A Herzen Reader

Moscow Gazette are trying on the sly to cast suspicion on Konstantin Nikolaevich... Muravyov has already quarreled with Shuvalov.

P.S. The Kurochkins have been released.

In the presence of this letter we stopped in a kind of endless, burning pain. Here is where this reign of liberation has arrived, and it is not the tsar's fault (from the letter it is clear how he is struggling in the darkness which has been created around him), but society, which has turned into the police, and the immoral press, which has been society's informer and ac­cuser under Muravyov.

It is an unfortunate nation, in which such an insolent and distorted envi­ronment could arise and mature, teaching, applauding, and stirring up the executioners with impunity!

"We have yet to mature," said someone in Petersburg, and everyone was angry with him. "But have already decayed," we added, "decayed terribly..."

Our article was finished, but having read the letter, we tore it up—it was weak and poor, words failed us, and we felt it deeply!

But one cannot simply fold one's arms in idle bitterness, and one cannot simply remain silent with a curse on the lips! No, that would be a betrayal of our entire life, and there isn't much left of it. We will use what remains of it to expose to the world the historic crime taking place in Russia, and to sustain and comfort the unhappy younger generation, being martyred for its sacred love for truth and its youthful faith in Russia. We, the old men, stand at the bedside of those being persecuted, wiping away the stains of slander and blessing the lost prophets of a future Russia.

They will not torture it away, and Edenkauer will not cure it with his electric shock.

.But it is good that electricity was used. Science and the press, fulfilling the function of executioner and instrument of torture. Humanity cannot decline much further than this.

What, then, can one add? Perhaps the yellow tickets that were given to young ladies and women because they cut their hair and dreamed that it was better to live by their own labor than on someone else's account, and the journal that threw mud at them.

We were recently criticized that we laugh as we speak about the vileness and brutality now taking place in Russia.

Our laughter has not been understood.

Never mind; we will speak seriously, and, first, will pose a question about the origin of the vastly increased impatience in society that circles, like a wreath, the investigative factory, in which Muravyov weaves a nonexistent conspiracy? Whence this new frenzy against nihilism, by which is now meant every kind of free, independent thought, every kind of learning that does not resemble the preaching of the neo-serf owners?

Can it simply be out of love for Alexander Nikolaevich, who freed the majority of the most furious unmaskers from half their income?² They are not that sentimental: here the roots go much deeper.

.Two years ago, for the first time at the summit of the nobility in Russia, a demand appeared for mature institutions, and a wish was expressed for civic freedom and private control of one's affairs. That took place in Mos- cow—what could be better?

But here's what is not so good. The first word spoken by the Moscow as­sembly of the nobility was hostile to the independent press, and, following the expression of gratitude to the journalist-denouncer there was the feeble speech of Orlov-Davydov,³ who demanded limitations to autocracy and to book-publishing (among us!), cursing the arbitrariness of bureaucrats and the translation of Buckle.

An environment that cannot bear free speech has chemically combined with inquisitors and executioners. As for Karakozov—or whatever he is called, the matter is not about him and he was immediately pushed into the background—with denunciations in their journals and blame for the assas­sination attempt placed on all freethinking people in Russia, dating from the nihilists to Chernyshevsky, and from Chernyshevsky to Petrashevsky, reach­ing Belinsky, and so on. Whether Karakozov lives or dies is all the same to them: that is the reason for such secrecy with the public and even doubly so with the sovereign, who must at all costs believe in a universal conspiracy.