Sergei
Kravchinskii,
the son of an army doctor, was born in 1851. He attended the Military
Academy and the Artillery School before joining the Russian
Army. He reached the rank of Second Lieutenant before resigning
his commission in 1871.
In 1874
Kravchinskii went to the Balkans to assist revolt of Southern Slavs
against the Turks. He returned four years later and joined the Land
and Liberty group. Along with Nikolai
Morozov and Olga Liubatovich,
Kravchinskii, edited the party journal Land
and Liberty.
Kravchinskii
became convinced that individual acts of political terrorism would
help persuade Alexander II to introduce
democratic reforms. In August, 1878, he assassinated the chief of
the gendarme corps.
After the
killing Kravchinskii left Russia and lived in several countries including
the United States. He eventually settled in
England where he established the Friends of Russian Freedom and the
Russian Free Press. Sergei
Kravchinskii was
knocked down and killed by a train in London
in 1895.
(1)
Olga
Liubatovich first met Sergei Kravchinskii in 1876.
There were a number of people in the room by the time
Kravchinskii walked in, but I felt my attention shift involuntarily
to his strong, manly figure and distinctive face. He carried a top
hat and was dressed like a gentleman; his Napoleonic goatee made him
look like a foreigner. Although several other women were present,
he walked directly toward me and extended his hand in a free, comradely
gesture.
He was
older than me and had more experience among the people; I regarded
him as a senior comrade. Although I was extremely shy with people
in my youth, we somehow struck up a sincere, unconstrained conversation;
and as we talked, I glanced freely at his open, bold face, a face
in which ugly, irregular features and broken lines became beautiful.
We became friends immediately.
(2)
In her autobiography Olga Liubatovich
described how Vera Zasulich and Sergei
Kravchinskii reacted to the news that Alexander Soloviev
had attempted to kill Alexander II.
In the spring of 1879, the unexpected news of Alexander
Soloviev's attempt on the life of the Tsar threw Geneva's Russian
colony into turmoil. Vera Zasulich hid away for three days in deep
depression: Soloviev's deed obviously reflected a trend toward direct,
active struggle against the government, a trend of which Zasulich
disapproved. It seemed to me that her nerves were so strongly affected
by violent actions like Soloviev's because she consciously (and perhaps
unconsciously, as well) regarded her own deed as the first step in
this direction.
Other émigrés
were incomparably more tolerant of the attempt: Stefanovich and Deich,
for example, merely noted that it might hinder political work among
the people. Kravchinskii rejected even this objection. All of us knew
from our personal experience, he argued, that extensive work among
the people has long been impossible, nor could we expect to expand
our activity and attract masses of the people to the socialist cause
until we obtained at least a minimum of political freedom, freedom
of speech, and the freedom to organize unions.
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