One couldn’t say that the 200^th anniversary of Alexander Herzen’s birth was met with great fanfare. The television network Kultura, Novaya Gazeta, Gazeta.Ru, OpenSpace, and Echo Moskvy radio all honored Herzen on this occasion, giving the classic Russian author and the founder of the famous Kolokol (The Bell) journal his due. However, when mainstream state-controlled television attempted to turn the anniversary into an occasion to put Herzen on trial, so to speak, which was, of course, to be expected, Alexander Ivanovich's defenders were nowhere to be seen—neither on TV nor, as far as I can tell, in the blogosphere. I would like to take on this role.

It’s not hard to understand where the prosecutors of mainstream television are coming from: to them, Herzen had two grave, if not fatal, flaws. Not only was he a liberal, but he also couldn’t stand the imperial nationalists or gosudarstvenniki (defenders of the state), as they preferred to be called. If for today’s gosudarstvenniki, liberalism is tantamount to treason (Maxim Shevchenko even called it “a cancerous tumor on the body of the nation”), then an attack on the unity of the empire is downright iconoclasm. If the empire, like power itself, is sacred to the gosudarstvenniki, then breaking up the empire is sacrilege and equivalent to the “dissolution of the nation.” The Poland of Herzen’s day is the same as Ukraine today. In fact, it is the contemporary gosudarstvennki’s conviction that the latter situation is temporary and can be fixed.

And what of Herzen? He put human dignity before the interests of the state (which is what, according to Shevchenko, makes Herzen like a “cancerous tumor”), had no respect for the government, spoke ill of the unity of the empire… From this perspective, our classic author could have easily been the inspiration for Bolotnaya Square's so-called New Decembrists. But he wasn't—the liberal memory is short.

The people behind the wheel understand that the anti-authoritarian attitudes of these New Decembrists do not bode well. In the Kremlin and on state-controlled television they are afraid: what if someone reminded Moscow protesters of their remarkable descent from Herzen and his Kolokol? No, it would be better to discredit Herzen preemptively. If, as Novaya Gazeta's Slava Taroschina so accurately pointed out, "for every Bolotnaya we have a Poklonnaya," [Poklonnaya Hill, site of a recent pro-Putin rally—Ed.] why wouldn't today's gosudarstvenniki beat the New Decembrists to the punch? Why wouldn't they try to hold a Poklonnaya before a Bolotnaya could ever happen?

This must be how the gosudarstvenniki and the people on television have been thinking. Dmitry Kiselev, a host on the Russia-1 channel, aired a show on Herzen's birthday entiteld "Our barbarism in our foreign intelligensia." The title comes from Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, the editor and publisher of Moskovskiye Vedomosti, and perhaps the most strident of Herzen's persecutors. We have our exemplary gosudarstvennik in Katkov, and in his representative Kiselev, acting as the chief witness in Herzen's contemporary trial. And finally, we have our war between the "patriots of Poklonnaya" and the "foreign intelligentsia" of Bolotnaya.

One show on the subject did not seem like enough for Kiselev, and he continued Herzen's trial on the program "Historical Process," where that same Shevchenko (diehard proponent of "patriotism") addressed Katkov's language directly to his contemporaries, saying, "You don't give a damn about what the Russian people think. You don't like your country's history, hatred for your country runs in your blood." This is very close to how Katkov characterized Herzen's relationship to "ordinary, ignorant Russians."

Let us get to the bottom of who Herzen was, and who was right in the argument between him and Katkov. If we rely on facts, it will be much easier to understand and judge the arguments. Here are the facts.

 

The All-Russian Inspector General

By the third year of the Great Reform period, Alexander Herzen  had almost attained the status of a political figure, if not actual power, in Russia. This may seem like an exagerration, but judging by what was written to and about him at that time, it's not a great exagerration. "You are the moving force, you hold the power in the Russian state," wrote his opponent B.N. Chicherin in an open letter. His friends who sympathized with his beliefs did not hide their admiration, either, "Kolokol is the conscience the government can't have and the public opinion that it scorns. Your articles start court cases surrounding long-buried crimes. Kolokol poses a threat to the regime. What will they write in the Kolokol? What will the Kolokol think of this? These are the questions everybody asks themselves, and this is the response that frightens officials of every rank."

 

In 1852, Alexander Herzen moved to London, where he started the Free Russian Press, and began publishing the Kolokol magazine

 

Letters printed in Kolokol had the power of ruining administrative careers, shattering gubernatorial seats. The government couldn't recover from its amazement when reports on secret meetings appeared in Kolokol before they even had a chance to reach the Tsar. Although, what was so amazing about that? All of honest Russia, all of the Bolotnaya, if you will, Russia of the time helped Herzen. Everyone understood that he had taken on an enormous burden—to cleanse Russia of inveterate filthy corruption. And since the fish rots from the head down, he had to begin with the Gogolian sheriffs and high-ranked bureaucratic gangsters.

For example, an article called "The Imperial Office and Muravyev-Amursky" exposed a large-scale fraud at the Nerchinsk gold mines that involved the highest rank officials, and documents that were so secret, the Governor-General himself was suspected of being the one who sent them to Herzen. The article concluded on a thundering admonition aimed at the Tsar: “Your Imperial Magesty’s ministers are worthless, thieving bastards.” Finally, a real Inspector General was found among the Russians!

Naturally, not everyone in Russia was happy about this situation. First among them were the municipal officials and gosudarstvenniki working alongside M.N. Katkov. Show me an official and gosudarstvennik who can stand a man who doesn’t mind taking out the trash—and airing it out in public, at that! That son-of-a-bitch is embarrassing the Empire! By calling the Emperial ministers thieving bastards he “undermines the very foundations of our system of government!” In other words, he blasphemes.

At the same time, they couldn’t deny Herzen’s authority. And how could they, considering that, in their own words, “military and civil officials alike, including ones at the very top, quake in fear of him”? His enemies could disparage him, call him the “dark force” and the “liberal goon,” but no matter what they said, the people’s sympathies were unanimously with the liberal Herzen and not the exemplary gosudarstvennik Katkov. Something very unusual would have had to happen in Russia in order for Katkov to win the debate. And it did, in 1863: to the great misfortune of Herzen and Russia, and to the great joy of the officials, who made it out unharmed.

 

The Warsaw Massacre

On February 27, 1861 Russian Imperial troops opened fire on a rather peaceful and even celebratory demonstration attended by thousands—a kind of Warsaw Bolotnaya. The demonstrators' demands were more than innocent (from the point of view of the Poles, of course): they called for amensty for their political prisoners and the re-opening of the university in Warsaw.

The shots were fired into the crowd without warning. Hundreds were injured, and five were left lying dead on the square, among them, children, gymnasium students. No official apologies were issued following the incident. "The bullets aimed at children, at crucifixes, and ladies," Herzen recounted, "The bullets aimed at hymns and prayers silenced all questions, erased all differences. With tears in my eyes, crying, I wrote a series of articles that the Polish found very touching." When he wrote this, Herzen did not know that these were the articles that would decide his fate in Russia.

Herzen was not the only one outraged at the events in Warsaw: Russian officer Baron Korf shot himself in the forehead out of shame for his colleagues, and on June 7, 1862, another Russian officer, A. A. Potebnya, write to Kolokol in the name of a large number of soldiers from the Warsaw division, saying that "the events of every day bring us closer to either becoming the butchers of Poland, or rising up with her. We don't want to be butchers." Meanwhile, the uprising was growing imminent, and the unvindicated victims of the February 27th shooting became its martyrs.

Unfortunately, when on January 22, 1863 the Polish rose up against the empire with weapons in their hands, Russia neither agreed with the officers of the Warsaw division, nor with Herzen. On the fateful morning of January 23, Russia woke up a new country. It was no longer concerned with fighting the "worthless and theiving bastard," who'd robbed the empire—it had more pressing problems. Russia now directed its ire at the insurgents threatening the unity of the Empire, the property of that very same "bastard." In the face of the "country's collapse," which is how the Polish uprising was presented in the official press, Russia suddenly found itself siding with the municipal administrators and Katkov.

Patriotic Hysteria

Since 1806, when the Russian army suffered crushing defeats at Austerlitz and Friedland, Russia has periodically been overcome with sudden hysterical fits of hatred for the West.

To start, the Orthodox Church anathemized Napoleon, calling him the Antichrist. Great ladies started showing up to balls in kokoshniki, traditional Russian headpieces; in drawing rooms, the belle monde would charge one another fines for speaking French. However, at the time, the patriotic hysteria was of a harmless nature, and was for the most part limited to high society.

The first signs of it evolving into a national phenomenon came in 1831, during the previous Polish uprising (recall Pushkin's "To the Slanderers of Russia") and in 1853, on the eve of the Crimean War. This mass hysteria is reminiscent of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate from 1984. The difference being that in 1863, the mass hysteria lasted not two minutes, but 18 months—that's how long it took the 200,000 strong Russian army to drown the Polish partisans in their own blood. In terms of both duration and scope, the frenzy was without precedent—nothing like that happened in 1806, or 1831, or 1853 (but since then, it has been repeated, and more than once).

Countless loyalist petitions were addressed to the Tsar from landowners' meetings and municipal dumas, from the clergy and the bureaucratic circles, from gymnasium and university students, peasants and Old Believers, all demaning a ruthless assault on the Poles. Everywhere, people prayed for the victory of the Russian army.

What can be said on this count? For decades, Russian minds had ripened the imperial nationalism of Nicholas I of Russia with its Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. The harvest was terrible. As Herzen reported in his Kolokol, "The aristocracy, the liberals, the writers, the scientists, and even the students all, without exception, have turned out infected: The syphilis of imperial patriotism had seeped into their flesh and blood." Let us recall poet Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev's ominous verses:

В крови до пят мы бьемся с мертвецами,
Воскресшыми для новых похорон.

Covered in blood from head to toe, we battle with the dead,
Who have risen again to be reburied.

The dead here are the Poles. The threat to "bury them" this time, forever, so they will not rise again, was no joke. Life and death were the very terms in which Katkov formulated the ideology of hysterical patriotism, writing, "Between these brother-nations, history has posed the fatal question of life and death. These states are not mere competitors, they are enemies, that cannot exist side by side, foes to the bitter end." As it turned out, the Tsar Liberator Alexander II had taken on this very task.

 

"The Annihilation of an Entire People"

So what did Herzen do in this situation, as yesterday's most powerful political thinker, overnight transformed into an outcast (is a more radical turn possible)? At first, believing there was some sort of misunderstanding, that Russia would not chose to be the executioner of its brothers, fellow Slavs, in shock, he tried to change his readers' minds: "Why shouldn't we live alongside Poland like free men neighboring free men, like equals next to equals? Why do we need to enslave them? What makes us better than them?"

 

 

After series of patriotic riots, the Russian namestnik of Tsar Alexander II, General Karl Lambert, introduced martial law in Poland on 14 October 1861. Public gatherings were banned and some public leaders made outlaws.

 

Alas, beginning on January 23, 1863, Herzen found himself in a completely different, unfamiliar Katkovian Russia. Herzen did not lay down his arms, however: "We will not stand by the annihilation of an entire people in silence." He simply could not keep silent, while right before his eyes, in complete accordance with Katkov's writ, there was quite literally an "annihilation of an entire people" going on.

Polish was forbidden in Poland. Conversations in Polish at school, even during breaks (classes were conducted entirely in Russian), were treated as criminal offenses. The national church was dissolved: monasteries shuttered, bishops fired. Even the very word 'Poland' was to disappear, to henceforth be referred to as Privislinsky Krai.

Nikolai I had already dismantled all institutions and symbols of Polish statehood in 1831. Alexander II had thought up something even scarier. As it became apparent, he was aiming at the very foundations of the national culture—the language and the faith. This time, the "dead" were to never rise again. Even Nikolai hadn't dared attempt this. But the Tsar Liberator showed no restraint. This this the example of what imperial nationalism can look like at the peak of patriotic hysteria–even in one of the most progressive periods in Russian history.

 

A Traitor to the Fatherland

From a letter written by one of Alexander Herzen's contemporaries: "Kolokol has suddenly ceased to be influential, and indeed, is nearly irrelevant." Moskovskie vedomosti loudly proclaimed to the nation that Herzen was a traitor, citing his "traitorous" articles on the Warsaw massacre. Herzen's reply is famous, "If our call finds no sympathizers, if not a single ray of reason can penetrate into this dark night and not a single sobering word can be heard over the patriotic orgy, we stand alone in our dissent, we do not rescind it. We will continue to to repeat our beliefs to serve as testaments to the fact that in times of a nearly universal intoxication with narrow-minded patriotism, there were still some who found the strength to object to a rotting empire in the name of an emerging Russia, who weren't afriad to be called traitors in the name of their love for the Russian people."

 

These were proud words, only there was no sense in repeating them. Contemporaries no longer heard Herzen, having turned their attention to Katkov. "The people are ordinary and ignorant. But they are Russian people, and they have heard the voice of their Fatherland. They pray for the souls of the Russian soldiers fallen in battle with the Polish insurgents. They pray for the blessed success of Russian army!" Katkov wrote.

Here is a question inspired by the heirs of Katkov in Russia today (after all, it is his words that are repeated in conversations about "the ordinary, ignorant Russian people" who are not understood by "our foreign intelligensia"): who was in the right in this historic feud? Katkov with his incendiary and unfulfilled prophecy that Russia and Poland cannot exist side by side? Or was it Herzen, who had foreseen the collapse of the "rotting Russian Empire"? Herzen's prophecy came true 120 years after his death, while Katkov's never did.

Indeed, the idealogue behind hysterical patriotism, Katkov, kicked at his diminished enemy with all his might. But he is not the one remembered today (and if he's remembered, it is with shame). It wasn't Katkov who had saved the country's honor. It was Herzen, whose 200th birthday was commemorated in Russia, albeit without recalling his life's drammatic turn.

What's left is reminding the New Decembrists the lessons they can learn from Herzen's story. It's not by accident that Katkov was dragged to the forefront when crisis struck. And Putin's reaction to the first demonstration on Bolotnaya was no accident, either. Didn't he address those very same "ordinary, ignorant Russians" then at the Uralvagonzavod tank-building plant? And didn't they respond to the suggestion of driving a tank into the anti-Putin rally in Nizhny Tagil.

Hysterical patriotism has been treated like an authoritarian cure—all for the past 200 years. It has the power to, as Herzen unfortunately saw for himself in 1863, silence all dissent. The moral of Herzen's story is that we must not forget about this last ace up the gosudarstvenniki's sleeve, of their ability to foment, when necessary, anti-Western sentiment, and with it, to mobilize the "ordinary, ignorant Russian people." There are much fewer of them today than there were in Herzen's time, but they remain the majority.

In conclusion, a trifle, almost a joke. "How do we get to Bolotnaya?" asked on May 6th at a Moscow train station some Nashi supporters arriving from Saratov, "They say it's where the enemies of Russia can be found."