Chapter XII: Part 12

If, then, my conclusion was that there are periods in human development when a conflict is unavoidable, and civil war breaks out quite independently of the will of particular individuals, let, at least, these conflicts take place, not on the ground of vague aspirations, but upon definite issues; not upon secondary points, the insignificance of which does not diminish the violence of the conflict, but upon broad ideas which inspire men by the grandness of the horizon which they bring into view. In this last case the conflict itself will depend much less upon the efficacy of firearms and guns than upon the force of the creative genius which will be brought into action in the work of reconstruction of society. It will depend chiefly upon the constructive forces of society taking for the moment a free course; upon the inspirations being of a higher standard, and so winning more sympathy even from those who, as a class, are opposed to the change. The conflict, being thus engaged in on larger issues, will purify the social atmosphere itself; and the numbers of victims on both sides will certainly be much smaller than they would have been in case the fight had been fought upon matters of secondary importance in which the lower instincts of men find a free play.

With these ideas I returned to Russia.

XI

During my journey I had bought a number of books and collections of socialist newspapers. In Russia such books were ‘unconditionally prohibited’ by censorship; and some of the collections of newspapers and reports of international congresses could not be bought for any amount of money even in Belgium. ‘Shall I part with them, while my brother and my friends would be so glad to have them at St. Petersburg?’ I asked myself; and I decided that by all means I must get them into Russia.

I returned to St. Petersburg _viâ_ Vienna and Warsaw. Thousands of Jews live by smuggling on the Polish frontier, and I thought that if I could succeed in discovering only one of them my books would be carried in safety across the border. However, to alight at a small railway station near the frontier while every other passenger went on, and to hunt there for smugglers, would hardly have been reasonable; so I took a side branch of the railway and went to Cracow. ‘The capital of Old Poland is near to the frontier,’ I thought, ‘and I shall find there some Jew who will lead me to the men I seek.’

I reached the once renowned and brilliant city in the evening, and early next morning went out from my hotel on my search. To my bewilderment I saw, however, at every street corner and wherever I turned my eyes in the otherwise deserted market place a Jew, wearing the traditional long dress and locks of his forefathers, and watching there for some Polish nobleman or tradesman who might send him on an errand and pay him a few coppers for the service. I wanted to find _one_ Jew; and now there were too many of them. Whom should I approach? I made the round of the town, and then, in my despair, I decided to accost the Jew who stood at the entrance gate of my hotel--an immense old palace, of which in former days every hall was filled with elegant crowds of gaily dressed dancers, but which now fulfilled the more prosaic function of giving food and shelter to a few occasional travellers. I explained to the man my desire of smuggling into Russia a rather heavy bundle of books and newspapers.

‘Very easily done, sir,’ he replied. ‘I will just bring to you the representative of the Universal Company for the International Exchange of (let me say) Rags and Bones. They carry on the largest smuggling business in the world, and he is sure to oblige you.’ Half an hour later he really returned with the representative of the company--a most elegant young man, who spoke in perfection Russian, German, and Polish.

He looked at my bundle, weighed it with his hands, and asked what sort of books were in it.

‘All severely prohibited by Russian censorship; that is why they must be smuggled in.’

‘Books,’ he said, ‘are not exactly in our line of trade; our business lies in costly silks. If I were going to pay my men by weight, according to our silk tariff, I should have to ask you a quite extravagant price. And then, to tell the truth, I don’t much like meddling with books. The slightest mishap, and “they” would make of it a political affair, and then it would cost the Universal Rags and Bones Company a tremendous sum of money to get clear of it.’

I probably looked very sad, for the elegant young man who represented the Universal Rags and Bones Company immediately added: ‘Don’t be troubled. He [the hotel commissionnaire] will arrange it for you in some other way.’

‘Oh yes. There are scores of ways to arrange such a trifle, to oblige the gentleman,’ jovially remarked the commissionnaire, as he left me.

In an hour’s time he came back with another young man. This one took the bundle, put it by the side of the door, and said: ‘It’s all right. If you leave to-morrow, you shall have your books at such a station in Russia,’ and he explained to me how it would be managed.

‘How much will it cost?’ I asked.

‘How much are you disposed to pay?’ was the reply.

I emptied my purse on the table, and said: ‘That much for my journey. The remainder is yours, I will travel third class!’

‘Wai! wai! wai!’ exclaimed both men at once, ‘What are you saying, sir? Such a gentleman travel third class! Never! No, no, no, that won’t do.... Eight roubles will do for us, and then one rouble or so for the commissionnaire, if you are agreeable to it--just as much as you like. We are not highway robbers, but honest tradesmen.’ And they bluntly refused to take more money.

I had often heard of the honesty of the Jewish smugglers on the frontier; but I had never expected to have such a proof of it. Later on, when our circle imported many books from abroad, or still later, when so many revolutionists and refugees crossed the frontier in entering or leaving Russia, there was not a case in which the smugglers betrayed anyone, or took advantage of the circumstances to exact an exorbitant price for their services.

Next day I left Cracow; and at the designated Russian station a porter approached my compartment, and, speaking loudly, so as to be heard by the gendarme who was walking along the platform, said to me, ‘Here is the bag your highness left the other day,’ and handed me my precious parcel.

I was so pleased to have it that I did not even stop at Warsaw, but continued my journey directly to St. Petersburg, to show my trophies to my brother.

XII

A formidable movement was developing in the meantime amongst the educated youth of Russia. Serfdom was abolished. But quite a network of habits and customs of domestic slavery, of utter disregard of human individuality, of despotism on the part of the fathers, and of hypocritical submission on that of the wives, the sons, and the daughters, had developed during the two hundred and fifty years that serfdom had existed. Everywhere in Europe, at the beginning of this century, there was a great deal of domestic despotism--the writings of Thackeray and Dickens bear ample testimony to it--but nowhere else had that tyranny attained such a luxurious development as in Russia. All Russian life, in the family, in the relations between commander and subordinate, military chief and soldier, employer and employee, bore the stamp of it. Quite a world of customs and manners of thinking, of prejudices and moral cowardice, of habits bred by a lazy existence, had grown up; and even the best men of the time paid a large tribute to these products of the serfdom period.

Law could have no grip upon these things. Only a vigorous social movement, which would attack the very roots of the evil, could reform the habits and customs of everyday life; and in Russia this movement--this revolt of the individual--took a far more powerful character, and became far more sweeping in its criticisms, than anywhere in Western Europe or America. ‘Nihilism’ was the name that Turguéneff gave it in his epoch-making novel, ‘Fathers and Sons.’

The movement is often misunderstood in western Europe. In the press, for example, Nihilism is confused with terrorism. The revolutionary disturbance which broke out in Russia toward the close of the reign of Alexander II., and ended in the tragical death of the Tsar, is constantly described as Nihilism. This is, however, a mistake. To confuse Nihilism with terrorism is as wrong as to confuse a philosophical movement like Stoicism or Positivism with a political movement, such as, for example, republicanism. Terrorism was called into existence by certain special conditions of the political struggle at a given historical moment. It has lived, and has died. It may revive and die out again. But Nihilism has impressed its stamp upon the whole of the life of the educated classes of Russia, and that stamp will be retained for many years to come. It is Nihilism, divested of some of its rougher aspects--which were unavoidable in a young movement of that sort--which gives now to the life of a great portion of the educated classes of Russia a certain peculiar character which we Russians regret not to find in the life of Western Europe. It is Nihilism, again, in its various manifestations which gives to many of our writers that remarkable sincerity, that habit of ‘thinking aloud,’ which astounds western European readers.

First of all, the Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as the ‘conventional lies of civilized mankind.’ Absolute sincerity was his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up, and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits, and customs which their own reason could not justify. He refused to bend before any authority except that of reason, and in the analysis of every social institution or habit he revolted against any sort of more or less masked sophism.

He broke, of course, with the superstitions of his fathers, and in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist, an agnostic, a Spencerian evolutionist, or a scientific materialist; and while he never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief which is a psychological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the hypocrisy that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion which they continually throw aside as useless ballast.

The life of civilized people is full of little conventional lies. Persons who dislike each other, meeting in the street, make their faces radiant with a happy smile; the Nihilist remained unmoved, and smiled only for those whom he was really glad to meet. All those forms of outward politeness which are mere hypocrisy were equally repugnant to him, and he assumed a certain external roughness as a protest against the smooth amiability of his fathers. He saw them wildly talking as idealist sentimentalists, and at the same time acting as real barbarians toward their wives, their children, and their serfs; and he rose in revolt against that sort of sentimentalism, which, after all, so nicely accommodated itself to the anything but ideal conditions of Russian life. Art was involved in the same sweeping negation. Continual talk about beauty, the ideal, art for art’s sake, æsthetics, and the like, so willingly indulged in--while every object of art was bought with money exacted from starving peasants or from underpaid workers, and the so-called ‘worship of the beautiful’ was but a mask to cover the most commonplace dissoluteness--inspired him with disgust; and the criticisms of art which one of the greatest artists of the century, Tolstóy, has now powerfully formulated, the Nihilist expressed in the sweeping assertion, ‘A pair of boots is more important than all your Madonnas and all your refined talk about Shakespeare.’

Marriage without love and familiarity without friendship were repudiated. The Nihilist girl, compelled by her parents to be a doll in a doll’s house, and to marry for property’s sake, preferred to abandon her house and her silk dresses; she put on a black woollen dress of the plainest description, cut off her hair, and went to a high school, in order to win there her personal independence. The woman who saw that her marriage was no longer a marriage--that neither love nor friendship connected any more those who were legally considered husband and wife--preferred to break a bond which retained none of its essential features; and she often went with her children to face poverty, preferring loneliness and misery to a life which, under conventional conditions, would have given a perpetual lie to her best self.

The Nihilist carried his love of sincerity even into the minutest details of everyday life. He discarded the conventional forms of society talk, and expressed his opinions in a blunt and terse way, even with a certain affectation of outward roughness.

We used in Irkútsk to meet once a week in a club, and to have some dancing, I was for a time a regular visitor at these _soirées_, but gradually, having to work, I abandoned them. One night, as I had not made my appearance for several weeks in succession, a young friend of mine was asked by one of the ladies why I did not come any more to their gatherings. ‘He takes a ride now when he wants exercise,’ was the rather rough reply of my friend. ‘But he might come to spend a couple of hours with us, without dancing,’ one of the ladies ventured to say. ‘What would he do here?’ retorted my Nihilist friend, ‘talk with you about fashions and furbelows? He has had enough of that nonsense.’ ‘But he sees occasionally Miss So-and-So,’ timidly remarked one of the young ladies present. ‘Yes, but she is a studious girl,’ bluntly replied my friend, ‘he helps her with her German.’ I must add that this undoubtedly rough rebuke had the effect that most of the Irkútsk girls began next to besiege my brother, my friend, and myself with questions as to what we should advise them to read or to study. With the same frankness the Nihilist spoke to his acquaintances, telling them that all their talk about ‘this poor people’ was sheer hypocrisy so long as they lived upon the underpaid work of these people whom they commiserated at their ease as they chatted together in richly decorated rooms; and with the same frankness a Nihilist would inform a high functionary that he (the said functionary) cared not a straw for the welfare of those whom he ruled, but was simply a thief!

With a certain austerity the Nihilist would rebuke the woman who indulged in small talk, and prided herself on her ‘womanly’ manners and elaborate toilette. He would bluntly say to a pretty young person: ‘How is it that you are not ashamed to talk this nonsense and to wear that chignon of false hair?’ In a woman he wanted to find a comrade, a human personality--not a doll or a ‘muslin girl’--and he absolutely refused to join in those petty tokens of politeness with which men surround those whom they like so much to consider as ‘the weaker sex.’ When a lady entered a room a Nihilist did not jump off his seat to offer it to her--unless he saw that she looked tired and there was no other seat in the room. He behaved towards her as he would have behaved towards a comrade of his own sex; but if a lady--who might have been a total stranger to him---manifested the desire to learn something which he knew and she knew not, he would walk every night to the far end of a great city to help her with his lessons. The young man who would not move his hand to serve a lady with a cup of tea, would transfer to the girl who came to study at Moscow or St. Petersburg the only lesson which he had got and which gave him daily bread, simply saying to her: ‘It is easier for a man to find work than it is for a woman. There is no attempt at knighthood in my offer, it is simply a matter of equality.’

Two great Russian novelists, Turguéneff and Goncharóff, have tried to represent this new type in their novels. Goncharóff, in _Precipice_, taking a real but unrepresentative individual of this class, made a caricature of Nihilism. Turguéneff was too good an artist, and had himself conceived too much admiration for the new type, to let himself be drawn into caricature painting; but even his Nihilist, Bazároff, did not satisfy us. We found him too harsh, especially in his relations with his old parents, and, above all, we reproached him with his seeming neglect of his duties as a citizen. Russian youth could not be satisfied with the merely negative attitude of Turguéneff’s hero. Nihilism, with its affirmation of the rights of the individual and its negation of all hypocrisy, was but a first step toward a higher type of men and women, who are equally free, but live for a great cause. In the Nihilists of Chernyshévsky, as they are depicted in his far less artistic novel, ‘What is to be Done?’ they saw better portraits of themselves.

* * * * *

‘It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves,’ our poet Nekrásoff wrote. The young generation actually refused to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been accumulated in their fathers’ houses by means of servile labour, whether the labourers were actual serfs or slaves of the present industrial system.

All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment which was produced at the court against Karakózoff and his friends, that these young men, owners of considerable fortunes, used to live three or four in the same room, never spending more than ten roubles (one pound) apiece a month for all their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for co-operative associations, co-operative workshops (where they themselves worked), and the like. Five years later, thousands and thousands of the Russian youth--the best part of it--were doing the same. Their watchword was, ‘V naród!’ (To the people; be the people.) During the years 1860-65 in nearly every wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between the fathers, who wanted to maintain the old traditions, and the sons and daughters, who defended their right to dispose of their life according to their own ideals. Young men left the military service, the counter, the shop, and flocked to the university towns. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kíeff, eager to learn a profession which would free them from the domestic yoke, and some day, perhaps, also from the possible yoke of a husband. After hard and bitter struggles, many of them won that personal freedom. Now they wanted to utilize it, not for their own personal enjoyment, but for carrying to the people the knowledge that had emancipated them.

In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg, small groups were formed for self-improvement and self-education; the works of the philosophers, the writings of the economists, the researches of the young Russian historical school, were carefully read in these circles, and the reading was followed by endless discussions. The aim of all that reading and discussion was to solve the great question which rose before them: In what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle amongst the people and to live the people’s life. Young men went into the villages as doctors, doctors’ assistants, teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural labourers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live there in close contact with the peasants. Girls passed teachers’ examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the poorest part of the population.

They went without even having any ideals of social reconstruction or any thought of revolution; merely and simply they wanted to teach the mass of the peasants to read, to instruct them, to give them medical help, or in any way to aid to raise them from their darkness and misery, and to learn at the same time from them what were _their_ popular ideals of a better social life.

When I returned from Switzerland I found this movement in full swing.

XIII

I hastened, of course, to share with my friends my impressions of the International Workingmen’s Association and my books. At the university I had no friends, properly speaking; I was older than most of my companions, and among young people a difference of a few years is always an obstacle to complete comradeship. It must also be said that since the new rules of admission to the university had been introduced in 1861, the best of the young men, the most developed and the most independent in thought, were sifted out of the gymnasia, and did not gain admittance to the university. Consequently, the majority of my comrades were good boys, laborious, but taking no interest in anything besides the examinations.

I was friendly with only one of them: let me call him Dmítri Kelnitz. He was born in South Russia, and, although his name was German, he hardly spoke German, and his face was South Russian rather than Teutonic. He was very intelligent, had read a great deal, and had seriously thought over what he had read. He loved science and deeply respected it, but, like many of us, he soon came to the conclusion that to follow the career of a scientific man meant to join the camp of the Philistines, and that there was plenty of other and more urgent work that he could do. He attended the university lectures for two years, and then abandoned them, giving himself entirely to social work. He lived anyhow; I even doubt if he had a permanent lodging. Sometimes he would come to me and ask, ‘Have you some paper?’ and, having taken a supply of it, he would sit at the corner of a table for an hour or two, diligently making a translation. The little that he earned in this way was more than sufficient to satisfy all his limited wants. Then he would hurry to a distant part of the town to see a comrade or to help a needy friend; or he would cross St. Petersburg on foot, to a remote suburb, in order to obtain free admission to a college for some boy in whom the comrades were interested. He was undoubtedly a gifted man. In Western Europe a man far less gifted would have worked his way to a position of political or socialist leadership. No such thought ever entered the brain of Kelnitz. To lead men was by no means his ambition, and there was no work too insignificant for him to do. This trait, however, was not distinctive of him alone; all those who had lived some years in the students’ circles of those times were possessed of it to a high degree.

Soon after my return Kelnitz invited me to join a circle which was known among the youth as ‘the Circle of Tchaykóvsky.’ Under this name it played an important part in the history of the social movement in Russia, and under this name it will go down to history. ‘Its members,’ Kelnitz said to me, ‘have hitherto been mostly constitutionalists; but they are excellent men, with minds open to any honest idea; they have plenty of friends all over Russia, and you will see later on what you can do.’ I already knew Tchaykóvsky and a few other members of this circle. Tchaykóvsky had won my heart at our first meeting, and our friendship has remained unshaken for twenty-seven years.

The beginning of this circle was a very small group of young men and women--one of whom was Sophie Peróvskaya--who had united for purposes of self-education and self-improvement. Tchaykóvsky was of their number. In 1869 Necháieff had tried to start, amidst the youth imbued with the above-mentioned desire of working amongst the people, a secret revolutionary organization, and to secure this end he resorted to the ways of old conspirators, without recoiling even before deceit when he wanted to force his associates to follow his lead. Such methods could have no success in Russia, and very soon his society broke down. All the members were arrested, and some of the best and purest of the Russian youth went to Siberia before they had done anything. The circle of self-education of which I am speaking was constituted in opposition to the methods of Necháieff. The few friends had judged, quite correctly, that a morally developed individuality must be the foundation of every organization, whatever political character it may take afterward and whatever programme of action it may adopt in the course of future events. This was why the circle of Tchaykóvsky, gradually widening its programme, spread so extensively in Russia, achieved such important results, and later on, when the ferocious prosecutions of the government created a revolutionary struggle, produced that remarkable set of men and women who fell in the terrible contest they waged against autocracy.

At that time, however--that is, in 1872--the circle had nothing revolutionary in it. If it had remained a mere circle of self-improvement, it would soon have petrified like a monastery. But the members found a suitable work. They began to spread good books. They bought the works of Lassalle, Bervi (on the condition of the labouring classes in Russia), Marx, Russian historical works, and so on--whole editions--and distributed them among students in the provinces. In a few years there was not a town of importance in ‘thirty-eight provinces of the Russian Empire,’ to use official language, where this circle did not have a group of comrades engaged in the spreading of that sort of literature. Gradually, following the general drift of the times, and stimulated by the news which came from Western Europe about the rapid growth of the labour movement, the circle became more and more a centre of socialistic propaganda among the educated youth, and a natural intermediary between numbers of provincial circles; and then, one day, the ice between students and workers was broken, and direct relations were established with working people at St. Petersburg and in some of the provinces. It was at that juncture that I joined the circle, in the spring of 1872.

All secret societies are fiercely prosecuted in Russia, and the western reader will perhaps expect from me a description of my initiation and of the oath of allegiance which I took. I must disappoint him, because there was nothing of the sort, and could not be; we should have been the first to laugh at such ceremonies, and Kelnitz would not have missed the opportunity of putting in one of his sarcastic remarks, which would have killed any ritual. There was not even a statute. The circle accepted as members only persons who were well known and had been tested in various circumstances, and of whom it was felt that they could be trusted absolutely. Before a new member was received, his character was discussed with the frankness and seriousness which were characteristic of the Nihilist. The slightest token of insincerity or conceit would have barred the way to admission. The circle did not care either to make a show of numbers, and had no tendency to concentrate in its hands all the activity that was going on among the youth, or to include in one organization the scores of different circles which existed in the capitals and the provinces. With most of them friendly relations were maintained; they were helped, and they helped us, when necessity arose, but no assault was made on their autonomy.

The circle preferred to remain a closely united group of friends; and never did I meet elsewhere such a collection of morally superior men and women as the score of persons whose acquaintance I made at the first meeting of the circle of Tchaykóvsky. I still feel proud of having been received into that family.

XIV

When I joined the circle of Tchaykóvsky, I found its members hotly discussing the direction to be given to their activity. Some were in favour of continuing to carry on radical and socialistic propaganda among the educated youth; but others thought that the sole aim of this work should be to prepare men who would be capable of arousing the great inert labouring masses, and that their chief activity ought to be among the peasants and workmen in the towns. In all the circles and groups which were formed at that time by the hundred at St. Petersburg and in the provinces the same discussions went on, and everywhere the second programme prevailed over the first.

If our youth had merely taken to socialism in the abstract, it might have felt satisfied with a mere declaration of socialist principles, including as a distant aim ‘the communistic possession of the instruments of production,’ and in the meantime it might have carried on some sort of political agitation. Many middle-class socialist politicians in Western Europe and America really take this course. But our youth had been drawn to socialism in quite another way. They were not theorisers about socialism, but had become socialists by living no richer than the workers live, by making no distinction between ‘mine and thine’ in their circles, and by refusing to enjoy for their own satisfaction the riches they had inherited from their fathers. They had done with regard to capitalism what Tolstóy advises should now be done with regard to war--that is, that people, instead of criticizing war and continuing to wear the military uniform, should refuse, each one for himself, to be a soldier and to use arms. In the same way our Russian youth, each one for himself or herself, refused to take personal advantage of the revenues of their fathers, Such a youth had to go to the people--and they went. Thousands and thousands of young men and women had already left their homes, and tried now to live in the villages and the industrial towns in all possible capacities. This was not an organized movement: it was one of those mass movements which occur at certain periods of sudden awakening of human conscience. Now that small organized groups were formed, ready to try a systematic effort for spreading ideas of freedom and revolt in Russia, they were forcibly brought to carry on that propaganda amidst the dark masses of peasants and workers in the towns. Various writers have tried to explain this movement ‘to the people’ by influences from abroad--‘foreign agitators’ is everywhere a favourite explanation. It is certainly true that our youth listened to the mighty voice of Bakúnin, and that the agitation of the International Workingmen’s Association had a fascinating effect upon us. But the movement ‘V naród’--To the people--had a far deeper origin: it began before ‘foreign agitators’ had spoken to the Russian youth, and even before the International Association had been founded. It began already in the groups of Karakózoff in 1866; Turguéneff saw it coming, and already in 1859 faintly indicated it. I did my best to promote that movement in the circle of Tchaykóvsky; but I was only working with the tide, which was infinitely more powerful than any individual efforts.

We often spoke, of course, of the necessity of a political agitation against our absolute government. We saw already that the mass of the peasants were being driven to unavoidable and irremediable ruin by foolish taxation, and by the still more foolish selling off of their cattle to cover the arrears of taxes. We, ‘visionaries,’ saw coming that complete ruin of a whole population which by this time, alas, has been accomplished to an appalling extent in Central Russia, and is confessed by the government itself. We knew how, in every direction, Russia was being plundered in a most scandalous manner. We knew, and we learned more every day, of the lawlessness of the functionaries, and the almost incredible bestiality of many among them. We heard continually of friends whose houses were raided at night by the police, who disappeared in prisons, and who--we ascertained later on--had been transported without judgment to hamlets in some remote province of Russia. We felt, therefore, the necessity of a political struggle against this terrible power, which was crushing the best intellectual forces of the nation. But we saw no possible ground, legal or semi-legal, for such a struggle.

Our elder brothers did not want our socialistic aspirations, and we could not part with them. Nay, even if some of us had done so, it would have been of no avail. The young generation, as a whole, were treated as ‘suspects,’ and the elder generation feared to have anything to do with them. Every young man of democratic tastes, every young woman following a course of higher education, was a suspect in the eyes of the state police, and was denounced by Katkóff as an enemy of the state. Cropped hair and blue spectacles worn by a girl, a Scotch plaid worn in winter by a student, instead of an overcoat, which were evidences of Nihilist simplicity and democracy, were denounced as tokens of ‘political unreliability.’ If any student’s lodging came to be frequently visited by other students, it was periodically invaded by the state police and searched. So common were the night raids in certain students’ lodgings that Kelnitz once said, in his mildly humorous way, to the police officer who was searching the rooms: ‘Why should you go through all our books, each time you come to make a search? You might as well have a list of them, and then come once a month to see if they are all on the shelves; and you might, from time to time, add the titles of the new ones.’ The slightest suspicion of political unreliability was sufficient ground upon which to take a young man from a high school, to imprison him for several months, and finally to send him to some remote province of the Urals--‘for an undetermined term,’ as they used to say in their bureaucratic slang. Even at the time when the circle of Tchaykóvsky did nothing but distribute books, all of which had been printed with the censor’s approval, Tchaykóvsky was twice arrested and kept some four or six months in prison--on the second occasion at a critical time of his career as a chemist. His researches had recently been published in the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences, and he had come up for his final university examinations. He was released at last, because the police could not discover sufficient evidence against him to warrant his transportation to the Urals! ‘But if we arrest you once more,’ he was told, ‘we shall send you to Siberia.’ In fact, it was a favourite dream of Alexander II. to have, somewhere in the steppes, a special town, guarded night and day by patrols of Cossacks, where all suspected young people could be sent, so as to make of them a city of ten or twenty thousand inhabitants. Only the menace which such a city might some day offer prevented him from carrying out this truly Asiatic scheme.

* * * * *

One of our members, an officer, had belonged to a group of young men whose ambition was to serve in the provincial _Zémstvos_ (district and county councils). They regarded work in this direction as a high mission, and prepared themselves for it by serious studies of the economical conditions of Central Russia. Many young people cherished for a time the same hopes; but all these hopes vanished at the first contact with the actual government machinery.

Having granted institutions of a very limited form of self-government to certain provinces of Russia, the government, immediately after having passed that law, directed all its efforts to reduce that reform to nothing and to deprive it of all its meaning and vitality. The provincial ‘self-government’ had to content itself with the mere function of state officials who would collect additional local taxes and spend them for the local needs of the state. Every attempt of the county councils to take the initiative in any improvement--schools, teachers’ colleges, sanitary measures, agricultural improvements, etc.--was met by the central government with suspicion--nay with hatred--and denounced by the ‘Moscow Gazette’ as ‘separatism,’ as the creation of ‘a state within the state,’ as rebellion against autocracy.

If anyone were to tell the true history, for example, of the teachers’ college of Tver, or of any similar undertaking of a Zémstvo in those years, with all the petty persecutions, the prohibitions, the suspensions, and what not with which the institution was harassed, no West European, and especially no American reader, would believe it. He would throw the book aside, saying, ‘It cannot be true; it is too stupid to be true.’ And yet it was so. Whole groups of the elected representatives of several Zémstvos were deprived of their functions, ordered to leave their province and their estates, or were simply exiled, for having dared to petition the emperor in the most loyal manner concerning such rights as belonged to the Zémstvos by law. ‘The elected members of the provincial councils must be simple ministerial functionaries, and obey the Minister of the Interior:’ such was the theory of the St. Petersburg government. As to the less prominent people--teachers, doctors, and the like, in the service of the local councils--they were removed and exiled by the state police in twenty-four hours, without further ceremony than an order of the omnipotent Third Section of the imperial chancelry. No longer ago than last year, a lady whose husband is a rich landowner and occupies a prominent position in one of the Zémstvos, and who is herself interested in education, invited eight schoolmasters to her birthday party. ‘Poor men,’ she said to herself, ‘they never have the opportunity of seeing anyone but the peasants.’ The day after the party the village policeman called at the mansion and insisted upon having the names of the eight teachers, in order to report them to the police authorities. The lady refused to give the names. ‘Very well,’ he replied, ‘I will find them out, nevertheless, and make my report. Teachers _must not_ come together, and I am bound to report if they do.’ The high position of the lady sheltered the teachers in this case; but if they had met in the lodgings of one of their own number they would have received a visit from the state police, and half of them would have been dismissed by the Ministry of Education; and if, moreover, an angry word had escaped from one of them during the police raid, he or she would have been sent to some province of the Urals. This is what happens to-day, thirty-three years after the opening of the county and district councils; but it was far worse in the seventies. What sort of basis for a political struggle could such institutions offer?

When I inherited from my father his Tambóv estate, I thought very seriously for a time of settling on that estate, and devoting my energy to work in the local Zémstvo. Some peasants and the poorer priests of the neighbourhood asked me to do so. As for myself, I should have been content with anything I could do, no matter how small it might be, if only it would help to raise the intellectual level and the well-being of the peasants. But one day, when several of my advisers were together, I asked them: ‘Supposing I were to try to start a school, an experimental farm, a co-operative enterprise, and, at the same time, also took upon myself the defence of that peasant from our village who has lately been wronged--would the authorities let me do it?’ ‘Never!’ was the unanimous reply.

An old grey-haired priest, a man who was held in great esteem in our neighbourhood, came to me a few days later, with two influential dissenting leaders, and said: ‘Talk with these two men. If you can manage it, go with them and, Bible in hand, preach to the peasants.... Well, you know what to preach.... No police in the world will find you, if they conceal you.... There’s nothing to be done besides; that’s what I, an old man, advise you.’

I told them frankly why I could not assume the part of Wiclif. But the old man was right. A movement similar to that of the Lollards is rapidly growing now amongst the Russian peasants. Such tortures as have been inflicted on the peace-loving Dukhobórs, and such raids upon the peasant dissenters in South Russia as were made in 1897, when children were kidnapped so that they might be educated in orthodox monasteries, will only give to that movement a force that it could not have attained five-and-twenty years ago.

* * * * *

As the question of agitation for a constitution was continually being raised in our discussions, I once proposed to our circle to take it up seriously and to choose an appropriate plan of action. I was always of the opinion that when the circle decided anything unanimously, each member ought to put aside his personal feeling and give all his strength to the task. ‘If you decide to agitate for a constitution,’ I said, ‘this is my plan: I will separate myself from you, for appearance sake, and maintain relations with only one member of the circle--for instance, Tchaykóvsky--through whom I shall be kept informed how you succeed in your work, and can communicate to you in a general way what I am doing. My work will be among the courtiers and the higher functionaries. I have among them many acquaintances, and know a number of persons who are disgusted with the present conditions. I will bring them together and unite them, if possible, into a sort of organization; and then, some day, there is sure to be an opportunity to direct all these forces toward compelling Alexander II. to give Russia a constitution. There certainly will come a time when all these people, feeling that they are compromised, will in their own interest take a decisive step. If it is necessary, some of us, who have been officers, might be very helpful in extending the propaganda amongst the officers in the army; but this action must be quite separate from yours, though parallel with it. I have seriously thought of it. I know what connections I have and who can be trusted, and I believe some of the discontented already look upon me as a possible centre for some action of this sort. This course is not the one I should take of my own choice; but if you think that it is best, I will give myself to it with might and main.’

The circle did not accept that proposal. Knowing one another as well as they did, my comrades probably thought that if I went in this direction I should cease to be true to myself. For my own personal happiness, for my own personal life, I cannot feel too grateful now that my proposal was not accepted. I should have gone in a direction which was not the one dictated by my own nature, and I should not have found in it the personal happiness which I have found in other paths. But when, six or seven years later, the terrorists were engaged in their terrible struggle against Alexander II., I regretted that there had not been somebody else to do the sort of work I had proposed to do in the higher circles at St. Petersburg. With some understanding there beforehand, and with the ramifications which such an understanding probably would have taken all over the empire, the holocausts of victims would not have been made in vain. At any rate, the underground work of the executive committee ought by all means to have been supported by a parallel agitation at the Winter Palace.

Over and over again the necessity of a political effort thus came under discussion in our little group, with no result. The apathy and the indifference of the wealthier classes were hopeless, and the irritation among the persecuted youth had not yet been brought to that high pitch which ended, six years later, in the struggle of the terrorists under the Executive Committee. Nay--and this is one of the most tragical ironies of history--it was the same youth whom Alexander II., in his blind fear and fury, ordered to be sent by the hundred to hard labour and condemned to slow death in exile; it was the same youth who protected him in 1871-78. The very teachings of the socialist circles were such as to prevent the repetition of a Karakózoff attempt on the Tsar’s life. ‘Prepare in Russia a great socialist mass movement amongst the workers and the peasants,’ was the watchword in those times. ‘Don’t trouble about the Tsar and his counsellors. If such a movement begins, if the peasants join in the mass movement to claim the land and to abolish the serfdom redemption taxes, the imperial power will be the first to seek support in the moneyed classes and the landlords and to convoke a Parliament--just as the peasant insurrection in France in 1789 compelled the royal power to convoke the National Assembly; so it will be in Russia.’

But there was more than that. Separate men and groups, seeing that the reign of Alexander II. was hopelessly doomed to sink deeper and deeper in reaction, and entertaining at the same time vague hopes as to the supposed ‘liberalism’ of the heir-apparent--all young heirs to thrones are supposed to be liberal--persistently reverted to the idea that the example of Karakózoff ought to be followed. The organized circles, however, strenuously opposed such an idea, and urged their comrades not to resort to that course of action. I may now divulge the following fact, which has hitherto remained unknown. When a young man came to St. Petersburg from one of the southern provinces with the firm intention of killing Alexander II., and some members of the Tchaykóvsky circle learned of his plan, they not only applied all the weight of their arguments to dissuade the young man, but, when he would not be dissuaded, they informed him that they would keep a watch over him and prevent him by force from making any such attempt. Knowing well how loosely guarded the Winter Palace was at that time, I can positively say that they saved the life of Alexander II. So firmly were the youth opposed at that time to the war in which later, when the cup of their sufferings was filled to overflowing, they took part.

XV

The two years that I worked with the circle of Tchaykóvsky, before I was arrested, left a deep impression upon all my subsequent life and thought. During those two years it was life under high pressure--that exuberance of life when one feels at every moment the full throbbing of all the fibres of the inner self, and when life is really worth living. I was in a family of men and women so closely united by their common object, and so broadly and delicately humane in their mutual relations, that I cannot now recall a single moment of even temporary friction marring the life of our circle. Those who have had any experience of political agitation will appreciate the value of this statement.

Before abandoning entirely my scientific career, I considered myself bound to finish the report of my journey to Finland for the Geographical Society, as well as some other work that I had in hand for the same society; and my new friends were the first to confirm me in that decision. It would not be fair, they said, to do otherwise. Consequently, I worked hard to finish my geological and geographical books.

Meetings of our circle were frequent, and I never missed them. We used to meet then in a suburban part of St. Petersburg, in a small house of which Sophie Peróvskaya, under the assumed name and the fabricated passport of an artisan’s wife, was the supposed tenant. She was born of a very aristocratic family, and her father had been for some time the military governor of St. Petersburg; but, with the approval of her mother, who adored her, she had left her home to join a high school, and with the three sisters Korníloff--daughters of a rich manufacturer--she had founded that little circle of self-education which later on became our circle. Now, in the capacity of an artisan’s wife, in her cotton dress and men’s boots, her head covered with a cotton kerchief, as she carried on her shoulders her two pails of water from the Nevá, no one would have recognized in her the girl who a few years before shone in one of the most fashionable drawing-rooms of the capital. She was a general favourite, and every one of us, on entering the house, had a specially friendly smile for her--even when she, making a point of honour of keeping the house relatively clean, quarrelled with us about the dirt which we, dressed in peasant top-boots and sheepskins, brought in after walking the muddy streets of the suburbs. She tried then to give to her girlish, innocent, and very intelligent little face the most severe expression possible to it. In her moral conceptions she was a ‘rigorist,’ but not in the least of the sermon-preaching type. When she was dissatisfied with some one’s conduct, she would cast a severe glance at him from beneath her brows; but in that glance one saw her open-minded, generous nature, which understood all that is human. On one point only she was inexorable. ‘A women’s man,’ she once said, speaking of some one, and the expression and the manner in which she said it, without interrupting her work, is engraved for ever in my memory.

Peróvskaya was a ‘popularist’ to the very bottom of her heart, and at the same time a revolutionist, a fighter of the truest steel. She had no need to embellish the workers and the peasants with imaginary virtues in order to love them and to work for them. She took them as they were, and said to me once: ‘We have begun a great thing. Two generations, perhaps, will succumb in the task, and yet it must be done.’ None of the women of our circle would have given way before the certainty of death on the scaffold. Each would have looked death straight in the face. But none of them, at that stage of our propaganda, thought of such a fate. Peróvskaya’s well-known portrait is exceptionally good; it records so well her earnest courage, her bright intelligence, and her loving nature. The letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she went to the scaffold is one of the best expressions of a loving soul that a woman’s heart ever dictated.

The following incident will show what the other women of our circle were. One night, Kupreyánoff and I went to Varvara B., to whom we had to make an urgent communication. It was past midnight, but, seeing a light in her window, we went upstairs. She sat in her tiny room at a table copying a programme of our circle. We knew how resolute she was, and the idea came to us to make one of those stupid jokes men sometimes think funny. ‘B.,’ I said, ‘we come to fetch you: we are going to try a rather mad attempt to liberate our friends from the fortress.’ She asked not one question. She quietly laid down her pen, rose from her chair, and said only, ‘Let us go.’ She spoke in so simple, so unaffected a voice that I felt at once how foolishly I had acted, and told her the truth. She dropped back into her chair, with tears in her eyes, and in a despairing voice asked: ‘It was only a joke? Why do you make _such_ jokes?’ I fully realized then the cruelty of what I had done.

* * * * *