A Herzen Reader

Meanwhile, the government had never been more powerful. Everything served its purpose—the good and the bad, Sevastopol and the Peace of Paris, the emancipation of the serfs and the Polish insurrection, Europe's empty threats and the long-awaited reforms. Literature had changed and the journals turned into observation towers for the Third Department, while university departments turned into sentry booths for the police, the gentry paralyzed themselves with nostalgia for serfdom, and the peasants continued to expect genuine freedom from the tsar.

The government, in the way that it was set up, could have produced posi­tive and negative miracles. What did it actually do?

Constantly frightened and on its guard, it punished and continues to punish on the right and on the left, which governments never do when they feel the earth firmly beneath their feet. They executed Poles, having already defeated them with weapons. They executed arsonists, later announcing that the arson about which their literary spies had written so extensively didn't exist at all; they alluded to appeals, to letters that had been inter­cepted, to the reading of The Bell, and beat indiscriminately every person who stood out not according to the wishes of the authorities and not in an acceptable way. The peasant Martyanov returned from abroad with a poetic faith in the earthly tsar, and with trust that would have moved not just an anointed ruler but a painted African king—and Martyanov is grabbed, hit in the head with a club, and sent off to hard labor.

And at the same time other forces were growing alongside it, both far away and close by, and were outstripping the official power that lived in the Winter Palace. Even those forces that the Winter Palace had itself sum­moned, bought, trained, and rewarded, turned out to be serpents who had warmed themselves on its breast.

The government unleashed crude declarations of patriotism, stirred up popular hatred and religious intolerance with the libel in its journals, which summons the people to act as judges. Like i8i2, before the occupation of Moscow by the French, when Count Rostopchin led Vereshchagin¹³ out into the square and handed him over to the savage crowd, our open¹⁴ govern­ment has been handing over its opponents to a pack of dirty hack writers, applying censorship to every justification and every defense. The popular assemblies, the open discussion of the land question, the declaration of their support for government officials and measures, the political banquets, demagogic toasts, and terrorist icons—everything was permitted. The wise statesmen rubbed their hands together and could not get over how they had "splendidly lit up" public opinion and how nasty were the bloodthirsty agents of the literary-police gang that they had unleashed. These profound psychologists with portfolios imagined that, having become accustomed to the groans of human beings and human blood, their creatures, like Kry- lov's mongrels, would howl and then quiet down, as soon as their masters whistled—but that did not happen.

Two and a half years had not gone by before the government—which had changed in a real sense—wanted to lasso its pack of hounds, but could not do it. One minister was badly bitten, and others found their undergarments in shreds. And not just the ministers, especially the civilians! Konstantin Niko- laevich himself was not spared. The Moscow Gazette even pestered him.¹⁵ [. . .]

The government, dumbfounded, to this very day sees before it an un­familiar power, which it wishes—because of changed circumstances—to banish, but which is not going anywhere. Why did it have to get mixed up in a family concert of unauthorized musicians?

The comic single combat of the minister of enlightenment with an of­ficial leaflet—published in opposition to him by one of the institutions un­der his jurisdiction—will pass away.¹⁶ The vile state of public opinion—on which a vile newspaper relies—will also pass away, but the realization of what a journal may do when public opinion is on its side, will remain.

We see the same thing in another sphere, which is closer to the matter at hand.