29
IN MEMORY OF HERZEN
departures from democracy to liberalism. However, it must
be said in fairness to Herzen that, much as he vacillated
between democracy and liberalism, the democrat in him
gained the upper hand nonetheless.
When Kavelin, one of the most repulsive exponents of
liberal servility—who at one time was enthusiastic about
Kolokol precisely because of its
liberal tendencies—rose
in arms against a constitution, attacked revolutionary agi-
tation, rose against “violence” and appeals for it, and began
to preach tolerance, Herzen broke with that liberal sage.
Herzen turned upon Kavelin’s “meagre, absurd, harmful
pamphlet” written “for the private guidance of a govern-
ment pretending to be liberal”; he denounced Kavelin’s
“sentimental political maxims” which represented “the Rus-
sian people as cattle and the government as an embodiment
of intelligence”. Kolokol printed an article entitled “Epi-
taph”, which lashed out against “professors weaving the rot-
ten cobweb of their superciliously paltry ideas, ex-profes-
sors, once open-hearted and subsequently embittered because
they saw that the healthy youth could not sympathise with
their scrofulous thinking”. Kavelin at once recognised him-
self in this portrait.
When Chernyshevsky was arrested, the vile liberal Kave-
lin wrote: “I see nothing shocking in the arrests ... the revo-
lutionary party considers all means fair to overthrow the
government, and the latter defends itself by its own means.”
As if in retort to this Cadet, Herzen wrote concerning Cher-
nyshevsky’s trial: “And here are wretches, weed-like people,
jellyfish, who say that we must not reprove the gang of rob-
bers and scoundrels that is governing us.”
When the liberal Turgenev
35
wrote a private letter to
Alexander II assuring him of his loyalty, and donated two
goldpieces for the soldiers wounded during the suppression
of the Polish insurrection, Kolokol wrote of “the grey-haired
Magdalen (of the masculine gender) who wrote to the tsar
to tell him that she knew no sleep because she was tormented
by the thought that the tsar was not aware of the repentance
that had overcome her”. And Turgenev at once recognised
himself.
When the whole band of Russian liberals scurried away
from Herzen for his defence of Poland, when the whole of
V. I. L E N I N
30
“educated society” turned its back on Kolokol, Herzen was
not dismayed. He went on championing the freedom of Po-
land and lashing the suppressors, the butchers, the hangmen
in the service of Alexander II. Herzen saved the honour of
Russian democracy. “We have saved the honour of the Rus-
sian name,” he wrote to Turgenev, “and for doing so we have
suffered at the hands of the slavish majority.”
When it was reported that a serf peasant had killed a
landlord for an attempt to dishonour the serf’s betrothed,
Herzen commented in Kolokol: “Well done!” When it was
reported that army officers would be appointed to supervise
the “peaceable” progress of “emancipation”, Herzen wrote:
“The first wise colonel who with his unit joins the peasants
instead of crushing them, will ascend the throne of the Ro-
manovs.” When Colonel Reitern shot himself in Warsaw
(1860) because he did not want to be a helper of hangmen,
Herzen wrote: “If there is to be any shooting, the ones to be
shot should be the generals who give orders to fire upon
unarmed people.” When fifty peasants were massacred in
Bezdna, and their leader, Anton Petrov, was executed (April
12, 1861), Herzen wrote in Kolokol:
“If only my words could reach you, toiler and sufferer of the
land of Russia! . . . How well I would teach you to despise your spiri-
tual shepherds, placed over you by the St. Petersburg Synod and a
German tsar. . . . You hate the landlord, you hate the official, you
fear them, and rightly so; but you still believe in the tsar and the
bishop . . . do not believe them. The tsar is with them, and they are
his men. It is him you now see—you, the father of a youth murdered
in Bezdna, and you, the son of a father murdered in Penza. . . . Your
shepherds are as ignorant as you, and as poor. . . . Such was another
Anthony (not Bishop Anthony, but Anton of Bezdna) who suffered
for you in Kazan. . . . The dead bodies of your martyrs will not per-
form forty-eight miracles, and praying to them will not cure a tooth-
ache; but their living memory may produce one miracle—your
emancipation.”
This shows how infamously and vilely Herzen is being
slandered by our liberals entrenched in the slavish “legal”
press, who magnify Herzen’s weak points and say nothing
about his strong points. It was not Herzen’s fault but his
misfortune that he could not see the revolutionary people
in Russia itself in the 1840s. When in the sixties he came to
see the revolutionary people, he sided fearlessly with the
revolutionary democracy against liberalism. He fought for a