The World That Never Was (33 page)

After twenty-three days journeying through an embryonic civil war, Chaikovsky’s fragile nerves were close to breaking. Having seen the viciousness of American class conflict he craved a speedy return home, but events in Russia rendered any such hopes futile. Pyrrhic victories in the war against Turkey had inflated nationalistic fervour, while the persecution of Chaikovsky’s old friends and colleagues became ever more harsh. Up to four years on from their arrest, hundreds were still held awaiting
trial in overcrowded conditions, and treated with growing contempt by their gaolers. And any illusions Chaikovsky harboured that his absence in America might prevent charges being laid against him would have been dispelled by news of the fate of Grigori Machtet, sentenced to exile in Siberia for his role in setting up a training camp for agitators.

Toiling as a hired-hand carpenter in the shipyards of Chester, near Philadelphia, Chaikovsky clung to the wreckage of his faith as the twelve-hour shifts under beady-eyed supervision brought him close to a state of complete breakdown. ‘Religion is rising,’ he persisted in claiming, ‘and so I shall seek it no matter where, even in the most outworn and dying Christianity.’ The utopian community of Harmonists near Pittsburgh, who saw in the Great Strike ‘the beginning of the harvest-time spoken of in scripture’, offered one possible haven, but on the suggestion of a fellow Russian he instead joined the Shakers at Sonyea. As time and rest healed his mental wounds, however, he recoiled from their submission to Christian doctrine, feeling that they should have been searching instead for ‘the presence of divinity in themselves’: the only sure foundation, he now held, for successful communistic life. Frey wrote to him, warning of the risks of political engagement – ‘The building of the barricades and the beating of drums will drown out your voice. The people will simply not listen to you’ – but the new-found solicitude of the Cedar Vale tyrant could not draw him back.

With the arrival of a subscription by friends in Russia to cover his family’s travel expenses, Chaikovsky made directly for New York City, where his wife and daughters awaited him. Next came a ship for Liverpool. France and Switzerland lay ahead. By the time he arrived there, Kravchinsky would finally have staked his unsavoury claim to fame.

7
Propaganda by Deed

Switzerland, 1876–1879

For Europe’s revolutionaries, Switzerland was a second home, but in the summer of 1876 it was visited too by those whose interest lay more in mankind’s past than in its future. Only twenty miles along the shore of Lac Leman from Elisée Reclus’ home in Clarens, and nearer still to Geneva, a Roman city was said to have been discovered, submerged beneath the water. Tourists from as far afield as Scandinavia and Poland descended, classicists and amateur antiquarians, and entrepreneurial locals rowed them out to where the city supposedly lay, pouring oil on the water’s surface to create a window through which they might peer. There was a street corner, the experts gasped, and there, on the lake’s deep bed, the statue of a horse. Learned papers verified the marvel, explaining the lost city’s position with half-baked reference to the latest geological theories. It was, of course, a brilliant hoax. The young radical Jogand-Pages, whose last major coup had been convincing the French navy to chase imaginary sharks off the coast of Marseilles, had once again toyed with public credulity. And once again he had escaped undetected.

A pioneering theorist of tectonic shift, Elisée Reclus would have given the archaeologists’ fanciful explanations short shrift, though he was probably too busy to notice. His vast project,
Universal Geography
, conceived and planned during his long incarceration in the prison barges at Trébéron, was in its early stages; every continent and country on earth would be examined, every great river and mountain range, all with reference to the human populations that had shaped and been shaped by them: the work of a lifetime. Not content with this undertaking, Reclus had also been refining his vision of an ideal society, and how it might be achieved. He had arrived in Switzerland in 1872, half broken by imprisonment, but now he was regaining his strength.

Reports sent back to Paris by agents of the French police stationed in Switzerland, including the sharp-eyed informant Oscar Testut, trace a growing vehemence in Reclus’ political engagement. Early in 1874, Reclus’ ‘shadows’ had seen little cause for concern in this ‘very learned man, [who is] hard-working, with regular habits, but very much a dreamer, bizarre, obstinate in his ideas and with a belief in the realisation of universal brotherhood’. Within weeks, however, Reclus’ second wife had died in childbirth on Valentine’s Day, and the balance of his interests shifted. Craving distraction from grief and less constrained by family responsibilities, he now embraced the revolutionary cause with such ardour that, by 1877, his activities among the émigré plotters were being closely observed. ‘Since his arrival in Switzerland,’ another agent opined, somewhat overexcitedly, ‘he has not ceased to give the most active assistance to every intrigue of the revolutionary party.’

That same year, the agents noted the return to Switzerland of another geographer, Peter Kropotkin, drawn back to the Jura by a hunger for passionate political companionship. But though their shared intellectual interests might have recommended Kropotkin to Reclus as a soulmate, the pair immediately found themselves rivals in an émigré community that was traumatised by the failure of the Commune, and increasingly polarised as to the best way forward. Bakunin’s death in the summer of 1876 had left the anti-authoritarian wing of the International rudderless. Now, as its members gathered at socialist congresses across Europe, new leaders and fresh ideas were called for. Questions that had previously been of mere style and emphasis became a matter of genuine substance, epitomised by the disputatious search for an appropriate name by which to distinguish the movement, and to which adherents could rally.

Reclus, whose graveside eulogy for Bakunin had positioned him as a reliable bearer of the torch, had seized the ideological initiative that spring, proudly declaring himself an ‘anarchist’ during the anniversary reunion for the Commune at Lausanne. His statement echoed that by Italian delegates at a recent congress in Florence, who had embraced the theory of anarchist communism: common ownership of the means of production and distribution, but with every individual entitled to a share according to his needs. But what did Reclus intend the word to identify? In the original Greek, it meant simply ‘without a ruler’, and both Proudhon and Bakunin had borrowed casually in this regard. Concern was expressed in the émigré community, however, about its popular currency as a term of abuse for those whose actions created dangerous disorder. During the French Revolution, after all, the dictatorial Directorate had disparaged its
enemies as proponents of ‘anarchism’. James Guillaume, editor of the Jura Federation’s newspaper and the man who had first introduced Kropotkin to the ideas of Bakunin, complained that the term contained ‘worrying ambiguities…without indicating any positive theory’ by way of counterbalance, and that its adoption would risk ‘regrettable misunderstandings’.

In assuming the title of ‘anarchist’, however, Reclus was intentionally embracing the negative connotations with which the term was freighted. His own experience of the Commune’s defeat had left him horrified and humiliated, and he longed to shake potential supporters of the anti-authoritarian movement out of their apathy. Attracting notoriety seemed an effective means to this end. Beyond this, though, he envisaged a revolution in pedagogy to generate the necessary groundswell in popular support, whereby children would be saved from the authoritarian tendencies of bourgeois education, and instead inculcated at the earliest and most receptive age with an appreciation of the virtues of true freedom. Though Elisée Reclus habitualy used his second rather than first forename, Jean-Jacques, it was the pioneering educational theories of his namesake, Rousseau – who like Reclus had been an exile from France, and who had lived only a few miles along the lake a hundred years earlier – that underpinned his thinking.

Kropotkin, by contrast, was insistently espousing a fierce anti-intellectualism that may have reflected his own guilty conscience over the educational privileges he had enjoyed. According to his fundamentalist vision at the time, educational advancement alone was a distraction: a pure anarchist society could only be produced by a spontaneous and instinctual revolution of the peasant masses, whose current state was, he erroneously insisted, like that of a volcano ready to erupt. Even the new international campaign for a weekly day of rest and leisure – intended to provide workers with the opportunity to expand their minds and strengthen their bodies through culture, sport and contemplation – appears to have left him cold. It was a stance that put him squarely in the camp of Guillaume and his ‘Jurassians’ of the north, in clear opposition to the southern ‘Genevans’ who were looking to Reclus for leadership. Kropotkin’s faith in such a revolution was, however, severely shaken in the spring of 1877 by the failure of Malatesta’s peasant revolt in the Matese mountains.

At the Berne Congress of Bakuninists in 1876, Guillaume and the Jurassians had enthusiastically adopted Malatesta’s and Cafiero’s proposal for a policy of ‘insurrectionary deeds’ as the most effective means of
promoting ‘the principles of socialism’, and a fortnight later, the French socialist Paul Brousse had even coined the striking phrase ‘propaganda by deed’ to express this new strategy. ‘Everyone has taken sides for or against,’ Brousse had once written of the Commune. ‘Two months of fighting have done more than twenty-three years of propaganda’, and the same logic was now simply to be applied elsewhere. But whilst there was near unanimity among socialists when it came to celebrating the glorious failure of 1871, the Matese debacle would not be treated so indulgently. Reclus’ old Communard friend, Benoît Malon, even charged that ‘to act in such a manner must be downright insane. No one will question how much harm these parasites of labour masquerading as internationalists have done.’

Nevertheless, the notion of ‘propaganda by deed’ was taking hold as a means for revolutionaries, who felt increasingly marginalised and persecuted, to advance their cause. By 1878, when events in Russia turned towards violence, Kropotkin would be caught in the bind of lauding the assassins who were targeting the tsar’s government, whilst perhaps hoping that the anarchists’ own call to action would elicit a response that eschewed the purely terroristic in favour of something more insurrectional.

The trigger for the attack that launched the wave of violence that swept over the tsarist regime had been a lapse in social etiquette. When General Trepov of the Third Section had visited the Peter and Paul fortress on a tour of inspection, Bogoliubov, one of the young radicals imprisoned there, had failed to acknowledge him with due deference. In contravention of all the unspoken rules of Russian society, which demanded that a veneer of civilised respect should be maintained between those of the better classes regardless of circumstances, Trepov had reacted by ordering Bogoliubov to be publicly beaten. Outrage among the radicals at his humiliation was extreme and widespread, but it was Vera Zasulich, amorously involved with Bogoliubov before his arrest and herself a veteran already of several years in prison and internal exile, who nominated herself his avenger.

Zasulich had waited just long enough to avoid prejudicing the Trial of the 193, at which many of the young radicals arrested in recent years were finally to be judged. Then, within a day of a verdict being delivered that dismissed the charges against the mass of defendants, she had acted. Calmly awaiting her scheduled appointment with the chief of the Third Section,
upon entering his office Zasulich, her hand trembling, had discharged her pistol at point-blank range. Trepov, though wounded, survived, but a bloodier sequel was not long in coming. Moved by Zasulich’s courage, Kravchinsky was perhaps also relieved about her poor aim. He might still claim the footnote in the history books for which he had so earnestly prepared, as the first assassin of a high-ranking tsarist official.

Arriving in Switzerland from Italy, carrying the stiletto dagger given to him as a parting gift by his fellow prisoners, Kravchinsky had remained there for only a few weeks before setting off back to Russia, where a St Petersburg jury had just acquitted Zasulich, despite overwhelming evidence against her. Encouraged by the popularity of the verdict, on 4 August Kravchinsky approached General Mezentsev, the chief of police, as he was walking in a St Petersburg park, drew the stiletto from a rolled newspaper, and stabbed him dead. A carriage pulled by Dr Veimar’s champion black trotter, Varvar, which had already given sterling service during Kropotkin’s escape from prison, allowed the assassin and his accomplice to make a clean getaway. The shocking boldness of the attack was not lost on the public, nor the extent of the conspiratorial networks that must be active in St Petersburg for it to have been possible.