Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alexander Herzen was a Russian writer and thinker born in Moscow in 1812 and died in Paris in 1870. He is regarded as a precursor of Russian socialism and agrarian populism, and his writings helped shape the political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. He was also the first independent Russian political publisher operating outside Russia.
Herzen emigrated in 1847 with his family to Italy, never returning to Russia. After personal tragedies in Geneva, he settled in London in 1852, where he founded the Free Russian Press in 1853 and lived for many years before eventually moving to Geneva and then Paris, where he died.
Kolokol, or The Bell, was a Russian-language journal published by Herzen and his friend Nikolay Ogarev in London between 1857 and 1867, at Herzen's personal expense. It was smuggled into Russia and was widely read there, including reportedly by the Emperor himself. The Bell broke the story of the government's consideration of serf emancipation in July 1857 and later campaigned under the slogan Liberty and Land after the Emancipation reform of 1861.
Isaiah Berlin called Herzen's autobiography My Past and Thoughts "one of the great monuments to Russian literary and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of... Turgenev and Tolstoy." Berlin regarded Herzen as a personal hero and repeatedly emphasized Herzen's condemnation of sacrificing present human happiness to abstract future ideals, sharing Herzen's belief that "the end of life is life itself."
My Past and Thoughts is Herzen's autobiography, written between 1852 and 1870, and is often considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature. It was originally written in Russian and portions were translated into English; it covers his life, exile, and the political upheavals he witnessed across Europe.
The death of Emperor Nicholas in 1855 transformed the reach of Herzen's Free Russian Press. For its first three years the press had been unable to sell a single copy or get one into Russia, but after 1855, Herzen's writings and the journals he edited were smuggled wholesale into Russia and their influence spread across the country and into Europe.