A fire broke out in St. Petersburg's Apraksin Dvor on May 28, 1862, destroying hundreds of stalls in the flea market. This and other fires in 1862 were blamed on revolutionary youth.
A number of revolutionary pamphlets, including "Young Russia," were secretly printed and distributed in St. Petersburg between 1861 and 1863. (See Doc. 45)
Anton Petrov was shot in April 1861 for spreading word of a different emancipation document among peasants and leading an uprising in Bezdna; Arngoldt, Slivitsky, and Rostkovsky were executed in June 1862 for propaganda among soldiers; in August 1863 a military court in Nizhny condemned a man on suspicion of robbery; in Kiev a Jewish soldier was killed for ripping off an officer's shoulder straps in a fight, and for muttering curses instead of giving answers at his trial.
Petr Alexeevich Martyanov (1834-1865), the freed son of a serf, made Herzen's acquaintance in London while there on business matters; he expressed his utopian ideas to the tsar in 1862, a letter which was published in The Bell, and was arrested upon his return the following year and sentenced to hard labor and perpetual exile. Martyanov had also expounded on his theories in a pamphlet, "The People and the Government," which was published by the Free Russian Press. Herzen wrote about Martyanov in the January 1, 1864, issue (No. 176) of The Bell.
Oprichniki, a term that has come into English usage, referred originally to a special administrative elite set up by Ivan the Terrible and responsible for a reign of terror in sixteenth-century Russia. D. D. Golokhvastov, in a speech to the Moscow Noble Assembly in January 1865, used the word oprichniki to characterize the highest levels of Russian government officials.
Paul I was killed in his new palace on the night of March 12, 1801.
♦ 69 *
The Bell, No. 197, May 25, 1865. After the great success of The Bell between the years 1859 and 1862, increased police activity made it more difficult to send correspondence to London and to distribute the publication in Russia. Switzerland was a stopping- off point for Russians going to and from Italy and France and the residence of a growing number of expatriates. When the great reforms proved to be narrow and incomplete, Herzen turned his attention to finding ways to help the Russian masses voice their concerns. This issue also contained one of Herzen's occasional theoretical articles in the form of a "letter to a traveler." The addressee may have been Vasily
Bodisko (i826-i873), a cousin of Granovsky, who had worked in the Russian embassy in Washington.
To Our Readers [1865]
We have moved our printing press to Switzerland, and from May 25 on, The Bell will be published in Geneva. Our move will not bring any internal changes to our publication. We stand on the same ground, more firmly than ever. We see no need in defining it and expressing our profession de foi on the occasion of this geographical move. The basis of our outlook has been known to you since the foundation of the first Russian free press in London. You knew them even before that, but know them even better from The Bell. For eight years it has been tolling one and the same thing; the tasks to which it summons you have changed, but the religion and the spirit have remained the same.
Now it is time to call people to a Council, an egalitarian assembly of the land. Our ringing will reach someone's ears and set people thinking about it. If we believed that it was fruitless, we would have just folded our arms.
Many of our ardent, secret wishes were made flesh and came true—and if it happened awkwardly and incompletely, it still happened.
Ten years ago serfdom stood firm, jealously guarded as the foundation of the empire. From Avacha1 to Odessa the Russian people were beaten with a court and without one, in barracks and front hallways, in private homes and in barns. The slightest murmur, a word of indignation, or a sign of the cross made with two fingers, was punished more severely than theft or robbery. and we said to the heir of Nicholas when he ascended the throne: "Do away with serfdom, give land to the Russian peasant, free the word from censorship, the Russian's back from the stick, open the courtroom doors, and grant freedom of conscience."2
.We spoke these words and repeated them in various ways for years on end. And everything that we touched began to sway.
Serfdom collapsed and barely hung onto the land.
Corporal punishment was eliminated for those judged guilty by a court, and one would think that soon they will stop beating and whipping the innocent.3
The closed doors of the courts are opening, and judicial reform—of some sort—is a direct acknowledgment on the part of the government of the unsuitability of the previous harsh punishments.4
The censorship cracked and has remained as more of a permitted evil than a defensible necessity.5
The two-fingered sign of the cross is no longer punished as if it were murder, and the government has placed the Old Believers in a comparable position to prostitutes—they are not so much permitted as tolerated.6
We are not saying that our bell summoned these initiatives, but they were carried out not without it—it anticipated them, it called for them, and it was the first to loudly and repeatedly discuss them. What the bell's share was in the actual substance of events, how it was changed by them and how it also effected change—who can capture that, who can retrace and measure it, and to what purpose?
[. . .] The reforms carried out by the government are unsatisfactory. They are all unfinished, lack openness, are oblique, and all have the quality of a temporary deal, something for the time being, done offhandedly, faute de mieux.7 Their real importance is as an initiative and an involuntary rejection of the existing state of affairs. But in all this, only the government spoke and acted while we listened and accepted it mutely, without even having the right to refuse. That the time has come for us to say our piece is so obvious, that the government itself constantly stops and listens (like the notorious police chief of Moscow)8 to the silence. and if anyone takes it into his head to say something that rubs them the wrong way, he gets sentenced to a prison cell or hard labor. Such a doubly absurd situation must end, and the voice of the people must receive the rights of citizenship. For that reason an Assembly of the Land is Russia's most immediate and pressing need.
Along with this, there is a growing necessity for an explanation of the social, economic, civic, and judicial issues which are pressing their way forward in the contemporary movement of Russian thought and Russian life. The assembly must not catch us off guard.
We would also like, as far as possible, to take part in this explanation of issues, and—while sticking to our previous critique of official plans and our expose of official planners—to put forward the principles of a possible new system. This compels us to broaden the scope of our publication.
We no longer exclude either purely theoretical articles or historical monographs, as long as they have a direct correlation to our Russian social and civic development. If there are a lot of them, or they are too long for The Bell, we will once again start up The Polestar. Send us articles that you cannot publish in Russia even under the current situation of freedom of the press with censorship.9
And since we have already asked you for articles, we will mention in conclusion another requirement of ours. Despite all our efforts, despite all our editorials, we cannot make The Bell a living Russian organ without correspondence from the regions. During there past two years there has been very little of this. We are announcing this to you. We do not have to plead for correspondence; open discussion abroad is your business as much as ours, and your conscience should decide for itself what must be done. There are no serious problems in delivering letters to us.