A Herzen Reader

98. The Shot of June 6 [1867]

332 A Herzen Reader The Right to Congregate—New Restrictions [1867] We received this from Petersburg: Why have you omitted the outrageous measures that have placed every sort of gathering under police surveillance? According to the new law, not only secret political and non-political meetings are considered “illegal,” but in general any kind of meeting with any sort of goal that does not receive preliminary permission. The police are ordered to seek out criminal societies everywhere, harsh punishments are set for participants, and, finally, there is a promise of forgiveness and all kinds of leniency for informers. Only that? Isn’t there any payment, by the number of societies, or per person? All this is vile, all this is pure Valuev and genuine Shuvalov, so why is the correspondent surprised? Don’t these measures belong to a series of vile measures from the past five years? And before that did we really have some kind of right of assembly—droit de reunion?... Enough! Notes Source: “Pravo sobirat’sia—novye stesneniia,” Kolokol, l. 242, June 1, 1867; 19:265, 469.  98  The Bell, No. 243, June 15, 1867. A Polish émigré, Anton Berezovsky, a veteran of the 1863 uprising against Russian rule, took a shot at Alexander II in Paris on June 6, 1867, a crime for which he was given a life sentence by the French courts. Herzen delayed a trip to Nice to respond in print to this new assassination attempt. He wrote to a friend that “my head is spinning—news, gossip, bullets, tsars, horses—but I have to keep my wits about me and write” (Let 4:419). He was likely unaware that the tsar’s young mistress , Katya Dolgorukaya, had also traveled to Paris and that Alexander II ignored considerations of safety to secretly visit her. Herzen’s disapproval of Karakozov’s attempt the previous year to kill the tsar damaged the writer’s relations with young Russian revolutionaries abroad, but he did not waver in his rejection of such acts of individual terror which only led to further repression, and he believed that his views would be better understood in the future.  The Shot of June 6 333 The Shot of June 6 [1867] Once more a shot rings out. We will not go on about it at great length. Our opinion about people who take such a path is well known, and neither the howl of crazy loudmouths,1 nor abuse by the powerful of this world will cause us to extol this type of attempt, which brings with it terrible calamities , nor to pronounce words of judgement on the martyrs who condemn themselves to death and whose conscience is clear for the very reason that they are fanatics. It goes without saying that the June 6 shot will exert no influence on the spirit of our publication. Our convictions were formed a long time ago, and no chance event can bend them to the right or to the left. There is a great lesson for Russia in this. Berezovsky will be judged in open court, not in a secret torture chamber the way Karakozov was judged, and he will be tried by judges, not by specially selected generals. The first investigator, looking at the poor-quality pistol Berezovsky used, noted that in all likelihood, he had no accomplices.2 Hundreds of young people were brought into the Karakozov case, although their innocence was known. Just the mention by Limayrac in Le Constitutionnel about a moral connection between the shot and cries of “Long live Poland!” provoked a cry of disapproval not only in liberal journals but in those with a monarchist or religious point of view.3 In closing, we turn our readers’ attention to Shuvalov’s police trickery, in asking Berezovsky whether he had corresponded with his father.4 That is, he tried to entangle relatives, acquaintances, their relatives and their acquaintances —in both Poland and Russia—in this business, which so clearly stood on its own! This should be a genuine cause for contemplation. Notes Source: “Vystrel 6 iiunia,” Kolokol, l. 243, June 15, 1867; 19:269, 472–74. 1. Herzen had received anonymous letters of abuse after his article “Irkutsk and Petersburg ” (Doc. 80). 2. The accused had pawned his coat in order to purchase this cheap weapon, which wound up injuring him instead of the tsar. 3. Paulin Limayrac, the chief editor of the newspaper, made note of pro-Polish demonstrators in Paris during the days leading...