Nikolay Ogarev

Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev (also Ogaryov; Russian: Николай Платонович Огарёв; 6 December [O.S. 24 November] 1813 – 12 June [O.S. 31 May] 1877) was a Russian poet, historian and political activist. He was deeply critical of the limitations of the Emancipation reform of 1861, claiming that the serfs were not set free, but had simply exchanged one form of serfdom for another.

Ogarev was a lifelong friend, fellow-exile and collaborator of Alexander Herzen on Kolokol, a newspaper printed in England and smuggled into Russia. In the summer of 1827, during a walk in the Sparrow Hills above Moscow, Herzen and Ogarev (both in their teens) made an oath not to rest until their country was free; the oath reportedly sustained them and their friends throughout many crises of their lives at home and abroad and was described in E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles. The place of the oath is now marked with a monument.

Biography

Nikolay Ogaryov was born in Saint Petersburg into a family of wealthy Russian landowners. Having lost his mother early, Nikolay spent his childhood years in his father's estate near Penza. In 1826 he met and became a close friend of his distant relative Aleksandr Herzen, with whom he instantly found two things in common, the aversion to monarchy and deep empathy with the Decembrists' ideas. In 1829 he left the farm and went to study at the University of Moscow, where he developed a remarkable political work by joining a group of utopian socialists, resulting in his arrest and internal exile to his father's farm.

In 1856 he left Russia for good, living many years in London and Geneva, dedicated to the organization of free Russian print publication of The Bell and General Assembly.