CHAPTER IV

SUBVERSIVE SOCIETIES
“ Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. . . and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up . . . Andin those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them . . . And behold a great red dragon ... And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them . . that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” —The Revelation of St. John the Divine.
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(1) Anarchists
Exaggerated individualism—Bakunin—His Alliance of Social Democracy, 1868— Johann Most—Fretheit newspaper—His murderous plots—Removal to Chicago—and execution—Sporadic survivals of anarchism.
IKE virtues which become vices when pushed to an
extreme, the reasonable doctrines of Individualism, such as Herbert Spencer and Auberon Herbert preached, have been expanded to include Anarchy, Communism and many criminal conspiracies.
Individualism is merely resistance against the petty tyrannies of “our grandmother, the State,’ and teaches that men have the right to do whatever they please so long as their actions do not interfere with the liberties of others. Not only, according to an Individualist, has the State no right to restrict the purchase of sweetmeats and cigarettes to certain hours, but it may not interfere with private drunkenness or any individual vice, nor with the sins which two or more persons may agree to share, provided they are of full age and in possession of their senses.
Logically also, the State has no right to impose taxes, for an individual should be entitled to enjoy his own property in his own way, and Auberon Herbert advocated voluntary taxation. Objection was made to this that nobody would pay any taxes at all, that essential services of State would have to be abandoned through lack of support. On the other hand, the purchase of a stamp for a letter is a volun- tary payment for the service of transmission; turnpike tolls enabled those who used the roads to pay for their maintenance ; hospitals are still maintained by voluntary contributions. At any rate, it is an unwarrantable inter- ference with individual liberty and the rights of property to seize a man’s earnings for distribution as doles to the undeserving poor.
The Anarchists have advanced further than the Indivi-
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dualists. Zhey are not content to limit the sphere of Government but, as their name implies, seek to abolish government altogether. Then they may proceed to deny an individual’s right to the enjoyment of property, whether inherited or acquired or created. And finally, they may drift into the ranks of the Communists, who need a State organisation to administer confiscated property and whose doctrines are accordingly the antithesis of those of the Anarchists.
The Anarchists, however, came not to build up but to destroy, and they welcomed recruits far less for their gifts of logic than for their nerve and nimbleness in handling grenades. Proudhon was the first to use the name Anar- chist and did not consider that it belied his phrase, “‘ Pro- perty is theft.’”’ Bakunin has been claimed both as the father of Anarchism and the father of Communism, but did so much to inspire Anarchists that it may be more conve- nient to deal with him here.
Bakunin was born of respectable Russian parents in 1814, enjoyed considerable education and passed out of a military academy with hopes of a commission in the Imperial Guards. These being disappointed, he obtained permission to study abroad and became a discontented wanderer. Music and metaphysics, dreaminess and dominoes would probably have crystallised him into one of the many harmless drones who abstain from evil merely through lack of energy and oppor- tunity. But unfortunately his family grew concerned over his wasted life and used their influence with the Russian Government to summon him home. He snapped his fingers and learned that all his property had been confiscated. He was confronted by the hideous prospect that he might be obliged to work! Well, if he must work, he would work up revolutions.
It was then 1847. The year of revolutions was at hand, and he soon found many opportunities of inciting other people to bloodshed in a variety of countries. A French Cabinet Minister sent him to stir up trouble in Germany, with the result that he was tried by courts-martial both in Prussia and Austria, and each sentenced him to death. His rela
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tives, however, intervened and the Russian Government obtained his extradition. A biographer relates how Russian handcuffs were punctiliously exchanged for Austrian fetters at the frontier, after which he was packed off to Siberia.
The severities of the old Russian administration cannot have been very serious, for the biographies of nearly every prisoner to Siberia seem to end with a release or an escape. Bakunin was no exception, and if he could not be compli- mented on his chivalry, he could certainly point to a romance. His gaoler’s daughter was fair and fondly ready to risk everything to win his affections, yet shrewd enough to insist on marriage before smuggling him on to a river-steamer. Everything went off well so far as he was concerned, and he made good his escape with the usual ease, but his gratitude did not lead him to fulfil his promise and send for his eman- cipatress to share the restoration of his fortunes. Those fortunes, moreover, seemed far from bright. His old friend, Turghenieff, with whom he used to play chess and discuss philosophy, would have no more to do with him ; Karl Marx and Liebknecht accused him of stealing their revolutionary funds and betraying them to the Russian police. The matter was brought before a congress of the International at The Hague and Bakunin was expelled.
But he still contrived to find followers, and in 1868 at Geneva, he founded a secret society, known as the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which, in spite of its name, was con- ducted on Anarchist lines. Adherents joined him from Swit- zerland, France, Belgium, Spain, Russia and Italy. In Italy he mapped out a revolutionary plan according to the very method carried out by Lenin and Trotsky at St. Peters- burg in 1917, summarised as follows to one of his intimates : To organise a band of determined conspirators, not afraid of taking risks, and assemble them at an agreed spot at anagreedmoment. Then, at the appointed spot, the armed revolt was to begin. First of all, the Town Hall was to be attacked. The next stage was to be the “ liquidation” of the existing régime, that is to say, the confiscation of all estates, factories, etc.
Nothing, however, came of this, nor was his secret society
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successful in provoking risings in France and Switzerland after he had taken part in the Paris Commune. There was certainly a strain of madness about him, as is shown by his biographer’s account of his last years, hidden away in the darkest attic of a gloomy house with secret chambers and passages, throwing off revolutionary proclamations from a small printing-press, armed to the teeth in instant fear of police-raids. He was enormously tall and enormously fat, ‘a wild and wheezy man whom there were none to praise ~ and very few to love.”
Johann Most seems to have been a more practical Anar- chist. He founded secret revolutionary groups of five persons each among German democrats, preaching murder to the working classes. Coming under the ban of the Govern- ment, he fled to London and started the Fretheit newspaper with extreme Anarchist views and incitements to murder, after which he founded the Propagandist Club, a secret association with branches all over the world. In 1881, he summoned an International Revolutionary Congress in London with delegates from hundreds of groups, and they decided to pass from words to deeds. Crowned heads, Ministers of State, high ecclesiastics and nobles were to be systematically removed. Murder andrapine were his watch- words and he spared no effort to rouse the beast in his hearers. He studied all the most deadly poisons and became expert in their application.
The English police, however, began to trouble him in 1882, the Fretheit was suppressed, and he decided to re- move his headquarters to Chicago. Murders and attempted murders succeeded one another at Chicago, Madrid, Bar- celona, Strasburg, Frankfort on the Main, Stuttgart, Vienna and elsewhere. A group of Anarchists sentenced the head of the Prague police to death, and a glove-maker’s assistant named Dressler was chosen by lot to kill him. But Dressler shrank from the task and preferred to commit suicide, leaving a letter to his parents with full details of the con- spiracy. Accordingly, Most and many of his accomplices were hanged, others sent to penal servitude, and for a long time the Anarchist groups remained small and harmless.
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The Anarchist idea, however, still survives sporadically, and Anarchist publications still emanate from secret societies in London, Paris, Switzerland and America. The Soviets regard them as dangerous criminals in Russia.
AUTHORITIES
R. A. Stamler: Die Theorie des Anarchismus. Berlin, 1894.
G. Plechanoff: Anarchismus und Sozialismus. Berlin, 1894.
E. von Zenker: Der Anarchismus: Knitik und Geschichte der anarchistischen Theorie. Jena, 1895.
Eltzbacher : Der Anarchismus. Berlin, 1900.
N. Radek: Die Anarchisten und die Sowjet-Republik. Pub- lished by the Spartakusbund or German Communistic Party, 1920.
N. Radek: Anarchismus und Sowyjetregierung. Vienna, no date.
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(2) Nihilists
The Russian Mystery—Precipitate progress—Bureaucracy—Philanthropic Societies—Their democratic development—Union of Public Welfare— Decembrists—Origins of Nihilism—Weak concessions of Alexander II— Organised outrages—Czar’s miraculous escapes—His murder, 1881— Plots against Alexander IlI—Abject failure of Nihilists—Their worst persecution by Bolsheviks.
It is difficult to crystallise Russia in a nutshell, but we may picture the vastness of the distances and the depths of the ignorance; discolour some of the extravagances of Tolstoi, Turghenieff and other prejudiced pessimists; use test-tubes, acids, lenses, induction and intuition; above all, divest ourselves of the accepted theories, whether they be White or Red, hopeful or despondent, honest or partisan. Then, if we devote a lifetime to this very ungrateful sub- ject, we may begin to grasp some of the difficulties of the problem.
It is not sufficient to think of the Russians of the eight- eenth century as Asiatics, Orientals, savages, children, though their mentality partook of all these. They were rather like dwellers in another planet, entirely outside our ken. All deductions from Tartar origin, nomadic traditions, folklore, philology, cranial measurements, reflex actions, psycho-analysis would lead us far astray. It would be safer to cast their horoscopes or diagnose their development from the flight of their birds. Even now there is no good way of guessing how a Russian will behave in any given cir- cumstance, and, if there were, he would baffle us by his dogged secretiveness. The mysterious Chinese are an open