American Notebook: Alexander Herzen-Ancestor in Defeat

...But in Herzen's early life there had already been another catastrophic event of almost traumatic intensity: the revolt of the Russian officers in December, 1825, and its ferociously brutal suppression by Nicholas I. Herzen was then a boy of thirteen, and he tells in his memoirs—My Past and Thoughts—how he and his friend Ogarev went into the Sparrow Hills outside Moscow and there swore that they would devote their lives to fulfilling the ideals of the Decembrists...

...His love of Western Europe was a short-lived phenomenon which did not survive the storms of reality...

...But the ineptitudes of most of the revolutionaries in 1848 and the horror of the repression that followed the June insurrection of that year precipitated a reaction of feelings...

...Indeed, in some respects he was actually nearer to the liberal wing of the Slavophils, with their rejection of autocracy and their sense of the destiny of Rus sia, than to any of the wide array of revolutionary groups that took part in the first Russian revolution of 1905...

...For, if the radical intellectual has a second purpose beyond that of thinking creatively about the world in which he lives, it is surely that of preventing the radical mind from becoming so armoured with complacency that it loses all power of adaptability and growth...

...The whole bourgeois world blown up by gunpowder, when the smoke disperses and reveals the ruins, will start again with different variations—another bourgeois world...

...During his years in Switzerland and England he continued to live among political exiles, and from among them he chose most of his friends...

...Intellectually critical of the prejudices and follies of the men of 1848, he was still fascinated by their personalities and compassionate of their misfortunes...

...In Ehrenburg's petty world of essentially middle-class relation...

...He rejected industrialism as he saw it developing in England and other western countries, but he did not reject the idea of applying science to production, provided this application were based on "the relation of man to the soil," which he regarded as "a primordial fact, a natural fact...

...Towards the terrorism of the Narodnaya Volya, towards violent anarchism, towards Marxism, the young generation rapidly moved away from Herzen, and, except in a general way as an innovator who started the wave of intellectual rebellion in the 1850's, he did not have a great direct influence on his successors...

...t Herzen is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world through E. H. Carr's study of him and his circle, The Romantic Exiles...

...Pestel, who was executed in 1826 at the age of 33, demanded the emancipation of and the granting of land to the serfs, a progressive agricultural program, universal manhood suffrage and a democratic republic...

...For Herzen, as for his friend Proudhon and for many other radicals of the mid-nineteenth century, 1848 was the Great Divide, the line that marked off the relatively facile optimism of youth from the conflict between idealism and despair that dominated the years of maturity...

...But the aristocratic revolutionary cannot entirely be dismissed in negative terms of this kind...

...All these demands were later developed by Herzen, and the only major point on which he seems to have disagreed with Pestel is to be found in his rejection of the latter's desire that the state be centralized...

...In particular, he was indebted to Pavel Ivanovich Pestel...

...A last—and not least—reason for Herzen's enduring relevance is to be found in the elaborate documentation of the nineteenth century revolutionary personality that appears in his memoirs...

...Herzen's role in preparing the end of Tsarism in Russia belongs to history...

...He remained always anti-bourgeois, and he looked with distrust on western forms of democracy which, like de Tocqueville, he feared might end in the universal reign of mediocrity...

...the death of his father, a wealthy landowner, gave him the means to travel, and in 1847 he crossed the frontier into the western Europe...

...But Herzen never even attempted to produce a propaganda that would reach the Russian peasants (the only "masses" that existed in his time) , and his writings and the publications which he sent into Russia were all calculated to appeal to the intelligentsia and to the liberal minority in the official class and among the aristocracy...

...Herzen's Decembrism, reinforced by French socialist ideas, led him into the circles of student discussion which sprang up in the universities during the 1830's...

...A few years later he returned to Moscow, but a mild criticism of the inefficiency of the Tsarist police in preventing murders was enough to bring him a second term of exile, this time in Novgorod...

...For him, as for the best of his type today, the rejection of methods, the loss of facile optimism, the development of a realistic view of persons, did not mean the abandonment of an ideal, the rejection of a moral standpoint...

...He was a romantic in whom the antibodies of intellectual scepti cism grew steadily stronger, until, on most questions, he developed an ironic detachment such as was attained by few of his contemporaries...

...It is from the time of this last experience that the characteristic tone of bitterness, the tendency towards habitual disillusionment, became evident in Herzen's attitude...

...But even in his youth elements of resistance to this influence were present...

...Ehrenburg is tolerated precisely because his meager shows of rebellion are harmless to the existing regime and have their uses as external propaganda...

...The kind of betrayal of inner experience, the masochistic self-degradation which one encounters in men like Chambers and Koestler, and which in Herzen's day formed the less pleasant side of Dostoevsky's mental history, would have seemed too undignified and—perhaps most important—too absurd for him even to consider...

...Herzen had in fact initiated something totally new in Russian history—the publication of direct criticisms of the Tsar, and to those who read them in the fear-ridden atmosphere of Nicholas's Russia his writings seemed audacious and stimulating in the extreme...

...A mass gathering was held in London in February, 1855, to commemorate the revolutions of 1848...

...My first impulse, on comparing the shallow and timid perception which Ehrenburg directed upon his environment with the penetrating irony that characterized Herzen's criticisms of the nineteenth-century world, was to draw the comparison between the vigor of the generation of Russian intellectuals that arose in defiance of Nicholas I, and the melancholy flutters of quasi-independence on the part of presentday Russian writers, to which western liberals are inclined to attach such exaggerated importance...

...Herzen began to see the west as degenerate and without hope of revival from within, and he found in the materialism of the bourgeoisie—who in 1848 turned from revolutionism to reaction—a reason for this degeneracy...

...Herzen had his faults in plenty—his aristocratic habits and prejudices, his semi-romantic lapses from realistic thinking, his considerable vanity, his comparative ignorance of economic trends—but, even when these are taken into account, he belongs to a breed of men whose therapeutic irony and psychological penetration make them indispensable to any movement of thought that is to avoid its own conservatism, its own ossification into orthodoxy...

...Leaving their native land with concealed anger, with the continual thought of going back to it on the morrow, men make no advance, but are continually thrown back upon the past...

...Again, while he anticipated the Narodniks in their theory of a society based on a modification of the primitive peasant commune, he did not evolve any plan of direct work among the peasants comparable to the movement which led the Narodnik intellectuals to leave the cities and work in the villages in the hope of turning the peasants into the vanguard of the revolution...

...In 1847, he entered Paris "with reverence, as men used to enter Jerusalem and Rome...

...After 1848, he knew that he was never likely to return to Russia, yet he did not attempt in any real way to sever the emotional links that tied him to his past in that country...

...The foundation of the Free Russian Press was indeed very largely a sentimental gesture in the direction of his ancient ideals, of his oath to the Decembrists, and nobody was more delightedly astonished than he when the first fugitive publications of the press aroused great attention in Russia...

...For, in general, it was these former noblemen, with their more liberal educations, who were the least liable of the nineteenth-century radicals to become bogged down in parochial and doctrinaire political attitudes, and at the same time the most open to fresh and invigorating ideas...

...He regarded governmental or administrative centralization as inimical to freedom, but, though he was influenced to this extent by anarchist conceptions, he saw the complete elimination of the state as an almost infinitely reced ing possibility...

...Victor Hugo, Arnold Ruge, Kossuth and Mazzini represented their own countries, and Herzen was chosen as the Russian speaker, upon which Marx, who had also been invited, refused to have anything to do with the meeting...

...III Essentially, Herzen was neither a propagandist nor a conspiratorial organizer (1848 cured him of that), but a revolutionary intellectual, and it is for this reason, more than any other, that, while the Narodnik movement and its tacticians have been rendered obsolete by events, Herzen is still interesting to us today...

...He arrived in Europe with two carriages full of relatives and retainers, and, wherever he lived, he maintained the lavish feudal manner, surrounding himself with dependents, handing out largesse to those exiles who were less fortunate than himself, and not only financing his own periodicals, but also playing patron to that of Proudhon, La Voix du Peuple...

...irritations and trivial but exasperated disputes prevent their escaping from the familiar circle of questions, thoughts and memories which make up an oppressive binding tradition...

...Seeing no chance of any improvement in Russia while Nicholas I was still Autocrat, Herzen resolved to leave the country as soon as he could...

...Even the pattern of his daily life remained in many respects, despite his acceptance of the title of socialist, that of a Russian feudal landowner...

...The emphases change, the degrees of enthusiasm vary, but the essential attitudes remain...

...The coming revolution must reconcile all the elements of social life for the general good, as the Fourierists dreamed of doing: we must not stifle some elements for the advantage of others...

...It was this sustained duality within Herzen's outlook that made him that rare bird indeed, the radical who is always disillusioned and yet who is renewed by a recurrent hope that makes action seem ever important, even in a cause that the sceptical self regards with pessimisin...

...On the strength of these slight publications Herzen not only became recognized by the liberals within Russia as a kind of intellectual mentor—a position which he held for more than a decade while he published his expatriate periodicals, The Northern Star and The Bell—but also assumed, as if by acknowledged right, the position of unofficial ambassador in Western Europe of the dissident forces within Russia...

...Herzen, in fact, was in no way a protoCommunist...

...his father had been a Voltairean, and Herzen inherited his eighteenth century intellectual irony...

...once, it is true, he published under the aegis of the Free Russian Press a translation of The Communist Manifesto (ironically, this first Russian version was the work of Bakunin...

...faced with the celebrated phrase, "Whatever is real is rational," he objected, early in the 1840's: "But once any existing social order is justified by reason, so can the struggle against that order, if the struggle exists, be equally justified...

...Finally, Herzen's concern with Russia, his sense of an immense potential energy underlying the hard crust of autocratic rule, never vanished...

...but he did so in the spirit of making available to Russians the most interesting publications of contemporary radicalism, and his own view is expressed more exactly in his remark that "Communism is Russian autocracy turned upside down...

...It was these words of Alexander Herzen that occurred to me when I recently finished reading Ilya Ehrenburg's The Thaw, that tenth-rate echo of Arnold Bennett...

...he showed the Russians that it was possible to criticize the regime, but, once they had learned this from him, the radical groups which sprang up during the 1860s soon abandoned the gradualism that underlay his policy and the limited program of reforms with which he expressed it in The Bell...

...Both of them kept their oaths to the best of their ability, and Herzen's radical ideas undoubtedly took their original form from the Decembrist programs...

...Like Marx, most of the radicals of western Europe refused to share his belief in the destiny of Russia, and they were right in rejecting the mystical elements that entered into his point of view...

...It was typical of his situation as an exiled nobleman that his first attempts in this direction, involving the printing and the despatch by secret means to Russia of one or two pamphlets criticizing the Tsarist regime, should have arisen as much out of the bored need for action of a leisured and moneyed expatriate as it did from any hope that his actions would bear fruit...

...Lenin, in his anxiety to prepare a family tree for the Bolshevik regime, went to the extent of claiming that Herzen was "the first to raise the standard of battle by turning to the masses with the free Russian word," and other writers have seen in Herzen the precursor of the Narodniks, with their creed of "going to the people...

...And, as the events of our century have tended to show, there was perhaps more truth in his idea that social initiative was passing out of the hands of western Europeans than in the thoughts of those who believed that Paris was the permanent capital of the revolution or that Germany would Iead the new uprising of the proletariat...

...His ideas have been somewhat obscured by his record as a publicist and by that romantic element in his personal life which so appealed to Professor Carr, but when one comes to consider them, they still have a provocative relevance both to Russian problems and also to certain perennial problems of socialism...

...He represents, more than almost any other man of his age, the kind of disillusioned yet committed intellectual, the revolutionary malgre lui, with whom we have become familiar in the twentieth century...

...This fact needs to be stressed in view of the Communist attempts to claim Herzen as an ancestor...

...From this time onward Herzen was to remain an exile, never establishing a permanent home or becoming assimilated into any of the countries that gave him passing hospitality...

...Once, at least, this last fact had a consequence that appears more ironical to us than it can have done to anybody in Herzen's day...

...All of them retained and incorporated into their political philosophies the contempt for the shopkeeper which is shared by most aristocrats, and all of them showed the former landowner's tendency to see virtue in the country and the former proprietor's guilty inclination to elevate the peasant above the town classes of bourgeois and proletariat...

...But having realized that a direct comparison between Ehrenburg and any nineteenth century Russian writer was perhaps superfluous, I was brought back to the ironic figure of Herzen himself, that ancestor in disillusioned radicalism, and to the realization that, as a critic of revolutionary attitudes and as an observer of the nineteenth century world, Herzen has an interest for us today which could hardly be brought out by a routine comparison with a contemporary Stalinist hack...

...He came to hate the middle class of Western Europe with a detestation that never waned, and, though his sympathies were aroused by the French workers who fought behind the June barricades and by such individualistic radicals as Proudhon and Orsini, he did not feel that they had the power to halt the decline of the West...

...He watched them with irony and perceptiveness, and in My Past and Thoughts he left a series of portraits of revolutionary leaders and followers and of comments on the psychological quirks of the professional rebel which, even today, might be made into a handbook that radicals themselves could read with profit...

...Like his literary contemporaries, Herzen was at first influenced by the Romantic movement which flowered belatedly in Russia during the 1830's...

...When most of his friends, following the romantic trend, became enamoured of German philosophy, he avoided that crepuscular labyrinth, and turned instead to the clearer thought of France, of socialists like Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose extravagances he rejected, but whose essential insights he took as a basis for his own social views...

...His attachment to France before 1848 was romantic and unrealistic, and after 1848 this attachment was transferred to Russia, so that, throughout the most active part of his career, Herzen's outlook on his homeland was consistently ambivalent, combining with hatred of autocracy a strong feeling that Russia had regenerative powers that might yet give it a positive role in European affairs...

...Herzen, though never an anarchist in any doctrinaire sense, distrusted the State (this was part of a natural reaction against the elaborate bureaucracy set up by Nicholas I) and advocated a thorough policy of administrative decentralization...

...More and more he began to turn towards Russia, the land which had not undergone the corrupting process of mercantilism and industrialism, the land where the peasants were still a vast inarticulate potential force...

...Herzen, the ironicaI radical aristocrat, was the nearest thing the nineteenth century produced to Orwell and Silone...

...To anyone who has known the boredom and exasperation of most radical group activity, Herzen's description of what he calls "the chorus of the revolution" ("Immovable conservatives in everything connected with the revolution, they stop short at some program and never advance beyond it") and the revolutionary bureaucracy, which "dissolves things into words and forms just as our official bureaucracy does," will seem apt and perennial, while those who have moved in contemporary circles of political exiles in Paris or London or Mexico City will recognize the melancholy truth of these remarks on the mentality which is developed by all but the most exceptional expatriates: Exile, not undertaken with any definite object, but forced upon men by the triumph of the opposing party, checks development and draws men away from the activities of life into the domain of fantasy...

...I will nowhere and at no time appear on the same platform as Herzen," he explained to Engels, "since I am not of the opinion that 'old Europe' can be rejuvenated by Russian blood...

...While his friend Bakunin, an unregenerate romantic to the end, went through a period of fanatical Hegelianism, Herzen realized fully the ambiguities of the German philosopher's dialectic...

...he would have seen here, as he saw in Western Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, facile materialism spreading like "a syphilitic growth infecting the blood and bone of society...

...And so this essay has become rather a re-examination of Herzen in his own right, with the original point of comparison fading into an initial and discarded excuse...

...In this he established a pattern that was followed by all the Russian aristocratic revolutionaries—Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Lavrov, Cherkesov, and so on...

...He believed that socialism could only be justified if it enriched rather than impoverished life, and for this reason he rejected its more ascetic forms...

...II In his more general attitudes, too, Herzen remained the Russian and the aristocrat...

...It presents, however, an incomplete and distorted view of a complex and often contradictory personality...

...Herzen was always a socialist, but in the Proudhonian sense, rejecting governmental socialism in favor of a conception based on modifications of the peasant mir and the cooperative artel of workmen...

...He liked to compare himself with Byron, and the comparison is not inapt, for in both of these radical aristocrats one sees the romantic and the Voltairean passions in perpetual conflict, the emotional vision be ing constantly undermined by eroding doubt, yet never completely dis integrating...

...In some aspects of his life and thought, in the curiously morbid sentimentality that ruled his personal relationships, in the quasi-mystical elements that sometimes emerged in his political attitudes, the influence was enduring...

...The climate of free thought in the Russian universities that bred Herzen and Belinsky and Bakunin has long been extinct, and even if in some way a critical mentality like theirs were to emerge it would find no vehicle of expression in the controlled Russian press...

...Ironically, all this was made possible by the intervention of the financier Rothschild, who forced the Tsarist authorities to liberate Herzen's funds within Russia by threatening to sabotage a frontier into Western Europe...

...At the same time, Herzen's arguments were not entirely governed by sentiment...

...ships, of intrigues and ambitions and half-hearted rebellions hardly distinguishable from those of Levittown and Tooting, Herzen would certainly have detected the new bourgeois world which he prophesied as the result of a revolution misconceived and misapplied...

...The comparison is instructive, but it merely deepens what we already know in general terms: that the autocrats of the nineteenth century were not so acutely conscious as modern totalitarians of the need to prevent the emergence of any kind of genuine intellectual liberty...

...as a result of the vaguely liberal ideas which he propounded, he was banished in 1835 to the Urals, whence, in Byronic spirit, he emerged secretly to marry his cousin and whisk her off to his place of exile...

...Behind all the writings of Herzen's later years there hovers the vision—how prophetic one is too uneasily aware—of Russia and America facing each other over a dispirited Europe...

...We can make of our world neither a Sparta nor a Benedictine convent," he said...

...Bakunin, Pisarev, Chernyshevsky, even Nechaev, all contributed more to the tactics and programs of later movements than Herzen did...

...and Carr's thesis that Herzen was primarily a romantic among romantics has colored most recent judgments of him...

...hope hinders them from settling down and undertaking any permanent work...

...As an exile, he was able to look on Russia with more detachment than anyone within the country, and on western Europe with more detachment than most of the radicals who had spent their lives in its liberal and revolutionary movements...

...It was the feeling, after 1848, of the bankruptcy of the west that led Herzen to concentrate more and more of his energy on the task of initiating propaganda in Russia, and in this role he became the great pioneer of all the Russian liberal and radical movements of the later nineteenth century...

...In the last resort, Herzen can be fitted into no category in the history of radicalism...

...Like them, even in disillusionment he could not destroy the rebellious inner urge that bound him to the movements of his time...