Infuriated by the arrest of his daughter, Sophie, while she was attempting to return to England to raise humanitarian funds, Kropotkin finally gave vent to his moral disgust. His anger spilled into a letter addressed to Lenin, which the Bolshevik leader received as he convalesced from the serious wounds inflicted by a Socialist Revolutionary assassin. ‘To throw the country into a red terror, even more so to arrest hostages, in order to protect the lives of its leaders is not worthy of a party calling itself socialist and disgraceful for its leaders.’ It was a bold act on Kropotkin’s part, just when the Bolsheviks’ suppression of what the anarchists and the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party claimed as a ‘Third Revolution’ was about to reach its bloodiest pitch, and seemed almost to be inviting a response that would bind his fate to that of his more militant colleagues. His only punishment, though, was continued obscurity and an equal share of the hardships that were visited on the Russian people as the cold winter closed in, the burgeoning civil war reducing still further their meagre supplies of food or fuel.
‘Many too many are born and they hang on their branches far too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and wormeatenness from the tree!’ Friedrich Nietzsche had written in the mid-1880s, in his work of esoteric philosophy Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The intervening years had seen diverse attempts to answer his subsequent call for ‘a declaration of war on the masses’. Cesare Lombroso and his followers had set out to identify the symptoms of atavism, but laid the intellectual groundwork for those who argued that deficient stock should be eliminated from the gene pool. Others, such as Enrico Ferri, had proposed a role for capital punishment in expediting natural selection, since ‘It would therefore be in agreement with natural laws that human society should make an artificial selection, by the elimination of antisocial and incongruous individuals.’ For such a policy to work, though, required the commission of crimes of a kind at which even the vast majority of anarchists baulked. Other theorists argued straight out for the sterilisation of undesirables.
In the two summers immediately preceding the war, Kropotkin had dragged his tired old limbs, weakened by his own past experiences of incarceration as a criminal, to the congresses first of the eugenicists and then of the British Medical Association to protest their position. His compassionate involvement with the immigrant slum-dwellers of London’s East End had confirmed to him that poverty rather than inherited debility lay at the root of most crime and most physical underdevelopment; to suggest that sterilisation could solve such problems was simply to express a violent hatred of the poor. And yet the cost of the struggle against Prussian militarism that he had passionately advocated had been an indiscriminate cull of the world’s youth, with eight million killed in the course of the Great War. The appetite for eugenicist solutions would for a while be muted, but Europe’s leaders now had to ensure a future free of war and in which death on an industrial scale had no place.
When the victorious Allies convened their Peace Conference in 1919 to assign prizes and penalties in search of a lasting settlement, the threat of anarchist terrorism still haunted the politicians of the West. Neither the common cause that the anarchists in Russia were making with western interests in their struggle against Bolshevism, nor the unheeded campaign for peace by the majority of the movement, had erased the stigma of anarchism’s long association with terrorism. In selecting a city to host the conference, the organiser’s first choice, Geneva in neutral Switzerland, had to be abandoned on the advice of the international police that it remained a hotbed of anarchist assassins. It was therefore in Paris that the victors and their petitioners convened on what Clemenceau, the French president, arranged to be the anniversary of France’s humiliation on 18 January 1871, when Wilhelm I had been crowned kaiser of the newly united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The switch in location did not prevent Clemenceau himself from being seriously wounded by a shot fired by an anarchist into his car, while he was travelling to a meeting to discuss, once again, the vexed question of whether Russia’s revolutionary government should be allowed to participate in the conference.
That Lloyd George, by now prime minister, could suspect the anarchist responsible for injuring Clemenceau to have been working for the Bolsheviks illustrated how poorly informed the western leaders were about developments in Russia, where the anarchists were involved in a fight for survival against the Bolsheviks. Restricted communications, fostered by a western blockade of the country, prevented greater understanding. Nevertheless, there were some in Allied circles who harboured a degree of sympathy for how the relatively obscure Bolsheviks had been impelled to seize power by the cruelty of the tsarist autocracy and the predations of capitalism, and to look forward to a time when the ferocity of the revolution would soon give way to peaceful, social democratic rule. Such hopes, though, were at odds with the presence of over 180,000 Allied troops on Russian soil, and their support for the White Army’s campaigns, which were then approaching their high-water mark. For even while political arguments for engagement with the Bolshevik government were advanced, the overriding desire in the West was that the revolution be contained lest it prove infectious.
Nowhere was the fear of contagion more apparent than among the Italian delegation, trapped in fraught negotiations over their territorial claims to the Adriatic port of Fiume, while under intense domestic pressure from the extremes of both left and right. ‘What will happen in our country?’ asked the Italian foreign minister, Sonnino, of the other Allied representatives who were resisting his argument for Italy to be granted a more generous allocation of land from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, immediately supplying the answer that ‘We shall have not Russian Bolshevism, but anarchy.’ If Lloyd George and others thought such upheaval a price worth paying for a lasting settlement in the Balkans, the ‘madness’ they predicted on the streets of Italy was not long in coming, with clashes between squads of militant socialists and the nationalist Fasci di Combattimento increasingly frequent and violent. It was an ‘anarchy’ fomented by extremist parties of all hues, but one in which the Italian anarchists themselves played a prominent part. And, just as it had five years earlier, the task of catalysing a movement prone to factionalism and defections into a dynamic force fell to Errico Malatesta.
The dramatic reversal of fortune that Malatesta’s return to Italy in late 1919 represented could not quite match that of the old heroes of the revolution in Russia, lifted out of interminable exile in Siberian labour camps and thrown before the adulation of the Mariinsky audience. Yet for the small, bearded figure greeted by a cacophony of claxons and the clamour of stevedores lining the docks as his ship entered the port of Genoa, the contrast with the anonymous existence he had endured for much of the last twenty years in London must have been overwhelming. The following day, Christmas Day, the city’s workers turned out in their tens of thousands to greet him, and when he arrived in Turin four days later, the crowd was estimated to be more than 100,000 strong, its cries of ‘Long live Malatesta! Long live Lenin!’ brimming with the hope of international revolution. The linkage of his name with the Bolshevik leader, and the implied equivalence of their positions, cannot have sat easily with Malatesta, who would write that ‘To achieve communism before anarchism, that is before having conquered complete political and economic liberty, would mean stabilising the most hateful tyranny.’ Insofar as the Bolsheviks had come to power through alliances of convenience and a conspiratorial insurgency, however, he appeared briefly ready to embrace their example.
The recent parliamentary election in Italy had left the socialists with the largest block of representatives and, buoyed with success, they proposed a great march on Rome to force the government to cede power. Malatesta’s anarchists, and the nationalists of the right, headed by the poet and politician Gabriele d’Annunzio, who in the absence of agreement from the Peace Conference had shortly before occupied the disputed port of Fiume in a paramilitary raid, would make common cause. Their alliance was an amusing idea – t
wo passionate but diminutive orators, with diametrically opposed political ideas, one zealous to demolish centralised power, the other to seize it – but their nationalism and socialism certainly promised a potent and hazardous mix. Unsurprisingly, though, the coalition quickly fractured: the triumphal entry into Rome would have to wait for a leader in whom the two ideologies had fused into a more perfect and monstrous hybrid. The possibility of revolution flared brightly, only to be quickly extinguished. A general strike called in the autumn of 1920 saw soviets set up across the industrial north of Italy, but the mainstream socialist movement stepped back and Malatesta was arrested, with more than eighty other leading anarchists. The following summer, when the strategy was tried again, in a last-ditch attempt to check the brutal rise of Mussolini’s new fascist party, Malatesta was still in prison, petitioning for an early trial and staging a hunger strike, and his ultimate acquittal came too late for him to regain the initiative.
In 1922, half a century had passed since Malatesta had attended the Saint-Imier Congress of the anti-authoritarian International as the protégé of the ageing Bakunin. He returned that year to celebrate the anniversary with yet another bout of the ideological bickering without which, it seemed, no meeting of anarchists would be complete. Malatesta, though, was himself now aged sixty-eight, and long past being riled by such disagreements, however insolent his detractors must have seemed. Rather, the experience occasioned from him a statement of mature pragmatism concerning the current status of the cause to which he had devoted his life, and the duty of anarchists in the event of revolution: ‘the problem’ was, he wrote in a newspaper article, ‘of greatest interest in the present time, so full of opportunities, when we could suddenly face situations that require for us to either act immediately and unhesitatingly, or disappear from the battleground after making the victory of others easier’. An anarchist revolution, he urged his readers to recognise, would only be possible once the majority of the population were anarchist in outlook, and yet only the educationalists in the movement believed that the overthrow of the current political regimes should be deferred until such a time. It therefore fell to anarchists to work with the reality of whatever revolutions should occur, resisting authoritarianism, whilst accepting that ‘For us violence is only of use and can only be of use in driving back violence. Otherwise, when it is used to accomplish positive goals, either it fails completely, or it succeeds in establishing the oppression and the exploitation of some over others.’
The article was a model of restraint and modest self-sacrifice, appearing as it did in Umanità Nova, the newspaper that Malatesta had founded in 1919 and whose offices and presses had recently been broken up in a raid by blackshirts. By the time the article was published, in October 1922, the fascists would have been cheering Mussolini’s March on Rome, and his usurpation of the position of prime minister. Malatesta alone remained to deliver the valedictory wisdom of the whole generation of anarchists of which he had been a part to a world that had disdained their ideas and demonised those who had propounded them. Even amidst the turmoil and horror of recent years, it seemed, the vision of equality, justice and harmony to which they aspired had less appeal than the experiments in violent authoritarianism that public apathy and tribal atavism had allowed to take root. ‘The establishment and the progressive improvement of a society of free men can only be the result of a free evolution; our task as anarchists is precisely to defend and secure the freedom of that evolution,’ Malatesta’s article concluded. In his mind, perhaps, was the memory of Reclus and Kropotkin, who had lent their scientific genius to that cause.
Kropotkin had died more than a year earlier, on 8 February 1921, his last great work – an Ethics that was, he insisted, not specifically anarchistic, but simply ‘human’ and ‘realistic’ – unfinished. The previous year he had enjoyed visits from Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, deported back to Russia by America for conspiring against the military draft, and had echoed the horror his guests had expressed at the direction taken by the revolution, writing to chastise Lenin in the sternest terms. Likening his policies to those of the ‘darkest Middle Ages’, he questioned the sincerity of his purported ideals, and asked plaintively ‘What future lies in store for communism?’ He needed some hope to cling on to, but would have to supply his own. While his wife Sasha eked out meals from the produce of their frozen vegetable patch during that last winter, Kropotkin’s scant reserves of energy had been spent on recording his reflections on the terrible whirlwind of revolution all around him, which had slipped human control and become something worse than he could ever have imagined. With no end in sight to civil war and massacres and terror, the two years he had predicted that it would take for the elemental fury to burn itself out had stretched to five, but after that, he still insisted, would ‘begin the constructive work of building the new world’. Though built, however, it was not to be the world of which he dreamed.
Kropotkin’s burial in the cemetery of the Novodevichy monastery in Moscow was to be the last time that the anarchists would gather in numbers in Soviet Russia. Having at first shown the kind of insensitivity to political principle that only the most brutish regime could muster, by announcing a state funeral for a man who had always fought against the power of the state, the security organs of the Bolshevik government did all in their power to hinder the attendance of those imprisoned anarchists who had been promised parole for the purpose by Lenin himself. As Kropotkin’s body lay in the ballroom where, as a young prince dressed in Persian fancy dress, a lifetime earlier and in a very different world, he had first caught the attention of the tsar, thousands visited to pay their last respects, the atmosphere tense with rumours of duplicity by the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky’s secret police who had inherited the mantle of the Okhrana, along with its methods and many of its staff. Spontaneous outbursts of speechifying fury against Lenin and his cohorts marked the funeral itself. Days later, the final, ruthless suppression of Russian anarchism began.
Malatesta’s last years, spent in fascist Italy, resembled the isolation that Kropotkin had suffered under Bolshevik rule, though in Malatesta’s case the house arrest was official and stringently enforced. That he was left to reflect alone on the miserable fate of his anarchist colleagues in Italy’s worst prisons was the cruel privilege accorded to his venerable reputation, and a rare example, perhaps, of Mussolini’s sentimental attachment to a man he had once esteemed. Not even anarchist bids to assassinate Mussolini, on at least two occasions, could jeopardise Malatesta’s strangely protected position, thanks perhaps to his words cautioning against violent resistance to the regime. Following the suppression of his newspapers, he was left untouched to grow old in voiceless frustration, finally dying in 1932.
Coda
For half a century following the Paris Commune, socialist revolution had been an abiding fear for democracies and autocracies alike, with ‘anarchism’ all too often the label fixed upon for the festering resentment that threatened violence to the status quo. It had been Elisée Reclus who had argued in 1876 that by embracing the notorious title of ‘anarchist’ with which others had tarred them, those who dreamed of a social revolution that would truly free mankind of all inherited institutions and authority would at least win recognition for their ideas. Instead, they had merely singled themselves out for opprobrium. Practicable as its ideals may have been, or not, anarchism had believed in the inherent perfectibility of humanity, far more than humanity had been willing to trust its own good nature. When alienation and a thirst for vengeance had driven a few misguided youths to perpetrate violence in anarchism’s name, the state’s response had often been so disproportionate as to force the fulfilment of its own prophecy, even when that response was sincerely conceived for the protection of society. Moreover deception on the part of the organs of state security, rather than sincerity, was generally the rule.
Inevitably, then, when the revolutions finally arrived, in one form or another, it was not the anarchists – battered, demonised and wary, on principle,
of accepting or imposing discipline – who assumed power. ‘The majority of anarchists think and write about the future without understanding the present,’ Lenin had written in 1918. ‘That is what divides us communists from them.’ Mussolini, having conquered that future through an appeal to crude nationalism, similarly condescended to the movement whose humane ideals he had outgrown, asserting that ‘Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.’ But if naïvety was anarchism’s fatal flaw, it was one that clever, moral men such as Reclus and Kropotkin must have consciously struggled to maintain: the siren song of authoritarianism in the supposed cause of the greater good would have been only too easy to heed. That way, though, as history would prove, lay only shipwreck and servitude.
‘The internal rivalries aren’t important,’ Louise Michel had written at a time of intense factionalism; ‘I think that each of the “tendencies” will provide one of the stages through which society must pass: socialism, communism, anarchism. Socialism will bring about justice and humanise it; communism will refine the new state and anarchism will be its culmination. In anarchism, each will achieve his own fullest development… Man, because he will no longer be hungry or cold, will be good.’ That her words now read more like a route map to spiritual enlightenment rather than to political power is revealing. For whilst Kropotkin and others fiercely rejected Marx’s and Engels’ slighting of anarchism as a utopian doctrine, throwing the charge straight back in their faces, it was nevertheless the transcendent idea of heaven on earth, albeit underpinned by scientific theories as to its achievability, that carried the movement through endless years in the wilderness.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 61
