On the Eve [1861]
Holy Saturday has come and soon the bell will begin to ring for the morning service. and the soul feels frightened and oppressed. Why would we poison this festive moment? Like our poor peasants, we stand deep in thought, with incomplete faith, with a deep desire for love and with an insurmountable feeling of hate.
If only we could say once more: "You have conquered, Galilean!" how loudly and enthusiastically we would have said it, and let any one-sided doctrinaire and immobile front-line soldier of schoolboy science, while mocking us, produce proof that we do not continually repeat one and the same thing.
Russia did not have this much at stake either in i6i2 or in i8i2.
It is good that on the anniversary of the death of Nicholas they will lay to rest the Petrine era. We would like to say: "many thanks to it for a difficult lesson and for consigning to oblivion the evil caused by it!" But for this the evil must die, and it has not died out in the criminal, dishonest old men who do not repent of the money-grubbing and greed.
Foreign journals talk about the plantation owner opposition by the invalids. The grave will be an unquiet place for these gray-haired eunuchs if they succeed in disfiguring the Rus that is being born. This is not just about bribes and theft, this is a knife being driven into the future. Watch out, Mu- ravyovs and Gagarins,1 double traitors—of the people, whom you are pillaging, and of the tsar, whom you are robbing—if you manage to make your way to the swampy Petersburg cemeteries, your descendants will answer before the Russian people.
There are sacred, solemn moments in the life of people and nations during which wrongs are not forgiven!
Note
Source: "Nakanune," Kolokol, l. 93, March i, i86i; ^33-34, 3i0-ii.
i. Ivan V. Gagarin was head of the nobility in the province of Voronezh from i853 to i859, a member of the province's committee on peasant issues, and author of a proposal to deprive serfs of any estate lands upon their emancipation and credit landowners with half the value of peasant dwellings.
This pamphlet was printed, but never distributed. Herzen awaited the imminent announcement about the serfs' fate with keen anticipation and regret that he could not be in Moscow himself (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. i, i39-40). This is the speech, dated March 24, that Herzen intended to give at an April i0, i86i, celebration of the emancipation in his London home, to which Russians in London and other sympathizers were invited. Part of the evening's festivities would be the premier performance of Prince Yury Golitsyn's "Fantasia on the Emancipation" (Let 3:i98, 2i7). Herzen reminds his audience that reaching this milestone has been the primary focus of his life's work.
Herzen's speech was to be published immediately afterward in The Bell, with a French translation to be placed in Parisian newspapers, but it was never given. On the day of the celebration, he received news from a Polish colleague at the Russian printing house in London that Russian troops had once more attacked a peaceful demonstration in Warsaw. It was now unthinkable to offer a toast in honor of the tsar who permitted this attack (on March 27 [April 8]). During an evening that he later described as more "like a funeral" he did offer a brief toast to Russia's success, prosperity, and further development (Let 3:i98). One memoir account says that prepared copies of the speech in Russian, Polish, English, and French were thrown into the fire instead of being distributed to guests, but Herzen's handwritten copy was preserved (Literaturnoe Nasledtsvo, 63:59-70).
Friends and Comrades!
[1861]
Today we have stepped away from our printing press for the free Russian word in order to celebrate in a fraternal manner the beginning of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. You know what this emancipation means for us. In the emancipation of the serfs with land lies the entire future of a Rus that is not autocratic, manor-house, aggressive, Moscow-Tatar, not Petersburg- German, but national, communal—and free!
The first word from our printing house was a word about St. George's Day.
The first booklet issued by it was about baptized property.
The Polestar and The Bell set as their motto: the liberation of the serfs and of the word!
And now its beginning has been declared—timidly, with equivocations— but declared!
Events have undergone major changes since we printed the first issues in i853. Everything around us was gloomy and hopeless. An oppressive orgy of reaction reached the final stage, it was time to give up the struggle, but we began a strange kind of work, sowing, on the stony debris of foreign ruins, seeds meant for the far-off homeland from which we were cut off. What did we hope for? I don't know, and I will speak just for myself— whether it was because I was not then in Russia and did not experience the direct effect of arbitrary rule or for another reason—but I believed in Russia at a time when everyone had doubts!
Much water has flowed under the bridge since that time.
I turn to those who witnessed our beginning and ask you to think about anyone who had said in i853 that in eight years we would be gathering at a friendly feast and that the hero of that feast would be the Russian tsar! You would have thought that such a person was crazy or worse. For my part I frankly confess that such a thing never entered my head.
Fortunately, gentlemen, none of us are guilty—there is only one guilty party, the man himself.
For giving him credit I will be scolded by revolutionary ascetics and rigorous thinkers—I have been scolded for many things I have said. But if I expressed my opinion when for that you could be imprisoned and exiled to Vyatka, if I was not afraid of irritating the haughty aristocratic spirit of a decrepit and self-satisfied civilization, then why would I stop at the opposite prejudices?
It is all the easier for me to acknowledge Alexander II's great deed because that acknowledgment is a guarantee of our sincerity, and we need people's confidence, as much confidence as possible!
The February i9 manifesto is a milestone; the whole road still lies ahead, and the mail is in the hands of the most savage Tatar coachmen and German riding-masters. They will do everything to overturn or to tie up the cart. But it is impossible to expose their machinations in Russia. The word has fallen behind—as before it is firmly censored at home—that is why publishing abroad is essential and we know our duty.
And let them not be anxious—their business affairs will not disappear: we will follow them with great fervor step by step, bribe after bribe, crime after crime, with the tireless attention coming from a hatred that senses its own rightness. We will lead them out to the place of punishment, we will bind them up in their own filth to the pillory—all these Muravyov- the-hangmen, prince-deacons, like Gagarin, and radiant gendarmes, like Dolgorukov; these soulless hoarders and embezzlers, rebels in the name of slavery, knights of the birch rod—not ashamed to steal from the people the first day of their celebration!