Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1905-1914

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Abstract
How long ago was it that, terrified from childhood, we ceased to kill in ourselves the most innocent desires? How long ago did we cease to shudder when finding in our souls passionate impulses unrecorded in the tariff of romanticism?Aleksandr Herzen, From The Other Shore In a letter to his friends in Russia in 1850, Aleksandr Herzen complained of the “democratic orthodoxy” that was forming among the exiled revolutionaries of 1848:They have established their own radical inquisition, their poll tax on ideas: ideas and thoughts which satisfy their demands have the rights of citizenship … the others are … the proletariat of the moral world: they have to be silent or win their place by a head-on attack. Against rebellious ideas there has appeared a democratic censorship, incomparably more dangerous than any other, because it has neither police, nor packed juries … nor prisons, nor fines. When the reactionary censorship takes a book from your hands, the book receives universal respect: they persecute the author, close a printing house, smash the machinery, and the persecuted word acquires the status of a belief. Democratic censorship achieves the moral destruction of its object: its accusations are promulgated not … from a procurator's mouth, but from the distance of exile, the darkness of prisons. A verdict written by a hand which bears the marks of chains leaves a deep impression on the heart, which does not prevent it from being unjust.

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