Kolokol (The Bell)

Origins

The Free Russian Press initially attracted almost no Russian authorship. From summer 1855 Herzen's almanac Polyarnaya Zvezda generated correspondence with readers inside Russia, and by 1857 it had more material than the annual could carry, so on Ogarev's initiative the publishers brought out a newspaper as a supplement to the third volume. The first issue reprinted the programme already published in Polyarnaya Zvezda; the announcement leaflet, dated 13 April 1857, circulated with that volume. The publishers themselves defined the paper as supplementary sheets (прибавочные листы) to the almanac, yet it soon led the uncensored Russian press.

Contents and methods

Regular departments carried critical correspondence and columns such as 'Смесь' (Miscellany) and 'Правда ли?' (Is It True?), open letters addressed to the Tsar and Tsarina, and secret documents. Officials of the ministries of internal and foreign affairs and of the Holy Synod sent material; the paper obtained and published the full state budgets of 1859 and 1860. Alexander II himself read it and warned ministers not to pass it on but to keep it for personal reading. Herzen wrote about 1,200 of its 2,000 pages. Literary material was subordinated to agitation and exposure: poems by Lermontov and Nekrasov, accusatory verse by Ogarev, Mikhailov and others, and drafts of Herzen's My Past and Thoughts.

Smuggling and repression

The paper was immediately banned in Russia, and in the first half of 1858 the tsarist government obtained its official prohibition in Prussia, Saxony, Rome, Naples and Frankfurt am Main. Herzen nevertheless built comparatively safe routes via Rothschild, the booksellers Trubner and Frank, Maria Reichel and others, with delivery costs sometimes rising tenfold; these methods became models for later illegal and revolutionary publishing. Over ten years about half a million copies were printed including reprints; at its peak a single issue ran 2,500-3,000 copies and, with reprints, 4,500-5,000, comparable to the largest legal Russian papers (10,000-12,000). At least 52 issues were re-typeset and reprinted.

Political line

The paper rested on Herzen's theory of Russian peasant socialism; its platform demanded liberation of the peasants with land and the abolition of censorship and corporal punishment. After the 1861 emancipation it took the side of revolutionary democracy, publishing proclamations and articles that probed the reform's shortcomings, and favoured the creation of the clandestine revolutionary organisation Land and Liberty.

Decline and cessation

From 1862 more radical currents appeared in Russia for which Kolokol seemed 'altogether constitutional', and public opinion blamed Herzen for upheavals such as the Petersburg fires of 1862. After the editors backed the 1863 Polish uprising, liberal readers turned away and by the end of 1863 the print run fell to 500 copies. In spring 1865 the press moved to Switzerland, with no. 196 in London (1 April) and no. 197 in Geneva (25 May). After Karakozov's shot in 1866 Herzen admitted in an open letter to Alexander II that 'there were times when you read Kolokol; now you do not read it'. Condemning terrorism, the paper still kept losing readers and correspondence from Russia nearly ceased. In 1867 it returned to one issue a month and on 1 July 1867 announced with Ogarev's poem 'Goodbye!' that the Bell fell silent 'for a time'.

Continuations and imitations

In 1868 Herzen and Ogarev revived the paper in French with Russian supplements ('La Cloche'), which failed, running fifteen issues to December of that year. In 1870, from 21 March (2 April) to 27 April (9 May), Ogarev issued six more issues of Kolokol together with Sergey Nechayev; they differed significantly from the 1857-1867 paper, and Nechayev was their main author. In 1862-1865 in Brussels L. Fontaine published the newspaper 'La Cloche', reprinting French translations of Herzen's Kolokol articles. On 21 January 1920, the fiftieth anniversary of Herzen's death, a one-day memorial 'Kolokol' appeared in Petrograd, and annotated facsimile reprints followed in 1962-1964 and 1978-1979.

Supplements

The separate supplements 'Под суд!' (To Trial; 13 issues, 1 October 1859 - 22 April 1862) and 'Общее вече' (General Veche, a paper for the common people; 29 issues, 15 July 1862 - 15 July 1864) had their own pagination, and irregular supplements accompanied issues 21, 29, 44, 49, 61, 84, 102, 119-120, 122-123 and others. The French revival gained a 'Supplement du Kolokol' (15 February 1869) carrying documents from Pyotr Dolgorukov's archive. The first Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, in Bakunin's translation, was printed at the Kolokol press in 1868.

Disputed dating

The statement that the first Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto appeared in 'the early 1860s' derives from Marx and Engels' own 1882 preface. The editors' note in Marx-Engels, Sochineniya, 2nd ed., vol. 19, p. 304 marks that date as inexact and states that the edition in question appeared in 1869, while other scholarship places the first Russian (Bakunin) translation in Geneva in 1869.