The World That Never Was (20 page)

Kropotkin’s journey to Irkutsk in 1862 offered an education he would not forget. It took him past endless scenes of human suffering: a living hell of a kind he could never before have conceived. In the labour camps of the east, convicts mined gold waist-deep in freezing water, or quarried salt with frostbitten hands for the few short weeks that they could expect to survive the appalling conditions: to be sent there was a death sentence. As fast as they expired, others replaced them, transported from occupied Poland in their thousands, and in soaring numbers after the Polish rebellion of 1863 was ruthlessly suppressed. Kropotkin was relieved to discover that there were at least humane, even liberal men serving among his colleagues in the regiment, though it soon became obvious that they were very far from representative of the imperial administration as a whole.

Shortly after Kropotkin’s arrival, his commanding officer General Kukel, who had taken the new recruit under his wing, was removed and disciplined for wilful negligence, having allowed Michael Bakunin, the lionised revolutionary, to escape and plague the regime with his plotting from
abroad. Eager to avoid Kukel’s hard-line successor, Kropotkin volunteered to oversee a convoy of barges along the River Amur, a ‘new world’ ceded to Russia by China only a few years before. But the job served only to deepen his disillusionment. When a storm wrecked the convoy, Kropotkin undertook a breakneck mercy mission back to St Petersburg – by means of sled, horse and train – to demand assistance from the capital. Funds were forthcoming, but soon squandered on personal luxuries by the local officers responsible for the purchase of rescue tugboats.

Promotion brought Kropotkin further dismal insights into the canker of corruption and callous self-interest that infected the Russian Empire. Having secured an appointment as secretary of the prison reform committee, the condition of the Siberian transit camps had horrified him, but his recommendations were disregarded, leaving him no alternative but to resign. Beneath the casual brutality and venal incompetence that confronted him at every turn, in the exploitation of the workers Kropotkin had started to perceive an underlying dynamic that was more pernicious still: the harsh imperatives of Western capitalism, as it rapidly colonised a Russian economy built on the robust and flexible foundation of the village mir. ‘This is where one can gaze every day to one’s heart’s content upon the enslavement of the worker by capital,’ he wrote to his brother Alexander following a visit to the Lena gold mines, ‘and at the great law of the reduction in reward with the increase in work.’

Years later, Kropotkin made an even bolder claim in his
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
. ‘I may say now, that in Siberia I lost all faith in state discipline. I was prepared to become an anarchist.’ The sight of hungry peasants handing crusts to prisoners more famished than themselves, the ‘semi-communistic brotherly organisation’ of the political prisoners, and the non-hierarchical structure of the indigenous tribes of Asia all seemed evidence that altruism, mutuality and cooperation were the true bedrock of a well-functioning human society. Meanwhile, his experience of military command, in the most adverse conditions, reinforced the belief that collective effort lies at the heart of all successful social enterprises, while the best leadership inspires rather than directs.

During the latter years of the 1860s, as vested interests at court seized upon any pretext to roll back the reformist agenda initiated by the tsar, Alexander Kropotkin was the more active of the brothers in opposing the tsarist regime, while Peter continued to enjoy many fringe benefits from membership of the Russian elite. Geography rather than politics claimed most of his attention, on expeditions that filled the state’s coffers: charting new routes to the gold fields to increase their profitability helped
win him a gold medal from the Imperial Society. When the hazardous dynamiting of cliffs for the construction of one road prompted a revolt by the Polish slave gangs, leading to the execution of five of their number, Kropotkin was sickened. Nevertheless, he found it hard to renounce the joy of scientific discovery that his work afforded him: ‘the sudden birth of a generalisation, illuminating the mind after a long period of research’, such as he felt on apprehending how geological folding had formed the Asiatic mountain ranges. And his glittering career promised many more such moments.

In years to come, Kropotkin applied these same powers of analytical and synthetic thought to the question of how to create the ideal human society, and the form it should take, dismissing any ‘study of nature without man [as] the last tribute paid by modern scientists to their previous scholastic education’. For the moment, though, he salved his conscience by compiling a comprehensive guide to the soils and topography of Russia, to assist the peasants in their productive cultivation of the land. It was a token gesture of solidarity with the twenty million or more serfs, whose predicament had only worsened under the ill-considered terms of their recent emancipation.

The greatest threat to the peasants’ economic independence, however, came not from any shortcomings in their husbandry of the land but from the rapacious attitude of their former masters, whose greed had not been satisfied by compensation with government bonds. Once released from the tacit contract of mutual obligation that had provided the foundation for centuries of feudalism, Russia’s landowners embraced the capitalist ethos of the market with a rough passion, while continuing to pocket the government’s cash. Rents were doubled, land reclaimed for the slightest infraction on the part of its new owners, and every effort made to claw back property through the landed class’ domination of local government. Still tied to their village communities, unable to afford better land elsewhere, those serfs who had been freed looked back on their indentured days with more than a little nostalgia.

Under intense lobbying by vested interests and the grinding pressure of a deeply conservative culture, Alexander II’s bold plans had crumbled faster even than Napoleon III’s progressive social schemes had in France. With unrest brewing among large elements of society, ambitious reforms to the army, judiciary and the education system were all reversed: schools, maternity facilities and homes for injured workers were either closed or else never opened, and censorship was reimposed. The second wave of emancipation, which many hoped would prove
more thorough and genuine than the first, broke and lost its force before it reached land. And following the attempt by the young radical Dmitri Karakozov to assassinate the tsar in 1866, hardliners had the perfect excuse to reassert themselves at court, accelerating the drift towards repression; ineptitude and a lack of resources were the only brake on the conservative backlash.

The educated youth of Russia felt the collapse of the reforms as both a moral outrage and a personal disaster, restricting as it did their own intellectual and political freedoms, while exposing the hypocrisy of their parents’ generation. Seeing how their fathers shamelessly mouthed idealistic platitudes while continuing to act as petty autocrats, they had adopted an attitude of excoriating candour, in defiance of all the hollow proprieties of social convention. Where they could be acquired, the writings of foreign authors and philosophers were read and discussed in search of possible solutions to the extreme injustices of a sclerotic society, a process stymied by the tsarist censor’s restrictions on books and papers that contained the faintest hint of sedition. Among home-grown writers, the St Petersburg novelist Nicholas Chernyshevsky developed a huge following: ‘there have been three great men in the world,’ wrote one prominent young firebrand at the time, ‘Jesus Christ, Paul the Apostle, and Chernyshevsky.’

Chernyshevsky’s character Rakhmetov in his 1863 novel
What is to be Done?
, written in the Peter and Paul fortress while he was imprisoned on charges of sedition, was seized upon as the very model of a revolutionary. A university dropout who renounces wealth, God and all the mores of a moribund civilisation, Rakhmetov pledges himself to a life of extreme asceticism, without wine, women or cooked meat and with a bed of nails on which to prove his powers of will and endurance; science and socialism are the sole object of his devotion, and cigars his only pleasure. That Chernyshevsky had intended the characterisation as a critique of the follies of youth did nothing to deter young people from aping Rakhmetov’s manners and demeanour, any more than Ivan Turgenev’s satirical intention when creating Bazarov in
Fathers and Sons
discouraged them from adopting the label of ‘nihilist’ coined by the author. The nihilists were easy to identify: with shoulder-length hair, bushy beards, red shirts and knee boots for the men, bobbed hair and dark, unstructured clothes for the women, and a unisex fashion for blue-tinted glasses, walking staves and smoking endless cigarettes, they stood out a mile. When it came to policing them, however, and censoring their reading or the course of their education, the reversals in the reform programme had left one crucial loophole.

Since 1861, male Russian citizens had enjoyed far greater travel rights: a passport and official permission to leave the country were still required, but their acquisition was usually a formality. The consequence was burgeoning émigré communities, especially in Switzerland, that had long been bolt-holes for dissidents of all hues. It was not merely the chance to applaud revolutionary sentiments that brought the younger sections of the audience to their feet at every performance of Rossini’s
William Tell
in the St Petersburg opera house; they were applauding the example set by Switzerland’s legendary liberator in resisting oppression.

In the aftermath of the Europe-wide upheavals of 1848, the Swiss authorities had briefly bowed to international pressure, handing over a number of political refugees to their own governments. Since then, though, trust had gradually returned, with Zurich and Geneva now a cacophony of foreign voices, and only the lurking presence of spies to remind the political refugees of their troubles back home. Unsurprisingly, Switzerland had become the most fecund source of the banned works of literature, history or philosophy that were smuggled into Russia to feed its more enquiring minds. But from the late 1860s cities like Zurich also held a less cerebral attraction for male émigrés, being home to an unusual concentration of passionately idealistic young women.

Medicine was a favoured subject for student radicals, offering an opportunity to alleviate suffering – of the individual, if not of society as a whole – and the pride of having embraced a truly rationalist vocation. For young women, the thought that their parents might be shocked by the notion of their cosseted daughters dissecting cadavers in anatomy lessons may well have held its own appeal. But there were many practical obstacles to be overcome. In 1864, the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy excluded women, and they were subsequently banned from taking the final exams necessary for a medical degree in any institution in the country. The result was a continuing exodus to Switzerland, where a medical diploma could be obtained.

Domineering fathers who withheld their permission were outflanked by means of marriages of convenience with male friends, which combined cunning with the frisson of moral transgression. Those impressionable youths who had read Chernyshevsky possibly considered the role of cuckold an honourable one: taking his feminist and free-love principles to an extreme, the author himself insisted on remaining faithful to his wife, despite her attempts to contrive affairs for him, while goading her into taking numerous lovers herself. It was said that on one occasion he had even continued scribbling away while
she took her pleasure with a Polish émigré in an alcove of the same room. For the male friends and tutors who agreed to marry the aspiring female doctors, however, separate bedrooms were usually considered a sufficient sacrifice.

The earnest young women of the émigré colony were nevertheless uncompromising in their expectations, and not least of the men who wooed them. Whilst the privileged male youth of Russia might dabble in socialism and empathise with the peasantry at arm’s length, without necessarily causing undue damage to their career, for their female counterparts the success or failure of the reformist enterprise had huge personal ramifications. Accepting the case for sublimating their feminist agenda in the cause of a wider ‘social revolution’, they were determined to instil in their male colleagues a shared sense of determination, and a commitment to the cause that demanded almost monastic austerity.

Vera Figner vividly captured the earnest atmosphere of this radical milieu. Years later, when she wrote her memoirs, she could still remember her arrival in a dreary, drizzly Zurich, and the drab view of tiled roofs from the window of her room. Having married to secure freedom to travel, and then sold her wedding gifts to cover the cost of several years’ study abroad, not even the severe temptation (for a tomboyish country girl) of a lake teeming with Switzerland’s famously sweet-fleshed fish, the fera and gravenche, could distract her. ‘I won’t even go fishing!’ she primly assured her diary, ‘No! There’ll be no fishing or boating! There’ll be nothing but lectures and textbooks!’

Studious attendance on the courses soon forged strong bonds between her female companions – Auntie, Wolfie, Shark and Hussar, as they called themselves – who encouraged each other’s awakening political awareness. Thirteen of the women formed a discussion and study circle, on the model of those then flourishing in Russia, and named it after the Fritsche boarding house where most of them lodged.
‘Mesdames –
all of Europe is watching you!’ the chairwoman – most often Lydia Figner, Vera’s sister – would declare, grandiosely paraphrasing Napoleon Bonaparte. The full pathos of some of the subjects they thrashed out could not have been predicted at the time: of the group who engaged with the question of ‘Suicide and Psychosis’, tsarist persecution would later impel five to take their own lives.

When the Swiss hosts expressed concern over the young women’s supposedly lax attitudes, the opportunity was seized upon to practise their developing powers of rhetoric. The vicious rumours of sexual orgies – the usual slanders used throughout history to undermine independent
women and radicals – were most likely promulgated by the network of Third Section spies that Wilhelm Stieber established in Switzerland some years before his involvement in the Siege of Paris. In reality, the darkest secret of their gatherings was their addiction to an expensive import from the Orient, which crippled their finances and blunted their dynamism: tea. When it came to sex, by contrast, the women may have appeared to embrace Chernyshevsky’s free-love ethos, but their creed of renunciation far outweighed any tendency to libertinage.