When I joined the circle of Tchaykóvsky, I found its members hotly
discussing the direction to be given to their activity. Some were in
favour of continuing to carry on radical and socialistic propaganda
among the educated youth; but others thought that the sole aim of this
work should be to prepare men who would be capable of arousing the
great inert labouring masses, and that their chief activity ought to
be among the peasants and workmen in the towns. In all the circles and
groups which were formed at that time by the hundred at St. Petersburg
and in the provinces the same discussions went on, and everywhere the
second programme prevailed over the first.
If our youth had merely taken to socialism in the abstract, it might
have felt satisfied with a mere declaration of socialist principles,
including as a distant aim ‘the communistic possession of the
instruments of production,’ and in the meantime it might have carried
on some sort of political agitation. Many middle-class socialist
politicians in Western Europe and America really take this course.
But our youth had been drawn to socialism in quite another way. They
were not theorisers about socialism, but had become socialists by
living no richer than the workers live, by making no distinction
between ‘mine and thine’ in their circles, and by refusing to enjoy
for their own satisfaction the riches they had inherited from their
fathers. They had done with regard to capitalism what Tolstóy advises
should now be done with regard to war--that is, that people, instead
of criticizing war and continuing to wear the military uniform, should
refuse, each one for himself, to be a soldier and to use arms. In the
same way our Russian youth, each one for himself or herself, refused
to take personal advantage of the revenues of their fathers, Such a
youth had to go to the people--and they went. Thousands and thousands
of young men and women had already left their homes, and tried now
to live in the villages and the industrial towns in all possible
capacities. This was not an organized movement: it was one of those
mass movements which occur at certain periods of sudden awakening of
human conscience. Now that small organized groups were formed, ready to
try a systematic effort for spreading ideas of freedom and revolt in
Russia, they were forcibly brought to carry on that propaganda amidst
the dark masses of peasants and workers in the towns. Various writers
have tried to explain this movement ‘to the people’ by influences from
abroad--‘foreign agitators’ is everywhere a favourite explanation.
It is certainly true that our youth listened to the mighty voice of
Bakúnin, and that the agitation of the International Workingmen’s
Association had a fascinating effect upon us. But the movement ‘V
naród’--To the people--had a far deeper origin: it began before
‘foreign agitators’ had spoken to the Russian youth, and even before
the International Association had been founded. It began already in the
groups of Karakózoff in 1866; Turguéneff saw it coming, and already in
1859 faintly indicated it. I did my best to promote that movement in
the circle of Tchaykóvsky; but I was only working with the tide, which
was infinitely more powerful than any individual efforts.
We often spoke, of course, of the necessity of a political agitation
against our absolute government. We saw already that the mass of the
peasants were being driven to unavoidable and irremediable ruin by
foolish taxation, and by the still more foolish selling off of their
cattle to cover the arrears of taxes. We, ‘visionaries,’ saw coming
that complete ruin of a whole population which by this time, alas, has
been accomplished to an appalling extent in Central Russia, and is
confessed by the government itself. We knew how, in every direction,
Russia was being plundered in a most scandalous manner. We knew, and
we learned more every day, of the lawlessness of the functionaries,
and the almost incredible bestiality of many among them. We heard
continually of friends whose houses were raided at night by the police,
who disappeared in prisons, and who--we ascertained later on--had
been transported without judgment to hamlets in some remote province
of Russia. We felt, therefore, the necessity of a political struggle
against this terrible power, which was crushing the best intellectual
forces of the nation. But we saw no possible ground, legal or
semi-legal, for such a struggle.
Our elder brothers did not want our socialistic aspirations, and we
could not part with them. Nay, even if some of us had done so, it
would have been of no avail. The young generation, as a whole, were
treated as ‘suspects,’ and the elder generation feared to have anything
to do with them. Every young man of democratic tastes, every young
woman following a course of higher education, was a suspect in the
eyes of the state police, and was denounced by Katkóff as an enemy of
the state. Cropped hair and blue spectacles worn by a girl, a Scotch
plaid worn in winter by a student, instead of an overcoat, which were
evidences of Nihilist simplicity and democracy, were denounced as
tokens of ‘political unreliability.’ If any student’s lodging came to
be frequently visited by other students, it was periodically invaded
by the state police and searched. So common were the night raids in
certain students’ lodgings that Kelnitz once said, in his mildly
humorous way, to the police officer who was searching the rooms: ‘Why
should you go through all our books, each time you come to make a
search? You might as well have a list of them, and then come once a
month to see if they are all on the shelves; and you might, from time
to time, add the titles of the new ones.’ The slightest suspicion of
political unreliability was sufficient ground upon which to take a
young man from a high school, to imprison him for several months,
and finally to send him to some remote province of the Urals--‘for
an undetermined term,’ as they used to say in their bureaucratic
slang. Even at the time when the circle of Tchaykóvsky did nothing
but distribute books, all of which had been printed with the censor’s
approval, Tchaykóvsky was twice arrested and kept some four or six
months in prison--on the second occasion at a critical time of his
career as a chemist. His researches had recently been published in the
Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences, and he had come up for his final
university examinations. He was released at last, because the police
could not discover sufficient evidence against him to warrant his
transportation to the Urals! ‘But if we arrest you once more,’ he was
told, ‘we shall send you to Siberia.’ In fact, it was a favourite dream
of Alexander II. to have, somewhere in the steppes, a special town,
guarded night and day by patrols of Cossacks, where all suspected young
people could be sent, so as to make of them a city of ten or twenty
thousand inhabitants. Only the menace which such a city might some day
offer prevented him from carrying out this truly Asiatic scheme.
* * * * *
One of our members, an officer, had belonged to a group of young men
whose ambition was to serve in the provincial _Zémstvos_ (district
and county councils). They regarded work in this direction as a high
mission, and prepared themselves for it by serious studies of the
economical conditions of Central Russia. Many young people cherished
for a time the same hopes; but all these hopes vanished at the first
contact with the actual government machinery.
Having granted institutions of a very limited form of self-government
to certain provinces of Russia, the government, immediately after
having passed that law, directed all its efforts to reduce that reform
to nothing and to deprive it of all its meaning and vitality. The
provincial ‘self-government’ had to content itself with the mere
function of state officials who would collect additional local taxes
and spend them for the local needs of the state. Every attempt of the
county councils to take the initiative in any improvement--schools,
teachers’ colleges, sanitary measures, agricultural improvements,
etc.--was met by the central government with suspicion--nay with
hatred--and denounced by the ‘Moscow Gazette’ as ‘separatism,’ as the
creation of ‘a state within the state,’ as rebellion against autocracy.
If anyone were to tell the true history, for example, of the teachers’
college of Tver, or of any similar undertaking of a Zémstvo in
those years, with all the petty persecutions, the prohibitions, the
suspensions, and what not with which the institution was harassed,
no West European, and especially no American reader, would believe
it. He would throw the book aside, saying, ‘It cannot be true; it
is too stupid to be true.’ And yet it was so. Whole groups of the
elected representatives of several Zémstvos were deprived of their
functions, ordered to leave their province and their estates, or were
simply exiled, for having dared to petition the emperor in the most
loyal manner concerning such rights as belonged to the Zémstvos by
law. ‘The elected members of the provincial councils must be simple
ministerial functionaries, and obey the Minister of the Interior:’
such was the theory of the St. Petersburg government. As to the less
prominent people--teachers, doctors, and the like, in the service
of the local councils--they were removed and exiled by the state
police in twenty-four hours, without further ceremony than an order
of the omnipotent Third Section of the imperial chancelry. No longer
ago than last year, a lady whose husband is a rich landowner and
occupies a prominent position in one of the Zémstvos, and who is
herself interested in education, invited eight schoolmasters to her
birthday party. ‘Poor men,’ she said to herself, ‘they never have
the opportunity of seeing anyone but the peasants.’ The day after
the party the village policeman called at the mansion and insisted
upon having the names of the eight teachers, in order to report them
to the police authorities. The lady refused to give the names. ‘Very
well,’ he replied, ‘I will find them out, nevertheless, and make my
report. Teachers _must not_ come together, and I am bound to report
if they do.’ The high position of the lady sheltered the teachers in
this case; but if they had met in the lodgings of one of their own
number they would have received a visit from the state police, and
half of them would have been dismissed by the Ministry of Education;
and if, moreover, an angry word had escaped from one of them during
the police raid, he or she would have been sent to some province of
the Urals. This is what happens to-day, thirty-three years after the
opening of the county and district councils; but it was far worse in
the seventies. What sort of basis for a political struggle could such
institutions offer?
When I inherited from my father his Tambóv estate, I thought very
seriously for a time of settling on that estate, and devoting my energy
to work in the local Zémstvo. Some peasants and the poorer priests of
the neighbourhood asked me to do so. As for myself, I should have been
content with anything I could do, no matter how small it might be, if
only it would help to raise the intellectual level and the well-being
of the peasants. But one day, when several of my advisers were
together, I asked them: ‘Supposing I were to try to start a school, an
experimental farm, a co-operative enterprise, and, at the same time,
also took upon myself the defence of that peasant from our village who
has lately been wronged--would the authorities let me do it?’ ‘Never!’
was the unanimous reply.
An old grey-haired priest, a man who was held in great esteem in our
neighbourhood, came to me a few days later, with two influential
dissenting leaders, and said: ‘Talk with these two men. If you can
manage it, go with them and, Bible in hand, preach to the peasants....
Well, you know what to preach.... No police in the world will find you,
if they conceal you.... There’s nothing to be done besides; that’s what
I, an old man, advise you.’
I told them frankly why I could not assume the part of Wiclif. But
the old man was right. A movement similar to that of the Lollards is
rapidly growing now amongst the Russian peasants. Such tortures as have
been inflicted on the peace-loving Dukhobórs, and such raids upon the
peasant dissenters in South Russia as were made in 1897, when children
were kidnapped so that they might be educated in orthodox monasteries,
will only give to that movement a force that it could not have attained
five-and-twenty years ago.
* * * * *
As the question of agitation for a constitution was continually being
raised in our discussions, I once proposed to our circle to take it up
seriously and to choose an appropriate plan of action. I was always
of the opinion that when the circle decided anything unanimously,
each member ought to put aside his personal feeling and give all his
strength to the task. ‘If you decide to agitate for a constitution,’ I
said, ‘this is my plan: I will separate myself from you, for appearance
sake, and maintain relations with only one member of the circle--for
instance, Tchaykóvsky--through whom I shall be kept informed how you
succeed in your work, and can communicate to you in a general way
what I am doing. My work will be among the courtiers and the higher
functionaries. I have among them many acquaintances, and know a
number of persons who are disgusted with the present conditions. I
will bring them together and unite them, if possible, into a sort of
organization; and then, some day, there is sure to be an opportunity
to direct all these forces toward compelling Alexander II. to give
Russia a constitution. There certainly will come a time when all these
people, feeling that they are compromised, will in their own interest
take a decisive step. If it is necessary, some of us, who have been
officers, might be very helpful in extending the propaganda amongst
the officers in the army; but this action must be quite separate from
yours, though parallel with it. I have seriously thought of it. I know
what connections I have and who can be trusted, and I believe some of
the discontented already look upon me as a possible centre for some
action of this sort. This course is not the one I should take of my own
choice; but if you think that it is best, I will give myself to it with
might and main.’
The circle did not accept that proposal. Knowing one another as well as
they did, my comrades probably thought that if I went in this direction
I should cease to be true to myself. For my own personal happiness, for
my own personal life, I cannot feel too grateful now that my proposal
was not accepted. I should have gone in a direction which was not the
one dictated by my own nature, and I should not have found in it the
personal happiness which I have found in other paths. But when, six
or seven years later, the terrorists were engaged in their terrible
struggle against Alexander II., I regretted that there had not been
somebody else to do the sort of work I had proposed to do in the higher
circles at St. Petersburg. With some understanding there beforehand,
and with the ramifications which such an understanding probably would
have taken all over the empire, the holocausts of victims would not
have been made in vain. At any rate, the underground work of the
executive committee ought by all means to have been supported by a
parallel agitation at the Winter Palace.
Over and over again the necessity of a political effort thus came under
discussion in our little group, with no result. The apathy and the
indifference of the wealthier classes were hopeless, and the irritation
among the persecuted youth had not yet been brought to that high pitch
which ended, six years later, in the struggle of the terrorists under
the Executive Committee. Nay--and this is one of the most tragical
ironies of history--it was the same youth whom Alexander II., in
his blind fear and fury, ordered to be sent by the hundred to hard
labour and condemned to slow death in exile; it was the same youth who
protected him in 1871-78. The very teachings of the socialist circles
were such as to prevent the repetition of a Karakózoff attempt on the
Tsar’s life. ‘Prepare in Russia a great socialist mass movement amongst
the workers and the peasants,’ was the watchword in those times. ‘Don’t
trouble about the Tsar and his counsellors. If such a movement begins,
if the peasants join in the mass movement to claim the land and to
abolish the serfdom redemption taxes, the imperial power will be the
first to seek support in the moneyed classes and the landlords and to
convoke a Parliament--just as the peasant insurrection in France in
1789 compelled the royal power to convoke the National Assembly; so it
will be in Russia.’
But there was more than that. Separate men and groups, seeing that the
reign of Alexander II. was hopelessly doomed to sink deeper and deeper
in reaction, and entertaining at the same time vague hopes as to the
supposed ‘liberalism’ of the heir-apparent--all young heirs to thrones
are supposed to be liberal--persistently reverted to the idea that the
example of Karakózoff ought to be followed. The organized circles,
however, strenuously opposed such an idea, and urged their comrades not
to resort to that course of action. I may now divulge the following
fact, which has hitherto remained unknown. When a young man came to
St. Petersburg from one of the southern provinces with the firm
intention of killing Alexander II., and some members of the Tchaykóvsky
circle learned of his plan, they not only applied all the weight of
their arguments to dissuade the young man, but, when he would not be
dissuaded, they informed him that they would keep a watch over him and
prevent him by force from making any such attempt. Knowing well how
loosely guarded the Winter Palace was at that time, I can positively
say that they saved the life of Alexander II. So firmly were the youth
opposed at that time to the war in which later, when the cup of their
sufferings was filled to overflowing, they took part.