Aleksandr Ivanovich HerzenArticle Free Pass Life in exile. Loss
of faith in the West, however, provoked a spiritual return to
Russia: though “old” Europe, “fettered by the richness of her
past,” had proved incapable of realizing the ideal of socialism,
“young” Russia, precisely because its past offered nothing worth
conserving, now seemed to Herzen to possess the resources for a
radical new departure. And Herzen (borrowing an idea from his
old foes, the Slavophiles) found these resources above all in a
collectivist peasant commune, which he viewed as the basis for a
future socialist order. This new faith in Russia’s revolutionary
potential was expressed in Letters to the French historian Jules
Michelet and the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini in 1850
and 1851. In 1852 Herzen moved to London, and the following
year, with the aid of Polish exiles, he founded the “Free
Russian Press in London,” the first uncensored printing
enterprise in Russian history. In 1855 Nicholas I died, and soon
thereafter Alexand