Meanwhile, Malatesta devoted himself to practical preparations, convinced that the time was ripe for yet another attempt at insurrection. Although socialist in name, the national government had been elected on the suffrage of barely one in fifty of the population, and was dependent for its survival on support from the very propertied classes whose inept management of the land had caused widespread economic damage. Moreover, whilst ideologically at odds with the Catholic Church, and demonised by the intemperate Pope Pius IX, both shared a common enemy that was subject to ever more ruthless government persecution: the communists and, above all, the anarchists, whose numbers the police estimated to be in the tens of thousands nationwide, with Naples second only to Florence as a centre of support.
Faced with organised resistance to its half-hearted reforms in the 1860s, the Italian authorities had cast their opponents as ‘brigands’: a linguistic sleight of hand that had since earned a spurious scientific legitimacy from a young doctor called Cesare Lombroso. Like Malatesta, he too had been drawn to medical studies by his social conscience, and also shared a commitment to the education of the peasantry, the redistribution of land and a strong anticlericalism. One dull December morning in 1870, however, while examining the skull of Vilhella, Italy’s most famous recent outlaw, ‘a vast plain under a flaming sky’ had revealed itself to him: the beautifully simple, if horribly mistaken apprehension that the criminal was ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals’.
His notion of the inherently ‘delinquent man’ struck a blow against Catholic ideas of ‘sinfulness’, but at the same time challenged the fundamental tenet of revolutionary socialism: that man was perfectible. And whilst offering the nascent science of anthropometry a compelling vision of a subspecies whose ‘facial asymmetry, irregular teeth, large jaws, dark facial hair, [and] twisted noses’ could be measured and graded with calipers, it also opened the door to political repression and racial subjugation. For what, after all, were the doomed and stunted creatures of his imagination, if not genetic detritus, upon whose eradication mankind’s highest development depended?
Malatesta could not have disagreed more. Following his late master’s dictum that ‘Popular revolution is born from the merging of the revolt of the brigand with that of the peasant’, for him, the uneducated outlaw was to be celebrated as an avenging force of nature and recruited to the political struggle. It was with this belief that he and his friends focused their efforts on the Matese massif, a mountainous region several miles inland from Naples. During the winter of 1877 and into spring, they tramped repeatedly several thousand feet up to the icy massif, still deep in snow and home to packs of wolves, to build what they believed to be a strong relationship with the natives of the region: a population proud of their warrior ancestry and indomitable independence. For this they had the assistance of Salvatore Farina to thank, a veteran of Garibaldi’s campaigns whose knowledge of the local dialect opened doors, and whose enthusiastic reading of the locals’ reactions to their presence further emboldened them.
Attuned by Bakunin’s constant urging of caution about informants, however, Malatesta had caught the scent of betrayal and Farina’s sudden disappearance confirmed his fears. The action, scheduled to begin on 5 May, would be brought forward by a month, regardless of the wintry conditions that still prevailed in the mountains. It was not enough to outwit the authorities in Naples though, who had kept the revolutionaries under surveillance since January. Police spies noted every arrival and departure from the hilltop village of San Lupo, where Malatesta made his base camp, and before long the Carabinieri took up concealed positions around the Taverna Jacobelli, where the weapons from the Puglia cache were being stockpiled, and waited for the moment to strike.
Kravchinsky and his Russian companions had good reason in April to want to strike out against authority, as news came through of the recent mass persecutions of their friends in St Petersburg. Already, though, their contribution had fallen short. The funding of the adventure by a Russian heiress, who was rumoured to have named marriage to Kropotkin as the sole price of her support, had never materialised: the reality was simply that Natalia Smetskaya had been looking for a husband, to meet the conditions of a bequest. Far worse frustration was to follow. Returning to San Lupo from a visit to Naples, the day before the expedition was due to begin, Kravchinsky was intercepted at the nearby Solopaco station by armed police. There had been a shoot-out, a carabiniere had been killed, and Malatesta and Cafiero, together with only ten followers and a hastily arranged mule train, had escaped up into the mountains. Kravchinsky himself, however, was going nowhere.
Detained for interrogation in Benevento under the wittily improvised pseudonym ‘Nobel’, Kravchinsky may have kept his spirits up by imagining his friends carrying out a glorious tour of the Matese towns and villages, a great army of righteous peasants rising in their wake. In reality, though, such an outcome had never been likely, and the seizure of a copy of Kravchinsky’s own guerrilla manual at the time of his arrest may have worsened their predicament, convincing the authorities to commit greater resources to snuffing out the band’s activities. Twelve thousand troops were mobilised for the hunt, intimidating the peasantry into spurning their would-be liberators, and cutting off towns to starve them out.
The best that Malatesta could hope for in the circumstances was to impress the peasantry he encountered with the zeal and honour of the revolutionaries. Passing through the villages of Gallo and Letino, his paltry band indemnified the custodians of the municipal archives before making a bonfire of their tax and property records. Without Farina to translate their words into local dialect, however, their rousing speeches fell flat, and Cafiero was reduced to the simplest rhetorical formula: ‘If you want to, do something,’ he shouted in exasperation at the warily mute peasants, ‘If not, then go fuck yourselves.’ Yet the group persisted in their ideals: each morning the leadership passed to a new member of the party, approximating anarchist principles of dispersed authority, and even when half starved after a forty-eight-hour march they declined to eat a solitary goat out of pity for the herdsman. But after five long days, the game was finally up. Trapped in a farmhouse, they watched the troops close in. The powder from their guns drenched beyond salvation, Malatesta and his friends surrendered.
During the months of his imprisonment Kravchinsky immersed himself in the prison community of artisans, tradesmen, ex-Garibaldean insurrectionaries and professional intellectuals from across the country, learning Italian and Spanish, but struggling to keep boredom at bay. Writing to Kropotkin, he reluctantly pleaded for ‘domestic and personal news’ in place of the ‘political argument’ that caused letters to inmates to be confiscated, though he appears to have had no trouble acquiring copies of Marx and other socialist writers for his edification. Kravchinsky must have feared that it would be a long time before he would be able to put into practice the lessons he had learned. Even the astonishing amnesty for political prisoners announced after the death of King Victor Emmanuel on 9 January 1878 seemed unlikely to include the Matese insurrectionists. At last, though, after many anxious hours of uncertainty, the heavy doors of the prison creaked open and Kravchinsky, Malatesta and six companions emerged into the cold, crisp light of the New Year.
Penniless and ill-shod, Kravchinsky set off to walk the 400 miles up the Italian peninsula to Switzerland. As a parting gift, his fellow prisoners had pressed upon him an Italian dagger, and as he strode on, pondering the injustices inflicted on the youth and peasantry of Russia, his thoughts must have dwelt on its stiletto blade and the deep mark it might carve on the psyche of their persecutors.
Chaikovsky had done his walking during the summer of Kravchinsky’s imprisonment, and could hardly have chosen a worse time to be on the tramp. The spring of 1877 had seen heavy rains turn the roads of Kansas to a quagmire, after which prairie fires had swept the Chisholm Trail in the unseasonally harsh heat of early summer. Elsewhere in the
country, though, it was not merely the weather that was proving tempestuous as the press predictions of an American commune during Rochefort’s visit three years earlier seemed set to be proved right.
After three years of recession, there appeared to be no end in sight to the plight of America’s workers, victims of the great industrialists’ rapacity: the willingness of their ruthless companies to cut wages to below starvation levels, and then halve them again, before knocking a dime off their shareholders’ profits. Worse, the causes of the economic collapse lay in the robber barons’ own greed: the overexpansion of their railroads and associated enterprises which had led to desperate price-cutting wars. ‘Capital has changed liberty into serfdom, and we must fight or die,’ asserted a labourer in St Louis, and one slogan reverberated across demonstrations, and was whispered conspiratorially in workers’ hovels: that it was ‘better to die fighting than work starving’.
Setting out equipped with nothing but $10, a Russian chemistry degree and ‘a dilettante knowledge of carpentry’, every step of Chaikovsky’s three-week, 420-mile journey in search of work took him closer to Philadelphia. It was thence that Marx had attempted to transplant the International to save it from Bakunin in 1874, and there that it had quickly expired, only to take on a new life during the Centennial Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations the previous year, 1876, as the Working Men’s Party of the United States. Of more immediate relevance to Chaikovsky, however, Philadelphia was also home to the railway companies that lay at the heart of the spreading storm. No one in the eastern states needed the telephonic apparatus that Alexander Bell had demonstrated at the exhibition to warn them of the violence: the bush telegraph of railwaymen conveyed the information only too clearly.
Chaikovsky had presumably left Cedar Vale before news filtered through of the first downing of tools by railroad workers on the Baltimore & Ohio line on 16 July, and the shooting dead of a striker by militiamen that followed it. He must already have been on his way by the time he heard about the troop shipments from Philadelphia to proletarian Pittsburgh where a new civil war seemed to be brewing, this time on class lines. The strike action would soon spread to over 80,000 workers nationwide. The wonder is that Chaikovsky did not turn in his tracks, but perhaps he felt somehow complicit; after all, the support and sympathy shown towards the strikers in the small towns through which he passed-by free labourers, farmers and tradesmen, and even their sheriffs – was the stuff of which his St Petersburg circle had dreamed.
Newly inaugurated as president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, however, was a world apart from the ideal holder of that office that the Chaikovskyists had described to the peasants. The bulk of his votes had come from working men, and his opposition to any unprecedented deployment of federal troops in a labour dispute was a matter of record. But while the election’s outcome had hung in the balance, with contested results in Florida and elsewhere, it was the head of the Pennsylvania Railway who had chaired the special electoral commission, and it had been while travelling in a private company rail carriage that Hayes had finally celebrated its ruling in his favour. Then and since, he and half his cabinet had sold their souls to the railroad bosses, who had all but dictated the appointment of his secretary of war.
Hayes’ resistance to his multi-millionaire puppeteers quickly crumbled. Troops were redeployed from South Carolina, Virginia and even Dakota to put down the strikers. From supervising resettled ‘redskins’, soldiers turned their attention to suppressing socialist reds, and from guaranteeing the new-won rights of blacks to denying the basic economic rights of working men of all colours. Thousands more troops were made ready, with the navy shipping men to Washington to secure the capital against rioters. In light of the scruples shown by regular officers, however, even this was deemed insufficient: mercenaries would be required to complete the job, and they would be supplied by the Pinkerton Agency.
Back in the late 1830s, the young Scot, Allan Pinkerton, had been among the leading firebrands of the Chartist movement, when mass support for its reformist challenge to the British Establishment posed a genuine threat of revolution, and shared friends in common with Marx and Engels. Under threat of deportation to Botany Bay he had fled to the United States, and in an extreme volte-face turned his insider’s understanding of subversive organisations into a thriving business. Having established a name for himself during the Civil War as a Unionist spymaster, in peacetime his company’s freelance operatives had earned their spurs chasing down Jesse James, then by infiltrating the Mollie Maguires: an Irish labour organisation notorious for its murderous bully-boy tactics against strike-breakers, mining company officials and any non-Irish immigrants who threatened their ascendancy. Pinkerton’s exposure and extirpation of the Mollies in the first half of the 1870s had in short order sent union membership tumbling from 300,000 to barely a sixth of that number.
Like its clients, the detective agency suffered during the recession, but Pinkerton had ‘The Larches’ to pay for: his fortress-like country house built with timber shipped specially from Scotland, from whose central cupola-topped tower guards equipped with binoculars watched for approaching assassins, and beneath which a secret escape tunnel ran. Safe behind its defences, Pinkerton surveyed the conflict racking the country with a keen professional interest. ‘It was everywhere, it was nowhere. It was as if the surrounding seas had swept in upon the land from every quarter, or some sudden central volcano had… belched forth burning rivers that coursed in every direction,’ he wrote, calculating his profit. The storm, however, subsided almost as quickly as it had gathered: the posting of army detachments along all the trunk lines, under the command of General Getty, broke the strikers’ will, and almost all had returned to work by 1 August. For Pinkerton, though, this was only the beginning.
Using undercover investigators, the agency produced an unequivocal judgement: ‘the strikes were the result of the communistic spirit spread through the ranks of railroad employees by communistic leaders and their teachings.’ Middle-class fear and outrage was stoked, while the police, militia and army attacks that had provoked mob violence were speedily forgotten and the railroad bosses exonerated. The strikers were stigmatised with that cruellest of labels: they were ‘un-American’ socialists unworthy of the care or protection of the law in the Land of the Free. They lacked due respect for property or the hard-won wealth of men like the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Newspapers drew comparisons with France’s Commune and suggested ‘making salutary examples of all who have been taken red-handed in riot and bloodshed, just short of the bloody vindictiveness shown by the Versaillais in 1871.’ In the absence of photographs of the events, the illustrated press now commissioned draughtsmen, who had previously lampooned the robber barons as lacking even the social conscience of the European monarchs, to produce images of infernal destruction and diabolic strikers.
After twenty-three days journeying through an embryonic civil war, Chaikovsky’s fragile nerves were close to breaking. Having seen the viciousness of American class conflict he craved a speedy return home, but events in Russia rendered any such hopes futile. Pyrrhic victories in the war against Turkey had inflated nationalistic fervour, while the persecution of Chaikovsky’s old friends and colleagues became ever more harsh. Up to four years on from their arrest, hundreds were still held awaiting trial in overcrowded conditions, and treated with growing contempt by their gaolers. And any illusions Chaikovsky harboured that his absence in America might prevent charges being laid against him would have been dispelled by news of the fate of Grigori Machtet, sentenced to exile in Siberia for his role in setting up a training camp for agitators.
Toiling as a hired-hand carpenter in the shipyards of Chester, near Philadelphia, Chaikovsky clung to the wreckage of his faith as the twelve-hour shifts under beady-eyed supervision brought him close to a state of complete breakdown. ‘Religion is rising,’ he persisted in claiming, ‘and so I shall seek it no matter where, even in the most o
utworn and dying Christianity.’ The utopian community of Harmonists near Pittsburgh, who saw in the Great Strike ‘the beginning of the harvest-time spoken of in scripture’, offered one possible haven, but on the suggestion of a fellow Russian he instead joined the Shakers at Sonyea. As time and rest healed his mental wounds, however, he recoiled from their submission to Christian doctrine, feeling that they should have been searching instead for ‘the presence of divinity in themselves’: the only sure foundation, he now held, for successful communistic life. Frey wrote to him, warning of the risks of political engagement – ‘The building of the barricades and the beating of drums will drown out your voice. The people will simply not listen to you’ – but the new-found solicitude of the Cedar Vale tyrant could not draw him back.
With the arrival of a subscription by friends in Russia to cover his family’s travel expenses, Chaikovsky made directly for New York City, where his wife and daughters awaited him. Next came a ship for Liverpool. France and Switzerland lay ahead. By the time he arrived there, Kravchinsky would finally have staked his unsavoury claim to fame.
7
Propaganda by Deed
Switzerland, 1876–1879
For Europe’s revolutionaries, Switzerland was a second home, but in the summer of 1876 it was visited too by those whose interest lay more in mankind’s past than in its future. Only twenty miles along the shore of Lac Leman from Elisée Reclus’ home in Clarens, and nearer still to Geneva, a Roman city was said to have been discovered, submerged beneath the water. Tourists from as far afield as Scandinavia and Poland descended, classicists and amateur antiquarians, and entrepreneurial locals rowed them out to where the city supposedly lay, pouring oil on the water’s surface to create a window through which they might peer. There was a street corner, the experts gasped, and there, on the lake’s deep bed, the statue of a horse. Learned papers verified the marvel, explaining the lost city’s position with half-baked reference to the latest geological theories. It was, of course, a brilliant hoax. The young radical Jogand-Pages, whose last major coup had been convincing the French navy to chase imaginary sharks off the coast of Marseilles, had once again toyed with public credulity. And once again he had escaped undetected.
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