Alexander Radishchev's Journey from St

Kahn, Andrew. "Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow: The Defence of Natural Rights and the Right to Self-defence." Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 89–96. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350006195.ch-012>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 19:51 UTC. Copyright © Xavier Márquez and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER ELEVEN Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow: The Defence of Natural Rights and the Right to Self-defence Andrew Kahn In a firm voice and ringing pronunciation I finally declaimed the following. Each person is born into this world the equal of any other. We all have similar limbs, we all have reason and will. Man considered, therefore, outside society is a being dependent on nobody else for his own deeds. But he puts a limit on these, consents not to subordinate himself to the general will alone, becomes obedient to the commands of other human beings, in a word becomes a citizen. For the sake of what cause does he restrain his desires? For what purpose does he set a power over himself? Unlimited in the exercise of his will-power, why does he limit it through the condition of obedience? ‘For his own sake’, says reason. ‘For his own sake’, says an inner voice. ‘For his own sake’, says wise legislation. It follows therefore that whoever wants to deprive him of the advantage of being a citizen is his enemy. He seeks in the law defence and retribution against his 90 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS enemy. If the law either does not have the power to defend him or does not wish to do so, or lacks the power to help him immediately in his present woe, then the citizen uses his natural right of defence, preservation, welfare. For the citizen . the first duty arising from his organism is defence, preservation, welfare. The Assessor murdered by the peasants violated with his bestial actions their rights as citizens. At that moment when he condoned the violence of his sons, when to the heartache of the betrothed he added rape, when he threatened murder because they dared to resist his hellish domination, at that moment the law intended to protect the citizen was distant and its power was imperceptible. That was when the law of nature awakened and the power of the insulted citizen, inseparable from the law concerning injury, came into force. The peasants who killed the bestial Assessor are innocent before the law. The citizen, no matter the station of life into which he was fated to have been born, is and always will be a person.1 Alexander Radishchev, a Westernized Russian civil servant and legal theorist, is best remembered as the author of the Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a work of travel literature that takes a narrator through the landscape of late Enlightenment Russia.2 Radishchev had first-hand experience of Russia’s judicial and taxation systems, and offers a biting critique of the state of the empire filtered through stories of exploitation and frustrated reform. Although the book cleared the censor, Catherine the Great reacted furiously, ordering the confiscation and destruction of the entire print-run of more than 600 copies. An initial death sentence was commuted to exile in Siberia. Socialist revolutionaries, including the Bolsheviks, regarded him as a hero and forerunner in radical politics.3 Eighteenth-century Russia was an absolutist state. It did not, however, lack the rule of law.4 Catherine promulgated a new legal code in 1767. While much of this document was cribbed from the works of Montesquieu and Beccaria, the package looked progressive.5 In the event, only a few parts of the code were implemented. The Journey poses an enquiry into whether the basis of a better society lay in alternative forms of government; in administrative reform and a less corrupt civil service and judiciary; or in changes to moral expectations that would benefit the common good and potentially educate the ruling class. Radishchev tended to avoid explicit terminology that would have been instantly objectionable to an absolute ruler. He uses the Russian word for democracy only once in all his writings, NATURAL RIGHTS AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENCE 91 but frequently substitutes equivalent expressions in writing about the interest, the condition and rights of the people. This context underpins the creation of a democratic moment in the seventh chapter (‘Zaitsovo’) of the Journey. The Journey mounts more of a pragmatic than theoretical critique of absolutism at a moment late in Catherine’s reign when it had been seen to have deteriorated into despotism and rampant cronyism. In the preceding chapter, called ‘Novgorod’ after the legendary city-state and republic destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, the speaker asks, ‘What is popular right?’ Drawing on Rousseau’s myth of the state of nature, he equates popular right and the general will. In the chapter that concerns us, he addresses the meaning of citizens’ rights. The vehicle for political statement is a speech made in a law court, ending a tale of injustice. ‘Zaitsovo’ narrates how the son of a landowner exercised his droit de seigneur and violently raped a young peasant girl. Her fiancé and his brothers came to her rescue, a melee ensued, the landowner and his sons were killed and the peasants brought to trial. This passage comes from a speech made by one of the judges who defends the right of the serfs to self-defence and identifies popular violence as a democratic instrument. The passage employs the concepts of egalitarianism, citizenship and the rights of resistance. In explicitly treating the conditions under which the population might overturn a state of economic obedience, the chapter gives an implicit definition of the political arrangements to which ‘democracy’ may refer as an ideal or possible alternative. The speech begins with a declaration of egalitarian principle in order to establish the idea that each individual has a right to liberty. This is a remarkably progressive statement in its Russian context. In the absence of economic liberty, Radishchev asks whether liberty can be exercised through collective action to protect individuals or a group when the social contract has been broken: popular action might stop wrongdoing and in the longer term might realign norms of conduct with a concept of the natural order he supposed to be free. Arguments on the basis of natural justice were not routine in Russian thought and writing of the period. The only precedent for state sanction of popular action was a traditional idea of ‘collective responsibility’, seen as a more passive way to meet certain requirements imposed on the peasantry like tax or conscription levels.6 Moreover, the principle of the general will mooted here would also have been provocative, since Catherine the Great’s objections to Rousseau were well-known. Democracy as represented in the dramatic story told in the chapter involves the direct participation of the members of a group who use collective action when the masters to whom they have historically ceded autonomy no longer rule adequately. Underlying this view is the idea that the exercise of power of one person over another cannot be justified if it grievously violates the interest of the subjected person. This egalitarian defence of democracy presumes that a society, defined by class structures whose economic interests are paramount, ought at least to guarantee the safety 92 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS of a subordinate class. Within that framework, reason must be applied in the judgment and punishment of crimes in order to ensure the safety of all. When these conditions are violated, however, he envisages, as happens here, a democratic process in which even serfs become citizens and the people rise up: democracy here is people power in its basic sense. Citizenship is construed from a moral standpoint according to which obedience to an elite or state lapses when their authority has been compromised by violation of those basic rights. Democracy does not extend to the political realm through representation or a franchise, and it only involves an element of self-determination when the self faces considerable danger. It is under these conditions that even serfs, who must always be recognized as human, can become temporary citizens. This speech constitutes a democratic moment because it creates a speaker who is an ardent defender of the people’s interests. In practice, as the Journey demonstrates repeatedly, liberty entitles one to live without the threat of bodily harm, but does not imply that any individual is the master of his or her life. This is not a vision of the equal advancement of the interest of individuals’ within a pluralistic society. His idea of equality is not relational since Radishchev (who never freed his own serfs) nowhere argues that all are equal in political rights; or that the equal opportunity to pursue social equality should be a norm. But the speech envisages the possibility that there are conditions in which a champion of the people, like an elected representative or perhaps like the Gracchi in ancient Rome, will arise if democratic action can spearhead a permanent change to social conditions. Radishchev’s views on government were positioned between the reality of Russian history and his knowledge of influential European accounts. He followed Montesquieu in accepting that many factors influenced the types of government best suited to nations, and in that respect theoretically accepts the view that absolutism and oligarchy were the natural shape of the Russian state.

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