I’ NEW MEN’
In the east a form of political religion was developing in which ‘sacred violence’ was intrinsic to men who considered themselves to be ‘just’ murderers on the ground that their terror allegedly struck only at those guilty of oppression. Paradoxically, such figures emerged at a time when social reform seemed a distinct possibility.
War is often the forcing house of domestic liberalisation and modernisation. The ancien régime in Prussia was compelled to undertake various internal reforms following its defeats by Napoleon. Defeat by the French, British and Ottoman Turks in the Crimean War also compelled tsar Alexander II of Russia, who came to the imperial throne in early 1855, to introduce movement into a society that had been immobilised, as if entombed in lead, by Nicholas I.
The scale of Alexander’s undertaking was so breathtaking that even exiled opponents of the regime, such as the leading liberal Alexander Herzen, praised the Tsar Liberator. Serfdom was abolished in 1861, ending the institution of ‘baptised property’ that most isolated Russia from enlightened Europe, although slavery, and then racial segregation, lingered in parts of the no less civilised US into the 1960s.
While it was relatively easy to emancipate the twenty-one million serfs owned by the state and the royal family, liberation of the twenty-two millions who were the property of thirty-three thousand private landowners was a more complicated affair. This was because of the tangled tenurial relations that the custom-conscious serfs were liberated into, and the complexity of the compensation arrangements for landlords that the government felt obliged to put in place. Three years later the authorities conceded elected local government in the provinces and councils in the major towns. Trial by jury and an independent and irremovable judiciary followed. Together with juries which, by virtue of gentlemanly indulgence or guilt, often sympathised with the perpetrators of what were crimes, these measures ensured that those convicted of murder or treason, for which in Britain or France they would have been executed, paradoxically received far more lenient treatment in Europe’s most grim autocracy. Universal military conscription was introduced, with six years’ service replacing the standard twenty-five years formerly inflicted on generations of superfluous village simpletons. Jews were effectively entitled to reside in Russia proper, with converts to Orthodoxy occasionally able to achieve prominent positions in government and society. Among Jews, Alexander II was known as ‘the good emperor’. Finally, censorship was relaxed, and preliminary censorship abolished altogether, which indirectly contributed to the formation of a critical intelligentsia.1
The location of radical dissent shifted from noble army officers, such as the Decembrists, who sought to capture the state from within, to a more socially heterogeneous student population that was part of the newly emergent ‘intelligentsia’, a term that became current in Russia in the 1860s. The usual perils of mindless expansion of education, however limited in this context, were soon there for some to see. All levels of education were expanded and the numbers of university students increased. The student body of St Petersburg University trebled between 1855 and 1861. Modest levels of tuition fees were waived for the poorest students, and Jews and women were admitted for the first time. At the universities, young noblemen who on idealistic grounds forsook state service under Nicholas I after 1825 mixed with the sons of clergy and minor officials, or with those whose origins were even further down in the social depths. Intoxicated with ill-digested abstract ideas and often seething with social resentment, the intelligentsia became progressively detached from conventional society. Its bureaucracies and professions could not absorb or satisfy people whose heady idealism ill suited them to these severely technical occupations in a society where individuality was not encouraged. The more advanced sections of the intelligentsia often described themselves as ‘new men’ to conceal their alienation from those above and below them with a term that suggested baptism into a new moral mode of being whose corollary was sometimes the rejection of moral discernment in general.2
The ‘new man’ had a name and definable characteristics in fiction before he could be said to have existed in reality. Rarely can literary criticism have exerted such a deleterious effect, beside which the solipsistic jargon of contemporary structuralism (upon whose doorstep multiple ills are sometimes unfairly laid) amounts to venial sin.3
‘New men’ were products of literary conflicts with serious social implications. The ‘new man’ appeared in the context of the inter-generational struggle waged within the Russian literary intelligentsia in the 1860s. The fault line ran through those who were part of the gentry Establishment, or at least, like Dostoevsky, could be sure of being reabsorbed into it should they abandon their juvenile political radicalism, and those extremists who were excluded and hence compelled to grub a modest living in criticism, journalism, translating and tutoring. Effectively they amounted to an academic or literary proletariat. A younger generation of influential literary cum social critics, such as Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, whom Turgenev dismissed as ‘literary Robespierres’, despised such amiably superfluous fictional slovens as Goncharov’s Oblomov and the older generation of liberal gentry writers, for whom the sovereign moral intelligence of the artist and his ability to ‘discover’ autonomous and plausible fictional characters was paramount.
Part of the conflict was about the nature and purposes of the novelist’s art. Neither the mature Dostoevsky, who was no liberal, nor Turgenev, to take two outstanding examples, knew whether they loved or hated the characters they created, nor how their individual destinies would end, with Raskolnikov, the protagonist of the new amorality in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, shooting himself in the authorial notes that preceded Dostoevsky’s final option for Raskolnikov’s slightly unreal religious conversion at the hands of Sonia Marmeladova. That indeterminacy to how things can snake this way or that is partly what made these men great writers, whose work speaks to us long after their radical critics have slipped into oblivion.
The radical critics were responsible for a series of extra-literary encroachments on the absolute freedom of the artist, where the latter’s prime ‘duty’ was to conform his or her creative work to a series of ideological agendas. This resembled, albeit from an opposite political perspective, the desire of the late-eighteenth-century writer Bogdanovich to put all writers in civil service uniforms, and to give them ranks according to their degree of usefulness to the state.4 No serious creative artist could possibly go along with constraints that were worse than those of the government’s own negative censorship, which while banning certain themes did not demand conformity to a set of socio-political objectives.5 In the view of the radical critics, literature was to be saturated with, and subordinate to, political creeds that sought to change the world, with their new positive heroes being the fictional anticipation of the ‘new men’ who would ceaselessly strive to bring about universal human emancipation. Emblematic fiction was designed to help these new moral personalities constitute themselves, rather in the manner of adolescents who try to model themselves on characters in a book or film, or, having become students, upon posters of Che Guevara.
The ‘new man’, as constituted in these critics’ own indifferent novels, was an activist, a totally politicised type of new moral personality, the forerunner of Bolshevik ‘leather men in leather jackets’, for in important respects the Bolsheviks ignored the reverence Marx and Engels themselves paid to absolute quality in high art, in favour of the indigenous Russian radical tradition of the ‘pre-Marxist materialists’ whom we are discussing.
The ‘new man’ was a monolithic personality, a tyro of enormous will, a little poorly digested utilitarian knowledge, no capacity for self-doubt and blinkered singularity of purpose. He was incapable of relating to the complexities of another human being beyond whatever ideological stereotype he had already imposed upon them. In the eyes of Herzen, who attacked such ‘new men’ in an article entitled ‘The Superfluous Men and the Men with a Grudge’, they had the roughness, rudeness and ruthlessness of ambitious and unsuccessful mediocrities, although they were themselves notoriously touchy. When Chernyshevsky met Herzen in London in 1859, the latter felt that this boorish ‘Daniel on the Neva’ gazed at him as ‘on the fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up, and belonged with a different sun and different trees’.6 Translated into fictional characters, the ‘new men’ lacked identifying marks of humanity, or the flaws that might make their actions vaguely interesting, except of course, when Dostoevsky or Turgenev got to grips with them. Such ‘new men’ had all the plausibility of religious saints; indeed, the literature that celebrated them, whose lineal descendant was Soviet socialist realism, was little more than a form of political hagiography, except that hairshirts and loincloths had been exchanged for uniforms and leather coats and jackets, the latter with their dual glamour of animality and perversion.7
The critics responsible for the outline of the ‘new men’ were themselves invariably myopic, sallow, sickly, bookish types, of whom Nicholas Chernyshevsky was the prototype.8 Of Chernyshevsky’s influence there can be little doubt. As one of his greatest admirers put it shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century:
Under his [Chernyshevsky’s] influence hundreds of people became revolutionaries…For example, he fascinated my brother and he fascinated me. He ploughed me up more profoundly than anyone else. When did you read What is to be Done?…I myself tried to read it when I was about fourteen. It was no use, a superficial reading. And then, after my brother’s execution, knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favourite books, I really undertook to read it, and I sat over it not for several days but for several weeks. Only then did I understand its depth…It’s a thing which supplies energy for a whole lifetime. An ungifted work could not have that kind of influence.
This was Lenin talking to a fellow revolutionary in a Swiss café. Exploring Chernyshevsky’s main work it is not difficult to see why he should have exerted such an attraction on this admirer. Part of that appeal was that of all prison literature, although in this case one has to imagine the four walls and bars to invest this ‘gospel’ of Russian radicalism with spurious romantic poignancy. What is to be Done? was published in the spring of 1863, despite the fact that Chernyshevsky had been in solitary confinement in the Petropavlovsk fortress in St Petersburg since December 1862, in itself striking testimony to the inefficiency of the tsarist censors.
Chernyshevsky’s life was devastated as well as deformed by ideological fanaticism, perhaps an appropriate fate for this scion of a long line of priests from provincial Saratov. In 1864, following his arrest for revolutionary conspiracy, Chernyshevsky was subjected to mock execution, with a wooden sword being broken over his head to symbolise civil degradation, and was then sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude to be followed by permanent exile. After spending the years 1864–71 in a prison in trans-Baikal, he was despatched in 1872 to a desolate town called Viliuisk, where he remained until 1883. During that entire period he saw his wife and son once, for other lives were devastated by fanaticism too. Chernyshevsky spent his last years under close surveillance in Astrakhan; he died in Saratov, after the authorities had finally released him, in June 1889.9
What is to be Done? was a radical’s rejoinder to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, with its alleged slanders against the ‘new men’ who as the ‘new people’ comprise the subject of Chernyshevksy’s own tale. They have become ‘people’ because the proto-feminist Chernyshevsky had much to say about ‘new women’. The ‘novel’, for early on the narrator concedes ‘I haven’t a drop of literary talent in me,’ is a modern rationalist’s answer to the old-fashioned agonies of a ménage á trois.
It begins with an alleged suicide that particularly distresses the young man and woman who are the other angles of the love triangle Chernyshevsky describes. The background to the ‘suicide’ is as follows. A medical student Lopukhov marries Vera Pavlovna, the daughter of a caretaker and his harpy pawnbroker consort. Lopukhov marries Vera to deliver her from her awful family circumstances. The couple live as brother and sister rather than man and wife, merely interrupting their respective reading and sewing sessions to rendezvous for tea in the middle of their flat. Vera opens what becomes a highly successful dress-making co-operative, run on Owenite lines, which miraculously transforms troubled girls into paragons of industrial virtue. To underline his point, Chernyshevsky informs his readers that the only decoration in Lopukhov’s study–bedroom is a portrait done in the presence of the great British socialist himself. Refusing to allow her husband even to kiss her hand, Vera transfers her unassuaged affections to Kirsanov, another former medical student who is her husband’s best friend. Lopukhov duly enacts the hoax suicide to oblige Vera and Kirsanov who live as husband and wife. The relationships drawn in the novel reject the sort of intense emotions that such situations usually entail; everyone chooses to play by the rules of ‘let’s be friends’. The trio also represent the normal types of ‘new people’. Rather awkwardly, Chernyshevsky intrudes into the story the more advanced version of the ‘new man’–in the form of Rakhmetov, the man of unalloyed will, who brings Vera the intelligence that Lopukhov is not dead but living abroad. He convinces Vera and Kirsanov that their guilt regarding his (fake) suicide is irrational.
The aristocratic radical Rakhmetov combines being a physical fitness fanatic (who eats nothing but raw beef) with the capacity to devour book after book, his life consisting of ‘Calisthenics, hard labour and books’.10 At one point he takes to sleeping on a bed of nails simply to establish that he can, although the result is blood all over his nightshirt and floor. Having inherited prodigious wealth, Rakhmetov proceeds to give it away or to use it to subsidise poor students. Every minute of his day is usefully employed. He suffers no fools gladly, but pursues interesting people at any hour of day or night, for he has utter disdain for social convention. The only time he entertains the notion of love is rapidly quashed as he rebuffs the woman concerned with a gruff ‘Love is not for me.’ No sooner has this titan entered the novel than it is time for him to disappear, criss-crossing Europe in Chernyshevsky’s thinly veiled version of a professional revolutionary career. Lopukhov reappears as the foreigner Beaumont. He rescues another girl from destructive family circumstances, and he, his second wife, Vera and Kirsanov live happily ever after.
Given that the book was written in prison, and would have to evade censorship, dreams are used to convey its explicit political message. Vera has four dreams, which are like escalators to her progressive enlightenment. Her protracted and vivid fourth dream is used to muse on mankind’s own progression to the total stasis of a richly described Fourierist utopia. Here nothing, as the pop song goes, ever happens, or at least nothing that might make life bearable by way of depth or variety. Heaven is like a Russian version of California. Blandly beautiful people, although California has its share of gnarled specimens too, populate the communities Chernyshevsky describes: ‘This is a lovely, joyful people, theirs is a life of elegance and light. Their humble homes reveal inside a wealth of refinement and mastery in the art of leisure; furniture and furnishings delight the eye in every detail. Aesthetically alive and appealing themselves, these people live in and for love and beauty.’
Vera is transported into a future that revolves around several aluminium, steel and glass replicas of London’s contemporary Crystal Palace exhibition halls: ‘Glass and steel, steel and glass, and that is all’. Once parched deserts have been rolled back by the intelligent application of human diligence; even changes in climate have been brought under mankind’s control. As in many utopias, and socialist realist posters, there are few old people; instead, everywhere abounds with children and cheery youths, while only machines puff about in the fields. There is human labour, but this has been reduced to the point where its chief value is to create the desire for endless leisure. Food is served in vast communal dining-halls, with aluminium tables bedecked with flowers and crystal vases. Nights are spent beneath ‘light–sunny, white and bright without harshness–electric of course’ dancing and singing: ‘Here there is neither the fear nor the memory of need, no thought but that of the good, of labour free and rich in satisfaction and none but the same in sight.’11 Those not enjoying these hedonistic nocturnal pursuits beaver away in lecture halls, libraries and museums. Given the briefest glimpse of the future, Vera concludes:
No, the world has yet to see true celebration, to produce the proper people for it. Only those we have just observed may drain the cup of pleasure to the dregs. In the full bloom of vitality they are full of grace, their features bold and striking. Handsome one and all, they are blessed with a life of liberty and labour–what fortune, what tremendous fortune.12
However banal Chernyshevsky’s utopian imaginings may have been, What is to be Done? had two important effects on the future of Russian radicalism. It provided models of human conduct, or what we might call ‘identities’, regarding how individual radicals should behave, and how they should interact among themselves and towards people outside the sect. Resembling a religious conversion, the neophyte became a member of a likeminded sectarian group, to which his or her behaviour was obliged to conform. Put differently, this meant the creation of a parallel radical morality, some of whose characteristics were unimpeachable enough, such as recognition of the autonomy of women, other aspects utterly appalling in the sense that the revolutionary ends justified the corrupt means, provided inordinate will-power had been demonstrated. Secondly, however risible Chernyshevsky’s vision of rosaceous beings amid their crystal palaces and glistening cornfields, by imagining the future, he contributed to making it happen. As we saw, Lenin (and his terrorist elder brother shared this feeling) regarded Chernyshevsky’s execrable book as one of his life’s inspirations.13
II ’THE GOSPEL OF THE REVOLVER’ (AND THE BOMB)
The flurry of reforms with which we began stopped short of a national parliament. Alexander II dismissed this with an elegantly curt: ‘surtout, pas d’Assemblé de notables!’14 In radical circles there was alarm that these reforms might lead to a constitutional monarchy, thwarting their desire for violent social transformation or, in some cases, their psychopathic visions of a cleansing revolutionary bloodbath. Among such people, incremental reform lacked the sinister glamour of the peasant’s axe, the terrorist’s gun or the devastating explosion, and the feeling of omnipotence that came from striking fear in the hearts of the powerful.15 Radicals, whose murderous activities and even more sanguinary rhetoric provoked reaction, therefore bore some moral responsibility for the polarised atmosphere that was uncongenial to the emergence of a more liberal rather than a totalitarian Russia. Others were not blameless.
The government overreacted to sporadic disturbances by peasants who, thinking they could simply usurp land, vented their anger against those who they imagined were frustrating the tsar’s noble intentions. Forty-one peasants were shot and seventy wounded in a minor (and passive) demonstration in Kazan province that was suppressed by troops. Simultaneously, in early 1861 Russian troops fired on Polish nationalist demonstrators in Warsaw, these unconnected events encouraging revolutionaries to imagine that the time was ripe to activate their inchoate conspiracy, for nationalist revolt on the peripheries of empire was supposed to coincide with full-scale uprisings by the Russian peasantry. In early 1862 a series of mysterious fires burned down entire areas of St Petersburg, leaving many wondering whether they were the inevitable risk that went with wooden houses or evidence of revolutionary incendiarism.
Minuscule radical sects issued revolutionary paperwork that was heroic in its ambition. Manifestos and proclamations, inciting agitation among the peasants and mutiny in the army, were issued in the name of a shadowy organisation called Land and Freedom. This was the first revolutionary organisation in Russia to be based on the western European model of co-option into small cells. It was also a classic example of revolutionary disconnection from those in whose name revolution would be made. For in reality the peasants had little or no contact with the tiny revolutionary intelligentsia, a term that encompassed all those with modest education in a land of mass illiteracy, while Polish nationalists, who in 1863 essayed a major rising, found that even their Russian revolutionary friends were infected by Greater Russian chauvinism. By early 1864, Land and Freedom had collapsed, but the example of a cell-based revolutionary organisation lived on.
Shortly after the demise of Land and Freedom, a new group called Organisation came into being, consisting of approximately fifty members and with an inner core of dedicated assassins called Hell. Their aim was regicide. It was from Hell that Dmitri Karakozov hailed, who in the spring of 1866 tried to shoot Alexander II as the tsar finished his daily walk in a St Petersburg public park and was about to mount his carriage. A hatter’s apprentice managed to jog the assassin’s arm just as he aimed, so that the bullet flew past the tsar’s head. When Karakozov was restrained, the tsar bravely decided to interrogate him, bravely because Karakozov still had a vial of acid (which he should already have used to disfigure his own face) and strychnine (which he would have used to kill himself after the successful assassination) about his person.
‘Who are you?’ asked the tsar.
‘A Russian,’ answered Karakozov
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said the failed assassin.
Following this botched assassination, the government went cool on its earlier reforming zeal, without implementing more repressive policies with the requisite rigour. That equivocal stance partly explains why otherwise decent, liberal-minded people proved extraordinarily indulgent about what were essentially criminal acts, provided their radical perpetrators could camouflage them with a higher moral–political purpose. Of course, some liberal-minded people were not immune either to the vicarious thrill of violence committed by ‘people’s criminals’ in the name of ‘people’s justice’, a pathology by no means unique to nineteenth-century Russia, since remote salivation over violence seems to be a more general inheritance.
People’s Justice was the title of a manifesto issued on behalf of the committee of a new revolutionary organisation called People’s Justice that in reality consisted of a psychotic confidence trickster and autodidact philosopher called Sergei Nechaev, who having falsely claimed to have escaped from Petropavlovsk fortress wormed his way into the willing confidences of the anarchist Bakunin in Geneva. We know quite a bit about this arch-terrorist.
Until 1861 Nechaev’s family had been serfs. He grew up with his grandparents, for his mother had died young, before being returned to his father and his second wife. The father worked as a part-time waiter in the homes of the rich, something that clearly demeaned the son. Nechaev followed his grandfather’s trade of sign painting. Having educated himself, although probably not to read Kant in German, Nechaev managed to get a post teaching ‘the word of God’ in a St Petersburg parish school. A photograph shows a slight, raffishly dressed young man, with the lean, bearded countenance of an American outlaw, for he was more like Jesse James than a bespectacled revolutionary swot.
Nechaev fell under the influence of an older Russian Jacobin and in turn brought his own malign intelligence to bear on the capital’s population of gullible students. Insofar as Nechaev had a strategy, it was to multiply the ranks of agitators by engineering expulsions of students from the university; these cadres would then direct a peasant uprising that Nechaev seemed to believe would erupt on or about 19 February 1870, when emancipated serfs would have to cough up for the land they had received in 1861. Nechaev fled Russia after the authorities began arresting students. He had long since taken the precaution of mastering elementary French.16
In Switzerland, Nechaev was warmly welcomed by the veteran Bakunin, who wrote: ‘They are magnificient, these young fanatics. Believers without God and heroes without phrases!’ He and Nechaev co-authored a number of manifestos destined for consumption in Russia. Nechaev may well have intended to radicalise the recipients of his pamphlets through the underhand method of having them arrested for receiving seditious literature from abroad. The Revolutionary Catechism may have been such a joint enterprise. It outlined the optimum structure of revolutionary organisations and the need to forge contacts with the criminal classes, and then sought to specify the inhuman qualities that should ideally characterise the dedicated revolutionary. The Catechism idealised a mythical being who was part revolutionary, part monk. He was a ‘doomed man’. The debt to Chernyshevsky’s ‘new man’ was striking:
He has no personal interests or activities, no private feelings, attachments, or property, not even a name. He is absorbed by one single aim, thought, passion–revolution…Moved by sober passion for revolution he should stifle in himself all considerations of kinship, love, friendship, and even honour.
In the depths of his being, not only in words, but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order and with the entire educated world, with all laws, conventions, generally accepted conditions, and with the morality of this world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, that is only the more certainly to destroy it.17
This single-minded suppression of things that make us human, including intellectual curiosity, moral discernment and feeling for others, was accompanied by murderous prescriptions for the future division of society. This was brutal, crude and schematic. There would be those who would be killed immediately, those whose temporary reprieve might provoke mass revolt, influential people and liberals whose stupidity could be exploited, other revolutionaries who could be propelled into self-destruction, and, finally, the remnant, and it was inevitably going to be modest after this bloodbath by categories, of those still deemed ideologically sound. Any methods were legitimate: ‘Poison, the knife, the noose…The revolution sanctifies everything in this battle.’ Bakunin went along with this, provided, as he was to discover, such amoral methods were not turned against him.
Equipped with this Catechism, and a certificate of membership number 2771 in the Russian section of a non-existent World Revolutionary Alliance, Nechaev returned to Moscow. He formed a revolutionary cell, whose members included impressionable students and Ivan Pryzhov, the dipso-maniac author of The History of Taverns and a self-pitying tract called I have had a Dog’s Life. This was almost too true since in the depths of despair Pryzhov tried to drown himself and his hound Leperello, but both were dragged alive from a pond. Trust was not paramount among the revolutionary group. Short of funds, they left a copy of the Revolutionary Catechism in the home of a supporter, disguised themselves as police officers, and then tried to extort money from the victim for possession of seditious literature. The quest for money led them to ultimate crimes. On 16 November 1869 Nechaev informed members of his cell that they had to kill the student Ivan Ivanov, another of their number, solely it seems because Ivanov had a mind of his own and was unhappy about how money he had given to Nechaev was being used. More generally, Ivanov was exercised about being treated as ‘merely a blind tool in someone else’s hands’. When Pryzhov objected that his alcohol-sodden eyes could not see in the dark and that he had hurt his leg, Nechaev replied that they would carry him to the scene of the intended crime.
Ivanov was lured to the grounds of the Petrovsky Academy of Agriculture where the gang rather clumsily pinned their victim down so as to strangle him. Although Ivanov was already dead, Nechaev insisted on firing a shot into his head, perhaps in a fury that the victim had sunk his teeth into one of the assassin’s hand. Weighed down with bricks, Ivanov’s corpse was thrown into an icy pond. After the murder, the assassins gathered in an apartment, whose floor was soon awash with water and blood. Clearly in an excitable state, Nechaev sent a bullet flying past Pryzhov’s drunken head. He escaped to Switzerland, where he returned the sanctuary provided by Bakunin with an obliging threat to murder the Swiss publisher who was hounding him for the late delivery of a translation of the first volume of Marx’s Kapital. Bakunin’s heart was probably not in the task since he numbered Marx as among the worst of the ‘Yids and Germans’ he hated.
During his sojourn in Geneva, Nechaev tried to use his combined amorality and charm to prevail upon the young heiress daughter of Herzen, who had recently died. It was then, in the summer of 1870, that Bakunin felt moved to warn a family with whom Nechaev had also entered into contact that the erstwhile ‘young eagle’ was a very dangerous man. This warning was all the more remarkable since it was designed to revoke earlier letters of the ‘warmest’ recommendation that Bakunin had supplied on his protégé’s behalf. Bakunin acknowledged that Nechaev was the most ‘persecuted’ man in Russia and that he was ‘one of the most active and energetic men I have ever met’, a singular compliment from the most indefatigable of European anarchists. But then the doubts came thick and fast:
When it is a question of serving what he calls the cause, he does not hesitate; nothing stops him, and he is as merciless with himself as with all the others. This is the principal quality which attracted me, and which impelled me to seek an alliance with him for a good while. Some people assert that he is simply a crook–but this is a lie! He is a devoted fanatic, but at the same time a very dangerous fanatic whose alliance cannot but be harmful for everybody.
The revolutionary secret committee had been decimated by arrests, leaving the fugitive Nechaev to refound his own clandestine organisation abroad. Bakunin detested the spirit that informed this enterprise: ‘one must take as the foundation the tactics of Machiavelli and totally adopt the system of the Jesuits, violence as the body, falsehood as the soul’. Bakunin warned his friends that Nechaev believed in deceiving and exploiting honest dupes, insinuating himself into their confidence, and then using any means, up to and including blackmail, to bend them to his ferocious will. He would stop at nothing:
If you have presented him to a friend, his first concern will be to sow discord between both of you by gossip and intrigue–in a word, to cause a quarrel. Your friend has a wife, a daughter; he will try to seduce them, to make them pregnant, in order to tear them away from official morality and to throw them into a forced revolutionary protest against society.
Bakunin testified to his personal experience of betrayal at the hands of Nechaev, who had stolen his letters in order to compromise the older man. He continued:
He is a fanatic, and fanaticism carries him away to the point of becoming an accomplished Jesuit, at moments, he simply becomes stupid. The majority of his lies are woven out of whole cloth. He plays at Jesuitism as others play at revolution. In spite of his relative naïveté he is very dangerous, because each day there are acts, abuses of confidence, treacheries, against which it is all the more difficult to guard oneself because one hardly suspects their possibility.
Bakunin recommended that the family lock up its daughters since Nechaev was hell bent on seducing and corrupting young girls, the example of Natalia Herzen being fresh in his mind. He also urged another person, whose address Nechaev had somehow got his hands on, to move at once.18
Meanwhile, Nechaev’s accomplices were rapidly apprehended, confessing their crimes to interrogators who applied the mildest of psychological pressures rather than thumbscrews. After further adventures, Nechaev was extradited in 1872 from Switzerland, where he had tried to organise bank robberies that qualified him as a criminal rather than political refugee. He was sentenced in 1873 to twenty years’ hard labour in Siberia. The trial took place amid the hysteria generated by the Paris Commune. The tsar personally intervened to have him confined in the altogether more rigorous Petropavlovsk fortress, whence he had allegedly escaped earlier in his revolutionary career. After many years of confinement, the remorseless Nechaev managed to suborn his guards, with a view to having him sprung by the People’s Will, the terrorist organisation that emerged from the ranks of disillusioned Populists. Discovery of this plot led him to be secreted deeper within the fortress prison, where in 1882 he died of scurvy, the date coinciding with that of the murder for which he had been convicted a decade earlier.
This squalid episode became the kernel in a great novelist’s reckoning with the modern Russian revolutionary tradition, a reckoning all the more devastating because the author had experience of life within the conspiratorial Pale. For in December 1849, after being convicted for his role in the radical Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevsky was subjected to a terrifying mock execution, and then despatched to four years’ penal servitude in Siberia. There, among the lowest of the low, he experienced the epiphany that convinced him that Christ was mysteriously present in the peasant soul. In exile in Semipalatinsk he would lie on the grass on warm nights, marvelling at the Creator of the millions of stars in the night sky.19 From there, in 1854, he wrote the famous letter in which he described himself as ‘a child of the century, of unbelief and doubt’, a struggle not only played out in all his major novels, but in the subsequent evolution of his own rather complex political positions.
Between 1867 and 1871 Dostoevsky and his wife settled in Dresden. Circumstances seemed to militate against this being a period of intense creativity. A newly born daughter died aged three months; a second infant daughter was constantly ill. His wife, without the benefit of either a maid or nanny, was exhausted and painfully thin. In winter, German stoves never seemed to generate enough heat, so the couple were perpetually cold. Frequent epileptic fits left Dostoevsky dazed for up to a week at a time: ‘They used to pass after three days, while now they may take six. Especially at night, by candlelight, an indefinite hypochondriac melancholy, and as if a red, bloody shade (not colour) upon everything. Almost impossible to work during those days.’20 His permanently irascible mood was compounded by his dislike of the Germans (and English tourists) in whose midst he had paradoxically settled: ‘It’s all trashy people, that is, in general. And my God, what trash there is!’21
His solution to chronic indebtedness–‘I’m absolutely in a horrible position now (Mister Micawber). I don’t even have a kopeck’–was to rob Peter to pay Paul, or, more desperately, to pawn his valuables so as to right all his financial problems at the roulette wheels of German spa towns.22 Like many compulsive gamblers, he began each foray confident in a foolproof system, but then lost everything betting on desperate hunches. Every trip to ‘Roulettenburg’ resulted in disastrous losses as the small white ball ineluctably rattled into the wrong slot. Serial losses eventually tempered his addiction.
Dostoevsky could control excess that would destroy lesser people. He was above all a professional writer, fluent, self-disciplined, well read, and equipped with an exceptional memory and acute powers of observation. He settled into a routine in the couple’s ever more modest Dresden lodgings, or as he had it: ‘I live boringly and too regularly.’23 He rose at one o’clock, worked for a few hours, walked and read the Russian newspapers in a reading-room, then returned for dinner. After a second walk, he took tea at ten, and then worked until five or six in the morning. His working notebooks testify to his extraordinarily meticulous artistry and to a lifetime of demanding reading.
A major breakthrough in Dostoevsky’s work, which would be elaborated in his subsequent ‘fat books’, was the publication in 1864 of the relatively short Notes from Underground. The psychological deformation of the narrator, a forty-year-old former government clerk who in earlier life behaves in an erratic, sadistic and vengeful fashion towards others, can be attributed, not just to the disparity between his pretensions and status, but also to his too rapid and uncritical ingestion of radical ideas that, by ruling his head, had incapacitated the dormant dictates of his heart. The ways in which bookish unreality contributes to an inhuman ‘malice of the brain’ is explored again and again in this novel, whose first part is also a reckoning with the utopian world of Chernyshevsky. Dostoevsky would develop these themes in novels that were polyphonies of characters, and one of which would take as its starting point the Nechaev case.24
Dostoevsky began working on The Possessed in February 1870. It was a ‘rich idea’, more ‘burning’ even than Crime and Punishment, which he had written in the interim, and one likely to make him some money too. Tempting fate, he added: ‘Never have I worked with such enjoyment and such ease.’25 What may have been intended as a satirical pamphlet grew by leaps and bounds into an enormously complex novel. By August 1870, when he had hoped to deliver the manuscript, Dostoevsky decided to scrap most of what he had done, destroying almost a year’s work. Enviously he remarked in a letter: ‘Would you believe that I know for certain that if I had two or three years of support for that novel, the way Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy do, I would write the sort of thing that people would be talking about 100 years later.’26 But, as he also acknowledged, it was never just a question of lacking the means and peace of mind to work. He compared himself to Victor Hugo, another writer whose ‘poetic impulse’ outran his ‘means of execution’ and who similarly tried to cram too many novels and stories into one.27
In his correspondence, Dostoevsky provided us with a detailed account of the genesis of the story: ‘I did not and do not know either Nechaev or Ivanov or the circumstances of that murder except from the newspapers.’ He had also been visited by his brother-in-law who was a student at the Petrovsky Academy where the Ivanov murder would later happen. But this was merely the incident around which he structured a much more complicated book, in which the crimes of an amoralist that he had imagined in Crime and Punishment now had a ghastly basis in contemporary fact. As he wrote Dostoevsky daringly upped the stakes, even though this deranged the structure of the book. While he originally intended to make the Nechaev character his central focus, by the summer of 1870 he had decided that ‘I don’t think that those pathetic monstrosities are worthy of literature.’28
If there was a fundamental problem with the novel, it stemmed from this shift of focus from the villain to Stavrogin, a sort of early nineteenth-century Byronic anti-hero whom Dostoevsky never quite managed to get right in a book whose other characters are personifications of ideas that had unfolded sequentially between the 1840s and 1860s. By October 1870 he was still dissatisfied with The Possessed, although he acknowledged that it was ‘entertaining’: ‘The idea is bold and big. The whole problem is just that I keep taking topics that are beyond me. The poet in me always outweighs the artist, and that’s bad.’29 In October 1870 Dostoevsky gave a detailed account of what his novel was primarily about. Apart from the immediate stimulus of the Nechaev affair, he had been deeply affronted by those deracinated liberals who had welcomed Russian defeat in the Crimean War:
The fact also showed us that the disease that had gripped civilized Russians was much stronger than we ourselves imagined, and that the matter did not end with the Belinskys, Kraevskys, and the like. But at that point there occurred what the apostle Luke testifies to: there were devils sitting in a man, and their name was Legion, and they asked Him: ‘Command us to enter into the swine,’ and He allowed them to. The devils entered into the herd of swine, and the whole herd threw itself into the sea from a steep place and they all drowned. And when the local inhabitants came running to see what had happened, they saw a formerly possessed man already dressed and in his right mind and sitting at the feet of Jesus, and those who had seen it told them how a man possessed had been healed. That’s exactly the way it happened with us. The devils went out of Russian man and entered a herd of swine, that is, the Nechaevs, Serno-Solovieches, and so on. They have drowned or are sure to, but the healed man that the devils came out of is sitting at the feet of Jesus. That’s exactly how it had to be. Russia has vomited up that garbage she was fed on and, of course, there’s nothing Russian left in these vomited-up scoundrels. And note, dear friend: whoever loses his people and his national roots loses both his paternal faith and God. Well, if you want to know, that’s exactly what the theme of my novel is. It’s called The Possessed, and it’s a description of how those devils entered a herd of swine.30
The Possessed was set in a muddy, wind-swept provincial town that was possibly modelled on Tver, although there is virtually no physical description of the setting. Nothing is what it seems and values are inverted; there is endless talk, but little by way of communication, in a novel that is hysterical and unsettling. The action alternates between the salons of grand stone houses and the dark squalor of wooden hovels by the river, the two worlds linked by the leading revolutionary conspirator, Peter Verhovensky, whose ramifying plots take him back and forth in a frenzy of mendacity and murder. There is something serpentine in the first extended description of him:
He talked quickly, hurriedly, but at the same time with assurance, and was never at a loss for a word. In spite of his hurried manner his ideas were in perfect order, distinct and definite–and this was particularly striking. His articulation was wonderfully clear. His words pattered out like smooth, big grains, always well chosen, and at your service. At first this attracted one, but afterwards it became repulsive, just because of this over-distinct articulation, this string of ever-ready words. One somehow began to imagine that he must have a tongue of special shape, somehow exceptionally long and thin, extremely red with a very sharp everlastingly active little tip.31
As gradually becomes apparent, Verhovensky is not simply treacherous but completely insane and given to outbursts of childlike petulance against anyone who stands in his way. A modern parallel would be Osama bin Laden lying down to weep and wail when one of his subordinates failed to shoot a leading British journalist. Verhovensky’s master plan contains every revolutionary strategy being essayed by the radical sects of the time, up to and including the use of pseudo-tsars to awaken the peasants from their slumbers:
‘Listen. First of all we’ll make an upheaval,’ Verhovensky went on in desperate haste, continually clutching at Stavrogin’s sleeve. ‘I’ve already told you. We shall penetrate to the peasantry. Do you know that we are tremendously powerful already? Our party does not consist only of those who commit murder and arson, fire off pistols in the traditional fashion, or bite colonels. They are only a hindrance. I don’t accept anything without discipline. I am a scoundrel, of course, and not a socialist. Ha Ha! Listen. I’ve reckoned them all up: a teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle is on our side. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims and could not help murdering them to get money is one of us. The schoolboys who murder a peasant for the sake of sensation are ours. The juries who acquit every criminal are ours. The prosecutor who trembles at a trial for fear he should not seem advanced enough is ours, ours…On all sides we see vanity puffed up out of all proportion: brutal, monstrous appetites…Do you know how many people we shall catch by little, ready-made ideas?…Listen, I’ve seen a child of six years of age leading home his drunken mother, whilst she swore at him with foul words. Do you suppose I am glad of that? When it’s in our hands, maybe we’ll mend things…if need be, we’ll drive them for forty years into the wilderness…But one or two generations of vice are essential now; monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. That’s what we need! And more, a little “fresh” blood that we may get accustomed to it…We will proclaim destruction…Why is it, why is it that idea has such a fascination? But we must have a little exercise; we must. We’ll set fires going…We’ll set legends going. Every scurvy “group” will be of use. Out of these very groups I’ll pick fellows so keen they’ll not shrink from shooting, and be grateful for the honour of a job, too. Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before…Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods…Well, then we shall bring forward…whom?’
‘Whom?’
‘Ivan the Tsarevitch.’
‘Who-m?’
‘Ivan the Tsarevitch. You! You!’
Stavrogin thought a minute.
‘A pretender?’ he asked suddenly, looking with intense surprise at his frantic companion. ‘Ah! So that’s your plan at last!’32
Verhovensky’s band of five revolutionaries, who co-opt the fugitive convict Fedka, seek to demoralise and destabilise the province, in anticipation of an illusory general uprising, the imaginary revolution that tantalised a fantasist such as Nechaev. Their would-be ideologist is a donkey-eared, mournful man called Shigalov, whose manifesto is contained within a notebook crammed with tiny writing. ‘I am perplexed by my own data,’ he says at one point, ‘and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.’33 Other emblematic characters are introduced either by the narrator or by Stavrogin, whose own casual flirtations with ideas have become his disciples’ deepest commitments. We meet the atheist Kirillov, whose determination to kill himself to prove the absolute power of human will and the absence of God results in his spirit of self-sacrifice being abused by Verhovensky to conceal a brutal murder. Kirillov is an enthusiastic exponent of the ‘new man’: “‘God is the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god. Then there will be a new life, a new man; everything will be new…then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to…” “To the gorilla?”’34 The serf’s son Shatov, whom Stavrogin persuades to abandon the revolutionary sect, espouses a Russian messianic nationalism, and doubts about God, worthy of Dostoevsky himself.
The revolutionaries’ plots are facilitated by the credulous indulgence the local literary and political ‘establishment’ shows to the younger generation. Verhovensky’s schemes are aided and abetted by governor Lembke’s ambitious consort Yulia Mihailovna, who seeks to patronise the younger generation, so as to promote her own advancement through the espousal of what might be called ‘tactical chic’. At the same time Verhovensky succeeds in driving the governor mad, by persuading this rather benign Russo-German official to take draconian measures over a minor workers’ disturbance while filling his head with visions of disorder and upheaval that Verhovensky is covertly seeking to bring about. Gradually, the delicate fabric of this society disintegrates. There is a perceptible increase in boorishness, lying, public drunkenness and vulgar speech, together with open expressions of cynical disrespect towards public figures on the part of a raucous rabble that becomes more omnipresent in ‘democratised’ elite settings. This culminates in a literary charity fête that degenerates into an unseemly slanging match and a costume ball that comes to a premature end as the guests realise that half the town is on fire.
The literary fête was the culmination of Dostoevsky’s reckoning with his own generation of liberal writers whose posturings in some way conduced to a climate of indulgence towards maniacs like Nechaev. One of his friends had the insight that many of the characters in The Possessed were ‘Turgenev’s heroes in their old age’.35 Dostoevsky had fallen out badly with Turgenev in Baden-Baden. He resented owing Turgenev money, just as he resented the leisure to perfect and polish his work that Turgenev’s wealth bestowed upon him while Dostoevsky wrote to keep the wolf away. He disliked his creditor’s aloof aristocratic manner, and in particular a kiss that never quite connected with one’s cheek, not to speak of Turgenev’s enthusiasm for all things German. In The Possessed Turgenev is savagely caricatured as the literary celebrity Karmazinov. He drones on at great length at the fête, unaware that the revolutionaries have rigged the event to end in disaster by inviting drunken hoi-polloi and inserting captain Lebyadkin, a notorious drunk and amateur poet, into a programme that was supposed to guarantee decorum. Dostoevsky’s narrator tries to get the drift of Karmazinov’s pretentious babble:
The great European philosopher, the great man of science, the inventor, the martyr–all these who labour and are heavily laden, are to the great Russian genius no more than so many cooks in his kitchen. He is the master and they come to him, cap in hand, awaiting orders. It is true he jeers superciliously at Russia too, and there is nothing he likes better than exhibiting the bankruptcy of Russia in every relation before the great minds of Europe, but as regards himself, no, he is at a higher level than all the great minds of Europe; they are only material for his jests. He takes another man’s idea, tacks on to it its antithesis, and the epigram is made. There is no such thing as crime; there is no such thing as justice, there are no just men; atheism, Darwinism, the Moscow bells…But alas, he no longer believes in the Moscow bells; Rome, laurels…But he has no belief in laurels even…We have a conventional attack of Byronic spleen, a grimace from Heine, something of Petchorin–and the machine goes rolling, whistling, at full speed. ‘But you may praise me, you may praise me, that I like extremely; it’s only in a manner of speaking that I lay down the pen; I shall bore you three hundred times more, you’ll grow weary of reading me…’
The culpability of the fathers was personified by Verhovensky’s father Stefan Trofimovich, who has earlier acted as tutor to the young Stavrogin. Trofimovich was a promising liberal scholar, with vast ambition but little application or talent, who had gone to seed in a demeaning relationship with a richer patroness. Having belatedly realised that the younger nihilists were dangerously iconoclastic and deeply stupid, Trofimovich attempts to defend his conception of the sublime: ‘I maintain that Shakespeare and Raphael are more precious than the emancipation of the serfs, more precious than Nationalism, more precious than Socialism, more precious than the young generation, more precious than chemistry, more precious than almost all humanity because they are the fruit, the real fruit of all humanity and perhaps the highest fruit that can be.’
The final speaker, a maniac professor of literature who perpetually beats the air with his fist, mounts the stage to inveigh against Russia past and present before mass pandemonium brings the afternoon to a close. That night the wooden houses along the river are engulfed by fire. The general conflagration does not conceal the fact that in a house that has also burned down despite its isolation from the general conflagration, captain Lebyadkin and his much abused sister have been murdered.
In due course Verhovensky persuades his quintet to murder Shatov, whom he falsely accuses of preparing to betray the group, simply on the ground that Shatov wishes to leave it. Shatov is lured to a park, where he is to hand over a printing machine, and is wrestled to the ground where Verhovensky shoots him. In echoes of the murder of Ivanov, Shatov’s corpse is weighted with stones and thrown in a pond. Some of the gang fail to exhibit Verhovensky’s steely revolutionary resolve and emit animalistic noises as they try to distance themselves from the crime. Nor does Kirillov go quietly into reason’s dark night in accordance with his plan to prove there is no God other than man. Verhovensky’s deal with him is that he should pen a false confession to having murdered Shatov before killing himself, the intention being to throw the authorities off the quintet’s trail. But the reasonable suicide degenerates into a messy affair, with Verhovensky stiffening Kirillov’s resolve at gunpoint, and receiving a bite in the hand when the ‘man–God’ turns all too ferally human shortly before he dies. Kirillov’s suicide turns out to be otiose as the authorities quickly unravel the plot and arrest the quartet (for Verhovensky flees), who confess their crimes at the first opportunity. Meanwhile, Stepan Trofimovich, the ageing radical, has embarked on a bid for freedom from his patroness. This journey on foot represents his first encounter with the peasant people he has spent his fifty or so years invoking, people who regard him as if he has fallen from another planet. He dies of a fever, not quite reconciled to the Christian faith, and with his patroness holding his hand. The novel ends with Stavrogin hanging himself in an attic, having failed to alight upon whatever faith he was seeking.36
Major events in Europe seemed to confirm Dostoevsky’s views on the pernicious futility of revolutionary idealism. He wrote The Possessed precisely when Europe was horrified by the Paris Commune:
For the whole 19th century that movement has either been dreaming of paradise on earth (beginning with the phalanstery) or when it comes to the least bit of action (’48,’49–now)–demonstrates a humiliating inability to say anything positive. In essence it’s all the same old Rousseau and the dream of recreating the world anew through reason and knowledge (positivism). Really, there seem to be sufficient facts to show their inability to say a new word is not an accidental phenomenon. They chop off heads–why? Exclusively because that’s easiest of all…They wish for the happiness of man and are still at Rousseau’s same definitions of the word ‘happiness’, that is, at a fantasy that is not justified even by knowledge. The burning of Paris is a monstrosity: ‘It didn’t succeed, so let the world perish, because the Commune is higher than the happiness of the world and of France.’ But after all, to them (and to lots of people) that madness doesn’t seem a monstrosity, but, on the contrary, beauty. And so the aesthetic idea in new humanity has been muddled.37
Viscous blood on a muddy pavement or the vivid orange blast of an explosion could be beautiful, carnage and destruction acts of creation.
III WORSHIPPING THE PEASANT FLEECE
Like Stepan Trofimovich, many of the revolutionaries paid lip-service to ‘the people’, the vast majority of whom, unlike the revolutionaries themselves, were peasants who knew how to deliver a new being, whether bovine, equine or human, and how to grow or make things; believed in God, tempered with much superstition; and revered the tsar as the Lord’s anointed. A new radical movement, temporarily disillusioned with the fruits of nihilist terrorism, opted for agitation among those below rather than the assassination of those at the top. Populism was born of a sense of guilt, and resembled worship of ‘the people’ rather than prostration before such malign cult leaders as the fictional Verhovensky or the real-life Nechaev. Turgenev once described Populism as worship of the peasant sheepskin coat. This was probably too cynical, although middle-class credulity towards indigenous ‘noble savages’ certainly invites parody.
The Populists who in the early 1870s embarked on a crusade or pilgrimage to the people were moved by a vast outpouring of Christian love, albeit a love that simultaneously expiated the emotional burdens of being born relatively privileged. As one pilgrim said at the time: ‘It was rather some sort of crusading procession, distinguished by the totally infectious and all-embracing character of a religious movement. People sought not only the attainment of a definite practical goal, but at the same time the satisfaction of a deep need for personal moral purification.’ Products of an increasingly alienated and differentiated urban society, Populists sought personal and social redemption through their own reintegration in a rural idyll based on the values and virtues of the ‘narod’ (nation). In their eyes, the peasants represented a more integrated, rooted type of human being than the alienated cogs to which western-style industrialisation and urbanisation were reducing factory workers, and for that matter the intelligentsia itself with its mechanical Positivism and utilitarianism.38
The nature of the communion between intellectuals and the people had ambivalences. The former’s earliest interest in the latter was often ethnographic, an approach that Populism could never entirely shed, like a well-meaning colonist celebrating the docile nobility of primitive tribes. The idealised, recruiting-poster version of Populism was best described by the anarchist prince Kropotkin in his memoirs:
In what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle among the people, and to live the people’s life. Young men came to the villages as doctors, doctor’s helpers, village scribes, even as agricultural labourers, blacksmiths, woodcutters…Girls passed teacher’s examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundreds to the villages, devoting themselves to the poorest part of the population. These people went without any idea of social reconstruction in mind, or any thought of revolution. They simply wanted to teach the mass of the peasants to read, to instruct them in other things, to give them medical help, and in this way to aid in raising them from their darkness and misery, and to learn at the same time what were their popular ideals of a better social life.
Many Populists set out to serve ‘the people’ by submerging themselves in the peasant mass as midwives, nurses and teachers, albeit often subsidised by their wealthy and well-placed parents. Some went to toil with the Volga boatmen, whom they probably knew only from Repin’s painting Haulers on the Volga.39 Some Populists disdained and ignored the people’s beliefs and customs, as Dostoevsky wrote: ‘Instead of living the life of the people, the young people, without knowing about them, on the contrary, deeply despising their principles, for instance their faith, are going to the people–not to study the people, but to teach them, to teach them haughtily, with contempt for them–a purely aristocratic lordly undertaking!’40 Others adopted more complex strategies. Notorious bandit chieftains, such as Stenka Razin or Yemelian Pugachev, were recast as ‘primitive rebels’, an indulgence that romantic Stalinists would subsequently apply to, say, Jesse James or Sicilian mafiosi. Since the peasants were religious in a primitive sort of way, some Populists endeavoured to create a new religion, a sort of hybrid of radical politics and socialised Christianity. So as to spread this new gospel, Jewish Populists converted to Christianity. However, the gospel recast as revolution invariably ran into the peasants’ simple faith in the inherent benevolence of the tsar, and their obdurate refusal to allow simple Christian precepts to be twisted this way or that by young students masquerading as ‘the people’. Peasants who knew about the injunction to render unto Caesar rejected Populist calls for tax boycotts. They used the student radicals’ cheap tracts as cigarette or lavatory paper.
Peasant responses to the radical message were best symbolised by the story of the two young former artillery officers who in the autumn of 1873, and folksily attired, tried to engage a peasant driving a sled: ‘We started to tell him that one should not pay taxes, that officials are robbers, and that the Bible preaches the need for a revolution. The peasant urged on his horse, we hastened our step. He put it into a trot, but we kept running, shouting about taxes and revolution…until we could not breathe’.41
About a thousand young Populists embarked on a ‘Pilgrimage to the People’, by setting up home among the not so gnarled objects of their earnest solicitations. There were some not inconsiderable handicaps, inevitable in this forerunner of late-twentieth-century ‘Revolutionary Campus Parties’. Many of the young women involved had never made a bed or brewed tea, having had servants to perform these functions. The only thing they were truly skilled at was high-flown talk. Many of them were rebelling against the constraints of their own severely patriarchal Orthodox or Jewish families.42 Some Populist grouplets went in for a confessional–therapeutic self-analysis, foreshadowing latterday hippy communes or Bolshevik self-criticism sessions. Those who tried to deskill themselves, by abandoning careers as doctors for joinery, encountered total incomprehension among peasants who knew the value of medical expertise. In some places, the pilgrims encountered not gritty sons and daughters of toil but people who were beginning to wear city clothes and were equipped with other accoutrements of modern urban life, many of them thanks to the entrepreneurship of former peasants who had transformed their villages into minor manufacturing centres. In fact social differentiation had advanced so rapidly in recent times that it was difficult to speak of ‘the people’, when the reality consisted of a richly diverse rural society, in which the more well-to-do former peasants employed others. Some Populists came to loathe the people they had attempted to understand, an experience common among those who tried to propagandise among the various religious sectarians, one group of whom fell into a trance, dancing and shouting, ‘He has come! He is here! He is with us!’ when a Populist tried to interest them in socialism. Such negative impressions were compounded whenever peasants handed over to the authorities Populists whose agitation was explicit.43
What seems as harmless as a nineteenth-century Anglican Oxbridge student mission to the slums of Bermondsey or Rotherhithe in south-east London was rendered dangerous by the clumsy response of the tsarist authorities who sent hundreds of young Populists to jail or Siberia. Mass arrests of Populists certainly created martyrs, but the conditions of their confinement or exile were so mild–partly owing to the victims’ age and rank–that the prisons themselves became breeding grounds for the next generation of terrorists. That is not, of course, a retrospective argument for more stringent conditions. New leaders emerged in the late 1870s, their credibility boosted by their success in springing prince Peter Kropotkin from the prison where he was awaiting trial. Land and Freedom was refounded in the late 1870s. Never numbering more than three to four hundred members and fellow travellers, Land and Freedom acknowledged the Populist ideal of peaceful agitation among the peasantry, but the improbability of this triggering general revolution increasingly inclined them to mindless acts of terrorism. Violence was a way of circumventing the frustrations the Populists had experienced in their efforts to radicalise an uncomprehending peasantry or industrial workers perplexingly preoccupied with upping their wages.
The responses of a government that exhibited signs of panic aided and abetted them. A minor demonstration outside Our Lady of Kazan cathedral in the capital, involving a handful of workers and a larger number of revolutionaries, resulted in unnecessarily harsh sentences for some of those arrested. In the south, members of Land and Freedom acted in ways that indicated a certain moral slippage worthy of Nechaev. In 1876 revolutionary conspirators decided to murder one of their own whom they suspected of being a police informer. Despite being clubbed half to death and having acid poured on his face, the victim survived to testify against his assailants. Those who organised this attack were not deterred from pressing ahead with a venture that relied upon gross deception. Disgruntled peasants in the neighbourhood of Kiev were given forged documents, allegedly from the tsar, encouraging them to murder the nobility and government officials. This fantastic scheme was nipped in the bud by the authorities. Again, the tsarist government managed to squander any moral capital when general Fyodor Trepov, the newly appointed governor of St Petersburg, ordered the flogging of a political prisoner who had had the effrontery to challenge him over some minor disciplinary dispute. This breach of the gentlemanly arrangements that had hitherto characterised treatment of upper-class political prisoners became a licence for acts of terrorism, and an alibi for the much wider body of educated and respectable opinion that routinely excused such activities. One of the very first victims was general Trepov himself, who in 1878 narrowly escaped death when a young woman called at his offices and shot him in the side at close range. It was indicative of the degeneration of public opinion that the subsequent trial managed to dilate at greater length on the sins of the victim of this assassination attempt rather than on probing the defence account of the character or motives of the would-be assassin, who incredibly enough was acquitted. By signalling that smart opinion, masquerading as society, approved of attempted murder, this trial opened the floodgates to further acts of terror, notably the 1878 stabbing of the head of the secret police force. Each assassination of progressively prominent targets, including a cousin of prince Kropotkin who was governor of Kharkov, emboldened them to go for the ultimate target. A second attack on Alexander II was made in April 1879 when an assassin fired four rounds at the tsar, who managed to escape unharmed. In the summer of that year, Land and Freedom held a ‘congress’ (there were twenty-one attenders) at which those who advocated violence broke away to form the People’s Will, while those who were faithful to the original Populist agenda decamped to form Black Partition, one of the direct ancestors of the Bolsheviks, although the latter owed much in spirit to the rival conspiratorial organisation.
Rather grandly, the People’s Will claimed to be a branch of a Russian Social Revolutionary Party, and to have an Executive Committee that steered the People’s Will. In fact, such a party did not exist, and the thirty or so members of the mysterious Executive Committee were all there were of People’s Will itself. Many of the cardinal tenets of previous revolutionary movements were quietly dropped by the leaders of People’s Will. There was no mention of either the peasants or of oppressed non-Russian nationalities. In other respects, the People’s Will anticipated the centralised discipline of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, it being no coincidence that he explicitly recommended People’s Will as a model of conspiratorial organisation. It demanded total and lifelong dedication among its adherents. People’s Will practised infiltration of otherwise innocuous organisations. It sought out prestigious fellow travellers among the artistic and intellectual elite, seeking to win them over through calls for elections and a constitutional assembly. It abandoned the Populist emphasis upon the peasant base, in favour of seeking to capture power. There was a newfound emphasis on the role of the Party, which ‘should take upon itself the task of overthrowing the regime, rather than waiting for the moment when the people undertake it by themselves’.
Terrorism was supposed to be a means of subverting public confidence in the stability and strength of the tsarist government, but in practice it was always liable to become an end in itself, as fanatic bombers, resembling the explosives-laden professor in Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent, went about their dastardly deeds. Both the quest to kill Alexander II, and there were seven attempts before the last succeeded in 1881, and the obsession with the most technologically ‘progressive’ means, involving dynamite or nitro-glycerine, gradually obliterated the more political aspects of the People’s Will programme. The destructive energy released by explosives, that is human body parts and things being punctured, ripped apart and hurled through the air, became an end in itself. As later terrorists have realised too, potential targets are at their most vulnerable when they are on the move. Apparently harmless husband-and-wife teams rented houses or secured licences to open businesses. Assassins were recruited to dig tunnels under the railway lines that carried the imperial train. The first such attempt resulted in the imperial train chugging unharmed over a massive bomb that failed to explode. The second, a month later, which involved digging a much longer tunnel, successfully derailed what turned out to be the wrong train, although fortunately no one was harmed. Failure with trains resulted in the adoption of the terrorists’ plan B.
Despite the discovery by the police of drawings of the layout of the Winter Palace, with an ‘X’ helpfully indicating the tsar’s dining-room, nothing was done by the authorities to check workmen entering the palace (where they often dossed down at night in the cellars) to conduct refurbishment. In this way, small quantities of explosives were smuggled in to make a very big bomb. On the evening of 5 February 1880 this exploded in the cellars, causing mayhem in the ground-floor guardroom situated immediately beneath the tsar’s dining-room. Eleven soldiers were killed and fifty-six wounded, a tragedy that in turn rippled through the lives of their families and dependants. Alexander II was elsewhere and his dining-room was unaffected by the blast. Three further assassination attempts that spring and summer came to nothing. Meanwhile, the police authorities began to gather significant intelligence about the Executive Committee and People’s Will, largely through the skilful interrogation of prisoners who, rather than having their fingers broken, were convinced by talk of imminent reform. Signs that the government was inclining towards some advisory form of elected assembly quickened the resolve of the terrorists to commit regicide so as to stymie even limited reform.
In December 1880 another apparently innocuous couple rented a basement where they set up a cheese shop, although, as customers noted, they knew little of cheese. Since the shop stood on the route the tsar took from the Winter Palace to the Hippodrome where he routinely inspected troops, at night teams of terrorists moved in to tunnel beneath the street. The plan was for the tsar to be blown up by a huge mine under his customary route. If this failed, then teams of bomb-throwers would flock to finish him off with nitro-glycerine bombs that had to be hurled within a range of one metre. The bomb-throwers would die too.44 The last line of attack was a final lone assassin armed with a knife. Incredibly, when the constant nocturnal comings and goings in the cheese shop led the police to despatch an officer masquerading as a sanitary inspector, the latter did not check the contents of what the proprietor claimed were barrels of cheese, although this did not normally come in such containers. At lunchtime on 1 March 1881, Alexander II set off to the Hippodrome, relieved it seems by his decision that morning to concede an elected advisory assembly. He took a route that bypassed the street with the sinister cheese shop in the basement. He spent forty minutes inspecting troops, before deciding, on the spur of the moment, to call on a cousin, via a route that took him to where three of the bomb-throwers had dispersed. The first bomb missed the tsar; its thrower was seized by the police. Alexander alighted to repeat his earlier foolhardy attempt to interview a captured failed assassin. As the tsar turned away from their desultory exchange of words, another assassin threw a bomb which exploded at his feet. The tsar cried, ‘Help me, help me,’ and ‘Cold, cold.’ He died fifty minutes later; his assassin died later that night.
IV ALTERNATIVES
The ‘new men’ had a vision of Russian society that was markedly at variance with that society’s complex reality, which included a widespread and keen appreciation of the supernatural. The Russian ‘soul’ may have originated as a (German) Romantic cliché, suggesting spiritual values allegedly lost in the materialistic west, but it also conveyed the existence of something beyond mere psychology.45 Pagan superstition permeated all levels of society, ranging from peasants who worshipped several natural gods in addition to the God of the Orthodox Church to gentlefolk and nobles with their ability to fuse Orthodoxy (or Lutheranism), a certain fashionable Voltairean scepticism, and belief in soothsaying and talismans.46 That is like saying, in an elaborate way, that Sloane Rangers, among others, often combine Anglican upbringings with faith in horoscopes and magic crystals.
The nineteenth century was a time of revival in the Russian Church, as it recovered its spiritual vitality. This was reflected in missionary work to indigenous peoples on both sides of the Bering Straits, and a renaissance of the monasteries that had been decimated by the westernising reforms of Elizabeth and Catherine the Great. One feature of this revival, namely the figure of the spiritual elder, who took on some of the wider social role of the stylites of late antiquity, has a direct bearing on our story.47
Dostoevsky had returned to Russia in 1871, becoming–despite continued police surveillance–editor of an ultra-conservative journal and increasingly lionised by the imperial family and Orthodox authorities. He felt himself to be maligned and misunderstood by the radical intelligentsia, writing, ‘People are trying with all their might to wipe me off the face of the earth for the fact that I preach God and national roots.’48 But he had since discovered that ‘the conservative part of our society is as rotten as any other; so many swine have joined its ranks’. While the heads of would-be revolutionaries swam with shallowly lethal imported solutions, the dinosaurs and dullards of the right were obsessed with policing, neglecting a moral malaise that Dostoevsky felt was promoting social breakdown in town and countryside, crime, drunkenness and the disintegration of the family. His often stridently nationalistic journalism, peppered with invective against Germans, Jews and Poles, did not reflect his core Christian convictions, nor his refusal to confuse Christianity with the mere defence of an immobilised ecclesiastical–political hierarchy and status quo.49
The complexities of these views emerge from his last great novel. Dostoevsky set The Brothers Karamazov in a provincial town, called Skotoprigonyevsk, whose order (such as it was) was being disturbed, not simply by what a modern sociologist might call the ‘dysfunctional’ Karamazov family, but by the swirl of ill-digested ideas stemming from the western European Englightenment, whose effect is to undermine traditional faith without providing an alternative. Reflecting his continued interest in inter-generational struggles, Dostoevsky explores a case of parricide, it being ambiguous (at least for the public in the novel) whether the degenerately sybaritic patriarch Fyodor Karamazov has been murdered by his sensualist elder son Mitia over a disputed inheritance or a young woman, or by an illegitimate lackey who has been infected by the intellectualised amoralism of the middle son Ivan by Fyodor’s second marriage.
Provocatively, Dostoevsky interrupted the fast flow of a sophisticated crime story by according the relative stillness of an Orthodox monastery (in which the youngest Karamazov brother is a monk) as much space as the courtroom drama with its extended exploration of the relationship between lawyers, morality and truth, on which theme the book ends. Fashionable opinion, parodied in the book, was that monks were ‘parasites, pleasure-seekers, sensualists, and insolent vagabonds’. Dostoevsky knew otherwise. His childhood had been spent in a deeply religious household, and every year he accompanied his parents on their pilgrimage to the St Sergius Trinity monastery outside Moscow.50 He also repaired to the famous monastery of Optina Pustyn’ to recover from the death of his three-year-old son.
At the heart of the novel is the elder Zosima, whose odyssey is recounted shortly after his death. In his youth Zosima had been an army officer, given over to carefree pursuits. A beautiful young woman whom he loved had married an older man. Zosima challenged her husband to a duel. On the eve of the duel, Zosima struck his orderly twice in the face, something he had not done before with such ferocity. During the night he repents of striking the servant: ‘how did I deserve that another man, just like me, the image and likeness of God, should serve me?’ He falls on the ground in front of the servant and begs his forgiveness. Despite running the risk of social ostracism, Zosima then deliberately shot wide during the duel with his rival:
‘Gentlemen,’ I cried suddenly from the bottom of my heart, ‘look at the divine gifts around us: the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep…’51
This passage, whose words inevitably forfeit their force in translation, gets very near to Dostoevsky’s own experience of Christianity. Zosima resigns his commission and enters a monastery. According to Zosima, ‘in their [the monks’] solitude they keep the image of Christ fair and undistorted, in the purity of God’s truth, from the time of the ancient fathers, apostles, and martyrs, and when the need arises they will reveal it to the wavering truth of the world. This is a great thought. This star will shine forth from the East.’
This ideal, at whose core was the jettisoning of ‘superfluous and unnecessary needs’, is contrasted with the atomised spiritual death that Dostoevsky saw in the world around him:
The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest and richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them’–this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder, for they have been given rights, but have not yet been shown any way of satisfying their needs…Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display…We see the same thing in those who are not rich, while the poor, so far, simply drown their unsatisfied needs and envy in drink. But soon they will get drunk on blood instead of wine, for they are being led to that…They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.
Dostoevsky’s own contrasting ideal is spoken as one of Zosima’s homilies, and illustrated by an encounter between Zosima the monk and his former orderly, who, now a settled married man, gives the wandering Zosima fifty kopecks for the monastery. This example of ‘a great human communion’ becomes Dostoevsky’s vision of the future:
I dream of seeing our future, and seem to see it clearly already: for it will come to pass that even the most corrupt of our rich men will finally be ashamed of his riches before the poor man, and the poor man, seeing his humility, will understand and yield to him in joy, and will respond with kindness to his gracious shame. Believe me, it will finally be so: things are heading that way. Equality is only in man’s spiritual dignity, and only among us will that be understood.
Anticipating derision from more secular-minded proponents of social justice, Dostoevsky counters with the argument that ‘They hope to make a just order for themselves, but, having rejected Christ, they will end by drenching the earth with blood, for blood calls to blood, and he who draws the sword will perish by the sword. And were it not for Christ’s covenant, they would annihilate one another down to the last two men on earth.’
Of course, Dostoevsky did not entirely neglect the question of how such precepts might be converted into practice or social and political structures. What he envisaged was a theocracy worthy of Joseph de Maistre, although with socialistic undertones that would have appalled the French ideologue. Earlier in the Brothers Karamazov, the monks had been exposed to Ivan Karamazov’s semi-scholarly ruminations on Church and state relations. Ivan argues that the pagan Roman state had incorporated the Church, investing the latter with characteristics that owed little or nothing to the Church as an eternal transcendental community. This reflected Dostoevsky’s deep-seated antipathy towards the Roman Catholic Church, a theme he treated at some length in Ivan’s story of the Grand Inquisitor.
Instead of the Church imperial, Dostoevsky argued that ‘every earthly state must eventually be wholly transformed into the Church and become nothing but the Church, rejecting whichever of its aims are incompatible with those of the Church’.52 The Church would absorb the whole of society, while shedding those hierarchical and ‘romanising’ accretions it had assumed through its own absorption by the imperial Constantinian state. In these altered circumstances, excommunication would be the gravest social sanction, more efficacious than the punishments of the time. Dostoevsky returned to these reflections in the account of Zosima’s life and teachings: ‘There can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty for the crime of the one standing before him.’53 The reawakening of a residual faith in the criminal would make Russia’s stringent penal system superfluous and might even reduce crime.
Where this could tend in a broader sense is tantalisingly left to the final scenes in the novel. One of its sub-plots concerns a poor child called Illyusha in whose fate, as the victim of cruel children, the younger Karamazov brother, the monk Alyosha, has taken a growing interest. When Illyusha sickens with tuberculosis, Alyosha persuades the other boys to include him in their fellowship. They bring the dying boy such gifts as a toy cannon. When Illyusha finally dies, his father collapses in crazed grief. The mother is mad already. By contrast, the twelve boys and Alyosha seem to grow in dignity, as Alyosha gathers them around the stone under which the father had wanted to bury Illyusha: ‘And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune–all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.’54 Regardless of whether one regards such scenes as saccharine or sincere, the implicit political message was clear enough. Responding to an admirer in the same letter we cited above, Dostoevsky remarked: ‘a new intelligentsia is being restored to life and is on the march, and it wants to be with the people. And the first sign of an inseparable contact with the people is respect and love for what the people in all their entirety love and respect more and above anything else in the world–that is, their God, and their faith’. The prophet was wrong, because the new intelligentsia was in fact inspired by hate, and its militant atheism would destroy the Orthodox Church and send the remaining faithful underground for several generations.55 Across western Europe at this time the Church was being challenged by the state and its liberal allies, which in some countries resulted in formal separation, the themes to which we turn next.