Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, rossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far nd wide among the youth. There was a time when not a eek passed without disclosing some new infamy of that rt, or even worse.
Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. ‘In ther countries,” they began to say, “men have the courage yresist. An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate ich outrages. How can we tolerate them? Let us resist, ms in hands, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; t them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and famous death at their hands, they will have to take us in mortal struggle.” At Odessa, Kovdlsky and his friends et with revolver shots the gendarmes who came one night y arrest them.
The reply of Alexander II. to this new move was the roclamation of a state of siege. Russia was divided into a umber of districts, each of them under a governor-general, ho received the order to hang offenders pitilessly. Ko- alsky and his friends — who, by the way, had killed no 1e by their shots — were executed. Hanging became the ‘der of the day. Twenty-three persons perished in two ars, including a boy of nineteen, who was caught posting revolutionary proclamation at a railway station; this act — say it deliberately — was the only charge against him. .e was a boy, but he died like a man.
Then the watchword of the revolutionists became “ self- afense:” self-defense against the spies who introduced emselves into the circles under the mask of friendship, 1d denounced members right and left, simply because they ould not be paid if they did not accuse large numbers of arsons; self-defense against those who ill-treated prisoners; 428 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST self-defense against the omnipotent chiefs of the state police.
Three functionaries of mark and two or three small spies fell in that new phase of the struggle. General Mézentsoff, who had induced the Tsar to double the sentences after the trial of the hundred and ninety-three, was killed in broad day- light at St. Petersburg; a gendarme colonel, guilty of some. thing worse than that, had the same fate at Kieff; and the governor-general of Kharkoff — my cousin, Dmitri Kropét- kin — was shot as he was returning home from a theatre. The central prison, in which the first famine strike and artificial feeding took place, was under his orders. In reality, he was not a bad man, —I know that his personal feelings were somewhat favorable to the political prisoners; but he was a weak man and a courtier, and he hesitated to inter- fere. One word from him would have stopped the ill treatment of the prisoners. Alexander II. liked him so much, and his position at the court was so strong, that his interference very probably would have been approved. “Thank you; you have acted according to my own wishes,” the Tsar said to him, a couple of years before that date, when he came to St. Petersburg to report that he had taken a peaceful attitude in a riot of the poorer population of Kharkoff, and had treated the rioters very leniently. But this time he gave his approval to the jailers, and the young men of Kharkoff were so exasperated at the treatment of their friends that one of them shot him.
However, the personality of the Emperor was kept out of the struggle, and down to the year 1879 no attempt was made on his life. The person of the Liberator of the serfs was surrounded by an aureole which protected him infinitely better than the swarms of police officials. If Alexander II. had shown at this juncture the least desire to improve the state of affairs in Russia; if he had only called in one or two!
DESPOTISM OF ALEXANDER II 429 of those men with whom he had collaborated during the re- form period, and had ordered them to make an inquiry into the conditions of the country, or merely of the peasantry; if he had shown any intention of limiting the powers of the secret police, his steps would have been hailed with enthusiasm. A word would have made him “the Libera- tor” again, and once more the youth would have-repeated Hérzen’s words: “Thou hast conquered, Galilean.” But just as during the Polish insurrection the despot awoke in him, and, inspired by Katkdff, he resorted to hanging, so now again, following the advice of his evil genius, Katkoff, he found nothing to do but to nominate special military governors — for hanging.
Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists, — the Executive Committee, — supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings, declared that war against absolutism which, after several attempts, ended in 1881 in the death of Alexander IT.
Two men, I have said already, lived in Alexander II., and now the conflict between the two, which had grown during all his life, assumed a really tragic aspect. When he met Solovidff, who shot at him and missed the first shot, he had the presence of mind to run to the nearest door, not in a straight line, but in zigzags, while Solovidff continued to fire; and he thus escaped with but a slight tearing of his overcoat. On the day of his death, too, he gave a proof of his undoubted courage. In the face of real danger he Was courageous; but he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination. Once he shot at an aide-de-camp, when the latter had made an abrupt move- ment, and Alexander thought he was going to attempt his life. Merely to save his life, he surrendered entirely all his imperial powers into the hands of those who cared uo- thing for him, but only for their lucrative positions.
430 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST He undoubtedly retained an attachment to the mother of his children, even though he was then with the Princess Yurievski-Dolgoriki, whom he married immediately after the death of the Empress. “Don’t speak to me of the Empress; it makes me suffer too much,” he more than once said to Loris Mélikoff. And yet he entirely aban- doned the Empress Marie, who had stood faithfully by his side while he was the Liberator; he let her die in the palace in neglect. A well-known Russian doctor, now dead, told his friends that he, a stranger, felt shocked at the neglect with which the Empress was treated during her last illness, — deserted, of course, by the ladies of the court, having by © her side but two ladies, deeply devoted to her, and receiy- ing every day but a short official visit from her husband, who stayed in another palace in the meantime.
When the Executive Committee made the daring attempt to blow up the Winter Palace itself, Alexander II. took a step which had no precedent. He created a sort of dicta- torship, vesting unlimited powers in Loris Mélikoff. This general was an Armenian, to whom Alexander II. had once before given similar dictatorial powers, when the bubonic plague broke out on the Lower Vélga, and Germany threat- ened to mobilize her troops and put Russia under quaran- tine if the plague were not stopped. Now that Alexander IT. saw that he could not have confidence in the vigilance © of even the palace police, he gave dictatorial powers to Loris Mélikoff, and as Mélikoff had the reputation of being a Liberal, this new move was interpreted as indicating that the convocation of a National Assembly would soon follow. As, however, no new attempts upon his life were made im- © mediately after that explosion, the Tsar regained confidence, and a few months later, before Mélikoff had been allowed to do anything, he was dictator no longer, but simply min- ister of the interior. The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during which Alexander II.
PLAN FOR A DELIBERATIVE ASSEMBLY 431 reproached himself with the reactionary character that his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, bringing Méli- koff to despair. Then he would ask his minister, ‘‘ When will your constitutional scheme be ready?” If, two days later, Mélikoff said that it was now ready, the Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Did I mention it?’ he would ask. ‘What for? We had better leave it to my successor. That will be his gift to Russia.”’
When rumors of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake something; but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. LEvery mo- ment Mélikoff expected dismissal.
In February, 1881, Mélikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II. decided that a sort of deliberative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVL., he described this gathering as an Assemblée des Notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI. before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the council of state, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a final warning by Loris Mélikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sun- day, and he was asked by Mélikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Hélene Pavlovna, who had been one of the leaders of the emancipation party in 1861), and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to the memory of the Empress Marie. He is said to have told her, “‘Je me suis décidé & convo- 432 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST quer une Assemblée des Notables.” However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been announced, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakéff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dig- nity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to con- dole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his féte. He approached Rysak6ff and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevétsky, the latter threw a bomb between himself and Alexander ik; so that both of them should be killed. They both lived but a few hours.
There Alexander II. lay upon the snow, profusely bleed- ing, abandoned by every one of his followers! All had disappeared. It was cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head with a cadet cap. And it was one of the ter- rorists, Emelidnoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts, Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II.’s life. ’ People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander IT. and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of ASSASSINATION OF ALEXANDER II 433 his complex personality, — that of a born autocrat, whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, of a man of strong passions and weak will, —it seemed that the tragedy developed with the un- avoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland. | IX IX A WILD panic ated, the court circles at St. Potersbutlll Alexander III., who, notwithstanding his colossal stature. and force, was a a very courageous man, refused to move to the Winter Palace, and retired to the palace of his| grandfather, Paul I., at Gatchina. I know that old build. | ing, planned as a Vauban fortress, surrounded by moats | and protected by watchtowers, from the tops of which secret staircases lead to the Emperor’s study. I have seen | the trap-doors in the study, for suddenly throwing an. enemy on the sharp rocks in the water underneath, and | the secret staircase leading to underground prisons and to. an underground passage which opens ona lake. All the | palaces of Paul I. had been built on a similar plan. - In the meantime, an underground gallery, supplied with automatic | electric appliances to protect it from being undermined by the revolutionists, was dug round the Anichkoff palace, i in which Alexander IIT. resided when he was heir apparent. — A secret league for the protection of the Tsar was ctartelll Officers of all grades were induced by triple salaries to join: / it, and to undertake voluntary spying in all classes of | society. Comical scenes followed, of course. Two officers, | without knowing that they Sa belonged to the league, would entice each other into a disloyal conversation, during» a railway journey, and then proceed to arrest each other, | | only to discover at the last moment that their pains had been labor lost. This league still exists in a more official — shape, under the name of Okhrana (Protection), and from | time to time frightens the present Tsar with all sorts of | concocted “dangers,” in order to maintain its existence. 3 | A still more secret organization, the Holy League, was formed at the same time, under the leadership of the brother of the Tsar, Vladimir, for the purpose of opposing the revolutionists in different ways, one of which was to kill those of the refugees who were supposed to have been the leaders of the late conspiracies. I was of this number. The grand duke violently reproached the officers of the league for their cowardice, regretting that there were none mong them who would undertake to kill such refugees; and an officer, who had been a page de chambre at the time I was in the corps of pages, was appointed by the league to carry out this particular work.
The fact is that the refugees abroad did not interfere with the work of the Executive Committee at St. Peters- ourg. To pretend to direct conspiracies from Switzerland, while those who were at St. Petersburg acted under a per- manent menace of death, would have been sheer nonsense; and as Stepniak and I wrote several times, none of us would dave accepted the doubtful task of forming plans of action without being on the spot. But of course it suited the jlans of the St. Petersburg police to maintain that they vere powerless to protect the Tsar because ail plots were levised abroad, and their spies —I know it well—amply upplied them with the desired reports.
Skobeleff, the hero of the Turkish war, was also asked © join this league, but he blankly refused. It appears tom Loris Mélikoff’s posthumous papers, part of which vere published by a friend of his in London, that when Alexander III. came to the throne, and hesitated to con- ‘oke the Assembly of Notables, Skdbeleff even made an ffer to Léris Mélikoff and Count Ignatieff (“the lying ?asha,’”’ as the Constantinople diplomatists used to nick- ‘ame him), to arrest Alexander III., and compel him to ign a constitutional manifesto; whereupon Ignatieff is said 436 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST to have denounced the scheme to the Tsar, and thus | have obtained his nomination as prime minister, in which | capacity he resorted, with the advice of M. Andrieux, the | ex-prefect of police at Paris, to various stratagems in order to paralyze the revolutionists. | If the Russian Liberals had shown anything like 4 modest courage and some power of organized action, at | that time, a National Assembly would have been convoked, From the same posthumous papers of Loris Mélikoff it | appears that Alexander III. was willing for a time to call | one. He had made up his mind to do so, and had an-| nounced it to his brother. Old Wilhelm I. supported him in this intention. It was only when he saw that the Liberals undertook nothing, while the Katkéff party was busy in the opposite direction, —M. Andrieux advising him to’ crush the nihilists, and indicating how it ought to be ee | (his letter to this effect is in the pamphlet referred to), — that Alexander III. finally resolved to declare that he would | continue to be absolute ruler of the empire. a I was expelled from Switzerland by order of the federal | | council a few months after the death of Alexander IL. | I did not take umbrage at this. Assailed by the monarchi- | cal powers on account of the asylum which Switzerland offered to refugees, and menaced by the Russian official press | with a wholesale expulsion of all Swiss governesses and ladies’ maids, who are numerous in Russia, the rulers of Switzerland, by banishing me, gave some sort of satisfac tion to the Russian police. But I very much regret, for the sake of Switzerland itself, that that step was taken. | It was a sanction given to the theory of ‘conspiracies con- cocted in Switzerland,” and it was an acknowledgment of! weakness, of which Italy and France took advantage at | once. Two years later, when Jules Ferry proposed to Italy | and Germany the partition of Switzerland, his argument EXPELLED FROM SWITZERLAND 437 ‘must have been that the Swiss government itself had ad- mitted that Switzerland was “a hotbed of international conspiracies.” This first concession led to more arrogant demands, and has certainly placed Switzerland in a far less independent position than it might otherwise have occupied. | _ The decree of expulsion was delivered to me immediately aiter I had returned from London, where I was present at an anarchist congress in July, 1881. After that congress I had stayed for a few weeks in England, writing the first articles on Russian affairs from our standpoint for the * Newcastle Chronicle.” The English press, at that time, was an echo of the opinions of Madame Novikoff, — that s, of Katkdff and the Russian state police, —and I was most happy when Mr. Joseph Cowen agreed to give me the hospitality of his paper in order to state our point of lew.
I had just joined my wife in the high mountains where jhe was staying, near the abode of Elisée Reclus, when [ was asked to leave Switzerland. We sent the little ‘uggage we had to the next railway station and went on ‘oot to Aigle, enjoying for the last time the sight of the nountains that we loved so much. We crossed the hills dy taking short cuts over them, and laughed when we dis- tovered that the short cuts led to long windings; and vhen we reached the bottom of the valley, we tramped long the dusty road. The comical incident which always omes in such cases was supplied by an English lady. A ichly dressed dame, reclining by the side of a gentleman na hired carriage, threw several tracts to the two poorly .tessed tramps, as she passed them. I lifted the tracts rom the dust. She was evidently one of those ladies who ielieve themselves to be Christians, and consider it their uty to distribute religious tracts among “ dissolute foreign- rs.” Thinking we were sure to overtake the lady at the railieee 438 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST way station, I wrote on one of the pamphlets the well-known verse relative to the rich in the kingdom of God, and similarly appropriate quotations about the Pharisees being the worst enemies of Christianity. When we came to Aigle, the lady was taking refreshments in her carriage. She evidently preferred to continue the journey in this vehicle along the lovely valley, rather than to be shut up in a stuffy railway car. lI returned her the pamphlets with politeness, saying that I had added to them something that she might find useful for her own instruction. The lady did not know whether to fly at me, or to accept the lesson with Christian patience. Her eyes expressed both impulses in rapid suc- cession.
My wife was about to pass her examination for the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Geneva University, and we settled, therefore, in a tiny town of France, Thonon, situated on the Savoy coast of the Lake of Geneva, and stayed there a couple of months.
As to the death sentence of the Holy League, a warning reached me from one of the highest quarters of Russia. Even the name of the lady who was sent from St. Peters- burg to Geneva to be the head centre of the conspiracy, became known to me. So I simply communicated the fact and the names to the Geneva correspondent of the “ Times,” asking him to publish them if anything should happen, and, I put a note to that effect in “Le Révolté.” After that I) did not trouble myself more about it. My wife did not take it so lightly, and the good peasant woman, Madame Sansaux, who gave us board and lodgings at Thonon, and) who had learned of the plot in a different way (through her| sister, who was a nurse in the family of a Russian agent), bestowed the most touching care upon me. Her cottage. was out of town, and whenever I went to town at night — sometimes to meet my wife at the railway station —she| always found a pretext to have me accompanied by her ~ PURSUED BY THE HOLY LEAGUE 439 ‘husband with a lantern. ‘‘ Wait only a moment, Monsieur ‘Kropétkin,” she would say; ‘my husband is going that ‘way for purchases, and you know he always carries a lan- ‘tern!’’ Or else she would send her brother to follow me at a distance, without my noticing it.
x In October or November, 1881, as soon as my wife had passed her examination, we removed from Thonon to London, where we stayed nearly twelve months. Few years | separate us from that time, and yet I can say that the in- tellectual life of London and of all England was quite different then from what it became a little later. Every one knows that in the forties England stood almost at the - head of the socialist movement in Europe; but during the years of reaction that followed, the great movement, which had deeply affected the working classes, and in which all that is now put forward as scientific or anarchist socialism | had already been said, came to a standstill. It was for-: gotten, in England as well as on the Continent, and what — the French writers describe as “the third awakening of the | proletarians” had not yet begun in Britain. The labors.
of the agricultural commission of 1871, the propaganda amongst the agricultural laborers, and the previous efforts of the Christian socialists had certainly done something to prepare the way; but the outburst of socialist feeling in — England which followed the publication of Henry George’s _ “Progress and Poverty ” had not yet taken place.
The year that I then passed in London was a year of — real exile. For one who held advanced socialist opinions, — there was no atmosphere to breathe in. There was no | sign of that animated socialist movement which I found | so largely developed on my return in 1886. Burns, | Champion, Hardie, and the other labor leaders were not | yet heard of; the Fabians did not exist; Morris had not — declared himself a socialist; and the trade unions, limited A YEAR OF REAL EXILE 441 in London to a few privileged trades only, were hostile to socialism. The only active and outspoken representatives of the socialist movement were Mr. and Mrs. Hyndman, with a very few workers grouped round them. They had held in the autumn of 1881 a small congress, and we used to say jokingly —but it was very nearly true — that Mrs. Hyndman had received all the congress in her house. Moreover, the more or less socialist radical movement which was certainly going on in the minds of men did not assert itself frankly and openly. That considerable number of educated men and women who appeared in public life four “years later, and, without committing themselves to social- ‘ism, took part in various movements connected with the well-being or the education of the masses, and who have ‘now created in almost every city of England and Scotland ‘a quite new atmosphere of reform and a new society of re- formers, had not then made themselves felt. They were there, of course; they thought and spoke; all the elements for a widespread movement were in existence; but, finding none of those centres of attraction which the socialist groups ‘subsequently became, they were lost in the crowd; they did not know one another, or remained unconscious of their ‘own selves.
Tchaykdévsky was then in London, and as in years past, ‘we began a socialist propaganda amongst the workers. ‘Aided by a few English workers whose acquaintance we ‘had made at the congress of 1881, or whom the prosecu- ‘tions against John Most had attracted to the socialists, we ‘went to the radical clubs, speaking about Russian affairs, ‘the movement of our youth toward the people, and socialism in general. We had ridiculously small audiences, seldom consisting of more than a dozen men. Occasionally some ‘gray-bearded Chartist would rise from the audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of work- 442 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST ers, but that now all was dead, and there was no hope of reviving it.
Mr. Hyndman had just published his excellent exposition of Marxist socialism under the title of “England for All; ” and I remember, one day in the summer of 1882, earnestly advising him to start a socialist paper. I told him what small means we had when we started “ Le Révolté,” and predicted a certain success if he would make the attempt. But so unpromising was its general outlook that even he thought the undertaking would be absolutely hopeless unless he had the means to defray all its expenses. Perhaps he was right; but when, less than three years later, he started “ Justice,” it found a hearty support among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers, and the social demo- cratic federation was an influential body. | In the summer of 1882 I spoke, in broken English, before the Durham miners at their annual gathering; I deliy- ered lectures at Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh about the Russian movement, and was received with enthusiasm, a crowd of workers giving hearty cheers for the nihilists, after the meeting, in the street. But my wife and I felt so lonely in London, and our efforts to awaken a social- ist movement in England seemed so hopeless, that in the autumn of 1882 we decided to remove again to France. We were sure that in France I should soon be arrested; but we often said to each other, ‘‘ Better a French prison than this grave.”
Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolu- tion ought to study the development of socialism in Eng- land. Evolution 7s slow; but its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress, XI WE settled once more in Thonon, taking lodgings with our former hostess, Madame Sansaux. A brother of my wife, who was dying of consumption, and had come to Switzerland, joined us.
I never saw such numbers of Russian spies as during the two months that I remained at Thonon. To begin with, as soon as we had engaged lodgings, a suspicious character, who gave himself out for an Englishman, took the other part of the house. Flocks, literally flocks of Russian spies besieged the house, seeking admission under all possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartettes in front of the house. I can imagine what wonderful reports they wrote. A spy must report. If he should merely _ say that he has stood for a week in the street without noticing anything mysterious, he would soon be put on the half-pay list or dismissed.
It was then the golden age of the Russian secret police.
Ignatieff’s policy had borne fruit. There were two or three bodies of police competing with one another, each having any amount of money at their disposal, and carrying on the boldest intrigues. Colonel Sudéikin, for instance, chief of one of the branches, — plotting with a certain Degéeff, - who after all killed him, — denounced Ignatieff’s agents to the revolutionists at Geneva, and offered to the terrorists in - Russia all facilities for killing the minister of the interior, ~ Count Tolstéy, and the Grand Duke Vladimir; adding that he himself would then be nominated minister of the interior, with dictatorial powers, and the Tsar would be entirely in his hands, This activity of the Russian police culminated, 444 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST {ater on, in the kidnapping of the Prince of Battenberg from Bulgaria.
The French police, also, were on the alert, The question, “What is he doing at Thonon?” worried them. I con- tinued to edit ‘‘Le Révolté,” and wrote articles for the ‘*En- cyclopedia Britannica’? and the “Newcastle Chronicle.” But what reports could be made out of that? One day the local gendarme paid a visit to my landlady. He had heard from the street the rattling of some machine, and wished to report that I had in my house a secret printing-press. So he came in my absence and asked the lady to show him the press. She replied that there was none and suggested that perhaps the gendarme had overheard the noise of her sewing-machine. But he would not be convinced by so prosaic an explanation, and actually compelled the landlady to sew on her machine, while he listened inside the house and outside to make sure that the rattling he had heard was the same.
‘What is he doing all day?” he asked the landlady.
“He writes.”
‘‘ He cannot write all day long.”
‘He saws wood in the garden at midday, and he takes walks every afternoon between four and five.” It was in November.
“Ah, that’s it! When the dusk is coming on?” (A la tombée de la nuit?) And he wrote in his notebook, “Never goes out except at dusk.”
I could not well explain at that time this special atten- tion of the Russian spies; but it must have had some — connection with the following. When Ignatieff was nomi- nated prime minister, advised by the ex-prefect of Paris, Andrieux, he hit on a new plan. He sent a swarm of his agents into Switzerland, and one of them undertook the publication of a paper which slightly advocated the exten- sion of provincial self-government in Russia, but whose chief A COMPROMISE 445 purpose was to combat the revolutionists, and to rally to its standard those of the refugees who did not sympathize with terrorism. This was certainly a means of sowing division. Then, when nearly all the members of the Execu- _ tive Committee had been arrested in Russia, and a couple of them had taken refuge at Paris, Ignatieff sent an agent to Paris to offer an armistice. He promised that there should be no further executions on account of the plots during the reign of Alexander II., even if those who had escaped arrest fell into the hands of the government; that _ Chernyshévsky should be released from Siberia; and that a commission should be nominated to review the cases of all those who had been exiled to Siberia without trial. On the _ other side, he asked the Executive Committee to promise to make no attempts against the Tsar’s life until his coronation _-was over. Perhaps the reforms in favor of the peasants, which Alexander III. intended to make, were also mentioned. The agreement was made at Paris, and was kept on both sides. The terrorists suspended hostilities. No- _ body was executed for complicity in the former conspiracies; _ those who were arrested later on under this indictment were immured in the Russian Bastille at Schltisselburg, where nothing was heard of them for fifteen years, and where _ most of them still are. Chernyshévsky was brought back _ from Siberia, and ordered to stay at Astrakhan, where he was severed from all connection with the intellectual world of Russia, and soon died. A commission went through Siberia, releasing some of the exiles, and specifying terms of exile for the remainder. My brother Alexander received from it an additional five years.
While I was at London, in 1882, I was told one day that a man who pretended to be a bona fide agent of the Russian government, and could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. ‘ Tell him that if he comes to my house I will throw him down the staircase,’ was my 446 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST reply. Probably the result was that while Ignatieff cone sidered the Tsar guaranteed from the attacks of the Execue tive Committee, he was afraid that the anarchists might make some attempt, and wanted to have me out of the Way.
XII Tur anarchist movement had undergone a considerable development in France during the years 1881 and 1882. It was generally believed that the French mind was hostile to communism, and within the International Work- ingmen’s Association “ collectivism’? was preached instead. It meant then the possession of the instruments of produc- tion in common, each separate group having to settle for itself whether the consumption of produce should be on individualistic or communistic lines. In reality, however, the French mind was hostile only to the monastic com- munism, to the phalanstére of the old schools. When the Jura Federation, at its congress of 1880, boldly declared itself anarchist-communist, — that is, in favor of free com- munism, — anarchism won wide sympathy in France. Our paper began to spread in that country, letters were ex- changed in great numbers with French workers, and an anarchist’ movement of importance rapidly developed at