Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

Bakunin was more in unison with the troubled spirit of the times. While Herzen had been ripening in political wisdom under the ampler intellectual life to which his exile introduced him, Bakunin's twelve years' confinement had maddened him into a fanatic, and instead of curing him of revolutionary propensities, only fixed the idea of revolution in his mind like a mania. When he came to London a huge, haggard man, always excited, always talking, he used to speak of himself as a Prometheus unbound, and he was to live henceforth for the undoing of the powers and systems that were. He was never found without a group of conspirators and refugees of all shades and nationalities about him. With some reminiscences of socialistic philosophy remaining in the background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His socialism itself had grown less sane—it was no longer the anarchism of the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"—society not merely without governmental institutions, but without institutions of any kind; and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which all States and Churches and all institutions religious, political, judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destruction" are not articles of a rational creed, but they were propagated with almost preternatural energy by Bakunin. The work of exciting revolution and disorder of any kind was the main business of his life till he died in 1876. Others might play a waiting game, but for him the work of the revolutionist was revolution; and he ought to be incessantly promoting it, not by word only, but by deed, by an unremitting terrorism, by shooting a policeman when you can't reach a king, and destroying a Bastile if you cannot overturn an empire. In his "Revolutionary Catechism," written in cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at a Russian nihilist trial in 1871, he says (I quote the passage from M. de Laveleye):—

"The revolutionist is a man under a vow. He ought to have no personal interests, no business, no sentiments, no property. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive interest, with one thought and one passion: the Revolution.... He has only one aim, one science: destruction. For that and nothing but that he studied mechanics, physics, chemistry, and medicine. He observes with the same object, the men, the characters, the positions and all the conditions of the social order. He despises and hates existing morality. For him everything is moral that favours the triumph of the Revolution. Everything is immoral and criminal that hinders it.... Between him and society there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be prepared to die, to bear torture, and to kill with his own hands all who obstruct the revolution. So much the worse for him if he has in this world any ties of parentage, friendship, or love! He is not a true revolutionist if these attachments stay his arm. In the meantime he ought to live in the middle of society, feigning to be what he is not. He ought to penetrate everywhere, among high and low alike; into the merchant's office, into the church, into the Government bureaux, into the army, into the literary world, into the secret police, and even into the Imperial Palace.... He must make a list of those who are condemned to death, and expedite their sentence according to the order of their relative iniquities.... A new member can only be received into the association by a unanimous vote, and after giving proofs of his merit not in word but in action. Every 'companion' ought to have under his hand several revolutionists of the second or third degree, not entirely initiated. He ought to consider them part of the revolutionary capital placed at his disposal, and he ought to use them economically, and so as to extract the greatest possible profit out of them.... The most precious element of all are women, completely initiated, and accepting our entire programme. Without their help we can do nothing."

Bakunin naturally turned his first attention to his own country, and the subsequent development of Russian affairs show sufficiently distinct signs of his ideas and influence.

In 1865 he sent a young medical student named Netchaïeff to Moscow, to work among the students there, and Netchaïeff had, by 1869, established a number of secret societies, which he linked together under the name of the Russian Branch of the International Working Men's Association. This organization was not very numerous—no Russian secret society is—but in 1873 as many as eighty-seven persons were brought to trial for connection with it, and in 1866 one of its members, a working man called Karakasoff, who was suffering from an incurable disease, made the first attempt on the life of the Czar—an event which had most important effects on the course of Russian politics. It rang out the era of reform, and rang in the era of reaction. The popular concessions which the Czar had already given he now began to withdraw. The people had never got, as they expected, an independent judiciary—perhaps in an autocratic country a judiciary independent of the executive is hardly possible—but they had enjoyed some pretence of public trial, and now that pretence was done away, and Karakasoff and his companions were not brought before the court at all, but tried and condemned by an extraordinary commission, with a military officer of approved ferocity at its head. Administrative trial and administrative condemnation became again the regular rule in Russia; and though these things were borne in the days of Nicholas as almost matters of course, they were now deeply resented as fresh invasions of right and direct breaches of imperial promises. Then the bodies to which a certain amount of the local government of the country, the management of roads, schools, poor, health, etc., had been entrusted, were obstructed in the exercise of their powers, or gradually deprived of their powers altogether, and forced into complete dependence on the imperial executive. The students at the universities began to be interfered with in their sick and benefit societies and their reading circles; their studies in the class-rooms were restricted to what was thought a safe routine; and even their private lives and motions were watched with an exasperating espionage. People felt the hand of the despot pressing back upon them everywhere, and they felt it with a most natural and righteous recoil. This reactionary policy, which has continued ever since—this return to the hated old methods of arbitrary and repressive rule—produced, as was inevitable, deep and general discontent at the very moment when the great historical measure of serf emancipation was desolating the families of the landed gentry, province after province; and when the execution of the Emancipation Act was completed in 1870, Russian society was already quivering with dangerous elements of revolt.

From that time evidences of an active revolutionary propaganda multiplied rapidly every year. In 1871 and 1872 the writings of the German socialists were translated and ran into great favour. Even of Marx's far from popular work, "Capital," a large edition was eagerly bought up, and ladies of position baptized their children in the name of Lassalle. Secret societies were discovered both north and south. From 1873 to 1877 nihilist arrests, nihilist prosecutions, nihilist conflicts with the police, were the order of the day, till at length, in 1878, the young girl, Vera Sassulitch, fired the shot at the head of the Russian police which began that long vendetta between the revolutionists and the executive, in which so many officials perished, and eventually, in 1881, after many unsuccessful attempts, the Czar himself was so cruelly assassinated.

The ardent youth of Russia, who, in 1861, were still giving themselves to the work of Sunday schools and reading circles, were, in 1871, throwing their careers away to go out, like the first apostles, without scrip or two coats, and propagate among the rude people of the provinces the doctrines of modern revolutionary socialism, and by 1881 had become absorbed in sheer terrorism, in avenging the official murder of comrades without trial by the revolutionary murder of officials, in contriving infernal plots and explosions, and trying vainly to cast out devils by the prince of devils.

Stepniak attributes the impetus which the socialist agitation received in 1871 to the impression produced in Russia by the Paris Commune; but it would perhaps be more correct simply to ascribe it to the exertions of two active Russian revolutionists, who were themselves associated with the Communard movement, and who happened to enjoy at this period unusual facilities of communication with the younger mind of Russia. One was Bakunin, who had himself organized an insurrection at Lyons on the principles of the Commune six months before the outbreak at Paris in March, 1871; and the other was Peter Lavroff, the present Nestor of Russian nihilism, who actually took part in the Paris Commune itself. Lavroff, who had been a colonel in the Russian army, and professor in the military college of St. Petersburg, was compromised in the attempt of Karakasoff in 1866 and administratively banished to Archangel; but, as happens so singularly often in Russia, he escaped in 1869, and lived to edit a revolutionary journal in Zurich, and play for a time no inconsiderable part in making trouble in Russia. At present, communications between the active revolutionists who are at work in Russia and their predecessors who have withdrawn to Western Europe are entirely interrupted; but they were still abundant twenty years ago. Partly in consequence of the reactionary educational policy of the Government, young Russians flocked at that time to Switzerland for their education, and were there conveniently indoctrinated into the new gospel of the International. Bakunin and Lavroff were both in Zurich, and in the year 1872 there were 239 Russian students, male and female, in Zurich alone. These young people were, of course, in continual intercourse with the older refugees. Bakunin and Lavroff both held stated and formal lectures on socialism and revolution, which were always succeeded by open and animated discussions of the subject treated in them. A little later there were, according to Professor Thun, four distinct groups among the Russian revolutionists in Zurich, some of them caused by personal quarrels. But from the first there were always two, one of whom swore by Bakunin, and the other by Lavroff.

Bakunin was an anarchist—an "amorphist" even, as we have seen—and he believed in the propaganda of deeds. Every little village, he thought, should make its own revolution; and if it could not make a revolution, it might always be making a riot, or an explosion, or a fire, or an assassination of some official, or something else to raise panic or confusion. All this seemed to Lavroff and his friends to be unmitigated folly. They too believed in revolution; but in their view revolution, to be successful, must be organized and simultaneous; it must, above all, first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it—that is, an itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society would eventually be able to do without any central authority, but not at first, nor for a considerable time, the length of which could not now be more precisely determined. In this Lavroff and his party stood much nearer the Social Democrats of Germany than other Russian nihilists, and they have come nearer still since then. They have cast off the Russian commune, of which the early nihilists made so great an idol. They see that it is an old-world institution doomed to dissolution, and rapidly undergoing the process.

The two tendencies—diverging both in principle and in tactics—appeared in Russia as well as Zurich. At first the more peaceful method prevailed. Lavroff's idea of "going into the people" was the enthusiasm of the hour, and brought upon the scene the typical nihilist missionary—the young man of good birth who laid down station and prospects, learnt a manual trade, browned his hands with tar and his face by smearing it with butter and lying in the sun, put on the peasant's sheepskin, and then, with a forged pass, procured at the secret nihilist pass factory, and a few forbidden books in his wallet, set off "without road" to be a peasant with peasants, if by any means he could win them over to the cause; and the still more remarkable young woman who went through a marriage ceremony to obtain the right of independent action, and the moment the ceremony was over, left father and mother and husband and all in order to work among the peasants of the Volga as a teacher or nurse, and live on milk and groats according to Tchernycheffsky's prescription in "What is to be Done?". Stepniak justly remarks that "the type of propagandist of the first lustre of 1870-80 was religious rather than revolutionary. His hope was socialism, his God the people. Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, he firmly believed that from one day to the other the revolution was about to break out, as in the middle ages people believed at certain periods in the approach of the day of judgment." ("Underground Russia," p. 30.)