In Memory of Herzen

A short article written by Lenin to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Herzen’s birth. It was written on April 25, 1912, and published in Sotzial-Demokrat issue No. 26 on the same date. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 21 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Herzen (1812-1870) was an outstanding Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, and writer. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, liberals throughout Russia took great efforts to confuse his ideas with liberal ideas and conceal his revolutionary identity in his commemoration.

The rightist press mourned Herzen by falsely claiming that he had renounced the revolution in his later years. In order to clarify the tasks of the working-class party and the real historical position of Herzen in the democratic revolution against Russian serfdom, Lenin wrote this article. He refuted the false views of the liberals and others, analyzed and summarized Herzen’s difficult life, evaluated his historical position in the Russian revolution and his shortcomings in a realistic manner. Lenin noted that Herzen belonged to the generation of revolutionaries among the nobility and landlords of the first half of the 19th century.

Herzen founded a free Russian press abroad (Polyarnaya Zvezda), and it played a major role in the development of progressive Russian literature and social thought, at the same time in the preparation of the Russian Revolution. Herzen rose to a height which placed him on a level with the greatest thinkers of his time. He assimilated Hegel’s dialectics. He realized that it was “the algebra of revolution”. He went further than Hegel, following Feuerbach to materialism. Herzen came right up to dialectical materialism, and halted—before historical materialism. This “halt” caused his mental breakdown, he slipped into skepticism and pessimism after the defeat of the European revolution in 1848. Lenin argued that this change in Herzen’s class and ideological roots lay in the errors and vacillations of his socialist doctrine. Lenin pointed out that Herzen left Russia in 1847; he had not seen the revolutionary people and could have no faith in it. Failing as he did to understand the bourgeois-democratic character of the entire movement of 1848 and of all the forms of pre-Marxian socialism, Herzen was still less able to understand the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution. Herzen was the founder of “Russian” socialism, the “Narodik” trend of thought. He saw “socialism” in the emancipation of the peasants by acquiring land, in community land tenure and in the peasant idea of “the right to land ownership”.

But his “socialism” was one of the countless forms and varieties of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism of the period of 1848, which were dealt their death-blow in the June days of that year. As a matter of fact, it was not socialism at all, but so many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were the expression at that time of the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats, as well as of the proletariat, which had not yet freed itself from the influence of those democrats. Thus, after the defeat of the European revolution in 1848, Herzen’s spiritual drama was a product and reflection of that epoch in world history when the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats was already passing away (in Europe), while the revolutionary character of the socialist proletariat had not yet matured.

Lenin noted that despite that Herzen vacillated between democracy and liberalism, the democrat in him gained the upper-hand nonetheless. For in the 1860s Herzen saw the historical role of the revolutionary people, fearlessly sided with the revolutionary democrats against the liberals, raised the banner of revolution against the Tsarist monarchy, and transformed from the illusion of a bourgeois democracy that is “above classes” to the grim, inexorable and invincible class struggle of the proletariat, to the international led by Marx, uniting the proletarians of the world. Lenin emphasized that the proletariat commemorated Herzen in order to learn by his example to understand the great significance of revolutionary theory, to know that unlimited loyalty to the revolution and revolutionary propaganda to the people would never be in vain even for decades; to learn to judge the role of the classes in the Russian and international revolutions. Enriched by these lessons, the proletariat will fight its way to a free alliance with the socialist workers of all lands, having crushed that loathsome monster, the Tsarist monarchy.