The World That Never Was (31 page)

Undaunted, Malatesta had followed up the Bologna debacle with a similarly doomed attempt to incite insurrection in Puglia, where only five of the several hundred expected activists actually materialised. Emerging from prison with his appetite for revolutionary adventure still unabated, the summer of 1875 had seen him on a mission to Spain to stage the prison break of an anarchist who proved infuriatingly reluctant to be liberated, before he returned to join the Masonic lodge in Naples, repeating Bakunin’s mistake of a decade earlier by thinking that he could transform it into an instrument of revolutionary organisation. After such embarrassing disappointments, anyone less single-minded than the tight-framed, tousle-haired and alarmingly moustachioed Malatesta might have been chastened: instead, perfectly undeterred, he plunged headlong into the ideological quicksand of Bosnia.

By the same count, Kravchinsky should have noted Malatesta’s unblemished record of failed insurrections and given him a wide berth. Had Kravchinsky been able to meet Bakunin for himself, while travelling through Switzerland on his way to the Balkans, perhaps his curiosity would have been satisfied, but only a few days previously age and ill health had finally claimed the sixty-two-year-old revolutionary. In Malatesta, Kravchinsky had found a surrogate who carried the conviction needed to help restore his battered faith in the possibility of a beneficent revolution. ‘We must make unceasing attempts, even if we are beaten and completely routed, one, two, ten times, even twenty times,’ Malatesta might have told his new friend, repeating words of encouragement written by Bakunin to another
narodnik
two years previously; ‘but if on the twenty-first time, the people support us by taking part in our revolution, we shall have been paid for all the sacrifices we will have endured.’

With Malatesta’s first mention of an arms cache in Puglia, left buried from two years earlier, and of a new scheme to mount an insurrection
near Naples, all Kravchinsky’s previous plans and promises were instantly forgotten.

‘We had planned to go to Montenegro together, before he had the whim of going to Italy instead,’ the earnest young Klements wrote plaintively from Berne, complaining about Kravchinsky, whom he nicknamed the ‘Bluebird’ dreamer. As Chaikovsky read the letter, the icy wind howling through the ramshackle walnut-wood walls that the ‘Godmen’ had thrown together for shelter at Cedar Vale, his baby wailing from the cold, his sympathy is likely to have been fleeting. His own predicament offered enough misery of its own, though whether the physical demands of life in Kansas or its communal nature was more taxing, he would probably have been hard put to say.

‘They have neither pilots nor lighthouses,’ had been how Frey described the ideal colonists he sought to recruit, since ‘everything is unexplored, everything must be discovered anew’. The ‘second-rate prairie’ on which Frey had chosen to stake out his plots yielded little to the incompetent husbandry of the colonists, however, who lacked even the skill to milk their cow, let alone produce the cheese or butter that might have made more appetising the ascetic diet of unleavened bread prescribed by the vegetarian Frey. The material challenges the group faced, however, were at least equalled by the emotional torment they suffered.

Though a modest lifestyle was accepted as part and parcel of the struggle for a new social order, the newcomers baulked at Frey’s evangelical imperative to ‘break yourself’ in order to release the true communist within, and vigorously resisted when he urged them to renounce clothes. Mealtimes were a trial too, with anyone late to the table forbidden to eat, even if delayed by urgent community business, while the other families winced as Frey subjected his daughter to daunting tests of mathematical prowess and punished her failure with a dowsing of cold water. Maybe he considered such treatment physically beneficial, as well as character building: with quinine unaffordable, a bath of rainwater was also the proposed cure for Chaikovsky’s malaria on one occasion.

‘This slow, constant mockery of man’s moral liberty’ was the overriding impression that would stay with Chaikovsky, who must have dearly wished that before leaving Europe he had thought to consult Elisée Reclus’ travelogue of 1861,
Voyage à la Sierra-Nevada de Sainte-Marthe
. A bible for
those seeking to establish communes in America (despite Reclus’ antagonism to such social experiments), it warned of the perverse tendency of utopian communities to constrain rather than encourage liberty, and their susceptibility to petty tyrants. Reclus had no time either for the utopian theories of Charles Fourier, with his wild promises and bizarre symbolism, according to which two crops at least should have flourished in Cedar Vale: the cauliflowers of free love, and the cabbages whose leaves represented illicit liaisons.

That Frey had decided to create his own colony may have been due to his prudish distaste for the sexual antics he and Mary had encountered elsewhere. Their first taste of cooperative life, in New York, had ended when ‘hungry debauchees’ with an appetite for promiscuity had swamped the commune, and discomfort at the libertarian ethos at Reunion had similarly prompted their departure. Whether Mary agreed with his view that they had escaped ‘the most discordant and hellish life that could be imagined’, however, is an open question. As a radiant young bride, eight years earlier, she would have been entitled to expect great things of marriage to a well-connected and highly respected scientist. Even after settling in America, the prospect of being free to pursue her own ambitions as a doctor would have made the hardships endurable. Since then, though, Frey’s neglect of his wife’s romantic and libidinous needs had led her to search for satisfaction outside the marriage.

Grigori Machtet may not have been the first to fill the gap in Mary’s heart and bed, but after his return to Russia, she had struck out desperately for independence, her brief visit to Chicago in search of a baby to adopt turning into a year’s absence. When necessity finally forced her back to Cedar Vale she had maintained her habit of free-loving, conceiving a child by her next young Russian paramour. Despite belonging to that generation of Russian radicals which had held Chernyshevsky’s writings as gospel truth, Frey’s jealousy seems to have bitten deep, and in his ever more pedantic enforcement of the community’s rules he may well have been sublimating the frustration he felt at the loss of control over his personal life. With his original partners in the foundation of Cedar Vale long gone, few of its subsequent residents were psychologically strong enough to withstand the Wednesday meetings that he still found so ‘electric, thrilling, [and] beneficent’: mutual criticism followed by enforced public confession may have been intended to clear the air, but the effect was rarely restorative.

The commune’s manifesto had been full of fine sentiments: ‘For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do,’ it pledged. Its
journal had once recorded such sentiments as being ‘like sailors throwing the baggage overboard to save the life…in order to get something to live on’, but entries had already ceased by the time of Chaikovsky’s arrival. Since then, the reality of their shipwrecked existence had become painfully apparent to everyone: it was the colonists themselves who lacked assistance, and Frey who needed resisting, while the ideal future to which they aspired lay so far over the horizon as to be quite fantastical. By late 1876, Chaikovsky and a chastened Malinkov had moved their families to a second shack just across the river from Frey’s own: ‘With what shame one recalls many episodes of this life,’ the leader of the ‘Godmen’ later wrote.

Chaikovsky bridled at the grim fascination with which the other residents of Cedar Vale watched their social experiment failing, and when the Kansas authorities launched a formal investigation into the commune’s supposed immorality, the humiliation became too much. To extricate himself, though, was no easy matter. Chaikovsky had staked everything on Cedar Vale and was penniless. Reluctantly leaving his wife and child behind, he set off on foot in the hope of earning the price of their escape.

While Chaikovsky shivered through the icy American winter and spring of 1877, Kravchinsky basked in the balmy Mediterranean climate of Naples, where he had arrived from Bosnia late the previous year. Posing as a consumptive, Abram Rubliov, he had at first attracted little attention among the other northern Europeans there for their health, during what was then the peak tourist season. Only the attentive care he received from a pair of fetching young Russian ladies prompted malicious rumours of a
ménage à trois
at 77 Strada Vendagliere. Far more than Italian morality was at risk, however, for one of Kravchinsky’s companions was Olympia Kutuzov, the radical activist who had married Carlo Cafiero a couple of years earlier, while the other, Natalia Smetskaya, was the ex-room-mate of Kropotkin’s Zurich friend Sofia Lavrova, now in flight from punitive exile to Siberia. And the work that preoccupied him was the composition of a pioneering manual of guerrilla warfare.

Meanwhile, Malatesta devoted himself to practical preparations, convinced that the time was ripe for yet another attempt at insurrection. Although socialist in name, the national government had been elected on the suffrage of barely one in fifty of the population, and was dependent for its survival on support from the very propertied classes whose inept
management of the land had caused widespread economic damage. Moreover, whilst ideologically at odds with the Catholic Church, and demonised by the intemperate Pope Pius IX, both shared a common enemy that was subject to ever more ruthless government persecution: the communists and, above all, the anarchists, whose numbers the police estimated to be in the tens of thousands nationwide, with Naples second only to Florence as a centre of support.

Faced with organised resistance to its half-hearted reforms in the 1860s, the Italian authorities had cast their opponents as ‘brigands’: a linguistic sleight of hand that had since earned a spurious scientific legitimacy from a young doctor called Cesare Lombroso. Like Malatesta, he too had been drawn to medical studies by his social conscience, and also shared a commitment to the education of the peasantry, the redistribution of land and a strong anticlericalism. One dull December morning in 1870, however, while examining the skull of Vilhella, Italy’s most famous recent outlaw, ‘a vast plain under a flaming sky’ had revealed itself to him: the beautifully simple, if horribly mistaken apprehension that the criminal was ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals’.

His notion of the inherently ‘delinquent man’ struck a blow against Catholic ideas of ‘sinfulness’, but at the same time challenged the fundamental tenet of revolutionary socialism: that man was perfectible. And whilst offering the nascent science of anthropometry a compelling vision of a subspecies whose ‘facial asymmetry, irregular teeth, large jaws, dark facial hair, [and] twisted noses’ could be measured and graded with calipers, it also opened the door to political repression and racial subjugation. For what, after all, were the doomed and stunted creatures of his imagination, if not genetic detritus, upon whose eradication mankind’s highest development depended?

Malatesta could not have disagreed more. Following his late master’s dictum that ‘Popular revolution is born from the merging of the revolt of the brigand with that of the peasant’, for him, the uneducated outlaw was to be celebrated as an avenging force of nature and recruited to the political struggle. It was with this belief that he and his friends focused their efforts on the Matese massif, a mountainous region several miles inland from Naples. During the winter of 1877 and into spring, they tramped repeatedly several thousand feet up to the icy massif, still deep in snow and home to packs of wolves, to build what they believed to be a strong relationship with the natives of the region: a population proud of their warrior ancestry and indomitable independence. For this
they had the assistance of Salvatore Farina to thank, a veteran of Garibaldi’s campaigns whose knowledge of the local dialect opened doors, and whose enthusiastic reading of the locals’ reactions to their presence further emboldened them.