Chapter XVI: Part 16

Twenty-two years have passed since; a number of International Socialist congresses have been held, and at every one of them the same struggle has been renewed--the social democrats trying to enlist all the labour movement of Europe under their banner and to bring it under their control, and the anarchists opposing and preventing it. What an amount of wasted force, of bitter words exchanged and efforts divided, simply because those who have adopted the formula of ‘conquest of power within the existing states’ do not understand that activity in this direction cannot embody all the socialist movement! From the outset socialism took three independent lines of development, which found their expression in Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen. Saint-Simonism has developed into social democracy, and Fourierism into anarchism; while Owenism is developing, in England and America, into trade-unionism, co-operation, and the so-called municipal socialism, and remains hostile to social democratic state socialism, while it has many points of contact with anarchism. But because of failure to recognize that the three march toward a common goal in three different ways, and that the two latter bring their own precious contribution to human progress, a quarter of a century has been given to endeavours to realize the unrealizable Utopia of a unique labour movement of the social democratic pattern.

* * * * *

The Ghent congress ended for me in an unexpected way. Three or four days after it had begun, the Belgian police learned who Levashóff was, and received the order to arrest me for a breach of police regulations which I had committed in giving at the hotel an assumed name. My Belgian friends warned me. They maintained that the clerical ministry which was in power was capable of giving me up to Russia, and insisted upon my leaving the congress at once. They would not let me return to the hotel; Guillaume barred the way, telling me that I should have to use force against him if I insisted upon returning thither. I had to go with some Ghent comrades, and as soon as I joined them, muffled calls and whistling came from all corners of a dark square over which groups of workers were scattered. It all looked awfully mysterious. At last, after much whispering and subdued whistling, a group of comrades took me under escort to a social democrat worker, with whom I had to spend the night, and who received me, anarchist though I was, in the most touching way as a brother. Next morning I left once more for England, on board a steamer, provoking a number of good-natured smiles from the British custom-house officers, who wanted me to show them my luggage, while I had nothing to show but a small hand-bag.

I did not stay long in London. In the admirable collections of the British Museum I studied the beginnings of the French Revolution--how revolutions come to break out; but I wanted more activity, and soon went to Paris. A revival of the labour movement was beginning there, after the rigid suppression of the Commune. With the Italian Costa and the few anarchist friends we had among the Paris workers, and with Jules Guesde and his colleagues who were not strict social democrats at that time, we started the first socialist groups.

Our beginnings were ridiculously small. Half a dozen of us used to meet in cafés, and when we had an audience of a hundred persons at a meeting we felt happy. No one would have guessed then that two years later the movement would be in full swing. But France has its own ways of development. When a reaction has gained the upper hand, all visible traces of a movement disappear. Those who fight against the current are few. But in some mysterious way, by a sort of invisible infiltration of ideas, the reaction is undermined; a new current sets in, and then it appears, all of a sudden, that the idea which was thought to be dead was there alive, spreading and growing all the time; and as soon as public agitation becomes possible, thousands of adherents, whose existence nobody suspected, come to the front. ‘There are at Paris,’ old Blanqui used to say, ‘fifty thousand men who never come to a meeting or to a demonstration; but the moment they feel that the people can appear in the streets to manifest their opinion, they are there to storm the position.’ So it was then. There were not twenty of us to carry on the movement, not two hundred openly to support it. At the first commemoration of the Commune, in March 1878, we surely were not two hundred. But two years later the amnesty for the Commune was voted, and the working population of Paris was in the streets to greet the returning Communards; it flocked by the thousand to cheer them at the meetings, and the socialist movement took a sudden expansion, carrying with it the Radicals.

The time had not yet come for that revival, however, and one night, in April 1878, Costa and a French comrade were arrested. A police-court condemned them to imprisonment for eighteen months as Internationalists. I escaped arrest only by mistake. The police wanted Levashóff, and went to arrest a Russian student whose name sounded very much like that. I had given my real name, and continued to stay at Paris under that name for another month. Then I was called to Switzerland.

VI

During this stay at Paris I made my first acquaintance with Turguéneff. He had expressed to our common friend, P. L. Lavróff, the desire to see me, and, as a true Russian, to celebrate my escape by a small friendly dinner. It was with almost a feeling of worship that I crossed the threshold of his room. If by his ‘Sportsman’s Notebook’ he rendered to Russia the immense service of throwing odium upon serfdom (I did not know at that time that he took a leading part in Hérzen’s powerful ‘Bell’), he has rendered no less service through his later novels. He has shown what the Russian woman is, what treasuries of mind and heart she possesses, what she may be as an inspirer of men; and he has taught us how men who have a real claim to superiority look upon women, how they love. Upon me, and upon thousands of my contemporaries, this part of his teaching made an indelible impression, far more powerful than the best articles upon women’s rights.

His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head covered with soft and thick grey hair, he was certainly beautiful; his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid of a touch of humour, and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence of affectation which are characteristic of the best Russian writers. His fine head revealed a vast development of brain power, and when he died, and Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the surgeon), weighed his brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest brain then known--that of Cuvier--reaching something over two thousand grammes, that they would not trust to their scales, but got new ones, to repeat the weighing.

His talk was especially remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out of one of his novels.

‘You must have had a great deal of experience in your life amongst Frenchmen, Germans, and other peoples,’ he said to me once. ‘Have you not remarked that there is a deep, unfathomable chasm between many of their conceptions and the views which we Russians hold on the same subjects--points upon which we can never agree?’

I replied that I had not noticed such points.

‘Yes, there are some. Here is one of them. One night, we were at the first representation of a new play. I was in a box with Flaubert, Daudet, Zola.... (I am not quite sure whether he named both Daudet and Zola, but he certainly named one of the two.) All were men of advanced opinions. The subject of the play was this: A woman had separated from her husband. She had had a new love and had settled with another man. This man was represented in the play as an excellent person. For years they had been quite happy. Her two children--a girl and a boy--were babies at the moment of the separation; now, they had grown, and throughout all these years they had considered the man as their real father. The girl was about eighteen and the boy about seventeen. The man treated them quite as a father, they loved him, and he loved them. The scene represented the family meeting at breakfast. The girl comes in, approaches her supposed father, and he is going to kiss her--when the boy, who has learned in some way that they are not his children, rushes forward towards him, and shouts out: “Don’t dare!” _N’osez pas!_

‘The hall was brought down by this exclamation. There was an outburst of frantic applause. Flaubert and the others joined in it. I was disgusted. “Why,” I said, “this family was happy; the man was a better father to these children than their real father, ... their mother loved him and was happy with him.... This mischievous, perverted boy ought simply to be flogged for what he has said....” It was of no use. I discussed for hours with them afterwards: none of them could understand me!’

I was, of course, fully in accord with Turguéneff’s point of view. I remarked, however, that his acquaintances were chiefly amongst the middle classes. There the difference from nation to nation is immense indeed. But my acquaintances were exclusively amongst the workers, and there is an immense resemblance between the workers, and especially amongst the peasants, of all nations.

In so saying, I was, however, quite wrong. After I had had the opportunity of making a closer acquaintance with French workers, I often thought of the rightness of Turguéneff’s remark. There is a real chasm indeed between the conceptions which prevail in Russia upon marriage relations and those which prevail in France: amongst the workers as well as in the middle classes; and upon many other points there is almost the same chasm between the Russian point of view and that of other nations.

It was said somewhere, after Turguéneff’s death, that he intended to write a novel upon this subject. If it was begun, the above mentioned scene must be in his manuscript. What a pity that he did not write that novel! He, a thorough ‘Occidental’ in his ways of thinking, could have said very deep things upon a subject which must have so deeply affected him personally throughout his life.

Of all novel-writers of our century, Turguéneff has certainly attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds to the Russian ear like music--music as deep as that of Beethoven. His principal novels--the series of ‘Dmítri Rúdin,’ ‘A Nobleman’s Retreat,’ ‘On the Eve,’ ‘Fathers and Sons,’ ‘Smoke,’ and ‘Virgin Soil’--represent the leading ‘history-making’ types of the educated classes of Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched with a fulness of philosophical conception and humanitarian understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in any other literature. Yet ‘Fathers and Sons’--a novel which he rightly considered his profoundest work--was received by the young people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared that the Nihilist Bazároff was by no means a true representation of his class; many described him even as a caricature of Nihilism. This misunderstanding deeply affected Turguéneff, and, although a reconciliation between him and the young generation took place later on at St. Petersburg, after he had written ‘Virgin Soil,’ the wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.

He knew from Lavróff that I was an enthusiastic admirer of his writings; and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to Antokólsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazároff. I frankly replied, ‘Bazároff is an admirable painting of the Nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you did your other heroes.’ ‘On the contrary, I loved him, intensely loved him,’ Turguéneff replied, with unexpected vigour. ‘When we get home I will show you my diary, in which I have noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with Bazároff’s death.’

Turguéneff certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Bazároff. He so identified himself with the Nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazároff’s point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the history-makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or the other of these characters. ‘Analysis first of all, and then egoism, and therefore no faith--an egoist cannot even believe in himself:’ so he characterized Hamlet. ‘Therefore he is a sceptic, and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote, who fights against windmills, and takes a barber’s plate for the magic helmet of Mambrin (who of us has never made the same mistake?), is a leader of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions, march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which they may be alone to see. They search, they fall, but they rise again, and find it--and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and Deceit are his enemies; and his scepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume his will.’

These thoughts of Turguéneff give, I think, the true key for understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet, and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazároff. He represented his superiority admirably well: he understood the tragic character of his isolated position; but he could not surround him with that tender, poetical love which he bestowed, as on a sick friend, when his heroes approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place.

‘Did you know Mýshkin?’ he once asked me, in 1878. At the trial of our circle Mýshkin revealed himself as the most powerful personality. ‘I should like to know all about him,’ he continued. ‘That _is_ a man; not the slightest trace of Hamletism.’ And in so saying he was obviously meditating on this new type in the Russian movement, which did not exist in the phase that Turguéneff described in ‘Virgin Soil,’ but was to appear two years later.

I saw him for the last time in the autumn of 1881. He was very ill, and worried by the thought that it was his duty to write to Alexander III.--who had just come to the throne, and hesitated as to the policy he should follow--asking him to give Russia a constitution, and proving to him by solid arguments the necessity of that step. With evident grief he said to me: ‘I feel that I must do it, but I feel I shall not be able to do it.’ In fact, he was already suffering awful pains occasioned by a cancer in the spinal cord, and had the greatest difficulty even in sitting up and talking for a few moments. He did not write then, and a few weeks later it would have been useless. Alexander III. had announced in a manifesto his intention to remain the absolute ruler of Russia.

VII

In the meantime affairs in Russia took quite a new turn. The war which Russia began against Turkey in 1877 had ended in general disappointment. There was in the country, before the war broke out, a great deal of enthusiasm in favour of the Slavonians. Many believed, also, that the war of liberation in the Balkans would result in a move in the progressive direction in Russia itself. But the liberation of the Slavonian populations was only partly accomplished. The tremendous sacrifices which had been made by the Russians were rendered ineffectual by the blunders of the higher military authorities. Hundreds of thousands of men had been slaughtered in battles which were only half victories, and the concessions wrested from Turkey were brought to naught at the Berlin Congress. It was also widely known that the embezzlement of State money went on during this war on almost as large a scale as during the Crimean war.

It was amidst the general dissatisfaction which prevailed in Russia at the end of 1877, that one hundred and ninety-three persons, arrested since 1873, in connection with our agitation, were brought before a high court. The accused, supported by a number of lawyers of talent, won at once the sympathies of the public. They produced a very favourable impression upon St. Petersburg society; and when it became known that most of them had spent three or four years in prison, waiting for this trial, and that no less than twenty-one of them had either put an end to their lives by suicide or become insane, the feeling grew still stronger in their favour, even among the judges themselves. The court pronounced very heavy sentences upon a few, and relatively lenient ones upon the remainder; saying that the preliminary detention had lasted so long, and was so hard a punishment in itself, that nothing could justly be added to it. It was confidently expected that the Emperor would still further mitigate the sentences. It happened, however, to the astonishment of all, that he revised the sentences only to increase them. Those whom the court had acquitted were sent into exile in remote parts of Russia and Siberia, and from five to twelve years of hard labour were inflicted upon those whom the court had condemned to short terms of imprisonment. This was the work of the chief of the Third Section, General Mézentsoff.

At the same time, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, General Trépoff, noticing, during a visit to the house of detention, that one of the political prisoners, Bogolúboff, did not take off his hat to greet the omnipotent satrap, rushed upon him, gave him a blow, and, when the prisoner resisted, ordered him to be flogged. The other prisoners, learning the fact in their cells, loudly expressed their indignation, and were in consequence fearfully beaten by the warders and the police. The Russian political prisoners bore without murmuring all hardships inflicted upon them in Siberia, or through hard labour, but they were firmly decided not to tolerate corporal punishment. A young girl, Véra Zasúlich, who did not even personally know Bogolúboff, took a revolver, went to the chief of police, and shot at him. Trépoff was only wounded. Alexander II. came to look at the heroic girl, who must have impressed him by her extremely sweet face and her modesty. Trépoff had so many enemies at St. Petersburg that they managed to bring the affair before a common-law jury, and Véra Zasúlich declared in court that she had resorted to arms only when all means for bringing the affair to public knowledge and obtaining some sort of redress had been exhausted. Even the St. Petersburg correspondent of the London ‘Times,’ who had been asked to mention the affair in his paper, had not done so, perhaps thinking it improbable. Then, without telling anyone about her intentions, she went to shoot Trépoff. Now that the affair had become public, she was quite happy to know that he was but slightly wounded. The jury acquitted her unanimously; and when the police tried to rearrest her, as she was leaving the court-house, the young men of St. Petersburg, who stood in crowds at the gates, saved her from their clutches. She went abroad, and soon was among us in Switzerland.

This affair produced quite a sensation throughout Europe. I was at Paris when the news of the acquittal came, and had to call that day on business at the offices of several newspapers. I found the editors glowing with enthusiasm, and writing forcible articles in honour of this Russian girl. Even the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes,’ in its review of the year 1878, declared that the two persons who had most impressed public opinion in Europe during the year were Prince Gortchakóff at the Berlin Congress and Véra Zasúlich. Their portraits were given side by side in several almanacs. Upon the workers of Western Europe the devotion of Véra Zasúlich produced a profound impression.

During the same year, 1878, without any plot having been formed, four attempts were made against crowned heads in close succession. The workman Hoedel, and after him Dr. Nobiling, shot at the German Emperor; a few weeks later, a Spanish workman, Oliva Moncási, followed with an attempt to shoot the King of Spain, and the cook Passanante rushed with his knife upon the King of Italy. The governments of Europe could not believe that such attempts upon the lives of three kings should have occurred without there being at the bottom some international conspiracy, and they jumped to the conclusion that the anarchist Jura Federation was the centre of that conspiracy.

More than twenty years have passed since then, and I can say most positively that there was absolutely no ground whatever for such a supposition. However, all the European governments fell upon Switzerland, reproaching her with harbouring revolutionists who organized such plots. Paul Brousse, the editor of our Jura newspaper, the ‘Avant-Garde,’ was arrested and prosecuted. The Swiss judges, seeing there was not the slightest foundation for connecting Brousse or the Jura Federation with the recent attempts, condemned Brousse to only a couple of months’ imprisonment for his articles; but the paper was suppressed, and all the printing offices of Switzerland were asked by the federal government not to publish this or any similar paper. The Jura Federation was thus silenced.

Besides, the politicians of Switzerland, who looked with an unfavourable eye on the anarchist agitation in their country, acted privately in such a way as to compel the leading Swiss members of the Jura Federation either to retire from public life or to starve. Brousse was expelled from Switzerland. James Guillaume, who for eight years had maintained against all obstacles the ‘Bulletin’ of the federation, and made his living chiefly by teaching, could obtain no employment, and was compelled to leave Switzerland and remove to France. Adhémar Schwitzguébel, boycotted in the watch trade and burdened by a large family, had finally to retire from the movement. Spichiger was in the same condition, and emigrated. It thus happened that I, a foreigner, had to undertake the editing of a paper for the federation. I hesitated, of course, but there was nothing else to be done, and with two friends, Dumartheray and Herzig, I started a new fortnightly at Geneva, in February 1879, under the title of ‘Le Révolté.’ I had to write most of it myself. We had only twenty-three francs to start the paper, but we all set to work to get subscriptions, and succeeded in issuing our first number. It was moderate in tone, but revolutionary in substance, and I did my best to write it in such a style that complicated historical and economical questions should be comprehensible to every intelligent worker. Six hundred was the utmost limit which the edition of our previous papers had ever attained. We printed two thousand copies of ‘Le Révolté,’ and in a few days not one was left. It was a success, and it still continues, at Paris, under the title of ‘Temps Nouveaux.’

Socialist newspapers have often a tendency to become mere annals of complaints about existing conditions. The oppression of the workers in the mine, the factory, and the field is related; the misery and sufferings of the workers during strikes are told in vivid pictures; their helplessness in the struggle against their employers is insisted upon; and this succession of hopeless efforts, described every week, exercises a most depressing influence upon the reader. To counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning words, by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy and faith. I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions. These symptoms should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the greater number the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, when a revival of thought takes place in society. To make one feel in sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts at working out new forms of life--this should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper. It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.

Historians often tell us how this or that system of philosophy has accomplished a certain change in human thought, and subsequently in institutions. But this is not history. The greatest social philosophers have only caught the indications of coming changes, have understood their inner relations, and, aided by induction and intuition, have foretold what was to occur. Sociologists have also drawn plans of social organizations, by starting from a few principles and developing them to their necessary consequences, like a geometrical conclusion from a few axioms; but this is not sociology. A correct social forecast cannot be made unless one keeps an eye on the thousands of signs of the new life, separating the occasional facts from those which are organically essential, and building the generalization upon that basis.

This was the method of thought with which I endeavoured to familiarize our readers--using plain comprehensible words, so as to accustom the most modest of them to judge for himself whereunto society is moving, and himself to correct the thinker if the latter comes to wrong conclusions. As to the criticism of what exists, I went into it only to disentangle the roots of the evils, and to show that a deep-seated and carefully-nurtured fetishism with regard to the antiquated survivals of past phases of human development, and a widespread cowardice of mind and will, are the main sources of all evils.

Dumartheray and Herzig gave me full support in that direction. Dumartheray was born in one of the poorest peasant families in Savoy. His schooling had not gone beyond the first rudiments of a primary school. Yet he was one of the most intelligent men I ever met. His appreciations of current events and men were so remarkable for their uncommon good sense that they were often prophetic. He was also one of the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere display of fine words, or would-be science. Herzig was a young clerk, born at Geneva; a man of suppressed emotions, shy, who would blush like a girl when he expressed an original thought, and who, after I was arrested, when he became responsible for the continuance of the journal, by sheer force of will learned to write very well. Boycotted by all Geneva employers, and fallen with his family into sheer misery, he nevertheless supported the paper till it became possible to transfer it to Paris.

To the judgment of these two friends I could trust implicitly. If Herzig frowned, muttering, ‘Yes--well--it may go,’ I knew that it would not do. And when Dumartheray, who always complained of the bad state of his spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly written manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, interrupted his reading by exclaiming, ‘Non, ça ne va pas!’ I felt at once that it was not the proper thing, and tried to guess what thought or expression provoked his disapproval. I knew there was no use asking him, ‘Why will it not do?’ He would have answered: ‘Ah, that it not my affair; that’s yours. It won’t do; that is all I can say.’ But I felt he was right, and I simply sat down to rewrite the passage, or, taking the composing stick, set up in type a new passage instead.

* * * * *

I must own that we had also hard times with our paper. No sooner had we issued five numbers than the printer asked us to find another printing office. For the workers and their publications the liberty of the Press inscribed in the Constitutions has many limitations beside the paragraphs of the law. The printer had no objection to our paper--he liked it; but in Switzerland all printing offices depend upon the government, which employs them more or less in issuing statistical reports and the like; and our printer was plainly told that if he continued to harbour our paper he need not expect to have any more orders from the Geneva government. I made the tour of all the French-speaking part of Switzerland and saw the heads of all the printing offices, but everywhere, even from those who did not dislike the tendency of the paper, I received the same reply: ‘We could not live without orders from the government, and we should have none if we undertook to print “Le Révolté.”’

I returned to Geneva in very low spirits, but Dumartheray was only the more ardent and hopeful. ‘It’s all very simple,’ he said. ‘We buy our own printing plant on a three months’ credit, and in three months we shall have paid it.’ ‘But we have no money, only a few hundred francs,’ I objected. ‘Money? nonsense! We _shall_ have it! Let us only order the type at once and immediately issue our next number and money will come!’ Once more he had judged quite right. When our next number came out from our own _Imprimerie Jurassienne_, and we had told our difficulties and issued a couple of small pamphlets besides--all of us helping in the printing--the money came in, mostly in coppers and silver, but it came. Over and over again in my life I have heard complaints among the advanced parties about the want of money, but the longer I live the more I am persuaded that our chief difficulty does not lie so much in money as in _men_ who would march firmly and steadily towards a given aim in the right direction and inspire others. For twenty-one years our paper has now continued to live from hand to mouth, appeals for funds appearing on the front page almost in every number; but as long as there is a man who sticks to it and puts all his energy into it, as Herzig and Dumartheray did at Geneva, and Grave has done for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in and the printing expenses are more or less covered, mainly by the pennies of the workers. For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.

We started our printing office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a Little Russian, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month. So long as he had his plain dinner every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he cared for nothing more. ‘Going to the Turkish bath, John?’ I asked him once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown paper parcel under his arm. ‘No, removing to a new lodging,’ he replied in his melodious voice, with his usual smile.

Unfortunately, he knew no French. I used to write my manuscript to the best of my caligraphic ability--often thinking with regret of the time I had wasted in the writing classes of our good Ebert at school--but John would read a French manuscript in the most fantastical way, and would set up in type the most extraordinary words of his own invention; but as he ‘kept the space,’ and the length of his lines had not to be altered for making the corrections, there were only a dozen letters in each line to be changed, and we managed to do it pretty well. We were on excellent terms with him, and I soon learned some ‘comping’ under his direction. The paper was always ready in time to take the proofs to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we pedantically submitted them before going to print, and then one of us carted the formes to a printing office. Our _Imprimerie Jurassienne_ soon became widely known for its publications, especially for its pamphlets, which Dumartheray insisted upon never selling at more than one penny. Quite a new style had to be worked out for such pamphlets. I must say that I often had the wickedness of envying those writers who could use any amount of pages for developing their ideas, and were allowed to make the well-known excuse of Talleyrand: ‘I have not had the time to be short.’ When I had to condense the results of several months’ work--upon, let me say, the origins of law--into a penny pamphlet, I had to give extra time in order to be short. But we wrote for the workers, and twopence for a pamphlet is often too much for them. The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in every other country in translations. My leaders from that period were edited later on, while I was in prison, by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘The Words of a Rebel,’ ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’

France was always the chief object of our aims, but ‘Le Révolté’ was severely prohibited in France, and the smugglers have so many good things to import into France from Switzerland that they did not care to endanger their trade by meddling with papers. I went once with them, crossing in their company the French frontier, and found that they were very brave and reliable men, but I could not induce them to undertake the smuggling in of our paper. All we could do was to send it in sealed envelopes to about a hundred persons in France. We charged nothing for postage, leaving it to the voluntary contributions of our subscribers to cover our extra expenses--which they always did--but we often thought that the French police were missing a splendid opportunity for ruining ‘Le Révolté,’ by subscribing to a hundred copies and sending no voluntary contributions.

For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves; but gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and finally joined us, giving after my arrest more life than ever to the paper. Reclus had invited me to aid him in the preparation of the volume of his monumental geography, which dealt with the Russian dominions in Asia. He knew Russian himself, but he thought that, as I was well acquainted with Siberia, I might aid him in a special way; and as the health of my wife was poor, and the doctor had ordered her to leave Geneva with its cold winds at once, we removed early in the spring of 1880 to Clarens, where Elisée Reclus lived at that time. We settled above Clarens, in a small cottage overlooking the blue waters of the lake, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background. A streamlet that thundered like a mighty torrent after rains, carrying away immense rocks in its narrow bed, ran under our windows, and on the slope of the hill opposite rose the old castle of Châtelard, of which the owners, up to the revolution of the _burla papei_ (the burners of the papers) in 1799, levied upon the neighbouring serfs feudal taxes on the occasion of their births, marriages, and deaths. Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for ‘Le Révolté,’ among them the address ‘To the Young,’ which was spread in hundreds of thousands of copies in all languages. In fact, I worked out here the foundation of nearly all that I have written later on. Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else. At Clarens I had that contact with Elisée Reclus and Lefrançais, in addition to permanent contact with the workers, which I continued to maintain; and although I worked much for the geography, I was able to produce even more than usually for the anarchist propaganda.

VIII

In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute character. Several political trials had been brought before high courts--the trial of ‘the hundred and ninety-three,’ of ‘the fifty,’ of ‘the Dolgúshin circle,’ and so on--and in all of them the same thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory workers, preaching socialism to them; socialist pamphlets, printed abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt--in some vague, indeterminate way--against the oppressive economical conditions. In short, nothing was done that is not done in the socialist agitation in every other country of the world. No traces of conspiracy against the Tsar, nor even of preparations for revolutionary action, were found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that movement of the years 1870-78, I can confidently say that most of them would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by the side of the peasants and the factory-workers, to teach them, to collaborate with them, either individually or as members of the local self-government, in any of the thousand capacities in which an educated and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I knew the men and say so with full knowledge of them.

Yet the sentences were ferocious--stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labour for six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia for life, was a common sentence. There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labour and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker: that was all her crime. Another girl of fourteen, Miss Gukóvskaya, was transported for life to a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klärchen, to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Koválsky and his friends when they were going to be hanged--an act the more natural in Russia, even from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment in our country for common-law crimes, and the application of the death penalty to ‘politicals’ was then a novelty, a return to almost forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon drowned herself in the Yeniséi. Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and North-east Russia, where they had to starve on the government allowance of six shillings per month. There are no industries in such hamlets, and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.

As if to exasperate the youth still more, their condemned friends were not sent direct to Siberia. They were locked up first for a number of years, in central prisons, which made them envy the convict’s life in a Siberian mine. These prisons were awful indeed. In one of them--‘a den of typhoid fever,’ as the priest of that particular gaol said in a sermon--the mortality reached twenty per cent. in twelve months. In the central prisons, in the hard labour prisons of Siberia, in the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the strike of death, the famine strike, to protect themselves from the brutality of the warders, or to obtain conditions--some sort of work, or reading, in their cells--that would save them from being driven into insanity in a few months. The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes. At Khárkoff, the prostrated prisoners were tied up with ropes and fed artificially, by force.

Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth. There was a time when not a week passed without disclosing some new infamy of that sort, or even worse.

Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. ‘In other countries,’ they began to say, ‘men have the courage to resist. An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages. How can we tolerate them? Let us resist, arms in hand, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle.’ At Odessa, Koválsky and his friends met with revolver shots the gendarmes who came one night to arrest them.

The reply of Alexander II. to this new move was the proclamation of a state of siege. Russia was divided into a number of districts, each of them under a governor-general, who received the order to hang offenders pitilessly. Koválsky and his friends--who, by the way, had killed no one by their shots--were executed. Hanging became the order of the day. Twenty-three persons perished in two years, including a boy of nineteen, who was caught posting a revolutionary proclamation at a railway station: this act was the only charge against him. He was a boy, but he died like a man.

Then the watchword of the revolutionists became ‘self-defence:’ self-defence against the spies who introduced themselves into the circles under the mask of friendship, and denounced members right and left, simply because they would not be paid if they did not denounce large numbers of persons; self-defence against those who ill-treated prisoners; self-defence against the omnipotent chiefs of the state police.

Three functionaries of mark and two or three small spies fell in that new phase of the struggle. General Mézentsoff, who had induced the Tsar to double the sentences after the trial of the hundred and ninety-three, was killed in broad daylight at St. Petersburg; a gendarme colonel, guilty of something worse than that, had the same fate at Kíeff; and the Governor-General of Khárkoff--my cousin, Dmítri Kropótkin--was shot as he was returning home from a theatre. The central prison, in which the first famine strike and artificial feeding took place, was under his orders. In reality, he was not a bad man--I know that his personal feelings were somewhat favourable to the political prisoners; but he was a weak man and a courtier, and he hesitated to interfere. One word from him would have stopped the ill-treatment of the prisoners. Alexander II. liked him so much, and his position at the court was so strong, that his interference very probably would have been approved. ‘Thank you; you have acted according to my own wishes,’ the Tsar said to him, a couple of years before that date, when he came to St. Petersburg to report that he had taken a peaceful attitude in a riot of the poorer population of Khárkoff, and had treated the rioters very leniently. But this time he gave his approval to the gaolers, and the young men of Khárkoff were so exasperated at the treatment of their friends that one of them shot him.

* * * * *

However, the personality of the Emperor was kept out of the struggle, and down to the year 1879 no attempt was made on his life. The person of the Liberator of the serfs was surrounded by an aureole which protected him infinitely better than the swarms of police officials. If Alexander II. had shown at this juncture the least desire to improve the state of affairs in Russia; if he had only called in one or two of those men with whom he had collaborated during the reform period, and had ordered them to make an inquiry into the conditions of the country, or merely of the peasantry; if he had shown any intention of limiting the powers of the secret police, his steps would have been hailed with enthusiasm. A word would have made him ‘the Liberator’ again, and once more the youth would have repeated Hérzen’s words: ‘Thou hast conquered, Galilean.’ But just as during the Polish insurrection the despot awoke in him, and, inspired by Katkóff, he resorted to hanging, so now again, following the advice of the same evil genius, Katkóff, he found nothing to do but to nominate special military governors--for hanging.

Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists--the Executive Committee--supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings, declared that war against absolutism which, after several attempts, ended in 1881 in the death of Alexander II.

Two men, I have said already, lived in Alexander II., and now the conflict between the two, which had grown during all his life, assumed a really tragic aspect. When he met Solovióff, who shot at him and missed the first shot, he had the presence of mind to run to the nearest door, not in a straight line, but in zigzags, while Solovióff continued to fire; and he thus escaped with but a slight tearing of his overcoat. On the day of his death, too, he gave a proof of his undoubted courage. In the face of real danger he was courageous; but he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination. Once he shot at an aide-de-camp, when the latter had made an abrupt movement, and Alexander thought he was going to attempt his life. Merely to save his life, he surrendered entirely all his imperial powers into the hands of those who cared nothing for him, but only for their lucrative positions.

He undoubtedly retained an attachment to the mother of his children, even though he was then with the Princess Dolgorúki, whom he married immediately after the death of the Empress. ‘Don’t speak to me of the Empress; it makes me suffer too much,’he more than once said to Lóris Mélikoff. And yet he entirely abandoned the Empress Marie, who had stood faithfully by his side while he was the Liberator; he let her die in the palace in complete neglect, having by her side only two ladies entirely devoted to her, while he stayed himself in another palace, and paid her only short official visits. A well-known Russian doctor, now dead, told his friends that he, a stranger, felt shocked at the neglect with which the Empress was treated during her last illness--deserted, of course, by the ladies of the court, who reserved their courtesies for the Princess Dolgorúki.

When the Executive Committee made the daring attempt to blow up the Winter Palace itself, Alexander II. took a step which had no precedent. He created a sort of dictatorship, vesting unlimited powers in Lóris Mélikoff. This General was an Armenian, to whom Alexander II. had once before given similar dictatorial powers, when the bubonic plague broke out on the Lower Vólga, and Germany threatened to mobilize her troops and put Russia under quarantine if the plague were not stopped. Now, when he saw that he could not have confidence in the vigilance even of the Palace police, Alexander II. gave dictatorial powers to Lóris Mélikoff, and as Mélikoff had the reputation of being a Liberal, this new move was interpreted in the sense that the convocation of a National Assembly would soon follow. However, no new attempts against his life having been made immediately after that explosion, he regained confidence, and a few months later, before Mélikoff had been allowed to do anything, the dictator became simply a Minister of the Interior.

The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during which Alexander II. reproached himself with the reactionary character his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, filling Mélikoff with despair. Then he would ask his minister, ‘When will your constitutional scheme be ready?’ But if, two days later, Mélikoff said that it was ready, the Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Did I mention it?’ he would ask. ‘What for? We had better leave it to my successor. That will be his gift to Russia.’

When rumours of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake something, in order to give satisfaction to the Executive Committee; but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. At any moment Mélikoff expected dismissal.

In February 1881 Mélikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II. decided that a sort of consultative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI., he described this gathering as an _Assemblée des Notables_, like the one convoked by Louis XVI. before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the council of state, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a new warning by Lóris Mélikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Mélikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being immediate danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Hélène Pávlovna, who had been one of the leaders of the reform party in 1861), and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to the memory of the Empress Marie. He is said to have told her, ‘_Je me suis décidé à convoquer une Assemblée des Notables_.’ However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been announced, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.

It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakóff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakóff and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevétsky, who stood there with a bomb, Grinevétsky threw the bomb between himself and the Tsar, so that both of them should be killed. Both were fearfully wounded, and lived but a few hours.

There Alexander II. lay upon the snow, abandoned by every one of his followers! All had disappeared. It was some cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the dying Tsar and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle. And it was one of the terrorists, Emeliánoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts.

Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander the Second’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II. and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, and seen in him a born autocrat, whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, a man of strong passions and weak will--it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland.

IX