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

by Alex Butterworth

  A pioneering theorist of tectonic shift, Elisée Reclus would have given the archaeologists’ fanciful explanations short shrift, though he was probably too busy to notice. His vast project, Universal Geography, conceived and planned during his long incarceration in the prison barges at Trébéron, was in its early stages; every continent and country on earth would be examined, every great river and mountain range, all with reference to the human populations that had shaped and been shaped by them: the work of a lifetime. Not content with this undertaking, Reclus had also been refining his vision of an ideal society, and how it might be achieved. He had arrived in Switzerland in 1872, half broken by imprisonment, but now he was regaining his strength.

  Reports sent back to Paris by agents of the French police stationed in Switzerland, including the sharp-eyed informant Oscar Testut, trace a growing vehemence in Reclus’ political engagement. Early in 1874, Reclus’ ‘shadows’ had seen little cause for concern in this ‘very learned man, [who is] hard-working, with regular habits, but very much a dreamer, bizarre, obstinate in his ideas and with a belief in the realisation of universal brotherhood’. Within weeks, however, Reclus’ second wife had died in childbirth on Valentine’s Day, and the balance of his interests shifted. Craving distraction from grief and less constrained by family responsibilities, he now embraced the revolutionary cause with such ardour that, by 1877, his activities among the émigré plotters were being closely observed. ‘Since his arrival in Switzerland,’ another agent opined, somewhat overexcitedly, ‘he has not ceased to give the most active assistance to every intrigue of the revolutionary party.’

  That same year, the agents noted the return to Switzerland of another geographer, Peter Kropotkin, drawn back to the Jura by a hunger for passionate political companionship. But though their shared intellectual interests might have recommended Kropotkin to Reclus as a soulmate, the pair immediately found themselves rivals in an émigré community that was traumatised by the failure of the Commune, and increasingly polarised as to the best way forward. Bakunin’s death in the summer of 1876 had left the anti-authoritarian wing of the International rudderless. Now, as its members gathered at socialist congresses across Europe, new leaders and fresh ideas were called for. Questions that had previously been of mere style and emphasis became a matter of genuine substance, epitomised by the disputatious search for an appropriate name by which to distinguish the movement, and to which adherents could rally.

  Reclus, whose graveside eulogy for Bakunin had positioned him as a reliable bearer of the torch, had seized the ideological initiative that spring, proudly declaring himself an ‘anarchist’ during the anniversary reunion for the Commune at Lausanne. His statement echoed that by Italian delegates at a recent congress in Florence, who had embraced the theory of anarchist communism: common ownership of the means of production and distribution, but with every individual entitled to a share according to his needs. But what did Reclus intend the word to identify? In the original Greek, it meant simply ‘without a ruler’, and both Proudhon and Bakunin had borrowed casually in this regard. Concern was expressed in the émigré community, however, about its popular currency as a term of abuse for those whose actions created dangerous disorder. During the French Revolution, after all, the dictatorial Directorate had disparaged its enemies as proponents of ‘anarchism’. James Guillaume, editor of the Jura Federation’s newspaper and the man who had first introduced Kropotkin to the ideas of Bakunin, complained that the term contained ‘worrying ambiguities…without indicating any positive theory’ by way of counterbalance, and that its adoption would risk ‘regrettable misunderstandings’.

  In assuming the title of ‘anarchist’, however, Reclus was intentionally embracing the negative connotations with which the term was freighted. His own experience of the Commune’s defeat had left him horrified and humiliated, and he longed to shake potential supporters of the anti-authoritarian movement out of their apathy. Attracting notoriety seemed an effective means to this end. Beyond this, though, he envisaged a revolution in pedagogy to generate the necessary groundswell in popular support, whereby children would be saved from the authoritarian tendencies of bourgeois education, and instead inculcated at the earliest and most receptive age with an appreciation of the virtues of true freedom. Though Elisée Reclus habitualy used his second rather than first forename, Jean-Jacques, it was the pioneering educational theories of his namesake, Rousseau – who like Reclus had been an exile from France, and who had lived only a few miles along the lake a hundred years earlier – that underpinned his thinking.

  Kropotkin, by contrast, was insistently espousing a fierce anti-intellectualism that may have reflected his own guilty conscience over the educational privileges he had enjoyed. According to his fundamentalist vision at the time, educational advancement alone was a distraction: a pure anarchist society could only be produced by a spontaneous and instinctual revolution of the peasant masses, whose current state was, he erroneously insisted, like that of a volcano ready to erupt. Even the new international campaign for a weekly day of rest and leisure – intended to provide workers with the opportunity to expand their minds and strengthen their bodies through culture, sport and contemplation – appears to have left him cold. It was a stance that put him squarely in the camp of Guillaume and his ‘Jurassians’ of the north, in clear opposition to the southern ‘Genevans’ who were looking to Reclus for leadership. Kropotkin’s faith in such a revolution was, however, severely shaken in the spring of 1877 by the failure of Malatesta’s peasant revolt in the Matese mountains.

  At the Berne Congress of Bakuninists in 1876, Guillaume and the Jurassians had enthusiastically adopted Malatesta’s and Cafiero’s proposal for a policy of ‘insurrectionary deeds’ as the most effective means of promoting ‘the principles of socialism’, and a fortnight later, the French socialist Paul Brousse had even coined the striking phrase ‘propaganda by deed’ to express this new strategy. ‘Everyone has taken sides for or against,’ Brousse had once written of the Commune. ‘Two months of fighting have done more than twenty-three years of propaganda’, and the same logic was now simply to be applied elsewhere. But whilst there was near unanimity among socialists when it came to celebrating the glorious failure of 1871, the Matese debacle would not be treated so indulgently. Reclus’ old Communard friend, Benoît Malon, even charged that ‘to act in such a manner must be downright insane. No one will question how much harm these parasites of labour masquerading as internationalists have done.’

  Nevertheless, the notion of ‘propaganda by deed’ was taking hold as a means for revolutionaries, who felt increasingly marginalised and persecuted, to advance their cause. By 1878, when events in Russia turned towards violence, Kropotkin would be caught in the bind of lauding the assassins who were targeting the tsar’s government, whilst perhaps hoping that the anarchists’ own call to action would elicit a response that eschewed the purely terroristic in favour of something more insurrectional.

  The trigger for the attack that launched the wave of violence that swept over the tsarist regime had been a lapse in social etiquette. When General Trepov of the Third Section had visited the Peter and Paul fortress on a tour of inspection, Bogoliubov, one of the young radicals imprisoned there, had failed to acknowledge him with due deference. In contravention of all the unspoken rules of Russian society, which demanded that a veneer of civilised respect should be maintained between those of the better classes regardless of circumstances, Trepov had reacted by ordering Bogoliubov to be publicly beaten. Outrage among the radicals at his humiliation was extreme and widespread, but it was Vera Zasulich, amorously involved with Bogoliubov before his arrest and herself a veteran already of several years in prison and internal exile, who nominated herself his avenger.

  Zasulich had waited just long enough to avoid prejudicing the Trial of the 193, at which many of the young radicals arrested in recent years were finally to be judged. Then, within a day of a verdict being delivered that dismissed the charges against the mass
of defendants, she had acted. Calmly awaiting her scheduled appointment with the chief of the Third Section, upon entering his office Zasulich, her hand trembling, had discharged her pistol at point-blank range. Trepov, though wounded, survived, but a bloodier sequel was not long in coming. Moved by Zasulich’s courage, Kravchinsky was perhaps also relieved about her poor aim. He might still claim the footnote in the history books for which he had so earnestly prepared, as the first assassin of a high-ranking tsarist official.

  Arriving in Switzerland from Italy, carrying the stiletto dagger given to him as a parting gift by his fellow prisoners, Kravchinsky had remained there for only a few weeks before setting off back to Russia, where a St Petersburg jury had just acquitted Zasulich, despite overwhelming evidence against her. Encouraged by the popularity of the verdict, on 4 August Kravchinsky approached General Mezentsev, the chief of police, as he was walking in a St Petersburg park, drew the stiletto from a rolled newspaper, and stabbed him dead. A carriage pulled by Dr Veimar’s champion black trotter, Varvar, which had already given sterling service during Kropotkin’s escape from prison, allowed the assassin and his accomplice to make a clean getaway. The shocking boldness of the attack was not lost on the public, nor the extent of the conspiratorial networks that must be active in St Petersburg for it to have been possible.

  ‘A Death for a Death,’ proclaimed the pamphlet already rolling off the secret presses, and in his memoir, published only a few years after the event, Kravchinsky would write that the assassination had ushered in the era of the ravening, moral superman. ‘The terrorist is noble, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero. From the day he swears in the depths of his heart to free the people and the country, he knows he is consecrated to death…And already he sees that enemy falter, become confused, cling desperately to the wildest means, which can only hasten his end.’

  As brutal gestures of Slavic resolve, the attacks provoked widespread exultation among the exile community in Switzerland, and their perpetrators were lionised. When Zasulich returned to Geneva, smuggled out by Klements after avoiding rearrest for several weeks by means of concealment in an apartment over Dr Veimar’s orthopaedic clinic in St Petersburg, Henri Rochefort himself was on hand to offer assistance. Having fed and housed her, however, the French anarchists revealed an ulterior motive: arrangements were already under way for her to travel to Paris, where it was planned that her celebrity status would draw a crowd of several thousand well-wishers, who might then be manipulated into a confrontation with the police.

  The anarchists of western Europe longed to gild their own abortive endeavours through association with their accomplished Russian colleagues, but Zasulich was reluctant to be drawn into their game. Remaining in Switzerland, she followed Klements’ example, filling her days with long mountain walks; the arrival of news of a friend’s execution or other sorrow from the motherland meant a day on paths not listed in the Baedeker guide, with only the occasional goatherd or lowing, bell-tolling cow for company. Before long, though, the mood would be temporarily lightened by Kravchinsky’s reappearance, still wearing the Napoleonic beard and grand style of the fictitious Georgian Prince Vladimir Ivanovich Jandierov that he had been using as his disguise in St Petersburg, ever since the assassination of Mezentsev. Ignoring the risk of arrest, Kravchinsky had been determined to stay in hiding in Russia. It had taken trickery on the part of his colleagues to persuade him that he would be of greater use to them abroad, where his wife had given birth to a premature baby who had since died.

  ‘Just sometimes, when reminiscing, he philosophises about love with us and teaches Vera and me the wise rules of coquetterie, by which you can make someone fall helplessly in love with you,’ wrote the other woman with whom Kravchinsky shared the mountain chalet. Yet, even the mountains could not distract Vera Zasulich from the true path for long, and within a couple of years of her arrival in Switzerland she would be immersed in the discussions that led to the foundation of the first Russian group with an explicitly Marxist agenda, the Emancipation of Labour; Kravchinsky, though more circumspect about such affiliations, continued to share her sympathies. But the fact that members of the Russian movement had distinct priorities of their own was no reason for the anarchists in the West to despair: not when the dramatic impact of the new Russian tactics was being felt too by the rulers of their own countries.

  Perhaps inspired by the violent Russian spring and summer of 1878, a spate of assassination attempts closer to home now supplied the multinational exiles gathered in Switzerland with fresh inspiration. At the beginning of May, a young tinsmith with anarchist connections, Emil Hoedel, fired a pistol somewhat haphazardly at Kaiser Wilhelm as his carriage travelled along Unter den Linden in Berlin. Hoedel’s motivation appears to have been a thirst for personal fame as much as idealism, but an apartment overlooking the same grand boulevard had been rented by Dr Karl Nobiling, an intellectual loner with a background in the minor German gentry and a more coherent sense of purpose: the decapitation of the social hierarchy as a prelude to revolution. Only a month after Hoedel’s attack, Nobiling aimed a shotgun at the kaiser’s head and discharged both barrels, leaving Wilhelm clinging to life, his face and arms lacerated by twenty-eight pieces of lead. Within the same year, Spain and Italy experienced failed attempts on their new young kings: Alfonso XII and Umberto I. Both were acts of class war, and in the latter case, the actions of the would-be assassin, Giovanni Passannante, demonstrated an almost ritualistic fervour: approaching the king’s open carriage as it passed through Naples, he had lunged at him with a dagger drawn from the folds of a flag on which were the words ‘Long Live the International Republic’.

  Faced with such acts, even Switzerland had to reconsider its tolerance of revolutionaries. In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, Prussia had mobilised its troops on the Swiss border, insisting that the Swiss government render up those fugitives to whom it had granted political asylum. Germany’s methods of persuasion in 1878 were subtler, though with the threat of harsher measures implicit, up to and including military action against its small neighbour. Switzerland needed a sacrificial victim. When Paul Brousse rashly used the December edition of his newspaper L’Avant-Garde to argue that it was the overly scrupulous methods employed by Nobiling and Passannante that had caused them to fail, when they should simply have thrown bombs at their targets without any care for the accompanying courtiers, the Swiss authorities were quick to act. His imprisonment and, latterly, expulsion were offered up to propitiate their angry neighbours.

  In Germany itself, the crackdown was severe. The kaiser had survived the attack, but while rumours of his death were still circulating Chancellor Bismarck seized the national emergency he had long sought as a pretext for a draconian crackdown on Germany’s socialists. Martial law was declared, and the city garrisoned, with the Tempelhof field converted to an army encampment. Censorship was introduced, with upwards of 1,000 books and periodicals outlawed; 1,500 suspects were arrested and others forced to flee abroad. Laws were speedily passed to suppress the burgeoning Social Democratic Party, which already boasted five million members. Stripped of parliamentary immunity, Johann Most, one of its most vociferous members, was given twenty-four hours to leave the country, prompting his ignominious rush to Hamburg, and thence to London.

  In comparison to the term ‘anarchist’, the phrase ‘propaganda by deed’ may initially have struck those who heard it as somewhat functional, but the events of 1878 had quickly lent it the character of a sinister euphemism. The blithe heroism it seemed to imply now began to appear more like a violent conspiracy to commit the terrorist outrages with which anarchism would soon become all but synonymous in the public mind. From exile, Johann Most would be at the forefront of those calling for vengeance against the oppressive powers of state and capital.

  Although four years younger than Kropotkin, Most too was more closely associated with a slightly earlier radical generation than many
of Bakunin’s other political heirs. Moreover, having been won over to Marxism during a visit to a workers’ festival in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1874, he was perhaps still best known at this time as a populariser of Marx’s philosophy. His earlier experiences, however, suggest a man for whom the anti-authoritarian International would always have offered a more natural home, and reveal the psychological seeds of his violent passion.

  ‘Evils lurks deep in the breast of the child, but the whip drives it out,’ Most’s father would reassure his young son after administering frequent and ferocious beatings. Both the psychological and the physical scars of his mistreatment were enduring. Crude surgery to excise an abscess on the boy’s cheek and jaw – itself the result of a punitive spell spent sleeping in a freezing storeroom – left half his face grotesquely twisted, and Most soon discovered in the injustices of society an insistent echo of those who had blighted his own childhood. ‘I wanted neither to lead “the good life”,’ wrote Most of his young self, ‘nor to earn a livelihood in the usual sense. I had to do what I did because in my brain an obsession pounded: The Revolution must happen!’

  Thwarted in his ambition to be an actor by his facial disfigurement, Most grew a thick beard and transferred his aptitude for melodrama on to the political stage. As a prominent socialist in Vienna in the late 1860s, his rabble-rousing address to a mass demonstration on the eve of a general strike had incurred a sensational charge of high treason. ‘If you judge such constructive criminality and such justifiable malefaction and such reasonable transgression wrong, then punish me,’ Most declaimed to the courtroom: the gavel banged out a sentence of five years, but he was soon amnestied and deported. There followed a series of picaresque adventures as he wrong-footed the Prussian police time and again, his preaching of class war finally winning him election to the Reichstag and, with it, immunity from prosecution. It was a privilege he tested to the full during the war against France in 1870 and its aftermath, urging his supporters to replace the bunting that festooned the industrial town of Chemnitz in celebration of the Prussian victory at Sedan with tax receipts, and openly acclaiming the Commune. Bringing the same instinct for confrontation to the congresses of 1876 and 1877 in Switzerland, he was soon recognised as one of the most vociferous proponents of propaganda by deed: a linchpin, the police services of Europe mistakenly thought, of a tightly coordinated international conspiracy.