A Herzen Reader

29. Down with Birch Rods! [1860]

Five Years Later 121 enough assistants to fill all the official cracks—clerks, bureaucrat-Germans, and bureaucrat-doctrinaires. It has raised officialdom to a science and has lowered the government to the level of an office in charge of decorum. Out of gratitude they should remain with the government, like mice with a sinking ship… But we will be off on our own! April 25, 1860 Notes Source: “Za piat’ let,” Kolokol, l. 72, June 1, 1860; 14:274–78, 555–56. 1. Herzen is referring to Panin’s appointment, the exile of Unkovsky and Evropeus, and the harassment of students and professors at St. Petersburg University. 2. “Seven terrible years” refers to the reactionary period between the failed 1848 uprisings and the death of Nicholas I in 1855. 3. On “vivos voco,” see the introduction and Doc. 9. 4. French forces landed in the Crimea in 1854. 5. Russian forces were defeated near Eupatoria on February 5, 1855, news received by Nicholas I on February 14; his health took a serious turn for the worse within a few days and by February 18 he was dead. This rapid sequence of events led to rumors of suicide.  29  The Bell, No. 75, July 1, 1860. Earlier in 1860, Herzen responded to a letter from a Russian ship captain with an essay about the extraordinary importance of ending corporal punishment, a practice which offended both human dignity and natural empathy. “The great men of the 14th of December understand the importance of this so well, that members of the society undertook an obligation not to tolerate corporal punishment on their estates, and eliminated it from regiments they commanded” (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 1, 22). The article below is one of Herzen’s most direct and passionate public statements on the issue, one of the problems weighing on his mind when he established the Free Russian Press (Doc. 13). This became a cause dear to many in Russia’s emerging civil society, but not one that soon led to new laws. Almost four decades later, at one of the lively and significant Pirogov medical congresses (April 21–28, 1896, in Kiev), the former serf D. N. Zhbankov made a plea for “removing the negative factors which retarded cultural development,” including corporal punishment. Zhbankov wore a peasant blouse, even to the Pirogov Society dinners, in order to call attention to the peasants’ situation (Frieden, Russian Physicians, 191).  122 A Herzen Reader Down with Birch Rods! [1860] We would like to make a very simple and possible proposal to the educated minority of the gentry—a proposal carrying with it neither responsibility nor danger. We propose that they set up a union to ban corporal punishment The degree of education of this minority, its conduct on the provincial committees, its maturity as expressed in a desire for self-governance—all this is incompatible with the savage beating and lashing of serfs. In times of backwardness and patriarchal brutality, the conscience of the person meting out the punishment was to a certain degree clear; he believed that this was not only his right but thought that it was his duty. No one believes that now, and now everyone knows that punishment without a trial—based on personal views—is a selfish application of the rights of the stronger person and is the same kind of torment as the lashing of a horse. Serfs in the field and the house are beaten exclusively and naturally for financial advantage and for petty convenience. The government cannot and will not hinder such a negative union… The government does not impose on gentry the obligation to lash their serfs. It simply allows this and helps in a fatherly way. [. . .] Let landowners think that flogging will not be around for long, and, following the awkwardness of the transitional state, one must, against one’s will, part company with the rod… is it not better to give it up voluntarily? To cast off the rod like the French nobility threw their feudal charters into the fire on August 4th?1 It is noble to reject the right to flog in light of the Cherkassky party and Samarin and Milyutin who are united with Cherkassky.2 And, really, what would the government take you for, thinking that you demand human rights for yourself and also want to flog without a trial, and this at a time when the government itself is beginning to limit beating in...