A Herzen Reader

And you, unfortunate brother schismatics, having greatly suffered but never having meddled with the Russia of landowners, executioners, and those who shoot the unarmed—preserve the day of new horrors, April i2, in your memory. The times of biblical persecutions are beginning; you know from the Lives of Saints⁶ about the slaughter of Christians undertaken by the emperors, and you know who prevailed. But prevailing doesn't come without faith and without action. Be strong in spirit and remember the cry with which the peasants of Bezdna perished: Freedom! Freedom!

Isk—r.⁷

We received three additional letters about details of the business in Ka­zan. The principal outlines of the events are the same and we will not repeat them, particularly after the confession in the St. Petersburg Gazette. But there are details too precious not to be preserved in The Bell for posterity and for our contemporaries.

From one of the letters. Apraksin did not approach the peasants, but dispatched someone to tell them to send eight people elected to carry out negotiations. They refused. Then a second time he sent the leader of the nobility Molostov⁸ to try to convince them, and then a priest.

The priest asked them if they believed in God and in the Orthodox Church. They said that they did believe. Then the priest demanded that they hand over the prophet, but they refused to do this, and the priest and official witness returned; neither he nor the witnesses experienced the slightest show of violence.

After this, Apraksin decided to speak to the crowd; he got on his horse and, having ridden about 20 steps further away from his soldiers, who were 100 feet behind him, shouted: "Hand over the prophet, or you will be shot." At this time the prophet was calming them, saying that no more than three volleys would be fired and that the bullets would then turn back upon the soldiers. Then they rather calmly replied to Apraksin: "Shoot, little father, you won't be shedding our blood, but the tsar's." Apraksin shouted to the soldiers: "Fire." Two aides-de-camp of the governor—sent there to find out what was going on—rushed in vain to try and persuade him. In vain they told him that if these were insurgents, they would be armed with something and would have long ago surrounded them, and that, finally, nothing had prevented them from attacking the soldiers while the priest and official witnesses were returning, because it would have been impossible to fire at the priest.

To all of these objections Apraksin cried out: "Officers, stand at attention, fire!" Four salvos were given. Until the fourth salvo the crowd stood motionless, crossing themselves; several covered their faces with their work gloves. After the fourth salvo the crowd began to scatter; one group simply began to run, while another moved closer to the group around the prophet in order to find out why the bullets had not been turned back against the soldiers. Apraksin imag­ined that they were running to get wooden stakes and ordered five salvos one right after another. The rest is known: when the smoke cleared and the hero saw the heap of dead and wounded (these canni­bals didn't even have a doctor with them!), Apraksin said: "Oh, there are a lot of them—well it will be possible to make it seem fewer, it's always done that way." But one local official pointed out to him that maybe that is what happens in wartime, but that here all the names would have to be written down.

The Kazan nobility wanted to give Apraksin a dinner, when he was up to his ears in peasant blood. Trubnikov, a member of the pro­vincial administration, restrained these carnivorous freaks with the observation that "it is somewhat awkward to wash away blood with champagne!"

It's a shame that this was prevented; masks, away with masks, it is better to see the animals' teeth and the wolves' snouts than feigned humaneness and cheap liberalism.⁹

The names, the names—we implore you for the names of the officers who took part in the handling of the bodies and the maggots who gathered to feast on the corpses.

Notes

Source: "i2 aprelia i86i (Apraksinskie ubiistva)," Kolokol, l. i0i, June i5, i86i; i5:i07-9, 362-64.

"The Mute Girl of Portici," an i828 opera by French composer Daniel Auber (i782- i87i). Herzen is ironically referring to the official government newspaper St. Petersburg Gazette.

Count Alexey A. Arakcheev (i769-i834), artillery general, war minister from i808 to i8i0, who later organized the infamous military colonies. He is believed to have brought out the worst side of Alexander I.

Herzen has in mind ambiguity in the emancipation law, which allowed differing interpretations of several key points.