A Chronicle of Terror [1862]
We received a long letter from Petersburg. The terror is not abating; constant arrests, prizes for the informers, gratitude to men of letters who trample people in the dirt, the bribery of soldiers. all the ugliness of fear that is not inhibited by anything—the fear of a young ignoramus and Nero put together.
Here are excerpts from the letter:
The zeal in searching out incendiaries is not slackening and the Third Department recently started a rumor that the government has in its possession the handwritten proclamations of Russian publishers and arsonists living abroad.1
Every day one hears about new detentions. Every person returning from abroad is searched at the border, shoes and stockings are removed. On Saturday, July 7/19 Chernyshevsky and Serno- Solovyovich were arrested.2 There are two active commissions in St. Petersburg: one concerning the arson, whose composition has been known for a while; the other concerning the distribution of the proclamation, under the chairmanship of Prince Golitsyn. Here the members are Gedda, a senior Senate official, aide-de-camp Sleptsov, and the former governor of Perm Ogaryov, a harmful and empty man.
During the first days of July (between the 1st and the 8th), the case of the Tver arbitrators was decided. Their sentence was announced and drawn up so absurdly, in such a repulsively foolish way, that one can't remember anything even vaguely approaching this level of stupidity for a very long time. The senators, for no reason at all, in a completely distorted way, doing the best they could, relied on article 319 of the "Sentencing Code." The Tver arbitrators were accused of spreading works whose goal was to make unlawful judgments about the government; they were sentenced to two and a half years confinement, with some loss of class privileges. Suvorov3 was struck by the absurdity of the senate's conclusions, and, it is said, has already asked the sovereign that this sentence not be carried out. [. . .]
While in residence in Peterhof, the sovereign requested a list of all the residents of Peterhof; finding on it two students, he ordered that their parents be obliged, by signed statements, to remove these students from Peterhof. "This is a joke," said one government supporter,4
"could this really be possible?" Allow us to supply the names of the students: Meshchersky and Nabokov. [. . .]
Notes
Source: "Khronika terrora," Kolokol, l. 141, August 15, 1862; 16:227-28, 425-26.
Herzen: "Is it really necessary to say that this is a despicable slander and a foul lie?"
Nikolay G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) was editor of The Contemporary and a well- known progressive journalist; after this arrest he spent his time in jail writing What Is to Be Done?, which, after being published through an oversight, became a bible of the Russian revolutionaries and Lenin's favorite literary work. Chernyshevsky spent the rest of his life in prison and exile. Nikolay A. Serno-Solovyovich worked for The Contemporary and helped organize "Land and Liberty."
Prince Alexander Suvorov was at this time the military governor-general of St. Petersburg.
Herzen's correspondent uses the word potaplennik, which relates to the first paragraph of this article, where there is a description of literary figures who criticize others to gain the authorities' favor as potapstvuiushchie, that is, people who trample others in the dirt.
♦ 48 ♦
The Bell, No. 141, August 15, 1862. Everyone on this list apparently visited Herzen in London during the spring and summer of 1862, and were observed by an agent of the Third Department, who kept watch on Herzen's house and was able to distinguish between those who came out of curiosity and a smaller group assumed to have a genuine interest in his "criminal affairs." Most of the latter were, in fact, subject to rigorous searches when they crossed the border into the Russian Empire. The list got to Herzen through one of his Polish correspondents. Herzen wrote to Vladimir Stasov, who was staying in London at the time, that his Sunday and Wednesday open houses would have to stop because "the spying has increased to the point of insolence" (Let 3:352). In a letter from 1858 on surveillance of his visitors, Herzen repeated a rumor that Alexander had responded to the earlier report with the words "leave them in peace" (Let 2:398).
A List of People Subject to Arrest by the Government Upon Their Return from Abroad [1862]
We received from a Polish correspondent, whom we thank most sincerely, the names of people who are presently abroad, and whom our progressive
Petersburg government has ordered to be detained at the first Polish station on the railroad. Here is the list.
Stasov Vladimir Kalinovsky Balthazar Albertini Nikolay Kovalevsky Petr Kovalevsky Yulyan Kovalevsky Oskar Suzdaltsev Vladimir Plautin Fedor Botkin Sergey Korsh Valentin
."What a mix of garments and faces, tribes, dialects, and status!"2 and what gigantic, colossal stupidity on the part of our government! [. . .]
Notes
Source: "Spisok lits, kotorykh pravitel'stvo velelo arestovat' po vozvrashchenii iz-za gra- nitsy," Kolokol, l. i4i, August i5, i862; i6:229, 426-27.
Pisemsky Alexander Betger Alexander Zagoskin Pavel Sovetov Alexander Zhemchuzhnikov Nikolay Rubinshtein Nikolay Davydov Pavel Davydov Denis Dostoevsky Fyodor1
Aside from Dostoevsky, the other well-known names on this list include the writers Pisemsky (Alexey, not Alexander) and Zagoskin (Mikhail, not Pavel), the pianist Ru- binshtein, the art and music critic Stasov, professor of medicine Botkin, and the liberal journalist Korsh.
A line from Pushkin's poem "The Robber Brothers."
♦ 49 ♦
The Bell, No. i46, October i, i862. This is one of several articles by Herzen devoted to the tsarist regime's commemoration of the founding of Rus a thousand years earlier. While "Jubilee," from the February i issue (Doc. 43), focused on the Novgorod bell and the historical figures depicted on it, eight months later Herzen reported on the September ceremony itself. Alexander II expended considerable energy on the unveiling of the Millennium statue in Novgorod, which was intended to be a moment of national joy and well-being (Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 2:48-5^ 86). Helping to set the tone, the historian Kostomarov arrived from the capital to give a public lecture to a packed house on the significance of Novgorod the Great in Russian history (Smirnov, Gertsen v Nogorode, 42). After the threat of non-participation in the dedication ceremony (local nobles were angry about the terms of the emancipation) had passed, the event came off as planned, with warm words from the tsar about how, after i86i, the various estates in Russia were even more closely bound together. Alexander II expressed a wish to the