Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  Political stagnation, as we saw, had driven many Germans to develop new forms of inwardness. German Idealism went on to inspire many frustrated intellectuals in the East, including in Japan and Russia. But, as the nineteenth century advanced, many of them felt, long before they had heard of Marx, that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’

  The Russians were at the forefront of this new and intensely political Sturm und Drang. Energetic, intelligent men like Bakunin grew into a class of professional revolutionists because their repressive states left no place for constructive action at home while the world seemed to change speedily around them. They could find fulfilment only in borderless intrigue, a politics of the rejection of politics, and a Romantic myth of the rebel-hero, if not violence.

  They had much baggage from the past to abandon. As Herzen wrote to his son, ‘We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new revelation, we eliminate the old lie.’ He wrote again and again of his vision of an uprising of unspoilt, virile barbarians who would destroy a decrepit Europe and Russia – the corrupt Rome of the nineteenth century. In 1863, Dostoyevsky, attending a conference of exiled radicals in Geneva where Bakunin was present, described how:

  They began with the fact that in order to achieve peace on earth the Christian faith has to be exterminated; large states destroyed and turned into small ones; all capital be done away with, so that everything be in common, by order, and so on … And most importantly, fire and sword – and after everything has been annihilated, then, in their opinion, there will in fact be peace.

  Bakunin was typical of his age in fully imbibing the militantly atheistic mood of the 1840s – the view of God as a human creation – and also incorporating recognizably Christian elements in his messianic faith in the freedom of the spirit. As he wrote:

  I had only one confederate: Faith! I told myself that faith moves mountains, overcomes obstacles, defeats the invincible and makes possible the impossible; faith alone is one half of victory, one half of success; complemented by powerful will it creates circumstances, makes men ripe, collects and unites them.

  By the end of the century, faith complemented by acts of powerful will would lead to a continuously escalating campaign of violence and terror across modernizing Europe and America. Bakunin, moving beyond peasant socialism in Russia, came to have significant disciples and colleagues in Europe, such as Malatesta, the Italian anarchist, and Élisée Reclus, the French geographer, who played an important role in the Paris Commune.

  But Bakunin’s spiritual influence over generations of anarchists and nihilists was even greater. He bequeathed to them his conviction that heroic acts of freedom could transform the world from an authoritarian cage into an arcadia of human freedom. Those who followed Bakunin were liberated from not only belief in God but also the shibboleths of German Idealism. Man’s freedom did not have to be the result of a long dialectical process; it could be created ex nihilo. It may not be clear where humanity would go next. But imagining the new world was less important than abolishing the old one. As Herzen wrote, inadvertently echoing Baudelaire’s Dandy and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘the future does not exist’ and the ‘truly free man creates his own morality’.

  Visions from the Underground

  The young Russians who came after 1848 possessed in even greater quantity this spirit of contradiction and negation, and the urgency to remake history. Turgenev captured the garish negativism of these ‘nihilists’ through his portrait of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862). A medical student of humble origins, Bazarov scornfully dismisses morality and art as superfluous, and praises the utility of mathematics and science, much to the chagrin of the liberal landed gentry. A character in the novel defines a nihilist as ‘a person who does not bow down before authorities of any kind, who does not accept a single principle on faith, however much respect surrounds such a principle’.

  The Russian, whom Lev Shestov defined as ‘hanging in the void’ after being ‘torn from the community’, replaced the German in the second half of the nineteenth century as the boldest explorer of spiritual and political dilemmas among late-modernizing peoples. The Russian radical in particular anticipated the appeal of apocalyptic goals, and the disembodied ideal of freedom, found among the angry young men of our own times.

  For Dostoyevsky, the ‘Nechaev affair’ underscored the dangers of an intellectual radicalization that goes with a near-total absence of political and economic reform and near-total political impotence. Sergei Nechaev, an educated provincial from the lower middle-class who, lacking talent and charm, and feeling marginalized by the cosmopolitan city, develops a penchant for violence, was a classic example of the sick, spiteful and unattractive Underground Man he had already described. Nechaev’s hatred, as a contemporary of his wrote, ‘was directed not only against the government and exploiters, but against society as a whole and against educated society’. Arriving in Saint Petersburg in 1866, the same year as an attempted assassination of the Tsar, Nechaev moved very quickly to form his own radical group. He presented himself to Bakunin in Geneva in early 1869 as the leader and delegate of a revolutionary movement of students. Bakunin took a great liking to the young man: an exemplar, he seemed, of Russia’s ardent young generation, who had the will to destruction. He helped the Russian to get some money from Herzen (who himself would have nothing to do with the young firebrand).

  The new friends then co-authored various pamphlets, advocating an elemental violence and terror. Herzen, who came down to Geneva to see his old friend, was alarmed. He wrote in a letter, ‘The mastodon Bakunin roars and thunders … Everywhere he preaches universal destruction. Meanwhile the Russian youth take his programme au pied de la lettre. Students are beginning to form bands of brigands. Bakunin is advising them to burn all documents, destroy property and not to spare people…’

  Nechaev returned to Russia late in 1869 to establish secret cells. All seemed to be going well for Bakunin until the Moscow press revealed some months later that Nechaev had murdered a student on the grounds of the Agricultural Academy in Moscow (where Dostoyevsky’s brother-in-law was a student). Bakunin himself was mentioned, along with his advice to the younger generation to nurture that ‘fiercely destroying and coldly passionate fervour that freezes the mind and stops the blood in the veins of our opponents’.

  It turned out that Nechaev had ordered a member of his radical cell, who disagreed with him, to be killed on suspicion of being an agent of the Russian police. He himself had strangled the young man to death. It also came out later that he had invented the accusation merely in order to get rid of a rival.

  Bakunin had refused to believe the rumours circulating in émigré circles about the murder, and Nechaev’s basic dishonesty. To friends, he tried to justify Nechaev as someone forced to seek short cuts by a desperate political situation: someone who wanted to strike a great blow for freedom in order to jolt people out of their ‘historical backwardness’, ‘apathy’ and ‘sluggishness’. In public, however, he angrily repudiated his collaborator. Nechaev was guilty, he wrote in a long epistle, of a ‘fanaticism bordering on mysticism’.

  * * *

  The modern terrorist tradition has many such instances of zealous pupils exceeding their masters’ brief: most recently, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who, radicalized in a Jordanian prison by a radical Salafist scholar, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, went on to win the label ‘sheikh of slaughterers’ in Iraq. Zarqawi’s brutishness provoked his spiritual guide to issue several censorious disavowals on Al Jazeera; he complained in particular about Zarqawi’s ignorance of Islam.

  Maqdisi now issues fatwas against Zarqawi’s offspring, ISIS, depicting it as a den of Saddam Hussein’s secular and socialist Baathists, who have ‘just discovered Islam’. He has been denounced in turn by ISIS’s chief propagandist, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, as one of ‘the donkeys of knowledge’. ‘The only law I subscribe to is the law of the jungle,’ Adnani asserts, and Nechaev would have agreed. The m
eans do not matter so long as they achieve the desired end of universal destruction. In many ways, figures like Zarqawi and Adnani represent the death of traditional Islam rather than its resurrection.

  Certainly, for Dostoyevsky, a ruthlessly egocentric and unscrupulous partisan of action like Nechaev embodied the consequences of the death of God. In his novel Demons (1872) he famously used the ‘Nechaev affair’ as a salvo against the phenomenon of active nihilism. But Dostoyevsky also admitted that he himself might have become ‘a Nechaevist … in the days of my youth’. What he had tried to show in Demons, he explained, was that ‘even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offence’. He believed that:

  no ant-heap, no triumph of the ‘fourth estate’, no abolition of poverty, no organization, will save humanity from abnormality and, consequently, from guilt and transgression. It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness that evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that abnormality and sin arise from the soul itself; and finally that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there cannot be either physicians or final judges.

  The First Phase of Global Jihad

  Responding to critics who had condescendingly labelled him ‘poet of the Underground’, Dostoyevsky said ‘Silly fools, it is my glory, for that is where the truth lies … The reason for the Underground is the destruction of our belief in certain general rules: “Nothing is sacred.”’ Certainly – and this accounts for the swift and deep popularity of Dostoyevsky in Europe – this ‘underground’ world of demonic will was not something confined to Russia or what Joseph Conrad called the ‘Russian temperament’, whose ‘moral and emotional reactions’ could be ‘reduced to the formula of senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny’.

  It is true that rigidly autocratic Russia had developed a degree of repression whose counterpart was insane rebellion. In a country without a public sphere, where educated young men were trapped between an oppressive elite and a peasantry they had no contact with or means of knowing, violence came to seem attractive – the only available form of self-expression. But many intelligent young men elsewhere, too, were breaking their heads against the prison walls of their societies.

  In that sense, Dostoyevsky’s literary recognition of active nihilism in Russia anticipated later acts of destructive violence. Beginning in the late 1870s, these kept erupting on the orderly surface of modern, rational civilization across Europe until it was consumed by the great conflagration of the First World War.

  The radical intelligentsia did not give up in Russia itself, despite severe repression. A movement called the People’s Will launched a campaign of terror, and in 1881 it managed to assassinate the Tsar, Alexander II. The deed, planned by a twenty-six-year-old female revolutionary, Sofia Perovskaya, was comparable in its boldness and implications to the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. And such was its infectious quality that a wave of assassinations washed over Europe and America in the next three decades.

  King Umberto I of Italy, who survived an attempt on his life made by an anarchist in 1878, considered assassination to be a ‘professional risk’. He was murdered twenty-two years later by an Italian silk worker, a member of an anarchist group from New Jersey. Attacks were also directed at institutions that seemed to represent the deceitful values of bourgeois society. An attack on a disreputable music hall in Lyons in 1882 seemed to have been provoked by the anarchist newspaper that said ‘You can see there, especially after midnight, the fine flowers of the bourgeoisie and of commerce … The first act of the social revolution must be to destroy this den.’

  An anarchist attacked the Paris Stock exchange in 1886; another hurled a bomb at the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in 1893. An Italian anarchist then stabbed to death the president of France, Carnot, for refusing to pardon the murderer. The European states responded with brutal police repression: torture became common again, along with summary trials and executions and crackdowns. Governments started to cynically use the threat of terrorism to shore up domestic support and ensure compliance: Bismarck blamed assassinations and bombings on the Social Democratic Party, and eventually banned it.

  The anarchist terrorists came to be depicted gaudily by a sensationalistic press as a powerful conspiratorial force spanning the globe. The radicals also began to make their way into literary fiction outside Russia. Oscar Wilde wrote a play about a bomb-throwing Russian, depicting her, in a Baudelairean touch, as an expression of satanic beauty. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), Henry James ventured into London slums with an unusual cast of anarchist conspirators. In Émile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), a Russian anarchist called Souvarine blows up a mine. The French novelist warned:

  the masters of society to take heed … Take care, look beneath the earth, see these wretches who work and suffer. There is perhaps still time to avoid the ultimate catastrophe … [Yet] here is the peril: the earth will open up and nations will be engulfed in one of the most appalling cataclysms in history.

  Literature, in turn, incited acts of terror. One of the readers of Germinal, and greatly inspired by its Russian anarchist, was Émile Henry. Henry bombed a mining company and a much-frequented café near the Gare Saint-Lazare. He defiantly spoke in court of ‘a deep hate, each day revived by the revolting spectacle of this society … where everything prevents the fulfilment of human passions and the generous tendencies of the heart, and the unimpeded growth of the human spirit’. Henry claimed to have acted so that the ‘insolent triumphs’ of the bourgeoisie were shattered, and ‘its golden calf would shake violently on its pedestal, until the final blow knocks it into the gutter and pools of blood’.

  In monarchical Spain, Mateo Morral Roca, the son of a Catalonian industrialist, directed his murderous rage at King Alfonso XIII in 1906. A student of Nietzsche and chemistry, he fabricated a bomb in his Madrid hotel room and threw it from his fifth-floor balcony at a royal procession, killing dozens of soldiers and bystanders and injuring nearly one hundred people. It was the Spanish king’s third escape from assassination during his reign. Barcelona, where a series of bombs exploded from 1903 to 1909, causing widespread terror and panic, became known as the ‘city of bombs’. The random attacks caused a precipitate decline in the tourist trade and provoked the city’s affluent class to flee to safer locations.

  * * *

  Anarchists were not always responsible for this unprecedented carnage across Europe prior to the First World War, even if it was inspired by anarchist techniques. The violence was aimed at different political ends. But it was inspired by the belief – fundamental to much modern terrorism – that assaults on symbols of political and social order, and the self-sacrifice of individuals, had a propaganda value that far exceeded any immediate political ends.

  Revolts against the dehumanization imposed by industrial society gave to anarchist movements in the 1880s and 1890s an international dimension. In one estimate, there were some ten thousand anarchists residing in Buenos Aires by the early years of the twentieth century. A German follower of Bakunin, Johann Most, found harshly industrializing America a fertile soil for his mentor’s ideas. He discovered adherents among the large number of German and Bohemian workers in Chicago. ‘Let us rely,’ he wrote, ‘upon the unquenchable spirit of destruction and annihilation which is the perpetual spring of new life.’

  Most published The Science of Revolutionary Warfare – A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc. Printed in Chicago and Cleveland in 1885 and 1886, it sang the glories of the then newly discovered dynamite. The explosive could:

  be carried in the pocket without danger … a formidable weapon against any force of militia, police, or detectives that may want to stifle the cry for justice that g
oes forth from the plundered slaves … It is a genuine boon for the disinherited, while it brings terror and fear to the robbers … Our lawmakers might as well try to sit down on the crater of a volcano or on the point of a bayonet as to endeavor to stop the manufacture and use of dynamite.

  This wasn’t just talk. Dynamite played a central role in the Haymarket affair in Chicago as labour militancy peaked among immigrant groups in the United States. On 3 May 1886, Chicago policemen shot dead six strikers outside the McCormick Reaper Works, and beat others with their clubs. At a mass meeting the next day, amid fiery speeches denouncing the atrocities, a dynamite bomb was thrown in the direction of the police. Four policemen died in the ensuing riot. During the resulting ‘red scare’, and general clamour for revenge from big business and the media, anarchist speech-makers and journalists, including Most, were rounded up. Despite appeals for clemency from such eminent writers as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, four men were hanged.

  The image of the bodies of four men hanging in turn radicalized many young men and women, including Emma Goldman, an immigrant from Russia who had experienced the brutality of working-class life. A young man of Polish origin assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. He had no connections to any anarchist groups, but he had been to a lecture by Goldman. He was executed and Goldman was arrested; the American Congress passed a law excluding from the country any one ‘who disbelieves in or is opposed to all organized governments’. Theodore Roosevelt launched an international crusade against terrorism, anticipating George W. Bush’s war on terror by more than a century.

  But the fear of terrorism did not go away. Nor did the attraction of propaganda by the deed diminish. Transatlantic cable telegraph and mass-circulation newspapers provided the right technological circumstances for it. Anarchist spectacles were meat and drink to the newspapers, which reported them at length with many lurid illustrations, titillating their readers, but also confirming the militants’ own high sense of their value and potency. In the late nineteenth century, as in the early twenty-first century, blunderingly repressive governments together with a sensationalist media made anarchist militancy seem more widespread than it was.