A Herzen Reader

With the death of Nicholas, tongues were loosened. The suppressed, se­cret, peevish thoughts that had accumulated came to light and told of their daydreams, each in its own way. In Russia at that time there was some­thing completely chaotic, but reminiscent of a holiday, of the morning and springtime.

A remarkable mixture of various ages of mankind, of various directions and views—ones that had long ago exhausted themselves and ones that had barely sprouted—appeared on the scene. It was an opera ball, in which every kind of costume colorfully flashed by, from liberal tailcoats with a collar up the back of the head, as in the time of the first restoration, all the way to democratic beards and hairstyles. The German doctrinaire approach to slavery and absolutism and forgotten platitudes on political economy walked alongside the Russian Orthodox socialism of the Slavophiles and Western social theory "from this world." And this was all reflected not only in public opinion, not only in somewhat uninhibited literature, but in the government itself. [. . .]

All of the Russia that was awakening sincerely craved independent speech—speech not made sore by the censor's collar—yet there was not a single free printing-press to answer this need, except for the one in Lon­don. We put the West aside, and turned all our strength to our native cause, toward which we have striven since childhood and throughout our whole life.

The Polestar and The Bell appeared when the move and the rearrangement of furniture were at their height, at that exciting time of endless ferment, in which each word could become an embryo and a point of departure. Hav­ing brought on ourselves the responsibility of the first free Russian speech, what in fact did we say? With what did we appear before the giant who was still wiping his eyes?

The entire positive and creative part of our propaganda comes down to those same two words which you will find on the pages of our first publica­tions and in the most recent issues—Land and Liberty, the development of the idea that there is no Liberty without Land and that the Land is not secure without Liberty. [. . .]

Right alongside the emancipation of the serfs we persistently demanded the emancipation of the word as the condition and the atmosphere without which there can be no popular advice about the common cause. Only open discussion and the press can replace the class-free assembly that was im­possible before the emancipation of the serfs; only a lively representation of the word—not bound by any forms or censorship—can clarify issues and point out what has actually matured in popular understanding and to what extent.

All around were private struggles and private incidents, issues arose from events and events took place which mixed up all the maps, provoking passionate rejections and attractions, but, while breaking away from the path, we constantly returned to it and constantly held onto our two funda­mental ideas.

And that is why, when the sovereign recognized in principle the eman­cipation of the serfs with land, without the slightest inconsistency and with complete sincerity we said: "You have conquered, Galilean!" for which we received reprimands from both sides.¹⁷

We will say in passing that neither the doctrinaires of loyalty nor the puritans of demagogy wanted to understand our unpretentious attitude to­ward the government. The oppositional and denunciatory character of our propaganda was a matter of practical necessity and not a goal or a founda­tion; strong in our faith, we had no fear of any kind of pacification, and, changing our weapon with ease, we continued the very same battle. It was impossible for us to lose our way. [. . .]

The idea of a bloodless coup was dear to us; everything that has been said of us to the contrary is just as much a lie as the statement that we assured the Poles that Russia was on the point of an uprising in 1862. There is, however, nothing fantastic in that; in Russian life there are none of the ir­reconcilable, stubborn, mutually destructive forces which have led Western life from one bloody conflict to another. If such irreconcilability did exist, then it is between the peasants and the landowners, but it was settled peace­fully, and would have been settled without any blood at all if the cowardly government and its agents, who are enemies of the peasant cause, had not strained the situation for no reason.