Few in the circle would have disagreed with Kravchinsky’s proselytising atheism, and most would have thrilled to Bakunin’s claim that the traditional Russian village community, the mir, would be in the vanguard of the eventual revolution, ‘freed from the oppressive tutelage of the state to become an ideal form of anarchical government, by all with the consent of all.’ For most young Russians, however, faced with the realities of a tight tsarist security apparatus and the atrophied popular instinct for justice, any question of a revolution within their own lifetime appeared, for the moment, delusional. Replying to his brother’s musings on the subject some years earlier, Alexander Kropotkin had expressed what remained the majority view among the country’s dissidents: ‘Of course I would rush to a social revolution; I would go to the barricades…But as for the success of the revolution, I wouldn’t hope for much; it would be too early I’m sure, and they would defeat us.’ Semi-clandestine visits to Russia by prominent figures from the Commune in the aftermath of the debacle of 1871 had briefly bolstered the extremist case, with Klements later reflecting that events in Paris had sparked ‘a new era in the development of the revolutionary deed in Russia’. Yet the conspicuous pathos of the defeated Communards’ predicament underlined the futility of insurrection, if launched prematurely. The fate of Marx’s envoy to the Commune Elizaveta Dmitrieff, arrested on her return home from Paris and sent to suffer a slow death in Siberia, offered the bitterest reminder of the price to be paid for such sedition.
Kropotkin’s admission had nevertheless galvanised debate within the twenty-strong circle over the nature and scope of the change that Russia required. Still, though, the majority held that it should be political only, rather than a more general upheaval in the structure of society, and must be achieved by constitutional means. Martin Langans, a leading member of the circle’s sister organisation in the south of Russia, would offer an eloquent expression of the limit of their hopes: ‘Back then,’ he wrote, ‘we believed that the state, like any powerful weapon, could both create happiness for mankind and oppress it, and that the mechanics lay in the creation of circumstances under which the abuse of power would become impossible.’
A visceral hatred for the tsar had yet to take hold, with the group directing its ire against those reactionary officials who were perceived to mislead and misinterpret him. On the one occasion when a member proposed assassinating Alexander II, the entire circle rounded on him, threatening to obstruct his intentions using whatever physical means necessary. And yet to those persuaded by Bakunin’s analysis of Russia’s predicament, any delay seemed certain only to weaken their position and play into their enemies’ hands. While they hesitated, the advance of European capitalism and industry would continue to seduce the peasant from his loyalty to the land and erode the traditions of communistic solidarity, offering the distant prospect of individualistic self-advancement whilst plunging workers into even worse living conditions than before.
For all his admiration of the circle and its members, Kropotkin refused to cede on the key principle of collective action, and tried every ruse to win the majority around to his view. Initially declining to surrender his personal wealth to the communal coffers, he made certain that no one could mistake his stance for avarice or self-interest. It was ‘because I am saving it for a more important time,’ he told them. ‘Later, when it becomes necessary to arm the workers in order to destroy the bourgeoisie, then no one will give a kopeck.’ Staking his fragile credibility with the circle on this sensitive issue, he went on to reaffirm his commitment to the collective ideal, forcing his cautious colleagues’ hand by volunteering for a task that entailed utter submission to the group’s will.
The new role that Kropotkin proposed for himself would have meant severing all ties with the group, to plunge back into the life of the imperial court that he so despised. Only, this time, he would be there with something close to treachery in mind. ‘I will agitate among the higher courtiers, I will try to unite them, if possible, into some form of organisation,’ he promised the circle, who were eager for constitutional reform. To establish a radical cell so close to the heart of tsarist power, where reactionary forces were in the ascendant, risked almost certain arrest. But imprisonment was not the greatest sacrifice Kropotkin was prepared to make on behalf of ‘such a collection of morally superior men and women’: as a man who had renounced his title and his lineage, the denial of his true sympathies that such a deep-cover operation entailed would have amounted to a double torment. Fortunately for Kropotkin, his brinksmanship paid off: the question of policy was revisited to find more common ground.
On one subject all could agree: it was from the benighted common people of Russia – the narod, peasants and factory workers – that the pressure for change must come. For Chaikovsky, the greatest mistakes made during the reforms of the early 1860s stemmed from a lack of consultation with the people whom they affected, who might have anticipated the catastrophic consequences the tsar’s advisers failed to foresee. Some of the young idealists of the circle heeded Bakunin’s advice that they should seek to merge with and learn from the people whilst inciting them to revolution. Most, however, preferred the lesson of Lavrov’s Historical Letters of 1868: that as members of the intelligentsia they had a moral duty to lead the peasantry to enlightenment. Collectively, the Chaikovskyists decided to follow the latter’s advice, ‘breaking all ties with the past, leaving parents, friends, studies, social position, and dedicating oneself to the service of the masses.’ It was to be a great, noble, bracingly self-effacing adventure.
The precocious Sofia Perovskaya had already set a fine example the previous year, when she had lived alongside the peasantry for several months while administering to them inoculations against smallpox. Now Chaikovsky, Kropotkin and Kravchinsky were among the first to venture out, testing the water with visits to local factories. It was an uphill struggle. Often they delivered the same lecture to the same audience, twice in quick succession, to be sure that they had understood. But while Kravchinsky was greeted with ‘encores’ for his rousing, demotic style, few were able to grasp the meaning of Kropotkin’s rarified prose.
By the summer of 1873, the early trickle of radicals had surged into a torrent of many hundreds, their numbers swollen by the return of scores of young women from Switzerland, most trailing male admirers in their wake and with a moral point to prove. The government could scarcely have encouraged domestic disturbance more effectively than by its ill-considered and untimely threat to bar any medical students who stayed in Switzerland from ever graduating in Russia. And the government’s dissemination of vicious propaganda claiming that the women were using their medical knowledge to abort the babies conceived of their promiscuity had fuelled their outrage. Like the original group of Chaikovskyists, once back in Russia the women of the Fritsche Circle also targeted factory workers as being ‘more highly developed mentally’ and therefore more receptive to their message.
Nevertheless, the tactics of the narodniki were fraught with hazards, and though well intentioned, the campaign ‘to the people’ was propelled by intellectual arrogance and class guilt, as Chaikovsky’s later testimony admitted: ‘We believed that history itself had laid upon us the mission to open up to the narod some truth that only we knew, and thereby… deliver the narod from all the suffering and humiliation that it bore for the sake of our education and our culture.’ Time and again, the exuberance of privileged youth collided with the hard realities of work and poverty, producing consequences that were heavy with black comedy and pathos. With their motto of ‘All for the people, and nothing for ourselves’, the narodniki descended on unsuspecting factories and peasant communities in groups of three or four, yet few had any hard skills to offer in exchange for the food they took from the hungry mouths of their hosts’ families. One gaggle of teenaged girls who earnestly resolved to acquire a trade in St Petersburg before departing typified the pervasive naïvety: ‘Their faces are young, serious, decided and clear’, reported one contemporary ob
server. ‘They talk little because there is no time. And what is there to talk about? Everything has been decided. Everything is as clear as day.’
Nor were the privileged Chaikovskyists any longer immune to the indignities of proletariat justice. Bored by a lecture that Klements was delivering, one metalworker at a munitions factory reached round from behind to smear him with axle grease. Kropotkin decried the affront to his friend as symptomatic of the self-interested elitism that he had witnessed previously among the more complacent of the Swiss watchmakers. His own failure to find the right words to win over the ill-educated masses had left him smarting. Even when he turned his hand to written propaganda, in the form of a historical novella, Tikhomirov had to step in as ghostwriter to untangle the ideological knottiness of Kropotkin’s prose.
Undoubtedly, some narodniki were better suited to their chosen task than others. A subscriber to the ‘great man’ theory of history, Kravchinsky’s choice of a back-breaking job as a sawyer, and his physical strength and determination, apparently made such a strong impression on the peasants that it prised open their minds to his propaganda. Tikhomirov offered an equally upbeat assessment of his own dynamic contribution as a teacher: a more fitting and hard-headed choice of role than many. ‘I would give an arithmetic problem to one; while he was solving it I would explain the alphabet to another. Then I would assign a lesson to one who could read, then explain a map to others.’ Yet Tikhomirov’s diligence in responding to his pupils’ questions drew him into dangerous territory. Asked by his chemistry students about the will-o’-the-wisps and wood goblins that filled the fields and forests, he and his colleagues were perfectly unguarded in explaining away such features of rural folklore as phosphoric miasmas and magic-lantern effects; but what appeared to such confirmed rationalists as a virtuous debunking of superstition, was tantamount to an attack on the essential credulity of the masses on which the entire social system depended.
Even at the time of the supposedly liberalising reforms of 1862, an edict had brusquely outlawed the teaching of workers as ‘likely to undermine faith in the Christian religion and in the institution of private property, and to incite the working classes to revolt.’ To a Third Section grappling with an ever more complex society – one in which the emancipation of the serfs was accompanied by the growth of independent professions and a growing intelligentsia – the underlying principle remained crucial to their maintenance of social order. Since Karakozov’s attempt to kill the tsar in 1866, an anxious and uncertain Alexander II had fallen deeper under the influence of a reactionary cabal at court, and the actions of the narodniki were bound to provoke a forceful response.
‘They ruled by fear,’ Kropotkin would write of this hard-line faction, led by Shuvalov and his ally Trepov, and advised by the manipulative Prussian counter-subversive, Colonel Stieber. The tsar himself was the prime target of their alarmism, and was soon in thrall to their exaggerated reports of ‘the spectre of revolution about to break out in St Petersburg’. Even once it became clear that their concerted campaign of repression had backfired, following the decision to recall the female medical students from Switzerland, draconian tactics continued to be advanced as the only way out of a worsening predicament.
At first the arrests were haphazard, carried out by Third Section officers following a vague scent and lucky enough to stumble upon radicals clumsily disguised in their ersatz peasant costumes, or else to receive tip-offs from locals exasperated by the hectoring tone of their uninvited guests. The hopes of the narodniki that the economic slump of two years earlier, and the hardship that it had caused to subsistence farmers, might have broken the peasantry’s deep loyalty to the tsar as their mystical leader proved misplaced. With time, plus a thousand Tikhomirovs and Kravchinskys to offer enlightenment, the peasants might perhaps have been cured of their superstitious awe of authority; as it was, radicals across all of Russia’s thirty-seven provinces soon discovered that they had walked into a picturesque trap. More often than not it was they who were seen as the enemy, and the tsar’s agents as the peasants’ protectors.
The youthful elite of the country was picked up by the cartload and hauled into indefinite detention. Some were indeed committed activists, many others simply friends along for the ride and the country air, or merely unlucky acquaintances. But as the Third Section sifted through their haul of prisoners, patterns and connections began to emerge that made possible a further stage of more methodical and carefully targeted police action. Colonel Stieber’s recent reforms of the Third Section had been designed to prepare it to confront and disrupt continent-wide networks of diehard, professional revolutionaries; the present campaign of persecution against untried men and women who were barely out of their teens was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Sofia Perovskaya was among those seized in the first St Petersburg raid late in the summer of 1873, Tikhomirov in one of the many that followed during that November. Piece by piece the movement in the capital, blamed for the ineffectual rabble-rousing, was dismantled. The exact numbers of those rounded up are elusive. Count Pahlen, the minister of justice, wrote of 612 being taken into custody in the course of the year, of which nearly a quarter were women. Others estimated the total, including those seized the following year, to be as high as 4,000, Pahlen’s supposedly comprehensive figure representing rather the number who would be kept in detention for at least two years without trial. ‘It was as though a disease had swept through a certain social stratum,’ Vera Figner would remember. ‘Everyone had lost a friend or relative.’ Chaikovsky fled the city, along with Klements, Kravchinsky and the others; only Kropotkin, fatefully, remained behind.
As the radical movement buckled, the ideologues of reaction cranked up their rhetoric, encouraging the police to carry on relentlessly with the persecution. The contribution of Fyodor Dostoevsky at this time was insidious. A quarter-century before, the novelist had himself been under sentence of death for sedition and reprieved only at the very last moment. During his penal service in the army, however, he had come to revile the idols of his youth with the kind of excoriating scorn that only those for whom religion had filled an existential void can muster. Writing to Tsarevitch Alexander in 1873, he presented his work on The Possessed as a process of empathetic enquiry: ‘to pose the question, and, as clearly as possible, to give an answer to it in the form of a novel: In what ways in our transitional and strange contemporary society is the emergence possible not just of Nechaev, but of Nechaevs, and in what way may it happen that these Nechaevs eventually gather for themselves Nechaevists?’
Whilst the literary merit of Dostoevsky’s work is beyond question, his alarmist preoccupation was unjustified and arguably irresponsible. Nechaev was imprisoned in the dreaded Alexeyevsky Ravelin prison, a triangular moated tower, slightly removed from the Peter and Paul fortress and entirely isolated from the world at large; unlikely ever to re-enter society, the revelations during his trial had lost him all support and his doctrine of murderous conspiracy stood discredited. Nothing short of the most brutal suppression of dissent now seemed likely to drive the youth movement towards violent tactics, at least in any significant numbers. And yet it was just this kind of brutal suppression that Dostoevsky’s purportedly ‘realist’ writing risked encouraging in the members of a court that suffered from a congenital predisposition to fear the worst and to act accordingly. Nor was Dostoevsky alone in his distaste for the youth of Russia. As tutor to the tsarevitch, his friend Constantine Pobedonostsev, future head of the Orthodox synod, was busy inculcating the heir to the imperial throne with his own reactionary beliefs.
Meanwhile, at St Petersburg University the fervently expressed views of the brilliant new professor of physiology, Elie Cyon, and his harsh marking of papers which exhibited too great an attraction to positivism’s political side, were provoking students attending his lectures to pelt him with eggs and gherkins. Thriving on the antagonism of an audience filled with radicals whose arrest and interrogation he craved, Cyon once even interrupted a le
cture on the medical use of the cardiograph to venomously taunt them with the machine’s alternative application: as a detector of lies and hypocrisy. Provocation of a different sort would, before long, become a consistent feature of the Russian police. Insofar as the young radicals’ commitment to the positivist cause was tantamount to a religious calling, however, Cyon’s accusations of blasphemous hubris held some water.
In an atmosphere heightened by grief and anger, pseudo-religious sentiments permeated the minds of even the most zealous atheists. ‘They went out as bearers of a revelation rather than political propagandists,’ Kravchinsky would recall, adding that ‘Men were trying not just to reach a certain practical end, but also to satisfy a deeply felt duty, an aspiration for moral perfection.’ Mere proximity to the movement’s secret printing presses filled him ‘with the subdued feeling of a worshipper entering a church’, and as the narodniki huddled together with their hosts in smoky peasant huts, solemnly discussing politics late into the night, revolutionary hymns would spontaneously be sung. ‘One couldn’t help recalling scenes of the first centuries of Christianity,’ admitted Kravchinsky, his thoughts as much about those absent in prison, as those active in the field. As had happened during the Paris Commune, the radical movement in Russia was already laying the foundations of a martyrology: one that Kravchinsky, the arch-propagandist, hoped might counter the self-righteous pieties of its Orthodox enemies.
Maintaining morale became ever more important. More by accident than design, the initial efforts of those who ‘went to the people’ had indeed scored an important symbolic point, by demonstrating the solidarity of what seemed like an entire generation against oppression in all its forms: whether by family, state, class or tradition. Yet such had been the pressure of the youthful energy released that the campaign had snowballed out of control, losing discipline and focus.
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