Alexander Herzen 1812 – 1870

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer, philosopher, and revolutionary, often called the father of Russian socialism. The illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, he was exiled within Russia for his early radical politics before settling permanently in Western Europe in 1847. From London, where he founded the Free Russian Press and edited the journal Kolokol, The Bell, he addressed his Russian readership with a sustained critique of both autocracy and Western liberal individualism, defending instead a Russian agrarian socialism rooted in the village commune. His memoir My Past and Thoughts is one of the great works of nineteenth-century Russian prose.

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was born at Moscow in April 1812, the illegitimate son of the wealthy nobleman Ivan Yakovlev and a young German woman from Stuttgart; the surname his father invented for him meant 'child of the heart'. He read the natural sciences at Moscow University from 1829 to 1833, was arrested in 1834 for involvement in a circle of young Saint-Simonians, and spent six years of internal exile at Vyatka and Vladimir, where he married his cousin Natalia Zakharyina. In 1847 he left Russia for ever and, after witnessing the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Paris and Italy, settled in London in 1852.

From London he ran the Free Russian Press, publishing the almanac Polar Star and from 1857 the celebrated journal Kolokol (The Bell), which was smuggled into Russia and became the most influential émigré paper of the reform era. His major works include From the Other Shore (1850), the novel Who Is to Blame? (1845–46), the long memoir My Past and Thoughts (begun 1852), The Russian People and Socialism (1851), and the late Letters to an Old Comrade (1869).

Herzen turned away from Hegelian world-spirit and from Western bourgeois liberalism to argue that Russia could leap directly from peasant communalism to socialism through the village commune, the obshchina; his combination of philosophical idealism, Western critique, and agrarian socialism is the founding document of Russian populist thought. He died in Paris in January 1870.