A Herzen Reader

Our imperial system and our gentry have no roots and they know it. They had prepared to take the last rites in 1862 and came to life only when the Petersburg fire, Katkov's slander, and the Polish uprising came to their res­cue. The people love the tsar as the representative of defense and justice (a common factor in all undeveloped peoples); they do not love the emperor. The tsar for them is an ideal, and the emperor is the antichrist. Imperial power is maintained by the military and by the bureaucracy, i.e., by ma­chines. The military will beat anyone on orders, without distinction, and the bureaucracy will copy out and fulfill the will of the leadership without argument. That kind of government cannot be felled with an axe, but at the first spring warmth it will melt into the life of the people and drown in it.

We were firmly convinced of the latter. The landowning class was being wiped out before our eyes, and, like vanishing pictures, was turning pale and being transformed into various pale deformities. The Russian imperial sys­tem has external political goals of self-preservation and it has tremendous power, but it has no principles; the same can be said of the environment surrounding it, and this has been the case since Peter himself. Between the day Nicholas died and his funeral, the court and the general staff were able to turn themselves into liberals "superficially, hypocritically." But who said that before this they were deep and sincere absolutists?

The Russian government was on the path to some kind of transforma­tion, but, having taken fright, sharply turned off it. Our primary mistake was a mistake in timing, and, more than that, in imagining all the condi­tions and forces we forgot one of the most powerful forces—the force of stupidity. The old ways used it to gain strength.

The emancipation of the serfs, the grumbling of the landowners, the mood of society, of journalism, and of certain government circles... all of this inexorably led to the first step, i.e., the creation of a duma or an as­sembly. The experiences of the Moscow and Petersburg nobility obviously demonstrate this, but, as befits landowners, they were too late. When they raised their voices, the sovereign had been crowned a second time in all his autocracy by European threats and popular ovations.

We did not foresee the power of popular reaction. The animated spirit of 1612 and 1812 was only raised at a time of genuine danger to the fatherland; there was none this time but there was a desire for some kind of demon­stration, and the mute made use of their tongues.

We looked upon the reaction as a day's misfortune and proceeded fore­most with an analysis and consideration of the economic and administra­tive coup in the very spirit and direction of Russian socialism.

Keeping in the forefront the right to land, we advocated the development of elected self-government from the village to district, from the district to the region, and from the region to the province—we went no further, and did not need to—on the one hand, we pointed to the disgrace of personal arbitrariness, of the military-bureaucratic governance of the country, the excesses of the seraglio, and landowner brutality; on the other hand, we pointed to the assembly that could be seen in the distance, which would be chosen by a free alliance of provinces to discuss the land question.

One of the most difficult questions—not by its content but by the incor­rigibility of prejudices defending the opposing view—was the question of "communal ownership of land."

[. . .] By Russian socialism we mean socialism that proceeds from the land and from the peasant way of life, from the factual allotment and exist­ing repartition of fields, from communal possession and communal gov- ernance—and we advance together with the workers' cooperatives toward that economic justice for which socialism strives in general and which is affirmed by science.

This title is all the more necessary because, alongside our doctrine, a purely Western socialist doctrine has developed—with great talent and un­derstanding—namely in Petersburg. This division is completely natural, stemming from the concept itself, and constitutes no kind of antagonism. We wound up complementing each other.