The World That Never Was (83 page)

Kropotkin’s stance on the war ran deeper than any of the tactical and ideological disagreements of the past, setting him irreconcilably at loggerheads even with Malatesta, a respected colleague for the best part of forty years. Unlike Kropotkin, the Italian had never allowed himself to develop any affection for the state, or assign especial virtue to a particular national character. For long periods since the turn of the century Malatesta had been largely inactive except as a journalist, while he struggled to earn a living in England as an electrician, sherbet-vendor and even salesman of chicken incubators; intermittent forays back into activism had only hardened his truculence and resolve. Instinctively critical of terroristic violence, he had nevertheless held back from publishing his article on the subject, convinced that ventures such as La Ruche were symptomatic of a tendency among anarchists to ‘let themselves fall into the opposite fault to the violent excesses’. His occasional positive contributions, though, had been influential and his attendance at the 1907 Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam had helped reinvigorate a movement that had drifted too far under the influence of syndicalism, and instill it once again with something of the old insurrectionary zeal. Indeed, it was his disagreement with Kropotkin over his wishful belief in spontaneous revolution that had originally opened up a gulf between them. In psychological terms, though, the two men’s very different experiences of life as exiles in England may also have shaped their attitudes to the war.

Since settling in England in 1887, Kropotkin’s existence had been far from that of the propertied Russian aristocracy into which he was born. The long hours of piecework reviewing, crammed in between his own studies, writing and lecturing in order to pay the bills on the various small rented properties in which his family lived, had taken their toll on his weakened constitution, and periods of intense application were punctuated by frequent bouts of ill health. But whilst he was familiar with the horrendous life of the urban underclass from his propaganda work in the East End and around the country, and had witnessed and campaigned against the persecution of the Walsall martyrs, Burtsev and others, Kropotkin personally had been untroubled by such hardships. Held in high esteem by the scientific Establishment, and even by the more radical sections of the political Establishment, he had enjoyed a status from which he could allow himself to recognise in a functioning liberal parliamentary democracy – even one that was yet to be elected by universal franchise – the
germ of an acceptable polity. He was even known to muse, or perhaps half joke, that a constitutional monarchy such as Britain’s might be a guarantor of something resembling an anarchistic society.

Malatesta, by contrast, was the perpetual outsider, and had seen nothing at the margins of British life to suggest that he should modify his heartfelt enmity towards the state, or its representatives. Since before the London Congress of 1881, he had been widely suspected by the British police as a terrorist mastermind, and had been subject to Special Branch surveillance for much of the 1890s. Never, though, had he come so close to being implicated in violent crime as in December 1910, when a blowtorch that he had lent to a Latvian émigré was found at the scene of a burglary whose perpetrators, holed up in Sidney Street in East London after shooting dead three policemen, were subsequently involved in a dramatic shoot-out with the British army, in what became famous as the ‘Battle of Stepney’. On that occasion, Malatesta escaped prosecution but then, in 1912, an Italian spy whom he had denounced exploited British libel laws to have him imprisoned for three months. He only avoided expulsion thanks to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, led by the unions and attended by Vera Figner, and a forthright letter to the press from Kropotkin.

Though Malatesta insisted that the British people were his friend, he was clear that their government was not. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was according to Malatesta ‘the most perfect kind of philanthropic and religious hypocrite’; his reforms to introduce welfare a mere sop. He presumably felt a far greater distaste for Winston Churchill. Despite Malatesta’s own denunciation of the Sidney Street revolutionaries, the fact that Churchill had grabbed headlines when, as Home Secretary, he visited Sidney Street during the 1910 siege, would have sickened Malatesta. Unable to place the slightest faith in the call to war against German aggression made by such Establishment politicians, in the autumn of 1914 Malatesta’s open letter, ‘Anarchists have forgotten their principles’, predicted that after what would be a long and crippling conflict ‘there will be more militarism than before. One side wanting revenge, the other wanting to remain prepared against their revenge.’ Much as he regretted it, the breach with Kropotkin was never to be repaired. ‘It was’, he would later recollect, ‘one of the saddest and most tragic moments of my life (as doubtless for him too), when after hard discussion, we parted as adversaries, almost as enemies.’

The weight of disappointment must have lain heavy on him, considering his failure yet again to foment a revolt against the Italian government
in the early summer of 1914. Malatesta had established a sizeable following among the dock workers of Ancona where he based himself during previous visits in 1907 and 1913, and circumstances seemed so propitious, with Italy unsettled after a recent foretaste of war against Turkey in North Africa. His contacts throughout the socialist movement in his homeland were strong, and in the preceding year he had successfully cultivated the young editor of the party’s leading newspaper,
Avanti!
, Benito Mussolini. The son of an anarchist, Mussolini had translated Kropotkin’s
The Great French Revolution
, which he thought ‘overflowing with a great love of oppressed humanity and infinite kindness’; he had even praised in print the revolutionaries involved in the Sidney Street siege, whom Malatesta had disowned. But for all the high hopes of the Red Week which followed the killing of two demonstrators by police in Ancona, the putative insurrection fizzled out when the unions called off their strike. And by the time Malatesta returned to London in August, his meetings and correspondence with Mussolini may have caused him some foreboding that Italian socialism might assume a dangerously nationalistic and even authoritarian aspect under the pressures of involvement in a continent-wide war: a war which Italy would join in 1915, breaching its previous promises to the Allies that it would confront Austro-Hungary, in the first instance, and subsequently Germany too. ‘Let the way be opened for the elemental forces of the individual, for no other human reality exists except the individual,’ Malatesta would have read in one letter from Mussolini, though he can little have suspected his bellicosity of being sponsored by the British secret service.

The obduracy of Belgian resistance, especially around the heavily fortified city of Liège, delayed the initial German advance into France for several days during August 1914, and the sacrifice at the same time of 200,000 Russian soldiers, dead or captured in the terrible Battle of Tannenberg on the Eastern Front, bought time for the forces of the Entente to steady their nerve and stabilise their front line. But as the French soon learned, the result would merely be a stalemate, as the opposing armies settled into a war of grinding attrition, waged across a barely shifting line of barbed wire and bomb craters. As the first Christmas of the war passed, and then the second, the quagmire of the Western Front drew in ever more millions of troops to fight and die in the most futile of battles.

Having staked so much of his faith on liberal Britain, Kropotkin at last received some vindication for his position on the home front. In the
government’s desperation to retain the loyalty of its citizens, who were being asked to sacrifice far more than ever before in the national cause, whole swathes of the socialist programme of reform for which Hyndman and others had argued for thirty years, consistently reviled by the Establishment for their efforts, were passed into law. The contribution to the war effort made by women in men’s jobs would even lead to their being granted the vote, as anarchists had demanded ever since Louise Michel had chaired the meetings of the Women’s Vigilance Committee during the Siege of Paris. By early 1917, however, Kropotkin’s attention had turned to events in the land of his birth. His stalwart defence of the Allies’ participation in the war had been intended to protect the revolutionary tradition of France but now, as his late friend Elisée Reclus had predicted in 1905, Russia appeared about to claim her destiny and fulfil the ‘rights of man’ that the French Revolution of the eighteenth century had betrayed.

The war had inflicted catastrophic casualties on Russia, its operations constantly compromised by poor communication technology and ill-educated soldiers. Whilst German military intelligence had built on the achievements of Wilhelm Stieber in the war of 1870, the emphasis placed by Russia on its efforts to suppress revolution now left it floundering on the battlefield, unable even to fall back on the ingenuity shown forty years earlier by the besieged defenders of Paris. For whereas the desperate French had then improvised their aeronautical postal service and experimented with the most improbable methods of communication, conscripted Russian peasants now chopped down telegraph poles for use as fuel. A single, disastrous offensive in 1915 saw over a million Russian troops taken prisoner, and even the breakthrough achieved the following year by dint of General Brusilov’s strategic brilliance failed to quell growing disquiet in the ranks, after the tsar, who had appointed himself commander-in-chief, neglected to capitalise on the advantage.

Away from the front, the atmosphere grew febrile during the winter of 1916 as bread shortages stoked fears of looming social disorder, and exposed the tsarist court – over which Tsarina Alexandra and her latest mystical adviser Rasputin presided in the absence of her husband – to ever more scurrilous rumour and the hatred of broad swathes of public opinion. Not even the murder of Rasputin that December, however, could stem the tide of discontent and by late February 1917 attempts at the violent suppression of spontaneous mass protests in St Petersburg at the shortages of bread had propelled the city into a state of open revolt. Even
the most prominent fulminators of revolution were caught unawares. As power in the city devolved to the twin institutions of the Provisional government and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, following the garrison’s refusal of orders and then its desertion, and central authority began to collapse across the empire with even villages declaring themselves ‘autonomous republics’, the tide of change became irresistible. It took the intervention of his generals to convince Tsar Nicholas that his abdication was unavoidable, but for all his air of denial he must already have known the game was up. A fortnight earlier, Gérard Encausse, Rasputin’s forebear as the imperial family’s favourite mystic, had died in Paris: as long as he lived, he had promised, the tsar would retain his crown.

On being appointed minister of justice in the Provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, who alone also served on the executive committee of the Soviet, cemented his position as the great hope of the new Russian politics by ordering the immediate release of all political prisoners. Forty years after he had last seen his homeland, Kropotkin received the news with exultation: ‘what they reproached us with as a fantastic Utopia has been accomplished without a single casualty,’ he wrote, not quite accurately and wholly prematurely. Yet even amidst the excitement he may have felt a twinge of envy. In accordance with Kerensky’s instruction that the returning martyrs of the revolution should be greeted with public acclamation, Vera Figner and German Lopatin, along with other ‘heroes and heroines of terrorism’, were given the imperial box of the Mariinsky theatre at a celebratory concert: ‘old gentlemen and several old ladies, with grave, worn, curiously expressive and unforgettable faces’.

‘I shivered to think of all that the little party stood for in the way of physical suffering and moral torment, borne in silence and buried in oblivion,’ recorded the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, as the orchestra struck up the ‘Marseillaise’. When reviewing a French naval squadron in 1893, Alexander III had cut short its rendition after a single verse, but now it was Russia’s new national anthem, its conclusion met with cries of ‘Long live the Revolution!’ and ‘Long live France!’ Mounting the conductor’s podium, elegant and ‘utterly unaffected’, in calm, level tones Figner intoned a litany listing all those who had died under tsarist persecution, reducing nearly all those present to tears. ‘What an epilogue to Kropotkin’s
Memoirs
, or Dostoevsky’s
Memories of the House of the Dead!’
Paléologue averred, but Kropotkin himself was not there to bear witness.

The effects of Kropotkin’s past imprisonment and a life spent sublimating disappointments had undoubtedly accelerated the ravages of time on a man who, half a century earlier, had been able to endure a journey
post-haste from Siberia to St Petersburg, much of it by sled. By 1912, he was writing to Edward Carpenter to express his regrets that they would be unlikely to meet again as he only ventured up to London from his south coast retreat during the summer months. Nevertheless, the prospect of a victorious homecoming rejuvenated Kropotkin to the extent that within a few weeks of the Mariinsky concert he embarked at Aberdeen for the North Sea crossing, his decision to transport fifty crates of books to Russia, with only his wife to assist him, a true bibliophile’s statement of intent.