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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on war
Alexander Herzen: Selections on the military and war
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Alexander Herzen
From My Past and Thoughts
Translated by Constance Garnett
Staraya Russa, the military settlements! Terrible words! Can it be that history…will never pull away the shroud under which the government has concealed the series of crimes coldly and systematically perpetrated in establishing the military settlements? There have been plenty of horrors everywhere, but in that case they were marked by the peculiar imprint of Petersburg and Gatchina, of German and Tatar influence. The beating with sticks and scourging with lashes for the insubordinate went on for months together…the blood was never dry on the floors of the rural offices…every crime that may be committed by the people against their torturers on that tract of land is justified beforehand.
The Mongolian side of the Moscow period which distorted the Slav character of the Russians, the inhumanity of army discipline which distorted the Petersburg period, are embodied in the full perfection of their hideousness in Count Arakcheyev. Arakcheyev was undoubtedly one of the most loathsome figures that rose to the surface of the Russian government after Peter the Great. That ‘flunky of a crowned soldier,’ as Pushkin said of him, was the model of an ideal corporal as seen in the dreams of the father of Frederick the Second; he was made up of inhuman devotion, mechanical accuracy, the exactitude of a chronometer, routine and energy, a complete lack of feeling, as much intelligence as was necessary to carry out orders, and enough ambition, spite, and envy to prefer power to money. Such men are a real treasure to the czars…
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