Just before Christmas 1908, Kropotkin went to Switzerland on the instructions of his doctor, who had advised clear mountain air after the damp of England. It was his first visit since he had been expelled in 1881. Though sixty-six and in weak health, Kropotkin could not be held back from spending his time there revising the text of The Great French Revolution, a grass-roots re-examination of the seminal event, first conceived on his release from Clairvaux prison in 1886. There must have been free moments for memories too, though: of his work with Reclus, tracing the outlines of anarchism, all those years ago; of the congresses and the endless, tiresome arguments; of the nights he had sat, his political vision as yet unformed, listening to tales of the brief, wondrous life of the Commune. And yet recent experiences had surely shaded such optimistic memories with pathos. ‘Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!’ said the fictional Russian ambassador at the end of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Kropotkin may have felt similarly, when informed of the exposure of yet another turncoat. ‘But what is this?’ he complained, ‘Now the revolution has become a sport: “If they arrest me, I will go over to their side!”’
Okhrana infiltration agent turned chief of the Berlin station Arkady Harting was, for once, in no mood for devious games. On New Year’s Day, 1909, he bluntly demanded of his superiors in the police department that Lopukhin be punished for the information he had divulged to Burtsev, with the result that Lopukhin was promptly dispatched to a posting in Siberia. Harting may well have guessed that after Azef’s exposure, he would be the next target of Burtsev’s investigative zeal, and that Lopukhin might divulge his true identity too. For Burtsev was caught up in his own private psychodrama. Years before, he had twice been tricked by his old friend Hekkelman into defending him against accusations of treachery: an error on Burtsev’s part that had since cost many comrades their lives or freedom. Would Burtsev now conclude that tearing down Hekkelman’s carefully constructed new identity as ‘Harting’ was his best chance of catharsis?
After years of patient research, Burtsev’s revelations about Harting were perfectly timed. Harting had only recently been posted back to Paris as head of Rachkovsky’s old agentura, to all appearances an elegant European aristocrat and famous socialite who had added the grand cordon of the Légion d’honneur to a drawer full of similar decorations. But then, on the morning of 15 June 1909, the story broke. ‘The Scandal of the Russian Police’ screamed the headline in La République, in what was a common theme. The fêted baron was revealed to be none other than Michel Landesen, the fugitive bomber of the Raincy Affair, sentenced by a French court to five years in absentia in 1890.
‘Do you really think he is Landesen?’ one newspaper interviewer asked Burtsev, who appeared astonished by the question; ‘Believe me, I know Landesen deeply – we started our careers together,’ he replied. For years Burtsev had avoided the subject of his misguided friendship with Hekkelman, when they were both young men. That he now spoke of it openly was a sure sign that he felt released from guilt’s spell. ‘Two years ago it came to our attention that Harting was not Harting, that he was a mysterious being, on whose past it was preferable not to lift the veil,’ he told L’Humanité in an interview published as ‘The Reign of the Provocateurs – Azef No. 2’. In publication after publication, the details of the 1890 bomb plot were once again laid before the public, except now with the last, shocking piece of the jigsaw inserted.
Quizzed by the press, Inspector Loze’s memory failed him. The journalists were quick to point out to their readers that as well as having headed the French investigation of the bomb plot, the inspector had also served on the committee that had awarded Harting the Légion d’honneur. Goron, the chief of the Sûreté in 1890, confirmed that there had been an official cover-up: the prefecture and the Okhrana, he recalled, had acted hand in glove. It was an acute embarrassment for the French government, and all the more so when Clemenceau, as president of the council, was forced to admit that a file discovered in the ministry of the interior proved that it had indeed known the truth all along. Before long Le Soir de Bruxelles joined the fray, dragging up the strange case of Monsieur Léonard and the Liège bombings of 1894, which had received so little coverage at the time. Harting was shown as being at the heart of that plot too. The government might have counted itself lucky that the unravelling of the Okhrana’s conspiracies to provoke terrorism and create fear and hatred went no further.
Having lifted Harting from Paris at the first inkling of trouble, the Okhrana was determined that he should enjoy its protection, arresting one man merely for recognising him in a St Petersburg restaurant. In Belgium too the local Sûreté stood ready to guard him on his return to his wife’s house against the revolutionaries sent to carry out the death sentence that had been passed in secret by the central committee of the Socialist Revolutionaries. It was soon clear, though, that he could not carry on his life as before, simply by moving on whenever word arrived that his executioners had caught his scent. There were rumours of a pension for him to retire to London under a new identity, or else to South America, but suddenly the Okhrana records fall silent. In 1910, Harting vanished into thin air. In the same year, Rachkovsky also left the scene, dying in circumstances that are somewhat obscure.
Speaking in the French Chamber of Deputies, the socialist Jean Jaurès expressed the outrage of the nation: ‘I personally know French citizens who, on French soil, have been subjected to investigation and frisking by Russian police agents,’ he protested. It would be brought to an end, Clemenceau promised, as would the surveillance of foreign émigrés to France. Twenty years on, Rachkovsky’s intriguing, which had seemed so astute at the time, had compromised the very cause it had set out to serve. Few lessons had been learned, though. Already, in the Okhrana’s encouragement of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, seen as a group with no future that might nevertheless help fragment the revolutionary movement, the law of unforeseen consequences was once again at work.
24
War and Revolution
Europe, 1914–1932
In the years preceding the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, members of the International League of Peace and Liberty, Elisée Reclus among them, had cherished high hopes that their project for a federated Europe might ensure a lasting peace. Even after the war’s outbreak, the solidarity with the besieged workers of Paris shown by socialists in the Reichstag and striking workers in Chemnitz and elsewhere had kept that flame alight. In the decades since, though, the flame had faltered: renewed conflict had been avoided more by the mutual fear of the Great Powers than by the force of fraternal idealism. And yet, as the moment of greatest danger approached in 1914, Jean Jaurès appealed once more to the workers of France and Germany to halt the slide towards a continent-wide conflagration by means of coordinated general strikes.
Those hopes were finally dashed on 31 July 1914, only hours before France began the fateful mobilisation of her armies, when Jaurès himself was shot dead. The assassin was a member of Action Française, an ultranationalist organisation born out of Boulangism, nurtured by Henri Rochefort and his anti-Semitic associates, and given distinct form during the Dreyfus Affair. Since then it had spawned a violent subculture of its own, breaking the revolutionary left’s monopoly on terroristic violence with an attack on Alfred Dreyfus during the ceremony to install the ashes of Emile Zola in the Panthéon in 1908; Dreyfus’ recent, belated exoneration of any lingering guilt had roused its members’ ire, but he had escaped with only a light wound. Now, a year after Rochefort’s death in Aix-les-Bains, the assassin’s bullet had ensured that the marquis’ forty-year campaign for vengeance against Germany would not again be thwarted.
It was, of course, another assassin, Gavrilo Princip who, a month earlier on 28 June, had precipitated the impending catastrophe by his shooting dead of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife in their car as they drove through Sarajevo. The bloodied cobblestones of the Balkan city were a long way, in every sense, from the Sussex countryside ar
ound Brighton, where Kropotkin now lived, or the middle-class English Utopia of Hampstead Garden Suburb, to which he sent his letters to Kravchinsky’s widow, Fanny; and yet they were linked: on the bookshelves of the assassin Princip and his co-conspirators in the Serbian underground movement, two works took pride of place – Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Underground Russia. From them, and from the practical example of the old People’s Will, the Serbian nationalist movement to which Princip belonged had drawn inspiration and courage for their bid to end Austro-Hungarian rule in the Balkans and promote a pan-Slavic agenda.
As co-signatories to the anti-anarchist pact agreed in St Petersburg in 1904, Austro-Hungary expected Serbia to mount a comprehensive investigation of the conspiracy. Equally, it required the cooperation of Russia to pressure its fellow Slavs into compliance. The Serbs’ continued reluctance to concede fully to Vienna’s demands, even as the situation gusted towards a crisis, perhaps betrayed an uneasy conscience over covert official involvement with the conspirators, if not in the plot against the archduke itself. The Serbian police, after all, had enjoyed a good relationship with the Okhrana, learning from its methods. Nevertheless, the tension might have been defused, and the archduke’s murder have resulted in nothing more than an expulsion of diplomatic hot air, or at worst a minor regional confrontation, had not Austro-Hungary prepared to enforce its will by punitive military action, and the military alliance between France and Russia set in motion the engine of wider war. For as a member of the triple alliance with Germany and Italy, the mobilisation of Austro-Hungarian forces against Serbia triggered the terms of the binding agreement that required a response in kind by the governments in Paris and St Petersburg.
As the man whose intrigues had helped secure the Franco-Prussian alliance and the St Petersburg Pact, Peter Rachkovsky must therefore bear his own small part of the blame for the outbreak of the First World War. Though dead, his influence lingered on as the Great Powers heaved their armies into readiness in the summer of 1914, and would continue to do so for many years to come.
The point at which conflict on a continent-wide scale became inevitable eludes easy identification, so various were the contingent factors. But when German and Austro-Hungarian military preparations were reported in mid-June, the tsarist regime’s fears for its own survival certainly served to make it more likely. Russia’s participation was a gamble. To back away from the fight would show weakness in the face of the nationalistic swell in public opinion, and risk revolution, but so too would defeat in a war for which Russia was ill prepared despite an annual military budget larger than Germany’s. Mobilisation was ordered, and the tsar’s apparent decisiveness was rewarded with the support of the country’s socialists, while pacifist dissenters had no choice but to scatter into exile. The unity of the Russian people when faced by a national challenge would, it was hoped, effect a spiritual renewal and restore respect for the tsar. The immediate effect of the mobilisation, however, was merely to provoke Germany to respond in kind.
For the anarchist movement, all war amounted to what Kropotkin had declared it to be in his essay of 1881, ‘La Guerre’: the ultimate betrayal of the individual by the state and by capitalism, in search of profit. It had long campaigned against militarism and conscription, and still clung to the hope that the international solidarity of the oppressed masses might stymie the warmongering folly of nation states. And yet, from the moment hostilities broke out in August 1914, Kropotkin expressed himself a passionate supporter of the Allied war effort.
It was not naïvety about the scale of the tragedy about to unfold that turned Kropotkin’s position inside out: on that matter he and Reclus had been many years in advance of most observers. Rather, it was the very Manichaean dimensions of the struggle that he judged as necessitating the temporary suppression of all other principles. German aggression was, Kropotkin had come to believe, an apocalyptic threat to Enlightenment civilisation, which sought ‘to impose on Europe a century of militarism’ along with the horrors of ‘state socialism in cooperation with Bismarckian policies’. It was a danger of which he had been warning for many years, and developments in the revolutionary movement internationally had only confirmed his position. Marx and Bismarck had been, he asserted, two sides of the same coin, and it was in the defeat of Germany on the battlefield that the malign influence of both might be stamped out, and the coming revolution saved from the centralising tyranny of Marx’s disciples. Those who failed to recognise what was at stake were sleepwalking into a totalitarian nightmare.
‘In what world of illusions do you live that you can speak of peace?’ Kropotkin wrote to Jean Grave, as the French army and the British Expeditionary Force attempted to regain their footing in the face of the German onslaught. His letter urged Grave to summon his countrymen and women to raise a people’s army that would take to the hills south of Paris to defend the capital in a superhuman effort of resistance, and inspire the continent with their ideals of liberty, communism and fraternity. Persuaded by the argument, if not the strategy, Grave was among a small faction of sympathisers that, with Kropotkin, issued the Manifesto of the Sixteen that autumn to explain their position. ‘If the anti-militarists remain mere onlookers of the war,’ he wrote, ‘they support by their inaction the invaders; they help them to become still stronger, and thus to be a still stronger obstacle to the social revolution in the future.’ Even Kropotkin’s closest friends, however, were for the most part hurt and mystified by his ostensible volte face which was, Max Nettlau averred, merely the result of an old man’s obtuse sentimentalism. ‘He spoke of France as the land of the Revolution, and I said France had lived on its revolutionary reputation for many years, and had exhausted the claim to be considered so now.’
On any clear-sighted assessment, the idealistic nation whose rebirth Kropotkin had described in his The Great French Revolution of 1909 had indeed long since been worn away by wave upon wave of political pragmatism. In the absence of an alternative, however, France continued to represent for Kropotkin an almost mystical model of anarchistic aspirations, its society a honeycomb of resilient autonomous cells, their iconic form replicated from microcosm to macrocosm. It was the France symbolised by the ‘Hexagon’, officially adopted as its symbol during the Terror of 1793, that was capable of generating by its example a great transnational hive of federated endeavour; France the aggregate of its communes, each a scaled version of the ‘great beehive’ which Kropotkin had used in his book Fields, Factories and Workshops as an image of the artisanal workshops of Paris.
Opponents might have pointed to how the advent of war had sealed the fate of the one surviving anarchist project in France that had striven to put Kropotkin’s ideals into practice. Founded by Sébastien Faure near Rambouillet in 1904, the colony named La Ruche, or the Beehive, had offered a libertarian education with the aim of raising the healthy, rational citizens to lead the march to social revolution. To illustrate his point, however, Kropotkin might in turn have offered a simple reminder of the disputes that had long dogged the interpretation of apian collaboration. Since for every account of the benign ‘spirit of the hive’ nurturing each individual contribution to what the playwright and Gnostic-sympathiser Maurice Maeterlinck referred to as ‘the science of the chemist, the geometrician, the architect and the engineer’, there was another claiming that it demonstrated the virtue of internalising rules or laws promulgated by a centralised state, and of a militaristic social structure.
Kropotkin’s stance on the war ran deeper than any of the tactical and ideological disagreements of the past, setting him irreconcilably at loggerheads even with Malatesta, a respected colleague for the best part of forty years. Unlike Kropotkin, the Italian had never allowed himself to develop any affection for the state, or assign especial virtue to a particular national character. For long periods since the turn of the century Malatesta had been largely inactive except as a journalist, while he struggled to earn a living in England as an electrician, sherbet-vendor and even salesman of chicken incubat
ors; intermittent forays back into activism had only hardened his truculence and resolve. Instinctively critical of terroristic violence, he had nevertheless held back from publishing his article on the subject, convinced that ventures such as La Ruche were symptomatic of a tendency among anarchists to ‘let themselves fall into the opposite fault to the violent excesses’. His occasional positive contributions, though, had been influential and his attendance at the 1907 Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam had helped reinvigorate a movement that had drifted too far under the influence of syndicalism, and instill it once again with something of the old insurrectionary zeal. Indeed, it was his disagreement with Kropotkin over his wishful belief in spontaneous revolution that had originally opened up a gulf between them. In psychological terms, though, the two men’s very different experiences of life as exiles in England may also have shaped their attitudes to the war.
Since settling in England in 1887, Kropotkin’s existence had been far from that of the propertied Russian aristocracy into which he was born. The long hours of piecework reviewing, crammed in between his own studies, writing and lecturing in order to pay the bills on the various small rented properties in which his family lived, had taken their toll on his weakened constitution, and periods of intense application were punctuated by frequent bouts of ill health. But whilst he was familiar with the horrendous life of the urban underclass from his propaganda work in the East End and around the country, and had witnessed and campaigned against the persecution of the Walsall martyrs, Burtsev and others, Kropotkin personally had been untroubled by such hardships. Held in high esteem by the scientific Establishment, and even by the more radical sections of the political Establishment, he had enjoyed a status from which he could allow himself to recognise in a functioning liberal parliamentary democracy – even one that was yet to be elected by universal franchise – the germ of an acceptable polity. He was even known to muse, or perhaps half joke, that a constitutional monarchy such as Britain’s might be a guarantor of something resembling an anarchistic society.
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