Nicholas Chaykovsky
"The Father of the Russian Revolution."
bayonets;[21] where they hack babes in twain and hurl the bleeding pieces at their agonized mothers; where they hammer spikes thru the heads of old men;[22] where youths are exiled for life for reading a forbidden author; where vulgar officers command refined women to become their mistresses[23] or pay the penalty of having their families shipped to that side of the tear-drenched monument which says, "Asia;" where officials who plan pogroms are promoted, and those who protest are imprisoned[24] where tortures like pricking out the eyes[25] and striking the stomach are perpetrated; where virgin and matron are used to glut the lust of the cossack;[26] where such crimes are openly committed from dawn to dusk and thru the darkness of the black night, that at mere thought of them the suffering brain reels, and the horrified senses faint—in a land like this could a Peter Kropotkin remain Chamberlain to the Czarina?
Such rare-souled characters formed this Circle, that Kropotkin spent here the two happiest years of his life. To pass whole days with Nicholas Chaykovsky, to speak with the Kornilov sisters, to work with the young Kuprianov, to grasp the honest hand of Stepniak, to enter the room at night in top-boots after lecturing to peasants, and see sweet Sophia Perovskaya say severely, "How dare you bring so much mud in this house!"—what life could be intenser?
The Circle of Chaykovsky held its meetings in a little dwelling in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg. There was nothing about it to excite suspicion. The neighbors often saw the mistress attending to her business. They knew her to be an artisan's wife, an ordinary workingwoman. She wore a cotton dress and men's shoes, her head was covered with a fancy kerchief, and she trudged slowly along, carrying on her shoulders full pails of water from the Neva River.
But they did not know that she belonged to the highest aristocracy; that one of her ancestors was the morganatic husband of Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great; that her grandfather was Minister of Public Instruction; that her uncle was a renowned conqueror in Asia Minor; that her father was Governor General of St. Petersburg; that she herself had shone in the most fashionable drawing rooms of the capital, and that her name was Sophia Perovskaya,—a name which thrills the soul of every rebel to its center.