We started our printing office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a Little Russian, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month. So long as he had his plain dinner every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he cared for nothing more. ‘Going to the Turkish bath, John?’ I asked him once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown paper parcel under his arm. ‘No, removing to a new lodging,’ he replied in his melodious voice, with his usual smile.
Unfortunately, he knew no French. I used to write my manuscript to the best of my caligraphic ability—often thinking with regret of the time I had wasted in the writing classes of our good Ebert at school—but John would read a French manuscript in the most fantastical way, and would set up in type the most extraordinary words of his own invention; but as he ‘kept the space,’ and the length of his lines had not to be altered for making the corrections, there were only a dozen letters in each line to be changed, and we managed to do it pretty well. We were on excellent terms with him, and I soon learned some ‘comping’ under his direction. The paper was always ready in time to take the proofs to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we pedantically submitted them before going to print, and then one of us carted the formes to a printing office. Our Imprimerie Jurassienne soon became widely known for its publications, especially for its pamphlets, which Dumartheray insisted upon never selling at more than one penny. Quite a new style had to be worked out for such pamphlets. I must say that I often had the wickedness of envying those writers who could use any amount of pages for developing their ideas, and were allowed to make the well-known excuse of Talleyrand: ‘I have not had the time to be short.’ When I had to condense the results of several months’ work—upon, let me say, the origins of law—into a penny pamphlet, I had to give extra time in order to be short. But we wrote for the workers, and twopence for a pamphlet is often too much for them. The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in every other country in translations. My leaders from that period were edited later on, while I was in prison, by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘The Words of a Rebel,’ ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’
France was always the chief object of our aims, but ‘Le Révolté’ was severely prohibited in France, and the smugglers have so many good things to import into France from Switzerland that they did not care to endanger their trade by meddling with papers. I went once with them, crossing in their company the French frontier, and found that they were very brave and reliable men, but I could not induce them to undertake the smuggling in of our paper. All we could do was to send it in sealed envelopes to about a hundred persons in France. We charged nothing for postage, leaving it to the voluntary contributions of our subscribers to cover our extra expenses—which they always did—but we often thought that the French police were missing a splendid opportunity for ruining ‘Le Révolté,’ by subscribing to a hundred copies and sending no voluntary contributions.
For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves; but gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and finally joined us, giving after my arrest more life than ever to the paper. Reclus had invited me to aid him in the preparation of the volume of his monumental geography, which dealt with the Russian dominions in Asia. He knew Russian himself, but he thought that, as I was well acquainted with Siberia, I might aid him in a special way; and as the health of my wife was poor, and the doctor had ordered her to leave Geneva with its cold winds at once, we removed early in the spring of 1880 to Clarens, where Elisée Reclus lived at that time. We settled above Clarens, in a small cottage overlooking the blue waters of the lake, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background. A streamlet that thundered like a mighty torrent after rains, carrying away immense rocks in its narrow bed, ran under our windows, and on the slope of the hill opposite rose the old castle of Châtelard, of which the owners, up to the revolution of the burla papei (the burners of the papers) in 1799, levied upon the neighbouring serfs feudal taxes on the occasion of their births, marriages, and deaths. Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for ‘Le Révolté,’ among them the address ‘To the Young,’ which was spread in hundreds of thousands of copies in all languages. In fact, I worked out here the foundation of nearly all that I have written later on. Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else. At Clarens I had that contact with Elisée Reclus and Lefrançais, in addition to permanent contact with the workers, which I continued to maintain; and although I worked much for the geography, I was able to produce even more than usually for the anarchist propaganda.
VIII
In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute character. Several political trials had been brought before high courts—the trial of ‘the hundred and ninety-three,’ of ‘the fifty,’ of ‘the Dolgúshin circle,’ and so on—and in all of them the same thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory workers, preaching socialism to them; socialist pamphlets, printed abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt—in some vague, indeterminate way—against the oppressive economical conditions. In short, nothing was done that is not done in the socialist agitation in every other country of the world. No traces of conspiracy against the Tsar, nor even of preparations for revolutionary action, were found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that movement of the years 1870-78, I can confidently say that most of them would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by the side of the peasants and the factory-workers, to teach them, to collaborate with them, either individually or as members of the local self-government, in any of the thousand capacities in which an educated and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I knew the men and say so with full knowledge of them.
Yet the sentences were ferocious—stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labour for six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia for life, was a common sentence. There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labour and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker: that was all her crime. Another girl of fourteen, Miss Gukóvskaya, was transported for life to a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klärchen, to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Koválsky and his friends when they were going to be hanged—an act the more natural in Russia, even from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment in our country for common-law crimes, and the application of the death penalty to ‘politicals’ was then a novelty, a return to almost forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon drowned herself in the Yeniséi. Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and North-east Russia, where they had to starve on the government allowance of six shillings per month. There are no industries in such hamlets, and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.
As if to exasperate the youth still more, their condemned friends were not sent direct to Siberia. They were locked up first for a number of years, in central prisons, which made them envy the convict’s life in a Siberian mine. These prisons were awful indeed. In one of them—‘a den of typhoid fever,’ as the priest of that particular gaol said in a sermon—the mortality reached twenty per cent. in twelve months. In the central prisons, in the hard labour prisons of Siberia, in the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the strike of death, the famine strike, to protect themselves from the brutality of the warders, or to obtain conditions—some sort of work, or reading, in their cells—that would save them from being driven into insanity in a few months. The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes. At Khárkoff, the prostrated prisoners were tied up with ropes and fed artificially, by force.
Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth. There was a time when not a week passed without disclosing some new infamy of that sort, or even worse.
Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. ‘In other countries,’ they began to say, ‘men have the courage to resist. An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages. How can we tolerate them? Let us resist, arms in hand, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle.’ At Odessa, Koválsky and his friends met with revolver shots the gendarmes who came one night to arrest them.