The Autobiography of a Revolutionist: St. Petersburg
XIII.
WHEN I joined the Circle of Tchaykovsky, I found its members hotly discussing the direction to be given to their activity. Some were in favor of continuing to carry on radical and socialistic propaganda among the educated youth; but the greater number thought that this work had no other aim than to prepare men who would be capable of arousing the great inert laboring masses, and that the 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.
We often spoke, of course, of the necessity of a political agitation against the absolute government. We saw already that the mass of the peasants were being driven to an unavoidable and irremediable ruin by foolish taxation, and by 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 the youth. 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, were evidences of nihilist simplicity and democracy. 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. Even at the time when the Circle of Tchaykovsky did nothing but distribute books, all of which had been printed with the censor’s approval, Tchaykovsky 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 transporting him to the Urals ! “ But if we arrest you once more,” he was told, “ we shall send you to Siberia.” In fact, it was a favorite 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 provincial Zemstvos (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.
If any one were to tell the true history, for example, of the teachers’ college of Tver, or of any similar undertaking of a Zemstvo 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 Zemstvos 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 Zemstvos 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 Zemstvos, and who is herself interested in education, invited eight schoolmasters to her birthday party. “ Poor men,” she said to herself, “they never have the opportunity of seeing any one but the peasants.” Numerous guests came to this party, the schoolmasters among them. Next day, 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. Teachers must not come 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 Zemstvo. Some peasants and the poorer priests of the neighborhood asked me to do so. As for myself, I could 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 : “ Suppose I tried to start a school, an experimental farm, a coöperative enterprise, and, of course, also took on myself the defense 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 gray-haired priest, a man who was held in great esteem in our neighborhood, 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 last year, 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, Tchaykovsky, — 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 of the palace. 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 natural, 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 on both sides 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 labor 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 counselors. 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.”
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 never before been made public. When a young man came to St. Petersburg from one of the provinces with the firm intention of killing Alexander II., and some members of the Tchaykovsky 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 then opposed to the war in which later, when the cup of their sufferings was filled to overflowing, they took part.
XIV.
The two years that I worked with the Circle of Tchaykovsky, before I was arrested, left a deep impression upon all my subsequent career. 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 recall now 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.
Meetings of our circle were frequent, and I, at least, 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, when 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 favorite, and every one of us, on entering the house, had a specially friendly smile for her, — even when she, making a point of honor of keeping the house relatively clean, quarreled with us about the dirt which we, dressed in peasant top boots and sheepskins, brought in, after our walks in 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 woman man,” she once dubbed an effeminate fellow, saying it without interrupting her work, and the expression and the manner in which she said it are engraved in my memory like a sentence of condemnation.
Peróvskaya was a “ popularist ” to the bottom of her heart, and a revolutionist at the same time, 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 which men sometimes think funny. “ B.,” I said, “ we came 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 the 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 make such jokes ? ” I fully realized then the cruelty of what I had done.
Another general favorite in our circle was Serghéi Kravchínsky, who became so well known, both in England and in the United States, under the name of Stepniák. He was often called “ the Baby,” so unconcerned was he about his own security ; but this 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 reproached. “ You might have awakened suspicion and have been arrested.” But I wish that every one 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 which of us could undertake to translate for to-morrow 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, and doing their work properly. So Serghéi’s translation and his capacity of working rapidly had already influenced me in his favor. 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 simplicity and truthfulness, his courage and tenacity. He had read and thought a great deal, and upon the revolutionary character of the struggle which he had undertaken it appeared we had similar views. He was ten years younger than I, and perhaps did not quite realize what a hard contest the coming revolution would be. He told us later on, with much humor, 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 trot 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, 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 me say each fifth word — which has a sense. You write, for instance : “ Excuse my hurried letter. Come to-night to see me; to-morrow I will go away to my sister. My brother Nicholas feels worse; it was late to make an 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 only to introduce 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 and another ex-officer, Kogachóff, endowed with equal physical force, went traveling 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 barns about 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 soon come; 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 honor 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 that I could hold mine to my mouth 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, quoting texts from the Bible ; 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 open.” 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, all of rich family, 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. 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 traveling 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 any one 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, which used to meet for reading and discussion. The engineers are pretty well paid at St. Petersburg, and those 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 realized. 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 to think as 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, or artéls, 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 other artéls, of stone-masons, carpenters, and the like. In some of these artéls Serghéi and Kelnitz were quite at home, and spent whole nights talking about socialism. Besides, we had in differents 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 we 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 labor movement abroad. The eyes of my listeners glistened ; 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, and burned to follow in his footsteps. “ Speak to others,” we said ; “ bring men together; and when we shall be 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, like a leading theme in an opera of Wagner, one note resounded : How might each man preserve his own personal well-being ? Yet no one had the courage to say, frankly and openly, that he was ready to do only what 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 : “ Borodin, a friend.” “ Tell us, Borodin,” he said, “ what you have seen abroad.” And I spoke of the labor movement in Western Europe, its struggles, its difficulties, and its hopes.
The audience consisted mostly of middle-aged people. They were intensely interested. I never minimized the dangers of our agitation, and frankly said what I thought. “ We shall probably 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.
XV.
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 that we did not lose somebody, or learn 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. Dmitri Kelnitz, Serghéi, and I, in our sheepskins and with our peasant looks, passed unnoticed, and continued to visit the haunted ground. But Dmitri 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 during a nocturnal raid, they would have been arrested at once. Poor Dmitri had to hunt every day for a place where he could spend the night in relative safety.
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. Tchaykovsky was in the south, and we forced Dmitri 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 goto the southwest 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 Nizovkin, 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 Dmitri and Serghéi he knew Serdukóff, the founder of the circle, and myself, and he would certainly name us as soon as he 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 Borodin — were arrested. These two would surely set the police at once upon the track of Borodin, the would-be peasant who spoke at the weavers’ meetings. Within a week’s time all the members of our circle, excepting Serdukóff and me, were arrested.
There was nothing left 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 that had been slowly built up during the last two years ; and 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 — only the smuggling addresses had been deposited, in cipher, in security — 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. Then, always in disguise, we had to take the new members to our sympathizers in the town, and introduce them to those workers who had not yet been arrested.
The thing to be done in such a case was to disappear from one’s apartments, and to reappear 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 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 would 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 a too far-reaching speculation, 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 met 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 Third Section.
It would have been best not to return at all to my apartment, but I was broken down with fatigue and went home. I looked through the heaps of my papers, destroyed everything that might be compromising for any one, 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 ran 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 some one 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. Borodin, Prince Kropotkin, I arrest you ! ” He made a signal to the policemen, of whom there are many along the main thoroughfare of St. Petersburg, and at the same time jumped into my cab and showed me a paper which bore the stamp of the St. Petersburg police. “ I have an order to take you before the governor-general for 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 Borodin 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 Serghéi, and another from Dmitri addressed to a 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 governorgeneral’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 did not reveal a scrap of paper that could tell against me or any one 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 subject 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 say, a confidant of the most intimate affairs of the rulers of Russia.
Under 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 and law courts in Russia. They arrested whom they liked, kept people imprisoned as long as they pleased, and transported hundreds to Northeast Russia or Siberia according to the fancy of general or colonel; the signature of the minister of the interior being 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 Nikolai Tchaykovsky ? ”
“ 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 awhile ago ? ”
“ The moment you ask 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 a newcomer, 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 Dmitri was addressed. Polakóff was a young student, a very gifted zoölogist and botanist, with whom I had made my Vítim 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 ray word of honor,” 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 ; they had nothing in common, and belonged to two quite different periods. “ I am positive,” I exclaimed at once, “ that the note and the envelope were not found together ! It is you who 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 his audacity, 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 has never said 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.”
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, and did not know who V. E. was. 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.
I was not taken back to my cell, but half 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 fourwheeled cab ; but when we went rolling over the Palace Bridge I understood that I was going 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 gray 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 ? ” was his reply. “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 ; in two years you will not have done.” But 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,” looked at him with a sort of scorn, and then turned his eyes toward me. It was evident that he was not at all pleased to receive a new inmate, and that he felt 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 officer’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 woolen 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. Of course I 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.
P. Kropotkin.