V—"I LANGUISHED FOR EIGHT YEARS IN A DEAD CITY"
In 1885 I was again sent on the rights of a settler beyond the Baikal, in the dead city of Selenginsk, where I spent eight of the most sad years of my life. The naked steppe, the nailed-up cabins and the tireless trailing of the police became my lot. I was given neither the rights of a peasant nor a passport for travel in Siberia. And the heart burned with a passionate desire to escape, to renew the struggle with the enraged foe and take revenge for the innocently destroyed powers for good—the daughters and sons of our motherland. I sought, attempted, fought against obstacles, but all in vain. The steppe beyond the Baikal, the moundless Mongolian steppe, and, on the north, the inaccessible Baikal were the severe allies of the guard with which the authorities had surrounded me. There was no railroad nor steamship connection with the outside world. Right there then, in lifeless Selenginsk, I languished for eight whole years, languished like a hawk in a cage. All alone, ever yearning, I would go out into the steppe and in a loud voice pour my tempestuous heart, longing for freedom, into space.
There was not a day on which I did not think of escaping, and I was always ready for any risk and peril, clinging to the littlest possibility to get away, but all in vain. No one, absolutely no one, promised any help. All those in whom it was possible to confide considered any attempt to escape foredoomed. My soul ached. And only the thought of my comrades—convicts who were sent to the Yakutsk huts, only the thought of their suffering made me forget my own. The eight empty years of my life in Selenginsk have remained all through my life a gray void, eating up the warm feelings of a warm heart. I filled my time with work, so as to be able to send my earnings to the dark prisons, snowbound wastes, to the hungry, forgotten comrades. I read, studied, in order to know how mankind lived, and how far or near was the possibility of transforming it into that "intelligent being" with whom it would be joyful to live. "Have patience," I would tell myself in the moments of keen grief; "be patient, endure to the end; you will get what you are waiting for."
In 1890, after living for four years on the rights of a peasant, I finally received a passport to travel all over Siberia, and on the same day I departed from the suffocating place so as to gradually approach the boundary of European Russia as my term was nearing its end. My health was much undermined by the severe trials I had undergone in solitariness. Anæmia and strong neuralgia had tormented me in Selenginsk. But the inherited vigor of the organism soon returned to me, and the last four years of my life in Siberia, spent in journeying from town to town, I succeeded in having many conversations with young and mature people—succeeded in making allies of some of the leading citizens of Siberia. And when in September, 1896, I returned to Russia I found there many students of both sexes whom I taught in Siberia the theories and the urgency of regenerating the old watchwords. They soon tackled the work of liberation, and many of them remain loyal to this date to our principles.
VI—"WHEN I CAME BACK FROM SIBERIA"
Again I arrived in Russia in September. But upon my arrival I encountered a new movement, which was rapidly conquering a place for itself. Marxism was taking hold of, capturing, the minds of the youth, and the old fighters were regarded as dead forces. But faith in the force of personality, faith in the healthy strength of the people, a knowledge of their aims and needs lent so much firm confidence to my energy that, without hesitating a moment, I began to do some practical work, which had ripened in my mind as long before as the celebrated trial, in 1878, when I declared to my judges that "I have the honor of belonging to the Russian socialistic and revolutionary party, and consequently do not recognize the authority of the Czar's courts over me."
Eighteen years passed after that, and my adherence to the party of socialism and revolutionism lived in me as freshly and ardently as in the days of my arrest and trial. Confidence that the peasant masses, these pillars of the state government, will obey the voice of their friends and will not be slow to follow their leaders—this confidence urged me to hasten the consolidation of the various forces likely to join the Social Revolutionary party, as it has been christened from its very beginning.
It is necessary to bear in mind that from Siberia I came back to Russia all alone. I did not even have the addresses of the old comrades who remained in safety in the gloomy folds of Alexander III's reign. And it took considerable time, care and patience before my tireless but modest little journeys about Russia netted definite results as to acquaintance with people and opportunities. The readiness of the peasants to join the party became ever clearer, and on the fourth year of endeavor the party loudly proclaimed its existence, and in the fifth year all the separate committees recognized one centre. Both the increase in membership and growth in activity attracted the savage attention of the Czar's government.
In 1903 the party suffered an enormous wreck. Wholesale arrests and searches robbed it of many of its leading workers, of its best printing shops and stores of literature. It was necessary to replace all that. By this time the work of the party had developed and grown strong abroad, thanks to our talented and zealous emigrants, who bent all their energies for the publication of party organs and popular books and pamphlets.
In order to recall this youth to immediate activities at home, in Russia, I went abroad for the first time. In May, 1903, I boarded a steamer in Odessa and accompanied by an experienced contrabandist-intellectual, went, by way of Rumania, Hungary and Vienna to Geneva, Switzerland, where there centred the group of the party workers who were scattered in Paris, London and Switzerland. At this conference we were fully joined by the old fighters of the past '70s, Shishko, Volkhovskoy, Lazaroff, Tchaikovsky.