The World That Never Was (27 page)

Inevitably, a climate stifling of imaginative playfulness and emotional release was to prove dangerously counterproductive for those who wished to maintain the status quo. In those rare cases when utopian science fiction was written and published in Russia – such as Prince Odoevsky’s novels
The Year 4338
and
The Town with No Name –
it was earnest in its preoccupations: concerned less with the extravagant possibilities of space travel and underwater exploration that so fascinated French and British authors, than with the new world that might be realised in the here and now by social renewal. Even the utopian section of Chernyshevsky’s
What is to be Done?
, ‘Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream’ – by far the most notable example of utopianism from Russian literature of the period – alludes to futuristic architecture and food production only as background detail for its vision of a society made perfect by free love, socialism and the disappearance of religion.

By the beginning of the 1870s, though, the ground was shifting. A new generation of radicals was coming to the fore who insisted that there was ‘more out there than the social sciences, that the anatomy of a frog won’t get you very far, that there are other important questions, that there is history, social progress …’ Alongside the elevated political and historical tracts that formed their staple reading, the high-minded youth of Russia developed an appetite for intrepid stories of adventure – by Fenimore Cooper and, especially, Verne – and they craved intellectual heroes who were similarly single-minded.

Before 1871, Darwin had been known in Russia merely as a disciple of Lamarck, who held that inheritance was subject to only limited environmental influence. The publication of
The Descent of Man
gave him a distinct and compelling reputation of his own, as a scientist whose daring new ideas might, by extrapolation, help unravel the whole tightly wound mythology of Russian hierarchy, in which the tsar’s position was guaranteed by divine will and the instinctual deference of the masses. For if evolution discounted the Genesis story, then the rationale of Adam’s fall and Christ’s promise of redemption surely came tumbling down, dragging with it any claim to authority for God’s intermediaries on earth. Moreover, Darwinism confirmed mankind’s shared birthright, while Thomas Huxley and others tenaciously teased out the social significance of ‘the survival of the fittest’; the political and economic subtext was not lost on those determined to work deep change in Russian society.

When an anxious Alexander Kropotkin wrote to his brother Peter in 1872 that he feared himself to be under police surveillance, he drew comfort from the imminent appearance in Russia of translations of Darwin’s most recent work. ‘Those nice children’, he wrote facetiously of the tsarist goverment, ‘simply don’t comprehend that it is more dangerous than a hundred A. Kropotkins.’ Ex-followers of Nechaev, abandoning terrorism for the subtler challenge that evolutionary theory posed to religious and state authority, lost none of their passion in the transition, ‘Every one of us would have gone to the scaffold and would have laid down his life for Moleschott or Darwin.’ The positivist efforts of Karl Marx to anatomise the social condition, diagnose its ailments and prescribe a cure were yet to make anything like such a deep impression.

Following Natanson’s arrest and imprisonment in February 1872, Nicholas Chaikovsky emerged as a calm influence to which the circle’s members
looked in the midst of the ideological ferment that engulfed them. Even the heavy-handed policemen who had detained the pioneers in their raid on the Kusheliovka summer colony in 1871 appear to have recognised something exceptional in him: while the other suspects were subjected to prolonged grilling, he had been left in peace to study for his university exams. Taking the lead in the circle’s endless correspondence with bookshops, libraries and their new sister groups, the circle became closely identified with him. All members should fund the cause to the utmost of their ability, he determined, while themselves maintaining a habit of frugality in order to encourage self-discipline, and foster solidarity with the privations of the Russian peasantry. When the book-trading business found itself in urgent need of capital, one of the Kornilova sisters even went so far as to marry a fellow ‘Chaikovskyist’ with the express aim of extracting a generous dowry from her father, an affuent merchant, to augment the regular contributions that she and her sisters made from their allowances.

For a while, difficult decisions were taken by Chaikovsky almost unilaterally, but such a style of leadership was so at odds with the group’s guiding principles that it could not last. One applicant to the circle, who on failing to receive the unanimous agreement of members necessary for admission had turned informer for the Third Section, evoked their devoted and egalitarian beliefs with surprising generosity. ‘There are no “juniors” and “elders” among them, all are equal, everyone acts according to the circumstances, unaffected by the wishes of others, though the manner of their actions does reflect a mood of resolute unity, as they are always following a common aim.’ In reality, by mid-1872 that unity was becoming increasingly fragile, and even after the departure of members who favoured a more direct form of action, the whispered debate over future policy continued.

Into this simmering uncertainty stepped the dashing figure of Sergei Kravchinsky. Intense and solitary by disposition, when he joined the Mikhailovskoe Artillery Academy as a cadet he already spoke four languages and, having honed his revolutionary credentials since adolescence, possessed a grasp of radical ideas far in advance of his years. Strikingly handsome, with a rich mane of brown hair and the beginnings of a fulsome beard, he was remembered by one contemporary, Shishko, as ‘an exceptionally serious and even sombre young man, [with] a bit of a stoop, a large forehead and sharp features’. The strongest impression that the nineteen-year-old Kravchinsky had made on Shishko, though, was during a summer camp in the forest near Lake Duderhof when,
addressing a clandestine gathering of cadets on the imperative of revolution, his oratory had taken flight. Invoking the great and expeditious changes wrought by the French Revolution, compared to which the endless examples from history of concessions from above appeared meagre and easily reversible, Kravchinsky’s seditious ideas left his audience shaken and intoxicated.

Weeks after his barnstorming performance the restless Kravchinsky had abruptly abandoned his studies for an unglamorous posting to Kharkov, a provincial backwater turned railway boom town. Fellow junior officers remembered how his room was stripped of all furniture except a stool, so that nothing should distract from his reading, which he continued even while walking around the barracks. If the other soldiers viewed such eccentricities with some suspicion, their respect for his burly frame and innate acumen in military matters deterred mockery. He was a man over whom women would swoon and men hover in the hope that something of his aura might rub off on them.

Kravchinsky’s admission at this time into the Chaikovsky Circle, unopposed and at the first attempt, was hardly surprising: he had already demonstrated a ready talent for the circle’s main business, having smuggled illicit pamphlets on his own initiative for some time. His knowledge of the French Revolution also struck a chord with members, who self-consciously modelled themselves on Danton, Desmoulins and the Girondists of the 1790s. The welcome he received was in marked contrast to the group’s more circumspect reaction a few weeks later when Dmitri Klements put forward the name of Prince Kropotkin for membership.

The thirty-year-old Kropotkin appeared, at first, an antiquated anomaly to a group that was bound in most cases by connections from school and college days, but there was more to their resistance than this. German Lopatin did not mince his words. ‘What prince do you have now? Perhaps he wishes to amuse himself beneath the mask of democracy,’ he argued, ‘but later he will become a dignitary and cause us to be hanged.’ Eventually, Kropotkin was elected thanks to the testimony of the recently released Sofia Perovskaya that he was reliable and ‘completely young in spirit’; but whilst those who had suspected him of a hidden agenda mistook its nature, they were not altogether misguided. Lev Tikhomirov probably came closest to the truth when he recognised in Kropotkin an intellectual impatience with his colleagues: ‘A revolutionary to the core [he was] already at that time an anarchist, [while] anarchism for us was still entirely new.’ Even Kravchinsky lagged behind Kropotkin in this respect, for despite his later profession to have been an anarchist at this point, his erroneous
claim that ‘in 1870 the whole of advanced Russia was anarchist’ suggests a certain ideological confusion.

Few in the circle would have disagreed with Kravchinsky’s proselytising atheism, and most would have thrilled to Bakunin’s claim that the traditional Russian village community, the
mir
, would be in the vanguard of the eventual revolution, ‘freed from the oppressive tutelage of the state to become an ideal form of anarchical government, by all with the consent of all.’ For most young Russians, however, faced with the realities of a tight tsarist security apparatus and the atrophied popular instinct for justice, any question of a revolution within their own lifetime appeared, for the moment, delusional. Replying to his brother’s musings on the subject some years earlier, Alexander Kropotkin had expressed what remained the majority view among the country’s dissidents: ‘Of course I would rush to a social revolution; I would go to the barricades…But as for the success of the revolution, I wouldn’t hope for much; it would be too early I’m sure, and they would defeat us.’ Semi-clandestine visits to Russia by prominent figures from the Commune in the aftermath of the debacle of 1871 had briefly bolstered the extremist case, with Klements later reflecting that events in Paris had sparked ‘a new era in the development of the revolutionary deed in Russia’. Yet the conspicuous pathos of the defeated Communards’ predicament underlined the futility of insurrection, if launched prematurely. The fate of Marx’s envoy to the Commune Elizaveta Dmitrieff, arrested on her return home from Paris and sent to suffer a slow death in Siberia, offered the bitterest reminder of the price to be paid for such sedition.

Kropotkin’s admission had nevertheless galvanised debate within the twenty-strong circle over the nature and scope of the change that Russia required. Still, though, the majority held that it should be political only, rather than a more general upheaval in the structure of society, and must be achieved by constitutional means. Martin Langans, a leading member of the circle’s sister organisation in the south of Russia, would offer an eloquent expression of the limit of their hopes: ‘Back then,’ he wrote, ‘we believed that the state, like any powerful weapon, could both create happiness for mankind and oppress it, and that the mechanics lay in the creation of circumstances under which the abuse of power would become impossible.’

A visceral hatred for the tsar had yet to take hold, with the group directing its ire against those reactionary officials who were perceived to mislead and misinterpret him. On the one occasion when a member proposed assassinating Alexander II, the entire circle rounded on him,
threatening to obstruct his intentions using whatever physical means necessary. And yet to those persuaded by Bakunin’s analysis of Russia’s predicament, any delay seemed certain only to weaken their position and play into their enemies’ hands. While they hesitated, the advance of European capitalism and industry would continue to seduce the peasant from his loyalty to the land and erode the traditions of communistic solidarity, offering the distant prospect of individualistic self-advancement whilst plunging workers into even worse living conditions than before.

For all his admiration of the circle and its members, Kropotkin refused to cede on the key principle of collective action, and tried every ruse to win the majority around to his view. Initially declining to surrender his personal wealth to the communal coffers, he made certain that no one could mistake his stance for avarice or self-interest. It was ‘because I am saving it for a more important time,’ he told them. ‘Later, when it becomes necessary to arm the workers in order to destroy the bourgeoisie, then no one will give a kopeck.’ Staking his fragile credibility with the circle on this sensitive issue, he went on to reaffirm his commitment to the collective ideal, forcing his cautious colleagues’ hand by volunteering for a task that entailed utter submission to the group’s will.

The new role that Kropotkin proposed for himself would have meant severing all ties with the group, to plunge back into the life of the imperial court that he so despised. Only, this time, he would be there with something close to treachery in mind. ‘I will agitate among the higher courtiers, I will try to unite them, if possible, into some form of organisation,’ he promised the circle, who were eager for constitutional reform. To establish a radical cell so close to the heart of tsarist power, where reactionary forces were in the ascendant, risked almost certain arrest. But imprisonment was not the greatest sacrifice Kropotkin was prepared to make on behalf of ‘such a collection of morally superior men and women’: as a man who had renounced his title and his lineage, the denial of his true sympathies that such a deep-cover operation entailed would have amounted to a double torment. Fortunately for Kropotkin, his brinksmanship paid off: the question of policy was revisited to find more common ground.