The World That Never Was (30 page)

Every stage of the journey brought new and alarming insights, but nowhere more so than the town of Wichita, at whose newly built station the Russian family and their fellow ‘Godmen’ finally alighted. ‘Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check,’ read the sign that greeted them, but the sound of six-shooters being fired at flies on saloon walls spoke of a certain laxity in the enforcement of this rule. Wichita was booming. Rail links to the eastern cities and a steamboat connection to New Orleans saw to that, along with the influx of cash that came from the jangling-spurred cowboys who delivered herds of longhorn cattle for shipment along the Chisholm trail from Texas. In the six years since it had been founded, Wichita had already acquired close to 3,000 regular inhabitants, outstripping its once larger neighbours, and the building plots on its grid plan of 140 streets were rapidly starting to fill. Bars occupied a disproportionate number, though the Masons had already secured a prominent position for their hall.

Arriving as they did in the final weeks of 1875, Chaikovsky and his companions would have been just in time to witness the dregs of the wild carnival that engulfed the town between June and December. For a few days the population of Wichita swelled to twice its normal size with seasonal traders bringing with them an influx of gamblers and whores. Brass bands blared from the doors and windows of saloons every hour of the day and night, while Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp attempted to keep order. ‘Near Brimstone’ was how one journalist headlined his report on Wichita, and Chaikovsky is unlikely to have lingered long.

If he had wondered what Lavrov meant when he wrote of the ‘swindlers’ who awaited naïve immigrants to America, Chaikovsky would by now have had a range of candidates, from the exploitative railroad bosses to the local card sharps. Perhaps, though, as the train had chugged through Missouri, he would have also reflected more closely on the letter Frey had written to
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‘To veto the reproduction of undesirable children…grossly sensuous…gratification of his own senses’: the
phrases that leaped out were troubling indications of a dogmatism regarding the physical life of the commune. Might Lavrov’s warning have been alluding to a swindler of a different kind altogether, who played on one’s hopes of a promised land of freedom in the Midwest, but delivered only another kind of servitude?

Undaunted, Chaikovsky crossed the verdant plains outside Wichita with high hopes, approaching the ‘Happy Valley’ in which Cedar Vale lay. Nor, after the final forty-mile trek, did the place disappoint, at least at first sight: a pleasant community of seventy farms and twenty schoolhouses spread across rolling prairie, its people hard-working and peaceable. However, when William and Mary Frey – thin and feverish, shivering in threadbare old Unionist overcoats and smiling a slightly too eager greeting – emerged from a ramshackle building, the travellers must have felt more like a rescue party happening upon marooned sailors than hopeful recruits to a thriving social experiment. Perhaps, for a moment, Chaikovsky experienced a first twinge of the bitter homesickness described by a previous Cedar Vale colonist in his book
The Prairie and the Pioneers
, and the longing that he and his Russian cohabitants felt ‘to be under our own poor grey sky, surrounded by naked and cold plains and forests!’

Letters from the author of the Prairie memoir, Grigori Machtet, to Mary Frey, once frequent, had become less so of late. The reason, though, would have become plain to the colony when editions of
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containing Machtet’s recent contributions finally reached Cedar Vale. It was as if he and Chaikovsky had exchanged places, though the world of radical St Petersburg into which Machtet had immersed himself on his return from America seemed already to have progressed several steps further towards political upheaval in the short time since Chaikovsky had left.

When the reactionary professor Elie Cyon had roused his students to riot a year or two earlier, forcing the closure of the university for several months, the tsar had simply dispatched the outspoken academic to Paris as a privy councillor, and the tension had been defused. Recent protests, however, had incurred a more extreme and confrontational response, and none more so than the funeral of Pavel Chernyshev. A medical student who had been arrested in error, he had subsequently died from tuberculosis due to the appalling conditions in which he was held. While crowds chanted an elegiac verse hastily composed by Machtet, Chernyshev’s open coffin was processed around sites symbolic of the tsar’s infamous penal system: courts, police headquarters and prisons.

In the past, the tsarist administration had paid lip service, at least, to the basic dignities of political prisoners, but the time for such indulgence was now past. On direct instructions from the tsar, the words ‘an honourable fighter for a sacred cause’ were excised from the dead man’s grave. ‘A great judgement day’ was coming, his outraged mourners proclaimed in reaction, when the thin crowds to whom they usually proselytised would ‘be transformed into tens, even hundreds, of thousands, who, with weapons in hand, will go out into the square to judge the executioners, torturers, robber barons and exploitative landowners.’ The authorities, however, moved swiftly to ensure that the cataclysm would be indefinitely postponed, with the Third Section stepping up its repression.

Having struggled against mounting odds to maintain the Chaikovskyists’ links with the peasantry, frustration now drove Sergei Kravchinsky to join the exodus of fugitive dissidents. His first stop was Paris, as it had been for Chaikovsky, but his final destination was to be not some spurious heaven on earth but a war zone: Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the imposition of onerous taxes by the Ottoman Empire had provoked a popular revolt in which he meant to hone his skills as a militant revolutionary. While the tsar’s generals hung back, hamstrung by factional wrangling over the geopolitical complexities of engagement in the Balkans, Kravchinsky would plunge in, sensing an opportunity to seed a socialist future in lands liberated from Turkish misrule.

Departing Paris in August 1876 with Klements as his sole companion, Kravchinsky crossed from northern Italy into war-torn Bosnia, where his military training promptly earned him the command of a rebel division’s artillery: a single cannon. His excitement was to be short-lived, however. Marooned in a landscape of suffering, rendered toxic by a cycle of massacres perpetrated by Ottoman irregulars against the Bosniacs and avenged by them on the Turkish population, Kravchinsky felt the futility of his predicament deeply. Before long his pride would take a further battering: confronted by a steep hill, the rebels had no choice but to bury their cannon, while a puffed Kravchinsky – who had been famed among the bookish Chaikovsky Circle for his outstanding physical prowess and hardiness – had to be carried piggyback over the ridge by his commanding officer.

Contradictory messages filled his letters to Russia and his reports to Lavrov. In one letter he summons colleagues to the fight, then declares that ‘I won’t start calling comrades over from Russia until I have been convinced with my own eyes. I’ve become very sceptical.’ The Bosniacs
are ‘a brave, decisive and cunning people’, but the insurgents ‘a gang of ordinary bandits’. ‘There isn’t even the faintest whiff of socialism here,’ he claims, shortly before opining to another correspondent that ‘You could lead socialist propaganda here wonderfully.’ The contradictions suggest a man unsure of how best to brazen out the terrible reality of his disappointment, yet all too alive to the risks of defeatism. The candid appraisal of the liberation movement he has promised to
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cannot be delivered, he admits, until ‘it’s all over, because it would be counterproductive to tell the whole truth now. It has to be inflated for the sake of politics.’

Insofar as Kravchinsky’s intention in Bosnia had been to convince those he had left behind in Russia that ‘we have to take up, not the pen, but the knife’, he had failed. His adventure ended with a brief spell in a deafeningly noisy and brutal Turkish gaol, about which he remained silent until many years later. The one saving grace, however, had been the friendships formed with members of the Italian contingent, among them the sons of the legendary Garibaldi, who like him had seen in the Balkan liberation struggle the perfect testing ground for revolutionary action.

While the insurgency of the nationalist Risorgimento remained a touchstone for Europe’s revolutionaries, however, the new imperative since the watershed of 1871 was to promote the creed of internationalist socialism. ‘It was on the cadaver of the Commune – fecund in its ruins – that we pledged ourselves to the struggle between the old spirit and the new,’ wrote one member of the Italian movement, ‘and it was from the blood of the slain Communards that the omens were drawn.’ Foremost among the promulgators of this inspiring vision was the twenty-four-year-old Errico Malatesta, and whilst he had no personal experience of the Paris uprising to offer, he provided Kravchinsky with a living link to Bakunin, who had otherwise passed beyond reach.

From the furthest reaches of the Russian Empire in Asia to the southernmost point of Europe, where African and Latin blood mingled, the 1860s and 70s seemed to breed revolutionaries in a recognisably similar mould. The son of a propertied factory owner, Malatesta’s early childhood had been blighted by respiratory illnesses that led doctors to predict his early death and left him vulnerable to infections throughout his life. Sickness, though, had not subdued a stubborn, contrarian streak that, subjected to the ‘cretinising and corrupting’ dogma of a religious boarding school in Naples, bred a spirit of resistance. A confirmed atheist and anti-authoritarian by the age of fourteen, only his youth saved him from prosecution for a disrespectful letter written to the new king of Italy,
Victor Emmanuel II. Next came medical studies, a characteristic first step for guilt-stricken young humanitarians on the road to political activism, the flamboyance of which, in Malatesta’s case, led to his expulsion from the course and flight from Italy in search of a mentor. Having crossed the freezing St Gotthard Pass at the coldest time of the year, he arrived at Bakunin’s home in Switzerland penniless and with a fever running so high that the Russian felt obliged to watch over his sickbed in person: he could hardly have made a more dramatic first impression.

Defeat in the struggle for control of the International in 1873 had seen the revolutionary fervour that had sustained Bakunin through countless doomed uprisings and secret societies begin to ebb. Exhausted by the ceaseless machinations of Marx and Engels and the calumnies they poured upon him, disappointed by a world where repression had become ‘a new science taught systematically to lieutenants in military schools of all nations’, Bakunin had grown weary of pushing ‘the rock of Sisyphus against the reaction that is triumphant everywhere’. Regardless of the realities, Malatesta’s devotion was absolute. ‘It was impossible for a youth to have contact with [Bakunin] without feeling himself inflamed by a sacred fire, without seeing his own horizons broadened, without feeling himself a knight of a noble cause,’ he wrote, and took up arms as the old man’s paladin, travelling to Spain under the code name ‘Beniamino’. In 1874, he prepared an insurrection in Bologna intended to reinstate Bakunin as the revolutionary hero that he had once been. ‘I am convinced that the time of grand theoretical discourse, written or spoken, is past,’ the Russian had declared. ‘It is no longer time for ideas but for deeds and acts.’

It must have taken a wilful blindness, by this point, not to recognise Bakunin for the corrupt husk he now was, but Malatesta was not alone in his credulity. With a certain rheumy-eyed regret for the life of aristocratic ease that he had left behind in Russia decades earlier, Bakunin was squandering more than merely his energy in the spendthrift pursuit of an old man’s folly: the refurbishment of the grand house and estate of La Baronata, on a hill overlooking Lake Locarno, the cost of which had absorbed nearly the entire sizeable inheritance of Bakunin’s eager acolyte, Carlo Cafiero. It took the young Italian’s belated realisation that hiring picturesque milkmaids and excavating an artificial lake was not wholly essential to the creation of a revolutionary headquarters before he finally staunched his indulgence of the old rogue.

If only to raise the spirits of their bombastic icon, and without any
genuine prospect of success, the young Bakuninists had nevertheless proceeded with the Bologna plan. Unless from a sense of obligation, it is hard to explain Bakunin’s own half-hearted participation except as a craving for the kind of heroic death that could obscure the embarrassment of the Baronata fiasco and extricate him from his responsibilities to his young family. Yet when the insurrection failed to take hold, he had been grateful to elude the Italian Carabinieri, even at the price of further crushing indignity: the notorious scourge of organised religion was reduced to shaving off his locks and donning a priest’s robe to disguise his identity, while comrades had to push his capacious posterior through the door of a waiting coach.