In
1869, two Russian writers, Mikhail Bakunin
and Sergi Nechayev published the
book Catechism of a Revolutionist.
It included the famous passage: "The Revolutionist is a doomed
man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property
nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose,
one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely
by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order
and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners,
conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy
and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it."
The book
had a great impact on young Russians and in 1876 the group Land
and Liberty was formed. Most of the group shared Bakunin's anarchist
views and demanded that Russia's land should be handed over to the
peasants and the State should be destroyed.
In October,
1879, the Land and Liberty split into two
factions. The majority of members, who favoured a policy of terrorism,
established the People's Will. Others, such as George
Plekhanov formed Black Repartition,
a group that rejected terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda
campaign among workers and peasants.
Soon afterwards
the People's Will decided to assassinate Alexander
II. The following month Andrei Zhelyabov
and Sophia Perovskaya attempted to
use nitroglycerine to destroy the Tsar train. However, the terrorist
miscalculated and it destroyed another train instead. An attempt the
blow up the Kamenny Bridge in St. Petersburg as the Tsar was passing
over it was also unsuccessful.
The next
attempt on Alexander's life involved a carpenter, Stefan
Khalturin, who had managed to find work in the Winter Palace.
Allowed to sleep on the premises, each day he brought packets of dynamite
into his room and concealed it in his bedding.
On 17th
February, 1880, Khalturin constructed a mine in the basement of the
building under the dinning-room. The mine went off at half-past six
at the time that the People's Will had calculated Alexander would
be having his dinner. However, his main guest, Prince Alexander of
Battenburg, had arrived late and dinner was delayed and the dinning-room
was empty. Alexander was unharmed but sixty-seven people were killed
or badly wounded by the explosion.
The People's
Will contacted the Russian government and claimed they would call
off the terror campaign if the Russian people were granted a constitution
that provided free elections and an end to censorship. On 25th February,
1880, Alexander II announced that
he was considering granting the Russian people a constitution. To
show his good will a number of political prisoners were released from
prison. Loris Melikof, the Minister of the Interior, was given the
task of devising a constitution that would satisfy the reformers but
at the same time preserve the powers of the autocracy.
At the
same time the Russian Police Department established a special section
that dealt with internal security. This unit eventually became known
as the Okhrana. Under the control of
Loris Melikof, the Minister of the Interior, undercover agents began
joining political organizations that were campaigning for social reform.
In January,
1881, Loris Melikof presented his plans to Alexander
II. They included an expansion of the powers of the Zemstvo.
Under his plan, each zemstov would also have the power to send delegates
to a national assembly called the Gosudarstvenny Soviet that would
have the power to initiate legislation. Alexander was concerned that
the plan would give too much power to the national assembly and appointed
a committee to look at the scheme in more detail.
The People's
Will became increasingly angry at the failure of the Russian government
to announce details of the new constitution. They therefore began
to make plans for another assassination attempt. Those involved in
the plot included Sophia Perovskaya,
Andrei Zhelyabov, Gesia
Gelfman, Nikolai Sablin, Ignatei
Grinevitski, Nikolai Kibalchich,
Nikolai Rysakov and Timofei
Mikhailov.
In February,
1881, the Okhrana discovered that their
was a plot led by Andrei Zhelyabov
to kill Alexander II. Zhelyabov was
arrested but refused to provide any information on the conspiracy.
He confidently told the police that nothing they could do would save
the life of the Tsar.
On 1st
March, 1881, Alexander II was travelling
in a closed carriage, from Michaelovsky Palace to the Winter Palace
in St. Petersburg. An armed Cossack sat with the coach-driver and
another six Cossacks followed on horseback. Behind them came a group
of police officers in sledges.
All along
the route he was watched by members of the People's
Will. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal Sophia
Perovskaya gave the signal to Nikolai
Rysakov and Timofei Mikhailov to
throw their bombs at the Tsar's carriage. The bombs missed the carriage
and instead landed amongst the Cossacks. The Tsar was unhurt but insisted
on getting out of the carriage to check the condition of the injured
men. While he was standing with the wounded Cossacks another terrorist,
Ignatei Grinevitski, threw his bomb.
Alexander was killed instantly and the explosion was so great that
Grinevitski also died from the bomb blast.
Of the
other conspirators, Nikolai Sablin committed
suicide before he could be arrested and Gesia
Gelfman died in prison. Sophia Perovskaya,
Andrei Zhelyabov, Nikolai
Kibalchich, Nikolai Rysakov and Timofei
Mikhailov were hanged on 3rd April, 1881.
Five members of the People's Will being executed on 3rd April, 1881
(1)
Mikhail Bakunin and Sergi
Nechayev, Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869)
The
Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs,
sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire
being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution.
Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every
link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with
the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He
is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose
- to destroy it.
He
despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality
of his time, its motives and manifestations. Everything which promotes
the success of the revolution is moral, everything which hinders it
is immoral. The nature of the true revolutionist excludes all romanticism,
all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.
(2)
In October, 1879, Vera Figner joined
the People's Will.
I was invited to become an agent of the Executive
Committee of the People's Will. I agreed. My past experience had convinced
me that the only way to change the existing order was by force. If
any group in our society had shown me a path other than violence,
perhaps I would have followed it; at the very least, I would have
tried it out. But, as you know, we don't have a free press in our
country, and no ideas cannot be spread by the written word. And so
I concluded that violence was the only solution. I could not follow
the peaceful path.
(3)
When the Land
and Liberty movement split in October, 1879, Olga
Liubatovich joined the People's Will group.
Stefanovich
became the head of the Black Repartition, and his friends Vera Zasulich
and Lev Deich joined him. But even ardent populists like Vera Figner,
who had been working in one of the countryfolk settlements in the
provinces, and Sophia Perovskaia joined the People's Will, the group
that had taken up arms to defend the people and their apostles.
Black Repartition
was stillborn; it left no visible traces of its work among the people
at the end of 1879 and the beginning of 1880, because no such activity
was possible on a broad scale. After a series of failures, Stefanovich,
Deich, Plekhanov, and Zasulich returned abroad.
As for
me, naturally I joined the People's Will. The Executive Committee
of the People's Will soon began to chart its own course. Its initial
plan had been to carry out a number of actions against the governor-generals,
but this decision was called into question at one open-air meeting
in Lesnoi: shouldn't we concentrate all our forces against the Tsar
instead, it was asked. We resolved that this should indeed be the
goal of the Executive Committee. The implementation of that decision
engaged the People's Will right up to March 1, 1881.
(4)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia
was a member of Land and Liberty and later
joined the Black Repartition faction.
In the spring of 1879, after Governor Krapotkin was
assassinated, there was a wave of searches and arrests in Kharkov.
I had to flee and go understanding for good. I spent brief periods
of time in various cities, reaching St. Petersburg in the fall of
that year. By this time, Land and Liberty had split into the People's
Will and Black Repartition. Firmly convinced that only the people
themselves could carry out a socialist revolution and that terror
directed at the centre of the state (such as the people's Will advocated)
would bring - at best - only a wishy-washy constitution which would
in turn strengthen the Russian bourgeoisie, I joined Black Repartition,
which had retained the old Land and Liberty program.
(5)
Praskovia
Ivanovskaia
joined the People's Will and often visited the home of Sophia
Perovskaya and Andrei Zhelyabov.
In the intervals between printing jobs, we visited
Sophia Perovskaya's apartment. She shared the place with Andrei Zhelyabov,
and when we stayed late, we saw him, too. To us, the visits to Perovskaia
were like a refreshing shower. Sophia always gave us a warm, friendly
welcome; she acted as if we were the ones with stimulating ideas and
news to share, rather than the reverse. In her easy and natural way,
she painstakingly helped us to make sense of the complicated muddle
of everyday life and the vacillations of public opinion. She told
us about the party's activities among workers, about various circles
and organizations, and about the expansion of the revolutionary movement
among previously untouched social groups. Perovskaia spoke calmly,
without a trace of sentimentality, but there was no hiding the joy
that lit up her face and shone in her crinkled, smiling eyes - it
was as if she were taking about a child of hers who had recovered
from an illness.
(6)
Members of the People's Will were constantly being arrested by the
Okhrana.
Although leader of the group, Vera
Figner managed
to avoid capture for many years.
Occasionally, they stumbled on the trial of people
who actually had been involved in the Moscow Organization's work;
in other instances, however, they contrived to tie in people who were
not implicated at all. That's how the "Trial of the Fifty"
came about. It included eleven of the women who had studied in Zurich;
a twelfth, Keminskaia, was not brought to trial, ostensibly because
she became mentally disturbed during her preliminary detention. There
was a rumour that the quiet melancholia from which she suffered would
not have saved her from trial if her father hadn't given the police
5,000 rubles. After her comrades were sentenced. Kaminskaia's thwarted
desire to share their fate led her to poison herself by swallowing
matches.
(7)
Olga Liubatovich
left the People's Will over the issue of Jacobinism
in 1880.
During the debates, the question of Jacobinism - seizing
power and ruling from above, by decree - was raised. As I saw it,
the Jacobin tinge that Tikhomirov gave to his program for the Executive
Committee gave to his program for the Executive Committee threatened
the party and the entire revolutionary movement with moral death;
it was a kind of rebirth of Nechaevism, which had long since lost
moral credit in the revolutionary world. It was my belief that the
revolutionary idea could be a life-giving force only when it was the
antithesis of all coercion - social, state, and even personal coercion,
tsarist and Jacobin alike. Of course, it was possible for a narrow
group of ambitious men to replace one form of coercion or authority
by another. But neither the people nor educated society would follow
them consciously, and only a conscious movement can impart new principles
to public life.
At this
point, Morozov announced that he considered himself free of any obligation
to defend a program like Tikhomirov's in public. I too, declared that
it was against my nature to act on the basis of compulsion; that once
the Executive Committee had taken on a task - the seizure of state
power - that violated my basic principles, and once it had recourse
in its organizational practice to autocratic methods fraught with
mutual distrust, then I, too, reclaimed my freedom of action.
(8)
Vera Figner was involved in the planning
of the assassination of Alexander II.
Everything was peaceful as I walked through the streets.
But half an hour after I reached the apartment of some friends, a
man appeared with the news that two crashes like cannon shots had
rung out, that people were saying the sovereign had been killed, and
that the oath was already being administered to the heir. I rushed
outside. The streets were in turmoil: people were talking about the
sovereign, about wounds, death, blood.
On March
3, Kibalchich came to our apartment with the news that Gesia Gelfman's
apartment had been discovered, that she'd been arrested and Sabin
had shot himself. Within two weeks, we lost Perovskaia, who was arrested
on the street. Kibalchich and Frolenko were the next to go. Because
of these heavy losses, the Committee proposed that most of us leave
St. Petersburg myself included.
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