A Herzen Reader

In 1848 a new phalanx of heroic young people were sent to prison, and from there to hard labor in Siberia.²² An oppressive wave of terror cut down all the new shoots and forced everyone to yield; intellectual life once again hid itself, and, if it revealed itself, then only fearfully, only in mute despair, and, since then, every bit of news coming out of Russia has filled the soul with sorrow and deep sadness. [. . .]

No matter what people say, the methods employed by the Russian gov­ernment—cruel methods—are not, however, sufficient to choke all the new shoots of progress. They cause many to perish in terrible moral suffering, but we must be prepared for this, and there are doubtless more people aroused than disarmed by these measures.

In order to actually choke off the revolutionary principle in Russia—the consciousness of our position and the desire to get out of it—Europe itself must assimilate more deeply the Petersburg government's principles and paths so that its return to absolutism is complete. One must wipe the word Republique from France's facade—that terrible word, even if it is only a lie and a taunt. In Germany the right to free expression—imprudently given— must be taken away. The day after a Prussian gendarme, with the aid of a Croat, has broken up the last printing presses which were dragged in the mud by des Freres Ignorantins²³ against the pedestal of Gutenberg's statue, or when an executioner in Paris, with the pope's blessing, has burned the works of French philosophers on la place de la Revolution—on the follow­ing day the all-powerful tsar will have reached his apogee.

Could this be possible?

Who can say these days what is and isn't possible? The battle is not over, the struggle continues.

The future of Russia has never been more closely linked to the future of Europe than it is at present. Our hopes are well known to all, but our reluctance in answering does not come from childlike vanity, or from a fear of the future catching us in a lie, but because of the impossibility of seeing any aspect of this issue whose resolution does not depend completely on internal conditions.

On the one hand, the Russian government is not Russian, just generally despotic and retrograde. As the Slavophiles say, it is more German than Rus­sian, and that explains the good disposition and love toward it shown by other states. Petersburg is a new Rome, the Rome of universal enslavement, and the capital of absolutism; that is why the Russian emperor fraternizes with the emperor of Austria and helps him to oppress Slavs. The principle of power is not national, and absolutism is more cosmopolitan than the revolution.

On the other hand, the hopes and aspirations of revolutionary Russia coincide with the hopes and aspirations of revolutionary Europe and antici­pate their alliance in the future. The national element that Russia adds is the freshness of youth and a natural tendency toward socialist institutions.

The European states have clearly reached an impasse. They must make a decisive surge forward or they will fall even further back than now. The contradictions are too irreconcilable and the issues are too acute and have ripened too much through suffering and hatred to be able to stop at half- solutions and peaceful negotiations between power and freedom. But if there is no salvation for states in their current form of existence, the man­ner of their death can differ greatly. Death can come by means of rebirth or decay, through revolution or reaction. Conservatism, having no goal other than the preservation of an outdated status quo, is just as destructive as revolution. It annihilates the old order, not with the hot flame of rage, but with the slow flame of senility.

If conservatism gets the upper hand in Europe, imperial power in Russia will not only crush civilization, but will annihilate an entire class of civilized people, and then...