eyes to Russian realities and, much later, his mind to radical anarcho-Populist ideas. Kropotkin was descended from the princes of Smolensk and the house of Rurik that ruled Muscovy before the Romanovs. His father was one of the favourite generals of Nicholas I; Kropotkin’s precociousness as a child attracted the tsar’s attention at a royal gathering. Nicholas I ordered that Prince Kropotkin be enlisted in the Corps of Pages, the most exclusive military academy in the empire.
Kropotkin did well and was soon appointed the personal page of the new tsar Alexander II. When the latter issued the historic declaration that emancipated the serfs, Kropotkin’s fondness for his new master turned to hero-worship. But not for long. His doubts began to emerge as soon as it became clear that members of the landed nobility were utilising the serfs’ freedom to bleed them dry. As the mist clouding Kropotkin’s political eyesight cleared, he began to notice the seamier aspects of court life: the endless intrigues, the jostling for power, the nauseating sycophancy, the embedded anti-Semitism. Gradually, his ambivalence turned to outright hostility. Collaboration with the autocracy became impossible. The Russian army lost a gifted future commander, and the radical intelligentsia was about to gain an illustrious new recruit.
Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist
theoretician, whose history of
the French Revolution formed an
entire generation.
Kropotkin became close to the Populists, was imprisoned and went into exile, where he was greatly influenced by Bakunin’s ferocious debates with Marx, even though one such debate revolved around Bakunin’s agreement to translate Capital into Russian and subsequent failure to do so. It was ‘too boring’, he insisted, while refusing to return the advance he had received for the translation.
Kropotkin was much less attracted to the violent side of anarchism. Bloody revolutions, he argued, were sometimes necessary (and here he was thinking of the English, American and French revolutions), but were ‘always an evil’; the means always infected the ends. His own description of anarchist utopia, as published in the much celebrated, cerebral 1911 version of the Encyclopædia Britannica, was elegant, couched in polite language and far removed from the terrorist conspiracies and violent prose of Bakunin and Nechaev as well as the actions of the anarchists on horseback, Durutti and Makhno:
ANARCHISM (from the Gr. ἄυ, and άρχη, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international, temporary or more or less permanent – for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary – as is seen in organic life at large – harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.3
The main carriers of anarchism were the newly rising intelligentsia, emerging in the 1860s, no longer confined to the nobility or the church, but increasingly dominated by less privileged sections of the urban population, the result of an education system that produced literates who could be of use to the regime.4 Disregarding the tiny working class, some intellectuals began to refer to themselves as the ‘intellectual proletariat’ and saw their task as liberating the peasantry from the ideological and economic chains of absolutism. Razin and Pugachev had lacked knowledge and understanding. They had not experienced the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. The new intelligentsia could make up for these shortcomings, and lead the peasants to make a revolution that would get rid of the tsar and the nobility while bypassing the cities, dominated by merchants.
The ‘To the People’ movement was not a success. It had concentrated on the traditional zones of peasant unrest; neither the Don, the Dnieper nor the Volga regions were receptive. It was too soon after the 1860 reform. Most peasants trusted in God and the tsar and, despite the insatiable monkish greed for money, food and sex, the Orthodox Church remained a central point of reference. Consequently, the peasants were hostile to the city folk, the gentry, students and radicals of any sort. The city was not to be trusted. Not yet.
The first attempt was a disaster for the new radical-Populist vanguard: two large show trials, the ‘Case of the 50’ and the ‘Case of the 193’, meted out harsh punishments as a deterrent to others who might travel down the same path. But the rulings pushed the radicals in a different direction. One group decided that the previous experiment had failed because of attempts to lead the peasants and too-brief visits to the countryside. They would return and this time serve the people: educate them, teach basic hygiene, help in their daily labours and become part of their lives. Bakunin’s ideas would have to wait.5
But the rapid growth of revolutionary circles in the cities brought the propaganda of the deed to the fore. Its principal ideologue was a provincial teacher, Sergei Nechaev, whose daytime job was teaching theology in a parish school. At night he devoured the texts of the French Revolution and won himself over to the anarchist cause. In 1866, he left his job and moved to St Petersburg to meet like-minded people. The city was still buzzing with a series of clandestine pamphlets titled Young Russia and distributed in the name of Peter Zaichnevsky, yet another admirer of the Jacobins, Mazzini and the Italian Carbonari, the leading exponents of ‘revolutionary conspiracy’ and terrorism. To this group must be added the name of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French author of What Is Property? – the answer to which became more famous than the essay. It was Proudhon who first proposed the idea of a decentred socialism against a centralised state. Zaichnevsky had been translating Proudhon into Russian when he was arrested. His own particular contributions would have shocked poor Proudhon, not to mention Tolstoy and Kropotkin. Herzen, the intellectual father of Russian Populism, declared such views utterly repellent.
In Young Russia, Zaichnevsky recalled the heroism of Razin and Pugachev and called for a ‘bloody and pitiless’ revolution that went beyond the limited aims of their peasant forebears. Now, he argued, in his own version of the friend/enemy dichotomy, it was time to calmly and mercilessly exterminate the tsarist royal family, their courtiers and the nobility that sustained them:
We will cry ‘To your axes’ and then we will strike the imperial party without sparing our blows just as they do not spare theirs against us. We will destroy them in the squares, if the cowardly swine dare to go there. We will destroy them in their houses, in the narrow streets of the towns, in the broad avenues of the capital, and in the villages. Remember that, when this happens, anyone who is not with us is against us, and an enemy, and that every method is used to destroy an enemy.
This was the political atmosphere of the 1860s in the bohemian and political cellars of the Russian underground. The former theology teacher approved strongly of what was being proposed. Nechaev was one of the most charismatic, if somewhat unhinged, characters produced by Russian anarchism and the competition on this front was always fierce. He became a close collaborator of Bakunin and,
