A Herzen Reader

What's going on? Have the sons of the fatherland completely lost their minds and their conscience?

In December, Mitrofan Podkhalyuzin, a Cossack from the nobility, was shot in Warsaw for his part in the Polish uprising, more than a year after the suppression and pacification. Seeing this, Russian journalists still have no shame in pointing out the cruelty of Turkish rule. Where have the Turks executed someone a year after an offense? Austria betrayed Podkhalyuzin!⁴ There's character for you!

.I am Rosslav on the throne, and I am Rosslav in shackles.⁵

Russia is being beaten and beaten. it's all black eyes, bruises, and rags, the provinces and its reputation are being lost little by little, and everything is as vile as before, people are being handed over for punishment as in Ba- kunin's time⁶ . only then there were no executions.

Russian newspaper further inform us that in Ryazan Yurlov and Obno- vlensky have been sentenced to death . That in Omsk they shot the peasant Portnyagin, "who did not confess to the killing and who WAS NOT FOUND with the stolen belongings of the deceased, but clues in the case demonstrate that the murder must have been committed by him."

What a Hercules column ofcruelty, dullness, stupidity, and heartlessness!

In Orenburg the soldier Arkhip Mayorov was shot for impertinence to­ward a superior who was planning to flog him, for what reason the news­papers failed to say.

In the matter of the Polish outrage in eastern Siberia,⁷ the military field court in Irkutsk decided on death sentences for 7 men from the first cat­egory, namely Artsimovich (Kvyatkovsky), Sharamovich, Tselinskii, Illya- shevich, Bronsky, Reymer, and Kotkovsky, and, along with that, i9 more by a throw of the dice (one out of every ten) from the second and third catego­ries. An additional i94 were sentenced to one hundred strokes of the lash and an unlimited period of time working in the mines; 92 men, accused of consorting with the rebels, were sentenced according to statutes i99 and 830 relating to exiles; i33 remained under suspicion; 260 were freed out­right and four were turned over to a civilian court (The Moscow Gazette, December i5, i866, No. 264).

Notes

Source: "Nashe pravosudie," Kolokol, l. 233-34, February i, i867; i9:22i-23, 442-45.

i. The investigation into the insurrection began in i863; its leaders were tried by a military court and executed. The sentences passed down for the remaining defendants by the Kazan criminal court were affirmed—and the number of years increased—by the Senate in June 1866.

Herzen: "Zhemanov and Shcherbakov escaped in November 1866." The two young men were members of the Kazan branch of Land and Liberty, which conducted propa­ganda among the peasants. After their escape, both eventually made their way to Swit­zerland, and introduced themselves to Herzen and Ogaryov.

Herzen's additional comments begin at this point.

Podkhalyuzin was accused of deserting his regiment in 1863 to help the Poles, then hiding under an assumed name in Austria, until his 1865 arrest.

Herzen is paraphrasing the words of Rosslav from Knyazhnin's tragedy of the same name.

Austria handed Bakunin over to Russian authorities in 1851. In 1861, Bakunin escaped from Siberian exile and made his way east, eventually reaching Herzen and Ogaryov in London.

In 1865, Polish exiles staged an uprising in Siberia. Of the 680 people turned over to the military court, only 95 did not receive additional sentences.

♦ 95 ♦

Moscow—Our Mother and Stepmother [1867]

IT IS NOT FOR YOU, NOT FOR YOU¹ to hoist the banner for libera­tion—first cleanse yourselves, repent, acquire one language and one stan­dard, or openly remain the slaves that you are; in this status you can be the "scourges of Providence" but not liberators. A person who selfishly wants freedom for himself and others like him, and at the same time puts his neighbor in stocks, is unworthy of freedom. That is what it was like for Christianity—at the beginning a great thing—and then for the great revo­lution of 1789 (about which our pygmies now speak condescendingly); if they did not save and liberate the entire world, all the same they did believe in general salvation and liberation, and summoned everyone to their side without the bestial hatred of one species for another, without zoological biases and antipathies.

It is possible at one and the same time to be a loving mother and an evil stepmother, but then you cannot complain that in the eyes of any honest person your unjust love calls forth if not hatred, then revulsion.