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

by Alex Butterworth

  Malatesta, by contrast, was the perpetual outsider, and had seen nothing at the margins of British life to suggest that he should modify his heartfelt enmity towards the state, or its representatives. Since before the London Congress of 1881, he had been widely suspected by the British police as a terrorist mastermind, and had been subject to Special Branch surveillance for much of the 1890s. Never, though, had he come so close to being implicated in violent crime as in December 1910, when a blowtorch that he had lent to a Latvian émigré was found at the scene of a burglary whose perpetrators, holed up in Sidney Street in East London after shooting dead three policemen, were subsequently involved in a dramatic shoot-out with the British army, in what became famous as the ‘Battle of Stepney’. On that occasion, Malatesta escaped prosecution but then, in 1912, an Italian spy whom he had denounced exploited British libel laws to have him imprisoned for three months. He only avoided expulsion thanks to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, led by the unions and attended by Vera Figner, and a forthright letter to the press from Kropotkin.

  Though Malatesta insisted that the British people were his friend, he was clear that their government was not. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was according to Malatesta ‘the most perfect kind of philanthropic and religious hypocrite’; his reforms to introduce welfare a mere sop. He presumably felt a far greater distaste for Winston Churchill. Despite Malatesta’s own denunciation of the Sidney Street revolutionaries, the fact that Churchill had grabbed headlines when, as Home Secretary, he visited Sidney Street during the 1910 siege, would have sickened Malatesta. Unable to place the slightest faith in the call to war against German aggression made by such Establishment politicians, in the autumn of 1914 Malatesta’s open letter, ‘Anarchists have forgotten their principles’, predicted that after what would be a long and crippling conflict ‘there will be more militarism than before. One side wanting revenge, the other wanting to remain prepared against their revenge.’ Much as he regretted it, the breach with Kropotkin was never to be repaired. ‘It was’, he would later recollect, ‘one of the saddest and most tragic moments of my life (as doubtless for him too), when after hard discussion, we parted as adversaries, almost as enemies.’

  The weight of disappointment must have lain heavy on him, considering his failure yet again to foment a revolt against the Italian government in the early summer of 1914. Malatesta had established a sizeable following among the dock workers of Ancona where he based himself during previous visits in 1907 and 1913, and circumstances seemed so propitious, with Italy unsettled after a recent foretaste of war against Turkey in North Africa. His contacts throughout the socialist movement in his homeland were strong, and in the preceding year he had successfully cultivated the young editor of the party’s leading newspaper, Avanti!, Benito Mussolini. The son of an anarchist, Mussolini had translated Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution, which he thought ‘overflowing with a great love of oppressed humanity and infinite kindness’; he had even praised in print the revolutionaries involved in the Sidney Street siege, whom Malatesta had disowned. But for all the high hopes of the Red Week which followed the killing of two demonstrators by police in Ancona, the putative insurrection fizzled out when the unions called off their strike. And by the time Malatesta returned to London in August, his meetings and correspondence with Mussolini may have caused him some foreboding that Italian socialism might assume a dangerously nationalistic and even authoritarian aspect under the pressures of involvement in a continent-wide war: a war which Italy would join in 1915, breaching its previous promises to the Allies that it would confront Austro-Hungary, in the first instance, and subsequently Germany too. ‘Let the way be opened for the elemental forces of the individual, for no other human reality exists except the individual,’ Malatesta would have read in one letter from Mussolini, though he can little have suspected his bellicosity of being sponsored by the British secret service.

  The obduracy of Belgian resistance, especially around the heavily fortified city of Liège, delayed the initial German advance into France for several days during August 1914, and the sacrifice at the same time of 200,000 Russian soldiers, dead or captured in the terrible Battle of Tannenberg on the Eastern Front, bought time for the forces of the Entente to steady their nerve and stabilise their front line. But as the French soon learned, the result would merely be a stalemate, as the opposing armies settled into a war of grinding attrition, waged across a barely shifting line of barbed wire and bomb craters. As the first Christmas of the war passed, and then the second, the quagmire of the Western Front drew in ever more millions of troops to fight and die in the most futile of battles.

  Having staked so much of his faith on liberal Britain, Kropotkin at last received some vindication for his position on the home front. In the government’s desperation to retain the loyalty of its citizens, who were being asked to sacrifice far more than ever before in the national cause, whole swathes of the socialist programme of reform for which Hyndman and others had argued for thirty years, consistently reviled by the Establishment for their efforts, were passed into law. The contribution to the war effort made by women in men’s jobs would even lead to their being granted the vote, as anarchists had demanded ever since Louise Michel had chaired the meetings of the Women’s Vigilance Committee during the Siege of Paris. By early 1917, however, Kropotkin’s attention had turned to events in the land of his birth. His stalwart defence of the Allies’ participation in the war had been intended to protect the revolutionary tradition of France but now, as his late friend Elisée Reclus had predicted in 1905, Russia appeared about to claim her destiny and fulfil the ‘rights of man’ that the French Revolution of the eighteenth century had betrayed.

  The war had inflicted catastrophic casualties on Russia, its operations constantly compromised by poor communication technology and ill-educated soldiers. Whilst German military intelligence had built on the achievements of Wilhelm Stieber in the war of 1870, the emphasis placed by Russia on its efforts to suppress revolution now left it floundering on the battlefield, unable even to fall back on the ingenuity shown forty years earlier by the besieged defenders of Paris. For whereas the desperate French had then improvised their aeronautical postal service and experimented with the most improbable methods of communication, conscripted Russian peasants now chopped down telegraph poles for use as fuel. A single, disastrous offensive in 1915 saw over a million Russian troops taken prisoner, and even the breakthrough achieved the following year by dint of General Brusilov’s strategic brilliance failed to quell growing disquiet in the ranks, after the tsar, who had appointed himself commander-in-chief, neglected to capitalise on the advantage.

  Away from the front, the atmosphere grew febrile during the winter of 1916 as bread shortages stoked fears of looming social disorder, and exposed the tsarist court – over which Tsarina Alexandra and her latest mystical adviser Rasputin presided in the absence of her husband – to ever more scurrilous rumour and the hatred of broad swathes of public opinion. Not even the murder of Rasputin that December, however, could stem the tide of discontent and by late February 1917 attempts at the violent suppression of spontaneous mass protests in St Petersburg at the shortages of bread had propelled the city into a state of open revolt. Even the most prominent fulminators of revolution were caught unawares. As power in the city devolved to the twin institutions of the Provisional government and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, following the garrison’s refusal of orders and then its desertion, and central authority began to collapse across the empire with even villages declaring themselves ‘autonomous republics’, the tide of change became irresistible. It took the intervention of his generals to convince Tsar Nicholas that his abdication was unavoidable, but for all his air of denial he must already have known the game was up. A fortnight earlier, Gérard Encausse, Rasputin’s forebear as the imperial family’s favourite mystic, had died in Paris: as long as he lived, he had promised, the tsar would retain his crown.

  On being appointed
minister of justice in the Provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, who alone also served on the executive committee of the Soviet, cemented his position as the great hope of the new Russian politics by ordering the immediate release of all political prisoners. Forty years after he had last seen his homeland, Kropotkin received the news with exultation: ‘what they reproached us with as a fantastic Utopia has been accomplished without a single casualty,’ he wrote, not quite accurately and wholly prematurely. Yet even amidst the excitement he may have felt a twinge of envy. In accordance with Kerensky’s instruction that the returning martyrs of the revolution should be greeted with public acclamation, Vera Figner and German Lopatin, along with other ‘heroes and heroines of terrorism’, were given the imperial box of the Mariinsky theatre at a celebratory concert: ‘old gentlemen and several old ladies, with grave, worn, curiously expressive and unforgettable faces’.

  ‘I shivered to think of all that the little party stood for in the way of physical suffering and moral torment, borne in silence and buried in oblivion,’ recorded the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, as the orchestra struck up the ‘Marseillaise’. When reviewing a French naval squadron in 1893, Alexander III had cut short its rendition after a single verse, but now it was Russia’s new national anthem, its conclusion met with cries of ‘Long live the Revolution!’ and ‘Long live France!’ Mounting the conductor’s podium, elegant and ‘utterly unaffected’, in calm, level tones Figner intoned a litany listing all those who had died under tsarist persecution, reducing nearly all those present to tears. ‘What an epilogue to Kropotkin’s Memoirs, or Dostoevsky’s Memories of the House of the Dead!’ Paléologue averred, but Kropotkin himself was not there to bear witness.

  The effects of Kropotkin’s past imprisonment and a life spent sublimating disappointments had undoubtedly accelerated the ravages of time on a man who, half a century earlier, had been able to endure a journey post-haste from Siberia to St Petersburg, much of it by sled. By 1912, he was writing to Edward Carpenter to express his regrets that they would be unlikely to meet again as he only ventured up to London from his south coast retreat during the summer months. Nevertheless, the prospect of a victorious homecoming rejuvenated Kropotkin to the extent that within a few weeks of the Mariinsky concert he embarked at Aberdeen for the North Sea crossing, his decision to transport fifty crates of books to Russia, with only his wife to assist him, a true bibliophile’s statement of intent.

  In St Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd as a patriotic gesture, the popular reception that greeted Kropotkin recalled that which Paris had always shown his old friend Louise Michel on her homecomings from exile. Despite his train not arriving until two o’clock in the morning, a crowd 60,000 strong was waiting at the station to cheer him on his way to a formal audience with Kerensky, with only the absence of those who opposed his position on the war to mar the celebration. Kropotkin’s advice was widely solicited during the summer of 1917, and willingly offered in private meetings with Kerensky and Prince Lvov, a long-time reformer and the original head of the Provisional government. And yet the turmoil of political uncertainty and almost untrammelled possibility into which he had plunged seems to have left Kropotkin somewhat bewildered. When offered the education portfolio in a Provisional government that already included Boris Savinkov as assistant minister for war, Kropotkin declined, true to his long-held principle that all centralised government was corrupting to popular autonomy. And yet the efforts of Jacobin elements to seize power left him close to despair and he won a rapturous response from across the political spectrum at the State Conference of all parties, held in Moscow at the end of August, by appealing for Russia to become a federal republic, similar to that of the United States.

  The political atmosphere had long been filled with factionalism, but as the year progressed and the authority of the Provisional government seeped away, the worst features of the French Revolution and the Commune looked set to repeat themselves, with new forms of Jacobinism taking root. Only a few days before the old revolutionaries had taken their bow at the Mariinsky theatre, the most dynamic and ruthless figure of the new generation had made his return from Switzerland. It was nearly thirty years since Lenin had been drawn into the revolutionary underworld by the execution of his brother. Talent and determination had seen him navigate the hazardous waters of socialist politicking with alarming deftness, but his own rise and that of his Bolshevik Party had been helped too by timely assistance from its natural enemies. As far back as 1905, when Lenin had been lecturing at an East End socialist club during a visit to London, Special Branch officers had intervened to save him from the fury of a mob that believed him to be a police spy, and subsequently the Bolsheviks had received lenient treatment by an Okhrana hoping to drive a wedge through the revolutionary left. More recently, Lenin’s return to Russia had itself required the cooperation of the German intelligence services, who clearly thought that his disruptive presence there, funded in part from their coffers, might hasten Russia’s military collapse.

  Both strategies in turn now proved almost too effective, as Lenin bypassed the bourgeois stage of revolution that Marxist dogma demanded, and progressed immediately to that of the workers and peasantry. Tentatively allied with the anarchists to form a proletarian vanguard, in July Lenin’s Bolsheviks had come within a hair’s breadth of toppling the Provisional government and seizing power in a coup d’état. Accused of high treason and impugned as a German agent, Lenin had gone to ground, secretly winning over the expanding network of soviets from their crucial support for Kerensky’s regime, while reflecting further on the military and political lessons to be learned from the failure of the Commune: a subject he had studied and written about over many years. Unlike Kropotkin and the Russian anarchists, who agreed that federalism and devolved autonomy must be encouraged, Lenin concluded that, having bided its time, a revolutionary elite must seize power and implement a centralised revolutionary programme. Peace, Lenin insisted, should be made with Germany at almost any cost, in contradiction of the Provisional government’s policy.

  After months of mounting economic crisis, military setbacks and increasingly violent expressions of discontent, the October Revolution saw Lenin’s plan come one step closer to realisation. With most members of the Provisional government apprehended in the captured Winter Palace and summarily imprisoned, power passed into the hands of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, laying the ground for their subordination to a dictatorship of the proletariat, for which Lenin had called in his recent work, The State and Revolution. Failing to read the runes, significant numbers of anarchists continued to lend Lenin their support, viewing recent events as a vindication of their belief in revolution by mass action. But whilst Lenin’s insurrectionary leadership prompted a number of contemporary observers to liken him to Bakunin, Lenin would not have appreciated the comparison. As the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on power they soon turned mercilessly on those whom it had briefly served their purposes to tolerate.

  During the autumn of 1917, Kropotkin had kept a low profile, while privately complaining of Bolshevik rule that ‘this buries the revolution’, and when the envoy of President Wilson of America visited him the following spring, he confided his hatred of the Bolsheviks as ‘aliens, enemies of Russia, robbers and gangsters, set upon looting and destruction’. He had always thought Lenin dangerous and now considered him despicable too, his request for an armistice in the war with Germany adduced as evidence that he had sold out his country and the revolution, despite Lenin’s professed belief that the cause of Marxist revolution would be best served by the victory of a socially advanced Germany. ‘Revolutionaries have had ideals,’ Wilson’s envoy would recollect him saying, ‘Lenin has none. He is a madman, an immolator, wishful of burning, and slaughter, and sacrificing. Things called good and things called evil are equally meaningless to him. He is willing to betray Russia as an experiment.’ For the moment, though, Kropotkin kept his powder dry, restricting his publi
c utterances to theoretical matters and hoping that in ‘two or three hard years’, the worst of the horrors of Bolshevik revolution may have passed.

  The political ideas with which Kropotkin engaged nevertheless posed a dangerous challenge to the structures of Soviet rule, drawing inspiration from an England which the Germanophile Lenin despised, and whose attempt to interfere in Russian politics, clandestinely and later by military means, infuriated him. When Kropotkin lectured the Federalist League on the historical lesson that ‘federation led to unity and how the opposite path of centralisation has led to discord and disintegration’, it was the example of the British Empire which he cited, while in his capacity as president of the Society of Relationships with England, he sought to create links with his adopted home of many years as a source of humanitarian assistance.

  And yet, for all their differences, Lenin appears to have looked upon the old anarchist philosopher with a certain grudging respect, which Kropotkin would attempt to exploit. Invited to a meeting with Lenin in Moscow in April 1919, the discussion was wide-ranging as they debated how the revolution should develop and Kropotkin lobbied on behalf of the beleaguered cooperative movement, in which he placed great hope. With Bolshevik violence already beginning to sweep the country, eradicating enemies of the new regime through imprisonment and large-scale summary executions, every word of the futile discussion must have stuck in Kropotkin’s throat. In future, he would not be so diplomatic.

  The demolition of Boris Korolenko’s cubist statue of Bakunin, less than a year after it had been commissioned, vividly illustrated how quickly opportunistic inclusiveness had slipped into intolerance. All around, Kropotkin watched his friends and allies suffer persecution, and by early summer he himself had been driven out of his Moscow apartment by Bolshevik wiles, and sought refuge on a smallholding in the town of Dmitriev, forty miles from Moscow. The timing of his move into rural seclusion was well advised, coming as anarchists, together with the Mensheviks and the ‘left’ faction of the Socialist Revolutionaries, launched insurrections against Bolshevik rule in Petrograd and in cities across Russia, and embarked upon a series of assassination attempts, aimed in part at undermining the armistice and renewing hostilities. Both were causes with which Kropotkin had much sympathy, and his outspoken views on the necessity of war against Germany risked identifying him with a strategy in which Boris Savinkov would later claim to have been sponsored by the French government.