Europe: A History (171 page)

The Russian revolutionary tradition was as old as the autocracy which fuelled it. Its first incarnation in the nineteenth century broke surface with the Decembrists of 1825—a fraternity of army officers influenced by French and Polish ideas. But in subsequent decades, under the guidance of Alexander Herzen (1812–70) and Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89), it took on increasingly socialist, populist, and anarchist flavours. In the 1860s and 1870s Russian populism—
narod-nichestvo
or ‘the movement to the people’—saw starry-eyed idealists going out to the villages to convert the peasantry, only to be met with incomprehension. In 1879 the populists split into two wings, with one emphasizing agrarian and educational reform and the other, the
Narodnaya Vol’ya
or ‘People’s Will’, advocating violence. A member of the latter assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

One key figure, P. N. Tkachev (1844–85), is often overlooked in Western accounts. Nor was he chosen for the later Bolshevik pantheon. Yet he was the true precursor of bolshevism. A ‘Jacobin’ among the Populists and an economic materialist, he provided the intellectual link between Chernyshevsky and Lenin. He spurned the education of the masses, calling instead for the training of a revolutionary élite. ‘The question “What should be done?” should no longer concern us,’ he wrote in the 1870s. ‘It has long since been resolved. Make the Revolution!’ He spent his later years in exile in Switzerland, where Lenin was to read his works avidly whilst denouncing him in public. There were no ‘filial ties’, but a definite fellow spirit.
⁴²

The history of Lenin’s group well illustrates the impossible dilemmas forced on would-be socialists in a hostile setting. As exiles or illegals, they had no chance to practise the democratic methods of the German SPD, from whom their original inspiration was taken. As revolutionaries, they could appeal to a certain body of Russian opinion that would cheer on anyone promising to fight the Tsar. But as socialists, they were bound to conflict with other branches of the movement, notably the Social Revolutionaries or SRs, who were better attuned to the Empire’s two largest constituencies, the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities. As Marxists, they had to concede that a genuine working-class revolution had little chance of success wherever, as in Russia, the working class was small; and as the group most devoted to conspiratorial methods, they were reluctant to organize an open, mass following. (Despite the name of
Bol’sheviki
or ‘Majoritarians’, which Lenin seized on at a suitable moment, they usually formed a minority, even within the Russian SDP.) Lenin rightly suspected, like Tkachev, that a disciplined minority could seize power without popular support. Yet in trying to justify such a strategy on socialist principles he was condemned from the outset to cloak it in fantasy. ‘Mendacity is the soul of bolshevism.’
⁴³
Put another way, Leninism was cargo-cult socialism—a weird and distant imitation of the original model. ‘The Marxism which prevailed in the Russian Revolution’, comments a critic who came to be highly regarded in post-Communist Russia, ‘bore about as much relation to the original as the “Christianity” of T’ai Ping to that of Thomas
Aquinas.’
⁴⁴
It has taken the best part of a century for this fact to be generally recognized.

Anarchism
, though passing its infancy in the company of socialism, soon grew up to be incompatible. At the core of anarchist thought lies the contention that all forms of domination are hateful, that government is not just unnecessary but harmful. One early strand, which could be traced to the Anabaptists and Diggers of the seventeenth century,
⁴⁵
came to fruition in England in the
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793) of William Godwin (1756–1836) and in the soaring vision of
Prometheus Unbound
written by Godwin’s son-in-law, Shelley:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself…
And women, too, frank, beautiful and kind …
From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel
And changed to all which once they dared to be,
Yet being now, made earth like heaven …
⁴⁶

A second strand, in France, in the work and writings of Proudhon and his disciple, Anselme Bellegarrigue, centred on the doctrine of
mutualité
(mutualism). This held that the workers should avoid involvement in parliamentary politics, and should liberate themselves by direct action on the streets and in the factories.

A third strand grew from an extreme reaction against the extreme autocracy of the Russian Empire. It was nourished by two aristocratic Russian exiles, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) and Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). Bakunin, who once declared that ‘the passion for destruction is also a creative urge’, broke up Marx’s First International. ‘The Communists believe that they must organize the working class in order to seize power in states’, he declared. ‘Revolutionary socialists [meaning anarchists] organize in order to destroy states.’ He was the inspiration of the collectivist variant of anarchism that took hold in the Latin countries. Kropotkin, a distinguished author and geographer, wrote
The Conquest of Bread
(1892),
Fields, Factories and Workshops
(1899), and
Mutual Aid
(1902) in his campaign for a communist society free from all central government.

A fourth strand, initially described in
Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
(The Individual and His Property, 1845) was launched by the Berlin journalist Max Stirner (1806–56). It stressed the absolute rights of the individual to freedom from institutional control. This proved attractive to numerous avant-garde artists and writers, from Courbet and Pissarro to Oscar Wilde. But it also shows why the anarchists’ own principles ruled out any chance of an effective anarchist organization.

In practical terms, anarchism bore fruit in several directions. Revolutionary
anarcho-syndicalists dominated workers’ movements in France, Italy, and especially in Spain, where the
Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo
(CNT) developed into a major popular movement. Their favoured weapon was the general strike, designed to paralyse all working institutions. Peasant anarchists wielded influence in scattered locations from Andalusia to Ukraine. Anarchism also inspired the birth of modern terrorism—what the early Italian militant, Enrico Malatesta, called the ‘propaganda of the deed’. The idea was that sensational acts of murder or destruction would publicize injustice, break the resolve of government policy, and shatter the nerve of the ruling élite. The list of victims included Tsar Alexander II (1881), President Sadi Carnot of France (1894), Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1896), Premier Cánovas del Castillo of Spain (1897), and King Umberto I of Italy (1900). Nowhere did these violent preludes precipitate the peace and harmony which anarchists see as their ultimate destination.

Finally, and in diametric contrast, anarchism has inspired an important tradition of moral protest against all forms of coercion. Starting with Count Leo Tolstoy, the novelist, who felt that marriage was no less coercive than tsarism, the gospel of non-violence has attracted many dedicated followers, from Mahatma Gandhi in India to the Solidarity movement in Poland and to modern environ-mentalism.
⁴⁷
Bellegarrigue’s famous battle-cry, ‘L’Anarchie, c’est l’ordre’, is widely dismissed as a purely negative sentiment. But it contains a very serious moral constituent that underlies much of the modern concern about the mindless juggernauts of political and technological power. It is in this sense that anarchism has been classed as ‘the most attractive of political creeds’.
⁴⁸
It stood at the opposite end of the political spectrum from that of the one politician, Bismarck, who was as central to European politics as the anarchists were marginal.

Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) bestrode the Germany of the late nineteenth century much as the German Empire, which he designed, bestrode the rest of Europe. He, more than anyone else, was the architect of the European order which emerged from the turmoil after 1848, the year when he entered politics, and whose revolutions he detested. He was a man of immense contradictions both of personality and of policy. The ‘Iron Chancellor’, of fearsome countenance in
Reichstag
or diplomatic encounter, he was in private a hysteric, an insomniac, and, as recently revealed, a morphine addict. He was a landed Junker, wedded to his estates at Schonhausen and Varzin, who presided over Europe’s mightiest programme of industrialization. He was an antiquated Prussian conservative and monarchist who despised his sovereign, who adopted the nationalism of the liberal opposition, and who gave Germany both universal suffrage and social insurance. He was a victorious militarist who was infinitely suspicious of the fruits of victory. He was the hero of so-called German unification who chose to keep Greater Germany divided. The key to his success lay in a marvellous combination of strength and restraint. He built up positions of great power, only to disarm his opponents with carefully graded concessions that made them feel relieved and secure. ‘You can do everything with bayonets’, he once said, ‘except sit on them.’

Yet Bismarck’s reputation is a mixed one. No one can deny his mastery of the political art; but many question his morality and his intentions. For German patriots and conservative apologists, he was the person who gave his country, and his continent, an era of unparalleled stability: one has only to see what conflicts arose after his downfall when Wilhelm II ‘dropped the pilot’. For liberal critics, however, he was and remains, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, ‘a great and an evil man’. They see him as an aggressor, who used war as a conscious instrument of policy (and, what is worse, succeeded); as a cheat, who introduced democratic forms in order to preserve the undemocratic Prussian Establishment; as a bully, who bludgeoned his opponents with the blunt instruments of state power—the Catholics with the
Kulturkampf
, the Poles with the Colonization Commission, the Social Democrats with proscription. He would not have denied it. He believed, no doubt, that minor surgery and small doses of nasty medicine were well justified if major diseases were kept at bay. To quote a rare admirer of a leftist persuasion: ‘The history of modern Europe can be written in terms of three Titans: Napoleon, Bismarck, and Lenin. Of these three… Bismarck probably did the least harm.’
⁴⁹

European Jewry
has played such a prominent role in modern times that its story has been the subject of all sorts of myths and misunderstandings, both sympathetic and hostile. The main lines, however, are clear. After the break-up of Poland-Lithuania, the only large state to have provided a safe haven in preceding centuries, three closely related developments took place. First, the Jews began a new era of migration. Secondly, they received full civil rights in most European countries. And thirdly, they rebelled in ever increasing numbers against the traditional restrictions imposed on them by their own community.
⁵⁰

Jewish migration was mainly set in motion after 1773 by the Partitions of Poland. Jews from the western districts of Poland, in Posen or Danzig, found themselves to be citizens of Prussia, and free to travel without restriction to Berlin, Breslau, and other German cities. Jews from Galicia, who became Austrian citizens, began to move to other Habsburg provinces, especially to Bukovina, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia, and at a later stage to Vienna. Jews living in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania or in eastern Poland found themselves citizens of the Russian Empire, where they were required by law to inhabit the Pale of Settlement. (See Appendix III, p. 1311) But the law was often observed in the breach; and new, dynamic Jewish communities began to form in the great Russian cities, particularly in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. Jewish migrants who left their homes in the ultra-conservative religious communities of historic Poland were subject to several new trends: to the
Haskalah
or ‘Jewish Enlightenment’, to assimilation, and to secular Jewish politics.

The scale and tempo of Jewish migration markedly increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. To some extent, the outflow can be explained by mounting demographic pressure and by the regular processes of modernization and urbanization. The Jewish population of Europe multiplied from about two millions in 1800 to about nine millions in 1900. But persecution, and still more the
fear of persecution, were also factors. Under Alexander III (r. 1881–94), the Tsarist government sought to enforce the laws of the Pale. In the ensuing stampede, the distinction between migrants and refugees was often lost. Hundreds of thousands of Jews left Russia for good, heading for Western Europe and the USA.
[POGROM]

Jewish migration was greatly assisted by the growing circle of European states where Jews enjoyed full civic rights. Here, the lead had been taken by revolutionary France, where on 27 September 1791 the Convention granted citizenship to all Jews swearing an oath of loyalty. The initiative had been taken by the Convention’s President, the Abbé Gregoire (1750–1831), who regarded the equal treatment of Jews as part of his Christian duty. During the debate, the Marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre had made the famous distinction: ‘The Jews must be refused everything as a separate nation, and be granted everything as individuals.’
⁵¹
Henceforth, the legal emancipation of Jews became a standard article of European liberalism, and was gradually introduced almost everywhere except for the Russian Empire. (See Appendix III, p. 1295.)

Yet Jewish emancipation was a double-edged operation. It required a fundamental change in the conduct and the attitudes both of the host societies and of the Jews themselves. It demanded the dismantling not only of the constraints imposed on Jews from outside but also of the ‘internal ghetto’ in Jewish minds. Modern concern with the roots of anti-Semitism sometimes overlooks the severity of the Jews’ own laws of segregation. Observant Jews could not hold to the 613 rules of dress, diet, hygiene and worship if they tried to live outside their own closed community, and intermarriage was strictly forbidden. Since Judaic law taught that Jewishness was biologically inherited in the maternal line, Jewish women were jealously protected. A girl who dared to marry out could expect to be disowned by her family, and ritually pronounced dead. Extreme determination was needed to withstand such acute social pressures. It is not surprising that Jews who rejected their religion often turned to extreme alternatives, including atheism and communism.