The Proud Tower (21 page)

In Russia the tradition of revolution was old and deep and as full of despair as of hope. Each generation turned up new fighters in the long war between rebel and despot. In 1887, the year the Haymarket Anarchists were hanged, five students of the University of St. Petersburg were hanged for the attempted murder by bomb of Alexander III. Their leader, Alexander Ulyanov, justified the use of terror at his trial as the only method possible in a police state. He was one of three brothers and three sisters, all revolutionaries, of whom a younger brother, Vladimir Ilyich, swore revenge, changed his last name to Lenin, and went forth to work for revolution.

Increasing unrest during the nineties encouraged the revolutionists to believe that the time was ripening for insurrection. A new Czar who was that most dangerous of rulers, a weak autocrat, marked his accession as Nicholas II in 1895 by flatly dismissing all pleas for a constitution as “nonsensical dreams,” thereby causing democrats to despair and extremists to exult. In the cities, strikes by newly industrialized workers followed one upon another. Over all, exerting a mysterious intangible pull, like the moon upon the tides, loomed the approaching moment of the end of the century. There was a sense of an end and a beginning, of “a time to break.”

All the groups of discontent felt the need to prepare for a time of action, to gather their strength in parties and to state their program. But there was conflict between the followers of Marxism, with its hardbitten insistence on organization and training, and the inheritors of the Narodniki tradition, who believed in spontaneous revolution brought on by some deed of terror. As a result, two parties took shape in the years 1897 and 1898, the Marxist Social-Democratic party on the one hand, and on the other, the Populist Socialist-Revolutionaries, whose various groups merged into a definitive party in 1901.

In so far as they accepted organization as a party, the Socialist-Revolutionaries were not Anarchists of the true breed, but they shared the Anarchists’ belief that deeds of terror could precipitate revolution. Like them they saw revolution as a sunburst on the horizon under whose benevolent beams the future would take care of itself. The public’s identification of Anarchists with Russians stemmed partly from their addiction to the bomb, which, ever since the killing of the Czar in 1881, seemed peculiarly a Russian weapon, and partly from the unconscious syllogism: Russians were revolutionists; Anarchists were revolutionists; ergo, Anarchists were Russians. Orthodox Anarchists, of whom there were small groups who published Russian-language journals in Geneva and Paris, and took their inspiration from Kropotkin, were not a significant force inside Russia.

In 1902 Maxim Gorky put into
The Lower Depths
all the woe, the wretchedness and the despair of Russia. “Man must live for something better!” cries the drunken cardsharp in the play, “something better,” and searching for words, for meaning, for a philosophy, he can only repeat, “something better.” Toward that end, in the years 1901–03 the Terror Brigade of the Socialist-Revolutionaries assassinated the Minister of Education, Bogolepov; the Minister of Interior, Sipiagin, who directed the Secret Police; and the Governor of Ufa, Bogdanovitch, who had put down a miners’ strike in the Urals with particular brutality. On July 15, 1904, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, they disposed of a second Minister of Interior, Wenzel von Plehve, the most hated man in Russia. An ultrareactionary, Plehve was if anything even firmer than the Czar in the belief that autocracy must be kept unimpaired by the slightest concession to democratic processes. His sole policy was to smash every possible source of antipathy to the regime. He arrested revolutionaries, suppressed the orthodox “old believers,” restricted the
zemstvos
, or village governments, victimized the Jews, forcibly Russified the Poles, Finns and Armenians and, as a result, increased the enemies of Czarism, and convinced them of the need for a final change.

A method he favored for diverting popular discontent was expressed to a colleague in the words, “We must drown the revolution in Jewish blood.” Stirred up by his agents, watched tolerantly by the police, Russian citizens of Kishinev during the Passover of 1903 burst into a frenzy of violence against the eternal scapegoat, killing and beating, burning and plundering homes and shops, desecrating synagogues, tearing the sacred Torah from the arms of a white-bearded rabbi whose horror at seeing it defiled by Gentiles was shortened by his death under their clubs and boots. The Kishinev pogrom not only resounded around the world but succeeded in penetrating under the skin of the leader of the Terror Brigade, Evno Azev, who was at the same time an agent of the Secret Police and also happened to be a Jew. Azev took care not to inform on the plan for the assassination of Plehve which duly took place. It made an enormous impression upon everyone in Russia as a terrible blow against the system of which Plehve was the incarnation. So ominous did it seem that the assassin was condemned to hard labour in Siberia for life instead of to death by Plehve’s successor, Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, in the hope that a mild policy might accomplish something.

Six months later, in January, 1905, occurred the massacre in front of the Winter Palace known as “Bloody Sunday,” when troops fired on a crowd of workingmen who had come to petition the Czar for a constitution. About one thousand were killed. The terrorists now made plans to assassinate the Czar and his uncles, the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was held responsible for the massacre, and the Grand Duke Sergei, who was said to be the person with the greatest influence on the Czar. As Governor-General of Moscow, Sergei was known for the merciless brutality of his rule, for a capricious and domineering character and extremes of autocratic temperament bordering on derangement. According to an English observer, he was “conspicuous for his cruelty and renowned, even among the Russian aristocracy, for the peculiarity of his vices.” Although in the pay of the police, Azev had to allow the Brigade enough successes to satisfy them and to maintain his position as their chief, without which he would have been of far less value to the police. In February, 1905, Sergei was blown up with a bomb thrown by a young revolutionary named Kaliaev who was left standing alive in the midst of the debris, in his old blue coat with a red scarf, his face bleeding, but otherwise unhurt. All that was left of the Grand Duke and of his carriage and horses was “a formless mass of fragments about eight or ten inches high.” That evening when the Czar heard the news he came down to dinner as usual and did not mention the murder, but, according to a guest who was present, “after dinner the Czar and his brother-in-law amused themselves by trying to edge one another off the long narrow sofa.”

At his trial in April, 1905, Kaliaev, thin, haggard and with eyes sunken in their sockets, said to the judges, “We are two warring camps,… two worlds in furious collision. You, the representatives of capital and oppression; I, one of the avengers of the people.” Russia was in the midst of war, outside against the Japanese, and inside against her own people, who were in open revolt. “What does all this mean? It is the judgment of history upon you.” When sentence of death was pronounced, Kaliaev said he hoped his executioners would have the courage to carry it out openly and publicly. “Learn to look the advancing revolution straight in the eye,” he told the Court. But he was hanged, dressed in black, after midnight in the prison yard and buried beneath the prison wall.

In October the Revolution came; propaganda of the deed, in the murders of von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, had helped to excite the nerves of the masses toward the point of insurrection. Neither organized nor led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social-Democrats or Anarchists, it was the spontaneous revolution Bakunin had believed in and did not live to see. In accordance with Syndicalist theory it erupted out of a general strike by the workers, and during the regime’s first fright, succeeded in forcing the concession of a constitution and a Duma. Although these were subsequently withdrawn, and the Revolution, when the regime had recovered its nerve, ferociously suppressed, it heartened the Syndicalists’ belief in “direct action” through the general strike, and re-enforced the movement of Anarchists into the industrial unions. In Russia the Terror Brigade accomplished several more deaths before it disintegrated under the shock of the exposure of Azev in 1908. By the time the Premier, Stolypin, was assassinated in 1911 the half-lunatic world of the Romanov twilight had so darkened that it was never clear whether the assassins were genuine revolutionaries or
agents provocateurs
of the police.

However self-limited its acts, however visionary its dream, Anarchism had terribly dramatized the war between the two divisions of society, between the world of privilege and the world of protest. In the one it shook awake a social conscience; in the other, as its energy passed into Syndicalism, it added its quality of violence and extremism to the struggle for power of organized labour. It was an idea which drew men to follow it but because of its built-in paradox could not draw them together into a group capable of concerted action. It was the last cry of individual man, the last movement among the masses on behalf of individual liberty, the last hope of living unregulated, the last fist shaken against the encroaching State, before the State, the party, the union, the organization closed in.

3
End of a Dream
THE UNITED STATES: 1890–1902

3
End of a Dream

I
N THE
United States on the opening of Congress in January, 1890, a newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives was in the Chair. A physical giant, six feet three inches tall, weighing almost three hundred pounds and dressed completely in black, “out of whose collar rose an enormous clean-shaven baby face like a Casaba melon flowering from a fat black stalk, he was a subject for a Frans Hals, with long white fingers that would have enraptured a Memling.” Speaking in a slow drawl, he delighted to drop cool pearls of sarcasm into the most heated rhetoric and to watch the resulting fizzle with the bland gravity of a New England Buddha. When a wordy perennial, Representative Springer of Illinois, was declaiming to the House his passionate preference to be right rather than President, the Speaker interjected, “The gentleman need not be disturbed; he will never be either.” When another member, notorious for ill-digested opinions and a halting manner, began some remarks with, “I was thinking, Mr. Speaker, I was thinking …” the Chair expressed the hope that “no one will interrupt the gentleman’s commendable innovation.” Of two particularly inept speakers, he remarked, “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” It was said that he would rather make an epigram than a friend. Yet among the select who were his chosen friends he was known as “one of the most genial souls that ever enlivened a company,” whose conversation, “sparkling with good nature, was better than the best champagne.” He was Thomas B. Reed, Republican of Maine, aged fifty. Already acknowledged after fourteen years in Congress as “the ablest running debater the American people ever saw,” he would, before the end of the session, be called “the greatest parliamentary leader of his time,… far and away the most brilliant figure in American politics.”

Although his roots went back to the beginning of New England, Reed was not nurtured for a political career by inherited wealth, social position or landed estate. Politics in America made no use of these qualities, and men who possessed them were not in politics. Well-to-do, long-established families did not shoulder—but shunned—the responsibilities of government. Henry Adams’ eldest brother, John, “regarded as the most brilliant of the family and the most certain of high distinction,” who made a fortune in the Union Pacific Railroad, “drew himself back” from government, according to his brother. “He had all he wanted; wealth, children, society, consideration; and he laughed at the idea of sacrificing himself in order to adorn a Cleveland Cabinet or get cheers from an Irish mob.” This attitude was not confined to the rather worn-out Adamses. When the young Theodore Roosevelt announced his intention of entering politics in New York in 1880, he was laughed at by the “men of cultivated and easy life” who told him politics were “low” and run by “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors and the like,” whom he would find “rough, brutal and unpleasant to deal with.”

The abdication of the rich was born out of the success of the American Revolution and the defeat of Hamilton’s design to organize the State in the interests of the governing class. Jefferson’s principles and Jackson’s democracy had won. The founding fathers and the signers of the Declaration had been in the majority men of property and position, but the very success of their accomplishment ended by discouraging men of their own kind from participating in government. With the establishment of universal manhood suffrage, men of property found themselves counting for no more at the polls than the common man; being far outnumbered they retired from the combat. No President after the first six came from a well-established family (unless the Harrisons could be considered to so qualify). Retreating to the comfort of their homes and the pursuits of their class, they left government increasingly to hard-driving newcomers pushing up from below. Such energies as they had they devoted to making money in banking and trade, rather than from the land which they gradually abandoned. The great estates of the Dutch-descended patroons of New York declined first; the Southern plantations went with the Civil War; Boston’s old families remained active and prosperous but on the whole aloof from government. The proud “Hub” had produced no President after the first two Adamses. “The most valuable, most moderate, able and cultivated part of the population,” wrote Emerson, in his essay on Politics, “is timid and merely defensive of property.”

Forty years later the Englishman James Bryce was struck by the “apathy among the luxurious classes and fastidious minds,” and devoted a whole chapter in
The American Commonwealth
to “Why the Best Men Do Not Go into Politics.” They lacked a sense of noblesse oblige. The “indifference of the educated and wealthy classes” was due partly, he thought, to the lack of respect in which they were held by the masses. “Since the masses do not look to them for guidance, they do not come forward to give it.”