A Herzen Reader

Foreign journals talk about the plantation owner opposition by the in­valids. The grave will be an unquiet place for these gray-haired eunuchs if they succeed in disfiguring the Rus that is being born. This is not just about bribes and theft, this is a knife being driven into the future. Watch out, Mu- ravyovs and Gagarins,¹ double traitors—of the people, whom you are pillag­ing, and of the tsar, whom you are robbing—if you manage to make your way to the swampy Petersburg cemeteries, your descendants will answer before the Russian people.

There are sacred, solemn moments in the life of people and nations dur­ing which wrongs are not forgiven!

Note

Source: "Nakanune," Kolokol, l. 93, March i, i86i; ^33-34, 3i0-ii.

i. Ivan V. Gagarin was head of the nobility in the province of Voronezh from i853 to i859, a member of the province's committee on peasant issues, and author of a proposal to deprive serfs of any estate lands upon their emancipation and credit landowners with half the value of peasant dwellings.

This pamphlet was printed, but never distributed. Herzen awaited the imminent an­nouncement about the serfs' fate with keen anticipation and regret that he could not be in Moscow himself (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. i, i39-40). This is the speech, dated March 24, that Herzen intended to give at an April i0, i86i, celebration of the emancipation in his London home, to which Russians in London and other sympathiz­ers were invited. Part of the evening's festivities would be the premier performance of Prince Yury Golitsyn's "Fantasia on the Emancipation" (Let 3:i98, 2i7). Herzen reminds his audience that reaching this milestone has been the primary focus of his life's work.

Herzen's speech was to be published immediately afterward in The Bell, with a French translation to be placed in Parisian newspapers, but it was never given. On the day of the celebration, he received news from a Polish colleague at the Russian printing house in London that Russian troops had once more attacked a peaceful demonstration in War­saw. It was now unthinkable to offer a toast in honor of the tsar who permitted this attack (on March 27 [April 8]). During an evening that he later described as more "like a fu­neral" he did offer a brief toast to Russia's success, prosperity, and further development (Let 3:i98). One memoir account says that prepared copies of the speech in Russian, Pol­ish, English, and French were thrown into the fire instead of being distributed to guests, but Herzen's handwritten copy was preserved (Literaturnoe Nasledtsvo, 63:59-70).

Friends and Comrades!

[1861]

Today we have stepped away from our printing press for the free Russian word in order to celebrate in a fraternal manner the beginning of the emanci­pation of the serfs in Russia. You know what this emancipation means for us. In the emancipation of the serfs with land lies the entire future of a Rus that is not autocratic, manor-house, aggressive, Moscow-Tatar, not Petersburg- German, but national, communal—and free!

The first word from our printing house was a word about St. George's Day.

The first booklet issued by it was about baptized property.

The Polestar and The Bell set as their motto: the liberation of the serfs and of the word!

And now its beginning has been declared—timidly, with equivocations— but declared!

Events have undergone major changes since we printed the first issues in i853. Everything around us was gloomy and hopeless. An oppressive orgy of reaction reached the final stage, it was time to give up the struggle, but we began a strange kind of work, sowing, on the stony debris of foreign ruins, seeds meant for the far-off homeland from which we were cut off. What did we hope for? I don't know, and I will speak just for myself— whether it was because I was not then in Russia and did not experience the direct effect of arbitrary rule or for another reason—but I believed in Russia at a time when everyone had doubts!

Much water has flowed under the bridge since that time.

I turn to those who witnessed our beginning and ask you to think about anyone who had said in i853 that in eight years we would be gathering at a friendly feast and that the hero of that feast would be the Russian tsar! You would have thought that such a person was crazy or worse. For my part I frankly confess that such a thing never entered my head.

Fortunately, gentlemen, none of us are guilty—there is only one guilty party, the man himself.