memoirs and political pamphlets that he wrote disappeared. General Potapov, the head of the tsarist secret police, realising how useful this prisoner might be in dismantling the terror networks, visited him in his cell after the tsar’s assassination and offered financial rewards and other inducements if Nechaev agreed to become an informer. The enchained prisoner rose to his feet, steadied himself, and used the entire weight of one arm to strike Potapov across the face, drawing much blood. Both his hands and feet were chained and he began to rot. Literally. Within two years Nechaev was dead. He was thirty-five years old.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature is rich in depictions of nihilists, terrorists, revolutionaries. As in life, so in fiction: a single character usually encompassed all three. In Dostoevsky, they were treated severely. Russian novelists did not shy away from politics. They regarded themselves and were seen by their readers as public intellectuals. The 1861 reform heightened the tempo. In the following year, Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons. The distillation of politics into art transpired without any fuss and with tremendous effect. The novel depicts a generational conflict between liberalism and nihilism. The central character, Bazarov, marked a break for Turgenev. Till now his women had been strong and the men slightly pathetic, weak and self-centred (as in some of Pushkin’s work). Turgenev identified himself and a majority of his peers as Hamlets, incapable of action, which was reflected in his work. Bazarov is a partial exception. He displays a sense of character and is a strong man, but even he, endlessly subjected to the patronizing and smug conceit of his father, is not allowed to triumph. No victory for the brave. Resigned to his fate, he dies passively, much to the anger of Turgenev’s younger readers. By contrast, Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece, Oblomov, is the self-portrait of an entire social stratum and pitiless in its depiction. Lenin loved this novel. The average Russian nobleman is lazy, indolent, empty-headed and beyond redemption. The novel’s success was celebrated by the entry of a new word into the Russian lexicon: oblomovism, used by liberals, anarcho-Populists and Marxists alike. In The Precipice (1869), Goncharov pillories a nihilist (a word invented by Turgenev as a virtual synonym for a radical student) without restraint. There is not the least trace of sympathy.
The emergence of a social-realist school of writers and critics was partially a response to these liberal writers and largely an attempt to connect with the growing movement of the razochyny. The two most prominent representatives of this increasingly radical wing of the intelligentsia were the essayist, historian and novelist N. G. Chernyshevsky and the fierce literary critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Both were sons of respected priests, both recorded happy childhoods; even as they rejected religion and the Orthodox Church in favour of science and materialism, they retained an affection for the moral atmosphere that had prevailed in their respective homes. It was the fierce honesty of their fathers that appealed to them. They loathed hypocrisy on every level: social, political, sexual. And their stinging prose left its mark. On one occasion, Turgenev accosted Chernyshevsky simply to inform him: ‘You are a snake, but Dobrolyubov is a rattlesnake.’
Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is to Be Done? was written in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he had been incarcerated because of his political beliefs. The hero is a dedicated and ascetic revolutionary (who could not be more different to Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, or the real-life Nechaev) who sacrifices all for the cause. Even his name, Rakhmetov, was chosen with care. He descends from a thirteenth-century Tatar family of the high nobility; the novelist paints a four-page pen portrait of the origins and history of the family. He took for granted that his readers were only too aware that many Tatars (who had by then turned Muslim) had fought under Pugachev against the tsar. A forebear had married a Russian woman, a common occurrence, and the resulting dynasty had retained many positions within the state apparatus. The fictional Rakhmetov’s fictional grandfather had accompanied Alexander I to Tilsit. Given Chernyshevsky’s deep knowledge of Russian history, it’s likely that the character was based on a real person. What we are not told is that the name Rakhmet is of Arab origin, and means ‘mercy’.
While the novel lacked the literary power of Dostoevsky, Turgenev or Tolstoy, it became the bible of the new generation in Russia, the ‘young people’ entering the struggle against the autocracy. It’s difficult to recall a work of fiction that had an analogous impact on political consciousness elsewhere though, half a century ago, an American critic proposed a fascinating comparison.8
The fact that Lenin titled his first major political essay ‘What Is to Be Done?’ is not coincidental. He would have been amazed if a friend had predicted that one day, people would try to read the original in order to better understand its successor. The novel, too, was a call to action and written precisely for that purpose. Judged by its own criteria, it was a huge success. Its sympathetic treatment of women, in particular, was widely noted in a country where patriarchy, little different from contemporary Saudi Arabia, ruled supreme. In contrast to that unfortunate country, however, many women joined secret societies and participated in the acts decided upon by terrorist organisations.9 As we shall see in a later chapter, revolutionary feminists openly acknowledged their debt to the ideas contained in Chernyshevsky’s masterwork, including the role and function of the family and monogamy.
Lenin’s text, first published in 1902, was an attempt to both critique and move beyond the tactical and strategic limitations of prior revolutionary organisations. A break was necessary. The Executive Committee of the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) had scored its biggest success on 1 March 1881 by assassinating Alexander II, but also its biggest failure. It had successfully targeted the heart of the regime, but had burnt itself out in the process. The repression was heavy, the hanging chains of Siberia heavier still and though many young suicide terrorists were queuing up to join, the organisation was beginning to disintegrate. Its own leader, Zhelyabov, confessed that ‘we are using up our capital’ and while small groups spontaneously emerged in different parts of the country, they were, in the main, ignored by the radical intelligentsia. The reason was not simply fear (though that played its part) but a feeling that the basic outline of the original programme was, to put it at its mildest, faulty. The aim of the terror was to rouse the people from their torpor and trigger a mass uprising based on previous models (Razin/Pugachev), but this time under new conditions and in order to completely destroy the autocracy and its institutions. It never worked out and, in a grumpy mood, Lenin once characterised terrorists as liberals with bombs, suggesting that both held the opinion that propaganda alone, of deed or word, would be sufficient for the task that lay ahead. For the most part terrorist acts scared people and legitimated government repression.
Till now the Executive Committee had won the admiration and financial support of many intellectuals who felt that they were on the right track. Key members of the committee were at the house of Gleb Uspensky, a major pro-Populist writer, on 1 March, waiting for news of the operation. They drank to success and then withdrew to compose a powerful open letter to the dead man’s son. The opening paragraph was suitably defiant, even while misjudging the writers’ own strength. They informed Alexander III that ‘the bloody tragedy which took place along the Catherine Canal was not just the result of chance and was not unexpected. After everything that has been happening for the last ten years, it was inevitable.’ They warned him that their struggle against the autocracy would continue, unless political prisoners were released and a national assembly convened via elections based on proportionality and without any restrictions whatsoever, including freedom of speech, press, assembly and electoral programmes. This would enable Russia to develop peacefully: ‘We solemnly declare before our beloved Fatherland and the entire world that our party will of its own accord unconditionally submit to the decisions of a National Assembly.’
The initial reaction of the court to the death of the tsar was fear. When the open letter reached him, the new monarch burst into tears and had to be comforted by his tutor. But the autocracy was soon back on course. Tsarist ministers and advisers had noted the absence of uprisings or popular assemblies anywhere in the country. And the hard-line councillors of Alexander III turned their back on concessions of any sort and accelerated the counterreformation. A chain of legal proclamations sought to seal off free thought of any kind. Violations of these ordinances led to swift and brutal punishments. The mood in
