I hastened, of course, to share with my friends my impressions of the International Workingmen’s Association and my books. At the university I had no friends, properly speaking; I was older than most of my companions, and among young people a difference of a few years is always an obstacle to complete comradeship. It must also be said that since the new rules of admission to the university had been introduced in 1861, the best of the young men, the most developed and the most independent in thought, were sifted out of the gymnasia, and did not gain admittance to the university. Consequently, the majority of my comrades were good boys, laborious, but taking no interest in anything besides the examinations.
I was friendly with only one of them: let me call him Dmítri Kelnitz. He was born in South Russia, and, although his name was German, he hardly spoke German, and his face was South Russian rather than Teutonic. He was very intelligent, had read a great deal, and had seriously thought over what he had read. He loved science and deeply respected it, but, like many of us, he soon came to the conclusion that to follow the career of a scientific man meant to join the camp of the Philistines, and that there was plenty of other and more urgent work that he could do. He attended the university lectures for two years, and then abandoned them, giving himself entirely to social work. He lived anyhow; I even doubt if he had a permanent lodging. Sometimes he would come to me and ask, ‘Have you some paper?’ and,having taken a supply of it, he would sit at the corner of a table for an hour or two, diligently making a translation. The little that he earned in this way was more than sufficient to satisfy all his limited wants. Then he would hurry to a distant part of the town to see a comrade or to help a needy friend; or he would cross St. Petersburg on foot, to a remote suburb, in order to obtain free admission to a college for some boy in whom the comrades were interested. He was undoubtedly a gifted man. In Western Europe a man far less gifted would have worked his way to a position of political or socialist leadership. No such thought ever entered the brain of Kelnitz. To lead men was by no means his ambition, and there was no work too insignificant for him to do. This trait, however, was not distinctive of him alone; all those who had lived some years in the students’ circles of those times were possessed of it to a high degree.
Soon after my return Kelnitz invited me to join a circle which was known among the youth as ‘the Circle of Tchaykóvsky.’ Under this name it played an important part in the history of the social movement in Russia, and under this name it will go down to history. ‘Its members,’ Kelnitz said to me, ‘have hitherto been mostly constitutionalists; but they are excellent men, with minds open to any honest idea; they have plenty of friends all over Russia, and you will see later on what you can do.’ I already knew Tchaykóvsky and a few other members of this circle. Tchaykóvsky had won my heart at our first meeting, and our friendship has remained unshaken for twenty-seven years.
The beginning of this circle was a very small group of young men and women—one of whom was Sophie Peróvskaya—who had united for purposes of self-education and self-improvement. Tchaykóvsky was of their number. In 1869 Necháieff had tried to start, amidst the youth imbued with the above-mentioned desire of working amongst the people, a secret revolutionary organization,and to secure this end he resorted to the ways of old conspirators, without recoiling even before deceit when he wanted to force his associates to follow his lead. Such methods could have no success in Russia, and very soon his society broke down. All the members were arrested, and some of the best and purest of the Russian youth went to Siberia before they had done anything. The circle of self-education of which I am speaking was constituted in opposition to the methods of Necháieff. The few friends had judged, quite correctly, that a morally developed individuality must be the foundation of every organization, whatever political character it may take afterward and whatever programme of action it may adopt in the course of future events. This was why the circle of Tchaykóvsky, gradually widening its programme, spread so extensively in Russia, achieved such important results, and later on, when the ferocious prosecutions of the government created a revolutionary struggle, produced that remarkable set of men and women who fell in the terrible contest they waged against autocracy.
At that time, however—that is, in 1872—the circle had nothing revolutionary in it. If it had remained a mere circle of self-improvement, it would soon have petrified like a monastery. But the members found a suitable work. They began to spread good books. They bought the works of Lassalle, Bervi (on the condition of the labouring classes in Russia), Marx, Russian historical works, and so on—whole editions—and distributed them among students in the provinces. In a few years there was not a town of importance in ‘thirty-eight provinces of the Russian Empire,’ to use official language, where this circle did not have a group of comrades engaged in the spreading of that sort of literature. Gradually, following the general drift of the times, and stimulated by the news which came from Western Europe about the rapid growth of the labour movement, the circle became more and more a centre of socialistic propaganda among theeducated youth, and a natural intermediary between numbers of provincial circles; and then, one day, the ice between students and workers was broken, and direct relations were established with working people at St. Petersburg and in some of the provinces. It was at that juncture that I joined the circle, in the spring of 1872.
All secret societies are fiercely prosecuted in Russia, and the western reader will perhaps expect from me a description of my initiation and of the oath of allegiance which I took. I must disappoint him, because there was nothing of the sort, and could not be; we should have been the first to laugh at such ceremonies, and Kelnitz would not have missed the opportunity of putting in one of his sarcastic remarks, which would have killed any ritual. There was not even a statute. The circle accepted as members only persons who were well known and had been tested in various circumstances, and of whom it was felt that they could be trusted absolutely. Before a new member was received, his character was discussed with the frankness and seriousness which were characteristic of the Nihilist. The slightest token of insincerity or conceit would have barred the way to admission. The circle did not care either to make a show of numbers, and had no tendency to concentrate in its hands all the activity that was going on among the youth, or to include in one organization the scores of different circles which existed in the capitals and the provinces. With most of them friendly relations were maintained; they were helped, and they helped us, when necessity arose, but no assault was made on their autonomy.
The circle preferred to remain a closely united group of friends; and never did I meet elsewhere such a collection of morally superior men and women as the score of persons whose acquaintance I made at the first meeting of the circle of Tchaykóvsky. I still feel proud of having been received into that family.
When I joined the circle of Tchaykóvsky, I found its members hotly discussing the direction to be given to their activity. Some were in favour of continuing to carry on radical and socialistic propaganda among the educated youth; but others thought that the sole aim of this work should be to prepare men who would be capable of arousing the great inert labouring masses, and that their chief activity ought to be among the peasants and workmen in the towns. In all the circles and groups which were formed at that time by the hundred at St. Petersburg and in the provinces the same discussions went on, and everywhere the second programme prevailed over the first.
If our youth had merely taken to socialism in the abstract, it might have felt satisfied with a mere declaration of socialist principles, including as a distant aim ‘the communistic possession of the instruments of production,’ and in the meantime it might have carried on some sort of political agitation. Many middle-class socialist politicians in Western Europe and America really take this course. But our youth had been drawn to socialism in quite another way. They were not theorisers about socialism, but had become socialists by living no richer than the workers live, by making no distinction between ‘mine and thine’ in their circles, and by refusing to enjoy for their own satisfaction the riches they had inherited from their fathers. They had done with regard to capitalism what Tolstóy advises should now be done with regard to war—that is, that people, instead of criticizing war and continuing to wear the military uniform, should refuse, each one for himself, to be a soldier and to use arms. In the same way our Russian youth, each one for himself or herself, refused to take personal advantage of the revenues of their fathers, Such a youth had to go to the people—andthey went. Thousands and thousands of young men and women had already left their homes, and tried now to live in the villages and the industrial towns in all possible capacities. This was not an organized movement: it was one of those mass movements which occur at certain periods of sudden awakening of human conscience. Now that small organized groups were formed, ready to try a systematic effort for spreading ideas of freedom and revolt in Russia, they were forcibly brought to carry on that propaganda amidst the dark masses of peasants and workers in the towns. Various writers have tried to explain this movement ‘to the people’ by influences from abroad—‘foreign agitators’ is everywhere a favourite explanation. It is certainly true that our youth listened to the mighty voice of Bakúnin, and that the agitation of the International Workingmen’s Association had a fascinating effect upon us. But the movement ‘V naród’—To the people—had a far deeper origin: it began before ‘foreign agitators’ had spoken to the Russian youth, and even before the International Association had been founded. It began already in the groups of Karakózoff in 1866; Turguéneff saw it coming, and already in 1859 faintly indicated it. I did my best to promote that movement in the circle of Tchaykóvsky; but I was only working with the tide, which was infinitely more powerful than any individual efforts.
We often spoke, of course, of the necessity of a political agitation against our absolute government. We saw already that the mass of the peasants were being driven to unavoidable and irremediable ruin by foolish taxation, and by the still more foolish selling off of their cattle to cover the arrears of taxes. We, ‘visionaries,’ saw coming that complete ruin of a whole population which by this time, alas, has been accomplished to an appalling extent in Central Russia, and is confessed by the government itself. We knew how, in every direction, Russia was being plundered in a most scandalous manner.We knew, and we learned more every day, of the lawlessness of the functionaries, and the almost incredible bestiality of many among them. We heard continually of friends whose houses were raided at night by the police, who disappeared in prisons, and who—we ascertained later on—had been transported without judgment to hamlets in some remote province of Russia. We felt, therefore, the necessity of a political struggle against this terrible power, which was crushing the best intellectual forces of the nation. But we saw no possible ground, legal or semi-legal, for such a struggle.
Our elder brothers did not want our socialistic aspirations, and we could not part with them. Nay, even if some of us had done so, it would have been of no avail. The young generation, as a whole, were treated as ‘suspects,’ and the elder generation feared to have anything to do with them. Every young man of democratic tastes, every young woman following a course of higher education, was a suspect in the eyes of the state police, and was denounced by Katkóff as an enemy of the state. Cropped hair and blue spectacles worn by a girl, a Scotch plaid worn in winter by a student, instead of an overcoat, which were evidences of Nihilist simplicity and democracy, were denounced as tokens of ‘political unreliability.’ If any student’s lodging came to be frequently visited by other students, it was periodically invaded by the state police and searched. So common were the night raids in certain students’ lodgings that Kelnitz once said, in his mildly humorous way, to the police officer who was searching the rooms: ‘Why should you go through all our books, each time you come to make a search? You might as well have a list of them, and then come once a month to see if they are all on the shelves; and you might, from time to time, add the titles of the new ones.’ The slightest suspicion of political unreliability was sufficient ground upon which to take a young man from a high school,to imprison him for several months, and finally to send him to some remote province of the Urals—‘for an undetermined term,’ as they used to say in their bureaucratic slang. Even at the time when the circle of Tchaykóvsky did nothing but distribute books, all of which had been printed with the censor’s approval, Tchaykóvsky was twice arrested and kept some four or six months in prison—on the second occasion at a critical time of his career as a chemist. His researches had recently been published in the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences, and he had come up for his final university examinations. He was released at last, because the police could not discover sufficient evidence against him to warrant his transportation to the Urals! ‘But if we arrest you once more,’ he was told, ‘we shall send you to Siberia.’ In fact, it was a favourite dream of Alexander II. to have, somewhere in the steppes, a special town, guarded night and day by patrols of Cossacks, where all suspected young people could be sent, so as to make of them a city of ten or twenty thousand inhabitants. Only the menace which such a city might some day offer prevented him from carrying out this truly Asiatic scheme.
One of our members, an officer, had belonged to a group of young men whose ambition was to serve in the provincialZémstvos(district and county councils). They regarded work in this direction as a high mission, and prepared themselves for it by serious studies of the economical conditions of Central Russia. Many young people cherished for a time the same hopes; but all these hopes vanished at the first contact with the actual government machinery.
Having granted institutions of a very limited form of self-government to certain provinces of Russia, the government, immediately after having passed that law, directed all its efforts to reduce that reform to nothingand to deprive it of all its meaning and vitality. The provincial ‘self-government’ had to content itself with the mere function of state officials who would collect additional local taxes and spend them for the local needs of the state. Every attempt of the county councils to take the initiative in any improvement—schools, teachers’ colleges, sanitary measures, agricultural improvements, etc.—was met by the central government with suspicion—nay with hatred—and denounced by the ‘Moscow Gazette’ as ‘separatism,’ as the creation of ‘a state within the state,’ as rebellion against autocracy.
If anyone were to tell the true history, for example, of the teachers’ college of Tver, or of any similar undertaking of a Zémstvo in those years, with all the petty persecutions, the prohibitions, the suspensions, and what not with which the institution was harassed, no West European, and especially no American reader, would believe it. He would throw the book aside, saying, ‘It cannot be true; it is too stupid to be true.’ And yet it was so. Whole groups of the elected representatives of several Zémstvos were deprived of their functions, ordered to leave their province and their estates, or were simply exiled, for having dared to petition the emperor in the most loyal manner concerning such rights as belonged to the Zémstvos by law. ‘The elected members of the provincial councils must be simple ministerial functionaries, and obey the Minister of the Interior:’ such was the theory of the St. Petersburg government. As to the less prominent people—teachers, doctors, and the like, in the service of the local councils—they were removed and exiled by the state police in twenty-four hours, without further ceremony than an order of the omnipotent Third Section of the imperial chancelry. No longer ago than last year, a lady whose husband is a rich landowner and occupies a prominent position in one of the Zémstvos, and who is herselfinterested in education, invited eight schoolmasters to her birthday party. ‘Poor men,’ she said to herself, ‘they never have the opportunity of seeing anyone but the peasants.’ The day after the party the village policeman called at the mansion and insisted upon having the names of the eight teachers, in order to report them to the police authorities. The lady refused to give the names. ‘Very well,’ he replied, ‘I will find them out, nevertheless, and make my report. Teachersmust notcome together, and I am bound to report if they do.’ The high position of the lady sheltered the teachers in this case; but if they had met in the lodgings of one of their own number they would have received a visit from the state police, and half of them would have been dismissed by the Ministry of Education; and if, moreover, an angry word had escaped from one of them during the police raid, he or she would have been sent to some province of the Urals. This is what happens to-day, thirty-three years after the opening of the county and district councils; but it was far worse in the seventies. What sort of basis for a political struggle could such institutions offer?
When I inherited from my father his Tambóv estate, I thought very seriously for a time of settling on that estate, and devoting my energy to work in the local Zémstvo. Some peasants and the poorer priests of the neighbourhood asked me to do so. As for myself, I should have been content with anything I could do, no matter how small it might be, if only it would help to raise the intellectual level and the well-being of the peasants. But one day, when several of my advisers were together, I asked them: ‘Supposing I were to try to start a school, an experimental farm, a co-operative enterprise, and, at the same time, also took upon myself the defence of that peasant from our village who has lately been wronged—would the authorities let me do it?’ ‘Never!’ was the unanimous reply.
An old grey-haired priest, a man who was held in great esteem in our neighbourhood, came to me a few days later, with two influential dissenting leaders, and said: ‘Talk with these two men. If you can manage it, go with them and, Bible in hand, preach to the peasants.... Well, you know what to preach.... No police in the world will find you, if they conceal you.... There’s nothing to be done besides; that’s what I, an old man, advise you.’
I told them frankly why I could not assume the part of Wiclif. But the old man was right. A movement similar to that of the Lollards is rapidly growing now amongst the Russian peasants. Such tortures as have been inflicted on the peace-loving Dukhobórs, and such raids upon the peasant dissenters in South Russia as were made in 1897, when children were kidnapped so that they might be educated in orthodox monasteries, will only give to that movement a force that it could not have attained five-and-twenty years ago.
As the question of agitation for a constitution was continually being raised in our discussions, I once proposed to our circle to take it up seriously and to choose an appropriate plan of action. I was always of the opinion that when the circle decided anything unanimously, each member ought to put aside his personal feeling and give all his strength to the task. ‘If you decide to agitate for a constitution,’ I said, ‘this is my plan: I will separate myself from you, for appearance sake, and maintain relations with only one member of the circle—for instance, Tchaykóvsky—through whom I shall be kept informed how you succeed in your work, and can communicate to you in a general way what I am doing. My work will be among the courtiers and the higher functionaries. I have among them many acquaintances, and know a number of persons who are disgusted with the present conditions. I will bring them together and unite them, if possible,into a sort of organization; and then, some day, there is sure to be an opportunity to direct all these forces toward compelling Alexander II. to give Russia a constitution. There certainly will come a time when all these people, feeling that they are compromised, will in their own interest take a decisive step. If it is necessary, some of us, who have been officers, might be very helpful in extending the propaganda amongst the officers in the army; but this action must be quite separate from yours, though parallel with it. I have seriously thought of it. I know what connections I have and who can be trusted, and I believe some of the discontented already look upon me as a possible centre for some action of this sort. This course is not the one I should take of my own choice; but if you think that it is best, I will give myself to it with might and main.’
The circle did not accept that proposal. Knowing one another as well as they did, my comrades probably thought that if I went in this direction I should cease to be true to myself. For my own personal happiness, for my own personal life, I cannot feel too grateful now that my proposal was not accepted. I should have gone in a direction which was not the one dictated by my own nature, and I should not have found in it the personal happiness which I have found in other paths. But when, six or seven years later, the terrorists were engaged in their terrible struggle against Alexander II., I regretted that there had not been somebody else to do the sort of work I had proposed to do in the higher circles at St. Petersburg. With some understanding there beforehand, and with the ramifications which such an understanding probably would have taken all over the empire, the holocausts of victims would not have been made in vain. At any rate, the underground work of the executive committee ought by all means to have been supported by a parallel agitation at the Winter Palace.
Over and over again the necessity of a political effort thus came under discussion in our little group, with no result. The apathy and the indifference of the wealthier classes were hopeless, and the irritation among the persecuted youth had not yet been brought to that high pitch which ended, six years later, in the struggle of the terrorists under the Executive Committee. Nay—and this is one of the most tragical ironies of history—it was the same youth whom Alexander II., in his blind fear and fury, ordered to be sent by the hundred to hard labour and condemned to slow death in exile; it was the same youth who protected him in 1871-78. The very teachings of the socialist circles were such as to prevent the repetition of a Karakózoff attempt on the Tsar’s life. ‘Prepare in Russia a great socialist mass movement amongst the workers and the peasants,’ was the watchword in those times. ‘Don’t trouble about the Tsar and his counsellors. If such a movement begins, if the peasants join in the mass movement to claim the land and to abolish the serfdom redemption taxes, the imperial power will be the first to seek support in the moneyed classes and the landlords and to convoke a Parliament—just as the peasant insurrection in France in 1789 compelled the royal power to convoke the National Assembly; so it will be in Russia.’
But there was more than that. Separate men and groups, seeing that the reign of Alexander II. was hopelessly doomed to sink deeper and deeper in reaction, and entertaining at the same time vague hopes as to the supposed ‘liberalism’ of the heir-apparent—all young heirs to thrones are supposed to be liberal—persistently reverted to the idea that the example of Karakózoff ought to be followed. The organized circles, however, strenuously opposed such an idea, and urged their comrades not to resort to that course of action. I may now divulge the following fact, which has hitherto remained unknown. When a young man came to St. Petersburg from one ofthe southern provinces with the firm intention of killing Alexander II., and some members of the Tchaykóvsky circle learned of his plan, they not only applied all the weight of their arguments to dissuade the young man, but, when he would not be dissuaded, they informed him that they would keep a watch over him and prevent him by force from making any such attempt. Knowing well how loosely guarded the Winter Palace was at that time, I can positively say that they saved the life of Alexander II. So firmly were the youth opposed at that time to the war in which later, when the cup of their sufferings was filled to overflowing, they took part.
The two years that I worked with the circle of Tchaykóvsky, before I was arrested, left a deep impression upon all my subsequent life and thought. During those two years it was life under high pressure—that exuberance of life when one feels at every moment the full throbbing of all the fibres of the inner self, and when life is really worth living. I was in a family of men and women so closely united by their common object, and so broadly and delicately humane in their mutual relations, that I cannot now recall a single moment of even temporary friction marring the life of our circle. Those who have had any experience of political agitation will appreciate the value of this statement.
Before abandoning entirely my scientific career, I considered myself bound to finish the report of my journey to Finland for the Geographical Society, as well as some other work that I had in hand for the same society; and my new friends were the first to confirm me in that decision. It would not be fair, they said, to do otherwise. Consequently, I worked hard to finish my geological and geographical books.
Meetings of our circle were frequent, and I never missed them. We used to meet then in a suburban part of St. Petersburg, in a small house of which Sophie Peróvskaya, under the assumed name and the fabricated passport of an artisan’s wife, was the supposed tenant. She was born of a very aristocratic family, and her father had been for some time the military governor of St. Petersburg; but, with the approval of her mother, who adored her, she had left her home to join a high school, and with the three sisters Korníloff—daughters of a rich manufacturer—she had founded that little circle of self-education which later on became our circle. Now, in the capacity of an artisan’s wife, in her cotton dress and men’s boots, her head covered with a cotton kerchief, as she carried on her shoulders her two pails of water from the Nevá, no one would have recognized in her the girl who a few years before shone in one of the most fashionable drawing-rooms of the capital. She was a general favourite, and every one of us, on entering the house, had a specially friendly smile for her—even when she, making a point of honour of keeping the house relatively clean, quarrelled with us about the dirt which we, dressed in peasant top-boots and sheepskins, brought in after walking the muddy streets of the suburbs. She tried then to give to her girlish, innocent, and very intelligent little face the most severe expression possible to it. In her moral conceptions she was a ‘rigorist,’ but not in the least of the sermon-preaching type. When she was dissatisfied with some one’s conduct, she would cast a severe glance at him from beneath her brows; but in that glance one saw her open-minded, generous nature, which understood all that is human. On one point only she was inexorable. ‘A women’s man,’ she once said, speaking of some one, and the expression and the manner in which she said it, without interrupting her work, is engraved for ever in my memory.
Peróvskaya was a ‘popularist’ to the very bottom ofher heart, and at the same time a revolutionist, a fighter of the truest steel. She had no need to embellish the workers and the peasants with imaginary virtues in order to love them and to work for them. She took them as they were, and said to me once: ‘We have begun a great thing. Two generations, perhaps, will succumb in the task, and yet it must be done.’ None of the women of our circle would have given way before the certainty of death on the scaffold. Each would have looked death straight in the face. But none of them, at that stage of our propaganda, thought of such a fate. Peróvskaya’s well-known portrait is exceptionally good; it records so well her earnest courage, her bright intelligence, and her loving nature. The letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she went to the scaffold is one of the best expressions of a loving soul that a woman’s heart ever dictated.
The following incident will show what the other women of our circle were. One night, Kupreyánoff and I went to Varvara B., to whom we had to make an urgent communication. It was past midnight, but, seeing a light in her window, we went upstairs. She sat in her tiny room at a table copying a programme of our circle. We knew how resolute she was, and the idea came to us to make one of those stupid jokes men sometimes think funny. ‘B.,’ I said, ‘we come to fetch you: we are going to try a rather mad attempt to liberate our friends from the fortress.’ She asked not one question. She quietly laid down her pen, rose from her chair, and said only, ‘Let us go.’ She spoke in so simple, so unaffected a voice that I felt at once how foolishly I had acted, and told her the truth. She dropped back into her chair, with tears in her eyes, and in a despairing voice asked: ‘It was only a joke? Why do you makesuchjokes?’ I fully realized then the cruelty of what I had done.
Another general favourite in our circle was Serghéi Kravchínsky, who became so well known, both in Englandand in the United States, under the name of Stepniák. He was often called ‘the Baby,’ so unconcerned was he about his own security: but his carelessness about himself was merely the result of a complete absence of fear, which, after all, is often the best policy for one who is hunted by the police. He soon became well known for his propaganda in the circles of workers, under his real Christian name of Serghéi, and consequently was very much wanted by the police; notwithstanding that, he took no precautions whatever to conceal himself, and I remember that one day he was severely scolded at one of our meetings for what was described as a gross imprudence. Being late for the meeting, as he often was, and having a long distance to cover in order to reach our house, he, dressed as a peasant in his sheepskin, ran the whole length of a great main thoroughfare at full speed in the middle of the street. ‘How could you do it?’ he was reproachfully asked. ‘You might have aroused suspicion, and have been arrested as a common thief.’ But I wish that everyone had been as cautious as he was in affairs where other people could be compromised.
We made our first intimate acquaintance over Stanley’s book, ‘How I Discovered Livingstone.’ One night our meeting had lasted till twelve, and as we were about to leave, one of the Korníloffs entered with a book in her hand, and asked who among us could undertake to translate by the next morning at eight o’clock sixteen printed pages of Stanley’s book. I looked at the size of the pages, and said that if somebody would help me the work could be done during the night. Serghéi volunteered, and by four o’clock the sixteen pages were done. We read to each other our translations, one of us following the English text; then we emptied a jar of Russian porridge which had been left on the table for us, and went out together to return home. We became close friends from that night.
I have always liked people capable of working, anddoing their work properly. So Serghéi’s translation and his capacity of working rapidly had already influenced me in his favour. But when I came to know more of him, I felt real love for his honest, frank nature, for his youthful energy and good sense, for his superior intelligence, simplicity, and truthfulness, and for his courage and tenacity. He had read and thought a great deal, and upon the revolutionary character of the struggle which we had undertaken it appeared we had similar views. He was ten years younger than I was, and perhaps did not quite realize what a hard contest the coming revolution would be. He told us later on, with much humour, how he once worked among the peasants in the country. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘I was walking along the road with a comrade when we were overtaken by a peasant in a sleigh. I began to tell the peasant that he must not pay taxes, that the functionaries plunder the people, and I tried to convince him by quotations from the Bible that they must revolt. The peasant whipped up his horse, but we followed rapidly; he made his horse trot, and we began to run behind him; all the time I continued to talk to him about taxes and revolt. Finally he made his horse gallop; but the animal was not worth much—an underfed peasant pony—so my comrade and I did not fall behind, but kept up our propaganda till we were quite out of breath.’
For some time Serghéi stayed in Kazán, and I had to correspond with him. He always hated writing letters in cipher, so I proposed a means of correspondence which had often been used before in conspiracies. You write an ordinary letter about all sorts of things, but in this letter it is only certain words—let us say, every fifth word—which has a meaning. You write, for instance: ‘Excuse my hurried letter. Come to-night to see me; to-morrow I shall go away to my sister. My brother Nicholas feels worse; it was late to makean operation.’ Reading each fifth word, you find: ‘Come to-morrow to Nicholas, late.’ We had to write letters of six or seven pages to transmit one page of information, and we had to cultivate our imagination in order to fill the letters with all sorts of things by way of introducing the words that were required. Serghéi, from whom it was impossible to obtain a cipher letter, took to this kind of correspondence, and used to send me letters containing stories with thrilling incidents and dramatic endings. He said to me afterward that this correspondence helped to develop his literary talent. When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.
In January or February 1874 I was at Moscow, in one of the houses in which I had spent my childhood. Early in the morning I was told that a peasant desired to see me. I went out and found it was Serghéi, who had just escaped from Tver. He was strongly built, and he, with another ex-officer, Rogachóff, endowed with equal physical strength, went travelling about the country as lumber sawyers. The work was very hard, especially for inexperienced hands, but both of them liked it; and no one would have thought to look for disguised officers in these two strong sawyers. They wandered in this capacity for about a fortnight without arousing suspicion, and made revolutionary propaganda right and left without fear. Sometimes Serghéi, who knew the New Testament almost by heart, spoke to the peasants as a religious preacher, proving to them by quotations from the Bible that they ought to start a revolution. Sometimes he formed his arguments of quotations from the economists. The peasants listened to the two men as to real apostles, took them from one house to another, and refused to be paid for food. In a fortnight they had produced quite a stir in a number of villages. Their fame was spreading far and wide. The peasants, young and old, began to whisper to one another in the barnsabout the ‘delegates;’ they began to speak out more loudly than they usually did that the land would soon be taken from the landlords, who would receive pensions from the Tsar. The younger people became more aggressive toward the police officers, saying: ‘Wait a little; our turn will come soon: you Herods will not rule long now.’ But the fame of the sawyers reached the ears of one of the police authorities, and they were arrested. An order was given to take them to the next police official, ten miles away.
They were taken under the guard of several peasants, and on their way had to pass through a village which was holding its festival. ‘Prisoners? All right! Come on here, my uncle,’ said the peasants, who were all drinking in honour of the occasion. They were kept nearly the whole day in that village, the peasants taking them from one house to another, and treating them to home-made beer. The guards did not have to be asked twice. They drank, and insisted that the prisoners should drink too. ‘Happily,’ Serghéi said, ‘they gave us the beer in such large wooden bowls, which were passed round, that I could put my mouth to the rim of the bowl as if I were drinking, but no one could see how much beer I had imbibed.’ The guards were all drunk toward night, and preferred not to appear in this state before the police officer, so they decided to stay in the village till morning. Serghéi kept talking to them, and all listened to him, regretting that such a good man had been caught. As they were going to sleep, a young peasant whispered to Serghéi, ‘When I go to shut the gate I will leave it unbolted.’ Serghéi and his comrade understood the hint, and as soon as all fell asleep they went out into the street. They started at a fast pace, and at five o’clock in the morning were twenty miles away from the village, at a small railway station, where they took the first train, and went to Moscow. Serghéi remained there, and later,when all of us at St. Petersburg had been arrested, the Moscow circle, under his inspiration, became the main centre of the agitation.
Here and there, small groups of propagandists had settled in towns and villages in various capacities. Blacksmiths’ shops and small farms had been started, and young men of the wealthier classes worked in the shops or on the farms, to be in daily contact with the toiling masses. At Moscow, a number of young girls, of rich families, who had studied at the Zürich university and had started a separate organization, went even so far as to enter cotton factories, where they worked from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and lived in the factory barracks the miserable life of the Russian factory girls. It was a grand movement, in which, at the lowest estimate, from two to three thousand persons took an active part, while twice or thrice as many sympathizers and supporters helped the active vanguard in various ways. With a good half of that army our St. Petersburg circle was in regular correspondence—always, of course, in cipher.
The literature which could be published in Russia under a rigorous censorship—the faintest hint of socialism being prohibited—was soon found insufficient, and we started a printing office of our own abroad. Pamphlets for the workers and the peasants had to be written, and our small ‘literary committee,’ of which I was a member, had its hands full of work. Serghéi wrote a couple of such pamphlets—one in the Lamennais style, and another containing an exposition of socialism in a fairy tale—and both had a wide circulation. The books and pamphlets which were printed abroad were smuggled into Russia by thousands, stored at certain spots, and sent out to the local circles, which distributed them amongst the peasants and the workers. All this required a vast organization as well as much travelling about,and a colossal correspondence, particularly for protecting our helpers and our bookstores from the police. We had special ciphers for different provincial circles, and often, after six or seven hours had been passed in discussing all details, the women, who did not trust to our accuracy in the cipher correspondence, spent all the night in covering sheets of paper with cabalistic figures and fractions.
The utmost cordiality always prevailed at our meetings. Chairmen and all sorts of formalism are so utterly repugnant to the Russian mind that we had none; and although our debates were sometimes extremely hot, especially when ‘programme questions’ were under discussion, we always managed very well without resorting to Western formalities. An absolute sincerity, a general desire to settle the difficulties for the best, and a frankly expressed contempt for all that in the least degree approached theatrical affectation were quite sufficient. If anyone of us had ventured to attempt oratorical effects by a speech, friendly jokes would have shown him at once that speech-making was out of place. Often we had to take our meals during these meetings, and they invariably consisted of rye bread, with cucumbers, a bit of cheese, and plenty of weak tea to quench the thirst. Not that money was lacking; there was always enough, and yet there was never too much to cover the steadily growing expenses for printing, transportation of books, concealing friends wanted by the police, and starting new enterprises.
At St. Petersburg it was not long before we had wide acquaintance amongst the workers. Serdukóff, a young man of splendid education, had made a number of friends amongst the engineers, most of them employed in a state factory of the artillery department, and he had organized a circle of about thirty members, who used to meet for reading and discussion. The engineers are pretty well paid at St. Petersburg, andthose who were not married were fairly well off. They soon became quite familiar with the current radical and socialist literature—Buckle, Lassalle, Mill, Draper, Spielhagen, were familiar names to them; and in their aspect these engineers differed little from students. When Kelnitz, Serghéi, and I joined the circle, we frequently visited their group, and gave them informal lectures upon all sorts of things. Our hopes, however, that these young men would grow into ardent propagandists amidst less privileged classes of workers were not fully realised. In a free country they would have been the habitual speakers at public meetings; but, like the privileged workers of the watch trade in Geneva, they treated the mass of the factory hands with a sort of contempt, and were in no haste to become martyrs to the socialist cause. It was only after they had been arrested and kept three or four years in prison for having dared tothinkas socialists, and had sounded the full depth of Russian absolutism, that several of them developed into ardent propagandists, chiefly of a political revolution.
My sympathies went especially toward the weavers and the workers in the cotton factories. There are many thousands of them at St. Petersburg, who work there during the winter, and return for the three summer months to their native villages to cultivate the land. Half peasants and half town workers, they had generally retained the social spirit of the Russian villager. The movement spread like wildfire among them. We had to restrain the zeal of our new friends; otherwise they would have brought to our lodgings hundreds at a time, young and old. Most of them lived in small associations, orartéls, ten or twelve persons hiring a common apartment and taking their meals together, each one paying every month his share of the general expenses. It was to these lodgings that we used to go, and the weavers soon brought us in contact with otherartélsof stonemasons,carpenters, and the like. In some of theseartélsSerghéi, Kelnitz, and a couple more of our friends were quite at home, and spent whole nights talking about socialism. Besides, we had in different parts of St. Petersburg special apartments, kept by some of our people, to which ten or twelve workers would come every night to learn reading and writing, and after that to have a talk. From time to time one of us went to the native villages of our town friends, and spent a couple of weeks in almost open propaganda amongst the peasants.
Of course, all of us who had to deal with this class of workers had to dress like the workers themselves—that is, to wear the peasant garb. The gap between the peasants and the educated people is so great in Russia, and contact between them is so rare, that not only does the appearance in a village of a man who wears the town dress awaken general attention, but even in town, if one whose talk and dress reveal that he is not a worker is seen to go about with workers, the suspicion of the police is aroused at once. ‘Why should he go about with “low people,” if he has not a bad intention?’ Often, after a dinner in a rich mansion, or even in the Winter Palace, where I went frequently to see a friend, I took a cab, hurried to a poor student’s lodging in a remote suburb, exchanged my fine clothes for a cotton shirt, peasant’s top-boots, and a sheepskin, and, joking with peasants on the way, went to meet my worker friends in some slum. I told them what I had seen of the labour movement abroad. They listened with an eager attention; they lost not a word of what was said; and then came the question, ‘What can we do in Russia?’ ‘Agitate, organize,’ was our reply; ‘there is no royal road;’ and we read them a popular story of the French Revolution, an adaptation of Erckmann-Chatrian’s admirable ‘Histoire d’un Paysan.’ Every one admired M. Chovel, who went as a propagandist through the villages colporting prohibited books, and burned to follow in his footsteps. ‘Speak to others,’we said; ‘bring men together; and when we become more numerous, we shall see what we can attain.’ They fully understood, and we had only to moderate their zeal.
Amongst them I passed my happiest hours. New Year’s day of 1874, the last I spent in Russia at liberty, is especially memorable to me. The previous evening I had been in a choice company. Inspiring, noble words were spoken that night about the citizen’s duties, the well-being of the country, and the like. But underneath all the thrilling speeches, one note resounded: How could each of the speakers preserve his own personal well-being? Yet no one had the courage to say, frankly and openly, that he was ready to do only that which would not endanger his own dovecote. Sophisms—no end of sophisms—about the slowness of evolution, the inertia of the lower classes, the uselessness of sacrifice, were uttered to justify the unspoken words, all intermingled with assurances of each one’s willingness to make sacrifices. I returned home, seized suddenly with profound sadness amid all this talk.
Next morning I went to one of our weavers’ meetings. It took place in an underground dark room. I was dressed as a peasant, and was lost in the crowd of other sheepskins. My comrade, who was known to the workers, simply introduced me: ‘Borodín, a friend.’ ‘Tell us, Borodín,’ he said, ‘what you have seen abroad.’ And I spoke of the labour movement in Western Europe, its struggles, its difficulties, and its hopes.
The audience consisted mostly of middle-aged people. They were intensely interested. They asked me questions, all to the point, about the minute details of the working-men’s unions, the aims of the International Association and its chances of success, and then came questions about what could be done in Russia, and the prospects of our propaganda. I never minimized the dangers of our agitation, and frankly said what I thought. ‘Weshallprobably be sent to Siberia, one of these days; and you—part of you—will be kept long months in prison for having listened to us.’ This gloomy prospect did not frighten them. ‘After all, there are men in Siberia, too—not bears only.’ ‘Where men are living others can live.’ ‘The devil is not so terrible as they paint him.’ ‘If you are afraid of wolves, never go into the wood,’ they said as we parted. And when, afterward, several of them were arrested, they nearly all behaved bravely, sheltering us and betraying no one.
During the two years of which I am now speaking many arrests were made, both at St. Petersburg and in the provinces. Not a month passed without our losing someone, or learning that members of this or that provincial group had disappeared. Toward the end of 1873 the arrests became more and more frequent. In November one of our main settlements in a suburb of St. Petersburg was raided by the police. We lost Peróvskaya and three other friends, and all our relations with the workers in this suburb had to be suspended. We founded a new settlement, further away from the town, but it had soon to be abandoned. The police became very vigilant, and the appearance of a student in the workmen’s quarters was noticed at once; spies circulated among the workers, who were watched closely. Dmítri Kelnitz, Serghéi, and myself, in our sheepskins and with our pleasant looks, passed unnoticed, and continued to visit the haunted ground. But Dmítri and Serghéi, whose names had acquired a wide notoriety in the workmen’s quarters, were eagerly wanted by the police; and if they had been found accidentally during a nocturnal raid at a friend’s lodgings they would have been arrested at once. There were periods when Dmítri had every day to hunt for aplace where he could spend the night in relative safety. ‘Can I stay the night with you?’ he would ask, entering some comrade’s room at ten o’clock. ‘Impossible! my lodgings have been closely watched lately. Better go to N——.’ ‘I have just come from him, and he says spies swarm in his neighbourhood.’ ‘Then, go to M——; he is a great friend of mine, and above suspicion. But it is far from here, and you must take a cab. Here is money.’ But, on principle, Dmítri would not take a cab, and would walk to the other end of the town to find a refuge, or at last go to a friend whose rooms might be searched at any given moment.
Early in January 1874, another settlement, our main stronghold for propaganda amongst the weavers, was lost. Some of our best propagandists disappeared behind the gates of the mysterious Third Section. Our circle became narrower, general meetings were increasingly difficult, and we made strenuous efforts to form new circles of young men who might continue our work when we should all be arrested. Tchaykóvsky was in the south, and we forced Dmítri and Serghéi to leave St. Petersburg—actually forced them, imperiously ordering them to leave. Only five or six of us remained to transact all the business of our circle. I intended, as soon as I should have delivered my report to the Geographical Society, to go to the south-west of Russia, and there to start a sort of land league, similar to the league which became so powerful in Ireland at the end of the seventies.
After two months of relative quiet, we learned in the middle of March that nearly all the circle of the engineers had been arrested, and with them a young man named Nízovkin, an ex-student, who unfortunately had their confidence, and, we were sure, would soon try to clear himself by telling all he knew about us. Besides Dmítri and Serghéi he knew Serdukóff, the founder of the circle, and myself, and he would certainly name us as soon ashe was pressed with questions. A few days later, two weavers—most unreliable fellows, who had even embezzled some money from their comrades, and who knew me under the name of Borodín—were arrested. These two would surely set the police at once upon the track of Borodín, the man, dressed as a peasant, who spoke at the weavers’ meetings. Within a week’s time all the members of our circle, excepting Serdukóff and myself, were arrested.
There was nothing left to us but to fly from St. Petersburg: this was exactly what we did not want to do. All our immense organization for printing pamphlets abroad and for smuggling them into Russia; all the network of circles, farms, and country settlements with which we were in correspondence in nearly forty (out of fifty) provinces of European Russia and which had been slowly built up during the last two years; finally, our workers’ groups at St. Petersburg and our four different centres for propaganda amongst workers of the capital—how could we abandon all these without having found men to maintain our relations and correspondence? Serdukóff and I decided to admit to our circle two new members, and to transfer the business to them. We met every evening in different parts of the town, and as we never kept any addresses or names in writing—the smuggling addresses alone had been deposited in a secure place, in cipher—we had to teach our new members hundreds of names and addresses and a dozen ciphers, repeating them over and over, until our friends had learned them by heart. Every evening we went over the whole map of Russia in this way, dwelling especially on its western frontier, which was studded with men and women engaged in receiving books from the smugglers, and the eastern provinces, where we had our main settlements. Then, always in disguise, we had to take the new members to our sympathizers in the town, and introduce them to those who had not yet been arrested.
The thing to be done in such a case was to disappear from one’s apartments, and to re-appear somewhere else under an assumed name. Serdukóff had abandoned his lodging, but, having no passport, he concealed himself in the houses of friends. I ought to have done the same, but a strange circumstance prevented me. I had just finished my report upon the glacial formations in Finland and Russia, and this report had to be read at a meeting of the Geographical Society. The invitations were already issued, but it happened that on the appointed day the two geological societies of St. Petersburg had a joint meeting, and they asked the Geographical Society to postpone the reading of my report for a week. It was known that I was going to present certain ideas about the extension of the ice cap as far as Middle Russia, and our geologists, with the exception of my friend and teacher, Friedrich Schmidt, considered this speculation of far too reaching a character, and wanted to have it thoroughly discussed. For one week more, consequently, I could not go away.
Strangers prowled about my house and called upon me under all sorts of fantastical pretexts: one of them wanted to buy a forest on my Tambóv estate, which was situated in absolutely treeless prairies. I noticed in my street—the fashionable Morskáya—one of the two arrested weavers whom I have mentioned, and thus learned that my house was watched. Yet I had to act as if nothing extraordinary had happened, because I was to appear at the meeting of the Geographical Society the following Friday night.
The meeting came. The discussions were very animated, and one point, at least, was won. It was recognized that all old theories concerning the diluvial period in Russia were totally baseless, and that a new departure must be made in the investigation of the whole question. I had the satisfaction of hearing our leading geologist, Barbot-de-Marny, say, ‘Ice cap or not, we must acknowledge,gentlemen, that all we have hitherto said about the action of floating ice had no foundation whatever in actual exploration.’ And I was proposed at that meeting to be nominated president of the Physical Geography section, while I was asking myself whether I should not spend that very night in the prison of the Third Section.
It would have been best not to return at all to my apartment, but I was broken down with fatigue after the exertions of the last few days, and went home. There was no police raid during that night. I looked through the heaps of my papers, destroyed everything that might be compromising for anyone, packed all my things, and prepared to leave. I knew that my apartment was watched, but I hoped that the police would not pay me a visit before late in the night, and that at dusk I could slip out of the house without being noticed. Dusk came, and, as I was starting, one of the servant girls said to me, ‘You had better go by the service staircase.’ I understood what she meant, and went quickly down the staircase and out of the house. One cab only stood at the gate; I jumped into it. The driver took me to the great Perspective of Névsky. There was no pursuit at first, and I thought myself safe; but presently I noticed another cab running full speed after us; our horse was delayed somehow, and the other cab passed ours.
To my astonishment, I saw in it one of the two arrested weavers, accompanied by someone else. He waved his hand as if he had something to tell me. I told my cabman to stop. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘he has been released from arrest, and has an important communication to make to me.’ But as soon as we stopped, the man who was with the weaver—he was a detective—shouted loudly, ‘Mr. Borodín, Prince Kropótkin, I arrest you!’ He made a signal to the policeman, of whom there are hosts along the main thoroughfare of St. Petersburg, and at the same time jumped into my cab and showedme a paper which bore the stamp of the St. Petersburg police. ‘I have an order to take you before the Governor-General for an explanation,’ he said. Resistance was impossible—a couple of policemen were already close by—and I told my cabman to turn round and drive to the Governor-General’s house. The weaver remained in his cab and followed us.
It was now evident that the police had hesitated for ten days to arrest me, because they were not sure that Borodín and I were the same person. My response to the weaver’s call had settled their doubts.
It so happened that just as I was leaving my house a young man came from Moscow, bringing me a letter from a friend, Voinarálsky, and another from Dmítri, addressed to our friend Polakóff. The former announced the establishment of a secret printing office at Moscow, and was full of cheerful news concerning the activity in that city. I read it and destroyed it. As the second letter contained nothing but innocent friendly chat, I took it with me. Now that I was arrested I thought it would be better to destroy it, and, asking the detective to show me his paper again, I took advantage of the time that he was fumbling in his pocket to drop the letter on the pavement without his noticing it. However, as we reached the Governor-General’s house the weaver handed it to the detective, saying, ‘I saw the gentleman drop this letter on the pavement, so I picked it up.’
Now came tedious hours of waiting for the representative of the judicial authorities, the procureur or public prosecutor. This functionary plays the part of a straw man, who is paraded by the State police during their searches: he gives an aspect of legality to their proceedings. It was many hours before that gentleman was found and brought to perform his functions as a sham representative of justice. I was taken back to my house, and a most thorough search of all my papers was made: this lasted till three in the morning, but didnot reveal a scrap of paper that could tell against me or anyone else.
From my house I was taken to the Third Section, that omnipotent institution which has ruled in Russia from the beginning of the reign of Nicholas I. down to the present time—a true ‘state in the state.’ It began under Peter I. in the Secret Department, where the adversaries of the founder of the Russian military empire were subjected to the most abominable tortures, under which they expired; it was continued in the Secret Chancelry during the reigns of the Empresses, when the Torture Chamber of the powerful Minich inspired all Russia with terror; and it received its present organization from the iron despot, Nicholas I., who attached to it the corps of gendarmes—the chief of the gendarmes becoming a person far more dreaded in the Russian Empire than the Emperor himself.
In every province of Russia, in every populous town, nay, at every railway station, there are gendarmes who report directly to their own generals or colonels, who in turn correspond with the chief of the gendarmes; and the latter, seeing the Emperor every day, reports to him what he finds necessary to report. All functionaries of the empire are under gendarme supervision; it is the duty of the generals and colonels to keep an eye upon the public and private life of every subject of the Tsar—even upon the governors of the provinces, the ministers, and the grand dukes. The Emperor himself is under their close watch, and as they are well informed of the petty chronicle of the palace, and know every step that the Emperor takes outside his palace, the chief of the gendarmes becomes, so to speak, a confidant of the most intimate affairs of the rulers of Russia.
At this period of the reign of Alexander II. the Third Section was absolutely all-powerful. The gendarme colonels made searches by the thousand without troubling themselves in the least about the existence of laws andlaw courts in Russia. They arrested whom they liked, kept people imprisoned as long as they pleased, and transported hundreds to North-east Russia or Siberia according to the fancy of general or colonel; the signature of the Minister of the Interior was a mere formality, because he had no control over them and no knowledge of their doings.
It was four o’clock in the morning when my examination began. ‘You are accused,’ I was solemnly told, ‘of having belonged to a secret society which has for its object the overthrow of the existing form of government, and of conspiracy against the sacred person of his Imperial Majesty. Are you guilty of this crime?’
‘Till I am brought before a court where I can speak publicly, I will give you no replies whatever.’
‘Write,’ the procureur dictated to a scribe: ‘“Does not acknowledge himself guilty.” Still’ he continued, after a pause, ‘I must ask you certain questions. Do you know a person of the name of Nikolái Tchaykóvsky?’
‘If you persist in your questions, then write “No” to any question whatsoever that you are pleased to ask me.’
‘But if we ask you whether you know, for instance, Mr. Polakóff, whom you spoke about a while ago?’
‘The momentyouask me such a question, don’t hesitate: write “No.” And if you ask me whether I know my brother, or my sister, or my stepmother, write “No.” You will not receive from me another reply: because if I answered “Yes” with regard to any person, you would at once plan some evil against him, making a raid or something worse, and saying next that I named him.’
A long list of questions was read, to which I patiently replied each time, ‘Write “No.”’ That lasted for an hour, during which I learned that all who had been arrested, with the exception of the two weavers, had behaved very well. The weavers knew only that I had twice met a dozen workers, and the gendarmes knew nothing about our circle.
‘What are you doing, prince?’ a gendarme officer said, as he took me to my cell. ‘Your refusal to answer questions will be made a terrible weapon against you.’
‘It is my right, is it not?’
‘Yes, but—you know.... I hope you will find this room comfortable. It has been kept warm since your arrest.’
I found it quite comfortable, and fell sound asleep. I was waked the next morning by a gendarme, who brought me the morning tea. He was soon followed by somebody else, who whispered to me in the most unconcerned way, ‘Here’s a scrap of paper and a pencil: write your letter.’ It was a sympathizer, whom I knew by name; he used to transmit our correspondence with the prisoners of the Third Section.
From all sides I heard knocks on the walls, following in rapid succession. It was the prisoners communicating with one another by means of light taps; but, being anew-comer, I could make nothing out of the noise, which seemed to come from all parts of the building at once.
One thing worried me. During the search in my house, I overheard the procureur whispering to the gendarme officer about going to make a search at the apartment of my friend Polakóff, to whom the letter of Dmítri was addressed. Polakóff was a young student, a very gifted zoologist and botanist, with whom I had made my Vitím expedition in Siberia. He was born of a poor Cossack family on the frontier of Mongolia, and, after having surmounted all sorts of difficulties, he had come to St. Petersburg, entered the university, where he had won the reputation of a most promising zoologist, and was then passing his final examinations. We had been great friends since our long journey, and had even lived together for a time at St. Petersburg, but he took no interest in my political activity.
I spoke of him to the procureur. ‘I give you myword of honour,’ I said, ‘that Polakóff has never taken part in any political affair. To-morrow he has to pass an examination, and you will spoil forever the scientific career of a young man who has gone through great hardships, and has struggled for years against all sorts of obstacles, to attain his present position. I know that you do not much care for it, but he is looked upon at the university as one of the future glories of Russian science.’
The search was made, nevertheless, but a respite of three days was given for the examinations. A little later I was called before the procureur, who triumphantly showed me an envelope addressed in my handwriting, and in it a note, also in my handwriting, which said, ‘Please take this packet to V. E., and ask that it be kept until demand in due form is made.’ The person to whom the note was addressed was not mentioned in the note. ‘This letter,’ the procureur said, ‘was found at Mr. Polakóff’s; and now, prince, his fate is in your hands. If you tell me who V. E. is, Mr. Polakóff will be released; but if you refuse to do so, he will be kept as long as he does not make up his mind to give us the name of that person.’
Looking at the envelope, which was addressed in black chalk, and the letter, which was written in common lead pencil, I immediately remembered the circumstances under which the two had been written. ‘I am positive,’ I exclaimed at once, ‘that the note and the envelope were not found together! It isyouwho have put the letter in the envelope.’
The procureur blushed. ‘Would you have me believe,’ I continued, ‘that you, a practical man, did not notice that the two are written in quite different pencils? And now you are trying to make people think that the two belong to each other! Well, sir, then I tell you that the letter was not to Polakóff.’
He hesitated for some time, but then, regaining hisaudacity, he said, ‘Polakóff has admitted that this letter of yours was written to him.’
Now I knew he was lying. Polakóff would have admitted everything concerning himself; but he would have preferred to be marched to Siberia rather than to involve another person. So, looking straight in the face of the procureur, I replied, ‘No, sir, he hasneversaid that, and you know perfectly well that your words are not true.’
He became furious, or pretended to be so. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘if you wait here a moment, I will bring you Polakóff’s written statement to that effect. He is in the next room under examination.’
‘Ready to wait as long as you like.’
I sat on a sofa, smoking countless cigarettes. The statement did not come, and never came.
Of course there was no such statement. I met Polakóff in 1878 at Geneva, whence we made a delightful excursion to the Aletsch glacier. I need not say that his answers were what I expected them to be: he denied having any knowledge of the letter, or of the person the letters V. E. represented. Scores of books used to be taken from me to him, and back to me, and the letter was found in a book, while the envelope was discovered in the pocket of an old coat. He was kept several weeks under arrest, and then released, owing to the intervention of his scientific friends. V. E. was not molested, and delivered my papers in due time.
Later on, each time I saw the procureur, I teased him with the question: ‘And what about Polakóff’s statement?’
I was not taken back to my cell, but an hour later the procureur came in, accompanied by a gendarme officer. ‘Our examination,’ he announced to me, ‘is now terminated; you will be removed to another place.’
A four-wheeled cab stood at the gate. I was asked to enter it, and a stout gendarme officer, of Caucasian origin, sat by my side. I spoke to him, but he only snored. The cab crossed the Chain Bridge, then passed the parade grounds and ran along the canals, as if avoiding the more frequented thoroughfares. ‘Are we going to the Litóvsky prison?’ I asked the officer, as I knew that many of my comrades were already there. He made no reply. The system of absolute silence which was maintained toward me for the next two years began in this four-wheeled cab; but when we went rolling over the Palace Bridge I understood that I was taken to the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.
I admired the beautiful river, knowing that I should not soon see it again. The sun was going down. Thick grey clouds were hanging in the west above the Gulf of Finland, while light clouds floated over my head, showing here and there patches of blue sky. Then the carriage turned to the left and entered a dark arched passage, the gate of the fortress.
‘Now I shall have to remain here for a couple of years,’ I remarked to the officer.
‘No, why so long?’ replied the Circassian who, now that we were within the fortress, had regained the power of speech. ‘Your affair is almost terminated, and may be brought into court in a fortnight.’
‘My affair,’ I replied, ‘is very simple; but before bringing me to a court you will try to arrest all the socialists in Russia, and they are many, very many; in two years you will not have done.’ I did not then realize how prophetic my remark was.
The carriage stopped at the door of the military commander of the fortress, and we entered his reception hall. General Korsákoff, a thin old man, came in, with a peevish expression on his face. The officer spoke to him in a subdued voice, and the old man answered, ‘All right,’ looking at him with a sort of scorn, and thenturned his eyes toward me. It was evident that he was not at all pleased to receive a new inmate, and that he felt slightly ashamed of his rôle; but he seemed to add, ‘I am a soldier, and only do my duty.’ Presently we got into the carriage again, but soon stopped before another gate, where we were kept a long time until a detachment of soldiers opened it from the inside. Proceeding on foot through narrow passages, we came to a third iron gate, opening into a dark arched passage, from which we entered a small room where darkness and dampness prevailed.
Several non-commissioned officers of the fortress troops moved noiselessly about in their soft felt boots, without speaking a word, while the governor signed the Circassian’s book acknowledging the reception of a new prisoner. I was required to take off all my clothes, and to put on the prison dress—a green flannel dressing-gown, immense woollen stockings of an incredible thickness, and boat-shaped yellow slippers, so big that I could hardly keep them on my feet when I tried to walk. I always hated dressing-gowns and slippers, and the thick stockings inspired me with disgust. I had to take off even a silk undergarment, which in the damp fortress it would have been especially desirable to retain, but that could not be allowed. I naturally began to protest and to make a noise about this, and after an hour or so it was restored to me by order of General Korsákoff.
Then I was taken through a dark passage, where I saw armed sentries walking about, and was put into a cell. A heavy oak door was shut behind me, a key turned in the lock, and I was alone in a half-dark room.