood, accompanied by executions, prison, hard labor, then the spectacle that Russia now presents would have been performed with comedy and irony on a world-historical scale, which not a single divine or demonic comedy had ever achieved. It is a kind of Babylonian chaos, an orgy, a geological cataclysm applied to the strata of civic life. Everything is strange, massive, and confused. The government is violently wringing its hands, the liberal gentry is becoming a painful obstruction to any solution, and the only conservative element is agrarian communism—all of this mixture is under the observation of the police, who do not interfere in anything, but ask "who should be beaten?" and then beat them.

It's a terrible muddle.

Yes, gentlemen, and long may it live! Let us give thanks for the blind man's bluff that we are playing. In this chaos, in this ferment, in this lime pit, new forms will solidify, different foundations will crystallize, those which are close to our heart and which would have greater difficulty break­ing through with fixed conceptions, established procedures, and the belief that a soldier by rights draws a line in the sand.

In the West, reactionaries have unity and meaning.

[. . .] It is clear that we cannot have any proper kind of reactionary move­ment, because there is no actual necessity for it. And as soon as reactionary activity is meaningless, then it must carry that meaningless character that it has among us. Accidental causes, accidental measures, whims, incompre­hension, state power unrestrained by reason and not fearing accountability, Asian customs and a barracks upbringing, with no kind of plan and no kind of system. The main resistance always concentrated on the external, the word and not the deed. In half of the cases of persecution, the coward­ice of an uneasy conscience and government touchiness are mixed in. The model of Petersburg measures remains the shaving of beards, the cutting off of hair, the return of an official document from an office because it was not signed according to regulations. Nicholas himself, who for thirty years de­fended Russia from any progress and any revolution, limited himself to the system's fagade, not order, but the appearance of order. In exiling Polezhaev and Sokolovsky¹¹ for their bold verses, removing the words "liberty" and "civic spirit" from print, he let Belinsky, Granovsky, and Gogol slip through his fingers, putting the censor in jail for empty hints, not having noticed that literature from two directions rapidly drifted toward socialism.

Embarking once again on the path of resistance and reaction, the gov­ernment of "emancipation and reform" demonstrated that it had not gotten any wiser.

It ruined a huge number of people, which would have horrified any Ben- kendorf or Dubelt¹²—that's that. The movement was not stopped, it was not even driven underground, like it was under Nicholas.