Chernyshevsky’s character Rakhmetov in his 1863 novel What is to be Done?, written in the Peter and Paul fortress while he was imprisoned on charges of sedition, was seized upon as the very model of a revolutionary. A university dropout who renounces wealth, God and all the mores of a moribund civilisation, Rakhmetov pledges himself to a life of extreme asceticism, without wine, women or cooked meat and with a bed of nails on which to prove his powers of will and endurance; science and socialism are the sole object of his devotion, and cigars his only pleasure. That Chernyshevsky had intended the characterisation as a critique of the follies of youth did nothing to deter young people from aping Rakhmetov’s manners and demeanour, any more than Ivan Turgenev’s satirical intention when creating Bazarov in Fathers and Sons discouraged them from adopting the label of ‘nihilist’ coined by the author. The nihilists were easy to identify: with shoulder-length hair, bushy beards, red shirts and knee boots for the men, bobbed hair and dark, unstructured clothes for the women, and a unisex fashion for blue-tinted glasses, walking staves and smoking endless cigarettes, they stood out a mile. When it came to policing them, however, and censoring their reading or the course of their education, the reversals in the reform programme had left one crucial loophole.
Since 1861, male Russian citizens had enjoyed far greater travel rights: a passport and official permission to leave the country were still required, but their acquisition was usually a formality. The consequence was burgeoning émigré communities, especially in Switzerland, that had long been bolt-holes for dissidents of all hues. It was not merely the chance to applaud revolutionary sentiments that brought the younger sections of the audience to their feet at every performance of Rossini’s William Tell in the St Petersburg opera house; they were applauding the example set by Switzerland’s legendary liberator in resisting oppression.
In the aftermath of the Europe-wide upheavals of 1848, the Swiss authorities had briefly bowed to international pressure, handing over a number of political refugees to their own governments. Since then, though, trust had gradually returned, with Zurich and Geneva now a cacophony of foreign voices, and only the lurking presence of spies to remind the political refugees of their troubles back home. Unsurprisingly, Switzerland had become the most fecund source of the banned works of literature, history or philosophy that were smuggled into Russia to feed its more enquiring minds. But from the late 1860s cities like Zurich also held a less cerebral attraction for male émigrés, being home to an unusual concentration of passionately idealistic young women.
Medicine was a favoured subject for student radicals, offering an opportunity to alleviate suffering – of the individual, if not of society as a whole – and the pride of having embraced a truly rationalist vocation. For young women, the thought that their parents might be shocked by the notion of their cosseted daughters dissecting cadavers in anatomy lessons may well have held its own appeal. But there were many practical obstacles to be overcome. In 1864, the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy excluded women, and they were subsequently banned from taking the final exams necessary for a medical degree in any institution in the country. The result was a continuing exodus to Switzerland, where a medical diploma could be obtained.
Domineering fathers who withheld their permission were outflanked by means of marriages of convenience with male friends, which combined cunning with the frisson of moral transgression. Those impressionable youths who had read Chernyshevsky possibly considered the role of cuckold an honourable one: taking his feminist and free-love principles to an extreme, the author himself insisted on remaining faithful to his wife, despite her attempts to contrive affairs for him, while goading her into taking numerous lovers herself. It was said that on one occasion he had even continued scribbling away while she took her pleasure with a Polish émigré in an alcove of the same room. For the male friends and tutors who agreed to marry the aspiring female doctors, however, separate bedrooms were usually considered a sufficient sacrifice.
The earnest young women of the émigré colony were nevertheless uncompromising in their expectations, and not least of the men who wooed them. Whilst the privileged male youth of Russia might dabble in socialism and empathise with the peasantry at arm’s length, without necessarily causing undue damage to their career, for their female counterparts the success or failure of the reformist enterprise had huge personal ramifications. Accepting the case for sublimating their feminist agenda in the cause of a wider ‘social revolution’, they were determined to instil in their male colleagues a shared sense of determination, and a commitment to the cause that demanded almost monastic austerity.
Vera Figner vividly captured the earnest atmosphere of this radical milieu. Years later, when she wrote her memoirs, she could still remember her arrival in a dreary, drizzly Zurich, and the drab view of tiled roofs from the window of her room. Having married to secure freedom to travel, and then sold her wedding gifts to cover the cost of several years’ study abroad, not even the severe temptation (for a tomboyish country girl) of a lake teeming with Switzerland’s famously sweet-fleshed fish, the fera and gravenche, could distract her. ‘I won’t even go fishing!’ she primly assured her diary, ‘No! There’ll be no fishing or boating! There’ll be nothing but lectures and textbooks!’
Studious attendance on the courses soon forged strong bonds between her female companions – Auntie, Wolfie, Shark and Hussar, as they called themselves – who encouraged each other’s awakening political awareness. Thirteen of the women formed a discussion and study circle, on the model of those then flourishing in Russia, and named it after the Fritsche boarding house where most of them lodged. ‘Mesdames – all of Europe is watching you!’ the chairwoman – most often Lydia Figner, Vera’s sister – would declare, grandiosely paraphrasing Napoleon Bonaparte. The full pathos of some of the subjects they thrashed out could not have been predicted at the time: of the group who engaged with the question of ‘Suicide and Psychosis’, tsarist persecution would later impel five to take their own lives.
When the Swiss hosts expressed concern over the young women’s supposedly lax attitudes, the opportunity was seized upon to practise their developing powers of rhetoric. The vicious rumours of sexual orgies – the usual slanders used throughout history to undermine independent women and radicals – were most likely promulgated by the network of Third Section spies that Wilhelm Stieber established in Switzerland some years before his involvement in the Siege of Paris. In reality, the darkest secret of their gatherings was their addiction to an expensive import from the Orient, which crippled their finances and blunted their dynamism: tea. When it came to sex, by contrast, the women may have appeared to embrace Chernyshevsky’s free-love ethos, but their creed of renunciation far outweighed any tendency to libertinage.
Kropotkin was not alone in being lured to Switzerland by the prudish, caffeine-addled temptresses of Zurich, but he was among the most pure-hearted. Week after week he worked through the night in the socialist library that Sofia Lavrova had established with her room-mate, gorging on the theoretical literature of which he had for years been starved. By day, he sampled the melting pot of revolutionary and utopian ideas that the different exile traditions had created in the city, until his desire for further knowledge outstripped even his fascination with Sofia. Eager to further his education, it was not long before Kropotkin packed his bags for Geneva, for centuries a centre of religious as well as political dissent and now the scene of a simmering dispute between the followers of Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin.
When Michael Bakunin had visited London in 1865 as a fugitive from Siberia, Karl Marx remarked with barbed generosity that he was ‘one of the few people improved by prison’. Since then the relationship between the two men had deteriorated to an extravagant degree. Marx, busy insinuating his way into the leadership of the newly founded International Working Men’s Association and intent on making it a vehicle for the dissemination of his own theories, was adamant that a hot-headed Slavic rival like Bakunin should not be
allowed to challenge his monopoly of influence. In this he had the support of his friend and financial supporter Engels, whose skill as a propagandist was a huge asset to his cause. Bakunin, meanwhile, though born into an aristocratic family with extensive estates, possessed an impressive if rather over-inflated reputation as a revolutionary whose mettle had been tested on the barricades of 1848, with an exciting story to tell of his escape from prison in Siberia, and racial prejudices that even exceeded Marx’s own. What he lacked, however, after years of enforced absence in Siberia, was a formal organisation to sustain his self-image as the high priest of socialism.
During the second half of the 1860s Bakunin had gained a tenuous foothold in the International, brokering alliances with other radical groups whose grand titles belied their infinitesimally small membership. But with Marx increasingly intolerant of Bakunin’s presence, the battle lines between them were drawn: Bakunin’s doctrine of federalism and grassroots activism on one side, Marx’s vision of a centralised authority guiding the workers towards the coming revolution on the other. Bakunin would doubtless have put it more simply: freedom and autonomy against authority and repression.
The bitterness between the two men and their supporters had grown in intensity since the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Bakunin’s early and abortive attempt to inspire the creation of a federal, revolutionary France by his declaration, in October 1870, of a commune in Lyons had prompted Marx to comment that ‘At first everything went well but those asses, Bakunin and Clusuret, arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything.’ And yet, despite the paucity of Marxists among the leading figures of the Commune and his initial opposition to the Paris insurrection, it was Marx who had contrived to emerge, in the summer of 1871, as the perceived mastermind of the international revolutionary movement and all its actions.
After listening to Engels present a summary account of the Commune’s origins to the executive committee of the International in late March 1871, Marx had been content to accept the commission to write a longer address on the subject. Surfacing only to repudiate the most egregious slanders against him, Marx had kept his head down for the duration, digesting every scrap of information to emerge from Paris. Only when the Bloody Week was drawing to a close had he read On the Civil War in France to the central committee in London. Quickly and widely disseminated, it presented a powerful first draft of history to counter the Versaillais lies.
‘Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of the new society,’ boasted his opportunistic obsequy, and Marx was gleeful when his address was mistaken as something akin to a general’s valediction to his brave but defeated troops, that promised a counter-attack across an even wider front. ‘I have the honour to be at this moment the best calumniated and most menaced man of London,’ he wrote to a German benefactor, ‘which really does one good after twenty years’ idyll in my den.’ But while the prestige that accrued to Marx may have encouraged him to face down Bakunin once and for all, it was a sensational murder case in Russia that provided him with the ammunition to assert his ascendancy over the International.
Sergei Nechaev had arrived on Bakunin’s doorstep in March 1869 like some irresistible Lucifer: young, handsome, bright and charismatic, with a matchless pedigree in the political underground. He was, he claimed, a collaborator in the ‘Secret Revolutionary Committee’ – the inner core of the ‘European Revolutionary Committee’ set up by an associate of the tsar’s would-be assassin, Karakozov – and codenamed simply ‘Hell’. Having been arrested in St Petersburg, he was on the run. And lest anyone should doubt the sincerity of his commitment, he was dedicated to a life of fanatical asceticism.
Bakunin was wholly enchanted. For years, his bravura assertion that Russia was ripe for spontaneous revolution had rested on nothing but wishful thinking; now here was the son of a serf, a factory worker who had clawed his way up by dint of will and intellect, come to vindicate his claims with the most compelling personal testimony, and bearing fiery tidings that their time had come. If Bakunin wanted an acolyte, though, Nechaev was not going to be an easy conquest. The twenty-year-old made clear that he was seeking not a mentor but an equal, whose sponsorship could burnish the lustrous aura he already possessed. Bakunin agreed, and a potent but misbegotten manifesto soon emerged from their collaboration.
When presenting his ideas, the manifesto had long been Bakunin’s preferred form, the assertive nature of such documents punching through the tedium of the essay, their titles claiming ‘secrecy’ and promising deliciously occult insights. The Revolutionary Catechism was no exception, but for its new-found vigour and razor-sharp edge; Nechaev’s nihilist influence led Bakunin’s zeal to new extremes. ‘We devote ourselves exclusively to the annihilation of the existing social system. To build it up is not our task but the task of those that come after us,’ asserted one of its more restrained statements, while others advocated terroristic murder outright. The document gifted Bakunin’s enemies the opportunity to caricature his theories as advocating senseless violence. When Nechaev returned to Russia with the aim of preparing a full-scale revolution for 19 February 1870, his actions seemed to prove their case.
Travelling in disguise between St Petersburg and Moscow, with a certificate from Bakunin declaring him to be ‘an accredited representative of the Russian section of the World Revolutionary Alliance No. 2771’, Nechaev set about creating his own cell-based organisation called the People’s Revenge (Narodnaya Rasprava). Members were expected to adhere to the imperatives of the Catechism: ‘The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interest, no business, no emotions, no attachments, no property, not even a name…In his innermost depths he has broken all ties with the social order, not only in words but in actual fact’. Most importantly, however, they were required to submit themselves unquestioningly to Nechaev’s will and the instructions he conveyed to them from the central committee.
When a member of the St Petersburg cell, Ivanov by name, astutely questioned the very existence of this secret committee, Nechaev decided to eliminate the threat to his authority. Each of Ivanov’s colleagues was to take a hand in his murder to demonstrate their absolute commitment to the cause. Nechaev had already acquired the habit of incriminating students in order that their punishment by the authorities should radicalise them, and this was the next logical step. Following the macabre farce of Ivanov’s killing, Nechaev had succeeded in escaping back to Switzerland before the crime was discovered, but had been tried and convicted in absentia in 1871 and was, at the time of Kropotkin’s visit, fighting extradition.
That Nechaev had all along been a terrible liability was now obvious to Bakunin yet still he could not bring himself entirely to disown his protégé. ‘No one has done me, and deliberately done me, so much harm as he,’ Bakunin would write, and yet he maintained a correspondence with Nechaev. It was a fatal error, both for the future of revolutionary socialism and, more immediately, for Bakunin’s reputation.
Accusations concerning the pair’s ongoing conspiratorial activities were collected by Utin, the leader of the Marxist faction in Geneva, or else fabricated. For his pains, Marx rewarded Utin with recognition of his group as an official splinter of the International in Switzerland. He then convened a meeting of his cabal at the Blue Posts pub in Soho for what he termed the London Congress of the International. The challenge of travel in post-Commune Europe prevented many delegates from attending, while the émigré Communards in London, who had begun to distrust Marx’s egotism and challenge his dominance within the organisation, were excluded on the grounds that they might be French police spies. Having eliminated all sources of disagreement, the congress did Marx’s bidding: Nechaev was indicted and Bakunin thoroughly smeared as an accessory to and beneficiary of his violent crimes. The German Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht topped off the character assassination by labelling Bakunin as a tsarist agent, paid to undermine the International.
The feud between Marx and Bakunin now spilled over i
nto open warfare. Convening a congress of its own in the Swiss village of Saint-Imier in late 1871, the Jurassian Federation – the anti-authoritarian core of Bakunin’s support, which had been founded in the Swiss canton of the Jura a year before – denounced the London event as a partisan farrago. Some delegates countered Liebknecht’s charge by asserting that it was Marx himself who was the spy, hired by Bismarck. In fact, Bakunin sincerely saw strong similarities between the two autocratic Prussians, while the new Germany itself seemed to him the very embodiment of the modern nation state: one ‘based on the pseudo-sovereignty of the people in sham popular assemblies’ while exploiting them for the ‘benefit of capital concentrated in a very small number of hands’. Writing his pamphlet Statism and Anarchy in 1873, Bakunin presciently identified in Bismarck’s Germany the roots of a kaiserism and militarism that would generate something monstrous. Where his judgement carried less moral weight, however, was in his accusations of anti-Semitism.
Hypocritically, Bakunin insisted that he was ‘neither the enemy nor the detractor of the Jew’, while denouncing ‘this whole Jewish world which constitutes a single exploiting sect’, and ‘reign[s] despotically in commerce and banking.’ Having become the victim of its machinations, Bakunin now decried the London Congress of the International as ‘a dire conspiracy of German and Russian Jews’ who were ‘fanatically devoted to their dictator-Messiah Marx’. From a man who possessed both strong conspiratorial and millenarian tendencies himself, his words sounded like a bitter and vicious howl of envy. Such anti-Semitic sentiments, however, were far from unusual, and would only become more vehement and widespread with the passage of time.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 14
