A Herzen Reader

46. Journalists and Terrorists [1862]

Journalists and Terrorists 167  46  The Bell, No. 141, August 15, 1862. Herzen develops ideas previously raised in “The Cannon Fodder of Liberation” (Doc. 42). He retains some faint hope that the tsarist regime can distance itself from the support of the elite and meet more of the people’s needs, and that socialism can be achieved through a nonviolent process. Ivan Aksakov wrote a response to the ideas expressed in “Journalists and Terrorists,” but its publication in The Day was blocked by the censorship (Let 3:436).  Journalists and Terrorists [1862] [. . .] One of the oddest of all the oddities in the war being waged against us is that “Aging Russia” accuses us of a thirst for explosions, violent revolutions , terrorist impulses, and just about accuses us of arson, and, at the same time, “Young Russia” scolds us for having lost our revolutionary fervor and for having lost “all faith in violent revolutions.” Until unforeseen circumstances change, we will not answer “Aging Russia .” What could you use to convince people who talk about chair à canon1 after “the sacrificial offerings to liberation”? What can you say to people, who naively declare that if we were to scold those people and learn to love these ones, that everything would be fine? What can be done about the fact that an impertinent child who throws a stone at a street lamp is less repulsive to us than the self-satisfied lymphatic bedbug who reprimands him. Why do we address “Young Russia”? They think that “we have lost all faith in violent revolutions.” We have not lost our faith in them, but our love for them. Violent revolutions can be unavoidable, and maybe that is how it will be with us; it is a desperate measure, the ultima ratio2 of peoples and of tsars, and one must be ready for this, but to call for it at the beginning of the working day, not having made a single effort, not having exhausted any means, to settle on this seems to us as juvenile and immature as it is improvident and harmful to use it as a threat. Those who are familiar with the maturing of ideas and expressions will recognize in the bloody words of “Young Russia” the age of the people saying them. Revolutionary terror with its threatening atmosphere and its scaffolds appeals to the young, the way that the terror in fairy tales with their sorcerers and monsters appeals to children. 168 A Herzen Reader Terror is easy and quick, much easier than labor [. . .] it liberates through despotism and convinces by means of the guillotine. Terror gives free rein to the passions, cleansing them by means of the common good and the absence of individual views. That’s why it appeals to more people than does self-restraint on behalf of the cause. [. . .] We long ago ceased to love either chalice full of blood, both the civil and the military, and in like manner do not wish to drink from the skull of our enemies in battle, nor see the head of the Duchess of Lamballe on a pike3 … Whatever blood is flowing, tears are flowing somewhere, and if sometimes it is necessary to cross this threshold, then let it be done without bloodthirsty mockery, but with a melancholy, anxious feeling of a terrible duty and a tragic necessity. Moreover, the May of death, like the May of life, flowers only once und nicht wieder.4 The terror of the nineties will not be repeated; it had a kind of naive purity of ignorance, an unconditional faith in its innocence and success , which the terror that follows it will not have. [. . .] The French Terror is possible least of all with us. The revolutionary elements in France flowed from other cities to Paris, and there they tripled in size in the clubs and the Convention, and marched with sword and axe in hand to preach philanthropic ideas and philosophical truths to every city rampart and every urban dweller, but rarely beyond that. Little bits reached the peasants, but by chance. The Revolution, like a swift stream, reached the edges of the fields and washed them away, but never lost its primarily municipal course. Decentralization is the first condition of our revolution, which is coming from the rows of grain, from the fields, from the village, and not at all toward Petersburg, where until February 19, 1861 the people received nothing but troubles and humiliations. And not toward Moscow, where alongside holy...