century, no form of popular representation whatsoever. The tsar was the supreme ruler, appointing and dismissing ministers at will and wielding the power of life and death. Most courtiers appeared genetically sycophantic. A cumbersome and inert state bureaucracy carried out the instructions of the tsar. Police officers saw themselves as servants of power, not justice. Where was the opposition? What was the people’s will?
In 1860 the intelligentsia – an educated elite unconnected with the royal court – was infinitesimal, numbering between 20,000 and 25,000 in a largely peasant population of 60 million people. This social stratum began to regard itself as the only possible opposition to the autocracy. Its education, its ideals, its desire to do good, its passion for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution all created the basis for its politics in the decades that lay ahead. Many believed that the only way out was via ‘the propaganda of the deed’. Terrorism was carried out by individuals or tiny groups of conspirators, but support for it was much broader. In 1866, the first attempt on Alexander II’s life failed. The would-be-assassin, Karakazov, was in police custody when the tsar appeared. The conversation was brief but to the point.
‘Why did you shoot at me?’
‘Because’, responded an unabashed Karakazov, ‘you promised the peasants freedom and you deceived them.’
Lenin was born four years later in 1870. His generation grew up at a time when tsarist Russia was saturated with anarchist and radical ideas; women’s emancipation and an end to patriarchy (detested parental control of young women) were frequently discussed within intellectual circles, and terrorist acts against the powerful were viewed with awe and sympathy. Much of this was a consequence of the absolutist political structures, which provided the Russian segment of the newly developing Social Democratic movement with its unique characteristics. But there were other and larger fish in the pond.
The late nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of radical anarchism on virtually every continent. For almost half a century prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the dominant tendency on the radical left in Europe and elsewhere was anarchism rather than Marxism or socialism. Prince Kropotkin and Enrico Malatesta were more popular than Marx and Engels. Activists were far more drawn to the direct-action philosophy preached by Bakunin and Nechaev; the principles of The Revolutionary Catechism were viewed by many radicals as much more attractive than the message of The Communist Manifesto. Targeted assassinations of tsars and princes, presidents and prime ministers cheerfully carried out by individuals or small groups were considered by young activists of the period to be far more glamorous and effective than building a radical political party.
Primitive ‘anarchism’ in rural Russia had long predated any theorist in the country or elsewhere. Individual responses to institutionalised brutality were not uncommon. It was not the big landlords who were usually the targets, but their intermediaries. Bakunin, Kropotkin and Nechaev arrived much later. The first two of this remarkable triumvirate imbibed anarchism during long years of exile. Both came from the nobility. Prince Kropotkin was born two decades before the abolition of serfdom and, in his wonderful Memoirs of a Revolutionist, describes vividly how his close and warm relations with the serfs belonging to his family opened his eyes to Russian realities and, much later, his mind to radical anarcho-Populist ideas. Kropotkin was descended from the princes of Smolensk and the house of Rurik that ruled Muscovy before the Romanovs. His father was one of the favourite generals of Nicholas I; Kropotkin’s precociousness as a child attracted the tsar’s attention at a royal gathering. Nicholas I ordered that Prince Kropotkin be enlisted in the Corps of Pages, the most exclusive military academy in the empire.
Kropotkin did well and was soon appointed the personal page of the new tsar Alexander II. When the latter issued the historic declaration that emancipated the serfs, Kropotkin’s fondness for his new master turned to hero-worship. But not for long. His doubts began to emerge as soon as it became clear that members of the landed nobility were utilising the serfs’ freedom to bleed them dry. As the mist clouding Kropotkin’s political eyesight cleared, he began to notice the seamier aspects of court life: the endless intrigues, the jostling for power, the nauseating sycophancy, the embedded anti-Semitism. Gradually, his ambivalence turned to outright hostility. Collaboration with the autocracy became impossible. The Russian army lost a gifted future commander, and the radical intelligentsia was about to gain an illustrious new recruit.
Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist
theoretician, whose history of
the French Revolution formed an
entire generation.
Kropotkin became close to the Populists, was imprisoned and went into exile, where he was greatly influenced by Bakunin’s ferocious debates with Marx, even though one such debate revolved around Bakunin’s agreement to translate Capital into Russian and subsequent failure to do so. It was ‘too boring’, he insisted, while refusing to return the advance he had received for the translation.
Kropotkin was much less attracted to the violent side of anarchism. Bloody revolutions, he argued, were sometimes necessary (and here he was thinking of the English, American and French revolutions), but were ‘always an evil’; the means always infected the ends. His own description of anarchist utopia, as published in the much celebrated, cerebral 1911 version of the Encyclopædia Britannica, was elegant, couched in polite language and far removed from the terrorist conspiracies and violent prose of Bakunin and Nechaev as well as the actions of the anarchists on horseback, Durutti and Makhno:
ANARCHISM (from the Gr. ἄυ, and άρχη, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international, temporary or more or less permanent – for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary – as is seen in organic life at large – harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.3
The main carriers of anarchism were the newly rising intelligentsia, emerging in the 1860s, no longer confined to the nobility or the church, but increasingly dominated by less privileged sections of the urban population, the result of an education system that produced literates who could be of use to the regime.4 Disregarding the tiny working class, some intellectuals began to refer to themselves as the ‘intellectual proletariat’ and saw their task as liberating the peasantry from the ideological and economic chains of absolutism. Razin and Pugachev had lacked knowledge and understanding. They had not experienced the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. The new intelligentsia could make up for these shortcomings, and lead the peasants to make a revolution that would get rid of the tsar and the nobility while bypassing the cities, dominated by merchants.
The ‘To the People’ movement was not a success. It had concentrated on the traditional zones of peasant unrest; neither the Don, the Dnieper nor the Volga regions were receptive. It was too soon after the 1860 reform. Most peasants trusted in God and the tsar and, despite the insatiable monkish greed for money, food and sex, the Orthodox Church remained a central point of reference. Consequently, the peasants were hostile to the city folk, the