people-like France with its universal suffrage in 1 848-nearly cut its
own throat;2 to try to remedy this by a dictatorship ('Petrograndism')
leads to even more violent suppression. Gracchus Babeuf, who was
disappointed by the results of the French Revolution, proclaimed the
religion of equality-'the equality of penal servitude'.3 As for the
communists of our own day, what is it they offer us? The 'forced
labour of communism' of Cabet? The 'organisation of labour in
ancient Egypt a Ia Louis Blanc'?' The neatly laid out little phalansteries of Fourier, in which a free man cannot breathe-in which one side of life is permanently repressed for the benefit of others?& Communism is merely a levelling movement, the despotism of frenzied mobs, of Committees of Public Safety invoking the security of the
people-always a monstrous slogan, as vile as the enemy they seek to
overthrow. Barbarism is abominable whichever side it comes from:
'Who will finish us off, put an end to it all? The senile barbarism of
the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism? A blood-stained
sabre or the red Rag?'8 It is true that liberals are feeble, unrealistic,
and cowardly, and have no undetstanding of the needs of the poor
and the weak, of the new proletarian class which is rising; it is true
that the conservatives have shown themselves brutal, stupid, mean,
and despotic-although let it be remembered that priests and landowners are usually closer to the masses and understand their needs better than liberal intellectuals, even if their own intentions are less
benevolent or honest. It is true that Slavophils are mere escapists,
defenders of an empty throne, condoning a bad present in the name
of an imaginary past. These men follow brutal and selfish instincts,
or empty formulas. But the unbridled democracy of the present is no
1 ibid.: VI s • .
2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 584.
3 ibid.: XX 578.
4 'From the Other Shore': VI 472.
& 'To an Old Comrade': XX 578.
1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 1 .
H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
better, and can suppress men and their liberties even more brutally
than the odious and sordid government of Napoleon III.
What do the masses care for 'us'? The masses can hurl in the teeth
of the European ruling class, 'We were hungry and you gave us chatter,
we were naked and you sent us beyond our frontiers to kill other
hungry and naked men.' Parliamentary government in England is
certainly no answer, for it, in common with other so-called democratic
institutions ('traps called oases of liberty'), merely defends the rights
of property, exiles men in the interests of public safety, and keeps
under arms men who are ready, without asking why, to fire instantly
as soon as ordered. Little do naive democrats know what it is that
they believe in, and what the consequences will be. 'Why is belief
in God . . . and the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly
Utopias is not silly?'1 As for the consequences, one day there really
will be democracy on earth, the rule of the masses. Then indeed
something will occur.
The whole of Europe will leave its normal courses and will be
drowned in a general cataclysm . . . Cities taken by storm and looted
will fall into poverty, education will decline, factories will come to
a stop, villages will be emptied, the countryside will remain without
hands to work it, as after the Thirty Years' War. Exhausted and
starving peoples will submit to everything, and military discipline
will take the place of law and of every kind of orderly administration. Then the victors will begin to fight for their loot. Civilisation, industry, terrified, will Ree to England and America, taking with them from the general ruin, some their money, others their
scientific knowledge or their unfinished work. Europe will become
a Bohemia after the Hussites.
And then, on the brink of suffering and disaster, a new war will
break out, home grown, internal, the revenge of the have-nots
against the haves . . . Communism will sweep across the world in
a violent tempest-dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift; in thunder and
lightning, amid the fire of the burning palaces, upon the ruin of
factories and public buildings the New Commandments will be
enunciated . . . the New Symbols of the Faith.
They will be connected in a thousand fashions with the historic
ways of life . . . but the basic tone will be set by socialism. The
institutions and structure of our own time and civilisation will
perish -will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be liquidated.
You regret the death of civilisation?
1 'From the Other Shore': VI 104.
97
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
I , too, I am sorry.
But the masses will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave
nothing but tears, want, igrwrance and humiliation.1
It is prophecies of this type by the founding fathers of the New
Order that cause embarrassment to contemporary Soviet critics and
hagiographers. They are usually dealt with by omission.
Heine and Burckhardt too had seen nightmarish visions, and spoke
of the demons called into being by the injustices and the 'contradictions'
of the new world, which promised not Utopia but ruin. Like them,
Herzen harbours no illusions:
Do you not perceive these . . . new barbarians, marching to
destroy? . . . Like lava they are stirring heavily beneath the surface
of the earth . . . when the hour strikes, Herculaneum and Pompeii
will be wiped out, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust will
perish equally. This will be not a judgement, not a vengeance, but
a cataclysm, a total revolution . . . This lava, these barbarians, this
new world, these Nazarenes who are coming to put an end to the
impotent and decrepit . . . they are closer than you think. For it is
they, none other, who are dying of cold and of hunger, it is they
whose muttering you hear . . . from the garrets and the cellars,
while you and I in our rooms on the first lloor are chatting about
socialism 'over pastry and champagne'.l
Herzen is more consistently 'dialectical' than the 'scientific' socialists
who swept away the 'Utopias' of their rivals, only to succumb to
millennia! fantasies of their own. To set by the side of the classless
idyll of Engels in the Communist Manifesto let us choose these lines
by Herzen:
Socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own
extremes and absurdities. Then there will again burst forth from
the titanic breast of the revolting minority a cry of denial. Once
more a mortal battle will be joined in which socialism will occupy
the place of today's conservatism, and will be defeated by the
coming revolution as yet invisible to us . . . 8
The historical process has no 'culmination'. Human beings have
invented this notion only because they cannot face the possibility of