Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 1967.

4 ANARCHISM AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM


Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the
blow?

LORD BYRON


Most Russian anarchists harbored a deep-seated distrust of rational systems and of the intellectuals who constructed them. While inheriting the Enlightenment's belief in the inherent goodness of man, they generally did not share the faith of the philosophes in the powers of abstract reason.1 Anti-intellectualism existed in varying degrees throughout the movement. Least evident in Kropotkin's mild and bookish Khleb i Volia group, it was particularly strong among the terrorists of Beznachalie and Chernoe Znamia, who belittled book learning and ratiocination and exalted instinct, will, and action as the highest measures of man. "Im Anfang war die Tat," an aphorism of Goethe's, adorned the masthead of the journal Chernoe Znamia in 1905 -- "In the beginning there was the deed."2

The anarchists firmly rejected the notion that society is governed by rational laws. So-called scientific theories of history and sociology, they maintained, were artificial contrivances of the human brain, serving only to impede the natural and spontaneous impulses of mankind. The doctrines of Karl Marx bore the brunt of their criticism. Bidbei, the leader of the Beznachalie group, assailed "all these 'scientific' sociological systems concocted in the socialist or pseudo-anarchist kitchen, which have nothing in common with the genuine scientific creations of Darwin, Newton, and Galileo."3 In the same spirit, Abram Grossman of the Chernoe Znamia group attacked the impersonal rationalism of Hegel and his Marxist disciples:

An idea must not be left to pure understanding, must not be apprehended by reason alone, but must be converted into feeling, must be soaked in "the nerves' juices and the heart's blood." Only feeling, passion, and desire have moved and will move men to acts of heroism and self-sacrifice; only in the realm of passionate life, the life of feeling, do heroes and martyrs draw their strength. . . . We do not belong to the worshipers of "all that is real is rational"; we do not recognize the inevitability of social phenomena; we regard with skepticism the scientific value of many so-called laws of sociology.4
To gain an understanding of man and society, Grossman advised, one should ignore the a priori "laws" of the sociologists and turn instead to the empirical data of psychology.

The anti-intellectualism of the Russian anarchists was rooted in four radical traditions of the nineteenth century. The first, of course, was anarchism itself, the doctrines of Godwin, Stirner, and Proudhon, but most important by far for the Russian anarchist movement, the doctrines of Bakunin; the second (paradoxically, since the Marxists were the principal target of the Russian anarchists) was a single strand of Marxist thought; Russian Populism of the 1870's was the third; and the last, the syndicalist movement which emerged in France towards the end of the century.

Mikhail Bakunin, it has been noted, rejected "a priori ideas or preordained, preconceived laws" in favor of his own "purely instinctive" doctrines.5 In his view, it would have been utter folly to work out rational projects for the future, since, as he put it, "we consider purely theoretical reasoning fruitless."6 What mattered to ordinary men and women was not words but deeds. "Teach the people?" he once asked. "That would be stupid. . . . We must not teach the people, but incite them to revolt."7

Bakunin extended his distrust of abstract theories to the intellectuals who spun them. He deprecated the "scientific" system-builders -- above all, the Marxists and Comteans -- who lived in an unreal world of musty books and thick journals and thus understood nothing of human suffering. Their so-called science of society was sacrificing real life on the altar of scholastic abstractions.8 Bakunin did not wish to shed the fictions of religion and metaphysics merely to replace them with what he considered the new fictions of pseudo-scientific sociology. He therefore proclaimed a "revolt of life against science, or rather, against the rule of science."9 The mission of science was not to govern men but to rescue them from superstition, drudgery, and disease. "In a word," Bakunin declared, "science is the guiding compass of life, but not life itself."10

Although Bakunin himself believed that the intellectuals would play an important role in the revolutionary struggle, he warned that all too many of them, in particular his Marxist rivals, had an insatiable lust for power. In 1872, four years before his death, Bakunin speculated on the shape the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat" would assume if ever inaugurated: "That would be the rule of scientific intellect, the most autocratic, the most despotic, the most arrogant, and the most contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of genuine or sham savants, and the world will be divided into a dominant minority in the name of science, and an immense ignorant majority."11 In one of his major works, Gosudarstvennost' i anarkhiia (Statehood and Anarchy), published the following year, Bakunin elaborated upon this dire prophecy in a most striking passage:

According to the theory of Mr. Marx, the people not only must not destroy [the state] but must strengthen it and place it at the complete disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers -- the leaders of the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx and his friends, who will proceed to liberate [mankind] in their own way. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require an exceedingly firm guardianship; they will establish a single state bank, concentrating in its hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two armies -- industrial and agricultural -- under the direct command of state engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political estate.12
According to Bakunin, the followers of Karl Marx and of Auguste Comte as well were "priests of science," ordained in a new "privileged church of the mind and superior education."13 With great disdain, they informed the common man: "You know nothing, you understand nothing, you are a blockhead, and a man of intelligence must put a saddle and bridle on you and lead you."14

Bakunin maintained that education was as great an instrument of domination as private property. So long as learning was preempted by a minority of the population, he wrote in 1869 in an essay called Integral Instruction, it could be effectively used to exploit the majority. "The one who knows more," he wrote, "will naturally dominate the one who knows less." Even if the landlords and capitalists were eliminated, there was a danger that the world "would be divided once again into a mass of slaves and a small number of rulers, the former working for the latter as they do today."15 Bakunin's answer was to wrest education from the monopolistic grasp of the privileged classes and make it available equally to everyone; like capital, education must cease to be "the patrimony of one or of several classes" and become "the common property of all."13 An integrated education in science and handicrafts (but not in the hollow abstractions of religion, meta-physics, and sociology) would enable all citizens to engage in both manual and mental pursuits, thereby eliminating a major source of inequality. "Everyone must work, and everyone must be educated," Bakunin averred, so that in the good society of the future there would be "neither workers nor scientists, but only men."17

At the close of the century, Peter Kropotkin developed Bakunin's concept of the "whole" man in his book, Fields, Factories, and Workshops. At some length, Kropotkin described the "integrated" community in which everyone would perform both mental and manual labor and live in blissful harmony. Like Bakunin, Kropotkin distrusted those who claimed to possess superior wisdom or who preached so-called scientific dogmas.18 The proper function of the intellectuals, he believed, was not to order the people about, but to help them prepare for the great task of emancipation; "and when men's minds are prepared and external circumstances are favorable," Kropotkin declared, "the final rush is made, not by the group that initiated the movement, but by the mass of people... ,"19

A second source of anti-intellectualism among the younger generation of Russian anarchists was Marxist literature, an ironical fact considering Bakunin's and Kropotkin's strong suspicions of the Social Democrats. Though the Marxists were the very intellectuals whose political ambitions and "scientific" theories aroused the deepest hostilities of the anarchists, the latter found themselves in full accord with one basic idea that appeared frequently in Marx's writings, namely that the working class must liberate itself through its own efforts instead of depending on some outside savior to do the job. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels wrote that "all previous movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities," whereas "the proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority."20 Two years later, in 1850, Marx developed this theme in an address to the central committee of the Communist League, when he called on the workingmen of Europe to launch a "revolution in permanence," in order to establish their own proletarian government in the form of municipal councils or workers' committees.21 To more than a few Russian anarchists who read these bold words a half-century later, it seemed (though with little justification) that Marx had departed from his rigid scheme of historical stages for a radical plan of revolt very close to their own, a plan which aimed to achieve the stateless society all at once, and through the efforts of the dispossessed masses themselves. Bidbei, for one, would see fit to incorporate the watchword of "permanent revolution" into the credo of his Beznachalie group in 1905.22

A Marxist slogan that had an even stronger impact on the Russian anarchist movement was the famous sentence in Marx's preamble to the bylaws of the newly founded First International in 1864: "The emancipation of the working class must be accomplished by the working class itself."23 The anarchists interpreted this proclamation as an appeal for a social revolt by the masses themselves, with the object of annihilating rather than merely capturing the state. Marx's ringing sentence in the rules of 1864 was to appear again and again in Russian anarchist literature, sometimes accompanied by a stanza from the Internationale bearing an identical message:

II n'est pas de sauveurs supremes:
Ni dieu, ni cesar, ni tribun.
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous memes,
Decretons le salut commun!24
That Marxists and anarchists should use these same slogans reflected a common faith in a mass uprising -- as against a Blanquist coup d'etat -- which Marx shared with Bakunin in spite of their bitter feud within the First International, and which afterwards served as a point of contact between anarchists and anti-authoritarian socialists, who alike attached very great importance to the spontaneity and initiative of the masses.

The anti-intellectualism of the Russian anarchists was also influenced by the strong antagonism toward intellectuals and politicians that developed within the rank and file of European labor during the second half of the nineteenth century. This hostility, which stemmed from the belief that the intellectuals were a separate, soft-handed breed whose interests had little in common with those of workingmen at the bench, was so intense among the Proudhonists that they opposed the entry of nonworkers into the General Council of the First International and generally objected to the presence of educated bourgeois in the labor movement.25 In France, the determination of factory workers to rely solely on their own forces -- ourvrierisme as it was called -- was manifested everywhere, transcending all political differences. The ultra-radical Allemanists, for example, flatly excluded the "white-handed" from their ranks,26 and the reformist unions, while not quite so inimical to intellectuals per se, were nonetheless wary of radical ideologies which, if acted upon, might endanger the concrete gains of several decades. Nor had the revolutionary syndicalists any use for self-seeking politicians. Nothing could be gained from political agitation, they insisted; parliament was a nest of fraud and compromise, and all partial reforms were illusory, their main effect being the removal of the labor movement's revolutionary sting. Capitalism could be eliminated -- and the proletariat thereby liberated -- only through the direct industrial action of the workers' unions themselves.

Mistrust deepened when a number of prominent socialists entered parliament and the government. In 1893, the election to the French Chamber of Deputies of the Marxist chieftain Jules Guesde and of Edouard Vaillant, a well-known Blanquist, convinced many workers that their politically minded leaders were being bought off by the enemy. A greater shock came in 1899, when Alexandre Millerand accepted the post of Minister of Commerce in Rene Waldeck-Rousseau's government, the first socialist to serve in a "bourgeois" cabinet. Militant factory hands vented their bitterness the following year at a congress of the CGT in Paris. "All politicians are betrayers," declared one speaker, and another warned his comrades to close their eyes to the meretricious allurements of the middle-class intellectuals and "count exclusively on the enthusiasm of the workers."27 Fernand Pelloutier, the foremost syndicalist leader, drew a sharp distinction between the "Millerandism" of the politically oriented socialists and the undiluted revolutionism of his syndicalist followers, who were "rebels at all times, men truly without a god, without a master, and without a country, the irreconcilable enemies of all despotism, moral or collective -- the enemies, that is, of laws and dictatorships, including the dictatorship of the proletariat."28 This anti-political bias became the official policy of the CGT in 1906, when the Charter of Amiens affirmed the complete independence of the French trade union movement from all political entanglements.29

Pelloutier himself was no grimy proletarian, but a well-scrubbed and well-educated journalist of middle-class upbringing, who had adopted the workers' cause as his own, becoming an enormously effective union leader, trusted and admired by the rank and file of the CGT. Pelloutier devoted his energies to the practical affairs of labor organization and direct action, relegating ideological pursuits to those intellectuals who, in his estimation, were not genuinely concerned with the daily struggle of the workers for a better life. The labor unions, he declared, "don't give a hoot for theory, and their empiricism ... is worth at least all the systems in the world, which last as long and are as accurate as predictions in the almanac."30 Ideologies and Utopias never came from manual workers, he maintained, but were dreamed up by middle-class intellectuals who "have sought the remedies for our ills in their own ideas, burning the midnight oil instead of looking at our needs and at reality."31

Such theorists of syndicalism as Georges Sorel, Hubert Lagardelle, and Edouard Berth acknowledged that the practical syndicalist movement owed them very little. Indeed, Sorel and Lagardelle readily conceded that they had learned far more from the active unionists than they had taught them.32 "Burning the midnight oil," they worked out a philosophy which put the moral value of direct action on a much higher plane than its economic results. No great movement, Sorel maintained, had ever succeeded without its "social myth." In the present instance, the general strike was the "myth" that would inspire the working class to deeds of heroism and sustain it in its daily skirmishes with the bourgeoisie.33 The general strike was an action slogan, a poetic vision, an image of battle capable of rousing the masses to concerted action and of imbuing them with a powerful sense of moral uplift.34

Sorel's high-flown notions were largely ignored by the militants of the syndicalist movement -- Victor Griffuelhes, Emile Pouget, Georges Yvetot, and Paul Delesalle. Griffuelhes, general secretary of the CGT after Pelloutier's premature death in 1901, when asked by a parliamentary commission whether he had studied Sorel, answered wryly: "I read Alexandre Dumas."35 A shoemaker by trade and a crusty union activist, Griffuelhes accused the bourgeois intellectuals, who in his judgment knew nothing of the tribulations of factory life, of trying to lure the workers with abstract formulas in order to catapult themselves into positions of privilege and authority. "If one reflects too much," he once remarked, "one never does anything."36 In spite of his Blanquist antecedents, which led him to emphasize the place of a "conscious minority" in the labor movement, Griffuelhes despised the educated men who aspired to leadership in the unions or in public life. "Among the union activists," he wrote in 1908, "there is a feeling of violent opposition to the bourgeoisie. . . . They want passionately to be led by workers."37

Nowhere in Europe was there greater hostility towards the educated classes than in the villages of mother Russia. The Populist students who descended into the countryside during the 1870's ran into an invisible barrier that separated them from the ignorant narod. Bakunin regarded as futile any attempt to teach the dark people and his young disciple Nechaev ridiculed the "unasked-for teachers" of the peasantry, whose learning only sapped them of their life-giving "popular juices."38 After the fiasco of the 1870's, the pitiful failure of the students to communicate with the rural folk led some disillusioned Populists to abandon the education which they thought was dividing them from the masses. Others wondered whether the education gap could be bridged at all, whether the Populist philosopher Nikolai Mikhailovskii was not right when he observed that the literate few must "inevitably enslave" the toiling majority.39

Nor was the situation greatly improved when the peasants came to the city to work in the factories, for they brought their suspicion of the intellectuals with them. One laborer in St. Petersburg bitterly complained that "the intelligentsia had usurped the position of the worker." It was all right to accept books from the students, he said, but when they begin to teach you nonsense you must knock them down. "They should be made to understand that the workers' cause ought to be placed entirely in the hands of the workers themselves."40 Although these remarks were aimed at the Populist Chaikovskii circle of the 1870's, the same attitude persisted in succeeding decades toward both the Populists and the Marxists, who were competing for the allegiance of the emerging class of industrial workers. In 1883, Georgii Plekhanov, the "father" of Russian Social Democracy, felt constrained to pledge that the Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat would be "as far removed from the dictatorship of a group of raznochintsy revolutionists as heaven is from earth."41 He assured the workers that Marx's disciples were selfless men, whose mission was to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat so that it could become "an independent figure in the arena of historical life, and not pass eternally from one guardian to another."42

Notwithstanding repeated assurances of this sort, many factory workers eschewed the doctrinaire revolutionism of Plekhanov and his associates and bent their efforts to the task of economic and educational self-improvement. They began to manifest a tendency (in which they were joined by a number of sympathetic intellectuals) which later acquired the label of "economism," a rough equivalent of ouvrierisme in France. The average Russian workman was more interested in raising his material level than in agitating for political objectives; he was wary of the revolutionary slogans floated by party leaders who seemed bent on pushing him into political adventures that might satisfy their own ambitions while leaving the situation of the workers essentially unchanged. Political programs, wrote a leading spokesman of the "economist" point of view, "are suitable for intellectuals going 'to the people,' but not for the workers themselves. . . . And it is the defense of the workers' interests . . . that is the whole content of the labor movement." The intelligentsia, he added, quoting Marx's celebrated preamble to the bylaws of the First International, tended to forget that "the liberation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves."43

Underlying the anti-intellectualism of the "economists" was the conviction that the intelligentsia looked upon the working class simply as a means to a higher goal, as an abstract mass predestined to carry out the immutable will of history. According to the "economists," the intellectuals, instead of bringing their knowledge to bear on the concrete problems of factory life, were inclined to lose themselves in ideologies that had no relation to the true needs of the workers. Emboldened by the Petersburg textile strikes of 1896 and 1897, which were organized and directed by local workmen, the "economists" urged the Russian laboring class to remain self-sufficient and reject the leadership of self-centered professional agitators. As one bench worker in the capital wrote in an "economist" journal in 1897, "The improvement of our working conditions depends on ourselves alone."44

The anti-political and anti-intellectual arguments of Bakunin and the "economists" made a deep impression on a Polish Marxist named Jan Waclaw Machajski. Born in 1866 in Busk, a small town near the city of Kielce in Russian Poland, he was the son of an indigent clerk, who died when Machajski was a child, leaving a large and destitute family. Machajski attended the gimnaziia in Kielce and helped support his brothers and sisters by tutoring the schoolmates who boarded in his mother's apartment. He began his revolutionary career in 1888 in the student circles of Warsaw University, where he had enrolled in the faculties of natural science and medicine. Two or three years later, while attending the University of Zurich, he abandoned his first political philosophy (a blend of socialism and Polish nationalism) for the revolutionary internationalism of Marx and Engels. Machajski was arrested in May 1892 for smuggling revolutionary proclamations from Switzerland into the industrial city of Lodz, which was then in the throes of a general strike. In 1903, after nearly a dozen years in prison and Siberian exile, he escaped to Western Europe, where he remained until the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution.45

During his long banishment in the Siberian settlement of Viliuisk (in Iakutsk province), Machajski made an intensive study of socialist literature and came to the conclusion that the Social Democrats did not really champion the cause of the manual workers, but that of a new class of "mental workers" engendered by the rise of industrialism. Marxism, he maintained in his major work, Umstvennyi rabochii (The Mental Worker), reflected the interests of this new class, which hoped to ride to power on the shoulders of the manual workers. In a so-called socialist society, he declared, private capitalists would merely be replaced by a new aristocracy of administrators, technical experts, and politicians; the manual laborers would be enslaved anew by a ruling minority whose "capital," so to speak, was education.46

1905

According to Machajski, the radical intelligentsia aimed not at the achievement of a classless society, but merely to establish itself as a privileged stratum. It was small wonder that Marxism, rather than advocating an immediate revolt against the capitalist system, postponed the "collapse" until a future time when economic conditions had sufficiently "matured." With the further development of capitalism and its increasingly sophisticated technology, the "mental workers" would grow strong enough to establish their own rule. Even if the new technocracy were then to abolish private ownership of the means of production, Machajski said, the "professional intelligentsia" would still maintain its position of mastery by taking over the management of production and by establishing a monopoly over the specialized knowledge needed to operate a complex industrial economy.47 The managers, engineers, and political officeholders would use their Marxist ideology as a new religious opiate to becloud the minds of the laboring masses, perpetuating their ignorance and servitude.

Machajski suspected every left-wing competitor of seeking to establish a social system in which the intellectuals would be the ruling class. He even accused the anarchists of Kropotkin's Khleb i Volia group of taking a "gradualist" approach to revolution no better than that of the Social Democrats, for they expected the coming revolution in Russia not to go further than the French Revolution of 1789 or 1848. In Kropotkin's projected anarchist commune, Machajski held, "only the possessors of civilization and knowledge" would enjoy true freedom.48 The "social revolution" of the anarchists, he insisted, was not really meant to be a "purely workers' uprising," but was in fact to be a "revolution in the interests of the intellectuals." The anarchists were "the same socialists as all the others, only more passionate ones."49

What then was to be done to avoid this new form of enslavement? In Machajski's view, as long as inequality of income persisted and the instruments of production remained the private property of a capitalist minority, and as long as scientific and technical knowledge remained the "property" of an intellectual minority, the multitudes would continue to toil for a privileged few. Machajski's solution assigned a key role to a secret organization of revolutionaries called the Workers' Conspiracy (Rabochii Zagovor), similar to Bakunin's "secret society"60 of revolutionary conspirators. Presumably, Machajski himself was to be at the head. The mission of the Workers' Conspiracy was to stimulate the workers into "direct action" -- strikes, demonstrations, and the like -- against the capitalists with the immediate object of winning economic improvements and jobs for the unemployed. The "direct action" of the workers was to culminate in a general strike which, in turn, would trigger off a worldwide uprising, ushering in an era of equal income and educational opportunity. In the end, the pernicious distinction between manual and mental labor would be obliterated, together with all class divisions.51

Machajski's theories provoked passionate discussions within the various groups of Russian radicals. In Siberia, where Machajski hectographed the first part of Umstvennyi rabochii in 1898, his critique of Social Democracy "had a great effect upon the exiles," as Trotsky, who was among them, recalled in his autobiography.52 By 1901, copies of Umstvennyi rabochii were circulating in Odessa, where "Makhaevism" was beginning to attract a following. In 1905, a small group of Makhaevtsy, calling itself the Workers' Conspiracy, was formed in St. Petersburg. Despite Machajski's criticism of the anarchists, a number of them were drawn to his creed. For a time, Olga Taratuta and Vladimir Striga of Chernoe Znamia were associated with a society in Odessa known as the Intransigents (Neprimirimye), which included both anarchists and Makhaevtsy; and the Petersburg Beznachal'tsy contained a few disciples of Machajski.53 If some anarchist writers took Machajski to task for seeing everything as a clever plot of the intelligentsia,54 more than a few, as Nikolai Rogdaev admitted, found in his doctrines "a fresh and vivifying spirit" in contrast to "the stifling atmosphere of the socialist parties, saturated with political chicanery."55

Bakuninism, Populism, Syndicalism, Makhaevism -- and, ironically, even Marxism itself -- nourished the anti-intellectualism of the Russian anarchists and furnished them with slogans which they used to combat their socialist rivals. The influence of Bakunin was perhaps stronger than any other. Bakunin's spirit pervaded the scathing attack on the Social Democrats with which Bidbei opened one of his pamphlets. The leader of Beznachalie denounced "the insatiable plunderers and cheap men of ambition, all the geniuses and pigmies of Caesarism, all the pitiful cads and lackeys, and all sorts of vampires and bloodsuckers of the people" who were flocking to join the Social Democratic party.56 The Russian Marxists, he continued, were "worshipers in the cult of servility," whose unquenchable thirst for discipline was driving them to establish an "all-Russian centralization of power ... the autocracy of Plekhanov and Co."57 Bidbei condemned the fact that Marx's followers, like their teacher, considered the peasants and vagabonds amorphous elements of society, lacking the necessary class consciousness to be an effective revolutionary force. Had not the recent peasant disturbances in Poltava and Kharkov provinces amply demonstrated the fighting capacity of the rural population, he asked. And "who, if not the vagabond, can be the demon-accoucheur of history? From where, if not from the dismal slums, can seep the noxious poison of derision for the whole callous and cold code of shameful bourgeois morality?"58 If the socialists would only dispense with their drawn-out phases of revolutionary struggle and recognize the awful might of the dark masses, they would see that the "great day of retribution" was approaching (Bidbei was writing in 1904), that the spirit of pan-destruction was awakening in the hearts of the oppressed, that Russia stood "on the eve of a great social tempest."59

The words of Bakunin also echoed in the repeated attacks launched by the Khlebovol'tsy against the notion of a "proletarian dictatorship." The only dictatorship the Social Democrats envisioned, declared Kropotkin, was the dictatorship of their own party.60 A young associate of Kropotkin's with strong Tolstoy an leanings, Ivan Sergeevich Vetrov (Knizhnik), elaborated on this point by defining a political party as "a state in miniature," with its own bureaucratic hierarchy and its own circulars and decrees. The Marxists, said Vetrov, aimed to use this octopus of authority to satisfy "their appetite for absolute political power."61 According to the journal of the Khleb i Volia group, Plekhanov, Martov, and Lenin were the "priests, Magi, and shamans" of the modern age.62 Their "dictatorship of the proletariat" was an intrinsically evil concept, for, as Orgeiani once put it, "revolutionary government always plays an anti-popular role."63

Orgeiani, whose denunciation of the Social Democrats reflected the influence of the French syndicalists as well as of Bakunin and Machajski, feared that the socialist leaders meant to use the burgeoning labor movement to fulfill their own designs. The labor movement, he said, was divided into two camps: the workmen who produced goods and the intellectuals who were out to dominate the workers by "using the privilege of knowledge."64 If the socialist intellectuals would see fit to put their superior learning at the disposal of the rank and file workers, they could perform an invaluable service to the revolutionary movement. But the socialists, brought up in "the Jacobin tradition" of ordering others about, were likely to persist in their will to power, thus compelling the workers to liberate themselves by their own efforts "from God, the state, and the lawyers -- especially the lawyers."65 Orgeiani and his fellow pro-syndicalists in Geneva must have been immensely pleased with a report in 1904 that the factory workers of Chernigov province were beginning to look upon the anarchist movement as "a workers' organization, not under the tutelage of the intelligentsia, but in which the proletariat can in complete freedom manifest its own revolutionary initiative."66 This was precisely the attitude that Orgeiani, Korn, and Raevskii hoped to see develop within Russia's emergent working class. They wanted the industrial workers to know that "the Social Democrats view the workers' unions as an aid in the political struggle, whereas the anarchists view them as the natural organs of direct struggle with capitalism, and as the components of the future order."67

The pro-syndicalists of the Khleb i Volia group reserved a measure of disdain for the handful of Russian intellectuals who also called themselves syndicalists but repudiated the anarchist label. According to Maksim Raevskii, these men -- L. S. Kozlovskii, V. A. Posse, and A. S. Nedrov (Tokarev) were the most important -- in effect were "quasi-Marxists," who, in their splendid isolation from the practical workers' movement, had swallowed the jejune theories of "Sorel and Co."68 Former Social Democrats, Raevskii added, these self-styled syndicalist thinkers were endeavoring to found "a new school of socialism" by linking "the revolutionary forms of the labor movement with the old theories of Marx."69 Maria Korn joined the attack, arguing that revolutionary syndicalism was firmly anchored in the anarchist tradition and thus could hardly constitute an offshoot of Marxian socialism, as Kozlovskii and the others believed.70 These "neo-Marxist" theorists, she said, by embracing a moribund ideology, had divorced themselves from the "practical labor movement . . . deeply rooted in the very revolutionary instincts" of the working class.71

An examination of the writings of the "neo-Marxist" syndicalists reveals a curious similarity between their views and those of their anarchist critics.72 Kozlovskii, for example, who bore the brunt of the anarchist onslaught, fully agreed that syndicalism was a movement of factory workers and not of intellectuals. He assailed Lenin's Chto delat'? (What Is To Be Done?) for its plan to commission officers from the intelligentsia to lead the working class in the revolutionary struggle. Syndicalism demanded "great selflessness" from the intellectuals, Kozlovskii asserted; they were to act as "helper, not leader" of the industrial workers.73 Moreover, the dictatorship of the proletariat was a dangerous concept which could "only mean the dictatorship of the leaders of the proletariat, the dictatorship of a provisional revolutionary government, which one associates with bourgeois revolutions."74 Kozlovskii likened the Social Democratic party to a religious sect, with its evangels, catechisms, and cathedrals -- an obscurantist church in which absolute truths were affirmed and heresies condemned. The socialist leaders were "permeated with the spirit of authority" and aimed to "educate the masses in the cult of the teachers -- the apostles -- of socialism."75 In the coming revolution, Kozlovskii declared, the masses should not duplicate the past error of following political leaders. This time the workers, through their own initiative, should seize the means of production and inaugurate a libertarian society of autonomous producers' associations.76

In view of the large area of agreement between Kozlovskii's ideas and their own, it seems surprising that Raevskii and Korn should have subjected him to such withering abuse. Were they not intellectuals themselves, as guilty as Kozlovskii of "burning the midnight oil" at their paper-cluttered writing tables? Part of their animosity stemmed from Kozlovskii's praise of the syndicalist theories of Georges Sorel, whom they regarded as an ambitious interloper. Kozlovskii once observed that Sorel's writings, though flawed by unsystematic organization, were nevertheless the work of "a profound and original thinker, a writer of colossal erudition."77 If this encomium was merely irksome to the syndicalists of Khleb i Volia, they had stronger reasons for the icy reception they gave Kozlovskii. His refusal to join the anarchist movement or even to acknowledge the anarchist origins of revolutionary syndicalism was an intolerable affront to them. Worse still, his pretension of being the prophet of a novel doctrine78 made him a new competitor for the allegiance of the working class.

Like the exiles of Kropotkin's circle, Daniil Novomirskii, the Odessa Anarcho-Syndicalist, denounced the non-anarchist proponents of syndicalism as intellectuals who had never wielded a hammer or scythe, men who put abstract ideas above living human beings. Kozlovskii and his sympathizers, Novomirskii declared, wished to draw the active labor movement into a Russian form of "Lagardellism,"79 a type of syndicalism rooted in Marxist theory and still friendly to Social Democracy. Novomirskii's own writings compounded all the elements of anti-intellectualism discernible in the Russian anarchist movement -- Bakunin's hatred of government and politicians, Marx's exaltation of the proletariat, the syndicalist call for direct action by the workers, and Machajski's suspicion of "mental workers." (Novomirskii, after all, was a convert from Social Democracy, an anarchist and a syndicalist, and based in Odessa, an early center of Makhaevism.) That he was deeply influenced by Bakunin and Machajski is evident from the following passage in his journal, Novyi Mir (The New World): "Which class does contemporary socialism serve in fact and not in words? We answer at once and without beating around the bush: Socialism is not the expression of the interests of the working class, but of the so-called raznochintsy, or declasse intelligentsia."80 The Social Democratic party, said Novomirskii, was infested with "political crooks . . . new exploiters, new deceivers of the people."81 The long-awaited social revolution would prove to be a farce, he warned, should it fail to annihilate, together with the state and private property, yet a third enemy of human liberty: "That new sworn enemy of ours is the monopoly of knowledge; its bearer is the intelligentsia."82 Although Novomirskii believed, with the French syndicalists, that a "conscious minority" of far-sighted "pathfinders" was needed to stir the laboring masses into action,83 he cautioned the workers not to look for saviors outside their own class. Selfless men simply did not exist -- "not m the dark clouds of the etnpty sky, nor in the luxurious palaces of the tsars, nor in the chambers of the wealthy, nor in any parliament."84 The proletariat must go it alone, he said. "The liberation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself."85

A common hostility towards the intelligentsia was not enough to hold the anarchists together during the decade between the two Russian revolutions. Riven by factional disputes and subjected to Stolypin's stern measures of repression, the anarchist movement in the Tsarist Empire rapidly faded away. The relative prosperity of the years following the 1905 upheaval proved highly uncongenial to ultra-radical philosophies, which thrive in times of misery and despair. In 1906, Russian industry began to recover from the devastating effects of the revolution. Although wage levels remained low and the government narrowly circumscribed the activity of the newly formed labor unions, the over-all situation of the working class gradually improved and the number of strikes fell off sharply. In the countryside a note of hope was sounded with the remarkable growth of peasant cooperatives and the introduction of Stolypin's sweeping land reform, designed to break up the antiquated peasant commune and create in its place a class of sturdy farmers loyal to the Tsar. It was true that the bulk of the population -- both rural and urban -- remained impoverished and that there was widespread discontent over the Tsar's refusal to countenance a genuine constitutional government; nevertheless, the forces of unrest were decidedly on the wane.

For several years after the Revolution of 1905, the anarchists were targets of a tireless manhunt by the tsarist police. The more fortunate escaped to Western Europe and America. Hundreds of others were either executed after summary trials or made to serve long terms in prison or exile, where many fell victim to scurvy and consumption. They passed the time by reading and writing, meditating and hoping that the next revolution would not be long in coming. One inmate of the Peter-Paul fortress in the capital studied Esperanto, which many anarchists regarded as the universal tongue of the future;86 eventually he became fluent in the language, but complained that, owing to the dank air of his cell, his lungs had become seriously infected, making it difficult for him to speak at all.87 A few, like German Sandomirskii, the Kievan Anarchist-Communist, filled the long days of confinement by recording their impressions of life in prison and exile,88 while others thought only of escape. One Chernoznamenets who shared a Siberian prison cell with Egor Sazonov, the SR youth who had assassinated Viacheslav Pleve in 1904, succeeded in fleeing to the United States, along the same route Bakunin had taken 50 years earlier.89

The anarchists who had emigrated to the West lamented the fate of their comrades languishing in Russian jails or martyred on the gallows or before the firing squad. The Brotherhood of Free Communists (Bratstvo Vol'nykh Obshchinnikov), a group of Paris expatriates headed by Apollon Karelin, reviled the tsarist regime as "another medieval Inquisition," and likened the Okhrana (political police) to the oprichniki who had brought swift death to the real and imaginary enemies of Ivan the Terrible. Tsar Nicholas himself was the "crowned hangman," responsible for the slaughter of thousands of high-minded young men and women. "Eternal glory to the deceased! Eternal shame to the hangmen!"90 In 1907, the emigres organized an Anarchist Red Cross to aid their imprisoned confreres. Headquarters were established in New York and London (the latter under the direction of Kropotkin, Cherkezov, Rudolf Rocker, and Alexander Schapiro), with branches in the major cities of Western Europe and North America.91 At scores of lectures and banquets, the Anarchist Red Cross collected money and clothing to send to the prisoners in Russia, and circulated petitions to protest the repressive policies of the Imperial government.92

At the same time, the exiled anarchists in Geneva, Paris, London, and New York busied themselves with preparations for the next revolution. A small band of surviving Chernoznamentsy revived their journal Buntar' in Geneva, while Kropotkin's followers in London launched a successor to Khleb i Volia called the Listki "Khleb i Volia" (Leaflets of "Bread and Liberty"). In Paris, a group of Russian Anarchist-Communists was formed, with perhaps 50 active members. Occasionally, Kropotkin would cross the channel to attend its gatherings in Maria Korn's apartment.93 The Paris group, in conjunction with a small circle of Polish anarchists, sponsored rallies to commemorate the anniversaries of the Paris Commune and the Haymarket Square tragedy, and, in 1914, the centenary of Bakunin's birth. The speakers at these meetings included Korn, Orgeiani, Rogdaev, Zabrezhnev, and Karelin, as well as such prominent French anarchists and syndicalists as Sebastien Faure and Georges Yvetot.94 During these years, Maria Korn found time to study biology and psychology at the Sorbonne; in 1915, she was awarded a doctorate in natural science, having completed a thesis on "Physiological and Psychical Reactions of Fish."95

The most important anarchist journal of the postrevolutionary period, Burevestnik, was founded in Paris in 1906. Burevestnik (The Stormy Petrel) was the title of Maksim Gorky's celebrated poem, the last line of which appeared on the masthead: "Let the storm burst forth more strongly." Under the joint editorship of Nikolai Rogdaev, a Kropotkinite since 1900 and one of the Russian delegates to the Amsterdam Congress of 1907,96 and Maksim Raevskii, an articulate champion of syndicalism, Burevestnik generally followed the Khleb i Volia line, although Abram Grossman was allowed to register his anti-syndicalist views in its pages. In New York City, Burevestnik had a Kropotkinian, pro-syndicalist counterpart, Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor), which was established in 1911 as the organ of the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada. Golos Truda often published articles by the Paris anarchists, notably Rogdaev, Korn, Orgeiani, and Zabrezhnev. When Raevskii came to America during World War I, he was appointed editor, and, under his supervision, Golos Truda became an avowedly Anarcho-Syndicalist publication.

For all their bustling activity, the anarchists found life in exile frustrating and demoralizing, and their efforts to maintain a semblance of unity were poisoned by incessant quarrels and intrigues. A year before the war, Karelin's Brotherhood of Free Communists split asunder amid dark accusations of its leader's "dictatorial" behavior.97 Squabbles and recriminations plagued the other circles as well. In December 1913, however, hopes for a general reconciliation arose when a conference of Russian anarchists met in Paris to help arrange a new International Congress, the first since the Amsterdam Congress of 1907. After drawing up an agenda which included the momentous issues of terrorism, syndicalism, nationalism, and anti-militarism, the participants announced that the Congress would assemble in London the following August.98 At the headquarters of the London Anarchist Federation, Alexander Schapiro, who was designated secretary of the forthcoming gathering, threw himself into making preparations for the event." "The Congress promises to be a great success," he wrote with obvious excitement to a colleague in Austria, "delegates coming from as far as Brazil and Argentine."100 Peter Kropotkin agreed to deliver the welcoming address to anarchist representatives expected from 17 countries. But on 1 August war broke out, and the Congress was cancelled.

As if the old controversies over terror and syndicalism were not enough, the coming of World War I touched off new polemics which very nearly delivered the coup de grace to the European anarchist movement. The new dispute began when Kropotkin blamed Germany for the war and came out in support of the Entente. Kropotkin's action was prompted by the fear that the triumph of German militarism and authoritarianism might prove fatal to social progress in France, the revered land of the great revolution and the Paris Commune. He urged every man "who cherishes the ideals of human progress" to help crush the German "invasion" of Western Europe.101 As the bulwark of statism, the German Empire blocked Europe's path toward the decentralized society of Kropotkin's dreams.

Kropotkin's espousal of the Allied cause won the approval of some of the most eminent anarchists in Europe; in 1916, Varlaam Cherkezov, Jean Grave, Charles Malato, Christian Cornelissen, James Guillaume, and ten others joined him in signing the "Manifesto of the Sixteen," which set forth their "defensist" position.102 Yet, notwithstanding the enormous prestige of these names, the majority of anarchists throughout the world remained faithful to their antimilitarist and anti-patriotic heritage, rallying behind such "internationalists" as Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Rudolf Rocker, and Sebastien Faure. As they saw it, the war was a capitalist struggle for power and profit, with the masses serving as cannon fodder. Hence it was absurd to regard a victory for either side as preferable.103 In Geneva, a group of angry "internationalists," including Grossman-Roshchin, Aleksandr Ge, and Orgeiani (Kropotkin's disciple since the movement's inception),104 branded the champions of the Allied war effort as "Anarcho-Patriots." If Germany's appetite for Belgian territory was a cause of the war, they asked, did England not insist on maintaining its vast naval supremacy? Was France without guilt in its insatiable quest for empire? And what of Russia's eternal lust for the Straits? Only one type of warfare was acceptable to true anarchists, the "internationalist" wing maintained, and this was the social revolution which would destroy the avaricious bourgeoisie and its institutions of oppression. "Down with the war! Down with tsarism and capitalism! Long live the brotherhood of free men! Hail the worldwide social revolution!"105

The issue of the war effort caused an almost fatal split in the anarchist camp. Yet, paradoxically, the war itself, with its pulverizing effect on the Russian government and economy, spurred the revival of the movement, which had been showing new signs of life since 1911. An account of the anarchist reawakening in Moscow and its environs was left by a young participant named V. Khudolei, who would continue to play a significant role in the years to come.106 In 1911, a dozen students of the Moscow Commercial Institute organized an anarchist circle. They set about comparing the various forms of anarchism, using as their texts the leaflets and manifestoes still intact from the days of the revolution, as well as Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid, and Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and works by Bakunin, Stirner, Tucker, and others. In the end, the youths rejected individualist anarchism for Kropotkin's communal and pro-syndicalist brand, and in 1913 christened themselves the Moscow Group of Anarchist-Communists.

The new group began corresponding with Golos Truda in New York and with leading anarchists and syndicalists in Western Europe. Before long, the students were distributing proclamations in the factories of nearby Tula and Briansk, where they succeeded in forming tiny cells of two or three members each. They also carried literature to the textile centers northeast of Moscow and made contact with at least one new group, located in the town of Kineshma, near Ivanovo-Voznesensk, the Russian Manchester. The Kineshma circle was headed by none other than Nikolai Romanov (Bidbei, until his arrest the leader of the Petersburg Beznachal'tsy), who had escaped from Siberia and was now preaching his violent creed under the nom de guerre of Stenka Razin. Bidbei circulated anarchist literature through the cotton mills and instigated several strikes, but his group was soon rounded up by the police. Bidbei was never heard from again.107

The war issue split the Moscow anarchists into two hostile groups. Unlike their colleagues abroad, however, most of the Muscovites remained loyal to Kropotkin and his "defensist" associates. The antimilitarist minority followed the example of other disillusioned Kropotkinites by forsaking the Khleb i Volia school for Anarcho-Syndicalism. When anarchist cells sprang up in the large factories of the Zamoskvorechie district and within three Moscow trade unions (the printers, leather workers, and railwaymen), the syndicalists supplied them with leaflets calling for the transformation of the "imperialist" war into a social revolution. During the autumn of 1916, the anti-militarists planned a street demonstration with black banners, but their efforts were foiled by the police.

Despite this setback, the anarchist tide was rising swiftly. Russia's ramshackle war machine had suffered a series of disasters which undermined the morale of the troops -- many of whom were being sent to the front without arms -- and produced extensive disaffection at home. The bureaucracy, that mainstay of the empire, crumbled under the incompetent leadership of Rasputin's appointees. The overtaxed system of transportation was breaking down. In the cities, supplies of food and fuel dwindled to precarious levels, and in the villages, the peasants were beginning to stir, grieved by the senseless slaughter of their uniformed sons. Radical slogans reappeared and grumbling was audible everywhere. By the end of 1916, a second storm was gathering.


Notes

1 Anarchism was an expression of the "pragmatic revolt" against poetical and social theory manifested in Europe around the turn of the century. See W. Y. Elliott, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York, 28); and H. Stuart Hughs, Consciousness and Society: the Reconduction of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York, 1958).

2 Chernoe Znamia, No. 1, December 1905, p. 1.

3 Bidbei, O Liutsifere, p. 10.

4 A---------, Burevestnik, No. 4, 30 October 1906, p. 3.

5 Bakunin, Oeuvres, I, 91; Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, I, 189.

6 Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, III, 455.

7 Pis'ma M. A. Bakunina, p. 471.

8 Bakunin, Oeuvres, III, 92.

9 Ibid., III, 95.

10 ibid., III, 89.

11 Ibid., IV, 477.

12 Bakunin, Izbrannye sochineniia, I, 237.

13 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 432-433.

14 Eugene Pyziur, The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin (Milwaukee, 1955), p. 141.

15 Bakunin, Oeuvres, v, 135.

16 Ibid., V, 144. On this point, Bakunin may well have been influenced by Gracchus Babeuf, with whose work he was familiar. In his journal, Le Tribun du Peuple, 30 November 1795, Babeuf wrote that "education is a monstrosity when it is unequal, when it is the exclusive inheritance of one group of society ... it easily succeeds in strangling, deceiving, stripping, and enslaving."

17 Ibid., V, 145.

18 Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, p. 86.

19 Kropotkin, "Revolutionary Government," in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 247.

20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (2 vols., Moscow, 1962), I, 44.

21 Ibid., I, 106-117.

22 Listok gruppy Beznachalie, No. 1, April 1905, p. 2.

23 Marx and Engels, Selected Works, I, 386.

24 See, for example, Khleb i Volia, No. 15, February 1905, p. 2; No. 23, October 1905, p. 7; and Golos Anarkhista, No. 1, 11 March 1918, p. 2.

25 Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leipzig, 19l8), p. 520; Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 281.

26 Alexandre Zevaes, Histoire du socialisme et du communisme en France de 1871 a 1947 (Paris, 1947), pp. 202-206.

27 Levine, Syndicalism in France, pp. 101-102.

28 Fernand Pelloutier, Histoire des bourses du travail (Paris, 1902). p. ix.

29 Louis, Histoire de mouvement syndical, I, 263.

30 Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 33.

31 Ibid., p. 18.

32 Levine, Syndicalism in France, p. 155.

33 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Glencoe, 1950), p. 48.

34 Ibid., pp. 89-90, 200-201.

35 Edouard Dolleans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier (2 vols., Paris, 1936-1946), ii, 126-128.

36 Elliott, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics, p. 122.

37 Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 29. The same hostility towards politicians and intellectuals was displayed in many countries besides France. On England, Germany, and the United States, respectively, see Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom (New York, 1919), p. 81n; Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York, 1952), pp. 126-128; and Paul F. Brissenden, The I.W.W.: a Study of American Syndicalism (2nd edn., New York, 1957), pp. viii-ix.

38 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 371-372.

39 Arthur P. Mendel, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 23. Cf. the similar observations by the Populist writers Kablits and Vorontsov, in Richard Pipes, "Narodnichestvo: A Semantic Inquiry," Slavic Review, XXIII (September 1964), 449-453.

40 Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 539, 800.

41 G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniia (24 vols., Leningrad, 1923-1927), n, 77. Raznochintsy was the term which designated the "men of different classes" (except the nobility) who made up the Russian intelligentsia in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

42 Ibid. Cf. Plekhanov's address to the Second International in Paris in July 1889: "The strength and selflessness of our revolutionary ideologists might suffice in a struggle against the tsar as an individual, but would not be enough to triumph over tsarism as a political system. In the opinion of the Russian Social Democrats, therefore, the task of our revolutionary intelligentsia amounts to the following: it must master the views of contemporary scientific socialism, spread them among the workers, and with the aid of the workers capture the stronghold of the autocracy by storm. The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as a revolutionary movement of the workers. There is no other way, nor can there be!" Ibid., IV, 54.

43 S. N. Prokopovich, "Otvet na broshiuru Aksel'roda 'K voprosu o sovremennykh zadachakh i taktika russkikh sotsial-demokratov'," in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, xn, 501-502.

44 Peterburzhets, Ocherk peterburzhskogo rabochego dvizheniia, p. 81. On the tensions that existed between labor and the intelligentsia in St. Petersburg, see Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

45 Machajski's wife, Vera, has left a handwritten account of her husband's life up to the time of his escape from Aleksandrovsk prison in 1903. The manuscript is in the private collection of Max Nomad in New York City. On Machajski's life, see also Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues, p. 104; Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (65 vols., Moscow, 1926-1947), xiii (1929), 64-66; A. Shetlikh, "Pamiati V. K. [Vatslav Konstantinovich] Makhaiskogo," Izvestiia, 24 February 1926, P. 4; and P. A. [Petr Arshinov], "Pamiati V. K. Makhaiskogo," Delo Truda, No. 11, April 1926, pp. 5-8.

48 A. Vol'skii [pseudonym of Machajski], Umstvennyi rabochii (3 vols, in 1, Geneva, 1904-1905), II, 41-42. A good exposition of Machajski's ideas is presented by a former disciple, Max Nomad, in Aspects of Revolt (New York, 1959), chapter 5, and Rebels and Renegades (New York, 1932), pp. 206-208. Another able summary is Marshall S. Shatz, "Anti-Intellectualism in the Russian Intelligentsia: Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Jan Waclaw Machajski," unpublished essay, The Russian Institute, Columbia University (1963), pp. 52-81. Also see Ivanov-Razumnik, Chto takoe makhaevshchina? (St. Petersburg, 1908); N- Syrian, Makhaevshchina (Moscow and-fceningrad, 1931); P. A. Berlin, Apostoly anarkhii: Bakunin -- Kropotkin -- Makhaev (Petrograd, n.d. l*917]), pp. 28-31; D. Zaitsev, "Marksizm i makhaevshchina," Obrazovanie, 1908, No. 3, pp. 35-71; M. Ravich-Cherkasskii, Anarkhisty (Kharkov, 1929), pp. 47-60; and L. Kulczycki, Anarkhizm v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 80-90. There is a brief but interesting summary of Machajski's views by his wife: "Ian-Vatslav Makhaiskii, 1866 27/XII-1926 19/II," manuscript in Nomad's private collection.

47 Jan Waclaw Machajski, "An Unfinished Essay in the Nature of a Critique of Socialism," unpublished manuscript (written in Paris in 1911), pp. 16-17.

48 A. Vol'skii, Bankrotstvo sotsializma XIX stoletiia (n.p. [Geneva], 1905), p. 30; Umstvennyi rabochii, in, part 2, pp. 9-24; Burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia i rabochee delo (n.p. [Geneva], 1905), p. 25.

49 Rabochii Zagovor, No, 1, September-October 1907, p. 75.

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

51 Rabochii Zagovor, No. 1, pp. 58-63; Umstvennyi rabochii, I, 30.

52 Leo Trotzki, Mein Leben (Berlin, 1930), p. 125.

53 Buntar', No. 1, 1 December 1906, pp. 30-31; Al'manakh, p. 7; Syrkin, Makhaevshchina, pp. 7-8, 65; Gorev, in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii, III, 525; Genkin, Krasnaia Letopis', 1927, No. 1, pp. 186-190; Byloe, 1918, No. 9, pp. 171-172; Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, XIII, 66. Machajski's chief popularizer was an SR Maximalist named Evgenii Lozinskii. See his Chto zhe takoe, nakonets, intelligentsiia? (St-Petersburg, 1907).

54 Burevestnik, No. 10-11, March-April 1908, p. 31.

55 Ibid., No. 8, November 1907, p. 9.

56 Bidbei, O Liutsifere, p. 1.

57 Ibid., p. 7.

58 Ibid., pp. 11-24.

59 Ibid., pp. 27-28. Cf. A. Bidbei, O revoliutsii i o kazarmennykh do-brodeteliakh gospod Tuporylovykh (n.p. [Paris?], 1904), another vicious attack on the Social Democrats. (Tuporylov -- "Hard-Snout" -- was a Pseudonym of Tsederbaum-Martov, the Menshevik leader.)

60 Listki "Khleb i Volia", No. 1, 30 October 1906, p. 5.

61. Vetrov, Anarkhizm: ego teoriia i praktika (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 31. Knizhnik-Vetrov later abandoned revolutionary anarchism for a modified form of Tolstoyanism which advocated a decentralized parliamentary republic. See I. S. Knizhnik, Podgotovka k uchreditel'nomu sobraniiu (Petrograd, 1917).

62 Khleb i Volia, No. 17, May 1905, p. 7.

63 K. Orgeiani, O revoliutsii i revoliutsionnom pravitel'stve (London, 1905), p. 14.

64 Orgeiani, O rabochikh soiuzakh, p. 5; Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 9, March 1907, pp. 2-5.

65 Orgeiani, O rabochikh soiuzakh, pp. 4-5. Though apparently influenced by Machajski, Orgeiani rejected his belief that the intelligentsia comprised a separate class with its own ideology, and denied that mental labor was easier to perform than manual labor, as Machajski affirmed. Orgeiani, Ob intelligentsii (London, 1912), pp. 10-31.

66 Khleb i Volia, No. 12-13, October-November 1904, p. 8.

67 Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 1, 30 October 1906, p. 8.

68 Raevskii, Burevestnik, No. 8, November 1907, p. 4.

69 Raevskii, ibid., No. 12, July 1908, pp. 5-7; No. 15, March 1909, p. 24.

70 Korn, Revoliutsionnyi sindikalizm i sotsialisticheskie partii, pp. 3-6, and Revoliutsionnyi sindikalizm i anarkhism, pp. 6-9. Cf. Zabrezhnev's review of Kozlovskii's Ocherki sindikalizma vo Frantsii, in Listki "Khleb i Volia", No. 16, 7 June 1907, pp. 4-6.

71 Korn, Revoliutsionnyi sindikalizm i anarkhizm, p. 11; Khleb i Volia (Paris), No. 1, March 1909, p. 31. Cf. Korn, Rabochii Mir, No. 1, February 1914, pp. 3-5. A similar argument was presented a decade later by Aleksei Borovoi, an Anarchist-Individualist who had come to support the syndicalist position: "Theory does not subjugate the movement, but in the movement theories are born and pass away." Syndicalism, he said, was not a rational Utopia but the spontaneous expression of proletarian self-consciousness, emerging directly from life itself. A. Borovoi, Anarkhizm (Moscow, 1918), pp. 55-58.

72 Their principal works are L. S. Kozlovskii, Ocherki sindikalizma vo Frantsii (Moscow, 1907), and Sotsial'noe dvizhenie v sovremennoi Frantsii (Moscow, 1908); A. Nedrov, Rabochii vopros (St. Petersburg, 1906); and the series of books published by V. A. Posse under the general title of Biblioteka rabochego (n.p. [St. Petersburg], 1905-1906).

73 Kozlovskii, Sotsial'noe dvizhenie, pp. xvi-xviii.

74 Kozlovskii, Ocherki sindikaliztna vo Frantsii, p. vi.

75 ibid., pp. 76-78.

76 Ibid., pp. vi-x.

77 Kozlovskii, Sotsial'noe dvizhenie, p. xxix. Lenin, it may be noted in passing, thought Sorel a "well-known muddlehead" (izvestnyi putanik). Lenin, Sochineniia, XIII, 239.

78 Kozlovskii, Ocherki sindikalizma vo Frantsii, pp. iii, 81.

79 D. N., Listki "Khleb i Volia," No. 17, 21 June 1907, p. 5.

80 Novyi Mir, No. 1, 15 October 1905, p. 6.

81 Ibid., p. 10.

82 D. I. Novomirskii, Chto takoe anarkhizm? (n.p., 1907), p. 37.

83 Novyi Mir, No. 1, 15 October 1905, pp. 4, 10.

84 Ibid., p. 8.

85 Ibid.

86 See E. Chapelier and G. Marin, Anarchists and the International Language, Esperanto (London, 1908), a report to the International Congress of Anarchists at Amsterdam, August 1907. The Amsterdam Congress decided, however, that further study was required before Esperanto could be adopted as the official international language. See Resolutions approuvees par le Congress Anarchiste tenu a Amsterdam, Aout 24-31, 1907 (London, 1907), p. 12.

87 Golos Ssyl'nykh i Zakliuchennykh Russkikh Anarkhistov, No. 1, November 1913, p. 6.

88 G. B. Sandomirskii, V nevole: ocherki i vospominahiia (3rd edn., Moscow, 1923).

89 M. Berezin, Fun keyten tsu frayhayt (New York, 1916).

90 "Protest" of the Bratstvo Vol'nykh Obshchinnikov (leaflet, Paris, n.d.), Columbia Russian Archive.

91 Boris Yelensky, In the Struggle for Equality: the Story of the Anarchist Red Cross (Chicago, 1958); P. A. Kropotkin i ego uchenie, p. 336; Anarkhist, No. 1, 10 October 1907, pp. 11-13. Yelensky was secretary of the Anarchist Red Cross in the United States. See also V Pomoshch' -- Der Hilf-Ruf (London, 1911-1912), organ of the Anarchist Red Cross in London, published in Russian and Yiddish. An Anarchist Red Cross was also established inside Russia in 1906 or 1907.

92 See, for example, Golos Ssyl'nykh i Zakliuchennykh Russkikh Anarkhistov (organ of the Anarchist Red Cross of New York), No. 1, November 1913, p. 7; No. 2, October 1914, pp. 15-16. Kropotkin vehemently condemned the repressions in a report to the British Parliament: Prince Kropotkin, The Terror in Russia (London, 1909).

93 Knizhnik, Krasnaia Letopis', 1922, No. 4, p. 42.

94 The announcements of some of the rallies are in the Bund Archives and the Columbia Russian Archive.

95 Delo Truda, No. 75, March-April 1933, p. 8; Freedom (New York), 18 March 1933, p. 2.

96 Rogdaev served as a propagandist in Briansk, Nezhin, and Ekaterinoslav in 1903, when the anarchist movement in Russia was born, and fought behind the barricades in the Moscow uprising of December 1905. N. Makhno, "Nad svezhei mogiloi t. N. Rogdaeva," Probuzhdenie, No. 52-53, November-December 1934, pp. 21-31. In 1909, he brought together an invaluable collection of documents and personal reminiscences of the movement from 1903 to 1908: Al'manakh: sbornik po istorii anarkhicheskogo dvizheniia v Rossii.

97 The Columbia Russian Archive houses a number of leaflets and declarations arising out of this controversy.

98 "K tovarishcham" (manuscript, Paris, 1914), Columbia Russian Archive; A. Kochegarov (Karelin), "Po povodu predstoiashchego mezhdunarodnogo s"ezda anarkhistov-kommunistov," Golos Truda (New York), 1 January 1914, pp. 3-4.

99 See the Bulletin du Congres Anarchiste International, No. 1, May 1914, and No. 2, July 1914, edited by Schapiro in London.

100 Alexander Schapiro to Rudolf Grossmann, 13 July 1914, Ramus Archive.

101 Peter Kropotkin, "A Letter on the Present War," Freedom (London), October 1914, pp. 76-77; Lebedev, P. A. Kropotkin, pp. 70-71; P. A. Kropotkin i ego uchenie, pp. 161-166. According to Kropotkin's daughter, his hostility towards Germany was so intense that he sorely regretted that his age prevented him from joining the French army. Interview with Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, New York City, 10 March 1965.

102 P. A. Kropotkin i ego uchenie, pp. 341-343, contains the "Manifesto of the Sixteen."

103 "Zaiavlenie-Protest," typewritten declaration of Russian anarchists in Paris, Columbia Russian Archive; Nabat (Geneva), No. 5, April 1916, pp. 1-8. The latter includes protests against the war from anarchists in such far-flung countries as the United States, Bulgaria, and Australia.

104 Maria Korn, it may be noted, remained loyal to Kropotkin on the war issue.

105 "Otvet," leaflet of the Geneva Group of Anarchist-Communists (1916), Columbia Russian Archive; Put' k Svobode, No. 1, May 1917, pp. 8-11; cf. the protest of the Zurich Group of Anarchist-Communists, and Roshchin's leaflet, "Trevozhnyi Vopros," both in the Columbia Russian Archive, and Alexandre Ghe, Lettre ouverte a P. Kropotkine (Lausanne, 1916). For a lengthier "anarchist-internationalist" critique of Kropotkin, Cherkezov, and Korn, see A. Ge, Put' k pobede (Lausanne, 1917). The Bolshevik attacks on Kropotkin and his "defensist" sympathizers were, of course, more venomous, "The foremost anarchists of the entire world," wrote Lenin in Socialism and the War, "have disgraced themselves no less than the opportunists by their social chauvinism (in the spirit of Plekhanov and Kautsky) in the war." Lenin, Sochineniia, XVIII, 204-205. According to Trotsky, the "superannuated anarchist" Kropotkin had disavowed everything he had been teaching for almost half a century, without foreseeing "how a conquering France would humble herself before American bankers." Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (3 vols, in 1, Ann Arbor, 1957), I, 230; II, 179.

106 V. Khudolei, "Anarkhicheskie techeniia nakanune 1917 g.," in Mikhailu Bakuninu, pp. 314-322.

107 It is possible (though not likely) that this Nikolai Romanov was not in fact Bidbei. According to Maria Korn, Bidbei remained in prison after 1906 until liberated by the February Revolution of 1917. Max Nettlau, "Anarchistische Ideen in Russland und ihr Verhaltnis zu den revolutionaren Bewegungen," handwritten manuscript, p. 310 (reverse side), Nettlau Archive.