X. Appendix

• • Introduction
  • II. The secret Alliance
  • III. The Alliance in Switzerland
  • IV. The Alliance in Spain
  • V. The Alliance in Italy
  • VI. The Alliance in France
  • VII. The Alliance after the Hague Congress
  • VIII. The Alliance in Russia
  • IX. Conclusion
  • X. Appendix
  • XI. Documents

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1. BAKUNIN'S HEGIRA

In 1857, Bakunin was sent to Siberia, not to forced labour, as his accounts would have us believe, but simply to live there in exile. At that period, the governor of Siberia was Count Muravyov-Amursky, Bakunin's cousin and a relative of the Muravyov who was the executioner of Poland. Thanks to this relationship and to the services which he had rendered to the government, Bakunin enjoyed exceptional position and favours in Siberia.

Petrashevsky, leader and organiser of the 1849 conspiracy, was in Siberia at that time. Bakunin adopted an openly hostile attitude to him and tried to harm him in every way possible, which was easy for him as a cousin of the governor-general. His persecution of Petrashevsky gave Bakunin further grounds for governmental favours. A shady affair, which had considerable repercussions in Siberia and in Russia, put an end to this struggle between the two exiles. As a result of criticism levelled against the conduct of a highly-placed official who was playing at liberalism, a storm broke out in the governor-general's entourage and ended in a duel to the death. Now this whole affair stank so much of personal intrigues and fraudulent dealings, that the whole population was disturbed and accused the chief officials of having assassinated the victim of the duel, a young friend of Petrashevsky’s. Unrest took on such proportions that the government became fearful of a popular riot. Bakunin sided with the high officials, Muravyov included. He used his influence to have Petrashevsky exiled to a remoter place and he defended Petrashevsky’s persecutors in a long letter signed by him as witness and sent to Herzen. The latter, when publishing it in the Kolokol suppressed all the attacks against Petrashevsky; but the manuscript copy made of this letter while on its way to St. Petersburg was circulated there, and so the original text reached the public.

The merchants of Siberia, who are generally more liberal than those in Russia, wanted to found a university there in order not to have to send their children any more to distant schools in Russia, and to create an intellectual centre in those parts. For this, they needed imperial authorisation. Muravyov, advised and encouraged by Bakunin, opposed this project. Bakunin’s hatred of science goes back a long way. This is perfectly well-known in Siberia. Challenged on this point several times by the Russians, Bakunin could not deny it, but always explained his conduct by saying that, while preparing for his escape, he sought to win the good graces of his cousin the governor.

Not only did Bakunin use and abuse governmental favours, but for trifling sums of money he obtained them in abundance for the capitalists, contractors and tax-farmers. Bakunin’s proclamations, confiscated from Nechayev’s victims and published by the government in 1869 and 1870, contained lists of proscribed persons, including the notorious Katkov, editor-in-chief of the Moscow Gazette The latter took his revenge by publishing the following disclosure in his newspaper: he had in his possession letters sent to him by Bakunin from London on his arrival from Siberia, in which he begged Katkov, as an old friend, to advance him several thousand rubles. Bakunin admits that during his stay in Siberia he had been receiving an annuity from a vodka tax-farmer who paid him for ensuring, by his intercession, the good graces of the governor. This dishonourable fee (Bakunin ceased to collect it after his escape) weighed on his conscience; he wanted to send back to the tax-farmer the money received from him. He asked his friend Katkov for an advance to enable him to perform this good deed. Katkov refused.

At the time when Bakunin sent this request to his old friend Katkov, the latter had long since won his spurs in the service of the Third Department, devoting his newspaper to denunciations of the Russian revolutionaries and particularly of Chernyshevsky, as well as of the Polish revolution. And so, in 1862, Bakunin requested money of a man whom he knew to be a denouncer and a literary bandit in the pay of the Russian Government. Bakunin has never dared to deny this grave charge.

Supplied with money obtained by the methods already known to us, and enjoying the high protection of the governor, Bakunin was able to escape with the greatest of ease. Not only did he procure a passport in his own name to travel in Siberia, he obtained the official assignment of inspecting the region as far as its eastern frontiers. Once he arrived at the port of Nikolayevsk, he crossed without difficulty to Japan, from where he was able calmly to embark for America and arrive in London at the end of 1861. Thus did this new Mohammed accomplish his miraculous hegira.

2. BAKUNIN'S PAN-SLAV MANIFESTO

On March 3, 1861, Alexander II proclaimed, to the tumultuous plaudits of all liberal Europe, the emancipation of the serfs. The efforts of Chernyshevsky and the revolutionary party to obtain the preservation of communal landownership had produced results, but in a manner so unsatisfactory that, even before the proclamation of the manifesto emancipating the serfs, Chernyshevsky sadly admitted:

“Had I known that the question raised by me was to receive such a solution, I would have preferred to suffer a defeat rather than win such a victory. I would rather they had acted as they had intended, without any regard for our claims.” And, indeed, the act of emancipation was nothing but a swindle.

A large part of the land was taken away from its real owners, and a system was proclaimed whereby the peasants could buy back their land. This act of bad faith by the tsar gave Chernyshevsky and his party a new and irresistible argument against imperial reforms. The liberals, ranging themselves under Herzen’s banner, bayed at the top of their voices: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” By Galilean, they meant Alexander II.— From that moment, the liberal party, whose chief organ was Herzen’s Kolokol, never ceased to sing the praises of the tsar-liberator and, to distract the public’s attention from the complaints and claims which were stirred up by this anti-popular act, they asked the tsar to continue his emancipatory work and to launch a crusade for the liberation of the oppressed Slav peoples and for the achievement of pan-Slavism.

In the summer of 1861, Chernyshevsky, in the journal Sovremennik, denounced the manoeuvres of the pan-Slavists and told the Slav peoples the truth about the state of affairs in Russia and about the selfish obscurantism of their false friends, the pan-Slavists. It was then that Bakunin, on his return from Siberia, judged that the moment had arrived for him to step forward. He wrote the first part of a long manifesto published as a supplement by Kolokol on February 15, 1862, and entitled: To the Russian, Polish and All Slav Friends. The second part never appeared.

The manifesto begins with the following declaration:

“I have retained the audacity of all-conquering thought, and in heart, will and passion I have remained true to my friends, to the great common cause, to myself... I now appear before you, my old and tested friends, and you, my young friends, who live by one thought and one will with us, and I ask you: admit me to your midst again and may I be permitted, with you and in your midst, to devote all my remaining life to the struggle for Russian freedom, for Polish freedom, for the freedom and independence of all Slavs.”

If Bakunin addresses this humble prayer to his old and young friends, it is because

“it is bad to be active in a foreign land. I experienced this in the revolutionary years: neither in France nor in Germany was I able to gain a foothold. And so, while preserving all my ardent sympathy of former years for the progressive movement of the whole world, in order not to waste the rest of my life I must henceforth limit my direct activity to Russia, Poland, and the Slavs. These three separate worlds are inseparable in my love and in my faith.”

In 1862, eleven years ago, at the age of forty-seven, the great anarchist Bakunin preached the cult of the state and pan-Slav patriotism.

“It might be said that the Great-Russian people has hitherto lived only the external life of the state. However burdensome its position may have been within, reduced to extreme ruin and slavery, it has nevertheless cherished the unity, strength and greatness of Russia, and has been ready to make any sacrifice for their sake. And so there has been a growing awareness among the Great-Russian people of the state and patriotism, not in words, but in deeds. And so it alone has survived as a people among the Slav tribes; it alone has held out in Europe and made itself felt by all as a force... Do not fear that it may lose its legitimate influence and the political force which it has acquired solely by struggles lasting three centuries and accomplished by martyr-like abnegation to safeguard its state integrity... Let us send the Tartars to Asia, the Germans to Germany, and let us be a free people, a purely Russian people...”

To lend more authority to this pan-Slav propaganda, which ends by calling for a crusade against the Tartars and the Germans, Bakunin refers the reader to the Emperor Nicholas:

“They say that Emperor Nicholas himself, not long before his death, when preparing to declare war on Austria, wanted to call all the Austrian and Turkish Slavs, Magyars and Italians to a general uprising. He had stirred up against himself an eastern storm and, to defend himself against it, he wanted to transform himself from a despotic emperor into a revolutionary emperor. They say that his proclamations to the Slavs as also an appeal to the Poles had already been signed by him. However much he hated Poland, he understood that, without it, a Slav uprising was impossible ... he overcame his aversion to such an extent that he was ready, it is said, to recognise the independent existence of Poland, but ... only beyond the Vistula.”

The very man who, since 1868, has played the internationalist, preached, in 1862, a war of the races in the interests of the Russian Government. Pan-Slavism is an invention of the St. Petersburg cabinet and has no other goal but to extend Russia’s European frontiers further west and south. But since one dare not announce to the Austrian, Prussian and Turkish Slavs that their destiny is to be absorbed into the great Russian Empire, one represents Russia to them as the power which will deliver them from the foreign yoke and which will reunite them in a great free federation. Thus, pan-Slavism is open to various shades of interpretation, from the pan-Slavism of Nicholas to that of Bakunin; but they all tend to the same end and all are, at bottom, in an entente cordiale, as is proved by the passage which we have just quoted. The manifesto’ to which we now turn will leave us in no doubt on this score.

3. BAKUNIN AND THE TSAR

We have seen that, consequent upon the emancipation of the serfs, war broke out between the liberal and the revolutionary parties in Russia. Round Chernyshevsky, leader of the revolutionary party, there gathered a whole phalanx of journalists, a large group of officers, and the student youth. The liberal party was represented by Herzen, a few pan-Slavists, and a large number of peaceful reformers and admirers of Alexander II. The government lent its support to the liberals. In March 1861, the university students in Russia declared themselves vigorously in favour of the affranchisement of Poland. In the autumn of 1861, they tried to resist the “coup d’état” which wanted, by disciplinary and fiscal measures, to deprive the poor students (over two-thirds of the total number) of the chance to receive a higher education. The government declared this protest to be a riot, and in Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan, hundreds of young people were thrown into gaols, expelled from the universities, or banned from them after three months’ detention. And for fear that these young people might aggravate the discontent of the peasants, a decree of the State Council forbade ex-students all access to public functions in the villages. But the persecutions did not stop there. Professors such as Pavlov were exiled; public courses organised by students who had been expelled from the universities, were shut down; fresh police hunts were undertaken on the most futile pretexts; the “student youth fund”, only just authorised, was abruptly suppressed; newspapers were banned. All this brought the indignation and agitation of the radical party to a head and compelled it to resort to the underground press. At this point, a manifesto entitled Young Russia was published with an epigraph by Robert Owen. This manifesto exposed clearly and in detail the internal situation of the country, the state of the various parties and of the press, and, in proclaiming communism, deduced the necessity for a social revolution. It called on all serious people to group round the radical banner.

Hardly had this manifesto issued from the underground press, when, by a fatal coincidence (unless the police had a hand in it), numerous fires broke out in St. Petersburg. The government and the reactionary press joyously seized on the occasion to accuse the young people and all the radical party of incendiarism. The prison cells filled up again, and the roads to exile were once more thronged with victims. Chernyshevsky was arrested and thrown into the St. Petersburg fortress, from where, after two long years of intense suffering, he was sent to forced labour in Siberia.

Before this catastrophe, Herzen and Gromeka, who later contributed to the pacification of Poland as governor of one of its provinces, delivered a series of furious attacks, the former in London, the latter in Russia, on the radical party, and insinuated that Chernyshevsky would perhaps end up by receiving a decoration.—In as moderate an article as possible, Chernyshevsky called on Herzen to consider carefully the consequences of the new role which the Kolokol was going to play in open hostility to the Russian revolutionary party. Herzen pompously declared that he was ready to pronounce, in the presence of those he called international democrats—Mazzini, Victor Hugo, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, etc.— the famous toast to the health of the great tsar-liberator and, “whatever is said”, he added, “by the revolutionary Daniels of Petersburg, I know that despite all their protests, this toast will find a favourable echo in the Winter Palace” (the tsar’s residence). The revolutionary Daniels were Chernyshevsky and his friends.

Bakunin got the better of Herzen. It was when the revolutionary party was completely routed and Chernyshevsky was in prison, that Bakunin published, at the age of fifty-one, his notorious pamphlet to the peasant tsar: Romanov, Pugachev or Pestel. The People’s Cause. By Mikhail Bakunin, 1862.

“Many are still wondering whether there will be a revolution in Russia. It is taking place gradually, it reigns everywhere, in everything, in all minds. It acts still more successfully through the hands of the government than through the efforts of its own adherents. It will not abate and will not cease until it has regenerated the Russian world, until it has created a new Slav world.

“The dynasty is working to bring about its own destruction. It seeks its salvation in wishing to stop the life of the people which is awakening instead of protecting it. This life, if it were understood, could have raised the imperial house to hitherto unknown heights of power and glory... It is a pity! Rarely has it fallen to the lot of the tsar’s house to play so majestic and so beneficent a role. Alexander II could so easily become the idol of the people, the first peasant tsar,* mighty not through fear, but through the love, liberty and prosperity of his people. Relying on that people, he could become the saviour and head of the entire Slav world...

“For that all that was necessary was a Russian heart, broad and strong in magnanimity and truth. All Russian and Slav living reality went to him with open arms, ready to serve as a pedestal for his historic greatness.”

Bakunin then demands the abolition of the state of Peter the Great, of the German state, and the creation of the “new Russia”. The fulfilment of this task is entrusted to Alexander II.

“His beginning was magnificent. He proclaimed freedom for the people, freedom and a new life after a thousand years of slavery. It seemed as if he wanted to organise the Russia of the peasants” (zemskaya Rossiya), “because in Peter’s state a free people was unthinkable. On February 19, 1861, in spite of all the shortcomings and absurd contradictions in the Ukase on the Emancipation of the peasants, Alexander II was the greatest, most loved and most powerful tsar who ever existed in Russia.”—However, “liberty is contrary to all the instincts of Alexander II”, because he is German, and “a German will never understand and never love the Russia of the peasants ... he only dreamed of strengthening the edifice of Peter’s state ... having undertaken a thing that is fatal and impossible, he is working to his own ruin and that of his house, and he is on the point of plunging Russia into a bloody revolution”.

According to Bakunin, all the contradictions of the ukase on emancipation, all the shootings of peasants, the student disturbances, all the terror, in a word,

“is fully explained by the tsar’s lack of a Russian spirit and of a heart loving the people, by his insane striving to preserve Peter’s state at all costs ... and yet it is he, he alone who could accomplish in Russia the most serious and most beneficial revolution without shedding a drop of blood. He can still do so now. If we despair of the peaceful outcome, it is not because it would be too late, but because we have ended up by despairing of Alexander II and his ability to understand what is the only way of saving himself and Russia. To stop the movement of the people who are wakening up after a thousand years of sleep is impossible. But if the tsar were to put himself firmly and boldly at the head of the movement, his power for the good and the glory of Russia would be unlimited.”

For this, he would only have to give the peasants land, liberty, a n d SELF-GOVERNMENT.

“Do not fear that regional SELF-GOVERNMENT might break the ties between the provinces, that the unity of the Russian land might be shaken; the autonomy of the provinces will be only administrative, internally legislative, juridical, but not political. And in no country, with the exception, perhaps, of France, is the people endowed to the same extent as in Russia with a sense of unity, of harmony, of integrity of the state, and of national greatness.”

* The title of peasant tsar (Zemsky Tsar) conferred on Alexander II was invented by Bakunin and the KolokoL.

At that time, the convocation of a national assembly was being demanded in Russia. Some wanted it to resolve the financial difficulties, others to put an end to the monarchy. Bakunin wanted it to express the unity of Russia and to consolidate the power and greatness of the tsar.

“Since the unity of Russia has hitherto found its expression only in the person of the tsar, it needs another representation, that of a national assembly... The question is not to know whether or not there will be a revolution, but whether it will be peaceful or bloody. It will be peaceful and beneficial if the tsar, putting himself at the head of the popular movement, undertakes, with the national assembly, broadly and resolutely to transform Russia radically in the spirit of freedom; but if he wishes to retreat, or stops at half-measures, the revolution will be frightful. It will then take on the character of a pitiless massacre in consequence of the uprising of the entire people... Alexander II can still save Russia from total ruin and from bloodshed.”

Thus, in 1862, the revolution, for Bakunin, meant the total ruin of Russia, and he beseeched the tsar to save the country from it. For many Russian revolutionaries, the convocation of a national assembly would be equivalent to the collapse of the imperial house; but Bakunin puts an end to their hopes and announces to them that

“a national assembly will be against them and for the tsar. And if the national assembly should be hostile to the tsar? It is not possible; it is the people who will send their delegates, the people whose faith in the tsar is without limits to this day and who respect everything about him. Whence, then, would the hostility come?.. There is no doubt that if the tsar convoked the national assembly now” (February 1862), “he would, for the first time, find himself surrounded by men sincerely devoted to him. If the anarchy lasts a few years longer, the attitudes of the people may change. Life moves fast in our times. But, at present the people are for the tsar and against the nobility, against the officials, against everything that wears German dress” (that is to say, European-style dress). “In the official Russian camp, all are enemies of the people, all except the tsar. Who, then, will try to speak to the people against the tsar? And even if someone should try to do so, would the people believe him? Was it not the tsar who emancipated the peasants against the will of the nobility, against the general desire of the officials?

“Through their delegates, the Russian people will meet their tsar face to face for the first time. It is a decisive moment, critical to the highest degree. Will they like one another? The whole future of the tsar and of Russia will depend on this meeting. The confidence and devotion of the delegates towards the tsar will be boundless. Relying on them, going to meet them with faith and love, he will elevate his throne to a height and a security which it has never attained before. But what if, instead of the tsar-emancipator, the people’s tsar, the delegates find in him a Petersburg emperor in Prussian uniform, a narrow-hearted German? What if, instead of the expected liberty, the tsar gives them nothing, or next to nothing?.. Then, woe to tsarism! At least it will be the end of the Petersburg, German, Holstein-Gottorp emperorship.

“If, at this fatal moment, when the question of life or death, of peace or blood, is about to be decided for the whole of Russia, if the tsar of the people were to appear before the national assembly as a good and loyal tsar, loving Russia, ready to give the people an organisation according to its will, what could he not do with such a people! Who would dare to rise up against him? Peace and confidence would be re-established as if by a miracle, money would be found, and everything would be arranged simply, naturally, without prejudice to anybody, and to the general satisfaction. Guided by such a tsar, the national assembly would create a new Russia. No malevolent attempt, no hostile force, would be in a state to fight against the reunited might of the tsar and the people... May one hope that this alliance will become fact? We have every reason to say No.

Whatever he might say, Bakunin does not despair of dragging his tsar along, and in order to persuade him, he threatens him with the revolutionary youth who, if the tsar does not make haste, will be able to accomplish its mission and find its way to the people.

“And why is this youth not for you, but against you? That is a great misfortune for you ... they need, above all, liberty and truth. But why has it abandoned the tsar? Why has it declared itself against him who first gave liberty to the people?... Has it perhaps let itself be carried away by the abstract revolutionary ideal and the sonorous word ‘republic’} That may be partly so, but it is only a secondary and superficial cause. The majority of our progressive youth understands well that Western abstractions, whether conservative, bourgeois, liberal, and democratic, are not applicable to the Russian movement... The Russian people is not moved according to abstract principles ... the Western ideal is alien to it, and all attempts by conservative, liberal or even revolutionary doctrinairism to subject it to its own tendencies will be futile ... it has its own ideal ... it will bring new principles into history, will create another civilisation, a new religion, a new right, a new life.

“Faced with this great, serious, and even terrible figure of the people one dare not commit stupidities. Youth will abandon the ridiculous and disgusting role of impostrous schoolteachers... What could we teach the people? If one leaves aside the natural sciences and mathematics, the last word of our science will be the negation of the so-called immutable truths of the Western doctrine, the complete negation of the West.”

Bakunin then descends on the authors of Young Russia accusing them of doctrinairism, of wanting to set themselves up as the people’s teachers, of having compromised the cause, of being children who do not understand anything and who have drawn their ideas from a few Western books which they have read.— The government, which at that time arrested these same young people as incendiaries, hurled the same reproaches at them. And so to reassure his tsar, Bakunin announces that

“the people do not support this revolutionary party ... the vast majority of our youth belongs to the people’s party, to the party which has as its sole and single aim the triumph of the people’s cause. This party has no prejudices either for or against the tsar, and if the tsar, having begun the great work, had not betrayed the people, it would never have abandoned him, and even now it is not too late for him; and even now that youth would follow him with joy provided he would march at the head of his people. It would not allow itself to be stopped by any of the Western revolutionary prejudices. It is time for the Germans to go to Germany. If the tsar had realised that henceforth he must be the head not of an enforced centralisation, but of a free federation of free peoples, then, relying on a solid and regenerated force, allying himself with Poland and the Ukraine, breaking all the detested German alliances, and boldly raising the pan-Slav banner, he would become the saviour of the Slav world

“Yes, indeed, war on the Germans is a good and indispensable thing for the Slavs, at all events better than stifling the Poles to please the Germans. To rise and free the Slavs from the yoke of the Turks and the Germans will be a necessity and a sacred duty of the emancipated Russian people.”

In the same pamphlet, he calls on the revolutionary party to rally under the banner of the people’s cause. Here are some articles of faith from the programme of this popular cause à la tsar:

“Article 1. We” (Bakunin and Co.) “want popular SELF-GOVERNMENT in the commune, in the province, in the region and, finally, in the state, with or without the tsar—it doesn’t matter, according as the people wish.—Article 2. ...We are ready, and duty commands us, to come to the aid of Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine so as to prevent all violence, and to protect them against all their external enemies, especially the Germans.—Article 4. With Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, we wish to lend a hand to all our Slav brothers now groaning under the yoke of the kingdom of Prussia and of the Austrian and Turkish empires, and we undertake not to sheathe the sword as long as a single Slav remains in German, Turkish, or any other slavery.”

Article 6 prescribes an alliance with Italy, Hungary, Rumania and Greece. These were the very alliances then being sought by the Russian Government.

“Article 7. We shall strive, with all the other Slav tribes, to make the cherished dream of the Slavs come true, to establish a great and free pan-Slav federation, [...] so that there shall be but a sole indivisible pan-Slav power.

“This is the vast programme of the Slav cause, this is the last indispensable word of the Russian popular cause. To this cause we have devoted our whole life.

“And now, where shall we go, and with whom shall we march? We have said where we want to go; we have also said with whom we shall march—with none other than the people. It remains to be known whom we shall follow. Shall we follow Romanov, Pugachev, or a new Pestel, if one can be found? *

“Let us tell the truth. We would prefer to follow Romanov, if Romanov could, and would, transform himself from a Petersburg emperor into a peasant tsar. We would willingly rally under his banner, because the Russian people still recognises him, and because his power is already created, ready to act, and could become an invincible force if he gave it the popular baptism. We would follow him, moreover, because he alone can accomplish the great peaceful revolution without shedding a drop of Russian or Slav blood. Bloody revolutions sometimes become necessary owing to human stupidity; nevertheless they are a great evil and a great misfortune, not only as regards their victims, but as regards the purity and the fullness of the goal for which they are accomplished. We saw this during the French revolution.

“Thus, our attitude to Romanov is clear. We are not his enemies, any more than we are his friends. We are the friends of the Russian popular cause, of the Slav cause. If the tsar is at the head of this cause, we shall follow him; but if he opposes it, we shall be his enemies. Therefore, the whole question is to know whether he wishes to be the Russian tsar, the peasant tsar, Romanov, or the Petersburg, the Holstein-Gottorp emperor. Does he wish to serve Russia, the Slavs, or the Germans? This question will soon be settled, and then we shall know what we must do.”

Unfortunately, the tsar did not deem it appropriate to convoke the national assembly for which Bakunin, in this pamphlet, was already proposing his own candidature. He gained nothing out of his electoral manifesto and his genuflexions before Romanov. Humiliatingly deceived in his frank confidence, he had no alternative but to throw himself headlong into pan-destructive anarchy.

After this lucubration of a teacher who prostrated himself before his peasant tsar, his pupils and friends, Albert Richard and

Gaspard Blanc, had every right to cry at the top of their voices: “Long live Napoleon III, emperor of the peasants!”