“The more frustrated I am in what I’m doing, the more my hatred grows. It’s impossible to create anything here. It’s all a waste. One must first destroy this system which keeps people from living as humans. These people are like animals because they don’t know another way. Life in Russia corrupts them. You can’t survive here without the basest instincts. Remember we studied this! It’s natural selection. Here only the lowlife and parasites survive, the blockheads and boors. We need to alter life itself, down to the bare bones. This whole rotten system has to go. Yes, I hate this unjust world. Now my direction is clear!”
Thus, Lydia resolved to become a professional revolutionary.
“My darling,” she writes in late 1904. “Once again I feel strength and confidence in myself and my future. All the hesitations and depression are in the past. I often revisit in memory our Venice and the countless times I asked myself if I acted wisely then. And now I’m happy I made the right choice. And I know, my beloved, that you’ll support me.”
The following year, with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War and growing mass restlessness, Lydia decided she must take her place among those leading the Russian people against tsarism. She traveled to Switzerland, home to the headquarters of all the radical parties, and on the road from Petersburg sent Fritz an ebullient letter. “There’s revolution in the air at last! We, the entire Russian intelligentsia, believe and hope the Japanese will give it to the Russians. A defeat will shake the people’s trust in the government. All around us is discontent and a weakening State. Great moments in history come only once in a lifetime. Glorious revolutions only once in a century. What bliss to live to see it, to prepare it, to be part of it! Long live the revolution!”
She was closest to the Socialist Revolutionary Party and spent almost all of 1905 in Geneva, renting a room in the very same building that housed their headquarters. She met Party leaders and waited impatiently to return to her homeland with an important assignment. She frequented the circle of known revolutionaries, was friends with the radicals Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Vera Figner, and also got to know Vladimir Burtsev, activist and scholar, who would expose the double agent Yevno Azef. Burtsev really impressed her and she didn’t suspect the role he’d play in her fate. She was 33. She was happy to find her life’s purpose. Her letters to Zurich expressed this delight in her upcoming work and a twinge of sadness that she hadn’t as yet been sent to Russia.
Finally, when the revolution was already losing steam, she traveled to Saratov, assigned to resurrect the crippled Party organization and oversee the spread of revolutionary propaganda. She was also to supervise the preparation for land expropriations and peasant revolts. The Party directives called for immediate initiation of local riots, which would boil over into a full-blown revolution. From 1906 to 1908, Lydia was the Party representative in the Saratov province.
At first her letters from this place on the Volga were optimistic. Party membership inspired her. “It’s so important to feel yourself a part of something big, important, and meaningful. I’m happy as I never was before. If I pay for this for my life, that’s a small price to pay for what I now feel.”
The chance to be rid of one’s ego, to give it up, to meld into a great communal endeavor, gave meaning to her existence. She thought she had found what she was striving for all these years. “My family is my comrades. No matter where I am, I’m part of one great family—the Party. Most likely in this sense of belonging, of kinship, I’ve finally discovered what I was looking for all my life.”
As had Fritz, she compared this experience to a religious ecstasy. “Yes, indeed we truly resemble first century Christians—the same firm faith in the approaching, joyous salvation of the world, the same readiness to sacrifice, the same denial of the ego, of the philistine, of material things, of children, of everything that detracts from the grand idea. The difference being that religion is a lie and revolution, the truth!”
In a letter of 2 May, 1906, she described a boat trip along the Volga for an International Workers’ Day picnic on an island. “We returned at night. There was a huge moon, and my darling, I suddenly remembered our Venice and that moon of ours! And what an aching sadness welled up in me. I burst into tears. My comrades began to make fun of me and we broke into revolutionary songs. I tingled from tip to toe! My beloved! We’re so far from one another! And so close!”
At the end of May she reported excitedly about an assassination attempt on the Saratov prison’s warden. But in her next letter she sounded pensive. The accused, a 17-year-old apprentice to a metal worker in the railroad shops where Lydia’s comrades distributed proclamations, had failed. “Shatalov, the warden, recovered and got promoted and went to work for Prime Minister Stolypin. The prison has a new warden. They hung the boy. So now I can’t stop thinking—is this why that child was born and lived out his 17 years? He’s truly a hero and won’t be forgotten by progressive Russia. One day they’ll erect a monument to him, but I can’t bear to think of his last moments before the gallows. And what if he repented of his act? How terrible it was then for him to die!”
Still, in the following letter, Lydia cast off all her doubts. Her conscience troubled her for being a crybaby and that her faith was shaken. Once again she threw herself into revolutionary work. In the summer of 1906, she was sent by the Party to spread propaganda in the Atkarsk district of Saratov province. She was able to regulate the publication and distribution of leaflets and then became involved in the delivery of weapons and the organization of expropriations.
On 1 October, 1906, Lydia, euphoric, writes to Zurich from Atkarsk about the destruction of landed estates. “Expropriations going on throughout the whole province! Our people are the most marvelous on earth! Its soul is as close to Kropotkin’s anarchism as they come. Total disregard for the law, no understanding whatsoever of this word. The expropriations proceed so simply, with the effortlessness of those who have no compunctions when it comes to property, theirs and others, only communist instincts.”
But soon after, her disenchantment deepened. By the minute she awaited the start of a universal revolution. Her task was to organize militant peasant divisions and stir up revolts, but not only didn’t the revolution take hold, on the contrary, it burned out. Prime Minister Stolypin instilled order with his ruthless measures and formulated reforms. Because of the work of double agents, they arrested revolutionaries en masse.
“The snow’s gone,” she writes in March 1907, “but instead of revolts, they’re sowing. And my heart tells me that this year there won’t be any revolution! Our program—a call for local uprisings—that’s one thing. But it seems peasant life is another story. The moment the sowing or harvest of the crop begins, the peasant loses all revolutionary zeal. Everyone, young and old, is out in the fields. All they really care about is daily survival, the here and now, not the visionary socialist republic of tomorrow.”
She began to reflect on Russian women, simple peasants, whom it was necessary to awaken to the struggle against tsarism. “I compare myself with these peasant women. They have no time to think about saving mankind, no time to worry about the people’s happiness. They have to save their own family, their children, to think about how to feed them. I want to invest all of me into trying to free them, but a doubt creeps in—what if they don’t need any part of me altogether? What sad thoughts come to me in these sleepless nights.”
In one of her next letters she talks about how the peasants confuse expropriation with looting. “They take away everything bit by bit to their homes, and the estates look like barbarians had been there. I was on such an estate—everything plundered, the pierced eyes in portraits, piles of excrement everywhere, in the most conceivable and inconceivable places. My God, how come there’s so much excrement coming from my people? I see our revolution completely differently.”
More and more she’s repelled by the brutality of events. In October of that year she writes, “They slaughtered the landowner’s entire family—two kids, a boy and a girl. Not e
ven the doctor who was with them was spared, nor the French governess, who, by the way, came from Switzerland. I try to tell myself that that’s the way it must be, that without blood and violence there are no great revolutions. But the whole point is that I must keep convincing myself. It’s so hard for me, my beloved! People carry such hatred! And now a firing squad has come from Saratov, killing peasants from the neighboring village, not really caring who’s guilty and who isn’t. And all around the hatred is growing. And again I need to tell myself we’re living in the most wonderful, uplifting times, and that this violence will be the last.”
Her apprehension about the expropriations intensified. “If this violence floods the whole country, it will be hard to stop it. For that you need even more violence. It’s horrible!”
Lydia traveled several times to Europe during her three year stay in Saratov province. In 1908, for instance, under the pseudonym Volgina, she cast the deciding vote from the Saratov organization in the Party conference in London, even making a speech there. Each time she made a trip to Switzerland and reunited with her husband, but their meetings were becoming all too brief.
In Fritz’s diary of 1908 we read of Lydia’s visit to Zurich. “We’re growing further and further apart. Again I told her I want to finally be together, that I’m prepared to work in Russia and even study Russian. After all, the great Swiss doctor Friedrich Erismann went off to claim his wife in Moscow and started a clinic there. I’m not the first or the last. We talked again about a child. The kind of marriage we have can’t go on. Her reaction: ‘“Family happiness is not for revolutionaries.’”
The ultimate unmasking of the double agent Azef not only reverberated throughout the whole Socialist Revolutionary Party, but shook Lydia’s seemingly indestructible faith in the cause of the revolution itself. Party activity practically stopped. Former comrades began to suspect each other of provocation. For Lydia, working in such circumstances became impossible and futile.
“You can’t do something if you don’t believe you’ll succeed,” she writes in 1909 from Atkarsk to Zurich. “The Party’s falling apart. Party work has stalled. Its very heart has been pierced—everyone sees only provocation in everything, no one believes anyone. What am I doing here? There are no cultured people in Atkarsk, just philistines, and you can’t really call them people. You can only find the proletariat in the big cities. Here it’s all darkness, boredom, poverty, drunkenness, right wing nationalists, filth, in a nutshell, the Russian province, which it seems you have to either blow up or escape. It’s impossible to live here. I feel old, look terrible, my hair’s getting grey. I’m wrinkled. Life’s passing me by. In three years of daily labor I’ve not brought my dream of my country’s and my people’s great future even a jot closer, not matter how I’ve tried. Among my comrades there’s constant squabbling, mutual distrust and hatred. They hate their own more than they do strangers. I have to be an arbiter in their tedious Party trials. And I’m horrified that my love for this family, which I believed I finally found, is disappearing. I can’t believe these embittered, useless people are my family.”
She lost faith not only in her Party comrades but in the peasants. “It all boils down to the fact that they don’t need any revolution. What they’re after is the good life, dull but comfortable. To fire them up for revolution you don’t need drunken pillages, but a war. And not with Japan, but something real and big that rocks the government to its very foundations, so that trouble and hatred comes to each home, so that each peasant gets a rifle. Only then can the revolution blow up Russia. But will there be that revolution of which we dreamed, which we prepared, for whose sake we sacrificed ourselves and everyone around?”
Lydia sank into a deep depression.
“I’m still stuck here, waiting for something, but my escape from this hateful town, where nothing happens and will never happen, is long overdue. I’m like Firs who’s left behind in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—everyone’s gone, but they forgot me.”
She tried again to go on with her medical practice, but couldn’t. “I have no medical books here, and not enough experience. I didn’t turn out a revolutionary or a doctor. I’m left with nothing.”
Profoundly distraught, she traveled again to Switzerland in early 1909. “Maybe, it’s not at all about the people’s happiness or revolution, maybe, I simply wanted to be happy in the one life given me and was ready to sacrifice myself for the sake of personal happiness? So then, how can we call it a ‘sacrifice’? Sometimes it seems I got all knotted up in myself, in my life—in everything. Fritz, my beloved, I’m in a bad way. Really bad. I mean emotionally. As for my body, it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
Lydia Kochetkova went for the last time to Switzerland for treatment and again stayed at the Marbach sanatorium on Lake Boden. But the stay was brief. Flight from herself became a way of life. She couldn’t explain to Fritz her decision to return to Russia. Nor, it seems, to herself. After visiting his wife in the sanatorium, Fritz writes, “Lydia can’t possibly get back to herself after all that’s happened in the last years. She looks terrible.”
In any event, on 1 July, 1909, Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova crossed the border of the Russian empire and was arrested on the spot.
Following a brief imprisonment, she was exiled for three years to Arkhangelsk province, initially to the village of Ustvashka. In her first letters from there one can still detect a note of pride. For the Russian intellectuals, arrest, hard labor or exile traditionally served as a kind of Communion. But all too soon her tone changed.
“I have much time now to reflect on my life,” she writes in September, 1909, from Ustvashka. “Here it’s the same as all over Russia—dirt, backwardness, drunkenness, violence. The other day a neighbor stabbed his wife. Each year, in every village, someone gets killed. We worshiped the people, but they’re werewolves. Why love them? And the exiles are contentious, hostile, and hate each other. There’s not a drop of faith left in me, least of all in the revolution. Actually I feel only dread. What if the revolution really happened? We made the mess and it’s for our children and grandchildren to clean it up. Sometimes I think it’s just as well I have no child. You see, I’m not in a very good mood. My letters to you are all I can hold on to. I’m drowning.”
In the winter she was transferred to Pinega, where she contracted typhus. Fritz rushed off to her in this remote exile. He traveled through Moscow and Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, and from there six more days by sled.
And again, as so often before, their time together brought no joy. When he left she wrote, “Why do we love each other more when we’re apart? Tell me!”
We know from Fritz’ diary that for him this visit was a turning point in his relationship to his wife.
On route to Moscow he makes this entry: “I no longer have any illusions. We do not have and cannot have any real closeness—letters are one thing—but life’s something completely different. We’re close only with thousands of kilometers between us. Probably Lydia’s a certain kind of woman—a woman wired for self destruction and not the continuation of life. All her life she’s been destroying herself and dragging down everyone around her. Once she and I read Russian novels about superfluous people. She’s one of them. I can’t bear it. I’m a part of life and life’s a part of me. I must give her up. I’ve never felt such bitterness and such pain.”
Then and there he sent a letter from Moscow telling her he wanted to break off the relationship. “Lydia, I’m beside myself. I have to let you go and follow my own path. I’m healthy, not old yet. I want a nest, comfort, a family. At night I want to come home. We’ll never have this together. We have to let each other go.”
Fritz asked for a divorce. She agreed but kept writing to him because these letters were the last thing left to her. This blow coincided with another blow of fate from which she was unable to recover.
It came out in Pinega that Burstev, whom Lydia had greatly admired, circulated a letter abroad accusing her of being a provocateur and working for the t
sarist secret police.
“I can only think of how vile people are,” she tells Fritz in despair. “I would have born everything from my enemies. But to be knocked down by my own kind? I thought I had found a family among my comrades, but instead I found treachery and slander. My whole life is destroyed, everything I held sacred—sullied and debased. As if my very soul were trampled and smeared. I can’t go on. I don’t want to. I’ve nothing left to believe in. I do not want to and cannot go on.”
Lydia begged her former husband to contact Burtsev in Paris and clear up this monstrous misunderstanding. Fritz wrote to him, but it’s not known if Burstev ever answered.
She felt cornered. “People shun me like a leper. All the exiles turn away from me. Around me there’s only contempt and hatred. How can one live when everyone hates you? But maybe this hatred is a punishment for the hatred I felt for my enemies. So now I’m for my comrades the enemy. What should I do? Should I forgive everyone everything? No, I can’t do that. Anyhow, I have no strength left for forgiveness or hate. Should I hang myself? But that won’t prove my innocence.”
She resolved to break for good with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been her faith and truth.
After exile there was no place for her to go. She had no home. No one was waiting for her anywhere. In 1911 she arrived in Moscow from Pinega and stayed at her estranged brother Vyacheslav’s, with whom she had once broken all ties. Her mother was living there too.
Lydia continued sending anguished letters to Zurich.
With each letter she seemed to be closing the door on her life.
“Life passes and I still don’t know why I came into this world. I gave nothing to anyone. I’m worthless. I lost faith in myself. I don’t belong among people. Not even the closest ones. I start the day trading curses with my mother. And my brother. And his wife. With my mother it hurts the most. There’s no bridge between us, not even the tiniest sliver. Loneliness. Old age. I’m 40, but I look 60. She’s 60 and looks every bit 80. How awful when it suddenly hits you that at least she has me and Vyacheslav, distant and alien, but still her own children. But what and whom do I have? No one. And there’ll be no one any more. My one wish is to crawl away as far as possible from people and quietly croak.”
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