The first sheets to come off it were an appeal to the gentry to take the initiative in liberating the serfs. Otherwise, Herzen asserted, they would be emancipated by the Czar, which would strengthen his despotism, or else abolition would come as the result of a popular rising. The latter alternative meant a blood bath, but this was not too high a price to pay for freedom. Rather tactlessly he went on to tell the landlords that the country was on the eve of an overturn, which would be close to the heart of people living out their lives within the obshchina and that kind of mobile obshchina, the artel. 'Russia will have its rendezvous with revolution,' he concluded, 'in Socialism.' Before long Herzen returned to the subject of emancipation in a pamphlet entitled Baptized Property.
Shortly after the birth of the Second Republic, Fyodor Tyutchev, a diplomat who was also a poet, wrote to the Czar that only two opposing forces remained in Europe: Russia and Revolution, the Christian and the anti-Christian principle. And he pictured the sacred Ark of Empire riding the revolutionary flood which was to overwhelm the Western world. Far from collapsing, the West, coming to the aid of Turkey, dealt Russia a humiliating blow in the Crimean campaign.
The regime was unable to stand the test of war. The shell was splendid, the core rotten, as a contemporary observed. Since no initiative on the part of the public had been tolerated, the administration had to bear the blame for the debacle alone. Its corruption was exposed to plain view and its general incompetence demonstrated with finality. There were patriots who welcomed the fall of Sebastopol, in the hope that national defeat would mean the doom of the regime.
To a degree Herzen shared this defeatism. In a leaflet addressed to the troops stationed in Poland he told them that this was an unjust war, brought on by the Czar's stubbornness and pride, and he urged them not to lift a hand against the Poles, should they start an insurrection. Several incendiary appeals to the peasantry, composed by another expatriate, were run off the Free Press. In addressing his foreign audience, Herzen emphasized the fact that the Russian people were the victims, not the accomplices of their government, and he took every occasion to affirm his faith in Russia as the land peculiarly fitted to assure the victory of Socialism. At least in the beginning he felt that this war was not an ordinary military contest, but a 'fateful' clash destined to usher the Slavic world into the arena of universal history and to sound the knell of the old order.
On New Year's Eve, at a party welcoming 1855, he presented his son, then fifteen years old, with a flamboyant dedication of the Russian edition of his book, From the Other Shore. Herein he told the boy that the only religion he was bequeathing to him was that of revolution, enjoined him to go and preach it in good time to their people at home, and added his blessing, in the name of human reason, personal liberty, and brotherly love.
The boy did not become a revolutionary. The peasants did not rise. The soldiers did not mutiny. The Poles did not rebel -- not yet. But at the close of the winter something occurred to spur Herzen's hopes. On the morning of 4 March (N.S.) he dashed into the children's room waving a copy of The Times. It carried a headline announcing the death of Nicholas I. Later in the morning he celebrated the event in champagne with other emigres, Russian and Polish. The autocrat was dead, perhaps the system would not long outlive him. This end might mean a new beginning.
Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar4.html
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Road to Revolution
Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.
Chapter 5
Freedom?
The news of Nicholas's death brought a general sense of relief. All thinking people felt that the event marked the end of an era, and that there were bound to be decisive changes. The long winter had come to an end and the tumult of spring was sweeping through the political air. Tongues were loosened, minds were aroused. 'Whoever was not alive in Russia in 1856,' wrote Tolstoy, 'does not know what life is.'
At first the new Czar, busy bringing the war to an end, could not give thought to the great reforms awaited by the country. He did, however, show a concessive spirit in various small ways. Restrictions on the number of university students were lifted and difficulties in the way of foreign travel removed. Some Decembrists and Petrashevists were amnestied. One or two notorious obscurantists were dismissed from high posts. Each liberal or humane measure, however trivial, was greeted with enthusiasm and served to sustain the great expectations that buoyed up all hearts. Hints at coming reforms were read into official pronouncements. The time for patchwork measures seemed at an end.
The slogan of progress was on every tongue. It was the refrain of the books and periodicals that were appearing in greater numbers. The press was given licence to touch on questions of foreign and domestic policy, although certain topics, notably the abolition of serfdom -- the pivotal issue of the day -- could not be mentioned. Forbidden subjects were aired in manuscript pamphlets by both Slavophils and Westernists. In their eagerness to work for a regenerated Russia the two camps were ready to bury the hatchet. Not that the Westernists were all of one mind. They had a left wing with its own organ, the Petersburg monthly Sovremennik (The Contemporary). The magazine was controlled by Nikolay Nekrasov, a civic poet of great popularity, who was also a shrewd editor. He leaned heavily on a young man by the name of Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
The radicals had a somewhat uncertain ally in the handful of expatriates captained by Herzen. A few days after the beginning of the new reign he addressed an open letter to the Czar. Acknowledging himself 'an incorrigible socialist' and his addressee 'an autocratic Emperor,' he declared that nevertheless the two had in common a love for the Russian people. In the name of this love he urged Alexander II to free the press from censorship, abolish corporal punishment and wipe out the blot of serfdom. He promised 'to wait, obliterate himself, speak of something else,' as long as he could hope that the government would accomplish these great things. He did not know how to obliterate himself and he could not speak of other things, but he did observe a kind of private truce with the Czar during the years that preceded emancipation.
The open letter was printed in the first number of a review which Herzen issued from his Free Press in July, 1855, on the anniversary of the execution of the Decembrists. He called it The Polar Star, after the miscellany that Ryleyev had once edited, and he provided it with a frontpiece showing the profiles of the five who were hanged. His previous pamphlets lay on the shelves of a shop in Paternoster Row gathering dust. The Polar Star, however, found its way into Russia and was eagerly read. It was a year old when Herzen started another publication: Voices from Russia, in which he printed some of the political literature that circulated in manuscript.
He soon perceived that there was need of yet another organ which could more readily keep up with the rapid pace of events at home, and which, being less bulky, could be more easily smuggled across the border. Accordingly, on 1 July, 1857, he launched Kolokol (The Bell), first a monthly, then a bi-weekly. He now had the help of Ogarev, who had joined him in London the previous year. The Bell summoned the living -- Vivos Voco was its motto -- to bury the dead past and work for the glorious future. It undertook to be everywhere and always on the side of freedom and against oppression, for reason and against prejudice, for science and against fanaticism, for progressive peoples and against backward governments. Specifically, The Bell was devoted to 'the liberation of Russia.'
In addition to being an ideologue and a memoirist of high distinction, Herzen was a crusading journalist possessed of a powerful pen. And he had the inestimable privilege of freedom from censorship. The office of The Bell was flooded with communications from home, and there was a constant stream of Russian visitors of both sexes and all sorts and conditions to the house in Putney where Herzen lived and worked. With their help and that of scores of correspondents scattered through the country, Kolokol conducted a most successful muck-raking campaign. It cited particulars and named names. Minutes of the secret sessions of the highest bodies appeared in its columns. Fear of exposure there became a deterrent to administrative abuse. There was talk in high places of buying Herzen off, perhaps with an important post. The journal was read by all literate Russia, from the Emperor down to high school boys. The smuggled sheets were sold almost openly and were transcribed or mimeographed to meet the demand. The handful of London expatriates were a power.
When The Bell first began pealing from the shores of the Thames, Russia had known peace for more than a year. As soon as the war was over, the Czar had turned his attention to domestic matters. He was not a reformer either by temperament or conviction, but he was statesman enough to perceive that the Empire could not muddle along in the old way. Naturally, the peasant question was the first to engage him. It was increasingly obvious that the system of serf labour was choking the life of the country, economically and otherwise. Furthermore, the discontent of the masses was mounting. At the height of the war there were peasant riots in several provinces. They were caused by a rumour that the emancipation ukase had already been signed but was kept from the people by the officials. According to another rumour, the treaty that terminated the hostilities contained a secret clause which obligated the Czar to free the serfs.
The peace of Paris was signed on 30 March, 1856 (N.S.). Less than a fortnight later the Czar startled a gathering of nobles in Moscow by observing pointedly that while he did not intend to abolish serfdom with a stroke of the pen, the existing order could not be left unchanged, and that in any event it was 'better that bondage should be abolished from above than from below.' Nearly seventy years earlier Radishchev had had an imaginary czar advance this very argument. The serf owners, however, failed to take the hint. A secret commission was set up to study the problem, but made no headway. Finally, on 20 November, 1857, the Emperor took a long step toward emancipation by authorizing the gentry of three north-western provinces to form committees to discuss the terms of the measure.
This first public move in the direction of the epoch-making reform was greeted with enthusiasm by all the progressive elements. It rejoiced the hearts of Westernists and Slavophils, liberals and radicals. Herzen delivered himself of a paean to the Czar, saying that he was 'as much an heir of 14 December as of Nicholas.' He declared: 'We go with him who liberates,' adding cautiously: 'and as long as he liberates.' The Contemporary, too, called down blessings on the Emperor's head. Momentarily even the most radically-minded entertained the belief that the system could be overhauled under the existing regime painlessly and gradually, yet thoroughly.
II
The state of harmony between the Government and the public was short-lived. The Czar had wanted the initiative in the matter of abolition to come from the serf-owners, and he was willing to have committees of them debate the details of the measure. But he relied on the administration to formulate and carry out the reform and he made it plain that he would brook no nonsense from the gentry. In the autumn of 1859 delegates from a number of provincial committees were summoned to the capital to confer with the officials. They criticized the plans of the administration as both unjust and illegal. One of them wrote to the Emperor urging him to let the nobility have a hand in working out the measure instead of merely offering suggestions. The delegates were rudely reprimanded, and two or three of the bolder spirits, including a former Petrashevist, were deported.
Like the aristocratic frondeurs of the previous century, the malcontents among the gentry sought political power as a compensation for the threatened loss of economic privilege. To the Slavophils, wedded as they were to the principle of autocracy, constitutional guarantees limiting the sovereign's authority were anathema. But they allowed themselves to speak out for freedom of conscience and to harp on the necessity of an 'understanding' between the people and the state. As a result, some of their organs were hounded out of existence.
The deliberations dragged on. Were the freedmen going to be provided with land? How large would the allotments be? Would these be redeemed by the peasants or the Treasury? How onerous would the terms of redemption be? Would the obshchina be perpetuated? Would there be a transitional period, and of what duration? Would the landlords retain any of their authority over their former serfs? These momentous questions hung in the balance. They were guardedly debated in the press and were the chief subject of discussion in the publications issued by the London expatriates.
When Herzen had first considered the terms of emancipation, before any steps had been taken toward it, he had argued that in fifty years liberation 'without land' would turn Russia into another, and more wretched, Ireland. And, of course, he pleaded for the preservation of the peasant commune. This was Cinderella's dowry, the only precious possession of a backward, poverty-stricken nation. The salvation of Russia, perhaps of the world, lay in the obshchina. For did it not hold the germ of the collectivist society, toward which all mankind was striving? These views determined the position of The Bell on the peasant reform. Since what Herzen was to call the muzhik's 'religion of land' had as its cardinal dogma a man's right to the land he tilled, it followed that, if the expectations of the freedmen were to be met, they must be allotted gratis at least the acres they had worked under serfdom for themselves. Naturally the land would be held collectively and redistributed periodically on an equalitarian basis.
Although Herzen lost no opportunity to repeat that he would welcome liberation, whether it came from above or from below, in reality he heavily discounted the latter alternative. At first he expected that the progressive elements of the gentry would exert a decisive influence in shaping the reform. He also conceived the curious notion that the Czar could be persuaded to establish a species of agrarian socialism with a stroke of his pen. Only reluctantly did he accept the principle of redemption, preferring a money settlement to the bloody insurrection that the landowners' resistance to even partial confiscation would provoke.
Whenever the Government seemed to yield to reactionaries intent on sabotaging the emancipation, he would savagely turn on the Czar. 'We have nothing to expect from the Government,' he declared, when a notorious anti-abolitionist was appointed to head the commission that drafted the emancipation statutes. And he urged boycotting the reform. Nevertheless, his confidence in the Emperor's noble intentions persisted. He continued to imagine that 'the imperial dictatorship' could embrace the cause of the masses and overcome the resistance of the propertied classes without danger to itself or a breach of the public peace, and a Romanov become the crowned head of a Socialist state. [In 1890 Konstantin Leontyev, a reactionary thinker of some originality, threw out the suggestion that some day a czar might put himself at the head of the socialist movement and organize it, the way Constantine the Great had organized Christianity.] Lassalle's notion of an alliance between the King of Prussia and the working class comes to mind. For all his dislike of centralized political authority, Herzen's thinking reflected the strong tendency of native scholars to cast the monarchy in the role of the protagonist in the drama of Russian history.
Herzen's stand earned him criticism both from the moderates and the extremists. One liberal told him that no educated Russian had any use for his chimerical theories, least of all for 'social democracy.' What the country needed was freedom of the press and a way to liberate the serfs without shattering the whole body politic. And he pleaded with Herzen to stop telling the West that the muzhik was destined to bring socialism into the world. The plea went unheeded. In the columns of The Bell and elsewhere Herzen continued to harp -- in general terms, as usual -- upon the promise of 'Communism in bast shoes.' Nor was he any more willing to heed another liberal who reproached him for philippics that only irritated the authorities who were engaged in the delicate task of untying age-old knots. And he continued to reflect on the sad state of the West, what with political rights vanishing in Europe and slavery flourishing in America.
On the other hand, the small contingent of radically-minded intellectuals that sprung up during the first years of the new reign was far from pleased by the course the London emigres were pursuing. The issue of The Bell, dated 1 March, 1860, contained a letter to the editor signed 'A Russian.' It painted a black picture of the way in which the peasant reform was being mishandled. The serfs were exploited more ruthlessly than ever by the masters, who knew that tneir days of power were numbered. The peasants were desperate and ready to rise. Meanwhile the liberals were babbling of peaceful progress. The writer reproached Herzen for echoing them. 'Our situation is terrible, intolerable,' he concluded, 'only the axe can save us, and nothing but the axe! . . . You have done all you could to promote a peaceful solution of the problem. Now change your tune and let your Bell not call to prayers, but ring the alarm! Summon Russia to seize the axe! Farewell, and remember that trust in the Czar's good intentions has, for hundreds of years, been ruining Russia. It is not for you to support that faith.'
Herzen's retort, printed with the letter, was that the country really needed not an axe but a broom. In Russia the old order was without any genuine strength, and a painless transition to a better society was quite within the range of possibility. In any event, force was to be appealed to as the last argument. He confessed that since the butchery he had witnessed in Paris in 1848 he had conceived a horror of blood. (Had he forgotten his hosannah to 'chaos and destruction'?) True, the Government was cowardly and the serf owners were holding on to their 'baptized property' with the tenacity of a steppe wolf clutching a bone. Nevertheless, some progress had been made. Besides, there was no unanimity in the ranks of the opposition, and where were the troops of the revolution? It was possible that the people would swing axes without prompting. That would be a great misfortune, he wrote; 'let us do everything in our power to prevent it.' At any rate, he could not issue a call to arms from his safe retreat in London. 'And who, except the Emperor,' he asked, 'had in recent years done anything sensible for the country? Let us render unto Caesar,' he concluded, 'the things that are Caesar's.'
The identity of 'A Russian' has remained undisclosed. It was probably either Nikolay Chernyshevsky, the right hand of the editor of Sovremennik, or some member of the group that revolved about that publication, possibly Dobrolubov, one of its contributors. At the beginning of the new reign he had not reached his twentieth birthday, while Chernyshevsky was only half a dozen years older. Both came from ecclesiastical families and had attended divinity school. In fact, the elder of the two was expected to become a luminary of the Church. Like so many of their contemporaries, they lost their faith, not without help from Feuerbach and with no little travail of spirit. Chernyshevsky entered the University of Petersburg, Dobrolubov a normal school. But if they repudiated the beliefs and traditions in which they had been reared, they retained certain traits associated with the religious habit of mind: the dogmatism, the moral fervour, the missionary zeal, the sense of dedication.
A voracious reader, Chernyshevsky early became acquainted, for the most part at second hand, with the ideas of such writers as Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and Blanqui, and his contacts with Petrashevists further stimulated his interest in Socialism. As a student, he was nicknamed Saint-Just. Barely twenty when the revolution of 1848 broke out, he followed its course closely. Its failure did not lead him to turn his back on the West as was the case with Herzen, but the march of events in Europe confirmed him in his impatience with political liberalism. He disliked those gentlemen, he wrote in his diary, who paid lip service to liberty and equality, but would not lift a finger to destroy a social order under which nine-tenths of the people were 'slaves and proletarians.' The important thing, he reflected, was not king or no king, constitution or no constitution, but an economic system which would prevent one class from 'sucking the blood of another.' He fancied himself 'a partisan of socialists, communists, and extreme republicans, decidedly a Montagnard.' His distaste for palliatives and half-measures was to survive his youth.
The self-styled Montagnard confided to his diary the thought that for a caste society the best government was dictatorship or absolute monarchy, provided it championed the cause of the toilers and abdicated the moment it brought about real equality: 'paradise on earth.' Before long, however, he repudiated this fantasy, which was to have such a hold on Herzen. Monarchy, he decided, was the natural ally of the aristocracy, not of the masses. The people would only get their rights by fighting for them. The monarchy must perish, and the sooner the better. The monarch's authority gone, he argued, the plundering of the poor by the rich would become more shameless, and this would hasten the hour of reckoning.
He did not doubt that a revolution was irnminent in Russia, though he was not certain of its success. 'There is not a single forward step in history without convulsions,' he noted in his diary. Moreover, he felt that, in spite of the physical cowardice with which he was cursed, he was capable of 'the boldest, maddest, most desperate acts.' He would lay down his life for 'the triumph of liberty, equality, fraternity,' and, he added, 'the abolition of poverty and vice.' He told his fiancee: 'We shall soon have an uprising, and if we do I am sure to be in it. Neither filth nor drunken peasants with cudgels, not even slaughter, will frighten me.' He was then teaching in a school in his native Saratov, but he said things in class that 'smelled of penal servitude.' He was also preparing for a university career. Having failed of his professorial ambitions, in 1856 he joined the staff of Sovremennik, to which he had for some time been a contributor.
Chernyshevsky was a man of wide interests and varied, if somewhat shaky, learning, incurably didactic and given to ex-cathedra utterances. Modesty was not his forte. In his youth he felt that he was destined to change the course of history, that he was 'one of God's greatest instruments for doing good to mankind.' Not until he was twenty-five did he give up the idea of building a perpetual motion machine which was to abolish poverty and make him the greatest benefactor of man, in the material sense, as he put it in his diary. Later he dreamed of vast systematic treatises, the crown of which was to be an Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Life, and a popular, semi-fictional abridgement of it designed for those who read only novels; all these books were to be written in French, 'the common language of the civilized world.' His ambition was to be 'a good teacher of men during centuries,' a second Aristotle. His fate was to be the most casual of authors. His writings are a huge miscellany of occasional pieces, loosely reasoned, clumsily thrown together and swollen with acrimonious polemics. Moreover, like all radical writers, he had to play hide-and-seek with the censor, as one historian phrases it. Consequently he was forced to resort to the 'Aesopian' language of indirection, allusion, camouflage. But then the public had to perfect the art of reading between the lines. It was possible to smuggle in a surprising number of ideas dangerous to the established order. In the matter of thought control, as in other respects, the successor of the imperial government has proved vastly more efficient.
III
Chernyshevsky had first won the public ear with a Master's dissertation on aesthetics. Submitted at the University of Petersburg the very year Alexander II ascended the throne, it was the earliest manifesto of the new era. His thesis, which delighted the iconoclastic young, was that the arts generally, and literature particularly, could justify their existence only by accurately depicting, explaining, evaluating the actual in terms accessible to all, by being 'a textbook of life.' It was an attempt to bring the Muses down to earth and put them to socially useful work, a protest against the prevalent conception ofart as an autonomous transcendent realm. Unable to assault the established order on the political or economic level, the young man attacked the enemy's aesthetics. In the decades that followed, this utilitarian view exerted a strong influence. It assumed a quasi-official status under the Soviet regime, serving to sanction the regimentation of the arts by the State.
Chernyshevsky's venture into aesthetic theory was followed by a series of literary studies, in which he worked the vein of civic criticism opened up by Belinsky. His interest in belles-lettres fed on the conviction that in Russia they were the chief vehicle of intellectual energies. Before long, however, as virtual editor of Sovremennik he handed over the department of literary criticism to Dobrolubov, himself concentrating on surveys of the domestic and foreign scene and on essays in philosophy, politics, economics.
His ethics, too, were ultilitarian. He told his readers that at the root of human behaviour is self-interest. This doctrine eliminated hypocrisy and had the virtue of being 'scientific' -- he fervently believed in the infallibility of what he mistook for science. But to pursue one's self-interest one must be free to do so and one must know wherein it lies. Chernyshevsky attributed the greatest importance to knowledge as a power for good. People were wicked, he believed, because they did not know that it was to their advantage to eschew evil. His shibboleth was enlightened egoism. This, he held, precluded narrowly selfish, anti-social acts. It led the individual, naturally and effortlessly, to identify his own happiness with the happiness of all, his private advantage with the public weal. Furthermore, he argued that since man belongs in the order of nature, he is a creature of circumstance, shaped as an ethical being by society. Consequently, in the last account, moral responsibility lies there.
He loathed the principle of laissez-faire. This is the clue to his, as to Lassalle's, anti-liberal animus. Unrestricted competition sacrificed the weak to the strong, labour to capital, he insisted. He laid at the door of free enterprise not only unfair distribution of goods, but failure to stimulate production. Both the theory and practice of what he called capitalism had in him an implacable if muddle-headed, enemy. Marx observed that Chernyshevsky 'had no conception of the capitalist mode of production,' but he commended the Russian's critique of 'bourgeois' economics in no uncertain terms. Indeed, one of the reasons why he learned Russian was to read Chernyshevsky.
Having arrived independently at the concIusion that economic doctrine mirrored class interests, Chernyshevsky sketched out 'the toilers' theory,' as opposed to the economics favouring the rich. By 'toiler' he meant both the industrial worker and the peasant. For him, as for Herzen, the muzhik was the man of destiny as far as Russia was concerned, and the welfare of the individual the supreme good. 'The toilers' theory' rested on the proposition that labour alone was entitled to the goods produced and called for economic equality and elimination of socially wasteful enterprises. Chernyshevsky was vague as to the nature of the controls that would achieve these ends. At any rate, he did not advocate a centrally planned, nationalized economy. If to a lesser degree than Herzen's, his thinking was tinged with wariness of Leviathan. What he wanted was a loose aggregate of communities resembling phalansteries: voluntary associations (tovarishchestva), each engaging in both industry and agriculture on a co-operative basis, and large enough to use machinery. They were to be autonomous units, democratically administered and free from dictation by a central authority. The state was to have a hand in financing the associations, but would wither away once they had brought about abundance, as they were bound to do.
This was Chernyshevsky's conception of Socialism. It plainly stemmed from Fourier and Louis Blanc. He set it forth, taking care not to call it by its right name, as the system that had the backing of reason and justice alike, and was favoured by objective conditions as well. Unlike Herzen, he did not reject Communism. In fact, he intimated that it embodied a higher ideal than a co-operative society.
He realized that capitalism, i.e., industrialization, was making headway in Russia. But he believed that the process would be less cruel than in the West, and that indeed it might be arrested, the country entering the socialist phase at a leap. What would enable Russia to do this? The obshchina, of course. Chernyshevsky believed with Herzen that this institution made a short-cut to the new order a distinct possibility. In the West, Socialism involved the extirpation of inveterate habits of thought and action (Herzen likened the old order there to an elephant's tusk, blackened, diseased, yet deeply rooted in the jaw). Not so in a country where collective land tenure was an immemorial custom. Unlike the expatriate, Chernyshevsky saw in the village commune nothing peculiarly Russian or Slavic. In his judgment it was a relic of mankind's common past, preserved because the Empire had failed to participate in the onward march of the European nations. Yet Russia's backwardness was an opportunity: the country might avoid the mistakes made by the older peoples. History, he wrote, like a grandmother, loves her youngest grandchildren best; she gives them the marrow instead of the bones, in the breaking of which their elders have badly bruised their fingers. Further, Chernyshevsky did not share Herzen's distrust of the revolutionary potential of the European working-classes or his messianic dream of Russia bringing the new order into the world single-handed. In fact, he had it that the transition from the obshchina to Socialism was contingent on the triumph of the social revolution in the West. The idea of Socialism-in-one-land was alien to him. He went beyond Herzen in suggesting that, by abandoning the repartition of its acreage and by mechanizing production, the obshchina could easily take the tremendous step from communal land tenure to communal cultivation. Chernyshevsky seems to have been the first Russian to recognize the nexus between Socialism and the machine.
In any event, Socialism was a distant goal and Communism belonged to an even more remote future. The issue of the hour was liberation of the serfs. He had hailed the initial step toward the reform with no less enthusiasm than had Herzen, trusting with the latter to the Emperor's good intentions. Within the limits set by censorship, he fought with his pen for terms which he believed at once favourable to the interests of the peasantry and beneficial to the economy of the country as a whole. Realizing that the total expropriation of the landowners was out of the question, he pleaded for providing the freedmen with sufficient allotments on condition that the burden of the redemption payments should be borne by the entire population. That the peasants alone should pay for the land they had worked for themselves under serfdom he recognized as a crying injustice. Needless to say, he spoke for the preservation of the obshchina. After some two years, while the reform was still being shaped, he decided that the battle for true emancipation was lost, and he ceased to discuss the subject, except incidentally.
He continued to expound his ideas covertly in the pages of Sovremennik, often using an episode in recent European history as his text. He was at pains to drive home to his growing audience certain political lessons. The chief of these was that in the last account the masses had only themselves to rely upon. Their interests could only be secured through an independent organization formed by the people themselves and eschewing entangling alliances. The frank supporters of the existing order were, of course, the enemy, but so were also the counsellors of moderation and gradualism. In fact, one gets the impression that the liberal, rather than the conservative, was the villain of the historical drama, as seen by Chernyshevsky. He pictured liberals as born compromisers, ready to sell out at the first opportunity. At best, they were gullible triflers content with patchwork; at worst, adventurers seeking to fill their pockets while babbling of the rights of man. At heart they feared the masses and could only lead them astray. Confused souls, they failed to grasp that what the vast majority wanted was bread, not suffrage, that 'a poor man's freedom was a form of slavery.' Chernyshevsky was largely responsible for the fact that 'liberal' became a term of opprobrium in advanced circles. In a glossary of foreign words compiled by a budding agitator about 1861 a 'liberal' is defined as a liberty-loving individual, usually a landowner, who loves the liberty of idling and going to balls and theatres.
The masses from whom Chernyshevsky hoped so much remained inert and inaccessible. There were times when he must have felt as did the hero of an autobiographical novel of his who, looking about him, exclaimed: 'A nation of slaves, slaves from top to bottom.' The review that he directed had a relatively large following, but this was a political factor only potentially. The radical camp was still practically non-existent, and he had broken with the liberals, Slovophils as well as Westernists, and all but parted company with the London expatriates. Intellectually he owed a heavy debt to Herzen, but his admiration of this thinker was never entirely uncritical. And now he found much to his distaste in the policy of The Bell. Aside from the note of confidence in the Czar, he deplored the failure of the publication to espouse a definite programme of political action. As for the journal's denunciation of administrative abuses, he wondered if this did not help the regime, since the attack was directed against minor defects of the system, not against the very principle of autocracy, which was in substance a dictatorship of the upper classes. In the summer of 1859 Chernyshevsky visited Herzen in London, and it is reported that he left his host under the impression of having dealt with a craven liberal.
What Herzen thought of his visitor can only be guessed at. He had been annoyed by a tendency of some Sovremennik authors to dismiss the intellectuals of the previous generation -- that to which he himself belonged -- as blue-blooded drones and dreamers. Also he was angered by the fact that the review lampooned the mild muck-raking in which the press indulged. This campaign of ridicule, he wrote, played into the hand of reactionaries. He even insinuated that the jesters were officially inspired and were to have their reward. Herzen was moved to print a retraction, but as the months went by his irritation with the Sovremennik crew did not abate. There was something about these radicals of plebeian extraction that rubbed him the wrong way. They were morbid men, with mangled souls and 'curdled amour-propre.' Many things about them distressed him: they were ruthless, they took malicious pleasure in negation, they had no traditions, nothing of their own, 'not even habits' -- this from one who rejoiced volubly that the dead hand of the past did not weigh on his compatriots -- they viewed the present with such 'studied despair.' Perhaps he was inclined to misjudge the temper of these youths, whom he knew only by the few who visited him. If the immediate prospect filled them with despondency, they were buoyed up by the belief that the future would yet be theirs. Chernyshevsky, for one, was confident that many battles would be lost, but in the end the war would be won.
IV
The Emancipation Manifesto was signed on 19 February, 1861. Some twenty-three million serfs, owned by roughly a hundred thousand pomeshchiks (landowning nobles), were granted their personal liberty. For the loss of his 'baptized property' the master received no compensation, but he retained possession of the acreage of which his bondsmen had had the use. He was, however, required to provide them with allotments, including house-and-garden plot, ploughland, pasturage, and wood-lot. On their part, the freedmen were obligated to accept the allotments and keep them for at least nine years, recompensing the owner with services or moneypayments. Within two years of the date of the emancipation the size of the allotments and the rental were to be fixed by mutual agreement between master and men, or, failing that, by rather loose official regulations. This relationship, which rendered the freedmen 'temporarily obligated' might last indefinitely. Under certain conditions they might end it by purchasing their allotments, and the Government undertook to finance the transaction by remunerating the landlord and raising annual redemption payments from the peasants.
All agreements were made not with individual peasants but with village communities, which were often the old obshchinas under a different name. The householders who made them up were jointly responsible for their obligations to their former owners and the state. Thus where collective land tenure with periodic repartition had been in existence it was preserved and indeed strengthened by investing traditional practices with the force of law. What the radicals imagined to be the seed of Socialism the Emperor's advisers regarded as a pillar of the existing order: a guarantee against the rise of a proletariat and a means of assuring the Treasury (and later the zemstvos) of revenue and the landowner of his rent. The peasant class was accorded a form of self-government, but its institutions were under the thumb of the landed gentry and officialdom. Several ukases issued between 1859 and 1866 extended the emancipation to the millions of peasants settled on state and crown lands. (In 1857 they numbered close to eight million, and eight hundred and fifty thousand males respectively.)
This was scarcely 'the freedom' for which the peasants had waited. In their minds personal liberty was inseparable from owning either collectively or individually, the land that they and their forebears had worked for themselves and for their masters. And now they were required to pay for their plots, in fact' more than what these were worth, since alike the statutory rent rates for 'the temporarily obligated' and the redemption payments were excessive. Moreover, the manor lords were permitted to reduce the acreage that the former bondsmen had previously worked for themselves, and in many other ways the law favoured the interests of the masters. Indeed, the status of the 'temporarily obligated' bore a striking resemblance to serfdom. Surely this was a false 'freedom.' The true one, written in 'a golden charter' signed by the Czar, had been concealed by the officials and priests whom the landlords had bribed. To the peasant a person clothed with authority, be it of Church or State, was an alien and hostile force, to be endured like heat or cold, but the half-mythical Czar was still the image of justice and mercy.
As a result, in many localities the peasants opposed the reform. Their resistance was largely passive. The freedmen refused to continue rendering services or paying money-dues to their former masters. Nor would they sign agreements with the landlords, as required by the new law. The notion had arisen that the true 'freedom' would be proclaimed at the end of the transitional two-year period, and that its benefits would be lost to the households that had acquiesced in the false one. Often the resisters believed that they were doing the Czar's will. According to one of the rumours that circulated in the countryside, he had been wounded by the hirelings of the gentry and had fled abroad, commanding the people to oppose their masters. In some instances violence flared up, but unlawful seizure of land and attacks on landowners and officials were not frequent.
The Government having made no effort to explain the intricacies of the new law in simple language, disorders were sometimes due to a fantastic interpretation of the statutes. The villagers, faced with a stout book couched in complicated legal phraseology, would hire some half-literate leader who would leave confusion worse confounded or discover in the text what his hearers wanted to find there. In some regions where Russian was understood imperfectly or not at all, no translation into the local vernacular was made available.
There was much nervousness in high places immediately after the publication of the historic ukase. The authorities anticipated trouble and took measures to cope with it. Special emissaries were sent to the provinces, instructed to deal firmly with peasant insubordination. The frequent use of troops made for some bloodshed; there was much flogging, and there were also arrests and deportations to Siberia. In the provinces of Penza and Tambov the disturbances assumed the proportions of an insurrection, involving hundreds of hamlets. The peasants had come to believe that the Czar had given them with their liberty all the land and the other possessions of the gentry. They occupied a manor house, seized a pomeshchik's livestock, helped themselves to timber from another landowner's forest. There was talk of slaughtering the masters and setting their houses on fire. Leaders, including a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and a religious sectarian, sprang from the ranks and gave the movement the semblance of an organized attempt. Agitators visited neighbouring villages, carrying a red flag mounted on a wheel as a symbol of the true 'freedom.' A police officer who tried to make arrests was put in irons, and the peasants routed a small company of soldiers sent to subdue them. It took a large detachment of troops to restore law and order.
The most sanguinary incident occurred in the village of Bezdna, province of Kazan. Here the ringleader was a schismatic and visionary by the name of Anton Petrov. Having persuaded himself by reading the statutes that this was a false 'freedom,' he enjoined his fellow villagers to stop working for the landowner or paying him quitrent and to disobey the officials. Crowds of peasants from all over the district flocked to him. He declared them free, told them that all the land belonged to them, and urged them to elect new starostas (village elders) and send the rural constables packing, which they did. When troops arrived on the spot to arrest Petrov, the peasants refused to surrender him, and as the crowd assumed a menacing attitude the soldiers fired. After the fourth volley Petrov voluntarily gave himself up. The police reported that the shooting had resulted in sixty-one killed and 112 wounded. The unofficial estimate of the casualties was much higher.
According to police records, in the course of the year some one thousand two hundred estates were the scene of disorders, and in putting them down, the troops killed 140 and wounded 170 peasants. 'During these three miserable months [after the emancipation],' wrote a radically-minded contemporary, 'the people endured so much sorrow, so many tears were shed, and so much blood flowed, that the joy of liberation was extinguished.'
The spring and summer witnessed a wave of disturbances in the villages. Autumn brought serious disorders in the universities. At the beginning of the reign the restriction on the number of students in the schools of higher learning was removed and their doors thrown open to all comers, irrespective of social status. Thereupon, crowds of young men had flocked to the universities, some of them deserting military colleges and divinity schools to do so. The capitals were veritable magnets. In the University of Moscow the number of students doubled; in that of Petersburg it grew fourfold. During the 'sixties two new universities were added to those already in existence. An increasing number of youths came from plebeian families that were unable to support them at school. They had left home, some of them travelling long distances on foot, in the hope of making their way by tutoring and odd jobs. But there were not enough of these or of government scholarships either. In 1859 only 360 out of the 1,019 students of the University of Petersburg paid the modest tuition fee; in 1863 half of the students of the University of Moscow needed financial aid. Some of the young people lived on the edge of starvation. Typhus and tuberculosis decimated the student body. All this exacerbated the unrest natural to youth.
The students gradually acquired various liberties and developed a strong espirit de corps. They got into the habit of publicly voicing their approval and disapproval of lecturers, held meetings on the campus, ran co-operative libraries and eating houses, had publications and even courts of their own.
Clashes with the authorities over the behaviour of some particularly unpopular professor or over a fresh effort to enforce a distasteful disciplinary measure had occurred in previous years, but they were minor affairs compared to the events of the autumn in 1861. During the spring semester the students had been in such a turbulent state that the Emperor had planned to close some of the universities. Instead, in May, he sanctioned a new university statute, which called for a drastic cut in the number of Government scholarships and the abolition of the students' right to hold meetings. In July the newly appointed Minister of Education adopted even more stringent regulations. As soon as the University of Petersburg opened after the vacation, the fat was in the fire. An incendiary leaflet, calling on the students to take 'energetic measures,' appeared on the campus. Then a crowd broke into the locked auditorium and held a stormy protest meeting against the new rules. The next day the students, in a body, marched across the city to the home of the rector, who had refused to receive a delegation at the University. When the procession reached Nevsky Prospect, the French coiffeurs ran out of their shops and, excitedly rubbing their hands, shouted: 'Revolution! Revolution!'
The authorities would not yield ground, and the students boycotted classes. In the end several hundred young men, some of whom had been roughtly handled by policemen and soldiers, found themselves behind bars. The tedium of captivity was relieved by the singing of forbidden songs, political discussions, concerts, and private theatricals. One prisoner remembered those days as among the happiest of his life. A shadow was cast over the companionable hours by the news of the death of Dobrolubov. After being detained two months the youths were released. Some of them were deported to the provinces, and the University was closed. It did not reopen until the autumn of 1863. A group of liberal professors started a 'free university,' but this was short-lived.
From the northern capital the disturbances spread to other cities. In Moscow a student demonstration in front of the Governor's residence resulted in arrest for many participants and for others in body injuries inflicted by gendarmes, plain-clothesmen, and a ruffianly crowd. The mob seems to have been aroused by a rumour that the students were either rebel Poles or young masters protesting against the abolition of serfdom.
The student movement did not achieve its objectives. The new university statutes introduced in 1863 granted the faculty a large measure of autonomy, but banned all student corporate organizations.
It was suspected in high places that the disorders in the universities were part of a revolutionary conspiracy. As a matter of fact, they were literally an academic affair, with only faint political overtones, and quite spontaneous. It is true, however, that the students were more hospitable to radical ideas than any other group. As far back as 1860 they had made the first attempt to produce underground literature, chiefly reprints of Herzen's writings. They looked for guidance to the London expatriates, to Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov and writers of that ilk. One campus sheet was entitled Messenger of Free Opinions, another was called The Bell. The students were already beginning to enjoy the extraordinary prestige that was to be theirs for generations. In 1861 a group of Moscow professors drew up a memorandum in which they noted disapprovingly that the public regarded these youths not as learners but as teachers, and looked upon them with pride and respect. For at least three decades the revolutionary movement was to be a youth movement, manned chiefly by undergraduates. If under Alexander I the army had been a hotbed of active insurgence, under his namesake that role was played, with a difference, by the institutions of higher learning. It should be added that the student body was very small. While figures on the total number of students are unavailable, it is known that at late as 1880 there were no more than 8,193 in all the universities of the Empire.
The Bell met the Act of 19 February enthusiastically. It hailed the Czar as 'the Emancipator.' Within three months it ran 'An Analysis of the New Serfdom' in several issues. Each instalment ended with the words that were to become the burden of every radical comment on the reform: 'The people have been deceived by the Czar.' The author, Ogarev, urged all 'honest men' to break with the Government. News of peasant resistance to the reform elicited from Herzen an article entitled 'The Giant is Awakening.' The massacre at Bezdna moved him to an angry outburst: 'You hate the landlord,' he wrote, addressing himself to the peasants, 'you hate the official, you fear them and you are right. But you still trust the Czar and the priest. Don't trust them! The Czar is with them and they are with him.'
Herzen's own distrust of the Emperor was not complete. The previous year, as he had watched the swing toward reaction, he had allowed that a constitution might restrain a despotism running wild, as a strait-jacket restrains a maniac. He agreed with Ogarev that before anything more drastic was tried in Russia, the various elements of the opposition should unite to induce the Czar to convoke a General Assembly -- the term used was Zemsky Sobor, the quasi-parliamentary institution that had functioned in old Moscovy. A representative regime, he argued, might prevent a popular revolution and prove a stepping stone toward greater goals.
Such a united front was advocated by a short-lived group of self-styled 'Russian Constitutionalists,' which appeared on the scene soon after the emancipation. In the summer and autumn they put forth three issues of 'a gazette' entitled The Great Russian, one of the earliest examples of underground literature produced at home. As a matter of fact, it was run off on the press of the General Staff in the capital. Speaking in the name of a 'Committee' not otherwise designated -- its membership has remained a secret to this day -- and addressing itself to obshchestvo (the educated public), it advocated trie end of absolutist rule. Can a Romanov function as a constitutional monarch? The Committee had its doubts, but was willing to give the Czar a chance. Convinced that all would soon share this view, it counselled patience and moderation, and suggested a mammoth petition to the Emperor as the first step, adding airily that the undertaking involved no risk.
A draft of the petition was appended to the final issue of The Great Russian. It urged that the peasants' expectation of receiving gratis the land they had worked under serfdom should be met, the former owners to be compensated by the Treasury. 'Deign, Sire,' the petition concluded, 'to convoke representatives of the Russian nation in Moscow or Petersburg, so that they may draw up a constitution for Russia.'
The petition was still-born. Not that the constitutional movement completely lacked support. While the peasant reform was still in the planning stage some liberal members of the gentry had come to believe that a democratic regime under a constitutional monarch was its logical consequence. Now that the serfs were freed and the bungling administration was sowing dragon's teeth, the sentiment in favour of representative government had grown. The nobles were able to address remonstrances to the throne through their corporate organizations. Here and there they were touched by something like the generous spirit that had animated the spokesmen of the French noblesse on the historical night of 4 August, 1789. Early in 1862 Ivan Aksakov, a leading Slavophil and the scion of a venerable house of gentlefolk, suggested in print that the nobility be permitted 'solemnly, in the face of the whole of Russia to effect the great act of abolishing itself as a separate estate.' The gentry of Smolensk passed a resolution to the same effect on the initiative of a prince. The nobles of Tver took a similar step. In their address to the Emperor they urged him to shift the burden of the redemption payments to the shoulders of the entire population and to initiate other reforms, concluding that these could only be successfully carried out by an assembly of representatives freely elected by the whole nation. Moreover, a group of Tver country squires who acted as arbiters between the masters and their former serfs, finding the emancipation statutes unsatisfactory, practically declared that they would not be guided by them. They were forthwith arrested and given prison sentences, which were, however, annulled.
The incident aroused much indignation. One member of the gentry, V. V. Bervi, of whom more later, expressed his disapproval in a communication to the Emperor and the marshal of the nobility of the Tver province. He also apprized the British Ambassador of his protest, requesting that he make it known to the people of the United Kingdom. 'For I do not wish,' he wrote, 'that so honourable a nation should believe that the despotic and oppressive actions of the Russian Government go unprotested by its victims.' The man was committed to an insane asylum for observation and eventually deported to Siberia.
The Slavophils held to the quaint proposition that civil liberties would be safer under a Czar than under a constitutional monarch. A parliamentary regime was opposed by some liberal Westernists on the ground that the people were not ready for it. A correspondent of The Bell, writing in the issue of 15 September, 1861, spoke for the leftist fringe when he said that the people were to be appealed to and counted on, not 'the educated classes.' The interests of these were identical with those of the Government. There were among them, however, individuals ready to go over to the masses. United in secret societies -- the only weapon of men under the yoke of despotism -- they would be a formidable force capable of leading the masses to victory. A limited monarchy guaranteeing civil liberties was preferable to autocracy, but it was not enough. 'We' should neither help nor hinder the Constitutionalists.
In his rejoinder Ogarev granted the need for secret societies, but pleaded for co-operating with all the elements of the opposition to the end of limiting the Czar's authority, for even a constitution favouring the upper classes, he argued, was bound to assume a democratic character. As a matter of fact, with Herzen's approval he drafted a petition to the Emperor, similar to that of The Great Russian. Turgenev found the piece somewhat Machiavellian in that it seemed to appeal alike to liberals and disgruntled anti-abolitionists, and refused to sign it. Printed abroad, the petition was circulated in Russia, along with other documents of the same sort, and with no more effect.
It should be noted that 'the Russian Constitutionalists' did not intend to limit themselves to peaceful methods. The last issue of The Great Russian contained a broad hint that 'the Committee' might resort to revolutionary tactics: 'Should we see that the liberals fail to act, we shall have no choice but to speak another language and talk of other things.' Before the summer of 1861 was over, an attempt to speak 'another language' was made by a group that gravitated toward Chernyshevsky and the periodical he directed.
Sovremennik had met the Act of 19 February with eloquent silence. Since criticism of the statutes was forbidden, this was the only course open to the review. The issue for March, 1861, commented indirectly on the great event by carrying a translation of Longfellow's Poems on Slavery and an article on the Negroes in the United States, asking what would happen 'if the enslaved Samson should rise.' How Chernyshevsky felt about the reform may be inferred from an autobiographic novel that he wrote after emancipation had been in force for half a dozen years and which was not intended for publication at home. Taking the extremist's the-worse-the-better attitude -- years later Lenin will display it -- the hero, who is the author's alter ego, regrets that the terms of the loathsome measure were not even more onerous, since that would have hastened the hour of a popular explosion. The landowners haven't the right to a groat of redemption,' he says; 'whether or not they are entitled to an inch of Russian land must be decided by the will of the people.'
At the time when Chernyshevsky wrote these lines he was very sceptical about the prospects of a popular rising in Russia. But early in 1861 he was in a different frame of mind. It was a tense moment, electric with excitement. Together with several other men, he appears to have become convinced that the liberation of the serfs had precipitated a situation alive with revolutionary possibilities. Accordingly they conceived the plan of circulating inflammatory appeals, each addressed to a sector of the population that could be relied upon to support revolt. They were not backed by anything remotely resembling a conspiratorial organization, and altogether the enterprise was an example of premature action, against which Chernyshevsky had been repeatedly warning his readers.
Only one leaflet, entitled To the Younger Generation, was printed. It starts off by excoriating the peasant reform. What is this freedom, it asks, but a bone you throw to an angry dog to save your calves? The emancipation is the last act of 'a dying despotism.' The Romanovs have disappointed the people and must go. The liberals want a laissez-faire economy and a constitutional monarchy. This means a society burdened with a proletariat, an aristocracy, an oppressive state power. That is the way of the West. 'Why shouldn't Russia establish a new order unknown even in America?' All that is necessary is to develop the principles inherent in the life of the Russian folk, above all that of collective land tenure. Sale and private ownership of land must cease. A peaceful change, while preferred, is not the only one envisaged. 'If, in order to achieve our objectives, to distribute the land among the people, it would be necessary to slaughter a hundred thousand landowners, that would not frighten us.' Supporters of the Government and champions of privilege should no more be spared than you spare weeds when you clear the ground for a kitchen garden. The hope of Russia is 'the popular party,' that is, the oppressed masses and the educated youth.
The pamphlet concludes: 'Speak oftener to the people and the soldiers, explain to them what we want and how easy it is to get it. . . . Form circles of like-minded persons. . . . Look for leaders capable of and ready for anything. Let the shades of the martyrs of 14 December lead you into battle and, if necessary, to a glorious death for the salvation of your fatherland.'
To the Younger Generation was a product of the joint efforts of two contributors to Sovremennik, Shelgunov and Mikhailov. It was run off at the Free Press in London and smuggled into Russia in the early autumn. Shelgunov also composed a leaflet addressed to the soldiers, but it remained in manuscript. So did an appeal to the peasants believed to have been written by Chernyshevsky himself. In simple language he told them that the so-called freedom the Czar had given them would turn them into paupers, that indeed under autocracy there could be no freedom, and that to get it they must gradually and secretly prepare for an armed uprising, making common cause with the soldiery. At the proper moment, he promised, the revolutionaries would come out of hiding and declare themselves to the people.
Betrayed by a comrade turned informer, Mikhailov was arrested in September, took upon himself the blame for the composition of both leaflets, and suffered an early death in penal servitude. The appeal to the peasants was soon to play a fateful part in Chernyshevsky's life.
A revolutionary situation failed to develop in 1861. By the fall of the year the disorders in the villages had subsided, while the disturbances in the Universities had resulted merely in the deportation of scores of youths to the provinces. In Government circles reaction was on the rise. The appearance of incendiary underground sheets naturally enhanced this trend, which, indeed, had set in as soon as the emancipation manifesto was published. It was as though the administration were recoiling before its own audacity in freeing the serfs.
Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar5.html
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Road to Revolution
Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.
Chapter 6
'Get Your Axes!'
The belief in the imminence of a mass revolt persisted, though Chernyshevsky himself was greatly discouraged. The Government's arbitrary actions, it was argued, were driving the country to revolution. The point was made in a leaflet, copies of which were scattered in the chapel of the Winter Palace during the services on Easter Monday, 1862. It addressed itself to the army officers, urging them to side with 'the poor oppressed people' in the coming upheaval.
Then one morning in May people in Moscow and in the capital discovered on their doorsteps or in their mail a piece of underground literature entitled Young Russia that made their hair stand on end. 'Russia,' it ran, 'is entering the revolutionary period of its existence.' The interests of the masses are irreconcilable with those of 'the Imperial party': the landowners, the officials, the Czar. Their plundering of the people can only be stopped by 'a bloody, implacable revolution.' 'We are not afraid of it, although we know that a river of blood will flow and that innocent victims will perish; we greet its coming, we are prepared to lay down our lives for the sake of it, the long desired!' If necessary, the Russians would shed three times as much blood as the Jacobins. The Romanovs have failed to understand 'modern needs.' Some of these are: a federal republic; expropriation of the manor lords and assignment of the land to peasant communes; socialized factories run by elected managers; a national guard to replace the standing army; emancipation of women and public education of children; abolition of inheritance and, indeed, of marriage and the family; the closing of monasteries and nunneries, 'the chief sink of corruption.' To achieve these objectives, 'the revolutionary party' must seize power, set up a dictatorship and 'stop at nothing.' Elections to the National Assembly must take place 'under the influence of the Government, which shall see to it that no partisans of the present order, if any of them remain alive, become members of the Assembly.' Though the masses are relied upon, initiative is to be taken by the army and 'our youth.' The latter is urged to head the revolutionary movement.
The manifesto ends on a note of vehement rhetoric: 'Soon, soon the day will come when we will unfurl the great flag of the future, the red flag, and . . . move upon the Winter Palace to exterminate its inhabitants. It may be that the affair will end with the destruction of the Czar and his kin only, but it may also happen that the whole Imperial party will come to his aid. In that case, with full faith in ourselves, in the people's sympathy, in the glorious future of Russia, to whose lot it has fallen to be the first to effect the triumph of Socialism, we will shout with one voice: "Get your axes!", and then we will attack the Imperial party with no more mercy than they show us; we will kill them in the squares . . . kill them in the houses, kill them in the narrow alleys of towns, in the broad avenues of capitals, kill them in the villages and hamlets. . . . Who is not with us is against us, and who is against us is an enemy, and enemies one must destroy by all possible means. . . . And if our cause fails, if we have to pay with our lives for the daring attempt to give man human rights, then we shall go to the scaffold, and putting our heads on the block, or in the noose, repeat the great cry: "Long live the Russian social and democratic republic!"'
There were those who took this bloodthirsty pronouncement to be the work of an agent provocateur intended to discredit the revolutionaries. As a matter of fact, Young Russia emanated from a circle of Moscow students. They reprinted and distributed forbidden books -- so sketchy was control of printing establishments that they could do this with impunity for some time -- they set up 'Sunday schools,' in which adults were taught their letters, and after the liberation of the serfs some of the youths attempted to carry the message of revolt to the peasants. The group was captained by Pyotr Zaichnevsky, son of a retired colonel in moderate circumstances, and Pericles Argiropulo, scion of an aristocratic Graeco-Russian family. In March, 1861, Zaichnevsky made a speech on the church steps after a Mass for the Polish demonstrators shot by Russian troops in Warsaw. He called on the Poles and Russians present to unite against the common enemy, the Russian government, under 'the red banner of Socialism or the black banner of the proletariat.' During his summer vacation he contributed to the political enlightenment of several town misses and tried to arouse some villagers by telling them that all the land was theirs but that they needed arms to get it. As the letters to Argiropulo in which he detailed these activities were read by the police, in the autumn the friends found themselves in a Moscow detention house.
The discipline in this jail was so delightfully lax that their cell became a kind of political club. Incredible as this may sound, it was there that Zaichnevsky, aided by Pericles and other comrades, composed Young Russia. The leaflet was printed on a press which had been removed from the city to a safe place in the country before the start of the arrests that wiped out the circle. These facts remained unknown to the police, and the two youths, together with a score of others, were tried on a charge of having disseminated forbidden literature of a less inflammatory sort. One of the judges noted in his diary that Zaichnevsky gave him the impression of belonging to 'the confessors of Socialism, a word the meaning of which is very vague to them, but for which they are ready to be martyred.' Argiropulo soon died in jail, but Zaichnevsky reached advanced middle age, never out of prison for any length of time, a rebel to the end.
He was nineteen when he composed that prophetic proclamation, but it was by no means an example of the transient extremism of adolescence. All his life he clung to the programme of enforcing Socialism by means of the dictatorship of a revolutionary party -- an idea which after the lapse of many years was to become powerfully operative. In 1924, a leading Soviet historian described the Young Russia leaflet as 'the first Bolshevik document in our history.' This view was proscribed in later years, when emphasis on non-Marxist roots of the official ideology had become taboo. But unquestionably a place must be assigned to Zaichnevsky's thought in the genealogy of Bolshevism. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that a woman follower of his helped to dispose young Lenin to accept the idea that the seizure of political power by a revolutionary party was both feasible and desirable.
A few days after the appearance of Young Russia a succession of fires broke out in the capital. They culminated in a huge conflagration which razed a section of the city. Similar conflagrations occurred in the provinces. The fires may or may not have been accidental. According to The Bell, the police possibly had a hand in the arson, to the end of 'frightening the Emperor above and weak souls below,' a thesis which has recently been advanced again. But popular rumour saw the fires as the work of students and Poles, and the press seized on the theory of revolutionary incendiarism. A cartoon in a public print showed burnt-out buildings and distressed men and women surrounding a statue of Herzen holding an axe in one hand and a torch in the other. The caption read: 'To Iskander [Herzen's pseudonym], a ruined people, 28 May, 1862.' Herzen relates in his memoirs how a breathless young thing came to London all the way from Petersburg to ask him if it was true that he had had a hand in the burning of the capital. Dostoevsky called on Chernyshevsky to beg him to restrain the radicals from such excesses.
The fires were a godsend to the government. The head of the secret police reported to the Emperor that they had aroused universal indignation against students and Poles and 'rebellious heads generally.' It scarcely needs saying that this climate of opinion favoured the reactionary trend that had set in just after the liberation of the serfs. 'If in 1812 Moscow by its fires freed the country from a foreign yoke,' Herzen jested, 'half a century later Petersburg, in the same fashion, freed the country from the yoke of liberalism.'
The embers were hardly extinguished when a number of repressive measures were enacted in rapid succession. Because subversive propaganda had been discovered in one or two 'Sunday Schools,' all the three hundred of them throughout the country were closed, and so were the reading rooms and Petersburg's recently opened Chess Club, while Sovremennik and another radical review were suspended. Aroused by the appearance of underground literature of domestic origin, the police had for some time been more vigilant. In July a number of arrests took place. Among those seized was Chernyshevsky.
II
Chernyshevsky may have helped to form the Central Revolutionary Committee, in the name of which Young Russia spoke and which was never mentioned again. He was not, however, directly involved either in the composition or the dissemination of the leaflet. Indeed, he repudiated it as inopportune. Moreover, he did not share the intransigeance, the revolutionary fervour that it expressed. In fact, early in 1862 he wrote a series of open letters to an unnamed person who was clearly none other than the Emperor. Breaking his silence on the subject of the emancipation, he made bold to point out that the reform had changed the appearance of the relations between master and man, but had left the reality nearly intact. In his carefully 'Aesopian' manner he managed to insinuate the thought that revolution was the only way out of the crisis brought about by the abolition of serfdom. But he also professed a desire to prevent violence. And the very fact that the letters were intended for the Czar's eyes argued that the author expected some good to come from the throne. The censor prevented his message from reaching its destination.
For some time he had been under police surveillance. His name headed the list of political suspects, which the Chief of the Gendarmerie drew up in April, 1862. The immediate pretext for his arrest was supplied, inadvertently, by Herzen. In a letter intercepted by the police the expatriate wrote that he was ready to help Chernyshevsky publish Sovremennik in London or Geneva. Chernyshevsky was confined to a cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul and spent two years there awaiting trial. To beguile the empty hours he wrote, among other things, a tale called What's to Be Done? The investigating commission found nothing bearing on the case in the manuscript, and so registered no objection to it. The censor, assuming that it had been approved by an official body of high standing, passed it without further ado. Thus it came about that the work of a prisoner held in solitary confinement on a grave political charge appeared in 1863 in the pages of Sovremennik, which had been permitted to resume publication at the beginning of the year. Only then did the authorities outlaw the book. It remained under the ban until 1905.
What's to Be Done? is plainly a problem novel, the effort of a man intent on teaching his public what to think and how to live. The subtitle describes it as 'a tale of new men and women.' The heroine is the 'new woman,' as her two successive husbands represent the 'new man.' The story, which attempts to introduce the elements of a thriller, revolves around the trio's triumphant effort to make of marriage a comradeship based on equality, freedom, and reason. The accent is not, however, on the private complexities of what Henry James called 'the great constringent relation between man and woman,' but on the pursuit of the public good.
The two male protagonists are intellectuals of plebeian stock democrats by conviction, scientifically trained, tough-rninded self-assertive individuals. Adhering to the outwardly cynical moral code preached by the author, they reject such concepts as conscience, honour, duty, self-sacrifice, believing that the merely seek their own pleasure, which is man's natural bent Anything but starry-eyed idealists, they have persuaded them selves that they are moved exclusively by cold and calculating egoism, but, as a matter of fact, their ethical standards are ot the highest, they have hearts of gold, and they are selflessly devoted to the cause of the masses.
The 'new men' succeed in winning the heroine over to their way of thinking. She runs a co-operative tailoring shop, presides over a study circle for seamstresses, and studies medicine. In a dream she is granted a glimpse of the future that she and her friends are working to bring about. It beggars description. The deserts having been turned into gardens with the aid of science, the earth blooms like a rose. People live happily in the enjoyment of security, abundance, freedom, and equality of the sexes. Labour is a blessing. The workers inhabit sumptuous palaces built of metal and glass and provided with aluminum furniture, indirect lighting, and steam tables that render waiters unnecessary. Without being told in so many words, the reader knows that it was Socialism that had transformed a wretched land into an Eden.
What is to be done to turn the dream into a reality? The answer could not be specific, and it is not unambiguous. Speaking through his characters as well as in his own person, the author calls on his readers to emerge from their narrow, self-centred existences. Then, he tells them, light and joy will fill their days. Life can be wonderful. But they must love the future, reach forward to it, work for it, carry some of its elements into the present. And this is not difficult, it demands no sacrifices. On the other hand -- and this is more in keeping with the general tenor of his writings -- Chernyshevsky intimates that the transition to the new order will require the utmost efforts of a band of dedicated souls.
Such a one is Rakhmetov, a minor character. Unlike the other 'new men,' he is an aristocrat who has gone over to the people body and soul. He eats only such food as is the habitual fare of the peasantry, works with his hands, is proud of his phenomenal physical strength and completely disregards the proprieties. The money he has inherited he uses to help poor students. He travels abroad, not, Heaven forbid, for pleasure, but to inform himself about social conditions. He has no personal life, choosing celibacy, so as not to be deflected from his purpose. To test himself, presumably in anticipation of possible torture, he spends a night on a piece of felt studded with sharp nails, so that in the morning his back is a mass of bleeding wounds. Most of the time he leads the life of an athlete in training. In training for what? For Armageddon, of course; the battle on the great day of revolution. He is a man possessed, with something inhuman and superhuman about him. 'A sombre monster,' the heroine calls him, whereupon the author observes: 'A man with an ardent love of goodness cannot but be a sombre monster.' And he extols Rakhmetov as one of the chosen few, without whom life would lose its flavour. In creating this character the novelist drew, however awkwardly, a prophetic image. Here was the literary prototype of the professional revolutionary.
The influence exercised by What's to Be Done? was totally out of proportion to its literary merit, which is negligible. Writing years later, a competent observer asserted that since the start of printing in Russia no other book had achieved such an immense vogue. Much of this was due to the fact that it was a trumpet-call to action. Herzen noted that the young people who came from Russia in the 'sixties were all out of this novel with a dash of Bazarov in their make-up (Turgenev's Fathers and Children preceded Chernyshevsky's tale by a year). Denounced as lewd and immoral by the pillars of society, What's to Be Done? long remained the Bible of the radical youth. For all its glaring defects as a work of fiction it made effective propaganda for woman's emancipation, for Socialism, and, indirectly, for revolution. Be free in your personal relations and dedicate yourself in a disciplined realistic fashion to the cause of the people -- this was Chernyshevsky's answer to the query in his title. At the age of eighteen Lenin pored over its pages for weeks and later kept returning to it. He compared its effect on his mind to that which a second ploughing has on a field, and called it one of those books the impact of which lasts a lifetime. To judge by the reminiscences of Georgy Dimitroy, the Bulgarian revolutionary who was the hero of the Reichstag fire trial, the influence of the novel was not confined to Russia.
To come back to the prisoner, on the basis of documents forged, with the knowledge of the investigating commission, by a young protege of his who had turned informer, Chernyshevsky was convicted of composing the appeal to the peasants mentioned above and of an attempt to have it printed, as well as of 'an evil intent to overthrow the existing order.' The verdict also stated that he was 'a particularly dangerous agitator,' since his writings, steeped in 'extreme materialistic and socialist ideas,' had a great influence upon the young. He was condemned to fourteen years of hard labour and to Siberian exile for life, but the Emperor cut the term of penal servitude in half. There was widespread indignation at the sentence.
As a convict and as an exile staying in a small town lost in the Siberian wilderness, Chernyshevsky continued to write, but confined himself to fiction and allegorical skits, some of which have, fortunately, been lost. Absent, he was not forgotten. In revolutionary circles the question of freeing him was repeatedly mooted. One futile attempt was actually carried out, thereby worsening his position. When, in 1883, he was allowed to return to civilization, he was a broken man. Only half a dozen years were left him.
His martyrdom invested his name with a glory that time was slow in dimming. Early death had had the same effect on the reputation of his comrade, Dobrolubov. The Bolsheviks firmly clasped Chernyshevsky to their bosom. He had absolute revolutionary sense, Lenin declared privately, the way a singer has absolute pitch. He prized him particularly as an adversary of liberalism and as a thinker who demonstrated that every reasonable person must be a revolutionary. Lenin extolled him in print as 'a seer of genius,' an author whose works 'breathe the spirit of the class struggle,' as 'the great Hegelian and materialist' who prepared the best minds in Russia for the acceptance of Marxism. Lesser lights have been at pains to amplify and document these remarks. Chernyshevsky's leading Soviet biographer proclaimed him 'the founder of Russian Communism.' Some of his pages are required reading in the schools. In his native Saratov his statue has replaced the monument to the Czar who sent him to Siberia.
In order to establish him as an Ancestor, Soviet scholarship has had to distort the facts somewhat, a procedure in which it has had no little practice. True, he made his readers feel that they lived in an impermanent society which was in a state of deep crisis and which could and should be forcibly replaced by one resting on different foundations. Abominating the liberal temper, he came perilously close to extolling the revolutionary who is not squeamish about the means leading to his end, and is ready to soil his hands with mud or blood. But he was not free from the fear that revolution might be too costly a method of social change. Nor did he favour a centrally directed economy. He had a streak of the doctrinaire fanaticism that Herzen abhorred. Believing that material well-being is the sovereign good, he did not flinch from declaring that 'our Siberia' under the knout, where nevertheless people were well off, was 'much superior to England' with its Magna Carta, where 'the majority of people suffer need.' Yet he was certainly a determined enemy of the knout. As certainly he opposed compulsion where social and economic goals were concerned. 'Without a man's free consent,' he wrote, 'nothing truly useful can be done for him,' and he has made a character in his novel say that 'there is no happiness without freedom.' It is impossible to imagine him at ease in the society that has emerged from the revolution for which he laboured.
III
The gap made by Dobrolubov's death and Chernyshevsky's removal from the scene was partly filled by the meteoric career of another publicist who was destined to leave his mark on the thinking of young Russia: Dmitry Pisarev. Possessed of the verve, the truculence, the merciless dogmatism of a perennial adolescent, he had leapt into the limelight with an essay in which, following in Herzen's footsteps, he attacked scholasticism. He was then twenty-one (he was born in 1840). Chernyshevsky invited the youth to join the staff of Sovremennik, but Pisarev preferred to stay with another Petersburg monthly, Russkoe Slovo (The Russian Word), which soon became an influential organ of radical opinion.
The following year he was arrested. In a fit of indignation he had tossed off a vitriolic retort to a pamphlet against Herzen inspired by the police. 'The Romanov dynasty and the Petersburg bureaucracy,' he wrote, 'are ripe for the grave; all that is necessary is to give them the last push and cover their stinking corpses with mud.' Before the manuscript could be run off on an underground press it got into the hands of the authorities, and the author received a four-year prison term. It was from his cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul that he contributed to Russkoe Slovo the brash, spirited commentaries and lay homilies that endeared him to a large segment of the intelligentzia.
He was only briefly and half-heartedly committed to revolution. The outburst that had landed him in prison was but a momentary frenzy, as he phrased it. He came to realize that it would be long before a frontal attack could be made on the existing order and that the task at hand was to act upon people's minds. To this task he devoted himself heart and soul.
'Here is the ultimatum of our camp: what can be smashed should be smashed; what will stand the blow is good; what will fly into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left -- there will and can be no harm from it.' Thus said Pisarev in the early essay mentioned above. Such advice couched in such forthright language thrilled the radical youth. He went on employing his pen to discredit authority, tradition, all the pieties and taboos that restrain the individual. This did not keep him from upholding an extreme determinism which robbed the same individual of his freedom. The stand was forced upon him by his adherence to a materialism cruder than Herzen's or Chernyshevsky's. It was Pisarev who greatly contributed to the vogue, in avant-garde circles, of Buchner's Matter and Force and of Buckle's History of Civilization, with its assumption that human affairs, no less than theprocesses of nature, are subject to scientific laws.
Indeed, while himself incapable of scientific detachment, he ardently championed science as a cure-all, the power that could give the people both bread and freedom. Technological knowledge, he repeated, was Russia's greatest need. The country could not afford to divert its very limited intellectual cadres to any pursuits that did not increase the productivity of labour. As a result, this young man whose eyes would fill over a page of Crime and Punishment called for the abolition of arts and letters as a luxury that a poverty-stricken nation could not afford. "Some civic-minded artists and poets -- Pushkin was not among them -- he did exempt from proscription. He conceded reluctantly that a novel could serve as a medium of instruction or indoctrination and thus make itself useful to the common man, but warned that literature 'begins to demoralize society the moment it ceases to move it forward.' His advice to the general run of literati was to popularize the findings of the scientists. At this task he tried his hand himself, producing an exposition of Comte's philosophy and Darwin's theory of evolution. He ardently embraced the doctrine of the survival of the fittest in its crudest interpretation and, incidentally, ranged himself on the side of spontaneous generation, against Pasteur.
While the other leaders of radical opinion stressed man's duties toward society, Pisarev, when he began writing, accentuated self-cultivation and self-fulfilment. He even appeared to speak for a socially aloof and hedonistic individualism. Without, however, surrendering his belief that selfishness was man's prime mover, he came to hold that the enlightened egoist just naturally had at heart the good of all. In fact, Pisarev decided that the 'problem of the hungry and the naked' was the central concern of the age, the one toward which everyone's thought and action should be directed.
How was this problem to be solved? Pisarev's answer differed substantially from that offered by other radical thinkers. Exposed to the ideas of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon, as well as those of Herzen and Chernyshevsky, he had naturally not remained immune to Socialism. He could speak deprecatingly of competitive economy and remark that some day 'the tyrannical domination of capital would fall,' as had theocracy and feudalism. On one occasion he observed that this consummation could only be effected by the workers themselves. Yet there is little in his writings to suggest that he wanted a popular revolution, either political or social. Nor did he have faith in the collectivist tradition or any other native virtue of the peasantry. Salvation, he was convinced, lay in going to school to the West, in assimilating the more tangible fruits of European civilization. Repeatedly he argued that the country's greatest need was a large contingent of private entrepreneurs equipped with technological and managerial skills, but also well-meaning, cultivated, enlightened people. An industrial economy run by these paragons under the aegis of science in the interests of labour -- not that these clashed with the interests of capital -- such was Pisarev's solution of the problem of the hungry and the naked. To the state he assigned purely police functions.
The plea for a quasi-technocracy scarcely impressed his readers. They were more receptive to his emphasis on the role of the intellectual elite. The majority, poor because it was ignorant or ignorant because it was poor, was helpless, he argued, without the leadership of the educated minority. This pet idea of Pisarev's found a climate in which it could slowly but surely thrive. Did a member of the elite owe his first duty to himself or to society? Pisarev was uncertain. It was one of those loose ends that give his doctrine an untidy look.
This rather ramshackle system of ideas Pisarev called realism, or critical realism. He was also content to let it go by the name of 'nihilism.' The term had occasionally been used before both in Russia and abroad, but it was popularized by Fathers and Children. In a lengthy review of Turgenev's novel he had hailed Bazarov, 'the nihilist,' as a model of the man who was Russia's hope: the hard-working, tough-minded empiricist and pragmatist, to whom Nature was not a temple but a workshop. The designation 'nihilism' was obviously a misnomer. The views of Pisarev and his followers were anything but a philosophy of a moral wasteland. If the accent was on ruthless criticism, the negations were nearly balanced by affirmations, and both were professed with a passion verging on fanaticism.
Some word was needed to label a type of young person set apart by peculiar mannerisms and opinions, that had emerged in the late fifties, and Turgenev had supplied the need. To the conservatives frightened by the threatening effects of the new freedom, nihilism connoted atheism, free love, sedition, the outraging of every decency and accepted belief by men and, as often, by the unwomanly 'emancipated' woman. A report by the head of the Third Division for the year 1869 contains this thumbnail sketch of her: 'She has cropped hair, wears blue glasses, is slovenly in her dress, rejects the use of comb and soap, and lives in civil matrimony with an equally repellent individual of the male sex or with several such.' The official had nothing against women's striving for education and economic independence. It was not only for ideological reasons that they gave their fathers and husbands what James Barrie called 'the twelve-pound look.' As the decay of the gentry proceeded apace, the need for gainful employment was beginning to weaken the dogma that woman's place was in the home. But he lamented the fact that emancipation had taken on a character that made it a menace to 'everything that should be sacred to the sex: family, religion, womanliness.'
The stereotype bore some resemblance to the true picture. The nihilists did make a point of defying the conventions in appearance, manners, and address. Scorning decorum as hypocrisy, they affected forthrightness to the point of rudeness. An irreverent lot, impatient of all restraints, questioning all authority, they flattered themselves that they were hard-headed, cynical, materialistic, where their elders were sentimental, soulful, idealistic. They wanted to believe that they lived by the precepts of enlightened egoism, and they sneered at delicate feelings and fine words, looked down upon the arts, dismissed speculative thought as cobweb-spinning, and worshipped crude empiricism, under the name of science.
Nihilism was an aspect of the revolt of a generation with no deep roots in any cultural tradition against the values of a quasi-feudal past. It was a manifestation of what, in the words of Ecclesiastes, was a time to break down. Indirectly it reflected the naturalistic trend that asserted itself in mid-century Europe, as well as the change in the social structure of the intelligentzia. Ever since the beginning of the new reign the educated class had been rapidly expanding, due to the growth of the school system, the rise of the legal profession, the extension of the public health service. At the same time the group, while remaining alienated from the masses, was losing its upper-class character. Its ranks were being increasingly invaded by raznochintzy, i.e., newcomers from the middle and lower strata of society: scions of declasse gentry, sons of professional men, of petty officials, manufacturers, tradespeople, and especially of the clergy, which had a low social status.
To a certain extent nihilism was a fad. This applies less to its plebeian than its genteel variety. The parlour nihilist flourished after the manner of the parlour pink. Many a nihilist, having sown his intellectual wild oats in his youth, settled down to a humdrum career or made the most of the new opportunities for getting rich that the growing industrialism offered. Enlightened egoism was likely to turn into egoism tout court, and the emphasis on individual freedom and on realistic thinking could be useful to those bent on elbowing their way to a place in the sun. On the other hand, nihilism was obviously a possible road to political insurgency. The attitude of criticism and revolt could shift from manners and morals to the socio-political level. Pisarev died in 1868, two years after he had regained freedom and before it became clear in which direction he would have moved. But several other contributors to Russkoe Slovo, who had shared his views, eventually found themselves in the revolutionary camp. The police report cited above stated: 'From the nasty prankishness of a few young people of both sexes who saw in the rejection of accepted conventions a means of proving their independence, nihilism has become a positive doctrine pursuing definite social and political aims. . . . It acts in the name of an idea, and that lends its followers the character of sectarians, i.e., eagerness to spread their teaching and readiness to suffer for it. . . .'
The ideological trend of which Pisarev had been the chief exponent did not long survive him. Nevertheless, the term lingered on, the conservative public finding it a convenient synonym for extreme and distasteful notions. Years after the word 'nihilist' had fallen into desuetude on its native heath, it continued to have currency in the West as a designation for the dangerous intellectual, the soberly dressed, serious-faced, longhaired man or short-haired woman, peering at a wicked world through dark spectacles, a book in one hand, a bomb in the other.
IV
Alone the half a dozen years that followed the suppression of the 'conspiracy of ideas' associated with Petrashevsky's name form a virtual blank in the history of Russian radicalism. The lull ended when Alexander II ascended the throne. As has been seen, the beginning, however faint, of action 'in the name of an idea,' mentioned by the head of the Third Division, go back to the early years of the new reign. It was chiefly a matter of disseminating underground literature, at first produced abroad, later run off on clandestine presses at home. These activities were carried on by a few small groups, ephemeral, loose, having no connexion with each other. Not seldom they were offshoots of the ubiquitous 'circles for self-education,' the members of which -- mostly high-school and university students -- sought to improve their minds with respect to matters that the schools deliberately ignored. The situation finds its parallel in the French 'societies of thought' turning from discussions of the works of the philosophies to political propaganda.
The idea of gathering the scattered forces into a secret society on a national scale was not slow to sprout. It seems to have been considered by the London expatriates as early as 1857. An attempt to realize the idea was launched shortly after the liberation of the serfs. It was not a very serious or sustained effort, and Land and Liberty, as the organization that resulted from it was called, had only a shadowy existence. In theory it was a network of cells, each numbering five members and controlled from regional centres. In practice it was a congeries of several autonomous groups of young intellectuals located in the two capitals and in some of the provincial cities.
In the autumn of 1862 the society established contact with a group that called itself the Committee of Russian Officers in Poland. A list of sixty-four names, including that of Lenin's father-in-law, apparently members of this organization, has recently come to light. The Committee's propaganda aimed at persuading the troops stationed in the North-Western provinces not to use their arms against the Poles and to prepare to fight shoulder to shoulder with them for the freedom of the Russian and the Polish people. The previous spring the authorities uncovered the subversive activities of a circle of Russian officers in Warsaw, and three of the men were shot.
Land and Liberty survived the severe blow dealt it by the arrest in July 1862 of its chief organizer and of Chenyshevsky, who seems to have lent a hand in directing its activities. That winter a central committee was functioning in the capital. It is alleged that the society used the Petersburg Chess Club as a rendezvous. Perhaps because the society was trying for a united front, it was chary of a programme couched in anything but general terms. Ideologically the leadership followed Chernyshevsky in repudiating reformism. The first of the two issues of a sheet called Freedom, which were brought out early in 1863, contains an appeal to the educated classes. But while the Great Russian group had urged them to become politically active as an independent and decisive force; Land and Liberty sought to persuade the intellectuals to go over to the side of the masses and assume the leadership of a popular movement aiming at the expropriation of the landowners and the overthrow of the autocracy.
From the beginning, the enterprise had had Ogarev's sponsorship. In fact, the organization took its name from an article of his which answered the query: 'What do the people need?' with the words: 'Land and liberty.' But Herzen held aloof. Extremists continued to look askance at him. In fact, Young Russia dismissed The Bell as a liberal organ and 'a puzzle to truly revolutionary people.' Yet his prestige was still great. A leaflet that was circulated in Odessa in August 1862 ended thus: 'Long live the Republic! Long live the great dictator of Russia, A. Iskander!' But A. Iskander (Herzen's pseudonym, the reader will remember) was not cut out for the part of a dictator or revolutionary leader. He was an ideologue, not a man of action, a publicist, not a conspirator. Secret societies were not after his heart. Furthermore, he had not given up the notion that Alexander II was capable of heading a peacable social revolution. In denouncing the Young Russia manifesto as a rhetorical mixture of Babeuf and Schiller, he wrote, addressing the Russian youth: 'Should the fateful day [of revolution] arrive, stand firm and lay down your lives, but do not hail it as a desired day. If the sun does not rise amid bloodstained clouds, so much the better, and whether it wears a crown or a liberty cap -- it's all the same.' Another article of his, written about this time, concluded with the reflection that Russia's 'predestined saviour' might be 'an emperor who, renouncing the system inaugurated by Peter the Great, combined in his person a czar and a Stenka Razin (leader of the seventeenth-century jacquerie).'
In addition to Ogarev, Land and Liberty had in London another and far more ardent promoter in the person of Bakunin. He had joined the two expatriates shortly before 1862 was ushered in, and from then on the outside world came to think of Herzen, Ogarev, and Bakunin as a triumvirate, with the first of them as the master mind. Bakunin had escaped from Siberia to Japan, and on his way to Europe had stopped off in the United States long enough to declare his intention of becoming an American citizen and to have dinner with Longfellow, who described the Russian in his diary as 'a giant of a man with a most ardent, seething temperament.' The previous twelve years he had spent in the prisons of two countries besides his own and in Siberian exile. He had plotted with the Poles, had had a hand, it will be recalled, in the Paris revolution of 1848, made an abortive attempt to organize a secret revolutionary International, campaigned for a Czech revolt, participated in the Dresden uprising of 1849, been twice sentenced to death, and in 1851 extradited to the Russian authorities.
It was now his intention, he declared, to devote all his energies to fighting for the freedom of Russians and all Slavs. He had not yet formulated his anarchist doctrine, and he found himself echoing some of Herzen's views. But temperamentally the two men were so incompatible that they could not be comrades-in-arms, though they remained friends. Bakunin's instincts were all against moderation, and conspiratorial intrigue was his element. Small wonder then that he wholeheartedly embraced the cause of Land and Liberty and plunged into plotting with immense zest. He had plans for agitating in the army, among the peasantry and among the religious dissenters, and he toyed with the idea of a vast revolutionary organization ringing Russia with a network of its agents placed at strategic points on the border. Siberia was to be served by a branch located on the West coast of the United States.
Bakunin had long been convinced that a revolution was imminent at home. He was given to mistaking the second month of pregnancy for the ninth, as Herzen put it. It was then a common enough error. European radical circles were not free from it, and Bakunin's belief that the end of the old world was at hand had adherents in Russia. The explosion was expected to occur on the second anniversary of the emancipation. The peasants, it was said, looked for a new and better 'freedom' at that time, and the disappointment that was sure to follow was as sure to provoke a rising.
Meanwhile all through the summer and autumn of 1862 preparations for an armed insurrection were going on in the Polish provinces. The separatist movement there had revived with Alexander's accession, and now the situation was rapidly approaching a crisis. With Russian radicals and liberals sympathy for Poland's independence was traditional. It went back as far as the Decembrists. The Polish conspirators were naturally at pains to secure alliances with friends in the enemy camp. The Bell for 1 October, 1862, carried a manifesto by the People's Central Committee of Warsaw stating that the objectives of the movement were democratic. The editors declared that the Polish cause had their enthusiastic support. Shortly afterwards the Warsaw Committee concluded a pact with Land and Liberty, whereby the latter obligated itself to assist the insurrection by propaganda and diversionary tactics. The Poles seem to have believed that they had acquired a powerful ally. Herzen did what he could to dispel that delusion. He urged the conspirators to postpone action, at least until the spring of 1863, when, as has been said, the Russian villages were expected to be in a turmoil. With a sinking heart he watched the gathering of the storm, expecting nothing but calamity.
The course of events justified his worst fears. To force the issue, the Russian authorities suddenly declared conscription, in the Polish cities, and on 22 January, 1863, the revolt broke out. The Bell had urged the Russian officers not to spill Polish blood, and its issue dated 22 October, 1862, contained an address from the previously mentioned Committee of Russian Officers to the Governor of Poland, warning him that in case of an insurrection the troops would go to the Polish side and 'no power on earth could stop them.' Actually only one man, the Sub-Lieutenant who headed the Committee, took this step (and was killed in action against his own people). The troops both in and out of Poland remained loyal to the Czar, and the Poles were left alone to fight a losing battle.
In the midst of these events Herzen, finally yielding to the pressure of Ogarev and Bakunin, consented to give aid and comfort openly to Land and Liberty. In January, an emissary of the Society had arrived in London to secure the support of The Bell. According to Herzen's caustic account, the youthful envoy treated the expatriates -- the entire triumvirate was present -- 'as the commissars of the Convention of 1793 treated generals of distant armies.' Land and Liberty, the emissary declared, counted hundreds of members in the capital and three thousand in the provinces. Even the gullible Bakunin doubted these figures. The whole affair was distasteful to Herzen. Yet The Bell for 1 March ran an editorial which solemnly announced the formation of Land and Liberty as a result of the fusion of circles in the capital and the provinces with committees of officers, and extended a fervent greeting to it. Herzen was named the Society's chief representative abroad, and The Bell became in effect its organ.
This did not improve its fortunes. Except for printing an appeal to the troops not to bear arms against the rebels, it proved incapable of action. The emissary who had come to London failed to return home, and another member of the Central Committee also escaped abroad. Herzen could do nothing save inveigh against the Petersburg Government, while Bakunin kept evolving fantastic schemes, among them one for a rebellion in Finland. He actually took part in the quixotic expedition of a foreign legion which set out from Paris to join the Polish insurgents but disbanded before reaching its destination.
Seeing that no help was forthcoming from Land and Liberty, the Warsaw Committee decided to start on its own an uprising in the Volga region by way of creating a diversion in the enemy's rear. Kazan having been chosen as headquarters, in March several Polish patriots who served in the army and were stationed in the city persuaded a local student group affiliated with Land and Liberty to launch the insurrection by seizing the city. The conspirators had at their disposal four huridred roubles, fourteen revolvers without cartridges, and a number of copies of a fake imperial manifesto, composed by a Moscow student and printed abroad, which granted the peasants real 'freedom.' As one of the students turned informer, the plot was nipped in the bud, five Poles losing their lives and the Russians receiving prison terms.
As the months wore on, the Polish insurrection turned into guerrilla warfare which rapidly lost ground. Spring came and went, and nothing happened in Russia. Instead of being ablaze with revolt, the country was swept by a tide of reaction. The diplomatic intervention of foreign powers on behalf of the Poles caused a burst of chauvinism, and those who had sponsored the Polish cause were thoroughly compromised. Herzen had warned the Polish spokesmen: 'Our sympathy will do you no good at all, but will ruin us.' This is exactly what happened. Overnight the London expatriates had lost most of their following. They were denounced as traitors to their country. Towards the end of 1863 the circulation of The Bell dropped from two thousand five hundred copies to five hundred. Land and Liberty had ceased to exist. Herzen estimated the situation correctly when he wrote that before the insurrection a revolutionary organization was in the making, but that the impact of the explosion had destroyed it.
Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar6.html
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Road to Revolution
Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.
Chapter 7
'Men of the Future'
Secure from the revolutionary menace, the Government might now have let well enough alone. But Alexander went on enacting reforms. These included the abolition of corporal punishment that Herzen had urged, and a year later, in 1864, the introduction of self-government for rural districts in the form of so-called zemstvo boards. These measures were effected in an atmosphere of reaction which made it easy for the administration to emasculate them.
Early in 1865 the nobles of the Moscow province presented an address to the Czar in which they voiced their satisfaction with the newly created zemstvos and also urged him to convoke a National Assembly 'for the discussion of the needs of the entire state.' Alexander's reply was that the right to initiate reforms was part of his God-given autocratic power, and that no one was privileged to intercede before him for the whole nation. This was the last stirring of the constitutionalism of the 'sixties.
The revolutionary movement appeared to have been stillborn. Clandestine printing ceased. Sovremennik gave much space to labour and Socialism in Western Europe, but was timid in dealing with matters nearer home and spent much energy in polemics against Russkoe Slovo. It lacked the enthusiastic following it had had in Chernyshevsky's day.
After the failure of the Polish rebellion Bakunin settled in Italy and kept aloof from Russian affairs. As for Herzen, in the columns of The Bell he continued to berate the administration and to hold up to scorn the chauvinism, 'half rapacious, half rhetorical,' that prevailed at home. 'The public is worse than the Government,' he wrote to his daughter, 'and the journalists are worse than the public.' And he urged the convocation of a Zemsky Sobor. In and out of his review he also continued to preach what he called 'Russian Socialism,' stemming from the muzhik's way of life and reaching out for that 'economic justice' which is a universal goal sanctioned by science. And he harped on the antithesis of Europe, nearing the end of its vital cycle, and Russia, a country bypassed by history and knowing no cherished traditions save that of collectivism, possessing no accumulated wealth, belonging wholly to the future, resembling a woman heavy with child, a child that might prove, he hinted, the saviour of mankind. These were variations on old themes, but Herzen also sounded new notes. Perhaps the obshchina was not really the germ of the new society, he intimated, but rather a factor making the Russian soil ready to receive the Socialist seed, an article imported from the West. Might not an alliance between the muzhik and the European proletarian be the hope of the future? Possibly Russia, too, would succumb to 'the bourgeois pox.' On the other hand, meshchanstvo was conceivably just a passing phase in the development of Western societies. Herzen could not bear the thought that all the rivers of history must lose themselves in the swamp of a vulgar, property-worshipping middle-class civilization.
But The Bell had now neither readers nor influence. The editor antagonized the many who had drifted to the right, as well as the few who had moved further to the left, and he was too skittish to satisfy those who stood still. He found himself in no-man's-land. In 1865 he transferred the offices of the journal and of the Free Press to Geneva, 'the crossroads of Europe.' He hoped to find there a more congenial atmosphere than London could offer and, above all, closer contacts with home.
This step failed to improve matters. The city of Calvin harboured a number of recent arrivals from Russia, mostly young people of plebeian background. They had crossed the border chiefly in 1862-64 to avoid the police net or to escape from it. For some time Herzen had looked with favour at these radicals. They were half-baked, but there was a certain toughness about them. He had perceived that the intellectuals of gentle birth to whom he had once pinned his hopes were a weak reed to lean upon: bold in the realm of thought, they wavered and compromised when it came to action. His personal contacts with the new emigres were, however, galling. Twice had 'the Geneva puppies,' as he called them, approached him with a plan to make The Bell the official organ of a general-staff-in-exile, which would direct the revolutionary movement at home. The negotiations had come to nothing. Herzen gained the impression that these young people were merely out to get their hands on the review and also on the Bakhmetev fund for revolutionary progaganda. This had been entrusted to him in 1858 by a wealthy Russian landowner before he went off to the Marquesas to found a Communist settlement in that island paradise. 'The puppies,' for their part, looked down upon their celebrated fellow expatriate as a muddle-headed liberal and a man whose professed convictions were at variance with his lavish way of living.
One of them said, publicly, as much and more in a scurrilous pamphlet which came out in 1867. His ire had been roused by a remark made by the editor of The Bell to the effect that his message complemented Chernyshevsky's. No, the pamphleteer indignantly asserted, the two men had nothing in common: Chernyshevsky had formed 'a whole phalanx of socialists,' his ideas had struck deep roots; as for Herzen, he was a poet, an artist, a raconteur, a novelist, anything you please, but not a political thinker, and the notion that he was a leader of the youth was ludicrous. He understood nothing of what was going on around him. And what had this millionaire done for the cause? When young militants, covered with 'holy wounds,' had arrived in Switzerland fleeing from hard labour or the gallows, he had refused to work with them and had treated them with 'haughty contempt.' The younger generation had perceived that he was but a self-adoring phraseur and had turned away from him with disgust. 'You, Herzen,' the author of the pamphlet concluded graciously, 'are a dead man.'
The attack cut Herzen to the quick. These young people, he fumed, were shallow, arrogant, and ignorant; they were moved by low passions. In a letter to Bakunin of 30 May, 1867, he stigmatized his reviler and his kind as 'swindlers whose scoundrelism justified the Government's measures against them.' Bakunin took up the cudgels on behalf of these youths. Their defects, he argued with a perceptiveness of which he was rarely capable, were due to the fact that the old morality was gone, while the new had not taken shape. 'But this should not conceal from us the serious, nay, great qualities of our younger generation: it has a real passion for equality, work, justice, freedom, reason. Because of this passion, tens of them have already laid down their lives, while hundreds have gone to Siberia.' And he warned Herzen against senile hatred of youth.
By this time the two men had moved far apart in their thinking. Bakunin had now given up the idea that anything but oppression and enslavement could be expected from czarist autocracy, or indeed from any form of statehood. It was his conviction that the salvation of the Russian masses, as of the people everywhere, lay in an upheaval which would make a bonfire of both the political and the social order. To foment a total world revolution, which, he held, the combined efforts of the peasantry and the city workers were bound to bring about in the near future, he had for some time been busy organizing a secret International Brotherhood,
Herzen scarcely needed Bakunin's admonition against one of the infirmities of old age. Wholesale condemnation of the radical youth was far from his mind. Quite the contrary. When, at the end of 1868, The Bell was silenced for good, he wrote in an open letter to Ogarev, which was his parting word, that, in the main, their most precious convictions were secure. 'There are young people, so deeply, so irrevocably devoted to Socialism, so rich in logical audacity, so strong by virtue of their scientific realism and their rejection of all clerical and governmental fetishism that there is no more fear: the idea will not perish. The younger generation . . . is of age, and knows it.'
Here was an example of wishful thinking. One looks in vain for intimations of maturity in the ideas and behaviour of the radical fringe of the intelligentzia of the late 'sixties. There was something adolescent about its attempts at political action and at living the good life. Here and there co-operatives sprang up, often dress-making establishments, like the one run by the heroineof What's to Be Done? They did not last. The professional seamstresses, who worked while the others talked, were apt to take the initiative in breaking up the shop. Sometimes they would carry off the sewing machines for which the idealistic amateurs had paid. Had they not been taught, they argued, that the tools belonged to those who used them?
Occasionally young people attempted to set up communal households. Earnings were shared and even such personal belongings as boots and coats. This was by way of honouring Chernyshevsky's precept of importing the socialist future into the present. These 'communes' failed invariably and promptly, even though some of them were a useful form of mutual assistance. But they bequeathed to the revolutionary circles the habit of comradely sharing of possessions.
As the 'communes' included both men and women, rumour pictured them as dens of promiscuity. Such was not the case. True, among 'nihilists' there was a tendency to unions without the benefit of clergy. What particularly scandalized the public was the fact that to secure her independence from parental tutelage a girl would contract a fictitious marriage. One apologist for the practice pointed to the legal disabilities of the unmarried woman. On the other hand, the nominal unions involved no hazards since, as he put it, 'the relations of men and women in these circles are based on mutual confidence and respect, which exclude the very possibility that men will ever think of abusing their rights.'
II
A few clandestine 'circles' managed to carry on. An active one existed in Moscow and was in touch with a group in the northern capital. The members included several government clerks and school teachers, men of mature years, but for the most part they were university students. One member was a former house serf, another a scion of an impoverished princely family. A leading role was played by a merchant's son, Nikolay Ishutin, a hunchbacked youth, nicknamed 'the General.' For him, as for his comrades, Chernyshevsky was the object of a veneration that verged on a cult. Ishutin is reported to have named him, together with Jesus and St. Paul, as 'one of the world's three great men.' A wild scheme hatched by the circle was a plan to free him from captivity and smuggle him out of the country, so that he could edit a revolutionary review abroad. Herzen was looked down upon not only as a liberal but as one whose way of life belied his professed convictions, and Pisarev was dismissed as 'an empty phraseur.' These youths lacked the nihilists' respect for science, believing that a man's duty was total devotion to the people's cause. 'The masses are uneducated,' one of them observed, 'therefore we have no right to an education. You don't need much learning to explain to the people that they are being cheated and robbed.' With this anti-intellectualist bias went an ascetic streak.
At first the circle engaged in activities that kept more or less within the law. It ran a co-operative bindery and a dressmaking establishment. Further, it had plans for other producers' cooperatives, as well as a workmen's mutual loan association and -- an Owenite colony on the Amur in Siberia. It also set up a school for boys in the slums of Moscow. Here a slanted variety of elementary instruction was offered. Thus, the teacher, after pointing out that the eagle was a bird of prey, would observe that a government flaunting the eagle on its coat of arms (Russia was, of course, such a one) only proved thereby that it was as rapacious and bloodthirsty as that bird. The arithmetic teacher, having led his pupils to admit that one was less than seventy-two million, indeed, an insignificant quantity in comparison, would say: 'Well, we have one czar, but there are seventy-two million of us.' Ishutin is said to have remarked: 'We will make revolutionaries out of these boys.'
The Petersburg group inclined toward a political orientation. Its head, a young scholar who had several works on Russian folkways to his credit, addressed a memorandum to the Emperor, urging him to grant the country civil liberties. Only a revolution from above, he argued, not unlike Herzen, could prevent a revolution from below. He was willing to accept the hazards of a democratic order, believing that it was a prerequisite for Socialism. In Moscow a different view prevailed. Ishutin, for one, held that a constitutional regime would only worsen the condition of the masses: while guaranteeing personal liberty, it would hasten pauperization and the growth of a proletariat. When, in 1865, two years after the young people had first come together, a smaller group, of a distinctly revolutionary character, crystallized within the Moscow circle, the objective of this so-called 'Organization' was a purely 'economic revolution.'
On the subject of tactics there was no unanimity in the Organization, and this resulted in sharp friction. Some favoured peaceful propaganda cautiously conducted, others were eager for drastic action. Ishutin pleaded for 'bang, bang,' instead of talk. He was all for shocking the people out of their apathy by some violent deed, such as the blowing up of the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Perhaps a series of assassinations could frighten the Czar into decreeing a social revolution.
Half a dozen of the more audacious spirits discussed at length a plan for forming a terroristic band. They called it Hell. Each member of this secrecy-shrouded body was to be a dedicated and doomed man. He had to give up his friends, his family, his personal life, his very name. To disarm suspicion, the one chosen by lot to act was to abandon himself to dissipation, even play the informer. The deed done, the terrorist must destroy himself by squeezing a pellet of fulminate of mercury between his teeth, so as to make his features unrecognizable. In addition to political assassination, Hell's projected function was to liquidate traitors within the group. An all-powerful, all-controlling secret body, it was to be maintained even after the revolution had triumphed, so as to keep a watchful eye on the new government and, if necessary, use terror against it.
When the moderates got wind of this plan, they considered taking some rather stringent measures against the would-be terrorists, not excluding denunciation to the authorities. As for the extremists, when a refractory youth was reported to have spoken sharply against a certain proposal, it was suggested that he should be killed, since he knew too much and could be dangerous if he withdrew from the Organization. Apparently neither the moderates nor the extremists were inhibited by moral scruples or by a sense of comradeship. They believed that the end justified the means. Their amateur Machiavellianism did not stop at fraud, theft, murder -- at least, on the planning level. To provide the Organization with funds one member was to hire himself out as a valet to a rich merchant and rob him; another was to loot the mails; a third was to poison his father for the sake of the inheritance. To carry out his intention, this last plotter actually obtained arsenic.
Ishutin was given to mystifying his comrades so as to add to his prestige and to bolster up their morale. He spread fantastic rumours, such as that Siberia was ready to secede from the Empire and that the United States had promised to assume a protectorate over it as soon as the garrisons in the Urals had been exterminated. Again, he told the members that their society was affiliated with a secret all-powerful European Revolutionary Committee organized for the purpose of assassinating the monarchs of Europe. This was an invention of his own, which some of his less gullible comrades disbelieved. It was possibly suggested by news of the establishment of the International (in 1864). Information about it may have been conveyed to the circle by the emissary who had been dispatched abroad to establish contact with the emigres -- a step that failed to bring results.
Certainly here was an explosive mixture of irresponsible talk and adolescent thrill-seeking.
III
The few who were initiated into the plans for Hell included Ishutin's cousin, Dmitry Karakozov, a morose, self-centred youth, deaf in one ear, whose grey eyes were set in a lean, sickly face. At the gatherings he listened carefully, but hardly ever opened his mouth. The talk of self-immolation, of daring action, fascinated him. He was a soul possessed. The cause of the common people was his ruling passion.
Born into an impoverished family of gentlefolk, the youth was hard put to it to keep body and soul together. He had been expelled from the University of Kazan in 1861 for participation in the disturbances there, and in the summer of 1865 he was dropped from the University of Moscow for failure to pay the modest tuition fee. He was not sorry. The diploma would give him a place among the privileged, where a revolutionist scarcely belonged.
In the winter of 1865-66 he was taken ill and spent two months in the university infirmary. He was suffering from an intestinal disease, but he came to believe that his ailment was mental. He imagined that his days were numbered. And to think that he would die without having done anything for the cause! One day in February he vanished, leaving behind a note which hinted at suicide. On returning to town he said that he had visited a neighbouring monastery. Then he stunned his comrades by declaring that he had decided to make an attempt on the Czar's life. Regicide had by no means been excluded from the terrorist's plans. In fact, it seems to have been the main objective of Hell. It is possible that Ishutin nurtured the idea in his cousin's sick mind, intending to use him as a tool for the execution of his design.
Some of Karakozov's fellow members tried to dissuade him: talk of assassination was one thing, action was another. Yet the thought obsessed him. At the beginning of Lent he secretly went to Petersburg with a pistol in his pocket, apparently bent on carrying out his intention. Here he composed, or possibly had written for him by the head of the Petersburg group, a personal if unsigned statement addressed 'To Worker Friends,' which was at once a defence of his intended act and his testament.
He had long been tormented, he began, by the question as to why Russians tolerated an order that kept the toilers poor and the idlers rich. By dint of much reading and reflection he had come to the conclusion that the czars were at the bottom of the trouble, that they were indeed the people's worst enemies. 'And so,' he went on, 'I have decided to destroy the wicked Czar and die for my beloved people.' If he failed, others, inspired by his example, would succeed. Once the chief enemy has been eliminated, the lesser ones will lose their power. Then real freedom will come: the people will govern themselves without the Czar, the land and all capital will belong to associations of workers. 'Everyone will have plenty, and there will be no one to envy, for all will be equal, and the Russian people will live happily and honestly. . . . This is my last word to worker friends. . . .'
Karakozov made several copies of this leaflet and with a fine disregard for caution scattered them near factory buildings. Roaming the streets, dressed as a man of the people, he also handed the sheet to students he encountered. One copy was turned over to the police, but they paid no attention to it.
On hearing of these goings-on, two members of the Organization came to Petersburg to persuade him to abandon his plan. He did go back to Moscow, but abruptly returned to the capital. In the afternoon of 4 April, as the Czar, having left the Summer Garden, a public park, was walking toward his carriage, Karakozov fired a shot at him. Either because the cheap pistol was defective or because his aim was poor, the shot went wild, and no one was hurt. A bystander by the name of Komissarov, a cap-maker of peasant stock, claimed credit for saving the Czar's life by striking the assassin's arm, and the authorities went out of their way to spread this rather questionable story. Surely it was providential that the Liberator should have been saved by a liberated serf. It happened that the cap-maker was a native of the province of Kostroma, birthplace of Ivan Susanin, the peasant who, according to a firmly established, yet somewhat dubious tradition, had sacrificed his life to save the first Romanov from murder by the Poles, and this was taken as added proot fhat the Emperor had escaped the assassin's bullet by a special act of Providence. The event produced a great outburst of expressions of loyalty to the Czar. The common people generally took the attempt on his sacred person to be an act of revenge on the part of the disgruntled serf-owners. This interpretation gained currency abroad as well. In the joint resolution passed by the United States Congress, congratulating the Emperor and the Russian nation upon his escape from danger, the would-be assassin is described as 'an enemy of emancipation.'
Papers incriminating his comrades were found on Karakozov, and one member of the circle turned informer. Arrests followed, and since the prisoners confessed abjectly and volubly, they implicated others. As a result, all the members of the organization were rounded up and some innocent bystanders besides. Practically all of the former recanted and begged for mercy. Ishutin burst into tears and kept repeating that he had nothing to do with the shooting. As for Karakozov, shortly after his arrest he wrote to the Czar that in acting as he did he had been moved by a desire to bring happiness to 'the great majority of people' whose lot is ceaseless toil, suffering and degradation. He predicted that the masses would soon rise in their wrath at the injustice of the system and, further, that from time to time men would lay down their lives in order to show the people that their cause was just. 'As for me, Sire,' he declared, 'I can only say that if I had not one but a hundred lives, and if the people demanded that I should sacrifice all the hundred lives to promote their welfare, I swear that I would not hesitate a minute to make the sacrifice.'
While in prison he showed signs of mental derangement, which the authorities chose to disregard. For hours he was on his knees in prayer. He declared that he had carried out the attempt in a state bordering on insanity and also that he had been influenced by what he had learned of 'the Constantine Party.' During his stay in the capital he must have heard about the existence of an aristocratic clique that, in the event of the Czar's death, intended to turn the throne over to Grand Duke Constantine, reputedly a liberal, who was sure to grant the country a constitution.
After a lengthy preliminary investigation thirty-five people, some of them mere boys, were arraigned before a special tribunal. Ishutin and Karakozov were condemned to die, the rest receiving terms of penal servitude of varying length. On hearing the verdict, Karakozov addressed a petition to the Emperor. His offence was so monstrous, he wrote, that he dared not think of any alleviation of his lot, but he swore that he would not have committed the crime if it were not for his abnormal state of mind. He begged the monarch's forgiveness 'as Christian of Christian and man of man' and signed himself his well-wisher. The Czar's indirect response was that personally he had long since forgiven the man in his heart, but as a sovereign he did not believe he had the right to pardon such a criminal.
Princess Dagmar of Denmark, the fiancee of the Heir Apparent, was expected in the capital for the wedding, and it would have been awkward to carry out the hanging during the solemnities, which were scheduled to last for weeks. It was decided to speed up the execution. On 3 September, two days after the verdict had been pronounced, Karakozov was hanged by one of the peasants for whom he wished to lay down his life. At the last moment, when Ishutin was already in his shroud, he was told that the Czar had commuted his sentence to hard labour for life.
Karakozov's shot, while missing its target, was fatal to the circle. Just about the time when he was getting ready for the attempt in Petersburg, his comrades in Moscow had composed their differences and agreed on a programme of action. In the summer they were going to leave town and carry the revolutionary message to the peasantry, combining propaganda with a study of economic conditions. Arrests disposed of these plans and brought to an end all the activities of the circle, but did not entirely obliterate its influence. With its score or two of members, it was a tenuous link in the chain of which Land and Liberty was the beginning and which was to remain long unbroken. The thinking of these youths vaguely foreshadowed the revolutionary trends that asserted themselves in the next decade.
IV
The attempt on Alexander's life intensified the political reaction which had been gathering strength since the emancipation, and particularly since the Polish rebellion. For a while the two capitals were in the grip of what a contemporary pamphleteer described as 'white terror.' In vain did The Bell argue that the attack was not the result of a conspiracy, but the act of an unbalanced boy. In vain, and for the last time, did Herzen in a personal message appeal to the Emperor to reverse his illiberal policy. Men who favoured the strong arm were raised to power. A shining exception among the obscurantists and mediocrities who now surrounded the Czar was the Minister of War. Eventually he succeeded in humanizing the discipline, shortening the term of military service, and democratizing it by introducing universal conscription. This, and a limited form of municipal self-government, were the last of 'the great reforms' with which Alexander's name is associated.
Dejection and disillusionment overtook the liberals. The zemstvo and town elective boards, being at the mercy of the bureaucracy, were not an attractive field of activity. Those who belonged to the landed gentry applied themselves to planting their cabbages. Others settled down to careers in the civil service, or joined the scramble for the mad money which was being made in railway construction, banking, and the rapidly expanding industries. During the late 'sixties life in Petersburg suggested the atmosphere of Paris during the decline of the second Empire, even to the popularity of Offenbach's operettas. Here, too, though on a smaller scale, there was private extravagance; here, too, there was scandalous corruption in Government offices. Only the republican opposition was missing.
Shortly after Karakozov's attempt, an imperial ukase enjoined all agencies of the Government to help in combating the pernicious ideas directed against 'religious beliefs, the foundations of family life, the rights of property, obedience to law, and respect for the established authorities.' Even before this declaration of war against ideas, panic had seized the republic of letters. Every author, particularly every journalist whose published opinions were not quite orthodox, considered himself a marked man. And indeed many a writer saw the inside of a prison cell in those days. Nekrasov, whose character did not match his literary genius, lost his nerve and went so far to to read, at two successive dinners given by the aristocratic English Club, a patriotic poem in honour of the Czar's saviour, Komissarov, and a paean to Count Muravyov, a former Decembrist, who had been nicknamed The Hangman for the way he had treated the Polish rebels. The editor made these genuflexions in order to save Sovremennik from the axe. They were futile. On 1 June the review was suppressed and with it Russkoe Slovo. The opposition lost its two most influential organs.
As the schools were considered to be another source of infection, they too were in the first line of attack. The liberal Golovnin, who had headed the Ministry of Education, was replaced by a former Procurator of the Holy Synod, and an arrant reactionary. Under his direction mechanical drill in Greek and Latin crowded out the natural sciences and social studies in the secondary schools. He also enacted a set of special regulations applying to the schools of higher learning. They were aimed at the corporate organizations which continued to exist in the universities in defiance of the law. The student body was subjected to strict police supervision.
The new regulations were applied in a high-handed and tactless manner which was bound to bring on trouble. With the opening of the academic year 1868-69, the capital was the scene of numerous gatherings at which the problems of student life were heatedly debated. There was general acceptance of the programme that had rallied the student body in 1861. While many of the youths were reluctant to resort to any but lawful means in obtaining these rights, others favoured drastic, defiant action. Indeed, there were those who wanted to direct the movement into a revolutionary channel, turning their comrade's discontent with certain conditions in the schools into discontent with the entire system.
The extremist faction included the several underground groups that managed to lead a precarious existence. One of them grew out of a 'commune' set up by a few former members of the defunct Ishutin Organization, after they had served short prison terms. It became known as the Smorgon Academy, which was the popular name of a forest where Gypsies trained bears for performances at fairs. Presumably there was something bearlike in the appearance and manner of these youths. The Academy attracted a few radical intellectuals and semi-intellectuals. A novel feature at the gatherings was the presence of young women, who until then had not ventured into associations for political ends.
In a sense an offshoot of the Organization, the Academy followed in its footsteps. It made preparations to free Chernyshevsky from captivity and helped to pay for reprinting his works in Geneva. A plan for bankrupting the Government by flooding the country with counterfeit money was under discussion, and so was regicide. By way of actual performance, the group sent an emissary abroad to establish contact with the European Revolutionary Committee which, it will be recalled, had figured in Ishutin's talk. Of course, the man failed to discover the mythical body, but after being mistaken for an agent-provocateur, succeeded in gaining the confidence of some of his compatriots in Switzerland, and in the autumn of 1868 he returned, bringing with him copies of the first issue of a new Geneva journal Narodnoe Delo (The People's Cause), edited and largely written by Bakunin.
It called upon the student youth to rally to the banner of the social revolution. The latter was the only way out of the impasse created by the failure of the reforms to improve the lot of the masses. Rejecting Herzen's emphasis on the antinomy of Russia and the West, the veteran conspirator argued for a close link between Russian and world revolution, since both had the same objective: to free the people from 'the yoke of capital, hereditary property, and the State.' Bakunin had lately formulated the doctrine for which he is best known, and in the pages of the little review he lost no occasion to expound his anarchist creed. 'The business of every government,' he wrote, 'is to strangle the people in order to preserve itself; by the same token, the business of revolutionaries is to destroy the State in order to free the people.'
A segment of the student body proved unusually receptive to the bold message of Narodnoe Delo. The issue was copied and recopied and read to pieces. One article, which dealt with the role of enlightenment, received particular attention. Bakunin admitted that knowledge could set the people free, but not under the existing system. Alone the destruction of Church and State would enable the masses to come by the enlightenment. From this thesis some of the youths apparently drew the conclusion that it was incumbent on them to give up their studies and, merging with the common people, work for the revolution. That winter the matter was the subject of much excited discussion at the student gatherings in Petersburg.
V
Count Shuvalov, head of the Third Division, in the report for 1869, which has already been quoted, commented on the disturbances in the universities. He was willing to concede that the corporate organizations demanded by the students were in themselves innocent and could indeed be useful to the less fortunately circumstanced youths. The economic status of the student body had not improved with the years. In the early 'seventies three-quarters of the students in the provincial universities needed subvention. The house searches conducted in 1869 revealed living conditions that were officially described as 'truly shocking.' Yet the authorities were forced to forbid the reading rooms, the co-operative eating places, etc., for the reason, the official explained, that they were apt to become centres of anti-government propaganda. What with the young men dropping out of the universities for lack of means or being expelled for insubordination, the country faced the prospect, he observed, of being burdened with half-baked intellectuals who entered life with a deep-seated grudge against the established order. He deplored the presence of former divinity students in the institutions of higher learning: they were particularly apt to become 'fanatics and propagandists,' and being more mature than the graduates of secondary schools and more inured to privations by the harsh regimen of the seminaries, were an admired and influential group. However, much of the trouble in the universities, Count Shuvalov insisted, was due less to the students than to outside agitators whose only interest was to compromise as many innocents as possible, have them expelled and thus add to the ranks of potential revolutionaries.
One such outside agitator was a journalist whose student years were behind him. This Pyotr Tkachev was born into a moderately circumstanced family of gentlefolk. After a short stay behind bars, he was expelled from the University of Petersburg at the age of seventeen for his part in the disturbances of 1861. He continued to move on the periphery of radical groups, including the Smorgon Academy, and made a living by contributing reviews and miscellaneous articles to the periodicals.
From the first his thinking was tinged by a not too consistent adherence to economic determinism. He expounded this theory in a book review. It had been formulated, he wrote, by the well-known German exile, Karl Marx, and was now the common property of all decent thinking people. He was one of the earliest Russian radicals to be influenced by Marx's writings. Like Chernyshevsky, whom he acknowledged as his master, he used his censored pages as a vehicle for intellectual contraband. Like him, Tkachev harped on the failure of the programme of liberalism to meet the needs of the unpropertied masses. A revolutionary both by temperament and conviction, he missed no opportunity to point out the futility of moderation and gradualism in trying to alter social relations. Hatred of the existing order was his consuming passion. Alone, acts directed toward its destruction, he contended, might be called truly moral. Furthermore, he allowed that the revolutionaries -- he called them, euphemistically, 'men of the future,' as Chernyshevsky had dubbed them 'new men' -- were not bound by conventional ethics in their fight for the happiness of all. The doctrine was popular in the Ishutin circle and was soon to be acted upon by another underground group.
Chernyshevsky lodged some of his more daring ideas in notes to his rendering of John Stuart Mill's Political Economy. On his part, Tkachev concealed ideological dynamite in the introduction and notes he appended to his translation, published in 1869, of an obscure German book on the labour problem. The author advocated the establishment of workers' co-operatives by the existing States. Engaging in polemics against him, the translator argued that the State would not act in the interest of labour until it became the workers' State, virtually a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only then could the communist dream become a reality: a society free from competition and strife, guaranteeing the worker the full product of his labour, assuring economic and every other kind of complete equality to all. And though he had to resort to Aesopian language, he managed to make it clear to his readers that the workers' State could come into existence solely as a result of a break in the historical process, 'a jump,' as he put it, i.e., social revolution. 'The way of peaceful reform, peaceful progress,' he wrote, 'is one of the most unrealizable Utopias that mankind has devised to ease its conscience and lull its mind.' The book was, naturally, confiscated and eventually earned the translator a prison term.
It was in Tkachev's lodging that the hot-heads held their meetings. An informal committee seems to have been set up for the purpose of organizing, enlarging, and radicalizing the student movement. The group elaborated an ambitious 'Programme of Revolutionary Action.' Calling for a political upheaval as a preliminary to the social revolution, it envisaged a swift and vigorous propaganda campaign winning over the intellectual elite, the urban poor and the peasant masses -- all within the space of a year. The climatic event was scheduled for the spring of 1870. Until 19 February of that year, that is, the ninth anniversary of the Emancipation, the ex-serfs were legally bound to hold the parcels allotted to them by agreement with the landlords. After that date they had the option of either continuing in the state of temporary obligation to their former masters, or terminating all connexion with them by restoring their allotments to the owners. Thus, in the spring of that year, millions of peasants would have to face the problems of their relations with the manor-lords, and it was thought that, what with the anticipated worsening of the peasants' lot, the result would be many local clashes which might lead to a general uprising.
When the institutions of higher learning reopened in January, 1869, after the Christmas vacation, the police broke up some of the student meetings and took down the names of the participants. Some arrests were made. The academic air became dangerously charged. A spark could set off an explosion. It occurred in March, when a student of the Military Medical Academy was expelled for a breach of discipline. In defiance of regulations, stormy meetings were held, at which his fellows demanded his reinstatement. It was refused. On the 14th of the month a number of students were arrested, and the Academy was closed until further notice. Then the disturbances spread to the Technological Institute and the University. The students broke up lectures and held meetings in the lecture-halls. On the 21st, five students were expelled from the University. On that very day there appeared a printed leaflet setting forth the students' demands and urging the public to come to their support. 'Our protest,' the appeal concluded, 'is firm and unanimous, and we are ready to perish in exile and dungeon rather than suffocate and cripple ourselves morally in our academies and universities.' While the leaflet failed to elicit any response from the public, it did arouse the police, for here, after a lapse of five or six years, underground literature of domestic origin was making its reappearance.
The author of the sheet was Tkachev. It was run off secretly on a press owned by the young woman with whom he was living and who eventually became his wife. She was the illegitimate daughter of an army captain, and had some modest means. One of the first women to embrace the revolutionary faith, she conceived the idea of opening a printing shop that could turn out clandestine literature. As a minor, she could not dispose of her capital unless she became a married woman. Tkachev either could not or would not marry her at this time. She decided to contract a fictitious union, and Tkachev took her to Moscow to find her a nominal husband. An accommodating party was discovered in the person of a radical-minded guard in a detention house, but he was too young, and the priest refused to perform the ceremony. The girl then abandoned her matrimonial project and bought a small printing establishment with borrowed money. Here was a case to illustrate Count Shuvalov's contention that nihilists of the female sex were 'as harmful politically as they were socially.'
The appearance of the leaflet led to Tkachev's incarceration. After serving a prison term, he was deported to a provincial town, from which he escaped abroad at the end of 1873. The arrests of the early months of 1869 wiped out the group that centred around Tkachev, as well as the Smorgon Academy. The student movement spread to Moscow. More expulsions, arrests, and deportations followed. Hundreds of young people, many of them quite innocent, found themselves in the dragnet of the police.
Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar7.html
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Road to Revolution
Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.
Chapter 8
Force and Fraud
The meetings in Tkachev's lodging had been attended by a friend of the host, Sergey Nechayev, a non-matriculated student. The youth kept in the background and spoke little, but always to the point. His tone was ironic and cutting. He advocated action: open protest, street demonstrations, resistance to force. And he had no patience with democratic procedure.
As has been seen, in January 1869 the police stepped into the picture. They obtained a relatively large number of names of the bolder youths. It happened in this wise. After the Christmas vacation an attempt had been made, at Nechayev's suggestion, to collect the signatures of students who were ready to back a written demand on the authorities, a daring step indeed. The enterprise came to nothing, but the paper with ninety-seven signatures, which had been in Nechayev's hands, found its way into the files of the secret service. It has been conjectured that it was Nechayev himself who turned the list over to the authorities in order to compromise the signers, thus swelling the ranks of potential soldiers of the revolution.
He seems to have been summoned by the police for questioning or even detained for a short while. Be that as it may, he decided to withdraw from the scene. He made his exit in a characteristic manner.
At the end of January he vanished from the capital. Shortly afterwards a girl of his acquaintance, Vera Zasulich, received a communication from a stranger to the effect that just after a police coach carrying a prisoner had passed him by, he had found on the pavement a note, which he enclosed. The note, in Nechayev's hand, informed his friends that he had been arrested and was being taken to prison. The inquiries made by his sister were futile: the police knew of no such person under arrest. Then the rumour spread that he had escaped from the Fortress of Peter and Paul -- an unprecedented feat. During the weeks that followed it was whispered that he had been seen in Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, that he had been arrested again and broken jail a second time.
These arrests and escapes he had fabricated out of whole cloth in a deliberate effort to build himself up as a hero and a martyr in the eyes of his comrades. He impressed them all the more easily because of his background. He belonged neither to the gentry nor the middle class, but wore the halo of a child of the people. A native of the town of Ivanovo, the Russian Manchester, he was the son of a seamstress and a sign painter. In his teens Sergey worked as an office boy and also helped with sign painting. At the same time he was acquiring an education by dint of dogged tenacity and determination. Before he was twenty he became a grade teacher in a Petersburg parish school, where he taught religion, among other subjects. In the autumn of 1868 at the age of twenty-one he entered the university, a young man with the look of a peasant lad somewhat polished by city life. A voracious reader, he pored over many volumes, including the writings of the native radicals and -- 'the works of the latest American historians.' He is said to have known, at second hand, Buonarotti's description of Babeuf's 'conspiracy for equality,' the first attempt to set up a communist dictatorship. The book made a profound impression on the students who gathered in Nechayev's room.
Early in March Nechayev went abroad. This move, at least, was no invention. His destination, when he crossed the frontier, was Geneva. The most famous of the Russian expatriates, who had found a haven in that city, was no longer there. Herzen had left Switzerland soon after The Bell ceased publication. That fighting review did not long survive Sovremennik and Russkoe Slovo. With the issue of 1 July, 1867, which marked the paper's tenth anniversary, it was suspended. It failed to reappear. An effort to continue it as a French language publication was also unsuccessful, and so was the attempt to revive, after a lapse of six years, The Polar Star.
But when Nechayev arrived in Geneva, another emigre who was beginning to enjoy great prestige at home was living there: Bakunin. Before long the two met. The veteran rebel was fascinated by this 'young savage,' as he called Nechayev. Here was a man, he believed, through whom he could make his ideas felt at home. He saw in this 'tiger cub' a true representative of the new Russian youth, which he described about this time as the most revolutionary in the world, charming young fanatics, believers without a God and heroes without phrases, who knew neither doubts nor fears. Once more Bakunin found himself up to his neck in Russian events.
In a speech at the second congress of the League of Peace and Freedom, which had taken place the previous autumn at Berne and given him his first opportunity to proclaim his anarchist views in public, Bakunin declared that the people had lost their faith in the Czar, and that there was an army of forty or fifty thousand revolutionaries in Russia ready to turn against the State. He rather fancied the idea of assuming the generalship of this army. Shortly after this meeting with Nechayev he wrote: 'Two years will pass, one year, perhaps several months . . . and we shall have a revolution [in Russia] that will undoubtedly surpass all the revolutions seen hitherto.' It will be a social revolution 'such as the imagination of the West, which has been moderated by civilization, scarcely dares to picture.' Nechayev must have considerably strengthened Bakunin's belief in the imminence of this event. The young man spoke of himself as a representative of a powerful revolutionary body at home, with connexions in the army and ramifications everywhere, though he could produce nothing more tangible to support his claims than the Programme of Revolutionary Action mentioned above.
Bakunin repaid him in the same coin. He was at this time at the head of two organizations: the International Brotherhood, noted earlier, and the less exclusive but equally secret International Alliance, which had infiltrated the International Workingmen's Association for the purpose of combating 'the authoritarian communists' led by Marx. Yet he did not initiate his new friend into either of these bodies, which had a precarious yet real enough existence. Instead, he enrolled him in a society which was wholly the figment of his imagination. Under date of 12 May, 1869, he issued to Nechayev the following credentials: 'The bearer is one of the trusted representatives of the Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance. (No. 2771. (Signed) Michael Bakunin.' In the seal the parent organization is named, more modestly, Alliance Revolutionnaire Europeenne.
Whether or not Nechayev believed in the reality of this organization, he used the document to further his own ends. Bakunin took one more step to add to the young man's prestige. Ogarev had written a poem in memory of a dead friend of his childhood, in which that student is pictured as a fighter for the people, a martyr who perished in a 'snow-bound Siberian prison.' Bakunin persuaded the poet to dedicate the piece to 'his young friend Nechayev.' With this dedication the poem was printed and circulated in Russia (a stanza from it is reproduced in Dostoevsky's novel, The Possessed).
Each sought to use the other as his tool, and to achieve his ends neither scrupled to resort to fraud. A mere boy, a nobody, Nechayev nevertheless dominated his curious partnership with the celebrated firebrand. The slight young man exercised a strange ascendancy over the shaggy giant. There is a reliable story that Bakunin gave Nechayev a written pledge to the effect that he would obey him in all things as the representative of the Russian Revolutionary Committee (an alias of the Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance), and that in token of his complete submission he signed himself: Matryona (a woman's name).
While Herzen would have nothing to do with the two plotters, they found an ally in Ogarev. No attempt was made, however, to recruit the other expatriates. Nechayev's eyes were on Russia, and his efforts were directed toward producing literature for home consumption. Even before he formed an alliance with Bakunin he had issued an appeal to Petersburg students. Signed 'Your Nechayev,' it was in the nature of a personal message, opening with a reference to the author's lucky escape from 'the frozen walls' of the Fortress of Peter and Paul. He urged the comrades he had left behind to intensify their fight, to offer armed resistance, if need be, remembering that they had allies in the toilers and that there was no struggle without sacrifice. They must invite to their meetings representatives of all the discontented elements, except, of course, the liberals. They must think in terms not of the problem of youth but of the larger problem of Russia, for all questions come down to one: the necessity for renewing Russian life through a revolution.
About ten other leaflets were run off a Geneva press. One of them, which called for the annihilation of the entire social order, ended with a paean to the highwayman, 'the sole real revolutionary in Russia.' An appeal to the peasants, in verse, invited them to get ready stout nooses for the thin necks of the gentry, and urged them to burn the cities and plough up their sites. 'We must devote ourselves wholly to destruction, constant, ceaseless, relentless, until there is nothing left of existing institutions.' Thus runs a passage in the pamphlet entitled The Principles of Revolution. This sanctions every weapon in the revolutionary struggle: 'poison, the knife, the noose, and the like.' The emigres are bidden in accents of authority to return to Russia and join the ranks of the activists. An exception is made for those who had established themselves as workers for the European revolution. The reference is obviously to Bakunin.
Furthermore, a little review, Narodnaya rasprava (The People's Vengeance) was started in the name of the Russian Revolutionary Committee. The first issue anathematized science and civilization as instruments for exploiting the masses, and declared: 'We prize thought only in so far as it can serve the great cause of radical and ubiquitous destruction.' It listed the several groups of public enemies who never would be missed. Venal journalists should be silenced in one way or another, perhaps by cutting out their tongues. The Czar himself was to be spared 'for a painful and solemn execution before the eyes of the liberated masses.' Nevertheless, Karakozov's act was applauded as 'the beginning of our sacred cause,' a prologue to the great drama.
II
Much of the propaganda literature produced in Geneva found its way into Russia through the mails. Between the end of March and the beginning of August, 1869, 560 packages of leaflets addressed to 387 persons were seized at the Petersburg post office alone. Nechayev's purpose seems to have been to compromise the addressees rather than to convert them. It is not clear how these activities were financed. Not before July did the promoters of the Russian Revolutionary Committee come in for a windfall in the form of four hundred pounds. This sum represented half of the Bakhmetev fund. Herzen had turned the money over to Bakunin and Ogarev, yielding to the latter's importunities.
He did this with great reluctance and against his better judgment. Nechayev's personality was repugnant to him, and the leaflets brought out in the name of the Russian Revolutionary Committee horrified him. He could derive some comfort from the fact that not all the emigres were haunted by adolescent dreams of conspiracies and bloody upheavals. A group of them had taken over The People's Cause, the journal launched under Bakunin's aegis, and used its pages to excoriate the Russian Revolutionary Committee and all its works. An implicit critique of the Committee's programme is to be found in a series of essays Herzen wrote during the year 1869 in the form of open letters addressed to 'An Old Comrade,' that is, to Bakunin.
In these pages Herzen unequivocally repudiated the revolutionary way of achieving a socialist economy. He did not shrink from calling himself a gradualist, and indeed maintained that the old order held things that were fine and beautiful. Not only human beings should be pitied, he wrote, but also objects, products of men's toil, which were bound to perish in the cataclysm. What was this outcry against books and learning, this clamour for universal destruction, but demagogy of the most ferocious and dangerous kind? It could only unleash the low passions. The strength of fighters for freedom had always lain in their being pure of heart. As for the State, eventually it must pass away, but to abolish it before the people were ripe for a stateless existence was to invite disaster. Lassalle had been right in asking: why destroy a mill which could grind our flour? Not until the foundations of bourgeois society had been undermined from within, Herzen argued, would violence avail against it. Certainly, force could not break the nexus between private property and liberty which existed in the mind of the European. There must be no more civilizing by the knout and liberating by the guillotine. The workers' league, the future 'free parliament of the fourth estate' -- an allusion to the International -- this was the first step toward the coming economic order. The need of the age, he insisted, was not soldiers and sappers, but apostles. The eyes of the enemies must not be put out, but opened, so that they might see and be saved. While his addressee was rushing on, moved by the mistaken belief that the passion for destruction was a creative passion and deferring to the future alone, he, Herzen, was seeking to gauge the people's normal speed so as to keep in step with them.
These letters, which were not published during Herzen's lifetime, were in a sense his last will and testament. He must have known that his message of pity and patience, his appeal to reason and tolerance were likely to fall on deaf ears. The future belonged to the expedient of force. A man of a truly seminal mind, he combined an empirical habit of thought with a passionate, mercurial temperament, and consistency was not his hobgoblin. At heart he was a romantic, drawn to what is spontaneous, generous, grand. Ambivalence marked some of his attitudes and opinions. He did indulge in the rhetoric of revolutionary violence, but certainly in his later years his sympathies were not with Babeuf, the surgeon, but with Robert Owen, the accoucheur.
On one occasion he observed that Russia, unlike the West, would have Socialism before it had liberty. This must be accounted a temporary aberration. A libertarian by instinct, he appreciated that freedom is antecedent to and prerequisite for the blessings promised by the new order. 'A Socialism that would want to do without political liberty and equality before the law,' he wrote toward the end of his life, 'would quickly degenerate into authoritarian Communism.' His Socialism was a strategy for assuring the welfare of the individual here and now, and his concern was perhaps more with man's moral than with his physical well-being. 'The subjection of the person to society, nation, mankind, idea,' he wrote, 'is a continuation of human sacrifice.' While he abominated a government over which the governed have no control, he also perceived the dangers of popular sovereignty. It was part of his credo that the Slavs had an instinctive aversion from the centralized State. He wanted to restrict its authority and he looked forward to its disappearance. Since he rejected State control of national economy as 'industrial despotism,' the question of how to preserve personal freedom under collectivism did not present itself to him in all its acuteness. Yet on occasion he did speak of it as the excruciating problem of the age. Further, he had an inkling that the socialist order was not immune to the curse of the vulgarity that he so loathed in the bourgeois world, and to the danger of tyranny, including the doctrinaire variety, which he hated heart and soul. It was fitting that his concluding word should have been an affirmation of that humaneness which, he had said early in his career, was his banner.
The final 'Letter to an Old Comrade' was penned in the autumn of the year. That winter his eldest daughter, Natalie, the only one of his children with whom he felt a spiritual kinship, was struck down by a mental illness, which he mistakenly believed incurable. In January 1870 he died, a lonely and broken man. Ogarev, inactive and indeed extremely decrepit, survived him by seven years.
Soviet scholarship has been at pains to stress Herzen's aspersions of political democracy, his detestation of the bourgeosie, his adherence to philosophical materialism, yet on the whole its attitude toward him has been lukewarm. Lenin had it that there wasn't 'a grain of Socialism' in Herzen's 'Russian Socialism,' but allowed that the man 'has played a great role in the preparation of the Russian revolution.' It was a very different revolution from the one captained by Lenin that Herzen had hoped he was helping to prepare.
III
To return to Nechayev, early in September, 1869, he was back in Russia. He was out to destroy the Empire and found a new social order on its ruins almost single-handed, with no ammunition save a few leaflets in his luggage. To those who had heard of him at all he had now become a semi-legendary figure. And he carried credentials from Bakunin himself. He also brought from Geneva a super-secret opuscule printed in cipher, apparently a product of Bakunin's pen. It was in the nature of a preamble to the statutes of a most exacting underground society. The document is called, inappropriately, since it is not in the form of questions and answers, The Catechism of the Revolutionary. Its twenty-six paragraphs, divided into four sections, echo some of the ideas that were current in the Ishutin group. The first paragraph opens thus: 'The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments of his own, no property, not even a name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed by one sole, exclusive interest, one thought, one passion: revolution. He must train himself to stand torture and to be ready to die every day. The laws, the conventions, the moral code of civilized society, have no meaning for him. He lives in it the sooner and the more surely to destroy this vile order. To him, whatever promotes the triumph of the revolution is moral, whatever hinders it is immoral, criminal.' The sentiments of gratitude, friendship, love, honour itself must be sacrificed to 'the cold passion for the revolutionary cause.' It is a passion that must go hand in hand with callous calculation. When the question arises as to whether the life of a comrade should be saved, considerations of economy alone must prevail.
The Catechism divides 'all this foul society,' i.e., the upper and middle classes, into several categories. One, consisting of influential and intelligent notables, is sentenced to immediate systematic extermination. The lives of the members of another category are to be temporarily spared, so that their bestial conduct may drive the people to rebellion. A third -- highly-stationed, wealthy, stupid creatures -- are to be exploited by blackmail and other means. The ranks of the liberals are to be infiltrated with a view to compromising them and using them ruthlessly. Radical phraseurs should be constantly urged on and placed in situations which will ruin most of them and turn a few into revolutionaries. Women are singled out for special attention. Those who have wholeheartedly accepted 'our programme' are 'our most precious treasure.'
The organization, the Catechism declares, has no other objective than the liberation and happiness of the people, that is, the common labourers. And since this cannot be achieved save through a crushing popular revolt, it pledges itself to spread by every means the miseries and evils that are bound to put an end to the people's patience and bring about a general uprising. This upheaval, unlike the revolutions in the West, will completely wipe out the political and social order. What will take its place? The answer is left to the future. 'Our business is passionate, complete, ubiquitous, ruthless destruction.' To this end an alliance with the highwaymen, the sole true revolutionaries in Russia, is essential. 'It is our task,' the Catechism concludes, 'to consolidate the brigands, who for centuries have been the only active opponents of the social order, into an invincible, all-destructive force.'
Nechayev was the first Russian professional revolutionary, a man who gave to the cause not a spare evening but the whole of his life. His task was cut out for him: to bring into being the Russian Revolutionary Committee, which had two aliases but existed only on paper. It was to be a hierarchical network of cells, all doing the will of an omnipotent centre shrouded in the strictest secrecy. The individual member was not permitted to know more than was necessary for him or her to execute the particular task assigned. As in the Programme of Revolutionary Action mentioned in the preceding chapter, the uprising was scheduled for the ninth anniversary of the Emancipation. The seal of the society, with an axe as its symbol, read: 'The Committee of the People's Vengeance, 19 February, 1870.'
Identifying the cause with his own person -- la revolution c'est moi -- Nechayev used others as his working capital. He could twist everyone round his finger. His ascetic habits -- he lived on bread and milk, and slept on bare boards, at least while staying at the homes of his followers -- could not but make an impression. Those he did not fascinate he ruled by fear. His energy was unlimited, his vigilance unremitting, and he acted with lightning-like rapidity. Theorizing was not to his taste, and he was suspicious of it. He demanded complete and unquestioning obedience from his comrades. He arrogated to himself the right to destroy those who did not see eye to eye with him. He would not spare even those for whom he would lay down his life. 'To love the masses,' he told a comrade, 'is to expose them to grape-shot.'
Nechayev could make but little headway in Petersburg. In Moscow he was more successful. Here he chose the Agricultural Academy as his main field of activity. The discipline there was lax, and the students enjoyed extraordinary liberties. He persuaded the members of a clandestine study circle that existed in the college to join the revolutionary organization he said he represented. A founders' cell was set up, and the members, in their turn, formed subsidiary units. In all, perhaps as many as eighty men and women were enrolled.
A skilful and resourceful proselytizer, he appealed to the idealism of some and to the cowardice of others. He had an impressive way of telling prospective members that the time had come to stop idle talk and put their shoulders to a man-sized task. Everyone must begin in the ranks, he insisted, must learn to take orders. He set the members spying on each other, and before long they felt that they were under the eye of a severe, if invisible, authority. He would suddenly appear at meetings with sealed orders from the Central Committee. To no one would he reveal the composition of this committee, of which he was in fact the sole member. Indeed, he said very little about the objectives and the tactics of the society, and showed the Catechism to the fewest. He insinuated, however, that the converts were allying themselves with a powerful international organization.
Nechayev deceived his fellow conspirators at home and he intended to go on deceiving his partners abroad. He assumed various parts and had his fellow conspirators also change their roles. He paraded one youth before the uninitiated now as a member of the mysterious Central Committee, now as a rank-and-file activist with a message from forty thousand Tula gunsmiths, whom no power on earth could keep from rising. He told the Muscovites that there was a strong organization in Petersburg, and to the few Petersburg members he spoke of the mighty Moscow body. At least one member of a cell adopted this method of deception on his own part and gained a considerable reputation with his comrades by submitting fraudulent reports of his activities. In order to fill the cash-box, money was collected ostensibly for the relief of expelled students. At the height of its career the society is said to have had no more than three hundred roubles on hand. In October a large cheque was obtained from a sympathizer by blackmail, but it was never cashed.
The General Rules of the Organization, a document which, unlike the Catechism, was passed around in manuscript rather freely, called for establishing relations with 'the so-called criminal section of the society.' One of the first converts was an unemployed middle-aged government clerk who drank heavily. This Pryzhov was also a gifted and passionate student of Russian history and folkways, with several studies, including a monograph on pot-houses, to his credit. He was assigned the task of propagandizing the porters, drivers, bakers, and letter-carriers. As he was a familiar figure in the slums and low haunts of Moscow and its suburbs, it was through him that Nechayev tried to get a foothold in the underworld. Pryzhov put a fellow conspirator in touch with some prostitutes and thugs, but the man hastily withdrew when he was warned by a woman to whom he had given a meal that his prospective proselytes were planning to rob him. Some preparations seem to have been made to carry propaganda into the provinces.
The members of the cell were known by number. No. 2 of the founders' cell was a certain Ivanov, a student in the Agricultural Academy. A strong-minded youth, who wielded a considerable influence in his circle, he allowed himself to contradict Nechayev, disobey his orders and question his authority. He had an infuriating way of teasing the man, and he went to the length of expressing doubts as to the existence of the august Central Committee. He seems to have guessed the truth about its composition. It appears that he even spoke of seceding from the organization and forming another based on more democratic principles.
Ivanov's revolt, Nechayev felt, was a grave threat to his own authority and so to the cause. Perhaps he believed that the youth was capable of betraying them all to the police. He was about to leave for Petersburg, but postponed his departure and set about persuading Ivanov's comrades that it was necessary to kill him. Possibly he wished to test them and to seal with blood the bond that united them.
His task not was a difficult one. He was dealing with people who, once they accepted a principle, adhered to its consequences no matter how painful these were, or how much at variance with their instincts. It had previously been decided that the organization had the moral right to take the life of any of its members. Moreover, these men were in an exalted state of mind, ready to immolate themselves and so, of course, their comrades. On 21 November, 1869, Nechayev, aided by three members of Ivanov's cell, brutally murdered the youth in a grotto situated in a park on the Academy's grounds and threw the body into a hole in the ice of a nearby pond.
For years the cry to kill the people's enemies had repeatedly been raised by the handful of would-be liberators. The only victim turned out to be one of their own small number who had aroused the leader's hostility.
Some hours after the assassination Nechayev was showing several people the revolver from which he had fired a bullet into Ivanov's brain when the body was already lifeless. It went off, almost killing Pryzhov, one of those who had to be dragooned into participating in the murder. Nechayev blithely remarked that if Pryzhov had been killed, they could have pinned the murder on him. The incident is related in the man's reminiscences with the implication that the shot may not have been accidental. The suspicion was shared by another participant in the murder. Shortly thereafter Nechayev left for Petersburg, apparently to plan for the assassination of the Czar. He believed that forty or fifty resolute men could break into the Winter Palace and exterminate the Emperor and all his kin.
The discovery of Ivanov's body a few days after the murder, and a search accidentally made about the same time in the flat of one of the murderers, led to the arrest of hundreds of people. The organization was crushed. Needless to say, the spring of 1870 was uneventful. The precautionary measures taken by the authorities were unnecessary. There was not a sign of the heralded revolt.
IV
The chief culprit was not among the prisoners. As soon as the arrests started, Nechayev escaped abroad. Preceded by contradictory rumours, he turned up at Geneva in January, 1870. There had been no correspondence between him and Bakunin during his stay in Russia, but Ogarev wrote to him at least once. In this letter 'from grandfather to grandson' the expatriate asserted that the eastern section of the country was ripe for rebellion and that the best strategy would be to have two columns march on Moscow: one, from the Urals, containing a Bashkir contingent, the other, with Kirghiz insurgents, from the Don. Siberia and the Caucasus, he was certain, would always prove faithful allies. And he warned his 'grandson' to be sure to tear up rails in order to interfere with the movement of loyalist troops, and meanwhile to organize the rear, setting up communes and introducing exchange tokens so as to break up the power of money. The years had not subtracted from Ogarev's revolutionary zeal or added to his meagre stock of common sense.
When Bakunin heard of the young man's arrival, he jumped with joy so violently that, as he wrote to Ogarev, 'he nearly broke the ceiling with his aged head.' He was then living at Locarno, and Nechayev went to see him there. The visitor behaved with the self-assurance of the leader of a powerful organization and treated his old master rather cavalierly. Yet the relations between the two remained close. Bakunin did not leave a stone unturned to assure his friend's safety: the Russian authorities having demanded Nechayev's extradition, the Swiss police were after him. Now that Herzen was dead, Ogarev was the sole trustee for the Bakhmetev fund, and Bakunin had no difficulty in persuading him to hand over part, if not all, of the money to Nechayev, who received it in the name of the non-existent Central Committee. To a limited extent he was also helped by Natalie Herzen, who had recovered from her mental breakdown. Nechayev may have become interested in her because of the small fortune she had inherited. He contemplated augmenting his funds further by organizing a band of robbers to despoil tourists. It is said that he planned to enrol in this band the son of the English prostitute who was Ogarev's mistress.
In these early months of his second stay in Switzerland he was as active an ever. He issued appeals to burghers, merchants, women, the rural clergy, all in the name of the Committee and of another equally mythical body. In a proclamation addressed to 'Russian students' he told them that many of his comrades had fallen prey to 'bloody reaction,' though fate had again spared him. 'Apparently I am destined to outlive this vile Government,' he wrote, and he summoned them to action. There had been talk in the Ishutin circle of getting out a provocative leaflet purporting to come from an aristocratic source and suggesting the restoration of serfdom. Nechayev now issued a manifesto addressed 'To the Highborn Russian Nobility,' which listed the grievances of the gentry and urged it to overthrow the degenerate imperial power in knightly combat.
Nechayev also put out the second, and last, number of The People's Vengeance, dating it: Winter, 1870. It announced that in October of the previous year Nechayev had been strangled without a trial at the personal order of Mezentzev, head of the Third Division. He had been caught, the statement added, as a result of information lodged with the authorities by a Petersburg liberal. It is difficult to see what purpose was to be achieved by this clumsy stratagem, which directly contradicted Nechayev's appeal to the students. Least of all could it deceive the police.
The opening article, which brought the news of Nechayev's death, contained a veiled reference to the murder of Ivanov and a vague attempt to justify it by observing: 'the austere logic of the true workers for the cause cannot stop at any measure that leads to success.' The second article began by asserting that it was no longer possible for people to travel along the middle of the road. Well-meaning liberals must choose between joining our ranks or becoming police spies. The glorious time of popular self-liberation was approaching, and all honest people should share the sweet labour of preparing for the Great Day. But the workers for the cause were subject to harsh discipline. Anyone violating the rules or in any way deviating from them due to doubt of their wisdom and justice was to be expelled, and 'expulsion means elimination from the list of the living.' The last sentence was plainly another apology for Ivanov's assassination.
In contravention of the principle enunciated in the Catechism, the third, and last, contribution to the journal describes 'the main foundations of the future social order.' Karl Marx called it 'an excellent example of barracks Communism.' All the means of subsistence are in the hands of 'our Committee,' and under it are bureaus having charge of production, consumption, education. Physical labour is obligatory for all, including mothers, even if they choose to care for their children themselves, instead of entrusting them to communal nurseries. Everyone must join a workers' association, or lose the right of admission to a communal restaurant and communal dormitory. 'He, or she, has only one choice: work or die.' No contracts between persons or groups are recognized; the relations between the sexes are entirely free. Under these circumstances all ambition and pretence will vanish; everyone will seek to produce as much as possible for society and will himself consume as little as possible. For further details of a theoretical nature on the subject under discussion the reader is referred to the Communist Manifesto. The previous year the first Russian translation of it, made by Bakunin, was issued in Geneva from the printing establishment which had succeeded Herzen's Free Russian Press.
Nechayev's most ambitious literary enterprise, an attempt, with Ogarev's blessing, to revive the defunct Bell, is typical of his protean disguises. The six weekly issues which he succeeded in bringing out in April and May, 1870, preached a united front against the monarchy and affected a moderate tone completely at variance with the extremism of the other writings he had sponsored. He could even impersonate a liberal when he chose.
One looks in vain for Bakunin's influence in the revived Bell. Some of its pages breathe an authoritarian spirit which is incompatible with anarchism. His only contribution to the issues was a letter to the editor criticizing the policy of the paper. Obviously a rift had occurred between the two men. The disagreement was not entirely on ideological grounds. It appears that Nechayev either ignored or refused to meet the financial demands made on him by Bakunin. They were all the more legitimate since, in order to devote his time wholly to the cause, he had, at Nechayev's instance, given up his sole source of income, a translation of Marx's Capital, ordered by a Russian publisher. He had taken a sizable advance, but this little difficulty was disposed of by Nechayev, who wrote a threatening letter to the publisher demanding that he relinquish all claims on the translator. Bakunin may also have been influenced by an expose of Nechayev as a charlatan made by a former associate who had escaped from Russia. Finally, he may have been exasperated by Nechayev's unscrupulousness.
The relations between the two came to a violent end in July, just before Nechayev left for London. If Bakunin's words are to be credited, it was indeed he who forced Nechayev to leave Switzerland. But the young man must have had reasons of his own for getting out of Geneva: what with the attention of the police and the arrival from Russia of people who knew too much about him, the place was becoming uncomfortable. Before bidding it farewell, he stole a number of compromising papers belonging to Bakunin, Ogarev, Natalie Herzen, and others. They would come in handy if he wished to blackmail these erstwhile comrades. Confronted by his victims, Nechayev declared imperturbably: 'Yes, that is our system. We regard as enemies and are obliged to deceive and compromise all those who are not wholly with us.' He did not restore the papers.
Bakunin now turned violently against Nechayev. He dispatched warning letters to friends and associates to whom he had highly recommended the tiger cub. He characterized him as a dangerous fanatic, guided by the precept: 'For the body only violence; for the mind, lies,' and apt to ruin all who came in touch with him. Except for a few men at the top, all comrades were to him meat for conspiracies, whom it was permissible, nay compulsory, to compromise, deceive, rob, even murder. 'If you introduce him to a friend,' Bakunin wrote, 'he will immediately proceed to sow dissension, scandal, and intrigue between you and your friend and make you quarrel. If your friend has a wife or a daughter, he will try to seduce her, and get her with child, in order to snatch her from the power of conventional morality and plunge her despite herself into revolutionary protest against society.' Eventually the disclosures at the trial of the Nechayev group so outraged Bakunin that he advised one of the man's former comrades to make known his identifying marks, including the scars on his fingers where they had been bitten by Ivanov during the struggle preceding the murder.
Arrived in London, Nechayev started another review, Obshchina. The first, and only, issue carried a letter from him to Bakunin and Ogarev demanding that they deliver to him the remainder of the Bakhmetev fund which had remained in Ogarev's hands. The journal preached popular revolution, and incidentally dismissed Herzen's radicalism as a frail hothouse plant.
Before long Nechayev recrossed the Channel. He was in Paris during the siege, but not during the Commune, having returned to Switzerland in March, 1871. He tried to join a group of Russian followers of Bakunin in Zurich. He proposed to start a journal with the interest on the Bakhmetev fund, which, he claimed, the Herzen family still owed him. Should the money not be forthcoming, he would bring into play the compromising papers he had in his possession. The Zurich group could not stomach such methods. Besides, Bakunin resolutely opposed any collaboration with the man. Nechayev then allied himself with a tiny circle of Russian 'Jacobins' there. He eked out an existence by working as a sign painter.
Most of the emigres shunned him. At home his former comrades were bitter against him. One of them offered to act as a decoy to secure his arrest abroad; another undertook to assassinate him, promising to return to prison after the deed was accomplished. He was betrayed, however, by an outsider, a sign painter like himself, who was at once the secretary of a Polish revolutionary organization and an agent of the Russian police, Nechayev was arrested in August, 1872, and subsequently turned over to the Russian authorities.
He was tried as a common criminal. In protest he stubbornly refused to answer questions or testify. In certain radical circles it was rumoured that he was an agent provocateur. Indeed, a former comrade of his wrote a pamphlet to prove it. This remained unpublished, however, perhaps because the twenty years of hard labour to which Nechayev was sentenced invalidated the author's thesis.
When the trial was over, Nechayev sent a communication to the head of the secret service which, surprisingly enough, breathes a humane and liberal spirit. 'I am a child of the people,' he wrote. 'My first and foremost goal is the happiness, the welfare of the masses.' He did not hail the impending political overturn. 'Such cataclysms,' he observed, 'while they hit the upper classes, are a heavy burden on the common people.' Therefore he urged the authorities to put an end to administrative arbitrariness and brutality, for they sowed the seeds of future revolutionary terror and sharpened the blade that would descend on the government's neck. Alone the introduction of a representative regime could avert a catastrophe. 'I am going to Siberia,' he concluded, 'with the firm conviction that soon millions of voices will repeat the cry: "Long live the Zemsky Sobor!"'
Nechayev did not go to Siberia. According to regulations, he had to hear the verdict announced while he was tied to a pillory in a public square for ten minutes. On his way to the square he kept calling out: 'Down with the Czar! He drinks our blood!' When he stepped onto the scaffold, he cried out that on that very spot there would soon be erected the guillotine which would cut off the heads of those who had brought him there. Tied to the pillory, he shouted: 'Down with the Czar! Long live freedom! Long live the free Russian people!' As a result, the Emperor changed the court sentence to solitary incarceration for life in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.
V
Nechayev entered the fortress prison on 28 January, 1873. He was confined to the Alexis Ravelin, which had housed Decembrists and Petrashevists. At this time the entire population of the dreaded prison included one more inmate, who was demented. [This was Mikhail Beideman, who, on receiving his officer's commission, deserted, and for a while worked at Herzen's press in London. Arrested on his return to Russia in 1861, he told the police that his intention was to assassinate the Czar and arouse the peasants by means of a fake imperial manifesto. He was kept in the Ravelin for twenty years without a trial and died in an insane asylum.] The two were guarded by some sixty officers and men. So strict was the isolation in which Nechayev was kept that his identity was unknown even to his jailers, and in official correspondence he was referred to as 'a certain prisoner' or by the number of his cell. Nevertheless, his fare was tolerable, and he was supplied with Russian and French books of his choice, some of them specially purchased for him, and he was allowed to occupy himself with literary labours. He gave his keepers no trouble, except on one occasion when General Potapov, head of the Third Division, visited him and threatened to have him flogged as a common criminal. He slapped the General's face, apparently with impunity. [The General was known for his abhorrence of the printed word. The story goes that whenever he travelled in Germany he made a point of stopping in Mainz to stick out his tongue at the statue of Gutenberg.] In 1875 the authorities requested Nechayev to set forth his views, perhaps in the hope of discovering that he had undergone a change of heart. He composed a statement in which he elaborated the thesis that absolutism had seen its day and that only a liberal constitutional regime was likely to mitigate the violence of the impending revolution. He continued to believe in revolution as others believe in God.
On the third anniversary of his incarceration he petitioned the Emperor to have his case reviewed, since he was, he insisted, the victim of a miscarriage of justice. As a result, he lost the privilege of having writing materials, and all his manuscripts were taken away from him. He grew violent and was put in chains, remaining handcuffed for two years. He was able to keep his mental balance, perhaps because he continued to get the books he wanted.
His writings were destroyed and all that is known about them is what may be gathered from an official review of them. They included prison impressions, political essays, and sketches for two novels, one dealing with the Paris Commune, the other with Russian student circles. According to the reviewer, the fictional attempts revealed complete absence of moral sentiment and 'a kind of self-indulgence in the contemplation of the strength of the author's hatred of the wealthy.' Men belonging to the upper classes, even if they worked for the revolution, were depicted as villains, and upper class women as 'monsters of depravity.' The era of peaceful development would not begin, these writings suggested, until all those above the masses were destroyed.
Nechayev had been in prison half a dozen years when an important change occurred in his situation. Taking advantage of the incredibly lax discipline that prevailed in what passed for the Empire's most carefully guarded place of confinement, he succeeded in making friends with some of his keepers. He knew how to overawe these simple-minded peasants in uniform. He told them that he was suffering because he had stood up for the common people, he hinted that he was a very important personage and that the Heir was on his side. He harangued, cajoled, threatened, and managed to secure the men's sincere devotion. They called him admiringly their 'eagle' and, in defiance of strict regulations, engaged in talk with him. They kept him abreast of what was going on in the fortress, ran errands for him, and even supplied him with newspapers and writing materials. Astonishing as it is, underground literature circulated freely within the walls of the Ravelin. With the aid of the guards, this man, supposedly buried alive, was able to communicate with his fellow prisoners, of whom there were now two, and with the outside world.
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