The Autobiography of a Revolutionist: St. Petersburg; Journey to Western Europe

VII.

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 everything had changed around him in this formerly aristocratic quarter. The rich serf-owners, who once were so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a most reckless way the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of the serfs, and after having mortgaged and remortgaged their estates in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink into oblivion.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 builders, and the like, — while in nearly every one of the old families which remained 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 by predicting for Russia a certain and speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had in his house. 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 sister, 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 any one. When he entered the sick-room, with the deep, kind look of his large blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite kindness, and when he immediately discovered 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 go 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 returning to 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, 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 so 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.

Less than twelve months later, in a house within a stone’s throw of my father’s, 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; and a couple of doors further on, we held one of our secret meetings at the house of Nathalie Armfeld, the Kara “ convict ” whom George Kennan has so touchingly described in his book on Siberia.

VIII.

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 northwestern 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 contrast grows stronger and stronger as one penetrates further into Germany. Even dull Berlin seemed animated, after our Russian towns.

And the contrast of 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 later 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 had realized before 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 as the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russian people, 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 Oberstrasse, near the Polytechnic, 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 almost nothing. Tea and bread, some milk, and a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp, amidst animated discussions upon 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 all for the “common affairs,” — the library, the Russian review which was going to be published, the support of the Swiss labor papers. As to their dress, the most parsimonious economy reigned in that direction. Pushkin has written in a well-known verse, “ 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.

The International Workingmen’s 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 this 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, and these tools used by all members of society for the benefit of all; not only the reign of equality as regards criminal law, but particularly economic equality. The nationalists saw in their dreams the Young Italy, the Young Germany, and the 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 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, the understanding which was reached by some English workers and a few French workers’ delegates to the London International Exhibition of 1866 became quite unexpectedly 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 color,”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 England, Germany, and Spain, insignificant though they were in themselves, 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, Italy, and Spain, bringing to the front such a number of intelligent, active, and devoted workers, and attracting to it such a number of men, young and old, from the wealthier educated classes, that a force never before suspected to exist grew stronger every day. If the movement had not been arrested in its growth by the ill-omened Franco-German war, great things would probably have happened in Europe, deeply modifying the aspects of our civilization, and undoubtedly accelerating human progress; but the crushing victory of the Germans brought about abnormal conditions in Europe, and stopped for a quarter of a century the normal development of France.

All sorts of partial solutions of the great social question had currency at that time among the workers : coöperation, productive associations supported by the state, people’s banks, gratuitous credit, and so on ad infinitum. 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 scientifically correct, deeply thought over ideas which were circulated, — all being the results of the collective thought 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 ” have their origin in the discussions and reports of the congress 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 the 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 the jewelers) and the rougher trades (weavers, and so on), and which had prevented joint action in labor 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 favored few.

Italy, especially middle and northern Italy, was honeycombed with 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 labor unions of Barcelona. 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 always conservative trade unions had also joined the movement, at least in principle, and 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 enacted against the adherents of the association), every one 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.

While I was in Switzerland, wanting to know all about the Workingmen’s Association, I joined the local section. 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 they 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 Oberstrasse, 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 favor of socialist aspirations, but they give no idea how the workers accept socialist ideals, and how the latter could be put into practice. There remains nothing but to take collections of papers and read them all through, — the news as well as the leaders, perhaps even more than the leaders. 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 daily life 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 every-day 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 being given to the workers by the few, very few, middle-class men who had joined the movement, and mainly by 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, intelligent, and active man ; and the real soul of it was a 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 the different 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 stone-mason 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 speedily 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 education 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 well-being, 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, let it be war, if only it should bring with it wellbeing and liberty to the downtrodden 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 made sacrifices 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, — nay, even to be present at the meetings and the manifestations. 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.

Outsiders never realize the sacrifices which are made by the workers. 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. Even a few pence given for the common cause represent a burden on the meagre budget of the European worker, and many pence had 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 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 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 endeavors to spread and to develop the organization ; but how few and rare were those who came to assist without the intention of making political capital even of that helplessness ! 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 when some 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 come to serve the masses, not to utilize them for their own ambitions ? ”

Gradually, some doubts began to creep into my mind as to the soundness of the agitation which was carried on at the Temple Unique, One night, a wellknown 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 labor movement. I felt shocked at this cynical avowal, and when I communicated my reflections to my stonemason 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 labor 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 Genéve. This organ of the moneyed classes of Geneva had simply 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 the Temple 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, and concluded a hurried speech in support of it with the words, “If you agree, citizens, with this resolution, I will send it 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 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 if an increase were refused they would begin a general strike.

I was furious, and next day hotly reproached Ootin for his behavior. “ As a leader,” I told him, “you were bound to know that a general strike was really 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 Bakúnists. The name “ anarchist ” was not much in use then. Ootin gave me at once a word of introduction to another Russian, Nicholas Joukovsky, who belonged to that section, and, looking straight into my face, he added, with a sigh, “ Well, you won’t return to us ; you will remain with them.” He had guessed right.

IX.

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 for the next few years played an important part in the development of socialism, introducing into it the no-government, or anarchist, tendency.

At that time, 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 workingmen’s movement; it had its origin in a union concluded between workers across the Channel for mutual support in labor struggles, and its first public steps were internationally supported strikes. The workers understood it as a labor movement, not as a political party, and 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 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 the leading spirits of the London general council. 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,” and could not say whereto they would be led within the next twentyfour hours, — the general council insisted upon directing the insurrection from London. It required daily reports about the events, gave orders, favored this and hampered that, and thus put in evidence the disadvantage of having a governing body, even within the association. It set people thinking about the uselessness of any government, democratic though its origin may be. This was the first spark of anarchism.

The separation between leaders and workers which I had noticed at Geneva 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 proofreader and the manager of a small printing office. He was then translating a novel from German into French, and was paid eight francs — one dollar and sixty cents — for sixteen pages !

In a little valley in the Jura hills there is a succession of small towns and villages, whose French-speaking population was entirely employed, at that time, in the various branches of watchmaking. Whole families used to work in small workshops ; in one of them I found another leader, Adhemar Schwitzguebel, 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 a bench, 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 neighboring villages and towns, — some of them as much as seven miles distant, — to join 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 them. But the absence of a division between the leaders and the masses in the Jura Federation was also the reason why there was no 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 brethren, — 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 ; 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 far 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 Venders, only strengthened my views. These clothiers were one of the most sympathetic populations that I ever knew of in Europe.

X.

During my journey I had bought a number of books and collections of socialist newspapers. In Russia, the 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 happy to see them at St. Petersburg ? ” I asked myself ; and I decided that by all means I must take them into Russia.

I returned to St. Petersburg via Vienna and Warsaw. Jews, it was said, lived by smuggling on the Polish frontier, and if I could succeed in discovering one of them, my books surely would be carried in safety over the border. However, to stop at a small railway station to hunt for smugglers, while all other passengers continued on their journey, would have been too unreasonable ; 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 the hotel on my search. What was my bewilderment when at every street corner, and wherever I turned my eyes in the otherwise deserted market place, I saw a Jew, wearing the traditional long dress and locks of his forefathers, and watching 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 find one Jew ; 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 gayly dressed dancers, but which now performed the most prosaic function of giving shelter and food to a few occasional travelers. I explained to the man my desire of smuggling in 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 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.”

“ Our business,” he said in reply, “ is costly silks. If I were going to pay my men by weight, according to our silk tariff, I should have to name 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. . . . Five dollars will do for us, and then one dollar 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 any one, or took advantage of 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 gendarme who 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 happy 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.

XI.

Serfdom was abolished in Russia. 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 every-day 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 ” was the name that Turguéneff gave it in his epoch-making novel, Fathers and Sons.

The movement is wholly misunderstood in Western Europe. In the press, for example, nihilism is continually 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. No greater mistake, however, could be made. To confuse nihilism with terrorism is as wrong as to confuse a philosophical movement like stoicism or positivism with a political movement like, let us say, 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. 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 his fathers, 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 repeatedly throw aside as useless ballast.

The life of civilized people is full of little conventional lies. Persons who hate 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, inspired him with disgust, and all the criticisms which Tolstoy now makes against art were expressed forty years ago in the sweeping assertion, “ A pair of boots is more important than all your refined talk about Shakespeare.”

Marriage without love, and familiarity without friendship, were equally repudiated. The nihilist girl, compelled by her parents to be a doll in a Doll’s House, and to marry for property’s sake, preferred to abandon her house and her silk dresses, put on a black woolen dress of the plainest description, crop off her hair, and go to a high school, in order to win there her personal independence.

The nihilist carried his love of sincerity even into the minutest details of every-day 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.

Two great Russian novelists, Turguéneff and Goncharóff, have tried to represent this new type in their novels. Goncharóff, in Precipice, 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 labor, whether the laborers 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 five dollars apiece a month for all their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for starting coöperative associations, coöperative 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. Their watchword was, “ Vnaród! ” (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, and refused to follow the career prescribed to them by their elders. 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 and Moscow, 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 selfeducation ; the works of the philosophers, the writings of the economists, the historical 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’ helpers, teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers, 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.

When I returned from Switzerland I found this movement in full swing.

XII.

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 a difference of a few years is an obstacle to complete comradeship, at that age. It must also be said that since the new rules of admission to the university had been introduced in 1861, the best of the independent and rich young men were sifted in 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 Dmitri 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 perhaps 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 thought of such a thing 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 in a high degree.

Soon after my return Kelnitz invited me to join a circle which was known amongst the youth as “ the Circle of Tchaykovsky.” 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 Tehaykovsky, and a few other members of this circle. Tchaykovsky 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. Tchaykovsky was of their number. In 1869 Necháieff had tried to start in Russia 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 Tchaykovsky, gradually widening its programme, spread so extensively in Russia, achieved such important results, and later on, when circumstances and 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 laboring classes in Russia), Marx, 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 labor movement, the circle became more and more a centre of socialistic propaganda among the educated 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 to make a show of numbers, and had no tendency to concentrate in its hands all the activity that was going on amongst 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 Tchaykovsky. I still feel proud of having been received into that family.

T. Kropotkin.