Aleksandr Herzen

Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) was a Russian writer, thinker and political exile, often called the father of Russian socialism. The illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, he was arrested as a student radical and exiled to the provinces. In 1847 he left Russia for good, witnessed the revolutions of 1848 and settled in London, where he founded the Free Russian Press and, with Nikolai Ogaryov, the influential journal The Bell, which helped prepare the emancipation of the serfs. His memoir My Past and Thoughts, a portrait of himself and his age, remains his best-known work.