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Old Bolsheviks
In 1842 the radical Russian writer Vissarion Belinsky paraphrased part of Friedrich Engels’ 1842 critique of Friedrich Schelling, [1] and by 1848 Mikhail Petrachevsky’s St. Petersburg circle had a copy of Engels’ Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England (The Condition of the Working-Class in England) and Karl Marx’s Das Elend der Philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy). [2] In 1860 Marx heard that his Beitrag zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), which critiqued Georg Hegel’s philosophy on law, had ‘caused a considerable stir’ in Russian academic circles; [3] and in 1862 a Russian prince told a censor about a conversation he had had in a Berlin bookshop.
‘Would you care for some Russian books?’ a helpful salesman asked me. ‘What kind?’ ‘Well, for example, Herzen’s: I have every one of his works, the older ones and the very latest.’ ‘No’, I replied. ’ ‘They watch such things very carefully these days, and I am afraid that I would never get them to St. Petersburg: they’d be confiscated at the border.’ ‘That’s a lot of nonsense! I’ll deliver as many as you want to St. Petersburg, directly to your home, in fact right in your study.’ ‘Amazing!’ ‘But what if I suddenly decide to detain the person who delivered them?’ ‘Do not worry about that! You would not be able to do that; you would not even see the person delivering them to you.’ [4]
Alexandr Herzen was a wealthy utopian socialist émigré in London.
In 1864 the social revolutionary (SR) ‘Petr Lavrov’ (Petr Lavrovich Mirtov) paraphrased part of the Marx and Engels’ Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Manifesto of the Communist Party). He did not name his source or pursue its ideas, [5] but during the 1860s some of Marx’s ideas appeared in Russkoye slovo (The Russian Word). [6]
Volume I of Marx’s Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Capital. Critique of Political Economy) appeared in Hamburg in autumn 1867, [7] and considered the Russian village commune. ‘Everything, to the minutest detail, except for its ‘patriarchal nature’ and its ‘collective responsibility’ for paying taxes, was ‘the same as in the ancient Germanic community’. The commune was beginning to ‘decay’, [8] but the Russian army frightened him.
If on the continent of Europe the influence of capitalist production continues to develop as it has done up to now, enervating the human race by overwork, the division of labour, subordination to machines, the maiming of women and children, making life wretched etc., hand in hand with competition in the size of national armies, national debts, taxes, sophisticated warfare, etc., the rejuvenation of Europe by the knout and the obligatory infusion of Kalmyk [Caucasian] blood so earnestly prophesied by the half-Russian and full Muscovite Herzen may become inevitable. [9]
A few more Russian intelligenty read Marx.
Nikołai Danielson was born in Reval (today’s Tallin) in Estonia in 1844. He entered St. Petersburg University in the early 1860s, [10] and later worked with the SR German Lopatin at the Society of Mutual Credit, which gave them access to all kinds of economic data. [11] In 1868 Nikołai Liubavin, a student friend of Danielson’s, [12] went to Berlin to study, and then to Leipzig to find Marx’s works. He acknowledged to Marx’s friend Johann Becker in Geneva that ‘the liberation of the working class’ was ‘the common cause of all people’, though ‘I cannot yet apply this principle to my country, where no labour movement whatever exists’. Liubavin joined the International Working Men’s Association to be ‘better acquainted with the West European labour movement’, and Becker gave him a copy of Das Kapital and suggested that it be translated into Russian. Back in St. Petersburg Liubavin gave the book to Danielson, [13] and Nikołai Poliakov agreed to publish a translation. [14]
In London Marx was ‘extraordinarily pleased’, but found it ironic that the Russians, ‘against whom I have been fighting incessantly for 25 years’, had ‘always been my “patrons”’, since Das Elend der Philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy) and Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) ‘have nowhere had such good sales’. He believed that Russian aristocrats educated at French and German universities ‘yearn for the most extreme the West has to offer’, though that did not stop them ‘becoming scoundrels as soon as they enter government service’; yet Marx knew that a Russian translation of Das Kapital would not reach tailors and cobblers. When Liubavin asked him if Volume II was available, he thought it would not be ready for ‘perhaps another six months’, but wanted Danielson to go ahead with Volume I. (Volume II was eventually published 17 years later.) [15] By 1869 bookshops and libraries in St. Petersburg Moscow, [16] were distribution centres for illegal literature and student meeting-places. [17] An intelligent was translating Marx’s critique of Hegel when he was arrested, [18] and Danielson was briefly detained for contacting an SR terrorist in 1870. [19]
In 1870 Marx found the Russian Manifest Kommunisticheskoy partii (The Communist Manifesto) ‘very interesting’. [20] Reportedly the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the terrorist Sergey Nechaev had translated it, [21] and a Russian translation of Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich (The Civil War in France) appeared in Zurich in 1871. [22]
In 1871 Russian censors banned the importation of Engels’ book on the English working class, but not Das Kapital, which was ‘a difficult, inaccessible, strictly scientific work’ with a ‘colossal mass of abstruse, somewhat obscure politico-economic argumentation’. ‘It can be confidently stated that in Russia few will read it and even fewer will understand it, ‘ and its conclusions did not apply to Russia. Bakunin had agreed to translate the whole book, but managed only part of the first chapter, which Liubavin probably completed. Lopatin translated chapters 2, 3 and part of chapter 4, and Danielson translated the rest. In spring 1872 Kapital. Kritika Politicheskoi Ekonomii went on sale in St. Petersburg. Many news papers praised it, and 900 of the 3,000 copies had been sold in six weeks. It convinced a tiny number of mainly young intelligenty that the Russian economy was developing on capitalist lines, but most of them were desperate to avoid the horrors of proletarianisation and hoped to build on what they considered to be the ‘socialism’ of the village commune. [23] In autumn the police seized Poliakov’s stock, [24] and charged him with publishing ‘subversive’ stories by the French philosopher Denis Diderot, which were burned; [25] but one intelligent read Das Kapital in German.
Nikołai Ziber was born in Crimea in 1844. He later studied law at Kyiv University, graduated in 1866, [26] read Das Kapital, and, even before he published his masters’ thesis in 1871, [27] he was convinced that capitalism would take root in Russia. [28] In 1872 he studied at Zurich University, [29] and became a professor at Kyiv University in 1873. [30] His Ekonomicheskaya teoriya Karla Marksa (The Economic Theory of Karl Marx) popularised Marx’s ideas among SRs, [31] but because of censorship ‘economic materialism’ became code for Marxism. [32] Ziber reportedly called SRs ‘Ignoramuses’ and ‘Utopians’ who ‘do not understand the first thing about scientific socialism and political economy’. ‘We shall have no sense in this country until the Russian muzhik [peasant] is cooked up in the factory boiler’. [33]
By spring 1874 all 3,000 copies of Kapital had been sold, but Poliakov’s bankruptcy prevented him from reprinting it. [34] When Marx asked Danielson about the ‘historical development of communal property’, [35] Danielson sent him Ziber’s articles. [36] Marx was an assimilated Jew, and lived in London, but all the Jews in Russian were oppressed.
The Pale of Settlement for Jews dated from 1791. [37] It included the south-western border provinces of European Russia, and from 1793 the ten provinces of the former Kingdom of Poland. The southern Pale shared long borders with western Europe and the Black Sea, and the northern Pale bordered the Baltic and was within 600km of both Moscow and St. Petersburg. [38] From 1804 Jews were legally entitled to be educated at all levels, set up schools and factories and buy or lease land, but they could not take part in the liquor trade or join the armed forces. In practice the assimilatory parts of this legislation remained a dead letter, but from 1827 12-year-old Jewish boys faced conscription into the army. [39] Many Jewish families were forced to leave the southern ports of Luhansk and Sevastopol, and parts of Poltava and Kyiv provinces, and most went to the western Russian provinces of the Pale. [40] They had to live in towns, and many self-employed artisans were already under pressure from mechanised factories. [41] By 1835 the Pale included the provinces of Hrodna, Vilnius, Volhynia, Podolia, Minsk, Katerynoslav, Bessarabia, Białystok, Kyiv (except the city), Kherson (except the navy port of Mykołaiv), Taurida (except the navy port of Sevastopol), Magíloŭ, Vitebsk and Chernihiv. Jewish families Courland, Livonia, Poltava and Poland had to obey different laws to people in the rest of the empire, and could not live within 53km of the Prussian border, allegedly to prevent smuggling. [42]
By 1840 there were three million Jews in the Pale, and artisans in Vilnius, Minsk, Magíloŭ, Vitebsk and other towns had built mutual aid funds. Only 45 Vilnius Jews had a European standard of education, and during the 1840s there were only about 50 Jewish gymnasia pupils and very few university graduates; but after wealthy St. Petersburg Jews petitioned the tsar, there were more. From 1859 Jews could buy licences to trade outside the Pale, and Jewish university graduates became eligible for civil service posts across the empire in 1861. [43] By 1863 railways ran from St. Petersburg via Daugavpils, Vilnius, Hrodna and Białystok to Warszawa, from Vilnius to Moscow by 1866, and from Vilnius to Rïga and the Prussian border by 1870. [44] In 1871 the Baltic port of Königsberg became part of the German Empire, and had rail connections to Switzerland and England. [45]
Yankel Finkelshtein was born into a lower middle class Jewish family in Vladislavov, Suwalki province, in 1851, but they later moved to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. He entered the rabbinical Seminary in the later 1860s, [46] and got illegal literature from Moscow. [47] In 1872 he was expelled for possessing a ‘library of socialist literature’ and organising an illegal ‘educational society’, but he wanted to get hold of more illegal literature.
Anna Epshtein was born into Jewish family in Vilnius, around 1843. She later graduated from a girls’ gymnasium and became the first Jewess to enter higher education when she attended the Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1869. She met intelligenty from Nikołai Chaikovsky and Mark Natason’s kruzhki (clandestine circles), and became an SR; and after she graduated in 1873 she returned to Vilnius and organised the smuggling of illegal literature, and recruited.
Aron Zundelevich was born into a Jewish family in Vilnius in 1852. His mother ran an inn and his father was a scholar. Neither was overly orthodox, but Aron became extremely pious. He attended the Smorgon yeshiva run by a distant relative, where he encountered the ‘heretical books’ of the Haskalah, the liberal Jewish Enlightenment, and became increasingly secular. In the late 1860s he entered Vilnius Rabbinical Seminary, and by 1871 he had organised a kruzhok to read banned works by radicals such as Nikołai Chernyshevsky, and realised that Russians needed liberation as much as Jews. In summer 1873 Zundelevich helped Epshtein to smuggle illegal literature and travelled repeatedly to Königsberg, where Finkelshtein ran a transport route from London, Geneva and Zurich via Berlin. Zundelevich worked with professional Jewish smugglers, and set up facilities for receiving, storing and forwarding ‘red mail’ in Vilnius. Late that year the Seminary became a teacher-training institute, and Zundelevich organised a kruzhok of 12, with a periphery of 14. In summer 1875 the institute authorities searched the dormitory and found illegal literature, but Zundelevich had left. He was in Königsberg, where he had joined a radical kruzhok and organised the smuggling of revolutionary literature. It went from London and Geneva to the Volksstadt publishing house in Leipzig, then it was posted to the Bernshtein family’s business premises in Berlin, where it was repacked and sent to Königsberg. Finkelshtein and Jewish students took it to the border and handed it over to German, Polish or Lithuanian peasants, and Zundelevich sometimes took it to St. Petersburg. [48] He favoured both political struggle and terror, [49] since ‘Jewry as a national organism’ was not ‘worthy of support’. [50] Another young Jew had reached similar conclusions.
Lev Deutsch was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Odesa in 1855. His father had been born in Austria, but had moved to Odesa in the 1840s. He sold medical supplies to military hospitals during the Crimean War and achieved the rare status of becoming a merchant of the first class. He insisted that the children had a Christian education, but a pogrom (an anti-Jewish riot) at Easter 1871 ‘stirred up’ the Jewish community. [51] Lev’s father was bankrupted, but Lev’s mostly Jewish kruzhok wondered whether Jews’ ‘non-productive and profitable occupations’ were responsible for riots. Deutsch met Yakob Stefanovich, [52] the son of a Ukrainian priest, [53] at secondary school, [54] and after the government inspector closed talmud-torah schools the boys became convinced Jews caused this hostility by their ‘abnormal’ and ‘parasitic’ life; so they decided to work for Jewish ‘self-improvement’ through secular education and vocational training. [55] Stefanovich went to study medicine at Kyiv University, [56] and though Deutsch could not matriculate because of his ethnicity and status, he went too, and got involved in the student movement. [57] In 1873 he and Stefanovich went ‘to the people’ as SR propagandists, but in 1874 ‘initiated’ peasants betrayed ‘hundreds of their comrades to the authorities’. [58] In spring 1875 Deutsch propagandised in the village of Astrakhanka, but the peasants ‘remained firmly convicted of the worthlessness of my preaching’. [59] Late that year he joined propagandists in Chirigin province, but one betrayed them. They beat him with an iron ball and chain, [60] poured sulphuric acid over his face and attached a note to his body which read ‘Such will be the fate of all spies’. [61] He survived. [62] but another young Jew was radicalised in Kyiv.
Pavel Axelrod was born in into a tavern-keeper’s family in the small town of Pochep in Chernihiv province around 1849. He was a star pupil at primary school, then entered Magíloŭ gymnasium and tutored wealthy Jews’ children to make ends meet. He could not enter university, but he went to Kyiv, organised SR University students and went ‘to the people’ in summer 1874. Late that year he went to Germany illegally, stayed with a young socialist, met socialist workers and read Das Kapital, but did not understand it. He moved on to Switzerland in January 1875, met leading SRs, and married Nadezhda Kaminer; but they could not make ends meet. Axelrod returned to Russia illegally in summer and met leading SR survivors in St. Petersburg. [63]
Lev Tikhomirov was born in the town of Gelendzhik, on the Black Sea coast, [64] in 1852, into the family of a priest who had become a military doctor. Lev became a republican and an SR at secondary school, [65] and later entered Moscow University, [66] but had moved to St. Petersburg and joined Natanson’s SR kruzhok by late 1871. [67] Lopatin was also a member. [68] In 1872 Tikhomirov’s Skazka o chetyrekh bratyakh (The Tale of Four Brothers) and Pugachev (about the 18th century peasant leader Emelian Pugachev) were the kruzhok’s key propaganda pamphlets; [69] but while Tikhomirov contacted factory workers, [70] as did another member, [71] most worked with students. One noted that ‘We wish to save the people, but know nothing ourselves’, so ‘we should begin by studying’. Some sold books, or sought donations so they could give them away. They had 2,500 copies of the radical Vasily Bervi- Flerovsky’s Azbuka sotsialnykh nauk (The ABC of the Social Sciences) printed, [72] and left about 150 at the printer’s, so the police would confiscate them; [73] but took 800 to bookshops. Chaikovsky sold the rest to friends, including 300 to a medical student. Students raised money for ‘a commercial enterprise on socialist principles’ and a literacy school for workers. [74] In 1873 Tikhomirov was imprisoned; [75] but a young SR intelligent remained active.
Valentin Plekhanov was born into a family of landed Tatar gentry near Lipetsk in Tambov province. He became an army officer, married, and his wife bore seven children. Maria Fedorovna, their governess, came from an impoverished gentry family, but had attended the elite Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg and held strong liberal views. After Plekhanov’s wife died he married Fedorovna, and her dowry doubled the size of his small estate. But in 1855 he left to fight in the Crimean War. Georgi was born in 1856 and in 1858 Valentin sold some land to support his growing family. In 1861 the ‘emancipation’ freed his 50 serfs and halved his estate, and in 1863–4 he helped to suppress the Polish uprising. Georgi’s mother taught him to read, and he devoured the family library, but preferred military works. In 1866 he entered Voronezh Military Academy, but broke with religion after reading Chernyshevsky’s coded radical novel, Chto delat? (What Is To Be Done?). In 1873, after Valentin died, Plekhanova became a teacher, and Georgi entered Constantine Military Academy in St. Petersburg, but moved to the Mining Institute in 1874. His mother wanted to sell the estate, but he threatened to burn the barn unless she sold land to ‘our peasants’; so she agreed, but the peasants burned down her manor house. Late in 1875 Plekhanov attended clandestine kruzhki of students and workers, and he met Axelrod and Deutsch early in 1876. When the Institute expelled Plekhanov, he joined the embryo SR organisation Zemlia i volya (Land and Freedom), [76] whose members encouraged strikes, defended comrades against arrest, released prisoners and assassinated ‘harmful’ officials. [77] Late in December there was a memorial mass in Kazan Cathedral for the volunteers killed in the Balkan War. [78] Up to 250 SR intelligenty, [79] and about 50 workers, [80] including 40 from one workshop, assembled outside. [81] Plekhanov praised the revolutionary ‘martyrs’, condemned peasant oppression, and reportedly concluded with: ‘Death to the tsar. Long live freedom! Hurrah!’ [82] Afterwards Ignaty Bachin told him that he would conduct revolutionary propaganda only among fellow workers. ‘I’ll never go back to the village, not for anything’. ‘The peasants are sheep.’ [83]
Plekhanov was probably in contact with the Königsberg kruzhok, whose members translated socialist literature into Hebrew and Yiddish to help to create ‘social-revolutionary sections’ among Jews in the Pale. Zundelevich was mainly responsible for establishing kruzhki in Daugavpils, Minsk and Hrodna, and a small town in Biełaruś, while others established one in Białystok in north-east Poland. They included around 70 people, of whom 65 were Jews; but two spies had infiltrated the network and 19 members were arrested in spring 1876. When Zemlia i volya was formally founded in January 1877, Zundelevich joined. He later bought two printing presses in Berlin, and had them taken apart and smuggled to St. Petersburg. [84] Plekhanov’s kruzhok bought one of them, and Zundelevich ‘mastered the compositor’s art’, trained four others, [85] and strengthened the smuggling operation. [86]
Plekhanov escaped to Paris and went on to Berlin, but returned to St. Petersburg in summer. He carried a brass knuckle-duster, practised using a dagger and slept with a revolver under his pillow. He and some workers propagandised in the countryside, and though he was arrested, he escaped. [87] Back in St. Petersburg he criticised SR intelligenty, led workers’ kruzhki and wrote leaflets for strikers. [88] The worker Diakov Smirnov read translations of Marx and John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy with Chernyshevsky’s notes, but ‘understood little’. ‘The intelligentsia never spoke to us about Marx – they said we wouldn’t have understood it.’ Plekhanov recalled that the ‘centralists’, Marx and Engels, ‘were seen as quite mischievous reactionaries’. ‘Occasionally we would tell our audiences about the International Association of Workermen’ (IWMA), ‘but only in our role as “buntary” [insurrectionists] – making the activities of Bakunin our model’. [89] There were other ‘buntary’ in the south.
Vera Zasulich was born into an army captain’s family on his estate near Smolensk, the provincial capital, in 1849. Her father owned 40 or so serfs, but most paid him quitrent to work for wages elsewhere. After he died in 1855 Vera lived with wealthy relatives near Moscow and her tutor encouraged her to read radical books. She went to a private boarding school in 1864, and later trained to be a governess. An older sister was a member of an SR student kruzhok, and in 1866 she encouraged Vera to read Chernyshevsky, Lavrov and Mill, and attend SR lectures, and she stopped believing in god. By 1867, as a magistrate’s assistant in a nearby town, she saw the peasants’ poverty and ignorance, and returned to St. Petersburg in 1868 to learn the ‘phonetic method’ of teaching literacy. In 1869 she performed conspiratorial tasks for the terrorist Nechaev – konspiratsia was the art of avoiding arrest by adhering to strict rules – but she was arrested and imprisoned for a year without trial. She spent another year in the Fortress, and in 1871 she was deported to Novgorod province, then allowed to go to Tver, but was deported to Kostroma in 1872. In 1873 she studied midwifery at Kharkiv University, and in 1875 she joined 15 or so buntary in Kyiv. In summer 1877 she read about the illegal flogging of a student propagandist in a St. Petersburg prison, learned to shoot, threw dice with another woman to decide who would assassinate the police chief, and won. Early in 1878 she went to St. Petersburg, walked into the chief’s office and shot him. She was badly beaten, but he had a severe wound in the pelvis and thought he was going to die, so he made a will and left a fortune. When he recovered the tsar sacked him for taking bribes, and in spring his enemies got Zasulich treated as an ordinary criminal. The judge picked the most incompetent prosecutor he knew, and her barrister proved that the police chief had lied and was guilty of provocation, so the jury of minor officials and intelligenty found Zasulich innocent ‘out of conscience’. Sympathisers hid her, but the Senate nullified her acquittal and issued an order for her arrest. [90] She got a letter published in a St. Petersburg paper, and copies were ‘snatched up like hot cakes’, but the paper was closed, [91] so SRs helped her to escape to Switzerland. [92]
Mikhail Kravchinsky was born into a petit-bourgeois family. He later graduated from medical school, achieved gentry status, [93] and married. Sergey was born in the village of Novyi Starodub, Kherson province, in 1852. He later entered Orel military gymnasium, moved to Moscow Military Academy in 1867 and St. Petersburg Artillery Institute in 1869. He joined a radical kruzhok, [94] and was inspired by Bakunin’s ideas. [95] After he graduated he became a second lieutenant and circulated anarchist literature among fellow officers. He resigned in 1871, entered the Forestry Institute early in 1872, [96] and he and a serving army officer dressed as peasants and ‘went to the people in 1873’. [97] They were arrested early in 1874, [98] but peasants helped them escape. They went to Moscow ‘to carry on the propaganda among the youth’, met two women ‘just arrived from Zurich with the same object’, [99] and told the anarchist prince Petr Kropotkin that they had worked as sawyers for a fortnight and produced ‘quite a stir in a number of villages’. [100] A civil servant’s wife let them use her house as and they gave men and women peasant clothes, money, forged passports, addresses and simple propaganda. Kravchinsky and others arranged the transport of books, maps and false passports, [101] but he came to believe that many whose ‘faith was Socialism’, and whose ‘god’ was ‘the people’, ‘no longer saw any hope in victory, and longed for the crown of thorns’. It ‘resembled a religious movement’, ‘not a political movement’, [102] because ‘scientific socialism’ ‘bounces off the Russian masses like a pea off the wall’. [103] By 1875 he felt that he ‘movement’ had ‘changed its aspect’, since propagandists in Odesa, Kharkiv and Kyiv favoured ‘an immediate rising’. [104] Lavrov had escaped from exile to Paris in 1868, and in 1875 Kravchinsky told him that ‘We cannot change the thinking of even one in six hundred peasants, let alone of one in sixty’. ‘A revolt has to be organised.’ [105]
From 1873 to 1876 15 percent of 1,611 prosecuted or administratively-sentenced SR propagandists had been women, [106] and 68 women and men were Jews. [107] Early in 1877 the tsar increased the sentences of those convicted at the trial of 193 SRs, [108] and empowered the director of the Third Section (the political police) to exile those who had been found not guilty. [109] Gendarmes arrested 80, [110] including Tikhomirov. [111] In April the tsar declared war against the Ottoman empire, [112] and Kravchinsky fought with the Serbs against the Ottoman army in Herzegovina until the war ended early in 1878, [113] with 450,000 Russian dead. [114]
Deutsch had enlisted a soldier in Kyiv, but helped a friend to escape from prison in 1876, and was arrested, but escaped. [115] In 1877 100 Chirigin peasants were arrested, and Deutsch and Stefanovich were imprisoned in Kyiv, but escaped to Switzerland in May 1878. Thousands of Jews lived there, and Zurich, Bern and Geneva universities allowed Russian Jews to enrol. [116] When Zundelevich arrived in Switzerland he found that Zasulich, Deutsch and Stefanovich believed that terror ‘might hinder political work among the people’, but they wanted to return to Russia. Zundelevich taught them not to attract attention by their speech or dress – ‘Please don’t pull your hats down over your eyes’ – and they and another woman returned to Russia posing as two couples. [117]
In Russia the inner circle of Zemlia i volya included Plekhanov. [118] He supported agrarian terror and partisan warfare, and Tikhomirov argued that SRs had to ‘replace the emperor in the people’s mind as the symbol of power and legitimacy, and ‘this would never be done by propaganda, but only through violent deeds’. [119] Kravchinsky took part in an uprising near Naples, and was condemned to death, but escaped to Switzerland. When he heard about Zasulich’s assassination attempt he returned to St. Petersburg, [120] and helped her get to Geneva, where almost all the Russian émigrés were anarchists. [121] He acknowledged that over one million soldiers in Russia could ‘transform the five or six principle towns, the only places where any movement whatever is possible, into veritable armed camps’; but if revolutionaries were willing to kill a ‘vile spy’, why not kill a gendarme or higher officials? The ‘logic of life could not but compel the Revolutionaries to mount these steps by degrees’, and some argued that ‘bullets were better than words’. [122] He argued that it was necessary to remove socialism’s ‘German dress’ and ‘put it in peasant costume’. [123]
In summer one clandestine press in St. Petersburg printed Zemlia i volya and another printed Nachalo (The Beginning), which was aimed at unaligned socialists. Several members of Zemlia i volya favoured pushing political demands, but Zundelevich argued for the primacy of terror. [124]
In August a cab followed a general and the director of the Third Section near its St. Petersburg headquarters. [125] The passengers were Kravchinsky and Alexandr Barannikov, the 20-year-old son of a small tradesman in Gomel. His shot missed the director, so Kravchinsky stabbed him. He died almost immediately, and the assassins and their supporters got away. [126] Zundelevich had been a signaller. [127] Kravchinsky had previously described his motives in a pamphlet, [128] which was released. [129] ‘We are socialists. Our aim is to destroy the existing economic structure.’ [130] The government had driven socialists ‘devoted to the work of liberating the suffering people and condemning ourselves to any hardship so as to avoid it for others’ to ‘embark on a whole series of murders.’ ‘Gentleman of the government, policemen, administrators this is our last word to you.’
You are representatives of authority; we are opponents of any enslavement of man by man, therefore you are our enemies and there can be no reconciliation between us. You must be destroyed and you will be destroyed! But we do not believe that political slavery gives birth to economic slavery but rather the contrary. We are convinced that the destruction of economic inequality will bring about the destruction of the poverty of the people and with it also the ignorance, superstition and prejudice with which all authority supports itself ... Our real enemy is the bourgeoisie which is now hiding behind you, although it hates you because you have tied its hands. You are an outsider! If you do not prevent us from fighting our real enemies we will leave you in peace. You can sleep peacefully until the overthrow of the present economic order. [131]
As for the tsar, ‘whether you share power with the bourgeoisie is not our concern. Whether you grant or do not grant a constitution is a matter of complete indifference to us. Do not violate our human rights’. [132] Kravchinsky called for an end to persecution for political opinions and arbitrary behaviour by officials, and an amnesty for political prisoners. [133] Otherwise, ‘For each political activist hanged by the government, a tsarist official will die.’ [134]
In two days there were up to 1,000 arrests and from his hiding-place Kravchinsky saw several spies.
It was the easiest thing in the world to recognise them. That embarrassed air, that glance full of suspicion and fear which they fix upon the face of every passer-by, are signs which do not deceive an experienced eye. These, however, were professional spies. The others, that is, the ‘temporary spies’, had a much more comical appearance. They were evidently only private soldiers dressed up as civilians as could be seen at a glance. They always went about in little parties, and ... whole detachments had the same hats, the same overcoats, the same trousers. Some wore great blue spectacles, as large as cart-wheels, to give them the appearance of students. [135]
Almost 2,000 suspects were soon under arrest, [136] but Kravchinsky escaped to Switzerland. [137]
In autumn, as trustee of Zemlia i volya’s funds, Zundelevich gave 6,000 rubles towards reconstructing its ‘centre’. It still focussed on the peasantry, [138] but during 1878 women workers at a St. Petersburg tobacco factory had gone on strike and put a notice on the gate. ‘We cannot stand any further deduction in our wages’ which ‘do not allow us to dress decently’. [139] Some members of Zemlia i volya were influenced by Marx’s ideas.
By 1879 Plekhanov had a ‘great respect’ for the ‘materialist conception of history’ from reading Bakunin.
Marx shows us how life itself indicates the necessary reforms in the economic cooperation of a country, how the forms of production itself predispose the minds of the masses to accept socialist teachings, which until the necessary preparations exists, would be incapable not only of making a revolution but even of forming a more or less significant party. He shows us in what forms, and within what limits socialist propaganda can be considered to be a waste of energy.
Plekhanov believed that influencing the ‘entire mass’ of the peasantry was ‘impossible as long as one saw in the city workers only a material for the recruitment of individual persons’; yet workers were the ‘most enlightened representatives of the peasantry’, ‘the most mobile, the most susceptible to incitation’ and ‘the most easily revolutionised stratum of the population’, and they would support a peasant revolution. What was needed was ‘daily and hourly’ agitation about ‘the most trifling facts of the worker’s life’, [140] and strikes to develop ‘a sense of opposition to all privileged classes and a sense of their own class solidarity’. [141] As long as peasants supported the commune, ‘we cannot consider that our country has entered the path of that law by which capitalist production becomes an obligatory station on its line of progress’, [142] and he endorsed terror for self-defence. [143]
By spring Tikhomirov had initiated Svoboda ili smert (Liberty or Death), a top-secret organisation inside Zemlia i volya, [144] and a ‘secondary’ circle included Zundelevich. [145] Alexandr Soloviev told them that he intended to kill the tsar, but as soon as the tsar saw his revolver he ran away. Soloviev fired five shots, missed, [146] and was hanged. [147]
At a Zemlia i volya meeting in Voronezh, Plekhanov and Deutsch described the perspective of the majority of Zemlia i volya members as ‘liberalism with bombs’. [148] The organisation split, and 20 or so, including Plekhanov, Deutsch, Zasulich and Stefanovich, formed Chyornyi peredel (Black Repartition). [149] The majority called themselves Ispolnitelnyy komitet narodnaya volya (The Executive Committee of the People’s Will), and elected a leading committee of three which included Alexandr Mikhailov and Tikhomirov. [150] The EC were mainly intelligenty in their late twenties, [151] and while no more than 30 of 44 those whose names are known were active at any one time, they probably had 500 supporters, [152] and 1,000 or more sympathisers. [153] Eight of the 18 EC members were women, and women formed a substantial minority of their periphery. [154] The EC aimed to assassinate the tsar, hoping to spark a peasant uprising, take over the government, eliminate private property in land and introduce a constituent assembly. [155] Zundelevich was elected to the EC. [156] He secured the Zemlia i volya press and a large stockpile of type, the passport bureau and 8,000 rubles, or four or five times as much money as Chyornyi peredel. The EC also retained the ‘Department of Foreign Affairs’ – the smuggling network – and the dynamite workshop, [157] and supporters donated 23,000 rubles, [158] and Kravchinsky took money abroad to buy a press. [159] In autumn Zundelevich was arrested and faced a long sentence of katorga (hard labour) in eastern Siberia. [160]
St. Petersburg police suspected Plekhanov of conspiring to kill the tsar, so he went underground. Axelrod had formed the tiny Yuzhnyy Soyuz Rossiyskikh Rabochikh (The Southern Union of Russian Workers), and the tiny Severnyy Soyuz Rossiyskikh Rabochikh (The Northern Union of Russian Workers) invited him to edit their paper in St. Petersburg. [161] He wanted to focus on ‘the development of the independent revolutionary activism of the masses in preparation for the socialist revolution’, [162] but he did not reach St. Petersburg in time.
Maria Krylova was born into an impoverished gentry family in 1842. Her father was a minor government official. Maria later attended a boarding school in Moscow, stayed on after she graduated and taught workers at a Sunday school. She lived independently and joined women’s’ organisations, including a commune whose leader’s brother was associated with the SR terrorist Nikołai Ishutin. Krylova joined the ‘Organisation’ that was a cover for Ishutin’s kruzhok and helped to extend its female contacts. In 1866 she was briefly detained after Dmitry Karakozov failed to assassinate the tsar, but was released under surveillance. By late 1879 she worked on Chyornyi peredel’s press in St. Petersburg. Late one night in January 1880, when the printers were asleep, the doorbell rang. [163] Gendarmes, ‘by lifting the doors from their hinges, as the official report said, or by using skeleton keys, as ran the rumour’, caught the printers in bed. [164] Krylova met them with ‘arms in hand’, [165] but the gendarmes seized the press, [166] and most copies of the paper, [167] and arrested her. (She was later exiled). [168] Narodnaya volya’s press printed Chyornyi peredel’s manifesto, [169] but gendarmes got close to Plekhanov, Zasulich, Deutsch and Stefanovich, so their comrades told them to go abroad. [170] Axelrod was the only leader left in Russia, [171] and someone assassinated the person who betrayed the press. [172]
During the 1870s the police had spotted 5,664 intelligenty political suspects aged 18 or older, of whom 65 percent were students or professionals, 21 percent were workers, artisans or peasants, and 14 percent were raznochintsy (people of indeterminate rank). [173] Early in 1880, after several attempts to kill the tsar, and the hangings of several would-be assassins, the government merged the regular police and the Third Section into the Department of Police, whose St. Petersburg headquarters had a secret section dealing with political suspects and gosudarstvennyye prestupniki (state criminals), linked to okhrannye otdelinya (security sections) in Moscow and Warsaw, [174] which became known as the Okhrana.
Candidate gendarmes underwent a three-to-six month training course in law, history, regulations and operational procedures, and 6,708 of them included 521 officers who were mainly landless Orthodox gentry Around 60 percent were stationed on railway lines, and the rest were based in provincial and district headquarters. [175] The interior minister ordered that the political criminals who had been sentenced to katorga should be sent to Siberia, and the justice minister withdrew permission for those who had completed their sentences on Sakhalin Island off the Pacific coast to return to the mainland. Many men were sent to Lower Kara prison beyond Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, and women to nearby Ust-Kara. Peasants got three rubles for capturing a common criminal who escaped, but 50 for a state criminal. [176]
Tikhomirov’s revised programme for the Narodnaya volya EC appeared in Narodnaya volya without discussion. [177] It involved the ‘creation of a central fighting organisation capable of initiating a revolt’ with provincial organisations to support it. The aim was to ‘ensure the active support of the factory workers in the towns’ and that of ‘the Armed Forces, or at least to paralyse any assistance they might give to the Government’, and ‘win over the sympathy and co-operation of the intelligentsia’ and ‘public opinion in foreign countries’. [178] Tikhomirov’s ‘irregular methods’ were challenged, [179] and he offered to resign, [180] but most EC members accepted the new programme, [181] and one organised an escape route from Siberia.
Yuri Bogdanovich was born into a family of gentry in Nikolskoye, Pskov province, in 1849. In 1871 he entered St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, but left without graduating in 1873 and agitated Saratov province peasants. He joined Zemlia i volya in 1876, Narodnaya volya in 1879, its EC in 1880, and then founded Krasny Krest (the political Red Cross) to give exiled ‘politicals’ an escape route from Krasnoyarsk in Siberia to Kazan. [182]
Chyornyi peredel brought a press from Smolensk to St. Petersburg, a typesetter arrived from Saratov and two female comrades rented an apartment. [183] Praskovia Ivanovskaya, the 27-year-old daughter of a village priest, and Ludmila Terenteeva, the teenage daughter of a schoolteacher, worked as typographers; [184] but Axelrod had a second Chyornyi peredel printed in London and copies were smuggled into Russia. [185]
Peasants were under severe pressure. The average holding was around 6.7 hectares in the northern region of European Russia, 2.7 in the central region and Ukraine and 2.3 in the south west, [186] but they remained largely quiescent. Danielson noted that the government used 20 percent of taxes to underwrite railway shareholders’ dividends, and poor peasants suffered most; [187] but Kapital did not apply to Russia. [188] Marx disagreed.
In London in 1877 Marx drafted a letter to the liberal St. Petersburg monthly, Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland). He noted that the Russian empire was ‘tending to become a capitalist nation’, but it would ‘not succeed without having first transformed a large proportion of its peasants into proletarians’. He crossed out ‘if it continues along the path it has followed since 1861 it will miss the finest chance history has ever offered to a nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system’, but did not post the letter. Early in 1879 the Chicago Tribune published an interview with Marx. ‘“No socialist,”’ remarked the Doctor, smiling, “need predict that there will be bloody revolution in Russia.”’ A Liberal MP understood that Marx expected ‘a great and not distant crash in Russia’, sparked by ‘reforms from above which the old bad edifice will not be able to bear and which will lead to its tumbling down altogether’. For ‘a long time Russia would be unable to exercise any influence in Europe’, but ‘the movement will spread to Germany’ and lead to ‘a revolt against the existing military system’.
In spring Engels felt that the struggle between the Russian state and the ‘secret societies’ had ‘so violent a character that it cannot last’. The government seemed to be ‘on the brink of exploding,’ and its agents were ‘committing incredible atrocities’. ‘Against such wild animals one must defend oneself as one can, with powder and lead. Political assassination in Russia is the only means which men of intelligence, dignity and character possess to defend themselves against the agents of an unprecedented despotism.’ [189]
In January 1880 Marx felt ‘the Russian Revolution’ would ‘get underway’ that year, [190] and offered to help. In spring Engels noted that ‘everything is proceeding splendidly’, since ‘You cannot banish sheer lack of money’.
Not one banker will make a loan without a guarantee from the Imperial Assembly. Hence the present desperate recourse to an internal loan. On paper it will be a success, in reality a total failure. And then they will have to convene some assembly or other if only to obtain cash – always supposing something else does not happen in the meantime.
In summer Marx received Narodnaya volya’s programme, [191] and late that year the EC member Lev Hartmann visited London. [192] Marx was sympathetic, but declined to write for their publications since they were not socialists. [193] Marian Skinner often visited Marx’s daughters and met ‘a courtly young Russian’ who ‘had attempted to blow up the tsar’, but who was ‘one of the mildest mannered men that ever cut his country’.
He warbled Russian love songs delightfully, and punctuated them with languishing glances, and he told us that he had spent over a year in a Petersburg prison cell where there was not room to stand up, or to lie down at full length, and that snow drifted in through the paneless window until it was chest high. He was accused of being an anarchist – which accusation was probably not true at the beginning of his incarceration, but pretty correct at its end. [194]
Marx knew that the programme of the ‘terrorist Central Committee’ had ‘aroused considerable ire amongst the anarchist Russians’, and believed Chyornyi peredel was guilty of ‘Bakuninist doctrinarianism’. According to them Russia was ‘to leap head-over-heels into the anarchist-communist-atheist millennium!’, yet its members were ‘opposed to politico-revolutionary action’. [195]
In Geneva Plekhanov was impressed with Marx’s critique of bourgeois philosophers and believed that a bourgeois revolution was most likely in Russia. [196] He argued for a ‘mass organisation’ to propagandise ‘more highly developed’ workers and raise their ‘consciousness’, so they could begin ‘rousing’ other workers, lead strikes and move strikers ‘into the streets’ to support insurgent peasants. [197] He was unclear how Marx’s ‘law’ of economic progress applied to Russia, [198] but capitalism was developing in the countryside, and taxation and usury had caused contradictions within the peasantry. [199] The Narodnaya volya EC was mistaken: ‘Revolutions are made by the masses and prepared by history’. [200] The Russian translation of Marx and Engels’ Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei impressed Plekhanov, but he felt it was inadequate, so he asked Zasulich to retranslate it. [201] In summer Plekhanov was impressed by Engels’ Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science), and his wife joined him.
Rosalia Bograd was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Kherson in 1856. She later became a medical student in St. Petersburg, [202] and in 1877, during the war with the Ottoman empire, she went to the front to care for the sick and wounded; but their treatment was inadequate and the military authorities stole and were corrupt. The experience radicalised her, and back in St. Petersburg she distributed illegal literature to fellow students and organised workers. [203] The war ended in 1878, and by 1879, when Chyornyi peredel had around 100 members, Bograd was one of its leaders. [204] She had married Plekhanov, but stayed in Russia after he escaped abroad early in 1880, because she was about to give birth and take her final examinations to qualify as a doctor. She passed, but after the authorities discovered that she had lived with Plekhanov they withheld her diploma. In summer she decided to go to Geneva with her daughter, [205] and persuaded a young magistrate to look after a large suitcase, but next day police found political letters and illegal presses and the judge’s career was ruined. [206]
Soon after Rosalia reached Geneva the family moved to Paris, and Lavrov helped Plekhanov to write pseudonymously for liberal Russian journals. In autumn he wrote in Chyornyi peredel that Russia would have a bourgeois revolution before a socialist revolution, [207] and by late that year he was convinced that ‘economic relations’ were the basis of ‘all the phenomena of political life’. ‘Free communal organisation and self-government’ in Russian villages would ensure the right to free use of land and equal allotments, and an ‘economic agrarian revolution’ would automatically bring a ‘transformation of all other social relations’.
The social-revolutionary party should lead the people from passively waiting for ‘black repartition’ from above, to demanding actively ‘Land and Liberty’ from below by inciting the people to active struggle with the state, by instilling independence and activism in them, by organising them for struggle, using each small opportunity to arouse popular discontent and instilling in the people correct opinions about existing social relations and those desirable in the future by means of propaganda through word and deed. [208]
Narodnaya volya was ‘without foundations and influence among the people’, and so ‘a staff without an army’. [209]
On 27 February 1881 (according to the Russian calendar) Marx wrote to Zasulich in Switzerland that the Russian village commune would be ‘the fulcrum of ‘social reorganisation’, but only after all communal property had been ‘transformed into private property’ to ensure ‘the normal conditions of spontaneous development’. [210] There were no short cuts.
In 1879 Zundelevich had recruited Andrey Zheliabov to Narodnaya volya, [211] and by 1881 the 30-year-old son of a Crimean serf was a leading member of the EC, but he was arrested on 27 February; so his 27-year-old partner, Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a former city governor and the only other leading EC member who was fully informed about the latest plan to assassinate the tsar, took command. [212]
On the morning of 1 March she took a cab and nursed two bombs on her lap, in case a jolt set them off. She met 24-year-old Ignacy Hryniewiecki, the son of a small landowner near Hrodna, and Nikołai Rysakov, a 19-year-old artisan from Tikhvin in St. Petersburg province. At 10.00am Nikołai Kibalchich, the 27-year-old son of a Chernihiv province priest, brought two bombs, and they went to a cafe for coffee and cakes. [213] Early that afternoon Perovskaya positioned the bomb-throwers and gave them their bombs. At 2.15 p.m. she dropped her handkerchief as a signal to begin, then walked along Nevsky Prospekt and crossed over Kanal Ketrin. [214] As the tsar’s carriage went along beside the Kanal, [215] Rysakov threw his bomb under the back axle, killing a Cossack and badly injuring a small boy. The horses bolted, but the tsar returned. Rysakov had been arrested, but Hryniewiecki threw his bomb and injured 20 people, including himself and the tsar, who lay covered in blood with both his legs broken. [216] He died within an hour, [217] but a foreigner noted that people went about their business, ‘calm and carefree’, with ‘no curiosity or anxiety on their faces’. [218] The Narodnaya volya EC anxiously waited for news at the home of the writer, Gleb Uspensky, [219] but Hryniewiecki died that evening without giving his name.
By 3 March troops were digging deep trenches around the tsar’s Gatchina palace outside St. Petersburg, and 800 suspects had been arrested. Next day thousands of Cossacks patrolled the city centre, but the Narodnaya volya metalworker Timofei Mikhailov, a 20-year-old peasant from near Smolensk, shot several policemen before he ran out of ammunition. When Perovskaya failed to free Zheliabov, she was arrested, and Rysakov identified her and Kibalchich, but while she and Mikhailov did not talk, Kibalchich betrayed a young Jewess.
Gesya Gelfman, the 26-year-old daughter of a tradesman, was born near Kyiv. [220] Since 1879 she had managed Narodnaya volya’s conspiratorial headquarters in St. Petersburg, raised funds and represented the organisation in Krasny Krest. [221] She had worked in the underground press since autumn 1880, [222] and lived in the apartment where bombs were stored, but was not an EC member and knew nothing about the planned assassination. [223]
A leaflet from ‘worker members’ of Narodnaya volya circulated.
Alexandr I, torturer of his people, was killed by us socialists. He defended only the rich and himself, feasted and lived in luxury, while the people starved ... Alexandr was a wolf. Now we have Alexandr II on the throne. Don’t let him follow in the footsteps of his father; let him call to the senate as his advisers those whom the people will elect. Then the tsar will give land to the peasants and will lower taxes. Send petitions to him, you in the towns and villages. If he doesn’t listen to the people and gets to be like his daddy, he too will have to be replaced. [224]
On 10 March Tikhomirov addressed the new tsar in a leaflet on behalf of Narodnaya volya.
The movement must grow and increase, terrorist attacks must be repeated and intensified, the revolutionary organisation will replace eliminated teams by more sophisticated and stronger groups. The total number of malcontent people in the country is growing; the people’s confidence in the government should decline, the idea of revolution, of its possibility and inevitability will develop in Russia all the more strongly. A tremendous explosion, a bloody confusion, a convulsive revolutionary upheaval across all Russia will complete the process of the destruction of the old order. [225]
’A revolutionary movement, your Majesty, does not depend on individuals’, since it is ‘a process of the social organism’, and gallows were ‘just as impotent to save the existing order of state as was the crucifixion of the Nazarene to preserve the crumbling ancient world from the triumph of reforming Christianity’. The EC ‘set no conditions’, since they had been set ‘by history’, and a revolution was ‘absolutely inevitable’ unless there was ‘a voluntary turning of the Supreme Power to the people’. The EC hoped the tsar would summon ‘representatives of the whole of Russian people’ to ‘examine the existing framework of social and governmental life’ and ‘remodel it in accordance with the people’s wishes’, with elections based on freedom of speech, assembly and the press. After a ‘general amnesty to cover all past political crimes’, which the EC saw as ‘fulfilments of civic duty’, it would ‘voluntarily terminate its own existence’, and its members would ‘devote themselves to the work of culture among the people’. [226] Narodnaya volya supporters distributed 10,000 copies across the city. [227]
The assassins’ trial began on the 26th, before a special bench of the Senate. Someone took a stenographic record, but censors later edited it. Officials and a few others were present, but journalists were barred. Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Mikhailov, Zheliabov, Rysakov and Gelfman were charged with belonging to Russkaya sotsial-revolyutsionnaya partiya (The Russian Social Revolutionary Party). Zheliabov insisted that it was ‘the duty of a sincere Christian to fight on behalf of the weak and oppressed; and, if need be, to suffer for them’. The ‘main enemy of the Russian social movement was the Russian Bureaucracy’, but he ‘would willingly abandon violence if there were the possibility of serving my ideals by peaceful means’. Mikhailov also claimed that the aim of Narodnaya volya was ‘protecting the workers’, [228] and next day the tsar fled to Gatchina. [229]
On the 29th the court condemned all six defendants to death. Perovskaya could have asked the tsar to reconsider her sentence, because of her high social status, but she refused to do so. Mikhailov petitioned for a reprieve, and Rysakov offered to betray other EC members, but both were unsuccessful. [230] Gelfman was pregnant, and the tsar decided to let her live until her child was born. [231] The prison authorities barred relatives from visiting the condemned and the ‘most sinister rumours’ of torture circulated in the city. [232] On 2 April priests visited the prison, but Zheliabov and Perovskaya refused to see them.
On the 3rd 12,000 troops guarded the route to Semenovskaya square. At 9.20 a.m., in front of 80,000 spectators, the drunken Frolov hanged Kibalchich; but he knotted the rope badly for Mikhailov and had to hang him three times, while Zheliabov strangled for several minutes. [233] Perovskaya fastened her feet to the platform, and two men had to struggle to dislodge them, [234] before she became the first Russian woman state criminal to be executed. [235] Rysakov showed the crowd his mutilated hands and shouted that he had been tortured. [236] He hung on to the woodwork, but was pulled away, and it was all over by 9.30 a.m. [237] The Kölnische Zeitung correspondent had ‘been present at a dozen executions in the East, but never have I witnessed such hideous butchery’.
Officially, the courts had sentenced over 2,000 people to death during the tsar’s reign, [238] and 31 were executed. [239] About 1,200 had been deported within European Russia, and 60 of the 230 exiled to Siberia were sentenced to katorga. [240] Reportedly at least 2,348 political suspects had faced trial in the past four years, [241] but three-quarters of the 67,000 in Siberia had had no trial. [242] According to Kravchinsky, 1,767 of the ‘administrative’ exiles, including some in eastern Siberia, were from Odesa, Kyiv and Kharkiv alone. [243]
Before the assassination, 6,790 people had been under surveillance, [244] but that grew to 31,000, [245] and by summer 4,000 were under arrest. [246] A new law systematised existing emergency legislation, but curtailed the powers of police and gendarmes. In districts under a ‘state of emergency’ they could detain anyone they suspected of planning a ‘state crime’, or belonging to an illegal organisation, for a week. They could recommend that the interior minister exile them for up to five years without trial, while he and the justice minister could transfer cases involving violence against officials to military courts martial. In places under ‘reinforced security’ police and gendarmes could detain anyone they deemed ‘politically unreliable’ for two weeks, or a month if the governor agreed, and could search premises and sack unelected local officials. Provincial governors and governors-general could ban meetings, close businesses, deport people, fine them up to 500 rubles and imprison them for up to three months, and they and the interior minister could transfer cases to courts martial. In places under ‘extraordinary security’ governors-general and military commanders could sack civil servants and elected officials (except the top ranks), suspend publications, close educational institutions for a month, sequester the property and income of people deemed ‘harmful to state or public security’, fine them up to 3,000 rubles, [247] and create units of military police. Provincial governors could declare states of emergency, give police and gendarmes more power, establish provincial security sections accountable to the Police Department in St. Petersburg, [248] and ask for cases that might ‘disturb the public peace’ to be tried in camera, except for a member of the accused’s family. [249] The tsar imposed ‘reinforced security’ in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkiv, Poltava, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Volhynia, Podolsk, Kherson and Bessarabia provinces, plus districts of Simferópol, Evpatoria, Yalta, Feodosia, Perekop and Voronezh provinces, the cities of Voronezh, Berdiansk, Rostov-na-Donu and Mariupol, and the city governorships of Odesa, Taganrog and Kerch-Enikalsk.
Anyone deemed ‘politically unreliable’ was excluded from civil and military service and educational institutions, denied state privileges and pensions, and barred from running a bookshop, library, news paper, journal, society or professional association. The could not give a public lecture, [250] sell spirits, work in a typographic or photographic laboratory, or practice medicine, midwifery or pharmacology without an Interior Ministry licence. Almost 100,000 police carried out surveillance and could search homes at any hour, restrict suspects’ movements and confiscate internal passports. [251]
The 14,000 gendarmes included 1,000 officers, [252] and the organisation now had an annual budget of one million rubles. [253] Gendarmes operated independently of the civil administration, [254] but needed the governor’s permission to act in St. Petersburg. Around 7,000 were at railway stations, 5,000 at border crossings and ports and 2,500 in provincial sections; but most cities, large towns, and some provinces had only half a dozen. [255] The St. Petersburg headquarters had sections dealing with administration and finance, and domestic and foreign security, while the surveillance section had charts of revolutionary and liberal groups with suspects’ names circled in red. (The library eventually grew to half a million files and tens of thousands of dossiers, including 4,000 ‘secret collaborators’.) Another section could exile suspects to Siberia without trial. [256] The Moscow headquarters was responsible for 13 provinces, [257] and around a quarter of the empire was under martial law.
Successful applicants to become a gendarme were often men who had been born into a noble family and had done well at a military college and in the army. The training lasted six months, and those who did best could choose where to be deployed. A fileur (spinner), who was often a former junior army officer, followed suspects in the streets and reported where they went and who they met. Gendarmes could arrest known revolutionaries on sight and subject suspects to conditional arrest. [258] Orthodox priests swore in gendarme recruits, so Catholics and Jews were ineligible; [259] and one section at the St. Petersburg headquarters focussed on ‘Jewish affairs’. [260]
In 60 years the empire’s population had grown by 87 percent, but the Jewish community by 150 percent, [261] and the population of the Pale, at 611 per square kilometre, was the densest in the empire. [262] No more than three members of the Narodnaya volya EC had been Jews, but a Vilnius official noted that Jews had been influenced by SR ‘ideals’ since 1878, [263] and Jews formed around 12 percent of political suspects. [264]
In Ukraine the city of Kherson had a large police force, but whole districts of the province had nine policemen and some large towns had five, while 20 of the 70 or so troops in the district centres protected only government buildings and banks. Elizavetgrad had large police force, [265] for a population of 32,000, [266] since it was a garrison town. There was a large Jewish community, but some ethnic Russians resented the success of Jewish merchants and alleged that Jewish councillors did not represent them. After the tsar’s assassination a brawl involved a Jew and a Russian, and a Russian mob destroyed over 700 Jewish homes and shops.
In Kyiv, a week later, after a Russian hit a Jew, other Russians demanded free vodka from Jewish taverns. They seriously damaged Jewish-owned buildings and warned that ‘a gang of Muscovites’ would soon arrive and start a riot. Three days later troops guarded the Arsenal, but did not interfere next day as 4,000 rioters attacked Jewish shops and homes and looted a Jew’s vodka warehouse. The following day a brawl involved 600 people, and a mob destroyed a synagogue and Jewish buildings in poorer districts, including the homes of army veterans. Three Jews and three Russians died, 187 Jews were injured, around 4,000 were homeless and 1,800 crowded into temporary shelters under the governor’s protection. The overwhelming majority of the 1,789 rioters were Russians from Kyiv and Chernihiv provinces, but courts later convicted 89, [267] and the Kyiv police chief enforced the residence rules until only 3,200 Jews remained in the city. [268]
The government limited the number of Jewish army medical personnel to five percent, [269] and barred Jews from renting, leasing or buying land, [270] establishing new settlements, living outside large towns and shtetls (small towns), [271] and in villages with a Russian majority, [272] unless they converted to Orthodoxy. [273] The government suspended Jewish mortgages and leases on land, deprived Jews of the power of attorney for managing estates, and barred them from working on Sundays and the main Christian holidays, [274] thereby further disadvantaging pious Jews who could not work on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays. The government imposed a ten percent limit on Jewish pupils in secondary schools in the Pale, five percent in schools and universities outside and three percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow; [275] but there were international consequences to this policy.
The riots led to a reduction of 152 million rubles in the value of government bonds on the international market. [276]Some foreign bankers refused to buy bonds or lend capital, [277] and one financed a ‘colonisation scheme’ in Palestine. [278] By summer 225,000 Jewish families had emigrated in just over 12 months; [279] but many Russian-speaking Jewish workers went south, [280] and weavers built a trade union in Białystok. [281] They contributed 50 kopeks (half a ruble) a week until they raised 240 rubles, then went on strike. Other Jewish and German weavers gave them money and refused to blackleg, so the employer gave in; [282] and this success was later noted in periodicals published abroad which circulated illegally across the empire. [283]
A Narodnaya volya EC member published a leaflet claiming that the anti-Jewish riots were the beginning of a popular revolt against the autocracy. Other EC members failed to destroy many leaflets, which influenced other members and some in Chyornyi peredel. In Switzerland, Stefanovich denounced the leaflet as anti-Semitic, and Axelrod and Deutsch wanted to condemn it publicly, but Zundelevich persuaded them not to do so. [284]
There were further anti-Jewish riots in Chișinău in Bessarabia and Yalta in the Crimea, but wealthy St. Petersburg Jews gave the victims little aid. Jewish socialists in Vilnius saw themselves ‘as “men, “ not as Jews’, and believed that ‘workers of whatever religion and nation must unite’ and ‘work against the common enemy’, the bourgeoisie. There were no restrictions on Jewish residence in Odesa, [285] and Jewish students formed armed defence squads, but 150 were arrested and there was a riot, while fires destroyed Jewish neighbourhoods in Minsk, Bobruisk, Vitebsk and Pinsk. Some Jewish student SRs felt they ‘belonged to the Russian people’, and ‘all Jews were swindlers’, so they welcomed the riots. In autumn many Jews were expelled from Orel, Tambov, Kyiv, Dubno and Warszawa provinces. By the end of the year there had been over 200 riots. At least 40 Jews had died and tens of thousands made homeless; but the community continued to increase by 120,000 a year, [286] and socialists, some of them influenced by Marx, had built a party in neighbouring Germany.
The German confederation of states had collapsed after a war with Austria in 1866, but by 1867 Prussia was the strongest state in the north German confederation, which allowed four southern states to join in 1870, and in 1871 the Prussian army defeated the French army, and allowed the provisional French government’s troops to crush the Paris Commune. The Prussian king became the Kaiser (emperor), and the Reichstag (parliament) would be elected by men aged over 25, but the large number of the lowest tax payers, a sizeable number of the medium tax payers and a small number of the highest payers would elect the same number of deputies. There would be a two-stage election for each Landtag (state assembly), which would send delegates to the Bundesrat (federal council), which would include 17 Prussians, and a majority of the 58 members could veto any Reichstag decisions. [287] Socialists won 124,000 votes in the Reichstag elections, or 3.2 percent of those cast, but only two, or 0.5 percent, of the 382 seats, [288] since the chancellor had gerrymandered the constituency boundaries. [289] Jews were given full legal rights. [290] In 1874 socialists won over 350,000 votes, or six percent of those cast, but nine, or 2.2 percent of the 397 seats. [291] In 1875 the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (The General German Workers’ Association) formed the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (The Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany). [292] Its members vowed to fight ‘by every legal means for a Free State and a Socialist Society’, demanded state-aided socialist producers’ co-operatives and workers’ control, and aimed to ‘annul the wage system and its iron laws’, ‘remove exploitation in every form’ and ‘abolish all social and political inequality’. [293] The SDAP soon claimed almost 24,500 members, [294] and in 1876 it published Vorwärts (Forward) in Leipzig. [295] In 1877 its candidates won over 437,000 votes in the Reichstag elections, or 7.59 percent of those cast, and nine, or 2.26 percent, of Reichstag seats, [296] but it attracted a wealthy supporter.
Karl Höchberg was born in 1853, [297] into a wealthy Jewish merchant family in Frankfurt. His father secured him Swiss citizenship so he would avoid serving in the army, but when Karl was at the gymnasium his father died. [298]Karl joined the SDAP in 1876, and published a socialist weekly, Die Zukunft (The Future), in 1877. [299]
The SDAP had 42 periodicals, and paid its leaders 300 marks a months, while the Reichstag fraktion functioned as its Central Committee. By 1878 Vorwärts sold 150,000 copies, but in May a former member failed to kill the kaiser and another would-be assassin failed in June. [300] The chancellor denounced the SDAP as a ‘menacing band of robbers’, [301] blamed them for the assassination attempts and dissolved the Reichstag. The police harassed the SDAP, searched houses, dispersed meetings and confiscated newspapers. [302] The Reichstag debated a bill to empower the police to close socialist organisations, ban events, and, where the government imposed a ‘minor state of siege’, deport anyone they deemed politically dangerous. [303] The former worker and Reichstag deputy August Bebel insisted that SDAP members would ‘get together in workshops and factories, in the family circle and in pubs’, and on Sunday walks. ‘Everyone will take two or three or perhaps a dozen pamphlets’ for ‘friends and acquaintances in the country and the distant parts of the city’; [304] but in October the Reichstag passed the ‘exceptional law’ by 221 votes to 149, and the SDAP dissolved itself before it came into force. The government imposed a minor state of siege in Berlin and the police expelled 67 SDAP leaders. The SDAP had 47 papers, and a dozen appeared six days a week, but the police closed Vorwärts, [305] and 44 others, and the two survivors moderated their politics. [306] The police banned trade unions, or forced them into inactivity, often on flimsy evidence of a link to the SDAP, but the printers’ union survived by becoming a mutual aid society. [307] The SDAP deputy Wilhelm Liebknecht began a three-month prison term for allegedly insulting a government official, but in summer 1879 the SDAP retained two Reichstag seats in bye-elections. [308] By then the police had closed 82 periodicals and 278 other publications, so the SDAP decided to publish a paper in Switzerland, and Bebel appointed his friend Julius Motteler as business manager to report about its staff, informers and provocateurs (police infiltrators tasked with provoking arrestable offences). [309] Höchberg helped to finance the paper and Bebel and Liebknecht chose the aristocrat Georg von Vollmar as editor. Der Sozialdemokrat (The Social Democrat) was printed in Zurich in autumn, but Liebknecht wrote much of it and checked the rest. Just over 1,000 copies went to Germany and 300 to elsewhere in Europe; [310] but by the end of the year the print run was 3,600. [311] The paper was legal in Switzerland, but not in Germany, so Joseph Belli organised Swiss workers to row consignments across Lake Constance.
In 1880 Motteler, the ‘Red Postmaster’, posted a few copies to German subscribers, directly or indirectly, and his wife put bundles in packages of every size and shape and addressed them to ‘men of trust’ in 110 towns and cities in different handwriting. Motteler put the packages in a suitcase, bought a ticket on a fast train to a point across the border, put the case in the luggage compartment with an envelope containing the baggage receipt and directions, but did not board the train. If the copies were distributed the ‘man of trust’ telegraphed ‘Anna has departed’. If some were lost, the message might be ‘Uncle sick, letter follows’. If all were lost it could be ‘Uncle extremely ill, recovery hopeless’, so Motteler would send another package via Austro-Hungary, Belgium or Holland. The German police sometimes interrupted the operation, but could not link it to the SDAP.
In spring, ten months before the ‘exceptional law’ was due to lapse, the Reichstag renewed it for four years and four months. [312] By summer 1,600 copies of Der Sozialdemokrat reached Germany and 600 went elsewhere. [313] A secret SDAP conference in Schloss Wyden, Switzerland, [314] formally recognised the Reichstag fraktion as the party’s leading body, endorsed Der Sozialdemokrat as the party organ, set up a subscription system, removed ‘legal’ from the policy of using ‘all legal means’ to gain power and planned illegal meetings in clubs, choral societies, gymnastic organisations, beer halls and other innocent-looking organisations. [315] In autumn the Reichstag declared a minor state of siege in Hamburg-Altona, and later extended it to Harburg. Over 100 socialists were expelled and most left for the USA. In summer 1881, after the tsar’s assassination, the Reichstag declared a minor state of siege in Leipzig. By autumn 600 socialists were in prison, and the SDAP lacked candidates for the Reichstag election. Its total vote fell to almost 312,000, or 6.1 percent of those cast, [316] and its candidates won only 12, or three percent, of the seats; [317] but German financiers had invested heavily in neighbouring Poland.
German banks and capitalists could not invest in European Russia, on account of protectionism, so they had invested in industry in neighbouring Poland since 1877, [318] and by 1882 socialist ideas had taken root there.
In the 1850s the Pole Tadeusz Warynski, a Kyiv University graduate, was a well-to-do tenant farmer in Kyiv province, and one of 26 Catholics among 3,000 Orthodox villagers. Ludwik was born in 1856. His father was reportedly active in the 1863 Polish uprising, and by 1865 the teachers at Ludwik’s pro-gymnasium (preparatory school) used Russian. In 1869 they were ordered to stop teaching Latin because it allegedly encouraged thoughts of western Europe, but Ludwik and other pupils studied Polish culture in secret. In 1874 he entered St. Petersburg Technological Institute and joined a koło (secret circle) of Polish socialists, but was sent home for a year under surveillance in 1875. [319] By late 1876 he worked as a locksmith in the largest metal plant in Warszawa and met other well-educated socialists. Kazimierz Dluski, who had attended Odesa University, propagandised students with revolutionary socialist ideas. He proposed forming workers’ koła and became a metalworker. Henryk Duleba left his gymnasium to work as a soap-maker; and though Kazimierz Hildt stayed at his gymnasium, he worked in a factory part-time, while Stanislaw Mendelson, the son of a wealthy Warszawa banker, worked as a tailor. [320] He was also a student at Warszawa University, and in 1877 he helped to establish the first Polish socialist koło. [321] In the suburbs up to 60 young people discussed the ideas of Marx, Bakunin and Ferdinand Lassalle. [322]
In autumn 1877 Warynski enrolled at Pulawy Agricultural Institute to be exempt from conscription, [323] but returned to Warszawa by the end of the year, and joined 30 or so others who studied SR and SD ideas. They propagandised workers at factory gates, in taverns, workers’ quarters and at the University, but Warynski insisted on ‘No political innuendoes’. ‘Talk only of economic matters of exploitation and oppression of the workers, of capital, of the fact that work is the only basis of wealth and gives worth to products.’ [324] Early in 1878 Hildt took some of the propagandists’ manuscripts and Polish translations of German pamphlets to Leipzig, and in spring Warynski crossed the border and brought back large numbers of books and 6,000 pamphlets. He tried to persuade Warszawa factory workers to use their mutual aid funds to support strikes, but while most were unenthusiastic, some formed koła often to 15 and elected a treasurer and an organiser. The organisers formed their own koła and made decisions by a majority vote. Each organiser could form koła of members and non-members, including those who did not necessarily agree with all the programme, but were willing to help in some way. There were koła for finance, publications, propagandising, supporting arrested comrades and their families, contacting socialists outside Warszawa and smuggling literature from Germany and Switzerland. [325] By summer there were 300 organised workers, [326] and by autumn their programme was allegedly printed in ‘Brussels’. The police bribed two workers to betray their koło, and made arrests, but Mendelson, Warynski and other intelektualiści (radical intellectuals) escaped to Kraków in Austrian-controlled Galicia.
Mendelson founded Równość (Equality) in Geneva in 1879. [327] It advocated propagandising ‘socialist principles by word of mouth and writings’ and ‘agitation’ by ‘protests, demonstrations’ and ‘active struggle’ against the ‘social system’. Its aim was the ‘complete social equality of all citizens irrespective of sex, race or nationality’, and the transfer of all means of production to common ownership, with ‘collective labour’ in factories, workshops and farms. It wanted ‘federal associations with socialists in all countries’, and included the IWMA’s 1866 resolutions. It noted the success of peaceful German and Swiss labour movements; but ‘the ineffectiveness of legal means’ in Poland meant that socialism was achievable ‘only through social revolution’. [328]
During the 1870s the value of Polish industrial output had more than doubled from 247 to 541 million rubles. Russia imported a quarter of Polish cotton goods, and by 1880 9,600 inspected Polish factories and workshops employed almost 119,000 workers. The average workforce was 12, but it was 63 in Warszawa, and three cotton mills in Łódź employed almost 1,700 between them. Around 7,500 workers in 181 Polish metallurgical factories produced 9.3 million rubles’ worth of output, while 4,400 workers in 72 machine-building plants produced almost 5.5 million rubles’ worth, and Polish workers each made their employers 300 rubles a year more than their counterparts in Russia.
Kraków police had put Warynski and the Polish socialist intelektualiści in jail in 1879, and deported the Russians in spring 1880. [329] Warynski went to Geneva and attended a meeting of 500 socialists commemorating the 1830 Polish uprising. He spoke in Russian, and sought to disassociate Polish workers and socialists from nationalists, criticised the IWMA, Marx and Engels for supporting them, and praised Narodnaya volya. [330] In spring 1881 Równość applauded the assassination of the ‘hangman’ tsar; [331] but while the new tsar stationed 240,000 Russian troops, gendarmes and police in Poland, [332] they could not imprison, deport or exile socialist ideas.
Szymon Dikshtein was born into a comfortably off Jewish family in Warszawa in 1858. He entered the University in 1872, joined a socialist koło, [333] by 1877, and began translating Das Kapital Volume I, [334] but in 1878 he had to escape to Geneva to avoid arrest. He co-edited Równość in 1879, and his summary of Das Kapital, Kto z czego żyje? (Who Lives by What?), appeared in Warszawa as by ‘Jan Młot’ (Jan Hammer) in 1881. [335] A third of the city’s workers were in manufacturing plants, but 60 percent lived in one room. Almost 128,000 Jews formed the largest urban community in Europe. [336]
Felix Kon was born into a Jewish family in Warszawa in 1864, [337] and in 1881 he and other Narodnaya volya supporters at the University helped a koło of 25 Polish students at St. Petersburg University, and others in Vilnius and Kyiv. [338] Students imprisoned in Warszawa Fortress taught workers ‘the exact and deep principles of socialism’, but late that year, when Warynski returned, [339] the large plants were laying off workers. [340] A retired Russian colonel kept a list of Jewish shops, [341] and on Christmas Day an alarm panicked a large congregation in a Catholic church and 20 died in a stampede. Outside there were rumours about Jewish pickpockets, and mobs beat Jews and plundered their homes. For three days, as troops looked on and police impeded Jewish self-defence groups, two Jews were killed and 24 were injured. [342]
By 1882 Duleba led a small koło of Warszawa-Vienna railway workshop machinists, [343] and spoke and distributed leaflets and pamphlets at other factories. He recruited socialist workers, including Teodor Kallenbrun, Jozef Szmaus and Jan Ptaszynski, [344] and by spring there was a koło at all the largest factories. When one German foreman cheated workers, a blacksmith slapped his face, and managers called the gendarmes, but they retreated from a crowd of angry workers. Two blacksmiths faced charges, but 2,000 workers demonstrated, demanding their reinstatement and the sacking of the foreman were not intimidated when police and gendarmes surrounded them; but while the managers conceded their demands to get them back to work, they later reneged. In summer Duleba printed a leaflet calling on workers to ‘deal’ with managers, ‘lackeys’, ‘traitors’ and spies ‘without witnesses or anything that could leave a trace’, and this policy influenced a new clandestine organisation.
Stanislaw Kunicki attended the St. Petersburg Road Engineering Institute and contacted Narodnaya volya. In summer he arrived in Warszawa with the mandate of his Polish student koło and discussed forming a party with Warynski and others. They hectographed a programme, but while the machine was theoretically capable of printing 100 copies, 50 was the effective maximum. By autumn the manifesto of Międzynarodowa Socjalno-Rewolucyjna Partia ‘Proletariat’ (International Social Revolutionary Party ‘Proletariat’) circulated in Warszawa factories and at the University. It declared its solidarity with ‘all exploited’ people and had clear aims.
(1) The self-government of political groups; (2) everybody’s participation in law-making; (3) election of civil servants; (4) full freedom of speech, press, associations, etc., etc.; (5) full equality for women; (6) full equality of religions and nationalities; (7) international solidarity as the guarantee of universal freedom.
Proletariat’s operational perspective involved four main elements.
(1) incite the workers against all forms of exploitation; (2) organise combinations and secret workers’ associations; (3) terrorise capitalists and their servants for their inhuman treatment of the workers or for calling on the police during the workers’ conflicts; (4) found, as far as possible, associations consisting of workers only.
Proletariat aimed to ‘manifest our sympathy with all those who fight against the despotic Russian government’, ‘incite the population against paying taxes’, ‘resist government orders which are directed against the workers’, ‘oppose any interference on the part of government organs in the conflict between workers and factory owners’, join anti-government demonstrations, and ‘punish spies, traitors’ and those who ‘betray the cause’. [345]
Proletariat had a branch of Krasny Krest, [346] and its leading Warszawa workers’ committee took decisions by a majority vote and co-opted. It aimed to organise ‘propaganda among workers’, agitate on their ‘daily interests’ and ‘not miss anything, which demonstrates the present-day misery’. Each koło of five or six workers, but never more than ten, had a knowledgeable and reliable organiser. ‘Recognising that in some cases terror is the only weapon against the political rulers, the capitalists, spies, etc.’, the workers’ committee published statements after assassinations. On New Year’s Eve it called on factory and railway workers to form ‘associations for the collective ... defence of their rights and interests’, combat abuses, lead ‘every collective action or strike’ and ‘punish spies and traitors’. Workers’ koła met weekly in pubs or restaurants at a prearranged time, and someone, often Warynski, spoke about exploitation or read agitational literature aloud, since some workers were illiterate. They paid five kopeks a week into a fund, and often knew little about each other, but key individuals distributed large quantities of illegal literature and delegates formed a ‘section’. [347] The workers’ committee formed koła at the University and at other higher educational institutions across Poland, and recruited students, school pupils, officials and troops, and Polish émigrés in Geneva published a translation of Marx and Engels’ Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. In 20 years to the end of 1882 the number of inspected Polish workers had almost trebled, [348] to 144,000 in over 9,500 factories; [349] In Przedświt Mendelson argued that democracy could come to Poland only after it was separated from the Russian empire, [350] and Proletariat’s ideas had reached St. Petersburg.
By 1880 there were around 32,000 zemstvo (local authority) and state primary schools in European Russia, though most had only one teacher. [351] [352] The 22,000 schools in rural areas of European Russia and Poland had over a million pupils, and while 38 percent of teachers were Orthodox clergy, 30 percent were peasants, [353] though 37 percent of the 4,900 women had only a primary education or had been taught at home. [354] The rural literacy rate averaged almost ten percent, [355] but varied from six percent in Kharkiv and Kherson provinces to 20 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg provinces, and over a third of town-dwellers, and a higher proportion in major cities, were literate. [356] There were 238 boys’ gymnasia, [357] and around 8,000 men were at university, including 43 percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow, while 7,000 men were at institutes of higher education. University scholarships averaged 62 rubles and 19.6 percent of students received tuition waivers. Nationally, around 46 percent studied medicine, 22 percent law and 20 percent natural sciences and mathematics, and overall state expenditure per student was 311 rubles a year; [358] but only 556 students were Jews. [359] After the tsar’s assassination in spring 1881, the government closed all the higher courses for women, except those in St. Petersburg, but limited its enrolment, banned the study of natural science, required students to live in dormitories or at home, provided no funds, [360] and cut the number of scholarships; but male students organised social events to raise money for them. [361]
In autumn there were 9,344 male undergraduates in seven European Russian universities. [362] They represented less than 0.0001 percent of the population, but 15 percent of them were from peasant, artisan or workers’ families; [363] and though there were around 2,000 women ‘auditors’, or less than 0.00002 percent of the population, who attended university lectures, they could not take degrees. [364] Two ministers reported that many St. Petersburg University students were from ‘an almost uneducated environment’, and the ‘outlook bequeathed to them in their families loses any moral authority’. They had illegal mutual aid funds and held ‘disorderly’ secret meetings, but the ministers proposed legalising funds, cheap canteens and student-run ‘courts of honour’, and letting them to discuss ‘subjects of academic concern; but most ministers disagreed, [365] and repression continued.
There had been 62 legal papers in 1880, but there were 83 by the end of 1881. [366] The journalist Vladimir Korolenko had been deported to Vyatka province in 1879 for being ‘politically extremely unreliable and harmful for public tranquillity’. In summer 1881 he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the new tsar, and late that year the interior minister sent him to Yakutsk with a monthly allowance of six rubles. The journalist Mikhail Borodin was exiled on account of ‘dangerous and pernicious’ manuscript about conditions in Vyatka province, but months after he arrived in Yakutsk St. Petersburg censors allowed it to appear in Otechestvennye zapiski [367]
The tsar had commuted Gelfman’s death sentence to exile for life in Siberia; [368] but her baby was born in a St. Petersburg prison in autumn 1881, [369] and the authorities put it in an Orthodox foundling home. [370] Gelfman died in prison early in 1882, [371] and the baby died soon after; [372] but terrorist ideas and methods were being challenged.
Dimitar Blagoev was born into a Bulgarian family in a Macedonian village in 1856. He attended Orthodox schools in Istanbul, Adrianople, Gabrovo and Stara Zagora, and in 1878 he was enthusiastic about the Bulgarian volunteers who helped Russian troops to defeat the Ottoman army. He attended a realschule in Odesa, [373] but in 1880 he somehow got around the rules and managed to enter St. Petersburg University. [374] He met Vasily Kharitonov, a graduate of Troitsk gymnasium, and other University, Technological and Forestry Institute students in 1881. They ran a communal kitchen, [375] and read illegal philosophical and political texts, and Blagoev joined them early in 1882. [376] A police raid found SR leaflets, traced them to a legal print shop and found more; [377] but some students smuggled handwritten and hectographed copies of the Manifest Kommunisticheskoy partii, learned Polish to read Proletariat literature and brought in Polish workers to propagandise in factories. The police arrested 52 intelligenty and workers, but a warrant officer’s kruzhki survived. Ivan Popov believed that Narodnaya volya’s over-centralisation and workers’ indiscipline made it easy for spies to penetrate student-led kruzhki, and that terror ‘depleted revolutionary forces to no purpose’, but while he argued that the ‘liberation of the workers’ must be in ‘the hands of the people’, students should ‘create the foundations of a systematic revolutionary struggle’. [378]
From spring repression escalated. Almost 100,000 police were authorised to subject anyone to surveillance, search living quarters at any hour, take passports and restrict suspects’ movements. Suspects could not hold a government or public post, belong to private associations, teach, lecture, operate typographic or photographic laboratories, work in libraries or deal in spirits, and they could practice medicine, midwifery or pharmacology only under licence from the interior minister, who decided if they got mail and telegrams. [379]
The Russian army had 800,000 men and 30,000 officers, but almost 400 of those in 25 places were members or sympathisers of Narodnaya volya, and its military organisation had kruzhki in St. Petersburg’s Artillery Academy, Constantine Military Academy, the Engineering Academy, the Bombardiers’ Academy and the civilian Communications Institute. Many lieutenants and ensigns specialised in ordnance, and a navy sailors’ kruzhok on the nearby island of Kronstadt published SR literature and planned a journal. There were similar kruzhki in Odesa, Mykołaiv, and Tbilisi, and by late that year, there were others in Vilnius, Hrodna, Dinaburg, Bobruisk, Magíloŭ, Minsk, Pskov, Rïga and Smolensk. The Narodnaya volya EC decided to assassinate the military prosecutor in Odesa, [380] and a assassin succeeded, but failed to reach the getaway carriage. The driver ran after him, but they were both arrested, court-martialled and hanged in days. [381]
Bogdanovich had helped to organise the tsar’s assassination, and in May Moscow police charged him with belonging Narodnaya volya, conspiring to commit terrorist acts and running a bomb factory. He was sentenced to death, but that was later commuted to life in Shlisselburg Fortress. (He died of tuberculosis six years later.) [382]
Officially, 430 state criminals were in exile in eastern Siberia, including 123 in Kara katorga prison. In May the state criminals in Kara heard that their heads were to be half-shaven like common criminals, and barricaded themselves in their cells, but 800 Cossacks put them in chains and marched them out of the prison. After a convict was flogged for smuggling out letters, 73 of the 113 remaining state criminals began a hunger strike, but eventually gave in, and some were transferred to Alexandrovsk katorga prison. The government merged the administration of Semipalatinsk and Akmolynsk provinces to form the governor-generalship of the Steppe, abolished the western Siberian governor-generalship and took direct control of Tomsk and Tobolsk provinces. [383]
In summer Narodnaya volya dismantled its Moscow press, [384] but the St. Petersburg police chief noted that the ‘inactivity, hunger, and privation’ of imprisoned students destroyed any ‘hope of advancement’ and functioned as a ‘recruitment service, producing sedition in the ranks of student youth’. [385] The Senate could suppress periodicals, and the government established a censorship committee of three ministers and the Procurator of the Holy Synod. [386] It also secretly extended and systematised ‘perlustration’, the illegal opening, reading and copying of letters, [387] in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Tbilisi and Warszawa post offices. The deputy interior minister was made responsible for the Okhrana, and by the end of the year 20 so called ‘black office’ clerks had opened 380,000 letters and copied about 3,600 of them. [388] Two soldiers charged with passing messages between political prisoners in St. Petersburg Fortress had died in preliminary detention. Another army officer was sentenced to six months in prison, another got four years’ katorga and some got five years, while 15 soldiers were sent to punishment battalions. [389]
Niko Nikoładze was a leading Georgian intelligent and disavowed violence, but met Vera Figner of Narodnaya volya EC in Kharkiv, and she trusted him. In December he managed to reduce the EC’s demands to freeing one political prisoner, granting amnesties and permitting a free press; [390] but the tsar gave the police a free hand.
Late that year the rektor of Kazan University illegally deprived a student of a state bursary, and when fellow students protested they were illegally ‘beaten, whipped, thrown on the ground, dragged about by the hair’ and ‘hauled into prison’ by police. Students hectographed leaflets and some reached St. Petersburg, where students hectographed leaflets calling for a demonstration. On the day the police ordered them to disperse, but they stayed put and criticised the authorities, so the police arrested and imprisoned 280. The University was closed, and after more disturbances, the women’s medical school stopped recruiting. Police also attacked students in Kharkiv, Yaroslavl, Moscow, and in Kyiv, [391] where only half the students were gentry. [392] Student interest in socialist ideas began to generalise; but the ideas had yet to reach many, if any, of the growing number of industrial workers.
During the 1870s Russian industrial production had risen by 130 percent, and by 1880 French speculators had invested almost 27 million rubles, Britons 29 million and Germans almost 30 million, out of a total of 92 million. Foreigners owned 17 percent of joint-stock capital and had almost 23 million rubles invested in mining and metallurgy. [393] Around half a million workers were in 3,316 inspected enterprises, and 9.2 percent were under 15; but many were peasants. [394]
By 1881 St. Petersburg’s 928,000 inhabitants included 390,000 peasants and 240,000 workers, [395] over 31,000 of whom were metalworkers. [396] The province was sparsely populated, so employers had to pay relatively high wages in order to attract new workers, [397] though over 70 percent, including 90 percent of textile workers, returned to their villages for harvest. [398] There were 27 women workers for every 100 men, [399] but women formed 42 percent of textile workers. [400] A power-loom weaver could earn 12 to 18 rubles a month, or 15 percent more than in 1861, but the price of staples such as rye flour had doubled and that of meat had more than trebled. [401]
In the central industrial region around Moscow women formed 20 percent of textile workers in Tver province, 35 percent in Kostroma province and 36 percent in the town of Shuya in Vladimir province, but they earned eight rubles a month at best, [402] and workplace discipline was harsh. When dirty water dripped onto one weaver’s material she complained to her foreman about the resulting fines, but he ignored her. She followed him and told him again, but he ‘grabbed me by the hand and flung me from the door. I hit my head on the door’ and ‘clutched at my eyes because the blow produced sparks in my head. I went back to my machine, crying.’ ‘My eye swelled up, and now two weeks later there is still a yellow mark on my neck and under my eye’; but she dared not complain, since she might ‘fall into the black book’. [403] Being 15 minutes late could cost a day’s pay. [404]
By 1882 around 74 percent of the 754,000 inhabitants of Moscow were migrant peasants. [405] In just over a decade the number of spindles in the city’s textile mills had increased by 55 percent. [406] There were 58,000 textile workers, [407] and 40 percent came from Moscow province, where a quarter of peasants were literate, as were 51 percent of Moscow’s population. Almost all handloom weavers returned to their villages in summer, but 57 percent of power loom weavers, [408] including 86 percent of workers at the huge Tsindel Mill, did not. Around 83,000 of the 549,000 migrants had been in Moscow less than a year, 92,000 for five to ten years and 228,000 for 11 years or more. The median age of that year’s migrants was 25, but around 500,000 workers were separated from their families. An average of nine people lived in each dwelling, two or three to a room, and ten percent lived in basements, 57,000 in factory barracks and 120,000 in arteli (cooperatives). Waged workers constituted a third of the labour force, including almost 30,000 metalworkers and machine-toolmakers, and 62 percent of women workers were single. [409] Women textile workers’ wages were between a half and two-thirds of men doing the same job, and while a male cotton spinner spent a third of his pay on food, a woman had to spend two-thirds of her pay to buy 71 percent of the men’s protein and 65 percent of their fats, [410] so 72 percent of her calories came from grain and nine percent from potatoes. [411] The death rate had almost equalled the birth rate for a decade, and while almost half of the 100,000 people arriving each year were peasants, almost 100,000 left. [412]
Sergey Semenov was born into a Moscow province peasant family in 1868, [413] and recalled that in the 1870s ‘all the strong, healthy and able fled the village for Moscow, and got jobs wherever they could – some in the factories, others as domestics. Others turned into real entrepreneurs – the carrying trades, street vending etc. All left – men, women, boys’. Youngsters like Sergey ‘eagerly awaited the time when we would be old enough to be fit for something in Moscow’, and he had taught himself to read by the age of 11, [414] and in one provincial district 38 percent of literate workers had not been to primary school. [415] In 1880 Sergey was sent to a Moscow ribbon factory, and ‘worked there until sowing time, when I was summoned home to help with the housework’. He went back to Moscow to work in the same factory and stayed there all winter until Easter, then went home again. By 1882 he had worked in St. Petersburg, Poltava, Belgorod and Moscow, [416] but returned to his village in summer. [417]
In autumn Moscow police arrested S.K. Belov, a Pskov province peasant, for distributing anti-government literature, but released him after he agreed to be a spy. His information led them to an apartment where they found the names and addresses of 46 members of Chyornyi peredel in over a dozen cities, including their Moscow headquarters, and they arrested them all; [418] but the government’s finances were precarious.
Industry could not meet domestic demand. In 1882 coal production was 3.5 million tonnes, iron 500,000 tonnes, steel 300,000 tonnes and oil 700,000 tonnes; [419] but debts incurred during the war with the Ottoman empire still took 30 percent of the state budget, and military expenditure took 32 percent. [420] Peasants’ direct tax arrears had risen substantially in 15 years, [421] and the state budget deficit was 4.6 billion rubles, [422]
Professor Ivan Ianzhul, a factory inspector, [423] had studied 137,000 workers in 229 factories and mills in 48 European provinces. Children aged 15 or younger formed 5.5 percent of the workforces, but only nine plants had a school. [424] In 158 factories employing 85,000 workers, 80 of over 8,000 children were under ten, and three- quarters were under 15, while one-third were girls. The working day averaged 12 hours; but in 34 plants it was up to 14, in seven it was 15 or 16, and in some it was 18. Workers in a factory near Moscow were fined
for singing songs after 9.30 p.m., in the factory or in places not allocated for that purpose by the owner; for bringing tea, sugar or other provisions into the workshop; for washing underclothes in the common bedrooms; for having a wash under the pump in the court of the factory; for writing on the walls; for wandering from one workshop to another; for singing songs during work hours; for visiting the common bedroom of married workmen (this applied to bachelors only) or women’s apartments.
Most workers lived in barracks to save a ruble or two a month on rent. There were many verbal agreements, but few pay books, and only 71 of the 158 factories paid wages regularly. The rest did so two or three times a year, or at the end of the contract, so most workers were in debt to the factory shop where provisions cost up to 80 percent more than elsewhere. Children formed over a quarter of the workforces, and suffered over half the ‘accidents’, but there was no compensation. Administrators notified the zemstvo only when the injuries could not be kept secret, and children were fined for refusing to work on Sundays and three rubles for fighting in the yard. The total fines could amount to thousands of rubles a year, and Ianzhul concluded that the factory owner was ‘an absolute sovereign’. If workers strike ‘he fines them ten rubles apiece; if they leave the factory grounds he fines them one ruble each’. ‘No complaints about fines can be lodged with a magistrate’, and the owner ‘often applies and interprets existing regulations at his own discretion’. [425] Ianzhul recommended state intervention and balanced economic development, but the government largely ignored him; [426] and SRs disagreed.
Vasily Vorontsov was born into a noble family in 1847. He later graduated from St. Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy, became a country doctor, and began to publish articles, mainly in Otechestvennye Zapiski. [427] During the 1870s he contacted SR activists, but did not join them, and later worked as an economist. [428] In 1882 he published Sudby kapitalizma v Rossii (The Fate of Capitalism in Russia), which argued that the home market for large-scale industry, and the potential number of peasant workers, were both limited. [429] Competing in the world market ‘might utterly extinguish the weak sparks of our scarcely awakening capitalism’, but Russia could ‘make use of all the forms created in the west and does not have to crawl at a snail’s pace from stage to stage’. [430]
In 1880 Marx and Engels had refused to contribute to the SDAP’s Der Sozialdemokrat, even though Höchberg had no editorial control. [431] In spring Engels privately referred to Höchberg as ‘moneybags’, and argued that the ‘old party’ was ‘finished’. In spring 1881 Marx thought the Narodnaya volya assassins were ‘heroic’ at their trial. Their ‘vigorous action’ and ‘manifestoes of exquisite “moderation”’ showed they were ‘at pains to teach Europe that their modus operandi is a specifically Russian and historically inevitable mode of action’, while Chyornyi peredel were ‘muddle-headed anarcho-syndicalists’ whose influence on the ‘theatre of war’ was ‘ZERO’. [432]
In summer the Chyornyi peredel’s Stefanovich left Switzerland, returned to Russia and joined Narodnaya volya. [433] Only a lack of money prevented Zasulich and Deutsch from following him [434] And when Axelrod arrived in Zurich, [435] he believed that Russia was ‘living through the eve of a major revolution’. [436]
In Russia Elizaveta Durnovo, Chyornyi peredel’s main source of finance, was arrested. [437] A leaflet, bearing the name of Zemlia i volya, opposed anti-Jewish riots, but criticised the ‘Jew-kulak’. Late that year Zerno (Seed) questioned whether a kulak was any better than a factory owner who did not ‘flinch before extracting from the workers the last penny of his wages?’ ‘Even among the Jews there are many who must live by their labour and who are opposed by their wealthy fellow Jews’. [438] The third Chyornyi peredel turned out to be the last. [439]
At Lavrov’s suggestion Marx and Engels had written a preface for Zasulich’s translation of their Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, and early in 1882 it appeared anonymously in Narodnaya volya in St. Petersburg. [440] They doubted whether the peasant commune, ‘even if greatly undermined’, could ‘pass directly to the higher form of communist ownership’, but if a ‘revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development’. They believed that the tsar was ‘a prisoner of the war of the revolution’ in Gatchina, and Russia ‘formed the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe’. [441] Engels thought it was ‘a question of months’ before ‘the avant-garde of the revolution will be going into battle’; and in spring he and Marx were ‘proud to find ourselves contributors’ to Narodnaya volya. [442]
In Switzerland Zasulich welcomed what she took to be Marx and Engels’ ‘confirmation of one of the basic propositions’ of herself and the other former terrorist émigrés, [443] and believed the dissolution of the peasant commune was inevitable. [444] In summer her Russian Manifest Kommunisticheskoy partii appeared in Geneva, and included Marx and Engels’ preface, Marx’s IWMA rules and his Der Burgerkrieg in Frankreich. Plekhanov’s introduction acknowledged that ‘the final goal must be the same for socialists of all countries’, and Russian socialists had to study Marx and Engels’s works, but the Russians’ tasks ‘differ essentially from those of our western-European comrades’, because there was no large industrial proletariat. [445] He attempted a reconciliation with the Narodnaya volya EC, despite unresolved differences, but he failed; [446] and by the end of the year he was sure that Russia had ‘come upon the path of her natural law of development’, since ‘other paths’ were closed. [447]
Vorontsov had mentioned ‘socialists of the Marxian school’, and late that year, in London, Marx, crowed that ‘recent Russian publications, printed in Holy Russia, not abroad, show the great run of my theories in that country’. It gave him satisfaction to ‘damage a power, which, besides England, is the true bulwark of the old society’, and Engels believed that the Russian terrorists were ‘on the eve of victory’. [448]
1. Walicki 1979: 124–5.
2. Venturi 2001: 81.
3. MECW 41: 194.
4. Nikitenko 1975: 252.
5. McClellan: 29.
6. Eichner2004: 27–8.
7. Resis 1970: 219–20.
8. Shanin 1983: 43–4, 46.
9. White 1996: 180.
10. Shanin 1983: 173.
11. White 1996: 224.
12. MECW 43: 595n.
13. McClellan: 29–31, 119.
14. White 1996: 227.
15. MECW 43: 120–1, 123–25, 130–1, 594n.
16. Ulam 1977: 181.
17. Hardy 1977: 129.
18. Venturi 2001: 357.
19. Shanin 1983: 173.
20. MECW 43: 462, 491, 499–500, 502, 655.
21. McClellan: 41.
22. Anon 1974: 4: 528.
23. Resis 1970: 220–1, 225–37.
24. Meijer 1955: 183n.
25. Figes 1997: 139.
27. Vucinich 1976: 173.
28. White 2001: 5.
29. Meijer 1955: 54.
30. Kindersley 1962: 9.
31. Walicki 1979: 436.
32. Gonzalez 2017: 48.
33. Kindersley 1962: 9.
34. Figes 1997: 139.
35. MECW 44: 487.
36. White 1996: 234.
37. Hosking 1998: 33–4.
38. Klier & Lambroza2004: 138.
39. Hosking 1998: 33–5, 186, 188.
40. Deutscher 1970b: 6.
41. Tobias 1972: 1–9.
42. Baron 1987: 32–3.
43. Patkin 1947: 33, 37, 44, 65–6, 69.
44. Westwood 1964: 40, 42, 60–1.
46. Haberer 2004: 74.
47. Patkin 1947: 104.
48. Haberer 2004: 74–9, 81–2, 88–9, 123–5.
50. Jacobs 1992: 48.
51. Haberer 2004: 103.
52. Ulam 1977: 216, 258.
53. Footman 1968: 238.
54. Ulam 1977: 258.
55. Haberer 2004: 104.
56. Breshkovskaya 1931: 29.
57. Footman 1968: 230.
58. Deutsch 1977: 8.
59. Haberer 2004: 105.
60. Ulam 1977: 260.
61. Haberer 2004: 149–50.
62. Deutsch 1977:9–10.
63. Ascher 1972: 7–25, 27–8.
64. Footman 1968: 238.
65. Ulam 1977: 299.
66. Shanin 1983: 177.
67. Pomper 1970: 115.
68. Woodcock & Avakumovic 1990: 124–5.
69. Ulam 1977: 300.
71. Saunders 1992: 326.
72. Brower 1975: 203–4.
73. Broido 1977: 64.
74. Brower 1975: 203–5.
76. Baron 1966: 4–19.
77. Porter 1976: 220.
78. Ulam 1977: 253.
79. Pospielovsky 1971: 4.
80. Ulam 1977: 254.
81. Pokrovsky 1933: 1: 219.
82. Ulam 1977: 253–4.
83. Siefert 2003: 223.
84. Haberer 2004: 90–1, 134, 136, 144.
85. Stepniak 1888: 187–8.
86. Pomper 1972: 175.
87. Baron 1966: 20–1, 33.
88. Plekhanov 1977: 9–10.
89. Meadowcroft 2011: 289, 301.
90. Bergman 1983: 1–52, 64.
91. Korolenko 1972: 224.
92. Bergman 1983: 64.
93. Brower 1975: 58.
94. Senese 1987: 1–3.
95. Hulse 1970: 8.
96. Footman 1968: 233.
97. Ulam 1977: 225.
98. Kropotkin 1989: 301.
99. Stepniak 1888: 21.
100. Kropotkin 1989: 300–1.
101. Broido 1977: 88, 93.
102. Stepniak 1888: 26, 28.
103. Saunders 1992: 335.
104. Stepniak 1888: 26, 31.
105. Figes 1997: 136.
106. Venturi 2001: 595.
107. Haberer 2004: 273.
108. Footman 1968: 71.
109. Ulam 1977: 275.
110. Broido 1977: 142.
111. Herlth & Zehnder 2015: 96.
112. Norton & Gheith 2001: 143–4.
113. Hulse 1970: 8.
114. Kotkin 2015: 59.
115. Deutsch 1977: 84–7.
116. Lewinsky & Mayoraz 2013: 14–15.
117. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 87–8, 163–4.
118. Hardy 1987: 86.
119. Ulam 1977: 301, 317.
120. Hulse 1970: 8.
121. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 87–90.
122. Stepniak 1888: 32–3, 35.
123. Haimson 1966: 15.
124. Haberer 2004: 144, 147.
125. Korolenko 1972: 228.
126. Footman 1968: 82, 229.
127. Haberer 2004: 162.
128. Ulam 1977: 294.
129. Maxwell 1990: 30.
130. White 1996: 303.
131. McCauley & Waldron 1988: 156–7.
132. Saunders 1992: 334.
133. Offord2004: 24.
134. Maxwell 1990: 30.
135. Stepniak 1888: 71–2, 74.
136. Zilliacus 1905: 82.
137. Senese 1987: 9.
138. Haberer 2004: 163.
139. Turin 1968: 38.
140. Baron 1966: 50, 52.
141. Haimson 1966: 35.
142. White 1996: 299–301.
143. Hardy 1987: 87.
144. Herlth & Zehnder 2015: 96.
145. Venturi 2001: 640.
146. Haberer 2004: 165–6.
147. wiki/Alexander Soloviev (revolutionary).
148. Ulam 1977: 304.
149. Yarmolinsky 1962: 223–4.
150. Porter 1976: 232.
151. Pomper 1970: 141.
152. Ulam 1977: 327.
153. Saunders 1992: 336.
154. Engel 2000: 173.
155. Crisp & Edmonson 1989: 24.
157. Haberer 2004: 167.
158. Figner 1991: 68–70.
159. Ulam 1977: 293.
160. Haberer 2004: 191.
161. Ascher 1972: 42, 45–9.
162. Haimson 1966: 38–40.
163. Engel 2000: 88–91, 182–3.
164. Stepniak ND: 99–100.
165. Stepniak 1888: 191.
166. Baron 1966: 47.
167. White 1996: 307.
168. Hillyar & McDermid 2000: 51.
169. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 221.
170. Baron 1966: 47.
171. Ascher 1972: 49.
172. Zilliacus 1905: 96.
173. Brym 1978: 2.
174. Zuckerman 1996: 11–12, 22, 25.
175. Daly2004: 6–7.
176. Beer 2017: 265, 300, 308.
177. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 174–5.
178. Footman 1968: 108–9.
179. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 175.
180. Footman 1968: 238–9.
181. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 178.
182. Haberer 2004: 236.
183. Engel & Rosenthal 1992: 221.
184. Engel 2000: 183.
185. Yarmolinsky 1962: 224–5.
186. Falkus 1993: 49.
187. White 1996: 227, 254–5.
188. Billington 1958: 164.
189. MECW 24: 199–200, 252, 576, 581.
190. MECW 46: 4.
191. Shanin 1983: 61.
192. Anon ND: 302–4..
193. Shanin 1983: 61.
194. McClellan 1981: 167–62.
195. MECW 46: 45–46.
196. Baron 1966: 47, 59, 65.
197. Naimark 1983: 43.
198. Kindersley 1962: 9, 111.
199. Baron 1966: 54–6.
200. Walicki 1989: 4, 151.
201. Kindersley 1962: 24–5.
202. Baron 1966: 42–3, 56, 66.
203. Engel 2000: 187, 222.
204. Haberer 2004: 168.
205. Baron 1966: 43, 56, 63.
206. Zavarzine 2011: 50.
207. Baron 1966: 63–4.
208. McCauley & Waldron 1988: 157–8.
209. Haimson 1966: 38.
210. MECW 46: 71–2.
211. Haberer 2004: 185.
212. Engel 2000: 187.
213. Footman 1968: 181–4, 231–3, 236–7.
214. Engel 2000: 187–8.
215. Naimark 1983: 8.
216. Footman 1968: 185–6.
217. Engel 2000: 187.
218. Fenin 1990: 13.
219. Ali 2017: 53.
220. Footman 1968: 187, 192, 197–204, 232, 235, 240.
221. Stites 1978: 248.
222. Haberer 2004: 198–9.
223. Engel 2000: 188.
224. Ulam 1977: 360.
225. Herlth & Zehnder 2015: 97.
226. Kennan 1970: 2: 501–3.
227. Maxwell 1990: 73.
228. Footman 1968: 206–19.
229. Daly 1998: 37.
230. Footman 1968: 220–4.
231. Zilliacus 1905: 114.
232. Stepniak 1888: 129.
233. Footman 1968: 225–7.
234. Stites 1978: 148.
235. Figner 1991: 104.
236. Kropotkin 1991: 40.
237. Footman 1968: 228.
238. Porter 1976: 244.
239. Kropotkin 1991: 358.
240. Pipes 1984: 311.
241. Perris 1905: 209.
242. Porter 1976: 244.
243. Stepniak ND: 345.
244. Venturi 2001: 690.
245. Westwood 1993: 117.
246. Perris 1905: 235.
247. Daly 1998: 3–4, 33–4.
248. Thatcher 2005: 46.
249. Kropotkin 1991: 39.
250. Daly 1998: 40, 68.
251. Pipes 1984: 301, 309.
252. Lauchlan 2002: 109–12.
253. Ruud & Stepanov 1999: 80.
254. Zuckerman 1996: 13.
255. Lauchlan 2002: 113–14, 139.
256. Laporte 1935: 28–30, 34–5, 40, 58.
257. Schleifman 1988: 10.
258. Zavarzine 2011: 33–5, 85–7, 93.
259. Westwood 1993: 182.
260. Black 1960: 180.
261. Subtelny 2000: 276.
262. Fishman 2010: 22.
263. Haberer 2004: 200–1.
264. Brym 1978: 3.
265. Klier & Lambroza2004: 52–3.
266. Baron 1987: 44.
267. Hamm 1995: 123–8.
268. Hamm 1986: 93.
269. Seton-Watson 1967: 494.
270. Wolfe 1984: 169.
271. Crisp & Edmonson 1989: 138.
272. Patkin 1947: 267.
273. Pospielovsky 1971: 56.
274. Fishman 2010: 29.
275. Gitelman 1988: 13–14.
276. Baron 1987: 93.
277. Geyer 1987: 110.
278. Davies 1981: 253.
279. Fishman 2010: 30.
280. Davies 1981: 251.
281. Mendelsohn 1970: 28.
282. Turin 1968: 38.
283. Mendelsohn 1970: 28.
284. Haberer 2004: 209–15, 223, 228.
285. Anderson 1980: 170, 174.
286. Frankel 2003: 52, 68, 98, 103.
287. Craig 1988: 39–49.
288. wiki/German federal election, 1871.
289. Guttsman 1981: 37, 80.
290. Jacobs 1992: 178.
291. Grebing 1969: 60.
292. Gay 1962: 36.
293. Grebing 1969: 60.
294. Guttsman 1981: 59.
295. Miller & Potthof 1986: 307.
296. wiki/German federal election, 1878.
297. MECW 46: 548.
298. Bernstein 2011: 42–3.
300. Dominick 1982: 250–2, 259, 261, 265–6.
301. Grebing 1969: 55.
302. Gay 1962: 41.
303. Lidtke 1966: 78.
304. Guttsman 1981: 61.
305. Lidtke 1966: 70–4, 77, 79, 82, 85.
306. Gay 1962: 41.
307. Moses 1982: 1: 66–7.
308. Dominick 1982: 269, 276.
309. Lidtke 1966: 80, 89–93, 128.
310. Dominick 1982: 277–81.
311. Craig 1988: 148.
312. Lidtke 1966: 93–9.
313. Dominick 1982: 281.
314. Craig 1988: 149.
315. Lidtke 1966: 100.
316. Schorske 1983: 3.
317. wiki/German federal election, 1881.
318. Leslie 1980: 45.
319. Blit 1971: 21–3.
320. Naimark 1979: 66–7.
321. www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Mendelson Stanisław.
322. Blit 1971: 26.
323. Leslie 1980: 49.
324. Naimark 1979: 70–1.
325. Blit 1971: 26–7, 32–3.
326. Naimark 1979: 71.
327. www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Mendelson Stanisław.
328. Blit 1971: 27–33, 37.
329. Naimark 1979: 15–20, 84–6, 88.
330. Blit 1971: 43–8.
331. Naimark 1979: 93.
332. Blobaum 1995: 6.
333. yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Dickstein_Szymon.
334. Naimark 1979: 134.
335. yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Dickstein_Szymon.
336. Hamm 1986: 123, 130, 133, 135.
337. Lazitch & Drachkovitch 1986: 223.
338. Blit 1971: 53.
339. Naimark 1979: 108–9.
340. Blit 1971: 53.
341. Baron 1987: 44–5.
342. Klier & Lambroza2004: 181, 188.
343. Blit 1971: 51.
344. Naimark 1979: 109.
345. Blit 1971: 51, 54–62.
346. Leslie 1980: 51.
347. Blit 1971: 63–8.
348. Naimark 1979: 19, 114, 116, 128–9.
349. Zimmerman2004: 14.
350. www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Mendelson Stanisław.
351. Seregny 1989: 9, 13.
352. McDermid & Hillyar 2003: 73.
353. Todd 1978: 124.
354. McDermid & Hillyar 2003: 73.
355. Hosking 1998: 402.
356. McCauley & Waldron 1988: 37, 25.
357. Siefert 2003: 84.
358. Kassow 1989: 16, 25, 58, 71, 345.
359. Brym 1978: 55.
360. Noonan & Nechemias 2001: 30.
361. Billington 1958: 143.
362. Read 1990: 7.
363. Stavrou 1971: 25.
364. Seton-Watson 1967: 382–3.
365. McCauley & Waldron 1988: 182–3.
366. Ruud 1990: 59.
367. Beer 2017: 299, 302–3.
368. Zilliacus 1905: 114.
369. Engel 2000: 188.
370. Porter 1976: 277.
371. Engel 2000: 188.
372. Porter 1976: 277.
374. Naimark 1983: 73.
375. Offord 2004: 132.
376. Naimark 1983: 73.
377. Ruud & Stepanov 1999: 60–1.
378. Naimark 1983: 44–7.
379. Pipes 1984: 309.
380. Naimark 1983: 17, 51, 112, 116–17, 269–70.
381. Zilliacus 1905: 224.
383. Beer 2017: xx, 309–12.
384. Haberer 2004: 236.
385. Brower 1975: 140.
386. Kindersley 1962: 235–6.
387. Daly 2004: 4.
388. Daly 1998: 41–3.
389. Kropotkin 1991: 373–6.
390. Rayfield 2016: 306.
391. Stepniak ND: 367–70, 378–9.
392. Hamm 1995: 176.
393. McKay 1970: 5, 26, 28, 32–3.
394. Baron 1987: 97.
395. Surh 1989: 11.
396. Hogan 1993: 26.
397. Pospielovsky 1971: 23.
398. Figes 1997: 110.
399. Kollontai 1984: 21.
400. Baron 1987: 97.
401. Tugan-Baranovsky 1970: 344.
402. Engel 2004: 105, 108.
403. Glickman 1984: 211.
404. Harcave 1964: 23.
405. Anderson 1980: 93.
406. Luxemburg 1977: 101–2.
407. Bradley 1985: 74, 111, 123, 134, 137, 197, 204, 209–10, 219.
408. Pokrovsky 1933: 1: 209–10.
409. Engel 204: 202, 204.
410. Atkinson 1977: 69, 72.
411. Smith & Christian 1984: 257.
412. Hamm 1986: 13–16, 23, 213.
413. wiki/Sergey Terentyevich Semyonov.
414. Dobrenko 2002: 65.
415. Kassow 1989: 15.
416. Bradley 1985: 113–14, 130.
417. Dobrenko 2002: 65.
418. Ruud & Stepanov 1999: 64–5.
419. Christian 1986: 294.
420. Mosse 1996: 89.
421. Gregory 1994: 53.
422. Kotkin 2015: 66.
423. McClelland 1979: 86.
424. Pospielovsky 1971: 29.
425. Turin 1968: 32–5.
426. Kassow 1989: 42.
427. persona.rin.ru/eng/view/f/0/23303/vorontsov,-vasily-pavlovich.
429. White 1996: 257.
430. Walicki 1979: 429.
431. MECW 45: 366–8.
432. MECW 46: 8, 12, 83.
433. Baron 1966: 81.
434. Bergman 1983: 74, 79.
435. Ascher 1972: 53.
436. Rabinowitch & Kristof 1972: 64.
437. Yarmolinsky 1962: 225.
438. Klier & Lambroza 2004: 66, 74–5, 96.
439. Yarmolinsky 1962: 226.
440. White 1996: 308.
441. MECW 24: 426.
442. MECW 46: 198, 236.
443. White 1996: 308.
444. Possony 1966: 44.
445. White 1996: 308–9.
446. Mullin 2016: 13–14.
447. Kindersley 1962: 20.
448. MECW 46: 399.
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