Herzen was a prominent Russian Revolutionary Democrat; materialist philosopher, thinker and writer. He was born on April 6, 1812, to a bureaucratic aristocratic family in Moscow. In his youth, influenced by the ideas of the December party members, he was determined to oppose the tsarist autocracy. In 1829, Herzen went to study Physics and Mathematics (Natural Sciences) at Moscow University and organized a political group with his friend Ogarev and others to study various social and political issues. He graduated with distinction in 1833. In 1834, as he was planning to publish a magazine to publicize revolutionary ideas, the Tsar authorities arrested him for the crime of “a free thinker extremely dangerous to society”, and exiled him, Ogarev and other members of the group. He and his team were released in 1840. Shortly afterwards, a letter condemning the illegal shootings of citizens by a St. Petersburg policeman was seized by the censors and he was exiled to Novgorod. Many years of exile brought him widely exposed to the dark social reality of Russia, deepened his understanding of the crimes of autocratic system, and accumulated a lot of materials for his later works…
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