A Herzen Reader

Herzen was, of course, one of Russia's first and most successful inves­tigative journalists, and most of The Bell's 245 issues are "accusatory doc­uments," which give an impression of "unrelieved political, cultural and moral darkness, with shocking revelations of systematic injustice, cruelty, oppression, and continuous abuses and misgovernment, some of which were actually remedied as a result of these revelations."²² He was obliged to depend on others for on-site reports, but he turned this raw material into brilliantly constructed attacks on public officials and their private support­ers. Using publicity as a kind of "anti-police" force, he called to account those who punished the Russian people and who threatened him person­ally.²³ It is hardly surprising that the Russian authorities and other oppo­nents of meaningful reform were incensed by what appeared in the Free Russian Press, but Herzen was also criticized in print and in person by Bo­ris Chicherin, a liberal professor, and by Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, the progressive voices of The Contemporary (Sovremennik), the most impor­tant thick journal of the reform years. Faced with conservatives who found him despicable, liberals who thought him immoderate, and the radical intelligentsia who called him naive, Herzen did not waver from positions which accorded with 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.