A Herzen Reader

We are not petty bourgeois—we are peasants.

We are poor in cities and rich in villages. All efforts to create in our midst an urban bourgeoisie in the Western sense have resulted in empty and ab­surd consequences. Our only genuine city-dwellers are government work­ers; the merchants are closer to the peasants than to them. The gentry are naturally much more rural than urban dwellers. Thus—the city for us is re­ally just the government, while the village is all Russia, the people's Russia.

Our peculiarity, our originality is the village with its communal self- governance, with the peasants' meeting, with delegates, with the absence of personal land ownership, with the division of fields according to the num­ber of households. Our rural commune has survived the era of difficult state growth in which communes generally perished and has remained whole in double chains, preserved under the blows of the owner's stick and the bureaucrat's theft.

Naturally, a question arises at the very outset: should our commune be formed on the basis of an abstract notion of personal independence and a sovereign right to property, eradicating patriarchal communism and do­mestic mutual assistance, or, on the contrary, shouldn't we develop it on its popular and social principles, seeking to preserve and combine personal independence, without which there is no freedom, with a social inclination, with mutual assistance, without which freedom becomes a monopoly of the property owner. [. . .]

But in approaching this issue we are hindered not by the tsar but by the terrible crime of serfdom. Serfdom is Russia's guilty conscience, its right to slavery. The scars on the backs of the martyrs and suffering people of the field and the front hall are not in fact on their back but on our face, on Rus­sia's face. The landowners are bound hand and foot by their absurd right.

Thus the first enemy with whom we must fight is right before our eyes.

There is, at first glance, something crazy in our inability to resolve this question. The younger gentry wanted this fifteen years ago in Moscow, Penza, Tambov, and I do not know where else; Alexander I dreamed about it; Nicholas wished it. The young members of the gentry have now become middle-aged landowners, and we have no reason to doubt that Alexander II opposes it. Who does not want this to happen? Who is the powerful figure who is stopping at the same time the people and the tsar, the educated part of the gentry and the suffering peasants?

Again it's the fantastic boyards russes, and once again the invented old Muscovite party. Well, the estates of these boyars are also mortgaged and the payments are overdue, so where is their power—no, it is not about them.

No, let us be frank, the question of emancipation has not been resolved because we did not know how to begin, and we did not know how to begin in part because it is not soluble from the point of view of the Petersburg government, which nurtured this evil and profited by it, nor from the point of view of that liberalism at the heart of which lies the religion of personal property, the unconditional and ineradicable admission that it is forever indestructible. [. . .]

How can we approach a solution to such a complex question? For that to happen we must discuss it, exchange ideas and check opinions. The cen­sorship does not allow us to do this in print, and the police do not allow us to do this orally. Once again we have to run to those fruitless arguments between the adherents of an exclusive theory of nationality and the follow­ers of cosmopolitan civilization.² Is it not a sin to waste one's strength on these sham debates, to wear down one's mind on this internecine strife, at the same time that one's heart and conscience ask for something else, and the same time that the melancholy peasant leaves his unsown field to do his compulsory labor, and the house-serf with clenched teeth awaits the birch rod?

At least we should ask the sovereign that all of us again be subject to cor­poral punishment, because it is totally repulsive that the protection of our gentry's backs gives us the right to be executioners.

.Isn't it clear that as a first instance our entire program comes down to the need for open discussion and that all banners disappear into one—the banner of the emancipation of the serfs with land.

Down with the ridiculous censorship and the ridiculous rights of land­owners! Down with compulsory labor and quitrent. Free the house serfs!

We'll tackle other issues later on.

March 31, 1856

Notes

Source: "Vpered! Vpered! Pervaia stat'ia v Poliarnoi zvezde," Poliarnaia zvezda, kn. 2, 1856; 12:306-12, 546-47.

As was claimed by Napoleon III to justify the attack.

Herzen is referring to the arguments between the Slavophiles and liberal Westernizers.

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