The World That Never Was (35 page)

With the excuse of pressing deadlines for the annual delivery of the latest volume of his
Universal Geography
, Reclus was able to remain aloof from much of the sectarian wrangling that marred the late 1870s. He could instead adjust his own position in response to events, conveniently free from any immediate obligation to publicly account for himself. A sagacious presence in the wings, he would perfect this persona over the rest of his long life. At some point during 1877, for example, the firebrand Most left his one and only meeting with the geographer convinced that ‘Elisée Reclus I count as one of the greatest inspirers since I became an anarchist.’ Yet, at the time, Reclus was adamant in opposing the violent action that Most had begun to espouse. Likewise, in the spring of 1878, Kravchinsky had been only too pleased to serve as a messenger, carrying important papers from James Guillaume to Reclus, despite knowing full well their recipient’s views concerning attacks of the kind he was planning against Mezentsev.

It seemed, for a while, that only Kropotkin would prove immune to Reclus’ wisdom and charm. Yet such were the pressures bearing down on the nascent anarchist movement by late 1878 that even when Reclus published a stinging rebuke to Kropotkin concerning the Russian’s preference for dramatic, egotistical gestures over a gradualist, altruistic policy founded on education – expressed in the deeply humane article ‘The Future of Our Children’ – the slight was soon forgiven lest it jeopardise the pursuit of their common interests.

On one issue, above all, the geographers’ rigorous grounding in empirical method brought Kropotkin and Reclus together in shared
indignation: the conceited claims made by Marx and Engels to be the standard-bearers of ‘scientific socialism’, even while they slurred their rivals’ ideas as empty utopianism. In a letter to Guillaume, Kropotkin delivered his verdict on Marx’s great work with a succinct sneer:
‘Kapital’
, he wrote, ‘is a marvellous revolutionary pamphlet but its scientific significance is nil.’ Marx’s reliance on the universal dialectical pattern that Hegel had conceived for the purpose of explaining the historical process in metaphysical terms, served only ‘to repeat what the utopian socialists had said so well before him’. It was, Kropotkin asserted, not the anarchists who were guilty of wishful thinking, but those who claimed that the contradictions of bourgeois society would inevitably produce socialism: a dangerously fatalistic notion that appealed to the proletariat even as it sapped their will to strive for the revolution. ‘The political authority of the state dies out,’ Engels wrote. ‘Man, at last the master of his own form of social organisation, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master’: it seemed to Kropotkin a hateful doctrine of passivity, premised on a pseudo-religious promise of deliverance.

What was worse, the theories of Darwin that were so precious to adherents of the positivist tradition were all too readily abused by followers of Marx: forced to yield up analogies from nature to support the idea that out of class conflict, society would evolve into a perfect form. From Europe to America, the bones that were being dug out of the earth were making Darwinian ideas of evolution a hot topic. The year following the Universal Socialist Congress at Ghent in April 1877, an entire herd of iguanodons would be discovered by miners at the nearby St Barbara colliery at Bernissart. They were a time capsule from the Middle Cretaceous period, thirty or forty specimens in all, suspended in a sinkhole of Wealdian clay, together with the smaller fauna of 125 million years past: unprecedented proof, if any further was needed, of Darwin’s theories.

The most obvious challenge to ‘evolutionary socialism’ came from the political right. In 1878, a Bismarckian nationalist called Ernst Haeckel, who in his professional capacity as a biologist was preoccupied with the deterioration of the Teutonic race, found himself wondering ‘what in the world the doctrine of descent has got to do with socialism: the two theories are as compatible as fire and water’. Socialism ‘demands equal rights, equal duties, equal possessions, equal enjoyments for every citizen alike’, while evolutionary theory argues ‘in exact opposition to this, that the realisation of the demand is a pure
impossibility … [since] neither rights nor duties, neither possessions nor enjoyments have been equal for all alike nor ever can be.’ The only answer Marx could offer was a metaphysical faith in the dialectic mechanism, whereby contradictions latent in the most recent, capitalist manifestation of that community would see to it that matters did eventually change.

Some years would pass before Kropotkin’s thoughts on the subject settled into a coherent form, but as early as the mid-1860s he had begun to formulate a hypothesis informed by personal observations in Siberia of how the cooperative behaviour of animals appeared to be a key factor in a species’ success. Meanwhile Reclus, doubtless inspired by his recent friendship with Kropotkin, presented in 1880 his own political observations on the subject in the pamphlet
Evolution and Revolution
. ‘Will not the evolution which is taking place in the minds of the workers’, Reclus wrote, ‘necessarily bring about a revolution; unless, indeed, the defenders of privilege yield with a good grace to the pressure from below?’ That same evolutionary process in popular consciousness would, if receptive young minds were properly tutored, ensure too that justice and equality prevailed in the new society that would follow.

While some sought in evolutionary theory a scientific justification for their dreams of human perfectibility, however, others recognised that its eruption into the political and social realm risked terrible consequences. Even before Cesare Lombroso had presented his first ideas on criminal anthropometry or Francis Galton coined the notion of eugenics, at either end of the 1870s, such concerns had permeated the fantastical fiction of two of France’s and England’s most popular novelists. In
The Coming Race
, published in 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton had astutely identified the fundamental tensions latent within ‘scientific’ socialism. The utopian world inhabited by his perfect beings, the Vril-ya, was exposed as something closer to a dystopia when its price was fully accounted: the slower and more brutish breed of
Untermenschen
left languishing in perfection’s wake, and the suppression of individualism, such that ‘a thousand of the best and most philosophical of human beings…would either die of ennui, or attempt some revolution.’ Although written in a somewhat allegorical style, Jules Verne’s
The Begum’s Millions
of 1878 addressed similar questions within a more contemporary frame.

Reworked by an initially reluctant Verne from a first draft by none other than Paschal Grousset, the ex-foreign minister of the Commune and Rochefort’s fellow escapee from New Caledonia, it inevitably struck a chord with the anarchists. Its two protagonists, the megalomanic
Professor Schultze and Dr Sarrasin, a specialist in the new field of hygiene, found neighbouring colonies in the American Midwest, that fabulous land of ‘infinite possibilities’ and false promises. In Frankville, Sarrasin’s concern is the holistic health of the community, whilst the Stahlstadt of Schultze, author of
Why are all Frenchmen Stricken in Different Degrees with Hereditary Degeneration?
, is a militaristic city whose super-gun menaces its neighbour. ‘Germany can break up by too much force and concentration, France can quietly reconstitute itself by more freedom,’ was how its publisher, Herzel, explained the central theme, and neither Kropotkin nor Reclus would have disagreed.

The inexorable rise of Bismarck’s mighty Germany seemed to them, as it had to Bakunin, strangely of a kind with the bullying and overbearing brand of Teutonic socialism propounded by Marx and Engels. Threats such as that made at the Ghent Congress by Wilhelm Liebknecht, leader of the Social Democrats and friend of Engels, against a leading anarchist compatriot then resident in Switzerland – that ‘If you dare to come to Germany to attack our organisation we will use every means to annihilate you’ – only compounded the impression. For all the hatred and distrust that existed between Bismarck and Marx, the projects of both were centralising and dogmatic, and the anarchists’ hope was that, as their fortunes had risen together, so too they would fall, co-dependent to the end.

In 1879, staying at Reclus’ house in Clarens, Kropotkin and his host collaborated closely, and together founded a newspaper,
Le Révolté
. It was a meeting of minds that proved productive on all fronts, the Russian offering the benefit of his specialist knowledge of Siberia as the Frenchman composed the sixth volume of his
Universal Geography
, while calm study and conversation allowed Kropotkin to work out ‘the foundations of all that I wrote later on’. Their discussions sparkled, the advantage flowing without rancour from one to the other, generating fresh perspectives on tired subjects. Told that the two ideals of anarchism and communism howled in pain at being paired, Cafiero had shortly before observed that ‘these two terms, being synonyms of liberty and equality, are the two necessary and indivisible terms of the revolution’. Not the least achievement of Reclus and Kropotkin at this time was to trace a path towards their reconciliation.

Government would be abolished, in favour of a free federation of producers and consumers; property would be distributed by need rather than the contribution of labour; and for the moment, rather than
demanding improved wages and working conditions, trade unions should militate for the abolition of the wage system altogether. If Malatesta begrudged Kropotkin and Reclus their ascendancy as the anarchists’ ideological guides, by the time he left Switzerland in the summer of 1879 – rather than accept a fine and imprisonment after his arrest near Lugano on the night of 12 June – he had to acknowledge how effective they had been in focusing minds.

In the course of the give and take of argument, it appears that a transformation also occurred in Reclus’ stance towards the legitimacy of violence as a tactic, as he engaged with the hard moral choices implicit in a commitment to revolution. Having conceded some months earlier that if existing society was governed by force, the anarchists were justified in using force in response, in December 1878 he went further, writing in pained terms to a female correspondent that ‘in order to give birth to the new society of peace, joy and love, it is necessary that young people not be afraid to die’. Galvanised, perhaps, by the personal resolve that Kropotkin had displayed in November when he publicly congratulated the assassins of the governor of Kharkov, Kropotkin’s own cousin Dmitri, Reclus was finally released from the state of frozen circumspection in which his cruel experience of the Commune had left him. The painful duty of the conscientious man to embrace transgression was confronted head-on. ‘In society today you cannot be considered as an honest man by everybody. Either you are a robber, assassin and firebrand with the oppressors, the happy and pot-bellied, or you are a robber, an assassin and a firebrand with the oppressed, the exploited, the suffering and the underfed. It is up to you, you indecisive and frightened man, to choose.’

The implications of that choice, however, were becoming increasingly stark. From the quiet shores of Lake Geneva, Reclus and Kropotkin would have heard the distant echo of explosions up in the mountains, as engineers blasted a route for railways or roads. Until recently, the use of dynamite had been a hazardous business. Nobel’s own brother had died for a moment’s carelessness, and at the factory at Ardeer in Scotland where dynamite was produced, the supervisor balanced on a one-legged stool, lest a moment of sleepy inattention lead to disaster. As geographers, Reclus and Kropotkin could have expatiated confidently on the kieselguhr used to stabilise the dynamite: a porous, friable clay composed of tiny, fossilised crustacea. It is doubtful, however, that they yet grasped quite so well the implications for ‘propaganda by deed’ of Nobel’s recent innovation, gelignite. Stable, powerful and portable, it could be slipped all too easily into portmanteaux or else concealed beneath coats.

8
Spies and Tsaricides

Russia, 1878–1880

There was nothing in Peter Rachkovsky’s career before 1879 to augur his destiny as the greatest spymaster of his age, who would inherit the mantle of Colonel Stieber. Born in the Ukraine, the son of a humble postmaster and a nobleman’s daughter, both Polish Catholics, Rachkovsky’s lack of a family fortune obliged him to make his own way in life, and aged sixteen, in 1869, he had joined the Civil Service. Beginning as clerk in the Odessa mayor’s office, he was shunted through various minor secretarial posts in provincial administrations until, by 1875, he had finally clawed his way up to secretary in the office for peasant affairs. Along the way, however, lay the wreck of his failed marriage to Ksenia Sherle, from whom Rachkovsky had separated when the tedium of the life that he could offer had driven her to take lovers. An energetic man with higher expectations than his wife had appreciated, he responded by embarking on a course of legal studies that quickly led to a position as a prosecutor in the ministry of justice, and a posting to the frozen northern extremes of Archangel.