2 · THE TERRORISTS

The anarchist movement which emerged in the Romanov Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century had antecedents in the Russian past. Over the centuries, the Russian borderlands had been the scene of wild popular uprisings with strong anarchic overtones. Although the rebellious peasants had reserved their venom for the landlords and officials, and had continued to venerate the Tsar or some false pretender, this heritage of mass revolts, from Bolotnikov and Stenka Razin to Bulavin and Pugachev, was a rich source of inspiration to Bakunin, Kropotkin, and their anarchist disciples.

The anarchistic religious sects which abounded in Russia also made a deep impression on the leaders of the revolutionary anarchist movement, despite the fact that the sectarians were devout pacifists who placed their faith in a personal communion with Christ rather than in violent social action. The sects adamantly rejected all external coercion, whether religious or secular. Their adherents spurned the official hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and they often avoided paying taxes and refused to take oaths or bear arms. "The children of God," proclaimed members of the Dukhobor sect imprisoned in 1791, "have no need either of tsars or ruling powers or of any human laws whatever."¹

This same Christian quietism was a basic tenet of Leo Tolstoy and his followers, who began to form anarchistic groups during the 1880's in Tula, Orel, and Samara provinces, and in the city of Moscow.² By the turn of the century, Tolstoyan missionaries had spread the gospel of Christian anarchism with considerable effect throughout the black-earth provinces and had founded colonies as far south as the Caucasus Mountains.³ The Tolstoyans, while condemning the state as a wicked instrument of oppression, shunned revolutionary activity as a breeder of hatred and violence. Society, they believed, could never be improved through bloodshed, but only when men had learned Christian love. The revolutionary anarchists, of course, held no brief for Tolstoy's doctrine of nonresistance to evil; however, they admired his castigation of state discipline and institutionalized religion, his revulsion against patriotism and war, and his deep compassion for the "unspoiled" peasantry.⁴

Another source of anarchist ideas, though an indirect one, was the Petrashevskii circle in St. Petersburg, which transmitted Fourier's "Utopian" socialism to Russia during the 1840's. It was in part from Fourier that Bakunin and Kropotkin and their followers derived their faith in small voluntary communities, as well as their romantic conviction that men could live in harmony once the artificial restraints imposed by governments had been removed. Similar views were drawn from the Russian Slavophiles of the mid-nineteenth century, particularly Konstantin Aksakov, for whom the centralized, bureaucratic state was "evil in principle." Aksakov was thoroughly at home with the writings of Proudhon and Stirner as well as Fourier, and his idealized vision of the peasant commune strongly influenced Bakunin and his successors.⁵ Finally, the anarchists learned much from the libertarian socialism of Alexander Herzen, a progenitor of the Populist movement, who firmly refused to sacrifice individual freedom to the tyranny of abstract theories, whether advanced by parliamentary liberals or by authoritarian socialists.⁶

Notwithstanding this rich legacy left by the peasant revolts, the religious sects and Tolstoyan groups, the Petrashevtsy and Slavophiles, and Alexander Herzen, no revolutionary anarchist movement arose in Russia before the twentieth century -- not even in the heyday of Bakunin during the late 1860's and early 1870's. It is true that Bakunin won over a handful of young Russian emigres, who collaborated with him in publishing two short-lived journals in Geneva (Narodnoe Delo and Rabotnik) and in organizing (in 1872) an ephemeral circle in Zurich known as the Russian Brotherhood; and it is true, also, that he cast his unique spell over many of the student Populists who "went to the people" during the 1870's, and that his influence was felt within the clandestine groups of factory workers which began to appear at that time in Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. Nevertheless, no genuine Bakuninist organization was founded on Russian soil during his lifetime.⁷

Bakunin's principal followers in Switzerland were N. I. Zhukovskii, M. P. Sazhin ("Armand Ross"), and a young rebel of Rumanian descent named Z. K. Ralli. In 1873, Ralli helped create a small group in Geneva called the Revolutionary Commune of Russian Anarchists, which, like the Zurich Brotherhood, disseminated Bakunin's ideas among the radical exiles.⁸ Bakunin's most dramatic disciple inside Russia, however, the bizarre figure of Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev, was less a genuine anarchist than an apostle of revolutionary dictatorship, far more concerned with the means of conspiracy and terror than with the lofty goal of a stateless society. The true revolutionist, according to Nechaev, was a man who had broken completely with the existing order, an implacable enemy of the contemporary world, ready to use even the most repugnant methods -- including the dagger, the rope, and every manner of deception and perfidy -- in the name of the "people's vengeance."⁹ This image of the ruthless underground conspirator was to grip the imagination of more than a few anarchist youths during the stormy months of both 1905 and 1917.

The quarter-century following Bakunin's death in 1876 was a period of dark reaction in the Tsarist Empire. Only the prolific pen of Peter Kropotkin, who was living in West European exile, kept the dream of an anarchist movement alive. Then, in 1892, probably stirred into action by the great famine that afflicted their homeland, a group of Russian students in Geneva established an anarchist propaganda circle, the first since Ralli's Revolutionary Commune of 1873. Led by Aleksandr Atabekian, a young Armenian doctor and disciple of Kropotkin, the new group, which called itself the Anarchist Library (Anarkhicheskaia Biblioteka), printed a few pamphlets by Bakunin and Kropotkin, and by the noted Italian anarchists, Errico Malatesta and Saverio Merlino. Atabekian's efforts to smuggle the literature into Russia appear to have met with little success, but the work of his Anarchist Library was taken up again towards the end of the 'nineties by another propaganda circle, known simply as the Geneva Group of Anarchists. On the press of a sympathetic Swiss printer named Emile Held, the Geneva group turned out more pamphlets by Kropotkin and works by such celebrated West European anarchists as Jean Grave, Elisee Reclus, and Johann Most. In 1902, a group of Kropotkin's followers in London issued a Russian translation of The Conquest of Bread under the ringing title of Khleb i Volia (Bread and Liberty), which immediately entered the armory of anarchist slogans.

Not until 1903, when the rising ferment in Russia indicated that a full-scale revolution might be in the offing, was a lasting anarchist movement inaugurated both inside the Tsarist Empire and in the emigre colonies of Western Europe. In the spring of that year, the first anarchists appeared in Bialystok and organized the Bor'ba (Struggle) group, with about a dozen members.¹⁰ At the same time, a small circle of young Kropotkinites in Geneva founded a monthly anarchist journal (printed by Emile Held) which they christened Khleb i Volia, after their mentor's famous book. The leaders of the new Geneva group were K. Orgeiani, a Georgian whose real name was G. Gogeliia, his wife Lidiia, and a former student named Maria Korn (nee Goldsmit), whose mother had once been a follower of the eminent Populist, Petr Lavrov, and whose father had published a Positivist journal in St. Petersburg.¹¹ Kropotkin, from his London residence, gave Khleb i Volia his enthusiastic support, contributing many of the articles and editorials. Bakunin's famous dictum, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge," was chosen to adorn the masthead. The first issue, appearing in August 1903, contained the exultant proclamation that Russia was "on the eve" of a great revolution.¹² Smuggled across the borders of Poland and the Ukraine, Khleb i Volia was greeted with intense excitement by the Bialystok anarchists, who passed the precious copies among their fellow students and workmen until the paper disintegrated.

The Khleb i Volia group was soon deluged with appeals for more literature. In response, they issued additional pamphlets by Bakunin and Kropotkin, and Russian translations of works by Grave, Malatesta, and Elisee Reclus, among others. Varlaam Nikolaevich Cherkezov, a Georgian of princely blood and Kropotkin's best-known associate in London, contributed a critical analysis of Marxist doctrine,¹³ and Orgeiani produced an account of the tragic Haymarket Square riot of 1886, which had ended in the martyrdom of four Chicago anarchists.¹⁴ In addition to these works in Russian, a few copies of the Yiddish periodicals Der Arbayter Fraynd and Zsherminal, published by Jewish anarchists in London's East End,¹⁵ managed to reach the ghettos of the Pale.¹⁶ Before very long, the Bialystok circle was hecto-graphing handwritten copies of articles from the anarchist journals in the West,¹⁷ and turning out its own leaflets, proclamations, and manifestoes,¹⁸ which were sent in large batches to nearby communities, as well as to such distant points as Odessa and Nezhin (in Chernigov province), where anarchist groups arose toward the end of 1903.¹⁹ A few copies of Khleb i Volia even reached the industrial centers of the remote Ural Mountains, and in 1904 a handful of anarchist propagandists were circulating them in the ancient and dilapidated factories of Ekaterinburg.²⁰

In 1905, the long-awaited storm burst upon Russia at last. Popular discontent had been greatly exacerbated by the war with Japan that had broken out in February 1904. Totally unprepared for the conflict, the Russian colossus suffered a series of humiliating defeats, which the population naturally blamed on the blundering policies of the government. By the beginning of 1905, the situation in St. Petersburg was extremely tense. The dismissal of a few workmen from the huge Putilov metal works touched off a chain of strikes in the capital, culminating on 9 January in the gruesome episode known as Bloody Sunday.^20b

That day, workers from the factory suburbs poured into the center of the city and formed a mammoth procession that filled several streets. Led by Georgii Gapon, a histrionic priest of the Orthodox Church, the procession, bearing holy icons and portraits of the Tsar, and singing religious and patriotic hymns, converged on the Winter Palace. The unarmed crowds of workmen and their families carried a dramatic petition begging their sovereign to put an end to the war, to summon a constituent assembly, to grant the workers an eight-hour day and the right to organize unions, to abolish the redemption payments of the peasantry, and to endow all citizens with personal inviolability and equality before the law. Government troops greeted the marchers with point-blank fire, leaving hundreds lying dead or wounded in the streets.

In an instant, the ancient bond between Tsar and people was severed; from that day forward, in Father Gapon's words, the monarch and his subjects were separated by "a river of blood."²¹ Revolution immediately flared up all over the country. Strikes, especially violent in the non-Russian cities, broke out in every major industrial center; nearly half a million workers left their machines and went into the streets. Soon afterwards, the Baltic provinces and the black-soil regions of central Russia were ablaze with rebellion, the peasants burning and looting as in the time of Pugachev. By mid-October, waves of strikes, emanating from Moscow and St. Petersburg, had paralyzed the entire railway network and had brought industrial production to a near standstill. The rising number of peasant disturbances in the countryside, the October general strike in the cities, and the sudden appearance of a Soviet of Workers' Deputies at the head of the Petersburg strike movement frightened Nicholas into signing the Manifesto of 17 October, which guaranteed full civil liberties to the population and pledged that no law would become effective without the consent of the State Duma.²² Denied any satisfaction of their economic demands, however, and carried forward by the momentum of the revolution, the peasants and workers continued to riot.

In December, the revolution reached a climax. In Moscow, strikes and street demonstrations swelled into an armed insurrection, chiefly the work of the Bolsheviks, but in which anarchists and other left-wing groups took an active part. Barricades went up in the working-class quarter of Presnia. After more than a week of fighting, the uprising was put down by government troops, most of whom proved loyal to the Tsar despite sporadic mutinies earlier in the year. Fierce battles also raged for a short time in Odessa, Kharkov, and Ekaterinoslav, but the army and police succeeded in suppressing the rebels.

The outbursts of popular indignation touched off by Bloody Sunday gave a powerful boost to the inchoate radical movements in Russia. During the Revolution of 1905, as Iuda Roshchin, a leading participant in Bialystok recalled, anarchist groups "sprang up like mushrooms after a rain."²³ Before 1905, there had been a mere twelve or fifteen active anarchists in Bialystok, but by the spring of that year five circles were in existence, composed largely of former Bundists and Socialist Revolutionaries and totaling about sixty members. In the month of May, according to a reliable source, the entire "agitation section" of the Bialystok SR's went over to the anarchists.²⁴ When the movement reached its peak the following year, there were perhaps a dozen circles united in a loose federation.²⁵ Roshchin estimates that the Bialystok anarchists, at their greatest strength, numbered about 300,²⁶ but that figure seems too generous; the total number of active anarchists probably did not exceed 200 (factory workers, artisans, and intellectuals), though hundreds more regularly read their literature and sympathized with their views.

In the western provinces, the organization of anarchist groups spread from Bialystok to Warsaw, Vilna, Minsk, Riga, and also to such smaller cities as Grodno, Kovno, and Gomel. Eventually, even the little shtetls (market towns) that dotted the Jewish Pale had tiny anarchist groups containing from two to a dozen members, who received literature from the larger towns and weapons to use against the government and property owners.²⁷ In the south, anarchist groups sprouted first in Odessa and Ekaterinoslav, branching out to Kiev and Kharkov in the Ukraine as well as to the major cities of the Caucasus and the Crimean Peninsula.²⁸

Everywhere the pattern was the same: a handful of disaffected Social Democrats or Socialist Revolutionaries formed a small anarchist circle; literature was smuggled in from the West or brought by envoys from Riga, Bialystok, Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, or some other propaganda center, and distributed among the workers and students in the area; other circles sprang up and, before long, federations were organized which plunged into radical activity of every sort -- agitation, demonstrations, strikes, robberies, and assassinations. As the revolution gathered momentum, the anarchist tide began to move centripetally, sweeping into Moscow and St. Petersburg, the political centers of imperial Russia, though the movement in the twin capitals assumed a mild form in comparison with the violence in the peripheries.²⁹

The common object of the new anarchist organizations was the total destruction of capitalism and the state, in order to clear the way for the libertarian society of the future. There was little agreement, however, as to how this was to be accomplished. The most heated disputes centered on the place of terror in the revolution. On one side stood two similar groups, Chernoe Znamia and Beznachalie, which advocated a campaign of unmitigated terrorism against the world of the bourgeoisie. Chernoe Znamia (The Black Banner -- the anarchist emblem), easily the largest body of anarchist terrorists in the Empire, considered itself an Anarchist-Communist organization, that is, one which espoused Kropotkin's goal of a free communal society in which each person would be rewarded according to his needs. Its immediate tactics of conspiracy and violence, however, were inspired by Bakunin. Chernoe Znamia attracted its greatest following in the frontier provinces of the west and south. Students, artisans, and factory workers predominated, but there were also a few peasants from villages located near the larger towns, as well as a sprinkling of unemployed laborers, vagabonds, professional thieves, and self-styled Nietzschean supermen. Although many of the members were of Polish, Ukrainian, and Great Russian nationality, Jewish recruits were in the majority. A striking feature of the Chernoe Znamia organization was the extreme youth of its adherents, nineteen or twenty being the typical age. Some of the most active Chernoznamentsy were only fifteen or sixteen.

Nearly all the anarchists in Bialystok were members of Chernoe Znamia. The history of these youths was marked by reckless fanaticism and uninterrupted violence. Theirs was the first anarchist group to inaugurate a deliberate policy of terror against the established order. Gathering in their circles of ten or twelve members, they plotted vengeance upon ruler and boss. Their "Anarkhiia" (Anarchy) printing press poured forth a veritable torrent of inflammatory proclamations and manifestoes expressing a violent hatred of existing society and calling for its immediate destruction. Typical of these was a leaflet addressed to "All the Workers" of Bialystok, 2,000 copies of which were distributed in the factories during the summer of 1905, shortly before the conclusion of peace with Japan. The air was filled with anguish and despair, it began. Thousands of lives had been wasted in the Far East, and thousands more were dying at home, victims of the capitalist exploiters. The true enemies of the people were not the Japanese, but the institutions of the state and private property; the time had come to destroy them. The leaflet warned the Bialystok workers not to be diverted from their revolutionary mission by the alluring promises of parliamentary reform put forward by many Social Democrats and SR's. Parliamentary democracy was nothing but a shameless fraud, a clever instrument which the middle class would use to dominate the working masses. Do not be fooled, declared the leaflet, by the "scientific smoke-screen" of the socialist intellectuals. Let life alone be your leader and teacher. The sole path to freedom is "a violent class struggle for anarchist communes, which will have neither master nor ruler but true equality." Workers, peasants, and the unemployed must hold aloft the Black Banner of anarchy and march forward in a true social revolution. "DOWN WITH PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE! DOWN WITH DEMOCRACY! LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION! LONG LIVE ANARCHY!"³⁰

Although their usual meeting places were workshops or private dwellings, the Chernoznamentsy of Bialystok often assembled in cemeteries, under the pretense of mourning the dead,³¹ or in the woods on the outskirts of town, posting guards to warn of approaching danger. During the summer of 1903, socialist and anarchist workmen had held a series of forest meetings to plan their strategy against the rising number of layoffs in the textile mills. When one of these gatherings was dispersed with needless brutality by a contingent of gendarmes, the anarchists, in reprisal, shot and wounded the Bialystok chief of police. Thus began a vendetta which was to continue without interruption for the next four years.³²

The situation in the factories continued to deteriorate. Finally, in the summer of 1904, the weavers went out on strike. The owner of a large spinning mill, Avraam Kogan, retaliated by bringing strikebreakers onto the scene, with bloody skirmishes as the result. This provoked an eighteen-year-old Chernoznamenets named Nisan Farber to seek revenge on behalf of his fellow workers. On the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), he attacked Kogan on the steps of the synagogue, gravely wounding him with a dagger. A few days later, another forest meeting was held to consider further action against the textile manufacturers. Several hundred workmen attended -- anarchists, Bundists, SR's, and Zionists. They made bristling speeches and sang revolutionary songs. As shouts of "Hail Anarchy!" and "Long live Social Democracy!" pierced the air, the police descended on the all too boisterous assembly, wounding and arresting dozens of men. Once again Nisan Farber sought vengeance. After testing his home-made "Macedonian" bombs in a local park, he threw one of them through the entrance of police headquarters, injuring a few officers inside. Farber himself was killed by the explosion.³³

Nisan Farber's name soon became a legend among the Chernoznamentsy of the borderlands. After the outbreak of the revolution in January 1905, they began to follow his example of unbridled terrorism. To obtain weapons, bands of anarchists raided gun shops, police stations, and arsenals; the Mausers and Brownings thus acquired became their most cherished possessions. Once armed with pistols and with crude bombs produced in makeshift laboratories, the terrorist gangs proceeded to carry out indiscriminate murders and "expropriations" of money and valuables from banks, post offices, factories, stores, and the private residences of the nobility and middle class.

Attacks on employers and their enterprises -- acts of "economic terror" -- were daily occurrences throughout the revolutionary period. In Bialystok, sticks of dynamite were tossed into the factories and apartments of the most loathed manufacturers.³⁴ Anarchist agitators in one leather factory provoked the workers into attacking the boss, who jumped out of a window to escape his assailants.³⁵ In Warsaw, partisans of the Black Banner robbed and dynamited factories and sabotaged bakeries by blowing up ovens and pouring kerosene into the dough.³⁶ The Chernoznamentsy of Vilna issued "an open declaration" in Yiddish to the factory workers, warning them against company spies who had been planted among them to ferret out terrorists. "Down with provocateurs and spies! Down with the bourgeoisie and the tyrants! Long live terror against bourgeois society! Long live the anarchist commune!"³⁷

Incidents of violence were most numerous in the south. The Chernoznamentsy of Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, Sevastopol, and Baku organized "battle detachments" of terrorists, who set up bomb laboratories, perpetrated countless murders and holdups, bombed factories, and fought in gory engagements with the detectives who raided their hideouts.³⁸ On occasion, even merchant vessels docked in the port of Odessa were targets of anarchist "ex's," as the "expropriations" were called, and businessmen, doctors, and lawyers were forced to "contribute" money to the anarchist cause under penalty of death.³⁹

A case history of a typical terrorist was that of Pavel Golman, a young worker in Ekaterinoslav. Son of a village policeman, he was employed in the Ekaterinoslav Railroad Workshop. In 1905, having passed through the ranks of the SR's and Social Democrats, he joined Chernoe Znamia. "It was not the orators who won me over to anarchism," he explained, "but life itself." Golman served on the strike committee in his factory and fought behind the barricades during the October general strike. Soon he was taking part in "ex's" and sabotaging the railway system in the vicinity of Ekaterinoslav. Wounded by one of his own bombs, he was captured and sent to a hospital under guard. When his companions failed in a daring attempt to free him, Golman shot himself to death. He was then twenty years old.⁴⁰

In the eyes of the Chernoznamentsy, every deed of violence, however rash and senseless it might seem to the general public, had the merit of stimulating the lust of the great unwashed for vengeance against their tormentors. They needed no special provocation to throw a bomb into a theater or restaurant; it was enough to know that only prosperous citizens could congregate in such places. A member of Chernoe Znamia in Odessa explained this concept of "motiveless" (bezmotivnyi) terror to the judges officiating at his trial:

We recognize isolated expropriations only to acquire money for our revolutionary deeds. If we get the money, we do not kill the person we are expropriating. But this does not mean that he, the property owner, has bought us off. No! We will find him in the various cafes, restaurants, theaters, balls, concerts, and the like. Death to the bourgeois! Always, wherever he may be, he will be overtaken by an anarchist's bomb or bullet.⁴¹

A dissenting group within the Black Banner organization, headed by Vladimir Striga (Lapidus), was convinced that random forays against the bourgeoisie did not go far enough, and called for a mass uprising to convert Bialystok into a "second Paris Commune."⁴² These kommunary (Communards), as they were known to their fellow Chernoznamentsy, did not reject deeds of violence, but simply wished to take the further step of mass revolutionary action to inaugurate the stateless society without delay. Their strategy, however, failed to win much support. At a conference held in Kishinev in January 1906, the bezmotivniki, who argued that isolated acts of terrorism constituted the most effective weapon against the old order, easily prevailed over their kommunary associates.⁴³ For the bezmotivniki had just achieved two dramatic successes: in November and December 1905, they had exploded bombs in the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw and the Cafe Libman in Odessa,⁴⁴ gaining considerable notoriety and sending shudders through the respectable citizenry. Exhilarated by these accomplishments, the ^bezmotivniki now laid even more magnificent plans of destruction, unaware that their triumphant moment of violence was soon to be succeeded by a much longer interval of cruel retribution.

Just as fanatical as Chernoe Znamia was a smaller group of militant anarchists centered in St. Petersburg called Beznachalie (Without Authority). Operating largely outside the Pale of Settlement (though small circles did exist in Warsaw, Minsk, and Kiev), Beznachalie, unlike the Black Banner organization, contained few Jewish members. The proportion of students in its ranks was very high, even higher than in Chernoe Znamia, with unskilled workers and unemployed drifters comprising only a small fraction of the membership. Like the Chernoznamentsy, the Beznachal'tsy claimed to be Anarchist-Communists, since their ultimate goal was the establishment of a free federation of territorial communes. Yet they had much in common with the individualist anarchists, the epigoni of Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who exalted the individual ego over and above the claims of collective entities. And in their passion for revolutionary conspiracy and their extreme hostility towards intellectuals -- despite the fact that, for the most part, they were intellectuals themselves -- the Beznachal'tsy bore the stamp of Sergei Nechaev and his forerunners, the ultra-radical Ishutin circle which had operated in St. Petersburg during the 1860's.⁴⁵

Like their cousins of the Black Banner association, the Beznachalie rebels were ardent exponents of "motiveless" terror. Every blow dealt to government officials, policemen, or property holders was considered a progressive action because it sowed "class discord" between the submerged multitudes and their privileged masters.⁴⁶ "Death to the bourgeoisie!" was their battle cry, for "the death of the bourgeoisie is the life of the workers."⁴⁷

The Beznachalie group was founded in 1905 by a young intellectual who went by the name of Bidbei. His real name, by an odd coincidence, was Nikolai Romanov, the same as the Tsar's. Born the son of a prosperous landowner, Romanov was small and lithe, and possessed an impetuous nature and a sharp wit. He enrolled as a student in the St. Petersburg Mining Institute at the beginning of the century, but was dismissed for participating in student demonstrations. When the director of the Institute sent him a letter of expulsion, Romanov returned it with the inscription, "Prochel s udovol'stviem ("I read it with pleasure"), Nikolai Romanov," which the Emperor often wrote on documents submitted for his approval.⁴⁸ His dismissal thus sealed, young Romanov left for Paris, an underground man with a new identity. In a startling pamphlet composed there on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, Bidbei conjured up a demonic image of the debacle just beyond the horizon: "A terrible night! Terrible scenes. . . . Not the innocent pranks of 'the revolutionists.' But that Walpurgisnacht of revolution, when on Lucifer's call the Spartacuses, the Razins, and the heroes of the bloody boot will fly down to earth. The uprising of Lucifer himself!"⁴⁹

Some weeks after the outbreak of the revolution, Bidbei enlisted the help of two fellow exiles⁵⁰ in printing an ultraradical journal called the Listok gruppy Beznachalie (Leaflet of the Beznachalie Group), which appeared twice during the spring and summer of 1905. The first issue set forth the credo of Beznachalie, a curious mixture of Bakunin's faith in society's castaways, Nechaev's demand for bloody vengeance against the privileged classes, Marx's concepts of class struggle and permanent revolution, and Kropotkin's vision of a free federation of communes. Bidbei and his confederates declared a "partisan war" on contemporary society, in which terror of every sort -- individual terror, mass terror, economic terror -- would be sanctioned. Since the "bourgeois" world was corrupt to the roots, parliamentary reforms were of no use. It was necessary to wage a broad class struggle, an "armed uprising of the people: peasants, workers, and every person in rags . . . open street fighting of every possible type and in the fiercest possible form ... a revolution en permanence, that is, a whole series of popular uprisings until a decisive victory of the poor is achieved." In a Nechaevist spirit (Bidbei was fond of quoting or paraphrasing Nechaev, whom he keenly admired), the Beznachalie credo repudiated religion, the family, and bourgeois morality in general, and encouraged the dispossessed to attack and rob the businesses and homes of their exploiters. The revolution must be made not only by the peasant and worker, declared Bidbei, echoing Bakunin, but also by the so-called "base rabble -- the unemployed, vagabonds, hoboes, and all the outcast elements and renegades of society, for they are all our brothers and comrades." Bidbei summoned them all "to a mighty and ruthless, total and bloody, people's vengeance" (Nechaev's famous motto). "Hail the federation of free communes and cities! Long live anarchy (beznachalie) I"⁵¹

Bidbei's horrendous visions of the revolution were shared by a small circle of Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki (Anarchist-Communists), who turned out a prodigious quantity of incendiary literature in St. Petersburg during 1905. The outstanding member of this group was "Tolstoy" Rostovtsev (the alias of N. V. Divnogorskii), the son of a government official in the Volga province of Saratov. About thirty years of age (Bidbei was in his early twenties), Rostovtsev had a homely but interesting face and an idealistic nature that was readily transmuted into revolutionary fanaticism. While attending Kharkov University, he became a passionate disciple of Tolstoyan nonviolence (whence his peculiar nom de guerre), but soon swung to the opposite pole of unmitigated terrorism.⁵² By 1905, Rostovtsev was writing instructions on the preparation of homemade "Macedonian" bombs (complete with diagrams) and advising the peasantry on "how to set fire to the landlords' haystacks."⁵³ On the cover of one of his pamphlets is a drawing of bearded peasants, scythes and pitchforks in hand, burning the church and manor house of their village. Their banner bears the motto, "Za zemliu, za voliu, za anarkhicheskuiu doliu" ("For land and liberty, for an anarchist future!").⁵⁴ Rostovtsev summoned the Russian people to "take up the axe and bring death to the tsarist family, the landlords, and the priests!"⁵⁵

Rostovtsev and his fellow Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki addressed other leaflets to the factory workers of Petersburg, exhorting them to smash their machines, dynamite the city's power stations, throw bombs at the middle-class "hangmen," rob banks and shops, blow up the police stations, and throw open the prisons. Bloody Sunday had taught the workers what to expect from the Tsar and from the timid advocates of piecemeal reform. "Let a broad wave of mass and individual terror envelop all of Russia!" Inaugurate the stateless commune, in which each would take freely from the common warehouse and work only four hours a day to allow time for leisure and education -- time to live "like a human being." Onward with "the SOCIAL REVOLUTION! HAIL THE ANARCHIST COMMUNE!"⁵⁶

The Petersburg Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki and Bidbei's Beznachalie group in Paris clearly had a great deal in common. Many leaflets of the Petersburg group, in fact, were reprinted in Bidbei's Listok. It was therefore not surprising that, when Bidbei returned to the Russian capital in December 1905, the Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki at once accepted him as their leader and changed their name to Beznachalie.

The ranks of Beznachalie included a female doctor, three or four gimnaziia pupils, Rostovtsev's wife, Marusia, and several former university students (besides Bidbei and Rostovtsev), most notably Boris Speranskii, a youth of nineteen from the provinces, and Aleksandr Kolosov (Sokolov), about twenty-six years old and the son of a priest in Tambov province. Like so many others in the revolutionary movement, Kolosov received his education in an Orthodox seminary, where he excelled in mathematics and foreign languages. He was admitted to the Spiritual Academy, but cut short a promising church career by joining an SR circle and plunging into revolutionary agitation. He then spent brief periods in a succession of Russian universities, only to return to his father's village, where he distributed propaganda among the peasants. In 1905, Kolosov came to St. Petersburg and joined Rostovtsev's circle of anarchists.⁵⁷

Aside from Bidbei (and possibly Rostovtsev), at least one other Beznachalets was of noble birth. Vladimir Konstantinovich Ushakov, whose father was a government administrator (zemskii nachal'nik) in the province of St. Petersburg, had been brought up on the family estate near Pskov. After graduating from the gimnaziia at Tsarskoe Selo, where the Tsar had his summer palace, Ushakov entered St. Petersburg University, and in 1901 became involved in the student movement. Like Bidbei, he went abroad, but returned to St. Petersburg in time to witness the massacre of Bloody Sunday. Soon afterwards, he joined the Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki, serving as an agitator among the factory workers, to whom he was known as "the Admiral."⁵⁸

Finally, one other member of Bidbei's circle must be mentioned, a certain Dmitriev or Dmitrii Bogoliubov, who turned out to be a police spy and brought about the group's downfall in January 1906. As the Beznachal'tsy were planning a major expropriation" (so far, they had perpetrated only two acts of violence, a bombing and the shooting of a detective), the police broke into their headquarters, arrested the plotters, and seized their printing press.⁵⁹ Only Ushakov was lucky enough to elude the authorities, escaping to the city of Lvov in Austrian Galicia.

Chernoe Znamia and Beznachalie, though certainly the most conspicuous, were by no means the only Anarchist-Communist organizations to spring up in revolutionary Russia. Of the rest, a few pursued the relatively moderate course of Kropotkin's Khleb i Volia group, content to distribute propaganda among the workers and peasants. The majority, however, adopted the sanguinary creed of Bakunin and Nechaev and embarked upon the path of terrorism. One such ultra-radical society, the International Group in the Baltic city of Riga, carried out a series of "ex's" and issued a stream of hectographed leaflets reviling moderation and gradualism of any sort. The Riga group scornfully dismissed the claim of the socialists that the 1905 upheaval was merely a "democratic revolution" and denounced them for advocating "peaceful cooperation in parliaments with all capitalist parties." The slogan of "liberty, equality, fraternity," as the European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had amply demonstrated, was an empty promise of the middle class. Now "scientific" socialism aimed at a similar deception. The Marxists, with their centralized party apparatus and elaborate talk of historical stages, were no more "friends of the people" than Nicholas II. They were, rather, present-day Jacobins who aimed to use the workers to capture power for themselves. The true liberation of mankind could be accomplished only by means of a social revolution of the broad masses.⁶⁰ This impatient brand of anarchism took its most violent form in the south, where the "battle detachments" of the large cities, in an effort to coordinate their terrorist activities, joined together in a loose-knit South Russian Battle Organization.

The anarchists of Kiev and Moscow, by contrast, placed heavier emphasis on the dissemination of propaganda. The Kiev Group of Anarchist-Communists found a strong advocate of this moderate course in a young Kropotkinite named German Borisovich Sandomirskii.⁶¹ Moscow, however, was the more important propaganda center. Its first anarchist circle was founded in 1905, but fell apart almost immediately when the police arrested its leader, another young disciple of Kropotkin, Vladimir Ivanovich Zabrezhnev (Fedorov). The Svoboda (Freedom) group, which succeeded it in December 1905, acted as an entrepot of propaganda materials, obtaining literature from Western Europe and from anarchist circles in the border provinces, and passing it on to new cells in Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tula, and other industrial towns of central Russia. During 1906, four more groups appeared in Moscow: Svobodnaia Kommuna (The Free Commune), Solidarnost' (Solidarity), and Bezvlastie (Anarchy), which attracted their followings in the working-class districts; and a circle of students who used the classrooms of Moscow University as revolutionary forums. Joint meetings with the SR's and Social Democrats, marked by angry debates over the merits of parliamentary government, were occasionally held in the Sparrow Hills and Sokolniki Woods on the edge of town. "Down with the Duma!" the anarchists would shout. "Down with parliamentarism! We want bread and liberty! Long live the people's revolution!"⁶² Some of the Moscow groups added a measure of terrorism to their propaganda activities, manufacturing "Japanese" bombs and holding secret conclaves in the Donskoi Monastery to plan "expropriations." One young woman of twenty-six lost her life when a bomb she was testing exploded in her hands.⁶³

Apart from the numerous Anarchist-Communist groups which appeared all over Russia during the Revolution of 1905, a second, much smaller body of anarchists, the Anarcho-Syndicalists (to be discussed later), sprang up in Odessa, and yet another variety, the Anarchist-Individualists, emerged in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev.⁶⁴ The two leading exponents of individualist anarchism, both based in Moscow, were Aleksei Alekseevich Borovoi and Lev Chernyi (Pavel Dmitrievich Turchaninov). From Nietzsche, they inherited the desire for a complete overturn of all values accepted by bourgeois society -- political, moral, and cultural. Furthermore, strongly influenced by Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker, the German and American theorists of individualist anarchism, they demanded the total liberation of the human personality from the fetters of organized society. In their view, even the voluntary communes of Peter Kropotkin might limit the freedom of the individual.⁶⁵ A number of Anarchist-Individualists found the ultimate expression of their social alienation in violence and crime, others attached themselves to avant-garde literary and artistic circles, but the majority remained "philosophical" anarchists who conducted animated parlor discussions and elaborated their individualist theories in ponderous journals and books.

While all three categories of Russian anarchism -- Anarchist-Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, and Anarchist-Individualism -- drew their adherents almost entirely from the intelligentsia and the working class, the Anarchist-Communist groups made some effort to dispense their ideas among the soldiers and peasants as well. As early as 1903, a "Group of Russian Anarchists" published a small pamphlet which called for the "disorganization, dissolution, and annihilation," of the Russian Army and its replacement by the armed masses of people.⁶⁶ After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, anarchist leaflets strove to convince the soldiers that their real struggle was at home -- against the government and private property.⁶⁷ Anti-militarist literature of this sort, however, was distributed in limited quantities, and it is doubtful that it made much impression on the troops.

Propaganda in the peasant villages was conducted on a larger scale, but appears to have yielded only slightly better results. In September 1903, the second number of Khleb i Volia endorsed "agrarian terror" as an "outstanding form of the partisan struggle" against the landlords and central government.⁶⁸ An illegal brochure published in St. Petersburg the same year assured the peasants that they needed "neither tsar nor state" but only "land and liberty." The author conjured up the myth of an idyllic age of freedom that existed in medieval Russia, when authority rested with the local town assembly (veche) and the village commune; to restore this libertarian society, the narod was urged to wage an "unrelenting war of liberation." "Peasants and workers! Scorn all authority, every uniform and priest's cassock. Love only liberty, and introduce it now."⁶⁹

The Revolution of 1905 lent powerful impetus to propaganda of this type. "Down with the landlords, down with the wealthy," proclaimed Rostovtsev of the Beznachalie group, as he instigated the peasants to set fire to their masters' haylofts. "All the land belongs to us, to the entire peasant narod."⁷⁰ Anarchist-Communists from the cities of Odessa, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, and Chernigov descended into the villages with "little books" containing the message of revolt, just as their Populist forebears had done thirty years earlier.⁷¹ Leaflets with such titles as "Pull Your Plow from the Furrow" and "How the Peasants Succeed Without Authority" passed through many hands in Riazan province;⁷² the latter portrayed a village commune which, having rid itself of the government, lived in freedom and harmony. "And bread, clothing, and other supplies everyone took from the common storehouse according to his needs."⁷³ In Tambov province, the Beznachalets Kolosov sowed the seeds of anarchism in 1905, which bore fruit three years later in the form of the Probuzhdenie (Awakening) group of peasant anarchists.⁷⁴ Other anarchist groups appeared in the rural districts between 1905 and 1908, but they were seldom a match for the Socialist Revolutionaries, who maintained a near monopoly on peasant radicalism throughout the revolutionary period.

During the 1905 uprising, while the Chernoznamentsy and Beznachal'tsy were waging their life-and-death struggle against the government and the propertied classes of Russia, Kropotkin and his coterie remained in the West, occupied with the less flamboyant tasks of propaganda and organization. Both extremist groups found the comparative respectability of Kropotkin's Khleb i Volia association exceedingly distasteful. The terrorists, risking their lives in daily acts of violence, resented what they conceived to be the passive attitude of the Kropotkinites towards the heroic epic unfolding in Russia. Already uneasy over Kropotkin's description, in 1903, of the impending Russian revolution as merely "a prologue, or even the first act of the local communalist revolution,"⁷⁵ the ultras grew more suspicious in 1905, when Kropotkin compared the tempest in Russia to the English and French revolutions,⁷⁶ which in their view had simply installed a new set of masters into power. For the Beznachal'tsy and Chernoznamentsy, 1905 was not just a timid step toward a compromising system of "liberal federalism," but the final and decisive battle, Armageddon itself.⁷⁷

To a certain extent, perhaps, these zealots of the anarchist movement misconstrued the observations Kropotkin made in 1905. In drawing his analogy between the Russian revolution on the one side and the English and French revolutions on the other, Kropotkin specifically stated that Russia was undergoing more than just "a simple transition from autocracy to constitutionalism," more than a mere political transfer in which the aristocracy or the middle class would become the new rulers in place of the king.⁷⁸ What had impressed Kropotkin most in his study of the earlier upheavals in Western Europe was their all-encompassing scope and the profound changes they had wrought in human relationships. The Revolution of 1905, he believed, was Russia's "great revolution," comparable in breadth and depth to the great English and French revolutions and not just another transitory mutiny executed by a small body of insurrectionists.⁷⁹ It was "not a simple change of administration" that Russians were witnessing, but a social revolution that would "radically alter the conditions of economic life" and forever put an end to coercive government.⁸⁰ Indeed, the Russian revolution would prove even more sweeping than the prior revolts in the West, for it was a "people's liberation, based on true equality, true liberty, and genuine fraternity."⁸¹

Yet Kropotkin's continuous references to the revolutions in England and France did seem to imply something short of the immediate realization of stateless communism which the Chernoznamentsy and Beznachal'tsy so desperately craved. Moreover, in view of Kropotkin's strong antipathy towards mutinies and insurrections launched by small rebel bands, it is not surprising that the terrorist circles should have frowned upon his analysis of the 1905 uprising. Time and again, Kropotkin reiterated his opposition both to Blanquist coups and to campaigns of terrorist violence waged by tightly-knit conspiratorial bands in isolation from the bulk of the people.⁸² Random murders and holdups, he insisted, could effect no more change in the existing social order than could the mere seizure of political power; individual "ex's" had no place in a full-scale revolt of the masses, the aim of which was not the greedy transfer of wealth from one group to another, but the total elimination of private property itself.⁸³ One of Kropotkin's disciples, Vladimir Zabrezhnev, likened the escapades of the Russian terrorists to the "era of dynamite" in France -- the early 1890's, when the audacious exploits of Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, and Emile Henry made statesmen and businessmen tremble for their lives.⁸⁴ The endemic violence of those years, though prompted by social injustice, was little more than an outlet for personal "anger and indignation," said Zabrezhnev.⁸⁵ "It stands to reason," he concluded, "that such acts as attacking the first bourgeois or government agent one encounters, or arson or explosions in cafes, theaters, etc., in no sense represent a logical conclusion from the anarchist Weltanschauung; their explanation lies in the psychology of those who perpetrate them."⁸⁶ In a similar manner, Kropotkin's Khlebovol'tsy denounced such robber bands as Chernyi Voron (The Black Raven) and Iastreb (The Hawk) of Odessa for using the ideological cloak of anarchism to conceal the predatory nature of their activities. These "bomb-thrower-expropriators," declared the Kropotkinites, were no better than the bandits of southern Italy;⁸⁷ and their program of indiscriminate terror was a grotesque caricature of anarchist doctrine, demoralizing the movement's true adherents and discrediting anarchism in the eyes of the public.

For all these harsh words, Kropotkin and his Khlebovol'tsy nevertheless continued to sanction acts of violence impelled by outraged conscience or compassion for the oppressed, as well as "propaganda by the deed," specifically designed to awaken the revolutionary consciousness of the people. The Khleb i Volia group also approved of "defensive terror" to repulse the depredations of police units or of the Black Hundreds, the squads of hoodlums who launched frightful attacks upon Jews and intellectuals in 1905 and 1906.⁸⁸ Thus a report from Odessa printed in Khleb i Volia during the tumultuous summer of 1905 could declare, "Only the enemies of the people can be enemies of terror!"⁸⁹

Of the several schools of anarchism to make their appearance in Russia during this period, the severest critics of terrorist tactics were the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Not even the comparatively moderate Khlebovol'tsy were spared their censure. The foremost Anarcho-Syndicalist leader inside Russia, who went under the pseudonym of Daniil Novomirskii ("man of the New World" -- his real name was Iakov Kirillovskii), rebuked Kropotkin and his associates for sanctioning propaganda by the deed and other isolated forms of terrorism, which, he said, only fostered a wasteful "spirit of insurgency" among the backward and unprepared masses.⁹⁰ As for the outright terrorists of Beznachalie and Chernoe Znamia, Novomirskii compared them to the People's Will organization of the previous generation, since each group mistakenly relied on small "rebel bands" to bring about a fundamental transformation of the old order, a task which could be performed only by the broad masses of Russian people themselves.⁹¹

Novomirskii happened to be in the crowd which gathered outside the Cafe Libman after it was bombed in December 1905. The cafe was not a gathering place of the wealthy, he observed, but a "second-class" restaurant which catered to the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. The bomb exploded in the street, producing "nothing but noise." Novomirskii noted the reaction of a workman in the crowd: "Do the revolutionaries really have nothing better to do than throw bombs into restaurants? One might think the tsarist government had already been overthrown and bourgeois power eliminated! Undoubtedly the bomb was thrown by the Black Hundreds in order to discredit the revolutionaries."⁹² Should the anarchists continue to pursue these fruitless tactics and plunge into battle without readying their battalions, Novomirskii warned, their fate would be as tragic as that of the People's Will, whose leaders ended on the scaffold. The immediate mission of anarchism, he said, was to spread propaganda in the factories and organize revolutionary labor unions as vehicles of class warfare with the bourgeoisie. In these modern times, he added, the only effective terror was "economic terror" -- strikes, boycotts, sabotage, assaults on factory managers, and the expropriation of government funds.⁹³ The indiscriminate forays of marauding bands, instead of raising the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat, would only "embitter the workers and nourish coarse and bloodthirsty instincts."⁹⁴

Ironically enough, Novomirskii's own group of Odessa Anarcho-syndicalists itself organized a "battle detachment," which carried out a series of daring "expropriations." To fill the group's coffers, the "battle detachment" robbed a train outside Odessa, and, on another occasion, collaborated with a band of SR's in a bank holdup which netted the anarchists 25,000 rubles. (They used the money to purchase more weapons and to set up a printing press, which published Novomirskii's Anarcho-Syndicalist program and one number of a syndicalist journal, Vol'nyi Rabochii -- The Free Worker.) Novomirskii's group even had a bomb laboratory, run by a Polish rebel who was nicknamed "Cake" because he and his wife liked to dance the Cake-Walk in the laboratory with bombs in hand.⁹⁵ A second anarchist leader in Odessa, Lazar Gershkovich, though he considered himself a disciple of Kropotkin, concocted a similar mixture of syndicalism and terrorism. A mechanical engineer, Gershkovich constructed his own bomb laboratory and became known as the "Kibalchich" of the Odessa movement, after the young engineer of the People's Will who had made the bombs that killed Alexander II.⁹⁶

Novomirskii tried to justify the seemingly hypocritical maneuvers of his terrorist colleagues with the claim that they were acting for the benefit of the movement "as a whole" -- quite a different matter from wanton bombthrowing or the "purely vagabond conception of expropriation."⁹⁷ Novomirskii's arguments against "motiveless" terror were echoed in Western Europe by another prominent Russian syndicalist, Maksim Raevskii (L. Fishelev), who denounced the "Nechaevist tactics" of such conspiratorial societies as Chernoe Znamia and Beznachalie, and derided their faith in the revolutionary capacity of thieves, tramps, the Lumpenproletariat, and other dark elements of Russian society. It was high time, Raevskii declared, to recognize that a successful social revolution required an organized army of combatants, an army which only the labor movement could provide.⁹⁸

In the "maximalist" atmosphere of 1905, it was perhaps inevitable that the terrorist wing of the anarchist movement should have gained the upper hand. The patient efforts of the Anarcho-Syndicalists and Khlebovol'tsy to disseminate propaganda in the factories and villages were eclipsed by the daring exploits of their extremist comrades. Not a day went by without newspaper accounts of sensational robberies, murders, and acts of sabotage perpetrated by bands of anarchist desperadoes. They robbed banks and shops, seized printing presses to turn out their literature, and shot down watchmen, police officers, and government officials. Reckless and frustrated youths, they satisfied their desire for excitement and self-affirmation by hurling bombs into public buildings, factory offices, theaters, and restaurants.

Lawlessness reached a climax near the close of 1905, when the bezmotivniki exploded their bombs in the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw and the Cafe Libman in Odessa, and bands of "Forest Brethren" made a Sherwood Forest of the northern woodlands from Viatka to the Baltic provinces." After the suppression of the Moscow uprising, there followed a momentary lull, during which many revolutionaries went into hiding. But terrorism was resumed shortly afterwards. SR's and anarchists claimed more than 4,000 lives during 1906 and 1907, although they lost a comparable number of their own members (mostly SR's). The tide, however, was turning against them. P. A. Stolypin, the Tsar's new Prime Minister, initiated stern measures to "pacify" the nation. In August 1906, Stolypin's own summer house was blown up by SR Maximalists (an ultra-radical offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary party that demanded the immediate socialization of agriculture and industry), wounding his son and daughter and killing 32 people. By the end of the year, the Prime Minister had placed most of the Empire under a state of emergency. The gendarmes tracked the Chernoznamentsy and Beznachal'tsy to their lairs, seizing caches of weapons and ammunition, recovering stolen presses, and smashing bomb laboratories. Punishment was swift and ruthless. Field courts-martial were set up, in which preliminary investigation was waived, verdicts delivered within two days, and sentences executed at once.¹⁰⁰

If the young rebels had to die, they were determined to go in their own way, rather than fall victim to "Stolypin's necktie" -- the hangman's noose which was sending hundreds of revolutionaries, real and suspected, to an early grave. Death did not seem so terrible after a life spent in degradation and despair; as Kolosov of Beznachalie observed after his arrest, death is "the sister of liberty."¹⁰¹ Thus, when cornered by the police, it was not unusual for the terrorists to turn their pistols on themselves, or if captured, to resort to the grim gesture of Russian fanatics since the Old Believers of the seventeenth century -- self-immolation.¹⁰² "Damn the masters, damn the slaves, and damn me!" -- Victor Serge's characterization of the anarchist terrorists in Paris on the eve of the First World War might well have been said of these Russian youths. "It was like a collective suicide."¹⁰³

The ranks of Chernoe Znamia were quickly decimated, scores of young men dying violent deaths. Boris Engelson, a founder of the "Anarkhiia" printing press in Bialystok, was arrested in Vilna in 1905, but escaped from prison and fled to Paris. When he returned to Russia two years later, he was promptly recaptured and sent to the gallows.¹⁰⁴ In 1906, two of the most notorious Bialystok terrorists, men who had followed in Nisan Farber's footsteps, perished during encounters with the authorities. The first, Anton Nizhborskii, a member of the Polish Socialist party before entering the anarchist movement, killed himself to avoid capture after an unsuccessful "ex" in Ekaterinoslav.¹⁰⁵ His comrade-in-arms, Aron Elin (alias "Gelinker"), a former SR who had established his reputation as a terrorist by assassinating a Cossack officer and tossing a bomb into a group of policemen, was shot down by soldiers while attending a workers' meeting in a Bialystok cemetery.¹⁰⁶ Vladimir Striga, a third Bialystok Chernoznamenets, the offspring of well-to-do Jewish parents and an erstwhile student and Social Democrat, died in Parisian exile the same year. "Would it make any difference which bourgeois one throws the bomb at?" Striga asked in a letter to his comrades just before his death. "It is all the same: the shareholders will still lead their depraved lives in Paris. . . . I proclaim 'Death to the bourgeoisie,' and shall pay for it with my own life."¹⁰⁷ Striga met his end as he was walking in the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of the French capital. He stumbled, setting off a bomb in his pocket, which blew him to smithereens.¹⁰⁸

The Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath saw the accumulation of a "huge martyrology" of anarchists, as Nikolai Ignatievich Rogdaev (Muzil), one of Kropotkin's followers, noted in a report to an international congress of anarchists held in 1907.¹⁰⁹ Stolypin's military tribunals awaited those terrorists who managed to survive the bullets of the police and their own defective bombs. Hundreds of young men and women, many of them still in their teens, were summarily brought to trial and frequently sentenced to death or murdered by their jailers.¹¹⁰ At the trials, it was common for anarchist defendants to deliver impassioned speeches upholding their cause. A Chernoznamenets in Vilna, arrested for carrying explosives, endeavored to convince his audience that anarchy was not, as its traducers held, tantamount to sheer chaos: "Our enemies equate anarchy with disorder. No! Anarchy is the highest order, the highest harmony. It is life without authority. Once we have dealt with the enemies with whom we are struggling, we shall have a commune -- life will be social, fraternal, and just."¹¹¹ In Kiev, another typical case was that of a Ukrainian peasant girl named Matrena Prisiazhniuk, an Anarchist-Individualist convicted of taking part in a raid on a sugar factory, and of murdering a priest and attempting to kill a district police officer. After the military court pronounced the death sentence, the condemned girl was allowed to make her last remarks. "I am an Anarchist-Individualist," she began. "My ideal is the free development of the individual personality in the broadest sense of the word, and the overthrow of slavery in all its forms." She told of the poverty and hunger in her native village, "moans, suffering, and blood all around." Bourgeois morality, "official and cold -- purely commercial," was the cause. Then, in a brief peroration, the girl exalted her approaching death and the deaths of two fellow anarchists convicted with her: "Proudly and bravely we shall mount the scaffold, casting a look of defiance at you. Our death, like a hot flame, will ignite many hearts. We are dying as victors. Forward, then! Our death is our triumph!"¹¹² Prisiazhniuk's vision never came to pass, however, for she escaped her executioner by taking cyanide capsules smuggled into her cell after the trial.¹¹³

Sometimes the defendants expressed their contempt for the court by scornful silence or by loud and furious outbursts. When Ignatii Muzil (Nikolai Rogdaev's brother) was brought to trial -- he was seized in the woods near Nizhnii Novgorod with anarchist literature in his possession -- he refused to recognize the court or to stand up before his questioners.¹¹⁴ Similarly, a doomed terrorist in Odessa named Lev Aleshker branded his trial a "farce" and excoriated the judges who had condemned him. "You yourselves should be sitting on the bench of the accused," he exclaimed. "Down with all of you! Villainous hangmen! Long live anarchy!"¹¹⁵ While awaiting his execution, Aleshker drafted an eloquent testament, which prophesied the coming of the anarchist Golden Age:

Slavery, poverty, weakness, and ignorance -- the eternal fetters of man -- will be broken. Man will be at the center of nature. The earth and its products will serve everyone dutifully. Weapons will cease to be a measure of strength and gold a measure of wealth; the strong will be those who are bold and daring in the conquest of nature, and riches will be the things that are useful. Such a world is called "Anarchy." It will have no castles, no place for masters and slaves. Life will be open to all. Everyone will take what he needs -- this is the anarchist ideal. And when it comes about, men will live wisely and well. The masses must take part in the construction of this paradise on earth.¹¹⁶

The most spectacular of the anarchist trials involved the Odessa bezmotivniki who bombed the Cafe Libman in December 1905, and the Beznachalie group of St. Petersburg, rounded up by the police in 1906. Five young men and women were taken to court in the Libman affair. (A sixth participant, N. M. Erdelevskii, had been captured after wounding four policemen, but succeeded in escaping to Switzerland, where he helped found a Chernoe Znamia circle known as Buntar' -- The Mutineer.)¹¹⁷ All five were convicted in short order, three of them receiving the death penalty. Moisei Mets, twenty-one years old and a joiner by trade, refused to acknowledge any criminal guilt, though he readily admitted throwing a bomb into the cafe "with the aim of killing the exploiters there."¹¹⁸ Mets told the court that his group demanded nothing less than the complete leveling of the existing social system. No partial reforms would do, but only "the final annihilation of eternal slavery and exploitation." The bourgeoisie, no doubt, would dance on his grave, Mets went on, but the bezmotivniki were only the first swallows of the approaching spring. There would be others, he declared, who would take away "your privileges and idleness, your luxuries and authority. Death and destruction to the whole bourgeois order! Hail the revolutionary class struggle of the oppressed! Long live anarchism and communism!"¹¹⁹ Two weeks after the trial, Mets went to the gallows, together with two of his comrades, an eighteen-year-old boy and a girl of twenty-two.¹²⁰

The other two defendants received long jail terms. The oldest of the group, Olga Taratuta, about thirty-five years of age, had joined the Social Democratic party in Ekaterinoslav when it was formed in 1898, then subsequently transferred her loyalty to the anarchist camp. Sentenced to seventeen years in prison, Taratuta broke out of the Odessa jail and fled to Geneva, where she entered Erdelevskii's Buntar' association. But the sedentary life of an emigree proved uncongenial to Taratuta's dynamic temperament, and she soon returned to the active struggle inside Russia. Taratuta became a member of the Anarchist-Communist "battle detachment" in her native Ekaterinoslav, but was arrested in 1908 and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. This time she did not escape.¹²¹

On 13 November 1906, the very day that the three Odessa bezmotivniki were hanged, the Beznachalie group stood trial in the capital. The defendants, charged with possessing explosives and "belonging to a criminal society," refused to answer any questions put to them by the magistrates. Aleksandr Kolosov declared that the court, since it obviously had made its decision in advance of the proceedings, should simply pronounce sentence so that he and his friends could thank the judges and quietly depart. Bidbei, the group's sardonic leader, would not rise when the chief magistrate called his name, explaining that he never talked to anyone "with whom he was not personally acquainted."¹²² The accused were thereupon removed from the courtroom. Bidbei was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Kolosov, who received the same penalty, committed suicide 3 years later, throwing himself down a well in a Siberian penal colony.¹²³ Boris Speranskii received a lesser sentence of 10 years because of his youth (he was then twenty). He made an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the Schlusselburg fortress, and 10 more years were added to his period of confinement. Clandestine reports from Schlusselburg in 1908 stated that Speranskii was beaten for insulting a jailer and, on another occasion, was shot in both legs by a prison guard.¹²⁴ Of his ultimate destiny, nothing is known.

It remains to describe the fate of "Tolstoy" Rostovtsev and Vladimir Ushakov. Feigning insanity while immured in the Peter-Paul fortress, Rostovtsev was removed to a prison hospital, from which he escaped to safety in the West, just as Kropotkin had done 30 years before. Unfortunately, Rostovtsev had not left his terroristic proclivities behind in Russia. He tried to hold up a bank in Montreux, but succeeded only in killing several innocent bystanders, and had to be rescued from a lynch mob by the Swiss police. Imprisoned in Lausanne, he poured kerosene over his body and burned himself alive.¹²⁵ Ushakov, it will be recalled, had evaded the police net in St. Petersburg and had found temporary sanctuary in Lvov. Before long, he returned to Russia, first joining the Ekaterinoslav "battle detachment," then moving on to the Crimea. Captured during the "expropriation" of a bank in Yalta, Ushakov was taken to a prison in Sevastopol. He tried to escape, but as the police closed in, he put a pistol to his head and blew out his brains.¹²⁶

During the period of "pacification" that followed the 1905 Revolution, many other well-known anarchists were sentenced to long terms in prison or in forced labor camps. Among them were Lazar Gershkovich and Daniil Novomirskii, the leaders of the anarchist movement in Odessa,¹²⁷ and German Sandomirskii of the Kiev Anarchist-Communist organization.¹²⁸ Vladimir Zabrezhnev and Vladimir Barmash, key figures in the Moscow movement, were arrested and imprisoned, but both managed to escape.¹²⁹ Zabrezhnev eventually found his way to Kropotkin's circle in London, where a different sort of life awaited him, a life without the dangers and derring-do of the Moscow underground, but one which nevertheless demanded tireless effort and great fortitude. It was by now apparent that 1905 had been just a prelude after all, that it was necessary to lay the groundwork for the true social revolution yet to come.

1 Quoted in Geroid T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1957), p. 46.

2 A. Dunin, "Graf L. N. Tolstoi i tolstovtsy v Samarskoi gubernii," Russkaia Mysl', 1912, No. 11, p. 159.

3 A. S. Prugavin, O L've Tolstom i o tolstovtsakh (Moscow, 1911), pp. 193-200.

4 The leading apostle of Tolstoyanism during the first years of the twentieth century was Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov, editor of the periodical Svobodnoe Slovo (The Free Word) in Christchurch, England. Besides this journal (published in 1901-1905), see V. G. Chertkov, Protiv vlasti (Christchurch, 1905).

6 See N. N. Rusov, "Anarkhicheskie elementy v slavianofil'stve," in A. A. Borovoi, ed., Mikhailu Bakuninu, 1876-1926: ocherk istorii anarkhicheskogo dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1926), pp. 37-43; and E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London, 1957), pp. 155-157.

6 See Isaiah Berlin, "Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty," in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 473-499; and Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 376-382.

7 Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York, 1960), pp. 429-468.

8 See J. M. Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution: the Russian Colony in Zuerich (1870-1873) (Assen, 1955); M. P. Sazhin, "Russkie v Tsiurikhe (1870-1873)," Katorga i Ssylka, 1932, No. 10 (95), pp. 25-78; and A. A. Karelin, "Russkie bakunisty za granitsei," in Mikhailu Bakuninu, pp. 181-187.

9 On the strange history of Nechaev, see Carr, Michael Bakunin, chapter 28; Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 354-388; Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, pp. 215-255; and Michael Prawdin, The Unmentionable Nechaev: A Key to Bolshevism (London, 1961), pp. 13-107.

10 Frank, Geklibene shriftn, p. 390.

11 P. A. Kropotkin i ego uchenie: internatsional'nyi sbornik posviash-chennyi desiatoi godovshchine smerti P. A. Kropotkina, ed. G. P. Maksimov (Chicago, 1931), pp. 328, 333; I. Knizhnik, "Vospominaniia o P. A. Kropotkine i ob odnoi anarkhistskoi emigrantskoi gruppe," Krasnaia Letopis', 1922, No. 4, p. 32; "Pis'ma P. A. Kropotkina k V. N. Cherkezovu," Katorga i Ssylka, 1926, No. 4 (25), p. 25; G. Maksimov, in Delo Truda, No. 75, March-April 1933, pp. 6-11; Max Nettlau, "A Memorial Tribute to Marie Goldsmith and Her Mother," Freedom (New York), 18 March 1933, p. 2.

12 Khleb i Volia, No. 1, August 1903, p. 3.

13 V. N. Cherkezov, Doktriny marksizma: nauka-li eto? (Geneva, 1903).

14 K. Iliashvili (pseudonym for Gogeliia-Orgeiani), Pamiati chikagskikh muchenikov (Geneva, 1905). On the Haymarket incident, see Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (New York, 1936).

15 The Federation of Jewish Anarchists, located in the Whitechapel and Mile End districts of London, consisted largely of artisans who had emigrated from Russia during the 1880's and 1890's. At the turn of the century, their leader and the editor of their publications was Rudolf Rocker, a remarkable German of Christian ancestry, who had mastered the Yiddish language after joining the London group. Kropotkin and Cherkezov frequently spoke at the Federation's club on Jubilee Street. See Rocker's The London Years (London, 1956).

16 Still circulating within the Pale was an early piece of anarchist literature which Der Arbayter Fraynd had published in 1886 in London but labeled "Vilna" to deceive the tsarist police. In the form of a Passover Hagadah, or prayerbook, the pamphlet set forth the traditional "Four Questions," which begin, "Wherefore is this night of Passover different from all other nights in the year?" but gave them a radical twist: "Wherefore are we different from Shmuel the factory owner, Meier the banker, Zorekh the moneylender, and Reb Todres the rabbi?" Hagadah shol Peysakh (Vilna [London], 1886), p. 6, Bund Archives.

17 For example, a handwritten leaflet in the Columbia Russian Archive, "Nuzhen-li anarkhizm v Rossii?," was copied from Khleb i Volia, No. 10, July 1904, pp. 1-3.

18 Al'manakh, p. 6; Khleb i Volia, No. 10, pp. 3-4; Burevestnik, No. 8, November 1907, p. 10.

19 Al'manakh, p. 7; Burevestnik, No. 10-11, March-April 1908, p. 27.

20 Burevestnik, No. 13, October 1908, p. 18.

20b All dates are given according to the Julian calendar (thirteen days behind the western calendar in the twentieth century), which was used in Russia until February 1918.

21 Quoted in V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia (2nd edn., 31 vols., Moscow, 1930-1935), vn, 80.

22 For the text of the October Manifesto, see Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (London, 1939), pp. 503-504; and Sidney Harcave, First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905 (New York, 1964), pp. 195-196.

23 I. Grossman-Roshehin, "Dumy o bylom (iz istorii belostotskogo anar-khicheskogo 'chernoznamenskogo' dvizheniia," Byloe, 1924, No. 27-28, p. 176.

24 Frank, Geklibene shriftn, p. 393.

25 Burevestnik, No. 9, February 1908, p. 11; Al'manakh, p. 9; Khleb i Volia, No. 10, July 1904, p. 3; M. Ivanovich, "Anarkhizm v Rossii," Sotsialist-Revoliutsioner, 1911, No. 3, pp. 81-82.

26 Grossman-Roshehin, Byloe, 1924, No. 27-28, p. 177.

27 Hershberg, Pinkos Bialystok, n, 103; A. Trus and J. Cohen, Breynsk (New York, 1948), p. 125; Sefer Biale-Podlaske (Tel Aviv, 1961), pp. 222-223. The shtetl of Breynsk was located in Grodno province, and Biala-Podlaska between Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk.

28 On the spread of anarchism in the outlying areas of the Empire during 1905, see Khleb i Volia, No. 16, April 1905, p. 4; No. 21-22, August-September 1905, p. 8; Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, p. 30; Chernoe Znamia, No. 1, December 1905, pp. 6-7; Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 1, 30 October 1906, pp. 9-12; No. 3, 28 November 1906, p. 4; Burevestnik, No. 4, 30 October 1906, pp. 14-16; No. 6-7, September-October 1907, pp. 4-16; No. 8, November 1907, p. 10; No. 9, February 1908, pp. 9-13; No. 15, March 1909, pp. 18-19; and Anarkhist, No. 1, 10 October 1907, pp. 28-31. Orgeiani has left a detailed account of the movement in Georgia: Al'manakh, pp. 82-111.

29 Al'manakh, pp. 47-61; Burevestnik, No. 3, 30 September 1906, pp. 12-14; No. 10-11, March-April 1908, pp. 28-30; No. 13, October 1908, pp. 17-18; Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 17, 21 June 1907, p. 4; Ivanovich, Sotsialist-Revoliutsioner, 1911, No. 3, pp. 87-88.

30 "Ko vsem rabochim" (leaflet, Bialystok Group of Anarchist-Communists, July 1905), Columbia Russian Archive.

31 Grossman-Roshchin, Byloe, 1924, No. 27-28, p. 177.

32 Frank, Geklibene shriftn, pp. 390-391.

33 "Pokushenie v Belostoke" (Listok No. 5, Russian Anarchist-Communists, 1904?), Bund Archives; Khleb i Volia, No. 23, October 1905, pp. 7-8; Chernoe Znamia, No. 1, December 1905, pp. 8-9; Al'manakh, pp. 179-181.

34 "Di anarkhisten bay der arbayt," Folk-Tsaytung (Vilna), 24 May 1906, p. 5; 28 May, 1906, p. 6; Mikhailu Bakuninu, p. 292; Hershberg, Pinkos Bialystok, n, 104-108; Frank, Geklibene shriftn, pp. 398-400.

35 S. Dubnov-Erlikh, Garber-bund un bershter-bund (Warsaw, 1937), PP. 114-115.

36 Burevestnik, No. 9, February 1908, pp. 16-17; B. I. Gorev, "Apoliticheskie i antiparlamentskie gruppy (anarkhisty, maksimalisty, makhaevtsy)," in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii, m, 489.

37 "Ayn efentlikhe erklerung" (leaflet, Vilna Group of Anarchist-Communists, 1905), Columbia Russian Archive.

38 Khleb i Volia, No. 24, November 1905, pp. 5-8; Chernoe Znamia, No. 1, December 1905, pp. 6-7; Burevestnik, No. 6-7, September-October 1907, p. 6; S. Anisimov, "Sud i rasprava nad anarkhistami kommunistami," Katorga i Ssylka, 1932, No. 10 (95), pp. 129-142; P. A. Arshinov, Dva pobega (iz vospominanii anarkhista 1906-9 gg.) (Paris, 1929); Mikhailu Bakuninu, pp. 307-313.

39 Al'manakh, p. 151; Mikhailu Bakuninu, pp. 258-259, 268.

40 Burevestnik, No. 3, 30 September 1906, pp. 14-16.

41Ibid., No. 5, 30 April 1907, p. 14.

42 Frank, Geklibene shriftn, p. 403.

43 Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, pp. 20-24; Al'manakh, p. 23.

44 See O. I. Taratuta, "Kievskaia Luk'ianovskaia katorzhnaia tiur'ma," Volna, No. 57, September 1924, pp. 39-40. The author was a participant in the Odessa bombing.

45 "On the Ishutin circle, see Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 331-353.

46 T. Rostovtsev, Nasha taktika (Geneva, 1907), pp. 7ff.

47 Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 8, 15 February 1907, pp. 3-5; Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, p. 29.

48 I. Genkin, "Anarkhisty: iz vospominanii politicheskogo katorzha-nina," Byloe, 1918, No. 9, pp. 168-169; Genkin, Po tiur'mam i etapam (Petrograd, 1922), pp. 283-284; Max Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues (New York, 1964), pp. 77-78.

49 A. Bidbei, O Liutsifere, velikom dukhe vozmushcheniia, "nesoznatel'nosti," anarkhii i beznachaliia (n.p. [Paris?], 1904), p. 28.

50 Ekaterina Litvina and Mikhail Sushchinskii. See Probuzhdenie, No. 80-81, March-April 1937, p. 26.

51 Listok gruppy Beznachalie, No. 1, April 1905, pp. 1-3.

52 Genkin, Byloe, 1918, No. 9, pp. 172-173; Po tiur'mam i etapam, pp. 288-289.

53 "Prigotovlenie bomb" (leaflet of the Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki, 1905), Columbia Russian Archive; "Kak podzhigat' pomeshch'i stoga," reprinted in Listok gruppy Beznachalie, No. 2-3, June-July 1905, pp. 9, 16. Though simply signed "Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki," these leaflets are very probably the work of Rostovtsev. See Genkin, Byloe, No. 9, pp. 173-174. They are labeled "Moscow" rather than "St. Petersburg," most likely to mislead the police.

54 T. Rostovtsev, Za vsiu zemliu, za vsiu voliu (n.p., n.d. [1905?]).

55 Listok gruppy Beznachalie, No. 2-3, June-July 1905, pp. 3-4.

56 "Anarkhisty-Obshchinniki" and "K rabochim g. Peterburga" (leaflets, St. Petersburg, March and April 1905), Columbia Russian Archive. The first was distributed in 2,000 copies, the second in 5,000.

57 Genkin, Byloe, 1918, No. 9, pp. 175-176; Po tiur'mam i etapam, p. 292.

58 Burevestnik, No. 6-7, September-October 1907, pp. 29-30.

59 Ibid., No. 3, 30 September 1906, pp. 12-13; "Nezavisimaia Sotsialisticheskaia Mysl'" (hectographed journal, Petrograd, 1924), Fleshin Archive.

60 "Politicheskaia revoliutsiia ili Sotsial'naia?" and "Ko Vsem Iskrennim Druz'iam Naroda" (leaflets, Riga, 1905), Columbia Russian Archive.

61 In 1907, Dmitrii Bogrov, who was to assassinate Prime Minister Stolypin in Kiev four years later, was a member of the Kiev Group of Anarchist-Communists while serving as an agent of the secret police. His murder of Stolypin, however, seems to have been a personal act, not directly related to his revolutionary or police associations. See George Tokmakoff, "Stolypin's Assassin," Slavic Review, xxiv (June 1965), 314-321; G. Sandomirskii, "Po povodu starogo spora," Katorga i Ssylka, 1926, No. 2, pp. 15ff.; I. Knizhnik, "Vospominaniia o Bogrove, ubiitse Stolypina," Krasnaia Letopis', 1923, No. 5, p. 290; E. Lazarev, "Dmitrii Bogrov i ubiistvo Stolypina," Volia Rossii (Prague), 1926, No. 8-9, P- 59; A. Mushin, Dmitrii Bogrov i ubiistvo Stolypina (Paris, 1914), PP- 106ff.; and V. Bogrov, Dmitrii Bogrov i ubiistvo Stolypina (Berlin, 1931), pp. 37-48.

62 Burevestnik, No. 3, 30 April 1906, pp. 13-14; Al'manakh, p. 56.

63 Al'manakh, pp. 55-58.

64 See V. Zabrezhnev, Ob individualisticheskom anarkhizme (London, 1912); and Zabrezhnev, "Propovedniki individualisticheskogo anarkhizma v Rossii," Burevestnik, No. 10-11, March-April 1908, pp. 4-9.

65 A. Borovoi, Obshchestvennye idealy sovremennogo obshchestva (Moscow, 1906); L. Chernyi, Novoe napravlenie v anarkhizme: assotsi-atsionnyi anarkhizm (Moscow, 1907).

66 Chto nam delat' v armii? (n.p., 1903).

67 For example, "Po povodu voiny" (Listok No. 4, Russian Communist-Anarchists, 1904), Bund Archives.

68 Khleb i Volia, No. 2, September 1903, p. 6.

69 Vol'naia Volia, 1903, No. 1.

70 Rostovtsev, Za vsiu zemliu, p. 3.

71 Khleb i Volia, No. 6, January 1904, p. 8; Burevestnik, No. 8, November 1907, pp. 9-12; No. 13, October 1908, pp. 18-19; Al'manakh, PP- 12-13, 76-81, 187-188.

72 Burevestnik, No. 5, 30 April 1907, p. 15.

73 S. Zaiats, Kak muzhiki ostalis' bez nachal'stva (Moscow, 1906), p. 16.

74 Burevestnik, No. 17, July 1909, p. 10.

75 Khleb i Volia, No. 1, August 1903, p. 5.

76 P. Kropotkin, Russkaia revoliutsiia (Geneva, 1905), p. 3; Khleb i Volia, No. 15, February 1905, pp. 2-3; No. 16, April 1905, pp. 1-4.

77 Grossman-Roshchin, Byloe, 1924, No. 27-28, p. 173.

78 Kropotkin, Russkaia revoliutsiia, p. 10.

79 Ibid., p. 9.

80 Ibid., p. 13.

81 Ibid., p. 15.

82 P. Kropotkin, ed., Russkaia revoliutsiia i anarkhizm (London, 1907), PP. 8-9.

83 Ibid., pp. 5-7.

84 V. Zabrezhnev, "O terrore," in Russkaia revoliutsiia i anarkhizm, pp. 44-47; Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 3, 28 November 1906, pp. 2-4; No. 4, 13 December 1906, pp. 3-5. On the "era of dynamite," see Jean Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1880-1914) (Paris, 1951), pp. 189-230.

85 Zabrezhnev, in Russkaia revoliutsiia i anarkhizm, p. 47.

86 Ibid., p. 54.

87 Burevestnik, No. 8, November 1907, p. 11; Anarkhist, No. 1, 10 October 1907, p. 31; Al'manakh, p. 151; I. Genkin, "Sredi preemnikov Bakunina," Krasnaia Letopis', 1927, No. 1, pp. 199-201.

88 Zabrezhnev, in Russkaia revoliutsiia i anarkhizm, p. 43.

89 Khleb i Volia, No. 19-20, July 1905, p. 11.

90 D. I. Novomirskii, Iz programmy sindikal'nogo anarkhizma (n.p., 1907), pp. 16ff.

91 Ibid., pp. 19-20; Novyi Mir, No. 1, 15 October 1905, p. 10. Cf. Bez Rulia, No. 1, September 1908, p. 6; and the anonymous pamphlet, Anarkhizm i khuliganstvo (St. Petersburg, 1906).

92 Mikhailu Bakuninu, p. 256.

93 Novomirskii, Iz programmy sindikal'nogo anarkhizma, p. 192.

94 Novomirskii, "Programma iuzhno-rossiiskoi gruppy Anarkhistov-Sindikalistov," Listki "Khleb i Volia" No. 5, 28 December 1906, p. 9.

95 Mikhailu Bakuninu, pp. 263-271.

96 Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, p. 31; Al'manakh, pp. 150-151; Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 12, 12 April 1907, p. 5.

97 Novomirskii, Iz programmy sindikal'nogo anarkhizma, p. 161.

98 Burevestnik, No. 8, November 1907, pp. 3-4. Similar criticisms of anarchist banditry came from the socialist camp. The primitive battle cry of the anarchists, according to one Social Democrat, was "Your money or your life!" At the same time, he added, the anarchists tried to win over the workers by "evoking in them golden dreams of the future paradise of the anarchist system." S. Ivanovich, Anarkhisty i anarkhizm v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 1, 8. Thirty years later, the Bolshevik historian Emelian Iaroslavskii condemned the terrorist acts of the anarchists as "sheer banditry." E. Yaroslavsky, History of Anarchism in Russia (New York, 1937), p. 37. In doing so, he chose to ignore the "ex's" carried out by his own party during and after 1905. See Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, chapter 22.

99 Al'manakh, pp. 66-75; Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, p. 104.

100 Vtoroi period revoliutsii, 1906-1907 gody (7 vols., Moscow, 1959-1963), II, 73-84; V, 66-78.

101 Genkin, Byloe, 1918, No. 9, p. 183.

102 Ibid., p. 166; Genkin, Krasnaia Letopis', 1927, No. 1, pp. 181-182; Anarkhist, No. 5, March 1910, pp. 1-4.

103. Serge, Memoires d'un revolutionnaire, pp. 41-42.

104 Khleb i Volia, No. 23, October 1905, p. 4; Burevestnik, No. 9, February 1908, p. 1; Al'manakh, pp. 156-161.

105 Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, pp. 35-36; Al'manakh, pp. 29-32.

106 Burevestnik, No. 1, 20 July 1906, p. 1; No. 8, November 1907, PP. 23-24; Al'manakh, pp. 33-36; Grossman-Roshchin, Byloe, 1924, No. 27-28, pp. 179-180.

107 Pis'mo Vladimira Lapidusa (Strigi) (n.p., 1907), p. 7. The Labadie Collection.

108 Buntar', No. 1, pp. 32-34. Death by suicide or accidental explosion was extraordinarily common. For a few interesting cases, see Al'manakh, pp. 55, 114-116, 161-162; Burevestnik, No. 3, 30 September 1906, pp. 14-16; and No. 9, February 1908, pp. 20-23. An incident in London's Greenwich Park in 1894, strikingly similar to Striga's death, provided Joseph Conrad with material for his novel, The Secret Agent.

109 Burevestnik, No. 8, p. 11.

110 In 1906, for example, six members of the International Group in Riga were tried and executed. All were teen-agers. Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 3, 28 November 1906, p. 4.

111 Burevestnik, No. 1, p. 8.

112 Rech' Matreny Prisiazhniuka v Kievskom voenno-okruzhnom sude 19-go iiulia 1908 goda (New York, 1916); Golos Truda (New York), 1 March 1913, pp. 9-11. Also see Prisiazhniuk's letters from Kiev prison, in Golos Ssyl'nykh i Zakliuchennykh Russkikh Anarkhistov, No. 2, October 1914, pp. 11-12.

113 Edgar Khorn, the young Anarchist-Communist who delivered the poison, was apprehended and brought to justice. Anarkhist, No. 4, September 1909, p. 29.

114 Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 4, 17 December 1906, p. 7; Burevestnik, No. 5, 30 April 1907, p. 15.

115 Al'manakh, p. 134. Compare the courtroom scenes in Riga (Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 3, p. 4); Nizhnii Novgorod (Burevestnik, No. 6-7, PP. 30-31); Kiev (Anarkhist, No. 3, May 1909); and Moscow (Burevestnik, No. 13, pp. 21-22).

446 Mikhailu Bakuninu, p. 251.

117 One issue of a journal entitled Buntar' was published by the Chernoe Znamia exiles in Paris in December 1906, and four numbers appeared in Geneva in 1908-1909. A single number of another journal, Chernoe Znamia, was printed in Geneva in December 1905.

118 Burevestnik, No. 5, p. 13.

119 Ibid., p. 14. The courtroom statements of the Russian terrorists often resembled the famous trial speech of the French "propagandist by the deed," Emile Henry, which had been translated into Russian by the Geneva Group of Anarchists and published by Emile Held in 1898: Rech' Emilia Anri pered sudom. A translation also appeared in Vol'naia Volia, 1903, No. 2.

120 Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 3, p. 4; No. 4, p. 7. According to a tabulation made by an anarchist prisoner in the Odessa jail, 167 anarchists and anarchist "sympathizers" were tried in Odessa during 1906-1907. This figure included 12 Anarcho-Syndicalists, 94 Chernoznamentsy, 51 anarchist sympathizers, 5 members of the SR Fighting Union, and 5 members of the Anarchist Red Cross, an organization that gave aid to political prisoners and exiles. The list contains a fairly equal proportion of Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish names. The ages were mostly nineteen to twenty-two. Of those tried, 28 were executed and 5 escaped from jail (Olga Taratuta was among them). Burevestnik, No. 10-11, March-April 1908, pp. 23-24. From the sketchy data available (the anarchists, of course, issued no "party cards" and generally shunned formal organizational machinery), there appear to have been about 5,000 active anarchists in the Russian Empire at the peak of the movement (1905-1907), as well as thousands of sympathizers, who regularly read anarchist literature and closely followed the movement's activities without taking a direct part in them.

121 Anisimov, Katorga i Ssylka, 1932, No. 10, pp. 129-176; Anarkhist, No. 5, March 1910, p. 24. The leaders of the Ekaterinoslav "battle detachment," Andrei Shtokman and Sergei Borisov, were hanged.

122 Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 4, 13 December 1906, p. 8; Genkin, Byloe, 1918, No. 9, p. 179; Po tiur'mam i etapam, p. 297; Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, p. 78. Romanov-Bidbei was tried ader another pseudonym, Ter-Aganesov.

123 Genkin, Byloe, 1918, No. 9, p. 183.

124 Burevestnik, No. 13, October 1908, p. 22; No. 14, January 1909, pp. 18-20.

125 "Nezavisimaia Sotsialisticheskaia Mysl'," Fleshin Archive; Genkin, Byloe, 1918, No. 9, pp. 182-183; Po tiur'mam i etapam, pp. 300-301.

126 Burevestnik, No. 6-7, September-October 1907, pp. 29-30.

127 Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 12, 12 April 1907, p. 5; Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, p. 31. Eight policemen were killed or seriously injured when one of them lit a match during the raid on Gershkovich's bomb laboratory. Mikhailu Bakuninu, pp. 255-256.

128 Burevestnik, No. 16, May 1909, p. 27; Anarkhist, No. 3, May 1909, pp. 28-32.

129 Al'manakh, p. 48; Knizhnik, Krasnaia Letopis', 1922, No. 4, pp. 34-35; Buntar', No. 1, p. 29; Burevestnik, No. 13, pp. 21-22.