In 1912, Vladimir Lenin wrote an article "In Memory of Herzen", timed to coincide with the centenary of the birth of a prominent revolutionary democrat of the 19th century. Assessing the personality of this public figure, Lenin figuratively mentioned that "the Decembrists woke Herzen up." What significance did the participants in the December uprising, which agitated Russia in 1825, have on the formation of the revolutionary?
Awakened by the Decembrists
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen is a representative of the generation of noble revolutionaries of the first half and mid-19th century. The nobility in Russia was not homogeneous. Among the arrogant officers, amateurs of the game of gambling and beautiful-minded dreamers, a wide stratum of those who wanted a better life for Russia and were ready to lay down their lives for the liberation of the people developed. It was this phalanx of fearless people who came out on December 14, 1825 to Senate Square that awakened the young generation of future revolutionary democrats.
Alexander Herzen belonged to this new generation of fighters for the freedom of the people. The uprising of the Decembrists cleared his mind and awakened his spirit. Encouraged by the civic courage of the participants in the December protest, Herzen joined the struggle against the autocracy and launched revolutionary agitation.
Living in a country with an established serfdom, Herzen gradually managed to rise on a par with the most prominent thinkers of that time. Having assimilated Hegel's dialectical method, Herzen went further in philosophy, following the materialistic views of Ludwig Feuerbach.
Herzen, having become a democrat and a socialist, stopped only one step away from dialectical materialism.
Bell of Russian Democracy
Herzen's path in his social and political activities was not always straightforward. Herzen experienced some confusion after the collapse of the European revolutionary movements in 1848. The thinker, while living in Europe at that time, was a direct witness to the revolutionary events. In those days, the bourgeois revolutionism of Europe was already fading away, and the proletariat had not yet had time to gain strength. Unable to discern the main force of the revolution in the nascent labor movement, Herzen was deeply disillusioned with politics.
Herzen's views were reflected in the publications of the Kolokol newspaper, which he published abroad.
In his views, Herzen went much further than the Decembrists, who, as Lenin pointed out, were very far from the people. Becoming in fact one of the founders of populism, Herzen saw the essence of socialism in the emancipation of the peasants and in the idea widespread among the peasantry about the unconditional right of the people to land. The idea of the need for an equalizing division of landowners' land was in those years the formulation of the people's desire for equality.
Herzen's weakness was that he himself belonged to the aristocratic milieu and did not see in Russia those forces that were capable of carrying out revolutionary transformations in the country. That is why Herzen often turned to the top, in fact, retreating from revolutionary democracy to corny liberalism. For such temporary retreats, Herzen was more than once criticized by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov.