The World That Never Was (84 page)

In St Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd as a patriotic gesture, the popular reception that greeted Kropotkin recalled that which Paris had always shown his old friend Louise Michel on her homecomings from exile. Despite his train not arriving until two o’clock in the morning, a crowd 60,000 strong was waiting at the station to cheer him on his way to a formal audience with Kerensky, with only the absence of those who opposed his position on the war to mar the celebration. Kropotkin’s advice was widely solicited during the summer of 1917, and willingly offered in private meetings with Kerensky and Prince Lvov, a long-time reformer and the original head of the Provisional government. And yet the turmoil of political uncertainty and almost untrammelled possibility into which he had plunged seems to have left Kropotkin somewhat bewildered. When offered the education portfolio in a Provisional government that already included Boris Savinkov as assistant minister for war, Kropotkin declined, true to his long-held principle that all centralised government was corrupting to popular autonomy. And yet the efforts of Jacobin elements to seize power left him close to despair and he won a rapturous response from across the political spectrum at the State Conference of all parties, held in Moscow at the end of August, by appealing for Russia to become a federal republic, similar to that of the United States.

The political atmosphere had long been filled with factionalism, but as the year progressed and the authority of the Provisional government seeped away, the worst features of the French Revolution and the Commune looked set to repeat themselves, with new forms of Jacobinism taking root. Only a few days before the old revolutionaries had taken their bow at the Mariinsky theatre, the most dynamic and ruthless figure of the new generation had made his return from Switzerland. It was nearly thirty years since Lenin had been drawn into the revolutionary underworld by the execution of his brother. Talent and determination had seen him navigate the hazardous waters of socialist politicking with alarming deftness, but his own rise and that
of his Bolshevik Party had been helped too by timely assistance from its natural enemies. As far back as 1905, when Lenin had been lecturing at an East End socialist club during a visit to London, Special Branch officers had intervened to save him from the fury of a mob that believed him to be a police spy, and subsequently the Bolsheviks had received lenient treatment by an Okhrana hoping to drive a wedge through the revolutionary left. More recently, Lenin’s return to Russia had itself required the cooperation of the German intelligence services, who clearly thought that his disruptive presence there, funded in part from their coffers, might hasten Russia’s military collapse.

Both strategies in turn now proved almost too effective, as Lenin bypassed the bourgeois stage of revolution that Marxist dogma demanded, and progressed immediately to that of the workers and peasantry. Tentatively allied with the anarchists to form a proletarian vanguard, in July Lenin’s Bolsheviks had come within a hair’s breadth of toppling the Provisional government and seizing power in a
coup d’état
. Accused of high treason and impugned as a German agent, Lenin had gone to ground, secretly winning over the expanding network of soviets from their crucial support for Kerensky’s regime, while reflecting further on the military and political lessons to be learned from the failure of the Commune: a subject he had studied and written about over many years. Unlike Kropotkin and the Russian anarchists, who agreed that federalism and devolved autonomy must be encouraged, Lenin concluded that, having bided its time, a revolutionary elite must seize power and implement a centralised revolutionary programme. Peace, Lenin insisted, should be made with Germany at almost any cost, in contradiction of the Provisional government’s policy.

After months of mounting economic crisis, military setbacks and increasingly violent expressions of discontent, the October Revolution saw Lenin’s plan come one step closer to realisation. With most members of the Provisional government apprehended in the captured Winter Palace and summarily imprisoned, power passed into the hands of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, laying the ground for their subordination to a dictatorship of the proletariat, for which Lenin had called in his recent work,
The State and Revolution
. Failing to read the runes, significant numbers of anarchists continued to lend Lenin their support, viewing recent events as a vindication of their belief in revolution by mass action. But whilst Lenin’s insurrectionary leadership prompted a number of contemporary observers to liken him to Bakunin, Lenin would not have appreciated the comparison. As the Bolsheviks
tightened their grip on power they soon turned mercilessly on those whom it had briefly served their purposes to tolerate.

During the autumn of 1917, Kropotkin had kept a low profile, while privately complaining of Bolshevik rule that ‘this buries the revolution’, and when the envoy of President Wilson of America visited him the following spring, he confided his hatred of the Bolsheviks as ‘aliens, enemies of Russia, robbers and gangsters, set upon looting and destruction’. He had always thought Lenin dangerous and now considered him despicable too, his request for an armistice in the war with Germany adduced as evidence that he had sold out his country and the revolution, despite Lenin’s professed belief that the cause of Marxist revolution would be best served by the victory of a socially advanced Germany. ‘Revolutionaries have had ideals,’ Wilson’s envoy would recollect him saying, ‘Lenin has none. He is a madman, an immolator, wishful of burning, and slaughter, and sacrificing. Things called good and things called evil are equally meaningless to him. He is willing to betray Russia as an experiment.’ For the moment, though, Kropotkin kept his powder dry, restricting his public utterances to theoretical matters and hoping that in ‘two or three hard years’, the worst of the horrors of Bolshevik revolution may have passed.

The political ideas with which Kropotkin engaged nevertheless posed a dangerous challenge to the structures of Soviet rule, drawing inspiration from an England which the Germanophile Lenin despised, and whose attempt to interfere in Russian politics, clandestinely and later by military means, infuriated him. When Kropotkin lectured the Federalist League on the historical lesson that ‘federation led to unity and how the opposite path of centralisation has led to discord and disintegration’, it was the example of the British Empire which he cited, while in his capacity as president of the Society of Relationships with England, he sought to create links with his adopted home of many years as a source of humanitarian assistance.

And yet, for all their differences, Lenin appears to have looked upon the old anarchist philosopher with a certain grudging respect, which Kropotkin would attempt to exploit. Invited to a meeting with Lenin in Moscow in April 1919, the discussion was wide-ranging as they debated how the revolution should develop and Kropotkin lobbied on behalf of the beleaguered cooperative movement, in which he placed great hope. With Bolshevik violence already beginning to sweep the country, eradicating enemies of the new regime through imprisonment and large-scale summary executions, every word of the futile discussion must have stuck in Kropotkin’s throat. In future, he would not be so diplomatic.

The demolition of Boris Korolenko’s cubist statue of Bakunin, less than a year after it had been commissioned, vividly illustrated how quickly opportunistic inclusiveness had slipped into intolerance. All around, Kropotkin watched his friends and allies suffer persecution, and by early summer he himself had been driven out of his Moscow apartment by Bolshevik wiles, and sought refuge on a smallholding in the town of Dmitriev, forty miles from Moscow. The timing of his move into rural seclusion was well advised, coming as anarchists, together with the Mensheviks and the ‘left’ faction of the Socialist Revolutionaries, launched insurrections against Bolshevik rule in Petrograd and in cities across Russia, and embarked upon a series of assassination attempts, aimed in part at undermining the armistice and renewing hostilities. Both were causes with which Kropotkin had much sympathy, and his outspoken views on the necessity of war against Germany risked identifying him with a strategy in which Boris Savinkov would later claim to have been sponsored by the French government.

Infuriated by the arrest of his daughter, Sophie, while she was attempting to return to England to raise humanitarian funds, Kropotkin finally gave vent to his moral disgust. His anger spilled into a letter addressed to Lenin, which the Bolshevik leader received as he convalesced from the serious wounds inflicted by a Socialist Revolutionary assassin. ‘To throw the country into a red terror, even more so to arrest hostages, in order to protect the lives of its leaders is not worthy of a party calling itself socialist and disgraceful for its leaders.’ It was a bold act on Kropotkin’s part, just when the Bolsheviks’ suppression of what the anarchists and the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party claimed as a ‘Third Revolution’ was about to reach its bloodiest pitch, and seemed almost to be inviting a response that would bind his fate to that of his more militant colleagues. His only punishment, though, was continued obscurity and an equal share of the hardships that were visited on the Russian people as the cold winter closed in, the burgeoning civil war reducing still further their meagre supplies of food or fuel.

‘Many too many are born and they hang on their branches far too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and wormeatenness from the tree!’ Friedrich Nietzsche had written in the mid-1880s, in his work of esoteric philosophy
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. The intervening years had seen diverse attempts to answer his subsequent call for ‘a declaration of war on the masses’. Cesare Lombroso and his followers
had set out to identify the symptoms of atavism, but laid the intellectual groundwork for those who argued that deficient stock should be eliminated from the gene pool. Others, such as Enrico Ferri, had proposed a role for capital punishment in expediting natural selection, since ‘It would therefore be in agreement with natural laws that human society should make an artificial selection, by the elimination of antisocial and incongruous individuals.’ For such a policy to work, though, required the commission of crimes of a kind at which even the vast majority of anarchists baulked. Other theorists argued straight out for the sterilisation of undesirables.

In the two summers immediately preceding the war, Kropotkin had dragged his tired old limbs, weakened by his own past experiences of incarceration as a criminal, to the congresses first of the eugenicists and then of the British Medical Association to protest their position. His compassionate involvement with the immigrant slum-dwellers of London’s East End had confirmed to him that poverty rather than inherited debility lay at the root of most crime and most physical underdevelopment; to suggest that sterilisation could solve such problems was simply to express a violent hatred of the poor. And yet the cost of the struggle against Prussian militarism that he had passionately advocated had been an indiscriminate cull of the world’s youth, with eight million killed in the course of the Great War. The appetite for eugenicist solutions would for a while be muted, but Europe’s leaders now had to ensure a future free of war and in which death on an industrial scale had no place.

When the victorious Allies convened their Peace Conference in 1919 to assign prizes and penalties in search of a lasting settlement, the threat of anarchist terrorism still haunted the politicians of the West. Neither the common cause that the anarchists in Russia were making with western interests in their struggle against Bolshevism, nor the unheeded campaign for peace by the majority of the movement, had erased the stigma of anarchism’s long association with terrorism. In selecting a city to host the conference, the organiser’s first choice, Geneva in neutral Switzerland, had to be abandoned on the advice of the international police that it remained a hotbed of anarchist assassins. It was therefore in Paris that the victors and their petitioners convened on what Clemenceau, the French president, arranged to be the anniversary of France’s humiliation on 18 January 1871, when Wilhelm I had been crowned kaiser of the newly united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The switch in location did not prevent Clemenceau himself from being seriously wounded by a shot fired by an anarchist into his car, while he was travelling to a meeting to
discuss, once again, the vexed question of whether Russia’s revolutionary government should be allowed to participate in the conference.

That Lloyd George, by now prime minister, could suspect the anarchist responsible for injuring Clemenceau to have been working for the Bolsheviks illustrated how poorly informed the western leaders were about developments in Russia, where the anarchists were involved in a fight for survival against the Bolsheviks. Restricted communications, fostered by a western blockade of the country, prevented greater understanding. Nevertheless, there were some in Allied circles who harboured a degree of sympathy for how the relatively obscure Bolsheviks had been impelled to seize power by the cruelty of the tsarist autocracy and the predations of capitalism, and to look forward to a time when the ferocity of the revolution would soon give way to peaceful, social democratic rule. Such hopes, though, were at odds with the presence of over 180,000 Allied troops on Russian soil, and their support for the White Army’s campaigns, which were then approaching their high-water mark. For even while political arguments for engagement with the Bolshevik government were advanced, the overriding desire in the West was that the revolution be contained lest it prove infectious.