by Max Boot
Then, as now, London provided a safe haven for radicals, including for a time Émile Henry. Here exiles could print their books and pamphlets for distribution back home. They could even meet in their own clubhouse, the Autonomie Club off Tottenham Court Road. Scotland Yard, and in particular its Special Branch, which had been created in 1883 in response to Irish Fenian bombings, kept a wary eye on the foreign radicals but did not usually interfere unless they plotted against British targets. That was rare but not unheard of. In 1894, just three days after Henry’s attack in Paris, a French tailor named Martial Bourdin tried to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich but through “clumsy bungling” blew himself up instead, an incident that inspired Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.41
Outside of Britain the anarchists were more successful. President Sadi Carnot of France, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain, Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary, President William McKinley of the United States, and King Umberto I of Italy were all slain by self-professed anarchists between 1894 and 1901. Other monarchs, including Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany and the shah of Persia, narrowly escaped the same fate. Never before had any terrorist group killed so many heads of state, nor has any since then.42
Such killings posed, as King Umberto noted, a “professional risk” for rulers.43 More shocking were indiscriminate attacks like Émile Henry’s that were directed at ordinary people whose only crime was to be “bourgeois.” Three months before Henry’s attack on the Café Terminus, a Spanish anarchist, Santiago Salvador, had flung two bombs from a balcony into a crowded Barcelona theater during a performance of William Tell, Rossini’s opera, which, ironically, tells the story of an earlier rebel against established authority. Twenty-two people were killed and five others wounded.44 Many years later, in 1920, a horse-drawn wagon filled with explosives was blown up on Wall Street in New York. Thirty-eight people were killed and hundreds wounded, making this the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The perpetrators were never caught, but the leading suspect was the Italian anarchist Mario Buda, creating a climate of fear about Italian-Americans and other immigrants that intensified as the decade progressed.45
Many of these bloodlettings were justified as reprisals for punishments meted out for earlier attacks; the desire for revenge has always been the most powerful of terrorist motivations. In the twentieth century numerous radicals would claim they had been embittered by the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-American anarchists executed in Massachusetts in 1927 after a much criticized trial found them guilty of killing two men during an armed robbery. Émile Henry, for his part, said he was avenging August Vaillant, who had been executed for throwing a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies that had injured a number of people but killed no one. (The president of the chamber had memorably proclaimed, “The session continues.”)46 Henry’s arrest, in turn, led his friend, the Belgian anarchist Philibert Pauwels, to plant small bombs into two shabby Paris hotels, one of which killed an elderly landlady. Pauwels then tried to blow up the elegant Church of the Madeleine but killed only himself when his bomb exploded prematurely.47
NEWS OF ANARCHIST outrages, hyped by the yellow press of the day, led to panic among the respectable classes. Between 1892 and 1894 Paris was the scene of eleven bombings, which killed nine people. As a result, wrote a newspaper correspondent, “the Parisians of 1894 . . . lived in daily dread of some fresh eruption. . . . If a trifling mishap occurred to a tramcar, through an electric wire getting out of order, people imagined that an explosive had been deposited on the line.”48 (Anyone who was in New York after 9/11 will recognize the reaction.) Anarchist beliefs were attributed to many ordinary criminals who, for their part, were happy to claim political motives for their acts. In 1887 a French burglar who had stabbed to death a policeman trying to arrest him defended himself by saying, “The policeman arrested me in the name of the law; I hit him in the name of liberty.”49
There was widespread speculation that a nefarious Black International (black was the anarchists’ color) was scheming to bring down Western civilization. Bakunin furthered this impression by inventing grand if nonexistent organizations with names such as the World Revolutionary Alliance. His fanatical friend Sergei Nechaev was designated its “accredited representative” No. 2771, falsely implying there were 2,770 others.50
It was true that anarchists sometimes crossed national borders to carry out their deeds—something that was easy to do because, as one anarchist noted, “Europe at that time knew no passports, and frontiers hardly existed.”51 The Austrian empress Elizabeth, for instance, was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in Switzerland. King Umberto was killed by an Italian-American anarchist living in New Jersey. But anarchists never had a unified command structure in any individual nation much less across all nations. They did not even have joint training camps. Those were innovations that would await a subsequent wave of terrorism in the 1970s.
The very concept of an anarchist organization was an oxymoron. Anarchists were fierce individualists who resisted the kind of regimentation that Marxist leaders imposed on their parties, which helps to explain why anarchists were less successful. As Émile Henry noted, anarchism was not a “dogma, an unassailable, incontrovertible doctrine revered by its adepts the way Muslims venerate the Koran.”52 Although anarchists held occasional conventions (for example, a London congress in 1881 that endorsed “propaganda by the deed”), whatever cohesion they had—and it was not much—came from informal meetings and from newspapers such as L’Endehors, a Parisian weekly that was briefly edited by Henry. Most anarchist terrorists heeded the German exile Johann Most’s advice in his jaunty how-to pamphlet, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare (1885), one of the first terrorist manuals ever produced: “If you want to carry out a revolutionary act, don’t talk to others about it first—go ahead and do it!”53
For all their disunity, anarchists appeared to be so formidable that numerous governments responded with repressive measures in waging what the New York Times described in 1881—the year that both President James Garfield and Tsar Alexander II were assassinated—as “The War on Terrorism.”54 The most severe penalties were applied, as might be expected, in illiberal states such as Russia and Austria. But even in democratic France laws were passed to crack down on “evil-doers” who distributed anarchist propaganda or defended its doctrines. In the United States, Congress passed a law barring from the country any alien “who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government.” A more severe crackdown, known as the “Palmer Raids” after Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, occurred during the Red scare of 1919–20 when numerous radicals, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were deported or imprisoned. Theodore Roosevelt reflected the supercharged atmosphere of the times when he said in 1908 that “when compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.”55
Those today who believe that the world’s response to 9/11 is entirely novel should realize that the anarchist menace of a century earlier prompted growing attempts at international police cooperation such as the anti-anarchist conferences in Rome (1898) and St. Petersburg (1904). The Russian secret police established a sizable operation in Paris with the French government’s consent, and Italy deployed detectives to keep track of Italian anarchists around the world. Such steps laid the foundation for the creation in 1923 of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Commission. Anarchist groups were riddled with informers and provocateurs who kept the police forces of many countries well informed of their plots—and sometimes invented fresh plots simply to collect greater rewards for uncovering them.56
As usual, technology was a two-edged sword: the same cameras that made it possible for the mass media to publish pictures of terrorist attacks, thus furthering the perpetrators’ aims, also made it possible for the police to photograph and identify suspects. This era saw the beginning of “mug shots,” fingerprints, and
forensic laboratories, all of which made the terrorists’ jobs harder.57
ANARCHISTS WERE CONVINCED that attempts to repress them would spur a public backlash. At his trial, just before he went to the guillotine, Émile Henry declared, “Hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garroted in Xerez [Spain], shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many. But you have not been able to destroy anarchy. Its roots go deep; it sprouts from the bosom of a poisonous society which is falling apart. . . . It is everywhere . . . and it will end by defeating you and killing you.”58
Henry was wrong. Anarchists did not defeat anyone. By the late 1930s their movement had been all but extinguished. In the more democratic states, better policing allowed terrorists to be arrested while more liberal labor laws made it possible for workers to peacefully redress their grievances through unions. In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, anarchists were repressed with brute force. The biggest challenge was posed by Nestor Makhno’s fifteen thousand anarchist guerrillas in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, but they were finally “liquidated” by the Red Army in 1921.59 In Spain anarchists were targeted both by Franco’s Fascists and by their Marxists “comrades” during the 1936–39 civil war—as brilliantly and bitterly recounted by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Everywhere anarchists were pushed into irrelevance by Moscow’s successful drive to establish communism as the dominant doctrine of the left.
That the anarchists did not accomplish more was hardly surprising, since they were, in the words of a recent book, “demanding the impossible.” They were in some ways the opposite of the Ku Klux Klan, which pursued a broad-based campaign of terror to achieve limited objectives. Anarchists, by contrast, committed isolated acts of violence over many years and in many different countries in pursuit of utopian goals. By one estimate, between 1880 and 1914 these “wild beasts without nationality,” as an Austrian official dubbed them, struck in sixteen nations, killing 160 people and wounding at least 500. Ninety-three more people would die in anarchist attacks after World War I, not counting the Russian and Spanish civil wars.60 Nowhere did they achieve much momentum.
Socialists suffered from many deficiencies of their own, but in the land of the tsars, at least, they would achieve a critical mass of terror that would contribute to the ultimate collapse of the old regime.
33.
HUNTING THE TSAR
The Nihilists on the Trail of
Alexander II, 1879–1881
THE TSAR WAS sentenced to death on August 26, 1879. The verdict was delivered, incongruously enough, in a pleasant pine grove in a suburb of St. Petersburg where the wealthy had their dachas (summer houses). Here, amid the dry pine needles, assembled the executive committee of the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya)—twenty-five men and women who had dedicated their lives to bringing about a revolution in Russia.
They were all under thirty, all intellectuals, mainly of the middle class or the lower levels of the nobility. Most had attended university—still an anomaly in a society in which illiteracy was widespread. In their wealth and education, similar to the leaders of the American Revolution and the Ku Klux Klan but to few other contemporary rebels, they anticipated twentieth-century insurgent leaders such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Yasser Arafat. They were known as Nihilists, a term popularized by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons, but their agenda was more accurately described as “populist-socialist.” Unlike the anarchists, who wanted to destroy the state, they wanted to seize control of it. Previously they had belonged to a group called Land and Freedom, but they had split off because some members of Land and Freedom had objected to the use of violence. The executive committee had no such compunctions.
Vera Figner was one of its members, a twenty-seven-year-old from a family of “prosperous noblemen,” “a vivacious, merry, frolicsome girl,” a onetime debutante who had abandoned a budding medical career and a husband to devote herself to the cause of the peasants of whom she knew little. (One historian has written, accurately if acerbically, that the Nihilists were “peasant-lovers in the sense in which some people are animal-lovers.”) She believed, they all believed, that “so much inflammatory material had accumulated among the people that a small spark would easily flare up into a flame, and the latter into a gigantic conflagration.”
And what better spark than the assassination of the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias? Alexander II had begun his reign as a reformer; he had freed the serfs in 1861. But in the ensuing years he had turned more conservative, refusing to grant a constitution or an elected parliament. This deflated the high expectations raised by his early years and sparked a violent backlash. In 1878 Nihilists killed General Nikolai Mezentsov, chief of the Third Section, the tsarist secret police. The following year it was the turn of Prince Dimitry Kropotkin, a provincial governor and cousin of the famous anarchist. Yet another terrorist shot and wounded the governor of St. Petersburg, a crime for which she was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. These were not isolated incidents of political murder like the killings of Julius Caesar or Abraham Lincoln but rather a concerted campaign of terrorism designed to bring down an entire state. Targeting the tsar himself was the pinnacle of the campaign.
The People’s Will hoped to blow up the tsar’s train as he was returning from a Crimean holiday in November 1879. Vera Figner journeyed to Odessa with a load of dynamite. Dressing up as an “upperclass doll” (her own words), she made an application to procure a job on the railroad for a man who was supposedly her janitor, actually a fellow conspirator. He got the job, but the tsar decided to take another route home so the effort was wasted. Another terrorist, pretending to be a merchant setting up a tannery, buried dynamite on a section of tracks. The tsar traveled over this route on November 18, but the explosives did not explode; the wires had not been connected correctly.
A third ambush still awaited in a suburb of Moscow where two Nihilists pretending to be a married couple rented a house five hundred feet from the tracks and tunneled their way toward the rail line through “cold wet mud.” By November 19, when the tsar’s train was to pass by, they were ready. Their intelligence indicated that the tsar’s party would use three trains with Alexander himself in the fourth coach of the second train. They duly blew that coach to smithereens only to discover that Alexander had decided at the last minute to travel in the first train. The tsar did not even know about the blast until a courtier told him that “the fourth car of the retinue train has been turned into marmalade. There was nothing in it but fruit from the Crimea.”
The tsar in the end was not safe even at home. Stepan Khalturin, a radical carpenter, had gotten a job in the tsar’s Winter Palace, an immense affair of 1,050 rooms, 1,886 doors, and 1,945 windows that was in constant need of repair. He proved to be such a reliable and hardworking handyman that a police corporal approached him as a potential son-in-law. All the while Khalturin was slowly smuggling small bits of dynamite provided by the People’s Will into his room in the cellar, two floors beneath the dining room. On the afternoon of February 5, 1880, Khalturin connected the wires and left the building. Fifteen minutes later, a thunderous explosion rocked the palace. Eleven people were killed and fifty-six injured, but the tsar was not among them. The dining room had been only slightly damaged and the tsar was not yet inside. Most of the casualties had occurred among his bodyguards who occupied a first-floor room between the cellar and the dining room.
Yet another attempt failed in August 1880 when one of the People’s Will members overslept and failed to reach the bridge over which the tsar was traveling in time to set off a bomb. But the terrorists did not give up.
In December 1880 two of their operatives pretending to be “Mr. and Mrs. Kobozev” set up a “cheese shop” in St. Petersburg that was actually a front for a tunneling operation to install a mine under a street where the tsar was known to travel every Sunday to inspect his troops. As a backup, four assassins armed with handheld bombs were to be deployed on the street it
self. The tunneling began in late January 1881 and was complete by the end of February.
Even as the conspiracy unfolded, the secret police were closing in. The People’s Will had been able to continue operating with the aid of a mole who was working as a clerk in the police’s Third Section. But following a reorganization in 1880 that moved the secret police, the Okhrana, to a new police department, the terrorists’ luck began to change. By the end of February 1881 many members of the executive committee had been arrested, including their de facto leader Alexander Mikhailov and his successor, Andrei Zhelyabov. Both had been intimately involved in the tsar hunt, and both were now in solitary confinement in the forbidding Peter and Paul Fortress.
On Saturday, February 28, 1881, the day after Zhelyabov’s arrest, a “sanitary inspector”—actually a police general—appeared at the cheese shop. He wanted to know what was in one of the barrels. “Mr. Kobozev” said it was cheese. If the general opened it he would have found dirt from the excavations but he could not be bothered, leading at least one historian to wonder whether the police were deliberately turning a blind eye to the murder of a tsar who was too liberal for their tastes.
That very night the remaining members of the executive committee met at Vera Figner’s apartment to decide whether to abort the plot. They decided to proceed under the leadership of Sophia Perovskaya, Zhelyabov’s aristocratic girlfriend, a beautiful blonde with blue eyes, “a delicate little nose,” and a “charming mouth, which showed, when she smiled, two rows of very fine white teeth.” Notwithstanding her “sweet and affectionate disposition,” she was, in the words of a fellow Nihilist, “one of the most dreaded members of the Terrorist party.” With her in the lead, the attack was scheduled for the next day, Sunday, March 1.
