Alexander Herzen

(1812 - 1870)

Born the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman and a German woman in 1812, Alexander Herzen was arrested in 1834, a year after graduating from Moscow University, for his involvement in a socialist-sympathizing intellectual circle and exiled to work in provincial bureaucracies for six years. He later moved to Paris, where he witnessed the uprisings of 1848, and settled in London in 1852, becoming the founder of Russia’s first free press and printing radical periodicals for clandestine distribution in his native country.