Contemporary Socialism Part 9

[3] Garin, "L'Anarchie et les Anarchistes," p. 48.

CHAPTER IX.

RUSSIAN NIHILISM.

Haxthausen p.r.o.nounced a confident opinion in 1847, when most of the continental nations were agitated with rumours of revolution, that Russia at any rate was safe from the danger, inasmuch as she enjoyed an absolute protection against all such revolutionary agitation in her communistic rural inst.i.tutions. There was no proletariat in Russia, every man in the country being born to a share in the land of the towns.h.i.+p he belonged to; and without a proletariat, concluded the learned professor, there was neither motive nor material for social revolt. This belief became generally accepted, and pa.s.sed, indeed, for years as a political commonplace; but perhaps never has a political prognostication so entirely reasonable proved on experience so utterly fallacious. Instead of sparing or avoiding Russia, revolutionary agitation has grown positively endemic in that country; it is more virulent in its type, and apparently more deepseated than elsewhere; and, stranger still, not the least of its exciting causes has been that very communistic agrarian system which was thought to be the surest preservation against it.

In its earlier period, before the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs, the Russian revolutionary movement was largely inspired by an extravagant idealization of the perfections of the rural commune, and now since the emanc.i.p.ation it is fed far more formidably by an actual experience of the commune's defects. The truth is that the communistic land system of Russia, so far from preventing the birth of a proletariat, is now of itself begetting the most numerous and the most helpless proletariat in the world. The emanc.i.p.ation dues would have been a serious burden under any social arrangements, but they have proved so much heavier under the communistic system of Russia than they would have been elsewhere that the system itself is beginning to give way. With an unlimited stock of good land, all is plain sailing under any social inst.i.tutions; but when land is limited in extent and every new-comer has the right to cut in and get an equal share with those already in possession, excessive subdivision is inevitable, and the point is soon reached where any fresh impost or outgoing destroys the profitableness of cultivation, and converts the right to the land from an a.s.set into a liability. This is what is now happening in Russia. It appears there are already more paupers in St. Petersburg proportionally to population than in any other European capital, and as many as a third of the inhabitants of the provinces are either entirely landless, or, more unhappy still, find their land, instead of a benefit, to be only a grievous burden of which they cannot shake themselves clear. I shall have occasion later on to recur to this new economic development in rural Russia, which is very interesting to the student of socialism on its own account, but which will concern us in the present chapter more particularly in its bearing on the operations and prospects of the revolutionary party in that country.

The revolutionary or nihilist movement in Russia has pa.s.sed through several successive phases; but there is no good reason for denying its continuity, nor any impropriety, as is sometimes alleged, in the retention of the name of Nihilism, which it bore when it first engaged the attention of Western Europe, although it may be quite true that the word is more descriptive of the earlier developments of the movement than of the later. In its first stage, before the Emanc.i.p.ation Act, it was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation--an intellectual revolt all round, if you will--shaping more and more in its political ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to action. Then, second, the Emanc.i.p.ation Act gave it organization, purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know, converting it into the engine of the bitter discontent of the landed cla.s.ses, who were seriously straitened and many of them ruined by the operation of that great reform. Third, while the impoverishment of thousands of landed families was the first result of the Emanc.i.p.ation Act, its slower but more serious result has been the impoverishment of the peasantry, and nihilism is now a.s.suming a more agrarian character, and promoting the social revolution under the old Russian cry for "the black division."

For the origin of nihilism we must go back half a century to a little company of gifted young men, most of whom rose to great distinction, who used at that time to meet together at the house of a rich merchant in Moscow, for the discussion of philosophy and politics and religion. They were of the most various views. Some of them became Liberal leaders, and wanted Russia to follow the const.i.tutional development of the Western nations; others became founders of the new Slavophil party, contending that Russia should be no imitator, but develop her own native inst.i.tutions in her own way; and there were at least two among them--Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin--who were to be prominent exponents of revolutionary socialism. But they all owned at this period one common master--Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how a.s.siduously they read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and weeks to clearing up the meaning of single pa.s.sages in his writings, and how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where he lived among the Young Hegelians and wrote for their organ, the _Hallische Jahrbucher_; but before either he or Herzen ever had any personal intercommunication with the members of that school of thought, they had pa.s.sed through precisely the same development. Herzen speaks of socialism almost in the very phrases of the Young Hegelians, as being the new "terrestrial religion," in which there was to be neither G.o.d nor heaven; as a new system of society which would dispense with an authoritative government, human or Divine, and which should be at once the completion of Christianity and the realization of the Revolution.

"Christianity," he said, "made the slave a son of man; the Revolution has emanc.i.p.ated him into a citizen. Socialism would make him a _man_."

This tendency of thought was strongly supported in the Russian mind by Haxthausen's discovery and laudation of the rural commune of Russia. The Russian State was the most arbitrary, oppressive, and corrupt in Europe, and the Russian Church was the most ignorant and superst.i.tious; but here at last was a Russian inst.i.tution which was regarded with envy even by wise men of the west, and was really a practical antic.i.p.ation of that very social system which was the last work of European philosophy. It was with no small pride, therefore, that Alexander Herzen declared that the Muscovite peasant in his dirty sheepskin had solved the social problem of the nineteenth century, and that for Russia, with this great problem already solved, the Revolution was obviously a comparatively simple operation. You had but to remove the Czardom, the services, and the priesthood, and the great ma.s.s of the people would still remain organized in fifty thousand complete little self-governing communities living on their common land and ruling their common affairs as they had been doing long before the Czardom came into being. And what, after all, was the latest dream of philosophical socialism but a world of communities like these? The new formula of civilization had merely come back to the old Russian _mir_.

All Russian writers draw a kindly and charming picture of the _mir_, the rude village council, in which the heads of families have for ages managed their common land, distributed their taxes, and settled all the burning problems of the hamlet with remarkable freedom, fairness, and mutual respect. They meet together on some open s.p.a.ce--perhaps in front of the tavern, which is itself one of their common possessions; they beat out their question there till they are unanimous; for the _mir_ will know nothing of decision by majorities--the will of the _mir_ is believed to be the will of G.o.d Himself, and it must be no divided counsel. They argue sometimes long and keenly, and, as their interest waxes, they will raise many voices at once, or perhaps break up into separate groups, each discussing the subject apart; but presently, out of all the apparent disorder, the acceptable decision is somehow found, and peace reigns again in the village street. In these meetings they have the deepest feeling and habit of freedom; and even when a political question arises affecting their interests--a question of taxes or of administration--they make no scruple to speak in the plainest terms of the Government and the officials, and they are never interfered with.

"n.o.body but G.o.d," they say, "dare judge the _mir_," and the Czar, at any rate, respects the tradition. That rude a.s.sembly is the only free inst.i.tution in Russia. Even revolutionary manifestoes have been publicly read at its meetings, and socialist addresses publicly delivered. And this instinctive spirit of freedom is attended there with the instinctive spirit of equality. A recent Russian writer observes that a Russian peasant would be quite unable to understand the sort of respect the English labourer shows to a gentleman. With its freedom, its equality, its strong family sentiment, its common property, its self-government, the _mir_ is really the social democratic republic political philosophers have projected, and a Russian who dislikes the State and loves the _mir_ is, without more ado, a social revolutionist of the anarchist type. The favourite ideal among Russian revolutionists for the last fifty years has accordingly all along been the anarchist ideal of a free federation of local industrial communities without any separate political organization; for the anarchist ideal is natural to the Russian situation.

Revolutionary opinions were very rife in Russia during the reign of Nicholas; but under his iron rule they were never suffered to be spoken above the breath. His ascension to the throne in 1825 had been greeted by a revolution--a very abortive one, it is true, but unfortunately sufficient to set every fibre of the young Czar's strong nature inflexibly against all the liberal tendencies encouraged by his father, and to stop the political development of the country for a generation. A handful of const.i.tutional reformers--united three years before in a secret society to promote peasant emanc.i.p.ation, the common civil liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law--gathered a crowd to a public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine and a Const.i.tution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they had come together that they thought Const.i.tution was the name of the Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the conspirators--Pestel, the poet--said, as he was going to execution, "I wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done worse--he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come.

All freedom of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed; every means of influencing the public mind was stopped; there was no liberty of printing, speaking, or meeting; there was no saving grace but ignorance, for people of reading and intelligence lived under perpetual liability to most unreasonable suspicion. Alexander Herzen, for example, was banished to the Asiatic frontier while still a very young man, merely because he happened to make the casual remark in a private letter to his father, which was opened in the post, that a policeman had a few days before killed a man in the streets of St. Petersburg.

But this system of lawless and unrighteous repression nursed a deep spirit of revolt against const.i.tuted authority in the heart of the people, and among the younger minds a kind of pa.s.sion for the most extreme and forbidden doctrines. All the wildest phases of nihilist opinion in the sixties were already raging in Russia in the forties.

Haxthausen says he was astounded, when he visited the Russian universities and schools, to find the students at every one of them given over, as he says, to political and religious notions of the most all-destructive description. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his death-bed said to his son, the n.o.ble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually heavy enough, but in the meantime he wisely bent before the storm, relaxed the restraints the father had imposed, and gave pledges of the most liberal reforms in every department of State--judicial administration, local government, popular education, serf emanc.i.p.ation.

People believed completely in the young Czar's sincerity, awaited with great expectations the measures he would propose, and meanwhile indulged to the top of their bent in the practical liberties they were already provisionally allowed to enjoy, and gave themselves up to a restless fervour for liberty and reform.

An independent press was not among the liberties conceded, but Russian opinion at this period found a most effective voice in a newspaper started in London by Alexander Herzen, called the _Kolokol_ (Bell), which for a number of years made a great impression in Russia by the accuracy of its information on Russian affairs, by the boldness of its criticisms of the Government, and by the ease with which it got smuggled into universal circulation. When Herzen was sent to the Urals as a dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously--perhaps it was to keep him there--to an administrative and judicial post, in which he would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself; but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing, with deep interest and deeper disappointment, some of the revolutions of 1848, and writing that they had failed because their promoters were not prepared to follow them up with a positive social programme, as if, he says, the mere destruction of a Bastile were a revolution, he settled in England, and learnt there, as his son a.s.sures us, that revolution itself was but a vain expedient, and that gradual reform was the only effectual method of lasting social amelioration.

It was probably while he was learning this lesson--it was certainly entirely in this spirit--that he began his political agitation on the accession of Alexander II. The moment the new Czar ascended the throne, Herzen addressed to him a famous letter, demanding amends for the ills his father, Czar Nicholas, had done the people, a complete breach with the old system, and the introduction of thoroughgoing Liberal reforms, and more especially the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs. It was in the same spirit he conducted his agitation in the _Kolokol_. Without neglecting to ventilate his socialist and philosophical views, he welcomed the contemplated reforms as being in themselves true remedies for popular grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the peasants should not be deprived, in the emanc.i.p.ation arrangements, of a foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their emanc.i.p.ation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of officials. The journal was written with wit, vigour, and accurate knowledge; and, as it spoke what most men thought, but few would as yet venture to say, it was greedily read and distributed, and was for some years a remarkable power in the country. Herzen was the hero of the young. Herzenism, we are told, became the rage, and Herzenism appears to have meant, before all, a free handling of everything in Church or State which was previously thought too sacred to be touched. This iconoclastic spirit grew more and more characteristic of Russian society at this period, and presently, under its influence, Herzenism fell into the shade, and nihilism occupied the scene.

We possess various accounts of the meaning and nature of nihilism, and they all agree substantially in their description of it. The word was first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," where Arcadi Petrovitch surprises his father and uncle by describing his friend Bazaroff as a nihilist.

"A nihilist," said Nicholas Petrovitch. "This word must come from the Latin _nihil_, nothing, as far as I can judge, and consequently it signifies a man who recognises nothing."

"Or rather who respects nothing," said Paul Petrovitch.

"A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," said Arcadi.

"Does not that come to the same thing?" asked his uncle.

"No, not at all. A nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has."...

"Yes, before we had Hegelians; now we have nihilists. We shall see what you will do to exist in nothingness, in a vacuum, as if under an air pump."

Koscheleff, writing in 1874, gives a similar explanation of nihilism.

"Our disease is a disease of character, and the most dangerous possible.

We suffer from a fatal unbelief in everything. We have ceased to believe in this or in that, not because we have studied the subject thoroughly and become convinced of the untenability of our views, but only because some author or another in Germany or England holds this or that doctrine to be unfounded. Our nihilism is a thing of a quite peculiar character.

It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their fault-finding, their strong a.s.sertions, are grounded on nothing. They borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repeat them and magnify them _ad nauseam_, and treat persons of another way of thinking as absurd and antiquated people who continue to cherish exploded ideas and customs. The chief cause of the spread of this (I will not say doctrine, for I cannot honour it with such a name, but) sect is this, that it imparts its communications in secret conversations, so that, for one thing, it cannot be publicly criticised and refuted, and, for another, it charms by the fascination of the forbidden."

The same view precisely is given by Baron Fircks ("Schedo Ferroti") in his very elaborate and thoughtful account of nihilism in his _L'Avenir de la Russie_. It was merely, he said, the critical spirit--the spirit of intellectual revolt--carried to an extreme and running amuck against all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary society, and was in no way peculiar to Russia; but while that may be true, it has undoubtedly--as perhaps the Baron would admit--been carried into more extravagant manifestations in Russia than elsewhere.

Nor are the reasons of this extravagance far to seek. First, the Russians are, in national character, singularly impressionable, volatile, and predisposed to run to extremes. Diderot says they were rotten before they were ripe. Second, they are mere children in political experience, and even in intellectual training. Their education is in general shallow, and they are liable to the vagaries of the half educated. Third, both Baron Fircks and Koscheleff think nihilism was largely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with innovation,"

that "nothing was allowed to remain as it was," that "everything was always being changed," that "a new ministry invariably began its work by upsetting that of its predecessors." Russia being a Functionary State, not a Law State, to employ a useful German distinction, the decrees of officials take the place elsewhere filled by fixed laws established by legislative authority; and where these decrees are continually changing, reverence for the law is impossible.

But in all this there was no practical political disaffection before the Emanc.i.p.ation Act. The nihilists had as yet a vague belief in the Czar and the coming reforms; they felt that the Russian people were at last to have a chance of showing the rich genius that lay in them, and their whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and that she was already beginning to outs.h.i.+ne all other nations in literature, in art, in science, in music. "Some young people among us,"

says Turgenieff, "have discovered even a Russian arithmetic. Two and two do make four with us as well as elsewhere, but more pompously, it would seem. All this is nothing but the stammering of men who are just awaking."

Under these influences the energies of the nihilists took a different outlet than plotting. Instead of founding secret societies, they founded Sunday schools. For to their mind the first need of the time, above even political liberty, was popular education. As to liberty, the measure they practically enjoyed at the gracious pleasure of the Czar for the present contented them, inasmuch as it seemed an earnest of the better securities that were expected to follow; but they could not with any satisfaction look round them and see the Russian people, for whom they were prophesying such a great career, still lying in almost aboriginal ignorance. The stuff was indeed there which should yet astonish the world, but it must first be made. To "make the people," as they phrased it, was the task the nihilists now undertook, and they threw themselves into it with the zeal of apostles. They put on shabby clothes to avoid any offensive superiority to their poorer neighbours, and they wore green spectacles to correct the even more intolerable inequality of personal beauty, for, as they were fond of saying, they had put off the old man and were now new men created again by Buchner and Feuerbach in the gospel of humanity; but with all their extravagances they carried on for some years a most active and no doubt useful work in the Sunday schools and reading circles which they rapidly established everywhere.

Although this movement fell eventually under the suspicion of the Government, as in despotic countries any movement will, it seems to have had no political, or what the authorities call "ill-intentioned"

purpose. It was pervaded with patriotic and humanitarian feeling, and though no doubt many of the nihilists who took part in it held as extreme opinions in politics as they did in everything else, yet these opinions were mere matters of speculation. It is certain that democratic and revolutionary socialism was a very popular doctrine among the nihilists, even at that earliest period of their history, for their most representative man during that period was Tchernycheffsky, the editor of the _Contemporary_ magazine, and a political economist of some note in his day; and Tchernycheffsky was undoubtedly a democratic and revolutionary socialist. He belonged to a younger generation than Herzen and Bakunin, but, like them, he had been led to socialism through Hegel and Feuerbach, and he expounded his ideas in a famous romance ent.i.tled, "What is to be done?" which the Government allowed him to write, and even to publish, while in prison for sedition in 1862, though they suppressed the book sternly when they saw it beginning to make a sensation.

But although revolutionary and socialistic principles may have been very considerably entertained by the nihilists from the first, there was no practical revolutionary or socialistic organization before the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs. Up till then nihilism may be said to have been a benignant growth, if I may use a medical expression, and it was that great historical measure that converted it into the malignant and deadly trouble which we best know. The Russian Radicals, including the socialists, were strongly disappointed with that measure from the outset, because they thought it inflicted serious injustice on the peasantry. It deprived them, they said, of much of the land they had hitherto enjoyed as a right, and which was necessary for their comfortable subsistence, while it imposed on them for what they got excessive dues which their holdings would never be able to bear; and so the first Land and Liberty League was founded in 1863. But it was not the peasants, or the peasants' friends--it was the small landed gentry who were the first to feel the effects of the Emanc.i.p.ation Act, and to raise the standard of revolt. The Act made a serious change in their fortunes. Although the landlords were allowed most liberal terms of compensation for the enforced emanc.i.p.ation of their serfs, few of them actually received a kopeck, because they were almost all of them already deeply indebted to Government, and Government applied the compensation money to cancel their old debts, and gave up the policy of granting any more mortgages in the future. Then a great part of the land which was formerly cultivated by means of the serfs was now found to be too poor to afford the expense of paid labour; the landlords had neither stock nor implements to work it, if it were more fertile, the peasantry having in the old days tilled the field for them with their own horses and ploughs; nor had they any means of raising the stock on credit, and, besides, most of them were complete absentees, engaged as Government or railway officials, or in other professional work, and knew nothing whatever about the business of agriculture. The smaller landlords have therefore been compelled to sell their estates to the larger, or to leave much of their ground entirely uncultivated. In Moscow there were 633 separate estates in 1861, before the emanc.i.p.ation, but only 422 in 1877, and not more than one-fifth of the land that was cultivated in that province in 1861 continued in cultivation in 1877. Many of the sons of the smaller proprietors were at the universities studying for one of the professions, and had either to give up their studies altogether for want of means, or were put on shorter allowances, which was scarcely less annoying, and was indeed a great cause of revolutionary opinions at the universities. Many more of the sons of the gentry were in the army, and the pay of a Russian officer being extremely small, they had been accustomed to receive allowances from home, without which, indeed, they could hardly live; and now in the altered circ.u.mstances of the family these allowances were perforce suddenly stopped. Much of the revolutionary discontent that exists in the Russian army to such a serious extent that 200 arrests were made in March, 1885, and Government appointed a special commission of inquiry into the subject, has come from the source, and is practically a revolt against insufficient pay.

But what happened at the universities and in the army happened in other departments of Russian life; the Emanc.i.p.ation Act had left on every sh.o.r.e some wreckage of the gentry, an upper-cla.s.s and educated proletariat, whose distress might be due originally to their own improvidence or ignorance, but was undoubtedly first driven into an acute state by an act of Government, and therefore clamoured for vengeance on the Government that produced it.

The clamour of the victims of the Emanc.i.p.ation Act naturally woke up all the earlier discontents of the country. The Poles and the dissenting sects, with all their ancient wrongs, seem to have contributed but a small contingent to the nihilist ranks; but the Jews, subject to a barbarous and often very acute persecution, have filled the secret societies from the beginning with many of their most determined members, and have supplied a great part of the "Nihilistesses"; and even though the Revolutionary Executive Committee has latterly issued a proclamation against the Jews, mainly on the ground of the extortion practised by Jewish money-lenders on the peasantry, there are still, as appears very abundantly from the nihilist trials of 1890, many Jews among the revolutionists.

Then there are thirteen millions of native heretics in Russia, sects of various sorts springing up like the early Quakers from the bosom of the people, and filled with a rude spirit of freedom and a tendency towards socialistic ideas in their condemnation of luxury and acc.u.mulation, their hatred of war and military government, and their belief in fraternity and mutual a.s.sistance. Some writers allege that these sects are an important factor in the revolutionary movement; but though they certainly have suffered many wrongs from Government, they do not seem to have furnished any great quota to the revolutionary ranks. They are the freethinkers of the unlettered cla.s.ses, however, and their ideas no doubt have some influence in preparing these cla.s.ses for socialist principles. But there is another cla.s.s very numerous in Russia, who are the natural allies of revolution--the "illegal men" who, for various reasons, go about on false pa.s.sports, and are thus living in revolt already. And to all these diverse sources of disaffection must be added the aggravation arising at the moment from the tyrannical and arbitrary measures to which the Government resorted on the first outburst of complaints.

In 1862, perceiving the discontent raised by the Emanc.i.p.ation Act, Government took alarm, and withdrew or curtailed the liberties it had for a few years allowed the people to enjoy. It stopped some newspapers and warned a number more; it prohibited the Sunday schools and reading clubs altogether; it banished many persons on mere suspicion to remote provinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years, brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and sent him to the Siberian mines for the rest of his life. There he still remains, broken now both in mind and body, but probably doing more harm to the Government by his wrongs than he could ever have done by his pen, for nihilists have for twenty-seven years been constantly exciting popular sympathy by descriptions of his martyrdom and demands for his release.

It was while this alienation against the Government was thickening that Michael Bakunin escaped from Siberia, and it was by emissaries sent by Bakunin to Russia that the first successful attempt was made to incite and organize all these revolutionary materials into a revolutionary movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London, the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no patience now for the extravagance of the young Russian patriots who visited him in London. "Our black earth," he would say, "needs a deal of draining."

And there is a remarkable letter which he wrote shortly before his death, and apparently to Bakunin himself, in which he says:--

"I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, by houses destroyed with b.a.l.l.s and bullets, and listening feverishly as prisoners were being shot down, I called with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, without thinking much of what was to come in its place. Since that time twenty years have gone by; the vengeance has come, but it has come from the other side, and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time for pa.s.sions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view.

You rush ahead, as you did before, with a pa.s.sion of destruction, which you take for a creative pa.s.sion; you crush every obstacle; you respect history only in the future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to comprehend the march of men in the past and in the present, to know how to advance with them without falling behind, but without going on so far before as you, for they would not follow me--they could not follow me!"

Herzen gradually lost hold over the wilder forces in Russia, he was even openly denounced as a reactionary by the revolutionist Dolgourouki; and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support of the Polish insurrection of 1863, his spell vanished, and during the remaining seven years of his life his influence was of little account.

Bakunin was more in unison with the troubled spirit of the times. While Herzen had been ripening in political wisdom under the ampler intellectual life to which his exile introduced him, Bakunin's twelve years' confinement had maddened him into a fanatic, and instead of curing him of revolutionary propensities, only fixed the idea of revolution in his mind like a mania. When he came to London a huge, haggard man, always excited, always talking, he used to speak of himself as a Prometheus unbound, and he was to live henceforth for the undoing of the powers and systems that were. He was never found without a group of conspirators and refugees of all shades and nationalities about him.

With some reminiscences of socialistic philosophy remaining in the background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His socialism itself had grown less sane--it was no longer the anarchism of the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"--society not merely without governmental inst.i.tutions, but without inst.i.tutions of any kind; and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which all States and Churches and all inst.i.tutions religious, political, judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destruction" are not articles of a rational creed, but they were propagated with almost preternatural energy by Bakunin. The work of exciting revolution and disorder of any kind was the main business of his life till he died in 1876. Others might play a waiting game, but for him the work of the revolutionist was revolution; and he ought to be incessantly promoting it, not by word only, but by deed, by an unremitting terrorism, by shooting a policeman when you can't reach a king, and destroying a Bastile if you cannot overturn an empire. In his "Revolutionary Catechism," written in cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at a Russian nihilist trial in 1871, he says (I quote the pa.s.sage from M. de Laveleye):--

"The revolutionist is a man under a vow. He ought to have no personal interests, no business, no sentiments, no property. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive interest, with one thought and one pa.s.sion: the Revolution.... He has only one aim, one science: destruction. For that and nothing but that he studied mechanics, physics, chemistry, and medicine. He observes with the same object, the men, the characters, the positions and all the conditions of the social order. He despises and hates existing morality. For him everything is moral that favours the triumph of the Revolution. Everything is immoral and criminal that hinders it.... Between him and society there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be prepared to die, to bear torture, and to kill with his own hands all who obstruct the revolution. So much the worse for him if he has in this world any ties of parentage, friends.h.i.+p, or love! He is not a true revolutionist if these attachments stay his arm. In the meantime he ought to live in the middle of society, feigning to be what he is not. He ought to penetrate everywhere, among high and low alike; into the merchant's office, into the church, into the Government bureaux, into the army, into the literary world, into the secret police, and even into the Imperial Palace.... He must make a list of those who are condemned to death, and expedite their sentence according to the order of their relative iniquities.... A new member can only be received into the a.s.sociation by a unanimous vote, and after giving proofs of his merit not in word but in action. Every 'companion' ought to have under his hand several revolutionists of the second or third degree, not entirely initiated. He ought to consider them part of the revolutionary capital placed at his disposal, and he ought to use them economically, and so as to extract the greatest possible profit out of them.... The most precious element of all are women, completely initiated, and accepting our entire programme. Without their help we can do nothing."

Bakunin naturally turned his first attention to his own country, and the subsequent development of Russian affairs show sufficiently distinct signs of his ideas and influence.

In 1865 he sent a young medical student named Netchaeff to Moscow, to work among the students there, and Netchaeff had, by 1869, established a number of secret societies, which he linked together under the name of the Russian Branch of the International Working Men's a.s.sociation. This organization was not very numerous--no Russian secret society is--but in 1873 as many as eighty-seven persons were brought to trial for connection with it, and in 1866 one of its members, a working man called Karakasoff, who was suffering from an incurable disease, made the first attempt on the life of the Czar--an event which had most important effects on the course of Russian politics. It rang out the era of reform, and rang in the era of reaction. The popular concessions which the Czar had already given he now began to withdraw. The people had never got, as they expected, an independent judiciary--perhaps in an autocratic country a judiciary independent of the executive is hardly possible--but they had enjoyed some pretence of public trial, and now that pretence was done away, and Karakasoff and his companions were not brought before the court at all, but tried and condemned by an extraordinary commission, with a military officer of approved ferocity at its head. Administrative trial and administrative condemnation became again the regular rule in Russia; and though these things were borne in the days of Nicholas as almost matters of course, they were now deeply resented as fresh invasions of right and direct breaches of imperial promises. Then the bodies to which a certain amount of the local government of the country, the management of roads, schools, poor, health, etc., had been entrusted, were obstructed in the exercise of their powers, or gradually deprived of their powers altogether, and forced into complete dependence on the imperial executive. The students at the universities began to be interfered with in their sick and benefit societies and their reading circles; their studies in the cla.s.s-rooms were restricted to what was thought a safe routine; and even their private lives and motions were watched with an exasperating espionage. People felt the hand of the despot pressing back upon them everywhere, and they felt it with a most natural and righteous recoil.

This reactionary policy, which has continued ever since--this return to the hated old methods of arbitrary and repressive rule--produced, as was inevitable, deep and general discontent at the very moment when the great historical measure of serf emanc.i.p.ation was desolating the families of the landed gentry, province after province; and when the execution of the Emanc.i.p.ation Act was completed in 1870, Russian society was already quivering with dangerous elements of revolt.

From that time evidences of an active revolutionary propaganda multiplied rapidly every year. In 1871 and 1872 the writings of the German socialists were translated and ran into great favour. Even of Marx's far from popular work, "Capital," a large edition was eagerly bought up, and ladies of position baptized their children in the name of La.s.salle. Secret societies were discovered both north and south. From 1873 to 1877 nihilist arrests, nihilist prosecutions, nihilist conflicts with the police, were the order of the day, till at length, in 1878, the young girl, Vera Sa.s.sulitch, fired the shot at the head of the Russian police which began that long vendetta between the revolutionists and the executive, in which so many officials perished, and eventually, in 1881, after many unsuccessful attempts, the Czar himself was so cruelly a.s.sa.s.sinated.

The ardent youth of Russia, who, in 1861, were still giving themselves to the work of Sunday schools and reading circles, were, in 1871, throwing their careers away to go out, like the first apostles, without scrip or two coats, and propagate among the rude people of the provinces the doctrines of modern revolutionary socialism, and by 1881 had become absorbed in sheer terrorism, in avenging the official murder of comrades without trial by the revolutionary murder of officials, in contriving infernal plots and explosions, and trying vainly to cast out devils by the prince of devils.

Stepniak attributes the impetus which the socialist agitation received in 1871 to the impression produced in Russia by the Paris Commune; but it would perhaps be more correct simply to ascribe it to the exertions of two active Russian revolutionists, who were themselves a.s.sociated with the Communard movement, and who happened to enjoy at this period unusual facilities of communication with the younger mind of Russia. One was Bakunin, who had himself organized an insurrection at Lyons on the principles of the Commune six months before the outbreak at Paris in March, 1871; and the other was Peter Lavroff, the present Nestor of Russian nihilism, who actually took part in the Paris Commune itself.