A Herzen Reader

In the midst of the uncertainty and disorder of the present, when no one has said their final word, when everything is fermenting, everything is in a state of expectation—some for an assembly, others for land—when the people, no matter what the sovereign announces, no matter how the gover­nors speechify in Russian and Ukrainian, stubbornly believe in another kind of freedom, you summon them to rise against the tsar and the nobility, i.e., against despised social groups in which they include you, and against state power in which they see their protector. Whether they are mistaken or not, it is all the same. They are sure that they are not mistaken, and for that rea­son they will not follow you and you will perish. No minority from among the educated can carry out an invincible revolution without state power and without the people—that is how the questions stand; as long as the country­side, the village, the steppe, the Volga and Ural regions are quiet, the only possible revolutions are those led by oligarchs and guards officers. [. . .]

Up until now the people have been deaf and dumb to all revolutionary aspirations, because they have not understood what the masters lacked. But in the current struggle the people are mixed in as a living force; the ques­tion of emancipation became a cross-border question for both Russias—the one at the summit and the one in the fields; the people and the gentry un­derstood it that way. A clash was unavoidable. Until now it was not clear whether the people were prepared to yield on the land or whether the gentry were prepared to sell it cheaply. Both turned to the same mediator—the government. What did it do? Give the land? No. Take it away? No. There is a feeble impulse to do both one and the other. Let it try to take the land from under the peasants' feet, that is, to do what neither Peter I nor serf­dom was able to do. The people have already announced their passive veto. There's a good reason why they have not subscribed to either the statutory documents or moved from corvee to quitrent; they are waiting for the land.

While the land is to all intents and purposes theirs, the people will not rise up. It is difficult for the people to rise up; it is not the risk to themselves, or hard labor, or the executioners, but the complete ruin of their family, the unplowed field, hungry children, the descent of locusts. That is why the peasant is patient, is patient for a terribly long time, and only rarely, when the cup overflows, he turns up in some kind of gloomy despair and kills en masse not only his enemies but also his own children, so they will not be sent to military colonies.

A call to arms is possible only on the eve of battle. Any premature call is a hint, a piece of news given to the enemy, and an exposure of one's own weakness to them.

For that reason, leave off the revolutionary rhetoric and get to work. Unite more closely amongst yourselves, so that you are a force, so that you possess both unity and good organization; unite with the people, so that they forget your origins; do not preach Feuerbach and Babeuf to them, but the religion of the land

that they understand. and be prepared. The fateful day will come; stand up, fall in battle, but do not call for it as a longed-for day. If the sun rises without bloody storm clouds, so much the better, and if it wears Monomakh's cap or a Phrygian one, it's all the same. Surely the French have shown that a translation from a feudal-monarchic language of gestures and ranks to a Roman-republican language is not worth the spill­ing of blood or even of ink. [. . .]

All that is now dissatisfied and noisy in our midst, from the vieux boyards moscovites⁶

to the Russian Germans, from Nicholaevan generals to small­time plantation owners, will disappear, will be shaken off. How? Where? Where do mice and rats disappear with the first rays of the sun, where do crickets go during the day? [. . .]

In order for tsarist power to become popular power, it must understand that the wave that is washing away at its foundations and wishes to lift it up is in fact a wave from the sea, that it can neither be stopped nor sent to Siberia, that the rising tide has begun and that—a little earlier or a little later—it will have to choose between being at the helm of a popular state or in the silt at the bottom of the sea. [. . .]

Notes

Source: "Zhurnalisty i terroristy," Kolokol,

l. i4i, August i5, i862; i6:220-26, 424-25.

Cannon fodder.

A final argument.

A reference to the murder of the Princess de Lamballe during the "September Days" of i792. Her head was paraded through the streets in a celebration of the defeat of the counterrevolution.

And never again. Herzen is quoting Schiller's poem "Resignation."