The Nouméa of 1876 was a far cry from the titular Mysterious Island of Jules Verne’s new masterpiece, whose five fugitives are escaping not to America but from Confederate captivity in the Civil War, and by balloon rather than ship. Driven out into the Pacific by a storm, they land on a seemingly enchanted, uninhabited island where strange forces assist them in gradually reconstructing the sum of civilisation’s knowledge. The novel’s revelation that the guiding hand behind the marooned soldiers’ achievements belongs to Captain Nemo, who survived the Nautilus’ cataclysmic underwater battle and is in hiding on the island, is surely all Verne’s own. But in its sympathy for those cut off by fate from their homeland, and its strangely inverted echoes of the Communards’ experiences of exile, the influence of Paschal Grousset, who would collaborate on Verne’s next book, may already be discernible. And for all the rancour between the fellow fugitives from New Caledonia, even Rochefort might have found some solace in the novel’s optimistic vision of human resourcefulness, and a consoling echo of his own isolation in that of the proud Nemo.
5
To the People
Russia and Switzerland, 1874–1876
On 22 March 1874, as the humming wires of the telegraph cables carried news of Rochefort’s audacious escape from New Caledonia around the world, St Petersburg awoke to startling news of its own. The previous evening, Prince Peter Kropotkin had been taken into custody by the infamous Third Section of the police while on his way home from the Geographical Society after delivering a long-awaited lecture expounding his new theories about the Ice Age in Siberia. St Petersburg society was stunned, its salons feverish with rumour and outrage. Apparently Kropotkin had been tricked into responding when an undercover police agent, feigning distress, called to him by the code name ‘Borodin’. Now he was being held at police headquarters, awaiting interrogation about his suspected involvement in the city’s foremost subversive organisation, the Chaikovsky Circle.
A few weeks earlier, nearly all those members of the Chaikovsky Circle still at liberty had escaped south from St Petersburg in the hope of inciting a popular uprising. Kropotkin alone had insisted on remaining in the capital as part of a desperate recruiting drive intended to rebuild the underground networks that the police were busy uprooting. The plan had been that Kropotkin would join the others at the crucial moment of rebellion, but his obstinate confidence that his apparent respectability would protect him from arrest had proved pitifully misplaced.
Still wearing the formal dress required by the Geographical Society at its public events, Kropotkin was led into the Third Section’s headquarters in the Summer Garden, up several flights of stairs and past endless pairs of guards, to the suite of cells on the top floor. While other detainees had often been left to stew, sometimes for months, before they were interrogated, at four o’clock in the morning, three days later, Kropotkin was dragged to the hot seat. Bleary-eyed, he refused to divulge anything but his name and a smattering of irrelevant detail and was soon transferred to solitary confinement in the notorious Peter and Paul fortress. His cell was in the old artillery embrasure of the Trubetskoy tower, whose walls had been padded to prevent the tapped communication that kept the other inmates sane. It was a chilling end to an adventure that had begun with so much hope.
The Chaikovsky Circle had its origins in the socialist library that a young Mark Natanson had created for his fellow students at the Medical-Surgical Academy in 1869, so that they might read and discuss banned works of political theory from abroad and censored Russian literature. Not until 1871, however, had the circle coalesced into something close to its final form. That summer, mathematics student Nicholas Chaikovsky graduated into a world rocked by the events of the Paris Commune. To meet the urgent need for a safe space in which the most daring young freethinkers of St Petersburg could take stock and look ahead, he arranged a retreat in the village of Kusheliovka, a few miles upstream from the city on the River Neva. Devoting themseles to study, those present fully embraced the circle’s ethos of earnest commitment and austerity.
As well as Chaikovsky himself and Mark Natanson, the group included German Lopatin, a member of the general council of the International and a young veteran of conspiracy, Sofia Perovskaya, the estranged daughter of the ex-Governor General of the capital, and two sisters by the name of Kornilova. Their course of reading and discussion was sustained on a monotonous diet of soup and horse-flesh meatballs, varied only when they resolved to sacrifice the puppies who played under their balcony, ‘so that in the name of the struggle against prejudice we might try dog’. That summer also provided most with their first taste of Third Section tactics when the students were first raided and then, despite the absence of incriminating evidence, hauled in for intensive questioning and photographed for the police records.
The attention of the authorities was not easy to shake off and the arrest of Natanson the following February brought home to members the seriousness of the risks. The less resolute soon withdrew, concerned that being implicated in such an enterprise would cause irreparable damage to their academic careers. Behind them, though, they left a determined core of activists, eager to carve their mark on Russian history.
Beside the Paris Commune, the other event that had marked the year 1871 for radical thinkers was the trial in absentia of Bakunin’s dangerously charismatic protégé Nechaev, whose belief in the role of violence in maintaining discipline within his revolutionary groupuscule had led to the brutal murder of Ivanov. In reaction to this, the tight-knit Chaikovsky Circle adopted a firm policy of rational persuasion and set out to propagate further groups on the model of their own. Rejecting the strict hierarchy that Nechaev had espoused, the circles were to be characterised by equality and transparency, in which each member could be trusted to play their part. A national organisation for the publication and distribution of affordable editions of banned texts was rapidly established, the professionalism of which was said to have shamed the legitimate book trade. Seminal works, the most illicit of them printed in Switzerland and smuggled into the country, became available to readers for the first time: familiar names like Chernyshevsky, Dmitri Pisarev and Peter Lavrov, but also revolutionary French texts from the eighteenth century, as well as books by Marx (the translation of whose Das Kapital Lopatin initiated), Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill and, perhaps most inspiringly of all, Charles Darwin.
It had long been a corrosive paradox of Russian intellectual life that a fierce passion for imaginative science among many in the educated sections of society was matched by indifference, or even outward hostility on the part of the authorities. Ever since Catherine the Great had failed to invest in Ivan Polzunov’s refinement of the steam engine for the gold-mining industry in favour of the tried and tested British model, Russia’s discoverers and inventors had struggled for lack of encouragement. Whilst groundbreaking research continued to thrive in the country’s chemistry, engineering and medical faculties, society rarely saw the practical benefits.
The military ministry was the solitary exception, in the intermittent support it gave to aeronautical and rocket technology. Indeed, the previous twenty-five years had seen striking proposals emerge for balloon guidance systems such as might well have altered the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, had they been available to the besieged Parisians. Whilst the ministry backed Alexander Mozhaisky’s development of a prototype aeroplane during the early 1870s, even the successful flight of a scale model could not sustain its interest for long. Scant attention was paid either to the invention, some years before Edison’s success, of the filament light bulb by Alexander Lodygin, as the curious by-product of his work on helicopter design.
Ironically, the very lack of any Russian tradition of implementing such innovations afforded great freedom to the empire’s most enquiring minds, which were left untramelled by the practical requirements of production. Every conceptual breakthrough, however, appeared only to feed the growing tension between the claims of progressive thought, which challenged convention and pu
shed the boundaries of knowledge, and a moribund regime intent on holding the line. It was a tension symptomatic of that between reform and conservatism with which tsarist society as a whole was riven.
Throughout the 1860s, the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte – a ‘religion of humanity’ whose central article of faith was the potential of scientific enquiry to reveal solutions to society’s problems – had become a touchstone for progressive Russians. These were ‘civilised’ men, as the exiled political theorist Lavrov termed them, intelligentnyi and kul’turnyi, who understood Pisarev’s imperative to test both scientific knowledge and atrophying cultural convention to the point of destruction. In a letter to the tsar, Comte even offered his scientific system as an audacious means for Russia to bypass the interim phase of democratic rule and head straight for a new dispensation based on the religion of humanity, but his proposal went unanswered. Instead, the tsarist regime became ever less tolerant: practitioners of science were no longer to be considered irrelevant bores, but as possible threats to the state. At a moment rich in scientific promise – from Dmitri Mendeleev’s classification of the elements by their chemical properties in his Periodic Table of 1869, to Viacheslav Manassein’s overlooked discovery of the properties of penicillin two years later – the censor’s blue pencil regularly filleted Znanie, Russia’s first popular scientific journal, of any taint of positivism.
Inevitably, a climate stifling of imaginative playfulness and emotional release was to prove dangerously counterproductive for those who wished to maintain the status quo. In those rare cases when utopian science fiction was written and published in Russia – such as Prince Odoevsky’s novels The Year 4338 and The Town with No Name – it was earnest in its preoccupations: concerned less with the extravagant possibilities of space travel and underwater exploration that so fascinated French and British authors, than with the new world that might be realised in the here and now by social renewal. Even the utopian section of Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, ‘Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream’ – by far the most notable example of utopianism from Russian literature of the period – alludes to futuristic architecture and food production only as background detail for its vision of a society made perfect by free love, socialism and the disappearance of religion.
By the beginning of the 1870s, though, the ground was shifting. A new generation of radicals was coming to the fore who insisted that there was ‘more out there than the social sciences, that the anatomy of a frog won’t get you very far, that there are other important questions, that there is history, social progress …’ Alongside the elevated political and historical tracts that formed their staple reading, the high-minded youth of Russia developed an appetite for intrepid stories of adventure – by Fenimore Cooper and, especially, Verne – and they craved intellectual heroes who were similarly single-minded.
Before 1871, Darwin had been known in Russia merely as a disciple of Lamarck, who held that inheritance was subject to only limited environmental influence. The publication of The Descent of Man gave him a distinct and compelling reputation of his own, as a scientist whose daring new ideas might, by extrapolation, help unravel the whole tightly wound mythology of Russian hierarchy, in which the tsar’s position was guaranteed by divine will and the instinctual deference of the masses. For if evolution discounted the Genesis story, then the rationale of Adam’s fall and Christ’s promise of redemption surely came tumbling down, dragging with it any claim to authority for God’s intermediaries on earth. Moreover, Darwinism confirmed mankind’s shared birthright, while Thomas Huxley and others tenaciously teased out the social significance of ‘the survival of the fittest’; the political and economic subtext was not lost on those determined to work deep change in Russian society.
When an anxious Alexander Kropotkin wrote to his brother Peter in 1872 that he feared himself to be under police surveillance, he drew comfort from the imminent appearance in Russia of translations of Darwin’s most recent work. ‘Those nice children’, he wrote facetiously of the tsarist goverment, ‘simply don’t comprehend that it is more dangerous than a hundred A. Kropotkins.’ Ex-followers of Nechaev, abandoning terrorism for the subtler challenge that evolutionary theory posed to religious and state authority, lost none of their passion in the transition, ‘Every one of us would have gone to the scaffold and would have laid down his life for Moleschott or Darwin.’ The positivist efforts of Karl Marx to anatomise the social condition, diagnose its ailments and prescribe a cure were yet to make anything like such a deep impression.
Following Natanson’s arrest and imprisonment in February 1872, Nicholas Chaikovsky emerged as a calm influence to which the circle’s members looked in the midst of the ideological ferment that engulfed them. Even the heavy-handed policemen who had detained the pioneers in their raid on the Kusheliovka summer colony in 1871 appear to have recognised something exceptional in him: while the other suspects were subjected to prolonged grilling, he had been left in peace to study for his university exams. Taking the lead in the circle’s endless correspondence with bookshops, libraries and their new sister groups, the circle became closely identified with him. All members should fund the cause to the utmost of their ability, he determined, while themselves maintaining a habit of frugality in order to encourage self-discipline, and foster solidarity with the privations of the Russian peasantry. When the book-trading business found itself in urgent need of capital, one of the Kornilova sisters even went so far as to marry a fellow ‘Chaikovskyist’ with the express aim of extracting a generous dowry from her father, an affuent merchant, to augment the regular contributions that she and her sisters made from their allowances.
For a while, difficult decisions were taken by Chaikovsky almost unilaterally, but such a style of leadership was so at odds with the group’s guiding principles that it could not last. One applicant to the circle, who on failing to receive the unanimous agreement of members necessary for admission had turned informer for the Third Section, evoked their devoted and egalitarian beliefs with surprising generosity. ‘There are no “juniors” and “elders” among them, all are equal, everyone acts according to the circumstances, unaffected by the wishes of others, though the manner of their actions does reflect a mood of resolute unity, as they are always following a common aim.’ In reality, by mid-1872 that unity was becoming increasingly fragile, and even after the departure of members who favoured a more direct form of action, the whispered debate over future policy continued.
Into this simmering uncertainty stepped the dashing figure of Sergei Kravchinsky. Intense and solitary by disposition, when he joined the Mikhailovskoe Artillery Academy as a cadet he already spoke four languages and, having honed his revolutionary credentials since adolescence, possessed a grasp of radical ideas far in advance of his years. Strikingly handsome, with a rich mane of brown hair and the beginnings of a fulsome beard, he was remembered by one contemporary, Shishko, as ‘an exceptionally serious and even sombre young man, [with] a bit of a stoop, a large forehead and sharp features’. The strongest impression that the nineteen-year-old Kravchinsky had made on Shishko, though, was during a summer camp in the forest near Lake Duderhof when, addressing a clandestine gathering of cadets on the imperative of revolution, his oratory had taken flight. Invoking the great and expeditious changes wrought by the French Revolution, compared to which the endless examples from history of concessions from above appeared meagre and easily reversible, Kravchinsky’s seditious ideas left his audience shaken and intoxicated.
Weeks after his barnstorming performance the restless Kravchinsky had abruptly abandoned his studies for an unglamorous posting to Kharkov, a provincial backwater turned railway boom town. Fellow junior officers remembered how his room was stripped of all furniture except a stool, so that nothing should distract from his reading, which he continued even while walking around the barracks. If the other soldiers viewed such eccentricities with some suspicion, their respect for his burly frame and innate acumen in military matters deterred mockery
. He was a man over whom women would swoon and men hover in the hope that something of his aura might rub off on them.
Kravchinsky’s admission at this time into the Chaikovsky Circle, unopposed and at the first attempt, was hardly surprising: he had already demonstrated a ready talent for the circle’s main business, having smuggled illicit pamphlets on his own initiative for some time. His knowledge of the French Revolution also struck a chord with members, who self-consciously modelled themselves on Danton, Desmoulins and the Girondists of the 1790s. The welcome he received was in marked contrast to the group’s more circumspect reaction a few weeks later when Dmitri Klements put forward the name of Prince Kropotkin for membership.
The thirty-year-old Kropotkin appeared, at first, an antiquated anomaly to a group that was bound in most cases by connections from school and college days, but there was more to their resistance than this. German Lopatin did not mince his words. ‘What prince do you have now? Perhaps he wishes to amuse himself beneath the mask of democracy,’ he argued, ‘but later he will become a dignitary and cause us to be hanged.’ Eventually, Kropotkin was elected thanks to the testimony of the recently released Sofia Perovskaya that he was reliable and ‘completely young in spirit’; but whilst those who had suspected him of a hidden agenda mistook its nature, they were not altogether misguided. Lev Tikhomirov probably came closest to the truth when he recognised in Kropotkin an intellectual impatience with his colleagues: ‘A revolutionary to the core [he was] already at that time an anarchist, [while] anarchism for us was still entirely new.’ Even Kravchinsky lagged behind Kropotkin in this respect, for despite his later profession to have been an anarchist at this point, his erroneous claim that ‘in 1870 the whole of advanced Russia was anarchist’ suggests a certain ideological confusion.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 18
