A Herzen Reader

We thought that the autocracy in Russia could still perform the noble deed of freeing the serfs with land. [. . .] But what did happen? Autocracy, which never gives anything careful thought, spilling blood and tears with the callousness of a locomotive encountering obstacles, shyly stopped as it pronounced the words "emancipation with land," and began to consult with generals and bureaucrats, with young scholars and old men "decrepit" in their ignorance. As if that were not enough, they summoned prominent people and ordered them to keep their advice to themselves. All of this taken together—the involuntary realization that the imperial house has no more faith in its moral power and in its blood ties with the people, leads both the government and the revolutionary to sense that they have the right to act boldly!

Our article from April i, i860, was the final effort to convince ourselves of the possibility of "the improvement of the imperial way of life" with its liberation from crude and ignorant nobles and the pernicious, numbing bureaucracy.

But already Alexander II, frightened by some kind of apparitions, held onto the endless tails of Panin's coat and said to him: "Do not deceive me!"

That is a kind of abdication.

Alexander II released his bow, and in this lies his historical significance; where the arrow lands is out of his control, and it does not even depend on whether Panin deceives him or not. Isn't this tsarist vacillation another kind of vivos voco?³ Isn't it a bell reminding the minority of adults that it is time to do things themselves, that there has been enough of relying com­pletely on the government? Let us leave administrative matters and diplo­matic gossip to it. Let us withdraw from its place on the parade ground and take up our own affairs, and let it stand, like a Neva pyramid, like a mansion in which a dead person lives.

Be assured that there is nothing to expect from the government. Without an Achilles heel for reason, engaged in the preservation of old rituals and official uniforms, satisfied with magnificent robes and material power, it will sometimes, under the influence of the current flow of ideas, convul­sively extend its hand to progress, and every time will take fright halfway there... This all may continue for a long time, at least until someone more daring peeps under the curtain and sees not that the emperor is dead but that the government had given the order: "long live the people!"

Who has not happened to see old citadels gloomily standing for centu­ries on end? Since the time when they poured death down on enemies, a new life has surrounded them with a garland of streets, gardens, palaces, stretching further and further into the fields and coming closer and closer to the embrasures with their rusty cannon, along which a watchman walks in businesslike idleness, while within, sparrows build their nests. Genera­tions go by, and suddenly the question presents itself to everyone: what is the point of these walls, which are not defending us from anyone, why maintain a garrison, with an idle prankster with gray whiskers reporting

every evening to the commandant? The city finds it ridiculous: the ancient fortress is reduced to rubble, and life quickly covers over the scars with its own little swellings and ditches.

Such a threatening fortress is our government. Everything is requisi­tioned by the commandant, everything, as is expected in a state of siege, willing or not, does its duty. Russia offers the fantastic spectacle of a state in which everything acknowledged to be a human being consists wholly of officials, military and civilian.

Only literature, the universities, and the peasant hut took no positive part in the establishment and maintenance of the autocratic official order, accepted as the government's goal. No attention was paid to the dispirited hut; only schismatic groups were being harassed by officials from time to time for violations of church form. Literature and the universities were roundly hated by Nicholas, an expert on these matters.

The entire people were under a guardianship, like some sort of adoles­cent. The late guardian had gone to the Herculean extent that he did not allow private individuals to build railroads with their own money!

After that, it remained for the people to finally conclude that they were adolescents, to assume a zoological form and quietly dwell in the company of residents of Khiva, beavers, Kirgiz, and lemurs. But it was precisely here that there proved to be some signs of life. A slave, constrained hand and foot, tied and bound to the "job," without a voice, tangled up in the bureau­cracy's nets, sent to be a soldier and flogged, flinched at the incursion of a foreign enemy,⁴ stretched his muscles, and on the edge of disgrace felt his own power. [. . .]