A Herzen Reader

Alexander I knew this, and was somehow at a loss after the victory, feel­ing that it was impossible to continue on the path of absolute power, and he went sadly along with head bowed toward the 14th of December, lacking the strength to either gain control of events or to yield to them.

The same consciousness, on the other hand, was demonstrated by the tremendous conspiracy in which leading people from all active layers of Russian society took part. To remain any longer under the yoke of un­limited absolute power was so intolerable that a handful of heroic people proudly threw down a challenge to tsarist power "in the very jaws of the lion" as Michelet said. Strength won out over thought. With his cold and heavy arm Nicholas stopped the young life that pressed forward, stopped every kind of movement, and achieved what? In the thirtieth year of his reign a deadly quiet hung over his crushed, silent people; a restrained Po­land was barely breathing, Russian literature had come to a halt, the 14th of December was defeated, and he—the representative and head of reaction in Europe—wanted at last to test his strength.

And this thirtieth year became for him a year of terrible atonement. With impotent wrath, with burning shame, Nicholas saw his troops, which he had taught so well to handle a rifle, beaten by the commissary; courts, boards, and councils were filled with thieves. Surrounded by informers and two or three different police forces, he knew about every liberal quatrain written by some student, every imprudent toast proposed by some young man, but he lacked the means to find out the facts and to reach the truth in every other matter.

Right next to him, alongside him, brazenly stood another power, elusive, omnipresent, stealing at one go the gold from his throne and the iron from the peasant's plow, with one hand not allowing the soldier's rations to reach them while stealing the peasant's piece of bread with the other hand.

Several months before his death (as the newspapers recount), Nicholas, angered by the theft of money for disabled soldiers, said that he knew of only one person in the service who did not steal, and it was him.

What a realization of weakness and what a punishment! Nicholas died beneath its weight.

Is it possible that Alexander and Konstantin, whose honesty we have no right to doubt, imagine that they are eradicating evil by handing over to the courts several rogues and publishing official circulars with critical remarks?

Evil fears the light, evil fears publicity, evil fears freedom—and yet ab­solute power fears all of this. This is the frightening mutual guarantee be­tween the two powers. Theft was not a national problem in France, but ten years of the first empire was sufficient to turn French generals into robbers, and prefects into bribe-takers.

We ourselves have to fight evil, to raise our voice against it, to seek counsel and means, to display willpower and strength, if they were not in fact bro­ken by the Nicholaevan yoke. If we do not, nothing will happen.

But he did not break them. The same year that was so merciless for the tsar showed us once again the inexhaustible, healthy might of the Russian people. How strange all this is and how full of deep significance! Rus came to life as he was passing away, and he was passing away because he had no faith in his own people. [. . .]

The air of 1612 and 1812 began to blow through Russia with the news of the enemy invasion, and not a single person mistook the Turkish crusade for "enlightenment and freedom."¹ We don't know how the war would have ended had it really turned into a popular uprising, but we are genuinely glad of the peace, all the more because it brings not splendor but humility. The iron of victorious swords can forge the strongest chains.

On the contrary, the modest peace obliges everyone to be thoughtful about our position. Everyone now sees that the former path will not do at all; however, we are sure that no one—neither the government nor you— has a definite idea, plan, or program. But to leave the future to the vagaries of fortune is a bad thing. People are not responsible for the way that events change ideas about the future, but the wish to master them and realize in them one's reason and will is integral to conscious human development.

We did not comprehend our actual situation because, attracted by su­perficial strength, we approached a historical task like forced labor. There are many reasons for this, and an exclusionary national identity is as much of a hindrance to understanding our original development as Western civilization. [. . .]

It is not only imperial power in its Petrine form that has outlived its time, but all of Petersburg Russia. What it was able to achieve has been achieved. We must free ourselves from the moral yoke of Europe, that Europe on which up to now our eyes have been directed. [. . .]