You were frightened by a couple of printed leaflets in which the unfettered word, after a silence of thirty years, evaded the censorship.4 [. . .] You began a struggle with the younger generation—a struggle of brute power, bayonets, and prisons—against enthusiastic ideas and inspired words. Your predecessor fought children in Poland, and you will do battle in Russia with young people and adolescents, who have tried to convince you and your government that a new era has begun in Russia.
With the dying glow of this unfortunate fire even you turned pale, you became flustered, and you retreated to the background, and in your place a system familiar to us was set up—of repulsion and oppression, the arbitrary behavior of individuals and the unlawfulness of the courts—your father's system with the addition of rhetoric and blood.
Russian blood, first of all.
What a black day it was for Russia and what a great sin you took upon your soul when, under the influence of panicky fear and the slander of your minions, you allowed there to be blood, and, even worse, you vested your generals with the authority to shed it, as if you didn't know what kind of people they were.
Is it possible that you slept peacefully when first Anton Petrov, then Arn- goldt, Slivitsky, et al., were felled by bullets. Is it possible that you didn't freeze in horror when they shot people in Nizhny on mere suspicion, and in Kiev for fighting and rude responses?5 [. . .]
You cannot bring back the dead. Atone for your sin before the living, and, standing at your son's grave, renounce bloody reprisals. Give us back our pride in the fact that, in spite of our underdeveloped legal system, there was no death penalty, and an executioner ascended a scaffold, frightening everyone with his unlawful appearance, once or twice a century.
. Just think, how your situation has changed since you first sat on the throne. Then you had only to freely make a move, to lead, and you emancipated the serfs. Everyone expected something good, something fine from you—at that time you buried the past.. Now it is gloomy all around you, matters have gotten bogged down, there's no money, an entire region is getting beaten up, young people are being sent off to hard labor, the people's teachers are being sent off to hard labor, on fortress embankments they are hanging and shooting people, and you are burying your future.
Sovereign, the moment has come when you must decide on which path you will continue. Your son's gravestone stands as a road sign and a terrible reminder.
Decide now, do not await a second blow—by then it may be too late, and the blow may be too strong.
You can see clearly—and it would be difficult to hide—that the rusty and creaking old mechanism constructed by Peter in the German manner, and adjusted by the Germans for Russia, is no longer suitable. You can see that it is no longer possible to direct a population of seventy million as if it were a military division. The front will no longer remain "at attention." People are talking, thinking, dissatisfied, having guessed in the Crimea that the command structure is poor. [. . .] You lived through and endured all this—do you think that by replacing tax farming with excise duties, and the Assembly of the Land with district councils, you have met Russia's needs?
If you think this, it is because you do not know what Russia suffers from nor what it desires. And how would you know? The press is not free, and you do not read very much anyway. You see only servants who depend on you and tell lies in your presence! You punish free people who raise their voices. [. . .] There was a peasant who believed in you, seeing in you his "earthly tsar," an enraptured fanatic; he openly and passionately wrote you a letter in which he spoke of the people's needs. He wrote you from London and put himself into your hands, and you sent him to the mines.6 With unparalleled ferocity you convicted the only remarkable publicist to have appeared in your time. Do you even know what Chernyshevsky wrote? What his point of view was? What was the danger, what was his crime? Can you answer this question on your own? You would not be able to understand anything from the absurd Senate records.
It is clear that louder and more powerful voices are needed to shout down the trumpets and drums that surround you, so that the words would reach beyond the horse-guards and the "oprichniki," as they were recently called.7 Why are you pushing away the truth, why are you deceiving yourself that you—against popular advice and free speech—can take Peter's little wooden boat from the rocks back out to a deep channel?
Do as you wish, shoot people or give them a medal, send them to hard labor or to a lucrative post, take the side of Muravyov and his Russian executioners, or the side of the Germans and their Baltic civilizers—you won't be able to preserve or revive autocracy in its Nicholaevan innocence and purity.
You are stronger than your predecessors, but you are stronger by virtue of the emancipation. Your union with the people should not distract you. In the wreaths woven of grain and rural flowers that village elders have brought you there are thorns and the seeds of plants that are dangerous to those in power. You drew close to them not in the name of a conservative idea, but in the name of a revolutionary principle, in the name of a democratic leveling of the gentry and the acknowledgment of the agrarian principle in the land allotment. The decrepit Petrine robes were strengthened with a lining made from Pugachev's kaftan.
Take a clear and simple look from the Mont Blanc on which fate has placed you, chasing away the flocks of jackdaws and ravens who have access to the court, and you will see that you won't go far by maneuvering between official government-issue progress and reactionary police. [. . .]
Wouldn't it be better and more valorous to resolve common issues with common strength and summon from all corners of Russia, from all levels of society, chosen people? Among them you will hear severe judgments and free speech, but it will be less dangerous than it was for your grandfather, surrounded by moats, walls, and the lances of the horse-guards in the servile silence of the Mikhailovsky Palace?8
Fate, in extending the cold hand of death to your family, has restrained you—take advantage of that. You intended to continue on the terrible path you have followed since the second half of 1862. From the funeral of your son, turn back to your previous path. Repentance is never easier and cleansing more complete than at the foot of a coffin of one dear to us. It is essential in order to prepare for great earthly tasks.
. But first of all stop the hand of the executioner, bring back the exiles and banish the illegal judges, to whom you entrusted the tsar's vengeance and illegal persecution.
Forgiveness is not needed for your innocent victims or the suffering martyrs. It is necessary for you. You cannot go forward in a humane way without an amnesty from them.
Sovereign, be worthy of it!
Iskander
Geneva, Boissiere, May 2/April 20, 1865
Notes
Source: "Pis'mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru II," Kolokol, l. 197, May 25, 1865; 18:337-41, 622-23.
Nikolay Alexandrovich died on April 12, 1865, in Nice at age twenty-two from meningitis. His brother Alexander, who succeeded him as heir, was rumored to be of limited intelligence.
Dated March 10, 1855, on the occasion of Alexander II's ascension to the throne, and calling for a free press, and land and freedom for the Russian peasants. See Doc. 5.