Kathleen é - A Herzen Reader

his openly stated values; he was happy to be corrected on facts, but never altered his principles.

Herzen defended the many exposes of government misconduct in The Bell, with some of his most explicit arguments presented in 1858-59 (Docs. 20-22). When Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862, Herzen, himself a for­mer political prisoner, dropped their quarrel and focused on the shame that Russia brought on itself through its treatment of a man who only wished the best for the Russian people (Doc. 64). He was appalled that Russia's liberals failed to offer the fallen man their support. In their private corre­spondence, Herzen and Ogaryov frequently debated the function of their paper; for Herzen, its role was "uncompromising propaganda," a profound sermon which "could be transformed into political agitation, but was not itself agitation."²⁴

During the second half of the 1850s, while the reforms were under dis­cussion, Herzen's essays offered a nuanced picture of Alexander II. At the beginning of the new tsar's reign in 1855, Herzen had made it clear that it should not matter whence liberation came; Herzen was principled, but not rigid or dogmatic. His letters to the tsar were respectful and positive, under­standing that change from above was the preferred nonviolent alternative. Still, there was ample evidence by 1858 that conservative figures surround­ing Alexander II continued to influence the censorship, the universities, and other institutions. When Herzen's elaborately planned London celebra­tion of the March 1861 emancipation announcement was ruined by news of bloody repression in Poland, it was rightly seen as a poor omen. The gov­ernment's subsequent response to fires in St. Petersburg, upheaval among students and peasants, and the Polish uprising of 1863 bore no signs of a progressive spirit. For the 1867 essay "Our System of Justice" (Doc. 94) one of The Bell's correspondents provided evidence that even when the criminal chamber recommended moderate sentences, the State Senate substantially increased them, while military tribunals routinely handed out corporal pun­ishment and even death sentences. The exalted tone often used by memoir­ists and historians to describe the Russian judicial reforms of the 1860s is absent from Herzen's account, especially when the inauguration of a modern court system coincided with the closed proceedings and vindictive atmosphere surrounding the case of Dmitry Karakozov.

A dozen of the hundred essays in this volume are reflections on this first assassination attempt against Alexander II on April 4, 1866. Herzen's initial reaction (Doc. 80) was disapproval of such individual "surprises" as a way of changing history. "The shot was insane, but what is the moral condition of a state when its fate can be altered by chance actions, which cannot be foreseen or prevented, exactly because they are insane?" (Doc. 82). Three years earlier, a group of young Russians visiting England had offered to kill the tsar, but Herzen convinced them to abandon the plan.²⁵ He called Karakozov a "fanatic" who did much more harm than good by bringing the reform era to an abrupt conclusion. That the peasant Komissa- rov, who reportedly deflected the shot, was elevated to the nobility seemed absurd to Herzen. He reminds his reader that while the tsar escaped harm, Nikolay Serno-Solovyovich, the founder of the first Land and Liberty group and a member of The Contemporary's editorial staff, lay dying in Siberian exile. Having resolved early on to put information-gathering above ideologi­cal abstractions, Herzen developed the ability to vividly juxtapose facts and events, which became one of his greatest strengths as a political analyst.

Herzen's main point in the essays on Karakozov from 1866 and 1867 is that there was no conspiracy, no matter how hard the Investigative Commis­sion tried to manufacture one (Docs. 82, 84, 86, 91). Therefore, no justifi­cation existed for the widespread repression in the wake of the April 4 shot (Docs. 85, 88, 92). He deplored the efforts of the formerly liberal Mikhail Katkov to whip up enthusiasm for Karakozov's execution; the rhetoric in The Moscow Gazette may remind modern readers of Katkov's professional descendants during the 1930s (Docs. 87, 88). Herzen asks "who can fail to see that we were right in pointing out all the absurdity of bringing social­ism, nihilism, positivism, realism, materialism, journal articles, student dissertations, etc. into the Karakozov case?" He even laments the split in the conservative forces, pitting Moscow against Petersburg, because politi­cal truth and national unity suffered as a result. "Won't this enormous em- pire—whose peripheries are held together by lead and blood . . . crack at its very center?" (Doc. 89).

At the time, only an incomplete record of the investigation and trial was available even to pro-government journalists; a more thorough recent study of the archives in Claudia Verhoeven's The Odd Man Karakozov adds in­teresting details to the picture painted by Herzen. While the lengthy se­cret dossier points to the Russian Free Press as one of the foreign stimuli for Karakozov's act, the condensed version published at the time left out Herzen's name; in Russia, he could not be mentioned officially even to cast blame.²⁶ The Moscow Gazette still felt free to speculate on the failed assassin as an agent of the Russian revolutionaries Herzen, Ogaryov, and Bakunin, with their links to radical Polish circles, while government of­ficials spread a rumor that Ogaryov was the young villain's relation.²⁷ The numerous searches carried out in the hunt for co-conspirators turned up illegal Russian publications and photos of the heroic editors.²⁸ At the end of her monograph, Verhoeven focuses on the "odd" nature of Karakozov's act. When asked by the tsar what he wanted, his answer was "Nothing," under­scoring the terrorists' belief that the tsar had no power to act; Karakozov's vision on April 4, i866, was of "power's void."²⁹ In "Order Triumphs!" one of Herzen's final essays on the subject, a similar observation is made: "The echo of Karakozov's shot exposed a terrifying vacuum in the Winter Palace" (Doc. 92).

The translated essays from The Bell are presented in chronological order, but out of their original context, since the biweekly issues carried material by Ogaryov and others, along with reports and letters from Russia. The com­mentary at the beginning of each essay addresses the question of reading in context, but for Herzen the articles were also contributions to an ongoing discussion with fellow Russians, a vigorous debate that began in student groups of the i830s, continued most famously in Moscow and its environs in the i840s, and never ceased while he drew breath. He even refused to have his memoir called a chronicle, insisting to Ivan Turgenev that it was a conversation, full of "facts, and tears, and theory."³⁰ In an i868 letter he told his daughter Tata that "nothing is as boring as a monologue," and Her­zen dreaded boredom most of all.³¹ He enjoyed leaping from topic to topic, from Russian peasants to Polish rebels, and from ridiculous government ceremonies to the censorship, all the while deftly parrying blows from the right and left. Along with the Russian government's weak commitment to reform, Herzen addressed the desert-like sterility of homegrown Russian journalism.³² Accused by some of trying to dominate political discourse, he responded that while demanding and exercising freedom of speech, he did not claim an exclusive "concession on Russian speech in foreign lands" (Doc. 2i).

The strength of the essays in A Herzen Reader comes from astute political commentary married to the formidable literary

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