The World That Never Was (34 page)

‘A Death for a Death,’ proclaimed the pamphlet already rolling off the secret presses, and in his memoir, published only a few years after the event, Kravchinsky would write that the assassination had ushered in the era of the ravening, moral superman. ‘The terrorist is noble, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero. From the day he swears in the depths of his heart to free the people and the country, he knows he is consecrated to death…And already he sees that enemy falter, become confused, cling desperately to the wildest means, which can only hasten his end.’

As brutal gestures of Slavic resolve, the attacks provoked widespread exultation among the exile community in Switzerland, and their perpetrators were lionised. When Zasulich returned to Geneva, smuggled out by Klements after avoiding rearrest for several weeks by means of concealment in an apartment over Dr Veimar’s orthopaedic clinic in St Petersburg, Henri Rochefort himself was on hand to offer assistance. Having fed and housed her, however, the French anarchists revealed an ulterior motive: arrangements were already under way for her to travel to Paris, where it was planned that her celebrity status would draw a crowd of several thousand well-wishers, who might then be manipulated into a confrontation with the police.

The anarchists of western Europe longed to gild their own abortive endeavours through association with their accomplished Russian colleagues, but Zasulich was reluctant to be drawn into their game. Remaining in Switzerland, she followed Klements’ example, filling her days with long mountain walks; the arrival of news of a friend’s execution or other sorrow from the motherland meant a day on paths not listed in the Baedeker guide, with only the occasional goatherd or lowing, bell-tolling cow for company. Before long, though, the mood would be temporarily lightened by Kravchinsky’s reappearance, still wearing the Napoleonic beard and grand style of the fictitious Georgian Prince Vladimir Ivanovich Jandierov that he had been using as his disguise in St Petersburg, ever since the assassination of Mezentsev. Ignoring the risk of arrest, Kravchinsky had been determined to stay in hiding in Russia. It had taken trickery on the part of his colleagues to persuade him that he would be of greater use to them abroad, where his wife had given birth to a premature baby who had since died.

‘Just sometimes, when reminiscing, he philosophises about love with us and teaches Vera and me the wise rules of coquetterie, by which you can make someone fall helplessly in love with you,’ wrote the other woman with whom Kravchinsky shared the mountain chalet. Yet, even the mountains could not distract Vera Zasulich from the true path for long, and within a couple of years of her arrival in Switzerland she would be immersed in the discussions that led to the foundation of the first Russian group with an explicitly Marxist agenda, the Emancipation of Labour; Kravchinsky, though more circumspect about such affiliations, continued to share her sympathies. But the fact that members of the Russian movement had distinct priorities of their own was no reason for the anarchists in the West to despair: not when the dramatic impact of the new Russian tactics was being felt too by the rulers of their own countries.

Perhaps inspired by the violent Russian spring and summer of 1878, a spate of assassination attempts closer to home now supplied the multinational exiles gathered in Switzerland with fresh inspiration. At the beginning of May, a young tinsmith with anarchist connections, Emil Hoedel, fired a pistol somewhat haphazardly at Kaiser Wilhelm as his carriage travelled along Unter den Linden in Berlin. Hoedel’s motivation appears to have been a thirst for personal fame as much as idealism, but an apartment overlooking the same grand boulevard had been rented by Dr Karl Nobiling, an intellectual loner with a background in the minor German gentry and a more coherent sense of purpose: the decapitation of the social hierarchy as a prelude to revolution. Only a month after
Hoedel’s attack, Nobiling aimed a shotgun at the kaiser’s head and discharged both barrels, leaving Wilhelm clinging to life, his face and arms lacerated by twenty-eight pieces of lead. Within the same year, Spain and Italy experienced failed attempts on their new young kings: Alfonso XII and Umberto I. Both were acts of class war, and in the latter case, the actions of the would-be assassin, Giovanni Passannante, demonstrated an almost ritualistic fervour: approaching the king’s open carriage as it passed through Naples, he had lunged at him with a dagger drawn from the folds of a flag on which were the words ‘Long Live the International Republic’.

Faced with such acts, even Switzerland had to reconsider its tolerance of revolutionaries. In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, Prussia had mobilised its troops on the Swiss border, insisting that the Swiss government render up those fugitives to whom it had granted political asylum. Germany’s methods of persuasion in 1878 were subtler, though with the threat of harsher measures implicit, up to and including military action against its small neighbour. Switzerland needed a sacrificial victim. When Paul Brousse rashly used the December edition of his newspaper
L’Avant-Garde
to argue that it was the overly scrupulous methods employed by Nobiling and Passannante that had caused them to fail, when they should simply have thrown bombs at their targets without any care for the accompanying courtiers, the Swiss authorities were quick to act. His imprisonment and, latterly, expulsion were offered up to propitiate their angry neighbours.

In Germany itself, the crackdown was severe. The kaiser had survived the attack, but while rumours of his death were still circulating Chancellor Bismarck seized the national emergency he had long sought as a pretext for a draconian crackdown on Germany’s socialists. Martial law was declared, and the city garrisoned, with the Tempelhof field converted to an army encampment. Censorship was introduced, with upwards of 1,000 books and periodicals outlawed; 1,500 suspects were arrested and others forced to flee abroad. Laws were speedily passed to suppress the burgeoning Social Democratic Party, which already boasted five million members. Stripped of parliamentary immunity, Johann Most, one of its most vociferous members, was given twenty-four hours to leave the country, prompting his ignominious rush to Hamburg, and thence to London.

In comparison to the term ‘anarchist’, the phrase ‘propaganda by deed’ may initially have struck those who heard it as somewhat functional, but
the events of 1878 had quickly lent it the character of a sinister euphemism. The blithe heroism it seemed to imply now began to appear more like a violent conspiracy to commit the terrorist outrages with which anarchism would soon become all but synonymous in the public mind. From exile, Johann Most would be at the forefront of those calling for vengeance against the oppressive powers of state and capital.

Although four years younger than Kropotkin, Most too was more closely associated with a slightly earlier radical generation than many of Bakunin’s other political heirs. Moreover, having been won over to Marxism during a visit to a workers’ festival in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1874, he was perhaps still best known at this time as a populariser of Marx’s philosophy. His earlier experiences, however, suggest a man for whom the anti-authoritarian International would always have offered a more natural home, and reveal the psychological seeds of his violent passion.

‘Evils lurks deep in the breast of the child, but the whip drives it out,’ Most’s father would reassure his young son after administering frequent and ferocious beatings. Both the psychological and the physical scars of his mistreatment were enduring. Crude surgery to excise an abscess on the boy’s cheek and jaw – itself the result of a punitive spell spent sleeping in a freezing storeroom – left half his face grotesquely twisted, and Most soon discovered in the injustices of society an insistent echo of those who had blighted his own childhood. ‘I wanted neither to lead “the good life”,’ wrote Most of his young self, ‘nor to earn a livelihood in the usual sense. I had to do what I did because in my brain an obsession pounded:
The Revolution must happen!’

Thwarted in his ambition to be an actor by his facial disfigurement, Most grew a thick beard and transferred his aptitude for melodrama on to the political stage. As a prominent socialist in Vienna in the late 1860s, his rabble-rousing address to a mass demonstration on the eve of a general strike had incurred a sensational charge of high treason. ‘If you judge such constructive criminality and such justifiable malefaction and such reasonable transgression wrong, then punish me,’ Most declaimed to the courtroom: the gavel banged out a sentence of five years, but he was soon amnestied and deported. There followed a series of picaresque adventures as he wrong-footed the Prussian police time and again, his preaching of class war finally winning him election to the Reichstag and, with it, immunity from prosecution. It was a privilege he tested to the full during the war against France in 1870 and its aftermath, urging his supporters to replace the bunting that festooned the industrial town of
Chemnitz in celebration of the Prussian victory at Sedan with tax receipts, and openly acclaiming the Commune. Bringing the same instinct for confrontation to the congresses of 1876 and 1877 in Switzerland, he was soon recognised as one of the most vociferous proponents of propaganda by deed: a linchpin, the police services of Europe mistakenly thought, of a tightly coordinated international conspiracy.

There was certainly a pattern of connections for suspicious eyes to discover, if they so chose. Kravchinsky’s period of residence in Naples seemed to connect the murder of Mezentsev and the attack on Umberto I; Kropotkin’s influence during his travels to Spain linked the attempt on the life of Alfonso XII to Switzerland; Rochefort, though the outsider in Swiss circles, provided a direct link to the Commune; whilst Most was fingered as the link to Nobiling’s attack on the kaiser. Then, sometime between the end of 1878 and beginning of 1879, that other great impresario of anarchism, Errico Malatesta, reappeared in the Jura. Having fled to the Levant following his release from gaol in Italy, his expressions of solidarity with opponents of western colonialism whom he had befriended there, appeared to extend the scope of the imagined conspiracy far to the east.

Malatesta’s first port of call on his travels had been Alexandria, where an anarchist group was already active by 1877, but he was impressed no less by the growing strength and dynamism of the Egyptian nationalist movement. Pillaged by Europe since time immemorial, the parlous state of Egypt’s economy had become evident in 1875, when the Khedive’s bankruptcy had forced him to sell his shares in the Suez Canal – the country’s most precious strategic resource – to the British government of Disraeli, for the paltry sum of £4 million. In 1879 the European Commission would officially declare Egypt insolvent, but before then mutinous rumblings in the army had already signalled the depths of a problem that went beyond mere finance, to the very heart of Egyptian identity.

It was to the Italy of the early days of Garibaldi’s Risorgimento that the new generation of Egyptian leaders turned in search of a model for their own endeavours. And although derelict as a revolutionary force in Europe, Freemasonry also provided for Egyptians with a crucible for political debate and organisation: the radical reformist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Latif Bey Salim (who would lead the army rebels in February 1879) and even the Khedive’s heir apparent, Tawfiq, were all members of one secret lodge. Whether for his anarchist evangelising or his contacts with the ideologues of nationalism, the Egyptian authorities were sufficiently alarmed by
Malatesta’s presence – and, in particular, his call for a demonstration outside the Italian consular building in support of the failed assassin Passannante – to order his immediate arrest and then bundle him aboard a French ship bound for Beirut. From there, Syria was his first choice of destination, then Turkey and finally his native Italy, but repeated refusals to allow him ashore forced his weary return to Geneva via Marseilles.

Malatesta’s arrival could not have been less welcome to the Swiss Sûreté, which was clamping down on any of its guests who incited violence abroad. But it wasn’t only the Establishment to whom he proved a headache. Kropotkin too may have been momentarily discomforted by the addition of a new element to the complex expatriate mix, just at the moment when external circumstances promised to effect a conciliation between himself and Reclus.