The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  As his friends were picked off one by one, Kropotkin seethed with frustration. Having elicited an invitation to draft a manifesto for the circle, he returned to the question of revolution that so vexed the Chaikovskyists, apparently with an agenda to railroad colleagues who were absent among the peasants or in prison, into adopting a more robust policy to counter the depredations of the police. Brushing aside the adamant assertions of other Chaikovskyists that they were not anarchists, but rather social democrats, populists or even democratic republicans, his document Why We Must Concern Ourselves with the Structure of a Future Society asserted that ‘there is not the slightest doubt that among different socialists of the most varied shades there exists a rather complete agreement in their ideals’. Moreover, the vision it offered – of a federal society in which all benefited from advanced education and all participated in ‘useful labour’ – was premised on the notion that any lasting change in society must be revolutionary and would involve toppling the tsarist regime by force.

  While in Switzerland, Kropotkin had wrestled with his conscience over the bloodshed that would inevitably accompany any revolution, and concluded that a popular rising in Russia could be justified. To succeed, however, it would need to be far greater in scope and organisation than the Paris Commune, and the inauspicious circumstances then prevailing could not be allowed to delay the job of preparation. ‘By acquiring arms one can develop arsenals, and the troops will stand with the people,’ he promised and, during the winter of 1873, set about plotting the creation of armed peasant bands, druzhiny, who even in failure would ‘imprint their revolutionary action upon the minds and hearts with their blood’.

  Although the draft of Kropotkin’s manifesto was never presented to the Chaikovskyists for their approval, and never likely to receive it, when a copy fell into the hands of Third Section agents it was seized upon as powerfully incriminating evidence for their most extravagant claims against the circle. Kropotkin was not a figure whom the authorities could easily dismiss as a mere adolescent troublemaker: only a short time before, the Geographical Society had again offered him an official position. Once his secret identity as the revolutionary ‘Borodin’ was confirmed, however, arrest was inevitable, and yet for all Kropotkin’s intellectual achievements, at the crucial moment his carelessness severely compromised the movement: a letter found by agents searching his apartment provided the key to deciphering the movement’s coded communications, and exposed many of its members to persecution.

  Stalwart silence whilst in the Peter and Paul fortress could now save only Kropotkin’s self-respect, and yet nearly two years later, police records show that Kropotkin was still honouring the Chaikovskyists’ pact of secrecy. By then, however, weakening health was threatening him with martyrdom in its fullest sense.

  Alone in his freezing cell, cramped with rheumatism and wheezing with respiratory problems, the pressure on Kropotkin had been intense. Scores of prisoners had already succumbed to the terrible conditions in which they were forced to live. When a solicitous visit by the tsar’s brother, Grand Prince Nicholas, failed to extract a statement of regret and renunciation from Kropotkin, the authorities appeared quite content that Peter Kropotkin should be next. ‘Bring me a doctor’s certificate that your brother will die in ten days and only then will I free him,’ the procurator replied, with seeming relish, to pleas for clemency on his behalf by his sister-in-law, whose husband Alexander had himself been arrested while Peter was in prison, and sentenced to ten years’ exile in Siberia on the flimsiest of pretexts. Kropotkin’s predicament seemed equally hopeless, and the unproven claims by Nicholas Fodorov a few years earlier, that soon he would be able to resurrect the dead, provided scant comfort. Eventually, though, science did intervene in the form of the chief physician of the military hospital, who insisted that Kropotkin be transferred to his care for a period of convalescence.

  Acting on Kropotkin’s smuggled suggestions, a plan was drawn up by Dr Orest Veimar, a friend of Kravchinsky and an independent-minded sympathiser with the Chaikovsky group. The looser security measures in force at the prison infirmary in the northern suburbs of St Petersburg were probed and tested: the daily delivery of firewood noted, inside assistance procured, and a top-floor flat overlooking the exercise yard was rented. From there a violinist would signal the all clear as part of a complex system of communication. A prizewinning racehorse called Varvar, or Barbarian, was bought by the doctor and harnessed to the getaway carriage, and the other cabs in the vicinity hired to hinder the police pursuit.

  As the day in late June earmarked for his escape approached, Kropotkin received a message, concealed inside a pocket watch, confirming his imminent rescue. Then, at the last moment, calamity struck: a run on red balloons had stripped St Petersburg’s toyshops of a key element in the gaolbreakers’ signalling system. A few days later, they arrived better equipped.

  Those present recounted their memories of the sequence of events as a compelling montage: the bunch of red balloons drifting up over the wall of the prison infirmary, Kropotkin raising his prisoner’s cap to indicate his readiness, then casting off his cumbersome coat for the 300-yard dash to the perimeter of the courtyard; the guards distracted by conjuring tricks performed by Kropotkin’s accomplices, caught momentarily unawares. The fugitive then leaped into a waiting carriage, which rocked and threatened to overturn as it rounded a sharp corner at speed; from the barrels of the guards in the receding background puffs of smoke exploded harmlessly. And all was set to the strains of a wild mazurka that floated out from the violin played in a window high above the scene. Then the final shot: the anarchist prince, tapping a top hat firmly down on his head by way of disguise.

  Discrepancies between the the participants’ accounts of the evening that followed perhaps suggest a degree of embellishment, or else testify to the intensity of the celebrations, first in a private room in Donon’s famous restaurant, and then a well-stocked dacha on the road out towards Finland. After so many tragic failures, the presence among the outlaws of Kropotkin, his face pale and drawn, almost unrecognisable after shaving his fulsome beard to conceal his identity, represented a much-needed success. Little can any of them have guessed, however, that his escape would mark the start of many decades of exile.

  Travelling undercover from St Petersburg to Finland, then on by ship more openly to the Swedish capital, Christiana, now Oslo, Kropotkin finally arrived in Hull in June 1876. It was with a profound sense of relief that he saw the fluttering Union Jack, ‘under which so many Russian, Italian, French and Hungarian refugees have found asylum’. For a restless Kropotkin, however, the search for congenial company and a secure environment in which to develop his dangerous ideas had only just begun.

  6

  Forward!

  America and Back, 1874–1878

  Just as the defeat had dispersed Communard fugitives around the world, so the persecution of the narodniki by the tsarist authorities now began to create a diaspora of Russian radicals. For most, the move abroad was impelled by a simple instinct for self-preservation, while revolutionary evangelism was the motive for others. In the case of Nicholas Chaikovsky, however, his arrival in New York in late 1875, with his heavily pregnant wife, had a quite different explanation. For whilst the other members of the circle that bore his name were still risking arrest in their struggle to galvanise the peasant masses, Chaikovsky had succumbed to a growing sense of alienation from precisely the ‘adventurism of the intelligentsia’ that he himself had done so much to foster in the preceding years.

  Plunged into a maelstrom of spiritual self-doubt, Chaikovsky had experienced an epiphany whilst passing through the provincial town of Oryol in the spring of 1874, when he had chanced to meet Alexander Malinkov, the charismatic leader of a religious cult. ‘In every man there is a divine element,’ Malinkov taught. ‘It is sufficient to appeal to it, to find the God in man, for no coercion to be necessary. God will settle everything in people’s souls and everyone will become just and kind.’ Amidst th
e growing attrition that surrounded the populist project, Chaikovsky found deep consolation in the message.

  Chaikovsky’s old associates had greeted news of his conversion with incredulity. How, they asked, could he have been won over by such a charlatan, whose son announced to visitors that ‘Daddy is God’, and who had once been a favourite student of the reviled Pobedonostsev? Conveniently they failed to remember how often Malinkov had challenged his tutor. When Chaikovsky made the mistake of inviting fellow members of the sect to shelter overnight in a safe house belonging to the circle, the radicals present had made their feelings known by keeping the pacifistic ‘Godmen’ awake deep into the early hours with bitter accusations. Chaikovsky, though, was adamant, in both his new-found faith and his determination to emigrate.

  Messianic ideas had long flourished in Russia and, consciously or otherwise, had informed many of the socialistic theories to emerge from its political philosophers. Even Lavrov’s popularism was premised on the idea that the soul of the peasant, the muzhik, contained the germ of social salvation, and that a hidden, mystical force inherent to the peasant community would one day rise and sweep away bourgeois complacency, bringing renewal to the whole of mankind. Similarly, the young missionaries ‘to the people’ regularly held up the United States as a model for the freedom and social justice to which Russia could aspire: a country with no tsar, but rather a president elected by and representative of the people themselves. In the years since the Civil War, the intelligentsia’s fascination with America had seen any number of schemes and companies set up to assist with emigration, with pioneers dispatched to help populate new communities.

  No such preparation had paved the way for Chaikovsky, however, and having travelled to America ahead of Malinkov’s main party of fifteen, it fell to him, in New York, to determine their final destination. There was no shortage of existing communes that the sect might have joined: ready-made, if flawed, Utopias that included Josiah Warren’s Modern Times on Long Island, Noyes’ Oneida in New York State, the Fourierist Reunion in Missouri, or the Shakers at Sonyea, to name only the most prominent of several hundred then active. However, it was to a small colony called Cedar Vale, established near Wichita in Kansas, that Chaikovsky was drawn by an open invitation from its founder, a Russian calling himself William Frey, for newcomers to join him in ‘the great laboratory of all ideas and aspirations that agitate against the contemporary world’.

  In prospect, Chaikovsky would have found much about Frey with which to identify. Born William Giers, a mathematical prodigy like Chaikovsky himself, he had excelled first at the Artillery School in St Petersburg and then in the army. But Giers’ professional life had exposed him to the suffering of the masses, and their dispiriting political inertia had plunged him into a state of suicidal despair. Rejecting a promotion to serve as Surveyor General of Turkestan, he had preferred to set sail for a new life, having adopted his new surname while passing through Germany to denote a devotion to freedom. ‘We want persons who are kind, tolerant, and earnestly devoted to communism as the best means of benefiting the human race,’ he had written of his colony, in the letter published by Peter Lavrov’s newspaper Forward! He even warned potential recruits that ‘they must be actuated by principles, and not merely selfish purposes’. The proposition must have struck any self-regarding idealist as irresistible, but there were reasons too for Chaikovsky to have hesitated.

  While breaking his journey in London, Chaikovsky had been warmly received by Lavrov, whose purpose in publishing Forward! was to keep his readership informed about labour struggles internationally, including those with which the more industrialised regions of America were racked, and the picture it painted of the country on which Chaikovsky had set his sights was quite at odds with Frey’s vision of rolling prairies and opportunity. ‘Ship after ship departs from Europe bearing with it people who are filled to excess with sufferings in the Old World and who naïvely expect to find a different life in the New World,’ Lavrov wrote, warning that ‘The naïvety of these people is excellently made use of by clever swindlers.’ Moreover, he explained, the time was at hand when the workers in America must fight their exploiters, and it was surely no place for idle social experimentation.

  It was advice worth heeding, but all too easy for the imperturbable Chaikovsky to disregard as serving Lavrov’s personal agenda that political change at home should be the primary duty of any Russians contemplating emigration. Chaikovsky’s discovery that the atmosphere of growing intrigue and persecution he had found so intolerable in St Petersburg pervaded even émigré life in London must have made him uneasy too, and the steamer waiting in Liverpool docks all the more appealing. For whilst Lavrov himself was unaware that the sizeable private donation that sustained his newspaper was actually paid by the Third Section, the activities of its less subtle agents in Britain were all too obvious, as they used bribery and blackmail to stiffen Scotland Yard’s somewhat desultory efforts at keeping the Russian community under surveillance.

  On the long journey from New York to Cedar Vale with his wife and co-religionists, Chaikovsky would have ample opportunity to reflect on the wisdom or otherwise of his decision and to revise his rose-tinted view of America. During the previous decade, sums that were almost inconceivable had been spent on the expansion of the country’s railroads, netting vast fortunes for the entrepreneurs who had driven their development far beyond any immediate need. In the process, tens of thousands of indigenous peoples had been displaced from their land, and huge numbers of railway workers had suffered injury or death, not to mention the attrition on those toiling without safety provision in the mines and foundries that fed the railroad with its raw materials. The risks to the brakemen were all too obvious as they clambered over moving carriages to set the brakes, or whipped out their fingers as the buffers of rolling stock clanged heavily together for manual coupling. Had Chaikovsky known in full the miserable terms of their employment, half starved and lacking legal protection of any kind, he might have thought the freed serfs of Russia almost fortunate by comparison.

  Every stage of the journey brought new and alarming insights, but nowhere more so than the town of Wichita, at whose newly built station the Russian family and their fellow ‘Godmen’ finally alighted. ‘Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check,’ read the sign that greeted them, but the sound of six-shooters being fired at flies on saloon walls spoke of a certain laxity in the enforcement of this rule. Wichita was booming. Rail links to the eastern cities and a steamboat connection to New Orleans saw to that, along with the influx of cash that came from the jangling-spurred cowboys who delivered herds of longhorn cattle for shipment along the Chisholm trail from Texas. In the six years since it had been founded, Wichita had already acquired close to 3,000 regular inhabitants, outstripping its once larger neighbours, and the building plots on its grid plan of 140 streets were rapidly starting to fill. Bars occupied a disproportionate number, though the Masons had already secured a prominent position for their hall.

  Arriving as they did in the final weeks of 1875, Chaikovsky and his companions would have been just in time to witness the dregs of the wild carnival that engulfed the town between June and December. For a few days the population of Wichita swelled to twice its normal size with seasonal traders bringing with them an influx of gamblers and whores. Brass bands blared from the doors and windows of saloons every hour of the day and night, while Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp attempted to keep order. ‘Near Brimstone’ was how one journalist headlined his report on Wichita, and Chaikovsky is unlikely to have lingered long.

  If he had wondered what Lavrov meant when he wrote of the ‘swindlers’ who awaited naïve immigrants to America, Chaikovsky would by now have had a range of candidates, from the exploitative railroad bosses to the local card sharps. Perhaps, though, as the train had chugged through Missouri, he would have also reflected more closely on the letter Frey had written to Forward!: ‘To veto the reproduction of undesirable children…grossly sensuous…grat
ification of his own senses’: the phrases that leaped out were troubling indications of a dogmatism regarding the physical life of the commune. Might Lavrov’s warning have been alluding to a swindler of a different kind altogether, who played on one’s hopes of a promised land of freedom in the Midwest, but delivered only another kind of servitude?

  Undaunted, Chaikovsky crossed the verdant plains outside Wichita with high hopes, approaching the ‘Happy Valley’ in which Cedar Vale lay. Nor, after the final forty-mile trek, did the place disappoint, at least at first sight: a pleasant community of seventy farms and twenty schoolhouses spread across rolling prairie, its people hard-working and peaceable. However, when William and Mary Frey – thin and feverish, shivering in threadbare old Unionist overcoats and smiling a slightly too eager greeting – emerged from a ramshackle building, the travellers must have felt more like a rescue party happening upon marooned sailors than hopeful recruits to a thriving social experiment. Perhaps, for a moment, Chaikovsky experienced a first twinge of the bitter homesickness described by a previous Cedar Vale colonist in his book The Prairie and the Pioneers, and the longing that he and his Russian cohabitants felt ‘to be under our own poor grey sky, surrounded by naked and cold plains and forests!’

  Letters from the author of the Prairie memoir, Grigori Machtet, to Mary Frey, once frequent, had become less so of late. The reason, though, would have become plain to the colony when editions of Forward! containing Machtet’s recent contributions finally reached Cedar Vale. It was as if he and Chaikovsky had exchanged places, though the world of radical St Petersburg into which Machtet had immersed himself on his return from America seemed already to have progressed several steps further towards political upheaval in the short time since Chaikovsky had left.