Alexander
Herzen,
the illegitimate son of Ivan Iakovlev, a wealthy member of the nobility,
was born in Moscow, Russia, on 25th March, 1812. His father paid for
him to have an expensive education. However, he did not obtain the
conservative views of the ruling class and instead developed a deep
sympathy for the peasants and became
an advocate of social reform.
Herzen's
outspoken views on the need to bring an end to serfdom
and autocratic rule resulted in him being arrested and sent into internal
exile. In 1834 he was forced to work as a government official in Vyatka
and Vladimir. After criticizing the police he was sentenced to two
years exile in Novogorod.
In 1842
Herzen returned to Moscow and immediately joined those campaigning
for reform. His wide-reading had radicalized him and he was now a
supporter of the anarchist-socialism
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
After receiving
a large inheritance from his father, Herzen decided to leave Russia.
He arrived in Paris in 1846 and witnessed the political struggles
that resulted in the 1848 Revolution. His commentary on the failed
European revolutions, From the Other Shore,
was published in 1850.
In 1852
Herzen moved to London.
The accession of Alexander II in 1855
gave Herzen hope that reform would take place in Russia and he established
the Free Russian Press that published a series of journals including
The Polar Star, Voices
from Russia and The Bell.
In The
Bell Herzen predicted that because of its backward economy,
socialism would be introduced into Russia before any other European
country. "What can be accomplished only by a series of cataclysms
in the West can develop in Russia out of existing conditions."
Herzen
believed that the peasants in Russia could become a revolutionary
force and after the overthrow of the nobility would create a socialist
society. This included the vision of peasants living in small village
communes where the land was periodically redistributed among individual
households along egalitarian lines.
Herzen
was joined in England by Mikhail Bakunin.
The two men worked together on the journal, The
Bell, until 1863 when Bakunin went to join the insurrection
in Poland.
The
Bell was smuggled into Russia where it was distributed
to those who favoured reform. However, the views expressed in the
newspaper appeared fairly conservative to those embracing the ideas
of revolutionary groups such as the People's Will
and the Liberation of Labour. Herzen
criticized the desire to impose a new system on the people arguing
that the time had come to stop "taking the people for clay and
ourselves for sculptors".
After
the decline in popularity of The Bell,
Herzen devoted his energies to My Past and
Thoughts (1867). The book was a mixture of autobiography
and an analysis of the social, political and ideological developments
that had taken place during his life. Alexander
Herzen
died
in Paris on 9th January, 1870.
(1)
In 1858 Alexander Herzen was attacked by Nikolai
Chernyshevsky for his failure to support acts of terrorism in
Russia. He gave his reply in The Bell (1858)
We will not call for the axe as the ultima ratio
so long as there remains one vestige of reasonable hope for a solution
without the axe. The further I look into the western world, into the
chain of events which brought Europe to us Russians, the more there
arises in me a disgust for all bloody revolutions.
(2)
Alexander Herzen, The Bell (1865)
Social
progress is possible only under complete republican freedom, under
full democratic equality. A republic that would not lead to Socialism
seems an absurdity to us - a transitional stage regarding itself as
the goal. On the other hand, Socialism which might try to dispense
with political freedom would rapidly degenerate into an autocratic
Communism.
(3)
Alexander Herzen wrote about the use of violence to obtain
political reform in an article published in 1867.
Violence
and terror are employed to spread religious and political creeds,
to establish autocratic empires and indivisible republics. But force
can merely destroy and clear the place - no more. With the methods
of Peter the Great the social revolution will never attain beyond
the slave-labour equality of Gracchus and Babeuf and the Communist
serfdom of Cabet.
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