Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 1967.

PART I · 1905

1 · THE STORMY PETREL


The time has come, an enormous thing is moving down on us all, a mighty, wholesome storm is gathering; it is approaching, is already near, and soon will cleanse from our society its indolence, indifference, prejudice against work, and foul ennui.

BARON TUZENBAKH, CHEKHOV'S The Three Sisters


At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire was entering a time of troubles, a cataclysmic period of war and revolution destined to leave the old order in ruins. Opponents of the autocracy had long been forecasting the approach of a destructive tempest. Decades before Nicholas II ascended the throne, Mikhail Bakunin had sensed that the atmosphere in Russia was growing heavy with storms of devastating power, and Alexander Herzen more than once had thought he could hear the moan and grumble of an impending debacle.1 The reforms of Alexander II cleared the air momentarily, but after the emperor's assassination in 1881 the dark clouds of reaction enshrouded the country once more. By the turn of the century, few could escape the conviction that the old regime was on the eve of a great upheaval. The air seemed full of portents and forebodings. In a poem that was on many lips, Maksim Gorky predicted that a stormy petrel would appear "like black lightning" in the heavens, the harbinger of an immense storm soon to burst upon the Russian land.2 The stormy petrel became a symbol for Russians of all backgrounds -- for some the symbol of approaching calamity, for others of imminent salvation.

But Nicholas II firmly refused to heed the danger signals. He remained unshakeable in his determination to preserve the autocracy as his father had done before him. Under the spell of his reactionary advisor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, the Tsar stifled every constitutional impulse of the enlightened members of society. Dismissing as "senseless dreams" their desperate petitions for a larger political role, he placed his trust in an unwieldy bureaucracy, a large but ill-equipped army, and a stultifying network of secret police.

The greatest threat to the ancien regime came from the peasantry. A catastrophic famine in 1891 had reawakened Russian society to the misery that pervaded the countryside. Overpopulation and stagnation in the villages persisted even after the Emancipation. As the peasants multiplied (from fifty to eighty millions in a single generation), the average size of their already inadequate family holdings steadily shrank, so that most villagers could no longer support themselves without earning additional income as hired hands in agriculture or in manufacture. The peasants hungered for more land and struggled under the crushing burden of taxes and redemption payments. They remained paralyzed by the restrictions of communal tenure long years after the Tsar had proclaimed them free men. In most places, the widely scattered strips of farmland were still redistributed every few years, and antiquated methods of cultivation had not yet given way to modern agricultural techniques. The muzhiks continued to live out their primitive lives in one-room wooden huts with earthen floors, sharing them perhaps with their pigs and goats, and subsisting on bread, cabbage soup, and vodka.

The black-earth provinces of central Russia, once -the bulwark of serfdom, had changed but little since the great Emancipation of February 1861. In this overcrowded region, where "beggarly allotments" of land abounded, the impoverished peasants managed to avoid starvation only by carrying on their long-established cottage manufacture of nails, sacking, cutlery, and other small items. By the close of the century, however, handicrafts production had entered a steep decline, hard pressed by the competition of efficient factories in the burgeoning industrial towns to the north and west. The villagers, thrust into the darkness of despair, took to casting sullen and baleful looks at their former masters, whose land they now coveted more than ever before. In 1901, a landowner of Voronezh province fancied he [10] could see a bloody mist crawling over his estate, and noted that breathing and living had lately become more difficult, "as before a storm."3 In the autumn of that year, the central and southern agricultural regions yielded disastrously meager harvests, and the following spring the peasants of Poltava and Kharkov provinces resorted once again to the ugly weapons of Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev -- axe, pitchfork, and torch -- seizing grain wherever any could be found, and plundering the manor houses of their districts until government troops arrived to restore order.4

The wretched condition of the peasantry was matched by that of the growing class of industrial workers. Serfs only yesterday, the workers found themselves uprooted from their native villages and crowded into the squalid factory dormitories of the big towns. Victimized by callous foremen and factory directors, their paltry wages habitually reduced for petty infractions of workshop rules and without any legal means of communicating their grievances, the workmen could adjust to their new mode of life only with the greatest difficulty.5

Laborers in the factories, moreover, were afflicted with a crisis of identity. Powerful magnets pulled them in two directions, one leading back to their traditional villages, the other towards a strange new world beyond their comprehension. At the beginning of the new century, a large majority of factory workers -- especially those in the textile mills of north-central Russia -- were still legally classified as peasants. As such, they retained at least nominal possession of some allotment land and were liable to certain regulations of the commune, such as the issuance of work permits for factory employment. These worker-peasants often left their wives and children in the village, returning for the harvest season, or in times of sickness or old age. Their peasant mentality was evidenced in their sporadic outbursts against the harassments of the factory, more akin to the jacqueries of an earlier age than to the organized strikes of a more mature proletariat.6

Yet, at the same time, the workers were loosening their ties with the countryside. The heavy concentration of labor in Russian enterprises helped give the factory hands a sense of collectivity that more and more replaced the old loyalties of the village.7 The odd form of social schizophrenia that plagued the emerging working class was beginning to heal. The workingmen were breaking with past traditions and beliefs and taking on a single new identity as a social group distinct from the peasantry from which they sprang.8

The turn of the century brought the embryonic Russian working class an economic jolt as severe as the crop failures that shook the peasants in the central rural districts. In 1899, after a prolonged period of industrial growth, the Empire of the Tsars entered a depression from which it took nearly a decade to recover. The depression first struck a glancing blow at the textile industry of the northern and western provinces, then moved rapidly southward, enveloping factories, mines, oil fields, and ports, and bringing serious labor disturbances in its train. During the summer of 1903, the oil workers of Baku and Batum engaged in bloody skirmishes with the police, and walkouts in Odessa broadened into a general strike which swiftly spread to all the centers of heavy industry in the Ukraine, striking with particular force in Kiev, Kharkov, Nikolaev, and Ekaterinoslav.9

A noteworthy characteristic of the turbulence in Russia was the tendency of disaffected social elements to combine with one another to form highly inflammable mixtures. Factory workers, for example, acting as conduits for the radical ideas they absorbed in the cities, disrupted the isolation of their native villages. In a similar vein, a significant feature of the industrial strikes in the south was the frequent appearance of university students alongside the workmen in mass meetings, street demonstrations, and clashes with the authorities.

The years of economic decline coincided with a period of student unrest on an unprecedented scale in Russia's history. Many of the students felt as estranged from the existing social order as the pauperized peasants and their semi-proletarianized cousins in the factories. Quite commonly, university students led impecunious lives in dreary lodgings, embittered by the injustice of the tsarist regime and disheartened by the inevitable prospect of a minor post in the bureaucratic machinery. Even those who came from the wealthier nobility found it difficult to tolerate the highhanded policies of the government or the obscurantism of the Tsar's advisors, who obstinately refused to make any concessions to constitutional principles. The students deeply resented the university statute of 1884, which had dissolved their clubs and societies, banished liberal professors to obscure locations in the provinces, and destroyed all semblance of university autonomy and academic freedom.10

In February 1899, students at St. Petersburg University, indignant because the authorities had cautioned them against rowdy behavior during their annual college celebrations, created a small disturbance, whereupon mounted policemen dispersed them with whips. In reprisal, the furious students organized strikes and obstructed the attendance of lectures. Sympathetic demonstrations swept the other universities of European Russia, disrupting normal academic fife for several months. The situation was tantamount to a general strike in higher education, to which the government responded by expelling hundreds of insubordinate students and drafting many of them into the army.11 One of the expelled young men, Karpovich by name, vented his outrage by assassinating the Minister of Education, N. P. Bogolepov, whom he blamed for the government's harsh measures against the students. Recalling to everyone's mind the murder of Tsar Alexander II, carried out twenty years earlier by the group of young Populists known as the People's Will, Bogolepov's death touched off a rash of terrorist acts directed at high state officials. In March 1901, a month after Bogolepov was killed, a terrorist shot at Pobedonostsev, but missed his quarry. The following year, a disgruntled student mortally wounded the Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin, and a workman made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Governor of Kharkov. In May 1903, another worker with truer aim shot and killed the Governor of Ufa, who had ordered his troops to fire on a group of unarmed strikers.

In the midst of this violence, Russia hovered between two worlds, one dying and the other powerless to be born. The em-bitterment of the peasants, workers, and students could not be assuaged peacefully, for there were no legitimate outlets for their mounting frustrations, nor was the Tsar willing to introduce any reforms from above. There was a growing tendency among the insulted and injured to seek extreme solutions to their accumulating difficulties, especially after the depression dealt its body blow to the economy.

The signs of imminent upheaval were most noticeable in the provinces located along the periphery of the Empire, where social disquiet was intensified by national and religious persecution.12 During four centuries of continuous expansion, Russia had extended its dominion over Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and many other nationalities. Indeed, at the close of the century, non-Russians constituted a majority of the total population of the Empire. Living mostly in the border areas, they could plainly hear the reverberations of nationalism in central Europe. Yet, paradoxically, national consciousness among the minority peoples received an even stronger stimulus from the Russian government itself. Inspired by Pobedonostsev, whose political philosophy pervaded the era of the last Romanovs, Alexander III and his son Nicholas embarked upon a program of Russification, an attempt to force the restless inhabitants of the frontier provinces to suppress their own national traditions and recognize the supremacy of Russian culture. Intended somehow to curb national and social discontent, Russification only aggravated such problems in a multinational empire. The ethnic question played an important part in the strikes among the Transcaucasian oil workers in 1902 and 1903; and in 1904, after Nicholas II extended Russification to loyal Finland, which had been enjoying constitutional privileges since 1809, the son of a- Finnish senator murdered the Russian Governor-General, N. I. Bobrikov.

No national or religious minority suffered more from the harsh policies of the government than the Jews. At the opening of the twentieth century, five million Jews resided in the Empire, mainly in the Pale of Settlement, which extended along the western borderlands from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They had fared comparatively well during the moderate reign of Alexander II. In his program of reforms, the Tsar had permitted prosperous Jewish merchants, skilled craftsmen, former soldiers, and holders of university diplomas to live and work outside the Pale. But Alexander's violent death in March 1881 abruptly ended this period of calm and relative prosperity for the Jews. Easter time marked the outbreak of an ugly rash of pogroms, which spread through more than one hundred districts in the southwestern provinces. Although the least show of force was sufficient to stop a pogrom at once, the local authorities as a rule looked the other way before the rapine and plunder, and in some cases even encouraged the pogromists.13 On top of these depredations by the local populace, the government issued a series of obnoxious decrees affecting every vital aspect of Jewish life. "Temporary regulations" prohibited the Jews from settling in rural communities, even within the Pale, and although these rules applied only to new settlers, many old residents were expelled from the villages of their birth and forced to live in the larger towns. Movement from village to village was restricted and searches were conducted for Jews residing illegally outside the borders of the Pale, which was reduced somewhat in size. The Ministry of Education introduced quotas limiting the number of Jewish students in secondary schools and universities to 10 per cent of the student body inside the Pale and 5 per cent outside, except in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where the figure was fixed at 3 per cent. Jewish doctors could no longer find public employment, and their service in the army medical corps was curtailed. Admission to the bar for "non-Christians" was made subject to the approval of the Minister of Justice, who rarely granted entry to Jewish candidates. Jews could no longer participate in the zemstva (rural assemblies) or in the city councils. Furthermore, in 1891, the authorities evicted twenty thousand Jewish merchants and artisans from Moscow, where Alexander II had allowed them to settle in 1865, and three years later the introduction of a state monopoly on alcohol deprived many Jewish innkeepers of a livelihood.14

These pernicious regulations remained in force with little modification throughout the reign of Nicholas II. The plight of the Jews grew desperate. Crowded into ghettos, subjected to religious persecution, largely barred from higher education and professional careers, their traditional occupations increasingly circumscribed, the Jews faced the total collapse of their economic and social structure. After the depression struck in 1899, the vast majority were compelled to live on the margin of pauperism. Lacking modern equipment and cheap credit, the small entrepreneurs characteristic of the Pale were threatened with ruin by rising competition from large-scale industry. Artisans, abandoning forever their cherished dream of becoming independent manufacturers, joined the ranks of the factory wage earners or, if less fortunate, the swelling army of luftmenshn -- men without any employment, who lived precariously "off the air."

Matters were brought to a head soon after Viacheslav Pleve succeeded the slain Sipiagin as Minister of the Interior in 1902. A former director of the security police and an ardent agent of Russification, Pleve was an inveterate Jew-baiter and a reactionary bureaucrat of the worst stamp. It was Pleve who, in 1904, was to advocate saving the autocracy by instigating a "small victorious war" against the Japanese. The same motive now led him to divert popular discontent against the Jews. By stigmatizing the revolutionary movement as "the work of Jewish hands," he hoped to drown the revolution in Jewish blood.15

Pleve's strategy gave encouragement to P. A. Krushevan, the publisher of an anti-Semitic newspaper in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia. Launching a campaign of invective against the Jews, Krushevan accused them of revolutionary plots and ritual murders and called upon the Christian population to take revenge on their Jewish exploiters. On Easter Day of 1903, the horrible Kishinev pogrom erupted. For two days the police stood aside as hoodlums massacred scores of Jews, injured hundreds more, and ransacked their shops and dwellings. Many Jewish families were left homeless and destitute, utterly ruined by the attack, which ceased the moment the authorities intervened. A few months later, a tide of pogroms swept through the Pale, ravaging Rovno, Kiev, Mogilev, and Gomel.16

It was here in the borderlands of the west and the southwest, and chiefly in the Jewish towns, that the Russian anarchist movement was born. In these areas, economic distress combined with intense national oppression to nourish a strong nihilist sentiment among the workers, students, and peasants, driving many of them to the outermost fringe of radicalism. Ever since the very first years of reaction under Alexander III, artisans, intellectuals, and factory workers of the frontier provinces had been forming clandestine circles devoted mainly to self-education and radical propaganda. The great famine of 1891 stimulated the growth of such organizations, and throughout Russia they multiplied very rapidly, becoming the nuclei around which the two major socialist parties -- the Marxian Social Democrats and the neo-Pop-ulist Socialist Revolutionaries -- took shape at the end of the century. Yet by the spring of 1903, the year of the pogroms, a considerable number of young workers and students in Bialystok, a center of the radical labor movement in the Pale, were already rinding serious shortcomings in the socialist parties and were abandoning the Bund (the organization of Jewish Social Democrats), the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the PPS (the Polish Socialist party, whose socialist creed was wedded to a powerful desire for national independence) for the more extreme doctrines of anarchism."

The new anarchist recruits defected from the Social Democratic Bund for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the organization's firm stricture against acts of terrorism; such deeds, argued the Bund's leaders, would only demoralize the workers and lead to the degeneration of the labor movement.18 Defying this ban on violence, small groups of young rank-and-file Bundists formed a radical "opposition" within the movement and proclaimed a program of "direct action" against the state and private property. They obtained revolvers and dynamite, attacked government officials, manufacturers, policemen, and agents provocateurs, and carried out "expropriations" in banks, post offices, stores, factory offices, and private homes.19 These activities provoked a heavy barrage of criticism from the Bund leadership, causing many of the young terrorists to abandon Social Democracy for a brand of anarchism that favored violent exploits of every sort.20

The anarchists felt also that Marx's disciples included too many intellectuals who seemed bent on drowning the will to act in a mighty torrent of words; ideological debates and struggles for political leadership were exhausting their strength before the battle with the Tsar had even commenced. In the summer of 1903, a number of nascent anarchists from Bialystok attended the second congress of the Social Democratic party, a disillusioning spectacle of organizational squabbles and theoretical hairsplitting that ended in the schism of the Marxist movement into two irreconcilable factions, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. For all their ideological armor, declared the anarchists, the Social Democrats lacked "revolutionary scope" and intensity.21 Instead of idle chatter, the enrages of Bialystok craved direct action to eliminate the tyrannical state, which they regarded as the embodiment of evil and the source of all the suffering in Russia.

Furthermore, the anarchists were determined to rid themselves of the state at once, while the followers of Marx insisted that the intermediate stages of parliamentary democracy and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" were necessary predecessors of the stateless society. This convinced the impatient anarchists that the socialist intellectuals meant to defer the attainment of a workers' paradise indefinitely, in order to satisfy their own political ambitions. According to the anarchists, moreover, the Social Democrats relied too exclusively on the organized forces of skilled labor to emancipate Russia, and neglected the masses of peasants as well as the unskilled and unemployed castaways of society.

The anarchists found equally serious drawbacks in the programs of the SR party and the PPS. Although they admired the SR campaign of terror against government officials, the anarchists wished to wage "economic terror" as well, to extend violent activities to their employers and to property owners in general. In addition, they objected to the preoccupation of the SR's with the agrarian question; nor did they share the nationalist objectives of the PPS or, for that matter, the belief of all socialists in the necessity of some form of government.

In short, the anarchists accused all the socialist groups of temporizing with the existing social system. The old order was rotten, they argued; salvation could be achieved only by destroying it root and branch. Gradualism or reformism in any shape was utterly futile. Impatient for the immediate realization of their stateless Utopia, the youthful anarchists had only withering contempt for intermediate historical stages, partial achievements, and palliatives or compromises of any sort. They turned away from the Marxists and SR's and looked instead to Bakunin and Kropotkin for new inspiration. If the stormy petrel was soon to appear in Russia, they were convinced it was coming as the herald of the anarchist millennium.22

The young anarchists found the personality of Mikhail Alek-sandrovich Bakunin as electric as his creed. Born into the landed gentry and trained as an army officer, Bakunin abandoned his noble heritage for a career as a professional revolutionist; in 1840, at the age of twenty-six, he left Russia and dedicated his life to a relentless struggle against tyranny in all its forms. Not one to sit in libraries, studying and writing about predetermined revolutions, Bakunin threw himself into the uprisings of 1848 with irrepressible exuberance, a Promethean figure moving with the tide of revolt from Paris to the barricades of Austria and Germany. Arrested during the Dresden insurrection of 1849, he spent the next eight years in prison, six of them in the darkest dungeons of Tsarist Russia, the fortresses of Peter-Paul and Schliisselburg. His sentence was commuted to a lifetime of Siberian exile, but Bakunin escaped his warders and embarked on a sensational odyssey that encircled the globe and made his name a legend and an object of worship in radical groups all over Europe.23

Bakunin's broad magnanimity and childlike enthusiasm, his burning passion for liberty and equality, and his volcanic on- hts against privilege and injustice, all gave him enormous h n appeal in libertarian circles. "What struck me most," rote I'eter Kropotkin in his memoirs, "was that Bakunin's influence was ^ mucn *ess as the influence of an intellectual authority than as the influence of a moral personality."24 As an active force in history, Bakunin exerted a personal attraction that Marx never could rival. He won a unique place among the adventurers and martyrs of the revolutionary tradition.

Yet it was not Bakunin's personal magnetism alone that drew the raw youths of Bialystok away from Marxism and into the anarchist camp. There were also fundamental doctrinal differences between Bakunin and Marx, foreshadowing the disputes that were to arise in Russia a generation later between the anarchists and the Social Democrats. These differences centered around the nature of the approaching revolution and the form of society that would arise from its wake. In Marx's philosophy of dialectical materialism, revolutions were predetermined by historical laws; they were the inevitable product of ripened economic forces. Bakunin, on the other hand, considered himself a revolutionist of the deed, "not a philosopher and not an inventor of systems, like Marx."25 He adamantly refused to recognize the existence of any "a priori ideas or preordained, preconceived laws."26 Bakunin rejected the view that social change depended on the gradual maturation of "objective" historical conditions. On the contrary, he believed that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives could not be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract sociological formulas. "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world," Bakunin declared. "I cleave to no system, I am a true seeker."27 Mankind was not compelled to wait patiently as the fabric of history unfolded in the fullness of time. By teaching the working masses theories, Marx would only succeed in stifling the revolutionary ardor every man already possessed -- "the impulse to liberty, the passion for equality, the holy instinct of revolt."28 Unlike Marx's "scientific" socialism, his own socialism, Bakunin asserted, was "purely instinctive."29

In sharp contrast with Marx, who had a rationalist's scorn for the more primitive elements of society, Bakunin never deprecated the revolutionary capacities of nonworkers. He accepted the notion of a class struggle, it is true, but one that would not confine itself to the proletariat and bourgeoisie, since the instinct of rebellion was the common property of all the oppressed classes of the population. Bakunin shared the Populist faith in the latent forces of violence in the Russian countryside, with its long tradition of blind and pitiless uprisings. His vision was of an "all-embracing" revolution, a great rising both in town and country, a true revolt of the downtrodden masses, including, besides the working class, the darkest elements of society -- the primitive peasantry, the Lumpenproletariat of the urban slums, the unemployed, the vagrants and outlaws -- all pitted against those who thrived on the misery and enslavement of their fellow creatures.30

Bakunin's conception of an all-encompassing class war made room for still another unorganized and fragmented element of society for which Marx had only disdain. Bakunin assigned a major role to the disaffected students and intellectuals, alienated from the existing social order and from the uneducated masses as well. In Marx's view, these intellectuals did not comprise a class of their own, nor were they an integral component of the bourgeoisie; they were merely "the dregs" of the middle class, "a bunch of declasses" -- lawyers without clients, doctors without patients, petty journalists, impecunious students, and their ilk -- with no vital role to play in the historical process of class conflict.31 For Bakunin, on the other hand, the intellectuals were valuable revolutionary force, "fervent, energetic youths, totally declasse, with no career or way out."32 In the bitter struggle between Marx and Bakunin for supremacy in the European revolutionary movement, the declasse intellectuals, as Bakunin saw it were bound to join his side, for they had no stake whatever in things as they were and saw no prospect for improvement except through an immediate revolution that would demolish the present system. The part the intellectuals were to play in the overthrow of the old order was crucial: they would ignite the dormant rebelliousness of the people into a bonfire of destruction.

Such a philosophy of immediate revolution inevitably attracted its largest following in the relatively backward regions of Europe, in those countries still groping towards modern industrialism, countries where the hopes of the declasses were dim, where the peasantry remained large and impoverished, and where the workers were unskilled and unorganized. In such circumstances, the abject and illiterate populace could scarcely respond to the "gradualism" or to the theoretical intricacies of Marxism. Whereas Marx foresaw the revolt of a mature proletariat in the most advanced industrial nations, Bakunin insisted that the revolutionary impulse was strongest where the people truly had nothing to lose but their chains. This meant that the universal upheaval would start in the south of Europe, rather than in more disciplined and prosperous countries like Germany.33 Consequently, in the feverish contest for mastery in the International Working Men's Association (the First International), the Ba-kuninists succeeded in creating vigorous branches in Italy and Spain, lands in which the Marxists never managed to secure a significant following.

While entrusting the intellectuals with a critical role in the forthcoming revolution, Bakunin at the same time cautioned them against attempting to seize political power on their own, in the manner of the Jacobins or their eager disciple Auguste Blanqui.34 On this point Bakunin was most emphatic. The very idea that a tiny band of conspirators could execute a coup d'etat for the benefit of the people was, in his derisive words, a "heresy against common sense and historical experience."35 These strictures were aimed as much at Marx as at Blanqui. For both Marx and Bakunin, the ultimate goal of the revolution was a stateless society of men liberated from the bonds of oppression, a new world in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. But where Marx envisioned an intervening proletarian dictatorship that would eliminate the last vestiges of the bourgeois order, Bakunin was bent on abolishing the state outright. The cardinal error committed by all revolutions of the past, in Bakunin's judgment, was that one government was turned out only to be replaced by another. The true revolution, then, would not capture political power; it would be a social revolution, ridding the world of the state itself.

Bakunin perceived the authoritarianism inherent in a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. The state, he insisted, however popular in form, would always serve as a weapon of exploitation and enslavement.36 He predicted the inevitable formation of a new "privileged minority" of savants and experts, whose superior knowledge would enable them to use the state as an instrument to rule over the uneducated manual laborers in the fields and factories. The citizens of the new people's state would be rudely awakened from their self-delusion to discover that they had become "the slaves, the playthings, and the victims of a new group of ambitious men."37 The only way the common people could escape this lamentable fate was to make the revolution themselves, total and universal, ruthless and chaotic, elemental and unrestrained. "It is necessary to abolish completely in principle and in practice, everything that may be called political power," Bakunin concluded, "for as long as political power exists, there will always be rulers and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited."38 And yet, for all his vehement assaults on revolutionary oligarchies, Bakunin nevertheless was determined to create his own "secret society" of conspirators, whose members would be subjected to the "strictest discipline" and subordinated to a small revolutionary directorate. This clandestine organization, moreover, would remain intact even after the revolution had been accomplished, in order to forestall the establishment of any "official dictatorship."39 Bakunin's most famous successors, above all Kropotkin, were to find this strange and contradictory feature of their mentor's revolutionary strategy untenable and, it will be seen, would hasten to jettison it.

In Bakunin's theoretical framework, the popular rebellion that would erase all governments from the face of the earth did not lack a constructive side. Indeed, the most famous sentence ever to issue from his pen proclaimed that "the urge to destroy is also a creative urge."40 But the constructive side was exceedingly nebulous. Once the state was abolished, it was to be replaced by "the organization of productive forces and economic services."*1 The tools of production were not to be nationalized by a workers' state, as Marx desired, but were to be transferred instead to a free federation of autonomous producers' associations, organized on a worldwide basis "from the bottom up."42 In the new society, everyone except the aged or infirm would be expected to perform manual work and each was to be rewarded in proportion to his labor.43 Beyond this extremely vague picture Bakunin was not willing to venture. Contemptuous as he was of all rational speculation, he refused to draw up a detailed blueprint of the future,44 preferring to rely on the creative powers the masses would display once they had been freed from the shackles of private property and the state.

At bottom, Bakunin's philosophy of anarchism was an ardent protest against all forms of centralized power, political and economic alike. Bakunin was not only an enemy of capitalism, like Marx, but an intransigent opponent of any concentration of industrial might, whether in private hands or public. Deeply rooted in French "utopian" socialism and in the Russian Populist tradition, Bakunin's anarchist doctrines repudiated large scale industry as artificial, unspontaneous, and corrosive of genuinely human values. Through the creative spirit of ordinary men and women, aided by certain critically thinking individuals, the backward countries of eastern and southern Europe could avoid the "fate of capitalism"; these lands were not predestined to suffer the agonies of exploitation from any centralized authority, nor were their inhabitants foredoomed to undergo conversion into a dehumanized army of robots. The decentralized, libertarian society of the future, with its loose federation of workers' cooperatives and agricultural communes (purged of their ancient patriarchal authoritarianism), would accomplish a total reconstruction of social values and a regeneration of humanity. To Marx, whose ideology suited the temper of industrialism far better than it did the mood of pre-industrial societies, these anarchist images were romantic, unscientific, Utopian, and altogether removed from the unalterable path of modern history. In Bakunin's judgment, however, Marx may have known how to construct rational systems, but he lacked the vital instinct of human freedom. As a German and a Jew, Marx was "an authoritarian from head to foot."45

Peter Kropotkin, Bakunin's outstanding disciple, was, like his predecessor, a scion of the landed nobility, reared in a nest of gentlefolk even more illustrious than the estate in Tver province where Bakunin spent his boyhood. Kropotkin's ancestors had been grand princes of Smolensk in medieval Russia, descended from a branch of the Rurik clan, which had ruled in Muscovy before the advent of the Romanovs. Educated in the exclusive Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg, Kropotkin served with great devotion as a page de chambre of Emperor Alexander II and later as an army officer in Siberia, attached to the Cossack regiment of the Amur. Like Bakunin before him, Kropotkin renounced his aristocratic heritage for a life spent largely in prisons and in exile. He too was forced to flee from Tsarist Russia in extremely dramatic circumstances, escaping in 1876 -- the year of Bakunin's death -- from a prison hospital near the capital, and then through Finland to the West, where he remained until, at the age of seventy-five, the February Revolution enabled him to return to his native country.46

Although Kropotkin embraced some of the principal tenets of the Bakuninist creed, from the moment he took up the torch of anarchism, it burned with a gentler flame. Kropotkin's nature was singularly mild and benevolent. He lacked completely Bakunin's violent temperament, titanic urge to destroy, and irrepressible will to dominate; nor did he possess Bakunin's anti-Semitic streak or display the hints of derangement that sometimes appeared in Bakunin's words and actions. With his courtly manner and high qualities of character and intellect, Kropotkin was the very picture of reasonableness. His scientific training and optimistic outlook gave to anarchist theory a constructive aspect which stood in sharp contrast with the spirit of blind negation that permeated Bakunin's works.

For all his saintly qualities, however, Kropotkin by no means offered blanket opposition to the use of violence. He upheld the assassination of tyrants if the perpetrators were impelled by noble motives, though his acceptance of bloodshed in such instances was inspired by compassion for the oppressed rather than by any personal hatred of the ruling despots. Kropotkin believed that acts of terror were among the very few means of resistance available to the enchained masses; they were useful as "propaganda by the deed," calculated to supplement oral and written propaganda in awakening the rebellious instincts of the people. Nor did Kropotkin shrink from revolution itself, for he hardly expected the propertied classes to give up their privileges and possessions without a fight. Like Bakunin, he anticipated an upheaval that would demolish capitalism and the state for all time. Nevertheless, he earnestly hoped the rebellion would be a tame one, with "the smallest number of victims, and a minimum of embitterment."47 Kropotkin's revolution was to be speedy and humane -- quite unlike Bakunin's demonic visions of fire and brimstone.48

Again in contrast with Bakunin, Kropotkin deplored the use of putschist methods in preparing the revolution. As a member of the Chaikovskii circle in St. Petersburg during the early 1870's, Kropotkin had been sharply critical of the shadowy intrigues surrounding the personage of Sergei Nechaev, Ba-kunin's fanatical young admirer, whose mania for secret organizations exceeded even that of his master. The Chaikovskii circle concentrated its efforts on spreading propaganda among the factory workers of the capital, and denounced Nechaev, as Kropotkin put it, for resorting to "the ways of old conspirators, without recoiling even before deceit when he wanted to force his associates to follow his lead."49 Kropotkin had little use for secret associations of "professional revolutionists," with their clandestine schemes, ruling committees, and iron discipline. The proper function of the intellectuals was to disseminate propaganda among the plain folk in order to hasten the latter's own spontaneous rising. All self-contained conspiratorial groups, divorced from the people, carried the malignant germ of authoritarianism. No less vehemently than Bakunin, Kropotkin insisted that the revolution was not to be "a simple change of governors," but a "social" revolution -- not the capture of political power by a tiny group of Jacobins or Blanquists, but "the collective work of the masses."50 And yet, while Kropotkin never explicitly directed his animadversions at his teacher's own secret society of revolutionists, it was nonetheless clear that his rejection of every potential dictatorship was meant to include Bakunin's "invisible" one.

Kropotkin's unyielding determination to protect the spontaneous and egalitarian nature of the revolution was reflected in his conception of the new society that would emerge from the ruins of the old. Although he accepted Bakunin's vision of autonomous producers' associations loosely united in a free federation, he dissented on one fundamental point. Under Bakunin's "anarchist collectivism," each member of the local workers' cooperative was obliged to perform manual work and was to receive payment in proportion to his "direct contribution of labor."51 In other words, the criterion of distribution, as under the proletarian dictatorship of the Marxists, was performance rather than need. Kropotkin, on the other hand, regarded any system of rewards based on the individual's capacity to produce as just another form of wage slavery. By drawing a distinction between superior and inferior labor, and between what is mine and what is yours, a collectivist economy rendered itself incompatible with the ideals of pure anarchism. Collectivism, moreover, necessitated some authority within the workers' association tc measure individual performance and to supervise the distribution of goods and services accordingly. Consequently, like the conspiratorial organizations that Kropotkin eschewed, a collectivist order contained the seeds of inequality and domination. It was impossible to evaluate each person's part in the production of social wealth, declared Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread, for millions of human beings had toiled to create the present riches of the world.52 Every acre of soil had been watered with the sweat of generations, and every mile of railroad had received its share of human blood. Indeed, there was not even a thought or an invention that was not the common inheritance of all mankind. "Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and present," Kropotkin continued. "By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say -- This is mine, not yours?"53

Kropotkin considered his own theory of "anarchist communism" the very antithesis of the wage system in all its forms.54 No center of authority would compel any individual to work, though everyone would willingly labor "to the full extent of his capacities."55 For the principle of wages, Kropotkin substituted the principle of needs: each person would be the judge of his own requirements, taking from the common storehouse whatever he deemed necessary, whether or not he contributed a share of the labor. Kropotkin's benign optimism led him to assume that once political power and economic exploitation had been eliminated, all men would work of their own free will, without any compulsion whatsoever, and take from the communal warehouse no more than they required for a comfortable existence. Anarchist communism would put an end, at long last, to every manner of coercion and privilege, ushering in a Golden Age of liberty, equality, and brotherhood among men.

An eminent geographer and naturalist, Kropotkin believed -- no less than Marx -- that his own social theories rested on a scientific basis. During his five years of government service in Siberia, Kropotkin came to reject the emphasis which Darwin's followers (T. H. Huxley, in particular) placed on competition and struggle in the evolution of biological species. His study of animal life in the eastern regions of Siberia56 led him to question the widely accepted picture of the natural world as a savage jungle, red in tooth and claw, in which the fittest members of each species are the ultimate survivors. His own observations indicated that, in the process of natural selection, spontaneous cooperation among animals was far more important than ferocious competition, and that "those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest" to survive.67 By no means did Kropotkin deny the existence of struggle within the animal kingdom,58 but he was confident that mutual dependence played a much larger rote -- indeed, mutual aid was "the chief factor of progressive evolution."59

Kropotkin saw no reason why the principle of mutual aid should not apply with the same validity to Homo sapiens as to the other species of the animal world. In his boyhood, he had come to believe heart and soul in the fraternal spirit of the Russian peasantry.60 Some years later, while serving in the Siberian wilderness, the successful cooperation he observed among the Dukhobor colonies and the native tribes was a flood of light that illuminated his later thinking. It was during his Siberian sojourn that Kropotkin shed all hope that the state could act as a vehicle of social reform. His gaze turned instead to the spontaneous creativity of small anarchist communities.61 His favorable impressions of uncorrupted communal life were reinforced in 1872, when he visited the watchmaking communities of the Jura Mountains in Switzerland. He was drawn at once to their voluntary associations of mutual aid and to the absence among them of political ambitions or of any distinction between leaders and subordinates. Their mixture of manual and mental labor as well as the integration in their mountain villages of domestic manufacture and agricultural work likewise won his warm admiration.

Kropotkin found what he considered scientific confirmation of these pleasant observations in his scrutiny of the annals of human history. Throughout the past, he maintained, men had displayed a marked propensity to work together in a spirit of solidarity and brotherhood. Mutual aid among human beings had been far more potent a force than the egoistic will to dominate others. Mankind, in fact, owed its very survival to mutual aid.62 The theories of Hegel, Marx, and Darwin notwithstanding, Kropotkin held that cooperation rather than conflict lay at the root of the historical process. Furthermore, he refuted Hobbes' conception of man's natural condition as a war of each against all.63 In every period of history, he declared, mutual aid associations of diverse kinds had appeared, reaching a high point in the guilds and communes of medieval Europe.64 Kropotkin considered the rise of the centralized state from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries merely a transitory aberration from the normal pattern of western civilization. In spite of the state's appearance, voluntary associations had continued to play a key role in human affairs, he believed, and the spirit of mutual aid was reasserting itself "even in our modern society, and claims its right to be, as it has always been, the chief leader towards further progress."65 The predominant trends of modern history were pointing back towards decentralized, nonpolitical cooperative societies, in which men could develop their creative faculties freely, without the machinations of kings, priests, or soldiers. Everywhere the artificial state was abdicating its "holy functions" in favor of natural voluntary groups.66

Kropotkin's study of human history, together with his first- hand experiences in Siberia and among the Jura watchmakers, nourished his deeply rooted conviction that men were happiest in communities small enough to permit the natural instincts of solidarity and mutual aid to flourish. At the close of the century, Kropotkin sketched a new society in which "industry [was] combined with agriculture and brain work with manual work," as he succinctly described it in the subtitle of one of his best-known books.67 Men and women in the localities, joined by the natural bonds of cooperative effort, would rid themselves of the artificiality of centralized states and massive industrial complexes. Not that Kropotkin had any aversion to modern technology in itself. "I fully understand," he remarked at one point in his memoirs, "the pleasure that man can derive from the might of his machine, the intelligent character of its work, the gracefulness of its movements, and the correctness of what it is doing."68 Placed in small voluntary workshops, machinery would rescue human beings from the drudgery and monotony of capitalist enterprise, and the stamp of inferiority once borne by manual work would disappear forever.69 Members of the community would work from their twenties to their forties, four or five hours of labor a day sufficing for a comfortable life. The division of labor, including the invidious separation between mental and manual tasks, would yield to a variety of pleasant jobs, resulting in a reintegrated, organic existence, such as prevailed in the medieval city.70

In this serene portrait of the future, Kropotkin's nostalgic yearning for a simpler but fuller life led him to idealize the autonomous social units of bygone years -- the manor and guild, the obshchina and artel'. In the face of the ever-growing concentration of economic and political power in nineteenth-century Europe, he looked backward to a blissful world as yet undefiled by the intrusion of capitalism and the modern state, and forward to a similar world liberated from the straitjackets constricting the natural impulses of humanity.

To the new anarchists of Bialystok, the theories of Bakunin and Kropotkin appeared singularly applicable to the highly centralized and oppressive Russian state. The appalling misery of the peasants and workers, the alienation of the students and intelligentsia from government and society, the recurring instances of violence and terrorism, and the outrageous persecution of national and religious minorities -- all compounded by the economic depression -- darkened the atmosphere with frustration and despair. According to Bakunin's teachings, Russia, as a relatively backward country, should have been ripe for revolt. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was in great flux, having recently begun a fitful and jarring transition from rural to urban life, a transition which tore at the vital roots of tradition and stability. The Juggernaut of industrialism was leaving by the wayside a mound of human debris -- the Lum-penproletariat and other shattered elements of society, bereft of the least bit of security in a hostile and changing world. These wretched outcasts might well have been expected to respond to the anarchist appeal for the annihilation of the existing regime and the subsequent inauguration of a Golden Age. And, indeed, a good many of them did join the first anarchist circles in 1903 and 1904.

Yet, even in these troubled times, when the spirit of nihilism was abroad in the land, comparatively few citizens of the Empire entered the anarchist movement. The explanation lies partly in the fact that the political consciousness of the masses was still on a very low level -- indeed, the membership rolls even of the two major socialist parties which had emerged at the turn of the century contained but a tiny fraction of the peasant and proletarian populations. The few peasants who did have an interest in political questions commonly joined the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose programs were closely tailored to the aspirations of the rural folk. As for the workingmen, the doctrines of anarchism appealed most either to displaced artisans, who yearned with Peter Kropotkin for a passing age of crafts manufacture, or to the unskilled, unorganized, and unemployed castaways of the urban slums. Many members of these two groups, however, found an outlet for their violent propensities in the terrorist wing of the SR's or in the PPS. Between the artisans and the slum proletariat stood a growing class of steadily employed factory workers who were beginning to find a place in the evolving in- dustrial economy; they looked to the Social Democrats -- if to any political party at all -- for the protection of their interests.

Still another reason for the failure of anarchism to attract a larger following was the reluctance of most Russians, even those in the lowest depths of despair, to accept either the ultra-fanaticism of Bakunin or the seemingly naive romanticism of Kropot-kin as a plausible solution to their pressing difficulties. The socialist parties of Russia, in contrast to those of Western Europe with their strong reformist taint, were sufficiently militant to accommodate all but the most passionate and idealistic young students and craftsmen and the rootless drifters of the city underworld. Finally, the very nature of the anarchist creed, with its bitter hostility toward hierarchical organizations of any sort, impeded the growth of a formal movement. The Social Democrats, by contrast, not only shared much of the revolutionary spirit of anarchism, but were able to bolster it with an effective organizational underpinning.

For these reasons, throughout the quarter-century of their existence the Russian anarchists were to remain a varied assortment of independent groups, without a party program or a measure of effective coordination. Nevertheless, events were to show that anarchism, so closely attuned to the "maximalist" mood of revolutionary Russia, would exert an influence in the opening decades of the new century quite out of proportion to the number of its adherents.


Notes

1 M. A. Bakunin, Sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1828-1876, ed. Iu. M. Steklov (4 vols., Moscow. 1934-1936), III, 148; A. I. Herzen, "Kolokol": izbrannye stat'i A. 1. Gertsena, 1857-1869 (Geneva, 1887), p. 299.

2 M. Gorky, "Pesnia o burevestnike," Antologiia russkoi sovetskoi poezii (2 vols., Moscow, 1957), I, 9-10.

3 Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York, 1948), p. 265.

4 Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie 1902 goda (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923), pp. 17-128; P. P. Maslov, Agrarnyi vopros v Rossii (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1908), II, 104-129.

6 K. A. Pazhitnov, Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 92-161; Theodore H. Von Laue, "Factory Inspection under the Witte System, 1892-1903," American Slavic and East European Review, XIX (October 1960), 347-362; Von Laue, "Russian Peasants in the Factory, 1892-1904," Journal of Economic History, xxi (March 1961), 76-80; Gaston V. Rimlinger, "The Management of Labor Protest in Tsarist Russia, 1870-1905," International Review of Social History, v (1960), 226-248; Rimlinger, "Autocracy and the Factory Order in Early Russian Industrialization," Journal of Economic History, xx (March I960), 67-92.

6 M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii, Russkaia fabrika v proshlom i nastoiashchem (3 edn., St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 446-447; Maslov, Agrarnyi vo-pros v Rossii, I, 376-377.

7 A. G. Rashin, Formirovanie promyshlennogo proletariata v Rossii (Moscow, 1940), pp. 169-184.

8 P. N. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR (2 vols., Leningrad, 1947-1948), II, 168-171; Von Laue, Journal of Economic History, xxi, 61-71; Maslov, Agrarnyi vopros v Rossii, I, 378-382.

9 Vseobshchaia stachka na iuge Rossii v 1903 godu: sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1938); D. Shlossberg, "Vseobshchaia stachka 1903 g. na Ukraine," Istoriia Proletariata SSSR, VII (1931), 52-85; D. Kol'tsov, "Rabochie v 1890-1904 gg.," in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX-go veka, ed. L. Martov, P. Maslov, and A. N. Potresov (4 vols., St. Petersburg, 1909-1914), I, 224-229.

10 Thomas Darlington, Education in Russia, volume 23 of Great Britain, Board of Education, Special Reports on Educational Subjects (London, 1909), pp. 134-136, 433-449; William H. E. Johnson, Russia's Educational Heritage (Pittsburgh, 1950), pp. 153-154.

11 Darlington, Education in Russia, pp. 153-155; Johnson, Russia's Educational Heritage, pp. 176-179; N. Cherevanin, "Dvizhenie intelli-gentsii," in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii, I, 273-283; Nicholas Hans, History of Russian Educational Policy, 1701-1917 (London, 1931), pp. 169-174.

12 Z. Lenskii, "Natsional'noe dvizhenie," in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii, I, 349-371.

13 S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1916-1920), n, 247-258.

14 Ibid., II, 309-312, 336-357, 399-413; Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia (2 vols., New Haven, 1944-1951), II, 19-54.

15 Dubnow, History of the Jews, III, 69. Cf. S. Iu. Witte, Vospominaniia (2 vols., Berlin, 1922), I, 193; and S. D. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor (London, 1908), pp. 9, 15.

16 S. M. Dubnov (Dubnow) and G. la. Krasnyi-Admoni, eds., Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii (2 vols., Petrograd, 1919-1923), I, 130-295; Dubnow, History of the Jews, III, 72-104; Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, II, 50-52.

17 In the Ukrainian provinces, the RUP (Revolutionary Ukrainian Party) also lost some of its members to the anarchists.

18 Di Geshikhte fun Bund, ed. G. Aronson et al. (2 vols., New York, 1962), II, 92; H. Frank, Natsionale un politishe bavegungen bay Yidn in Bialystok (New York, 1951), p. 53; A. S. Hershberg, Pinkos Bialystok (2 vols., New York, 1950), n, 103.

19 M. Rates, Ocherki po istoril "Bunda" (Moscow, 1923), pp. 81-89; A. Litvak, Vos geven (Vilna, 1925), pp. 188-190; R. Abramovitch, In tsvey revolutsies (2 vols., New York, 1944), I, 202-203; N. A. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Leningrad, 1925), pp. 253-264.

20 H. Frank, "Di Bialystok tkufe fun der ruslendisher anarkhistisher bavegung," Geklibene shriftn (New York, 1954), pp. 388ff.

21 Al'manakh: sbornik po istorii anarkhicheskogo dvizheniia v Rossii (Paris, 1909), p. 6.

22 On the origins of the anarchist movement in the border provinces, see also Khleb i Volia, No. 11, September 1904, pp. 3-4; No. 12-13, October-November 1904, p. 8; Chernoe Znamia, No. 1, December 1905, pp. 6-8; Burevestnik, No. 8, November 1907, pp. 9-12; "Di anarkhistishe bevegung in Rusland," Der Arbayter Fraynd, 27 October, 3 November, and 10 November 1905; B. I. Gorev, Anarkhizm v Rossii (Moscow, 1930), pp. 58-69; L. Kulczycki, Anarkhizm v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 74ff; V. Zalezhskii, Anarkhisty v Rossii (Moscow, 1930), pp. 20-22; and Peter Kropotkin, Der Anarchismus in Russland (Berlin, 1905).

23 For accounts of Bakunin's life, see Edward Hallett Carr, Michael Bakunin (London, 1937); H.-E. Kaminski, Michel Bakounine: la vie d'un rivolutionnaire (Paris, 1938); Iu. M. Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin: ego zhizri i deiatel'nost' (4 vols., Moscow and Leningrad, 1926-1927); and Max Nettlau, "Michael Bakunin: eine Biographie" (manuscript, 3 vols., London, 1896-1900).

24 Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston, 1899), p. 288.

26 Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, m, 112.

28 Michel Bakounine (Bakunin), Oeuvres (6 vols., Paris, 1895-1913), i, 91.

27 Carr, Michael Bakunin, p. 167.

28 Bakunin, Oeuvres, n, 399.

29 Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, I, 189.

30 M. A. Bakunin, Izbrannye sochineniia (5 vols., Petrograd and Moscow, 1919-1922), v, 202; Gesammelte Werke (3 vols., Berlin, 1921-1924), III, 52; Pis'ma M. A. Bakunin k A. I. Gertsenu i N. P. Ogarevu, ed. M. P. Dragomanov (Geneva, 1896), pp. 497-498.

31 Friedrich Engels, Paul Lafargue, and Karl Marx, L'Alliance de la Democratic Socialiste et I'Association Internationale des Travailleurs (London, 1873), chapter 5; quoted in Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution (Boston, 1939), p. 127.

32 Bakunin, Gesammelte Werke, in, 120-121.

33 Bakunin, Oeuvres, rv, 381.

34 Bakunin, Izbrannye sochineniia, IV, 175; Gesammelte Werke, III, 87.

35 V. A. Polonskii, Materialy dlia biografii M. Bakunina (3 vols., Moscow and Leningrad, 1923-1933), III, 375.

36 Bakunin, Izbrannye sochineniia, v, 20.

37 Ibid., i, 234; Oeuvres, rv, 376.

38 Bakunin, Oeuvres, n, 39.

39 Bakunin, Gesammelte Werke, m, 35-38, 82.

40 Bakunin, Sobranie sochinenii i pisem, III, 148.

41 Bakunin, Oeuvres, II, 39.

42 Ibid., v, 75.

43 Ibid., I, 55.

44 Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, m, 454-455.

45 Ibid., I, 192-193.

46 For the events of Kropotkin's life, see his Memoirs of a Revolutionist; George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince (London, 1950); and N. K. Lebedev, P. A. Kropotkin (Moscow, 1925).

47 Kropotkin, Memoirs, pp. 290-291.

48 Bakunin, too, once expressed the wish that the revolution should claim as few lives as possible, but added the ominous footnote that one must not be greatly surprised if the people did kill many of their oppressors. Bakunin, Gesammelte Werke, III, 86.

49 Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 305.

50 Peter Kropotkin, "Revolutionary Government," in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger N. Baldwin (New York, 1927), pp. 246-248; Modern Science and Anarchism (New York, 1908), p. 86.

51 Bakunin, Oeuvres, I, 55.

52 P. Kropotkin, La Conquete du pain (Paris, 1892), p. 14.

53 Ibid., pp. 5-9.

51 Ibid., pp. 33-34, 74.

55 Kropotkin, "Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles," in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 59.

56 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution (London, 1902), pp. 46-49.

57 Ibid., p. 6.

58 Ibid., p. 57.

59 Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, p. 44.

60 Kropotkin, Memoirs, pp. 105-106.

61 Ibid., pp. 216-217.

62 Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, p. 48.

63 Ibid., p. 45; Mutual Aid, pp. 77-78.

64 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, pp. 153-222. As a prisoner in the fortress of Peter-Paul, Kropotkin relished perusing the chronicles of Pskov, the republican city-state of medieval Russia. Memoirs, p. 351.

65 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 292.

66 Kropotkin, La Conquete du pain, pp. 40, 188; "Anarchist Communism," Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 51-53, 59-61.

67 Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops (London, 1899).

68 Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 119.

69 Kropotkin, La Conquete du pain, pp. 194-195.

70 Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, pp. 184-212.