Aleksandr Herzen, excerpt from his Letter to Michelet
Aleksandr Gerzen (as in the Russian, generally transliterated as Herzen) was one of nineteenth-century Russia’s best-known and most forceful proponents of Westernization. Born into a wealthy noble family, Herzen honed his considerable intellectual and rhetorical skills at Moscow University. There his innate radicalism was influenced by the French Enlightenment, by German idealistic philosophy, and by utopian socialism. In self-imposed exile after 1847, Herzen entered European revolutionary circles and became a leading figure. Using his London-published newspaper Kolokol (The Bell) as a polemical platform, Herzen developed a theory of Russian socialism based on the supposed virtues of the peasant commune. This laid the ideological foundation for late nineteenth-century Russian populism. The text below is excerpted from a famous Herzen letter to the French historian Michelet. In it Herzen lays out much of his basic stance on the peasantry.
1. How does Herzen answer Michelet's presumption that French values, experience, and ideology are universal?
2. How does Herzen answer Michelet's charge that Russian peasants are a "casual rabble" prone to lying, stealing and resisting authority?
3. How does Herzen describe peasant understanding of the Tsar and of the Orthodox Church?
4. What virtues does Herzen find in the peasant commune?
22 September 1851
...
No man is bold enough or ungrateful enough to deny the importance of France in the destinies of the European world. However you must allow me a frank confession: I cannot share your view that the participation of France is the sine qua non of historical progress. Nature never stakes all her fortune on one card. Rome, the eternal city -- which had no less right to the hegemony of the world -- tottered, fell into ruins, and vanished, while pitiless humanity walked over its grave.
On the other hand, unless one regards nature as madness incarnate, it is hard to call a people that has grown and spread out for ten centuries, has obstinately preserved its nationality, formed itself into an immense empire, and intervened in history far more than it perhaps should have label an "outcast race"; a "vast deception"; and "a casual rabble, human only through its vices."
What makes such a view all the more difficult to accept is the fact that this people, even according to its enemies, is far from being in a stagnant condition. It is not a race that has attained social forms roughly corresponding to its desires and has sunk into slumber in them, like the Chinese. Still less is it a people that has outlived its prime and is wasting away in senile impotence, like the people of India. On the contrary, Russia is quite a new state. It is an unfinished structure in which everything smells of fresh plaster, in which everything is at work and being worked out, in which nothing has yet attained its object, and in which everything is changing (often for the worse, but changing nonetheless). In brief, this is the people whose fundamental principle, to quote your opinion, is communism, and whose strength lies in the redistribution of the land....
With what crime, after all, do you charge the Russian people? What does your accusation rest on?
"The Russian," you say, "is a liar and a thief; he is perpetually stealing, lying - quite innocently, too, because this is in his nature."
Disregarding the sweeping character of your verdict, let me ask you a simple question. Who does the Russian deceive? Who does he steal from? Obviously, the landowner, the government official, the steward, and the police officer -- in fact, the sworn foes of the peasant, whom he regards as ungodly strangers, apostates, and half-Germans. Deprived of every means of defense, the peasant resorts to cunning in dealing with his oppressors. He deceives them, and he is perfectly justified in doing so.
My dear sir: in the words of the great thinker, "cunning is the irony of brute force."
Through his aversion for private landowning so correctly noted by you, through his heedless and indolent temperament, the Russian peasant gradually and imperceptibly has been enmeshed by German bureaucracy and by the landowner's power. He has submitted to this degrading yoke with a passivity born of despair, but he never recognized the rights of the landlords, or of the law-courts, or the equity of the executive power. For nearly two hundred years the peasant has lived in mute opposition to the existing scheme of things. He submits to coercion, and suffers in silence, but reveals no concern for anything that goes on outside the village commune.
The name of the Tsar stirs a superstitious feeling in the people. It is not, however, to Tsar Nicholas that the peasant does homage, but to the abstract idea, the myth. In popular imagination the Tsar stands for a menacing avenger, an incarnation of truth, an earthly providence. Besides the Tsar, only the clergy could possibly have an influence on Orthodox Russia. In the realm of governance it alone represents old Russia. The clergy does not shave its beards, and by observing that ancient custom has remained true to the people. Common people believe in the monks. But the monks and the higher clergy, preoccupied solely with the afterlife, care nothing for the people. Meanwhile the village priests have lost all their influence through their greed, drunkenness, and close relations with the police. In their case, too, the peasants respect the idea but not the person.
As for the religious dissenters, they hate both person and idea, both Tsar and priest.
Apart from the Tsar and the clergy, every element of government and society is utterly alien and essentially antagonistic to the people. The peasant is literally an outlaw. The law-court affords him no protection. His share in the existing order of things is entirely confined to the twofold tribute that lies heavy upon him, and is paid in his toil and his blood. A veritable outcast, he has instinctively realized that the whole system is built up not for his benefit, but to his detriment, and that the aim of the government and the landowners is to wring out of him as much labor, money, and recruits as possible. Since he understands this and is gifted with a flexible and resourceful mind, he deceives them wherever and whenever he can. It could not be otherwise. If he spoke the truth, he would thereby be recognizing their authority over him. If he did not steal from them (mark you that to conceal part of the produce of his own labor is considered theft in a peasant) he would thereby be recognizing the lawfulness of their demands, the rights of the landowners, and the justice of the law-courts.
To fully appreciate the Russian peasant's position, you should see him in the law-courts. Look at his hopeless face, his frightened and searching glance, and you will understand that he is a prisoner of war before the court-martial, a traveler facing a gang of brigands. A single glance shows plainly that the victim has not the slightest faith in the hostile, pitiless, insatiable robbers who are questioning him, tormenting him, and fleecing him. He knows that if he has money he will be acquitted. If not, he will be found guilty.
The Russian people speak their own old language. The judges and the attorneys write in a new bureaucratic jargon, one that is hideous and barely intelligible. They fill whole notebooks with forensic flummery, and then babble it to the peasant. Let those who can, understand it. Let those who know how to find their way out of the muddle do so. The peasant sees through them and is on his guard. He will not say one word too much, and stands silent, concealing his uneasiness and pretending to be a fool.
The peasant who has been acquitted by the court trudges home, no more elated than if he had been condemned. In either case the decision seems to him arbitrary or accidental.
In the same way, when summoned as a witness he stubbornly pleads ignorance, even if confronted with incontestable evidence. Being found guilty by a law-court does not disgrace a man in the eyes of the Russian peasant. He regards exiles and convicts merely as unfortunate people. The life of the Russian peasantry has hitherto been confined to the village commune. It is only in relation to the commune and its members that the peasant recognizes his rights and duties. Outside the commune, everything to him seems based upon violence. What is fatal is his submission to that violence, not his refusal in his own way to recognize it and his attempt to protect himself by guile. Lying to a judge set over him by unlawful authority is far more straightforward than a hypocritical show of respect for the verdict of a jury tampered with by a corrupt prefect. The peasant respects only those institutions coinciding with his innate conception of law and right.
No one who has been in close contact with the Russian peasantry can doubt one fact: peasants rarely cheat each other. Their trust in each other is almost boundless. They know nothing of contracts and written agreements.
The problems connected with surveying their fields are necessarily complicated owing to the periodic redistribution of the land in accordance with the number of taxpayers in the family. Even so, the work is carried through without complaint or resort to the law-courts. The landowners and the government eagerly seek opportunities for interference, but in vain. Petty disputes are submitted to the judgment of the elders of the commune or the commune assembly. Their decisions are accepted unconditionally by everyone. The same is true of the artels. The artels are often made up of several hundred workmen, who form a cooperative for a definite period (for instance, for a year). At the end of the year, the workmen divide their earnings by common agreement, in accordance with the work done by each. The police never get the satisfaction of meddling in their accounts. As a rule, the artel makes itself responsible for every one of its members.
The bonds between the peasants of the commune are even closer when the peasants are not Orthodox but religious dissenters. From time to time the government makes a savage raid on some dissenting village. Peasants are put into prison and sent into exile, all of it done without rhyme, reason, need, or provocation, solely to satisfy the clergy and keep the police busy. It is during these hunts for heretics that the true character of the Russian peasants -- the solidarity existing among them -- is displayed. At such times it is worth seeing them tricking the police, saving their comrades, and concealing their holy books and vessels. They endure the most awful tortures without uttering a word. I challenge anyone to bring forward a single case in which a commune of dissenters has been betrayed by a peasant, even by an orthodox one.
The peculiarity of the Russian character makes police inquiries exceedingly difficult. I can only heartily rejoice at the fact. The Russian peasant has no morality except that which naturally, instinctively derives from his communism. This morality is deeply rooted in the people. The little they know of the Gospel supports it. The flagrant injustice of the landowner binds the peasant still more closely to his principles and to the communal system.
The commune has saved the Russian people from Mongol barbarism and imperial civilization, from the Europeanized landlords and the German bureaucracy. The communal system, though shattered, has withstood the interference of the authorities. It has successfully survived to see the development of socialism in Europe.
This circumstance is of infinite importance to Russia....
Original translation excerpted from Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), pp. 470-501. Revised (syntax clarifications, repunctuation, spelling changes, etc.) by Jon Bone.