A Herzen Reader

The Bell, No. 210, December 15, 1865. This is Herzen's response to the government's repression of literature and journalism in November 1865, only two months after the introduction of new regulations on periodicals, which freed them from pre-publication censorship. The main target of the government's actions was The Contemporary.

The First Ban, the First Warning, the First Trial!

[1865]

I. The Ban on Potekhin's Play

A Cut-off Piece has been banned all the same! Long live the English Club! What a thoroughly dissolute government—there is neither self-control nor unity. It is like the drunken sailor whom Suvorov made to walk "the plank," but who, in his zeal, walked two of them.

II. The First Warning

Instructions from the Minister of the Interior, November 10, 1865. Taking into consideration:

that in the article "Modern Times," placed in the August issue of The Contemporary, especially on pp. 376, 383-4, the principle of the marital union is offended;²

that in the article "Notes of a Contemporary," appearing in the same issue, especially on pp. 308-2i, there is an indirect negation of the principle of private property as applied to capitalists, who supposedly unfairly appropriate for themselves the savings of the working class;

that in an article of the same name in the September issue of the same journal, in the section entitled "How Can One Measure the Approximate Debt of the Civilized Classes to the People?", especially on pp. 93-5, the principle of private property is directly subjected to dispute and negation, and

that in the same article, especially on pp. 97, 98, 103-12, there is a stirring-up of enmity toward the upper classes, particularly property owners, who, by the very principle of their existence, are immoral and harmful to the popular well-being,

the minister of the interior, on the basis of articles 29, 31, and 33, approved of at the highest level on the 6th of April of the current year by the State Council, and in accordance with the conclusion of the Council of the main department on publishing issues has deter­mined: to announce a first warning to the journal The Contemporary, in the person of its publisher-editor Nikolai Nekrasov, and member of the landowning class, and its editor Alexander Pypin, who holds a civil rank in the VII class.³

Finally we can see with our own eyes the game of "warnings," this French disease of an unfree freedom of the press. [. . .]

The Contemporary has been doomed for a long time. Two more of Va- luev's "warnings" and the chronicle will be finished.⁴ We can neither harm nor help him; the edge of his clothing didn't get tangled up in the wheel of the Petersburg machinery just now, and this is not the case of Potiphar's wife—you can't escape her with a piece of your robe.⁵ On the day when Chernyshevsky was taken without any judicial basis, having been freed by the Senate from accusations made by the State Council, when he, com­pletely innocent, was placed in the stocks and then sent into exile—without the government considering it necessary or even possible to tell its loyal subject what the case was about—on that day the fate of The Contemporary was decided. Valuev wanted to amuse himself with "warnings." It was a new toy, and a Parisian one at that, something liberal, legal, literal—but the end will be the same: they will decide the fate of The Contemporary without a trial.⁶

The cause for which the warning was issued is also quite remarkable.

The Russian minister of the interior is turning into the minister for a moribund civilization—that is the way the liberal Kolnishche Zeitung under­stood it. [. . .]

One can apply the considerants⁷ for Valuev's warning not just to The Contemporary but to just about all of contemporary Russia. Many people avoided a ministerial dressing-down only because they published their ar­ticle before the lifting of censorship.

If we had freedom of the press in i86i,⁸ we would have undoubtedly read that the "minister of the interior,

Taking into consideration: that in the 'Statutes,' printed separately and in the publication of the Ed­iting Commission, there is an insult to the principles of the serf agreement, there is an indirect negation of private property as applied to landowners, as if they had unjustly appropriated the labor of serfs and peasants;

that in the same 'Statutes' the principle of land ownership is directly contested, and a careless distinction is made between property and its utili- zation—a distinction inevitably leading to enmity between property owners and users—