The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  When the reactionary professor Elie Cyon had roused his students to riot a year or two earlier, forcing the closure of the university for several months, the tsar had simply dispatched the outspoken academic to Paris as a privy councillor, and the tension had been defused. Recent protests, however, had incurred a more extreme and confrontational response, and none more so than the funeral of Pavel Chernyshev. A medical student who had been arrested in error, he had subsequently died from tuberculosis due to the appalling conditions in which he was held. While crowds chanted an elegiac verse hastily composed by Machtet, Chernyshev’s open coffin was processed around sites symbolic of the tsar’s infamous penal system: courts, police headquarters and prisons.

  In the past, the tsarist administration had paid lip service, at least, to the basic dignities of political prisoners, but the time for such indulgence was now past. On direct instructions from the tsar, the words ‘an honourable fighter for a sacred cause’ were excised from the dead man’s grave. ‘A great judgement day’ was coming, his outraged mourners proclaimed in reaction, when the thin crowds to whom they usually proselytised would ‘be transformed into tens, even hundreds, of thousands, who, with weapons in hand, will go out into the square to judge the executioners, torturers, robber barons and exploitative landowners.’ The authorities, however, moved swiftly to ensure that the cataclysm would be indefinitely postponed, with the Third Section stepping up its repression.

  Having struggled against mounting odds to maintain the Chaikovskyists’ links with the peasantry, frustration now drove Sergei Kravchinsky to join the exodus of fugitive dissidents. His first stop was Paris, as it had been for Chaikovsky, but his final destination was to be not some spurious heaven on earth but a war zone: Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the imposition of onerous taxes by the Ottoman Empire had provoked a popular revolt in which he meant to hone his skills as a militant revolutionary. While the tsar’s generals hung back, hamstrung by factional wrangling over the geopolitical complexities of engagement in the Balkans, Kravchinsky would plunge in, sensing an opportunity to seed a socialist future in lands liberated from Turkish misrule.

  Departing Paris in August 1876 with Klements as his sole companion, Kravchinsky crossed from northern Italy into war-torn Bosnia, where his military training promptly earned him the command of a rebel division’s artillery: a single cannon. His excitement was to be short-lived, however. Marooned in a landscape of suffering, rendered toxic by a cycle of massacres perpetrated by Ottoman irregulars against the Bosniacs and avenged by them on the Turkish population, Kravchinsky felt the futility of his predicament deeply. Before long his pride would take a further battering: confronted by a steep hill, the rebels had no choice but to bury their cannon, while a puffed Kravchinsky – who had been famed among the bookish Chaikovsky Circle for his outstanding physical prowess and hardiness – had to be carried piggyback over the ridge by his commanding officer.

  Contradictory messages filled his letters to Russia and his reports to Lavrov. In one letter he summons colleagues to the fight, then declares that ‘I won’t start calling comrades over from Russia until I have been convinced with my own eyes. I’ve become very sceptical.’ The Bosniacs are ‘a brave, decisive and cunning people’, but the insurgents ‘a gang of ordinary bandits’. ‘There isn’t even the faintest whiff of socialism here,’ he claims, shortly before opining to another correspondent that ‘You could lead socialist propaganda here wonderfully.’ The contradictions suggest a man unsure of how best to brazen out the terrible reality of his disappointment, yet all too alive to the risks of defeatism. The candid appraisal of the liberation movement he has promised to Forward! cannot be delivered, he admits, until ‘it’s all over, because it would be counterproductive to tell the whole truth now. It has to be inflated for the sake of politics.’

  Insofar as Kravchinsky’s intention in Bosnia had been to convince those he had left behind in Russia that ‘we have to take up, not the pen, but the knife’, he had failed. His adventure ended with a brief spell in a deafeningly noisy and brutal Turkish gaol, about which he remained silent until many years later. The one saving grace, however, had been the friendships formed with members of the Italian contingent, among them the sons of the legendary Garibaldi, who like him had seen in the Balkan liberation struggle the perfect testing ground for revolutionary action.

  While the insurgency of the nationalist Risorgimento remained a touchstone for Europe’s revolutionaries, however, the new imperative since the watershed of 1871 was to promote the creed of internationalist socialism. ‘It was on the cadaver of the Commune – fecund in its ruins – that we pledged ourselves to the struggle between the old spirit and the new,’ wrote one member of the Italian movement, ‘and it was from the blood of the slain Communards that the omens were drawn.’ Foremost among the promulgators of this inspiring vision was the twenty-four-year-old Errico Malatesta, and whilst he had no personal experience of the Paris uprising to offer, he provided Kravchinsky with a living link to Bakunin, who had otherwise passed beyond reach.

  From the furthest reaches of the Russian Empire in Asia to the southernmost point of Europe, where African and Latin blood mingled, the 1860s and 70s seemed to breed revolutionaries in a recognisably similar mould. The son of a propertied factory owner, Malatesta’s early childhood had been blighted by respiratory illnesses that led doctors to predict his early death and left him vulnerable to infections throughout his life. Sickness, though, had not subdued a stubborn, contrarian streak that, subjected to the ‘cretinising and corrupting’ dogma of a religious boarding school in Naples, bred a spirit of resistance. A confirmed atheist and anti-authoritarian by the age of fourteen, only his youth saved him from prosecution for a disrespectful letter written to the new king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II. Next came medical studies, a characteristic first step for guilt-stricken young humanitarians on the road to political activism, the flamboyance of which, in Malatesta’s case, led to his expulsion from the course and flight from Italy in search of a mentor. Having crossed the freezing St Gotthard Pass at the coldest time of the year, he arrived at Bakunin’s home in Switzerland penniless and with a fever running so high that the Russian felt obliged to watch over his sickbed in person: he could hardly have made a more dramatic first impression.

  Defeat in the struggle for control of the International in 1873 had seen the revolutionary fervour that had sustained Bakunin through countless doomed uprisings and secret societies begin to ebb. Exhausted by the ceaseless machinations of Marx and Engels and the calumnies they poured upon him, disappointed by a world where repression had become ‘a new science taught systematically to lieutenants in military schools of all nations’, Bakunin had grown weary of pushing ‘the rock of Sisyphus against the reaction that is triumphant everywhere’. Regardless of the realities, Malatesta’s devotion was absolute. ‘It was impossible for a youth to have contact with [Bakunin] without feeling himself inflamed by a sacred fire, without seeing his own horizons broadened, without feeling himself a knight of a noble cause,’ he wrote, and took up arms as the old man’s paladin, travelling to Spain under the code name ‘Beniamino’. In 1874, he prepared an insurrection in Bologna intended to reinstate Bakunin as the revolutionary hero that he had once been. ‘I am convinced that the time of grand theoretical discourse, written or spoken, is past,’ the Russian had declared. ‘It is no longer time for ideas but for deeds and acts.’

  It must have taken a wilful blindness, by this point, not to recognise Bakunin for the corrupt husk he now was, but Malatesta was not alone in his credulity. With a certain rheumy-eyed regret for the life of aristocratic ease that he had left behind in Russia decades earlier, Bakunin was squandering more than merely his energy in the spendthrift pursuit of an old man’s folly: the refurbishment of the grand house and estate of La Baronata, on a hill overlooking Lake Locarno, the cost of which had absorbed nearly the entire sizeable inheritance of Bakunin’s eager acolyte, Carlo Cafiero. It took the young Italian’s belated realisation that h
iring picturesque milkmaids and excavating an artificial lake was not wholly essential to the creation of a revolutionary headquarters before he finally staunched his indulgence of the old rogue.

  If only to raise the spirits of their bombastic icon, and without any genuine prospect of success, the young Bakuninists had nevertheless proceeded with the Bologna plan. Unless from a sense of obligation, it is hard to explain Bakunin’s own half-hearted participation except as a craving for the kind of heroic death that could obscure the embarrassment of the Baronata fiasco and extricate him from his responsibilities to his young family. Yet when the insurrection failed to take hold, he had been grateful to elude the Italian Carabinieri, even at the price of further crushing indignity: the notorious scourge of organised religion was reduced to shaving off his locks and donning a priest’s robe to disguise his identity, while comrades had to push his capacious posterior through the door of a waiting coach.

  Undaunted, Malatesta had followed up the Bologna debacle with a similarly doomed attempt to incite insurrection in Puglia, where only five of the several hundred expected activists actually materialised. Emerging from prison with his appetite for revolutionary adventure still unabated, the summer of 1875 had seen him on a mission to Spain to stage the prison break of an anarchist who proved infuriatingly reluctant to be liberated, before he returned to join the Masonic lodge in Naples, repeating Bakunin’s mistake of a decade earlier by thinking that he could transform it into an instrument of revolutionary organisation. After such embarrassing disappointments, anyone less single-minded than the tight-framed, tousle-haired and alarmingly moustachioed Malatesta might have been chastened: instead, perfectly undeterred, he plunged headlong into the ideological quicksand of Bosnia.

  By the same count, Kravchinsky should have noted Malatesta’s unblemished record of failed insurrections and given him a wide berth. Had Kravchinsky been able to meet Bakunin for himself, while travelling through Switzerland on his way to the Balkans, perhaps his curiosity would have been satisfied, but only a few days previously age and ill health had finally claimed the sixty-two-year-old revolutionary. In Malatesta, Kravchinsky had found a surrogate who carried the conviction needed to help restore his battered faith in the possibility of a beneficent revolution. ‘We must make unceasing attempts, even if we are beaten and completely routed, one, two, ten times, even twenty times,’ Malatesta might have told his new friend, repeating words of encouragement written by Bakunin to another narodnik two years previously; ‘but if on the twenty-first time, the people support us by taking part in our revolution, we shall have been paid for all the sacrifices we will have endured.’

  With Malatesta’s first mention of an arms cache in Puglia, left buried from two years earlier, and of a new scheme to mount an insurrection near Naples, all Kravchinsky’s previous plans and promises were instantly forgotten.

  ‘We had planned to go to Montenegro together, before he had the whim of going to Italy instead,’ the earnest young Klements wrote plaintively from Berne, complaining about Kravchinsky, whom he nicknamed the ‘Bluebird’ dreamer. As Chaikovsky read the letter, the icy wind howling through the ramshackle walnut-wood walls that the ‘Godmen’ had thrown together for shelter at Cedar Vale, his baby wailing from the cold, his sympathy is likely to have been fleeting. His own predicament offered enough misery of its own, though whether the physical demands of life in Kansas or its communal nature was more taxing, he would probably have been hard put to say.

  ‘They have neither pilots nor lighthouses,’ had been how Frey described the ideal colonists he sought to recruit, since ‘everything is unexplored, everything must be discovered anew’. The ‘second-rate prairie’ on which Frey had chosen to stake out his plots yielded little to the incompetent husbandry of the colonists, however, who lacked even the skill to milk their cow, let alone produce the cheese or butter that might have made more appetising the ascetic diet of unleavened bread prescribed by the vegetarian Frey. The material challenges the group faced, however, were at least equalled by the emotional torment they suffered.

  Though a modest lifestyle was accepted as part and parcel of the struggle for a new social order, the newcomers baulked at Frey’s evangelical imperative to ‘break yourself’ in order to release the true communist within, and vigorously resisted when he urged them to renounce clothes. Mealtimes were a trial too, with anyone late to the table forbidden to eat, even if delayed by urgent community business, while the other families winced as Frey subjected his daughter to daunting tests of mathematical prowess and punished her failure with a dowsing of cold water. Maybe he considered such treatment physically beneficial, as well as character building: with quinine unaffordable, a bath of rainwater was also the proposed cure for Chaikovsky’s malaria on one occasion.

  ‘This slow, constant mockery of man’s moral liberty’ was the overriding impression that would stay with Chaikovsky, who must have dearly wished that before leaving Europe he had thought to consult Elisée Reclus’ travelogue of 1861, Voyage à la Sierra-Nevada de Sainte-Marthe. A bible for those seeking to establish communes in America (despite Reclus’ antagonism to such social experiments), it warned of the perverse tendency of utopian communities to constrain rather than encourage liberty, and their susceptibility to petty tyrants. Reclus had no time either for the utopian theories of Charles Fourier, with his wild promises and bizarre symbolism, according to which two crops at least should have flourished in Cedar Vale: the cauliflowers of free love, and the cabbages whose leaves represented illicit liaisons.

  That Frey had decided to create his own colony may have been due to his prudish distaste for the sexual antics he and Mary had encountered elsewhere. Their first taste of cooperative life, in New York, had ended when ‘hungry debauchees’ with an appetite for promiscuity had swamped the commune, and discomfort at the libertarian ethos at Reunion had similarly prompted their departure. Whether Mary agreed with his view that they had escaped ‘the most discordant and hellish life that could be imagined’, however, is an open question. As a radiant young bride, eight years earlier, she would have been entitled to expect great things of marriage to a well-connected and highly respected scientist. Even after settling in America, the prospect of being free to pursue her own ambitions as a doctor would have made the hardships endurable. Since then, though, Frey’s neglect of his wife’s romantic and libidinous needs had led her to search for satisfaction outside the marriage.

  Grigori Machtet may not have been the first to fill the gap in Mary’s heart and bed, but after his return to Russia, she had struck out desperately for independence, her brief visit to Chicago in search of a baby to adopt turning into a year’s absence. When necessity finally forced her back to Cedar Vale she had maintained her habit of free-loving, conceiving a child by her next young Russian paramour. Despite belonging to that generation of Russian radicals which had held Chernyshevsky’s writings as gospel truth, Frey’s jealousy seems to have bitten deep, and in his ever more pedantic enforcement of the community’s rules he may well have been sublimating the frustration he felt at the loss of control over his personal life. With his original partners in the foundation of Cedar Vale long gone, few of its subsequent residents were psychologically strong enough to withstand the Wednesday meetings that he still found so ‘electric, thrilling, [and] beneficent’: mutual criticism followed by enforced public confession may have been intended to clear the air, but the effect was rarely restorative.

  The commune’s manifesto had been full of fine sentiments: ‘For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do,’ it pledged. Its journal had once recorded such sentiments as being ‘like sailors throwing the baggage overboard to save the life…in order to get something to live on’, but entries had already ceased by the time of Chaikovsky’s arrival. Since then, the reality of their shipwrecked existence had become painfully apparent to everyone: it was the colonists themselves who lacked assistance, and Frey who neede
d resisting, while the ideal future to which they aspired lay so far over the horizon as to be quite fantastical. By late 1876, Chaikovsky and a chastened Malinkov had moved their families to a second shack just across the river from Frey’s own: ‘With what shame one recalls many episodes of this life,’ the leader of the ‘Godmen’ later wrote.

  Chaikovsky bridled at the grim fascination with which the other residents of Cedar Vale watched their social experiment failing, and when the Kansas authorities launched a formal investigation into the commune’s supposed immorality, the humiliation became too much. To extricate himself, though, was no easy matter. Chaikovsky had staked everything on Cedar Vale and was penniless. Reluctantly leaving his wife and child behind, he set off on foot in the hope of earning the price of their escape.

  While Chaikovsky shivered through the icy American winter and spring of 1877, Kravchinsky basked in the balmy Mediterranean climate of Naples, where he had arrived from Bosnia late the previous year. Posing as a consumptive, Abram Rubliov, he had at first attracted little attention among the other northern Europeans there for their health, during what was then the peak tourist season. Only the attentive care he received from a pair of fetching young Russian ladies prompted malicious rumours of a ménage à trois at 77 Strada Vendagliere. Far more than Italian morality was at risk, however, for one of Kravchinsky’s companions was Olympia Kutuzov, the radical activist who had married Carlo Cafiero a couple of years earlier, while the other, Natalia Smetskaya, was the ex-room-mate of Kropotkin’s Zurich friend Sofia Lavrova, now in flight from punitive exile to Siberia. And the work that preoccupied him was the composition of a pioneering manual of guerrilla warfare.