IX

A wild panic seized the court circles at St. Petersburg. Alexander

III., who, notwithstanding his colossal stature and force, was not

a very courageous man, refused to move to the Winter Palace, and

retired to the palace of his grandfather, Paul I., at Gatchina. I

know that old building, planned as a Vauban fortress, surrounded by

moats and protected by watch towers, from the tops of which secret

staircases lead to the Emperor’s study. I have seen the trap-doors in

the study for suddenly throwing an enemy on the sharp rocks in the

water underneath, and the secret staircase leading to underground

prisons and to an underground passage which opens on a lake. All the

palaces of Paul I. had been built on a similar plan. In the meantime,

an underground gallery, supplied with automatic electric appliances

to protect it from being undermined by the revolutionists, was dug

round the Aníchkoff palace in which Alexander III. resided when he was

heir-apparent.

A secret league for the protection of the Tsar was started. Officers of

all grades were induced by triple salaries to join it, and to undertake

voluntary spying in all classes of society. Amusing scenes followed, of

course. Two officers, without knowing that they both belonged to the

league, would entice each other into a disloyal conversation, during

a railway journey, and then proceed to arrest each other, only to

discover at the last moment that their pains had been labour lost. This

league still exists in a more official shape, under the name of Okhrána

(Protection), and from time to time frightens the present Tsar with all

sorts of concocted dangers, in order to maintain its existence.

A still more secret organization, the Holy League, was formed at the

same time, under the leadership of the brother of the Tsar, Vladímir,

for the purpose of opposing the revolutionists in different ways,

one of which was to kill those of the refugees who were supposed to

have been the leaders of the late conspiracies. I was of this number.

The grand duke violently reproached the officers of the league for

their cowardice, regretting that there were none among them who would

undertake to kill such refugees; and an officer, who had been a page

de chambre at the time I was in the corps of pages, was appointed by

the league to carry out this particular work.

The fact is that the refugees abroad did not interfere with the work

of the Executive Committee at St. Petersburg. To pretend to direct

conspiracies from Switzerland, while those who were at St. Petersburg

acted under a permanent menace of death, would have been sheer

nonsense; and as Stepniák and I wrote several times, none of us would

have accepted the dubious task of forming plans of action without being

on the spot. But, of course, it suited the plans of the St. Petersburg

police to maintain that they were powerless to protect the Tsar because

all plots were devised abroad, and their spies--I know it well--amply

supplied them with the desired reports.

Skóbeleff, the hero of the Turkish war, was also asked to join this

league, but he blankly refused. It appears from Lóris Mélikoff’s

posthumous papers, part of which were published by a friend of his at

London, that when Alexander III. came to the throne, and hesitated to

convoke the Assembly of Notables, Skóbeleff even made an offer to Lóris

Mélikoff and Count Ignátieff (‘the lying Pasha,’ as the Constantinople

diplomatists used to nickname him) to arrest Alexander III., and compel

him to sign a constitutional manifesto; whereupon Ignátieff is said to

have denounced the scheme to the Tsar, and thus to have obtained his

nomination as prime minister, in which capacity he resorted, with the

advice of M. Andrieux, the ex-prefect of police at Paris, to various

stratagems in order to paralyze the revolutionists.

If the Russian Liberals had shown even moderate courage and some power

of organized action at that time, a National Assembly would have

been convoked. From the same posthumous papers of Lóris Mélikoff,

it appears that Alexander III. was willing for a time to convoke a

National Assembly. He had made up his mind to do so, and had announced

it to his brother. Old Wilhelm I. supported him in this intention. It

was only when he saw that the Liberals undertook nothing, while the

Katkóff party was busy at work in the opposite direction--M. Andrieux

advising him to crush the nihilists and indicating how it ought to be

done (the ex-prefect’s letter to this effect was published in the said

papers)--that Alexander III. finally resolved on declaring that he

would continue to be an absolute ruler of the Empire.

* * * * *

A few months after the death of Alexander II. I was expelled from

Switzerland by order of the federal council. I did not take umbrage

at this. Assailed by the monarchical powers on account of the asylum

which Switzerland offered to refugees, and menaced by the Russian

official press with a wholesale expulsion of all Swiss governesses and

ladies’ maids, who are numerous in Russia, the rulers of Switzerland,

by banishing me, gave some sort of satisfaction to the Russian police.

But I very much regret, for the sake of Switzerland itself, that that

step was taken. It was a sanction given to the theory of ‘conspiracies

concocted in Switzerland,’ and it was an acknowledgment of weakness, of

which other powers took advantage at once. Two years later, when Jules

Ferry proposed to Italy and Germany the partition of Switzerland, his

argument must have been that the Swiss Government itself had admitted

that Switzerland was ‘a hotbed of international conspiracies.’ This

first concession led to more arrogant demands, and has certainly placed

Switzerland in a far less independent position than it might otherwise

have occupied.

The decree of expulsion was delivered to me immediately after I had

returned from London, where I was present at an anarchist congress in

July 1881. After that congress I had stayed for a few weeks in England,

writing the first articles on Russian affairs from our standpoint, for

the ‘Newcastle Chronicle.’ The English press, at that time, was an

echo of the opinions of Madame Novikóff--that is, of Katkóff and the

Russian state police--and I was most happy when Mr. Joseph Cowen agreed

to give me the hospitality of his paper in order to state our point of

view.

I had just joined my wife in the high mountains where she was staying,

near the abode of Elisée Reclus, when I was asked to leave Switzerland.

We sent the little luggage we had to the next railway station and went

on foot to Aigle, enjoying for the last time the sight of the mountains

that we loved so much. We crossed the hills by taking short cuts over

them, and laughed when we discovered that the short cuts led to long

windings; and when we reached the bottom of the valley, we tramped

along the dusty road. The comical incident which always comes in such

cases was supplied by an English lady. A richly dressed dame, reclining

by the side of a gentleman in a hired carriage, threw several tracts

to the two poorly dressed tramps, as she passed them. I lifted the

tracts from the dust. She was evidently one of those ladies who believe

themselves to be Christians, and consider it their duty to distribute

religious tracts among ‘dissolute foreigners.’ Thinking we were sure

to overtake the lady at the railway station, I wrote on one of the

pamphlets the well-known verse relative to the rich and the Kingdom of

God, and similarly appropriate quotations about the Pharisees being

the worst enemies of Christianity. When we came to Aigle, the lady

was taking refreshments in her carriage. She evidently preferred to

continue the journey in this vehicle along the lovely valley, rather

than to be shut up in a stuffy railway train. I returned her the

pamphlets with politeness, saying that I had added to them something

that she might find useful for her own instruction. The lady did not

know whether to fly at me or to accept the lesson with Christian

patience. Her eyes expressed both impulses in rapid succession.

My wife was about to pass her examination for the degree of Bachelor

of Science at the Geneva University, and we settled, therefore, in a

tiny town of France, Thonon, situated on the Savoy coast of the Lake of

Geneva, and stayed there a couple of months.

As to the death sentence of the Holy League, a warning reached me

from one of the highest quarters of Russia. Even the name of the lady

who was sent from St. Petersburg to Geneva to be the head centre of

the conspiracy became known to me. So I simply communicated the fact

to the Geneva correspondent of the ‘Times,’ asking him to publish

the information if anything should happen, and I put a note to that

effect in ‘Le Révolté.’ After that I did not trouble myself more about

it. My wife did not take it so lightly, and the good peasant woman,

Madame Sansaux, who gave us board and lodgings at Thonon, and who had

learned of the plot in a different way (through her sister, who was a

nurse in the family of a Russian agent), bestowed the most touching

care upon me. Her cottage was out of town, and whenever I went to

town at night--sometimes to meet my wife at the railway station--she

always found a pretext to have me accompanied by her husband with a

lantern. ‘Wait only a moment, Monsieur Kropótkin,’ she would say;

‘my husband is going that way for purchases, and you know he always

carries a lantern!’ Or else she would send her brother to follow me at

a distance, without my noticing it.

X

In October or November 1881, as soon as my wife had passed her

examination, we removed from Thonon to London, where we stayed nearly

twelve months. Few years separate us from that time, and yet I can say

that the intellectual life of London and of all England was quite

different then from what it became a little later. Everyone knows

that in the forties England stood almost at the head of the socialist

movement in Europe; but during the years of reaction that followed,

this great movement, which had deeply affected the working classes,

and in which all that is now put forward as scientific or anarchist

socialism had already been said, came to a standstill. It was forgotten

in England as well as on the Continent, and what the French writers

describe as ‘the third awakening of the proletarians’ had not yet begun

in Britain. The labours of the agricultural commission of 1871, the

propaganda amongst the agricultural labourers, and the previous efforts

of the Christian socialists had certainly done something to prepare the

way; but the outburst of socialist feeling in England which followed

the publication of Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’ had not yet

taken place.

The year that I then passed in London was a year of real exile. For

one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to

breathe in. There was no sign of that animated socialist movement which

I found so largely developed on my return in 1886. Burns, Champion,

Hardie, and the other labour leaders were not yet heard of; the Fabians

did not exist; Morris had not declared himself a socialist; and the

trade unions, limited in London to a few privileged trades only, were

hostile to socialism. The only active and outspoken representatives

of the socialist movement were Mr. and Mrs. Hyndman, with a very few

workers grouped round them. They had held in the autumn of 1881 a

small congress, and we used to say jokingly--but it was very nearly

true--that Mrs. Hyndman had received all the congress in her house.

Moreover, the more or less socialist radical movement which was

certainly going on in the minds of men did not assert itself frankly

and openly. That considerable number of educated men and women who

appeared in public life four years later, and, without committing

themselves to socialism, took part in various movements connected with

the well-being or the education of the masses, and who have now created

in almost every city of England and Scotland a quite new atmosphere of

reform and a new society of reformers, had not then made themselves

felt. They were there, of course; they thought and spoke; all the

elements for a widespread movement were in existence; but, finding none

of those centres of attraction which the socialist groups subsequently

became, they were lost in the crowd; they did not know one another, or

remained unconscious of their own selves.

Tchaykóvsky was then in London, and, as in years past, we began a

socialist propaganda amongst the workers. Aided by a few English

workers whose acquaintance we had made at the congress of 1881, or whom

the prosecutions against John Most had attracted to the socialists,

we went to the Radical clubs, speaking about Russian affairs, the

movement of our youth toward the people, and socialism in general. We

had ridiculously small audiences, seldom consisting of more than a

dozen men. Occasionally some grey-bearded Chartist would rise from the

audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years

before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of workers, but

that now all was dead, and there was no hope of reviving it.

Mr. Hyndman had just published his excellent exposition of Marxist

socialism under the title of ‘England for All’; and I remember, one

day in the summer of 1882, earnestly advising him to start a socialist

paper. I told him with what small means we began editing ‘Le Révolté,’

and predicted a certain success if he would make the attempt. But

so unpromising was the general outlook, that even he thought the

undertaking would be a certain failure, unless he had the means to

defray all its expenses. Perhaps he was right; but when, less than

three years later, he started ‘Justice,’ it found a hearty support

among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers,

and the Social Democratic Federation was an influential body.

In the summer of 1882 I spoke, in broken English, before the Durham

miners at their annual gathering; I delivered lectures at Newcastle,

Glasgow, and Edinburgh about the Russian movement, and was received

with enthusiasm, a crowd of workers giving hearty cheers for the

Nihilists, after the meeting, in the street. But my wife and I felt so

lonely at London, and our efforts to awaken a socialist movement in

England seemed so hopeless, that in the autumn of 1882 we decided to

remove again to France. We were sure that in France I should soon be

arrested; but we often said to each other, ‘Better a French prison than

this grave.’

Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to

study the development of socialism in England. Evolution _is_ slow; but

its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods

of sudden progress.