Real Imperial Russian Privy Dynamiters

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Engels wrote this article on January 25, 1885 for Der Sozialdemokrat. About the same time he sent a letter to Paul Lafargue describing the same facts and expressing the same ideas more concisely and in somewhat different terms (see present edition, Vol. 47). Lafargue passed this letter on to Jules Guesde who drew on it in writing his article published as a leader in Cri du Peuple, No . 461 on January 31 , 1885. Guesde quoted a long passage from Engels’ letter without naming him, just saying that he had received this letter from London from “one of the veterans of our great social battles” . The article was reprinted in the Polish socialist press and in the USA.

Everybody knows that the Russian government is using every means at its disposal to arrive at treaties with the West European states for the extradition of Russian revolutionaries who have fled the country.

Everybody also knows that its overriding concern is to obtain such a treaty from England.

And the final thing that everybody knows is that Russian officialdom will shrink at nothing if only it leads to the desired end.

Very well then. On January 13, 1885 Bismarck concludes an agreement with Russia, which provides for the extradition of every Russian political refugee the moment Russia sees fit to accuse him of being a prospective regicide, or prospective dynamiter.

On January 15 Mrs Olga Novikov issued an appeal to England in the Pall Mall Gazette, the selfsame Mrs Novikov who in 1877 and 1878, before and during the war against the Turks, so magnificently duped the noble Mr Gladstone in the interests of Russia. In it England is exhorted no longer to tolerate people such as Hartmann, Kropotkin and Stepniak conspiring on English soil “to murder us in Russia”, especially now that dynamite has become such a burning issue for the English themselves. And, she remarks, is Russia asking any more of England with respect to Russian revolutionaries than England itself is now obliged to ask of America with respect to Irish dynamiters?

On the morning of January 24 the Prusso-Russian treaty is published in London.

And on January 24 at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, three dynamite explosions go off in London within the space of a quarter hour, and they cause more damage than all the earlier ones taken together, wounding at least seven people, and according to other sources eighteen.

The timing of these explosions is too opportune not to raise the question—Whose interests do they serve? Who has most to gain from these otherwise pointless shots of terror aimed at nobody in particular, to which not only lower-ranking policemen and bourgeois fall victim but also workers and their wives and children? Who? The few Irishmen who were driven to desperation partially because of the brutality of the English government during their imprisonment, and who are assumed to have planted the dynamite? Or, on the other hand, the Russian government which cannot achieve its end—the extradition treaty—without putting the government and people of England under the most extreme pressure, pressure so great that it whips up public opinion in England into a blind rabid rage against the dynamiters?

When the Polish refugees with very few exceptions, would not lower themselves, at the behest of the Russian diplomatic service and the police, to forge Russian banknotes, the Russian government sent agents abroad, including privy councillor Kamensky, to goad them into doing it, and when this too failed Messrs Kamensky and associates were obliged to forge Russian banknotes themselves. For a further detailed account see the pamphlet The Counterfeiters or the Agents of the Russian Government, Geneva, H. Georg, 1875.—The police forces of Switzerland and London, and probably of Paris as well, can tell a tale or two about how, in tracking down the Russian forgers, their inquiries finally led them to people whom the Russian embassies would steadfastly refuse to have prosecuted.

The history of the Balkan peninsula during the past one hundred years sheds enough light on the abilities of Russian officialdom in removing troublesome individuals by means of poison, the dagger, etc. I need refer only to the well-known Histoire des principautés danubiennes by Elias Regnault, Paris, 1855. The Russian diplomatic service constantly has at its disposal agents of all kinds, including the kind that are used to commit infamous deeds and then disowned.

I do not hesitate, for the time being to lay the blame for the explosions in London on January 24, 1885 at the door of the Russians. Irish hands may have laid the dynamite, but it is more than probable that a Russian brain and Russian money were behind it.

The means of struggle employed by the Russian revolutionaries are dictated to them by necessity, by the actions of their opponents themselves. They must answer to their people and to history for the means they employ. But the gentlemen who are needlessly parodying this struggle in Western Europe in schoolboy fashion, who are attempting to bring the revolution down to the level of Schinderhannes, who do not even direct their weapons against real enemies but against the public in general, these gentlemen are in no way successors or allies of the Russian revolutionaries, but rather their worst enemies. Since it has become clear that nobody apart from Russian officialdom has any interest in the success of these heroic deeds, the only question that remains to be asked is which of them were coerced and which of them volunteered to become the paid agents of Russian tsarism.

London, January 25, 1885

Frederick Engels