A Herzen Reader

Our sleepy inactivity, our sluggish lack of staying power, and our passive compliance inspire sadness and despair. With this dissoluteness we have reached the point where the government doesn't persecute us but just gives us a scare, and if it weren't for the youthful story—full of valor and reckless­ness—of Petrashevsky and his friends, one might think that you had come to an understanding with Nicholas Pavlovich and lived with him in harmony.

Meanwhile things are getting awkward in the villages. The peasants are looking gloomy. House serfs are less obedient. All kinds of stories are mak­ing the rounds. A landowner and his family burned, another killed with chains and pitchforks, a steward strangled by women in a field, a Kammer- herr² flogged with a birch rod and forced to keep silent about it.

The peasants have clearly had enough of serfdom, only they do not know how to work together to accomplish something. For your part, you know that there can be no step forward without the emancipation of the serfs. Fortunately, it depends mostly on you.

Today it depends on you. We don't know what will happen tomorrow.

What are you really waiting for?

The government's permission? It gave you a sort of sly and ambiguous hint in 1842. You didn't make use of it.

What kind of permission is needed here? It is impossible to force some­one to possess others; that would be a completely new form of tyranny, a reverse confiscation.

Think carefully about our words, and understand them.

At this moment you have more than a right;³ the fact of possession equals power. In either event, the key to the shackles is in your hands. It seems wiser and more practical to yield than to wait for an explosion. It's smarter to throw part of the cargo overboard than to allow the entire ship to sink.

We do not propose to you what Christ said to Nicodemus, to selflessly distribute your property; we have no paradise for you in exchange for such a sacrifice. We hate fine phrases and do not believe at all in mass generos­ity or in the unselfishness of entire social classes. On August 4, 1792, the French nobility acted in a way that was ten times wiser than it was selfless.⁴

Think carefully what is better for you—the emancipation of the serfs with land and with your assistance, or a struggle against emancipation with the assistance of the government? Starting with yourself, think carefully what is better—to begin a new, free Rus and amicably resolve a weighty is­sue with the peasants, or to begin a crusade against them with a weapon in one hand and a birch rod in the other? If Russia and the Slavic world are to have a future the peasants must be free...

Or there will be no Russia at all, and traces ofher, marked by unnecessary blood and terrible victories, will little by little disappear, like the traces of the Tatars, like a second unsuccessful northern population after the Finns. A state unable to separate itself from such a great sin, so deeply embedded in its inner structure, has no right to either formation or development, or to a part in the business of history.

But neither you nor I believe in such a terrible future.

You and I know that the emancipation of the serfs is essential, incontro­vertible, and inevitable.

If you are unable to do anything they will still be free by grace of the tsar and by grace of Pugachevism.⁵

In both instances you are lost, and with you is lost that education that you completed despite difficulties, humiliations, and great injustices.

It will be painful if emancipation comes from the Winter Palace; tsar­ist power will justify itself to the people, and, having crushed you, will strengthen its despotism more than ever before.

Pugachevism is also frightening, but let us be frank—if the emancipation of the serfs cannot be bought at any other price, then that will not be too dearly bought. Dreadful transgressions bring in their wake dreadful consequences.

It will be one of those terrible historical calamities which can be foreseen and avoided in time, but from which it will be difficult or impossible to save oneself at the moment of defeat.

You have read the story of the Pugachev uprising, and you have heard stories about old Russian rebellions.

Our heart bleeds at the thought of innocent victims, we weep for them in advance, but, bowing our head, we say: let this terrible destiny, which people were not able or willing to avert, come to pass.

If we thought that this cup could not be refused, we would not have ap­pealed to you, because our words would then have been empty or would have seemed a mockery that was nasty and inappropriate.

Quite the contrary, we are certain that there is no fatal necessity demand­ing that every step forward for the people must be celebrated with piles of corpses. A baptism by blood is a great thing, but we do not share the savage belief that every act of liberation and every triumph must pass through this.

Must the terrible lessons of the past always remain unspoken? [. . .]