.There was no place for the Gospel in Judea, so it was carried to Rome and preached to the barbarians; there is no room for a young worker in his father's house and his native fields, so he sets off for America. I do not know where.
We have said this not for the first time, but we think it necessary to sometimes repeat it, and especially necessary to repeat it now, when everything is covered with dark clouds and has so quickly become gloomy.
II
[. . .] Only two nations—among those who have entered the main channel—enjoy special rights in history and are oriented differently toward the future.
Their task is a simpler one.
Their situation is less complex.
They are not troubled at present by "an unnecessary recollection and an unresolved quarrel."5
Nothing needs to be done on behalf of the North American union, for it is going full sail, au large.6
Russia could find its own channel even more easily, but it has lost its way in some kind of fog. It has dreamed up a compulsory past, drowned its old ships, and has cast stones into its own sea, but then is afraid to strike them with an oar.
Strength and time are being lost to no purpose.
The government lacks understanding, and we lack faith.
The success of our reactionary movement—newly baked from stale European flour—is based on this.
To explain anything to the government is a major feat, which we will not undertake; it would sooner come across it by blind instinct, or find it by touch, than comprehend anything.
We wish for something else: to cleanse our primary question from all the rubbish and silt and say to our friends whose faith is faltering what Sieyes said to his colleagues after Mirabeau's famous "Allez dire": "We are the same people today that we were yesterday—let us continue."7
.A few months ago I talked for a long time with an old man.8 He has spent half of his more than sixty years in prison; his entire life he has been persecuted, and he is being persecuted now, not just by his enemies but by his own people. This man, forgotten in prison, emerged in i848 from the graves of Mont Saint-Michel like an apparition amidst the jubilation of the February revolution, and when they expected him to offer a joyful greeting, a shout, and delight, he said loudly: "We are drowning," and the crowd which had let him out of jail moved away, as if from a villain, a holy fool, or someone infected with the plague. "And it is you who are drowning us, not our enemies," he continued. He was imprisoned once again, and, taking advantage of his incarceration, he made slanderous remarks about it, and the republic drowned, and they were the ones who drowned it.
For another fifteen years he watched from inside the prison walls at the destruction of all the initiatives and all the hopes; gray as the moon, he emerged again from prison; the old man was met by the former hatred, the former spite, and physically broken, in terrible poverty, completely alone, he disappeared into the mountains, away from his native land.
This old man is Auguste Blanqui.
[. . .] He depressed me, and something dark arose in my soul. A book lay on the table;9 I took it up, sure that I would find lies, filth, and slander, and I could not put it down: once more a series of martyrs, tireless activists, and young and old fighters rose before me. This official Vilna literature had erected a remarkable monument to the Polish emigration. . . . From 1831 to 1866 they labor on, and their work is destroyed; they begin anew, and it is once more destroyed; again they begin [. . .] from every place they return to their homeland, bearing in their chest an unquenchable faith in the liberation to come and a readiness to fall in battle for it.
Why do we have so little faith, why is our faith so weak? Why have so many of us hung our heads and lost heart at the first sign of failure, at the first unfortunate attempts, not even realizing that they may have been carried out mistakenly?
Is it possible that to believe with great faith a desperate situation or a mystical lunacy is required?
[. . .] Our battle is just beginning, and its lines are just being drawn.
The reactionary period has been ongoing for less than five years. [. . .]
Everything that has happened is sad, and half of it was not even needed from their point of view. But could one really have expected that this government, the last fruit cultivated in the hothouses of the Winter Palace, would act sensibly and dispassionately, that it would act wisely and humanely? Could one really have expected that a society consisting of people who were raised in the depravity of manor house life, having become accustomed from their childhood years to arbitrariness and slavery, to the spectacle of suffering and torture, that a society raised on bribes and slander, in government offices and Shemyakin courts, consisting of characters out of Os- trovsky, from the menagerie of the "dark kingdom," would act wisely and humanely?10 That, like Saul, it would be blinded as a scoundrel and recover his sight as an apostle?
One should not have expected that Alexander Nikolaevich, having fallen asleep while reading What Is to Be Done? or The Bell, would wake up with a zealous desire to return land to the people and set up workshops for women and men in the Winter Palace.11
Then there would be no need for a struggle, as a miracle would be sufficient. [. . .]
In Russian government life one new element has developed recently, and we value it highly—it is the tsar's tongue, which is constantly chattering, the police, who go about satisfying their needs with a rattle in their hands, the literary dikasteria,12 who uphold on an hourly basis tsarist grandeur and Orthodox sanctity, freelance journalism on a temporary contract, which defends the throne and the fatherland.
It is a step in the mud—a huge step forward.
The mud will dry up and remain, but it is impossible to keep silent. The coarse and ignorant destruction of honest organs is a shame, but it would be twice the shame if these disgraceful organs were abolished.
It is not so important what the government says, but why it is speaking. It is speaking because it lacks faith. It feels the need to convince not only others, but itself, that it is as powerful as before, very powerful. If it possessed the Nicholaevan self-assurance, it would begin to strike out without opening its mouth. It speaks because it is afraid. In the dumb silence surrounding it, something is not right, is not what it used to be; you can hear the mouse-like bustle of history.
And we remain silent, consumed in our turn by unbelief and fear.
It is necessary to get out of this awkward situation. Afraid of the sea, we suffer from the rocking motion, holding on to one spot in an impossible equilibrium. We are fortunate that our ship is not going backward, and is not running aground.
"Well, what is to be done? Speak more definitely, and make a formulation".
The demand made of us, that we formulate our thoughts about the case of Russia, is repeated fairly often. It is surprising, and causes us to involuntarily smile at the naive proof of that inattention and carelessness with which people generally read. All of our activity, all our life has been nothing but a formulation of one thought, one conviction, and, namely, the one about which people ask. One can say that we have been mistaken our entire life, one can say that our idea is disastrous and our conviction absurd, but one cannot say that we have not formulated our point of view, with the logic common to mankind and the memories in our head.