A Herzen Reader

69. To Our Readers [1865]

238 A Herzen Reader Notes Source: “Pis’mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru II,” Kolokol, l. 197, May 25, 1865; 18:337–41, 622–23. 1. Nikolay Alexandrovich died on April 12, 1865, in Nice at age twenty-two from meningitis . His brother Alexander, who succeeded him as heir, was rumored to be of limited intelligence. 2. Dated March 10, 1855, on the occasion of Alexander II’s ascension to the throne, and calling for a free press, and land and freedom for the Russian peasants. See Doc. 5. 3. A fire broke out in St. Petersburg’s Apraksin Dvor on May 28, 1862, destroying hundreds of stalls in the flea market. This and other fires in 1862 were blamed on revolutionary youth. 4. A number of revolutionary pamphlets, including “Young Russia,” were secretly printed and distributed in St. Petersburg between 1861 and 1863. (See Doc. 45) 5. Anton Petrov was shot in April 1861 for spreading word of a different emancipation document among peasants and leading an uprising in Bezdna; Arngoldt, Slivitsky, and Rostkovsky were executed in June 1862 for propaganda among soldiers; in August 1863 a military court in Nizhny condemned a man on suspicion of robbery; in Kiev a Jewish soldier was killed for ripping off an officer’s shoulder straps in a fight, and for muttering curses instead of giving answers at his trial. 6. Petr Alexeevich Martyanov (1834–1865), the freed son of a serf, made Herzen’s acquaintance in London while there on business matters; he expressed his utopian ideas to the tsar in 1862, a letter which was published in The Bell, and was arrested upon his return the following year and sentenced to hard labor and perpetual exile. Martyanov had also expounded on his theories in a pamphlet, “The People and the Government,” which was published by the Free Russian Press. Herzen wrote about Martyanov in the January 1, 1864, issue (No. 176) of The Bell. 7. Oprichniki, a term that has come into English usage, referred originally to a special administrative elite set up by Ivan the Terrible and responsible for a reign of terror in sixteenth-century Russia. D. D. Golokhvastov, in a speech to the Moscow Noble Assembly in January 1865, used the word oprichniki to characterize the highest levels of Russian government officials. 8. Paul I was killed in his new palace on the night of March 12, 1801.  69  The Bell, No. 197, May 25, 1865. After the great success of The Bell between the years 1859 and 1862, increased police activity made it more difficult to send correspondence to London and to distribute the publication in Russia. Switzerland was a stoppingoff point for Russians going to and from Italy and France and the residence of a growing number of expatriates. When the great reforms proved to be narrow and incomplete, Herzen turned his attention to finding ways to help the Russian masses voice their concerns. This issue also contained one of Herzen’s occasional theoretical articles in the form of a “letter to a traveler.” The addressee may have been Vasily To Our Readers 239 Bodisko (1826–1873), a cousin of Granovsky, who had worked in the Russian embassy in Washington.  To Our Readers [1865] We have moved our printing press to Switzerland, and from May 25 on, The Bell will be published in Geneva. Our move will not bring any internal changes to our publication. We stand on the same ground, more firmly than ever. We see no need in defining it and expressing our profession de foi on the occasion of this geographical move. The basis of our outlook has been known to you since the foundation of the first Russian free press in London. You knew them even before that, but know them even better from The Bell. For eight years it has been tolling one and the same thing; the tasks to which it summons you have changed, but the religion and the spirit have remained the same. Now it is time to call people to a Council, an egalitarian assembly of the land. Our ringing will reach someone’s ears and set people thinking about it. If we believed that it was fruitless, we would have just folded our arms. Many of our ardent, secret wishes were made flesh and came true—and if it happened awkwardly and incompletely, it still happened. Ten years ago serfdom stood firm, jealously guarded as the foundation of the empire. From Avacha1 to...