A Herzen Reader

It is not so important what the government says, but why it is speaking. It is speaking because it lacks faith. It feels the need to convince not only others, but itself, that it is as powerful as before, very powerful. If it possessed the Nicholaevan self-assurance, it would begin to strike out without open­ing its mouth. It speaks because it is afraid. In the dumb silence surround­ing it, something is not right, is not what it used to be; you can hear the mouse-like bustle of history.

And we remain silent, consumed in our turn by unbelief and fear.

It is necessary to get out of this awkward situation. Afraid of the sea, we suffer from the rocking motion, holding on to one spot in an impossible equilibrium. We are fortunate that our ship is not going backward, and is not running aground.

"Well, what is to be done? Speak more definitely, and make a formulation".

The demand made of us, that we formulate our thoughts about the case of Russia, is repeated fairly often. It is surprising, and causes us to invol­untarily smile at the naive proof of that inattention and carelessness with which people generally read. All of our activity, all our life has been nothing but a formulation of one thought, one conviction, and, namely, the one about which people ask. One can say that we have been mistaken our entire life, one can say that our idea is disastrous and our conviction absurd, but one cannot say that we have not formulated our point of view, with the logic com­mon to mankind and the memories in our head.

Perhaps by "formulas," our friends, like the French, have in mind pre­scriptions, i.e., drugs and orders, given in advance about how to act in this case or that. Indeed, we do not have those kinds of formulas. And there is no need for them. Serious prescriptions are improvised on the general principle of science and on the investigation of a given circumstance. [. . .]

History is what differentiates man from the animals: its character, in contrast to animal development, consists of the application of more or less conscious efforts for the organization of his way of life, for the hereditary, generic refinement of instinct, understanding, and reason with the help of memory. [. . .]

In the middle of the night following the i4th of December and the Polish rebellion of i83i, in the midst of the amazing ease with which the Nicho­laevan yoke crushed all the new shoots, the first people to cry out for "land" were the Moscow Slavophiles, and although they stood on actual soil with their left legs,¹³ they were still the first.

They understood our socioeconomic uniqueness in the allotment of land, in the repartition of land, in the rural commune and communal land- holdings; but, having understood one side of the question, they neglected the other side—the freedom sought by the individual enslaved by the village, tsar, and church. The admirers of the good old days—out of spite for the Petrine order—the true nationalists and premeditated Orthodox believers, with ingratitude forgot that it was the West that had given them an all- saving civilization, in the light of which they found a treasure house in the land, which they began to examine.

Europe, where bourgeois liberalism was going full sail, had no concept of how a mute Russia was living on the sidelines; the most educated of Rus­sians prevented them from seeing anything other than poor copies of their own paintings.

The first pioneer who set off to discover Russia was Haxthausen.¹⁴ Hav­ing by chance come upon the traces of the Slavic communal system some­where on the banks of the Elbe, the Westphalian baron set off for Russia and, fortunately, addressed himself to Khomyakov, K. Aksakov, the Kireevskys, et al. Haxthausen was genuinely one of the first to tell the Western world about the Russian rural commune and its profoundly autonomous and so­cial principles—and when was that?

It was on the eve of the February revolution,¹⁵ i.e., on the eve of the first broad but unsuccessful attempt to introduce social principles into state structure. Europe was very busy, and, because of its own sad fiasco, it failed to notice Haxthausen's book. Russia remained for them an in­comprehensible state, with an autocratic emperor at its helm, and with an enormous military that threatened every movement for freedom in Europe.

Our own attempts to acquaint the West with unofficial Russia followed almost directly upon Haxthausen.

For seven whole years we taught about Russia—as much as we could and where we could.¹⁶ Pythagorean theory didn't help very much. We were listened to absentmindedly before the Crimean War, with hatred during it, and inattentively before and after. [. . .]

III