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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.16: The Russian Colony

Today, we are finally going to start mixing together our general history of Russia with those introductory episodes we did on 19th century revolutionary theory. We are going to mix them together like baking soda and vinegar to create a couple of those science fair volcanoes. The first one is labeled 1905, that one won’t really work and will just kind of froth itself into a disappointing mess. The second one is labeled 1917. That one is going to get the fire department called. Now that metaphor took like seven drafts to get right, so you better not be rolling your eyes out there. To begin this mixing process, we are actually going to replay the events of last week’s episode from the perspective of a very specific set of people: those who would push toward the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, not from inside Russia, but from abroad. And even more specifically, from the so-called Russian colony in Switzerland. The Russian colony had a radical wing, dedicated to advancing revolution in Russia by way of proclamations and pamphlets and books. And it featured, among other luminaries, the scruffy old anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but we are much more interested in the generation that will follow Bakunin, the generation who had succeeded the so-called men of the forties as the driving force of revolutionary theory and practice. And it is through this next generation that we will open up a whole new chapter in our series on the Russian Revolution.

We begin this new chapter with a man named Pavel Axelrod. Now I’m introducing Pavel Axelrod first, not because he’s the most important person in our story, though he is pretty important, but because through the 1870s, he very helpfully bounces back and forth between Russia and Switzerland and meets every person and engages in every debate that I want to talk about today. So let’s begin with Pavel Axelrod.

Pavel Axelrod was born in Chernigov in Northern Ukraine in 1850. He was Jewish and his parents were pretty poor, making Axelrod relatively unique among his radical comrades in that he did not come from the more elite rungs of society. He was not just for the people, he was of the people. He started dipping his toe into radical ideas as a teenager, and when he went off to Kiev University, he read an eclectic mix of western authors: John Stuart Mill. The German social Democrat Ferdinand Lassalle, he also read stuff coming out of the Russian émigré community like Bakunin, who we already know, and Pyotr Lavrov, who we are about to meet.

An idealistic young radical, Axelrod spent his free time working at literacy programs for workers. He also took a job tutoring the daughters of a guy named Isaac Kaminer, himself a Ukrainian Jew who was a notable local physician with a radical socialist bent. Axelrod said it was here at the Kaminer home that he first encountered the work of Karl Marx, though he admitted he did not really understand it at the time. More important than Axelrod’s encounter with Marx though was his encounter with Nadezhda Kaminer, one of the young women he was tutoring. Nadezhda was herself rapidly radicalizing, and the two were very soon engaged, beginning a lifelong revolutionary partnership.

The political and emotional inclinations of the young couple naturally led them to support the Going to the People in the mad summer of 1874. But Axelrod took on a unique mission: there were rumors of a Robin Hood-like bandit running around out there, raiding rich estates and distributing the proceeds to the poor. And there was some hope that, if the rumors were true, that a guy like that would be a great candidate to run a peasant revolution. So basically Axelrod went off looking for Pancho Villa, but never found him. When he came home in September 1874, he found his old network of like-minded friends decimated by arrests and flights and disillusionment. Believing he too was very likely to be arrested, Axelrod split for Berlin where Nadezhda joined him a few weeks later. The couple then headed to Geneva in January of 1875, where they were officially married. Now life was difficult in Switzerland, and through these years, they lived on the knife’s edge of real poverty, but in between working crummy jobs for low pay, they also entered the intellectual and social milieu that was the revolutionary wing of Switzerland’s Russian colony.

By the time the Axelrods arrived in 1875, the most famous member of the Russian colony, Mikhail Bakunin was mostly in retirement, with his influence on the politics of northern Europe on the wane thanks to the split of the first international a few years earlier. But Bakuninist anarchist groups were still flourishing in Italy and Spain, and his message fit in very nicely with Russian narodism, the Russian populism we talked about last week, which had a special emphasis on getting the peasants to erupt from their communal villages to throw off the superfluous and parasitic tsarist state. A lot of Bakunin’s worldview was in fact shaped by the model of the Russian communal villages he carried around in his head. And Bakunin had no doubt that such a popular revolution would come. He said that the Russian peasant was revolutionary by instinct and socialist by nature.

Old Bakunin was not the only game in town though, and in 1872, another radical immigrant named Pyotr Lavrov had arrived in Zurich to challenge the intellectual ascendancy of Bakuninist anarchism. Lavrov was almost 50 when he settled in Switzerland. He had been born back in 1826, endowed with a polymath’s intellect, and he had spent 20 years teaching mathematics while using his free time to study everything else. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Lavrov directed his vast knowledge of natural science, history, economics, and psychology towards radical politics. This got him in big trouble and an 1868 Lavrov was exiled to the Ural mountains, but he escaped and fled west, eventually finding his way to Paris. Now, more radical than ever, he joined the First International in 1870, and was still in Paris when many of his friends in the International staged the insurrection that created the Paris Commune in 1871. A thrilled supporter of the commune, Lavrov decamped Paris to go drum up support abroad. But of course the whole thing fell apart in one very bloody week, and Lavrov never came back. When he settled in Zurich in 1872, he quickly established himself as an alternative to Bakunin inside the socialist and anarchist circles of the Russian colony.

Now Lavrov and Bakunin shared a lot in common. They both wanted to destroy the tsarist state root and branch. They dreamed of remaking the existing social order. They both identified the peasant commune, autonomously governed and collectively owned, as the natural future for Russia. They also thought that politics as such was a waste of time, energy and spirit. Theirs was not a struggle for the right to vote, for freedom of the press, or for an eight hour day. This was about a complete and thorough going revolutionary rebirth.

So not unlike the Marx/Bakunin conflict, the Lavrov/Bakunin conflict was not so much about where do we want to go, but how do we get there? Lavrov insisted on a course of slow, steady education of the people, that knowledge was power. Indeed, knowledge was the only power that could lead to a successful revolution. Lavrov thus assigned a special role to the intelligentsia: to educate, prepare, and propagandize the peasants, to raise their revolutionary consciousness. He described the task of the radical intelligentsia as that of a penitent who must make amends for the historical crime of subjecting the peasants to millennia of ignorant impoverishment. Lavrov’s ideas helped fuel the Going to the People, and he was not dissuaded by its resolute failure. In his mind, the going to the People had been altogether too brief and too superficial. He had said long term commitment, not go to summer camp.

Bakunin of course thought this was all wrong. The problem with the Going to the People was the presumption that the peasants needed any further education at all. They don’t need a bunch of idealistic but misguided rich kids coming around at teach them about revolution. For Bakunin, anyone who doesn’t like their landlord is a potential revolutionary. The only role Bakunin assigned to the intelligentsia was to be ready to act as a communication link between these spontaneous local rebellions he predicted would get going any day now. This was a prediction he would keep making pretty much until the day he died in July of 1876.

But this argument between Bakunin and Lavrov was about whether the peasants needed to be educated, and how long it would be until they were ready for revolution. But there was fundamental agreement between Bakunin and Lavrov that the revolution would come from below, that it had to come from below. It had to be by the people, in order for it to be for the people.

But there was this other dude out there who entered the Russian colony preaching an altogether different and very enticing message: this was Pyotr Tkachev. Born in the lower rungs of the gentry in 1844, Tkachev got involved in radical politics as a teenager, and was arrested for the first time in 1861 for participating in some student strikes in St. Petersburg. And it was while imprisoned for this that he was fed even more radical ideas. When Tkachev got out of prison, he fell into the circle surrounding the soon to be infamous Sergei Nechaev, who we talked about last week. And so was among those rounded up in the fallout of the murder Nechaev committed in 1869.

Tkachev had nothing to do with the murder though, and was eventually released from prison, but he still wound up exiled from Russia. So coming out of Nechaev’s hardcore world of compact disciplined revolutionary action Tkachev came to Switzerland telling everyone that it was hopeless to wait for the people, impossible to educate and cultivate them the way Lavrov demanded. The revolution must be carried out by a small, utterly committed revolutionary vanguard party who could topple the repressive tsarist apparatus and create a revolutionary dictatorship. This program gets Tkachev described as a Jacobin, or a Russian Blanquist, since this is exactly the theory that Blanqui preached. And the foundation of that theory is that while the revolution was for the people, it could not be by the people. And for Tkachev, ignoring the people was an asset, not a liability. He believed that unless some kind of unified revolutionary dictatorship was established with the power to remake society, the temperamental resistance to change inherent in all people would simply be an impossible obstacle to overcome. He especially thought that Bakunin’s idea that destroying the central government without having anything to go in its place would lead to disastrous chaos.

Now the other key point about Tkachev is that he believed the revolution had to be carried out right now, immediately, ASAP. And we’re going to talk about this a bit more next week, but Tkachev believed the revolution had to be accomplished before western style industrial capitalism set in, and all of these guys suspected that western style industrial capitalism was coming to Russia. Tkachev believed that once that happened, the anti-revolutionary forces would simply be too strong. Now, partly owing to the death of Bakunin in 1876, and partly owing to the course of events back in Russia, Tkachev wound up becoming very popular among the post Going to the People radicals who would soon be forming People’s Will.

So I’m going back now to Pavel Axelrod. Axelrod himself mostly fell in with the Bakuninists after arriving in Switzerland, Lavrov was too passive. Tkachev too much an authoritarian Jacobin. And in criticizing Tkachev, Axelrod would use the same eternally devastating observation made by Bakuninists everywhere: that if you’ve asked the most ardent revolutionary with absolute power, they become a tyrant within a year, guaranteed. That there is a low probability they will use absolute power to advance liberation and socialism, and a high probability they will use it to just stay in power at all costs. That’s how these things go.

So as a promising young Bakuninist, Axelrod was sent back to Russia in 1875 on a mission. First, he was to make contact with other anarchist groups in Russia and encourage their members to volunteer for the army. This was both about getting anarchists inside the military to radicalize the rank and file, and about getting military training that would be very helpful when the revolution came. But Axelrod was also tasked with seeing what he could do about steering this thing called the Chigirin Affair. Some peasants in Ukraine had gotten very upset, and they were in low grade insurrection against their local officials. But these insurrectionary peasants were operating under the assumption that their good father the tsar supported them in their efforts. A few revolutionaries proposed using this insurrection to the movement’s advantage: let’s print phony but official looking proclamations from this are saying, yes, go into revolt. I am with you. I support you. The idea was that any de-stabilizing revolt was good. But Axelrod was there repping the émigré Bakuninists and saying, don’t tell people that support from the tsar is a necessary condition for them to go into revolt. This does nothing to help with our real long-term problem of getting them to overcome their traditional sentimental, and in Bakuninist eyes, ignorant attachment to the tsar.

Among those encouraging the exploitation of the Chigirin peasants was an old acquaintance of Axelrod’s named Lev Deutsch. And I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that, but that’s his name? D E U T S C H Deutsch. So I’m going to say Deutsch. Deutsch was five years younger than Axelrod. He was born in Tulchyn in 1855 to a jewish father and a peasant mother. He started out young and idealistic, and got swept up in the desire to educate and liberate the people. So at the age of 19, Deutsch had joined the Going to the People, believing that once they were enlightened to the realities of the world that the peasants would naturally rise up and overthrow their oppressors, the revolution would probably be over by Christmas. This is not how it went. And Deutsch himself managed to avoid getting arrested, but like Axelrod, he came home again in the summer of 1875 and found his old friends and comrades either arrested, fled, or turning their backs on radical politics.

But Deutsch didn’t want to give up. And when this little insurrectionary crisis started brewing in Chigirin, he wanted to stoke and use that energy any way possible. And though Axelrod tut tutted the plan, he and Deutsch further cemented a friendship, a comradeship, that would last for the rest of their lives. And before moving on, Axelrod probably played a role in encouraging Deutsch to volunteer for the Russian army, which he did in October, 1875, becoming a private and self- assigning himself, the mission to radicalize his regimen and learn all he could about military logistics, tactics, and weaponry.

Axelrod, meanwhile, kept moving from city to city, trying to make contact with revolutionary groups and keep them on the pure Bakuninist path. By the end of 1875, he was in St. Petersburg, where he met probably the most important person we’ll talk about here today, certainly more important than Axelrod himself: Georgi Plekhanov. When they met, Axelrod was an experienced revolutionary of 25, while Plekhanov was a yet-unbaptized 19-year-old student. Plekhanov missed going to the people, and was only just now really finding his way into revolutionary politics. The eldest son of a small land owning family may own 270 acres and 50 serfs, Plekhanov spent the first seven years of his education in a military academy, where he was noted mostly for being intelligent, well-liked, and well-behaved. In 1873, Plekhanov transferred to the Metallurgical Institute in St. Petersburg, a university focused on mining and engineering, and found himself drawn to the exciting modern ideas coming out of France and Germany. Prior to meeting Axelrod, Plekhanov mostly dreamed of traveling abroad to advance his education, and both Axelrod, and Plekhanov implied that it was this encounter here in 1875, that set Plekhanov off on his path to revolution. But this wasn’t some kind of abrupt, overnight conversion, as Axelrod’s biographer, Abraham Asher, points out, they only met because the Plekhanov’s house was considered a safe place for an itinerant revolutionary like Axelrod to crash, which means he already had one foot in the door.

During their initial conversations, Axelrod discovered in Plekhanov an intelligent, well-read, passionate, creative articulate mind that would be of enormous value to the revolution, so he encouraged Plekhanov to give up petty thoughts of going abroad to complete his education. He was needed here, now, at home. The cause was the thing. Axelrod then kept moving, and Plekhanov stayed behind in St. Petersburg. When the new Land and Liberty party formed in 1876 and held their first public demonstration at the end of the year, Plekhanov was there. He gave a fiery speech denouncing the tsar, then had to disappear underground. He never did finish his degree.

By early 1876, Axelrod was back in Switzerland, where he found the Russian colony splitting between the still faithful Bakuninists, the slow and steady Lavrovists, and Tkachev’s Jacobin militancy, with Tkachev now taking a decisive lead. Axelrod himself remained somewhere between Lavrov and Bakunin, still believing absolutely that if a social revolution was going to come, it would have to be staged and carried out by the people themselves. Tkachev’s revolutionary dictatorship was sure to be short on revolutionary and long on dictatorship. But he was never a doctrinaire Bakuninist, and certainly agreed with Lavrov that the people did require further political education, that they would never just be spontaneously and magically anarchist revolutionaries. But this meant a program of slow and steady cultivation of forces that could erupt when the time was right. But as we saw last week, this puts Axelrod at odds with those back in Russia, who are well on their way towards forming People’s Will; men and women who were concluding that they couldn’t count on the people, that they couldn’t wait that long. We have to destroy the Imperial government by violent revolution and seize power, and we have to do it, like, yesterday.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, many of those coming to this conclusion were coming to this conclusion because they were locked up for their role in the debacle that was the failed Going to the People. I mean, it’s not like they hadn’t tried it Lavrov’s way, it just hadn’t worked. One of those in prison was an old friend of Lev Deutsch’s, which is how Lev Deutsch’s recently launched military career lasted all of about four months. When he found out he was in a position to help, Deutsch helped. In February 1876, Deutsch sprang his buddy from prison and then deserted from the army. Now on the run, living under an assumed name, Deutsch joined a militant revolutionary cell in Kiev, which led, in June of 1876, to the most infamous moment in his own revolutionary career.

An old comrade picked up in the Going to the People had been released very quickly — no harm, no foul. And it was widely suspected this guy had given up every name he could think of in exchange for clemency. In his memoir, Deutsch says, if the guy had just retired from radical politics quietly, no one would have harmed a hair on his head. But instead this guy came around looking to rejoin the party. Some newer members let him in, but Deutsch and another guy recognized this probable informant and resolved to take care of the rat permanently. They invited this guy on a trip to Odessa, and on the road beat him nearly to death and left his body on the side of the road with a note pinned to his chest that said, roughly, this is what happens to rats.

But unfortunately for Deutsch, they beat this guy nearly to death, not to death. The guy lived, and he spilled a bunch more names. Deutsch himself once again managed to get away, but most of his immediate comrades were rounded up. Deutsch himself then returned to the area around Chigirin, where he rejoined the effort to trick the peasants into going into revolt in the name of the tsar. But though they successfully recruited — or tricked, however you want to say it — some 2000 people into this phony scheme, it was eventually betrayed, and everything fell apart by the summer of 1877, and Deutsch was finally arrested. He was facing a certain death sentence, but he managed to escape from prison in May of 1878 and go on the lam again. By that point, both the government and the revolutionaries had been thrown into violent confusion, thanks to the near assassination of Governor General Trepov in January of 1878, and then the shocking acquittal of the assailant a few months later, 27-year-old veteran revolutionary Vera Zasulich.

Now for the sake of moving through events last week, I only noted the assassination attempt and its consequences, but I do now need to fully introduce the doer of the deed. Vera Zasulich had been born in Smolensk in 1851 into a family of relatively impoverished lower gentry. Her father died when she was three and little Vera was sent off to live with wealthier relatives who saw to her education. Intelligent, precocious, and with an instinctively rebellious spirit, she graduated school in 1866 and went off to St. Petersburg to work as a clerk. As a young woman in the 1860s who was intelligent, precocious, and with an instinctively rebellious spirit, she was drawn into the nihilist circles where men and women considered themselves equals, unbound by the old repressive patriarchal family structures. Her two sisters soon joined her in these progressive egalitarian circles. Fully radicalized before she turned 20 years old, Zasulich spent her off hours working as a literacy tutor to educate workers towards dignity and self-confidence. And it was at one of these literacy workshops in the late 1860s that she encountered the soon to be infamous Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev tried to recruit Zasulich into his little cell, but she remained aloof. He kept after it though, and a few months later, he declared that he was madly in love with her, which Zasulich dismissed as him trying to manipulate her on behalf of his own agenda, and she remained aloof. But not aloof enough.

She did let Nechaev use her address to send and receive mail, and so when he murdered that guy and skipped town in 1869, Zasulich was also caught up in the resulting police sweep and spent the next few years in prison. When she was released, she settled in Kiev and immediately resumed her radical activities, joining that same militant revolutionary cell in Kiev that Deutsch would join just a few years later. In Kiev, Zasulich was highly regarded as a natural leader, sincere, magnetic, and committed to the cause. She spent her time working as a typesetter for an underground press operation. And it was while following the course of the trial of the 193 in 1877 that she and a friend of hers resolved on the double murder pact that we talked about last week. And while her friend failed to kill the prosecutor in the trial of the 193, Zasulich returned to St. Petersburg. She got into see Trepov, she pulled out a revolver, and she shot him point blank in the chest.

This assassination attempt, and the even more amazing acquittal a few months later made Zasulich a legend in the underground, a woman who had the courage and the guts to do what was necessary. But the interesting twist is that this is simultaneously the moment when Zasulich herself turned away from advocating terrorist violence as an effective means of revolution. The debate about terrorism, which had begun when she shot Trepov in January of 1878, intensified in April, 1879, when Alexander Soloviev nearly shot the tsar — that’s the time Alexander dodged five bullets running away from his would be assassin in a frantic zigzag. The majority of revolutionaries out there regretted only that the tsar yet lived. They were all now fully on board with the idea that the tsar must die. So they embraced Tkachev, and his call for an immediate vanguard style revolution to kill the tsar, overthrow the government and seize power.

But as we also talked about last week, there was that smaller minority group who still followed something along the Trepov and Bakunin lines: that the revolution had to originate from below. The tsar had to be toppled by an earthquake, not a lead pipe to the back of the head. And looky here, wouldn’t you know it, the core of that minority group was: all the people we’ve talked about today. Pavel Axelrod, Lev Deutsch, Vera Zasulich, and emerging as their main intellectual leader, Georgi Plekhanov, who had by now had his revolutionary baptism by way of two brief stints in jail. They continued to insist that propagandizing education and building the revolution from below was essential.

In August of 1879, the split inside the Land and liberty party became permanent. The majority formed People’s Will and went off to wage their terror campaign on behalf of a political revolution, while the smaller group around Plekhanov formed Black Repartition. Based in St. Petersburg and aiming to keep up their own separate propaganda efforts, the whole crew came together in the same place at the same time very briefly in the fall of 1879. But there was a lot of heat on Plekhanov and Zasulich and Deutsch, and they resolved to temporarily leave the country, inviting Axelrod to stay behind in the capital and act as editor of their press operation. But I am now required by law to tell you that when this group departed for their quote unquote temporary sojourn in January of 1880, that they would not in fact, return to Russia for 37 long years.

Now Axelrod wasn’t far behind his friends, their press was seized almost immediately by the police and he had to go back underground. And with almost everyone left in Russia now on board with People’s Will Axelrod left for Switzerland in June of 1880. Which turned out to be just in time, because the cops burst in on his last known address just a few days later.

Now in among the Russian colony of Switzerland, the members of Black Repartition continued to argue for their side of the split with People’s Will. They tried in vain to convince their comrades that this path of terrorist violence would backfire. Whatever hopes they had that their exile would be temporary were blown to pieces along with Tsar Alexander the second in March of 1881. The aftermath of that assassination was repression, reaction, and a shattering of People’s Will as a viable revolutionary organization, just as the members of Black Repartition had predicted.

And next week we will open with that swift and thoroughgoing repression, and the reaction from our little cadre that is still Black Repartition. It was no longer safe for them to come home. It would probably never be safe for them to come home. And as the split with what was left of People’s Will became permanent, they decided to form a new revolutionary party based on new reading they had been doing in their now accidentally permanent exile. Dubbing themselves the Group for the Emancipation of Labor, they would be the founders of the first party of Russian Marxists.