New stage in the development of liberation ideas in Russia is associated with the name of Radishchev - the first Russian revolutionary thinker, the direct predecessor of the noble revolutionaries - the Decembrists. Radishchev was one of the first educators to connect the protest against serfdom with the struggle against autocracy. He brought the ideas of the 18th century Enlightenment. to their logical conclusion, proclaiming the right of the oppressed to respond to violence with violence. Radishchev's revolutionary conclusions were in direct connection with the turbulent events of his time: the American and French bourgeois revolutions and the peasant war led by Pugachev.
Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was born in 1749 into a landowner family. Noble estate in early childhood, noble Moscow, where his initial training took place, and finally, the court environment in which he remained until the age of 17 as a student of the Corps of Pages, did not drown out the impulses for justice and freedom in the soul of the thoughtful young man. Studying at the University of Leipzig, where he was sent to receive a legal education, getting acquainted with educational French literature and reading Russian progressive journalism strengthened his hatred of all types of oppression.
Upon returning to Russia, Radishchev translated for the “Society Trying to Print Books,” organized by Novikov, Mably’s essay “Reflections on Greek History or on the Reasons for the Prosperity and Misfortune of the Greeks.” Already in this early literary speech, Radishchev expressed his views on absolutism, accompanying the translation with his own notes, in one of which he declared that the people are the judge of the sovereign and that the injustice of the monarch gives the people the right to judge him as a criminal. Radishchev developed these thoughts in his subsequent works, written after the Peasant War of 1773-1775. and revolutions in North America.
In his ode “Liberty” (1781-1783), remarkable in its depth of philosophical thought and revolutionary pathos, Radishchev openly proclaimed the idea of a violent revolution. The main content of the ode is to describe the disasters that monarchical power brings to the people, and to proclaim the regularity and justice of the popular uprising. “Liberty” is a hymn to the freedom and revolutionary power of the people. Radishchev calls himself the first prophet of liberty and expresses the hope that posterity will not forget him for this. The final stanzas of the ode are dedicated to Radishchev’s dreams of the future glory of his fatherland, freed from the oppression of autocracy.
The heyday of Radishchev's creativity falls in the 80s. During these years, his wonderful book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” was completed, in which an angry denunciation of autocratic serfdom Russia is inextricably linked with a revolutionary call for the destruction of the feudal system.
At the beginning of the Journey, the author sets out the reasons that prompted him to write this book and the goal that he pursued. This is, first of all, a desire to contribute to the achievement of happiness of people whose suffering deeply hurt his soul. To reveal to people the cause of their suffering and to find people who sympathize with his ideas - this is the goal that the author set for himself.
Either citing the stories of those he met, or with the help of his own reasoning about what he saw and heard, or in the form of borrowings from other people’s manuscripts that supposedly fell into the hands of the traveler, the author reveals the depth of the decay of autocratic-landlord Russia, contrasting his revolutionary ideals of social order with the repulsive reality.
Everything that the traveler encounters is a blatant contradiction of the external, ceremonial side of Catherine’s regime, which was presented by the defenders of autocracy as the kingdom of “universal happiness.” Radishchev exposes this ostentatious, deceitful prosperity. Radishchev contrasts the corrupted nobles, slavishly servile to the authorities and tyrannically cruel to their serfs, with the peasants, whose hands create the country’s wealth, as truly noble people. From the first steps the traveler is confronted with these polar opposite forces.
Radishchev portrays a whole gallery of stupid, self-righteous representatives of bureaucratic power, for whom there is only one interest - their own profit. With the same accusatory force, Radishchev denounces the feudal landowners. The chapter “Lyuban” talks about a landowner for whom the peasants work six days a week, the chapter “Vyshny Volochok” talks about a “zealous” owner who robbed his peasants and transferred them to “monthly wages.”
Drawing these landowners, Radishchev views their actions not as the result of personal cruelty or self-interest. He reveals the ulcers of the entire system, which gave rise to base traits in the character of the landowners - the owners of serf souls. The legalized right to own people is, in Radishchev’s fair opinion, the source of peasant enslavement and the vices with which landowners are endowed.
In “The Journey” there are also courageous, noble people who, together with the author, suffer from the violence and meanness that surrounds them: the landowner from the chapter “The Sacred People”, who raised in his sons a sense of duty, honor, truthfulness and courage; the chairman of the criminal chamber, Krestyankin, who tried to be a fair judge; fictional author of the ode "Liberty". These are the same “sympathizers” that Radishchev speaks of in his dedication-preface.
Radishchev characterizes the peasants with attractive features. The moral purity of the peasant girl Anyuta is contrasted with the corruption of official daughters. A blind beggar singer who rejected the traveler's ruble alms; peasants who stood up for the honor of the peasant girl-bride, whom the sons of the landowner were trying to dishonor - all these images are sharply contrasted with the parasite nobles mired in vices. With anger and indignation, Radishchev describes the plight of half-starved peasants who cannot find justice and are sold at auction like cattle.
Based on the idealistic, but for its time, progressive theory of the social contract, Radishchev views enslavement as a crime. He speaks threateningly to the nobles. “Be afraid, hard-hearted landowner, I see your condemnation on the forehead of each of your peasants.” He was deeply convinced of the inevitability of the overthrow by the enslaved themselves of a system based on crime, since “the stream, blocked in its desire, the stronger it becomes, the more firmly it finds opposition.”
But Radishchev looks into the future without fear, when the bursting stream begins to crush everything in its path. “Oh, if only the slaves, burdened with heavy bonds, furious in their despair, would break our heads, the heads of their inhuman masters, with iron, the heads of their inhuman masters, and stain their fields with our blood! What would the state lose? “Nothing at all,” says Radishchev. Great men would emerge from among the people themselves, and in the new society there would be no place for the oppression of man by man.
Radishchev's idea of the possibility of a victorious peasant revolution was utopian; he could not avoid contradictions in his views. He believed that the new society would be based on universal labor, but he saw the source of general well-being in free private property on tools and means of production.
Objectively, his theory consisted in demanding the most complete and decisive destruction of feudal-serf relations and the feudal form of property. True, he did not exclude the possibility of social reconstruction through reform. This was reflected in the project for the liberation of the peasants, set out in “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” and in some of his individual statements. But Radishchev’s hopes for reform and an “enlightened” monarch were much weaker than the conviction of the necessity and inevitability of the violent destruction of serfdom, and with it the autocracy.
Radishchev could not help but know what consequences the publication of the book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” would lead to, but he courageously took this heroic step. The blow that Radishchev’s speech dealt to the autocracy was so strong that Catherine personally took up his cause. “He is a rebel worse than Pugachev,” was her conclusion. The Senate obsequiously approved the decision of the St. Petersburg Criminal Court, which sentenced Radishchev to death penalty, leaving the empress the opportunity to demonstrate her ostentatious “mercy” and replace the death penalty with exile. Radishchev was exiled for 10 years to one of the most remote areas of Siberia, to the Ilimsky prison.
But neither the arrest nor the difficult journey to Siberia broke the great creator of “Liberty.” In poems written on the way, Radishchev proudly said:
I am the same as I was, I will be all my life:
Not a cattle, not a tree, not a slave, but a man!
Living in distant Ilimsk exile, Radishchev did not stop literary activity. The most significant work of this period was the philosophical treatise “On Man, His Mortality and Immortality.” This work reflected the contradictions of his worldview. Recognizing the objective existence of matter and the knowability of the world through sensory experience and reasoning, Radishchev at the same time does not dare to reject the belief in the immortality of the soul.
Radishchev was returned from Ilim exile only after the death of Catherine II. On the part of Emperor Paul, this was not an act of mercy, but a manifestation of hatred towards the memory of his mother. Pavel replaced Radishchev’s exile in Ilimsk with a link in his family estate, located in the Kaluga province, under the strict supervision of the authorities. But even here Radishchev continued his literary activity.
In March 1801, Radishchev was released from supervision and after some time was appointed a member of the Commission for Drafting Laws. Deceived by this liberal-demagogic gesture of Alexander I, Radishchev eagerly set to work, hoping to raise the issue of abolishing serfdom through reform. But he soon became convinced that Alexander’s ostentatious liberalism was only a repetition of the hypocritical tactics of his sovereign grandmother. This was said in latest works Radishchev, especially in the poem “Historical Song”.
Believing that he could do nothing more for the good of the people, Radishchev committed suicide on September 11, 1802. Shortly before his death, he said: “Posterity will avenge me.”
Early Russian enlighteners of the 60-80s of the 18th century. put the peasant problem at the center of attention of Russian society. The great Russian revolutionary thinker Radishchev made the first attempt to indicate the path to its revolutionary solution. Thus, anti-feudal ideas, common to the “age of Enlightenment”, acquired in Russia, due to historical conditions, their own specific features: representatives of advanced Russian thought received new public relations were depicted as based primarily on the well-being of the peasants.
The great attention shown by representatives of Russian liberation thought to the peasant question contributed to further development revolutionary-democratic traditions of Russian liberation movement.
Radishchev A.N.
Radishchev Alexander Nikolaevich (1749 - 1802), writer.
Born into a landowner family. His childhood years were spent in the village of Verkhnee Ablyazovo (now Penza region). The boy’s first educators were serfs: nanny Praskovya Klementyevna and uncle Pyotr Mamontov, who taught him to read and write. They brought him into the world folk art, an interest and love for which the writer retained throughout his life. In 1762, Radishchev was assigned to a privileged educational institution- St. Petersburg Page Corps. All sciences were taught to the students of the corps by one French teacher, but the young pages were on duty in the palace, serving the empress herself. Here Radishchev observed the palace atmosphere and court morals.
Upon completion of the corps, Radishchev, among the best students, was sent abroad, to Leipzig, to receive a special legal education.
After graduating from university, Radishchev returned to his homeland, ready, in his own words, to “sacrifice his life for the benefit of the Fatherland.” He expected to take part in great job to draw up new legislation promised by Catherine. However, Radishchev was forced to take a very modest position as a protocol clerk in the Senate. Here, a whole string of cases about serfs passed before him: torture of peasants by landowners, peasant riots and unrest, pacified by “small guns and cannon.” After some time he retired.
During these years, Radishchev made acquaintances in literary circles, becomes close to N.I. Novikov. In the notes to the translation of the book by the French enlightenment philosopher Mably, he writes: “Autocracy is the state most contrary to human nature...” Following this, he emphasizes that the “unjustice of the sovereign” gives the people the right to judge and punish him as the worst criminal. Here the idea is concisely expressed, which the writer would later develop in the famous ode “Liberty” (1783).
Glorifying in it the tyrant fighters - Brutus, William Tell, he glorifies and calls on the “thunderstorm of kings” - a revolution, the “voice” of which should turn the darkness of slavery into light. At the same time, Radishchev’s “Liberty” is a hymn to the people and their work.
In 1789-1790 four works of Radishchev, written in different topics. This is “The Life of Fyodor Vasilyevich Ushakov,” which tells about the life of Russian students in Leipzig; “Letter to a Friend...”, giving a historically correct assessment of the activities of Peter I; “A conversation about being a son of the Fatherland,” where the right to be called a patriot is denied to the majority of representatives of noble society, and, finally, the main work and feat of Radishchev’s entire life is “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.”
In “The Journey...” Radishchev set out to show the Russian reality of his time. After the publication of “Travel-,” by order of Catherine II, Radishchev was imprisoned in a casemate at the Peter and Paul Fortress. The court sentenced him to death, which was commuted to ten years of exile in Siberia. Driving into exile through Tobolsk, he wrote:
You want to know: who am I? what am I? where am I going?
I am the same as I was and will be all my life:
Not a cattle, not a tree, not a slave, but a man!..
After the death of Catherine II, Radishchev was allowed to return to Central Russia. Until the end of his days, the writer lived under police supervision in the small Kaluga estate Nemtsov. Here he continued to study literary work. In the unfinished poem “Songs Sung at Competitions in Honor of the Ancient Slavic Deities,” the author of “Journeys...” speaks about the future awaiting his native people:
O people, glorious people!
Your later descendants
They will surpass you in glory...
All barriers, all strongholds
They will crush with a strong hand,
They will defeat... even nature,
- And before their mighty gaze,
In front of their illuminated faces
The glory of huge victories,
Kings and kingdoms will fall on their faces...
On March 11, 1801, another palace coup: Paul I was killed and his son, Alexander I, ascended the throne. Radishchev was invited to take part in the work of the commission for drafting laws, and he got down to business. But none of his projects got off the ground. Radishchev committed suicide by taking a lethal dose of poison.
...Yes, a young man hungry for glory,
Came to my dilapidated tomb,
So that he can speak with feeling:
"Under the yoke of power, this one is born.
Wearing gold-plated shackles,
He was the first to prophesy freedom for us."A. Radishchev, ode "Liberty".
I. CITIZEN OF FUTURE TIMES
"Man, man is needed to bear the name of the son of the Fatherland..."
A. Radishchev
Do you want to know: who am I?.. - Radishchev asked in one of his poems.
I am the same as I was and will be all my life:
Not a cattle, not a tree, not a slave, but a man!
He wrote this poem when he arrived in a road wagon, accompanied by two non-commissioned officers, in the winter of 1790, to snow-covered Tobolsk.
He had just escaped from the hands of the Tsar’s executioner, from the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where, sentenced to “beheading,” he waited a long time for his death hour, which was later replaced by exile. He was exhausted from the long and difficult journey.
The future worried him. It seemed to him that the vast snowy desert, stronger than a stone prison wall, stronger than a cast-iron grate, would stand between him and his old life. Exile seemed to him like a grave, ready to swallow everything that he especially treasured: an active life full of work and struggle, love for family and children, cherished dreams, favorite books.
Will you have enough mental strength, courage and faith in your cause to endure hardships, melancholy and bitterness of exile, a lonely, barren life?
Yes, he will endure everything, endure everything! He remained the same as he was, and will remain so throughout his entire life. Nothing could break, nothing will break him: he is a human!
He could have been thrown into prison, deprived of his rights, shackled in chains, doomed to a slow death in Siberia. But no one could ever make him a slave, take away his pride in the high title of a person.
This consciousness was the source of his unshakable courage.
Like all great Russian revolutionaries, fighters for the freedom and happiness of the people, Radishchev sacredly believed in man.
“It is known that man is a free being, since he is endowed with intelligence, reason and free will,” he wrote, “that his freedom consists in choosing the best, that he knows and chooses this best through reason... and always strives for the beautiful, majestic, high.” .
These words clearly and strongly express Radishchev’s faith in the good will of man, the noble dream of human happiness.
And this was not only the conviction of the thinker. This was the thrill, joy, pain and suffering of a living, warm heart; it was the main work of the brave and selfless life of a revolutionary fighter.
Unlike many advanced thinkers and writers Western Europe At that time, Radishchev did not generalize the concept of “man.” And this alone not only distinguishes him from them, but the vitality and truth, the clear and precise purposefulness of his activity puts Radishchev above the most daring Western European thinkers and writers of the 18th century, and reveals the depth and originality of his philosophical thought.
That person, for whose freedom and happiness he fought all his life, was not an abstract idea of man in general, but a living historical reality: a Russian man, a Russian serf. Radishchev was alien to cosmopolitan tendencies; first of all, he loved his native Russian people and believed in them. He believed in powerful forces, believed in the majestic and wonderful future of the Russian people. He lived for this future and fought for it.
“Firmness in enterprises, tirelessness in execution are the essence of the qualities that distinguish the Russian people... Oh, people, born to greatness and glory!..” wrote Radishchev.
And before his spiritual gaze the coming times were revealed, when the slaves, “burdened down by heavy bonds, furious in their despair, will break the heads of the inhuman masters with the iron that prevents them from liberties and will stain their fields with their blood...”
“What would the state lose?” - Radishchev asked a question. And his answer sounded like a wonderful prophecy:
“Soon great men would be plucked from among them (slaves - B.E.) to stand up for the beaten tribe... “This is not a dream, but the gaze penetrates the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes; I see through a whole century..."
He belonged to the number of people whose meaning in life was to fight for a better future for his people, so that this future would soon become today.
Contemporaries said about Radishchev: “he saw ahead.”
Later Herzen wrote about him:
“Alexander Radishchev looks forward... His ideals are our dreams, the dreams of the Decembrists. Whatever he writes, you hear the familiar string that we are used to hearing in the first poems of Pushkin, and in the Dumas of Ryleev, and in our own hearts...”
In his famous book“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” Radishchev tells such an incident. Coming out of the road cart at the Khotilov station, he picked up a bundle of papers from the ground, dropped by an unknown traveler. He unfolded it and began to read the papers. They contained “an outline of legal provisions” on the abolition of slavery in Russia. Reading these papers, Radishchev found in them a manifestation of a humane heart, “everywhere I saw a citizen of future times...”
Probably won't find better definition and for Radishchev himself. Truly he was a "citizen of the future." He reveals a glorious galaxy of fighters for the happy future of the Russian people, for the happy future of humanity.
It was not for nothing that he so often addressed us, his descendants, the continuers of his life’s work. Not for nothing, shortly before his death, he said:
Posterity will avenge me...
But striving for a better future, carried away by the dream of it, Radishchev did not stand aside from the pressing issues of our time, and did not neglect the present. The strength and truth of truly great “citizens of future times,” that is, figures fighting for a happy future for mankind, lies in the fact that they, seeing far ahead, grow strong and strong shoots of the future on the soil of modernity in labor and struggle.
The greatest examples of this type of figure are Lenin and Stalin.
Radishchev was a practitioner of struggle - this is another remarkable difference between him and Western European thinkers and writers - his most advanced contemporaries - and until the end of his days he honestly fulfilled the duty of a citizen, a faithful son of his homeland, of his time, as he understood this duty.
Boris Sergeevich Evgeniev
RADISHCHEV
...Yes, a young man hungry for glory,
Came to my dilapidated tomb,
So that he can speak with feeling:
“Under the yoke of power, this one is born.
Wearing gold-plated shackles,
He was the first to prophesy freedom for us.”
A. Radishchev, ode “Liberty”.
I. CITIZEN OF FUTURE TIMES
“Man, man is needed to bear the name of the son of the Fatherland...”
Do you want to know: who am I?.. - Radishchev asked in one of his poems.
I am the same as I was and will be all my life:
Not a cattle, not a tree, not a slave, but a man!
He wrote this poem when he arrived in a road wagon, accompanied by two non-commissioned officers, in the winter of 1790, to snow-covered Tobolsk.
He had just escaped from the hands of the Tsar’s executioner, from the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where, sentenced to “beheading,” he waited a long time for his hour of death, which was later replaced by exile. He was exhausted from the long and difficult journey.
The future worried him. It seemed to him that the vast snowy desert, stronger than a stone prison wall, stronger than a cast-iron grate, would stand between him and his former life. Exile seemed to him like a grave, ready to swallow everything that he especially treasured: an active life full of work and struggle, love for family and children, cherished dreams, favorite books.
Will you have enough mental strength, courage and faith in your cause to endure hardships, melancholy and bitterness of exile, a lonely, barren life?
Yes, he will endure everything, endure everything! He remained the same as he was, and will remain so throughout his entire life. Nothing could break, nothing will break him: he is a human!
He could have been thrown into prison, deprived of his rights, shackled in chains, doomed to a slow death in Siberia. But no one could ever make him a slave, take away his pride in the high title of a person.
This consciousness was the source of his unshakable courage.
Like all great Russian revolutionaries, fighters for the freedom and happiness of the people, Radishchev sacredly believed in man.
“It is known that man is a free being, since he is gifted with mind, reason and free will,” he wrote, “that his freedom consists in choosing the best, that he knows and chooses this best through reason... and always strives for the beautiful, majestic, high.” .
These words clearly and strongly express Radishchev’s faith in the good will of man, the noble dream of human happiness.
And this was not only the conviction of the thinker. This was the thrill, joy, pain and suffering of a living, warm heart; it was the main work of the brave and selfless life of a revolutionary fighter.
Unlike many progressive thinkers and writers of Western Europe of that time, Radishchev did not generalize the concept of “man”. And this alone not only distinguishes him from them, but the vitality and truth, the clear and precise purposefulness of his activity puts Radishchev above the most daring Western European thinkers and writers of the 18th century, and reveals the depth and originality of his philosophical thought.
That person, for whose freedom and happiness he fought all his life, was not an abstract idea of man in general, but a living historical reality: a Russian man, a Russian serf. Radishchev was alien to cosmopolitan tendencies; first of all, he loved his native Russian people and believed in them. He believed in powerful forces, believed in the majestic and wonderful future of the Russian people. He lived for this future and fought for it.
“Firmness in enterprises, tirelessness in execution are the essence of the qualities that distinguish the Russian people... Oh, people, born to greatness and glory!..” wrote Radishchev.
And before his spiritual gaze the coming times were revealed, when the slaves, “burdened down by heavy bonds, furious in their despair, will break the heads of the inhuman masters with the iron that prevents them from liberties and will stain their fields with their blood...”
“What would the state lose?” - Radishchev asked a question. And his answer sounded like a wonderful prophecy:
“Soon great men would be plucked from among them (the slaves - B.E.) to stand up for the beaten tribe... “This is not a dream, but the gaze penetrates the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes; I see through a whole century...”
He belonged to the number of people whose meaning in life was to fight for a better future for his people, so that this future would soon become today.
Contemporaries said about Radishchev: “he saw ahead.”
Later Herzen wrote about him:
“Alexander Radishchev looks forward... His ideals are our dreams, the dreams of the Decembrists. No matter what he writes, you hear the familiar string that we are accustomed to hearing in Pushkin’s first poems, and in Ryleev’s Duma, and in our own hearts...”
In his famous book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” Radishchev recounts such an incident. Coming out of the road cart at the Khotilov station, he picked up a bundle of papers from the ground, dropped by an unknown traveler. He unfolded it and began to read the papers. They contained “an outline of legal provisions” on the abolition of slavery in Russia. Reading these papers, Radishchev found in them a manifestation of a humane heart, “everywhere I saw a citizen of future times...”
There is, perhaps, no better definition for Radishchev himself. Truly he was a “citizen of the future.” He reveals a glorious galaxy of fighters for the happy future of the Russian people, for the happy future of humanity.
It was not for nothing that he so often addressed us, his descendants, the continuers of his life’s work. Not for nothing, shortly before his death, he said:
Posterity will avenge me...
But striving for a better future, carried away by the dream of it, Radishchev did not stand aside from the pressing issues of our time, and did not neglect the present. The strength and truth of truly great “citizens of the future,” that is, figures fighting for a happy future for humanity, lies in the fact that, seeing far ahead, they grow strong and strong shoots of the future on the soil of modernity through work and struggle.
The greatest examples of this type of figure are Lenin and Stalin.
Radishchev was a practitioner of struggle - this is another remarkable difference between him and Western European thinkers and writers - his most advanced contemporaries - and until the end of his days he honestly fulfilled the duty of a citizen, a faithful son of his homeland, of his time, as he understood this duty.
He called the time in which Radishchev lived, the 18th century, “mad and wise,” worthy of curses and surprise. A century of creation and destruction, the triumph of the free human mind and the revelry of the dark forces of the hated “autocracy” - this is how Radishchev saw XVIII century.
In honor of him, he composed poems, solemn and passionate, like a hymn. In these verses, written at the dawn of the new, XIX century, Radishchev tried to comprehend those phenomena of life of which he was a contemporary.
He wrote that the 18th century was born in blood and, watered with blood, goes to the grave. It raised and toppled kingdoms. It broke the bonds that fettered the human spirit and gave freedom of thought. In this century, new lands and peoples were discovered, the heavenly bodies were numbered. Science has achieved marvelous successes by putting volatile vapors to work, luring heavenly lightning to earth.
But the main thing that Radishchev saw and appreciated in the 18th century is that, in his opinion, it opened the way for people to freedom, to the fight for freedom.
“O unforgettable century, you grant truth, freedom and light to joyful mortals...”
This is how it seemed to Radishchev, and this is how he portrayed his time - the 18th century - in poems written in his twilight years.
He was born during the reign of “Peter’s daughter”, Empress Elizabeth, he lived in the “Catherine’s century”, glorified by court writers, he survived the short reign of the “madman on the throne” - Paul - and died in those days when Alexander I, “the weak and crafty ruler “2, stepping to the throne over the corpse of his father, he promised to rule Russia “according to the behests” of his grandmother.
Radishchev was a contemporary of the events that dealt crushing blows to the old, feudal way of life: the revolutionary war of the American people for their independence, bourgeois revolution in France, which heralded the death of feudalism in Western Europe, and the formidable peasant war in Russia under the leadership of Emelyan Pugachev.
Russia second half of the XVIII centuries was a noble, military-bureaucratic empire. Its power and wealth rested on the old basis of feudal serfdom, on the predatory robbery of the people by kings, noble landowners, merchants, and officials. The state of landowners-serfs, insatiable in their greed, merciless in their cruelty, squeezed the last vital juices out of the serf peasants who made up the overwhelming majority of the population of then Russia.
The export of grain abroad increased from year to year. Serf manufactories arose. This gave big profits to the serf owners, fueled their passion for money-grubbing, and led to their even greater enslavement of the people. The people groaned in the shackles of slavery, under the burden of poverty and backbreaking forced labor.
However, what is new in Radishchev’s views is not the theory of progress, but the theory of revolution; what is new is that history for him is no longer just a collection of illustrations and examples, as it was for the enlighteners. He is trying to establish a connection between historical events, find the reasons for their occurrence in the conditions of people’s material life.
Interest in history and attempts to comprehend laws historical development Radishchev was determined by the desire to prove the inevitability of revolutionary upheavals, which alone bring to humanity the triumph of freedom and justice. Hence the desire to abandon general, abstract reasoning and get closer to real facts historical reality. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” first of all set the task of clarifying the political, economic and legal situation of the Russian state and people in order to prove, using concrete material of modern Russian life, the crime of autocracy and serfdom, the inevitable onset of a revolutionary coup. It was this concreteness of thinking that made it possible to raise the question of scientific foresight. Based on the study of Russian life, Radishchev concluded that it was the “severity of enslavement” that would push the peasantry to revolt, that this revolution would bring freedom to the people, establish a republic of workers, and sweep away autocracy and oppression from the face of the earth.
In “Travel” and the ode “Liberty,” Radishchev outlined a heartfelt and dear dream about the future of the Russian people, carried in his heart for long years struggle. He inspiredly painted a picture for the reader future life free people.
The years of revolution will pass, and the people will create their government from among the free. “Soon great men would be torn from their midst to defend the beaten tribe.” The interests of the people, concern for their welfare - this is what will be the subject of their attention in their daily work. In this state the population will be free. All citizens will be required to work. The land will be distributed to the people for their possession. New laws adopted by the people's government will operate in society, which are designed to regulate not only the economic relations of workers, but also to educate them, pursuing the benefit and interest of millions.
The great spirit of freedom, “creative like God,” which has triumphed in the society of workers, will transform all aspects of the lives of workers. Labor, which was a curse under corvée, becomes joyful and creative. In the state of workers, says Radishchev, “work-fun, sweat-dew, which produces meadows, fields, forests with its vitality.” The final liberation from poverty and destitution - free labor, the basis of growing economic wealth - will become a real possibility. If under serfdom “the land is like a stepmother”, “it gives meager bribes to slaves”, then in the state of free workers
The spirit of freedom warms the fields,
Tearslessly the field instantly becomes fat,
Everyone sows to himself and reaps to himself.
The previous humiliation will end. The worker will be able to live freely and in contentment. No one will dare to encroach on his work, his family, his independence; his people’s government will be his faithful defense. Living in contentment, the people will pay much attention to education and the arts, and then the sciences, arts and “handicrafts raised to the highest degree of perfection” will flourish. The basis of public education will be the principle of comprehensive education of the mind, feelings and body, but the main attention will be paid to instilling in every free worker a sense of love for the fatherland and civic virtue, love of work and freedom.
Devotion to the people's interests, expression of the will and spirit of the people, Radishchev's genius allowed him to dream so boldly and confidently under the conditions of the serfdom regime about the advent of this happy future. Radishchev at the same time, based on a study of real conditions modern Russia knew something else too. “It is not this dream, not the gaze that pierces the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes; I see through a whole century.” The possibility of this kind of guesswork can only be possible for a person trying to think historically and explain the phenomena of reality.
According to Belinsky, it was in the 18th century, in the very its beginning, in the era of Peter the Great, Russia became one of the those states, together with which she began to “hold the fate of the world on the scales of her power.”
The following decades further strengthened this place and position of Russia in the system of states of the world; not a single major event of the century, no matter how far from Russia the geographical location of its occurrence, took place outside the direct or indirect participation of Russia, outside the influence of Russian politics. This, in turn, could not help but determine the peculiarity of the development of Russian culture.
Leading Russian figures who took upon themselves the function of leading the cause of education treated the culture of the world in a businesslike manner. Getting acquainted with the ideological wealth of the past and present of the advanced countries of Europe, they knew how to pay tribute to the results achieved and reject, condemn sharply and categorically what could harm the Russian liberation movement, the cause of the struggle against the feudal-autocratic state.
The time when the historical experience of other peoples and, above all, the experience of socio-political, liberation struggles, came to Russia in an indirect form, that is, in the form of ready-made political, sociological and philosophical teachings. A new era was dawning—the Russian people put forward a thinker of such caliber as Radishchev, who independently studied, comprehended, and theoretically formulated this experience. At the same time, the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of the world was always and invariably formulated and summarized from the standpoint of the practical needs of the Russian liberation movement, from the heights of the achievements and experience of the Russian historical process. So Russian democratic culture, Russian revolutionary thought acquired a world-historical character.
Radishchev, an encyclopedic educated, independent and inquisitive thinker who showed extraordinary political sensitivity to the greatest events of the century, was closely connected with the intellectual and social life world, which was certainly facilitated by Russia’s position in international affairs, turned out to be exactly the person who made a new contribution, entered new page in the history of advanced philosophical and political thought of the era of enlightenment of the 18th century, laying the foundation for the Russian revolutionary movement, he became the first Russian revolutionary.
Facts indicate that Radishchev labored in Russia in an exceptional environment political activity society, that the flow of events put him forward with his “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” as an ideological leader and leader, as an exponent of the revolutionary aspirations of the people. His rebellious book is therefore not only a wonderful monument to personal courage and heroism. This is a document that testifies to the formation of an independent, advanced philosophical and political worldview in Russian society.
In Radishchev’s literary activity, one extraordinary circumstance attracts attention. Working long and hard for nine years, creating one work after another, he does not publish them. He began publishing long-completed works only in 1789. Consecutively, one after another, “Conversation about what is the son of the fatherland?”, “Life of F.V. Ushakov”, “Letter to a friend living in Tobolsk”, “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” are published. At first glance, this seems incomprehensible: the person sought
