A Herzen Reader

Herzen: "It stands to reason that not a single serious social teaching has ever at­tacked property rights from the viewpoint of theft." Herzen goes on to call Gagarin's view that serfs should not receive any post-emancipation allotment as an endorsement of theft as the foundation of landowners' rights.

This quote from Psalm ii3 (ii5 in the King James version) appeared on Russian coins under Paul I and later on i8i2 war medals.

In Denis Fonvizin's i782 play The Minor.

♦ 87 +

The Bell, No. 225, Aug. i, i866. This article focuses its sarcasm on the most prominent pro-government journalist.

Katkov and the Sovereign [1866]

The sovereign could not manage without Katkov and once again appointed him to look after the floodgates of the Moscow sewer, from which filth and sewage have flowed for the past four years, contaminating all Russia. Af­ter two weeks, the sovereign could wait no longer and, like a physiologist, decided that a six-week-long cleansing was sufficient for Katkov.¹ For his part, Katkov did not reconcile with the sovereign for free: he set conditions, and they were accepted. He won for himself the right to leave Russia to the whims of fate and separatism after the first subsequent warning. With this threat in the air let any sort of Valuev interfere with his committees and is­sue a warning.

[. . .] Now the Karakozov case will proceed very smoothly. Nekrasov will be satisfied:² they will get to the roots of the matter,

and if there are none, they will grow some in The Moscow Gazette. Now a universal conspiracy will come to light, from London, Paris, Switzerland, and Sweden to Tulcea, Jassy, Bukhara, and Samarkand. "Evildoers of the world, tremble!"

They definitely needed Katkov on the eve of the execution. in order to whip up people's minds, in order for the government itself to believe that it had to feel rage. Without him, Muravyov was incomplete, unfinished— wasn't that the reason that he failed to discover a conspiracy, because he was deprived of the leadership of The Moscow Gazette?

But nothing was lost. Katkov, having rested in the summer sun, con­centrated his best poison on humiliation and malice, and issued one of his most priceless drops of it when he started up again with an article in issue No. 134 of The Moscow Gazette.

[. . .] He speaks of a certain nihilist who influenced Karakozov and brought back with him from abroad "a newly arisen doctrine in world-revolutionary circles about the need to exterminate all the crowned heads of Europe."³ What next? Judges will calmly sign off on sentences for every nihilist who has traveled abroad.

"World revolution"⁴

and a nihilist returning from abroad present a great opportunity for the restored detective to tie everything in the world to the Karakozov case, and, to do him justice, he did not forget anyone—not Ba­kunin, The Bell, our powerful agency in Tulcea, the Poles, or the fires. All this nonsense, mired in the filth of police reports and in the even greater filth of his own imagination, at another time would not have merited any attention, but at the present time, when it pushes people toward the gallows and hard labor, one cannot remain silent.

Where will our degradation end? Where will we touch bottom, the limit of our baseness and heartlessness? We go on sinking lower and lower. Recall the howl of indignation that greeted the doctrine of blind obedience, when it was expressed by a Moscow professor,⁵ but now—now what is be­ing preached is not the philosophy, but the poetry of slavery, the madness of slavery. Have you read anything in the basest excesses of Byzantine servility and Eastern self-abnegation that matches the following lines from the June 3/15 issue of The Moscow Gazette:⁶

For us, the state and the dynasty are not a matter of party, and the sovereign for us is not the leader of an armed force, but is desig­nated by birth to lead his entire people, in the calm and indisputable possession of supreme rights. For that reason not only officials, who have been placed in various positions in accordance with executive authority, but every honest citizen must, in good conscience, see

himself as a servant of the sovereign, and concern himself, as our an­cestors would say, with his sovereign's affairs, which for every person ought to be a vital matter to him as well.

. If you are eating, you are eating for the sovereign; if you have cholera, the sovereign is sick; if you marry, then the sovereign has married; if you take medicine, then you are treating his majesty!

Notes

Source: "Katkov i Gosudar'," Kolokol, l. 225, August i, i866; i9:ii7-20, 406-8.

Katkov was allowed to resume publication of The Moscow Gazette two weeks before the end of the official suspension.