A Herzen Reader

32. Friends and Comrades! [1861]

128 A Herzen Reader  32  This pamphlet was printed, but never distributed. Herzen awaited the imminent announcement about the serfs’ fate with keen anticipation and regret that he could not be in Moscow himself (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 1, 139–40). This is the speech, dated March 24, that Herzen intended to give at an April 10, 1861, celebration of the emancipation in his London home, to which Russians in London and other sympathizers were invited. Part of the evening’s festivities would be the premier performance of Prince Yury Golitsyn’s “Fantasia on the Emancipation” (Let 3:198, 217). Herzen reminds his audience that reaching this milestone has been the primary focus of his life’s work. Herzen’s speech was to be published immediately afterward in The Bell, with a French translation to be placed in Parisian newspapers, but it was never given. On the day of the celebration, he received news from a Polish colleague at the Russian printing house in London that Russian troops had once more attacked a peaceful demonstration in Warsaw . It was now unthinkable to offer a toast in honor of the tsar who permitted this attack (on March 27 [April 8]). During an evening that he later described as more “like a funeral ” he did offer a brief toast to Russia’s success, prosperity, and further development (Let 3:198). One memoir account says that prepared copies of the speech in Russian, Polish , English, and French were thrown into the fire instead of being distributed to guests, but Herzen’s handwritten copy was preserved (Literaturnoe Nasledtsvo, 63:59–70).  Friends and Comrades! [1861] Today we have stepped away from our printing press for the free Russian word in order to celebrate in a fraternal manner the beginning of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. You know what this emancipation means for us. In the emancipation of the serfs with land lies the entire future of a Rus that is not autocratic, manor-house, aggressive, Moscow-Tatar, not PetersburgGerman , but national, communal—and free! The first word from our printing house was a word about St. George’s Day. The first booklet issued by it was about baptized property. The Polestar and The Bell set as their motto: the liberation of the serfs and of the word! And now its beginning has been declared—timidly, with equivocations— but declared! Events have undergone major changes since we printed the first issues in 1853. Everything around us was gloomy and hopeless. An oppressive orgy of reaction reached the final stage, it was time to give up the struggle, but we began a strange kind of work, sowing, on the stony debris of foreign Friends and Comrades! 129 ruins, seeds meant for the far-off homeland from which we were cut off. What did we hope for? I don’t know, and I will speak just for myself— whether it was because I was not then in Russia and did not experience the direct effect of arbitrary rule or for another reason—but I believed in Russia at a time when everyone had doubts! Much water has flowed under the bridge since that time. I turn to those who witnessed our beginning and ask you to think about anyone who had said in 1853 that in eight years we would be gathering at a friendly feast and that the hero of that feast would be the Russian tsar! You would have thought that such a person was crazy or worse… For my part I frankly confess that such a thing never entered my head. Fortunately, gentlemen, none of us are guilty—there is only one guilty party, the man himself. For giving him credit I will be scolded by revolutionary ascetics and rigorous thinkers—I have been scolded for many things I have said. But if I expressed my opinion when for that you could be imprisoned and exiled to Vyatka, if I was not afraid of irritating the haughty aristocratic spirit of a decrepit and self-satisfied civilization, then why would I stop at the opposite prejudices? It is all the easier for me to acknowledge Alexander II’s great deed because that acknowledgment is a guarantee of our sincerity, and we need people’s confidence, as much confidence as possible! The February 19 manifesto is a milestone; the whole road still lies ahead, and the mail is in the hands of the most savage Tatar coachmen and German riding...