For the last few years the health of my father had been going from bad to worse, and when my brother Alexander and I came to see him, in the spring of 1871, we were told by the doctors that with the first frosts of autumn he would be gone. He had continued to live in the old style, in the Stáraya Konúshennaya, but around him everything in this aristocratic quarter had changed. The rich serf-owners, who once were so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a reckless way the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of the serfs, and after having mortgaged and re-mortgaged their estates in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink into oblivion. Their houses had been taken by ‘the intruders’—rich merchants, railway contractors, and the like—while in nearly every one of the old families which remained in the Old Equerries’ Quarters a young life struggled to assert its rights upon the ruins of the old one. A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and relieved their griefs bypredicting for Russia a certain and speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had now. Out of our many relatives, numbering nearly a score of families at Moscow alone in my childhood, two families only had remained in the capital, and these had joined the current of the new life, the mothers discussing with their girls and boys such matters as schools for the people and women’s universities. My father looked upon them with contempt. My stepmother and my younger stepsister, Pauline, who had not changed, did their best to comfort him; but they themselves felt strange in their unwonted surroundings.
My father had always been unkind and most unjust toward my brother Alexander, but Alexander was utterly incapable of holding a grudge against anyone. When he entered our father’s sick-room, with the deep, kind look of his dark blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite kindness, and when he immediately found out what could be done to render the sufferer more comfortable in his sick-chair, and did it as naturally as if he had left the sick-room only an hour before, my father was simply bewildered; he stared at him without being able to understand. Our visit brought life into the dull, gloomy house; nursing became more bright; my stepmother, Pauline, the servants themselves, grew more animated, and my father felt the change.
One thing worried him, however. He had expected to see us come as repentant sons, imploring his support. But when he tried to direct conversation into that channel we stopped him with such a cheerful ‘Don’t bother about that; we get on very nicely,’ that he was still more bewildered. He looked for a scene in the old style—his sons begging pardon, and money—perhaps he even regretted for a moment that this did not happen; but he regarded us with a greater esteem. We were all three affected at parting. He seemed almost to dread returningto his gloomy loneliness amidst the wreckage of a system he had lived to maintain. But Alexander had to go back to his service, and I was leaving for Finland.
When I was called home again, from Finland, I hurried to Moscow, to find the burial ceremony just beginning, in that same old red church where my father had been baptized, and where the last prayers had been said over his mother. As the funeral procession passed along the streets, of which every house was familiar to me in my childhood, I noticed that the houses had changed little, but I knew that in all of them a new life had begun.
In the house which had formerly belonged to our father’s mother and then to Princess MÃrski, and which now was bought by General N——, an old inhabitant of the Quarter, the only daughter of the family maintained for a couple of years a painful struggle against her good-natured but obstinate parents, who worshipped her but would not allow her to study at the university courses which had been opened for ladies at Moscow. At last she was allowed to join these courses, but was taken to them in an elegant carriage, under the close supervision of her mother, who courageously sat for hours on the benches amongst the students, by the side of her beloved daughter; and yet, notwithstanding all this care and watchfulness, a couple of years later the daughter joined the revolutionary party, was arrested, and spent one year in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.
In the house opposite, the despotic heads of the family, Count and Countess Z——, were in a bitter struggle against their two daughters, who were sick of the idle and useless existence their parents forced them to lead, and who wanted to join those other girls who, free and happy, flocked to the university courses. The struggle lasted for years; the parents did not yield in this case, and the result of it was that the elder girl ended her life by poisoning herself, when her younger sister was allowed to follow her own inclinations.
In the house next door, which had been our family residence for a year, when I entered it with Tchaykóvsky to hold in it the first secret meeting of a circle which we founded at Moscow, I at once recognized the rooms which had been so familiar to me, in such a different atmosphere, in my childhood. It now belonged to the family of Nathalie Armfeld, that highly sympathetic Kará ‘convict’ whom George Kennan has so touchingly described in his book on Siberia.
And in a house within a stone’s throw of that where my father had died, and within a few months after his death, I received Stepniák, clothed as a peasant, he having escaped from a country village where he had been arrested for socialist propaganda amongst the peasants.
Such was the change which had been accomplished in the Old Equerries’ Quarter within the last fifteen years. The last stronghold of the old nobility was now invaded by the new spirit.
The next year, early in the spring, I made my first journey to Western Europe. In crossing the Russian frontier I experienced, even more intensely than I was prepared to do, what every Russian feels on leaving his mother country. So long as the train runs on Russian ground, through the thinly populated north-western provinces, one has the feeling of crossing a desert. Hundreds of miles are covered with low growths which hardly deserve the name of forests. Here and there the eye discovers a small, miserably poor village buried in the snow, or an impracticable, muddy, narrow, and winding village road. But everything—scenery and surroundings—changes all of a sudden as soon as the train enters Prussia, with its clean-looking villages and farms, its gardens, and its paved roads; and the sense of contrastgrows stronger and stronger as one penetrates further into Germany. Even dull Berlin seemed animated after our Russian towns.
And thecontrastof climate! Two days before I had left St. Petersburg thickly covered with snow, and now, in Middle Germany, I walked without an overcoat along the railway platform, in warm sunshine, admiring the budding flowers. Then came the Rhine, and further on Switzerland, bathed in the rays of a bright sun, with its small, clean hotels, where breakfast was served out of doors, in view of the snow-clad mountains. I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the history of the Russian nation had been influenced by the fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high latitudes, as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists southward, further into Manchuria.
At that time Zürich was full of Russian students, both women and men. The famous Oberstrass, near the Polytechnicum, was a corner of Russia, where the Russian language prevailed over all others. The students lived as most Russian students do, especially the women—that is, upon very little. Tea and bread, some milk, and a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp, amidst animated discussions about the latest news of the socialistic world or the last book read, that was their regular fare. Those who had more money than was needed for such a mode of living gave it for the ‘common cause’—the library, the Russian review which was going to be published, the support of the Swiss labour papers. As to their dress, the most parsimonious economy reigned in that direction. Pushkin has written in a well-knownverse, ‘What hat may not suit a girl of sixteen?’ Our girls at Zürich seemed defiantly to throw this question at the population of the old Zwinglian city: ‘Can there be a simplicity in dress which does not become a girl, when she is young, intelligent, and full of energy?’
With all this the busy little community worked harder than any other students have ever worked since there were universities in existence, and the Zürich professors were never tired of showing the progress accomplished by the women at the university as an example to the male students.
For many years I had longed to learn all about the International Workingmen’s Association. Russian papers mentioned it pretty frequently in their columns, but they were not allowed to speak of its principles or what it was doing, I felt that it must be a great movement, full of consequences, but I could not grasp its aims and tendencies. Now that I was in Switzerland I determined to satisfy my longings.
The Association was then at the height of its development. Great hopes had been awakened in the years 1840-48 in the hearts of European workers. Only now we begin to realize what a formidable amount of socialist literature was circulated in those years by socialists of all denominations, Christian socialists, State socialists, Fourierists, Saint-Simonists, Owenites, and so on; and only now we begin to understand the depth of that movement, and to discover how much of what our generation has considered the product of contemporary thought was already developed and said—often with great penetration—during those years. The republicans understood then under the name of ‘republic’ a quite different thing from the democratic organization of capitalist rule which now goes under that name. When they spoke of the United States of Europe they understood the brotherhood of workers, the weapons of war transformed into tools, andthese tools used by all members of society for the benefit of all—‘the iron returned to the labourer,’ as Pierre Dupont said in one of his songs. They meant not only the reign of equality as regards criminal law and political rights, but particularly economic equality. The nationalists themselves saw in their dreams Young Italy, Young Germany, and Young Hungary taking the lead in far-reaching agrarian and economic reforms.
The defeat of the June insurrection at Paris, of Hungary by the armies of Nicholas I., and of Italy by the French and the Austrians, and the fearful reaction, political and intellectual, which followed everywhere in Europe, totally destroyed that movement. Its literature, its achievements, its very principles of economic revolution and universal brotherhood were simply forgotten, lost, during the next twenty years.
However, one idea had survived—the idea of an international brotherhood of all the workers, which a few French emigrants continued to preach in the United States, and the followers of Robert Owen in England. The understanding which was reached by some English workers and a few French workers’ delegates to the London International Exhibition of 1862 became then the starting point for a formidable movement, which soon spread all over Europe, and included several million workers. The hopes which had been dormant for twenty years were awakened once more, when the workers were called upon to unite, ‘without distinction of creed, sex, nationality, race, or colour,’ to proclaim that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be their own work,’ and to throw the weight of a strong, united, international organization into the evolution of mankind—not in the name of love and charity, but in the name of justice, of the force that belongs to a body of men moved by a reasoned consciousness of their own aims and aspirations.
Two strikes at Paris, in 1868 and 1869, more or less helped by small contributions sent from abroad, especiallyfrom England, insignificant though they were in themselves, and the prosecutions which the Imperial Government directed against the International, became the origin of an immense movement, in which the solidarity of the workers of all nations was proclaimed in the face of the rivalries of the States. The idea of an international union of all trades, and of a struggle against capital with the aid of international support, carried away the most indifferent of the workers. The movement spread like wildfire in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, bringing to the front a great number of intelligent, active, and devoted workers, and attracting to it some decidedly superior men and women from the wealthier educated classes. A force, never before suspected to exist, grew stronger every day in Europe; and if the movement had not been arrested in its growth by the Franco-German war, great things would probably have happened in Europe, deeply modifying the aspects of our civilization, and undoubtedly accelerating human progress. Unfortunately, the crushing victory of the Germans brought about abnormal conditions in Europe; it stopped for a quarter of a century the normal development of France, and threw all Europe into a period of militarism, which we are still living in at the present moment.
All sorts of partial solutions of the great social question had currency at that time among the workers—co-operation, productive associations supported by the State, people’s banks, gratuitous credit, and so on. Each of these solutions was brought before the ‘sections’ of the Association, and then before the local, regional, national, and international congresses, and eagerly discussed. Every annual congress of the Association marked a new step in advance, in the development of ideas about the great social problem which stands before our generation and calls for a solution. The amount of intelligent things which were said at these congresses, and of scientificallycorrect, deeply thought over ideas which were circulated—all being the results of thecollectivethought of the workers—has never yet been sufficiently appreciated; but there is no exaggeration in saying that all schemes of social reconstruction which are now in vogue under the name of ‘scientific socialism’ or ‘anarchism’ had their origin in the discussions and reports of the different congresses of the International Association. The few educated men who joined the movement have only put into a theoretical shape the criticisms and the aspirations which were expressed in the sections, and subsequently in the congresses, by the workers themselves.
The war of 1870-71 had hampered the development of the Association, but had not stopped it. In all the industrial centres of Switzerland numerous and animated sections of the International existed, and thousands of workers flocked to their meetings, at which war was declared upon the existing system of private ownership of land and factories, and the near end of the capitalist system was proclaimed. Local congresses were held in various parts of the country, and at each of these gatherings most arduous and difficult problems of the present social organization were discussed, with a knowledge of the matter and a depth of conception which alarmed the middle classes even more than did the numbers of adherents who joined the sections, or groups, of the International. The jealousies and prejudices which had hitherto existed in Switzerland between the privileged trades (the watchmakers and jewellers) and the rougher trades (weavers, building trades, and so on), and which had prevented joint action in labour disputes, were disappearing. The workers asserted with increasing emphasis that of all the divisions which exist in modern society by far the most important is that between the owners of capital and those who not only come into the world penniless, but are doomed to remain producers of wealth for the favoured few.
Italy, especially middle and northern Italy, was honeycombedwith groups and sections of the International; and in these the Italian unity so long struggled for was declared a mere illusion. The workers were called upon to make their own revolution—to take the land for the peasants and the factories for the workers themselves, and to abolish the oppressive centralized organization of the State, whose historical mission always was to protect and to maintain the exploitation of man by man.
In Spain similar organizations covered Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalusia; they were supported by, and united with, the powerful labour unions of Barcelona, which already then had introduced the eight hours’ day in the building trades. The International had no less than eighty thousand regularly paying Spanish members; it embodied all the active and thinking elements of the population; and by its distinct refusal to meddle with the political intrigues during 1871-72 it had drawn to itself in an immense degree the sympathies of the masses. The proceedings of its provincial and national congresses, and the manifestoes which they issued, were models of a severe logical criticism of the existing conditions, as well as admirably lucid statements of the workers’ ideals.
In Belgium, Holland, and even in Portugal the same movement was spreading, and it had already brought into the Association the great mass and the best elements of the Belgian coal miners and weavers. In England the trades unions had also joined the movement, at least in principle, and, without committing themselves to Socialism, were ready to support their Continental brethren in direct struggles against capital, especially in strikes. In Germany the socialists had concluded a union with the rather numerous followers of Lassalle, and the first foundations of a social democratic party had been laid. Austria and Hungary followed in the same track; and although no international organization was possible at that time in France, after the defeat of the Commune and the reaction which followed (Draconic laws having been enactedagainst the adherents of the Association), everyone was persuaded, nevertheless, that this period of reaction would not last, and that France would soon join the Association again and take the lead in it.
When I came to Zürich I joined one of the local sections of the International Workingmen’s Association. I also asked my Russian friends where I could learn more about the great movement which was going on in other countries. ‘Read,’ was their reply, and my sister-in-law, who was then studying at Zürich, brought me large numbers of books and collections of newspapers for the last two years. I spent days and nights in reading, and received a deep impression which nothing will efface; the flood of new thoughts awakened is associated in my mind with a tiny clean room in the Oberstrass, commanding from a window a view of the blue lake, with the mountains beyond it, where the Swiss fought for their independence, and the high spires of the old town—that scene of so many religious struggles.
Socialistic literature has never been rich in books. It is written for workers, for whom one penny is money, and its main force lies in its small pamphlets and its newspapers. Moreover he who seeks for information about socialism finds in books little of what he requires most. They contain the theories or the scientific arguments in favour of socialist aspirations, but they give no idea how the workers accept socialist ideals, and how they could put them into practice. There remains nothing but to take collections of papers and read them all through—the news as well as the leading articles—the former, perhaps, even more than the latter. Quite a new world of social relations and methods of thought and action is revealed by this reading, which gives an insight into what cannot be found anywhere else—namely, the depth and the moral force of the movement, the degree to which men are imbued with the new theories, their readiness to carry them out in their dailylife and to suffer for them. All discussions about the impracticability of socialism and the necessary slowness of evolution are of little value, because the speed of evolution can only be judged from a close knowledge of the human beings of whose evolution we are speaking. What estimate of a sum can be made without knowing its components?
The more I read the more I saw that there was before me a new world, unknown to me, and totally unknown to the learned makers of sociological theories—a world that I could know only by living in the Workingmen’s Association and by meeting the workers in their everyday life. I decided, accordingly, to spend a couple of months in such a life. My Russian friends encouraged me, and after a few days’ stay at Zürich I left for Geneva, which was then a great centre of the international movement.
The place where the Geneva sections used to meet was the spacious Masonic Temple Unique. More than two thousand men could come together in its large hall at the general meetings, while every evening all sorts of committee and section meetings took place in the side-rooms, or classes in history, physics, engineering, and so on, were held. Free instruction was given there to the workers by the few, very few, middle-class men who had joined the movement, mainly French refugees of the Paris Commune. It was a people’s university as well as a people’s forum.
One of the chief leaders of the movement at the Temple Unique was a Russian, Nicholas Ootin, a bright, clever, and active man; and the real soul of it was a most sympathetic Russian lady, who was known far and wide amongst the workers as Madame Olga. She was the working force in all the committees. Both Ootin and Madame Olga received me cordially, made me acquainted with all the men of mark in the sections of thedifferent trades, and invited me to be present at the committee meetings. So I went, but I preferred being with the workers themselves. Taking a glass of sour wine at one of the tables in the hall, I used to sit there every evening amid the workers, and soon became friendly with several of them, especially with a stonemason from Alsace, who had left France after the insurrection of the Commune. He had children, just about the age of the two whom my brother had so suddenly lost a few months before, and through the children I was soon on good terms with the family and their friends. I could thus follow the movement from the inside, and know the workers’ view of it.
The workers had built all their hopes on the international movement. Young and old flocked to the Temple Unique after their long day’s work, to get hold of the scraps of instruction which they could obtain there, or to listen to the speakers who promised them a grand future, based upon the common possession of all that man requires for the production of wealth, and upon a brotherhood of men, without distinction of caste, race, or nationality. All hoped that a great social revolution, peaceful or not, would soon come and totally change the economic conditions. No one desired class war, but all said that if the ruling classes rendered it unavoidable, through their blind obstinacy, the war must be fought over, provided it would bring with it well-being and liberty to the down-trodden masses.
One must have lived among the workers at that time to realize the effect which the sudden growth of the Association had upon their minds—the trust they put in it, the love with which they spoke of it, the sacrifices they made for it. Every day, week after week and year after year, thousands of workers gave their time and their coppers, taken upon their very food, in order to support the life of each group, to secure the appearance of the papers, to defray the expenses of the congresses,to support the comrades who had suffered for the Association. Another thing that impressed me deeply was the elevating influence which the International exercised. Most of the Paris Internationalists were almost total abstainers from drink, and all had abandoned smoking. ‘Why should I nurture in myself that weakness?’ they said. The mean, the trivial disappeared to leave room for the grand, the elevating inspirations.
Outsiders never realize the sacrifices which are made by the workers in order to keep their labour movements alive. No small amount of moral courage was required to join openly a section of the International Association, and to face the discontent of the master and a probable dismissal at the first opportunity, with the long months out of work which usually followed. But, even under the best circumstances, belonging to a trade union, or to any advanced party, requires a series of uninterrupted sacrifices. Even a few pence given for the common cause represent a burden on the meagre budget of the European worker, and many pence have to be disbursed every week. Frequent attendance at the meetings means a sacrifice too. For us it may be a pleasure to spend a couple of hours at a meeting, but for men whose working day begins at five or six in the morning those hours have to be stolen from necessary rest.
I felt this devotion as a standing reproach. I saw how eager the workers were to gain instruction, and how despairingly few were those who volunteered to aid them. I saw how much the toiling masses needed to be helped by men possessed of education and leisure in their endeavours to spread and to develop the organization; but few and rare were those who came to assist without the intention of making political capital out of this very helplessness of the people! More and more I began to feel that I was bound to cast in my lot with them. Stepniák says, in his ‘Career of a Nihilist,’ that every revolutionist has had a moment in his life whensome circumstance, maybe unimportant in itself, has brought him to pronounce his oath of giving himself to the cause of revolution. I know that moment; I lived through it after one of the meetings at the Temple Unique, when I felt more acutely than ever before how cowardly are the educated men who hesitate to put their education, their knowledge, their energy at the service of those who are so much in need of that education and that energy. ‘Here are men,’ I said to myself, ‘who are conscious of their servitude, who work to get rid of it; but where are the helpers? Where are those who will come to serve the masses—not to utilize them for their own ambitions?’
Gradually some doubts began, however, to creep into my mind as to the soundness of the agitation which was carried on at the Temple Unique. One night a well-known Geneva lawyer, Monsieur A., came to the meeting, and stated that if he had not hitherto joined the Association it was because he had first to settle his own business affairs; having now succeeded in that direction, he came to join the labour movement. I felt shocked at this cynical avowal, and when I communicated my reflections to my stone-mason friend he explained to me that this gentleman, having been defeated at the previous election, when he sought the support of the radical party, now hoped to be elected by the support of the labour vote. ‘We accept their services for the present,’ my friend concluded, ‘but when the revolution comes our first move will be to throw all of them overboard.’
Then came a great meeting, hastily convoked, to protest, as it was said, against the calumnies of the ‘Journal de Genève.’ This organ of the moneyed classes of Geneva had ventured to suggest that mischief was brewing at the Temple Unique, and that the building trades were going once more to make a general strike, such as they had made in 1869. The leaders at theTemple Unique called the meeting. Thousands of workers filled the hall, and Ootin asked them to pass a resolution, the wording of which seemed to me very strange: an indignant protest was expressed in it against the inoffensive suggestion that the workers were going to strike. ‘Why should this suggestion be described as a calumny?’ I asked myself. ‘Is it, then, a crime to strike?’ Ootin concluded in the meantime a hurried speech in support of his resolution with the words, ‘If you agree, citizens, with it I will send it at once to the press.’ He was going to leave the platform, when somebody in the hall suggested that discussion would not be out of place; and then the representatives of all branches of the building trades stood up in succession, saying that the wages had lately been so low that they could hardly live upon them; that with the opening of the spring there was plenty of work in view, of which they intended to take advantage to increase their wages; and that if an increase were refused they intended to begin a general strike.
I was furious, and next day hotly reproached Ootin for his behaviour. ‘As a leader,’ I told him, ‘you were bound to know that a strike had really been spoken of.’ In my innocence I did not suspect the real motives of the leaders, and it was Ootin himself who made me understand that a strike at that time would be disastrous for the election of the lawyer, Monsieur A.
I could not reconcile this wire-pulling by the leaders with the burning speeches I had heard them pronounce from the platform. I felt disheartened, and spoke to Ootin of my intention to make myself acquainted with the other section of the International Association at Geneva, which was known as the BakunÃsts. The name ‘anarchist’ was not much in use then. Ootin gave me at once a word of introduction to another Russian, Nicholas Joukóvsky, who belonged to that section, and, looking straight into my face, he added with a sigh, ‘Well, youwon’t return to us; you will remain with them.’ He had guessed right.
I went first to Neuchâtel, and then spent a week or so among the watchmakers in the Jura Mountains. I thus made my first acquaintance with that famous Jura Federation which played for the next few years an important part in the development of socialism, introducing into it the no-government, or anarchist, tendency.
In 1872, the Jura Federation was becoming a rebel against the authority of the general council of the International Workingmen’s Association. The Association was essentially a working-men’s organization, the workers understanding it as a labour movement and not as a political party. In East Belgium, for instance, they had introduced into the statutes a clause in virtue of which no one could be a member of a section unless employed in a manual trade; even foremen were excluded.
The workers were moreover federalist in principle. Each nation, each separate region, and even each local section had to be left free to develop on its own lines. But the middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times, had introduced the same notions into the Workingmen’s Association. Beside the federal and national councils, a general council was nominated at London, to act as a sort of intermediary between the councils of the different nations. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits. It soon appeared, however, that the mere fact of having such a central body became a source of substantial inconvenience. The general council was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement, to approve or to censure the action of the local federations and sections,and even of individual members. When the Commune insurrection began in Paris—and ‘the leaders had only to follow,’ without being able to say whereto they would be led within the next twenty-four hours—the general council insisted upon directing the insurrection from London. It required daily reports about the events, gave orders, favoured this and hampered that, and thus put in evidence the disadvantage of having a governing body, even within the Association. The disadvantage became still more apparent when, at a secret conference held in 1871, the general council, supported by a few delegates, decided to direct the forces of the Association towards electoral agitation. It set people thinking about the evils of any government, however democratic its origin. This was the first spark of anarchism. The Jura Federation became the centre of opposition against the general council.
The separation between leaders and workers which I had noticed at Geneva in the Temple Unique did not exist in the Jura Mountains. There were a number of men who were more intelligent, and especially more active, than the others; but that was all. James Guillaume, one of the most intelligent and broadly educated men I ever met, was a proof-reader and the manager of a small printing office. His earnings in this capacity were so small that he had to give his nights to translating novels from German into French, for which he was paid eight francs for sixteen pages.
When I came to Neuchâtel, he told me that unfortunately he could not spare even as much as a couple of hours for a friendly chat. The printing office was just issuing that afternoon the first number of a local paper, and in addition to his usual duties of proof-reader and co-editor, he had to write on the wrappers a thousand addresses of persons to whom the first three numbers would be sent, and to fasten himself the wrappers.
I offered to aid him in writing the addresses, but that was not practicable, because they were either kept in memory or written on scraps of paper in an unreadable hand.... ‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘I will come in the afternoon to the office and fasten the wrappers, and you will give me the time which you may thus save.’
We understood each other. Guillaume warmly shook my hand, and that was the beginning of our friendship. We spent all the afternoon in the office, he writing the addresses, I fastening the wrappers, and a French Communard, who was a compositor, chatting with us all the while as he rapidly composed a novel, intermingling his conversation with the sentences which he had to put in type and which he read aloud.
‘The fight in the streets,’ he would say, ‘became very sharp.’... ‘Dear Mary, I love you.’... ‘The workers were furious and fought like lions at Montmartre,’ ... ‘and he fell on his knees before her,’ ... ‘and that lasted for four days. We knew that Galliffet was shooting all prisoners—the more terrible still was the fight,’ and so on he went, rapidly lifting the type from the case.
It was late in the evening that Guillaume took off his working blouse, and we went out for a friendly chat for a couple of hours, when he had to resume his work as editor of the ‘Bulletin’ of the Jura Federation.
At Neuchâtel I also made the acquaintance of Malon. He was born in a village, and in his childhood he was a shepherd. Later on he came to Paris, learned there a trade—basket-making—and, like the book-binder Varlin and the carpenter Pindy, with whom he was associated in the International, had come to be widely known as one of the leading spirits of the Association when it was prosecuted in 1869 by Napoleon III. All three had entirely won the hearts of the Paris workers, and when the Commune insurrection broke out they were elected members of the Council of the Commune, all three receiving formidable numbers of votes. Malonwas also mayor of one of the Parisarrondissements. Now, in Switzerland, he was earning his living as a basket-maker. He had rented for a few coppers a month a small open shed out of the town, on the slope of a hill, from which he enjoyed while at work an extensive view of the Lake of Neuchâtel. At night he wrote letters, a book on the Commune, short articles for the labour papers—and thus he became a writer. Every day I went to see him and to hear what this broad-faced, laborious, slightly poetical, quiet, and most good-hearted Communard had to tell me about the insurrection in which he took a prominent part, and which he had just described in a book, ‘The Third Defeat of the French Proletariate.’
One morning when I had climbed the hill and reached his shed, he met me quite radiant with the words: ‘You know, Pindy is alive! Here is a letter from him; he is in Switzerland.’ Nothing had been heard of Pindy since he was seen last on May 25 or May 26 at the Tuileries, and he was supposed to be dead, while in reality he remained in concealment at Paris. And while Malon’s fingers continued to ply the wickers and to shape them into an elegant basket, he told me in his quiet voice, which only slightly trembled at times, how many men had been shot by the Versailles troops on the supposition that they were Pindy, Varlin, himself, or some other leader. He told me what he knew of the death of Varlin, the book-binder whom the Paris workers worshipped, or old Delécluze, who did not want to survive the defeat, and many others; and he related the horrors which he had witnessed during that carnival of blood with which the wealthy classes of Paris celebrated their return to the capital, and then—the spirit of retaliation which took hold of a crowd, led by Raoul Rigault, which executed the hostages of the Commune.
His lips quivered when he spoke of the heroism of the children; and he quite broke down when he told me the story of that boy whom the Versailles troopswere going to shoot, and who asked the officer’s permission to hand first a silver watch, which he had on, to his mother, who lived close by. The officer, yielding to a moment of pity, let the boy go, probably hoping that he would never return. But a quarter of an hour later the boy was back and, taking his place amidst the corpses at the wall, said: ‘I am ready.’ Twelve bullets put an end to his young life.
I think I never suffered so much as when I read that terrible book, ‘Le Livre Rouge de la Justice Rurale,’ which contained nothing but extracts from the letters of theStandard,Daily Telegraph, andTimescorrespondents, written from Paris during the last days of May 1871, relating the horrors committed by the Versailles army under Galliffet, together with a few quotations from the ParisFigaro, imbued with a bloodthirsty spirit towards the insurgents. In reading these pages I was filled with despair concerning mankind, and should have continued to despair, had I not afterwards seen in those of the defeated party who had lived through all these horrors, that absence of hatred, that confidence in the final triumph of their ideas, that calm though sad gaze of their eyes directed towards the future, that readiness to forget the nightmare of the past, which struck me in Malon; in fact, in nearly all the refugees of the Commune whom I met at Geneva, and which I still see in Louise Michel, Lefrançais, Elisée Reclus, and other friends.
From Neuchâtel I went to Sonvilliers. In a little valley in the Jura hills there is a succession of small towns and villages of which the French-speaking population was at that time entirely employed in the various branches of watchmaking; whole families used to work in small workshops. In one of them I found another leader, Adhémar Schwitzguébel, with whom, also, I afterward became very closely connected. He sat among a dozen young men who were engraving lids of gold and silver watches. I was asked to take a seat on abench or table, and soon we were all engaged in a lively conversation upon socialism, government or no government, and the coming congresses.
In the evening a heavy snowstorm raged; it blinded us, and froze the blood in our veins, as we struggled to the next village. But, notwithstanding the storm, about fifty watchmakers, chiefly old people, came from the neighbouring towns and villages—some of them as far as seven miles distant—to join in a small informal meeting that was called for that evening.
The very organization of the watch trade, which permits men to know one another thoroughly and to work in their own houses, where they are free to talk, explains why the level of intellectual development in this population is higher than that of workers who spend all their life from early childhood in the factories. There is more independence and more originality among petty trades’ workers. But the absence of a division between the leaders and the masses in the Jura Federation was also the reason why there was not a question upon which every member of the federation would not strive to form his own independent opinion. Here I saw that the workers were not a mass that was being led and made subservient to the political ends of a few men; their leaders were simply their more active comrades—initiators rather than leaders. The clearness of insight, the soundness of judgment, the capacity for disentangling complex social questions, which I noticed amongst these workers, especially the middle-aged ones, deeply impressed me; and I am firmly persuaded that if the Jura Federation has played a prominent part in the development of socialism, it is not only on account of the importance of the no-government and federalist ideas of which it was the champion, but also on account of the expression which was given to these ideas by the good sense of the Jura watchmakers. Without their aid, these conceptions might have remained mere abstractions for a long time.
The theoretical aspects of anarchism, as they were then beginning to be expressed in the Jura Federation, especially by Bakúnin; the criticisms of state socialism—the fear of an economic despotism, far more dangerous than the merely political despotism—which I heard formulated there; and the revolutionary character of the agitation, appealed strongly to my mind. But the equalitarian relations which I found in the Jura Mountains, the independence of thought and expression which I saw developing in the workers, and their unlimited devotion to the cause appealed even more strongly to my feelings; and when I came away from the mountains, after a week’s stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.
A subsequent journey to Belgium, where I could compare once more the centralized political agitation at Brussels with the economic and independent agitation that was going on amongst the clothiers at Verviers, only strengthened my views. These clothiers were one of the most sympathetic populations that I have ever met with in Western Europe.
Bakúnin was at that time at Locarno. I did not see him, and now regret it very much, because he was dead when I returned four years later to Switzerland. It was he who had helped the Jura friends to clear up their ideas and to formulate their aspirations; he who had inspired them with his powerful, burning, irresistible revolutionary enthusiasm. As soon as he saw that a small newspaper, which Guillaume began to edit in the Jura hills (at Locle), was sounding a new note of independent thought in the socialist movement, he came to Locle, talked for whole days and whole nights long to his new friends about the historical necessity of a newmove in the anarchist direction; he wrote for that paper a series of profound and brilliant articles on the historical progress of mankind towards freedom; he infused enthusiasm into his new friends, and he created that centre of propaganda from which anarchism spread later on to other parts of Europe.
After he had moved to Locarno—from whence he started a similar movement in Italy and, through his sympathetic and gifted emissary, Fanelli, also in Spain—the work that he had begun in the Jura hills was continued independently by the Jurassians themselves. The name of ‘Michel’ often recurred in their conversations—not, however, as that of an absent chief whose opinions would make law, but as that of a personal friend of whom everyone spoke with love, in a spirit of comradeship. What struck me most was that Bakúnin’s influence was felt much less as the influence of an intellectual authority than as the influence of a moral personality. In conversations about anarchism, or about the attitude of the federation, I never heard it said, ‘Bakúnin has said so’ or ‘Bakúnin thinks so,’ as if it clenched the discussion. His writings and his sayings were not a text that one had to obey—as is often unfortunately the case in political parties. In all such matters, in which intellect is the supreme judge, everyone in discussion used his own arguments. Their general drift and tenor might have been suggested by Bakúnin, or Bakúnin might have borrowed them from his Jura friends—at any rate, in each individual the arguments retained their own individual character. I only once heard Bakúnin’s name invoked as an authority in itself, and that struck me so much that I even now remember the spot where the conversation took place and its surroundings. The young men began once in the presence of women some young men’s talk, not very respectful towards the other sex, when one of the women present put a sudden stop to it by exclaiming: ‘Pity that Michel is not here: hewould have put you in your place!’ The colossal figure of the revolutionist who had given up everything for the sake of the revolution, and lived for it alone, borrowing from his conception of it the highest and purest conceptions of life, continued to inspire them.
I returned from this journey with distinct sociological conceptions which I have retained since, doing my best to develop them in more and more definite, concrete forms.
There was, however, one point which I did not accept without having given to it a great deal of thinking and many hours of my nights. I clearly saw that the immense change which would hand over everything that is necessary for life and production into the hands of society—be it the Folk State of the social democrats, or the free unions of freely associated groups, as the anarchists say—would imply a revolution far more profound than any of those which history has on record. Moreover, in such a revolution the workers would have against them, not the rotten generation of aristocrats against whom the French peasants and republicans had to fight in the last century—and even that fight was a desperate one—but the far more powerful, intellectually and physically, middle classes, which have at their service all the potent machinery of the modern State. However, I soon noticed that no revolution, whether peaceful or violent, has ever taken place without the new ideals having deeply penetrated into the very class itself whose economical and political privileges had to be assailed. I had witnessed the abolition of serfdom in Russia, and I knew that if a conviction of the injustice of their rights had not widely spread within the serf-owners’ class itself (as a consequence of the previous evolution and revolutions accomplished in Western Europe), the emancipation of the serfs would never have been accomplished as easily as it was in 1861. And I saw that the idea of emancipation of the workersfrom the present wage-system was making headway amongst the middle classes themselves. The most ardent defenders of the present economical conditions had already abandoned the plea ofrightin defending the present privileges—questions as to theopportunenessof such a change having already taken its place. They did not deny the desirability of some such change, and only asked whether the new economical organization advocated by the socialists would really be better than the present one; whether a society in which the workers would have a dominant voice would be able to manage production better than the individual capitalists, actuated by mere considerations of self-interest, manage it at the present time.
Besides, I began gradually to understand that revolutions,i.e.periods of accelerated rapid evolution and rapid changes, are as much in the nature of human society as the slow evolution which incessantly goes on now among the civilized races of mankind. And each time that such a period of accelerated evolution and thorough reconstruction begins, civil war may break out on a small or on a grand scale. The question is, then, not so much how to avoid revolutions as how to attain the greatest results with the most limited amount of civil war, the least number of victims, and a minimum of mutual embitterment. For that end there is only one means; namely, that the oppressed part of society should obtain the clearest possible conception of what they intend to achieve and how, and that they should be imbued with the enthusiasm which is necessary for that achievement—in which case they will be sure to attract to their cause the best and the freshest intellectual forces of the class which is possessed of historically grown-up privileges.
The Commune of Paris was a terrible example of an outbreak with yet undetermined ideals. When the workers became, in March 1871, the masters of the great city, they did not attack the property rights vested in themiddle classes. On the contrary, they took these rights under their protection. The leaders of the Commune covered the National Bank with their bodies, and notwithstanding the crisis which had paralysed industry, and the consequent absence of earning for a mass of workers, they protected the rights of the owners of the factories, the trade establishments, and the dwelling-houses at Paris with their decrees. However, when the movement was crushed, no account was taken by the middle classes of the modesty of the Communalist claims of the insurgents. Having lived for two months in fear that the workers would make an assault upon their property rights, the rich men of France took upon the workers just the same revenge as if they had made the assault in reality. Nearly thirty thousand workers were slaughtered, as is known, not in battle but after they had lost the battle. If the workers had taken steps towards the socialization of property, the revenge could not have been more terrible.
If, then, my conclusion was that there are periods in human development when a conflict is unavoidable, and civil war breaks out quite independently of the will of particular individuals, let, at least, these conflicts take place, not on the ground of vague aspirations, but upon definite issues; not upon secondary points, the insignificance of which does not diminish the violence of the conflict, but upon broad ideas which inspire men by the grandness of the horizon which they bring into view. In this last case the conflict itself will depend much less upon the efficacy of firearms and guns than upon the force of the creative genius which will be brought into action in the work of reconstruction of society. It will depend chiefly upon the constructive forces of society taking for the moment a free course; upon the inspirations being of a higher standard, and so winning more sympathy even from those who, as a class, are opposed to the change. The conflict, being thus engaged in on larger issues, willpurify the social atmosphere itself; and the numbers of victims on both sides will certainly be much smaller than they would have been in case the fight had been fought upon matters of secondary importance in which the lower instincts of men find a free play.
With these ideas I returned to Russia.
During my journey I had bought a number of books and collections of socialist newspapers. In Russia such books were ‘unconditionally prohibited’ by censorship; and some of the collections of newspapers and reports of international congresses could not be bought for any amount of money even in Belgium. ‘Shall I part with them, while my brother and my friends would be so glad to have them at St. Petersburg?’ I asked myself; and I decided that by all means I must get them into Russia.
I returned to St. PetersburgviâVienna and Warsaw. Thousands of Jews live by smuggling on the Polish frontier, and I thought that if I could succeed in discovering only one of them my books would be carried in safety across the border. However, to alight at a small railway station near the frontier while every other passenger went on, and to hunt there for smugglers, would hardly have been reasonable; so I took a side branch of the railway and went to Cracow. ‘The capital of Old Poland is near to the frontier,’ I thought, ‘and I shall find there some Jew who will lead me to the men I seek.’
I reached the once renowned and brilliant city in the evening, and early next morning went out from my hotel on my search. To my bewilderment I saw, however, at every street corner and wherever I turned my eyes in the otherwise deserted market place a Jew, wearing the traditional long dress and locks of his forefathers, andwatching there for some Polish nobleman or tradesman who might send him on an errand and pay him a few coppers for the service. I wanted to findoneJew; and now there were too many of them. Whom should I approach? I made the round of the town, and then, in my despair, I decided to accost the Jew who stood at the entrance gate of my hotel—an immense old palace, of which in former days every hall was filled with elegant crowds of gaily dressed dancers, but which now fulfilled the more prosaic function of giving food and shelter to a few occasional travellers. I explained to the man my desire of smuggling into Russia a rather heavy bundle of books and newspapers.
‘Very easily done, sir,’ he replied. ‘I will just bring to you the representative of the Universal Company for the International Exchange of (let me say) Rags and Bones. They carry on the largest smuggling business in the world, and he is sure to oblige you.’ Half an hour later he really returned with the representative of the company—a most elegant young man, who spoke in perfection Russian, German, and Polish.
He looked at my bundle, weighed it with his hands, and asked what sort of books were in it.
‘All severely prohibited by Russian censorship; that is why they must be smuggled in.’
‘Books,’ he said, ‘are not exactly in our line of trade; our business lies in costly silks. If I were going to pay my men by weight, according to our silk tariff, I should have to ask you a quite extravagant price. And then, to tell the truth, I don’t much like meddling with books. The slightest mishap, and “they†would make of it a political affair, and then it would cost the Universal Rags and Bones Company a tremendous sum of money to get clear of it.’
I probably looked very sad, for the elegant young man who represented the Universal Rags and Bones Company immediately added: ‘Don’t be troubled. He[the hotel commissionnaire] will arrange it for you in some other way.’
‘Oh yes. There are scores of ways to arrange such a trifle, to oblige the gentleman,’ jovially remarked the commissionnaire, as he left me.
In an hour’s time he came back with another young man. This one took the bundle, put it by the side of the door, and said: ‘It’s all right. If you leave to-morrow, you shall have your books at such a station in Russia,’ and he explained to me how it would be managed.
‘How much will it cost?’ I asked.
‘How much are you disposed to pay?’ was the reply.
I emptied my purse on the table, and said: ‘That much for my journey. The remainder is yours, I will travel third class!’
‘Wai! wai! wai!’ exclaimed both men at once, ‘What are you saying, sir? Such a gentleman travel third class! Never! No, no, no, that won’t do.... Eight roubles will do for us, and then one rouble or so for the commissionnaire, if you are agreeable to it—just as much as you like. We are not highway robbers, but honest tradesmen.’ And they bluntly refused to take more money.
I had often heard of the honesty of the Jewish smugglers on the frontier; but I had never expected to have such a proof of it. Later on, when our circle imported many books from abroad, or still later, when so many revolutionists and refugees crossed the frontier in entering or leaving Russia, there was not a case in which the smugglers betrayed anyone, or took advantage of the circumstances to exact an exorbitant price for their services.
Next day I left Cracow; and at the designated Russian station a porter approached my compartment, and, speaking loudly, so as to be heard by the gendarmewho was walking along the platform, said to me, ‘Here is the bag your highness left the other day,’ and handed me my precious parcel.
I was so pleased to have it that I did not even stop at Warsaw, but continued my journey directly to St. Petersburg, to show my trophies to my brother.
A formidable movement was developing in the meantime amongst the educated youth of Russia. Serfdom was abolished. But quite a network of habits and customs of domestic slavery, of utter disregard of human individuality, of despotism on the part of the fathers, and of hypocritical submission on that of the wives, the sons, and the daughters, had developed during the two hundred and fifty years that serfdom had existed. Everywhere in Europe, at the beginning of this century, there was a great deal of domestic despotism—the writings of Thackeray and Dickens bear ample testimony to it—but nowhere else had that tyranny attained such a luxurious development as in Russia. All Russian life, in the family, in the relations between commander and subordinate, military chief and soldier, employer and employee, bore the stamp of it. Quite a world of customs and manners of thinking, of prejudices and moral cowardice, of habits bred by a lazy existence, had grown up; and even the best men of the time paid a large tribute to these products of the serfdom period.
Law could have no grip upon these things. Only a vigorous social movement, which would attack the very roots of the evil, could reform the habits and customs of everyday life; and in Russia this movement—this revolt of the individual—took a far more powerful character, and became far more sweeping in its criticisms, than anywhere in Western Europe or America. ‘Nihilism’ wasthe name that Turguéneff gave it in his epoch-making novel, ‘Fathers and Sons.’
The movement is often misunderstood in western Europe. In the press, for example, Nihilism is confused with terrorism. The revolutionary disturbance which broke out in Russia toward the close of the reign of Alexander II., and ended in the tragical death of the Tsar, is constantly described as Nihilism. This is, however, a mistake. To confuse Nihilism with terrorism is as wrong as to confuse a philosophical movement like Stoicism or Positivism with a political movement, such as, for example, republicanism. Terrorism was called into existence by certain special conditions of the political struggle at a given historical moment. It has lived, and has died. It may revive and die out again. But Nihilism has impressed its stamp upon the whole of the life of the educated classes of Russia, and that stamp will be retained for many years to come. It is Nihilism, divested of some of its rougher aspects—which were unavoidable in a young movement of that sort—which gives now to the life of a great portion of the educated classes of Russia a certain peculiar character which we Russians regret not to find in the life of Western Europe. It is Nihilism, again, in its various manifestations which gives to many of our writers that remarkable sincerity, that habit of ‘thinking aloud,’ which astounds western European readers.
First of all, the Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as the ‘conventional lies of civilized mankind.’ Absolute sincerity was his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up, and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits, and customs which their own reason could not justify. He refused to bend before any authority except that of reason, and in the analysis of every social institution or habit he revolted against any sort of more or less masked sophism.
He broke, of course, with the superstitions of hisfathers, and in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist, an agnostic, a Spencerian evolutionist, or a scientific materialist; and while he never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief which is a psychological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the hypocrisy that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion which they continually throw aside as useless ballast.
The life of civilized people is full of little conventional lies. Persons who dislike each other, meeting in the street, make their faces radiant with a happy smile; the Nihilist remained unmoved, and smiled only for those whom he was really glad to meet. All those forms of outward politeness which are mere hypocrisy were equally repugnant to him, and he assumed a certain external roughness as a protest against the smooth amiability of his fathers. He saw them wildly talking as idealist sentimentalists, and at the same time acting as real barbarians toward their wives, their children, and their serfs; and he rose in revolt against that sort of sentimentalism, which, after all, so nicely accommodated itself to the anything but ideal conditions of Russian life. Art was involved in the same sweeping negation. Continual talk about beauty, the ideal, art for art’s sake, æsthetics, and the like, so willingly indulged in—while every object of art was bought with money exacted from starving peasants or from underpaid workers, and the so-called ‘worship of the beautiful’ was but a mask to cover the most commonplace dissoluteness—inspired him with disgust; and the criticisms of art which one of the greatest artists of the century, Tolstóy, has now powerfully formulated, the Nihilist expressed in the sweeping assertion, ‘A pair of boots is more important than all your Madonnas and all your refined talk about Shakespeare.’
Marriage without love and familiarity without friendship were repudiated. The Nihilist girl, compelled by her parents to be a doll in a doll’s house, and to marryfor property’s sake, preferred to abandon her house and her silk dresses; she put on a black woollen dress of the plainest description, cut off her hair, and went to a high school, in order to win there her personal independence. The woman who saw that her marriage was no longer a marriage—that neither love nor friendship connected any more those who were legally considered husband and wife—preferred to break a bond which retained none of its essential features; and she often went with her children to face poverty, preferring loneliness and misery to a life which, under conventional conditions, would have given a perpetual lie to her best self.
The Nihilist carried his love of sincerity even into the minutest details of everyday life. He discarded the conventional forms of society talk, and expressed his opinions in a blunt and terse way, even with a certain affectation of outward roughness.
We used in Irkútsk to meet once a week in a club, and to have some dancing, I was for a time a regular visitor at thesesoirées, but gradually, having to work, I abandoned them. One night, as I had not made my appearance for several weeks in succession, a young friend of mine was asked by one of the ladies why I did not come any more to their gatherings. ‘He takes a ride now when he wants exercise,’ was the rather rough reply of my friend. ‘But he might come to spend a couple of hours with us, without dancing,’ one of the ladies ventured to say. ‘What would he do here?’ retorted my Nihilist friend, ‘talk with you about fashions and furbelows? He has had enough of that nonsense.’ ‘But he sees occasionally Miss So-and-So,’ timidly remarked one of the young ladies present. ‘Yes, but she is a studious girl,’ bluntly replied my friend, ‘he helps her with her German.’ I must add that this undoubtedly rough rebuke had the effect that most of the Irkútsk girls began next to besiege my brother, my friend, and myself with questions as to what we should advise them to read or to study. Withthe same frankness the Nihilist spoke to his acquaintances, telling them that all their talk about ‘this poor people’ was sheer hypocrisy so long as they lived upon the underpaid work of these people whom they commiserated at their ease as they chatted together in richly decorated rooms; and with the same frankness a Nihilist would inform a high functionary that he (the said functionary) cared not a straw for the welfare of those whom he ruled, but was simply a thief!
With a certain austerity the Nihilist would rebuke the woman who indulged in small talk, and prided herself on her ‘womanly’ manners and elaborate toilette. He would bluntly say to a pretty young person: ‘How is it that you are not ashamed to talk this nonsense and to wear that chignon of false hair?’ In a woman he wanted to find a comrade, a human personality—not a doll or a ‘muslin girl’—and he absolutely refused to join in those petty tokens of politeness with which men surround those whom they like so much to consider as ‘the weaker sex.’ When a lady entered a room a Nihilist did not jump off his seat to offer it to her—unless he saw that she looked tired and there was no other seat in the room. He behaved towards her as he would have behaved towards a comrade of his own sex; but if a lady—who might have been a total stranger to him—-manifested the desire to learn something which he knew and she knew not, he would walk every night to the far end of a great city to help her with his lessons. The young man who would not move his hand to serve a lady with a cup of tea, would transfer to the girl who came to study at Moscow or St. Petersburg the only lesson which he had got and which gave him daily bread, simply saying to her: ‘It is easier for a man to find work than it is for a woman. There is no attempt at knighthood in my offer, it is simply a matter of equality.’
Two great Russian novelists, Turguéneff and Goncharóff, have tried to represent this new type in theirnovels. Goncharóff, inPrecipice, taking a real but unrepresentative individual of this class, made a caricature of Nihilism. Turguéneff was too good an artist, and had himself conceived too much admiration for the new type, to let himself be drawn into caricature painting; but even his Nihilist, Bazároff, did not satisfy us. We found him too harsh, especially in his relations with his old parents, and, above all, we reproached him with his seeming neglect of his duties as a citizen. Russian youth could not be satisfied with the merely negative attitude of Turguéneff’s hero. Nihilism, with its affirmation of the rights of the individual and its negation of all hypocrisy, was but a first step toward a higher type of men and women, who are equally free, but live for a great cause. In the Nihilists of Chernyshévsky, as they are depicted in his far less artistic novel, ‘What is to be Done?’ they saw better portraits of themselves.
‘It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves,’ our poet Nekrásoff wrote. The young generation actually refused to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been accumulated in their fathers’ houses by means of servile labour, whether the labourers were actual serfs or slaves of the present industrial system.
All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment which was produced at the court against Karakózoff and his friends, that these young men, owners of considerable fortunes, used to live three or four in the same room, never spending more than ten roubles (one pound) apiece a month for all their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for co-operative associations, co-operative workshops (where they themselves worked), and the like. Five years later, thousands and thousands of the Russian youth—the best part of it—were doing the same. Theirwatchwordwas, ‘V naród!’ (To the people; be the people.) During the years 1860-65 in nearly every wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between the fathers,who wanted to maintain the old traditions, and the sons and daughters, who defended their right to dispose of their life according to their own ideals. Young men left the military service, the counter, the shop, and flocked to the university towns. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg, Moscow, andKÃeff, eager to learn a profession which would free them from the domestic yoke, and some day, perhaps, also from the possible yoke of a husband. After hard and bitter struggles, many of them won that personal freedom. Now they wanted to utilize it, not for their own personal enjoyment, but for carrying to the people the knowledge that had emancipated them.
In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg, small groups were formed for self-improvement and self-education; the works of the philosophers, the writings of the economists, the researches of the young Russian historical school, were carefully read in these circles, and the reading was followed by endless discussions. The aim of all that reading and discussion was to solve the great question which rose before them: In what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle amongst the people and to live the people’s life. Young men went into the villages as doctors, doctors’ assistants, teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural labourers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live there in close contact with the peasants. Girls passed teachers’ examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the poorest part of the population.
They went without even having any ideals of social reconstruction or any thought of revolution; merely and simply they wanted to teach the mass of the peasants to read, to instruct them, to give them medical help, or in any way to aid to raise them from their darkness andmisery, and to learn at the same time from them what weretheirpopular ideals of a better social life.
When I returned from Switzerland I found this movement in full swing.