Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s 0190066334, 9780190066338

Citation preview

 

Utopia’s Discontents

 

 

Utopia’s Discontents Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s–​1930s

FA I T H   H I L L I S

1

 

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Faith Hillis 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Hillis, Faith, author. Title: Utopia’s discontents : Russian émigrés and the quest for freedom, 1830s–​1930s /​Faith Hillis. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020049698 (print) | LCCN 2020049699 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190066338 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190066352 (epub) | ISBN 9780190066369 Subjects: LCSH: Russians—​Foreign countries—​Politics and government. | Russians—​Foreign countries—​Intellectual life. | Russians—​Foreign countries—​Societies, etc. | Social change—​Europe—​History. | Radicalism—​Russia—​History.  | Exiles—​Russia—​History. Classification: LCC DK35.5.H55 2021 (print) | LCC DK35.5 (ebook) | DDC 305.8917/​10409034—​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2020049698 LC ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2020049699 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

 

For my Cullman friends, with appreciation for their generosity and good humor.

 

 

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix Abbreviations  xi Explanatory Note  xiii

Introduction: From the Café Landolt  1

PART I   MAKING UTOPIA CONCRETE

1. The Other Communards  13 2. Living the Revolution  37 3. Jewish Workers Meet the Russian Revolution  65

PART II   EUROPE’S RUSSIAN MOMENT

4. Entangled Emancipations  97 5. Émigré Dystopias  124

PART III   REVOLUTIONARY REPERCUSSIONS

6. “The Party of Extreme Opposition”  155 7. Ou-​topos?  183

vii

 

viii C o n t e n t s

8. Revolution from Abroad  209 Epilogue: Émigré Clans  239 Notes  249 Selected Bibliography  297 Index  325

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I benefited from the support of many people and institutions while writing this book. Generous funding from the University of Chicago, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Dorothy and Lewis B.  Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New  York Public Library funded research trips and gave me time to write. Colleagues at the University of Chicago, including Leora Auslander, Kathleen Belew, Michael Geyer, Eleonor Gilburd, Alice Goff, Jan Goldstein, Adam Green, Emilio Kourí, Bill Nickell, Ken Pomeranz, Na’ama Rokem, Anna Elena Torres, and Tara Zahra, offered valuable feedback and advice at various junctures. Dozens of archivists and librarians shared their knowledge with me. Special thanks are due to the New York Public Library’s Bogdan Horbal and Hee-​Gwone Yoo and to the entire staff of the Dorot Jewish Division for their help locating sources. Many colleagues assisted with archival challenges and offered constructive critiques of the manuscript. David Brandenberger, Laura Engelstein, Henryk Głębocki, Nancy Green, Susan Heuman, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Maciej Janowski, Peter Holquist, Rebecca Kobrin, Mark Mazower, Brendan McGeever, Tony Michels, Ben Nathans, Katya Pravilova, Serhii Plokhy, Sasha Senderovich, and Andrew Sloin deserve special mention. Comments from “anonymous” readers Eugene Avrutin, Michael David-​Fox, David McDonald, and Mark Steinberg enriched my thinking and improved my writing. I am also grateful to colleagues who workshopped the manuscript at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Illinois, the Midwest Russian History Workshop, Princeton, the University of Toronto, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale as well as Poland’s Foundation for Civic Space and Public Policy. Nikita Bezrukov, Michael Filitis, Lauren Futter, Geoffrey Grimm, Alexey Isayev, Anna Sukhorukova, and Amy Vartenuk offered invaluable research assistance. ix

 

x A c k n o w l e d

gments

Susan Ferber was an ideal editor, expressing unwavering faith in the project while at the same time pushing me to realize its full potential. Anne Sanow diligently copy edited the manuscript and Jeremy Toynbee expertly guided it through the production process. Jessie Kindig offered wise counsel about how to develop the manuscript at a critical juncture. Dina Dineva, as usual, produced a superlative index. My residence at the Cullman Center in 2018–​19 was utopian in the sense I employ the term in this book, and the friendships and generative experiences that came out of that year profoundly influenced this project and its author. I will be eternally grateful to Salvatore Scibona, Lauren Goldenberg, and Paul Delaverdac for making that opportunity possible. Thanks as well to my “fellow fellows” who sustained me that year: David Bell, Jennifer Croft, Mary Dearborn, Ada Ferrer, Vona Groarke, francine j.  harris, Martha Hodes, Brooke Holmes, Karan Mahajan, Corey Robin, Marisa Silver, Kirmen Uribe, Amanda Vaill, and Frances Wilson. This book is for you. Reese Minshew patiently lived with this project for years, supporting it and me in more ways than I can count. Thank you as well to Daniel Brückenhaus, Nicole Eaton, Christine Evans, Leah Feldman, Annie Kaufman, Molly Lubin, Victoria Smolkin, Susanne Wengle, and the members of the Tzedek Chicago Midweek Gathering for their friendship; to Brigid O’Keeffe for the dialogue over the years and an especially heroic last-​minute proofread of the entire manuscript; to Sunny Yudkoff, Jessica Kirzane, Reyze Turner, and the other inspiring teachers who encouraged my midlife forays into Yiddishkayt; to Erwan Sorel for his help with French copyright terminology; to Brant Rosen for helping me to discover new sources of hope and joy in the midst of a pandemic; to Christine Sterkel for keeping everything in perspective; and to the Reese/​Cole extended family and my siblings for their love and sustenance.

 

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

AD AF AI AN APP BACU FR GARF HIA HJEC IISH JC KiS LB LNR LS PAAA PMG PSS PY RGASPI ROR TNA

Archives Diplomatiques Arbeter fraynd Archives Israélites Archives Nationales Archives de la Préfecture de Police Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University Free Russia Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii Hoover Institution Archives Harvard Jewish Ephemera Collection, Widener Library International Institute for Social History Jewish Chronicle Katorga i ssylka Landesarchiv Berlin La Nouvelle Revue Leninskii sbornik Politisches Archiv-​Auswärtiges Amt Pall Mall Gazette Vladimir Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (1958–​1965) Poylishe yidl Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-​Politicheskoi Istorii Review of Reviews The National Archives of the United Kingdom

xi

 

xii A b b r

SB SULSC SV YIVO ZO

eviations

Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv Stanford University Library Special Collections Sotsialisticheskii vestnik YIVO Archive and the Center for Jewish History Zagranichnaia agentura. Okhrana.

 

E X P L A N AT O RY   N O T E

Rendering the names of people and places across different languages always poses a challenge. As a general rule, I render personal names in the individual’s language of preference. Thus, the names of Ukrainian activists such as Drahomanov are transliterated from Ukrainian, not Russian, while those of Polish origin (Mendelson, Malinowski) are rendered in Polish. I  make exceptions for figures whose names have a common simplified form in English (thus, Trotsky and Luxemburg, not Trotskii and Luksemburg). Jewish émigrés are particularly likely to have common simplified English-​language variants of their names: I use Zhitlovsky, Jabotinsky, and Weizmann instead of Zhitlovskii, Zhabotinskii, and Veitsman. In bibliographical references, the name of the author is rendered as it appears on the publication, regardless of the transliteration that I use in the text. For the names of locations, I use the language of the state that ruled the place at the time. Therefore, Lemberg, not Lwów or L’viv; Vil’na, not Wilno or Vilnius. I refer to St. Petersburg during World War I by its official name, Petrograd. Some of the documents that I cite include dates in the Julian (Old Style) calendar used by the Russian empire as well as the Gregorian (New Style) calendar used elsewhere in Europe. In these cases, both dates will be preserved and cited: for example, April 9/​21, 1879. Many of my Yiddish-​language sources use nonstandard spelling and German-​ inflected lexicon. I have used the YIVO transliteration system to render words as they appear on the page, preserving any unconventional spellings that occur. There is a digital companion to this book that includes full bibliographical information, maps, and interactive visualizations:  https://​utopiasdiscontents. com.

xiii

 

 

Utopia’s Discontents

 

 

Introduction From the Café Landolt

The future of humanity once depended on a Geneva brasserie. Or so it seemed, at least, to the young people from Russia who frequented the Café Landolt in the summer of 1903. Located across the street from the city’s university, the establishment had become an unofficial headquarters for multiple movements that sought to reimagine life in Russia and beyond. Vladimir Lenin gathered with comrades in a back room, where they plotted to build a Marxist party capable of toppling the tsarist regime and international capitalism.1 Chaim Weizmann, the future first president of Israel, also frequented the Landolt, where he and his friends laid plans for a Zionist university that would cultivate the national potential of the Jewish people.2 Geneva was the most active center of Russian political life abroad in 1903, but the scenes that unfolded at the Landolt were not unique to that city. By the late nineteenth century, distinctive neighborhoods populated by Russian subjects, which their residents called “Russian colonies,” had emerged from London to Leipzig. Centers of political organizing and literary production, these neighborhoods were also sites of encounter. Russian revolutionaries mingled with Zionists as well as Polish, Armenian, and Ukrainian nationalists in libraries, canteens, and discussion clubs. Meanwhile, European socialists, suffragettes, and anti-​colonial activists ventured into the colonies to observe and learn from Russian comrades. The colonies are where Russians discovered socialism, anarchism, and Marxism, and where Bolshevism was born. They sheltered several generations of revolutionary activists and produced most of the illegal literature that circulated in Russia. Yet very little is known about the lives of these communities. In classic intellectual histories, they appear mostly as backdrops—​as way stations that offered safety from the tsarist regime but also estranged activists from the main Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0001

 

2

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

centers of revolutionary life. Some works delve deeper into the story of individual locales or groups abroad, but their focus on one corner of émigré life leaves the broader experience of exile and its consequences unexamined. Why did Lenin, a Russian Marxist from a provincial town on the Volga River, and Weizmann, a Jewish nationalist from Belarus, end up in the same café thousands of miles from their respective homes? What were the results of the encounters that occurred in the Café Landolt and other places like it? And what traces, if any, did the hundreds of thousands of Russian subjects who spent time abroad leave in Europe? Utopia’s Discontents provides the first comprehensive portrait of the colonies as communities. It argues that their institutions, collective practices, and the encounters that they catalyzed produced new forms of emancipatory politics that allowed residents to create the ideal world of freedom and justice of which they dreamed. This utopian project was a product of the colonies’ unique social practices and spatial configuration, but its influence reached far beyond their borders. The experiments that unfolded in the colonies had a profound influence on Russian politics, and the new forms of revolutionary living and political organizing to which they gave rise influenced a variety of emancipatory movements in Europe and beyond. Yet the utopian visions born of émigré life proved as fissile as they were fecund. The colonies’ revolutionary politics had an uncanny tendency to evolve in unexpected directions and to produce explosive conflicts. When Lenin returned to revolutionary Russia in 1917, some of his closest friends from the Landolt days had become his fiercest enemies. Likewise, idealistic Jewish youth who had much in common with Weizmann—​including his fondness for the café—​would vehemently oppose his Zionist politics. The colonies’ relationship with the outside world proved similarly Janus-​faced, producing new forms of international fraternity as well as intense anxieties and animosities. In the end, the patrons of the Café Landolt succeeded in shaping world history—​but not always in the ways that they expected. The dream of human emancipation runs through nineteenth-​century history like a red thread. However, freedom was both a contested concept and an elusive goal. No group better attested to the urgency—​and vexations—​of this struggle for liberation than the cohorts of exiles that appeared across Europe. In the first third of the century, a “circuit of revolutions” swept the continent’s periphery, leading to an exodus of liberals, radicals, and nationalists from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece, and Poland. As the century progressed, stillborn revolutions and the political persecution of socialists and anarchists expanded the continent’s population of political émigrés.3 Life abroad brought opportunities as well as adversity. Foreign refuge was crucial to the survival of many radical movements. Take, for example, Italian nationalists, who developed the Risorgimento on foreign soil, or

 

Int roduc tion

3

German Social Democrats, who created the foundations of their mass party in Switzerland. Exile exposed travelers to new ideas, creating common cause between different movements.4 Indeed, the foreign wanderings of Marxists, socialists, and anarchists informed the internationalism that stood at the heart of their radical politics.5 However, life abroad was also characterized by loneliness and longing, and by petty squabbles that ripped apart insular intellectual circles. The experience of Karl Marx, perhaps the most famous exile of the nineteenth century, vividly reveals this dualism. In addition to producing world-​changing manifestos in exile, he devoted considerable energy to undermining his revolutionary adversaries. His 1852 satire “The Heroes of Emigration” is a striking artifact of his bile, mocking his rivals’ incompetence and self-​importance.6 The first generations of political émigrés from Russia, who sought asylum in England, Switzerland, and France between the 1830s and 1860s, were an integral part of the exile networks that circulated around the continent. For those of Russian origin, however, the dualistic nature of life abroad was particularly pronounced. Idealizing Europe as the cradle of freedom and progress, they displayed a particularly utopian mindset, striving not only to emancipate their countrymen from autocratic rule, but also to renovate human relations.7 However, these revolutionary projects repeatedly collapsed under their own weight, embittering the émigrés. The experience of this first generation of exiles is often assumed to be emblematic of the émigré experience. In fact, the dynamics of life abroad changed significantly in the 1860s, the dawn of the era of mass migration. Over the next several decades, hundreds of thousands of Russian subjects flocked to the colonies in search of freedom, although they understood the meaning of this term in myriad different ways. Political dissidents fleeing police persecution tirelessly organized and published in exile. Students who enrolled in foreign universities were lured by promises of academic freedom and professional opportunity; workers by dreams of prosperity. Non-​Russians, whose cultural and political endeavors were policed by an imperial state that increasingly aligned itself with the interests of Orthodox Russians, emigrated in large numbers, constituting a majority of tsarist subjects living abroad by the 1880s. Jews were particularly overrepresented, accounting for more than half of the émigré population in many locales.8 In spite of their differences, the émigrés were drawn to one another—​at first, by their dietary preferences and cultural habits. Russian colonies emerged across the continent; England, France, and Switzerland, whose liberal politics offered exiles the most extensive protections, hosted especially large communities. Russian colonies appeared in North America as well, but their demography and distance from Russia distinguished them from their European counterparts. The

 

4

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

American portion of the diaspora at times intersects with the European story, but it demands a full-​fledged study of its own. The complexity of the colonies complicates the task of describing these communities and their residents, demanding linguistic choices that require explanation. There are large literatures delineating the boundaries between exiles, expatriates, and migrants; a rich scholarly tradition argues for the exceptionality of the exile experience and the forced estrangement that it entailed.9 Yet lived experience in the colonies tended to catalyze convergences between residents from different walks of life, blurring these conceptual distinctions. Countless students and workers became radicalized abroad, evolving into exiles who could not safely return home, while non-​Russian subjects of the tsar grew increasingly invested in the politics of the homeland they had left behind. This book will describe colony residents as “émigrés” and “exiles” to highlight the political calculus that spurred travelers to leave their homes and the ideological import that many assigned to life abroad, with the caveat that a single shorthand is incapable of capturing the complexity of all personal experiences. By the same token, it must be clarified that when travelers referred to their new homes as “Russian colonies,” the adjective did not refer to a narrow ethno-​national identity. Rather, it denoted their common country of origin and gestured to their belonging in a radical diaspora that welcomed representatives of all nationalities ruled by the tsarist regime.10 The emergence of distinctive Russian colonies and the evolutions that occurred within them transformed the émigré tradition of utopian thinking. On the one hand, exiles grew more skeptical about the idea of utopia, whose very etymology suggested that the dream of a “good place” (eu-​topos) was in fact an elusive “no place” (ou-​topos). Marxists were especially hostile to the notion, which they viewed as “a fantasy, invention, or fairy-​tale” that contradicted the tenets of scientific materialism.11 On the other hand, the utopian spirit only grew more pronounced in the colonies of the late nineteenth century, which produced a host of revolutionary experiments that aspired to transform humanity. The work of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who defended utopian thinking as a positive force in radical politics, is helpful in resolving this apparent contradiction. Bloch distinguishes between two modes of utopian thinking—​abstract and concrete. Abstract utopias are expressions of “pure wishful thinking,” like that which motivated the exiles of the 1830s and 1840s. Concrete utopias, by contrast, are “forward-​dreaming” forms of revolutionary praxis that extend “existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better.”12 The Russian colonies were perhaps the most ambitious concrete utopia of their era, prefiguring the ideal world of freedom and justice of which their residents dreamed. Their collective life transformed abstract radical ideas into quotidian reality, providing residents the opportunity to live their revolutionary values.

 

Int roduc tion

5

The colonies’ utopian potential was defined by their spatial configuration, their sense of themselves as unique places, and the encounters that they catalyzed. Scholars working at the intersection of geography, history, and critical theory have shown how the built environment and the act of moving through space inform individual behavior and define political possibilities.13 Black feminists and postcolonial theorists have identified marginal spaces as particularly powerful loci of emancipation that allow dispossessed people to renegotiate social norms.14 This is precisely what occurred in émigré neighborhoods. The term “colonies” (kolonii), which had been used to refer to small, self-​conscious, and isolated communities of foreign settlers in imperial Russia, gestured to exile settlements’ distance from the tsarist state and separation from the cities that surrounded them. This liminality proved a source of empowerment, allowing émigrés to emancipate themselves from external strictures and to assert their worth. Female students used emigration to prove that they were the intellectual equals of men, while Jews used it to overcome debilitating traditions of exclusion and to integrate themselves into Russian intellectual circles. As exile settlements developed a reputation for challenging imperial regimes and liberating subaltern subjects, the “colonial” aspect of their culture acquired a new meaning. They became places where power was critiqued and interrogated, and where new styles of postcolonial politics were imagined. The small size of the colonies, which compressed the complexity of the Russian empire into urban districts no more than a few square blocks in area, profoundly shaped their political culture as well. Although many schemes for emancipation articulated in emigration focused on the concerns of particular groups, collisions between colony residents produced new solidarities between men and women from different walks of life. Many Russians and Jews embraced the Polish cause as their own, while feminist activists insisted that they could only achieve freedom through the socialist liberation of labor. The emergence of a communal infrastructure—​libraries, mutual aid associations, and revolutionary courts that served the émigré community as a whole—​further encouraged different groups to become interdependent. These solidarities proved that it was possible to harness multiple, discrete quests for freedom in the service of the broader cause of human emancipation. The final spatial element that defined the colonies’ utopian potential was their uncanny ability to simultaneously collapse vast distances and expand horizons. Challenging the legitimacy of national borders, colony residents created intricate smuggling rings that spirited travelers out of the Russian empire and radical literature into it, as well as journals and organizations that knitted far-​flung exile settlements into cohesive communicative networks. At the same time, the colonies became important sites of international exchange. Russian subjects learned from European trade unions, political parties, and the mass-​appeal press,

 

6

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

developing their own organizational efforts in dialogue with foreign activists. Meanwhile, European liberals and revolutionaries, feminists and anti-​colonial activists ventured into émigré communities to observe the Russians’ radical experiments. These encounters imbricated Russians in European societies’ quests for freedom, and vice versa, further testifying to the colonies’ potential to transform arbitrary divisions into universal friendship. Although colony residents lacked access to formal political mechanisms in Russia and their host countries, this estrangement from power became a source of their communal genius. Their fusion of the personal and political allowed the abstract dream of human liberation to be realized through individual choices and everyday acts. Prioritizing collective belonging and the empowerment of the oppressed, they provided alternatives not only to the existing political order, but also to normative social behavior and moral judgments. The concrete forms that their emancipatory practices assumed made the experience of freedom deeply visceral. The bonds of love and solidarity forged in the colonies reshaped affective repertoires and even subjective experiences of reality. In these communities created by the crossing of borders and the formation of new friendships, the dream of tearing down the divisions between different nations and populations was not a distant fantasy but a way of life. Europe’s Russian colonies were not the only communities that attempted to prefigure the better world of the future through everyday practice. The intentional utopian communities that flourished in this era similarly believed that quotidian life was the medium through which human existence could be transformed.15 Siberian exile camps and the Russian revolutionary underground produced alternative societies characterized by strong friendships and organized practices of mutual aid.16 What was special about the colonies, however, is that they provided a topos, a place, in which residents could live the revolution and be observed by others in the process. These urban districts allowed distant dreams to be translated into concrete experience and provided a setting in which the striving for freedom became totalizing and immersive. Moreover, the networks of exchange that knitted the colonies into a cohesive radical diaspora testified to the capacity of these local experiments to scale up—​to transcend the peculiar spatial and social situation that had created them, becoming universal harbingers of freedom. Colony life expressed discontent with the world as it existed and a determination to transform it for the better. However, émigré communities also gave rise to other kinds of discontent. The powerful universalist ideas created by encounters that occurred in the colonies conflicted with the discrete projects of emancipation that had made it possible to imagine universal liberation in the first place. Increasingly, residents found themselves forced to choose between competing and mutually incompatible visions of freedom. Moreover, the colonies’ intimacy and intellectual intensity—​key components of their utopian

 

Int roduc tion

7

promise—​incubated a destructive culture of dogmatism intensified by bitter personal feuds. Meanwhile, colony residents’ success at living the revolution attracted unwanted scrutiny from outside adversaries, who turned these communities into breeding grounds for new forms of oppression. The cross-​border networks that émigrés built terrified both Russian and European police, who responded by developing new forms of surveillance, border control, and transnational policing. Reactionary critics seized on exiles’ commitment to Jewish emancipation as evidence that they were participants in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. These developments, which produced paranoia and despair that eventually supplanted feelings of love and solidarity, should not be read as evidence that the colonies’ utopian ambitions had always been unrealizable. On the contrary, the discontents of émigré life were unexpected byproducts of their most impressive accomplishments. Lenin and Weizmann crossed paths at the Café Landolt at precisely the moment that the crisis of émigré communities began to overshadow their promise and undermine their coherence. Although Russian Zionism had been profoundly influenced by encounters in the colonies, Weizmann and many of his comrades concluded that exile society no longer served the interests of Russian Jews. In the early twentieth century Zionists abandoned the colonies, forming their own exclusive networks—​and in some cases, moving on to Palestine. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik faction that Lenin organized at the café was an ambitious effort to revive and redefine the colonies’ disintegrating concrete utopias. Emphasizing discipline, secrecy, and order as traits indispensable to the revolutionary cause, the Bolsheviks created their own exclusive quarter and institutions in which they defined new modes of living the revolution. Approaching Bolshevism as an especially potent distillation of the colonies’ transformative potential and profound discontents, this study sheds new light on the party’s distinctive culture. Some scholars have emphasized the importance of key turning points, including the First World War and the Civil War, in shaping the party’s program.17 Others insist on its coherence across time and space, approaching it as a quasi-​religious movement, or even a millenarian cult.18 Utopia’s Discontents takes a different approach, arguing that at least in its early days, Bolshevism was as much an émigré lifestyle—​a byproduct of experiences accumulated abroad—​as it was an expression of a coherent philosophical tradition. Collisions with revolutionary adversaries in the close quarters of the colonies defined the party’s identity as the manifestation of revolutionary volition and masculine strength. Likewise, difficulties experienced abroad and encounters with other exiles from imperial states encouraged the Bolsheviks to identify with subaltern populations around the world, influencing the anti-​ colonial platform for which they would become famous.

 

8

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

Even after the Bolshevik elite returned to Russia in 1917, the émigré heritage left deep marks on the party. Bolshevik leaders successfully coopted networks formed abroad, the exile tradition of living the revolution, and many of the emancipatory projects first tested in the colonies. But perhaps the most important insight that they imported from Europe was an intuitive understanding of the relationship between space, place, and ideas. The Bolsheviks excelled at adapting old exile traditions to meet the demands of their new surroundings, which helped them to triumph over their revolutionary rivals and to create a new concrete utopia in the form of a revolutionary state. However, the unexpected byproducts of émigré life proved more resilient than the colonies themselves, for the contradictions and resentments imported from abroad would haunt the Bolshevik regime for decades. The intense factional warfare that followed the revolution of 1917, the schisms that challenged the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, and the purges that decimated the Old Bolshevik elite in the 1930s were all influenced by the saga of émigré life. Utopia’s Discontents is a history of political ideas, but an unconventional one. Coaxing intellectual history out of the realm of philosophical texts, it emphasizes the role of embodied experience, cultural networks, and physical space in the evolution of new ideas. It was researched almost entirely outside of Russia, relying on the scattered traces that colony residents left behind as well as records compiled by the foreign states that hosted them. Its method is intentionally eclectic, marrying a reading of a broad array of published sources with intensive archival excavation and digital mapping. This approach provides a new perspective on two classic themes in Russian intellectual history: the origins of the revolutionary tradition and Russia’s relationship with the West. The famed radicalism of the Russian intelligentsia is usually explained as a product of the alienation that resulted from its troubled encounters with Western philosophical ideas and its frustration with the country’s backwardness. According to this line of argument, the failed revolutions of 1848 discredited liberalism before it had gained traction in Russia, encouraging those who dreamed of a better future to seek maximalist solutions. Simultaneously, Russia’s archaic social structure and its autocratic regime forestalled most avenues for pursuing political change, transforming the educated elite into “superfluous men.” The superfluous men of the 1840s and 1850s, who were simultaneously desperate to break free from the strictures imposed on them by the autocracy and repulsed by the bankruptcy of foreign models, embarked on a desperate search for solutions suited to Russia’s unique circumstances. This way of thinking assumed ever more radical forms in the second half of the century, giving rise to revolutionary populism, then Marxism, then Bolshevism.19 Europe looms large in these classic intellectual histories, but mostly as an abstract idea. Utopia’s Discontents, by contrast, provides a properly transnational

 

Int roduc tion

9

account of the origins of Russian radical culture. It shows that the colonies were crucial actors in the creation of the Populist, Marxist, and Bolshevik projects usually seen as quintessential expressions of Russian radicalism. In addition to revealing the role that foreign spaces and places played in the production of revolutionary culture, it broadens the dramatis personae of Russian intellectual history. Treating revolution as a daily practice and not merely an intellectual project, it shows the crucial role that female students and non-​Russian activists played in creating radical political alternatives. It joins other recent studies to reveal the significant contributions that working-​class migrants made to revolutionary movements around the world.20 Utopia’s Discontents also provides a new entangled history of Russia and Europe. If the first generations of Russian émigrés believed that the vectors of cultural influence flowed from west to east, intellectual historians have shown that Russia played a prominent role in European political imaginaries on both the left and the right. Philosophes, Carbonari, and utopian socialists all saw Russia as a potential testing ground for their revolutionary visions; legitimists, conservatives, and reactionaries constructed a “Russian mirage” of their own, imagining the autocracy as the savior of Christian Europe.21 The story of the colonies reveals a process of mutual exchange that transcended the realm of high intellectual history, showing how the encounters that occurred in and around the colonies influenced politics, society, and public opinion. It discovers, for example, a surprisingly symbiotic relationship between Western liberalism and Russian radicalism. The utopian experiments of the colonies depended on the physical safety, press freedoms, and associational liberties provided by liberal regimes. The colonies left their own marks on European liberalism, bolstering national mystiques that celebrated Western states as guardians of liberty. By the turn of the century, however, Russian exiles played an active role in the destabilization of the liberal order. They inspired emancipatory movements and radical parties that challenged bourgeois supremacy, while simultaneously energizing antisemites and nativist activists whose campaigns undermined émigré rights and liberal philosophy. After 1917, it became impossible to ignore Russia on the world stage. The Bolsheviks created the Third International and cultivated “fellow travelers,” galvanizing the international left. The revolution also engendered a counterrevolutionary reaction that excoriated communalist politics and portrayed the Soviet regime as a Jewish conspiracy.22 Russia’s sudden appearance as a transformative force in world history is often jarring in narratives of continental politics. However, this evolution is less surprising when the extent to which Russians abroad had informed European political imaginations for decades before the revolution becomes apparent.

 

10

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

Utopia’s Discontents consists of three parts. Part I, “Making Utopia Concrete,” provides a street-​level view of life in the colonies. It traces the evolution of émigré settlements into utopian communities that lived their revolutionary ideals and explores how colony residents exported their ideas and practices back to Russia. Part II, “Europe’s Russian Moment,” turns to the relationship between the colonies and their European host societies. It reveals how Russian émigrés’ quest for liberation inspired foreign audiences—​and how it inadvertently contributed to an illiberal backlash that imperiled the collective future of the former. Part III, “Revolutionary Repercussions,” explores how the extreme disillusionment produced by internal strife and external repression at the turn of the century encouraged new and more radical evolutions in émigré politics. It also follows the fate of one-​time exiles and their dreams through the revolution of 1917 and into the 1930s. What, in the end, does the story of the colonies tell us about the fate of utopian ventures? On the one hand, several scholars emphasize the positive potential of utopian thinking in Russian history in spite of its evident shortcomings and blind spots.23 On the other hand, the Marxist dream of recreating heaven on earth has been characterized as bound to result in disaster: the quest for this elusive goal justified, even mandated, the use of all available tools to pursue it, including violence.24 Accounts that seek to excavate the unrealized potential of utopian thought and those that argue for the inevitability of its tragic consequences share one common trait, however: they are tragedies in the classical sense. Departing from an acknowledgment that utopian schemes ultimately failed, their narrative arc is preordained. The story of Europe’s Russian colonies affirms the power of the utopian imagination, as well as its potential to generate new forms of hatred and subjugation. Yet at no moment in exile history was this evolution inevitable. On the contrary, the fate of the colonies’ revolutionary project was determined by seemingly inconsequential decisions, such as the words that their residents used, how they treated their neighbors, and how they told their own stories. Observing the vicissitudes of the quest to perfect humanity on the intimate stage of everyday life provides an escape from the tragic genre, showing how individual choices acquired monumental powers of inspiration and destruction, producing repercussions across time and space that were impossible to foretell. The story of the colonies reveals the generative capacity of the seemingly mundane—​a lesson well-​suited for our own age, which is laden with crisis yet pregnant with the potential for transformative change.

 

PA RT  I

MAKING UTOPIA CONCRETE

 

 

1

The Other Communards

In 1872, Nikolai Kuliabko-​Koretskii arrived in Zurich to study law. Emerging from the train station, he crossed the river and began to climb a hill that led toward the Oberstrass district, just north of the university. Along the way, he encountered young Russian-​speaking women with “short skirts . . . that lacked trains and bustles” who refused to avert their eyes when he approached “as proper ladies should do.” The women were accompanied by male comrades sporting long hair, “grubby shirts and coats . . . and tall, dirty boots that the Swiss would wear to hunt water fowl.”1 Kuliabko-​Koretskii had entered Europe’s first Russian colony—​an island of radical culture in the middle of a bourgeois city. The Russians had settled in communes intended to cultivate universal fraternity, and they had created democratic institutions that insisted on the fundamental equality of all humans, including women. The unusual comportment and attire of colony residents proclaimed their determination to reimagine the most fundamental elements of human behavior. Kuliabko-​Koretskii arrived in Zurich at a difficult juncture in émigré history. For decades, exiles from Russia had used the freedoms of life abroad to envision new political possibilities and ways of living. Yet they had continually struggled to transform their abstract utopian dreams into quotidian reality. The rise and fall of the Paris Commune, which occurred about a year before Kuliabko-​Koretskii came to Switzerland, revealed the seriousness of this challenge. Hundreds of Russian exiles had joined the popular insurgency that declared Paris the center of a new “Universal Republic.”2 Yet within two months their euphoria turned to despair, as French troops crushed the uprising—​and the aspirations of an entire generation. The story of Zurich’s Communards, who were marginal in many respects, has been overshadowed by the tragedy of their Parisian counterparts. The residents of the Russian colony were anonymous youth living far from home and on the periphery of a foreign city; many came from the borderlands of the Russian empire and had been excluded from politics by virtue of their sex. Yet Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0002

 

14

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

precisely their liminality offered them a new perspective on the utopian potential of émigré politics. Eschewing grand revolutionary slogans and melding political traditions drawn from Russia and Europe, they quietly lived the revolution, expressing their devotion to equality, inclusion, and democracy in the life of the community that they built. In spite of its modesty and obscurity, their experiment, which predated the Paris Commune and outlived it by several years, would create new templates for revolutionary living that would influence future generations of émigrés and even compatriots in Russia. This is the story of how the Russian revolution matured on European soil, and how august traditions of utopian thinking acquired concrete form in Zurich, the most unlikely of locales.

Abstract Utopias The history of émigré utopias begins in the 1830s, an era of reactionary lethargy that followed the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars. Nevertheless, the dreams born of the French revolution, which sought to realize a perfect order of liberty, equality, and fraternity on earth, flourished in two corners of the Russian empire. The first was Russian-​occupied Poland, which boasted a long revolutionary tradition. A  powerful liberal-​constitutionalist movement survived the late-​ eighteenth-​century partitions of Poland, and Polish nobles had joined the revolutionary struggle in both America and France. In 1830, the Poles made their most dramatic stand yet. After rumors spread that Nicholas I  intended to dispatch Polish troops to quell revolutions that had broken out in France and Belgium, patriotic activists and soldiers spearheaded an insurrection that consumed the Russian empire’s western borderlands. Polish nobles joined plebeians and Jews to fight under banners reading, “For our Freedom and Yours!”3 The homes of Russian gentry became another breeding ground for political projects of foreign provenance in the 1830s. A  generation of nobles grew up poring over the works of the philosophes with foreign tutors and hearing stories about revolutionary France from their fathers, veterans of the Napoleonic wars.4 The young Aleksandr Herzen drew inspiration from France’s Saint-​Simonians, socialists who envisioned the regeneration of humanity through a “New Christianity” founded on social equality and individual self-​actualization.5 Other scions of the progressive gentry sought refuge in German Idealism, which taught that aesthetic perfection and philosophical truth could transcend human conflicts, creating a world of harmony and beauty. The most active proponents of this movement belonged to a private discussion circle (kruzhok) led by Nikolai Stankevich, who had discovered the “new German philosophy” while studying

 



The O ther Communard s

15

in Berlin. It included Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev, and others who would go on to become intellectual luminaries.6 In the late 1830s and 1840s, the members of radical kruzhki began to spend more time abroad, and their love affair with European political ideas grew more consuming. Bakunin and Turgenev both traveled to Berlin in the late 1830s to study with German philosophers. Pavel Annenkov, a young noble who was friendly with both the Stankevich and Herzen circles, recalled that he shuttled so frequently between his homeland and Europe’s great cities that he considered himself “an amphibian between the two worlds.”7 The Europe of the early 1840s was a cauldron of political ferment. In the span of a few short years, French socialists experienced their first successes in organizing workers; Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon published his early anarchist writings, which defined property as theft; George Sand and other feminists explored the potential of women’s liberation; and Karl Marx arrived in Paris, where he began the studies of workers that would become the basis for the Communist Manifesto.8 Under the influence of the radical ideas that they encountered abroad, many of the Russian “amphibians” assumed a more oppositional stance toward the tsarist regime. Within a year of his arrival in Germany, Bakunin had abandoned his philosophical studies and fallen in with groups of radicals, first in Dresden and later in Switzerland and France. In 1842 he published his first essay expressing revolutionary views, which analyzed how bourgeois society colluded with reactionaries to quash popular liberties.9 By the mid-​1840s, he condemned the tsar for treating his subjects as “slaves” and expressed his interest in reorganizing the Slavic nations into a federation of free states.10 Other Russians who spent time in Europe developed into liberals rather than radicals, but they too became impassioned critics of the autocracy’s excesses. They included Ivan Turgenev, Bakunin’s friend, and Ivan Golovin, a disgruntled tsarist bureaucrat who published a scathing polemic denouncing Nicholas I  and his “barbarism, tyranny, and immorality” in Paris in 1845.11 Ultimately, however, it was tsarist repression—​and not merely the power of Western political ideas—​that produced the first exiles from the Russian empire. The brutal suppression of the Polish revolt in 1831 was the first event to engender a wave of emigration. Facing execution or Siberian exile if they remained in the Russian empire, some 12,000 Polish patriots sought refuge in England, Switzerland, and above all, France.12 In the 1840s the tsarist authorities, who by then had come to see Europe as a center of revolutionary contamination, instigated a crackdown against the progressive youth who gravitated abroad. Imperial officials eventually ordered Bakunin and Herzen, who had left Russia to seek medical treatment for his wife, to return to their homeland. Both refused, which led the state to strip them of their noble status, place liens on their property, and sentence Bakunin in absentia to life in Siberian exile.13 Ivan Turgenev,

 

16

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

who agreed to repatriate in the early 1850s, was banished to his country estate after running afoul of Russian censors. After completing his sentence, he would live out the rest of his days in Europe, joining the growing cohort of dissidents and Polish patriots who refused to return home. Russian intellectuals of the era tended to see Europe as the fount of all wisdom and progress. Herzen vividly recalled the awe inspired by his first visit to France: “We had grown accustomed to associating the word ‘Paris’ with the memory of great events, . . . the colossal struggle for thought, for law, for rights, for human dignity.  .  .  . The name Paris is closely connected with all the best hopes of contemporary man, and I entered it with a trembling in my heart, with the timidity with which people in the past had entered Jerusalem and Rome.”14 Such sentiments burdened émigrés with a heavy sense of responsibility to learn from Europe’s experiences, to partake in the freedoms it offered, and to export the wisdom they acquired abroad to their homeland. By 1832, Polish émigrés had established “aristocratic” and “democratic” political organizations abroad. The former, founded by Prince Adam Czartoryski, the president of the Polish government during the uprising, envisioned a constitutional order for Poland and lobbied the great powers to engage in military action to resurrect the Polish state. The latter, dominated by men from more modest backgrounds, called for major social reforms—​including the emancipation of serfs—​to accompany the restoration of free Poland.15 Meanwhile, Polish exiles assumed the task of protecting Polish culture from Russian depredation, founding the Polish Literary Society, which boasted a large library and publishing house, on the Île Saint-​Louis. The Hôtel Lambert, Czartoryski’s Parisian manor, developed into another major cultural center, hosting lavish soirées at which guests danced the mazurka and enjoyed the artistic creations of the exiled Frédéric Chopin and the poet Adam Mickiewicz.16 The population of Russian exiles in the 1840s and 1850s was miniscule compared to the Polish “Great Emigration,” comprising about a hundred souls. Moreover, the Russians maintained a peripatetic lifestyle: Herzen moved nearly fifteen times between 1847 and the 1860s, residing in Paris, Rome, Geneva, Zurich, and London; Bakunin drifted between Paris, Prague, and multiple cities in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany.17 The lives of Russian exiles therefore tended to revolve around personal networks rather than formal institutions. They established a vibrant republic of letters, and Herzen, for his part, founded a salon that became so legendary that it was featured in guidebooks to London.18 Russian exiles imbibed Europe’s revolutionary spirit, but life abroad also influenced their ideas, exposing them to novel experiences and offering opportunities for personal reinvention. Russian intellectuals sought out Polish exiles, learning about their plight and eventually forming political alliances.19 One landed noble shared a bed with a stone mason in a cheap pension to educate

 



The O ther Communard s

17

himself about the plight of workers.20 Meanwhile, Western politicians, activists, and journalists greeted Polish and Russian exiles with interest. The newcomers, most of whom had a working knowledge of French and sometimes German, easily integrated themselves into intellectual circles, joining the major emancipatory movements of the era—​from socialism, to feminism, to national liberation campaigns.21 No element of émigré life more clearly testified to its potential for experimentation and self-​reinvention than exiles’ attempts to reform family life and sexuality. In emigration, Herzen reconnected with his childhood friend, Nikolai Ogarev, with whom he had first discovered Saint-​Simonianism and pledged to fight for a better Russia. Mariia Ogareva and Nataliia Herzen, who had followed their husbands abroad, became avid devotees of George Sand in Europe and engaged both men in earnest discussions about the liberation of the heart. The two women ultimately embarked on romantic liaisons outside of marriage, exploring their sexual passions while simultaneously rejecting the moral limitations placed on them by bourgeois society.22 Turgenev, too, challenged sexual conventions in exile, living in a ménage à trois with a French opera star and her husband that he described as an “unofficial marriage.”23 Experiences accumulated abroad had a lasting impact on émigré thought. Relationships between exiles of Russian origin and European revolutionaries encouraged the former to channel their political dreams in more radical directions. Bakunin, who befriended radical poet Georg Herwegh in a Dresden circle of Left-​Hegelians, followed him into exile in Switzerland and later France. Bakunin consorted with Marx, who encouraged his burgeoning interest in Communism, as well as Mazzini and other nationalist exiles.24 Herzen’s friendship with Proudhon, which blossomed in Paris, guided the evolution of his longstanding interest in Saint-​Simonianism into an explicitly revolutionary program.25 Furthermore, the alliances that developed between Russians and Poles abroad influenced the political projects of both. The Poles, whom Golovin identified as the greatest victims of the autocracy, occupied an important place in his critique of the Russian state.26 Herzen went further still, arguing that solidarity between Russians and Poles was essential to the success of the revolutionary movement. “A free Warsaw means the death of imperial Petersburg,” he wrote. “Those Russians who don’t understand that the independence of Poland is at the same time the liberation of Russia are not revolutionaries.”27 Prominent Polish exiles, for their part, celebrated the accomplishments of Russian revolutionaries.28 The politics of solidarity that coalesced abroad breathed new life into that old slogan of 1830, “For our freedom and yours.” By the early 1850s, the vague, utopian ambitions with which the Russians had arrived abroad had begun to develop into coherent political programs. Golovin

 

18

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

and Turgenev were liberal constitutionalists who advocated for the replacement of the autocracy by a rule-​of-​law state.29 Herzen established a reputation as the “first Russian socialist.” Continuing to develop his interest in Slavic federalism, Bakunin also celebrated the “urge to destroy” as a creative force, laying the foundations of modern anarchism.30 At first glance, this heterogeneity of exile thought might appear a handicap that prevented the unification of the Russians around a single political institution or cause. However, many émigrés cited the ability to air a multiplicity of opinions as one of the greatest blessings of life abroad. Herzen was particularly effective at developing the mystique of exile as a place for free expression and open debate in which writers could lodge a “public protest against that which suffocates [Russians] in forced silence.”31 The Russian Free Press, which Herzen launched in London in 1853, institutionalized this mission of “public protest,” publishing dozens of books on Russian and Polish themes as well as several periodicals. Its most successful product was Kolokol, a journal launched in 1857. Kolokol demanded the end of censorship and serfdom in Russia, but its primary moral authority was derived from the fact that it presented a diverse and even dissonant array of perspectives. Claiming to serve as the “uncensored voice of free Russia,” it welcomed contributions from Polish patriots, dissident Russian bureaucrats, and even critics of radical émigrés, including Slavophile intellectuals who criticized the exiles’ slavish devotion to Western political models.32 Kolokol attained great influence in emigration and in Russia, where readers digested its volumes as quickly as they could be smuggled in.33

“For Our Freedom and Yours!” If the political and personal explorations that occurred abroad defined the emancipatory potential of emigration, so too did the role that exiles of Russian origin played in continental politics. Although émigrés idealized Western society, many Europeans lamented that they had yet to realize the full promise of freedom. France’s July revolution of 1830 had resulted in the downfall of the hated Bourbon dynasty, but the “citizen king” Louis-​Philippe ultimately disappointed those who hoped he would bring about serious political reform. Liberals and radicals continued to push for change. However, their viewpoints were better represented in democratic societies, nationalist clubs, Masonic lodges, and private salons than in government offices. In some cases, political frustrations were transmuted into art: as novelist Victor Hugo put it, “Romanticism is liberalism in literature.”34 At the same time, the Romantic obsession with heroic pathos invaded politics. “Ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs,” remarked Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini.35

 



The O ther Communard s

19

Few populations had better claims to martyrdom than the men and women who had fled the Russian empire. Western reportage on Russia lavished attention on the “monstrous irregularity” of the tsarist regime and the suffering of its subjects, transforming those who had fled it into cult figures in the heroic struggle against oppression.36 The Polish cause, which centered on the pathos of a heroic nation dismembered by larger neighbors, was particularly suited for the preoccupations of the Romantic era, becoming a Rorschach test that invited Western audiences to project their own aspirations onto the lives of the foreigners. As defeated Polish soldiers began their westward trek, they were met by rapturous crowds who connected the Polish struggle with their own yearnings for a more perfect political order. German villagers greeted the Poles with patriotic anthems expressing their own desire for national unity and spiritual purification. When the exiles crossed into France at Metz, tens of thousands of citizens and national guardsmen enthusiastically greeted them. In London and several provincial cities, Britons convened banquets to express their support for the Poles and to raise funds to support their cause.37 Polish émigrés welcomed this attention and carefully finessed their image, delivering messages honed for divergent audiences. When they spoke to progressive Frenchmen then pressuring the July Monarchy to pursue a path of democratic reform, they highlighted their own strivings for “liberty, equality, fraternity” and touted the connection between the 1830 revolutions in France and Poland.38 To English audiences, they explained the Polish cause as an effort to protect the continent from barbarism and to defend civil and religious liberties.39 Before conservative Catholics struggling to restore the power of the Church in France, they presented themselves as Christian “martyrs” and warriors for the “sacred freedom of conscience.”40 They reconciled these divergent claims by insisting that, above all, theirs was “a struggle for progress” that pitted “reason and the fundamental rights of humanity against the pretensions of tyranny and violence.”41 In the words of one Pole, the émigrés elicited “universal sympathy” from broad segments of society in “every civilized country.”42 However, the depth of this sympathy also posed a challenge to the states that hosted them. On the one hand, European statesmen widely acknowledged the righteousness of the Polish cause and many offered material and moral support to its leaders. On the other, few evidenced an appetite to engage the Russians in a war to restore Polish independence.43 The institution of asylum provided one mechanism for integrating these conflicting imperatives. In the early nineteenth century, England, France, and Switzerland had formalized asylum policies to cope with the legions of Greeks, Portuguese, Spaniards, and Italians who had been displaced by war and national liberation struggles. Already by the 1830s, however, the influx of Poles had begun

 

20

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

to overwhelm the populations of southern European refugees who had settled in Western Europe in the post-​Napoleonic period. England and France offered Polish émigrés guarantees of safety and considerable financial subsidies. In 1833, the French Chamber of Deputies authorized payments totaling nearly 3  million francs to be made to some 4,000 refugees; the British parliament assigned some 10,000 pounds to support Polish exiles. Switzerland had weaker asylum protections prior to 1848 but nevertheless attracted several hundred Poles.44 Asylum regimes affirmed the hardships that refugees had endured at the hands of despotic governments, while at the same time relieving the public pressure that Western governments faced to intervene on Poland’s behalf. At times, European politicians instrumentalized refugee policies to advance their own interests. In France, the leaders of the July monarchy championed the Polish cause to diffuse the frustration produced by their own policies.45 In Britain, politicians across the ideological spectrum mythologized foreigners fleeing persecution as ideal liberal subjects.46 Although broad segments of Western society admired Polish exiles, critics of the July Monarchy rallied behind their cause most passionately, connecting the exiles’ struggle for liberation to their own dreams of political reform. As the Marquis de Lafayette explained in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, the cause of freedom in France was fundamentally connected with the Polish struggle:  “Two principles divide Europe, the sovereign right of peoples, and the divine right of kings; on one side: liberty, equality, on the other: despotism and privilege.”47 Pro-​Polish slogans became part a conspicuous part of French republican activism in the 1830s, appearing on posters, in plays, songs, and political manifestoes, and at street demonstrations.48 Indeed, the fall of Warsaw in September 1831 prompted several days of popular protest in Paris. Crowds irate that the French government had refused to invade Russia to protect the rebels chanted, “Down with Louis-​Philippe!”49 In other national settings, advocates for political change also came to see their programs as consonant with the Poles’ struggle for freedom. In Britain, politically active workers took a particularly lively interest in the Poles, whom they saw as heroes in the battle “between the oppressors and the oppressed.”50 Polish visitors appeared frequently at mass meetings advocating franchise reform and played a catalytic role in Chartism, which sought to empower working-​class men.51 In Switzerland, Polish émigrés were founding members of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe, which fought for national sovereignty and international brotherhood across the continent. The Italian revolutionary described the Polish cause as a transcendental struggle that represented the ambitions of all “citizens and brothers who struggle for the cause of Justice and Truth on earth.”52 Russian exiles followed the script written by the Poles. Many managed to obtain formal asylum protections. France, for example, recognized Golovin as a

 



The O ther Communard s

21

refugee in the 1840s and paid him a subsidy until at least 1871.53 Herzen and Bakunin lived as refugees in England and Switzerland for portions of the 1850s and 1860s. Like their Polish predecessors, the Russians highlighted the terrible suffering that they had endured under tsarist rule, but also argued that these tribulations endowed them with a special responsibility to struggle for liberty and justice.54 Indeed, Russian exiles positioned themselves at the vanguard of all the major emancipatory movements that unfolded in the 1840s. They were integral members of the radical circles surrounding Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Proudhon, and German revolutionary Georg Herwegh.55 They joined Polish comrades to support Chartism in England.56 They founded a Paris-​based club advocating for a “Brotherhood of Nations” led by Golovin and joined by Mazzini and Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth.57 Annenkov marveled at the speed with which his Russian compatriots had managed to shed the role of “gallery spectator” in movements for social change to claim the role of “participant and soloist in the democratic and social choruses of Paris.”58 By the late 1840s, exiles of Russian origin had evolved into figureheads of a universal struggle for emancipation that stretched across borders. Their peripatetic lifestyle and connections across borders allowed them to participate in multiple emancipatory movements at once, while the new alliances that Russians and Poles forged with each other (and with Europeans) in exile produced a politics of solidarity that transcended national divides. Bakunin eloquently made this point in an 1847 Paris speech that celebrated the anniversary of the Polish revolt. Citing the Poles’ famous slogan, “For our freedom and yours!,” he once again affirmed the need for all Russian subjects to unify in the struggle against the autocracy. However, his message was also aimed at Europeans, imploring liberation movements across the continent to unify in pursuit of revolutionary change and to destroy despotism wherever it existed.59 In February 1848, crowds of Parisians toppled Louis-​Philippe and declared the creation of the Second Republic. Overjoyed that the revolutionary moment they had long awaited had arrived, exiles of Russian origin played crucial roles in the emancipatory moments that unfolded across the continent. Early in the year, Herzen and Bakunin joined workers on Parisian barricades, singing the praises of the “simple, uneducated people, who always were and always will be a thousand times better than all their leaders!”60 Herzen later departed for Italy, where he joined Polish comrades in supporting Mazzini’s Risorgimento. Bakunin moved east, observing liberal agitation in the parliaments of the German states, forming a Slavic battalion in Prague to fight the Austrian authorities, and joining the popular uprising that coalesced in Dresden in May 1849.61 Brigades of Polish volunteers joined Kossuth’s struggle for Hungarian independence.62 Again highlighting the connections between these movements, Bakunin insisted that Europe was living through a pivotal moment that would mark the birth of a

 

22

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

new continental “utopia” defined by “truth, justice, freedom, life for all, both individuals and nations.” “The revolutionary movement will only stop when all of Europe, not excluding Russia, will become federal democratic republics,” he wrote.63 The revolutionary dreams developed in emigration had entered a new stage, with the emancipation of humanity appearing imminent.

Revolutionary Implosion Although émigrés dreamed of reimagining society, the transformation of abstract utopias into concrete realities proved more difficult than they expected. Alcoholism and depression were rampant in émigré society, and the poorer among the Polish rebels suffered from extreme privation.64 The difficulties of exile life, in turn, intensified ideological disputes that pitted liberals against revolutionaries and sometimes, Russians against Poles.65 Meanwhile, the love triangles that resulted from sexual experimentation bred jealousy and destroyed relationships. When Nataliia Herzen decided to “liberate” her heart, she discovered that it gravitated toward Herwegh, one of her husband’s close friends. In spite of Herzen’s admiration of George Sand and support for women’s liberation, he proved unable to accept his wife’s erotic feelings for his comrade.66 What began as an intense personal dispute between the two men soon evolved into a continent-​wide scandal after Herzen published an angry letter in a Swiss newspaper excoriating his one-​time comrade.67 Later, Herzen would initiate an affair with Mariia Ogareva that would produce several children and further divide émigré circles.68 Relations between émigrés and their host nations also grew more conflictual over time. As the exile population increased, European statesmen worried that the emancipatory fervor of the newcomers might produce dangerous forms of subversion. This was particularly true in France, where police and government officials feared that cooperation between Polish patriots and republican activists threatened to again plunge the nation into revolution. In an effort to address these perceived threats, the government issued a decree in November 1832 that barred all but the wealthiest émigrés from settling in Paris. Most Polish refugees were henceforth confined to approved settlements (dépôts) in provincial towns and obligated to obtain their subsidies at regular check-​ins with police.69 The new policy enraged Polish exiles, who complained that it was reminiscent of the tsar’s “cruel and barbarous” behavior that had compelled them to leave Russia in the first place; some abandoned their settlements without permission.70 However, Polish resistance only strengthened the government’s resolve, leading to the implementation of more coercive containment mechanisms. Beginning in the mid-​ 1830s, refugee stipends would be reduced on several occasions.71 Meanwhile,

 



The O ther Communard s

23

the government began to encourage Poles to emigrate to North America or to serve the Foreign Legion in Spain and Algeria.72 Similar confrontations occurred elsewhere as well. In the mid-​ 1830s, Switzerland acquiesced to Austrian demands to eject its most radical Polish émigrés on the pretext that they threatened continental security.73 Following a host of accusations that Polish refugees were “professional troublemakers,” the British government obligated exiles to register with police, reduced their subsidies, and offered incentives for their onward migration.74 Demoralized by these external and internal pressures, by mid-​century the “Great Emigration” had lost much of its coherence. Although a small handful of Polish refugees remained active in nationalist politics, many ultimately abandoned their patriotic agitation, started families with western women, and assimilated into their new societies.75 Russian émigrés, too, clashed with their western hosts. Within a few months of his 1847 arrival in Paris, Herzen reported with dismay that the civilized and progressive France he had idealized since childhood had proven a chimera. His short time abroad had revealed that France was in fact rife with corruption, elitism, and repression.76 That same year, the French authorities deported Bakunin, deeming his rousing speech in defense of Poland and in support of continent-​wide revolution a threat to national security.77 The ultimate failure of the revolutions of 1848 further embittered the émigrés who had so ardently supported them. In Paris, Herzen watched in horror as his comrades were beaten and arrested.78 Even liberals such as Turgenev, who deplored the radical tactics of French workers, expressed revulsion at the brutality of the police.79 The revolution also weakened the asylum regime in France, prompting new laws that simplified the expulsion of foreign radicals and complicated naturalization procedures. (Even the moderate Golovin was ejected from France in 1849.)80 Knowing that he faced arrest if he remained in the republic, Herzen fled to Switzerland and then to England.81 Bakunin was even less fortunate. Arrested in Saxony for his insurrectionist activities, he was deported to Russia, where he was promptly sentenced to a term of hard labor.82 A year that had begun with the greatest revolutionary upheaval since 1789 ended in abject disappointment. The events of 1848 convinced many émigrés that their dreams would never be realized in Europe. Annenkov recalled that Russian exiles came to regard “Europe reproachfully, as if it had not kept the promises it had showered on them in secret.”83 Prominent émigrés explained this outcome not as unfortunate happenstance, but as the result of systematic flaws in Western society. “The revolutionary idea of our time is incompatible with the European state structure,” concluded Herzen. The Republic that had emerged in 1848 preserved “monarchical organization and monarchical morals,” and even its most ardent defenders

 

24

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

had proven their subservience to petty-​bourgeois despotism. Now that the corruption of all existing models of politics had been revealed, the task that faced revolutionaries was to create an entirely new “ideal of social organization.”84 Bakunin’s analysis was similarly bleak: “In Western Europe, no matter where you turn, everywhere you see decrepitude, weakness, unbelief, and depravity.”85 The émigrés’ intense disappointment was nevertheless ideologically productive. In the aftermath of 1848, Herzen and Bakunin formulated new theories of revolutionary politics, both of which began by acknowledging Russia’s fundamental difference from other societies. Both emphasized Russia’s agrarian nature, its lack of an industrial proletariat, and its ambivalence about foreign liberal and capitalist models. However, unlike previous thinkers who had approached this difference as a deficit to be overcome, they celebrated it as a laudable feature that would allow Russia to assume a special role in the revolutionary process. In a piece that he authored while on the run from the German police, Bakunin portrayed the Russian peasantry as a potent revolutionary force, predicting that it would rise up and destroy the autocratic state.86 Herzen similarly emphasized the revolutionary potential of Russia’s peasants, though he placed special emphasis on the commune, whose values and traditions he saw as foundations for a future socialist society.87 These new visions of transformation directly contradicted the revolutionary theories that Marx was developing around the same time, which assumed that social revolution would happen first in the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe. Instead, they presented Russia—​a distant, underdeveloped country—​as the great hope for the continent’s radicals. However, these novel interpretations of the revolutionary process further estranged the Russians from their European comrades. Marx characterized Russian émigrés as aristocratic dilettantes and gourmands who “always snatch at the West’s extremes” and ridiculed their vision of peasant revolution as “a Panslavist attempt to revivify the old, rotten Europe.”88 His Neue Rheinische Zeitung accused Bakunin of being an agent of the Russian secret police, arguing that only a provocateur would promote such outrageous ideas.89 Meanwhile, Mazzini and French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-​Rollin, who found themselves at the receiving end of Herzen’s bitter attacks, distanced themselves from their one-​time comrade.90 After two decades of intense engagement in pan-​European struggles for freedom, Russian exiles had retreated into national exceptionalism. By the early 1860s, the revolutionary momentum appeared to be shifting back to Russia. Underground radical cells began proliferating in Russia’s major cities, and in 1863, another insurrection broke out in Poland. The radical youth of the era explicitly distanced themselves from Herzen’s generation, forming communes and donning canvas tunics, high boots, and long unkempt hair to display their disregard for bourgeois mores and their devotion to the radical cause. “Emancipated women” who donned large glasses and cut their hair short

 



The O ther Communard s

25

also played a conspicuous role in the activism of the 1860s.91 Author Nikolai Chernyshevskii chronicled these new revolutionary currents in his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done? In addition to capturing the lifestyles of the “new men” and “new women” of the era, the novel reproduced them, becoming a blueprint for youth across the empire inspired by the performative radicalism of the novel’s characters.92 The new tsar, Alexander II, had opened the 1860s with a series of momentous reforms, including the emancipation of the serfs. However, he proved no more tolerant of political dissent than his predecessor, ruthlessly suppressing the Polish rebels, dismantling underground circles, and banishing Chernyshevskii to Siberia. Growing panic in government circles about the dangers of the new radicalism meant that even some who expressed relatively mild forms of dissidence ran afoul of the state. For example, historian Petr Lavrov, who published an influential series of essays championing the virtues of gradual political reform, was sentenced to provincial exile for his writings.93 The deteriorating situation in Russia encouraged many Polish radicals and Russian new men and new women to flee abroad. Switzerland—​where a brief civil war in 1847 had empowered a liberal government that produced a federal constitution confirming the nation’s neutrality and strengthening its asylum regime—​proved an especially attractive destination for the newcomers.94 Smaller contingents of tsarist subjects settled in France. Lavrov eventually escaped from exile and moved to Paris, as did a small community of Polish activists who fled Russia after the second revolt.95 In spite of vigorous protestations from continental governments, England continued to provide strong asylum guarantees, becoming the temporary home of Herzen and Ogarev for stints in the 1850s and 1860s.96 Herzen and Turgenev briefly attempted to build common cause with the new émigrés, but the attitudinal difference between them and the younger generation complicated these relationships.97 Instead, it was Bakunin—​who escaped from Siberian exile in 1861, boarded a ship to San Francisco, and eventually returned to Europe—​who captured the imagination of the new arrivals. Bakunin’s political activities upon his return were so frenzied as to verge on incoherence: he spent part of the early 1860s in Italy studying the tactics of the Risorgimento; attempted to raise an army to defend Poland in Scandinavia; and continued to develop his anarchist philosophy that called for the “absolute rejection of any principle of authority.”98 Nevertheless, his reputation for extremism and his penchant for theatrical conspiracies resonated with the increasingly extreme politics of the 1860s.99 The radical resurgence in Russia in the early 1860s briefly improved relations between émigrés and European radicals. Marx, who had come to see the Polish cause as a vital concern of radical movements the world over, was enthralled

 

26

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

by the 1863 revolt and expressed his hope that the “lava [of revolution] will flow from east to west.”100 The insurrection also inspired a new wave of worker organizing in Britain, France, and the German states, which led to the creation of the International Working Men’s Association, or First International, in 1864.101 That group, headed by Marx, immediately denounced the abuses of the tsarist regime and called for the liberation of Poland.102 Eager to profit from this new revolutionary energy, Bakunin declared a truce with Marx. Working out of a Geneva café, the anarchist began recruiting Poles and Russians to join an underground revolutionary organization that pledged its loyalty to the International.103 The members of the Geneva group became the first Russian Marxists, going on to achieve prominent positions in the International, to participate in strikes that it organized, and to publish a Russian-​language journal of their own.104 In 1872, the Geneva circle of Russian Marxists completed the first foreign-​language translation of Das Kapital. Deemed by censors too dense and arcane to be subversive, the translation immediately became a bestseller in Russia.105 However, this period of relative harmony did not last for long. Even as he recruited for the International, Bakunin continued to promote his trademark anarchism and to emphasize the centrality of peasants rather than proletarians in the revolutionary process. Marx, for his part, bristled at the growing influence of the Russian, who had won the loyalty of a substantial number of delegates to the International. Bakunin then denounced Marx as an agent of German imperialism and Jewish exploitation, prompting the latter to expel the former from the International.106 This drama consumed Geneva’s small and close-​knit émigré community. Many residents aligned with one side or another, though Herzen, who by then had also settled in Geneva, expressed exasperation with the increasingly extreme rhetoric of both camps.107 The intensifying conflict in Geneva was punctuated by two shocking incidents. In March 1869 Sergei Nechaev, the leader of a conspiracy that endeavored to destroy “all society and its cultured elements,” arrived in the city and began to establish a cult following.108 Bakunin was particularly impressed by the charisma of the young man, with whom he coauthored a manifesto calling on activists to sacrifice everything—​including their closest relationships and their own lives—​ for the revolutionary cause. Touting his young protégé as the solution to the discord that had plagued émigré circles, Bakunin convinced an ailing Herzen to underwrite Nechaev’s propaganda. In late 1869, Nechaev returned to Russia to launch the revolution that he and Bakunin had plotted from Geneva. Personifying the figure of the ruthless revolutionary described in his revolutionary manifesto, Nechaev encouraged his comrades to spy on one another and to use blackmail and extortion to maintain discipline. When a fellow radical objected to these tactics, Nechaev murdered him. Pursued by the tsarist police, he fled again to the safety of Switzerland. There

 



The O ther Communard s

27

he resumed his scheming, collecting an archive of incriminating materials that he used to blackmail his fellow revolutionaries—​including Bakunin. Eventually, a Polish exile informed the Swiss police of Nechaev’s location. They arrested him, and after some internal debate, complied with Russian demands to extradite him.109 The declaration of the Paris Commune in March 1871 provided a welcome distraction from the crisis in Geneva. A grand experiment of “equality in action,” the Commune integrated multiple emancipatory struggles. Workers and women fought for equal rights and took to the barricades to defend them. Sustained by hyper-​local organization and neighborhood mutual aid, the Commune was also an “audacious act of internationalism” whose architects aspired to create a free federation of peoples around the world.110 Émigrés rushed to the aid of the Communards, who appeared poised to realize the dreams of a generation. Polish patriots manned the barricades; emancipated women from Russia organized their French sisters into brigades; Bakunin rushed from Switzerland to Lyon to form an armed battalion of federalists. Lavrov, who by then had begun to abandon his liberal beliefs for socialism, served as the Communards’ representative to the International.111 For a short time, it seemed that the Commune would resolve the persistent challenges that thwarted revolutionary exiles. Elizaveta Dmitrieva, an emancipated woman who took to the barricades, simultaneously worked to bridge the divide between Russian and Western intellectuals. Reconciling the teachings of Herzen and of Marx, she argued that the peasant struggle was an integral part of international proletarian revolution.112 Meanwhile, Lavrov focused on the Commune’s potential to bring abstract revolutionary dreams to life. “Until now, socialism did not possess a clear political program. Only in books and speeches of theorists-​dreamers could there be found a more vivid type of a state, which was considered impossible. Now this type has temporarily been translated into reality . . . That a government can be made up of workers has also been proved.”113 But if the Commune had made utopia concrete, this accomplishment proved short-​lived. Internal disputes about whether to prioritize civil liberties or collective defense crippled the revolutionary government. These conflicts also doomed the Communards’ original plan to launch an assault on French forces stationed at Versailles. In May, troops entered Paris, crushing the uprising in a week of bloody warfare. The Russian and Polish Communards who managed to evade arrest, including Bakunin and Lavrov, were forced to flee France.114 The Nechaev affair and the rout of the Commune deepened the challenges that faced émigrés. The former revealed the dangers of a ruthless pursuit of a perfect world; the latter, the difficulty of transforming utopian visions into reality. The forty-​year quest to realize the blessings of freedom in exile appeared to have come to naught, as Engels, no fan of the Russians, caustically noted.

 

28

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

The Russian revolutionary movement abroad, he explained, had been reduced to “half a dozen Russians squabbling among themselves as though world supremacy depended upon the outcome.”115

Toward the Concrete Any knowledgeable observer of the Russian emigration in the early 1870s would have agreed with Engels that its golden age had come to an end. But by this time, Zurich’s Russian students had already embarked on their experiment that would redefine the utopian potential of emigration. The presence of Russian students abroad was not novel: since the eighteenth century, Russian elites had flocked to European institutions of higher learning, especially in the German states.116 By the 1860s, Heidelberg, for example, boasted some one hundred Russian students—​enough to sustain several debating societies and a reading room.117 However, these communities of students remained fairly isolated, having little contact with other countrymen living abroad. In Zurich, though, the old tradition of studying abroad would eventually converge with the radical political currents of the 1860s and preexisting communities of exiles. The impetus behind the creation of Russian Zurich came from emancipated women, who had briefly been allowed to audit university courses at the height of Alexander’s reforms.118 After a counterreform forced women out of classrooms, they began to look to the handful of European universities that admitted female auditors. In 1864, two petitioned Zurich University’s medical school to allow them to attend classes.119 Their request provoked serious controversy. Although Zurich’s university had technically opened its doors to women in the 1840s, only two female students had taken advantage of this opportunity. Some professors objected that the women’s admission would result in overcrowded classrooms and that the coeducation of anatomy and physiology classes was unseemly. However, a group of liberal professors—​several of whom were political refugees from Germany who had settled in Switzerland after 1848—​struck a compromise, convincing their colleagues to accept the petitions.120 The Russian women arrived in Zurich in 1865 and began their medical educations. One soon withdrew, but the other, Nadezhda Suslova, flourished, defending her dissertation with distinction in 1867. Encouraged by Suslova’s success, the university opened all of its programs to female students in 1870. The nearby Technological Institute soon followed suit.121 Over the coming decades, hundreds of female students flocked to Zurich from across Europe and the Americas. From the beginning of its experiment in coeducation, however, Russian students dominated Zurich’s female cohorts. By 1873, 100 out of Zurich’s 114 female students came from Russia.122 About

 



The O ther Communard s

29

150 men of Russian origin ultimately joined the women in Zurich, drawn by the city’s low cost of living and the permissive admission policies of the university, which did not require proof of a gymnasium degree. Many brought their wives and children with them, bringing the total population of Russian Zurich to about 500.123 The Zurich students hailed from every corner of the empire—​even from distant Siberia, where railroad lines would not arrive for another few decades. Moscow and St. Petersburg provided many students, but so did the southern and western peripheries of the empire. A full one-​third came from New Russia, which stretched across the north coast of the Black Sea; left-​and right-​bank Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Bessarabia were other major producers of students. Poles, Armenians, and especially Jews appear to have been overrepresented in the student population.124 The social status of the students varied widely as well:  children of bureaucrats, merchants, and nobles studied alongside those who had been raised in poverty. Suslova herself had been born into a serf family whose former lords had recognized the young woman’s intellectual talents and supported her education.125 For the first time, a community of Russian subjects abroad reflected the complexity of the empire itself. The Russian students were drawn to the Oberstrass neighborhood by its low cost of living and its proximity to the university. The foreign residents of the district—​who accounted for about 1  percent of the city’s population of 35,000—​made it the first discernably Russian space in a European city. One resident recalled that one could not roam the streets of the Oberstrass without encountering large packs of students animatedly conversing in Russian.126 Another observed that the influx of foreign students into the neighborhood created a cosmopolitan atmosphere that provided a sharp contrast to the stodgy and patriarchal culture that prevailed elsewhere in the city.127 The students who came to Zurich were highly idealistic, reflecting the fanatical altruism that drove the progressive youth of the 1860s. They were awed by their access to the “cathedral of science,” as one woman referred to the university, but they were also intent on sharing its riches with the Russian people. Vera Figner, a noblewoman from Kazan’ who enrolled in the university in 1870 along with her sister and her husband, planned to return to Russia to work as a village doctor after the completion of her degree.128 Kuliabko-​Koretskii, a native of Ukraine who had worked as a law clerk in the Caucasus, enrolled in the law faculty with the intention of returning home and providing legal aid to peasants.129 Eschewing the fraternities and taverns around which Swiss student life revolved, the students led a “monastic” existence that centered on their studies and on their small circle of friends.130 Their isolation from the city that surrounded them allowed them to build their own society from ground up. The students settled in groups of six to twelve that lived, worked, and ate together in

 

30

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

the cheap pensions of the Oberstrass. These institutions created a familial and supportive environment for students living far from home. They also created new connections between individuals from different walks of life, bringing the children of Russian nobles and government officials under the same roof as those of Jewish artisans and merchants.131 By about 1870, the students had built a network of mutual aid associations and cultural institutions that served the community at large and further consolidated the solidarities between different groups. Wealthier students pooled their resources to assist less fortunate comrades, and a low-​cost canteen was established to feed the neediest. The students also organized discussion circles that united those with common origins or interests. One discussion club, for example, brought together students from the Caucasus, another the colony’s women. They even established an informal system of self-​governance—​an elected “court” empowered to arbitrate disputes among them.132 A small reading room became the spiritual center of the Russian colony and the place where the students spent most of their time. Stocked with literature in Russian, Armenian, and Georgian as well as “Jewish” and European languages, it also boasted books banned in Russia. Using its collections, the students embarked on ambitious programs of self-​education. The law student Kuliabko-​ Koretskii, who grew frustrated by the esoteric nature of his courses soon after his arrival, stopped attending the university, instead spending his days in the reading room poring over the classics of socialism and Marxism.133 Figner and her friends—​who referred to themselves as “the Fritschi,” after the landlady of the building in which they resided—​divided themselves into groups charged with researching the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of government.134 Of all the Zurich students, the women carried the heaviest burdens. Even getting to Switzerland proved an ordeal, for the Russian government required a woman who wished to leave the country to receive permission from her husband (or her father, if she was unmarried). Although some women who had failed to obtain consent from their parents managed to leave by entering fictive marriages with supportive men who helped them to obtain their travel papers, many among them faced rejection from disapproving families.135 The pressures on the female students only intensified when they arrived in Zurich, where they were subjected to intense scrutiny—​and often critique—​from professors, fellow students, and the international media.136 In response to these trials, the women of the colony developed close bonds among themselves and created organizations to address their needs. The women’s discussion club became the center of many students’ lives. In addition to providing a forum in which they could gather and address their concerns, it encouraged each member to present a public lecture—​an exercise intended to build the women’s confidence as thinkers and public speakers. The new forms

 



The O ther Communard s

31

of consciousness that women developed in this circle and in groups such as the Fritschi profoundly affected their quotidian behavior. Many ultimately renounced the institution of marriage, with some advocating free love and others preaching the value of an ascetic and abstinent lifestyle.137 These transformations sometimes caused painful ruptures with loved ones. Figner ultimately demanded a divorce from her husband, who did not share her radical gender politics.138 However, women’s groups, like communes, created alternative families defined by mutual respect and support rather than the expectations of bourgeois society. The short hair, plain dresses, and blue glasses that the women wore expressed their solidarity with one another, while their simple wardrobes and penchant for smoking signaled their collective disregard for conventional gender roles. The Fritschi also formed close bonds with male students from the Caucasus, connecting over their shared experience of marginality.139 Neither the ideas nor the practices that motivated the Zurich students were entirely unprecedented. Like previous generations of émigrés, they used the freedoms of life abroad to engage in self-​exploration and to imagine a better future. They also borrowed liberally from Russia’s revolutionary culture of the 1860s, embracing its traditions of communal living, radical reading rooms, and discussion clubs, as well as the distinctive uniform of the emancipated women.140 What was novel about the Zurich colony was the ways in which it inscribed the search for a perfect world in the life of a community whose ideals, in turn, transformed individual behavior. There were certainly echoes of the contemporaneous Paris Commune in residents’ efforts to make the colony a prefiguration of the better future of which they dreamed. But Zurich’s Communards, unlike their Paris counterparts, avoided grandiose rhetoric. Never claiming to revolutionize the world, their concrete utopia had more modest and communitarian goals: uniting in common cause Zurich’s diverse residents of Russian origin, and transforming the idea of self-​sufficient, politically engaged women into reality. The students had done all this with few resources and no outside help, an accomplishment in which they took great pride. As one explained to a friend back home, spending five months in the city taught him more about the revolutionary spirit than his entire life experience leading up to that moment; another boasted of the “land of freedom” that the students had created abroad.141 As word of developments in Zurich trickled back to Russia, curious visitors appeared in the city. Mykhailo Drahomanov, a professor and Ukrainian activist from Kiev, visited Zurich several times, and the young geographer Prince Petr Kropotkin spent three months in the city in the early 1870s.142 Those unable to visit the colony themselves could read about its achievements in Russian journals.143 Eventually, the small populations of political émigrés scattered across the continent began to gravitate toward Zurich as well. By 1872 Lavrov, Bakunin, and a handful of Polish Communards looking for a new home after the disastrous

 

32

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

events in Paris had settled in Zurich. Herzen died in 1870, but his sidekick Nikolai Ogarev spent time in the city. Meanwhile, Zurich became a popular destination for young radicals entrapped by ongoing police dragnets in Russia.144 The political émigrés who descended on Zurich settled among the students in the Oberstrass, working to influence their ambitious—​but largely nonpartisan—​ projects and to infiltrate their institutions. In public meetings at the reading room and at cafés, Lavrov expressed his dream that Russia’s peasants could revive the spirit of the Paris Commune by launching an empire-​wide socialist revolution. “The future belongs to the simple people,” he proclaimed.145 Bakunin and his disciples managed to acquire control of the colony’s reading room, which they used to propagate their anarchist ideas. They vastly expanded that institution, which soon boasted over one thousand titles.146 The radical émigrés also set up several printing presses in the city, which produced a steady stream of political treatises and tracts banned in Russia, including Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?147 Under the sway of the colonies’ charismatic leaders and the illegal literature that they peddled, the radical views that many students had expressed upon their arrival in Zurich began to acquire a sharper partisan edge. The Fritschi and Kuliabko-​Koretskii supported Lavrov’s socialism; students who rallied behind Bakunin organized a commune of their own in the building that housed the colony’s library.148 Although the two groups would engage in intense debates, they also shared commonalities. Both, for example, continued the tradition of Russian exceptionalism defined by the émigré intellectuals of the 1850s and 1860s. The Zurich students’ fervent belief that the revolution in Russia would be agrarian in nature meant that they, like their émigré forebears, tended to be hostile to Marxism. Indeed, when a disciple of Marx’s arrived in Zurich to proselytize the students, the latter chased him out of town.149 The radical new society that had emerged in Zurich depended on the distinctive space and place that it occupied. The intimate scale of the colony, which was squeezed into a few blocks, spurred contacts between different ethnic and social groups, creating new solidarities between them. The interaction between professional revolutionaries and students in the colony’s institutions encouraged the latter to channel their idealistic but vague ideas in more partisan directions. Ironically, the whole experiment to define alternatives to the existing political order owed its very existence to Swiss liberalism, which had opened the university to women and offered Russian residents the ability to create the organizations that brought their radical visions to life. Nevertheless, Zurich’s Communards were intent on exporting their ideas and experiments back to Russia. Correspondence provided one route for the transmission of the colony’s intellectual byproducts. As a Zurich-​based student explained to Prince Kropotkin, the long tradition of peasant communes rendered

 



The O ther Communard s

33

socialism far more natural to Russians than to Europeans. The Russian people, he predicted, would ultimately launch a campaign for popular self-​governance that would destroy “bureaucrats, boyars, pans, and merchants—​that is, all exploiters.”150 Another student argued to her St. Petersburg-​based friend that Russian peasants would be prepared to catalyze a revolution once they learned how to read, which would awaken them to their revolutionary self-​interest.151 The students’ habit of returning home during vacation periods—​and their diverse geographic origins—​assisted with the proliferation of revolutionary texts and ideas. In Vil’na, a circle of rabbinical students discovered the writings of Lavrov and established a socialist study circle to analyze them. In Moscow, pamphlets produced in Switzerland appeared in the city’s bookstores more quickly than police could confiscate them. In Kiev, visitors from Zurich regaled students with stories about the experiments unfolding there, enticing the latter to make their own plans to visit.152 The loudest echoes of the Zurich Commune resounded in a group of St. Petersburg students who called themselves the Chaikovtsy. Members of this radical circle boasted numerous personal connections to students studying in Zurich; some, such as Kropotkin, had even spent time in the colony. Abandoning the conspiratorial practices of the underground, the group chose to broadcast its political ideals through the creation of an intentional community. Its members prioritized self-​education through radical literature, opened a discussion club to study it, and moved into communes founded on the principles of brotherhood and equality. Like the Zurich students, the Chaikovtsy regarded inclusion as a crucial form of revolutionary praxis, attracting substantial numbers of women and Jews. By 1871, they had founded a printing press of their own in Zurich, effective cross-​border smuggling networks, and initiated contact with radical circles in several other cities.153 Zurich’s students had not only managed to create a new society that reflected their ideals, but had also succeeded in championing its values far beyond the colony’s borders.

From Zurich “to the People” Although Lavrov and Bakunin’s engagement in Zurich had strengthened the colony’s revolutionary credentials, it also introduced the culture of internecine strife that had challenged previous generations of exiles. In spite of their shared belief in the promise of agrarian revolution, the two men developed divergent understandings of the revolutionary process, informed in part by their clashing understandings of why the Paris Commune had failed. Lavrov faulted the Communards for being “overtaken” by emotion and neglecting to create the institutions necessary to sustain their revolutionary movement. In order to

 

34

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

avoid repeating this mistake, he believed, Russian revolutionaries had to work to raise the consciousness of the peasantry and to create an organized mass movement.154 Bakunin, by contrast, argued that the Commune had been paralyzed by a “cult of authority” that contradicted its original purpose—​the “negation of the state.”155 These debates were intensified by a bitter personal rivalry between the two men.156 The escalating feud inaugurated a struggle for control of the colony and its communal institutions. Lavrov’s disciples bitterly accused the Bakuninists of attempting to monopolize the colony library for their own benefit; Bakunin’s supporters countered that having invested so much energy in that institution, it was only natural that they should play the leading role in its affairs. Although Lavrov’s followers were ultimately forced to cede control of the library to their rivals, they formed a reading room of their own on the ground floor of the house occupied by the pro-​Lavrov Fritschi.157 However, the physical separation did not resolve the conflict. In the spring of 1873, members of the two camps came to blows in the city center, attacking each other with umbrellas and walking sticks. In the aftermath of this incident, some colony residents—​including the female students—​began carrying revolvers to protect themselves.158 As one student wrote to a friend in St. Petersburg, “When I was still in Russia, I thought that I would find more intelligent and cultivated people, both men and women, in Zurich: people of the deed, not just people of the word. But life here has convinced me that the products of my imagination don’t exist and never existed.”159 The communal life of the Zurich colony, which had defined its concrete utopian promise, was imploding. Ironically, tsarist persecution arrested this process of self-​destruction, reminding the city’s Russians that they shared a common adversary. By the early 1870s, tsarist agents had taken a keen interest in the students, sending warnings back to St. Petersburg that they were “more or less earning diplomas in revolution” while abroad.160 Surveillance of students who had returned from Zurich turned up no evidence that they were involved in plots that threatened the Russian state, but did raise concern about the revolutionary experiments that had unfolded there. One police official cited the simple dresses, short hair, and unfeminine appearance of the vacationing students in his province as evidence that they were likely to propagate “dangerous propaganda among the youth.” Others lamented that Zurich had become a center of sexual depravity.161 In response to these reports, Tsar Alexander II convened a special commission to gather more evidence about the “moral collapse” occurring in Zurich. The report that it eventually produced claimed that the female students perpetuated “communist theories of free love and changed their lovers more often than their gloves.” Furthermore, their “utopian, almost revolutionary” ideas about “the equalization of rights of women with those of men” threatened to “destroy the very basis of the family.”162 In early 1874, Alexander II issued a decree demanding

 



The O ther Communard s

35

the return of all female students in Zurich by the summer and announced that those who defied his order would be barred from obtaining further education in Russia.163 It was precisely the students’ ability to translate their revolutionary convictions into quotidian praxis through their appearance and lifestyle that had attracted the unwanted attention that resulted in the destruction of their community. The decree elicited shock and dismay from colony residents, who interpreted it as an attack on the entire community and the women who played such a crucial role in its foundation. This assault encouraged Zurich’s Russians to overcome their internal differences and to author a petition to the tsar defending the brand of “oppositional thought” that had arisen in the city.164 However, the colony struggled to overcome these new external pressures. When the academic term concluded, a sizable percentage of the students, including most of the Fritschi, returned to Russia. Others moved on to other European cities: Figner continued her studies in Bern, Lavrov resettled in London, Bakunin and his followers moved on to Locarno and Geneva. Only a small handful of tsarist subjects defied government orders and remained in the city. Although Zurich would continue to provide refuge to subsequent generations of Russian émigrés, never again would a single locale play such a dominant role in the revolutionary project; from this point on, émigrés would splinter into different “atoms and groups.”165 However, elements of the communal culture that had been created in Zurich would survive long after the colony’s demise. On the one hand, the disputes that strained the colony persisted for decades: as late as the 1920s, the followers of Lavrov and Bakunin continued to polemicize with each other in dueling memoirs, with each side blaming the other for the colony’s collapse.166 On the other hand, alumni of the colony who remained loyal to its traditions of emancipation from below and communal solidarity would long be inspired by its example.167 Moreover, former Zurich residents who resettled in other locales replicated the colony’s most significant cultural institutions in their new homes. One student who moved on to Paris, for example, created a library in that city modeled on the Zurich institution.168 Most important of all, the Zurich experiment had a profound influence on revolutionary politics in Russia. In the summer of 1874, the populist “to the people” movement—​the first episode of revolutionary agitation that transcended the imperial capitals—​consumed Russia. Some 3,000 radical youth fanned out across the empire to prepare the peasantry for revolution, providing a new coherence to the activities of the small radical circles scattered across the empire.169 Historians have long struggled to understand precisely what catalyzed this development at this particular moment; the most convincing explanation to date concludes that it was a reaction to the Paris Commune.170 However, understanding the

 

36

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

experience of the other Communards—​those of the Zurich colony—​yields new insights into the genesis of this turning point in Russian history. There were multiple ties between the “to the people” movement and the Zurich colony. The Chaikovtsy, who were closely connected to Zurich’s Russians and inspired by their efforts to embed revolutionary principles into the life of a community, played a catalytic role in the populist awakening of 1874. Moreover, other students who were forced to return from Zurich went on to play crucial roles in populist agitation. The Fritschi emerged as major figures in the movement, and nearly three-​quarters of the women who would ultimately be prosecuted in mass trials of populist leaders were alumni of the Zurich colony.171 Returnees from abroad also played important roles in populist agitation in the western borderlands and the Caucasus; Georgian activists recently returned from Zurich even launched a populist journal in their native language.172 If veterans of the Zurich colony played crucial roles in catalyzing the movement “to the people,” populists also drew on the organizational insights of the Zurich students. They too insisted that emancipation must occur from the bottom up, urging peasants to free themselves “from the economic oppression, the slavery, the barbarism, to which they were subjected.”173 Furthermore, they reflected the Zurich students’ culture of inclusion, becoming the first revolutionary movement in Russian history to reach non-​Russian ethnic minorities and to boast substantial numbers of women as both leaders and as rank and file members.174 The movement’s emphasis on openness and self-​direction facilitated its rapid proliferation, allowing activists to adapt populist ideology to suit local realities and needs. For example, the Vil’na radical circle—​which had been inspired by Lavrov’s Zurich publications and later became integrated into networks of Chaikovtsy—​brought the populist doctrine of revolution from below to that city’s Jewish workers.175 Although the utopian spirit of Zurich’s Russians was a product of the colony’s spatial arrangement and Swiss liberalism, émigrés proved that they could export their ideas and models of collective action to other environments. With little fanfare, Zurich’s Russians had inaugurated a new tradition that would become a distinctive feature of émigré life and inform several generations of radical thought: living the revolution within a community that embodied its spirit. The concrete utopia created in Zurich was informed by the radical ideologies of the “great men” of emigration, but it also transcended them by translating grandiose ambitions into quotidian reality. In the process, the Communards of Zurich created a revolutionary platform that was at once audacious in its aspiration to reimagine the foundations of society and accessible to anyone willing to embrace their cause. Although the students could not know it at the time, they had stumbled upon on formula that would guide émigré life for decades and change the course of Russian history in the process.

 

2

Living the Revolution

In 1882, Lev Tikhomirov arrived in Geneva. As he inhaled the fresh Alpine air, sensations of physical wellness and spiritual freedom overcame him. Tikhomirov, a veteran of the radical underground and of St. Petersburg’s notorious Peter and Paul fortress, and his wife Katia, a fellow revolutionary, were liberated from their burdens abroad. “I realized that I am free here, that no one will drag me into a cell. Not least, I look at Katia and see her devoid of fear that they will arrest her or me . . . I felt extraordinarily happy.”1 Tikhomirov understood freedom not merely as an abstract concept, but as a visceral experience. His account suggests that it was his arrival on Swiss territory—​and his distance from the tsarist police state—​that brought him to this ideal state of satisfaction and safety. But in fact, his arrival in Geneva’s rapidly growing Russian colony only marked the beginning of his journey toward emancipation. Tikhomirov and his comrades used life abroad to cast off the bonds that had once constrained them and to build new societies from the ground up that realized their ideals. Their ability to live the revolution transformed individual lives, residents’ understanding of human potential, and the nature of radical politics. However, the freedoms offered by colony life proved profoundly unstable. The intimate scale and emancipatory energy of émigré communities gave rise to bitter conflict, and their success at bringing revolutionary values to life attracted unwanted outside interference. As Tikhomirov himself would soon discover, the explosive discontents of the colonies proved no less transformative than their concrete utopias. The strains of exile life would eventually place him on a path very different from the one he had expected to take upon arriving in Geneva—​ one defined by the forces of reaction and leading back to the homeland he had fled.

Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0003

 

38

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

Émigré Archipelago The bustling Russian colonies that emerged across Europe in the late nineteenth century would evolve into living repudiations of the tsarist regime, but they were also direct results of its repression. By the mid-​1870s, the tsarist police had infiltrated populist circles and begun to prosecute their members in mass trials. The decimation of the populist movement spurred radical youth who had managed to avoid police dragnets to channel their revolutionary dreams in more radical directions. In 1878 Vera Zasulich, a follower of Bakunin, shot and wounded the governor of St. Petersburg. Shortly thereafter, Sergei Kravchinskii (better known under his nom de plume, Stepniak), an associate of the Chaikovtsy, assassinated a police commander with a stiletto. In 1879 Tikhomirov, recently released from prison and hardened by the experience, joined with other comrades to found the People’s Will, which endorsed terror in pursuit of political change. That group organized several plots to assassinate Tsar Alexander II before it finally succeeded at this task in 1881.2 The advent of revolutionary terrorism inaugurated a period of even greater state repression, spearheaded by the creation of the Okhrana, the secret political police.3 Efforts to contain the perceived threat of national separatism on the imperial periphery accompanied the war against political dissidence. New laws limited the influence of Poles in the imperial state as well as the publication of literature in Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Polish. Jews, whom imperial officials simultaneously accused of engaging in capitalist exploitation and plotting the assassination of the tsar, suffered most from the reactionary backlash. A wave of pogroms swept the borderlands in 1881–​82, followed by new regulations limiting where Jews could live and when they could work. In the late 1880s the authorities introduced a formal quota system that curbed Jews’ access to higher education.4 The deteriorating political situation in Russia led to an exodus of political radicals, who were joined in emigration by many disaffected residents of the imperial periphery. Meanwhile, student migration increased rapidly. Women remained well-​represented in student populations, flocking to universities in Geneva, Paris, Bern, and other cities.5 Western universities were popular with Russian men as well, thanks to their academic freedoms and their permissive admission standards. Jews were particularly likely to study abroad, as the university quotas left thousands of ambitious young men no choice but to pursue a higher education outside of Russia. By the early twentieth century, 12,000 students of Russian origin had enrolled in European universities.6 Switzerland remained a desirable destination for Russian subjects, boasting a population of 1,500 political émigrés by 1888 and 8,500 by 1910. Known for its strong asylum traditions, it was a particularly desirable destination for radicals;

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

39

Figure 2.1  Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Geneva, 1902–​03. Among the students were many men and women from the Russian empire, including Chaim Weizmann, who is pictured. Courtesy of Yad Chaim Weizmann, The Weizmann Archives, Rehovot, Israel, 22-​1.

more than one-​third of the total political émigrés living abroad in the 1870s and 1880s sought refuge in that country.7 Small colonies coalesced in Bern, Zurich, and in rural settlements in the Swiss countryside. But it was Geneva that became the prime destination for political émigrés, thanks to its reputation as a bastion of free thought and its old and established communities of Polish patriots and Russian affiliates of the International. The city would ultimately attract members of “most if not all of the secret organizations and circles that had been active in Russia in the 60s and 70s.” They included Petr Kropotkin (who had staged a daring escape from a tsarist prison); Ukrainian activist Mykhailo Drahomanov; Tikhomirov, Zasulich, and Kravchinskii; other remnants of the populist “going to the people” movement, such as Georgii Plekhanov and Pavel Aksel’rod; and small cohorts of Polish and Armenian activists.8 Several thousand Russian students settled in Switzerland, accounting for 36  percent of its total student population by the turn of the century and some two-​thirds of its female university students.9 As a result, the Russian colonies there were usually adjacent to universities. The Geneva colony, which boasted thousands of residents, stretched

 

40

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

south from the university along the rue de Carouge. The smaller Zurich colony remained in the Oberstrass district. In Bern, a colony of about 700 coalesced near the university.10 Paris became another major center of Russian settlement. Its Russian colony first emerged in the Latin Quarter, anchored by a community of students. Around one hundred political émigrés settled alongside the students in the 1870s, including the Fritschi, a group of Armenians who had been radicalized in Zurich, and Petr Lavrov.11 Official hostility toward radical activists in the wake of the Commune’s suppression meant that the Paris colony remained small through the 1870s. But around 1880—​a moment that witnessed the consolidation of France’s republican government as well as the rise of revolutionary terrorism in Russia—​the population of tsarist subjects in Paris expanded rapidly. By 1890, it would surpass 8,000.12 Tikhomirov and Kravchinskii, who had begun their period of exile in Switzerland, relocated to Paris in the 1880s, followed by legions of radical youth from the People’s Will.13 As the population of tsarist subjects in Paris continued to grow, it migrated south and east from the Latin Quarter toward Montparnasse and Les Gobelins—​inexpensive neighborhoods on the urban periphery that were still in close proximity to Paris’ major educational establishments. By the late nineteenth century, the Russian settlement on the southern periphery of Paris had become so dense that one émigré recalled that he had easily lived in that city for many years without ever having had to learn French.14 Although London would host Europe’s largest population of former tsarist subjects by the turn of the century, its colony was slowest of all to emerge. England never attracted a critical mass of Russian students. And despite the extensive rights that England accorded to political refugees (the nation had not declined entry to a single soul since 1826), many Russians disliked the country. Its language, less commonly spoken in Russia than German or French, bedeviled émigrés. Russians also complained of England’s high cost of living and of the hidebound, bourgeois mentality of its residents. “People looked upon all strangers with distaste. Street urchins would pursue anyone dressed out of the ordinary,” recalled one Russian of his unhappy stay in the British capital.15 London’s early population of Russian exiles, which did not surpass a hundred in the 1870s and 1880s, remained spatially dispersed, lacking the coherence of the Russian neighborhoods that had coalesced in Switzerland and France. Before they settled in Paris in the late 1870s, Lavrov and his followers had briefly established a commune in north London, where they printed Vpered!, the most influential émigré newspaper of that era. Kropotkin and Kravchinskii, who also settled in London in the 1880s, moved frequently between rented houses on the urban periphery.16 A few central locales, such as Soho’s radical clubs and the

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

41

reading room of the British Museum, emerged as centers for this scattered community, becoming hubs of Russian intellectual and social life in London.17 Smaller settlements of tsarist subjects appeared elsewhere on the continent. By the late nineteenth century, minor colonies had coalesced in Bulgaria, Italy, Belgium, and Romania.18 Germany and Austria boasted somewhat larger communities. The top-​notch universities of the German-​speaking lands attracted leagues of Russian students, who flocked to small university towns such as Heidelberg and Halle as well as major urban centers such as Berlin, Vienna, and Leipzig.19 Lemberg was a hub of both Polish and Ukrainian activism. Through the end of the nineteenth century, however, political radicals tended to avoid both states. The German and Austrian governments, which entered into a formal alliance with Russia in 1873, aggressively policed foreign radicals, complied with Russian extradition requests, and even cooperated with tsarist police agents.20 German Social Democrats, who regarded Russian terrorists as undisciplined fanatics, maintained chilly relations with exiles.21 As a consequence, in spite of the fact that almost all travelers from Russia passed through Germany or Austria, émigrés were more likely to regard these nations as points of transit than as permanent settlements. Until the turn of the twentieth century, these states would not attract the large and variegated populations of émigrés that had been drawn to Western Europe. Although each of Europe’s Russian colonies developed a distinctive character, regular correspondence and travel between these communities interconnected them. Residents of the colonies regularly moved from one city to another as their political affiliations, their programs of study, and the politics of their host nations evolved. It was not unusual for dozens of students or political émigrés to migrate en masse, conducting pilgrimages to visit people or places of interest in other cities.22 The colonies emptied out in the summer, as residents relocated to rural locales in order to enjoy the fresh air and to reduce their expenses. The travelers rented farmhouses in which they lived communally, learned to work the land, and studied artisanal trades.23 It is difficult to compile an accurate demographic picture of the colonies, but it is clear that they were exceptionally heterogeneous. Non-​Russians from the imperial borderlands left the empire at significantly higher rates than their Russian counterparts: Jews and Poles were 184 and 57 times more likely to emigrate than ethnic Russians, respectively.24 Observers of émigré communities remarked that Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, and Armenians played a particularly visible role in them. Indeed, the French police surveilling the Paris colony remarked that its ethnic diversity meant that the neighborhood could scarcely be described as “Russian” at all.25 Individuals of Jewish extraction played a particularly important role in the colonies’ communal lives. Émigré memoirs assigned Jews a key role in the networks

 

42

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

that created the colonies in the first place, highlighting their role in the thriving black market in false passports and the smuggling rings that ferried travelers out of the empire and illegal literature back in.26 Furthermore, many experienced the colonies themselves as Jewish spaces. Vladimir Medem, who moved to Switzerland in the 1890s, recalled that Bern’s university district resembled the shtetls that many of the students had left behind, “except for the absence of dirt, and for the fact that there were no old Jews about, only the young.”27 By the turn of the century, about 50 percent of the residents of Paris’ left-​bank colony, and some 60 to 80 percent of the total students living abroad, were Jewish by birth.28 Far from the hand of the tsarist state, the colonies allowed once-​oppressed populations to think and organize freely. But the true political promise of these communities was defined not by the mere absence of state repression, but by the collective experiences generated by crossing borders, meeting new friends, and building institutions together. These were the elements that defined the concrete utopias of colony life, allowing residents to interrogate the meaning of freedom and to realize its blessings.

Experiential Emancipation The experience of emancipation began in travelers’ journey westward, which many would later see as their first step toward freedom. This is curious, considering that the tsarist authorities did everything in their power to discourage movement across borders, which posed a threat to conscription pools, tax revenues, and political stability. In order to acquire a foreign passport, travelers had to obtain a certificate testifying to their “political reliability” and to pay a fee that exceeded the average monthly income of an agrarian laborer.29 Yet by placing obstacles in the path of would-​be travelers, imperial officials unwittingly created an opportunity for tsarist subjects to liberate themselves from state control. The difficulty and expense associated with crossing the Russian border imbued those who managed to do so legally with a sense of accomplishment; it also gave rise to a variety of creative schemes to circumvent restrictions on mobility. The vast majority of travelers who crossed the Russian frontier did so illegally: a mere 20 to 25 percent possessed legal papers.30 The safest and most reliable means of crossing the border illegally was to travel using a false passport. Black marketeers conducted a bustling trade in valid passports, selling the papers of individuals who had died or no longer needed them. In other cases, future émigrés obtained fraudulent passports from corrupt officials. By the late nineteenth century, revolutionary parties developed sophisticated forgery operations that specialized in the fabrication of travel documents, often staffed by former employees of government offices.31

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

43

Travelers unable to obtain false papers typically turned to smugglers, who ferried clients across the forests, swamps, and rivers that lined Russia’s border with Germany and the Habsburg empire. Bern student Vladimir Medem provided a vivid account of his journey out of Russia through this means. Having paid a smuggler to transport him as far as Leipzig, where the dragnets seeking to intercept Russian migrants grew more sporadic, he was instructed to turn up in a small village just west of Białystok. After a brief stay with a local family in a rat-​infested house, he crossed the German border in a rickety wagon stuffed with fifteen fellow travelers under the cover of night.32 Memoirs that detail the exodus from Russia often celebrate the triumph of individual initiative, recounting their authors’ daring escapes from tsarist prisons or exile.33 Many travel narratives also highlight the dysfunctions of the tsarist regime. Nikolai Kuliabko-​Koretskii, the student who was radicalized in the Zurich colony of the early 1870s, recalled that his departure for one of his westward journeys was delayed when he discovered that he needed to obtain an additional stamp to make his forged passport appear legitimate. The would-​be traveler scoured St. Petersburg for the corrupt police official with whom he was acquainted. He was astonished to discover that the officer had been dispatched to guard the tsar’s train. Kuliabko-​Koretskii wryly remarked on the irony that one of the very men protecting the physical safety of the autocrat was also chipping away at his authority one fake passport at a time.34 When a young Vasilii Maklakov, the future liberal lawyer and statesman, traveled to Paris for the first time in 1889, he falsely claimed to suffer from a medical condition that necessitated treatment abroad. Although a state doctor was supposed to verify his medical issues, the overwhelmed functionary confirmed the diagnosis without an exam.35 Chaim Weizmann escaped his homeland by obtaining a job as a raft worker and absconding on a trip that took him to the Prussian city of Thorn (now Toruń).36 In spite of the varied nature of these escape narratives, each might be read as a parable of liberation, highlighting the potential for determined individuals to triumph over an irrational and abusive system. By contrast, the memoirs of those who relied on smugglers more often speak to the dehumanizing quality of the journey westward than to its liberatory potential. Medem described the numerous humiliations he suffered while being smuggled across the border. Prussian soldiers demanded bribes to allow the migrants to continue on their way, hostile innkeepers abused them, and the smugglers cheated their clients.37 Others who relied on smugglers were dehumanized in an even more literal sense: Marxist intellectual Rosa Luxemburg once crossed into Germany buried under bales of straw, while others were concealed from border guards in bags of flour or under heads of cabbage.38 Tragedies accompanied these indignities: travelers were reportedly attacked, raped, or sold into sexual slavery by their traffickers.39

 

44

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

Having experienced autocratic oppression as well as the multiple hardships associated with the trip westward, émigrés were often shocked by the comparatively warm welcome they received in Europe. Until the late nineteenth century, the borders of France, Switzerland, and England were completely open to Russians. There were no systematic border controls, nor were migrants obligated to register with the police once they arrived at their destinations. Travelers defined the freedoms that they enjoyed abroad in different ways, but they shared a common faith that emigration would bring them new opportunity. One expressed amazement at the liberties that French students enjoyed and the vitality of the republic’s civil society.40 Another remarked that even in December the Luxembourg Gardens remained verdant—​a potent symbol of the bounty and vitality of European life.41 Once they arrived in their new cities, exiles created new societies that reflected their values. Victor Serge, who grew up in Brussels’ Russian colony and went on to become a prominent anarchist, recalled how thoroughly revolutionary ideas infiltrated his childhood dwelling: “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings there were always portraits of men who had been hanged.”42 Communal living, which remained a fixture of colony life, developed fraternal bonds and offered another expression of émigrés’ revolutionary values. The members of the kinship groups that developed in emigration expressed fierce loyalties to one another that persisted over years and across great distances. More than a decade after they had lived together in Geneva, Kravchinskii regularly dispatched monetary assistance to the sickly and impoverished Plekhanov.43 If communal living forged strong connections among émigrés, so did the colonies’ public life. Their rigorous secularism impressed residents and outside observers alike; some thirty years after the establishment of Paris’ left-​bank colony, the French authorities marveled that the Russians had not established a single church.44 Some exiles were overtly hostile to religion, endeavoring to replace it with a new revolutionary morality. Geneva-​based activists of the People’s Will published a calendar modeled on Orthodox daily devotional guides in which portraits of revolutionary martyrs replaced images of saints, and significant dates in revolutionary history replaced feast days.45 Others preserved their religious faith while abiding by the creed of universalism. For example, a periodical aimed at Russian students studying abroad published Armenian Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Muslim, and Jewish religious calendars—​an unambiguous signal from the editors that they were devoted to serving each of these constituencies.46 Social practice in the colonies reinforced this inclusive rhetoric, creating intimacies and interdependencies between men and women from very different backgrounds. As the colonies grew more populous and complex, émigrés formed cafeterias, mutual aid associations, and charitable organizations that served all members of the community and hosted all-​colony meetings. These gatherings

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

45

Figure 2.2  Revolutionary hagiography produced by the People’s Will group in Geneva. Note the centrality of women in the image. Kalendar narodnoi voli, 1883, APP, BA 196, 340.

brought together native speakers of Armenian, Polish, and Yiddish, who used Russian as a lingua franca. They also created opportunities for dialogue and cooperation between members from different walks of life.47 In some cases, exiles quite literally inhabited the experience of others from different backgrounds, such as the Georgian revolutionary who assumed the alter ego of the Finnish artist under whose passport he traveled.48 The cross-​cultural exchanges that occurred in the intimate space of the colonies and the communal infrastructure that their residents built had a profound effect on individual lives. Émigrés from different walks of life shared apartments,

 

46

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

mingled in the same bars and cafés, and even intermarried: Kropotkin, a titled prince from one of Russia’s oldest families, married a Jewish biology student whom he had met in Switzerland.49 The French police who surveilled Paris’ left-​bank colony were impressed by its residents’ strong sense of solidarity. In spite of the fact that “Orthodox Russians and Jews have the reputation of practicing their faiths with a superstitious devotion that would assume fierce antipathy between them,” noted one agent, the two communities freely mixed in Paris.50 Spaces of encounter, the colonies also challenged social hierarchies. Many émigrés who had grown up in wealthy families experienced downward economic mobility abroad, subsisting on meals of bread and water for days on end and shuttling between cheap rented rooms that lacked even basic furniture.51 Meanwhile, intellectuals who struggled to support families through writing and tutoring took on more proletarian jobs. After failed stints as a bannister polisher and a typesetter, for example, populist veteran Pavel Aksel’rod became an artisanal kefir maker, a venture in which he found greater success.52 The economic difficulties that exiles faced were a constant source of despair. But they also made it possible to imagine what a society not stratified by class might look like. Émigrés pooled community resources, further blurring the distinction between haves and have-​nots. Moreover, they signaled their devotion to creating a more equal society through quotidian lifestyle choices. “Even those who could afford to live and dress in comfort or fashion scorned to live better than the masses they intended to serve, . . . so eager were they to differentiate themselves from the parasitic . . . ruling classes,” recalled Anzhelika Balabanova, who deserted her wealthy family to study in Switzerland.53

The Last Become First In addition to permitting colony residents to reinvent the foundations of society from the bottom up, the improvised space of exile communities allowed groups that had been particularly disadvantaged in Russia to emancipate themselves. The colonies established a reputation as a “Jerusalem” for liberated women, thanks in large part to their female students.54 By the late nineteenth century, the first cohorts of women educated abroad had entered the professions, constituting Europe’s first generation of female lawyers, doctors, and professors. Periodicals aimed at the female students of the colonies proudly championed the accomplishments of these path-​breaking professionals:  the Paris-​trained doctor from Kiev who had established a physiological lab of her own, the economist who had become an advocate for working women in Belgium. Proving that

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

47

they were the intellectual equals of men, these women also opened new social opportunities for those who followed.55 Revolutionary politics became another venue in which women proved their equality and escaped limiting expectations. Women won key roles in party organizations and were frequent presences in colony meetings as both speakers and spectators. Moreover, many émigré women lived the revolution beyond the context of formal politics by participating in consciousness-​raising groups, residing in all-​female communes, and experimenting with free love.56 Indeed, radical women evolved into mascots of a sort, embodying the colonies’ potential to overturn political and social norms. Newcomers to émigré communities were often greeted with tales of the acts of defiance practiced by their women, from Figner’s much-​talked about divorce to the case of a woman who appeared at a revolutionary summit clad in a man’s suit.57 One resident of the Geneva colony marveled that its women were “truly the most developed and conscious

Figure 2.3  Female medical students in Geneva. Vera Weizmann (née Khatsman), the future first lady of Israel, is standing in the foreground. Courtesy of Yad Chaim Weizmann, The Weizmann Archives, Rehovot, Israel, 16-​23.

 

48

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

activists that I had met, not only among the ranks of women, but also among young men.”58 Many men in the colonies took great interest in the struggle for women’s emancipation, which they saw as a foundation of the entire revolutionary enterprise. If women, who were disenfranchised in both tsarist Russia and bourgeois Europe, could manage to liberate themselves from their bonds, so too could all suffering people. Male exiles offered unstinting praise of the accomplishments and ambition of their female comrades. Kropotkin hailed his wife’s intellect, describing her as a “severe literary critic” of his writings; Lavrov leaned heavily on Rozaliia Idel’son, a medical student whom he had befriended in Zurich, while encouraging her medical career and political endeavors.59 In other cases, women’s economic power quite literally underwrote revolutionary politics. Plekhanov’s wife Rozaliia, a Swiss-​trained doctor, served as the family breadwinner, liberating her husband to focus on his writing and political agitation.60 Before Aksel’rod could support his family on his kefir profits, he subsisted on earnings from his wife Nadezhda’s tailoring workshop.61 The financial power of women influenced domestic life as well: a visitor to the Drahomanov home was surprised to find the Ukrainian nationalist doing household chores for his working wife.62 Like women, non-​Russians used the freedom of the colonies to assert their worth and to organize schemes to liberate their people. Although the repression that followed the 1863 insurrection shattered the radical movement in Poland, a small handful of émigré activists continued to operate abroad. Stanisław Mendelson, the son of a wealthy Warsaw financier, was perhaps the most influential. Fleeing to Switzerland in the 1870s, he used his family’s fortune to establish two newspapers in Geneva. Both treated national emancipation and socialist revolution as connected goals, calling for a free, socialist Poland.63 In the 1870s and early 1880s, Geneva became a mecca for other nationalist activists as well. Drahomanov arrived in 1876, followed by a cohort of Ukrainian comrades. Like the radical wing of the Polish patriotic movement, Drahomanov married nationalism and socialism. Lamenting the oppression of Ukrainians by Polish nobles, Jewish capitalists, and Russian and Austrian imperialists, he insisted that the liberation of his people demanded the simultaneous destruction of imperial rule, feudalism, and capitalist exploitation. Assigning the development of a Ukrainian literary language a crucial role in this process, he spent much of his time in Geneva producing pamphlets and scholarship in the vernacular.64 He launched Hromada, a socialist journal that became the first political periodical in the Ukrainian language, as well as a publishing house that churned out literature that was widely distributed in the Russian and Austrian empires.65 Geneva was also a major center of Armenian nationalist and socialist agitation carried out by students. By the 1880s, these activists founded several

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

49

Armenian-​language newspapers that reached countrymen in the Russian and Ottoman empires as well as Persia through intricate smuggling networks.66 Geneva’s rival nationalist groups often clashed, but they also learned from each other. Drahomanov, along with many Polish, Jewish, and Caucasian activists of the era, was a federalist who dreamed of an “eastern European international association” of free states. Touting the broad applicability of his political tactics, he encouraged other downtrodden nations—​Latvians, Georgians, Estonians, and Jews—​to produce socialist literature in their own languages.67 At least some non-​Ukrainian activists who crossed paths with Drahomanov in the close quarters of the Geneva colony heeded this call. In 1880, a group of Jewish socialists announced their plans to publish the first agitational materials in Yiddish on Hromada’s printing press.68 Meanwhile, the city’s Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Caucasians gathered to discuss how to build solidarity with one another and how to create federalist structures that would affirm their new bonds.69 Just as many male émigrés had come to see how the struggle for women’s emancipation advanced their own quest for freedom, so too had the fates of multiple national programs become entangled in the intimate setting of the colonies. Of all the projects for national emancipation that emerged from exile communities, the “Jewish question” evoked the most passion. On the one hand, there was no clear consensus among colony residents about what it meant to be a Jew—​or even who could rightly be considered one. Some of the students and political activists who moved west had been steeped in traditional religion and educated in cheders, while others came from secular and assimilated families that spoke Russian or Polish. Some felt little connection to Jewish culture, which defined the identities of others. On the other hand, the persecution of Jews qua Jews in Russia transcended individual differences of experience. Most colony residents had experienced some form of anti-​Jewish prejudice, whether pogroms or mistreatment in schools or workplaces.70 Even those raised in the most privileged families, like Marxist activist Lidiia Dan, noticed from a young age that “we were in some way very distinct from the Russian, Orthodox world that surrounded us.”71 Even in revolutionary circles, anti-​Jewish prejudice remained pervasive. Bakunin, for example, was notoriously antisemitic, portraying Jews as parasitic exploiters.72 More than a few populist activists expressed similar sentiments. In 1881–​82, Ukraine-​based People’s Will cells attempted to incite pogroms, which they hoped would spark widespread popular revolt. Émigré leaders of the organization were slow to condemn this tactic, and some, including Tikhomirov, endorsed it.73 Life abroad offered Jews the opportunity to overcome these challenges. They created dense networks of Kosher cafeterias and mutual aid societies to serve their special needs.74 Moreover, emigration allowed them to renegotiate their

 

50

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

relationships with Gentile society. Aron Liberman, an acolyte of Lavrov, made early and effective interventions in this regard. A rabbinical student converted to radicalism by Vil’na’s populist circle, Liberman moved to London in the mid-​ 1870s to join Lavrov’s commune and to write for Vpered!75 In Vpered!, Liberman debunked the myth of Jews as exploiters, producing moving portraits of their suffering under the triple yoke of tsarist oppression, popular discrimination, and capitalist exploitation.76 At the same time, he insisted that Jews could and must stand alongside their Christian brethren in the battle for human emancipation. “The Russian peasant is our brother; . . . all who live in Russia are Russians; we have the same interests and customs. We are Russians! We unite against enemies in the names of equality and brotherhood!”77 Liberman’s insistence that the struggle for Jewish emancipation was part and parcel of a broader, all-​imperial quest of liberation reflected the cosmopolitan existence he had established in emigration. A proud Jew devoted to improving the future of his people, he also identified as a Russian populist and belonged to a revolutionary Polish club and international Communist group in London. For him, these commitments were complementary rather than contradictory, expressing different components of a singular striving for human emancipation. The Russian Lavrov, who popularized Liberman’s ideas in Vpered!, the most influential émigré publication of the era, had similar views. The first non-​Jewish intellectual to denounce fellow radicals’ anti-​Jewish prejudice and to treat the situation of the Russian Jews as a central concern of revolutionary politics, Lavrov reinforced his arguments with deeds.78 He welcomed Jewish intellectuals into his inner circle, even employing the Jewish populist-​turned-​socialist S. Ansky as his personal secretary.79 The efforts of Liberman and Lavrov to reconcile the particular needs of Russian Jews with the universal dream of human liberation inaugurated a rich tradition in émigré thought that others would continue to develop. In an 1892 pamphlet, Swiss-​based populist Chaim Zhitlovsky lamented that Jewish radicals had often experienced pressure to indulge in “national self-​ renunciation.” Russian Jews’ special struggles and their battle for “rebirth” as a nation was the very source of their revolutionary spirit, he argued.80 Jewish Marxists and anarchists would later pioneer their own versions of this argument, which would enjoy great influence in exile politics. However, this fusion of Jewish particularism and revolutionary universalism was not universally accepted. Aksel’rod, himself of Jewish origin, condemned any effort to recognize the distinctive experiences or needs of Jews. On the contrary, he saw Jewish particularism as a problem in its own right—​and as a major cause of Russian antisemitism.81 Other Jews, including Slanisław Mendelson, cast their lots with the Polish cause, insisting that Jews were integral members of that nation.

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

51

Zionism, which blossomed in the colonies of the 1880s, offered yet another response to the Jewish question. Students in Germany and Switzerland organized dozens of Zionist clubs, reading rooms, and journals; Chaim Weizmann would later boast that the universities of central Europe “gave us our best agitators and propagandists.”82 Vera Khatsman, a Geneva medical student, offers a vivid portrait of how Zionists replicated the infrastructure that had already been created by Russian émigrés in these locales, even as they worked to undercut the strength of organizations with a more universalist perspective. She was lured to the Zionist cause by a canteen that offered cheaper meals than the competing “Russian” club. It was there that she found her political calling as well as her future husband, Chaim Weizmann.83 Confrontations between proponents of these divergent approaches to Jewish emancipation often became intense. But at the same time, these debates integrated colony residents into a larger radical diaspora. By the 1880s Jews were well-​represented in every political movement in the emigration and had become vital participants in the colonies’ collective life. Even Zionist culture, which might at first glance appear a repudiation of interethnic cooperation, was an extension of the colonies’ cosmopolitan climate. Émigré Zionists frequented libraries and cafés where other colony residents mingled and engaged ideological opponents—​both Jews and Gentiles—​in lengthy public debates.84 The integration of Jews into Russian society was one of the most consequential developments of late imperial intellectual history. Scholars seeking to explain the entry of Jews into the educated professions and the revolutionary movement usually point to their high rates of urban dwelling, mobility, and literacy as well as the influence of the Haskalah ( Jewish enlightenment).85 What has passed unnoticed, however, is the crucial role that the colonies played in this process. Historian Jacob Katz identifies marginal social spaces such as masonic lodges, which encouraged mingling between Gentiles and Jews, as important loci of Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-​century Europe.86 The colonies played a similar role a century later, allowing Jews to redefine their social roles and their relations with their non-​Jewish neighbors. In émigré communities Jews evolved from a persecuted minority into a majority, from isolated bystanders in Russian politics to central participants in them. The fact that the tandem emancipations that occurred in the colonies unfolded with such simultaneity and in such a small space further enhanced the colonies’ utopian potential. Émigrés had overturned the arbitrary hierarchies that had been foisted upon them, creating a new society that placed the last first. Individuals from different walks of life joined in solidarity, affirming that the liberation of one group necessarily benefited others. Non-​Poles gathered with their Polish comrades to celebrate the anniversary of the 1863 revolt and the accomplishments of Polish socialism; presses operated by Russian socialists

 

52

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

produced Zhitlovsky’s pamphlet about the promise of Jewish revolutionary nationalism.87 In the lived experience of the colonies, quotidian practices of inclusion and interdependence reconciled the apparent tensions between particularism and universalism, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Reshaping Humanity, Deconstructing Borders The encounters that occurred in the colonies and the experimental nature of these communities had generated new visions of human emancipation. The next task facing colony residents was to build institutions capable of turning these revolutionary dreams into concrete realities. Literary culture played a crucial role in this transformation. Émigrés were voracious readers and collectors of libraries. Indeed, some colony residents prioritized their reading over their health: one Paris student recalled that his penniless comrades would often skip meals in order to buy books or pay their library dues.88 In one case, the passionate reading that took place in the colonies even claimed a life: Kravchinskii, who had survived his bold assassination of a tsarist official and his escape from Russia, died in London after wandering into the path of an oncoming train while absorbed in a book.89 Populated by insatiable readers, the colonies were also prodigious producers of texts. Between 1870 and 1917, tsarist subjects living in exile in England, France, and Switzerland published more than one thousand separate titles in some half-​ dozen languages, most of which engaged with political themes. Colony residents also produced dozens of newspapers in several languages that promoted every possible ideological agenda; by 1891, the Geneva colony alone sustained at least a half-​dozen newspapers in Polish, Russian, and Armenian.90 In spite of the poverty in which the exiles lived and the transience of their communities, political activists produced immense archives that chronicled the evolution of revolutionary circles.91 Colony residents saw reading and writing not merely as means of describing their dreams, but as revolutionary acts that summoned an alternative world into existence. One Geneva-​based exile remarked that the émigré press offered those who had been “insulted, robbed, enslaved” under the tsarist regime the opportunity to speak truth to power.92 In the words of one of the colonies’ most legendary bibliophiles, the book was not merely a repository of knowledge, but a “weapon in the struggle for truth and justice.”93 Furthermore, literature bound together far-​flung émigré settlements, creating a sense of community and common purpose across space. At first, literary networks were informal, created by authors who sent their works to comrades in other locales. Eventually, journals emerged that spoke to the needs of the colonies as a whole.94

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

53

Libraries, which played a key role in sustaining the reading culture of émigré communities, served as their unofficial centers. Geneva’s Russian library was among the most impressive of the dozens of Russian reading rooms established across the continent. Having acquired many of the collections from the Zurich library after the collapse of that city’s colony, it contained more than 18,000 volumes representing every possible genre at the turn of the twentieth century.95 Paris’ left-​bank colony also boasted a legendary library, founded in the mid-​ 1870s by Ivan Turgenev, who raised money at soirées and aristocratic salons to support this cause. Initially established in the Latin Quarter, the so-​called Turgenev library followed the Russians as they moved south and west. After several moves in the 1870s and 1880s, it found a permanent home at the very heart of the Russian colony of the 13th arrondissement, on the rue de la Glacière. As the colonies grew, their libraries proliferated. By the early twentieth century, Paris would boast at least six Russian reading rooms and Geneva three.96 The colonies’ libraries served multiple functions. They provided a space where residents could socialize and debate. They served as entertainment venues, hosting plays and concerts.97 They were sites of political agitation, where radicals wooed new arrivals to the colonies with the illegal collections of literature contained in these spaces.98 University students—​usually moderate if not entirely apolitical when they arrived—​were among the most sought-​after targets for agitators. Chaim Weizmann recalled the power that his neighbors who boasted the “glamour of Siberian records” exercised over wide-​ eyed students.99 Balabanova, who studied in Belgium and Switzerland, recalled that she had arrived abroad more an “instinctive rebel than a conscious revolutionary.” However, she was quickly radicalized in colony libraries, where she met Plekhanov as well as other socialists and anarchists.100 In this ideologically charged environment, it became difficult to distinguish the large population of students from the smaller cohorts of political émigrés. The libraries of the colonies also acquired spiritual significance, prefiguring the fair and just world of which radicals dreamed. Governed by their members through a democratic process, they embodied the inclusive and open spirit of the colonies at large, offering visible leadership roles to women and Jews.101 There was also a powerful affective element to the reading that took place in the libraries. Conducted in small study groups, it created intense bonds between participants while catalyzing their personal transformation. One Paris student, for example, recalled how he had fallen in love with his wife-​to-​be by reading Kant with her—​an experience that he claimed was far from exceptional in his milieu.102 Serving as “a nursery for the most useful social microbes,” libraries thus generated the love, friendship, and solidarity that many colony residents saw as the foundations of revolutionary society.103 Other institutions similarly summoned into being the emotional and political landscape that émigrés

 

54

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

wished to see. For example, a Paris cooperative cafeteria boasted that in addition to offering “healthy, filling, and cheap food,” it provided an alternative to “bourgeois philanthropy,” encouraging its patrons to develop “a spirit of comradely solidarity” by dining and democratically governing the institution together.104 These affective dimensions of émigré life made particularly strong impressions on colony residents. One exile crowed that his comrades in Paris had built a fundamentally new society in which all residents benefited from “a common and equal enjoyment of all property” and in which “all petty spites . . . are unknown.”105 Medem described feeling “as though I had been reborn” as a result of the loving relationships that he established abroad.106 An old friend of Aksel’rod’s remarked that life in Europe had radically altered the populist’s physical appearance: no longer haggard and unkempt, his bearing expressed self-​confidence and pride.107 The concrete utopias of colony life not only reimagined society, then; they also reshaped emotional repertoires and individual consciousness. Although the promise of exile communities was defined by their communal lives, colony residents were intent on transforming the outside world. On the one hand, the federalist schemes that many promoted were audacious reimaginations of the geopolitical order that appeared attainable only in the distant future. On the other, life abroad transformed the abstract ideal of international brotherhood into an attainable reality. Drahomanov drew inspiration from the success of the Swiss federal republic, which convinced him that his dream to establish a federation of Slavic nations was no idle reverie.108 And indeed, quotidian life in the colonies had created an improvised federal system of sorts. The new solidarities that connected nationalist activists and the umbrella organizations that they built together proved that it was possible for multiple groups to stand in common cause even as they pursued their own goals. Encounters with foreigners that occurred in the colonies influenced their residents’ understanding of political possibility no less than their cross-​cultural exchanges. Communards exiled to Geneva, who consorted with Russian radicals and even collaborated with them on two radical newspapers, exercised the greatest influence on émigré life in the 1870s and 1880s. The warm relations between the two camps continued after an 1880 amnesty allowed many Communards to return to Paris, where they met a new cohort of Russian exiles.109 It was also common for Russian émigrés to attend meetings of Western workers. During a visit to Berlin in the mid-​1870s, Aksel’rod observed the activities of socialist workers’ associations, expressing amazement at their democratic culture and collective strength. He would go on to pen a series of articles about the European labor movement in émigré newspapers, although the full import of his interactions with European laborers would only become fully evident later.110 Russian émigrés also crossed paths with non-​European revolutionaries abroad. In the late 1860s, Lev Mechnikov, a student-​turned-​radical who

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

55

joined Garibaldi’s army, befriended a group of Japanese radicals visiting Geneva. Accepting an invitation from his new friends to visit Tokyo, he spent several years there observing the Meiji Restoration. Challenging prevailing assumptions about European superiority, he hailed the destruction of Japan’s feudal system and the emergence of new forms of social mobility and mutual aid as revolutionary events of world-​historical importance—​and as inspiring examples for other nations to follow.111 Returning to Geneva in 1876, he became one of the first émigrés to explore the truly global potential of the revolutionary federalism so in vogue in that city’s Russian colony. Through conversations with the ex-​Communard Elysée Reclus, a vocal critic of French imperialism, he came to see the struggle of colonized populations around the world as part and parcel of the quest for social revolution.112 Mechnikov had begun to redefine the “colonial” aspect of émigré society, using his residence in Europe to advocate for colonized peoples around the world. In the decades to come other exiles would continue this mission, developing their own visions for a postimperial world. Thinking of themselves as representatives of an enlightened vanguard, émigrés tirelessly worked to inform comrades who remained in Russia of their accomplishments and experiences abroad. Students played a vital role in these communicative networks, as they had since the Zurich days, transporting news and texts from Europe when they returned home for holidays.113 Meanwhile, exiles established multiple networks to import illegal literature to Russia. Some of these efforts were small-​scale and ad hoc: one socialist activist recalled how his group recruited young women to sew illegal literature into their bodices—​ a technique that, with a few volunteers, could spirit 300 to 400 texts into the empire at a time.114 Others were more sophisticated, employing professional smuggling rings.115 Lavrov and his followers created the most effective contraband network of all, using the same traffickers who had smuggled Kuliabko-​ Koretskii out of Russia to import Vpered! and the pamphlets of Aron Liberman into the empire.116 This cultural traffic inspired new generations of radicals coming of age in Russia. The effects of cross-​border revolutionary networks were first felt in the western borderlands of the Russian empire, especially around Vil’na. The major rail juncture through which most traffic between Russia and Europe passed, that city became a major entrepôt for illegal literature.117 Having produced Liberman and other Jewish populists in the 1870s, by the 1880s, the city hosted a radical reading group that engaged dozens of young Jewish intellectuals. The youth voraciously consumed the products of the colonies that passed through their city, especially the writings of Liberman and Lavrov.118 This circle would later go on to make important contributions to émigré culture as well as the revolutionary movement in Russia.

 

56

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

Meanwhile, émigré activists labored to create institutions that would strengthen the connections between the émigré archipelago and Russia’s isolated pockets of revolutionaries. Colony residents established their own Red Cross organization to assist radicals in need in Russia and abroad.119 London-​ based émigrés established the Free Russian Press Fund, a centralized news agency for the emigration with a nonpartisan but distinctly revolutionary bent. The name of the fund alluded to Herzen’s Russian Free Press and appealed to his vision of exile communities as protectors and promotors of Russian progressive thought. This endeavor, however, was even more ambitious than Herzen’s original project, establishing a distribution network that connected bookstores owned or frequented by Russians across the continent, from Paris to Lemberg, from Leipzig to Milan.120 Exile communities not only dreamed of transforming world geopolitics, but actively diminished the distance between populations once divided by national frontiers and vast distances. Creating networks and institutions that reached across national boundaries, they united men and women from Perm’ to Paris in pursuit of an ideal world in which freedom and justice reigned. Defined from below and through democratic processes, their accomplishments took substantial steps toward creating the international fraternity and borderless world of which many émigrés dreamed.

The Dark Side of Utopia Yet the very elements that made the concrete utopias of the Russian colonies possible also produced unexpected and unwelcome consequences. One of the most profound challenges that émigré communities faced was how to manage their own ambitions, for their urgent desire to transform humanity led to constant doctrinal disputes about how to realize this goal. Although the colonies gave rise to new ideologies that reconciled the particular and the universal, the precise role that nationalism should play in the struggle for socialism remained a topic of vigorous debate. In 1878 Drahomanov, who had once enjoyed a warm and cooperative relationship with Lavrov, publicly split with the Russian’s program. The former complained that the latter’s cosmopolitan brand of socialism reduced federalism to an “abstract phrase,” conflating the interests of the empire’s Russians with those of its other ethnic groups. Lavrov and Aksel’rod responded with anger, accusing Drahomanov of sowing national separatism.121Another debilitating clash over dogma, centering on the legitimacy of terrorism as a revolutionary tactic, flared in the early 1880s. It eventually fractured the once-​dominant populist movement into hostile camps.122

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

57

Doctrinal conflicts troubled revolutionary circles in Russia as well. However, the demography and culture of the colonies made their disputes particularly explosive. Although the ability of diverse residents to build communities together defined the colonies’ utopian promise, the representation of many viewpoints in close-​knit neighborhoods tended to supercharge conflicts. Moreover, the merging of revolutionary politics and individual lifestyles meant that disputes over dogma were rarely experienced as abstract intellectual problems; all too often, they were seen as personal attacks on individuals or groups. It was not unusual for debates at all-​colony meetings to devolve into bitter exchanges of insults accompanied by physical altercations. Libraries and cafeterias became frequent settings for these factional wars, which destabilized even the most powerful émigré institutions, such as the Turgenev library.123 Fierce yet ultimately self-​destructive battles became such a pervasive feature of émigré communities that a new word—​skloki—​entered the Russian lexicon to describe them. The vaunted emancipatory campaigns of the colonies became fertile ground for doctrinal conflicts as well. The quest for Jewish liberation, which had consumed so much of émigrés’ collective energy, attracted particular controversy. Although Drahomanov styled himself as a champion of the empire’s oppressed non-​Russian populations, by the early 1880s he expressed serious misgivings about the ways in which Jewish exiles pursued their liberation. This turn was first evident in his polemics against Lavrov, in which he portrayed the socialist’s Jewish enthusiasts as agents of Russian chauvinism and centralism.124 Several years later, Drahomanov expanded on this critique. Claiming special authority on the “Jewish question” by virtue of his experience in his native Ukraine, he insisted that Lavrov’s efforts to integrate Jews into the revolutionary community had been both misguided and naïve. As Ukrainians knew, the “racial characteristics” of Jews prevented them from joining with other groups in common cause. One of Drahomanov’s followers went further still, arguing that Jews could never be true revolutionaries, for they showed an unquenchable “thirst for easy money at the expense of others that has penetrated to their very marrow.”125 These interventions framed emancipation as a zero-​sum game: Ukrainians could never be liberated so long as Jews’ putative penchant for exploitation—​supposedly empowered by Lavrov’s program—​remained unchecked. Drahomanov further developed this argument in Vol’noe slovo, the notoriously antisemitic paper that he founded in 1881.126 That Drahomanov, who had done so much to define émigré traditions of tolerance and cooperation, eventually undermined these practices speaks to the incendiary potential of the colonies’ concrete utopias. The struggle for women’s emancipation also generated resistance, as Vladimir Medem’s recollection of a scandal that consumed the Bern colony in his student days vividly shows. The problem began when a young woman announced

 

58

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

that she was pregnant and launched a public campaign to pressure her suitor to marry her. The colony court eventually intervened, ruling that the reluctant young man must comply with her wishes. Shortly after the wedding, however, it came to light that the woman had never been pregnant in the first place. Medem expressed revulsion at this “small-​town tempest,” which he cited as evidence of the destructive potential of rumor and interpersonal conflict in the close-​knit colonies. “The din created by the girls; the digging into the most intimate subjects; and the hauling up of a deeply personal matter virtually into the street, all of it was dreadfully repellent.”127 Even more important, his account expresses misgivings about the broader struggle for women’s emancipation and the ways in which it had been carried out. Displaying clear discomfort with the sexual license of émigré life, he depicts it as a source of division and suffering, not liberation. He portrays the emancipated woman who had feigned pregnancy, at least, as an oppressor who entrapped an unwitting man and deprived him of his freedom. The accounts of Drahomanov and Medem suggest that the emancipatory struggles that undergirded the concrete utopias of the colonies could ultimately lead to dead-​ends: one émigré’s emancipation might result in another’s bondage. Of course, these critics did not have the last word on these issues. Lavrov and the Jewish collaborators who had once admired Drahomanov’s passion, erudition, and populist fervor estranged themselves from the Ukrainian but continued their struggle for liberation.128 Similarly, the emancipated women of the colonies responded to their detractors with defiance. Publications aimed at female students warned that they would “live and study under the most difficult situations” even as these journals encouraged women to pursue their dreams.129 Stoic resistance had high personal costs, however. Vera Figner remarked that an unusually high number of her female comrades fell victim to madness or suicide.130 In the internecine conflicts that rocked the colonies, rival factions often accused one another of spying for the tsarist police. This allegation was repeated so frequently that it became fodder for jokes: Figner recalled that she and a friend tormented a rival by sending him anonymous notes warning that he was being surveilled and that his arrest was imminent.131 Given that many colony residents had spent time in Russia’s revolutionary underground and in tsarist prisons, fear of police infiltration caused great anguish. By the mid-​1870s, the autocratic state was indeed interfering in the growing archipelago of émigré settlements. The tsarist authorities recruited networks of informants abroad, pilfered émigré correspondence, and aggressively pursued those whom they could prosecute for crimes.132 Prior to about 1880, however, the Russian consular officials who oversaw the state’s efforts to surveil tsarist subjects abroad were spread too thin to conduct this task in a systematic manner.133

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

59

The rise of revolutionary terrorism, however, changed the relationship between the tsarist state and Europe’s Russian colonies. In 1879, a Russian special envoy arrived in Paris to study the city’s growing population of radicals. His report was alarming, suggesting that the French capital had become an “open arena” for “propaganda and theories striving, by means of ridicule and violence, to destroy the foundations of the Church, the throne, the family, and capital across the entire world.” Warning that revolutionary émigrés posed an existential threat to the tsarist regime, the envoy urged aggressive action to disrupt their activities.134 In 1881, a shadowy group of some eight hundred elite nobles, officials, and military personnel united to form the Holy Brotherhood, a parastatal group that pledged to destroy the revolutionary movement. Its agents fanned out across the continent to engage terrorists in negotiations, hoping to convince them to disavow violence.135 It also sought out allies within the colonies, including Drahomanov. In fact, the group appears to have underwritten the cost of the Ukrainian’s paper, Vol’noe slovo, which may explain his antisemitic turn.136 The infiltration of this newspaper and other émigré institutions allowed the group’s agents to influence the intellectual evolution of the colonies, while simultaneously weakening radical communities from within by fomenting conflict. Indeed, émigrés who suspected that Drahomanov was cooperating with tsarist agents publicly excoriated him.137 Alexander III disbanded the Holy Brotherhood shortly after his accession to the throne.138 Many of its functions, though, would be continued by the foreign agency of the Okhrana, which was established in Paris in 1883. Operating out of the first floor of the Russian embassy, it soon recruited a network of agents across the continent. Plain-​clothes Okhrana agents—​some Russian subjects and others European citizens with police backgrounds—​trailed prominent revolutionary leaders and infiltrated the libraries, clubs, and cafés favored by exiles. They paid the concierges of the buildings in which émigrés lived to report on residents’ activities. The agency also established postal surveillance stations in Paris, where agents intercepted the correspondence of Russians abroad.139 In 1885, Petr Rachkovskii was appointed director of the foreign agency of the Okhrana—​a post he would hold until 1902. Rachkovskii had an unusual background for a police official, having worked in several provincial government offices and as the editor of a newspaper about Russian-​Jewish affairs. During a stint living in Arkhangel’sk, Rachkovskii befriended several radicals who had been exiled there, which attracted the attention of the police. Threatened with prosecution for consorting with revolutionaries, he volunteered to become a police informant in exchange for his freedom.140 In 1881, he embedded himself in a revolutionary group in Kiev, reporting to the Holy Brotherhood on its activities.

 

60

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

He later conducted several short investigations in Paris before the promotion that would make the city his long-​term home.141 Thanks to his experience in radical circles, Rachkovskii understood the trials that revolutionaries faced. Capitalizing on this knowledge, he employed psychological warfare to demoralize émigré communities. In 1886 one of Rachkovskii’s agents broke into a printing plant operated by the People’s Will in Geneva, destroying its typographic machinery as well as thousands of pamphlets.142 Rachkovskii’s agents also fabricated manifestos and employed agents provocateurs that promoted violent and outrageous ideas designed to intensify the colonies’ doctrinal strife.143 The Paris Okhrana chief himself stalked prominent activists, working to break them. His greatest success in this respect came with none other than Tikhomirov, the émigré who had expressed such relief upon reaching Geneva’s freedom. After failed attempts to lure Tikhomirov to Germany, where the police planned to extradite him, Rachkovskii followed him around the streets of Paris, where he had resettled in the 1880s. After years of harassment, the terrorist finally relented, disavowing the revolutionary cause, denouncing his émigré comrades, and returning to Russia. His defection, a colossal victory for the Okhrana, outraged and demoralized his comrades for decades.144 Some of the Okhrana’s agents provocateurs were seasoned police agents or convinced anti-​revolutionary ideologues.145 Many others, however, were unassuming colony residents whose poverty or personal peccadillos made them vulnerable to manipulation. Evno Azev, who spent two decades embedded within revolutionary circles abroad before becoming imperial Russia’s most infamous provocateur, was first recruited as an impecunious student in Germany.146 Another double agent was conscripted when a police official summoned him to a Paris hotel and threatened to expose the fact that he had accrued large gambling debts in Monte Carlo.147 Although later investigations would show that only a few hundred double agents had been active, spy mania debilitated the colonies. Émigrés avoided newcomers, whom they feared might be police informants.148 Allegations of spying led to the estrangement of old friendships and even suicides.149 Even the most respected exiles attracted suspicion. In the late 1880s, a circle of radical youth in Paris warned comrades that the proprietor of a restaurant famed for offering meals on credit was a police agent. The unusual generosity that this individual had shown to colony residents, they insisted, provided proof of his guilt.150 Okhrana agents had successfully coopted the concrete utopias of colony life for their own purposes, transforming émigré intimacy into fodder for blackmail and the intense feelings of love that united colony residents into paranoid fears of betrayal.

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

61

The Turn to Marxism As the discontents of the colonies multiplied, growing numbers of exiles would look to Marxism for hope and inspiration. The collapse of the populist movement was one factor that instigated this shift, leaving Russians more open to new forms of political organizing and to rethinking their traditional antipathy toward German radicals. The turn to Marxism was also influenced by encounters that occurred in emigration. In 1878 Germany criminalized socialist agitation, prompting many leftists to flee to Switzerland. Russian émigrés began to visit the socialist clubs that their German comrades established and to publish in their journals.151 Aksel’rod, who had been greatly impressed by the work of German comrades during his visit to Berlin in the mid-​1870s, became close with the Marxist theoreticians Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein when they moved to Switzerland. He was among the first of the populists to convert to Marxism.152 Several of his comrades followed a similar trajectory. Plekhanov published several pamphlets on historical materialism in the late 1870s, followed by a Marxist critique of the populist ideology he had once avowed.153 Meanwhile, Vera Zasulich initiated a correspondence with Marx, inquiring whether Russia’s agrarian society would ever be able to sustain a Marxist revolution. Taking a more conciliatory stance toward the Russians than he had in the past, Marx affirmed that the Russian commune could indeed serve as the “fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia,” catalyzing the processes necessary to lead Russia forward to capitalism and onward to social revolution.154 By 1883, Plekhanov, Aksel’rod, and Zasulich had joined with other veterans of the “going to the people” movement to create the Liberation of Labor, the first Russian Marxist circle. Other groups in Switzerland embraced Marxism around the same time. In 1881 Szymon Diksztajn—​like Mendelson, a Jew who embraced the Polish cause and emigrated to Geneva in the late 1870s—​published “By What Does Man Live?” a popular distillation of Marx’s Kapital aimed at a mass audience. Originally written in Polish, it would ultimately become one of the colonies’ most influential intellectual products. Exiles went on to translate it into Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish—​another example of the cross-​cultural exchanges that occurred in the colonies.155 Shortly after the publication of Diksztajn’s work, Mendelson’s circle of Polish socialists, some of whom briefly shared a commune with the Liberation of Labor group, converted to Marxism.156 A Marxist circle of Armenian students that had been influenced by German émigrés and Russian Marxists also emerged in Geneva.157 By the mid-​1880s, Marxism was spreading like wildfire in the colonies, transforming their political culture in the process. The populist creed had

 

62

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

emphasized the importance of personal contact between small groups of peasants and revolutionaries, aspiring to give “many ideas to the few.” Marxism, by contrast, offered “one idea to many,” a task that required the creation of organized party structures.158 In 1887 Geneva’s Armenian Marxist circle founded Hunchak, a party that agitated for national unification and social revolution. Five years later, Mendelson and other Polish Marxists gathered in Paris to proclaim the creation of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). In the mid-​1890s, the Liberation of Labor group formed the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. Each of these parties emphasized the importance of public agitation, founding newspapers and organizing meetings in public squares and large meeting halls.159 Émigré Marxists endeavored to export their ideas to Russia, although the density of their treatises and the country’s lack of a large industrial proletariat complicated this task. Nevertheless, Marxists claimed modest organizational successes by the late 1880s, especially in the empire’s western borderlands. The circle of Jewish socialists that had coalesced in Vil’na, influenced by the writings of Plekhanov and Diksztajn, embraced Marxism and made its first forays into mass mobilization. Leon Jogiches, a talented young organizer, established a library filled with illegal books smuggled from abroad and began to conduct agitation among the city’s Jewish proletarians.160 Mendelson and his comrades exercised influence in the Kingdom of Poland and in Vil’na, which boasted a large Polish population. Polish workers in those regions organized their first strikes in the late 1880s and early 1890s.161 Only in the early 1890s did Marxism first penetrate the Great Russian heartland. In 1891, a student by the name of A. N. Potresov visited friends in Paris and Geneva, who acquainted him with the new doctrine. He returned to St. Petersburg armed with a large cache of illegal literature, and with the help of a friend whose father was employed by a railroad company, he established a reliable supply route to obtain Marxist tracts published abroad. Potresov introduced the writings of Aksel’rod, Plekhanov, Zasulich, and German Marxists to a small circle of university friends, including Iulii Tsederbaum and Vladimir Ul’ianov, who would become better known under their noms de guerre, Martov and Lenin. By 1893, the young men had become Marxists and began to refer to their circle as the St. Petersburg Liberation of Labor—​a nod to the Geneva group from which they drew inspiration.162 The Russian Marxists of the early 1890s were a small and elite group, consisting of no more than a few hundred intellectuals. However, the Marxist emphasis on unitary dogma and party organization strengthened the networks that connected the émigré diaspora with activists in Russia. Russia-​based Marxists frequently discussed organizational and ideological matters with émigré mentors.163 Furthermore, members of the Vil’na circle and the St. Petersburg Liberation of Labor made regular pilgrimages abroad to meet leading

 



Liv ing the R evoluti on

63

Marxists and to acquaint themselves with their latest literature.164 In 1895, for example, Lenin traveled to Geneva to meet Plekhanov, for whom he professed a fervent “love.”165 Marxism offered the most coherent dogma that the colonies had yet seen, preaching that complex social and political phenomena could be analyzed and ultimately transformed through dialectical materialism. But if many émigré Marxists hoped that their program would end the colonies’ strife, their certainty in their own positions only inflamed doctrinal conflicts. The universalist orientation of Marxism compounded preexisting concerns that campaigns to liberate particular groups might detract from the greater good. Aksel’rod, for example, expressed growing frustration with the national aspirations of many Jewish comrades. “There is no Jewish question, only the question of the liberation of the working masses of all nations, including Jews,” he wrote.166 Other groups influenced by Marxism, such as the PPS, insisted to the contrary that the emancipation of the proletariat and the liberation of the Polish nation were connected tasks.167 Conflict between Marxist internationalists and those who maintained that Marxism and nationalism could be reconciled soon disrupted the inner working of parties. Less than a year after the foundation of the PPS, a faction led by Zurich student Rosa Luxemburg broke with the party leadership, rejecting its national platforms. Jogiches, who had emigrated to Switzerland to avoid military service in 1890, allied with Luxemburg, his lover. Together, the couple founded a new party of Polish Marxist internationalists, Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP).168 Jogiches’s evolution from an organizer of Jewish workers to a self-​ identified Polish internationalist was emblematic of the elasticity of ideological identifications in this period. But far from diffusing skloki, the malleability of partisan identities inflamed them, destroying friendships and leading to accusations of treachery. “Polish debates” soon became a shorthand for “disagreeable wrangles over marginal matters which proved as insoluble as they were obscure.”169 The Poles, however, were far from the only group to struggle with this damaging culture of factionalism. Armenian and Georgian activists who embraced a more “narrowly nationalist” program drifted away from federalists who identified as members of the “all-​Russian revolutionary family.” By the 1890s these disputes led to a schism in the ranks of Armenian socialists, dividing the Hunchak party, which favored Armenian independence, from a new faction, Dashnak, that did not endorse that goal.170 These developments raised new questions about the feasibility of uniting all tsarist subjects in common cause. The rise of Marxism had one other unexpected effect:  energizing the proponents of rival movements. Exiles who remained loyal to populist traditions engaged Marxists in public debates in émigré clubs and taverns, rendering

 

64

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

institutions designed to unify populations into incubators of doctrinal conflict. One particularly epic confrontation between Plekhanov and Zhitlovsky stretched over seventy-​two nights.171 Yet as ideological doctrines diverged, the behavior of rival factions converged. Marxism’s emphasis on the importance of central party structures motivated its critics to form their own political organizations. By the 1890s, Zhitlovsky and populist Charles Rappoport had formed the nucleus of what would eventually become the Socialist Revolutionary party, which viewed the Russian peasantry as the fount of Russia’s revolutionary potential.172 Kropotkin, another critic of Marxism, built an international anarchist movement that dreamed of worldwide revolution that would abolish borders and state structures.173 Partisan competition encouraged the politicization of émigré institutions, as parties established their own clubs, cafes, and reading rooms and fought to win the allegiance of existing mutual aid organizations.174 In 1880, Kropotkin celebrated the legacy of the Paris Commune in a Geneva radical journal: “This fruitful idea was not the product of some one individual’s brain, of the conceptions of some philosopher; it was born of the collective spirit, it sprang from the heart of a whole community. But at first it was vague.” The Communards, he acknowledged, did not initially “realize the full purport of the revolution they inaugurated or the fertility of the new principle they tried to put in practice. It was only after they had begun to apply it that it . . . was seen in all its clearness, in all its beauty, its justice and the importance of its results.”175 Kropotkin’s description of the Commune bears a striking resemblance to the exile community that the anarchist himself inhabited, whose communal life and quotidian practice sought to emancipate mankind from the strictures that had limited its potential. Indeed, colony residents had proven even more successful than Paris’ Communards at sustaining concrete revolutionary experiments across time and space and transcending divisions between social groups, ethnicities, and nations. But perhaps Kropotkin was hesitant to make this comparison explicit because the colonies still faced a profound challenge that threatened to derail their promise: how to mitigate the dangerous dogmatism and contain the explosive conflicts born of the tight networks, intellectual intensity, and intimate encounters that had defined their utopian promise in the first place.

 

3

Jewish Workers Meet the Russian Revolution

Russian revolutionaries took their work very seriously, allowing themselves few respites from the constant reading, debating, and organizing that defined émigré life. Nikolai Kuliabko-​Koretskii, who had moved to London to work for Petr Lavrov’s populist newspaper, Vpered!, recalled that nearly two years after arriving in England he had ventured out to the famed one-​shilling Alhambra theater only once. But in the late 1870s, Lavrov and his entourage discovered a leisure activity that was enjoyable as well as edifying. Each Saturday night they traveled from their commune in North London to Whitechapel in the East End, which had recently begun to attract working-​class Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire. The great attraction of the neighborhood was a grocery that sold the black rye bread, pickles, and smoked herring for which the exiles pined. After visiting the store, Lavrov and his entourage would linger in Whitechapel for hours, enjoying its bustling street life and observing the habits of the proletarians of Russian origin who had taken up residence in the city from which the exiles plotted revolution.1 The new wave of migration that Lavrov and his entourage observed from London was only beginning, but it would soon reach epic proportions. By the early twentieth century, some 250,000 travelers left the Russian empire each year, 80 to 90 percent of whom were Jewish.2 The majority of Jewish migrants settled in North America, but hundreds of thousands remained in Europe, favoring England and France in particular. By the turn of the century, 63,000 Russian Jews had moved to London and 35,000 to Paris, vastly outnumbering the communities of students and political radicals of Russian origin that had earlier coalesced in those cities. By 1891, the Russian-​Jewish population of a single two-​square-​mile area of East London was double the population of Russian subjects who had resided in the British Isles only a decade earlier.3 Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0004

 

66

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

At first glance, the story of Jewish mass migration appears unrelated to the story of Russian revolutionary politics. In Russia, working-​class Jews were physically confined to the empire’s periphery; most had scant cultural capital and spoke Yiddish, which further marginalized them from Russian political life. Indeed, most Jewish proletarians would not have even thought of themselves as Russian, identifying more strongly with their native city or region.4 The fact that the Jews who settled in London and Paris gravitated to neighborhoods with reputations as Jewish spaces—​and not to the Russian colonies that existed in these cities—​further testifies to their sense of distinctiveness. Nevertheless, the lives of professional revolutionaries and Jewish proletarians grew increasingly entangled abroad. The early interactions described by Kuliabko-​Koretskii, which centered on shared cuisine, eventually gave way to more meaningful encounters. Jewish intellectuals were the first to venture into working-​class neighborhoods, translating the concrete utopias of the colonies into idioms that appealed to workers. Non-​Jewish radicals eventually followed suit, replicating the revolutionary infrastructure that had allowed residents of the Russian colonies to live the revolution. The entanglements between revolutionaries and Jewish proletarians in emigration ultimately transformed the culture of both parties. Working-​class Jews became more integrated into Russian radical culture abroad than they had ever been at home. Meanwhile, mass migration, which endowed émigré communities with an increasingly Jewish face, produced a new style of politics that simultaneously acknowledged the special challenges that Russian Jews faced while affirming their status as vital members of a broad, multiethnic coalition pushing for political change. This innovation would have a profound effect on politics in the colonies—​and in Russia as well.

Moving West Although pogroms remain closely associated with Jewish migration in popular memory, the Jewish exodus from late imperial Russia was catalyzed by a complex series of push and pull mechanisms. Moments of violence and political instability led to increases in out-​migration, but the endemic poverty of shtetls—​ compounded by high birthrates and state-​imposed limits on Jews’ economic activities—​were the most important drivers of migration.5 Eager to reduce Russia’s Jewish population, the imperial authorities authorized the activities of Jewish emigration societies in the 1890s—​a notable exception to policies that otherwise curbed migration. Nevertheless, legal emigration remained expensive and bureaucratically cumbersome. Most Jewish travelers, like their non-​Jewish

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

67

counterparts, crossed the border illegally, experiencing all the dangers and indignities that this voyage entailed.6 Germany, through which almost all travelers passed, acquired a reputation for being especially unfriendly to Russian Jews. In the 1880s, travelers from Russia were compelled to undergo a comprehensive battery of medical exams at their own expense, and by the turn of the century, the Reich refused entry to travelers unable to produce a prebooked ticket to a port city. A full one-​tenth of Prussian gendarmes were dispatched to the Russian border to intercept migrants attempting to circumvent these regulations.7 German Jews expressed ambivalence about their eastern brethren as well. On the one hand, German-​Jewish organizations painstakingly documented the horrors of Russia’s pogroms and mobilized to assist Jews fleeing their homeland. On the other, they expressed fear that an influx of poor and uneducated migrants would only encourage the new breed of racial antisemitism that emerged in the late 1870s and early 1880s.8 By contrast, England and France were comparatively welcoming for Russian Jews. Politicians and the general public in these states tended to define their values as antithetical to those of autocratic Russia, which produced widespread sympathy for the victims of autocracy. Moreover, although the British and French Jews who helped to frame conversations about their Russian brethren shared their German counterparts’ concerns about the dangers of mass migration, they demonstrated more confidence in their ability to manage any adverse consequences. In fact, after several failed attempts to ameliorate the situation of Jews in Russia, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded by Paris industrialists to assist the Jews of less “civilized” nations, began to facilitate their emigration.9 Between 1880 and 1910, it provided financial and logistical assistance to tens of thousands of Jewish migrants who settled in England and France, as well as those who continued on to North America.10 The Alliance continued to provide support to Russian Jews even after they had settled abroad, endowing a scholarship fund for needy students.11 Other Jewish organizations that operated in Britain and France complemented the efforts of the Alliance Israélite. Special-​interest periodicals, such as London’s Jewish Chronicle and Paris’ Archives Israélites, cooperated with the Alliance to educate the public about the struggles of Russian Jews and to organize relief efforts. Local Jewish organizations assumed most of the burden for helping immigrants to settle into their new homes. In London, the Russo-​Jewish Relief Committee, the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor, and the Hebrew Ladies’ Protective Society played the leading role; in Paris, the Consistory and the Jewish Philanthropic Committee assisted the newcomers.12 In London and Paris, the two cities that acquired the largest populations of Russian Jews, distinctive immigrant neighborhoods coalesced in the 1870s.

 

68

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

London’s first Russian-​ Jewish settlement emerged around Whitechapel’s Petticoat Lane. As the population continued to grow in the 1880s, migrants crossed Commercial Road, moving into neighborhoods traditionally occupied by the English and Irish working classes.13 Whitechapel boasted a rich Jewish history: many of the Dutch and German Jews who had immigrated to England in the early nineteenth century had initially settled there. As the immigrants departed for the West End and North London, however, the neighborhood fell on hard times. Its crumbling buildings lacked access to sewers and to potable water, becoming breeding grounds for disease. Its dark alleys were notorious for criminal activity even before the murders of Jack the Ripper catapulted the neighborhood onto the front pages of newspapers around the world.14 In the 1880s, nearly half of Whitechapel’s residents lived in poverty.15 Most of the Russian working-​class Jews who moved to Paris settled in the Marais, on the right bank of the Seine. Like Whitechapel, the Marais had a long Jewish history as well as an unsavory reputation. Its dilapidated housing stock and narrow, poorly maintained streets kept rents low, making the neighborhood affordable to newly arrived immigrants. Russian-​Jewish settlement was particularly dense along the Rue des Rosiers and the Rue des Écouffes, an area that became known as the Pletzl (“little square” in Yiddish). In the 1880s and 1890s, Paris’ Russian-​Jewish population pushed further north and east, along the rue du Temple and the rue de Turbigo. Meanwhile, Jewish organizations eager to alleviate overcrowding began to direct new arrivals to an emerging immigrant neighborhood coalescing on the north slope of Montmartre. By the last years of the century, the growing community of Russian Jews continued to expand into the eastern end of the eleventh arrondissement and up the hill toward Belleville.16 The populations of Russian Jews were no less diverse than those of political exiles and students: they included Litvaks and natives of southern Russia; Hasidim and the barely observant; Yiddish speakers from remote shtetls and urbanites from Warsaw and Kiev who preferred to speak Polish or Russian. Romanian, Hungarian, and Austrian Jews, while outnumbered by Russian subjects, also gravitated toward the East End and the Pletzl.17 One thing that held these complex neighborhoods together, however, was their resolutely proletarian character. Some migrants managed to establish successful small businesses or artisanal ventures, but most took on unskilled or semiskilled employment as casual laborers, street vendors, or factory workers. The garment industry was the largest employer of Russian-​Jewish immigrants in both Paris and London. In the former, immigrants typically subcontracted their labor to large conglomerates, performing piecework on leather goods, hats, and clothing at home. In the latter, large sweatshop operations were common. In both cases, workers conducted monotonous labor in buildings that lacked proper ventilation or sanitation; it

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

69

was not uncommon for work days of twelve hours or more to yield starvation wages.18 In spite of their poverty, working-​class Jewish immigrants managed to create close-​knit communities. Migrants typically settled alongside (and even traveled with) others from their native town or city, preserving communal bonds. Once they arrived abroad, these informal kinship groups evolved into landslayt associations, which provided mutual aid and assistance to cover the cost of burials.19 Immigrants also preserved their religious traditions. Rather than frequenting existing synagogues used by British and French Jews, new arrivals from Russia tended to found their own small prayer houses (hevrot). By the early twentieth century, as immigrant communities continued to grow, Russian Jews raised funds to build synagogues of their own.20 Although kinship ties served as the glue that held the new Russian-​Jewish settlements together, the newcomers also created new institutions that served the community at large. The size and relative stability of Russian-​Jewish neighborhoods sustained the emergence of a new “ethnic economy” in the East End and the Marais. Entrepreneurs opened grocery stores, cafés, and bookstores at which the entire community gathered, and signs in Yiddish gradually replaced those in French and English.21 Immigrant neighborhoods boasted a thriving Yiddish-​language theatre scene, staging shows that portrayed the challenges that Jews had faced in Russia as well as the vicissitudes of immigrant life. The East End and the Pletzl hosted frequent street festivals and huge outdoor meetings to welcome maggidim, itinerant (and often mystical and charismatic) preachers.22 Jewish workers also mobilized to address their challenges in the workplace, founding shop-​based mutual aid associations in the 1870s. A small handful of these organizations in both London and Paris developed into the first immigrant trade unions.23 In spite of the hardships of life abroad, many newcomers counted their blessings. They had been accorded substantial political liberties by their host nations, which in turn allowed them to create new communities that addressed their collective challenges. “The vitality compressed into that one square mile of over-​crowded slums generated explosive tensions,” recalled one child of Russian immigrants who grew up in Whitechapel. “We were all dreamers, each convinced it was his destiny to grow rich, or famous, or change the world into a marvelous place of freedom and justice.”24 Even laborers who toiled in dire conditions insisted that the self-​determination they enjoyed abroad outweighed the challenges of material privation. One London tailor who testified before a parliamentary committee on sweating reported that he worked eighteen-​hour days in conditions more trying than those he had endured in Russia. But he insisted that he intended to remain in England, “since there is more freedom in London than there is in any other place.”25

 

70

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

Tales of the economic opportunity and political liberties that Jews enjoyed in England and France filtered back to Russian shtetls. At least one Yiddish-​ language guidebook that described the practicalities of settling in Paris circulated in the Pale of Settlement.26 Economic remittances from settled immigrants and encouraging news about the quality of life abroad encouraged further migration from Russia. On the eve of his departure from his homeland, one would-​be migrant described his hope to find “a home, a country, a place on this great planet where I can focus my strength on making a living for myself ”; another sought “redemption” from life abroad.27 For Jewish immigrants, as for the residents of the Russian colonies, western cities acquired a near-​mythical status as spaces of freedom.

The Battle for Immigrant Neighborhoods The cohesive communities created by Jews from Russia attracted the attention of several outside groups. The first was the bourgeois Western Jews who had facilitated the newcomers’ immigration in the first place. Native-​born Jews frequently remarked on the difference of the newcomers whom they had mobilized to assist. One concern focused on the ultra-​Orthodox Judaism of many immigrants. Another centered on Russian Jews’ supposed lack of cultivation, manifested in their poor hygiene, the dilapidated appearance of immigrant neighborhoods, and the Yiddish “jargon” spoken there.28 Although British and French Jews found these traits deeply lamentable, they tended to view them as unfortunate vestiges of tsarist persecution rather than innate deficiencies of the immigrant population. According to this logic, exposure to education and “Western ideas of civilization” would eventually correct the newcomers’ “undesirable traits.”29 “If rescued from their wretched condition,” wrote one British volunteer, “they will be a credit to the Jewish community at large.”30 From the moment that Russian Jews arrived in the west, their brethren mobilized to acculturate the newcomers. Jewish charitable groups dispatched volunteers to ports and railway stations, where they offered assistance to the new arrivals and attempted to prevent them from falling victim to thieves, swindlers, and pimps. They established shelters, clubs, soup kitchens, sanitary commissions, and work bureaus to ensure that immigrants had safe places to live, work, and socialize.31 The most prominent members of the Jewish community in London and Paris made lavish donations that underwrote much of this charitable work. The London branch of the Rothschild family, for example, endowed the acclaimed Jews’ Free School in Whitechapel as well as a housing estate. The French branch founded a hospital that served Paris’ immigrant population.32

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

71

The philanthropic endeavors organized by western Jews focused on transforming downtrodden refugees into respectable workers—​a task that often entailed reforming or eradicating social practices that the immigrants had defined from below. Shelters, soup kitchens, and work bureaus offered instruction in hygiene and morality in addition to providing newcomers with basic necessities. Samuel Montagu, a philanthropist and the MP for Whitechapel, established a social club that catered to the neighborhood’s immigrant population. Aspiring to educate proletarians about respectable forms of leisure, it prohibited gambling and drinking.33 The leaders of the western Jewish community even intervened to transform the ways that Russian Jews worshiped. Rabbis and philanthropists worked to amalgamate the hevrot that immigrants had established in the Pletzl and the East End into larger congregations that were “properly-​conducted,” housed in airy and sanitary spaces, and overseen by qualified religious authorities.34 Each of these efforts aimed to instill migrants with a “suitable Parisian demeanor” or to render them “English in feeling and in conduct.”35 Children played a particularly important role in these efforts to transform Russian Jews. The Rothschild-​funded Jews’ Free School and the schools operated by the Consistory in Paris insisted that their pupils master the language of their host country—​which philanthropists saw as a necessary precursor to cultural assimilation and economic advancement. The schools operated by both institutions offered their pupils extensive religious instruction, but they actively agitated against Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, Lord Rothschild barred the pupils at his school from receiving additional religious education in talmud torahs or cheders, charging that these institutions promoted backward ideologies and “undermined [the students’] health.”36 Schools also strove to develop bourgeois mores in the children. The Jews’ Free School provided its students with a free suit and a pair of boots each year and insisted that the children respect “English notions of cleanliness.”37 It organized field trips to public celebrations and royal jubilees that integrated the children into British civic life and afforded them an opportunity to celebrate the generosity of the state that had offered them refuge.38 Some immigrants welcomed and benefited from this campaign of acculturation. Writer Israel Zangwill, mathematician Selig Brodetsky, and automobile designer André Citroën are but a few examples of the many children of Russian-​ Jewish immigrants who eventually moved out of working-​class neighborhoods and became bourgeois citizens.39 In his memoir, Brodetsky reflects on the transformative impact that the Jews’ Free School—​and the personal encouragement of Lord Rothschild, its benefactor—​had on his life. In a poignant recollection of the day that he departed for his first year at Cambridge, he recounts how he boarded a train dressed in a smart new suit and bade farewell to his proud

 

72

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

mother and grandfather, who still wore the traditional garb of Orthodox Jews. In addition to marking a new phase of his life, Brodetsky’s departure signified his own reinvention: no longer a Whitechapel Russian, he had become a British gentleman.40 But encounters with western Jews left other immigrants alienated. One needy migrant who had appealed to London’s Jewish Board of Guardians for a pair of boots complained that he received much more “help” than he had bargained for: he was compelled by his benefactors to take a bath, accept a work placement, and move into a room at a Board-​approved lodging house. “My life . . . had been mapped out completely,” he lamented. “I was trapped.”41 A Paris resident remarked, “I could only find affinities with people who had known the same sufferings, felt the same torments, shared my view of life, my ideas of social justice. The mentality of emancipated Jews, born in a free country, liberated by the Revolution, seemed to be very far from that of the Jewish masses and created a gulf between me and them.” He recalled the case of a pogrom victim who was so disaffected by his interactions with the French-​Jewish relief agency to which he appealed for help that he decided to forego the aid he originally sought, concluding that “he preferred hunger to a new humiliation.”42 The second group that competed to win the loyalty of proletarian Jews were the radicals of the Russian colonies. As Kuliabko-​Koretskii’s testimony shows, shared culinary cultures spurred some of the first contacts between the two groups. “Irresistible nostalgia” was another factor that attracted intellectuals to proletarian neighborhoods; one Russian-​Jewish student who lived in Paris’ left-​ bank colony often crossed the Seine catch up on gossip with others from his hometown.43 Already by the mid-​1870s, though, these exchanges were growing more political. Aron Liberman, the Lavrovist who had argued with such passion that Jews were vital members of the radical coalition, was among the first to peddle the revolutionary visions of the colonies to Jewish workers. Noting that the Jewish workers of the East End had been victimized by tsarist repression and by capitalist exploitation in emigration, he called for the creation of an international Jewish socialist party to coordinate the battle against the tsarist regime and the “Jewish plutocracy.” In pursuit of this goal, he founded the world’s first Jewish socialist club in 1876 as well as a Hebrew-​language socialist newspaper.44 Liberman faced a major challenge in peddling his socialist utopia to a newly arrived immigrant population that remained attached to traditional religion. Benefiting from his rabbinical training, he framed socialism as a natural extension of Jewish ethics: “Our existence is communal, revolution is our tradition, our law codes value the common good, clearly mandating . . . equality, brotherhood, and so on. Our ancient social structure was anarchistic; our current bonds are international, stretching across the surface of the entire earth. The great prophets of our time, such as Marx, Lassalle, and others, were brought up

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

73

and matured steeped in the spirit of our people.”45 A cultural intermediary who brought the cause of revolution to workers in language they could understand, Liberman also displayed interest in more literal tasks of translation. Jewish radicals of his generation largely shunned the Yiddish language as an uncultured jargon, and Liberman’s own political writings were exclusively in Russian and Hebrew. However, the activist recognized that a turn to the Yiddish vernacular was necessary to organize the masses, and he carried out much of his agitation in the East End in that language.46 Liberman’s efforts to mobilize proletarian immigrants were only marginally successful:  many workers rebuffed his advances, and his club attracted only a few dozen members. Arrested during a trip to Vienna in the late 1870s, he left for North America after a brief imprisonment and committed suicide shortly thereafter. However, by the 1880s, Jewish revolutionaries were pouring into the East End to carry on his legacy. Fluent in both Yiddish and Russian, these men exported the revolutionary practices of the Russian colonies to proletarian communities. One of the most successful organizers, Morris Winchevsky (born Lippe Benzion Novokhovich), had been drawn to the revolutionary movement by the writings of Lavrov and Liberman and had worked for the latter’s Hebrew newspaper. In 1884 he founded the first Yiddish-​language socialist newspaper. Although that project was short-​lived, Winchevsky and his associates soon launched a more enduring paper, Arbeter fraynd.47 In 1885, Winchevsky and several comrades established the International Workingman’s Educational Club on Whitechapel’s Berner Street. The club complemented the mission of Winchevsky’s radical paper, providing a physical space in which seasoned revolutionaries could mingle with immigrant workers and educate them about socialism.48 One radical described the club as a living embodiment of the revolutionary spirit. Its walls were decorated with portraits of “Marx, Proudhon, Lassalle overthrowing the golden calf of capitalism” and insulting caricatures of the “greedy, envious bourgeoisie, which, laden with treasures of all sorts, refuses the starving the pittance of a penny.”49 As the radical infrastructure of the East End began to take shape, non-​ Jewish revolutionaries soon followed the Jewish pioneers into immigrant neighborhoods. Russian and British socialists and anarchists frequented the Berner Street Club and mass meetings of workers.50 In some cases, non-​Jews made crucial contributions to organizational efforts. German Rudolph Rocker, who had become an anarchist while living in a Russian commune in Paris’ left-​ bank colony, moved to Whitechapel in the 1890s. Rocker fell in love with a sweatshop worker from Russia, taught himself Yiddish, and devoted the rest of his life to mobilizing working-​class Jews behind the anarchist cause.51 In addition to agitating in the Yiddish press and radical clubs, London-​based revolutionaries infiltrated immigrant trade unions. By the late 1880s, meetings

 

74

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

at the Berner Street Club hosted gatherings of intellectuals and laborers that demanded improvements in the workplace as well as social revolution.52 March 1889 witnessed the first mass mobilization on the part of Whitechapel workers. Inspired by the match girls’ strike of the previous year, they staged a protest against sweatshops at which a brass band played the Marseillaise and speakers demanded the “abolition of the capitalist ruling class.”53 That summer, several thousand members of a Yiddish-​speaking tailors’ union in the East End declared a general strike. Organized with help from the Berner Street Club and Arbeter fraynd, it became “the first [labor action] in any country in which large numbers of Jewish workers took part.”54 The following year, Winchevsky organized a federation of Jewish unions in the East End, which recognized Arbeter fraynd as their official organ.55 Each year, more Jewish workers joined the struggle for the “emancipation of humanity from . . . God, State and Capitalism.”56 News of the accomplishments of organizers in London quickly circulated among Jewish immigrant communities across the world. London’s Yiddish press reported on events in cities with other large Jewish populations, and the frequent movement of migrants (as well as political organizers) further facilitated the spread of information.57 As a result, the politics of Jewish immigrant neighborhoods around the world began to develop in tandem. Developments in New York—​which boasted the world’s largest population of Russian Jews—​ paralleled those in London particularly closely. That city’s first Yiddish newspaper launched two years after London’s, and activists there successfully built their own network of radical clubs and Yiddish-​speaking unions. These transnational exchanges would intensify over the coming decades, becoming a crucial feature of radical Jewish proletarian culture.58 The community of Russian Jews in Paris was substantially smaller than in London or New York, and events there tended to lag five to ten years behind those in the larger centers. Nevertheless, worker mobilization in that city followed a familiar pattern. By the early 1880s, Paris boasted two groups that unified intellectuals and proletarians. The first, the Jewish Workers’ Society, was founded by Osip Zetkin and Philip Krantz (born Yankev Rombro), who would later move to London to work for Arbeter fraynd and, finally, New York. Building on a preexisting mutual aid association founded by workers, the group aimed to expose proletarians to socialism and appointed Petr Lavrov as its president.59 Zetkin was involved in the creation of the Union of Russian Workers, a group with similar aims, a few years later.60 In the 1890s, the activists involved in these groups began to expand their activities. They launched the city’s first Yiddish-​ language newspapers and began to cooperate with workers to organize unions.61 A  Yiddish-​speaking tailors’ union staged a successful strike in 1901, which attracted significant attention and resulted in a dramatic rise in union membership and radical activity. In the succeeding years, tailors would strike on several

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

75

other occasions and Jewish workers in other industries would stage industrial actions of their own.62 Radical organizers courted immigrants by describing the ideal world that would result from a socialist revolution, but they also capitalized on workers’ resentment toward the bourgeois Jews who sought to acculturate them. The Paris-​based Jewish Workers’ Society became an outspoken critic of the Alliance Israélite, complaining that the relief offered by the organization was heavy-​ handed and misaligned with the real needs of the immigrant population.63 A 1906 conflict between the Jewish Philanthropic Committee and immigrants who complained about its policies grew so intense that a protest outside the offices of the group resulted in the arrest of several participants.64 In London, radicals protested the paternalism of the Board of Guardians, complaining that English Jews focused more on transforming working-​class culture than on improving the lives of laborers.65 Indeed, participants in London’s March 1889 street demonstration that ended in calls for revolution jeered London Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler as an enemy of the working class. This event, too, concluded in arrests.66 Of course, sympathy for revolutionaries was not universal within proletarian communities. Immigrants who clung to their faith battled socialist and anarchist activists, staging protests at left-​wing demonstrations.67 Others expressed misgivings about the motives of the non-​Jewish radicals who proselytized them. At a London meeting at which Russian revolutionaries called on Jews to join the all-​imperial struggle for liberation, attendees reportedly murmured among themselves that if the revolution envisioned by the orators were in fact to occur, “the Jews will probably be the first victims.”68 Nevertheless, revolutionaries had made inroads in Russian-​ Jewish neighborhoods. By the 1890s, anarchists had emerged as the preeminent force in London, thanks to the accomplishments of a few particularly talented organizers. Shaul Yanovsky, who had frequented the Jewish Workers’ Club in Paris and later pioneered New York’s Yiddish-​language press, arrived in London to edit Arbeter fraynd in 1891. Under his leadership, that paper (and the Berner Street Club, with which it was closely affiliated) abandoned Winchevsky’s ecumenical radicalism, acquiring a strongly anarchist orientation.69 Rocker proved another gifted organizer, presiding over the opening of a new anarchist club on Whitechapel’s Jubilee Street, the expansion of Arbeter fraynd, and the launch of a new Yiddish-​language newspaper.70 Over the same period, the influence of Social Democrats waned, as Winchevsky and other organizers departed for New York. Nevertheless, socialists remained a visible presence in the East End, operating clubs, organizing meetings, and launching a Yiddish-​language newspaper of their own.71 By contrast, Social Democrats enjoyed the upper hand in the Pletzl, although Paris also boasted some half-​dozen anarchist groups catering

 

76

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

to workers.72 By the early twentieth century, more than half of Russian citizens living in Paris were affiliated with a revolutionary party.73 Zionists also established a presence in immigrant neighborhoods, competing to win the loyalty of proletarians. In London, a charismatic rabbi established a Zionist club that would claim some 1500 members by 1893.74 By the 1890s, several Zionist organizations that catered to working-​class populations had emerged in Paris.75 Zionists differed from revolutionaries in their diagnosis of the ills of immigrant life and its remedies, presenting the creation of a Jewish state as the necessary precursor for the liberation of the Jewish people. However, many Russian Zionists shared the revolutionaries’ utopian mindset and their antipathy toward bourgeois culture, defining themselves as much against the

Figure 3.1  Circle of Jewish anarchists active in the Pletzl. APP, BA 1709.

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

77

assimilationist ethos of western Jews as they did against antisemitism. Perhaps the most prominent Russian Zionist theoretician, Ahad Ha’am, characterized Jewish life in England as “a cemetery with ornamental tombstones” and indignantly registered his refusal to live in “slavery in the midst of freedom.”76 Russian Zionists’ awareness of the deep cultural gulfs separating them from Western Jewry meant that their relations with European Zionists were quite tense. Many, for example, denounced Theodor Herzl as a “smooth talker, more at ease in café society than in Jewish culture,” and a misguided proponent of “high diplomacy and grand publicity coups.”77 The anti-​bourgeois orientation of Russian Zionists endowed many of their activities with a distinctly revolutionary character. Indeed, some insisted that Zionism and socialism were intrinsically linked. In 1901, London-​based Nachman Syrkin, who had come of age in the Zionist student movement in Bern and Berlin, authored a tract arguing that Jews must simultaneously free themselves from their “economic and political yoke” and establish a Jewish state founded on socialist values. “Long live international socialism! Long live socialist Zionism!” he proclaimed.78 A few years later, Ber Borochov, also working in London, developed a fusion of Zionism and Marxism. This synthesis would provide the intellectual foundations for Poale Zion, a Russian labor Zionist party.79 The encounters between Eastern European Jews and Russian revolutionaries that occurred in working-​class neighborhoods had produced a new brand of revolutionary culture. On the one hand, it was unapologetically Jewish: organized by Jews, for Jews, and carried out in Yiddish. On the other, it invited Jewish workers to integrate themselves into a broader revolutionary coalition that included men and women from many backgrounds. Jewish proletarians, who had been excluded from intellectual life in Russia by virtue of their cultural, social, and linguistic difference as well as their geographic isolation, were becoming increasingly entangled in a political movement that sought to transform the nature of life in their homeland.

Universalist in Content, Jewish in Form How did the revolutionary culture forged in working-​class neighborhoods shape individual lives and conceptions of community? The revolutionaries’ penchant for conspiracy, combined with the poverty and transience of the immigrant workers, makes it difficult to gain insight into the interactions between laborers and intellectuals. There are no extant archives of proletarian revolutionary organizations or early Yiddish newspapers, and the memoirs of the individuals involved in these organizations address their inner workings only in passing.

 

78

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

The most voluminous documentation on the functioning of these institutions comes from outside observers:  European journalists who ventured into revolutionary clubs and workers’ meetings, and local police, who engaged in direct surveillance of radical organizations and compiled reports from informants who frequented them. The observations of these interlopers are impressionistic and often unreliable, but when read in tandem with memoirs and other sources, they can offer insight into the intimate relationships that developed between Russian revolutionaries and Jewish workers. The revolutionaries who courted immigrant workers thought of themselves as enlighteners, providing the latter with the tools that they needed to integrate themselves into an international community of revolutionaries. The Yiddish press served as one tool of acculturation. In his newspapers, Winchevsky pioneered a genre of popular reportage that he called notitsn (little notes)—​brief, politically pointed reflections on current events. Written in easily accessible Yiddish, they encouraged laborers to situate their own life struggles in a broader political context.80 Arbeter fraynd took a similarly didactic approach under its anarchist editors, publishing essays that introduced workers to major figures in Russian radical politics and explained the significance of the Paris Commune.81 The pedagogical mission of the paper was further reinforced by a school affiliated with it that taught workers Western languages and offered instruction in history and sociology.82 Radical intellectuals also encouraged proletarian immigrants to live the revolution, replicating the institutions that served as the foundations of the colonies’ concrete utopias. Libraries, for example, quickly proliferated in the Pletzl and the East End. The Paris Jewish Workers’ society opened a reading room, while London socialists and anarchists opened two sizable libraries on Church Lane and Princelet Street, one of which also hosted a cafeteria. Offering materials in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish, workers mingled with “a large number of Russian revolutionaries and refugees of all nationalities” in these institutions.83 Revolutionaries also used leisure activities for agitational purposes, organizing balls, concerts, and plays to raise money for partisan activities and to win over the politically noncommitted.84 In some cases, the performances themselves were overtly political:  one London-​based Marxist organization staged a vaudeville performance about the assassination of a tsarist police official.85 The radical institutions of proletarian neighborhoods, like those of the colonies of intellectuals, were emancipatory spaces that embodied revolutionary dreams of transforming the social order. Orators at mass meetings spoke of the need to liberate women from constrictive social norms and to engage them in revolution—​a process already set in action by the fiery speeches delivered by Communard Louise Michel and anarchist Emma Goldman at these gatherings.86

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

79

Figure 3.2  Arbeter fraynd celebration of the Paris Commune, explaining its significance to workers. “Es lebe di komune!” AF, March 14, 1890, 1.

Trade unions encouraged women to join industrial actions, and at least one London-​based anarchist group organized a women’s section.87 Some Jewish workers used their personal lives to flout bourgeois norms:  Rocker and his Russian partner, Milly Witcop, refused to marry as a protest against patriarchy.88 Radical activism in proletarian neighborhoods promoted the goal of international brotherhood. Activists worked to integrate Yiddish-​speaking unions into English and French umbrella organizations.89 Meanwhile, orators at mass meetings pointed to the common concerns that working-​class Jews shared with Russians. At one London gathering, a speaker bemoaned the plight of Russian students, comparing the poverty and oppression that young intellectuals faced in Russia to the struggle of Jewish workers. At other gatherings, attendees presented Russian revolutionaries, including the assassins of Alexander II, as heroes for Jewish workers.90 Russian revolutionary celebrities such as Kropotkin and Kravchinskii encouraged these emergent solidarities, appearing at strikes

 

80

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

Figure 3.3  Russian library in London’s East End at the turn of the twentieth century. From George Sims, ed., Living London (London, 1902), 27.

and protests to cheer the contributions that Jewish workers had made to the cause of international revolution.91 Eventually, collective practice in radical clubs and at mass meetings began to reinforce internationalist ideals. At public gatherings, speakers were encouraged to address the crowd in the language that felt most comfortable, which turned meetings into a Babel of addresses in Russian, Yiddish, and Polish. Meeting attendees who were conversant in a particular tongue that others did not understand provided simultaneous translation; multilingual orators repeated their speeches several times in each language they could speak.92 These acts of translation were a practical necessity, but one Paris agitator assigned them ideological import, noting that the repetition of revolutionary ideas in multiple tongues demonstrated the universality of the revolutionary struggle.93 The European periodicals, Russian revolutionary literature, and Yiddish newspapers displayed for sale in the lobby of the Berner Street Club implicitly made a similar argument.94 Yet radical activists did not merely replicate the concrete utopias of the Russian colonies in proletarian neighborhoods. They also drew on Jewish proletarian culture, which influenced radical discourse. The move to agitation in

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

81

Yiddish signaled political organizers’ respect for the language and traditions of Jewish proletarians. At the same time, the political activity that occurred in immigrant neighborhoods transformed the nature of the Yiddish language itself, defining it for the first time as a language of political agitation. Winchevsky was a prolific poet, publishing vignettes that captured the plight of workers—​and heralded the victory of socialism—​in the Yiddish-​language newspapers to which he contributed. He set many of his poems to the tune of folk songs that had circulated in the Pale of Settlement, which allowed him to simultaneously imbue alien socialist ideas with the veneer of familiarity, explain complicated ideas to semiliterate audiences, and unite workers at meetings and protests through song.95 As workers grew more comfortable with literary Yiddish, activists used the presses that produced Yiddish-​language newspapers to print translations of Russian revolutionary classics. The Arbeter fraynd group translated and published texts by Kravchinskii and Kropotkin, among others.96 A Paris-​based activist translated Diksztajn’s influential Marxist pamphlet, By What Does Man Live?, into Yiddish, which soon circulated in widely in that city and beyond.97 Although the agitators who courted immigrant laborers were avowed atheists, they also drew on religious traditions. From the very beginning, Arbeter fraynd connected its vision of socialist brotherhood to Jewish ethics: its motto, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?,” was borrowed from the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder. One popular pamphlet published by the paper used kinnot (elegies) and excerpts from the book of Lamentations to bemoan the plight of sweatshop workers.98 Another provided a socialist reimagining of the Haggadah, chronicling the emancipation of the Jews not from Egyptian slavery, but from the slavery of capital and religious belief.99 Political addresses and Winchevsky’s poems imagined the wonders of the postrevolutionary order by invoking messianic images and referring to Biblical notions of beauty and justice.100 These texts, notes historian Vivi Lachs, expressed “a mainstream, socialist critique of religion and capitalism” but were expressed in a “totally Jewish” idiom “specifically targeting the Jewish worker.”101 Proletarians were not merely the target audience for radical activists; they also made vital contributions of their own to the development of radical culture. Trade unions offered logistical assistance to revolutionary parties by allowing intellectuals to use their printing equipment to publish political tracts. One unemployed Paris mason permitted revolutionaries to use his workshop to set up a reading room for Jewish workers.102 Literate but underemployed workers provided an army of volunteer translators: it was a Paris-​based tailor who first translated the Communist Manifesto into Yiddish.103 Workers’ many contributions to the revolutionary cause imbued radical life with a truly democratic spirit. At mass meetings, workers sometimes took to the dais alongside intellectual luminaries. At one Paris gathering, a speech by

 

82

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

a prominent Liberation of Labor activist was followed by an address by a group of Jewish bakers. Distributing a Yiddish-​language pamphlet that discussed their labor grievances, the bakers announced the formation of their union and called on their comrades in other professions to do the same.104 At another, revolutionaries who explained the doctrines of Karl Marx to workers shared the stage with an unnamed hat-​maker, who addressed the crowd in Yiddish.105 The new brand of Yiddish-​speaking, internationalist, and democratic mass politics that emerged in proletarian neighborhoods more effectively than ever marshaled the particular concerns of Jews in pursuit of the universalist goal of human emancipation. In a speech delivered before the Paris Jewish Workers’ Society, Lavrov argued that the special suffering that Jews had endured rendered them ideal revolutionaries:  oppressed by the Russian autocracy as well as European capitalists, they possessed an unusual determination to destroy oppression around the world. “Socialists can learn a good lesson about endurance and patience from Jewish history,” he noted.106 Jewish workers themselves showed that they were aware of the importance that they had acquired within the Russian revolutionary diaspora. Proletarian neighborhoods hosted frequent protests against the tsarist regime, which simultaneously denounced anti-​Jewish violence and discrimination and rallied support behind the radical coalition seeking to topple the autocracy. At one Paris meeting, a worker took the stage to lament that “a single man, the despot of all Russia, is responsible for all the misfortunes that we currently witness.”107 At another, a member of the tailor’s syndicate, delivered a rousing speech in Yiddish about his desire to return home to Russia and spill his blood in order to free his brothers.108 These expressions of solidarity across borders and cultures were reinforced by actions. A  London-​based tailors’ union raised funds to support the political initiatives of Russian revolutionaries. Political émigrés in France, for their part, saluted striking Jewish workers in the East End and financially supported their efforts.109 Lived experience had destroyed the barriers that had once separated Jewish proletarians, on the one hand, from the students and professional revolutionaries of the Russian colonies. The entanglement of these two groups, a result of the encounters that occurred abroad, also changed the geography of émigré settlements. Already in the mid-​1880s, political organizations formed by Russian revolutionaries began to relocate to Whitechapel, where they courted the support of the working-​class Russian Jews who resided in that neighborhood.110 By the 1890s, the East End had become the undisputed center of émigré political life in London. Boasting that city’s highest concentration of revolutionary presses and émigré political organizations, it became the first port of call for newly arrived individuals of Russian origin.111 In the process, non-​Jews acquired an ever more prominent presence in the neighborhood. The Revolutionary

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

83

Polish Club followed the migration into East London, which would also host several conferences organized by Russian Social Democrats in the early twentieth century.112 Although Paris’ original left-​bank colony and the Jewish neighborhoods on the right bank retained their distinctive characters, these communities also grew more interconnected. By the turn of the century, more than ten percent of the Russians who resided in the Marais were non-​Jews, as were nearly one-​quarter of those who lived in Montmartre.113 Meanwhile, Jewish grocers and restauranteurs moved from the right bank to expand the city’s Russian “ethnic economy” across the river.114 Some one-​time residents of the Pletzl eventually assumed leadership positions in the colony of political émigrés; one such individual even attained a coveted job at the Turgenev library.115 It became more common for radical groups to include students and workers drawn from both the left- ​and right-​bank colonies, and more common for members of radical cells based in one neighborhood to cross the river for meetings and recruitment events.116 One Russian visitor to Paris in the early twentieth century marveled at how the tsarist subjects living in that city had managed to overcome social divisions: politically mobilized workers, he claimed, accounted for about three-​fourth of the attendees of a mass meeting that he visited in the left-​bank colony.117 The integration of Jewish immigrant workers into the Russian revolutionary diaspora had ushered the concrete utopias of colony life into a new phase, testifying to the ability of Russian subjects to transcend ethnic, linguistic, class, and cultural divides. However, it simultaneously intensified the rifts that divided proletarian neighborhoods. “Free-​thinking” Jews taunted their religiously observant neighbors by organizing raucous parties on Yom Kippur and by smoking cigarettes and waving slices of ham in front of religious processions, episodes that resulted in protracted conflicts and even physical violence.118 The radicalization of proletarian culture also highlighted social fissures within the immigrant community. Revolutionaries denounced successful immigrants who had managed to establish small businesses or to buy property as “exploiters”; indeed, strikes often pitted workers against fellow immigrants who had escaped from wage labor and become subcontractors of larger conglomerates.119 Jewish employers sometimes broke strikes by hiring recently arrived immigrants, who in turn were abused and even attacked by politically mobilized workers.120 The dividing lines between Marxism, socialism, and anarchism were fluid and often blurry in immigrant communities, and activists representing each of these camps successfully cooperated to stage mass meetings and to organize strikes. However, the radicalization of Russian-​Jewish organizations infected them with the damaging culture of dogmatism that had challenged the Russian colonies. For example, ideological disputes inflamed by personal rivalries between activists eventually destroyed the coalition that had organized the 1889 London

 

84

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

tailors’ strike. The fallout, which included frequent brawls at mass meetings, complicated organizing efforts for several years.121 Following the pattern that had occurred in the Russian colonies, doctrinal wars in working-​class neighborhoods led to the replication of political institutions, as rival parties rushed to consolidate their support base by forming clubs, newspapers, mutual aid associations, and labor bureaus of their own. By the early twentieth century, the Pletzl hosted at least five reading rooms affiliated with different groups, and Yiddish-​language newspapers representing Marxist, anarchist, and Zionist viewpoints.122 Anarchists alone operated three printing presses and organized a training school for revolutionaries.123 There are two ways to interpret this phenomenon. One is to highlight its self-​destructive effects, especially the compulsion to atomize radical groups into smaller and smaller units. Another is to treat the emergence of rival institutions as an unwitting force of integration, for the multiplication of political organizations further confirmed the reputation of proletarian neighborhoods as revolutionary spaces. Both modes of thought coexisted in immigrant communities. Some workers insisted that the dreams of revolutionaries were bound to lead to “bitterness, failure, despair.”124 Others highlighted the new solidarities their communities had produced, touting their potential to transform revolutionary politics and even reform human nature. A  member of Paris’ Jewish Workers’ Society suggested that the new forms of camaraderie that had developed between workers and intellectuals, Gentiles and Jews had created a spirit of “unprecedented solidarity” that could serve as a positive model for all mankind.125 To this participant, at least, the new intimacies and forms of organization that had emerged from proletarian neighborhoods was the best indication yet that the Russian radical diaspora would realize its aspiration to improve humanity.

Jewish Politics across Borders In the 1880s the Russian labor movement remained in an embryonic state, lagging decades behind the accomplishments of émigré organizers in Western Europe. Although Poland and Lithuania boasted several radical workers’ circles that organized mutual aid associations, lodged grievances against factory managers, and even declared a few strikes, most activism was carried out in intimate, underground circles (kruzhki) and remained focused on the concerns of a single industry. However, this changed quickly in the early 1890s, when a powerful Jewish workers’ movement emerged around Vil’na. By the end of the decade, it would evolve into the Jewish Labor Bund, the Russian empire’s most prominent Marxist party. This turn of events is usually understood as a domestic story, driven by social and economic conditions in the Russian empire’s

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

85

northwestern provinces.126 Understanding the nature of émigré politics, however, sheds new light on the origins of the Bund, showing how experiences acquired abroad and networks built there influenced life in Russia. The PPS was the first to apply the insights of émigré activists as it worked to mobilize Jewish proletarians in the Kingdom of Poland as well as the overwhelmingly Jewish industrial workforce of Lithuania. The party imported tens of thousands of illegal works into the Russian empire each year, and its leader, Stanisław Mendelson, made several trips back to Russia to coordinate with local organizers. Having observed the success of democratic mass politics that catered to the needs of Jewish workers in emigration, Mendelson hoped to replicate this approach in his homeland. By 1890, the PPS added Yiddish-​language materials produced abroad to the lists of the titles ferried into the Russian empire by its legendary smuggling network.127 Around the same time, PPS activists approached Arkadii Kremer and Timofei Kopel’zon, members of the Vil’na circle of Jewish Marxists. The PPS organizers asked the two men to assist with the party’s new initiatives aimed at Jews, but Kremer and Kopel’zon balked. Most of the seventy intellectuals who belonged to the circle had received university educations in Russian and had little to no knowledge of Yiddish, which they considered the jargon of the unenlightened masses. In fact, a major aim of the Vil’na circle’s interactions with workers was to encourage the latter to attain fluency in Russian—​a task that its leaders saw as a prerequisite for entry into radical enlightenment. The paternalistic and hierarchical culture of the circle, which required workers to reach educational milestones before deepening their engagement with the group, also clashed with the democratic spirit that prevailed in émigré organizations. In short, Kremer, Kopel’zon, and the rest of the Vil’na Marxists still associated revolutionary praxis more closely with Plekhanov’s dense excurses on Marxist theory than with mobilized workers in the street. Frustrated by the group’s intransigence, PPS activists abandoned their hopes of cooperation and formed a Jewish section of the party to cater specifically to Yiddish-​speaking proletarians.128 By 1893, however, the Vil’na Marxists began to reconsider their position. The Yiddish tracts smuggled in by the PPS proved wildly popular, attracting new adherents to that party. Under pressure from their rivals, the members of the Vil’na group began to circulate Yiddish pamphlets and newspapers published in London, Paris, and New  York to the workers among whom they agitated. According to Kopel’zon, the Yiddish-​language translation of Diksztajn’s By What Does Man Live? played a particularly important role in their efforts, becoming a new “Torah” in Jewish workers’ circles.129 The turn to the vernacular revolutionized the culture of the Vil’na Marxist circle. Its leaders’ ignorance of Yiddish forced them to invest more responsibility in semieducated workers who could carry out agitation in the language. Their

 

86

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

embrace of vernacular agitation was accompanied by the development of a more populist orientation, as leaders ventured out of the revolutionary underground and into Vil’na’s public spaces to stage street demonstrations and May Day celebrations.130 By the mid-​1890s the group began to produce Yiddish-​language literature of its own, including a newspaper, and to create workers’ libraries that featured the latest literature smuggled in from abroad.131 The events in Vil’na had been spontaneous, informed by a steady supply of illegal literature from Europe and the new models of organizing that had originated abroad. Eventually, the city’s Marxist intellectuals developed theories to explain what was happening on the ground. In 1894 Arkadii Kremer published a pamphlet titled On Agitation, which argued that Marxists must make their movement more practically minded and accessible to workers if they wanted to attract the masses. Kremer urged activists to push for immediate improvements in workers’ economic lives and to better integrate Marx’s theories with quotidian praxis.132 This approach, which would soon be branded “economism,” was echoed in another pamphlet published in the Yiddish vernacular by a member of the Vil’na circle that same year.133 This emphasis on democratic practices and practical progress represented a stark departure from the group’s earlier didactic approach. Moreover, it promoted sensibilities similar to those that had motivated the colony residents who pursued emancipation from below and who realized political change through everyday life. These tracts would go on to make their own contributions to émigré politics, offering a coherent theoretical justification for the practices of worker empowerment that had emerged abroad and then spread to Russia. In addition to urging Marxists to follow a new course, the leaders of the Vil’na circle emphasized the importance of unifying the small but scattered Marxist groups then emerging across the empire. In 1895, Vil’na activists organized a conference that brought together Jewish revolutionaries from across the Pale of Settlement—​the first gathering on Russian soil at which activists from different cities could exchange strategies and concerns. In the wake of this meeting, some local groups began to emulate the tactics of the Vil’na circle, publishing their own materials in Yiddish and launching newspapers and organizing public demonstrations.134 Vil’na had long enjoyed the first fruits of foreign organizing by virtue of its location. Now, the city’s Marxists had positioned themselves at the vanguard of a democratic workers’ movement, becoming the envy of other parties active in the empire’s northwestern borderlands. As the profile of the Vil’na group grew, it attracted attention from radicals in other locales. In 1893, Iulii Martov, a member of the St. Petersburg Liberation of Labor, was expelled from the capital for his radical activity. Condemned to a term of provincial exile, he chose Vil’na for its reputation as a hub of Marxist organizing. He soon befriended the city’s leading activists, assisting Kremer in

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

87

the publication of On Agitation and delivering a galvanizing speech at a May Day rally. When Martov was permitted to return to St. Petersburg in 1895, he regaled his comrades there with news of the feats of the Vil’na organizers and distributed copies of On Agitation. Impressed by the group, Lenin established contact with its organizers, and he traveled to Vil’na himself in 1895 to learn more about its tactics.135 The next year, Lenin and his St. Petersburg comrades followed the Vil’na group’s example in shifting from conspiracy behind closed doors to mass agitation, organizing a successful strike of spinners and weavers.136 The work of the Vil’na organizers attracted the attention of émigré Marxists as well. London-​based Social Democrats offered the Vil’na group the services of a printing press that they operated in the East End, which provided a reliable supply of Yiddish-​language literature destined for the Pale of Settlement.137 The Geneva-​based Liberation of Labor group reprinted Kremer’s On Agitation in 1896. This is not to say that the relationship between the fathers of Russian Marxism and the Vil’na upstarts was completely harmonious. The former expressed some skepticism about the new economist doctrines as well as suspicion at the unbridled ambition of its purveyors. Nevertheless, in an afterword to On Agitation, Aksel’rod credited the young activists for inaugurating a “new period in our movement.”138 In 1896, Kremer ventured to Switzerland to engage in negotiations with the Geneva Marxists. He argued before Plekhanov, Akselrod, and Zasulich that the time had come for the Vil’na group to establish a formal, all-​imperial party for Jewish workers that would serve as the “avant-​garde of the workers’ army in Russia.” The elders approved, and Kremer returned to Russia to begin planning for a conference.139 The meeting convened outside Vil’na in September 1897 and concluded with the formation of the Jewish Labor Bund. Although the Bund focused its agitation on Jewish proletarians, its founders remained extremely committed to building an all-​imperial Marxist movement and offered assistance to non-​Jewish organizers. In fact, Bundists played a crucial role in organizing a second conference outside Minsk in 1898, which resulted in the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP).140 The Bund affirmed the consensus on the national question that had emerged from London and Paris. Its leaders insisted that it was crucial to acknowledge the specificity of the Jewish proletarian’s struggle, while also encouraging Jewish revolutionaries to fight hand in hand with other groups. In a dazzling speech delivered at a Vil’na May Day rally in 1895, Martov called on the party to serve as the “leader and enlightener of the Jewish proletariat in the struggle for economic, civic, and political liberation” and to develop the “national consciousness” of the Russian Jews. “Although tied to the Russian movement,” he continued, “the Jewish proletariat must not await liberation . . . either from the Russian movement or from the Polish movement.” At the same time, Martov

 

88

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

did not see Jewish national consciousness as a virtue in its own right, but as a tool that would integrate Jews into a broader revolutionary movement working to destroy the bourgeois construct of the nation altogether.141 Discussions about the status of the Bund at the founding conference of the RSDRP reinforced this position, recognizing the party as the voice of the Jewish proletarian while reiterating its belonging in an all-​imperial revolutionary coalition.142 With the creation of the Bund, Russia finally re-​emerged as a revolutionary center of gravity. However, the new flurry of activity in Russia was deeply indebted to émigré organizing. The democratic spirit, Yiddish parlance, and nationalist orientation of the Bund, as well as the networks and illegal literature that sustained it, had all been profoundly influenced by the experiments that occurred in exile. The mobilized Jewish proletarians of London and Paris deserve no small part of the credit for the rise of Jewish socialism in Russia and the creation of a Marxist mass movement.

The Paradox of Jewish Politics It was not long before the Bund, which stood at the very center of the revolutionary movement in Russia, attracted the attention of the tsarist police. Around the time of its founding congress, the Okhrana infiltrated the party and began tracking its members. In 1898 most of the party’s Central Committee was arrested, though the precautions taken by Kremer, Kopel’zon, and another key organizer, John Mill (né Yoysef Mil), allowed them to evade the dragnets and safely escape Russia. Mill and Kremer settled in Geneva, and Kopel’zon in Bern. Together they established the Foreign Committee of the Bund, which helped set the party’s ideological course and to coordinate its actions from the safety of Europe.143 Far from destroying the Bund, the emigration of the party’s leaders invigorated it. Mill, Kremer, and Kopel’zon enjoyed the opportunity to mingle with émigré intellectuals, to publish freely, and to develop their party organization free from police interference. They convened five international conferences between 1899 and 1903 at which delegates from Russia and the colonies met and debated doctrinal issues.144 They also prioritized the production of mass-​appeal publications, establishing a printing press in Geneva that produced a newspaper along with countless agitational pamphlets. By the end of its first year abroad, the Foreign Committee had published 50,000 copies of some 79 distinct works, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the print runs of party publications reached into the hundreds of thousands. Eager to establish reliable smuggling routes that could ferry this literature into the empire and party activists out, the Foreign Committee reached out to German Social Democrats in Berlin, who offered the

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

89

émigrés access to their networks traversing the Prussian-​Russian border. Within a year of the Foreign Committee’s founding, the Bund’s smuggling operations had become the envy of all other parties, overshadowing the PPS’s early domination of this domain.145 Russia was not the only destination for Bundist literature: pamphlets produced in Geneva reached immigrants of Russian origin as far away as South Africa, North and South America, and Australia.146 Exiled Bundists, like the émigré activists who preceded them, focused on strengthening the ties between the diverse populations of Jewish immigrants living in Europe. They quickly infiltrated political life in the Pletzl and the East End, delivering speeches at mass meetings and organizing unions, mutual aid associations, and reading rooms. Replicating the behavior of the leadership in Switzerland, Bund affiliates in London and Paris launched newspapers of their own.147 Perhaps the most important innovation by the Bund’s Foreign Committee was the enlistment of Russian-​Jewish students in Switzerland, Germany, and provincial cities in France—​places that did not have large numbers of Yiddish-​speaking workers from Russia—​in the struggle to emancipate proletarian Jews. Bundist students translated the Communist Manifesto and the works of Kautsky and Lassalle into Yiddish, which party leaders then circulated among workers in London and Paris. University students also played a crucial role in expanding the Bund’s following in Russia by encouraging friends and family to join the party on their frequent trips home.148 Thanks to the tireless efforts of organizers in exile, Bundists succeeded in rebuilding and even expanding the party’s influence in Russia less than two years after its infiltration by police. The illegal literature smuggled in by the party became omnipresent across the Pale of Settlement; many youth who later became involved in radical politics recalled the influence of this literature on their political awakening.149 By the first years of the twentieth century, the Bund had organized dozens of demonstrations and hundreds of strikes that engaged tens of thousands of participants, and it was even making strides in transcending its original support base in the industrial cities of the empire’s northwestern borderlands. It claimed 30,000 members, making it the most powerful revolutionary party in the Russian empire by far.150 In addition to facilitating the Bund’s organizing efforts, the experience of exile informed the party’s doctrines. Although Martov had argued for the compatibility of Jewish nationalism and the broader struggle for socialism as early as 1895, this idea was far from universally accepted in Bundist circles. In emigration, however, the party developed a more nationalist stance. Its leaders befriended and admired leading Austro-​Marxists, who saw national renewal and social revolution as complementary tasks and called for nonterritorial autonomy to be granted to the Habsburg empire’s national minorities. In an essay published in a Bundist newspaper in 1899, Chaim Zhitlovsky, who was not

 

90

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

a formal member of the party but nevertheless influenced its burgeoning national consciousness, advocated for a similar approach in Russia. He argued that Yiddish-​speaking Jews constituted a nation with a cultural heritage no less rich than other European civilizations, encouraging Jewish socialists to develop Yiddish into a language of high culture and education. By 1901, demands for Jewish cultural autonomy found their way into the Bund’s platform.151 The Bund’s embrace of Jewish nationalism did not, however, mean that it had abandoned the goal of universal human emancipation. On the contrary, it conceived of itself as the voice of the Jewish proletariat within a broader federation of Marxist parties. It acknowledged the internal diversity of Russian Jewry, producing literature in Russian, German, and Polish in addition to Yiddish, and maintained the multilingual traditions of émigré radicalism at its meetings.152 At the same time, it emphasized that its agitation on behalf of Jews advanced the broader cause of human liberation. A poster of revolutionary heroes distributed by party activists in Paris made this point quite clearly, depicting Jewish populists, Russian radicals, and European Marxists, such as Marx and Kautsky.153 Echoing arguments that Liberman, Lavrov, and Winchevsky had made in the 1870s and 1880s, activists argued that precisely the special suffering that Jews had endured had imbued them with an implacable desire to lead humanity toward “total emancipation” on a “universal basis.”154 The crucial assistance that the Bund offered to the weaker and less organized RSDRP provided another indication of its broad revolutionary commitments. Its organizers used the cross-​border smuggling networks they controlled to spirit illegal literature and activists representing a variety of Marxist groups into Russia.155 Furthermore, its organizational successes challenged other RSDRP activists to redouble their own outreach efforts. The Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, which had been founded by the Liberation of Labor group as the RSDRP’s official voice in emigration—​a counterpart of sorts to the Bund’s Foreign Committee—​imitated the agitational tactics of the Bund, founding a newspaper and party bulletin of its own and engaging in Yiddish-​language agitation.156 Bundists from all over the world, for their part, supported and cheered these endeavors.157 The power of the Bund and its crucial role in developing party structures accorded it substantial influence in determining the future evolution of Russian Marxism. This influence was best reflected by the growing strength of economism within the Social Democratic movement, in spite of the misgivings of the Liberation of Labor group about this new doctrine. Rabochee delo, the newspaper of the Union of Social Democrats Abroad, endorsed economist ideas, and supporters of this approach gained control of important émigré institutions, including the East End’s Russian revolutionary library.158

 

Figure 3.4  Poster of revolutionary heroes distributed by the Bund. They are (from left to right and top to bottom): Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Andrei Zheliabov, Petr Lavrov, Paul Singer, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Victor Adler, Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vera Zasulich, Charles Gide, Aron Zundelevich, Aleksandr Mikhailov, Sofiia Perovskaia, and Gessia Gel’fman. AN, F7/​12520B.

 

92

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

The rapid ascendence of the Bund had the greatest impact on the RSDRP, of which it was a constituent member, but it also influenced the behavior of other parties. Non-​Marxist parties rushed to match the organizational capacity of the Marxists and to coordinate their operations across borders. Charles Rappoport and Chaim Zhitlovsky, who had remained loyal to the populist creed, began to organize conferences, rally their partisans in the colonies, and build bridges with Russia. By 1902 this flurry of organizational activity resulted in the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party, which preached that revolution would emerge from the countryside and celebrated the transformative power of terror.159 Russian Zionists in emigration expanded their network of reading rooms and other agitational spaces, launched new journals, and contemplated forming a university. They, too, began to cooperate much more closely with comrades in Russia, transmitting publications and traveling home to deliver lectures.160 Echoing the Bund’s argument that national emancipation was inseparable from the struggle for social revolution, Jewish anarchists in London established a federation of their own, which they argued was necessary to represent the special interests of Jews within the broader anarchist movement.161 Recognizing the role that the turn to the Yiddish vernacular played in the Bund’s rapid growth, virtually all the other parties in emigration launched Yiddish-​language outreach programs of their own. The East End’s Anarcho-​ Communists began to publish bilingual materials in Russian and Yiddish, while the PPS launched a London-​based journal in Yiddish. Under Zhitlovsky’s direction, the SRs worked to build a political organization that was “world-​wide in scope, socialist and secular in content, Yiddish-​speaking in form.”162 Zionist and Labor Zionist organizations launched Yiddish-​language journals of their own.163 The question that had bedeviled émigré communities in the 1870s and 1880s—​ whether Jews were true allies of the all-​ imperial movement for liberation—​had seemingly been resolved. Émigrés of Jewish origin had come to play leading roles in every party active in emigration, from the Bund, Zionists, SRs, and Anarchists, to the RSDRP (Aksel’rod), PPS (Mendelson), and SDKP (Luxemburg and Jogiches). By the same token, a desire to alleviate the suffering of Russia’s Jews had become one of the strongest connective threads of colony life—​one that united émigrés in defiance of the tsarist regime. For example, the 1903 Kishinev pogrom touched off a protest of some 10,000 in London, perhaps the largest single gathering in the history of the Russian colonies.164 Many activists took pains to emphasize that their efforts to improve the plight of Russia’s downtrodden Jews served all humanity. A moving speech given by a Yiddish-​speaking revolutionary in the Pletzl made exactly this point. Surveying the political situation as far away as Germany and Persia, he insisted that the Russian revolutionary diaspora would soon catalyze a worldwide revolution

 



Jew ish Work ers Meet the R u s s ian R e voluti on

93

that would make 1848 appear pale in comparison.165 By the turn of the century, Jewish revolutionaries convened regularly in Paris with representatives of Polish, Latvian, Armenian, and Georgian parties, jointly calling for the emancipation of the empire’s non-​Russian nationalities while affirming their devotion to the broader cause of social revolution.166 The struggle for Jewish liberation thus mobilized and unified a broad range of colony residents. However, it also deepened the divisions in émigré society. Social Democrats and anarchists complained that Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism hindered the march toward universal emancipation, while Zionists bristled at the characterization of their thought as “intellectually backward” and “chauvinistic.”167 Collisions between the two sides produced physical violence, including a melee that broke out in Geneva in 1900 between students carrying Zionist symbols and those who defended a socialist coalition that united Russian subjects.168 These conflicts destroyed longtime friendships and led to party purges, as activists sought to weed out potential dissidents.169 The fact that émigré politics unfolded in close-​knit communities and in a handful of cultural institutions meant that debates about dogma were necessarily dialogic:  one group’s support of a particular platform usually produced sharp reactions from rival factions. These confrontations were also influenced by the narcissism of small differences: as a general rule, the more two parties shared in common, the more heated their arguments became. For example, Zionist Chaim Weizmann described his attitude toward Geneva’s Russian Social Democrats as “indifferent,” but raged against the Bund for forsaking Jewish interests and becoming a “Russian revolutionary party.”170 Emotional reactions to the charged collisions that occurred in cafés and reading rooms not only encouraged observers to take sides, but to assume ever more radical positions. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the future right-​wing Zionist, recalled that he was moved to deliver his first political speech by his disgust for the ideas that the Marxist Zionist Syrkin had presented at a public lecture in Bern.171 Similar dynamics were evident in the RSDRP. As the Bund gained power, the Liberation of Labor group grew harsher in its critiques of the Jewish party’s doctrines. In contrast to Bund leaders, who emphasized worker agency and democratic organization from below, Plekhanov argued that the party should play a “hegemonic” role, serving as “the liberator par excellence, a center to which all democratic sympathies will gravitate and from which all the greatest revolutionary protests will emanate.”172 The elder Marxists also declared war on economism, which they saw as a perversion of Marx’s ideas. In 1900, Plekhanov penned a scathing anti-​economist screed that insulted its purveyors in crude and personal terms. That same year, confrontations between the two sides at a party conference produced fist fights and a volley of insults, which ultimately led Plekhanov and Aksel’rod to walk out.173

 

94

Part I: Making Utopia Concrete

Meanwhile, the Bund’s efforts to harness Jewish nationalism in the service of universal emancipation encouraged the opponents of particularism to stake out ever more radical positions. Plekhanov, for example, reportedly quipped that Bundists were crypto-​Zionists who were “afraid of seasickness.”174 Luxemburg’s SDKP and the PPS—​whose original organizing work in Yiddish had helped to inspired the Bund’s tactics in the first place—​charged that the party’s national project would estrange Jewish proletarians from their Polish and Lithuanian brothers.175 Personal grievances had infiltrated these doctrinal debates so thoroughly that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The young leaders of the Bund complained that the leaders of the Liberation of Labor group were vain, bourgeois, and pedantic, while the elder Russian Marxists bemoaned the impertinence of the youth.176 Moreover, the Liberation of Labor group, which had been struggling for years to build an organized party in exile, resented the Bund’s meteoric rise. In a letter to Lenin, by then in Siberian exile, Aksel’rod bitterly complained that the Bund had claimed four-​fifths of the Russian delegation to the 1900 International Socialist Conference in Paris.177 Colony life had allowed Russian Jews to envision a better future and to take the first steps toward realizing a life of freedom, equality, and happiness. Yet precisely these accomplishments left émigré life more fractured than ever before and the fate of Russia’s Jews more uncertain. The transformative potential of émigré communities and the magnitude of the challenges that faced them grew in direct proportion to each other. The intimacy and intensity of exile life allowed residents to bring revolutionary values to life, but also bred constant conflict. The colonies’ potential to redefine human relations and emotional repertoires rendered the collisions that occurred within them all the more devastating, turning feelings of love and connection into resentment. Each time exiles appeared to have established a stable equilibrium between the particular and the universal, more intense manifestations of each tradition emerged, provoking new schisms. By the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly unclear whether the colonies’ concrete utopias could survive the explosive discontents that they produced. Resolving this question was only partially in the control of colony residents. As the populations of Russians who had sought refuge in Europe continued to grow, émigré communities attracted growing scrutiny from their host societies, rendering them more susceptible to outside interference. Encounters between Russian exiles and their European neighbors would only enhance the dualistic nature of colony life, encouraging their utopian imaginations while multiplying their discontents.

 

PA RT   I I

EUROPE’S RUSSIAN MOMENT

 

 

4

Entangled Emancipations

In the late nineteenth century, Europeans developed an obsession with Russian radicals. Intellectuals praised Russia’s “noble revolutionists” and their “deep abiding love of liberty,” while bourgeois citizens took to the streets to protest the execution of the “martyrs of liberty” who had assassinated the tsar.1 Russian revolutionaries became fixtures of mass culture as well, gracing the pages of boulevard fiction and popular illustrated journals, and appearing as wax figures at Paris’ popular Musée Grevin. At one baking competition in France, a competitor stunned crowds by rendering the face of Vera Zasulich in a loaf of bread.2 The rise of the popular press, which was drawn to the drama and pathos of revolutionary circles, played a key role in creating Europe’s Russian moment. So too did the Russian colonies and their residents. As émigré communities grew, they attracted intensifying interest from Western observers. Europeans who ventured into the colonies expressed both shock and wonder at the concrete utopias that the émigrés had built. These enthusiasts of exile society became crucial mediators of knowledge about Russia and Russians, transforming foreign radicals into international celebrities and popular heroes of democracy. Western visitors often misunderstood émigré culture, and they frequently projected their own ideas and desires onto it. Nevertheless, the exchanges that occurred in and around the colonies had profound effects on all of their participants. European guests borrowed from and responded to the emancipatory experiments that they observed, which informed their own efforts to define the meaning of freedom and to realize its blessings. Meanwhile, the outsized influence of the colonies’ alternative lifestyles on their host societies validated the exiles’ claims that they were capable of leading all humanity toward liberation. Although the colonies at first glance might appear worlds unto themselves, their revolutionary imaginations and new models for living resonated far beyond their borders.

Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0005

 

98

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

Dialogue and Difference By the time that the Russian colonies began to coalesce, the struggle to displace the landed aristocracy and to establish liberal regimes was complete across the western half of the continent. Liberalism assumed different guises in different national settings, but the liberal powers of England, France, and Switzerland also shared common commitments and cultures. All encouraged free enterprise and the development of a strong bourgeoisie. All espoused a fervent belief in the perfectibility of man and society and preached the gospel of gradualism and rationality. And all featured strong constitutional-​parliamentary systems that relied on the rule of law to protect individual rights.3 The Russian colonies’ relationship with the mature liberal order was complex and often contradictory. On the one hand, the existence of these islands of Russian radicalism in the heart of Europe depended on liberal ideas of tolerance and the existence of asylum regimes. On the other, colony residents were vocal about the shortcomings of bourgeois society. As one émigré put it, “political democracy [in Europe] was accompanied by the most abject poverty. The revolutions of the past, fought in the name of these beautiful abstractions, left the working class enslaved.”4 Indeed, it was exiles’ unapologetic rejection of liberal doctrine and bourgeois norms that left the greatest impression on the Europeans who ventured into their communities. Visitors to émigré neighborhoods often remarked on their backwardness and underdevelopment. One visitor to Paris’ left-​bank colony remarked on the “queer and pensive quarters” that the Russians occupied, speculating that they preferred “semi-​provincial corners” of the city because these spaces were reminiscent of the travelers’ “imperfectly civilized” homeland.5 The difference of the neighborhoods occupied by working-​class Jews was even more conspicuous. Upon venturing into the Pletzl or especially the East End, with its vast size and extreme poverty, visitors often felt that they were entering a foreign country.6 Of all the curious features of the colonies, their radicalism attracted the most sustained attention. Many Europeans understood terrorism as a distinctly “Russian method” and treated revolutionary violence as the expression of Russian radicalism par excellence.7 Newspapers and illustrated journals covered terrorist attacks in Russia with breathless interest, alongside celebrations of successful assassinations in the Russian colonies.8 Fictional treatments of émigrés consolidated their reputation for terroristic extremism. Take, for example, the character Souvarine in Emile Zola’s Germinal, who incites striking miners to violent action, or the radicals depicted in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent.

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

99

In the late 1870s, both French-​and English-​language commentators began to refer to Russian radicals as “nihilists.” This terminology—​like the media’s intense focus on revolutionary terrorism—​drew attention to the putative singularity of Russian radicalism. The term had been popularized in Russian by Ivan Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, which used it to describe the youth of the 1860s who rejected the traditions of their fathers in favor of extreme and ascetic materialism. The term acquired a strong negative valence in Western discourse. Nihilism, wrote one British commentator, “has no definite aims of reorganization or improvement in view. In its sight everything as it now exists is rotten, and before anything new and good can be created all existing institutions must be utterly destroyed . . . religion, the State, the family, laws, property, morality.”9 Authors also highlighted the strength of the nihilists’ transnational conspiratorial networks and their ruthless murders of police spies. “It is probable that no secret society that has ever existed, not even the Spanish Inquisition, has been so widespread, so firmly knit together, so pitiless, and so true in all its parts, as the Russian Revolutionary Party,” remarked one journalist.10 The emancipated women of the colonies provided additional evidence of émigrés’ radical alterity. Westerners marveled at the plain and unadorned wardrobe of these women, their prioritization of the revolutionary struggle over family and romance, and their full participation in the colonies’ political and intellectual affairs.11 Female terrorists attracted special attention, and coverage of them often emphasized the ways in which they violated conventional gender norms. One female revolutionary was described as “wanting in everything that was womanly and attractive in her sex.”12 A  French newspaper depicted Vera Zasulich, who became an international celebrity after attacking a police official, as possessing a “strong will, and a brusque manner . . . the opposite of most young women her age.”13 Colony residents were acutely aware of Europeans’ fascination with their culture, which they simultaneously welcomed and endeavored to shape. Anarchist theoretician Petr Kropotkin and admitted assassin Sergei Kravchinskii penned multiple bestselling books, while other exiles contributed to European journals, launched their own periodicals, or published novelistic accounts of revolutionary life. In the mid-​1880s, Kravchinskii founded the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), which aimed to draw attention to the misdeeds of the tsarist regime and to rally support for exiles. It acquired significant influence in London, attracting social reformers (Annie Besant and Beatrice Webb), socialist intellectuals (George Bernard Shaw and Edward Pease, the founder of the Fabian Society), liberal members of the clergy, and even a few MPs.14 Émigré activists also worked under the auspices of existing human rights groups, including France’s League for the Rights of Man.15

 

100

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

Far from contesting ideas about Russian difference, émigré publicists and organizations embraced them. Kravchinskii’s bestselling Underground Russia created a heroic cult around the Russian terrorist, describing him as “a wrestler, all bone and muscle” endowed with “almost superhuman energy.”16 Exiles also drew attention to the engagement of women in radical politics. In France, émigré activists published a feminist journal that highlighted the accomplishments of Russian women for European audiences.17 A London-​based exile who founded a magazine of his own to familiarize Britons with radical culture insisted that the women of his homeland were uniquely brave and self-​sacrificing: “In other countries women strive for themselves, for their own peculiar ‘women’s’ rights,’ but in Russia it is not woman for woman, but woman for humanity.”18 These practices of self-​exoticization aimed to attract attention to the revolutionary cause—​a recognition in the incipient age of mass media that all publicity was good publicity. Émigrés also hoped to parlay this attention to change European society for the better. A play staged by the SFRF in London was one such attempt. It told the story of Katia, the daughter of a Russian merchant, who spurned the advances of a cruel and domineering lieutenant to elope with a nihilist. Life in the underground offered Katia the opportunity to exercise more autonomy, but she pined for her beloved family. She eventually hatched a plot to return home disguised as a servant, which she hoped would allow her to reunite with her parents while evading the attention of her first suitor. However, the lieutenant recognized Katia and flew into a rage, assaulting her father and attempting to rape her. Katia’s mother immediately died of shock, but her father managed to kill the lieutenant. This traumatic turn of events led the father to recognize the immorality of his wealthy and sheltered life, and he ultimately resolved to join the ranks of the nihilists, departing with Katia and her lover to live happily in the underground.19 The broader context of the play, which revolves around the struggle between the conspiratorial underground and the autocratic state, emphasizes Russia’s difference. Yet at the same time, the domestic setting in which the plot unfolds looked familiar to Western audiences. It is not the autocracy that directly produces the suffering in the play, but more intimate forms of oppression that were blights on the liberal order as well as the tsarist regime: social inequality, patriarchal authority, and sexual violence. The destruction of these injustices, the play suggests, is the necessary first step toward the liberation of Katia and those who love her. What might at first appear idle melodrama thus doubles as an invitation to Europeans to identify the forces that constrain their own freedom and to follow radical exiles in dismantling them. The message that Russians were different but that this peculiarity could be a source of inspiration was not lost on Europeans. Of course, various audiences engaged with émigré alterity in different ways. Mainstream liberals tended to

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

101

use it as a foil against which they articulated their own values and virtues. By contrast, groups that remained confined to the margins of liberal politics (or excluded from them altogether) emulated tactics pioneered by the Russians to challenge bourgeois hegemony. In each case, however, the concrete utopias created in the colonies influenced Europeans’ own efforts to envision a better future.

Russian Émigrés and the Liberal Dream The asylum regime, a hallmark of liberal politics, remained a crucial mediating force in relationships between liberal Westerners and émigrés of Russian origin.20 Public outrage about the abuses of the tsarist regime grew more intense than ever, inflamed by the sensationalism of the popular press. Reportage on Russia provided graphic accounts of prisoners beaten with knouts and dissidents confined in prisons that were not even suitable for “wild animals.”21 In addition to focusing on the torture that the autocracy unleashed on human bodies, European commentators often referred to the institution of slavery to analyze its abuses. Describing the Russian people as “slaves” of the tsar allowed observers to express sympathy for his hapless victims while simultaneously condemning the regime for perpetuating a backward and barbaric practice that had been abolished across the “civilized” world.22 The suffering endured by Russian Jews also received significant attention. Correspondents lamented the forcible confinement of Russia’s Jews to the Pale of Settlement, their limited professional opportunities, and the poverty and isolation in which they lived. Pogroms, which European observers described as “hideous barbarism” and as attacks on “the honor of the nineteenth century,” provoked particular horror.23 Journalists provided graphic descriptions of rape, murder, and plunder as well as heartfelt reflections on the emotional impact of the violence. A British correspondent who had observed Kiev’s 1881 pogrom remarked, “A heart of stone would have melted, and I confess I could not withhold my tears.”24 Recognition of the traumas that tsarist subjects had endured meant that most travelers of Russian origin—​whether political émigrés, Jewish workers, or even students—​were commonly understood to be “refugees.” Each of these groups had suffered abuse at the hands of the autocracy, went the logic, so each deserved the legal protections of asylum. Although the older practice of offering refugee subsidies had ended by the 1870s, recognition as a refugee still guaranteed freedom from extradition. France and Switzerland signed treaties with Russia in the late nineteenth century explicitly barring extradition requests for crimes with a “political tint,” including assassination, theft, and arson.25 A law passed by

 

102

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

the British parliament in 1870 and a new extradition treaty negotiated in 1886 contained similar stipulations.26 The asylum regime encouraged Europeans to express empathy for refugees and created new solidarities that stretched across borders. Take, for example, the flurry of humanitarian activity that followed the 1881–​82 pogroms. Clergy, politicians, and captains of industry gathered in major European cities to raise money for the victims and to facilitate their emigration; local religious communities, voluntary associations, and town councils eventually organized relief efforts of their own.27 At a public meeting in Manchester, that city’s bishop argued that Britain’s Christians were obligated to relieve the plight of Russian Jews. No resident of a “civilized land,” he insisted, “would desire any human being to be put under penal disabilities or to be subjected to unrighteous wrongs.”28 Insisting on the fundamental equality of Jews and Gentiles, the bishop’s speech presented human suffering in a faraway land as a vital concern to British Christians. At the same time, the bishop’s invocation of “civilization” illustrates how cultural hierarchies coexisted with invocations of universal human rights. Indeed, Western democracies’ willingness to protect the most miserable populations not only testified to their generosity, but also demonstrated their own national genius. A French economist boasted that his nation’s willingness to accept vulnerable migrants was proof that it was the true “land of liberty.”29 A Swiss illustrated journal made a similar argument in pictorial form, depicting two bedraggled men fleeing “Russia’s government through violence” and searching for “freedom and the rule of law.” Having washed up on a rock marked “Switzerland” in the middle of a stormy sea, they are met by a radiant figure of Helvetia who greets them with one arm outstretched and defends them with the other, armed with a sword. “Stop, murderer, you do not rule here!” she cries out to their persecutors. The cartoon celebrates Switzerland’s openness, while at the same time emphasizing the contrasts that invest the asylum regime with its meaning: it is precisely the shabby clothes and pained faces of the male refugees that make Helvetia’s transcendent feminine beauty so striking.30 The valorization of Russian émigrés also reinforced the class and racial hierarchies that undergirded liberal regimes. One exile openly admitted that the well-​born origins of many prominent radicals—​and their willingness to forsake their comfort for the cause of the revolution—​explained the warm reception they received from bourgeois audiences.31 An article in a British journal provides a case in point: the author decries the continental anarchists who had taken shelter in London as “predatory criminals,” but insists that Kropotkin, a prince by birth, is a “pure-​minded and unselfish” exception.32 Likewise, although Western commentators exoticized Russians, they proved more capable of identifying with radical émigrés than with the Africans and Asians whom

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

103

Figure 4.1  Willy Lehmann-​Schramm, “Zur Auslieferungsfrage,” Nebelspalter 31 (1905): n.p.

they colonized. Historian Choi Chatterjee has remarked on the stark contrast between Britons’ widespread celebration of Russians fighting for their freedom and the near-​universal condemnation of Indians who shared similar goals.33 Thus Britons’ embrace of Russian refugees allowed them to celebrate their own benevolence even as they treated their colonial subjects with brutality. Depictions of Russian exiles said as much about Western observers as they did about the traits of the foreigners, serving as mirrors that Europeans used to examine their own images. Sometimes these mirrors reflected the liberal values of openness and inclusion that liberals held dear, and at other times they deflected light from the oppression inflicted by bourgeois society. This

 

104

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

is not to say, however, that exiles lacked the ability to define their image. To the contrary, they proved remarkably successful at adapting their messages to speak to Western audiences, shaping the repertoire of liberal politics in the process. Émigrés shamelessly dramatized their suffering in Russia, which underpinned their asylum claims. They fixated on a handful of shocking episodes from revolutionary history, including the Kara tragedy, an 1888–​89 episode in which female political exiles organized hunger strikes and eventually committed suicide en masse to protest the flogging of a comrade.34 They often brought a dramatic flair to efforts to depict their plight. One public lecture on the atrocities of Siberian exile hosted by the SFRF featured speakers dressed as convicts, wearing heavy chains; another used a camera obscura to project life-​sized portraits of Russian dissidents on a screen. A witness of these performances noted their intense emotional impact: “I didn’t know what extraordinary mixture of sensations I felt,” she wrote. “There was a great deal of applause.”35 Exiles also excelled at justifying their radical ideas to bourgeois audiences. In an appeal begging Europeans to support Russian revolutionaries, Lavrov and Zasulich insisted that terrorist attacks on the tsarist regime were righteous acts of vengeance justified by the autocracy’s brutality and the “cruel sufferings of the condemned.”36 Kravchinskii described Zasulich, whose assault on a police official had been driven by her anger at his mistreatment of her comrade, as an “angel of vengeance, and not of terror . . . who voluntarily threw herself into the jaws of the monster in order to cleanse the honour of the party from a mortal outrage.”37 The image of the angel of vengeance, which recurred frequently in émigré writings, did more than rationalize terrorist violence for bourgeois audiences. It also domesticated radical feminism, celebrating the “kindness of heart” that female revolutionaries displayed alongside their “iron will.”38 Kropotkin was the most successful of all in packaging Russian revolutionary utopias for bourgeois citizens. Painfully aware that liberal observers associated his anarchist beliefs with chaos and violence, he insisted that peaceful mutual aid was the true basis of anarchist ideology, offering an escape from the “deceit, cunning, exploitation, depravity, vice” that had deformed modern society. Presenting the moral practices of cooperation and fair play to which anarchists were devoted as innate features of the animal world, Kropotkin marshaled support from an unlikely source: liberal icon Adam Smith, who had advanced a similar interpretation of natural law in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Elsewhere, he presented anarchism as an extension of the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you in the same circumstances.”39 Framing anarchism as an ideology that was consonant with natural law and Christian morality, Kropotkin thus presented it as the apotheosis of the very values that liberals held dear. In fact, he went so far as to argue that anarchism provided the most direct

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

105

path toward the ultimate goals of liberal ideology: “individual development and freedom.”40 Remarkably, many treatments of Russian radicals in the liberal press echoed the ideas of émigré publicists, testifying to the success of the Russians’ outreach campaigns. Some excused revolutionary violence as an unfortunate but justified reaction to years of oppression. For example, French historian and journalist Anatole Leroy-​Beaulieu, who wrote several influential books about Russia, argued that the “moral duress and intellectual privations” imposed by the autocratic regime left Russians subject to “bizarre appetites, to passionate fits, to morbid reveries.”41 Another tactic that Europeans used to rationalize the behavior of Russian exiles was to refer to their own past. A journalist who published a sympathetic interview with a Russian “nihilist” in the Pall Mall Gazette assured readers that the Russians’ fanaticism was a transient developmental stage in their history: “No European nation has succeeded in obtaining its liberties without some rising or civil war beside which the worst deeds yet done by the Nihilists are a trifle.”42 French commentators situated Russian radicalism in the context of that nation’s revolutionary traditions, likening the conditions that existed in Russian prisons to those of the Bastille and comparing the abuses of the autocracy to the injustice of the pre-​revolutionary lettres de cachet.43 A popular genre of reportage brought liberal journalists into the homes of exiles and recounted what it was like to spend a “night with a nihilist.” In this intimate setting, the journalist often discovered that proper gentlemen lurked underneath the long beards and crude canvas tunics sported by Russian revolutionaries. A  journalist for the Sunday Times who visited Kravchinskii marveled that the confessed assassin was a polite and cultivated man with a passion for music and a boundless love for animals.44 Another writer who befriended nihilists concluded that they articulated “the protest of enlightened reason against the despotic tyranny of the police,” not the “political hysterics” of which other continental radicals were guilty.45 Visitors to the Paris colony were ultimately forced to rethink their belief in civilizational hierarchies, finding their Russian interlocutors “hardworking, tranquil people, with gentle manners” and “men like us western Europeans, . . . a race worthy of a very high civilization.”46 In addition to idealizing nihilist men, bourgeois observers expressed great admiration for radical women. Female revolutionaries from Russia appear frequently in late-​nineteenth-​century fiction, often as love interests who display preternatural beauty.47 The transformation of the female radical into an object of male desire—​like journalists’ visits to nihilists’ homes—​tended to diffuse the threat of revolutionary ideologies. In some cases, such as Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin in the Alps, the female nihilist whom the narrator pursues is completely defanged; she becomes a “sweet girl” possessed with “golden curls . . . cascades like plumes of feathers.” Although she acknowledges her terrorist past, she

 

106

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

explains that she espouses a “humane” style of killing that targets only guilty tsarist officials and avoids civilian casualties.48 Other treatments of beautiful nihilists, by contrast, staked out new social roles for women while simultaneously mitigating their danger. One such short story published in French newspaper recounted a romance between a female medical student from Russia and a Paris man allured by her unusual combination of delicate red lips and a “masculine physiognomy”—​until she disappears without a trace. On the one hand, the story emphasizes the woman’s independence and acknowledges her beauty, in spite of her lack of conformity with conventional norms. On the other, the woman’s atypical lifestyle and features are precisely the source of her sexual allure, which the reader experiences through the eyes of her suitor.49 Bourgeois society’s empathy for and fascination with exiles ultimately led many to identify with the newcomers. One observer described Russian terrorism as an extension of liberals’ long-​held expressions of “human nature’s longing for justice and right.”50 Multiple French outlets likened Vera Zasulich and other female revolutionaries to Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, thereby inscribing Russian radicals in France’s own historical struggles for freedom.51 Kropotkin himself expressed shock at the extent to which bourgeois Britons were willing to align themselves with him, recalling that European interlocutors frequently approached him and exclaimed, “If I were in Russia, I too would be a nihilist.”52 Working-​class Jews of the East End and the Pletzl also acquired a place in the liberal imagination, although they drew less attention than the professional revolutionaries. Some observers assigned them a critical role in liberal political economy, remarking that a continuous influx of new workers was necessary to weather this period of mass emigration from Western Europe to the Americas. Others remarked on immigrant Jews’ “temperate, frugal, industrious, and law-​ abiding” nature and their “obstinate optimism,” comparing them favorably to the local working class.53 These traits suggested that the newcomers would not only enrich national economies but would also become model citizens once they had acclimated to Western norms. For example, one visitor who remarked on the “poor physique” of Whitechapel’s Jewish workers nevertheless insisted that this trait was fleeting. “For two thousand years they have lived in the worst parts of a crowded city; they have been denied work, except of the lowest; they have endured every kind of scorn and contumely. Come again in ten years’ time. In the free air of Anglo-​Saxon rule they will grow; you will not know them again.”54 The presence of immigrant Jews played a particularly important role in the evolving relationship between their Western brethren and liberal states. The immigration of Russian Jews roughly doubled the Jewish population of both Paris and London, while catalyzing the creation of hospitals, charities, schools, and places of worship that native-​born Jews in England and France formed to serve

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

107

the newcomers. This proliferation of Jewish institutions left indelible marks on the urban landscape and civil society, offering Jews qua Jews an ever-​more conspicuous place in public life.55 Philanthropy on behalf of immigrants also provided new outlets through which European Jews could express their patriotism and further integrate themselves into national collectives. Contrasting the hardships that Russian Jews faced to the boundless opportunities available in France and England, Western Jews expressed their joy that “there exists no Jewish question [in liberal democracies], since all enjoy equality.”56 Portrayals of émigrés of Russian origin in liberal discourse were deeply contradictory. Refugees were at once pitiful victims, bold freedom fighters, and symbols of individuals’ capacity for self-​improvement. At times, their engagement with Western observers destabilized cultural hierarchies, while at other junctures it reinforced them. But this multiplicity of roles that émigrés played in the liberal imagination is precisely what guaranteed their prominence in it. Thus, the Russian colonies—​which had produced political ideologies and alternative lifestyles that challenged bourgeois norms—​found themselves active, if sometimes unwitting, accomplices in the apotheosis of liberal ideals.

Exiles and Emancipation If émigrés of Russian origin helped European liberals to articulate their own ideals, they played an even more significant role in the political imaginations of groups that challenged bourgeois hegemony. In the late nineteenth century, alternative subcultures and liminal spaces served as breeding grounds for new movements that challenged social hierarchies and imagined alternatives to the liberal order. Literary theorist Leela Gandhi, for example, shows that relationships formed in vegetarian and homosexual circles challenged the foundational assumptions of imperialist and capitalist society.57 Historian Seth Koven explores how “slumming” in the East End allowed well-​heeled Londoners to experiment with new identities and ways of thinking.58 Interactions between progressive Westerners and Russian exiles—​and the experiences of the former in the concrete utopias of the colonies—​produced similar results, freeing Europeans from the strictures of bourgeois society and allowing them to explore alternative modes of living. The first contacts between progressive Westerners and Russian émigrés usually occurred under the auspices of groups such as the SFRF and in private salons. Habitués of these venues immediately remarked on the Russians’ deep wisdom and spiritual authenticity—​traits that they saw as lacking in bourgeois society. One British scholar praised his Russian friends for their fondness of “fundamental discussions” and their willingness to “tear things up by the roots to examine them.”59 Upon meeting Kropotkin, Juliet Hueffer, the sister of

 

108

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

novelist Ford Madox Ford, remarked that the Russian’s eyes “looked as though they could see to the end of the world and understand the tiniest thing they met, and were sorry for all the people that were unhappy. They made me feel he must be almost holy (not religious).”60 Oscar Wilde, a follower of Kropotkin and an intimate of many exiles, went so far as to praise Russian nihilists as the truest embodiment of the Christian values of truth and righteousness.61 Admirers of émigrés tended to see them as beacons of social progress and even emulated some of the utopian experiments that had unfolded in the colonies. In the 1890s, Kravchinskii joined a coalition of progressive Londoners to found the experimental community of Bedford Park. Renowned for its compact, mass-​produced homes, its political activism, and its heavy emphasis on cooperation, the community replicated in West London the colonies’ commitment to pursuing social equality through mutual aid.62 The Angel of Revolution, a popular work of speculative fiction published in 1894, even more explicitly identifies Russian radicals as a futuristic force. It tells the story of a circle of Russian nihilists who obtain an airship from a British inventor and use this weapon to launch a universal war that destroys oppressive governments across the world. The conflict ultimately produces a more just and equal order in which men from “East and West, North and South” become “brothers of blood and speech.”63 Fictional depictions as well as memoirs portray Russians as forces of international integration. This idea, which is implicit in the universal polity that the Russians create in the Angel of Revolution, is further developed elsewhere in the novel: each nihilist is obligated to know four European languages, and visitors are only admitted to the Russian radicals’ inner sanctum after reciting a series of multilingual slogans about freedom.64 Olive Garnett, a young woman who first encountered the émigrés in the library of the British Museum, which was run by her father (another SFRF member), remarked that the varied origins of her émigré friends infused the Russian colonies with a cosmopolitan spirit. “It certainly is extraordinary that with all the Russians we know each is racially different. Thus Kropotkin is a Muscovite, his wife a Siberian, Stepniak [the pseudonym of Kravchinskii] has something of the Tatar, his wife is a Jewess . . . & so on.”65 Above all, Western progressives admired Russian radicals as advocates for the oppressed and disenfranchised. The nihilists in The Angel of Revolution, for example, are led by a Jew who had become a revolutionary to avenge the “injury, insult, and degradation” that his people had experienced in the pogroms of 1881.66 Similar themes emerge in discussions of revolutionary women. Vera Zasulich’s attack on a government official was a particularly striking example of the ability of the weak to conquer the strong, securing her a place in “universal history,” as a French paper put it.67 Numerous authors drew inspiration from her example, including Oscar Wilde, whose first play, “Vera, or the Nihilists,” is clearly indebted

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

109

to her story. The opening scene of the drama depicts a legion of convicts being marched past the Siberian tavern operated by the eponymous heroine’s father. Vera’s family and their fellow peasants express their concern about the welfare of the prisoners, but police guards condescendingly urge the villagers to mind their own business:  “Till your fields, store your harvests, pay your taxes, and obey your masters.” Vera’s distress at this abusive treatment (as well as her shock at discovering that her own brother is among the convicts) inspire the young woman to join the nihilist cause and to participate in a conspiracy to assassinate the tsar, allowing her to avenge the victims of tsarism and liberate herself in the process.68 If portrayals of radical women allowed European observers to imagine a world in which women were empowered and confident, engagement with émigré communities offered Western women the opportunity to renegotiate their role in society. Women played an important role in the SFRF, accounting for some half-​dozen members of the group’s steering committee and providing about one-​third of its donations in the mid-​1890s.69 Furthermore, many women worked as translators who made the writings of radical exiles accessible to Western audiences. One of the most famous and successful was Constance Garnett, who married Olive Garnett’s brother and translated Turgenev, Herzen, and Tolstoy into English.70 Advocacy on behalf of refugees and literary translation offered middle—​and upper-​class women new roles in the public sphere without compromising their propriety. The Russian colonies also inspired more radical challenges to the gender order. A handful of male professors cited the success of their female pupils from Russia to argue that women should enjoy greater access to higher education and the professions. Some went so far as to insist that women were in every way the equals of men.71 Meanwhile, the outspoken, professionally successful, and politically involved women of the colonies emerged as role models for westerners who hoped to emulate their example. Sofiia Kovalevskaia—​the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, Europe’s first female professor in the field, and the author of a bestselling novel about a female nihilist—​became a leading light of continental feminism. George Eliot and Swedish activist Ellen Key, among others, made pilgrimages to visit the scholar and to express their appreciation for her path-​breaking accomplishments.72 Meanwhile, the men of the Russian colonies attracted intelligent and politically engaged women, including social reformers Isabella Ford, Annie Besant, and Beatrice Webb.73 Suffragettes such as Sylvia Pankhurst also frequented émigré salons, which discussed extending the franchise to women as early as the 1890s. Indeed, in 1908, a Russian-​Jewish émigré publicist became the first man on English soil to withhold tax payments to protest female disenfranchisement.74 Furthermore, the suffragettes appear to have learned their trademark

 

110

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

tactic of the hunger strike from their Russian friends, who so often championed the heroic example of the fasting women of the Kara penal colony.75 It was not only the egalitarian ideas of the émigrés that attracted progressive women, but the ways in which the Russians’ behavior modeled these beliefs. Juliet Hueffer remarked of her first encounter with Kropotkin, “He was one of the most learned men alive, but he was not too proud to talk to me although there were a lot of other people and I was so ignorant.”76 Her friend Olive Garnett expressed similar amazement that prominent émigré men treated a naïve twenty-​ year-​old like herself with such respect. She embarked on an intense intellectual relationship with Kravchinskii, who tutored her on Russian history and language, invited her to political meetings, and encouraged her literary ambitions. Before long, their intellectual romance blossomed into a love affair. Garnett’s relationship with the exile attracted ridicule from her father and his friends, who chided her for acting a “little rebel, going in for Russians & revolutionists & all that sort of thing.”77 This patriarchal pressure, however, only deepened Olive’s infatuation with the Russians, whom she credited for her intellectual and sexual self-​actualization. Although she had initially expressed shock at the radical ideas promoted by the exiles, including the abolition of marriage, within a few years she endorsed them herself.78 Olivia and Helen Rossetti, daughters of the writer and critic William Michael Rossetti, friends of Garnett, and the cousins of Hueffer, also became involved in émigré circles. Under the Russians’ influence, the teenagers eventually came to identify as anarchists and launched a radical journal. The Rossetti sisters left a chronicle of their discovery of radical politics in A Girl among the Anarchists, the largely autobiographical novel that they coauthored under a pseudonym. The novel’s protagonist first discovers Russian radicalism through Kropotkin’s pamphlets. She then begins to attend a salon where she meets emancipated women as well as Marxists and anarchists, whom she admires for their “habit of taking nothing for granted, of boldly inquiring into the origin of all accepted precepts of morality, of intellectual speculation unbiased by prejudice.”79 Eventually, she becomes a fixture of London’s radical scene, launching a clandestine press, attending mass meetings, and traveling between anarchist safe houses. These activities free her from “all the ideas, customs, and prejudices which usually influence my class.” At the same time, they catalyze her transformation from a diffident orphan into a confident and independent young woman who is her “own mistress.”80 European women’s quests for liberation, assisted by the feminist politics of the colonies, often intersected with the struggles of Jewish proletarians. Olive Garnett recounted visiting a political meeting in Whitechapel with Russian friends, where she saw speeches by Kropotkin, Louise Michel, and British Marxists. But it was a Jewish labor activist and contributor to Arbeter fraynd whose fiery

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

111

speech made the greatest impression on her. “Born orator,” she wrote. “Spoke in Yiddish, much applause. Wonderful powers. Will be shot down in insurrection probably.”81 The Rossetti sisters spent substantial time in the East End, as does the protagonist of their book, who mingles with Russian-​Jewish anarchists.82 In addition to allowing them to explore the world that existed beyond the bourgeois milieu in which they were raised, the women’s wanderings in the East End offered another opportunity to flout the authority of their parents, who objected to their roaming the city’s most notorious district unaccompanied.83 No progressive woman’s struggle for emancipation became more entangled with Russian Jews than Beatrice Webb’s. An SFRF member and the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Webb spent several years in the 1880s posing as a Jewish trouser fitter in the East End. The exposés of the sweating system that she produced as a result of her undercover work established her as one of the leading authorities on urban poverty and immigrant labor. Melding established traditions of female relief work with the more masculine pursuits of journalism and sociological research, her activity in the East End allowed her to achieve her life-​long goal of earning “recognition as an intellectual worker.”84 In addition to opening new professional and social opportunities, Webb’s contacts with Russian Jews profoundly influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her. She came to identify with Jewish immigrants so strongly that she claimed Jewish ancestry and boasted about her supposedly Jewish physiognomy, which she believed facilitated her undercover work in sweatshops. Moreover, her experience in Whitechapel led her to disavow the liberal beliefs that she had initially held and to become “more and more of a collectivist.” She eventually embraced socialism, becoming a founding member of the Fabian Society with her husband, Sidney Webb.85 In dialogue with émigrés, Webb had learned that the struggles of women, Jews, and impoverished workers were fundamentally interconnected—​and that the emancipation of one group advanced the liberation of all the others. The colonies’ continued engagement in the anti-​imperial cause consolidated their reputation as emancipatory spaces. In publications aimed at European audiences, exiles celebrated their struggles on behalf of the Russian empire’s minority religions and non-​Russian nations.86 Moreover, their public activism often situated their own quest for freedom in a global, anti-​imperial context. At one Paris meeting attended by more than 800 Russian subjects, speakers denounced imperialist violence across the globe, from the abuses of the tsar to Belgian atrocities in the Congo and French aggression in North Africa.87 The concrete utopias created by Russians abroad had a profound effect on other exiled subalterns. Paris police reported that Irish nationalists living in France regularly consorted with Russian émigrés.88 Although Irish patriots enjoyed fewer opportunities for organized activism in England, they often

 

112

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

discussed the evils of the Russian autocracy, which provided an Aesopic means of addressing their own suffering under British rule. This likely explains Oscar Wilde’s fascination with Russia, which stood in for Ireland at multiple junctures in “Vera; or, the Nihilists.” Incidentally, critics of the Irish cause also conflated that nation with Russia: the so-​called Fenians, the radical Irish nationalists who began organizing attacks on British targets around 1880, were often described in the British press as “Irish nihilists.”89 By the late nineteenth century, colonized peoples from the Levant to East Asia looking for alternatives to exploitative capitalism, militarized borders, and Social Darwinism drew inspiration from Russian radicals.90 Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian activists living in European exile gravitated to Russian neighborhoods and mingled with their residents, making the colonies centers of an emergent global struggle against imperialism.91 These encounters had an especially profound influence on Indian activists, who were enthralled by the Russians’ culture of self-​sacrifice, use of hunger strikes, and the engagement of women in their struggle. Nationalist, socialist, and feminist crusader Madame Cama encouraged Indians to embrace the Russians’ methods of agitation against an oppressive empire and to emulate the network of radical presses and institutions that they had established abroad.92 In 1907, a circle of Bengali youth who had studied bomb-​building under the tutelage of Russians in Paris returned home and detonated a bomb that derailed a train carrying a high-​ranking British official.93 The fact that the experiments undertaken in the Russian colonies informed so many different emancipatory projects suggested that their residents’ dreams of leading all humanity toward freedom and fulfillment were not entirely far-​ fetched. This point is emphasized in the last scene of the Angel of Revolution. Natasha, the beautiful daughter of the Jewish chief of the nihilists, sings a song of “victory and thanksgiving” to celebrate the triumph of the revolution. It is significant that a character whose sex, religion, and political views guaranteed her marginalization in her homeland becomes the herald of emancipation who announces the destruction of national borders and the emergence of a more just and equal world. The book closes with a final act that defies boundaries and subverts hierarchies: Natasha’s marriage to the British narrator, a Gentile. “There is peace on earth at last!” opines the omniscient narrator.94

Remaking the Left In addition to inspiring critics of the liberal status quo, the concrete utopias of the colonies played a catalytic role in the revivification of the international left. The destruction of the Paris Commune had plunged European radicals into

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

113

despair, further dividing anarchists and socialists, who squabbled about the causes of its failure. Marx himself, who had once hailed the Paris Commune’s “working existence” as a landmark in revolutionary history, eventually developed a more critical attitude, faulting the Communards for having failed to launch an immediate attack against government forces at Versailles.95 The passage of Germany’s anti-​socialist laws in the late 1870s struck yet another blow to the revolutionary cause. Russian exiles insisted that the “passionate, pure socialism” modeled in colony life offered an escape from the half-​measures of “reformism, parliamentarianism,” as well as the impasse in which the European left had found itself.96 Once again, revolutionary terrorism emerged as a powerful symbol of Russians’ promise to revive the revolutionary cause. Terrorists-​turned-​revolutionary celebrities toured the continent boasting of their successes and contemplated founding a journal to inform Western audiences about their accomplishments.97 At an international anarchist conference in 1881, Kropotkin argued for the virtues of the “propaganda of the deed,” convincing conference delegates to pass a resolution urging young anarchists to study chemistry.98 Even activists who disapproved of terrorism recognized its transformative power. In a French-​language pamphlet addressing the tsaricide of 1881, Ukrainian socialist Drahomanov predicted that terrorism in Russia would catalyze a spate of popular uprisings like those that had swept France in 1789.99 European revolutionaries representing a wide variety of ideological positions rallied behind the Russians’ narrative. German anarchist Johann Most, living in exile in London, cheered the assassination of Alexander II as the dawn of a new revolutionary era.100 Henri Rochefort, a Communard exiled in Geneva, concurred, explaining that “liberty in all nations germinates in the blood of oppressors.”101 Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky marveled that “a small band of revolutionaries” had shaken the autocracy to its core.102 Even Marx and Engels, who had once been so critical of Russian extremism, expressed new admiration for their eastern comrades and began studying Russian so as to be able to read their revolutionary tracts in the original. As Engels wrote to a Russian interlocutor, “if ever Blanquism—​the fantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy—​had a certain justification for its existence,” the terrorists who had brought the tsar to his knees provided it. In fact, Engels went so far as to find a role for Russian terrorism in the historical dialectic. Likening Russia to “a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it,” he argued that revolutionary violence would provide the explosive power necessary to destroy the old regime. This, in turn, would catapult Russia into the modern age and permit “economic forces” to direct the revolutionary process.103 Marx, for his part, had come to see terrorism as “a specifically Russian and historically inevitable method.”104

 

114

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

Marx and Engels’s newfound receptivity to Russian perspectives on the revolutionary process had an immense impact on their thought. In the era of Herzen and Bakunin, they had resolutely resisted the notion that Russia’s agrarian society was prepared for socialist revolution. By 1884, however, Engels had reversed course, arguing that the catalyst for revolution “can scarcely come from anywhere but Russia.”105 Marx’s views evolved in a similar fashion, acknowledging that the theories of historical development outlined in his earlier writings might apply in different ways to different places. This transformation paved the way for the global dissemination of Marxism and for the application of Marx’s theories to agrarian societies beyond industrialized Europe.106 The Russians’ investment in the cause of women’s emancipation also left a mark on European radicals. Clara Zetkin, who would go on to become Germany’s most prominent feminist socialist, developed her political commitments in the Russian colonies, where she lived and worked for years. Zetkin (née Eisner) had fallen in love with Osip Zetkin, a Russian, while both were studying in Leipzig. Forced to leave Germany after the passage of the anti-​socialist laws, the couple settled first in Switzerland and then in France, where Osip became one of the Russian-​Jewish pioneers who organized workers in the Pletzl and founded the Jewish Workers’ Society. Clara spent the 1880s organizing female workers in Paris, putting the ideal of women’s equality that motivated so many émigrés into practice. In 1889, she burst upon the radical scene with a rousing speech at the inaugural meeting of the Second International, in which she argued that Marxists should prioritize the political mobilization of working women.107 Charlotte Wilson, a member of the SFRF and an apostle of Kropotkin who cooperated with him to found a British journal, emerged as Zetkin’s analogue in the anarchist movement. She eventually formed a radical ladies’ group from which prominent suffragettes later emerged.108 In some cases, Russian exiles played catalytic roles in the regeneration of radical parties. This was especially true in Britain, where the left had been cowed since the collapse of the Chartist movement in the 1850s. Henry Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first socialist party, recalled the crucial role that Russians played in his political evolution. A close friend of Kropotkin, he described the anarchist’s Appeal to the Young as the “best propagandist pamphlet that ever was penned. . . . Nothing ever written so completely combines the scientific with the popular, the revolutionary with the ethical.” He was also deeply influenced by Kravchinskii’s Underground Russia, which he translated into English. In the thrall of radical exiles, he eventually abandoned the conservative ideas he had once held, declared himself a Marxist, and founded his own radical paper.109 Other activists who spearheaded the revival of the British left in the 1880s shared Hyndman’s fascination with the Russians. The founders of the Fabian

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

115

Society had close connections with émigrés, whom one leader of the group described as people of “outstanding ability and unimpeachable character.” The Society drew heavily on Kropotkin’s ideas of mutual aid, welcomed Russian speakers to its events, and claimed numerous members with pre-​existing ties to exiles, including Beatrice Webb and Charlotte Wilson.110 William Morris, who founded the internationalist Socialist League in 1884, strongly identified with “the heroic opponents of autocracy,” and lauded them as inspirations for British workers.111 Although British radicals remained notoriously fractured in the 1880s and 1890s, the esteem in which they held Russian comrades was universal. One Fabian Society activist went so far as to suggest that Kravchinskii should be appointed the official leader of the British socialists.112 By the late nineteenth century, Russian exiles had acquired prominent roles in radical movements across the continent. This was true even in locales that did not host large numbers of Russian émigrés. For example, Anzhelika Balabanova, a university student radicalized in Switzerland, moved to Rome and became a leading figure in the Italian socialist party.113 Meanwhile, proletarians of Russian origin were becoming integrated into left-​wing parties and organizations in London and Paris. Whitechapel’s Berner Street Club attracted Western anarchists, who admired the radical intransigence of its immigrant members; Russian-​Jewish workers corresponded with radical journals, reporting on their accomplishments and concerns.114 In Paris, many of the Yiddish-​speaking unions that had emerged in the Pletzl ultimately affiliated themselves with French syndicates and sent representatives to trade union conferences across the continent.115 By the early twentieth century, politically mobilized immigrants from Russia were frequently identified as fiery orators by police surveilling trade unions and anarchist clubs. In spite of the fact that some relied on translators to communicate owing to their poor grasp of French, their passion captivated their audiences and, in some cases, convinced workers to strike.116 The Second International, which was founded in 1889, reflected the growing influence of Russians in the European left. Exiles occupied prominent billings in the group’s founding conference—​the first at which Russian delegates joined western comrades. Georgii Plekhanov observed that although Russia had been a lodestar for “reactionaries from all lands” for much of the nineteenth century, it had now produced some of the continent’s most important revolutionary voices. Petr Lavrov took to the stage to celebrate the Jewish Workers’ Society and the Arbeter fraynd group for forging new solidarities between Jewish workers and revolutionaries in several nations. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who presided over the meeting, exclaimed, “It is the proudest moment in my life to stand here and to see the fulfillment of my ideals, expressed in the phrase: ‘Proletarians of all nations unite!’ ”117

 

116

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

In 1890, Bismarck’s anti-​socialist laws lapsed, permitting German Social Democrats to return to their homeland and to resume their efforts to build a national party, the SPD. The returnees founded newspapers, established cultural and political organizations, and recruited party activists. Within a few years, they had built the continent’s strongest socialist party; by the turn of the century, they would win nearly a third of the parliamentary vote. Germany’s growing reputation as a major center of socialist activism attracted radical Russians. Izrail’ Gel’fand, a student of political economy who discovered Marxism in Basel, settled in Germany in 1891. There he joined a circle frequented by Karl Kautsky and Clara Zetkin, who returned to her homeland after the death of her husband. Gel’fand acquired a reputation as a brilliant theoretical thinker and a fiery polemicist who wrote under the pen name Parvus, and he would go on to become the editor of a major party paper.118 Rosa Luxemburg, who had befriended Karl Kautsky in Switzerland, also moved to Germany in the 1890s. Like Parvus, she became one of the SPD’s leading lights.119 Other émigré Marxists joined the pilgrimage to Germany, where they tolerated the risks of extradition and police persecution in the hope that they could learn to build a mass party of their own by observing workers’ meetings and socialist clubs. Even provincial towns acquired hundreds of Russian residents. Meanwhile, Russian exiles outside Germany integrated themselves into that nation’s bustling socialist public sphere. Members of the Geneva-​based Liberation of Labor group, for example, published regularly in SPD newspapers and were hailed by German activists as revolutionary icons.120 In some cases, exiles of Russian origin played decisive roles in the SPD’s ideological development. The rise of Social Democracy in Germany was accompanied by intense debates within the party. One of the most heated was catalyzed by a critique of Marx formulated by Eduard Bernstein, who like the Russian economists urged Marxists to work for reform within existing political structures. Many German activists took Bernstein’s revisionist ideas to heart. Indeed, the SPD made rapid gains precisely because it mastered the art of parliamentary politics. Karl Kautsky, however, denounced Bernstein’s ideas as heretical, urging comrades to stand by orthodox Marxist principles.121 In the debates over the party’s future, it was Russian activists in the SPD who emerged as the most impassioned proponents of an “ultra-​revolutionary and hyper-​dogmatic version of Marx.”122 Parvus launched one of the earliest and most ferocious critiques of Bernstein’s doctrines. Declaring “war on the self-​ satisfaction and torpor of many members of the party,” he argued that Marxists must never cooperate with bourgeois-​parliamentary institutions and should use all tools at their disposal to disrupt them, including mass strikes.123 Luxemburg, who echoed Parvus’s support for mass strikes and similarly attacked Bernstein’s revisionism, also established a reputation as a left-​wing enfant terrible. She not

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

117

only denounced the conciliatory stance of the center and right of the SPD, but also the trade unionism of British socialists and the commitments of the French to parliamentarianism and gradual reform.124 If lived experience in the colonies had inspired their anti-​bourgeois fervor and radical dogmatism, their intellectual culture had begun to leave its mark on the outside world. Far from solving the internal debates within the SPD, these interventions from Parvus and Luxemburg intensified them. Although Kautsky shared the Russians’ hostility toward Bernstein, he saw mass strikes as a counterproductive—​or even dangerous—​tactic.125 An Austrian revisionist went further still, accusing Rosa Luxemburg of being a police provocateur.126 Yet even those who expressed misgivings about the Russians’ maximalist approach were forced to acknowledge that the rejection of bourgeois norms in their thought and their actions had infused the left with vital new energy. As Kautsky put it in a 1902 essay: The revolutionary center is shifting from the West to the East. . . . The Russian revolutionary movement that is now flaring up will perhaps prove to be the most potent means of exorcising the spirit of flabby philistinism and coldly calculating politics that is beginning to spread in our midst, and it may cause the fighting spirit and the passionate devotion to our great ideals to flare up again.127 For years to come, Kautsky and other revolutionaries would grapple with how to marshal the force of Russian radicalism without unleashing its potentially destructive byproducts.

Virtue Becomes Vice The utopian prefigurations of the Russian colonies had proved extraordinarily fertile, informing European visions of emancipation from the radical left to the liberal center. However, the very features of colony life that most inspired Western observers also produced anxieties. The image of Russians as ultra-​ radicals—​perhaps the source of their greatest mystique—​alarmed European police and politicians, and surveillance of émigré communities grew more intrusive in the era of revolutionary terrorism. France, which boasted the continent’s most sophisticated and aggressive political police, aggressively surveilled Russian exiles in Paris as well as Geneva and London.128 Swiss police expressed alarm about the nihilists who had taken up residence in that country, resolving to destroy their networks.129 In the wake of a spate of bombings by Irish nationalists, the British Home Office founded the Special Branch of Scotland Yard in 1881. It

 

118

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

immediately began monitoring potential domestic threats besides the Fenians, including Russian nihilists and the East End’s Jewish radicals.130 The effects of intensified policing were most evident in Paris, the largest center of Russian settlement in the early 1880s. Louis Andrieux, the Paris Prefect of Police between 1879 and 1881, oversaw a crackdown against the tsarist subjects who had sought refuge in France.131 When Andrieux learned that Russian agents active in France had located a terrorist who had attempted to derail the tsar’s train, the prefect directed his agents to arrest the émigré.132 A year later, he expelled a number of Russian radicals from Paris, including Lavrov.133 Meanwhile, police in other cities adopted a more aggressive stance. In 1882, Lyon police arrested Kropotkin, who had traveled to the city to protest alongside striking silk workers, and charged him with inciting civil war.134 Andrieux’s hostility to colony residents endeared him to his Russian counterparts, with whom he cultivated a cordial relationship. When a Russian delegation arrived in Paris in 1879 to study the revolutionary emigration, Andrieux invited its members into his archives and educated them about French policing tactics. The experience in France informed the reorganization of the Russian political police in 1880–​81, and the new agency that emerged from the restructuring, the Okhrana, imitated the structure and tactics of Andrieux’s agents.135 These early exchanges provided a robust foundation for decades of Franco-​Russian police cooperation. By the 1880s, the prefecture as well as the national Sûreté regularly exchanged information with the Russian political police.136 Meanwhile, Russian diplomats launched their own campaign to convince their Western counterparts that asylum regimes imperiled European society by offering safe harbor to Russian radicals. As one communiqué put it, revolutionary exiles “aspire to overthrow religion, the family, and society as a whole. . . . [They promote] an occult propaganda that attacks all the aforementioned principles through the means of assassination, poison and arson.”137 Cajoling and overt threats often accompanied such attempts to persuade Europeans of the dangers of the colonies’ revolutionary lifestyles. Diplomats offered material incentives to nations that promised to disrupt radical networks and threatened to curtail trade or even to cut off diplomatic relations if their demands were not met.138 Although Switzerland boasted a robust tradition of asylum, it proved particularly vulnerable to pressure as a result of its small size and economic relationships with Russia. The first great compromise made by the Swiss government came in 1872, when the federal authorities reluctantly extradited Nechaev in exchange for a promise from the tsarist authorities—​almost immediately broken—​that he would not be prosecuted for political crimes.139 In 1879, the Swiss agreed to extradite Kravchinskii after receiving a strongly worded demand from the Russian

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

119

government. However, a tip from a sympathetic official allowed the Russian to escape to France before he could be repatriated.140 Swiss officials insisted that the Nechaev and Kravchinskii cases were exceptional. However, Russian diplomats saw the behavior of their Swiss counterparts as a clear indication that their commitment to protecting refugees was faltering.141 As great powers, Britain and France were better situated to resist Russian pressure. Prominent statesmen in both nations energetically defended the asylum principle. Shortly after the assassination of the tsar, the British foreign secretary pledged in a speech before the House of Commons:  “All foreigners have the unrestricted right of entrance and residence in this country; and while they remain in it are, equally with British subjects, under the protection of the law.”142 Invoking similar arguments, French officials refused to extradite the would-​be Russian regicide arrested by Andrieux, which prompted the tsar to withdraw his ambassador to Paris.143 Several years later, republican authorities declined to extradite Kropotkin.144 In private, however, politicians in both France and England revealed a growing willingness to infringe on the political rights of refugees. In 1878, the British authorities declined a Russian request to surveil several exiles whom the tsarist government claimed were plotting the execution of the tsar. Yet at the same time, the Home Office added, “There is nothing to prevent [the Russians] watching their refugees here.”145 Although the French prime minister earned plaudits for his refusal to extradite Kropotkin, he signaled his support for the Russian’s prosecution. Found guilty by a French jury, the anarchist would serve three years in prison before he was pardoned in 1886.146 Meanwhile, new anxieties about radical refugees surfaced in public opinion. In the early 1880s, some legal scholars, politicians, and journalists argued that asylum policies had been created to protect religious and political dissenters, not to offer comfort to admitted terrorists and murderers.147 As one member of the British House of Commons put it, why should Britain guarantee refuge to the nihilist who abused this privilege to “plot his murderous schemes against the Czar of Russia” and to “lay his plans for blowing up palaces and streets by the score?”148 In spite of the new anxieties that surrounded the asylum regime, it remained a centerpiece of the liberal political imagination. Periodic exposés that revealed the extent of the cooperation between the Okhrana and French police outraged many citizens, who denounced this collaboration as a betrayal of republican values.149 Furthermore, complaints about the putative dangers of Russian exiles were met with rejoinders that they had risked their lives to oppose a “reactionary, Byzantine regime.”150 Indeed, few causes were capable of producing more righteous indignation than infringements on the rights of refugees. Figures as varied as Herbert Spencer, Ernest Renan, and Victor Hugo rallied behind Kropotkin

 

120

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

and denounced his prosecution. Even the conservative newspaper Le Figaro described his arrest and trial as a miscarriage of justice.151 A dramatic episode in 1891 revealed the outsized role that Russian radicals continued to play in liberal conceptions of freedom and even individual ideas about morality. In Constantinople, an emissary of the Okhrana boarded a British steamer and offered its captain five hundred pounds in exchange for a famous passenger: Vladimir Burtsev, a one-​time People’s Will activist. The British captain, who expressed horror at the “tyranny prevailing in Russia,” adamantly refused. As a “gentleman,” he stated, he was obligated to protect the Russian’s right to asylum, to which Burtsev had been entitled as soon as he boarded a ship flying the Union Jack. Several weeks later the captain and the émigré arrived in London, where both were feted by members of the National Liberal Club.152 For this Briton, at least, being a moral individual and upstanding citizen demanded that he defend hapless refugees. Enduring public support for the right of asylum, on the one hand, and increasing fear about the threats posed by radicals, on the other, placed western officials in a difficult vise. In the 1880s, French and Swiss functionaries stumbled on an elegant solution to this dilemma: administrative expulsions, which could be conducted quickly and without public scrutiny.153 In the 1880s, Swiss officials expelled Plekhanov and Kropotkin, allowing federal officials to dodge a Russian request for their extradition while ridding themselves of men they viewed as troublesome agitators.154 Both Russians resettled in France, but that nation too began to rely on administrative expulsions with regularity. After the government’s famed refusal to extradite the would-​be assassin of the tsar, he was expelled, forcing him to move on to Britain.155 Proletarian Jews of Russian origin became another focus of concern, providing an additional example of how the positive traits ascribed to foreigners could evolve into reflections of their danger. Discussions about the sweating industry produced a public panic in the 1880s. One line of analysis warned of sweating’s baleful effects on public health and morality, revealing the horrific conditions that existed on shop floors. Another lamented its economic effects, charging that sweated industries flooded the market with substandard goods, deflated worker pay, and created unfair competition with native labor.156 Although most of these interventions expressed empathy for exploited workers, even some of the most sympathetic observers of Russian Jews suggested that the immigrants’ own behavior accounted for some of the industry’s evils. Beatrice Webb argued that “the Polish or Russian Jew represents to some extent the concentrated essence of Jewish virtue and Jewish vice.”157 On the one hand, she claimed, the suffering that Jews had experienced in Russia equipped them with a superior ability to withstand difficult working conditions and a drive to “become tiny capitalists themselves, and begin to feel equal to a Montefiore

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

121

or a Rothschild.” On the other hand, their impressive work ethic and desire to succeed supposedly drove them to exploit others.158 Other erstwhile allies of Jewish workers expressed similar complaints. Trade unionists who welcomed immigrant Jews into their organizations simultaneously warned that the willingness of Jewish laborers to work for a pittance posed serious threats to native workers, protesting that their nations must not become “a receptacle for continental paupers.”159 The Jewish special-​interest journals that served as the primary clearing house for information about immigrant Jews for Western audiences also covered the sweating industry with interest. They voiced an additional concern:  the entanglement of recent immigrants in the revolutionary movement. London’s Jewish Chronicle, for example, lamented that the East End had become a “centre of demoralization both ethical and political.” The French Archives Israélites complained that many immigrants had become “enemies of order and public peace.”160 Here too, then, efforts by Jewish immigrants to free themselves from oppression, once seen as laudable by many observers, were reframed as threats. The anxiety of Western Jews about their eastern brethren intensified rapidly in the 1880s, as the influence of racial antisemitism grew. As one British observer put it, “The outside world is not capable of making minute discrimination between Jew and Jew, and forms its opinion of Jews in general as much, if not more, from [the immigrants] than from the Anglicised portion of the community.”161 French and English Jews worked hard to change immigrant behaviors that had the potential to reflect negatively on Jewry as a whole. Some blamed the “communistic” sentiments they observed in Jewish immigrant neighborhoods on the density and inward-​looking nature of the East End and the Pletzl.162 This contingent focused on altering the geography of Russian-​Jewish settlement. London’s Jewish charities invested new energy in the neighborhood of Stepney, hoping that immigrants would follow the aid eastward and abandon Whitechapel.163 French philanthropists used a similar strategy, building new shelters for immigrants in Montmartre in the 1880s in an effort to disperse the immigrant population in the Marais.164 Others, however, insisted that the immigrants themselves were the problem. At an 1886 meeting of London’s Jewish charities, Chief Rabbi Adler, who frequently battled with radical immigrants, described the Russians who had settled in Whitechapel as the “scum of the populace.” Adler’s language suggested that the supposedly deviant behavior of the immigrants had deep cultural or even biological roots.165 Bernard Lazare, a prominent Franco-​Jewish writer, went even further, insisting that Eastern European Jews were distinguished from their western brethren by “profound differences in ethnic constitution, character, and morality.” The former, whom he claimed were descended from Huns and Tatars, were fundamentally incapable of being assimilated into Western society

 

122

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

by virtue of their “depredations, immorality, lack of faith, and indifference to the public good.”166 The notion that innate characteristics rather than learned behavior was responsible for the undesirable behavior of the newcomers suggested that reducing the number of immigrants was the only means of limiting their deleterious influence. By the 1890s the Alliance Israélite had shifted its focus from facilitating the emigration of Russian Jews to intercepting those newly arrived in Paris, who were then encouraged to move on to other cities. However, this scheme would be thwarted by the fact that Jewish communities in more than half a dozen French cities refused to accept immigrants from Russia.167 In London, the Jewish Board of Guardians and the Russo-​Jewish Committee offered financial incentives to residents of the East End willing to resettle in North America. These enticements led to the departure of some 31,000 Russian Jews between 1881 and 1906.168 Some Jewish activists went further still, campaigning for comprehensive immigration restrictions. At an 1886 meeting of London philanthropists, architect and social reformer N. S. Joseph lamented that the British capital had become the premier destination for “paupers from all parts of the world” and demanded that the state implement new measures to limit access to Britain’s shores.169 Lazare endorsed similar ideas. Rather than pretending that French Jews shared common interests with their coconfessionalists in Russia, he argued, “It would be more natural for French Jews to stop, to curb if they can, the perpetual immigration of these predatory, uncouth, and dirty Tatars, who are crude and filthy, who come to graze in a country not theirs without due cause.”170 The results of the Russian moment in European history were deeply ambivalent, once again revealing the contradictory nature of the colonies’ utopian experiments. If Russian exiles had emerged as partners and sometimes guides in Westerners’ own quests for freedom, they unwittingly raised new concerns about the costs of emancipation. The alternative lifestyles that they modeled produced both inspiration and fear, as did their success at challenging power structures and transcending borders. That said, the symbiotic relationship that the Russian colonies had developed with their liberal host societies offered a surprising source of stability. Even as émigrés critiqued the shortcomings of bourgeois society, they benefited from the guarantees that liberal regimes provided. By the same token, many liberals saw their ability to cope with difference and to welcome needy populations as proof of their cultural superiority. There was not yet any debate about the merits of the asylum tradition; the question was which populations deserved its sacred protections. As long as the continent’s liberal regimes remained secure, so too did the Russian colonies and their concrete utopias. By the mid-​1880s, however, it was

 



Entangl ed Emancipati ons

123

clear that anti-​parliamentary, nativist, and antisemitic movements were rapidly gaining strength, the first indication of the illiberal tsunami that would soon inundate the entire continent. The new European right that emerged in the last years of the century would have a devastating impact on émigré communities, making their dystopian features more pronounced than ever. But it too was unwittingly shaped by conversations that happened in and around the colonies—​ another example of émigré activism yielding unexpected results.

 

5

Émigré Dystopias

In the spring of 1890 Paris police conducted raids in the left-​bank’s Russian colony, uncovering a bomb-​building ring alleged to have been planning attacks on targets in Russia and France. The resulting arrests attracted intense media attention and generated panic about the dangers posed by colony residents. This incident, along with several others that occurred around the same time, marked an important turning point in the lives of émigré communities. Russian citizens once seen as refugees were increasingly described as “bombers,” “terrorists,” or “aliens,” becoming targets of prosecution and discrimination. The Russian colonies, once beacons of a unified and harmonious world, crystallized the dangers of cross-​border exchange. The deteriorating condition of exiles coincided with the rapid destabilization of liberal regimes at the fin de siècle. In the early 1890s, international networks of anarchists staged a series of terrorist attacks that aimed quite literally to destroy the foundations of bourgeois society. At the same time, noisy contingents of radical nationalists and antisemites emerged on the right, denouncing liberal traditions of toleration and open borders. Imperiled by these challenges, the liberal powers declared war on revolutionary networks and created new legal distinctions between the rights of foreigners and the native-​born.1 Given their reputation for political radicalism and cultural difference, it is not surprising that exiles of Russian origin would be disadvantaged by these developments. However, the Russian colonies were not merely passive victims of these transformations in political culture; conversations that occurred in and around émigré communities played a crucial role in the continent’s illiberal turn. In this case, the agents of change were not the exiles themselves, but a colorful cast of defenders of the tsarist regime who sought to alter the prevailing narrative about the émigrés and the state that they had fled. Using old-​fashioned influence peddling to reach politicians while harnessing the mass media to speak directly to the public, this small but determined group of individuals refashioned the distinct and unconnected anxieties that had already emerged about the Russian colonies Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0006

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

125

Figure 5.1  Russian “nihilists” arrested in 1890. L’éclair, July 3, 1890, 1.

into a new narrative. These agitators presented the colonies’ concrete utopias as dangerous and degenerate while transforming émigré dreams into cudgels employed against liberal regimes. This campaign imperiled émigré communities and unraveled their international networks, but it too was a product of the international exchanges that defined Europe’s Russian moment.

 

126

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

“Government By Journalism” In 1886 W. T. Stead, the editor of the wildly popular Pall Mall Gazette, hailed the dawn of a new age of “government by journalism” that would offer ordinary people the opportunity to shape public opinion.2 Stead was right to point to modern journalism’s democratic potential, but he failed to mention that the incipient mass media could also reinforce the state’s mechanisms of repression. The French political police recognized this potential in the first years of the Third Republic. The Paris prefect of police, Louis Andrieux, was himself a journalist who had founded Le Petit Parisien, France’s largest daily. As prefect, Andrieux established France’s first anarchist newspaper, which he used to sow discord in revolutionary circles and to discredit anarchist ideas before the general public by promoting “unheard-​of violence; burning, assassination, dynamite bombs.”3 Although Andrieux touted these methods to the Russian agents who visited Paris in 1879–​80, it would not be the Okhrana that initiated the task of turning European public opinion against Russian revolutionary networks.4 Instead, a colorful cast of independent agents who acted outside of the state altogether embraced this task. One of the pioneers of this campaign was Olga Novikova, a salonnière and journalist who settled in London in the 1870s. Arriving at a time of intense diplomatic tensions between Russia and England, she appointed herself the unofficial “M.P. for Russia,” attempting to explain Russia’s interests to Britons in newspapers such as The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette—​and to demystify England to Russian readers in Moskovskie vedomosti, the empire’s premier conservative daily.5 In the midst of the hysteria about Russia’s designs on the Balkans and Central Asia, she insisted that Russia shared Britain’s interest in advancing the cause of Christianity and in “civilizing” less developed nations. Indeed, she went so far as to suggest that Britain and Russia should join in a formal alliance—​an unimaginable proposition at the time.6 Around the same time, another tsarist subject, Élie de Cyon (né Il’ia Tsion), launched a campaign to alter French opinions about Russia. Born into a poor Jewish family, Cyon completed a physiology degree in Germany. While still in his twenties, he established a reputation as one of his generation’s best research scientists, discovering the nerve that stimulates the heart, which was named in his honor.7 In Germany, Cyon had embraced the radical politics of the student colony. As a young professional, however, he became a staunch defender of the tsarist regime and converted to Christianity. In the late 1860s, Cyon returned to Russia to accept a professorship at St. Petersburg’s famously progressive Medical-​Surgical Institute. His experience there was unhappy, though, for he clashed with students and faculty who were atheists and materialists. Denied a promotion, which he saw as retribution for his conservative beliefs, the distraught academic moved to Paris. There, he reinvented himself, abandoning

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

127

science for journalism and adopting a new French name that simultaneously obscured his Jewish roots and suggested that he came from aristocratic stock.8 In contributions to Moskovskie vedomosti and other Russian outlets from Paris, Cyon distinguished himself as an outspoken foe of Russia’s revolutionary movement. He also took an interest in French politics, working to vanquish both liberalism and radical movements in his adoptive homeland. He published numerous critiques of the republican system aimed at French audiences, predicting that “parliamentary follies, liberal musings, socialist aspirations, and anarchist tendencies” would lead France to destruction.9 When a coalition of liberal and radical parliamentarians passed a law dictating that public spaces in France must remain secular, Cyon lamented that republican leaders had launched “a war against God.”10 Although Novikova and Cyon were outsiders to European society, both established networks that promoted their agendas. Novikova’s unusual passion and intelligence earned her media attention and the admiration of the powerful men who frequented her salon, including former prime minister William Gladstone.11 The newspaper impresario W.  T. Stead was another intimate of Novikova’s. A  Nonconformist attracted to his Russian friend’s Christian moralism, Stead was also enthralled by Novikova’s penchant for drama and controversy, which he shared. Stead’s half-​penny Northern Echo, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Review of Reviews all featured regular columns by Novikova. In addition, they advanced a dependably pro-​Russian agenda and included reportage from the multiple trips to Russia that Stead undertook in the 1880s and the 1890s.12 In 1882, Cyon used the fortune of his wife, the daughter of a prominent Russian-​Jewish merchant, to establish control of the Paris conservative daily Le Gaulois. Although he acquired a reputation as a scoundrel in his adoptive homeland—​he abandoned his wife for an actress after spending her inheritance, and he physically assaulted a Russian artist visiting Paris—​his control over one of France’s major dailies expanded his access to the capital’s intellectual, political, and economic elite.13 Furthermore, Cyon proved a talented political operator who managed to ingratiate himself with leading politicians in both France and Russia. He managed to convince the Russian Ministry of Finance to appoint him as a special emissary to France in the 1880s, while befriending leading French financiers and conservative politicians, including General Georges Boulanger and the Rothschild family.14 Although Novikova and Cyon integrated themselves into elite political networks, they likely would have remained marginal characters had they not become involved in a larger circle of Russophiles that surrounded the Paris salon of Juliette Adam. On many counts, the Adam circle was an unlikely center of pro-​tsarist agitation. A prominent member of Paris’ republican opposition in the 1850s and 1860s, Adam founded a thriving salon of her own in the early years

 

128

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

of the Third Republic. Frequented by George Sand, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Léon Gambetta, who became prime minister in 1881, it became Paris’ premier cultural and political gathering. In 1879, Adam launched her own journal, La nouvelle revue, which provided a platform for the salonnière and her followers to introduce their ideas to a broader public.15 In spite of Adam’s prominence in republican politics, the salonnière began to lose her faith in liberal democracy by the late 1870s. Deeply disturbed by the defeatist attitudes that she believed had taken hold in France since its defeat in the Franco-​Prussian war, she distanced herself from the “internationalism, cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism” that republicans had long claimed to hold dear. She ultimately became one of France’s most impassioned nationalist voices, who argued her nation should stop at nothing to exact vengeance on Germany. Around the time that Adam redefined her political commitments, she befriended Novikova and Cyon, who became regular visitors to her gathering and close intellectual collaborators. Indeed, by 1886, Cyon had taken over the editorship of La nouvelle revue.16 Under the influence of her Russian interlocutors, she came to the conclusion that a strong friendship between Russia and France would prevent German domination of the continent and allow France to preserve its national traditions. “Russia is the only force that can render us anything other than a victim without dignity or a dupe,” she wrote.17 Over the 1880s, Adam’s gathering evolved into a major center of pro-​Russian agitation frequented by conservative Russians residing abroad and by visiting tsarist officials. It also attracted Europeans who were interested in improving relations between the tsarist regime and the Western liberal powers. Louis Andrieux, the former prefect of police, frequented the gathering.18 So did Jules Hansen, a native of Denmark who was naturalized in France and worked as an intelligence operative in that nation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Having fled his native Holstein after it was annexed by Bismarck in 1864, he shared Adam’s belief that Franco-​Russian friendship could counteract German domination of the continent. He also happened to be a childhood friend of Russia’s tsarina, a Danish princess, and remained in close contact with the Russian royal family.19 Under the influence of these figures, La nouvelle revue became an important clearinghouse for information about Russia—​and one that peddled a uniformly rosy view of that state. In 1885, Petr Rachkovskii moved to Paris to assume leadership of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency. His arrival would have a momentous impact on the interlocking circles that had taken it upon themselves to engage in pro-​Russian lobbying. Emulating the tactics of Andrieux’s political police, he spearheaded new efforts to influence European audiences, publishing several ghost-​written pamphlets and books in French.20 In the 1890s he grew more ambitious still, organizing a press agency with several full-​time employees. Rachkovskii’s press

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

129

agents befriended European journalists, using suasion and financial incentives to encourage them to print articles that smeared radical exiles and advanced the perspectives of the Russian state; in some cases, Okhrana agents even joined the regular staffs of newspapers.21 Rachkovskii’s superiors in St. Petersburg did not share his interest in public outreach—​and on at least one occasion expressed active disapproval of it.22 Ultimately, he appears to have self-​funded his media activities, using proceeds earned in various business ventures that he conducted in his spare time.23 Rachkovskii’s financial independence and his willingness to circumvent formal command and control structures invested him with a great deal of autonomy. However, it also isolated this impassioned defender of the tsarist regime, forcing him to seek out his own allies. It is not altogether clear when or how Rachkovskii first made contact with Adam and her circle. It is possible that Louis Andrieux, whose russophilic Le Petit Parisien would go on to cooperate with the Okhrana press agency, made the introduction.24 Jules Hansen, who befriended Rachkovskii in the 1880s and who worked as a consultant on the Okhrana’s public opinion campaign, may have also put the Russian in touch with the salonnière.25 In any case, Rachkovskii was working in tandem with the Adam circle by the mid-​1880s. One of the first works published by the Okhrana in France drew on an article that had been published in La Nouvelle revue; that periodical, in turn, would promote works published by Rachkovskii’s agents.26 For nearly twenty years, Rachkovskii’s Okhrana and Juliette Adam’s circle would embark on their own project of government by journalism, carrying out a coordinated campaign to discredit Russian exiles and to improve Western opinions of the autocratic state. This collaboration proved fruitful for both parties. It offered Rachkovskii access to European intellectuals and statesmen, while amplifying his messages aimed at the broader public. It allowed Adam and her associates to avail themselves of the resources of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency. Although the collaboration between the Adam circle and Rachkovskii operated in the shadows and assumed a conspiratorial tone, it would prove remarkably successful in shaping public discourse.

The Campaign Against the Emigration Working in concert, Rachkovskii, his press agents, and their allies in Juliette Adam’s circle mobilized to overturn the conventional wisdom about the residents of Europe’s Russian colonies and the state from which they had fled. Challenging the popular image of exiled radicals as long-​suffering, upstanding dissidents, pro-​tsarist agitators insisted that they were shameless criminals. The

 

130

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

first Okhrana pamphlet published in France, The Confession of a Nihilist (1886), portrayed émigrés as social reprobates motivated by “bestial instincts” and “political charlatanism.”27 Members of Juliette Adam’s network echoed these sentiments. A  French contributor to La nouvelle revue characterized Russian radicals as morally defective criminals.28 Novikova insisted that they aimed to destroy “the Church, the family, property, the state . . . the social order.”29 Antisemitic ideas and images figured prominently in the campaign against radical networks. Rachkovskii and his agents were obsessed with the notion that the revolutionary movement was a Jewish plot, and Okhrana publications aimed at Western audiences frequently highlighted the emigration’s supposedly Jewish face.30 The Confession of a Nihilist claimed that many of the unsavory characters who roamed Paris’ Russian colony were of the “Jewish type.”31 A  book-​length work produced in 1887, Jewish Russia, presented the revolutionary movement as just the most recent installment in a centuries-​long effort by Russian Jews to exploit “Aryan” populations—​one supposedly coordinated by the kahal, an institution of Jewish self-​governance that had in fact been abolished in 1844.32 Rachkovskii transformed his antisemitic fantasies into reality, recruiting many provocateurs of Jewish origin and including the names of his own double agents in lists that he compiled to demonstrate that radical exiles were “all Jews.”33 One of the most prominent and successful of these agents was Abram Gekkel’man, who began working for the police in Russia in the 1880s under the nom de guerre Landesen. Relocating in the mid-​1880s, he ingratiated himself with prominent radicals in both Switzerland and France, including Lavrov and Tikhomirov.34 Rachkovskii also found recruits among the Jewish proletarians of London and Paris, enlisting needy artisans and workers to join the ranks of police informants.35 Presenting themselves as authorities on Russian revolutionaries and the Jews they supposedly served, pro-​tsarist publicists warned that émigrés posed pressing threats to European as well as Russian society. Articles penned by Okhrana agents and by Novikova insisted that Russian radicals would sow sedition and violence across the continent; Cyon’s Le Gaulois devoted an entire front page to the “nihilist invasion” supposedly overwhelming France.36 Jewish Russia insisted that mass migration had extended the inimical influence of the kahal beyond Russia, facilitating a Jewish plot to achieve world domination.37 In addition to warning of the dangerous influence of radical exiles and Russian-​Jewish workers, pro-​tsarist agitators attacked the liberal regimes that had protected Russian subjects in Europe. Russophile authors drew attention to the failures of liberal government—​including economic inequality, political instability, and corruption—​which they also blamed on Jews.38 The author of Jewish Russia claimed that in France, whose 1789 revolution had resulted in

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

131

Jewish emancipation, Jews had become “charlatans of liberalism,” using their newfound rights to “preserve their [separate] nationality through the shameful means of usury, traffic, and mercantile depredations.” The same text warned that widespread support for the “right of asylum and civil rights” in the West advanced the efforts of the kahal to destroy Christian societies.39 Although pro-​tsarist agitators painted a dark portrait of a continent on the verge of collapse, they insisted that the Russian state provided a positive model that could help Europeans reclaim their societies from the threats of disorder and Jewish domination. Contrasting the strong authority vested in the tsarist regime to the discord and corruption that supposedly reigned in Europe, Novikova and Cyon presented autocracy as an ideal form of government—​one that was capable of affecting “speedy and drastic reforms” and advancing “liberty for citizens and progress for institutions.”40 Noting that both Bonapartism in France and New York’s corrupt machine politics had emerged from democratic regimes, Stead claimed that that tsarist Russia had surpassed its liberal rivals in promoting the interests of the masses.41 Anarchy and Nihilism, another Okhrana pamphlet, went furthest of all, insisting that Russia’s autocratic government had in fact established a perfect form of mass “democracy”—​one that should be the envy of French workers and peasants.42 Pro-​tsarist agitators presented the ongoing competition between the autocracy, on the one hand, and liberal and radical ideas, on the other, as a zero-​sum game that would determine the future of the entire continent. “In one hundred years,” predicted Cyon, “either autocracy or anarchy will reign in Europe.”43 At times, this civilizational struggle doubled as a racial war. Works produced by the Foreign Agency portrayed Russia as the natural leader of the “Aryan” people and the autocratic state as the only force capable of defeating the “Semitic world” (sémitisme).44 The Russian tsar, concurred Cyon, “is the only man in Europe who cannot be bought by the Jews, and the Russian nation is the only one that has understood, defied, and curbed the ambition of this greedy and cruel race with a will to dominate. That is why the Jews hate Russia, why they undermine and attack the autocratic principle.”45 Anxieties about revolutionary disorder, Jewish migration, and the failings of liberal democracy had not been conjured up by tsarist apologists; all had indigenous European roots. Jewish Russia paid homage to Édouard Drumont’s Jewish France, the bestselling compendium of antisemitic conspiracy theories that had been published the previous year. Adam’s and Stead’s networks attracted individuals who had already begun to lose their faith in liberal democracy. Russophile publicists do, however, deserve credit for knitting these distinct concerns into a coherent narrative, connecting the radicalism of the colonies to their heavily Jewish population, and presenting Russian-​style authoritarianism as the remedy to the threats posed by both.

 

132

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

Consequently, the Russian opponents of the radical emigration acquired a growing influence in Europe’s extreme right. Drumont himself, who was involved with the Adam circle, appears to have served as a conduit between French and Russian antisemites. His screeds drew on work of Russian provenance, and his antisemitic organization republished and distributed Jewish Russia.46 He lavishly praised Russia’s laws that limited where Jews could work, live, and study, urging Europeans to emulate the tsar’s efforts to contain Jewish influence.47 By the 1890s, Jewish Russia and other texts of Russian origin that identified the kahal as the center of a Jewish conspiracy were cited regularly in Western antisemitic literature, which also celebrated the tsar’s efforts to suppress the putative Jewish revolution.48 Indeed, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that history’s greatest antisemitic libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, may have originated in the Adam circle.49 The authoritarian fantasies of Russian publicists also influenced France’s new right, which overlapped with its antisemitic circles. In 1882, Juliette Adam provided funds that helped another member of her salon, Paul Déroulède, establish the League of Patriots, an ultra-​nationalist group.50 The League—​which claimed tens of thousands of members by the mid-​1880s, including Cyon—​became one of the strongest critics of liberal democracy in France.51 Déroulède spent two months in Russia in 1886, where he met with top tsarist officials. During and after his trip, he expressed admiration for the undivided authority vested in the tsar, suggesting that France could benefit from a charismatic authoritarian leader. Déroulède, Cyon, and others who conspired to bring General Georges Boulanger to power in the late 1880s self-​consciously referenced the autocracy as a model, presenting the General as a Russian-​style strongman.52 Similarly, the Action Française, which emerged out of the Adam salon to become France’s premier right-​wing organization by the early twentieth century, continued the romance with the autocratic state. The leaders of this group argued that the tsarist regime’s resistance to liberalism, individualism, and secularism provided a valuable model in France’s own struggle to defend national traditions and the Catholic faith from the assaults of foreign interlopers.53 Russophile activists had created a coherent and compelling story that challenged the conventional wisdom about Russian émigrés and the state they had fled, and the continent’s incipient extreme right embraced and propagated their ideas. However, there is little evidence that the messages conveyed by pro-​ Russian apologists had much influence on public opinion at large in the 1880s. Support for Russian exiles and the asylum regime remained too entrenched in liberal political culture to be overturned by libelous attacks, no matter how often they were repeated. Only after a series of alarming events drew unprecedented scrutiny to Europe’s Russian colonies would the ideas peddled by Russophile publicists begin to gain broader traction in continental society.

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

133

Russian Émigrés and the War Against Terror In March 1889, two students from Russia experimenting with dynamite in the hills above Zurich accidentally detonated a bomb. The explosion killed one and injured the other. Alarmed by Russian reports that the two men were preparing a new spate of assassinations, Swiss officials cracked down on émigré radicals. The student who had survived the explosion was ordered to leave Switzerland, along with about a dozen of his friends and acquaintances.54 Marxist intellectuals Georgii Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, and Stanisław Mendelson were all deported as well. They resettled in France, which also welcomed many of the students who had been ejected from Zurich.55 Then came the discovery of the Paris bomb plot of 1890. Mendelson and several of the former Zurich students were implicated in that conspiracy, along with more than two dozen professional revolutionaries and Jewish workers. Tried over the summer, some defendants were acquitted, while others were sentenced to up to three years in prison.56 A few months later, General Mikhail Seliverstov, a high-​ranking Okhrana official, was assassinated in a Paris hotel. Mendelson, who had recently been exonerated in the Paris bomb affair, was publicly identified as a suspect and held in solitary confinement for several weeks.57 Ultimately, suspicion shifted to a Polish activist named Stanisław Padlewski after a search of his dwelling yielded weapons as well as evidence linking him to Russian, German, and Swiss anarchists.58 Although Padlewski disappeared immediately after the assassination, he turned up several months later in Texas. Offering a series of sensational interviews to journalists from the safety of North America, he explained that the murder had been retaliation for the suffering of those arrested in the Paris bomb plot.59 These dramatic events became front-​page news across the continent, stoking anxieties about the international reach of Russian radical networks and the threats that they posed to European targets.60 Illustrated journals expressed this sense of unease in vivid pictorial form, printing illustrations of the bombs confiscated in Paris and of the exiles being arrested in their squalid apartments. By the early twentieth century, representations of the dangers of Russian exiles became even more graphic: one popular journal depicted the accidental detonation of a bomb in an émigré home.61 The developments in Paris played into the hand of pro-​Russian propagandists, who touted them as proof that colony residents posed imminent threats to Europeans.62 This was no coincidence. Unbeknownst to European society, the Paris bombing plot was a provocation masterminded by Rachkovskii himself. The circle of Paris émigrés arrested in 1890 had been infiltrated, taught to build bombs, and even supplied with materials by Gekkel’man/​Landesen. As the bombs neared their completion, Jules Hansen, acting on Rachkovskii’s orders,

 

Figure 5.2  “The bomb makers: an explosion in the room of a Russian nihilist in Paris,” Le Petit journal illustré, June 2, 1907, 865.

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

135

tipped off the French government. Although Landesen was publicly identified as one of the suspects in the initial investigation, he managed to slip out of France undetected.63 Continuing to work as an agent provocateur in the Low Countries in 1890s, he would rise through the ranks of the Okhrana. Appointed head of its Berlin office in 1902 (by then working under a third name, Arkadii Harting), he would be promoted to chief of the Foreign Agency in 1905.64 The two other terror plots may have been provocations as well. The French police investigating the Zurich bomb incident insisted on this point. Indeed, Gekkel’man/​Landesen, who had been posing as an engineering student at Zurich’s Polytechnic Institute in those years, personally knew the students implicated in the bombing.65 Meanwhile, rumors swirled in Paris’ Russian colony that Padlewski was a provocateur. The Russian Minister of the Interior rekindled these suspicions in 1902, when he accused Rachkovskii of having ordered Seliverstov’s assassination.66 The Paris “bomb plot,” at least, was a spectacular act of revolutionary theater designed to advance Rachkovskii’s interests. First and foremost, it allowed Okhrana agents to capitalize on concern about the dangers of international anarchism, which had been intensifying since the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago. They portrayed Mendelson and others implicated in the affair as anarchists, in spite of the fact that Mendelson was a committed Marxist who had no interest in the “propaganda of the deed.”67 Stead and Cyon assisted this effort, insisting that anarchist terror was a logical outgrowth of the radical ideologies that prevailed in émigré communities, on the one hand, and the toleration of these ideas by Europe’s liberal regimes, on the other.68 The second aim of the Paris provocation was to strengthen Russia’s relationship with its continental rivals. The fact that the Paris conspirators had clear ties to the incident in Zurich suggested that Russian “anarchists” had established effective international networks and revealed the inadequacy of policing conducted within national borders. Rachkovskii cited Russia’s willingness to share intelligence about the Paris “bombers” as evidence that it was committed to assisting European partners in the emergent international war against terror. He invoked the principle of cooperation, in turn, to demand access to intelligence about Russian subjects domiciled on foreign territory.69 Finally, the profile of the émigrés whom Rachkovskii targeted in Paris sent a clear message. The fact that students and proletarians found themselves entangled in the plot drew attention to the extent to which these groups had become engaged in radical politics. Furthermore, at least half of the conspirators were of Jewish origin, bolstering the Okhrana’s long-​running argument that the revolutionary movement was a product of “foreign” agitation. Mendelson, the putative ringleader of the plot, belonged to a particularly prominent Jewish family: his father was a wealthy financier, and his grandfather was reportedly the

 

136

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

Chief Rabbi of Warsaw.70 Lest Europeans miss this message, networks of pro-​ tsarist propagandists also drew attention to the culpability of non-​Russians in terrorist activity. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette remarked on the Jewish identity of many of the Russians implicated in the Paris bomb affair.71 Drumont, for his part, insisted that the murder of Seliverstov had been a Jewish conspiracy and that Mendelson was the true culprit.72 In conversations with their European counterparts, Russian diplomats insisted that Jews were to blame for the apparent radicalization of the émigré community, and they ridiculed those who challenged these claims as Jewish lackeys.73 Some Europeans resisted the narratives peddled by Okhrana agents and their European allies. In both France and Switzerland, small groups of radicals and liberals leapt to the defense of the exiles implicated in the plots, insisting that they were upstanding individuals who had been victims of a rush to judgment.74 In the panic that surrounded the incidents of 1889–​90, however, many more voices uncritically repeated the interpretations put forth by pro-​Russian propagandists. Mainstream outlets in multiple countries echoed the Okhrana’s depiction of the Russian plotters as anarchists, “mere murderers,” and “bands of terrorists.”75 Swiss social scientists later characterized the Zurich incident as one of the continent’s first anarchist “outrages,” while a French criminologist predicted that Russian radicals would set off a pan-​European wave of terror that would could meet and even surpass the horrors of 1793.76 University students also suffered in the wake of the 1889–​90 events, as alarm about their penchant for radical politics intensified. Some Zurich residents refused to rent apartments to Russians, citing their fear of becoming victims of the students’ “chemical experiments.”77 A  French landlord who remarked on the abnormally heavy luggage carried by his Russian tenants contacted the police, concerned that the baggage contained bombs. In fact, the weighty contents were medical books.78 German police informed Russian students that “every Russian coming to Prussia is regarded as an anarchist and treated accordingly.”79 The notion that the revolutionary movement was a Jewish plot had long been a fixture of antisemitic circles. In the wake of the events in Paris, this idea began to surface in mainstream sources as well. Some commentators remarked on the Jewish heritage of the Russians involved in the 1889–​90 incidents, as if their ethnic extraction explained their radical views; others claimed that Jews dominated the ranks of Russian revolutionaries.80 A  French illustrated journal that depicted Seliverstov’s murder portrayed the assassin wearing the dark hat, long beard, and long coat favored by Orthodox Jews.81 University students also provided fodder for antisemitic fantasies. Writing to a local paper, one Lausanne resident insisted that that city’s Russian-​Jewish students lived a “double life”: those who appeared ordinary scholars by day became revolutionary “combatants” at night.82

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

137

Figure 5.3  The assassination of General Seliverstov, Le monde illustré, November 29, 1890, 460.

The striking shift in European opinions about Russian émigrés led to calls for more aggressive state action to contain the putative threats that the foreigners posed. British and Swiss citizens complained that administrative expulsions were counterproductive, resulting in the circulation of violent agitators around the continent.83 French police reported being bombarded by demands to thwart the “plots of dangerous foreign revolutionaries.”84 A few French citizens took the task of defending their nation upon themselves, contacting the Russian embassy in Paris to denounce émigrés whom they suspected were involved in anarchist conspiracies.85 Growing anxiety within European governments, coupled with intensifying public pressure, made states more amenable to cooperating with Russia. Although the Swiss federal authorities originally balked at Russian demands that they share the documents seized from the Zurich conspirators, they eventually relented.86 Bilateral relations continued to warm over the course of the 1890s, as Swiss politicians sent clear signals that they regarded the tsarist regime as a valuable partner in the emergent war against terror. When federal officials apprehended two Okhrana agents who had illegally entered Swiss territory in

 

138

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

pursuit of radical émigrés, the former opted to quietly expel the intruders rather than prosecute them.87 In 1902 Russia’s Foreign Minister expressed his glee at the pliancy of his Swiss counterparts, noting that after a recent demonstration against the tsarist regime, “many . . . Russian students, even those who were not guilty of anything, were expelled from Geneva.”88 The Okhrana also worked closely with cantonal police forces. Geneva’s police chief argued for the importance of maintaining a “good rapport” with the tsarist political police, “who are useful to us”; several agents from German-​speaking regions approached Rachkovskii and volunteered to become informants for the Russians.89 The Okhrana had established a strong working relationship with the Paris Prefecture of Police under Andrieux, and it only grew friendlier in the aftermath of the 1890 incidents. Rachkovskii was in frequent contact with agents of the prefecture as well as the Sûreté.90 Indeed, agents of the latter organization produced a report that waxed poetic about Rachkovskii’s intelligence and his counterrevolutionary zeal.91 Traditionally, republican politicians had been more hesitant than the police to cooperate with the Russians. However, this too began to change after the Paris plot. Rachkovskii cooperated with high-​ranking French officials, and his efforts to curry favor were reinforced by the lavish awards that the tsarist state offered to the politicians who assisted its policing efforts.92 In the 1890s, the Okhrana chief was inducted into the Legion of Honor and was personally received by at least two presidents of the republic.93 Russian patriots’ success at connecting Russian émigrés to the anarchist threat and the ensuing rapprochement between Western states and the tsarist regime had serious repercussions for the residents of the Russian colonies. Police officials perceived these communities as breeding grounds for anarchist subversion, subjecting them to more intrusive surveillance.94 Governments implemented new measures to track the Russians, obligating them to register with local authorities and to obtain residency permits.95 Meanwhile, university officials in several cities instituted measures designed to limit the number of Russian matriculants. By the early twentieth century, Zurich University—​ whose liberal admission policies had prompted the creation of the first Russian colony—​had closed entire faculties to students from Russia.96 France and Switzerland, once the major centers of asylum for Russian subjects, had become less welcoming for than ever before.

The British Campaign The deteriorating position of Russian émigrés in France and Switzerland prompted many exiles to search for new homes. For most, Britain was an attractive choice. Public support and legal protections for tsarist subjects in that

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

139

country, relatively unscathed by the events of 1889–​90, remained strong. Indeed, a new extradition treaty negotiated between Britain and Russia in the late 1880s reaffirmed that the British government would not extradite Russians wanted for political crimes of any character.97 Several of the students involved in the bomb scares in Switzerland and France relocated to London, as did Mendelson, who was expelled from France after the Seliverstov assassination.98 Apprehensive that the influx of tsarist subjects into Britain would render that state the next target of the opponents of the asylum tradition, London-​based émigrés mobilized to defend their rights. The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF) organized public meetings to rally support for Russian exiles and warned Britons to stand vigilant against Okhrana interference. Remarking that antisemitic agitation had played a prominent role in the assaults on refugee rights across the continent, the group also defended Britain’s Jewish immigrant workers. It continued to draw attention to the plight of Russian Jews and to organize mass rallies to defend their rights.99 However, just as many London-​based exiles had feared, the Okhrana soon set its sights on Britain. Rachkovskii made several visits to London in the late 1880s and early 1890s, during which he assembled a network of agents and émigré informants. Okhrana agents carefully tracked the radicals who had relocated to Britain after the Zurich and Paris bomb incidents, and they monitored the meetings and publications of the SFRF.100 Agents also infiltrated the East End’s radical organizations, including the Berner Street Club.101 Rachkovskii, in turn, passed along the intelligence gathered by his agents to Russian diplomats, who relentlessly lobbied their British counterparts to weaken the protections they accorded to refugees. In 1892 Baron E.  E.  de Staal, Russia’s ambassador to London, delivered a memorandum to the Marquis of Salisbury, then serving as Britain’s Foreign Secretary. Staal expressed outrage that England had offered a safe haven to the dangerous anarchists involved in the Zurich and Paris plots. In addition, he condemned the SFRF for engaging in anti-​Russian “calumny” and promoting “revolution and civil war.” Britain’s liberal asylum policies, he concluded, offered comfort to a “terrorist revolution” that threatened not only to undermine Russia, but also to destabilize the entire continent. In this memorandum and in subsequent dispatches, the ambassador demanded that British officials halt the activities of the SFRF, share intelligence about the movements of tsarist subjects on British soil, and extradite a number of émigrés wanted by the Russian government, including radical activists as well as working-​class Jews of the East End.102 Salisbury informed his Russian counterpart that British law prevented him from intervening in the activities of the SFRF or extraditing tsarist subjects accused of political crimes. However, he clearly shared some of Staal’s concerns, for he proved far more proactive in responding to Russian demands than his

 

140

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

predecessors. On several occasions, Salisbury wrote to Staal to share information about Russian émigrés departing from Britain’s shores as well as intelligence received from informants.103 Although Salisbury’s response to Staal thus conformed to the letter of the law, it represented an important break from tradition, marking the first time that a high-​ranking British official had volunteered intelligence to the Russian government about the tsarist subjects who had sought shelter on its soil. Salisbury’s relationship with the Russian authorities appears to have remained quite friendly in the ensuing years. When Tsar Nicholas II visited the royal family at Balmoral in 1896, Salisbury met directly with Rachkovskii, who accompanied the tsar on European trips as his personal bodyguard.104 Salisbury was not the only Briton who harbored concern about the asylum regime. Employees of the Home Office complained that Britain’s open-​door policy had transformed it into a dumping ground for Europe’s most dangerous radicals. When the French authorities expelled revolutionaries, they typically ushered the deportees to northern port cities and loaded them on UK-​ bound ships. British officials frustrated by this practice issued strongly worded warnings to their French counterparts not to send expellees from the continent to England. However, they bitterly confessed that they had no recourse when foreign governments defied these orders, for they could not lawfully refuse entry to any foreigner.105 Russian efforts to undermine Britain’s asylum regime thus confronted a serious obstacle:  the rule of law. Rachkovskii, however, was unbound by this stricture. In the early 1890s, the Okhrana chief ’s British agents alerted him that William Melville, the superintendent of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, was frustrated by what he saw as the government’s complacency about the revolutionary threat. Shortly thereafter, Rachkovskii approached his British counterpart. The two men established a warm and cooperative relationship that entailed frequent correspondence and several in-​person meetings. Rachkovskii also introduced Melville to Gekkel’man/​Landesen/​Harting, his famed agent provocateur. Melville became a key ally in Rachkovskii’s efforts to discredit the emigration and to undermine the protections that Britain provided to refugees. He reassured colleagues who expressed concern about the operations of the tsarist political police on British soil that the Okhrana endeavored only to thwart terrorist plots, not to compromise the integrity of the asylum traditions.106 In fact, Melville provided crucial—​yet surreptitious—​assistance to Rachkovskii that severely undermined émigré rights. In 1897, the Okhrana chief appealed to his friend for help in apprehending the refugee Vladimir Burtsev. The very émigré who had been saved by the captain of the British ship docked at Constantinople six years before, Burtsev had recently launched a new journal in London that advocated regicide. Melville instructed Rachkovskii to compose a formal complaint to the British government about Burtsev’s activities. When the case arrived on

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

141

Melville’s desk, he ushered it through the bureaucracy, arguing all the while that Burtsev posed an imminent threat to national security. In December of 1897, Melville approached Burtsev in the library of the British Museum, where he theatrically arrested the émigré.107 Burtsev’s defenders protested that Melville’s agents had violated the law on several occasions, conducting an illegal search of the Russian’s home and willfully misinterpreting evidence. Nevertheless, a jury convicted Burtsev and sentenced him to eighteen months of hard labor. The first time that a Russian refugee had been punished for his political activities in Britain, the case set an important precedent in legal history.108 Rachkovskii also appealed to public opinion to undermine Britain’s asylum tradition. Repeating the tactics they had employed on the continent, his press agents slandered the émigrés who had sought refuge in England as dangerous terrorists who abused British hospitality.109 Likewise, they portrayed the SFRF and its sympathizers as accomplices of and apologists for terrorist groups.110 Once again, the circle of Russophile activists surrounding the Adam salon assisted the Okhrana’s campaign. Jules Hansen drew up a report identifying British journalists who would be susceptible to bribes, presumably for Rachkovskii’s benefit.111 Stead harassed Britons who had written articles that he considered hostile to Russian interests, relying on inducements, threats, and even blackmail to convince them to change their opinions.112 Novikova continued to rail against “the propaganda of Nihilists, Jews, and revolutionaries,” and she echoed Staal’s denunciations of the SFRF.113 Antisemitic images and conspiracy theories resurfaced in the campaign to shape British public opinion, although they acquired a new focus. Okhrana agents no longer merely connected Jews to the scourge of radicalism but also suggested that the very presence of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees posed an existential threat to Britons. Given the unparalleled sympathy that Jews fleeing poverty and pogroms had evoked in British society, Okhrana attempts to malign this population as “dangerously miserable and ready to do anything for a few pounds sterling” were bold.114 But if defenders of the tsarist regime were to succeed in corroding British protections of émigré rights, they would first need to change the dominant narrative about who the Russian Jews were and why they had fled their native land. “The Bible and the Bomb,” a fantastical short story drawn up by the Okhrana’s press office, provides unique insight into the agency’s effort to shape British perceptions of Russian Jews. The story chronicles the adventures of a group of English missionaries traveling to Russia on a mission to convert its Jews. Deep in the Pale of Settlement, they encounter a certain Sergei Canaillevshevich, who informs them that he had lived in Whitechapel for several years, where he had been forced to flee after stabbing a Russian general. As the missionaries continue to probe their interlocutor about his life in London, they discover that he was

 

142

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

a “loafer” who had relied on petty crime to support himself. The missionaries eventually notice that he is wearing a coat and a pair of shoes stolen from one of their friends a few years earlier. In spite of the evidently poor moral character of Canaillevshevich, the missionaries urge him to return to England and to pose as a political refugee. Upon his return, the SFRF rallies in his defense. Some members of the group celebrate his violent acts as brave acts of resistance against the autocracy; others try to curry favor with Canaillevshevich, predicting that he and his friends will soon win control of the Russian government and dominate “the greater part of the globe.”115 In spite of its nonsensical plot, the story creatively intertwines several distinct anxieties about Russian Jews. It revives the trope of the Jewish terrorist, while also portraying the Jews of Whitechapel as poor workers and moral degenerates. It suggests that Jews have abused Britain’s asylum tradition to take advantage of native populations. Finally, it implicates Russian Jews in a global conspiracy to overthrow states and to corrupt the traditions of Christian countries. It is unclear whether “The Bible and the Bomb” was ever published. Nevertheless, the network of pro-​tsarist agitators surrounding the Okhrana echoed many of the themes that appeared in the story in their effort to sow fear about Jewish proletarians. In contributions to The Times, Novikova lamented that London had become “a new land of Canaan” for Russian Jews, warning that the ongoing influx of immigrants threatened British traditions and morality.116 Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette played a particularly important role in fomenting panic about Russian-​Jewish immigration. It blamed economic and social distress on immigrant Jews, charging that their arrival had resulted in the lowering of wages and the spread of diseases.117 Contrasting the Russian Jews to the earlier populations of German and Huguenots who had settled in Whitechapel, it insisted that the newcomers would prove impossible to assimilate and would only bring suffering to the local population.118 According to one British-​born resident of Whitechapel who shared his frustrations with the editors, the tens of thousands of Russian Jews who had arrived in his neighborhood in recent years “have a greater responsibility for the distress which prevails there probably than all other causes put together.”119 Stead’s coverage echoed earlier critiques of the supposed moral shortcomings of the immigrants. The Pall Mall Gazette portrayed Russian Jews as zealous revolutionaries and purveyors of anarchy, as “crafty and clever” malefactors motivated by “racial feeling” to engage in perjury and exploitation. It presented the evils of the sweating system as a byproduct of Jewish greed, pointing to the prevalence of immigrant Jews among the ranks of the sweaters.120 At the same time, it insisted that sweated laborers were responsible for their own suffering, charging that their “fanatical” hesitance to work on the Sabbath prevented them from finding better jobs.121 These interventions, like “The Bible and the Bomb,”

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

143

depicted Russian-​Jewish proletarians as immoral exploiters who threatened the moral foundations of British society. The murders of Jack the Ripper, who terrorized Whitechapel in late 1888, played into the hands of the journalists and Okhrana agents working to spread alarm about the effects of Russian-​Jewish immigration. Russian officials and journalists insisted that the Ripper was a “fanatical anarchist” from Russia who had first settled in Paris and committed several murders there. Supposedly released from jail, he fled to England and settled in London, where he lodged with fellow “refugees.”122 Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette reprinted these rumors, embellishing them with additional speculation that the murderer was a “Hebrew type” with a “sinister” expression who lodged at a disreputable boarding house on Brick Lane.123 The fact that one of the victims was found outside the Berner Street Club only intensified such speculation; Stead’s paper was quick to point out that the club had hosted a large meeting of immigrants about “Judaism and socialism” on the evening of the murder.124 The Pall Mall Gazette’s vivid reportage of the East End horrors was widely consumed in London and beyond. The paper’s depiction of working-​class Jews as political radicals and moral degenerates soon gained broader resonance, fomenting anxiety about Russian immigrants across the British Isles and enhancing ethnic tensions in the East End. Local residents and journalists insisted that the murderer must be a Russian Jew, since “no Englishman could have perpetrated such a crime.”125 By October of 1888, East London police feared that the neighborhood was on the verge of a pogrom. Rather than alleviate these tensions, Stead’s paper continued to inflame them. “Until this year English people have failed to understand how it is that in Hungary, Roumania, and in Russia popular outbreaks of savage ferocity from time to time take place against the Jews,” read a commentary published in the Pall Mall Gazette in the fall of 1888. “This year we have unfortunately no difficulty whatever in realizing how easily popular passion can be excited against the sons of Israel.”126 Having drawn attention to numerous ways in which immigrant Jews supposedly threatened their new communities, Stead warned that Whitechapel was on the verge of an “explosion”—​or even a “war against the Jews.”127 His publications ultimately concluded that restrictive immigration policies were necessary to stem the “invasion of England” and the popular violence that it encouraged. Articles in the Pall Mall Gazette and Review of Reviews praised other nations that had already moved to limit the entry of “aliens both in race and religion” and suggested that Britain would benefit from doing the same.128 Novikova joined in the nativist agitation. If “the Alien race seems determined to take up a domineering position, replacing our laws and customs by its own, is it not our duty to become more determined and energetic than ever in our policy of self-​defence?” she asked.129 Apologists for the tsarist regime had again succeeded in condensing a

 

144

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

welter of anxieties and stereotypes into a compelling and all-​encompassing narrative of threat. This danger, they insisted, could only be mitigated by an equally elegant (and simplistic) solution: immigration exclusion. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, several other notable figures had joined Stead and Novikova’s campaign to restrict immigration. One was the journalist and social reformer Alfred White. White, who traveled to Russia several times in the 1880s and 1890s, echoed Stead’s complaints that Russian-​Jewish immigrants were untrustworthy, parasitic, and prone to seditious ideas.130 In addition to engaging in anti-​immigrant agitation in outlets such as The Times and The Pall Mall Gazette, he created political networks of nativist activists, organizing a series of public meetings in the East End to draw attention to the threat of “alien” immigration.131 Lord Salisbury, who had already revealed his concerns about radical émigrés, also attempted to halt the immigration of proletarian Jews. In a dispatch to British diplomats in Germany, through which most tsarist subjects passed in their journey westward, he directed his subordinates to dissuade Russian Jews from settling in Britain by claiming that “labour markets in England are already overstocked.”132 By the early 1890s, the hostility toward political émigrés expressed by pro-​ Russian publicists had become more prevalent in British society at large. A variety of mainstream venues characterized Russian radicals as “wretched men and women” who demonstrated “social depravity” and joined the Okhrana’s attacks on the SFRF, charging that the group provided comfort to admitted terrorists.133 The shift in public opinion is also evident in literature. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, which examine the culture of Russian radicals, emphasize their violence and irrationality. A short story that appeared in a popular magazine echoed Conrad’s conclusions, recounting the tragic tale of a young American woman studying art in Paris who had taken up with a radical Pole. At the beginning of the narrative, she expresses her horror at the abuses of the tsar and her sympathy for the revolutionaries fighting him. Over the course of the story, however, she grows increasingly disturbed by the “nihilists’ ” violent tactics. The tale concludes with her watching in horror as her lover hurls a bomb at innocent civilians on the street. The story presents the émigrés who had claimed to lead the world toward freedom and a new revolutionary morality as terrorists with no regard for the suffering they caused. By the same token, the young woman’s engagement in the Russian colonies leads her to anguish and ruin, not personal liberation.134 Public opinion toward the proletarian Jews of the East End followed a similar trajectory. The notion that Russian-​Jewish immigrants were purveyors of anarchy and revolutionary unrest grew more pervasive in British discourse and also bled into literature.135 One novel of the era highlights the terrorist threat posed by the Jews of Whitechapel, ending with a fantasy of the neighborhood’s

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

145

destruction, which left London “physically cleansed” and “morally bettered.”136 Even discussions that did not explicitly link Russian Jews to revolutionary terror treated the newcomers as forces of moral and social degeneration that threatened bourgeois society no less than the anarchist’s bomb. Muckraking journalists linked the Jewish immigrant population to crime and sexual depravity, exposing the misdeeds of the “sharks” who intercepted new immigrants at docks and train stations and directed them to illegal boarding houses where the newcomers were robbed, cheated, or sold into sexual slavery.137 Other commentators accused Jewish bosses of enslaving the most vulnerable segments of the native-​born population, noting that desperate Gentile women and children who resided in the East End often worked in sweatshops alongside newly arrived immigrants.138 The invocation of slavery—​which surfaced in discussions of the “sharks” who operated human trafficking networks as well as portrayals of the sweater as a slave-​driver—​revealed how much public perceptions of Russian-​Jewish immigrants had changed in just a few short years. As late as the 1880s, European commentators had often likened the victims of tsarist oppression to slaves—​ a rhetorical technique that highlighted the suffering that émigrés had endured as well as the barbarism of the Russian state. By the 1890s, though, a growing number of critics held Russian Jews themselves responsible for the rekindling of this “backward” and “uncivilized” institution. With hostility toward immigrant populations at an historic high, nativist crusaders mobilized to push for legislative solutions. In 1894 Lord Salisbury endorsed a bill that would permit the expulsion of destitute aliens and allow the British authorities to bar particularly dangerous political activists from Britain’s shores.139 Although the legislation failed to pass, British restrictionists, led by White, continued a loud public crusade and enlisted growing support from the native-​born population of the East End. In the ensuing years, parliamentarians convened several commissions to study the effects of immigration.140 In 1905 they finally passed the Aliens Act, which implemented the first immigration restrictions since 1826. Seeking to limit the entry of “destitute Aliens”—​a category that was broadly understood to refer to Eastern European Jews—​the bill also limited the ports through which migrants could pass and obligated them to undergo invasive health inspections.141 Within a few years, the bill would cut Russian-​Jewish immigration by more than half.142 The dramatic shift in public opinion that occurred in England in the 1890s had reverberations beyond the British Isles. Media outlets across the continent covered political developments in Whitechapel with alarm, claiming that the neighborhood had become an organizational center for Jewish anarchists who advocated the “destruction of all authority, property, wealth, the family and marriage.”143 Meanwhile, commentators associated immigrant Jews with multiple forms of degeneration, presenting them as purveyors of disease, criminality, and

 

146

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

economic exploitation.144 The defamatory depictions of Russian Jews that had appeared so out of step with public opinion in the works of pro-​tsarist agitators and Drumont in the 1880s had become commonplace in the continent’s mainstream media outlets by the turn of the century. Similar attitudes guided the police who surveilled the colonies, who increasingly saw Russian Jews as “aggressive, socialistic, and hostile to the people of the country which is sheltering them.”145 Reports produced by the French Sûreté and the Swiss federal police claimed that the Russian revolutionary movement was dominated by Jews and that Russian-​Jewish immigrants were particularly susceptible to anarchist ideology.146 The archives of the former organization include an Okhrana-​produced report that advances precisely these arguments, providing evidence of the provenance of these ideas.147 Émigrés’ decades-​long quest for freedom now confronted new forms of oppression and more rigorous border controls. The panic that surrounded Jewish proletarians had a profound impact on individual lives. Take the case of Emmanuel Gopelson, a native of Vil’na who emigrated to Paris in the early 1880s, settled in the Pletzl, and started a family that soon grew to eight members. It is clear that Gopelson struggled to adjust to his new surroundings: he first worked as a tailor, and later sold candy and jewelry on the street; between 1896 and 1901, he moved at least eight times. In 1896, several of Gopelson’s acquaintances, including a tailor who had made him clothes on credit, a wine merchant, and a former landlord, filed police complaints about debts he had accrued. The complainants charged that Gopelson had not only defrauded them, but that he was also a violent anarchist. One accuser claimed that Gopelson routinely beat his wife and the tailors whom he had once employed; another charged him with extorting funds from fellow workers to support the anarchist cause; and a third stated that he had threatened to murder a man to whom he owed money. Interrogated by the Prefecture of Police, Gopelson maintained his innocence, noting that he had lived in Paris for more than a dozen years and had never run afoul of the law. Nevertheless, the police launched an investigation of the immigrant that would continue for years. Clandestine surveillance produced no evidence that Gopelson “occupies himself with politics,” but police still insisted that his penchant for late-​night activity and the fact that he had once hosted a guest for ten days suggested that he was a “dangerous anarchist.” In 1901, his name was added to France’s anarchist watch list, in spite of the fact that no proof of his “subversive ideas” had ever surfaced.148 In 1902 police placed Gopelson’s eighteen-​year-​old son, Maurice, who had been the target of an antisemitic attack in the Pletzl three years before, under surveillance.149 By 1903, Gopelson and his wife had died in asylums; their six children disappeared from the historical record.

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

147

The Gopelson case provides a tragic example of how working-​class Jewish immigrants had become embroiled in the narratives of criminality and subversion that already haunted political émigrés. The Parisians to whom Gopelson had accrued debts clearly understood that accusing the immigrant of anarchism would capture the attention of the police, increasing the likelihood that their money could be reclaimed. In the absence of clear evidence of subversion, Gopelson’s nonconformity with French norms offered adequate proof of his intent to destroy bourgeois society. It is also notable that the police appeared to view radicalism as an inheritable trait that could be passed to one’s children—​ or even as an ethnic attribute that Jewish immigrants were particularly likely to display. Having once inspired those working to unite humanity against despotism, the colonies now emboldened those working to erect new divisions between Gentiles and Jews, natives and foreigners. Changing opinions about émigrés and their concrete utopias deprived Russians of the vaunted status they had once enjoyed in Western societies, but catalyzed a convergence of another sort, between mainstream European opinion and the perspective of tsarist apologists. The bridging of this gulf, which had been one of the greatest irritants in Russia’s relationships with its European neighbors, would have consequences beyond the realms of domestic law and public opinion.

A New “Holy Alliance” As long as Europeans saw émigrés as victims of an unjust despotic regime, full-​fledged cooperation with Russia was politically impossible. But changing perceptions of the colonies and their residents opened new possibilities. In 1892, France and Russia entered into a formal alliance; an Anglo-​Russian accord followed in 1907. Geostrategic concerns, including mutual alarm about the rise of Germany and evolving economic relationships, motivated these new alliance structures.150 However, the sustained processes of cultural and political exchange reconstructed here also played an important role in making the reconciliation of old adversaries palatable to Western publics. It is difficult to imagine that French and British citizens would have accepted a friendship with the autocracy had decades of pro-​Russian agitation not prepared them to see Russia in a more positive light.151 Indeed, many of the self-​appointed defenders of the Russian cause abroad played prominent roles at key junctures in the creation of the new alliances. At the time of the Franco-​Russian alliance, Juliette Adam’s circle was widely credited for first identifying friendship as a desirable outcome and for forging new bonds between elites in both countries.152 Furthermore, several of Adam’s

 

148

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

followers directly assisted the logistics of the rapprochement. As emissary for the Russian Ministry of Finance, Cyon negotiated the first French loan to the tsarist regime in 1887—​a crucial development that marked the beginning of a thaw in bilateral relations and paved the way for additional French investments in Russia that would more closely intertwine the two states.153 Observers credited Rachkovskii’s 1890 provocation as another crucial moment in the reconciliation, noting that it convinced skeptical officials in both France and Russia that the two countries shared common interests and could develop a trusting relationship.154 Finally, Rachkovskii and Jules Hansen played important roles in the diplomatic negotiations that led up to the alliance, passing messages, correspondence, and drafts of the military convention between top military officials, tsarist bureaucrats, and republican ministers.155 In England, Stead and Novikova played a similar role as Adam’s circle.156 Stead facilitated the early stages of the Anglo-​Russian alliance, embarking on a mission to Russia in 1905 as an informal emissary of the Foreign Office. Benefiting from the contacts he had made during his previous trips to the empire and the high regard in which officials held him, he met with high-​ranking functionaries and even had several audiences with the tsar himself. In each of these fora, he argued for the benefits of an Anglo-​Russian alliance and attempted to address specific concerns expressed by Russian officials and conservative elites.157 If the cultural convergences produced through decades of pro-​Russian agitation created an ideological framework in which the new alliances could take root, the military realignments, once completed, reinforced the growing bonds between Russia and its one-​time rivals. In 1896, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs directed his representatives in Russia to “avoid any misunderstanding, complication, or action that could harm the good relations existing between the two governments.”158 British officials demonstrated a similar impulse during the Anglo-​Russian rapprochement. Police expressed horror when a London butcher hung an effigy of Tsar Nicholas II outside his shop and threatened to burn it at the height of the 1905 revolution, ultimately browbeating him into removing it.159 Meanwhile, Foreign Office officials worked to squelch the publication of news critical of Russia, fearful that it would harm the ongoing diplomatic rapprochement.160 In short, politicians’ interest in maintaining a healthy relationship with the tsarist regime resulted in the silencing of its critics in both countries. Pleased by the deepening bonds between the autocracy and the Western great powers, pro-​Russian activists promoted their own brand of international integration. After the Franco-​Russian alliance, Cyon and Rachkovskii embraced the cause of Catholic-​Orthodox reconciliation, which they believed would create a universal Christian rite. The former insisted that together, “the Kremlin and the Vatican” could become the dual “summits” of the “civilized world,” leading

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

149

the struggle against anarchism and other forms of sedition.161 Rachkovskii, who deemed Pope Leo XIII a “man of genius,” traveled to the Vatican several times in an attempt to reach a political agreement with the pontiff.162 Stead and Novikova pursued a different vision of world peace. In the mid-​1890s, they launched a campaign for international disarmament—​an effort that they argued Russia could and should lead.163 These schemes echoed the universalist strivings of the colonies but inverted their values. They treated religion rather than socialism as an integrative force and presented Christian values and autocracy, not revolution, as Russia’s great contribution to the rest of the world. The results of these campaigns were mixed. Tsarist officials eventually tired of Cyon’s machinations, ordering him to cease his foreign activities and return to Russia. He refused and remained in Europe until his 1912 death, but this episode appears to have chastened him, and he published little in its wake.164 Rachkovskii too proved a victim of his own ambition. His superiors frowned on his mission to the Vatican—​not to mention his unauthorized provocations, his extra-​curricular speculation in business ventures, and his history of insubordination. In 1902 Tsar Nicholas II recalled him to Russia, ending his illustrious career in Paris. However, the press agency that he built outlived him, and was even expanded in the early twentieth century.165 Stead and Novikova fared better than Cyon and Rachkovskii. In 1898, the Russian government organized an international conference at The Hague to limit armaments, fulfilling the dream that the two had articulated some five years before. On the eve of the Hague conference, Stead launched a tour of Europe that aimed to win support for the venture.166 During and after the proceedings, he cited the conference as evidence of the autocracy’s beneficence, its peaceful intent, and its ability to lead the world toward a better future.167 Until he sank on the Titanic in 1912, he remained one of the continent’s most impassioned and influential Russophile activists. Stead’s dream of world peace did not contradict his admiration for strong state authority, but complemented it. “If you want to free the world from the scourge of war and militarism you must inoculate it with police,” he wrote. “To replace soldiers with policemen, that’s what we must do.”168 This dream, too, would be aggressively pursued by tsarist officials, who invoked the threat of anarchism to push for formal international security agreements. At an 1898 conference on the anarchist threat in Rome, the Russian delegation took a particularly hard line. It demanded that anti-​anarchist intelligence be shared across national police forces, that anarchist ideas and utterances be excluded from legally protected speech, and that the European powers agree to expel anarchist activists to their home countries.169 As many Europeans noted, these proposals dramatically expanded state powers and went far beyond the improvised practices of cooperation that had

 

150

Pa rt I I :   E u r o p e ’s Ru s s i a n   M o m e n t

developed between the Okhrana and European police forces. Switzerland’s federal prosecutor noted that the vague definition of anarchism set the stage for the persecution of “social revolutionary elements who are seeking to change the established order, and not only anarchists.”170 British and French representatives remarked that the broad powers of search, seizure, and expulsion outlined in the proposal were “tantamount to the establishment of a true international police service.”171 Although all three countries thus expressed serious reservations about the compatibility of the Russian proposals with their own legal traditions, they sent unambiguous signals that they sympathized with the tsarist regime’s goals. The French delegation promised to participate in international efforts to destroy revolutionary cells, pledging to expel “all foreign anarchists living in France.”172 British officials insisted that anarchism was a plague imported by foreigners and expressed their intention to cooperate with the accord “so far as circumstances permit.” They added, however, that the more rigorous policing that they planned to conduct must be carried out in strict secrecy.173 Switzerland ultimately signed the Russian proposal, on the condition that its participation in the accord remain confidential.174 Although the Rome Conference had already yielded promising results, in the ensuing years the Russian government continued to push for a more robust agreement to combat the “anti-​social doctrines” that “menace the public order and the governmental organization of all civilized countries.”175 Russian initiative ultimately culminated in a second international conference, held in St. Petersburg in 1904. The protocol produced by that conference, adopted immediately by ten nations, was even more stringent than the Russian demands issued in 1898. It made no legal distinction between anarchists who used terror and other radicals, providing police forces license to indiscriminately harass both; it obligated signatories to repatriate foreign radicals; and it created new norms for international intelligence sharing.176 The British, French, and Swiss governments initially informed the Russians that they could not formally sign the agreement, noting that its extreme expansion of state powers violated their domestic laws. In private, however, they affirmed their support for the principles of the protocol.177 Indeed, in the years after the St. Petersburg conference, cooperation between the Okhrana and the security forces of Europe’s liberal states continued to deepen, though always behind the veil of secrecy. Switzerland, which clandestinely signed the St. Petersburg protocol in 1907, began to extradite Russian radicals under its provisions.178 Agents at Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, following the precedent set by Melville, continued to test the limits of British law—​and to furtively defy legislation that protected individual privacy when state security demanded it.179 The Okhrana maintained the strongest relationship of all with the French security forces, which colluded with the Russian police to circumvent laws that

 



Émig ré D ystop ia s

151

limited police powers. After a 1907 parliamentary interpellation confirmed that it was illegal for French security officials to communicate with foreign police forces, an ex-​Sûreté officer who had worked for the Okhrana since 1882 established a private detective agency that provided an informal conduit between the French government and Russia.180 Russian officials praised the heavy-​handed tactics with which republican officials had put down workers’ strikes and the willingness of their allies to “destroy our common enemy”—​that is, radicals of all stripes.181 The French daily Le Matin, which leaked reports of the secret arrangements forged in St. Petersburg, characterized the agreement on international police cooperation as a new “Holy Alliance.”182 Although this language might seem hyperbolic, the observation was incisive. The Russian campaign to enhance international police cooperation, which built on the work of earlier pro-​Russian propagandists and Okhrana provocateurs, provided the clearest indication yet of the extent to which liberal ideals and practice had compromised. The agreement further corroded the protections afforded to Russian émigrés, placing yet another strain on the asylum traditions that had played such a prominent role in the liberal political imagination while incubating the radical politics of the Russian colonies. Europe’s Russian colonies faced many forms of adversity over the years. However, the transformation of Western public opinion produced the greatest challenge that they had ever experienced, turning their utopian experiments on their heads. The new narrative that emerged at the turn of the century reframed the colonies’ visions of human transformation as acts of subversion, their revolutionary morality as degenerative, and their investment in Jewish emancipation as evidence of their participation in a Jewish conspiracy. In the process, these centers of international exchange became the front lines of a new global battle against revolutionary sedition waged by expanding security states. These changes led to profound transformations in the colonies’ culture. They would catalyze the rapid dispersion of tsarist subjects across the continent, since residing in Europe’s liberal nations no longer conveyed the special privileges it once had. They would further radicalize émigré thought, enhancing the appeal of the revolutionary ideas that the more vigorous policing had aimed to stamp out. Finally, they would change the nature of the colonies’ concrete utopias, producing new forms of revolutionary praxis and collective behavior as residents attempted to transcend the challenges of the present and move toward a more perfect future.

 

 

PA RT   I I I

REVOLUTIONARY REPERCUSSIONS

 

 

6

“The Party of Extreme Opposition”

In 1900, Vladimir Lenin arrived in London, fresh from several years in Siberian exile. He used his time abroad to develop a new set of revolutionary principles. Convinced that the revolution would never be sparked merely by popular action from below, Lenin emphasized the importance of centralized organization and the activism of stalwart revolutionary cadres. Within a few years, he had succeeded in assembling a small cohort of followers and creating the foundations of the Bolshevik party. Historians searching for the roots of Bolshevik culture tend to privilege philosophical ideas. The classic intellectual history literature, for example, treats Bolshevism as the product of Marxist ideology refracted through the maximalist lens of Russian intelligentsia thinking.1 Yuri Slezkine’s recent reexamination of the party as a millenarian cult is more attuned to questions of psychology and group behavior, revealing the role that collective rituals played in Bolshevik culture. Nevertheless, his analysis ultimately locates the origin of the party’s messianic mission in abstract ideas—​in this case Marxist eschatology, which itself built on older millenarian traditions.2 The following chapters take a different approach, showing how profoundly the émigré milieu in which Bolshevism was born and spent its formative years shaped its character. The goal here is not to minimize the role of ideas in the Bolshevik project, but rather to highlight the ways in which revolutionary ideologies and lived experience informed one another. Approaching the story from this vantage point reveals a party that was far more responsive to its surroundings—​and less internally coherent—​than is often assumed. Aspects of party culture that might at first appear expressions of preformed philosophical traditions were in fact informed by specific experiences and collisions that occurred in the colonies. Lenin’s program was in many respects a reaction to the failures of exile life that became so apparent at the turn of the century. He blamed chronic infighting among émigré Marxists and the colonies’ traditions of emancipation Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0007

 

156

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

from below for the chaos that had invaded their collective lives. Seeking to destroy existing networks and institutions and to rebuild émigré society under the aegis of a centralized party, he believed that his program would “unify everyone, locate a common language,” in the words of Vladimir Bonch-​Bruevich, his old friend from St. Petersburg and newfound compatriot in emigration.3 Yet even as he broke with precedent, Lenin perpetuated several august émigré traditions. The Bolsheviks, like their predecessors, lived the revolution, relying on the colonies’ social infrastructure and physical space to transform their visions from abstract ideas into concrete forms of quotidian practice. Moreover, confrontations between the Bolsheviks and their rivals in the close quarters of the colonies played a crucial role in defining the party’s platform and identity. Lenin ultimately succeeded in creating a new concrete utopia and in transforming the terms of émigré debates. However, his accomplishments had unintended results. His struggle to build a centralized party infrastructure intensified the harmful dogmatism that had long plagued colony life. And the conflict that he catalyzed, which overshadowed all other émigré debates, resulted in the most destructive schisms that exiles had ever seen. Bolshevism, a child of the colonies, thus distilled the paradoxes of their collective life in particularly potent form, revealing their generative potential as well as the impossibility of controlling the creative energies they unleashed.

The Colonies in Crisis At the turn of the century, cynicism and despair supplanted the sentiments of hope and love that had once unified colony residents. The disintegration of émigré rights was a major cause of this collapse in morale. Radicals representing many parties lamented that anti-​anarchist legislation rendered them liable to prosecution, censorship, and expulsion; students and workers complained that they were subjected to regular document checks by European police and potential employers.4 The growing aggression of European police forces and their evident collaboration with the Okhrana, which had embodied the evils of the tsarist system for generations of Russian radicals, was a particular source of anguish. One veteran of the Paris colony lamented that surveillance of émigrés had become routine “not only in the centers of the Russian empire . . . but also in the capital of the Great [French] Republic and on the territory of freedom-​loving Switzerland.”5 A Geneva-​based Russian paper complained that the “police international” created by the anti-​anarchist accords rendered legal norms in the “republican” governments of Western Europe scarcely indistinguishable from those of Bismarck’s Germany.6

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

157

Meanwhile, internecine conflicts in the colonies continued to intensify, preventing residents from forming a united front capable of responding to the external threats that they faced. Marxists clashed with Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists who rejected their dogma. The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP) itself was riven by deep doctrinal ruptures. These divisions were on full display at a party conference that occurred in Geneva in 1900, at which the orthodox Marxists of the Liberation of Labor group denounced the economists as heretical and Russian Marxists decried the Bund’s national particularism as well as its sympathy for economism.7 Émigrés who had seen life abroad as an opportunity to free Russia’s Jews from their burdens expressed a particularly acute sense of disillusionment. They had not only failed to reach a consensus on the “Jewish question” in colony politics, but also faced hostility from European antisemites and from the Western Jews who had once claimed to protect them. Zionism, which attracted many new followers in the colonies at the turn of the century, provided one outlet for these frustrations. Chaim Weizmann, for example, expressed a desire to break free from the skloki that had consumed the colonies, as well as the assimilatory pressures and materialistic impulses of Western life, which had extinguished “everything exalted in our Jews.”8 The dream for Weizmann and other Zionists was to live a proud and unapologetic Jewish existence—​a task that appeared increasingly impossible in Russia, its émigré colonies, and in Europe’s liberal societies.9 Bundists remained the most impassioned opponents of Zionism, which they denounced as “the reaction of the bourgeois classes.” Nevertheless, the same factors that emboldened Zionists at the turn of the century encouraged a more nationalist turn in the Bund’s work. A 1901 party conference voted to insert a clause adapted from the Austro-​Marxists into the party’s platform, calling for the Russian empire to be reorganized into a federation that recognized national rights: “Each nation, in addition to its struggle for economic, civic, and political freedom and equality, has national ambitions. . . . The Poles, the Finns, the Jews, the Lithuanians have the full right to demand not only that their national peculiarities be recognized and that they not be russified against their will, but also that the forms of social life exclude any possibility of restraint and inequality for them as a nation.”10 Bund activists also pushed for the reorganization of the RSDRP on federalist principles, insisting that their party be recognized as the official voice of the Jewish proletariat, the PPS as the representative of Polish workers, and so on.11 The intensification of Jewish nationalism, in turn, antagonized the universalists of the Liberation of Labor Group, who unleashed unprecedented attacks on the Bund’s leadership. At a meeting of Russian Marxists, Plekhanov argued that the Bund was “not a Social-​Democratic organization, but a band of exploiters who abuse Russians,” and “that all Jews are chauvinistic and nationalistic, that

 

158

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

the Russian [Social Democratic] Party should be Russian.” He concluded, “our goal is to drive this Bund out of the party.”12 Likewise, Pavel Aksel’rod described the Bund’s leaders as “Vil’na Philistines” and warned his interlocutors to “hold your pockets when you have business with [its members], or something will be stolen.”13 These assaults on the integrity of Bund leaders ushered the ongoing debate between universalists and those who defended the virtues of particularism to a new moment of crisis. The dream of liberating Russia’s Jews, which had motivated so much of the colonies’ emancipatory activity, had become the greatest wedge dividing Marxists amongst themselves. Moreover, in their desperation to discredit their Bundist rivals, the Russian Marxists drew on tropes of Jewish perfidy more commonly associated with antisemitic propaganda, echoing the Okhrana’s claims that Jewish activists had hijacked the revolutionary cause to serve their own interests. These venomous attacks were themselves byproducts of émigré intimacy, informed by personal jealousies and grievances. But they also revealed the depth of the challenge facing the colonies, raising questions about how long rival factions and different ethnic groups could continue to occupy the same neighborhoods and parties. As the colonies became crippled by external and internal crises, activists in Russia appeared poised to reclaim the revolutionary mantle from their exiled comrades. By the turn of the century, signs of political ferment were evident in virtually all corners of imperial society. Industrial strikes and peasant unrest increased rapidly, university students organized street demonstrations, and educated professionals demanded political change. When one émigré returned home after several years abroad, she was surprised but pleased to discover that Russia had become a “seething cauldron” of political activity.14 Zionist activism in Russia grew in leaps and bounds at the turn of the century. Local chapters of Zionist groups appeared in even the smallest towns, and Minsk hosted a large all-​imperial Zionist conference in 1902.15 The Socialist Revolutionary party also made major gains. The spectacular terrorist attacks staged by Socialist Revolutionary (SR) “combat units,” which managed to assassinate two Ministers of the Interior, a Grand Duke, and a regional governor, were especially effective in raising the party’s profile.16 Marxist organizers made the greatest strides of all. By the 1890s, thousands of young men and women had begun to see Marxism as a viable “formula that offered hope”—​especially in Russia’s rapidly growing cities, which hosted hundreds of thousands of proletarians.17 Tracts by Marx and Kautsky, the émigré theoreticians of the Liberation of Labor, and economist newspapers published by the Bund were smuggled into Russia by the thousands and rapidly spread across the empire. As one newly minted Marxist recalled of his Belarusian hometown at the turn of the century, “There was not a home completely free of illegal literature. There

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

159

was not a family whose children did not participate in some kind of political circle.”18 Marxists acquired particular influence in the Pale of Settlement, thanks to its abundance of cities with dispossessed workers, its proximity to the western border through which most illegal literature was smuggled, and the strong organizational infrastructure of the Bund. But powerful Marxist movements emerged in other corners of the empire as well. So-​called legal Marxism, influenced by economist principles, flourished in St. Petersburg’s elite Free Economic Society. In the Caucasus, Noe Zhordania, a Georgian activist who had befriended Kautsky during a period of European exile, launched the empire’s first legal Marxist publication. Assuming control of the periodical Kvali, founded by a previous generation of populist émigrés, Zhordania used the publication to develop a specifically Georgian brand of Marxism whose influence would be felt for decades.19 The relationship between the émigré colonies and these new radical centers in Russia was complex. On the one hand, Russian activists continued to regard Paris and Geneva as the “Mecca and Medina for Russian revolutionary youth” and to lust after illegal literature published abroad.20 On the other hand, Russian radicals were painfully aware of the conflicts that permeated colony life, greeting word of each new skloka that erupted abroad with “vexation and anxiety.”21 Many Russian youth of the fin de siècle dealt with this contradiction by priding themselves on their “practical” orientation. Integrating themselves into the radical diaspora by reading whatever illegal literature they could obtain from abroad, they studiously avoided being drawn into the factional battles that raged in emigration. Martov’s younger brothers, Sergei and Vladimir (better known as Ezhov and Levitskii), who remained behind in Russia and maintained relations with economists, Orthodox Marxists, Bundists, and circles close to the SRs, provide a classic example of this catholic radicalism.22 Eventually, revolutionary circles managed to establish their own clandestine presses, allaying their dependence on émigré literature.23 The political mobilization that occurred in Russia at the turn of the century produced a backlash, however. Tsarist police liquidated revolutionary circles as quickly as they could locate them, causing the population of prisoners and Siberian exiles to soar. Reactionary agitation also intensified:  antisemitic publicists and vigilante groups blamed Jews for popular misery and political unrest, producing a new wave of pogroms. The increasingly difficult situation in Russia complicated the efforts of domestic groups to maintain their distance from the colonies, encouraging many to seek refuge abroad. For many radical youth, the colonies became a “temporary way station for those escaping from exile or arrest.”24 But members of illegal parties were not the only Russians who fled abroad. The disruptions that resulted from student

 

160

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

protests, along with the severe police repression that followed, led to large increases in the number of Russian students at foreign universities. By the early twentieth century, Russians accounted for 25  percent of the total students in Geneva, four-​fifths in Lausanne, and up to three-​quarters in some German medical schools.25 A short-​lived and disastrous war against Japan in 1904–​05 further spurred migration, encouraging men from all walks of life to flee conscription. According to one Okhrana official, more than eight hundred draft dodgers arrived in London in a single week in late 1904.26 The newcomers greatly expanded the size of the existing Russian colonies in Paris, London, and Geneva. They also created new colonies in cities that had never before hosted large Russian districts. In Berlin, students and Jewish laborers gravitated to the neighborhood of Charlottenburg, where they created mutual aid organizations, libraries, and a canteen.27 Vienna, which boasted plentiful employment opportunities and relative proximity to the smuggling routes that traversed the Russian-​Habsburg border, became another new center of Russian settlement.28 The Balkans, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries attracted a substantial cohort of Russian émigrés, as did provincial towns such as Nancy, Montpellier, Liège, and Basel. In some cases, newly arrived Russians even spilled out of urban spaces: one rural Swiss hamlet attracted almost two hundred Jewish anarchists.29 As the colonies became more geographically dispersed, the demographics and behavior of their residents also evolved. The Russians who arrived abroad at the turn of the century were more sociologically varied than their predecessors. For the first time a significant number of Russian proletarians emigrated, joining the Jews who had previously dominated the ranks of unskilled laborers living abroad. Meanwhile, substantial numbers of migrants from the Baltic region appeared in the Russian colonies.30 Observers also remarked on a change in émigré mentalities, noting that fewer arrived with the ambitious dreams that had motivated previous generations. In an era of “national catastrophe, lawlessness, revolution, unemployment, and pogroms,” most Russians had a keen understanding of the importance of political organizing as well as its limitations.31 The new arrivals infused the colonies with fresh energy, spurring initiatives to unify their inhabitants across space and ideological divisions. In 1901 émigrés organized the first nonpartisan, international conference of Russian radicals in Austrian Galicia, uniting revolutionaries living across the colonies as well as those who remained in Russia.32 Students living abroad showed a similar impulse to unite, planning a congress that would lay the groundwork for a united organization that could speak to the needs of all Russian students. However, the increased population and diversity of the colonies rendered this task more difficult than ever before. Indeed, the student conference failed to come to fruition

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

161

because its organizers could not agree on the most basic of parameters, including the date when it would be convened.33 Because the colonies continued to play such an important role in the Russian radical diaspora, their dysfunction threatened not only their own future, but also that of the revolutionaries who remained beyond their borders. One young Marxist who greeted the dawn of the new century in Siberian exile recalled the consternation produced by each troubling dispatch that he and his comrades received from Geneva. Poring over conflicting accounts of the polemics between Orthodox Marxists and economists, between the Liberation of Labor and the Bund, the Siberian exiles wondered how Russia’s Marxist movement would ever escape the destructive influence of émigré squabbles.34 The intractable crisis of the colonies was on the verge of extinguishing the concrete utopias that had long defined their promise.

The Lessons of Crisis The turn of the century found the organizers of the St. Petersburg Liberation of Labor group—​Lenin, Martov, and Potresov—​in Siberian exile. They too followed news from Europe, which they received concealed in the binding of legal literature, with concern. They displayed considerable sympathy for the positions taken by the Geneva Liberation of Labor, sharing its antipathy for the SRs’ terrorist methods, the Bund’s economism, and the corrosive force of nationalism. However, they also faulted the émigrés for their poor leadership. They saw the exiles as aloof, aristocratic, and pedantic—​a reflection of their advanced age as well as their decades of estrangement from the realities of Russian life. They especially deplored Plekhanov’s legendary vanity, which instigated more than one falling out. The young men, who had imbibed the “practical” spirit of radicals in the 1890s, had no interest in participating in the internecine warfare that had debilitated the colonies. Instead, they were eager to build a mass party and press forward to revolution.35 While still in Siberia, the activists agreed on the necessity of creating a party newspaper, which would revitalize and reunify the radical diaspora.36 Around the same time, Lenin began to formulate a new principle to guide party work: konspiratsiia, which historian Lars Lih defines as “the fine art of not getting arrested.” Konspiratsiia aimed to create a mass-​appeal party founded on worker participation through the organization of the party into tight-​knit, conspiratorial cells that preserved the utmost secrecy. This new revolutionary doctrine creatively synthesized two contrasting approaches to revolutionary agitation: the Bund’s emphasis on worker mobilization and the Liberation of Labor’s insistence on building a strong party center.37

 

162

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

In early 1900 Lenin, his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, Martov, and Potresov completed their terms of exile. The old comrades first reconvened in central Russia, where they began to lay plans for their newspaper and for the reinvention of the party “from the top-​down.” Later in the year, Lenin and Potresov journeyed to Geneva to lobby the Liberation of Labor group for support.38 Although the elder exiles expressed sympathy for this cause, the tension between the two camps was immediately evident. Lenin’s ambition alienated the prickly Plekhanov, who was perennially insecure about being usurped by young activists. Lenin, for his part, was taken aback by Plekhanov’s fanatical diatribes against the Bund, which expressed “suspicions of espionage, accusations of crooked speculation [gesheftmakherstvo] and scoundrelry [prokhvostnichestvo], exclamations that he would shoot traitors such as these without hesitating.”39 Furthermore, the two camps clashed over who would exercise control of the paper. The elders wanted it based in Geneva; the youth in Germany, a location that would facilitate efforts to smuggle it into Russia and distance it from the notorious skloki of the Swiss colonies. On this question, at least, Lenin and his comrades eventually prevailed. By the fall they had settled in Munich and launched Iskra.40 The new arrivals settled in the working-​class district of Schwabing and established their printing press in a building a few doors down from the local SPD club. From the beginning, their existence was precarious. Living in constant fear of police infiltration, Lenin used more than 90 aliases during his time in Germany.41 His concerns turned out to be warranted: in 1902, the German police, acting on a tip received from the Okhrana, conducted an illegal search of an Iskra affiliate’s flat and confiscated documents that revealed the identities of many of the paper’s contributors. Alarmed that the arrest of the entire editorial board was imminent, the editors then fled to London. Their life in England was also difficult. They lived in chronic poverty, which led to protracted disputes with landlords, and they struggled with ill health during the damp winters. In the spring of 1903, the journal’s editors were evicted from their London dwelling. At this point, Martov moved on to Paris and the rest of the editorial board relocated to Geneva.42 In some respects, Iskra continued old émigré traditions. In both Munich and London, most of the editors resided together in a communal apartment. The Iskra communes were squalid and overcrowded, welcoming trusted visitors from Russia and across the colonies at all hours of the night, but they also created a warm and familial environment and allowed the editors to spend all their waking hours engaged in collective reading and debate.43 Women played a crucial role in the project, as they had in previous émigré endeavors. Liberation of Labor member Vera Zasulich, who moved into the commune soon after the paper’s founding, was respected by the male editors as a full equal. Krupskaia assumed

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

163

the gargantuan task of managing the group’s correspondence, much of which was written using ciphers and invisible ink, with the help of Lidiia Dan, Martov’s sister.44 Iskra, like other émigré ventures, relied on help from Western radicals. In both Munich and London, the paper was produced on a press owned by local Marxists. In Germany, Karl Liebknecht provided legal assistance to the Russians in their battle against the police, and a respected German doctor received their mail to safeguard it from police meddling.45 Western radicals also provided letters of recommendation to local libraries, where the editors pored over Marxist texts and socialist newspapers.46 At the same time, Lenin challenged several elements of émigré culture. Allergic to the free-​wheeling intimacy of colony life, he was like a house with “tightly bolted shutters on all the windows,” to use the words of one his associates in these years.47 Disturbed by the din and the disarray that characterized life in the Iskra communes, he and Krupskaia inhabited private apartments of their own in both Munich and London. Lenin regularly ventured into the East End to conduct agitation among Russian-​Jewish workers and enjoyed visiting London’s famed revolutionary locales, including the Hyde Park Speaker’s corner, sites of Chartist demonstrations, and Marx’s grave. However, he spent most of his time researching in the British Library and writing in his flat off King’s Cross Road, keeping his distance from the center of colony life.48 Lenin’s avoidance of the émigré milieu reflected not only his personal preferences, but also his revolutionary values. He viewed the collective life of the colonies as an invitation for skloki and police infiltration, warning Martov that his love of late-​night drinking, debating, and gossip in émigré taverns undermined the ventures of the entire Iskra group.49 Lenin’s short bouts of mass agitation followed by long stints of isolation from émigré politics provided a model of konspiratsiia, offering his own expression of what it meant to live the revolution. As he explained to a subordinate: “When you are taken up with secret, conspiratorial matters, you must not speak with those whom you normally converse, nor about the things you usually talk about, but only with those you need to talk to and only about things you need to talk about.”50 Even as Lenin challenged the specific prefigurative practices that had emerged in emigration, then, he continued the colonies’ tradition of using quotidian life to experiment with new approaches to politics. Iskra’s programmatic line mirrored Lenin’s behavior, building on the work of the Liberation of Labor group while simultaneously attempting to set a new course for Russian Marxism. The paper continued the Geneva émigrés’ attacks on the SRs, whose terroristic tactics it denounced as petty bourgeois perversions, and it vigorously criticized the Bund and its economist inclinations.51 Although Lenin had once seen Plekhanov’s bigoted fulminations against the Bund as

 

164

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

evidence of the perils of émigré life, the former launched his own inflammatory attacks on the party once he settled abroad. In correspondence with a comrade in Russia, Lenin characterized the Bund as an “unreliable friend (or even an enemy)” and added that he hoped to teach the Jewish party “not to shove its nose in Russian affairs.52 At the same time, Iskra was already leading Russian revolutionaries in a new direction. In 1901–​02, Lenin published a series of essays in the paper, which eventually would be collected and published as What Is to Be Done? These essays offered Lenin’s strongest repudiation yet of the recalcitrant economists of the RSDRP and the European socialist parties that worked within parliamentary systems. It was in these essays that Lenin developed his novel interpretation of the revolutionary process, arguing that a small conspiracy of dedicated cadres would lead the masses toward consciousness and ignite the social revolution.53 The young editors of Iskra assigned their paper a crucial role in catalyzing the transition from “propaganda conducted in small circles to mass agitation.”54 They recruited agents in every major émigré center and in most large industrial cities in Russia, who provided reportage and promoted the paper’s ideological program. They also prioritized the establishment of smuggling networks, which passed through Persia into the Caucasus and through Finland into northwestern Russia. In addition to these routes, the Iskrovtsy gained access to Bundist smuggling rings that ran through Vil’na, thanks to Martov’s brothers and their connections. Indeed, the Bund’s famed smuggling networks greatly benefited the Iskra network, ferrying its agents and its publications over the Russian border.55 By 1902, Iskra’s novel approach to overcoming the problems that plagued the radical diaspora and its success at building communicative networks had begun to renew hope in the future of the RSDRP. Local party committees in Russia declared their allegiance to Iskra and its editors; Lidiia Dan recalled that many radical youth regarded Lenin with a fervent devotion exceeding that which they felt for their own friends.56 Iskra’s reputation as an authoritative radical voice, in turn, attracted an influx of new émigrés who moved abroad with the hope of joining the paper’s editors. When the twenty-​three year old Leon Trotsky, then in Siberian exile, managed to obtain copies of Iskra, he was awestruck. “My handwritten essays, newspaper articles, and proclamations . . . looked small and provincial to me in the face of the new and tremendous task which confronted us. I had to look for another field of activity. I had to escape from exile.” In 1902 he succeeded, hastening to London, where he sought out Lenin. Joining Martov, Potresov, and Zasulich in the commune, he became a valued member of their collective.57 If the culture of the colonies had generated chronic problems that Lenin’s revolutionary program hoped to address, it also proved indispensable in his schemes for transformation. Lenin used his residence abroad to define

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

165

konspiratsiia as a lifestyle and relied on the cross-​border networks operated by exiles to popularize his ideas. There is one other respect in which the émigré milieu influenced Lenin’s ideas at the turn of the century. Lenin, like most of his comrades, depended heavily on European radicals for ideological inspiration as well as logistical help. In fact, his first blueprints for a Russian mass party were modeled on Karl Kautsky’s transformation of the SPD.58 In exile, however, the Iskrovtsy developed a more conflictual relationship with European Marxists. The Russians lamented their Western comrades’ willingness to conform with bourgeois norms, citing their tendency to hold party meetings in churches, to condescend to workers, and to denigrate the extremism of the RSDRP. Lenin and Krupskaia frequently clashed with their working-​class landlady in London, who chided the couple for refusing to wear wedding rings or hang curtains. These experiences convinced the pair that even proletarians in the West had imbibed the false promises of liberal democracy.59 These frustrations informed the new revolutionary doctrines developed in Iskra. Contributors condemned British and Swiss socialists for their excessive moderation, and Belgian workers for prioritizing the expansion of suffrage.60 A satirical cartoon skewered French socialist Alexandre Millerand for agreeing to join a government that remained an ally of Russia. It portrayed the socialist politician bowing before Tsar Nicholas, who had made a mockery of the constitution of 1793 by constructing his throne on it, as French bankers handed one of Nicholas’s top ministers a bag of money.61 These treatments emphasized the weakness and corruption of the Western left, presenting it as a barrier to true revolutionary change, rather than as an inspiration. Gradually, the paper began to sketch out an alternative path forward. In revising Marx’s theory of revolution, What Is to Be Done? made one contribution to this effort. A 1901 article, “The Lesson of Crisis,” offered another, suggesting that Russia’s agonizing predicament could become a source of revolutionary transformation. Lenin argued that the crisis of capitalism was particularly intense in Russia, where the “starvation of the peasants accompanies stagnation in industry.” Furthermore, state repression intensified popular suffering, forcing workers and peasants to struggle against “police tyranny” as well as “unemployment and hunger.” Ostensibly, the article was a rejoinder to economists who suggested that the damaging effects of boom and bust cycles would eventually dissipate, paving the way for a more cooperative relationship between socialists and liberals. At the same time, it offered an alternative interpretation of the revolutionary process, suggesting that impoverished peasants and victims of political repression would join with proletarians to catalyze social revolution.62 This analysis defied Marxist orthodoxy that the industrial proletariat is the engine of revolutionary change, assigning that role to all oppressed peoples—​or what

 

166

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

Figure 6.1  Cartoon satirizing the corruption of French socialists. Iskra, September 1, 1901, prilozhenie.

historian Martin Malia has called the “metaphysical proletariat.”63 In a move reminiscent of the first generation of émigré revolutionaries, the article also reimagined Russia’s economic and political backwardness as a source of revolutionary potential. Lenin was not the first émigré to position himself as an ultra-​radical enfant terrible; Herzen had assumed this role in his polemics with Western comrades, as had Luxemburg and Parvus in the internal debates within the SPD in the 1890s. He was, however, the first exile committed to building a mass party that explicitly contrasted its revolutionary fortitude to the putative bankruptcy of Western revolutionary movements. Although his radical politics were deeply rooted in the Russian philosophical tradition, they were also determinatively shaped by the challenges and opportunities that existed in the colonies, and by the anguish and alienation he experienced abroad.

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

167

The Personal Is Political “The Lessons of Crisis” argued for the creative possibility of despair, for its capacity to catalyze radical political transformation. Lenin took a similar approach to life in the colonies, using the breakdown of émigré society to define a new mode of revolutionary action. However, Lenin’s innovations produced unexpected crises of their own. Iskra succeeded in unifying and mobilizing a large segment of the revolutionary diaspora, but it also deepened existing fissures in émigré society and produced new ones. Unsurprisingly, the first major explosion pitted the Iskrovtsy against the Bund. In early 1903, the Iskra organization in the southern Russian city of Ekaterinoslav published a pamphlet titled “To Jewish Workers.” The tract denounced “the fairy tale about a single and indivisible Jewish people—​a fairytale propagated and supported by Zionists,” calling on Jewish workers to forsake any expression of particularism and to join with their Gentile comrades. In a scathing editorial published in its Russian-​language paper, the Geneva-​based Foreign Committee of the Bund condemned the pamphlet. It complained that the missive denied the rising threat of antisemitism, becoming complicit in the oppression of Jewish workers by refusing to acknowledge the special challenges that they faced.64 In the months after the polemic, several pogroms broke out—​including one in Ekaterinoslav itself, where Gentile workers attacked their Jewish comrades. Bundists pointed to the violence as confirmation of their argument that the Jewish proletariat did indeed possess pressing concerns of its own and needed an autonomous party capable of attending to them.65 The Iskrovtsy responded to these demands with fury and ridicule. In an editorial in Iskra, Lenin sarcastically remarked that if the Bundists had familiarized themselves with recent works of German Marxists that had been translated into the Yiddish “jargon,” they would know that only the bourgeoisie could be antisemitic, not the working class. Furthermore, he alleged that the Bund’s lectures about the “imperishability of antisemitism” dulled the class consciousness of Jewish workers. The centralized party he was building, he added, would abide by the agreement reached with the Bund at the founding congress of the RSDRP in 1898, but would grant no further concessions.66 At this point, Martov made a decisive choice. In spite of his own history with the Bund and his brothers’ continued association with the party, he sided with Lenin, complaining that the Jewish party’s “nationalist” policies led workers down the dangerous path of bourgeois Zionism.67 Iskra’s assaults on the Bund reflected a new consensus emerging among its leaders about the vexing question of how to balance non-​Russians’ aspirations for national liberation with the necessity of supra-​national solidarity. The editors affirmed the efforts of nationalist activists who sought cultural self-​determination

 

168

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

under the auspices of the RSDRP, but sharply denounced such demands articulated outside of the party’s structure.68 No “nationalist” party, however, attracted as much vitriol as the Bund. Lenin’s description of Yiddish as a mere jargon denigrated the value of Russian-​Jewish culture, while his insinuation that the Bund’s leaders were only able to read the Marxist classics in Yiddish questioned their belonging in Russian educated society. In the hothouse of colony politics, Lenin’s rivalry with the Bund had intensified rapidly, leading him to denounce the group in language no less charged than that of Plekhanov and the other elder Marxists whose antipathy for the group had once taken him aback. The conflict between the Iskrovtsy and the Bund was not limited to literary polemics; it also unfolded in the colonies’ collective life. An Iskra agent based in Berlin recalled that the city hosted intense debates about the “Jewish question” in the spring of 1903. Bundists and Zionists organized large demonstrations to denounce pogroms and to decry the RSDRP’s putative lack of concern about the welfare of Russian Jews. The Iskrovtsy responded by accusing Bundists and Zionists of “inciting national hatred” among colony residents.69 For the universalists who rallied behind the centralizing agenda of Iskra, the mere suggestion that there were issues of special concern to Jews signaled support for a dangerous breed of particularism. Although Iskrovtsy united in opposition of the Bund, tensions within their ranks were growing more evident. The mistrust between the activists of Lenin’s generation and the Liberation of Labor group continued to intensify.70 Meanwhile, the bonds between the young editors began to fray. Martov deplored Lenin’s domineering style; Martov’s sister, Lidiia Dan, complained that Lenin hoarded newly arrived newspapers and correspondence before other comrades could read them.71 Lenin, for his part, accused Martov of excessive impressionism in his writing.72 Having aspired to transcend the skloki of the colonies, the Iskrovtsy were increasingly falling victim to them. The multiple conflicts that erupted in the first half of 1903 were exacerbated by their proximity to the RSDRP’s second congress, planned for that summer. Lenin was determined to use the conference to confirm the status of the Iskra group as the new ideological center of the party—​and his own reputation as its apparent leader. Working through a secret organizational nucleus within the Central Committee, he ensured that a majority of conference delegates—​some 33 of 50—​were loyal to Iskra. He also schemed to exclude representatives of independent Polish and Latvian groups who were sure to contest his vision.73 Meanwhile, Lenin penned draft resolutions that enshrined the Iskra party line as RSDRP doctrine. One struck a blow to the SRs by outlawing political assassination; another banned the creation of the offshoot political factions that he blamed for the chaos in the party.74 But it was the battle against the Bund that consumed most of his attention. “It is necessary to prepare for war against the

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

169

Bund if we want peace with it,” he wrote in April to a comrade in Russia. “War at the Congress, war even to the extent of a split—​whatever the cost. Only then will the Bund be sure to surrender.”75 In pursuit of this goal, he penned a resolution demanding the Bund’s complete cooperation with and subordination to the RSDRP.76 The conference convened in a warehouse in Brussels—​a location that organizers hoped would evade outside scrutiny—​in July 1903. However, almost immediately the Belgian police discovered the gathering and ordered it to disperse. The Russian Marxists then reassembled in London.77 This external interference was inconvenient and demoralizing, but the internal disputes at the conference proved far more debilitating. Bund delegates opened the conference by demanding the insertion of language in the party statutes that acknowledged the “special conditions” of the empire’s peripheral regions. They also called for the Bund to be recognized as the voice of the Jewish proletariat. The long series of debates that followed were inconclusive, but they opened a broader conversation about the structure of the party. Bund leaders noted that their demands for autonomy were, above all, demands for party democracy. A looser and more inclusive party apparatus, they argued, would benefit all members—​and ethnic minorities in particular.78 The Iskrovtsy responded with numerous counterattacks condemning the Bund for sowing divisions in the party. An Iskra agent from Berlin complained that Bundists had manipulated the tragedy of pogroms to promote national separatism. Another from the Caucasus remarked that Georgians and Armenians in his native region had managed to work together effectively without insisting on national autonomy, wondering why the Bundists insisted on creating a “state within a state.” Mark Liber, a member of the Bund’s Central Committee, bitterly retorted that the remarks of the Iskrovtsy revealed their utter disregard for the lives of Jewish proletarians.79 The debate between those who saw the special experiences of Russian Jews as a source of revolutionary fortitude and those who saw any discussion of Jewish particularism as divisive had been raging for decades. And the party congress was far from the first time that personal jealousies and grievances had informed doctrinal conflicts. However, the theatrical setting of the conference, which placed a few dozen revolutionaries who had lived and worked together for years in a single room and charged them with determining the future of the party, proved unusually destructive. Bundists emerged from the encounter seeing Martov as a turncoat who had betrayed his own Jewish heritage and longstanding connections with the party. They were also deeply offended by the remarks of Trotsky, who explicitly invoked his Jewish roots to argue that the Bund could not and did not speak for all Russian Jews.80 One Bundist described the pain of these exchanges “as if a piece of flesh was being torn from a living body.”81

 

170

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

After this decisive rift between the two camps, discussion turned to the question of party organization. Broached early in the conference by the Bund’s calls for enhanced party democracy, the issue had also surfaced in the conflict between the Iskrovtsy in the lead-​up to the conference. Martov and Lenin had clashed about how to organize the conference presidium: the former advocated for an elected board of nine members, while Lenin wanted only three who would be selected for their “proven fortitude.”82 “To hell with all conciliators, people of ‘elusive views’ and mumblers,” he wrote to a comrade. “Better two or three energetic and fully devoted people than a dozen dawdlers.”83 Lenin continued to pursue this line of argument at the conference, insisting that party membership should be limited to the most stalwart and devoted activists. In order to avoid “organizational chaos,” “those who worked” must be separated from “those who simply talked.” Although Martov had sided with Lenin during the debate with the Bund, he broke with him on this point, arguing that Lenin’s proposal defied the democratic spirit that had always guided the revolutionary cause. A majority of conference delegates, many of whom harbored their own concerns about Lenin’s domineering style, aligned with Martov. Trotsky and Zasulich joined Bund leaders to oppose the measure and then walked out of the hall in protest.84 The conflicts at the conference were no less painful for Lenin than they were for the Bundist who likened the experience to live vivisection. Immediately after the gathering, Lenin aired his agony and frustration to close friends. He acknowledged that the splits that had emerged were results of the “mixing of the personal and the political”—​as much reflections of his comrades’ simmering frustrations at his efforts to remake revolutionary culture as they were coherent statements of ideological difference. He also expressed his own grievances, complaining that Martov had abused the “family character” of the editorial board by conspiring with Aksel’rod and Zasulich to neutralize his influence.85 Lenin’s reflections on how the intimacy of émigré life had become a liability for the revolutionary cause did not mean that he was capable of extricating himself from the colonies’ culture of dysfunction. He branded those who had joined the walkout “zigzaggers,” lamenting their inadequate devotion to the revolutionary cause.86 He then schemed to purge the Iskra editorial board of three excessively “soft” members—​Zasulich, Aksel’rod, and Potresov.87 Lenin’s coalescing narrative about the meaning of the rift at the conference emerged fully formed in “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in our Party,” published in May 1904. The tract reframed the conference as “a struggle between the revolutionary wing and opportunist wing in our Party.” The revolutionary wing, according to Lenin, was defined by its devotion to discipline and order; the opportunist wing, by its fear of a centralized party and its deference to the bourgeois principles of moderation and compromise.88 His account thus condensed a complex series of

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

171

doctrinal disputes inflected by personal grievances into a struggle between weak and strong, right and wrong. Moreover, it debuted an ingenious rhetorical turn that Lenin would use to great effect. He described his camp as “majoritarians”—​ or Bolsheviks—​and the other side as the “minoritarians”—​or Mensheviks—​ in spite of the fact that his opponents outnumbered his allies. This approach also obscured the many differences that divided Iskrovtsy such as Martov and Plekhanov and their unlikely allies from the Bund.89 Lenin’s attempts to shape the narrative about the conflict at the congress not only aimed to consolidate his power in the RSDRP, but also to propagate his version of the story beyond the small circle of activists who had attended the conference. He began to appear at public meetings in Geneva to denounce the Mensheviks and their “political cretinism, theoretical backwardness, organizational tailism.” He spoke with such passion and fury that he sometimes made himself physically ill.90 Martov and his defenders often appeared at these events, screaming and lunging at Lenin in a futile attempt to silence him.91 By mid-​1904, leading Russian Marxists were growing weary of the protracted struggle. Shortly after the London conference, Martov revealed that Lenin was planning to oust Plekhanov from the Iskra editorial board. Plekhanov reacted with fury, denouncing Lenin as a new Robespierre and forcing him to resign from the board of Iskra, which passed into the control of his Menshevik critics.92 The Central Committee of the RSDRP formally reprimanded Lenin, ordered him to halt his agitation, and threatened to bar the publication of “One Step Forward.” The Central Committee ultimately softened its position on the last point after Lenin pledged that he would stop seeking to alter the direction of the party without consulting other party leaders.93 Lenin’s dream of uniting the party behind his vision had backfired. His efforts to consolidate power only energized his critics in the Bund, whose leaders appeared at the 1904 International Socialist Conference in Amsterdam to make even more expansive demands than they had voiced at the 1903 gathering. Now, they demanded recognition as the official representatives not only of the Jews of Poland and Lithuania, but also of localities in which “Jewish workers live in a more or less compact mass,” including the cities of Kiev, Odessa, and Ekaterinoslav.94 Meanwhile, Lenin had alienated his oldest comrades, who had deprived him of control of his beloved Iskra. At this point, many of his one-​time comrades predicted that his revolutionary career was over. Plekhanov speculated that he was “good for nothing but to scare crows in gardens.”95 The French police who had watched the rise of Iskra with concern rejoiced that the circle had destroyed itself from within.96 Increasingly isolated, Lenin fell into a deep depression. For the first time in his life he suffered from writer’s block. His estrangement from Martov, his closest collaborator for over a decade, especially troubled him. One day shortly after his

 

172

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

return to Geneva, perhaps contemplating his problems as he biked around the city, Lenin careened into a tram. He received serious cuts and bruises on his face and barely missed gouging out his eye.97 By the summer of 1904, Lenin and Krupskaia decided they needed a respite, retreating to the Alps for an extended vacation. Even in the breathtaking beauty of the mountains, Lenin remained obsessed by the skloki of Geneva. One day, the couple, along with a friend, went on an exquisite hike outside Montreux. When they arrived at the top of a ridge with an especially breathtaking view, the companion was so moved she felt ready to “recite Shakespeare, Byron. Then I looked at Vladimir Il’ich: he was sitting, lost deep in thought. Suddenly he blurted out: ‘The Mensheviks are shitting on [zdorovo gadiat’] everything!’ ”98

Pro or Contra Lenin’s critics bemoaned his “coldness, contempt, and cruelty,” his “firm and unflinching” pursuit of power, and his aversion to “any spirit of compromise.”99 However, some of the young men and women who came of age in the tense political climate of Russia at the turn of the century admired these traits as necessities for a leader. By 1904, a small cohort of young disciples had begun to coalesce in Geneva. Almost all were under thirty and had been hardened by long sojourns in tsarist prisons and Siberian exile. They included Lidiia Fotieva, an Iskra enthusiast from Perm’ who hastened to Switzerland after her release from prison, and several revolutionary couples:  Olga and Panteleimon Lepeshinskii, Vladimir Bonch-​Bruevich and Vera Velichkina; and S. I. Gusev and Feodosiia Drabkina. By late in the year others joined the cohort, including Maksim Litvinov and Lev Kamenev, activists from Russia who had staged a spectacular escape from a Kiev prison; Grigorii Zinoviev, a student from Bern who had once been close to the Bund; Aleksandr Bogdanov, a party activist from Tver’; and his brother-​in-​law, Anatolii Lunacharskii. Emboldened by the appearance of these acolytes, Lenin returned to Geneva in the fall of 1904 and resumed his agitation. Embracing the rhetorical strategy that he had used in “One Step Forward,” Lenin and his followers began to call themselves Bolsheviks. The split at the party conference had illuminated meaningful differences about how to organize the party as well as bitter personal rivalries. That said, neither the Bolsheviks nor their Menshevik adversaries had yet articulated a coherent platform. Upon his return to Geneva, Lenin began to delineate the distinctive features of Bolshevism. He described the Bolsheviks as the “party of extreme opposition”—​that is, a faction defined primarily by what it was not. The Bolsheviks were not “soft” like the Mensheviks, whom he described as the “epigone of Economism.”100 Nor were they weak like the European radicals he

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

173

Figure 6.2  The original Geneva Bolsheviks. Note Lenin’s outsized presence. N. P. Lepeshinskii, Na povorote (Petersburg, 1922).

had observed in emigration. In a series of lectures on the Paris Commune that he delivered in the colonies in 1904, he celebrated the insurrectionists’ dream of establishing a workers’ state, but condemned the caution that had prevented them from realizing their goals. Their disorganization, “lack of class consciousness,” and failure to launch a preemptive attack on the Versailles government had sealed the Communards’ fate, sounding the death knell for the revolutionary dreams of an entire generation.101 Determined that the Bolsheviks not share the fate of the Communards, Lenin explained that schism was necessary to extirpate the “soft” interpretations of Marxism that had doomed the Paris uprising and infected the Menshevik

 

174

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

faction and the Bund. The split in London had revealed “the whole character of the Party,” swept away “each and every remnant of factional interests, sentiments, and traditions,” and produced a “genuine Party consciousness” for the first time in history. He argued for the necessity for further breaks in the future, which would weed out unreliable party members and mobilize stalwarts around ultra-​ radical principles.102 Lenin’s talk about breaking down party structures was not a metaphor. He interpreted this mission quite literally, working to destroy émigré institutions and networks and to reconstruct them according to his own rules. In 1904–​ 05, he formed a secret Bolshevik central committee to plan for the next party congress and launched a new paper of his own, which waged war against the Menshevik-​dominated Iskra. Personal attacks played such a key role in his politics of destruction that some opponents concluded that his political beliefs could be summarized by the maxim, “what is useful for my enemy is harmful to me and vice versa.”103 For example, Lepeshinskii, an amateur artist, produced a series of satirical cartoons designed to demoralize and dehumanize the Mensheviks. One portrayed Lenin as a cat preparing to eviscerate Menshevik mice; another depicted the Menshevik faction as a tsarist chancery, making light of the fact that Plekhanov’s brother was a high-​ranking bureaucrat who remained loyal to the state. These images, like Lenin’s writings, vastly exaggerated the differences between the two sides, suggesting that the debate between them was best understood as a battle between revolutionaries and reactionaries, or even between different species. At the same time, they provoked intense rage from the Mensheviks, reifying the gulf between the two sides that had been imagined in Lenin’s polemics.104 Lenin’s efforts to reforge radical culture and networks also influenced the physical space of the Geneva colony. In 1904, the Bolsheviks relocated from the streets surrounding the Pleinpalais square to the banks of the Arve. There, within a two-​block radius, they established two low-​cost cafeterias, a museum, a party archive, a library, a printing press, and a hotel to house activists visiting from Russia. The new Bolshevik district was only a few blocks south of the heart of the Russian colony, to which Lenin and his followers regularly returned to conduct agitation. At the same time, it offered the sense of privacy and exclusivity that the party craved.105 This community would evolve into a Bolshevik concrete utopia, allowing the faction to live the revolutionary lifestyles that defined its new ideological program. A canteen attached to political club operated by Lepeshinskii and his wife became the nerve center of Bolshevik life in Geneva. Each night, after venturing out to conduct agitational work, the faction’s members reconvened at the club to sing revolutionary songs and to listen to Lenin’s lectures on Marxism.106 The Bolshevik museum and library, which amassed a collection of 10,000 books and

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

175

Figure 6.3  A Bolshevik cartoon depicting Geneva’s Mensheviks as tsarist bureaucrats. Plekhanov sits behind the desk, Martov smokes in foreground, Trotsky is on the telephone. Lepeshinskii, Na povorote.

2,000 party documents, also became crucial institutions. Bonch-​Bruevich, who oversaw the creation of these establishments, called for donations of “materials related to the history of the anarchist, Tolstoyan, student, sectarian, Old Believer, Ukrainophile, Slavophile, and other movements of Russia.”107 The fact that the Bolsheviks were so intent on collecting diverse revolutionary heritage within their exclusive space reveals how eager they were to establish themselves as the curators of Russia’s radical tradition and the utopian heritage of the colonies. The Geneva Bolsheviks, like previous generations of émigrés, cultivated a warm family environment. The Bolshevik family, however, was founded on order and patriarchy—​a sharp contrast to the nonhierarchical forms of intimacy that prior colony residents had cultivated. The family life of the Ul’ianovs in Geneva modeled these values. Lenin and Krupskaia resided with Krupskaia’s mother and Lenin’s sister, who fled abroad after being released from prison in the fall of 1904. The mother-​in-​law and sister performed the bulk of the domestic labor, often with the help of a maid.108 Krupskaia was an intellectual powerhouse who retained the crucial job of managing the faction’s correspondence, but observers also remarked on her subservience to her husband. She referred to him in public by his patronymic, Il’ich, conveying a sense of distance and respect.109 She tolerated his extended affair with the Bolshevik organizer Inessa Armand, who spent several long stints living with the couple, apparently

 

176

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

without exercising similar sexual license herself.110 Indeed, Krupskaia expressed open skepticism about the émigré traditions of free love and women’s autonomy in her remembrances of Vera Zasulich. She paints a rather tragic portrait of Zasulich, who never married, as a lonely old maid who regretted not having a family and lamented that the only consequence of her death would be one less cup of tea served in the Iskra commune.111 The patriarchal culture of the Ul’ianov home was reflected in the Bolshevik colony at large. The early Bolshevik settlement was comprised primarily of married couples equally devoted to the cause, but the women tended to support the party behind the scenes, leaving the men to serve as its public face. Many of the Bolshevik women helped Krupskaia to manage the correspondence; Olga Lepeshinskaia assumed the crucial but conventionally feminine role of cooking for the Bolshevik canteen. When fellow Bolsheviks expressed their admiration for Krupskaia, they often remarked on her feminine graces. Lidiia Fotieva, who assisted Krupskaia with the correspondence, praised her as “even-​keeled, calm, kindly, and always caring, ready to help every comrade.”112 Lunacharskii described her as a “little party mama.”113 In at least one case, Krupskaia quite literally assumed a maternal role: when Gusev and Drabkina returned to Russia to conduct party work, they left their young child in the care of “aunt Nadia.”114 The original Bolsheviks later claimed that they felt great devotion to Lenin from the early days of the party, describing him not only as their unquestioned leader, but as the personification of masculine revolutionary will. One Geneva Bolshevik remembered being struck by Lenin’s firmness and directness, which she contrasted to the weak and equivocal nature of Western radicals.115 Lepeshinskii asserted that Lenin had a near-​hypnotic effect on his listeners, causing them to forget about the “the skloki of Geneva . . . about Martov’s hysteria, about the self-​worshipping madness of Trotsky the narcissist, about the Talmudic contradictions of Aksel’rod.”116 Another old Bolshevik recalled how party activists ordered grenadine when they visited cafés—​a fact that amused waiters, since the drink was usually consumed by children. Lenin alone ordered beer, another sign of his fatherly role and patriarchal power.117 These paeans to Lenin’s revolutionary charisma should be read with skepticism, given that many were written in the 1920s as part of a state-​sponsored project to create a personality cult around Lenin. But even the enemies of the Bolshevik leader agreed that he enjoyed unusual power over his followers. “No one dared to joke, or to give him a friendly tap on the shoulder,” recalled one former Bolshevik who left the party before 1905. “It was as if an invisible barrier separated him from his party comrades, and I never saw anyone overcome it.”118 Aksel’rod described his former acolyte as a dictator whose behavior produced a “very simple copy or caricature of the bureaucratic-​autocratic system of our Minister of the Interior.”119 Even Lenin’s most impassioned enemies grudgingly

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

177

admitted that he had transformed the terms of émigré life. As Parvus, a newly minted Menshevik, wrote to Aksel’rod, “Lenin endlessly rings in your ears, Leninism sits in your heads, and no matter what anyone says to you, you can only comprehend it as pro or contra Lenin.”120 Parvus’s observation was incisive, for even as the Mensheviks denounced Lenin as a bearer of division and chaos, they emulated some of his tactics. Although some Mensheviks hoped to reach a compromise with Lenin, the faction’s leaders assumed a provocative course of their own. Trotsky deemed Lenin a “Jacobin,” complaining that he had embarked on a path toward violence and dictatorship.121 Lenin happily embraced the moniker, insisting that “Jacobin” simply meant “revolutionary Social Democrat.”122 Martov responded to “One Step Forward” with scorn and personal mockery, authoring a pamphlet called “Forward or Back: In Lieu of a Funeral Speech.”123 The Mensheviks engaged in vigorous agitation that aimed to win uncommitted Geneva residents to their side, and they founded their own exclusive institutions, including a club in the heart of the colony.124 It was becoming increasingly difficult for Russians in Geneva to remain aloof from the conflict, which had clarified the contrasting characters of the two factions while retaining the classic attributes of an émigré skloka. Indeed, most of those who chose sides in this period admitted that personal predilections and emotional responses superseded ideological considerations. Fedor Dan, Lidiia’s husband, reportedly chose the Mensheviks after Lenin showed him a dossier containing information about the sexual peccadillos of his rivals; although Lenin thought that this aggressive tactic would win Dan to his side, it backfired in this case.125 One Bolshevik activist admitted that he chose Lenin’s camp because his émigré nemesis had become a devoted Menshevik.126 The arbitrary nature of these decisions made factional affiliations extremely fluid, and many participants in these debates would ultimately change their allegiances. However, the mutability of these camps, when combined with the dialogic relationship they had established in the close quarters of the Geneva colony, rendered encounters between the two sides explosive. Confrontations often resulted in bar brawls and other forms of physical violence.127 Factional warfare severed long-​time friendships, estranged siblings, and broke up marriages.128 Some Geneva residents concluded that the most sensible option was simply to avoid each other: a Bolshevik and a Menshevik approaching each other on the street would cross to opposite sides.129 Rumors of the rift that had begun in London and subsequently consumed the Geneva colony traveled quickly through the radical diaspora. Party activists residing outside Geneva traveled to the city and attempted to clarify the stakes of the debate. However, most returned home convinced that the schism revolved more around personal conflicts inscrutable to outsiders that it did around

 

178

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

ideology. RSDRP workers in Russia began to avoid contacts with Geneva, hoping to insulate themselves from the city’s toxic “factional spirit” (kruzhkovskii dukh).130 But before long, the city’s epic skloki infiltrated émigré networks that stretched across borders. Both factions dispatched agitators to other colonies, where they were tasked with establishing partisan libraries, schools, labor bureaus, and mutual defense funds, and infiltrating local workers’ organizations. Paris boasted a particularly active Menshevik club, whose fiery female leader insisted that Lenin’s ideas threatened “not only our party, but the Russian revolution and the Russian workers’ movement.”131 Lenin’s efforts to reform the party and to overcome the dysfunctions of émigré communities produced the most serious internecine conflict that exile communities had yet seen—​“a battle to the death between formerly intimate political comrades,” in the words of Bonch-​Bruevich.132 It is certainly conceivable that the war that had consumed Geneva, the capital of Russian Marxism, would have eventually exhausted itself—​or destroyed that city’s colony altogether. However, an entirely unanticipated event soon intervened, heightening the stakes of the colonies’ skloki and endowing them with new meaning.

Revolution and Skloki One morning in January 1905, Bolshevik typesetters were completing the latest edition of their newspaper. Suddenly, they heard the news boys in the street cry out: “Revolution in Russia!” The Bolsheviks rushed into the street and jostled with the other émigrés attempting to obtain a newspaper. The previous day, they learned, hundreds of thousands of workers had taken to the streets of St. Petersburg to petition the tsar for political reform. The tsarist authorities had called in troops, who opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds.133 The early reportage on the incident, which predicted that the massacre would plunge Russia into revolution, proved prescient. Over the course of the year to come, peasants, workers, and the intelligentsia would mobilize in pursuit of political change. By October, an empire-​wide general strike wrested major concessions from the tsar, including the convocation of an elected parliament. As the dramatic events of the year unfolded, colony residents struggled to keep up with the news: many checked in multiple times a day at émigré canteens, which posted the latest dispatches from Russia on their doors.134 The events in Russia encouraged exiles to overcome their differences, an impulse already evident on the first day that the news reached the colonies. Representatives of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and other parties gathered in Geneva that evening, celebrating and singing revolutionary songs late into the

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

179

night.135 Fotieva, who had been sent to Paris to conduct Bolshevik agitation in that city, described a similar atmosphere there, which culminated in a pro-​ revolutionary rally of some 10,000 at the Trocadero.136 The new spirit of fraternity and cooperation outlasted the immediate shock of the massacre. Bundists who had cut off relations with Russian Marxists after the Second Party Congress began to reappear at RSDRP meetings in Geneva.137 The Berlin circle that had coalesced around Iskra discussed the possibility of cooperating with the SRs, PPS, and the Bund.138 Gradually, political activity moved out of partisan clubs and into city streets. Large gatherings held in squares tabled discussion of the most controversial issues that divided émigrés, instead focusing on the pressing need for political change in their homeland.139 The renewed sense of focus and unity also rekindled efforts to create institutions capable of transcending narrow partisan interests. In both Paris and Bern, émigrés organized free peoples’ universities.140 In Berlin and Paris, they founded nonpartisan clubs and revolutionary museums, aspiring to unite a “disunified and scattered Russian population.”141 Meanwhile, émigrés organized to provide direct assistance to comrades in Russia. Smuggling routes that had once imported illegal literature into the empire now carried arms; at least one London organization offered instruction in bomb-​building and exported the products of these lessons to Russia.142 The most elaborate scheme to traffic weapons to Russia was devised by the Bolshevik Litvinov, who posed as an Ecuadorian diplomat to purchase heavy armaments from several European nations. Although the yacht carrying these weapons ran aground in the Black Sea, he managed to redirect some of his purchases through overland smuggling routes.143 Many colony residents decided that they could not bear to watch the events of 1905 from afar. Trotsky was among the first to return to Russia. Passing through Berlin on his way east, he met with the Menshevik Parvus, with whom he authored a tract arguing that the bourgeoisie could not be trusted to see the revolution to fruition and urging workers to seize power for themselves. Foreshortening the revolutionary process described by Marx, this idea would become known as “permanent revolution.” When Trotsky arrived in St. Petersburg, he began to work within newly formed workers’ councils, or Soviets, to prepare proletarians for this task.144 Other émigrés soon followed Trotsky on his journey east. Litvinov, Lunacharskii, and Zinoviev returned to establish a Bolshevik newspaper and workers’ committees.145 Over the course of the fall and summer, Martov and the Dans returned to their homeland, as did members of the Bund Central Committee and émigré SRs.146 Lenin eventually returned as well, but only in November, after the revolutionary wave had already crested. In the first half of 1905, his attention had been focused exclusively on planning the party congress that convened that summer.

 

180

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

In addition to encouraging émigrés to prioritize practical action over factional squabbling, the revolution offered them an opportunity to reframe their message to Western audiences. They founded new organizations that aimed to educate the public about conditions in Russia and to advocate for the victims of the tsarist regime at home and abroad.147 Drawing attention to the abuses of the autocracy, they challenged the morality of international police cooperation and the French and British rapprochements with Russia.148 One of the most effective émigré communicators of the 1905 period was Vladimir Burtsev, the celebrity refugee who had been entrapped by Scotland Yard in 1897. In 1906, Burtsev made contact with a disgruntled Okhrana agent who began to leak information about the organization’s operations and network of informants. On the basis of these tips, Burtsev managed to reconstruct the activities of the police within the colonies and to unveil multiple agents provocateurs. Burtsev’s most explosive revelations came in 1909, when he announced that the Paris bomb plots of 1890 had been orchestrated by Rachkovskii and that the man now running the Foreign Agency of the Okhrana was none other than the provocateur Landesen.149 The new political circumstances and reinvigorated outreach efforts of the émigrés mended their strained relationships with Europeans. In Britain, radical activists such as Harry Hyndman, Isabella Ford, and George Bernard Shaw, among others, spoke at meetings rallying support for the revolutionary cause.150 Some British radicals even abetted émigré gun-​running schemes.151 Vorwärts, the organ of the SPD, vigorously defended Russian revolutionaries active in Germany and drew attention to their cause.152 French unions and syndicates were also vocal in their support for the Russians—​and in their opposition to the republic’s alliance with the tsar. “We only recognize one alliance: the international alliance of workers,” emerged as a common refrain of mass meetings and a popular slogan featured on posters that appeared in industrial cities.153 Although leftists were most sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, liberal attitudes toward the exiles also improved in the 1905 period. Voluntary organizations and human rights groups across the continent passed resolutions and raised funds in support of the Russians.154 In France, outrage over Burtsev’s revelations about Okhrana interference in France resulted in a parliamentary interpellation.155 Across the Channel, public outcry against a visit by British naval vessels to Russia planned for the summer of 1906 resulted in the cancellation of the exchange.156 However, the spirit of solidarity that accompanied the 1905 revolution was short-​lived. Lenin’s single-​minded focus on preparing for the party congress allowed him to secure a Bolshevik majority, but this accomplishment prompted the Mensheviks to boycott the event.157 Furthermore, developments on the ground in Russia drove the two factions further apart. Lenin argued that Russia

 



“The Par t y o f Ex treme O p pos i ti on”

181

had already plunged into civil war and advocated for any tactic that would hasten the fall of the regime, from the insurrection that Moscow workers launched in late 1905 to the use of revolutionary expropriation.158 Warning that a bourgeois revolution would only benefit the forces of reaction, he explained that Marxists should settle for nothing less than “the revolutionary-​democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” This dictatorship could only be established through violence, not through “institutions of one kind or another, established ‘legally’ or ‘through peaceful means.’ ”159 Defying the Bolsheviks’ characteristically maximalist stance, the Mensheviks took an Orthodox Marxist approach to the revolution, arguing that the immediate goal should be the establishment of a bourgeois-​democratic provisional government. Only after years of preparation in the Soviet and in trade unions would Russian proletarians be prepared to seize power.160 If the revolution of 1905 had initially encouraged émigrés to unite, it eventually hardened the skloki of the London conference and Geneva colony into opposing ideological platforms. Furthermore, the communicative networks that had been strengthened over the course of the year became conduits for the transmission of émigré conflicts. Lepeshinskii’s scandalous anti-​Menshevik cartoons began to appear in Russia, and the culture of personal attacks that had fragmented the Geneva colony became part of revolutionary discourse there.161 At a November 1905 meeting of the St. Petersburg Soviet, Lenin, who had just arrived from Geneva, delivered a rousing speech urging workers to begin an armed revolt against the government. Russian workers, he insisted, now had the opportunity to revive “the spirit of the [Paris] Commune” and to complete its unfinished revolutionary agenda. But what one observer most vividly recalled about this speech was not Lenin’s denunciation of the tsarist state or of bourgeois society, but the vicious assaults he levied on Martov and Trotsky, whom he accused of peddling a “spirit of capitulation” and revealing their “impotence through their loud and empty words.”162 One Marxist who came of age in this period recalled that even at the height of the revolutionary activity of 1905, partisan identifications in many corners of Russia had remained weak. In his provincial hometown, Marxists often cooperated with the SRs, and members of the RSDRP did not distinguish between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.163 By the end of the revolutionary period, however, this was starting to change, as local committees in Russia began to join the émigré committees in aligning themselves with one faction or another. By 1907, the Bolsheviks claimed some 46,000 members in Russia, the Mensheviks, 38,000; the Bundists and Polish socialists some 25,000 each.164 Decades after the 1903 London congress, one observer who had witnessed the birth of Bolshevism and Menshevism described them as conjoined twins: “Each

 

182

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

expressed (and, as is always the case in a fight, in a one-​sided and often exaggerated form) one of the two equally vital and indispensable tendencies of the workers’ movement in the conditions of the expanding revolutionary fight against the Tsarist autocracy.”165 At the time, however, émigrés were unable to recognize or acknowledge the factions’ shared origins or common strivings. Blinded by the narcissism of small differences bred in the claustrophobic environment of the colonies, they could only focus on assuring victory for their own side. The 1905 revolution removed the twins vying for control of the RSDRP from their native habitat of the colonies and thrust them onto the world-​historical stage. As émigrés returned home, their horizons expanded; as Russian workers and peasants mobilized for revolution, they integrated themselves into a rapidly expanding radical diaspora. But if the increasing entanglement of the émigré colonies and the homeland their residents had left behind at first appeared a positive beacon, its downsides eventually became clear. The revolution offered Russian activists the opportunity to join their émigré comrades’ efforts to realize a better future, but it also intensified the interpersonal violence between two offspring of the Geneva colony who had come to think of themselves as mortal enemies.

 

7

Ou-​topos?

In the spring of 1906, a steamship departed the Finnish port city of Hanko bound for Stockholm. Aboard were dozens of Russian Marxists traveling to the fourth party congress of the RSDRP. The political climate had changed dramatically since the conference the previous year, which the Bolsheviks had organized at the height of the 1905 revolution. Russia’s revolutionary wave was quickly receding:  the Moscow workers’ uprising had been brutally crushed, and government repression forced radical parties back into the underground, producing dramatic contractions in their membership. The mood aboard the ship was accordingly dark. Members of rival factions began to quarrel before they left port, blaming each other for the failures of the revolution and arguing about the RSDRP’s future. Shortly after embarkation, the ship encountered mechanical problems that caused it to list from side to side, prompting the passengers to scurry for life vests and rafts. One traveler likened the distressed vessel to the divided and demoralized party, whose own lurches from left to right prompted its members to contemplate abandoning ship.1 The metaphor also applied to émigré communities more broadly. By 1907, the major political figures who had returned to Russia in 1905 had once again settled abroad, joined by tens of thousands of rank and file activists who had been radicalized by the revolution and could no longer live safely in Russia. Few of the post-​1905 émigrés carried the hopeful aspirations that earlier travelers had brought to Europe. Sobered by the brutal reaction unfolding in Russia, they were also driven to despair by the deepening crisis of colony life. As Nadezhda Krupskaia, who returned abroad with Lenin in 1907, put it, “Emigration was now one hundred times more difficult than it had been before the revolution. Émigré struggles [emigrantshchina] and skloki were endless.”2 Like the Stockholm-​bound ship, the colonies ultimately proved unable to contain the explosive conflicts they had produced. The chaos within the RSDRP—​and the enmity between Russian Marxists and other parties—​ destroyed communal organizations and exile networks. Five decades of émigré Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0008

 

184

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

experiments terminated in ou-​topos, no place. This “no place” was not merely a metaphor that described the implosion of the colonies’ concrete utopias. It was also a spatial phenomenon, resulting in the dissolution of the physical spaces and communities that had nourished ambitious social experiments. As the colonies unraveled, émigré schemes to transform humanity became increasingly abstract and detached from quotidian experience. Nevertheless, everyday encounters continued to influence the evolution of radical politics. Even as rival groups drifted further apart, they moved in tandem, watching and reacting to each other. Meanwhile, intensifying conflict with European host societies remained a major influence on Russian radical thought. As the crises of the colonies compounded, the Bolsheviks proved particularly adept at transforming them into opportunity, drawing on the discontents of life abroad to develop new radical alternatives. If the experience of exile had become more dystopian than ever before, it remained a source of ideological innovation and reinvention.

The RSDRP at War Russian Marxists entered the post-​1905 period demoralized and divided. The Bolsheviks argued among themselves about whether or not they should participate in the imperial parliament that had been created in the midst of the 1905 revolution. The Mensheviks were more fractured still, engaging in fierce debates about the revolutionary process. The faction’s right wing, led by Aksel’rod, Potresov, and Plekhanov, insisted that the violent revolutionary activity of 1905 had alienated the bourgeoisie, forestalling the liberal revolution that necessarily preceded the socialist one. The trio eventually concluded that the party should liquidate its illegal activities and work through purely legal processes, leading Lenin to derisively describe them as “liquidators.” The party’s left wing rallied behind the doctrine of “permanent revolution” devised by Trotsky and Parvus (though both activists insisted that they were “independent” Social Democrats, declining to formally join the faction). Fedor Dan and Martov stood between these two extremes, arguing for the historical necessity of the bourgeois revolution, while remaining committed to the radical struggle against the Russian state.3 The Bund faced an even more serious crisis, having experienced a precipitous decline in influence in the aftermath of the revolution. This was a result of the attacks it had suffered at the hands of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as well as the rise of new Jewish political movements in Russia. Labor Zionism (Poale Tsion) and a nonterritorial autonomist movement, which sought to preserve the vitality of Yiddish culture through legal cultural work, emerged as major

 



O u -​to p o s ?

185

rivals to the Bund, even as the anarchists, PPS, and the RSDRP continued to compete for the loyalty of Jewish workers. In addition, the Bund was forced to grapple with the traumatic aftermath of the 800 pogroms that ravaged the empire in 1905.4 The party’s leaders split about how to respond to these challenges, with some arguing that the party should focus on Jewish self-​defense, and others advocating legal cultural work.5 Acknowledging the impossibility of overcoming the many divisions in Russian Marxism, the Menshevik leadership aspired to create a “big tent” party that tolerated doctrinal differences while maintaining a united front. This approach produced a major achievement at the Menshevik-​dominated Stockholm congress of 1906: the Bund’s reentry into the RSDRP. The conference was less successful, however, at reconciling the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The conference delegate who recounted his ill-​fated voyage to Stockholm recalled that the members of the two factions inhabited “two separate worlds” at the conference, staying at separate hotels, stubbornly defending their own positions at plenary sessions, and preserving their own organizational centers.6 The Fifth Congress, held in 1907, was even more fraught. After diplomatic pressure from Russia, the Danish government, which had initially authorized the Russians to gather in Copenhagen, retracted the invitation. The organizers hurriedly relocated to London, but the move left many attendees in severe financial distress. More than a few, including Joseph Stalin, a young Bolshevik who traveled from Baku to attend the conference, had no choice but to seek shelter in the notorious flophouses of Whitechapel.7 Meanwhile, the now-​routine police cooperation between Britain and Russia meant that agents tracked every move of the conference delegates. Indeed, one of Scotland Yard’s multilingual operatives claimed to have eavesdropped on the debates of Lenin and Trotsky by disguising himself as a waiter.8 During the conference, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks engaged in open combat. Lenin charged that the Menshevik platform, which called for the use of parliamentary politics, workers’ clubs, and peoples’ universities to prepare the proletariat for revolution, was proof that the faction failed “to support revolutionary democracy and preferred the liberals.” The Mensheviks retorted that Lenin’s disdain for all features of bourgeois democracy—​a crucial developmental stage in Marx’s revolutionary scenario—​proved that he was not a real Marxist.9 Although such confrontations were not new in émigré history, their intensity evoked unprecedented despair. Anzhelika Balabanova, the Italy-​based organizer, remarked that the vigorous debates that she had witnessed at conferences of German and Italian Social Democrats had always concluded with the two sides reaching “a sense of sufficient unity on certain fundamental concepts to provide an effective working alliance against a common enemy.” Her Russian comrades, by contrast, demonstrated

 

186

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

an “all-​absorbing, almost fanatical, spirit of factionalism that seemed capable of rending [the conference] apart at almost any moment.”10 A bitter joke of the era mused that arrested Bolsheviks and Mensheviks could be abandoned by their jailers, since they would spend all their time arguing with each other instead of trying to escape.11 Perhaps because the skloki of party conferences had become so destructive, the rival factions initially kept their distance from each other when they returned to European exile. The Mensheviks claimed Paris as their headquarters, founding a party school and a newspaper there.12 Lenin returned to Geneva, where he founded a new Bolshevik newspaper. But in 1908 Lenin opted for a more confrontational approach, moving to Paris and bringing the party’s archives, flags, and leading activists with him.13 Working to overcome their late start in organizing that city’s Russians, the Bolsheviks soon caught up to their rivals, thanks to the efforts of Aleksandr Shliapnikov (one of the few party activists of proletarian origins) and Solomon Lozovskii, a trade unionist who had joined the party in 1905. Both arrived in Paris in 1908 and immediately began infiltrating the labor unions and mutual aid associations of the Pletzl to attract workers to the Bolshevik cause.14 Confrontations that occurred on city streets, like those during party conferences, were uncomfortable but ideologically productive, allowing the two factions to delineate distinctive platforms and patterns of collective behavior. These encounters established the Mensheviks, who consistently argued that the revolution must pass through the developmental stages described by Marx, as the more Orthodox Marxists. At the same time, the Mensheviks proved more tolerant of heterodoxy. To the extent that they advanced a single party line at all, it centered on the goal of “creating an independent, politically conscious working class.”15 The Mensheviks’ relatively cordial relationship with European Social Democrats (Aksel’rod considered Kautsky one of his oldest friends) also played a crucial role in defining the faction’s identity. Lidiia Dan remarked that her party thought of itself as the “most European of the Russian socialists,” aspiring to emulate continental comrades in creating an effective party capable of exercising parliamentary power.16 The Bolsheviks, by contrast, styled themselves as rigid, uncompromising ultra-​radicals. As Nikolai Bukharin, who joined the party in 1906 and arrived abroad in 1911, put it, “The severe discipline of Bolshevism . . . the extreme uniformity of its views, and the centralization of all its ranks have always been the most characteristic features of our party.”17 The establishment of this Bolshevik hard line depended on dialogic encounters that allowed party members to juxtapose themselves to their rivals. Lenin, for example, proved his own masculine resolve and radical credentials by contrasting himself to “flabby-​minded” Mensheviks and sentimental European socialists. Continuing to argue for the

 



O u -​to p o s ?

187

Figure 7.1  Menshevik comrades in Switzerland, 1904. Courtesy of Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Boris Sapir Papers, Box 42, Folder “P. A. Garvi.”

value of schism, he insisted that confrontations between these opposing currents in socialist culture would eventually extirpate weak elements from the party, thereby strengthening its fortunes.18 At the same time, the Bolsheviks demonstrated skill at responding to political exigencies. In spite of Lenin’s insistence on the importance of ideological purity, he maintained that a revolutionary party must nimbly adjust to the needs of the moment. Indeed, he often framed opportunism as a natural expression of Bolshevik extremism. A case in point is the Bolsheviks’ use of expropriation, a tactic that had been outlawed by the Menshevik and Bundist majority at the London conference in response to its frequent use in 1905. Shortly after this

 

188

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

decision was reached, a secret summit of émigré Bolsheviks convened to discuss a new plot. Ignoring the RSDRP directive, it authorized a group of Caucasian Bolsheviks, including Stalin, to rob a bank in Tiflis. The heist succeeded, netting some 300,000 rubles, and the funds were smuggled abroad. Ultimately, however, several Bolsheviks, including Litvinov, were arrested when they appeared at European banks and attempted to exchange banknotes with identifying serial numbers.19 In the wake of the Tiflis incident, a wave of Bolshevik expropriations swept the colonies. In 1907, members of the faction carried out a midday bank robbery in Montreux that killed four. In 1908, a group of Bolshevik students were arrested in Lausanne and charged with attempting to extort funds from a wealthy oil baron of Russian origin.20 Mensheviks and Bundists vociferously denounced expropriation as an “anarcho-​Blanquist” perversion of Marxist ideology.21 The Bolsheviks, however, reveled in this characterization, which drew a contrast between their style and that of the “soft” and “unprincipled” Mensheviks—​the faction of “agreements and compromises.”22 Some Bolsheviks grumbled that Martov had come a long way from the days when “he used to be an Iskrist”; others complained that the sole guiding principle of Menshevism was its pathological fear of “anything that could scare away the liberal bourgeoisie.”23 Collisions over the national question provided another venue in which the rival factions defined their opposing cultures. By 1905, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks had evolved into “an international in miniature,” engaging a diverse coalition of activists.24 Revolutionaries of Jewish origin—​including Martov, Aksel’rod, and Dan—​played a conspicuous role in the Menshevik leadership, and the rapprochement with the Bund further consolidated the faction’s reputation as a welcoming place for Jews. Furthermore, Mensheviks made great inroads in attracting Georgian members in Russia and in emigration, who accounted for one-​fourth of the Menshevik delegation to the Fourth Party congress in 1906 and one-​third at the Fifth a year later.25 The original Bolsheviks, by contrast, were mostly ethnic Russians, although some of Lenin’s oldest and most trusted comrades—​including Litvinov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—​came from Jewish families. In the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, the Bolsheviks also attracted contingents of Caucasians (such as the Georgian Stalin) and Latvians.26 The ongoing debate about the relationship between nationalism and Marxism became even more intense in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution. During the unrest, many Jewish, Ukrainian, and Caucasian socialists had treated the quest for national emancipation as part and parcel of the broader struggle for social revolution. Even after the revolution, their influence remained pronounced in the RSDRP. Swayed by their agitation, the Mensheviks, who had taken a strongly assimilationist stance between 1903 and 1905, grew more sympathetic to the notion that non-​Russians should enjoy some form of cultural autonomy.27 Lenin,

 



O u -​to p o s ?

189

by contrast, took a characteristically hardline stance, insisting that nationalism was an inimical vestige of capitalist society. He argued that Marxists should extract from each culture “only its democratic and socialist elements,” with the goal of integrating the population of the Russian empire into an international community of workers.28 Although Lenin criticized “separatist nationalists” from many backgrounds, he reserved special bile for the “schism of Jewish separatism”—​a position that reflected his longstanding antipathy for the Bund as well as his belief that Jews were “mainly traders” who preferred to live as an isolated caste. The liberation of Russia’s Jews, he argued, depended on their “merging [sblizhenie] with the democratic and socialist movement in the countries of the diaspora”—​a process that would eventually “expel Jews from the ranks of nations.”29 The activists of Jewish origin who gravitated to the Bolshevik party took this task upon themselves, expurgating any mention of their heritage from their biographies and plunging themselves into a universalist struggle for emancipation.30 In addition to using their “hard” assimilationist stance to distinguish themselves from their rivals, the Bolsheviks employed it as a cudgel. In a polemical summary of the Fifth Party Congress, Stalin insinuated that the Mensheviks’ putative lack of devotion to the revolutionary cause was a result of the faction’s heavily Jewish membership. “The statistics show that the majority of the Menshevik fraction consists of Jews (not including, of course, the Bundists), then come the Georgians, then the Russians.” By contrast, he claimed, “the great majority of the Bolshevik faction are Russians.” “This is why one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (Comrade Aleksinskii, I  believe) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction, and the Bolsheviks are truly Russian; we Bolsheviks wouldn’t mind organizing a pogrom in the party.”31 Stalin’s efforts to pass off his invocation of antisemitic violence as a joke (and a second-​hand one, at that) were disingenuous; he would have been perfectly aware of the incendiary history of the “Jewish question” in radical circles. Rather, his dismissal of the Mensheviks as a “Jewish” faction was a deliberate effort to establish Bolshevik dominance through humiliating and mocking the faction’s rivals. Lenin used a similar tactic during a debate with the SR Viktor Chernov at a Paris café. Chernov remarked that if Lenin ever managed to win power, he would hang the SRs. Without missing a beat, Lenin responded that after he eliminated the SRs, he would kill the Mensheviks too.32 This crude rhetorical violence, which would become a hallmark of Bolshevik politics, was another byproduct of the intimate setting of the colonies. It required the aggressor to have personal knowledge of his adversary’s vulnerabilities, and it reflected a level of animus that only became only possible after years of intense conflict in close quarters. Indeed, one Menshevik sympathizer speculated that it was precisely Lenin’s “shared past” with his Marxist rivals that explained his

 

190

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

rage at the Mensheviks’ unwillingness to recognize him as the sole “interpreter of the will of history.”33 At the same time, the Bolsheviks’ mean-​spirited aggression provided a theatrical means for party members to distance themselves from rivals by denigrating and villainizing them. The dialogic conflict between émigré Bolsheviks and their adversaries produced an unresolvable paradox. On the one hand, each side needed the other as a foil to define its own ideas and cultural style. On the other, each confrontation between rival factions drove them further apart, rendering their reconciliation more and more unimaginable. At the Fifth Party Congress in 1912, the Bolsheviks officially severed their relationship with the Mensheviks. In the aftermath of the break, Lenin penned an open letter to Paris’ Russian colony. The letter alluded to Menshevik protests against the Bolsheviks’ conduct, but it did not explicitly acknowledge a schism. Instead, Lenin warned Paris residents that they should not “accord the slightest importance to the protests of small groups overseas that have no organizational attachment to the party in Russia.”34 The letter’s very existence is an artifact of the pitched battle that the two sides waged against one another in the colonies. Yet in a single sentence, Lenin denied the battles that had torn the RSDRP apart any significance and transformed the former comrades with whom he had revolutionized Russian Marxism into nonentities.

Dialogic Fracturing Other radical parties in the colonies were engaged in a similarly dialogic process, observing and emulating each other even as they drifted further apart. The multiplication of radical institutions brought about by the intensifying strife within the RSDRP had a profound effect on non-​Marxist parties, challenging them to improve their own partisan infrastructure to keep up with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The SRs, along with Polish, Latvian, and Armenian nationalists, all expanded their networks of workers’ clubs and founded their own newspapers, libraries, and mutual aid associations.35 Even anarchists, who tended to value local activism over central organization, created party superstructures. Rudolf Rocker’s powerful Jewish anarchist group, which retained a strong presence in London’s East End, established an affiliate organization in Berlin.36 Meanwhile, an anarchist group in Switzerland founded a party school of its own.37 Although no group could match the Bolsheviks’ aptitude for revolutionary theatre, many followed that faction’s evolution in more extreme directions. Some anarchists and SRs, for example, adopted the tactic of expropriation, participating in violent extortions and bank robberies. Victor Serge, the anarchist who had been born abroad to émigré parents, landed in a French prison

 



O u -​to p o s ?

191

after his associates carried out one such incident in Paris in 1911—​the first crime committed with the help of an automobile.38 The proprietor of a Russian restaurant in the heart of the Paris colony complained that after he refused several patrons’ requests to loan him money, they simply “expropriated” it.39 Meanwhile, desperate colony residents robbed neighbors who appeared “bourgeois” and announced that they would no longer pay bills to capitalist exploiters.40 Colony residents themselves were the most frequent victims of growing violence. But exiles of Russian origin were also involved in several episodes that compounded European anxieties about them. In 1907, a Russian-​Jewish tailor shot at a crowd from an omnibus at République, explaining to the police who arrested him that he hoped to kill soldiers.41 In 1909, two anarchists robbed a deliveryman in London’s Tottenham neighborhood, leading to a shootout that killed three and injured more than a dozen.42 At a 1909 meeting in Paris attended by Lenin, Martov, and representatives of the Bund, speakers called for French politicians to be assassinated. At least one such plot hatched by radical youth in the Pletzl was foiled by Paris police.43 The most spectacular explosion of violence related to the colonies occurred in London in the winter of 1910–​11. In December, a gang of Latvian revolutionaries who frequented an anarchist club on Jubilee Street robbed a jewelry store in the Houndsditch district. They shot at the police who pursued them, killing three agents. After a manhunt that lasted for several weeks, the suspects were finally tracked to a warehouse on the East End’s Sidney Street. At the orders of Home Secretary Winston Churchill, combined police and military forces stormed the building. A fire fight ensued, and a conflagration consumed the warehouse. By the time the siege was over, several of the conspirators and a fireman had been killed. The survivors were arrested, tried, and imprisoned.44 Exiles who lamented the violent turn in colony politics often suggested that the growing chaos in their communities was the result of police provocation. There is some evidence to support this charge. The archives of the political police confirm that every radical group in emigration had been thoroughly infiltrated by double agents by the early twentieth century.45 Evno Azev, the most successful and notorious agent provocateur in imperial Russia, had been recruited as an impecunious student in Germany in the 1890s. He went on to play a crucial role in the negotiations that led to the creation of the SR party and remained a prominent leader of that group who moved between the colonies and Russia.46 Double agents sat on the Bund’s Central Committee and served as the secretary of the RSDRP group in Lausanne.47 In spite of Lenin’s obsession with konspiratsiia, his inner circle had been infiltrated since the Iskra days. Roman Malinowski, the party’s watchdog on police infiltration and one of Lenin’s closest confidantes between 1912 and 1914, was an Okhrana agent. So was the leader of the Bolshevik émigré organization, who served as a delegate to the Fifth Party Congress.48

 

192

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

At several key junctures, double agents in leadership roles intentionally led their parties toward more radical and violent measures. In the fierce debates about the legitimacy of terror that divided the SRs, Azev consistently argued for the transformative power of violence and played a central role in planning assassinations. Terrorist Boris Savinkov recalled that Azev’s sangfroid made a tremendous impression on other members of the party, who regarded him as a demigod.49 A Bolshevik double agent was present at the secret party conference that blessed the Tiflis expropriation, and three of the thirteen Bolshevik delegates to the 1912 conference that confirmed the schism of the party were working for the Okhrana, including Malinowski.50 Vladimir Burtsev, the famed unmasker of agents provocateurs, argued that Lenin’s extremism suggested that he was among them.51 Although police infiltration certainly played some role in forging the maximalist politics of the colonies, it was not the only cause of their travails. In fact, the preexisting dysfunctions of exile communities unwittingly allowed provocateurs to operate with impunity. Whenever a colony resident was accused of being a double agent, his party comrades rushed to his defense, presenting his radicalism as proof positive of his revolutionary mettle. When Burtsev’s investigations uncovered evidence that incriminated Azev, the former was called into an émigré honor court, which accused him of provocation.52 The battle between the defenders of Azev and those of Burtsev was so intense that at least one SR committed suicide as a result of the confrontation.53 A few years later, the Mensheviks charged Malinowski with provocation, but Lenin defended him vigorously. Accusing the Mensheviks of a shameful attempt to cripple their rivals, Lenin insisted that Malinowski’s accusers be punished for their false allegations.54 If rising violence and police interference plagued revolutionary parties, so too did the explosive “Jewish question.” The unresolved debates surrounding this issue remained irritants for many radical groups, spurring defections and personal conflicts. Take, for example, the case of Grigorii Aronson, a young activist who had come to revolutionary consciousness thanks to Iskra. In his first years of revolutionary activity, Aronson had been a staunch internationalist who supported Lenin’s universalist stance. Even after the devastating pogroms of 1905, he continued to see the “Jewish question” as first and foremost a problem of class relations. Eventually, however, Aronson grew disillusioned by the Bolsheviks’ single-​minded focus on the scourge of Jewish separatism, complaining that it demanded compromises from Jews that were not made of other groups. “It began to become clear to me that cosmopolitans are recruited only from the Jewish milieu, that there is no equivalent movement among my Russian friends,” he wrote. Encouraged by the Bund’s efforts to counteract the

 



O u -​to p o s ?

193

threat of anti-​Jewish violence and to realize Jews’ legitimate demands for self-​ determination, he joined that party in 1908.55 Aronson’s conversion testified to the widening gulf that divided those who insisted on the need to recognize the special burdens of Russian Jews from those who saw complete assimilation as the only path forward. This conflict led to the further deterioration of the relationship between Zionists and Russian radicals, which had grown strained even before 1905. The experience of writer Yosef Chaim Brenner, who arrived in Whitechapel in 1904, provides a glimpse into this process of alienation. Like many Zionist activists in emigration, Brenner operated in a pan-​imperial, revolutionary milieu. He frequented Russian revolutionary libraries and worked as a Russian-​Yiddish translator for the Bund, anarchists, and SRs. However, he grew increasingly disenchanted with the “mockery and sarcasm” with which intellectuals assimilated into Russian culture treated nationally conscious Jews. A novel that he wrote in these years, Out of the Depths, explores this process of alienation by focusing on the friendship between the Jewish protagonist and the Russian Marxist comrade with whom he works in an East End printing shop. Over the course of the novel, the protagonist is pained to discover that the Russian is a “man of brutal force, without a trace of spirituality.” By the end of the work, the two become completely estranged.56 Chaim Weizmann described a similar sense of alienation from his Russian comrades in the early twentieth century. “My resentment of Lenin and Plekhanov and the arrogant Trotzky was provoked by the contempt with which they treated any Jew who was moved by the fate of his people and animated by a love of its history and tradition,” he wrote. “They could not understand why a Russian Jew should want to be anything but a Russian. They stamped as unworthy, as intellectually backward, as chauvinistic and immoral, the desire of any Jew to occupy himself with the sufferings and destiny of Jewry.”57 Four decades after Jewish intellectuals had begun to emancipate themselves in exile, efforts to use the utopian energy of the colonies to create a better future for Russia’s Jews appeared to have reached a dead end. Activists of Jewish origin had become a vital part of the revolutionary diaspora, accounting for some 25 of the 36 representatives (nearly 70 percent) at a 1914 summit of émigré leaders that brought together Bundists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, and Zionist parties, among others. Nevertheless, Jewish activists continued to face accusations from comrades that they were self-​interested and disloyal. Although some émigrés escaped from this impasse by embracing the Bolsheviks’ stringent universalism, others experienced this project as an assault on their identity and traditions. These intractable disputes made contacts between those who held opposing views increasingly fraught. One émigré summit that convened in 1914 immediately descended into chaos after Zionists objected to an “internationalist”

 

194

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

speaker describing the assembled delegates as “Russian” radicals; the ethnonym, argued the Zionists, was an insult to the Jewish nation.58 That same year, an international meeting of Russian students abruptly disbanded in the face of protests that erupted when the organizers refused to convene a break-​out session on the special challenges faced by Jewish students.59 To escape from the discord, exiles retreated into partisan clubs and reading rooms, engaging less often with those from rival parties.60 This process of fracturing was also reflected in the colonies’ physical space, as different factions gravitated to different locales. After a brief sojourn in Paris, SR leader Viktor Chernov ultimately moved to a coastal village in Italy, which became the new headquarters of that party.61 In 1912, when a wave of strikes erupted in Russia, Lenin moved to Krakow to be closer to the Russian border. The editors of his newspaper and close friends such as Kamenev and Zinoviev joined him there, making that city the new Bolshevik intellectual center. Trotsky attracted followers to Berlin and later Vienna, where he published a paper of his own.62 As rival factions grew more exclusive and isolated, their internal divisions became more severe. Ironically, the Bolshevik party, which preached the importance of central organization and party discipline, generated the deepest rifts of all. In 1908–​09, Bogdanov and Lunacharskii staged major challenges to Lenin’s leadership. The former urged Lenin to boycott the imperial parliament after reactionary changes to election laws; the latter complained that the Bolsheviks had neglected the spiritual and philosophical elements of their movement, while also devoting insufficient attention to building a proletarian membership. The pair founded a paper that propagated their views, Vpered! (no relation to Petr Lavrov’s earlier venture with the same title), and they established party schools in Capri and Bologna to train activists working in Russia. Gradually, the Vpered! group expanded its institutional apparatus, creating a club for Bolshevik intellectuals in Paris and another that aimed to educate and organize the workers of the Pletzl.63 Lenin did not take kindly to this critique from the left. He described the Vpered! group as “philosophical scum,” dispatched clandestine agents to spy on its activities, and opened a party school of his own in a Paris suburb.64 However, the threat that the Vperedists posed to Lenin was ultimately mitigated by their own ideological divisions, which ultimately split their organizations into two hostile camps.65 Lenin faced other challenges from the self-​described “practical workers” who operated in the Russian underground and viewed the factionalist spirit of exile culture as an impediment to their organizational efforts. Stalin, who only made brief trips abroad to attend the London congress of 1907 and to visit Lenin in Krakow in 1912, was among the harshest critics of émigré dysfunction. He labeled the feud between Lenin and the Vperedists “a tempest in a teapot,” insisting that “the main thing is the organization of work in Russia.” He went

 



O u -​to p o s ?

195

on to explain: “The history of our party shows that contentious questions are resolved not through debates, but primarily through the course of work, the application of principles.”66 Other Marxist groups suffered from internal rifts as well. The debate between the Mensheviks’ left wing and the liquidators was intense, nearly splitting the party in two on several occasions. Bundists engaged in fierce arguments about the legitimacy of illegal activity. Furthermore, the alliance between the Bund and the Mensheviks proved turbulent, characterized by periods of rapprochement followed by retreat.67 Armenian and Polish Social Democrats splintered, and Rosa Luxemburg’s party (now called the SDKPiL) broke in half; the main branch of the group ultimately aligned with the Mensheviks, while a group of younger activists, led by Karl Radek, sided with the Bolsheviks.68 The centralization of Marxist parties had relegated groups that had once enjoyed important roles in colony life to the sidelines. Several of them vigorously protested. A faction of Caucasian activists within the Menshevik party joined the Bund in arguing for the full cultural autonomy of the empire’s national minorities—​a stance that rankled elder leaders such as Plekhanov.69 Likewise, the Marxist feminist Aleksandra Kollontai pressed for more attention to women’s issues. Approaching the Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders in exile, she urged them to follow the example of the SPD and create women’s bureaus. Both factions, however, rebuffed the suggestion, describing the struggle for women’s rights as a “bourgeois” preoccupation.70 That activists who advocated for the emancipation of marginalized groups found it so difficult to gain traction reveals how profoundly the political culture of the colonies had been transformed. To the extent that their concrete utopias still functioned, they were defined by party leaders from the top down, not by experimentation from the bottom up. Non-​ Marxist parties struggled with similar schisms. In France, police identified at least four distinct groups of Russian anarchists divided by debates about revolutionary theory and tactics.71 After 1905, the SRs fractured into two camps: the so-​called Maximalists insisted that political terror was both acceptable and necessary, while the party majority disavowed violence.72 One disgruntled SR blamed the party’s disintegration on its centralization, which had been necessitated by the organizational advances of the Marxists. These changes, he alleged, had created a “revolutionary dynasty” that encouraged “sycophants and revolutionary careerists.”73 These conflicts severely diminished the organizational capacity of the colonies’ communal infrastructure. Disputes about which parties’ pamphlets should be available in Brussels’ Russian library became so fierce that the institution’s leaders ultimately decided to remove all political literature and to replace it with belles-​lettres.74 A  spirit of “apathy and apoliticism,” reflected most visibly in

 

196

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

flagging attendance at political events, began to supplant the colonies’ tradition of activism.75 A growing number of exiles responded to these stresses by leaving political work behind, acquiring citizenship in their host countries and assimilating into the local population.76 Even major political figures departed from colony life at this juncture: Parvus moved to Istanbul in 1912 and reinvented himself as an arms trader, while the prominent Bundist Arkadii Kremer retired from revolutionary activity.77 By the eve of the First World War, one observer of émigré life pondered whether it was even accurate to speak of “Russian colonies” any longer.78 The impulse to abandon the colonies was particularly pronounced among Zionists, who established new networks and byways. Brenner, for example, left London’s Russian colony for Lemberg, which was a major hub of Zionist activism for Jews from across the Habsburg empire. In 1909, he made Aliyah.79 Weizmann revised his dream for a Zionist university in Europe, seeking to establish it in Palestine instead.80 Zionists preserved the utopian mindset that had guided previous generations of émigrés, pursuing the task of establishing a Jewish homeland with abandon. At the same time, they replicated the colonies’ tradition of factional conflict, engaging in heated debates about whether Hebrew or Yiddish should serve as the common language of the Jewish people.81 At this point, however, their story diverges from that of the Russian revolutionary diaspora. The fracturing of communities, institutions, and networks brought the prefigurative utopias of emigration, which had always been realized through collective practices, to an end. Exiles would continue working to transform humanity, but their dreams tended to be expressed as abstract visions of a new world to be realized in the distant future, not as quotidian praxis. As émigrés’ political visions and everyday lives diverged, maximalism and a propensity for disputation remained some of the few characteristics that still bound them together.

Alienation Becomes Inspiration The unraveling of émigrés’ relationships with their European neighbors accompanied the deterioration of conditions inside the colonies. Each violent incident that involved Russians raised new concerns about the “public dangers” posed by émigrés, undermining the good will that had accompanied the 1905 revolution.82 In the aftermath of the Lausanne expropriation, local commentators lamented that the city’s Russian colony had become “a veritable bomb-​building school.”83 In Berlin, raids that uncovered combustible materials led some German residents to complain that their city was becoming “Russia on

 



O u -​to p o s ?

197

the Spree.”84 As one exasperated Swiss observer wrote to his Russian neighbors, “The revolution isn’t over here, my good men, it’s over there, in Russia. That’s where people are being killed. . . . And that’s where you should be.”85 Of all the violent incidents involving Russians, the Sidney Street Siege produced the greatest anxiety of all, perhaps because it was the first such event to be captured on live film and broadcast in newsreel footage around the world. The investigations that followed the incident shed new light on the dark underbelly of radical culture, documenting the murder of “snitches” in émigré circles and igniting a panic in the popular press about the dangers of heavily armed exiles.86 Anxiety about émigré criminality led to further restrictions in the Russians’ rights. French and German police harassed Russian reading rooms and mutual aid associations, forcing many to close.87 Meanwhile, the authorities in Berlin set a new goal to reduce the city’s Russian population by some 90 percent and conducted mass expulsions of Russian Jews.88 In the aftermath of the Sidney Street siege, British citizens inundated the police with tips about the suspicious behavior of “strange foreigners” and called for police to be armed in order to better defend themselves against gun-​toting exiles.89 In Switzerland and Germany, the authorities implemented new measures to reduce the number of Russian students, introducing cumbersome registration procedures and raising student fees as well as admission standards. By 1910, the activism of German student unions resulted in the implementation of formal quotas limiting Russian enrollment in several German states.90 The easy access to education, open borders, and bountiful civil rights that had once led Russian citizens to see Europe as the fount of freedom had now disappeared across the continent. Still, some Westerners complained that even these new measures remained inadequate. One German commentator argued that the “Russian invasion” necessitated more formal immigration restrictions modeled on Britain’s Aliens Act.91 Meanwhile, in Britain, some argued that the Aliens Act should be broadened, blaming Churchill’s party for having insisted on the removal of its most draconian measures. “Now we find [Churchill] directing a siege against alien assassins who have been admitted through sentimental Radical folly,” wrote one commentator in a Scottish provincial paper. “What a price to pay! Hordes of foreign immigrants, whether criminals or not, settle with us, bringing with them a miserably low standard of living. They herd among our poor, whose wretchedness they increase, and think nothing of thanking us for our hospitality by robbery and murder.”92 Relations between Russian exiles and European radicals also grew increasingly fraught in these years. On the one hand, the Russians remained extremely dependent on foreign radical parties, which consistently defended émigré rights and protested immigration restrictions.93 The SPD loomed especially large in the minds of Russian Marxists, who often appealed to its leaders for ideological

 

198

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

guidance and support in their factional struggles.94 Furthermore, financial support from the SPD underwrote many of the Russians’ revolutionary activities.95 On the other hand, the attitudinal differences between Russian radicals and their European comrades, apparent as early as the Iskra days, became even more pronounced. Russians who had survived the traumas of the underground, Siberian exile, and the 1905 revolution often complained of their Western counterparts’ slavish devotion to legality and propriety as well as their “calculating” and “greasy” style.96 As one London-​based Menshevik put it, “The Russian word ‘socialist’ was almost equivalent to ‘martyr.’ Socialists in Russia were required to be ready to sacrifice everything—​comfort, ease, health, liberty, and even life—​in the name of the battle for their ideas.” British radicals, by contrast, “Ate and slept well, amused themselves without a care in the world and were not afflicted by ‘problems’, as the Russians were.”97 The conduct of the Russians revealed their disregard for Western comrades. When the Fifth Party Congress was forced to relocate to London, its organizers managed to procure a large loan from a British industrialist who sympathized with the socialist cause to cover the additional expenses. But much to the chagrin of the European comrades who had facilitated the conclusion of this agreement, the RSDRP refused to pay the loan as promised, and the benefactor died without recovering a penny.98 The growing alienation of Russian radicals influenced the course of two major debates that roiled the Second International in the first years of the twentieth century. The first centered on how socialists should respond to the war between the great powers that appeared increasingly imminent. The International had long denounced the dangers of militarism, but now the French and German delegations debated the proper response to a conflict: the former favored a general strike, while the latter opposed it. At the 1907 conference in Stuttgart, Russian Marxists distanced themselves from both sides, arguing that this tactical debate missed the broader point. Grigorii Zinoviev lamented that both camps invoked the welfare of “’the nation’ and ‘the fatherland’ ”—​slogans that he associated with “imperialist reaction” and “imperialist wars.”99 Lenin, Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg complained that the anti-​war resolutions that had been drafted by the delegates were excessively vague. They united to produce a more militant statement that called on Europe’s socialist parties to “strive with all their power to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”100 By 1912, when the International reconvened in Basel, violence had flared in the Balkans. Although the gathering ultimately reiterated the Stuttgart resolution against war and militarism, Russians decried the efforts of German comrades to weaken the most radical language in the conference protocol. “One felt the need to frighten Europe, to threaten it with the ‘red specter’ in case the governments should risk a war,” recalled Kollontai.101 In his summary of the conference,

 



O u -​to p o s ?

199

Bolshevik Lev Kamenev did precisely this, warning that the outbreak of an imperialist war would produce continent-​wide civil wars that would spark socialist revolutions.102 The Russians’ strong stance against the impending war had once again situated them on the vanguard of the “revolutionary Marxist tradition,” in Zinoviev’s words.103 The second issue that divided the International was imperialism. A handful of Marxists denounced imperialism as an execrable extension of capitalist accumulation. Many more defended it as a “civilizing mission”—​a necessary stage in the development of humanity.104 Non-​Russians who had fled the Russian empire emerged as early and forceful anti-​colonial voices in these debates. A Polish delegate to the Stuttgart Congress, who noted that his people were painfully familiar with the horrors of imperialist oppression, added, “We have absolutely no grounds to be conceited about our so-​called civilization nor to impose it on the Asiatic peoples with their ancient civilization.”105 Armenian activists formulated an especially sophisticated Marxist critique of imperialism, drawing on their experience in emigration as well as their networks connecting Russia, the Ottoman empire, and Persia to reflect on the role that empires played in capitalist extraction around the world.106 Around 1910, growing segments of the emigration—​including some of its most ardent universalists—​joined the anti-​imperial campaigns of these non-​ Russian pioneers. The Paris-​based Menshevik M. P. Pavlovich devoted his life to studying the anti-​imperial struggle in Asia.107 Lev Kamenev published several critiques of global imperialism in Bolshevik newspapers between 1910 and 1913. One, which described the tense situation in the Balkans as a result of capitalist competition, endorsed the reorganization of the region into federal, nationally autonomous republics.108 Another argued that the anti-​imperial struggles unfolding in China, Persia, India, and North Africa were crucial components of the international struggle for social revolution.109 Lenin, who mingled with Indian nationalists living in European exile, denounced the left-​wing defenders of colonialism as “sham socialists.”110 These critiques built on long traditions of anti-​colonial activism in the colonies. But there is also evidence that the disappointments that Russians experienced in emigration informed their thinking about world geopolitics. In 1910, Lenin predicted that international Social Democracy was entering a new phase. Moving away from the model created by the SDP and its “exemplary use of bourgeois legality,” revolutionaries around the world would need to destroy “all bourgeois legality, the whole bourgeois system.”111 Lenin borrowed the idea that the revolutionary movement was on the threshold of a truly global era from Kautsky.112 However, Lenin used the German’s insight to challenge the supremacy of the SPD and the revolutionary models that it had provided. The future of humanity, argued Lenin, did not lie in “advanced Europe,” which

 

200

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

is “commanded by a bourgeoisie which supports everything that is backward.” Rather, hope rested in Russia and Asia, which European Marxists continued to regard as inadequately civilized.113 Here Lenin suggests that the “colonial” nature of the émigré experience can be taken quite literally. As the product of a “backward” land who faced discrimination and persecution in Europe, Lenin himself identified as a subaltern of sorts—​a perspective that imbued him with sympathy for the abused and anger toward the Westerners who assumed that their own cultures were superior. The ultra-​radical tendencies of Russian exiles and their sense of alienation further strained their relations with European comrades. August Bebel lamented that the SPD had done itself no favors by supporting the Russians; Kautsky and Zetkin speculated that Lenin aspired to bring the International to a schism, just as he had done within the Russian party.114 Other European radicals bemoaned the Russians’ penchant for “throwing stones” at fellow socialists and their use of violent expropriations.115 In Sweden and Denmark, relations became so bad that local leftist parties cut off relations with Russians.116 By the eve of the First World War, exiles of Russian origin found themselves more isolated from their Western comrades than ever before. However, their alienation was also ideologically productive, especially for the Bolsheviks. The party’s growing interest in the global struggle against colonialism had once again expanded the metaphysical proletariat whose interests it claimed to represent to include the victims of imperialist aggression. In 1912–​13—​precisely the moment that the anti-​colonial struggle acquired a more prominent role in party discourse—​the Bolsheviks also grew more amenable to the demands of other oppressed groups that they had once denounced as particularistic. Lenin, who had long dismissed national concerns as divisive, began to revise his views in a series of essays and public lectures.117 He invited Stalin for a short stay in Krakow in 1912–​13, where the Georgian activist penned a study of the national question that closely paralleled Lenin’s thinking.118 Lenin’s writings of this era continued to denounce the Austro-​Marxists and the Bund, which he accused of carrying “microbes of the western European opportunist species” that once imported to Russia threatened to become “epidemics.” Nevertheless, they demonstrate a newfound recognition of the potential of nationalism to advance social revolution. Approaching the Russian empire as a colonial formation, Lenin distinguished between exploiter nations and exploited nations. Expressions of patriotism on the part of the former necessarily reflected “petty bourgeois opportunism.” The struggle for self-​determination on the part of the latter was both necessary and laudable—​an extension of the global anti-​ colonial movement.119 Lenin thus distinguished between dangerous manifestations of national culture and “democratic and socialist” ones. This difference was partially defined by

 



O u -​to p o s ?

201

the national group’s access to capital and political power, but also by its willingness to conduct its struggle for emancipation under the auspices of a centralized, multinational party. For example, Lenin implored Ukrainian miners in the Donbas to include demands for self-​determination in their political programs, but he also denounced Ukrainians who “under the flag of Marxism” promoted “the division of workers by nationality and the separate national organization of Ukrainian workers.” He hailed Latvian and Caucasian Social Democratic groups that submitted to the Bolshevik party, while excoriating Polish activists who insisted on the necessity of independent organization.120 He viewed expressions of “Jewish national culture” as especially dangerous, claiming that they promoted the “absolute nationalism of petty national islets” and the separatist “slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies.”121 Around 1913, the Bolsheviks also began to display growing interest in organizing women, warming to the suggestions that Kollontai had been making since 1908. Lenin blessed the creation of a Bolshevik women’s journal, to which his lover, Inessa Armand, and Krupskaia both contributed. As in the case of the national question, Bolshevik activists insisted that particularism had no place in Russian Marxism, framing outreach to women as a means of achieving their goal of a strong, centralized party.122 Nevertheless, this evolving stance suggested that the Bolsheviks had begun to think of women, the non-​Russian subjects of the tsar, and colonized peoples as representatives of the ever-​expanding metaphysical proletariat whom the Bolsheviks sought to liberate. The Bolsheviks’ evolution on the “national question” and the “woman question” are usually explained as results of the growing restiveness of the working class in Russia. But these developments were also influenced by the sense of dispossession and alienation that pervaded the colonies between 1905 and 1914. The suffering of Russian radicals in emigration had imbued many of them with a keen understanding of the failures of both autocracy and parliamentary democracy, launching a search for more radical alternatives. Furthermore, exiles’ own sense of marginalization encouraged them to identify with the world’s most oppressed populations and to fight for their emancipation. The implications of this new subaltern consciousness were not fully clear, but they would have immense consequences for the future of Russian radicalism—​and for the rest of the world.

Apocalyptic Abstractions In the summer of 1914, the assassination of a Habsburg archduke by Serbian nationalists plunged the continent into a diplomatic crisis that soon resulted in a worldwide war. The conflict, which would eventually destroy the last remnants

 

202

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

of colony culture, almost immediately brought disastrous consequences for exiles across the continent. Russian citizens residing in Germany and the Habsburg empire were declared enemy aliens and subjected to arrest or deportation. Lenin and Krupskaia relocated from Krakow to Bern and later Zurich, while Trotsky, living in Vienna in the fall of 1914, settled in Paris after a brief sojourn in Switzerland.123 Kollontai, who had been on vacation in Bavaria when the hostilities began, was briefly detained by German authorities and moved to neutral Sweden upon her release.124 Conditions also grew more difficult in the allied states of Britain and France. In 1915, the Russian government ordered all men liable for military service to return home. Some refused, and others opted to fulfill their military obligations in the French Foreign Legion. The next year, the Home Secretary issued mobilization orders for Russian subjects on British soil, obligating them to join either the British forces or the Russian.125 Meanwhile, wartime restrictions on freedom of movement and press freedom subjected émigré communities to more invasive surveillance than ever before.126 These challenges provided new incentives for émigrés to overcome their differences and to address their collective problems. In Paris alone, residents formed some half-​dozen new organizations to defend the rights of émigrés and Russian soldiers in Europe.127 Some of these groups managed to engage representatives from a variety of parties: the Paris Émigré Committee, for example, attracted Bolsheviks, SRs, Mensheviks, Bundists, Latvian Social Democrats, and members of multiple workers’ syndicates.128 Jewish groups, moved by abuses and mass deportations of Russian Jews who resided near the front lines, raised funds to support their brethren back home.129 However, the war also produced new ideological cleavages that destabilized these cooperative efforts. As many Russian exiles had feared, the International’s commitment to anti-​militarism immediately crumbled after the declaration of war, and socialists across the continent mobilized to support their respective nations. “In the hour of danger,” remarked one German SPD activist, “we will not leave our own fatherland in the lurch.” French socialists joined in a “sacred union” with bourgeois parties, and one-​time Communards engaged in public displays of patriotic reconciliation with military officers who had once shot at them.130 Russian anarchist Victor Serge, incarcerated in a French prison, recalled that many fellow revolutionaries burst out in cries of “to Berlin!” when they learned of the declaration of war.131 Some Russian radicals had similar reactions. Mensheviks Plekhanov and Potresov, anarchist Kropotkin, and right-​wing SRs all insisted that the war was necessary to halt “the hydra of German imperialism.”132 Vladimir Burtsev, the SR who had terrorized the Okhrana with his revelations of double agents in emigration, returned to Russia after twenty-​five years in exile to rally support for the war.133 Writing in a British anarchist journal, Kropotkin went so far as to

 



O u -​to p o s ?

203

argue that radicals who did not defend the Allies offer “support by their inaction to the [German] invaders; they help them to make slaves of the conquered populations.”134 In the initial months of the war, similar sentiments were widespread in the Russian colonies. Many residents volunteered for military service even before it became compulsory.135 Some volunteers framed their support for the conflict as an expression of their long-​held revolutionary beliefs. As one group of radical émigrés who joined the French Foreign Legion put it, “The defense of the allies struck us as consonant with the interests of world democracy and participating in it engaged us more fully in the struggle for democratic ideas.”136 Other colony residents fiercely denounced the war. The Mensheviks Martov, Dan, and Aksel’rod expressed horror at their one-​time comrades’ “debauch of passion and greed.”137 The SR leaders Viktor Chernov and Charles Rappoport insisted that the hostilities would waste billions of francs and accomplish nothing.138 Rocker and his London anarchist associations mobilized the Yiddish-​ speaking workers of the East End in anti-​war demonstrations.139 In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg, working with Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht, founded a dissident group of internationalists within the SPD, which eventually evolved into the anti-​war Spartacus League.140 Lenin, characteristically, took the most provocative stance of all. On the day that he arrived in Switzerland from Krakow, he delivered his “theses on the war.” He cheered for the defeat of the tsarist regime and its European allies while chastising fellow socialists who supported a war that was “bourgeois, imperialist, and dynastic in character.”141 Although Trotsky often clashed with Lenin, he assumed a similar stance. He called for Russia’s rout, decried the hypocrisy of pro-​war socialists, and founded a newspaper in Paris to promote his views.142 As other exiles despaired, Lenin and Trotsky were alone in recognizing the transformative promise contained in the apocalyptic horror of the war. In an October 1914 speech at a Zurich workers’ club, Trotsky promised that the war would give rise to a “United States of Europe,” which would outlaw the forcible annexation of territory and guarantee national self-​determination.143 Lenin was more ambitious still. In a 1915 essay that he wrote with Zinoviev, he argued that the unjust conflict driven by imperialism and greed could be transformed into a global civil war for liberation. Like the Paris Commune, it would pit the “oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-​owners, serfs against land-​owners, and wage-​workers against the bourgeoisie.” This war would topple capitalist states around the world and purge socialist movements of “opportunism and chauvinism,” laying the foundations for a Third International that was truly “revolutionary, uncompromising and insurrectionary.” Celebrating the liberation of colonized peoples as an essential element of this emancipatory

 

204

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

program, he predicted that in Russia and other empires, the social revolution would double as a national struggle on the part of oppressed ethno-​national groups.144 This was perhaps the most ambitious utopian vision to emerge from exile life, promising the emancipation of the metaphysical proletariat in all nations of the world. However, these dreams were no longer expressed and prefigured through the life of a community. Instead, they were abstract reveries to be realized at an indeterminate point in the future. Moreover, the wartime visions of Trotsky and Lenin only deepened the divisions in radical networks. A substantial number of the self-​professed “internationalists” who opposed the war, such as Chernov and Martov, nevertheless objected to the efforts of “defeatists” to “disorganize” the armed forces and incite them to launch a civil war.145 Lenin even faced opposition from his own party. Shliapnikov and Kamenev, among others, expressed concern that his stance was needlessly provocative. Bukharin, who had become close with Lenin in Krakow, led a camp that challenged the latter’s views on the national question. Nationalism, Bukharin insisted, was a force of capitalist oppression, not of liberation.146 Lenin remained defiant, insisting that schisms that peeled off “opportunists” would only strengthen the RSDRP. For once, however, he did not follow through on his threats, permitting dissidents to remain in the party.147 Indeed, his combination of inflammatory rhetoric and pragmatic tolerance not only managed to keep the Bolshevik leadership united, but also won back long-​time critics. By 1915, Lunacharskii and the long-​estranged Vperedists had drawn closer to Lenin. So did Kollontai, who joined the Bolshevik party in 1915 in spite of having condemned Lenin’s defeatist extremism the year before.148 By 1915, the revolutionary alternative sketched out by Trotsky and especially Lenin had begun to make its influence felt outside Switzerland. “Defeatist” radicals distributed postcards reading “Long Live Civil War” in the colonies, founded newspapers, infiltrated workers’ unions, and fraternized with Russian troops in Europe, urging them to mutiny.149 However, émigrés who supported the war also intensified their agitation. The competition between the various camps crippled the nonpartisan groups working to address the challenges of the war; at one Bund meeting in Paris, the rival camps came to blows.150 The apparent growth of “defeatism” in the colonies panicked western police, who accorded the war’s radical opponents influence far beyond what they actually enjoyed. One British police agent suggested that East London’s anarchist groups were responsible for the assassination that had started the war in the first place.151 Another warned that a Russian arrested in a raid of a radical organization had “prepared his ground to spread his ideas among the workmen of the whole of Great Britain.”152 Surveillance of an anti-​war Marxist-​Zionist group in

 



O u -​to p o s ?

205

Paris yielded speculation that the trans-​Atlantic family networks of its members threatened to compromise the war effort across borders.153 Western states implemented draconian measures to contain these supposed threats. France and Switzerland banned Russian political meetings, and wartime censorship blocked the publication of any utterance that could be construed as critical of the Russian government or war effort.154 Kollontai and Rappoport were arrested under emergency wartime laws in Sweden and France, respectively.155 Trotsky’s paper was closed by the French authorities, and he was served a deportation notice. Denied transit visas to pass through England and Italy, he eventually relocated to New  York via Spain.156 Rocker, a German citizen, was detained as an enemy alien and remained in British prison until 1918. His son and his Russian-​born wife, Millie, were also arrested for anti-​war propaganda. Meanwhile, the British authorities closed Arbeter fraynd and liquidated the anarchist groups affiliated with it—​a blow from which the East End’s once-​powerful anarchist movement would never recover.157 However, intensifying repression did not stanch émigré opposition to the war, which continued to grow as the death toll increased and as gruesome reports filtered back from those who had volunteered for service. In June 1915, an unidentified woman who spoke at a Bund meeting in Paris described the plight of her husband, a volunteer for the Foreign Legion. She complained that the officers had been abusive to their immigrant subordinates, shouting “march or die” and even executing their own men who did not obey orders.158 In a letter to family, another legionnaire complained that he was not fed for days on end and that he was treated as roughly as “German prisoners in France.” “It’s the same here as it is in Russia: under the name freedom, reaction reigns and tyranny celebrates.”159 Draft dodging soon became prevalent among the émigré population.160 Lenin again capitalized on the growing misery. In mid-​1915, a Swiss “internationalist” began organizing a summit for leftists who opposed the war in the Alpine hamlet of Zimmerwald. The conference drew most of the major anti-​war activists from Russia who had not been imprisoned: Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Martov, Chernov, Balabanova, and anti-​war representatives of the SDKPiL and Latvian SD group.161 The organizers had hoped that the conference would reunify the left and revive the Second International, but Lenin had a different aim, using the gathering to advocate for the creation of an ultra-​radical Third International. He denounced the patriotic stance of many Russian and European leftists and the “half-​measures” of pacifists as craven. Insistent that civil war was the necessary outcome of the conflict, he championed its ability to destroy capitalism and colonial oppression at once. “If a war broke out between oppressed nations and their oppressors . . . in Eastern Europe and in the colonies, the sympathy of the socialists would have to be entirely on the side of the oppressed.”162

 

206

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

Lenin’s efforts to derail the Zimmerwald conference were ostensibly a failure: his resolutions denouncing pacifism and demanding civil war antagonized the event’s organizers. However, his conduct at the conference confirmed his status as the continent’s most radical anti-​war voice. The “defeatists” stranded in Switzerland, the one country where they could still operate, rallied behind his resolutions. He also won support from a handful of Europeans dismayed by the chauvinism of their national parties. Eight of the thirty-​eight attendees—​ including Zinoviev, Karl Radek, a Latvian Marxist, and dissident members of the German, Swiss, and Swedish parties—​ultimately rallied behind Lenin, declaring themselves the Zimmerwald left.163 This new coalition remained active after the conference concluded. Converging around a workers’ club in Zurich, the Zimmerwald left vowed to drive European socialism to a schism that would restore its revolutionary potential. At a second conference in 1916, the faction opposed all war credits and challenged the authority of “compromised opportunist leaders.”164 As the human costs of the war continued to grow, Lenin’s radical alternative vision grew more attractive. Although Luxemburg and Liebknecht were jailed for their anti-​war stance, their Spartacus League, which espoused left Zimmerwaldist principles, began to attract a mass following among German workers and dissident German socialists.165 Uniquely gifted at locating opportunity in crisis, Lenin had used the war—​the greatest trauma the continent had ever experienced—​to define the contours of a new revolutionary movement and to rally a multinational coalition behind it. Yet the abstraction of his utopian scheme proved its greatest weakness. Balabanova, who attended a Zurich meeting at which Lenin predicted an imminent revolution in Russia that would finally realize the aspirations of the Paris Commune, considered Lenin delusional.166 Fellow Zimmerwaldists, including Martov, insisted that peace, not civil war, was the only escape from the current crisis.167 The apocalyptic utopia of the left Zimmerwaldists offered no escape from émigré skloki, either. By 1916, the scourge of doctrinalism had destroyed most radical parties and organizations; Martov admitted with dismay that his Menshevik party had become “negligible, torn by internal struggle.”168 Never-​ ending disputes about the national question remained another source of division. When anti-​war Bundists asked that Jews be added to the list of the nationalities who supported the left Zimmerwald program, Trotsky rejected the request on the pretext that Jews are not a nation. Meanwhile, G. A. Aleksinskii, a defensist who made the “joke” about the need for a pogrom in the Menshevik party cited by Stalin, claimed that the defeatist movement was dominated by non-​Russians who were hostile to Russian interests.169 These conflicts kept the discontents of colony life alive long after the disintegration of the communal institutions that had fostered them.

 



O u -​to p o s ?

207

Figure 7.2  The Mensheviks Martov, Martynov, and Aksel’rod arguing on a Zurich street, 1915 or 1916. Courtesy of Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Boris Sapir Papers, Box 1.

By early 1917, even the most visionary émigré thinkers were losing faith that wartime abstract utopias would ever be realized in concrete form. At a January gathering in Zurich to celebrate the twelfth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, Lenin regretfully admitted: “Us elders may never live to see the decisive battle of the impending revolution.”170 When he did not express sadness, he seethed with anger, accusing his fellow Zimmerwaldists of abandoning the revolutionary cause in favor of “social pacifism.”171 At precisely the same time, Trotsky, exiled in New York, expressed a similar mix of dejection and rage. Recounting his wartime travails in France, he lamented that the cradle of revolution had become a police state no less repressive than Russia.172 One morning in mid-​March, Krupskaia had just finished washing the breakfast dishes and Lenin was preparing to leave for a day of research at the library. A fellow exile frantically rapped on the couple’s door and then barged in, sharing astonishing news:  street protests in Petrograd, which eventually evolved into massive strikes and a soldier’s mutiny, had toppled the tsarist regime.173 The revolution that the émigrés had spent years plotting had occurred without their engagement or even knowledge. Lenin lost no time in reacting to the shocking news. He wrote Kollontai the next day to say that it was time to begin the struggle for “international proletarian

 

208

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

revolution” in Russia.174 Krupskaia recalled that he immediately began plotting to return home, initially hoping to obtain an airplane that could fly him over the eastern front.175 This anecdote may well be embellished. Nevertheless, it effectively conveys Lenin’s impatience, so clear in his writings of the period, to transplant his revolutionary visions onto Russian soil. The Russian revolution offered the utopian experiments that had emerged from the colonies a new lease on life—​an unexpected opportunity to again turn abstract dreams into concrete reality.

 

8

Revolution from Abroad

By the spring of 1917, exiles who had resided abroad for years or even decades began appearing in Russia’s major cities. None of the returnees made a greater impression than Lenin. As soon as he arrived in Petrograd in April, he began working to transform the abstract visions he had developed in wartime Zurich into concrete reality. Although Lenin’s dream of a worldwide socialist revolution appeared risible upon his return, within six months he had made substantial progress toward this goal. By October he had overthrown the Provisional Government that had replaced the tsarist regime, embarking on the task of building a Communist utopia in Russia and exporting revolution abroad. Contemporary observers were shocked by the speed with which Bolshevik dreams had been realized—​and by the party leaders’ rapid reversal of fortunes. As one Scotland Yard official who had pursued Russian radicals through the streets of London less than a year earlier remarked, “Lenin, once a fleeing exile . . . had become a ruler more absolute than the Tsar he superseded; Trotsky was now a general; and over here men who had formerly been furtive anarchists living in slum streets with the official eye never very far removed from their neighborhood had suddenly been appointed ambassadors, consuls, plenipotentiaries, and welcomed as official and respected visitors.”1 The testimony of this police official suggests that the Bolsheviks’ roots in exile and their years of struggle on the margins of European society made their victory all the more surprising. However, there is also another story to tell about the relationship between exile and the Russian revolution: one that treats 1917 as the final chapter of a much longer émigré saga and reveals how experiences acquired abroad influenced the unfolding of the revolutionary era. The concrete utopias that emerged in revolutionary Russia owed many debts to Europe’s Russian colonies. The Bolsheviks proved particularly adept at harnessing émigré heritage for their benefit, embracing numerous emancipatory campaigns that had first been tested abroad while using networks and relationships they had built in exile to bring these schemes to fruition. At the Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0009

 

210

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

same time, they remained loyal to the improvisational tradition of émigré politics, adapting ideas and practices of foreign provenance to meet the demands of their new milieu. This is not to suggest, however, that the Bolsheviks fully mastered the complex inheritances of emigration. To the contrary, they were repeatedly challenged by longstanding conflicts and resentments imported to Russia alongside utopian visions and lifestyles. These produced new trials and forced multiple adjustments to their revolutionary program.

Wild Maelstroms of Revolution In March 1917 the Provisional Government issued an amnesty for political criminals, which allowed Siberian exiles as well as those who had fled abroad to return home. Internal exiles, including Stalin and Kamenev (who had been arrested during a visit to Russia in 1914), began to arrive in Petrograd late in the month. By that time, several émigré organizations had formed to coordinate the repatriation of Russian subjects living abroad.2 This was a complicated task, as international travel was exceedingly dangerous in the spring of 1917. It was impossible to cross the eastern front, where war still raged, by land; the German U-​boats that patrolled the waters of northern Europe made sea crossings perilous. Nevertheless, so many exiles were willing to assume the risk of travel that by the summer, Paris’ once-​bustling left-​bank colony had shrunk to around a thousand souls.3 Western governments were delighted to see most Russian exiles depart; one Home Office official celebrated the opportunity to rid Britain of a population that had proved a “great nuisance.”4 However, the Allied states thwarted the travel of the most radical anti-​war activists, whose return to Russia imperiled the war effort. Trotsky, sailing home from New  York, was detained when his boat docked in Halifax. Held in an internment camp for more than a month, he was released only after the Petrograd Soviet, which had been resurrected in the wake of the revolution, convinced the Provisional Government to protest to the Canadians.5 Lenin and the other Zimmerwaldists stranded in Switzerland were refused transit through France and England, from which most Russia-​bound ships departed. The Central Powers, however, saw opportunity in the radical exiles. In 1915 Parvus, who had made a large fortune as a war profiteer in Constantinople, approached German diplomats whom he had befriended there. He proffered a plan, soon adopted by both Germany and Austria, to cripple Russia’s war effort by supporting the activities of revolutionary parties inside Russia as well as national liberation movements in Ukraine, Finland, and the Caucasus. Meanwhile, Parvus and his German handlers established communication with Lenin in

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

211

Zurich through intermediaries. In the spring of 1917, these contacts approached Lenin with a plan to repatriate defeatist radicals in a sealed train provided by the German government.6 This unlikely alliance between conservative states and revolutionary émigrés represented the first major juncture at which networks forged abroad had a decisive influence on the events of 1917 in Russia. Uncowed by the Provisional Government’s threats to arrest those who returned with German assistance, Lenin departed immediately with Krupskaia, Karl Radek, the Zinoviev family, and a small handful of other Bolsheviks. Entering Russia on false passports, the train’s occupants arrived in Petrograd in early April.7 Other exiles were more cautious, waiting in Switzerland until the Provisional Government authorized their return. Martov, Lunacharskii, and Bundist internationalists departed in several sealed trains of their own in the late spring.8 Viktor Chernov eschewed German help altogether, ultimately managing to return by sea.9 The returned émigrés, many of whom had been abroad for decades, were foreigners in their own country. Mensheviks Martov and Plekhanov had lived in exile since 1900 and 1879, respectively; anarchist Kropotkin since 1876; SR Chernov since 1899. They found an exhilarating yet chaotic situation in their homeland. The Provisional Government had embarked on an ambitious course of reform, guaranteeing equal civil rights for all, abolishing the Okhrana and investigating its abuses.10 But if exaltation at Russians’ newfound freedom was universal, the explosive potential of the mass politics emerging from 1917 was equally evident. Joyful gatherings that toppled statues of imperial heroes, destroyed tsarist insignia, and hailed upcoming elections could quickly turn into mobs seething with anger that the prosperity and freedom they had been promised had not yet arrived. Unrest was rampant in the countryside, where peasants armed with pitchforks turned up at rural manors to “expropriate” nobles’ land. Denunciations of capitalist “exploiters” and “speculators” sometimes devolved into accusations of Jewish treachery, causing many radicals to fear that a new wave of pogroms was imminent.11 Meanwhile, the Provisional Government faced serious internal crises. Its relationship with the newly resurrected Soviets, ill-​defined from the beginning, became increasingly fraught as workers grew frustrated with the slow pace of change. And the question of how to manage the war—​the issue that had toppled the previous government—​remained unresolved. Chastened by the failures of emigration and unmoored by their new surroundings, many former exiles assumed a cautious stance upon their return. Plekhanov and Kropotkin argued that the era of utopian thinking had come to an end, given that the object of their lives’ work—​the fall of the tsarist regime—​ had already been accomplished.12 By May, the Zimmerwaldist branch of the Menshevik party, dominated by former émigrés, had veered dramatically to the

 

212

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

right, pledging to support the party majority, which defended the Provisional Government and its efforts to bring the war to a victorious end.13 The Bund, like the Mensheviks, argued that radicals should focus on preserving the democratic gains of February, since social revolution would not be possible for many years.14 Zimmerwaldist SR Chernov followed a similar trajectory: he not only supported the Provisional Government but joined it, as Minister of Agriculture.15 Trotsky argued that the circumspection of these seasoned revolutionaries revealed a certain tendency to regard the “awakened masses” as a “mutinous mob”—​an inclination that later historians have also observed.16 Some Bolsheviks proceeded with caution as well. Stalin and Kamenev, for example, insisted that it would take years for the Russian proletariat to prepare itself to seize power.17 Others disagreed. Shliapnikov, who had returned to Petrograd during the war and was the most senior Bolshevik activist in the city at the time of the revolution, argued that the Provisional Government was a bourgeois-​ imperialist power that should be overthrown as soon as possible.18 Kollontai, one of the first émigrés to arrive in Russia, echoed the views of Shliapnikov, her long-​time collaborator and former lover.19 Lenin was the most impassioned Bolshevik hardliner of all. While still in Zurich, he penned a series of articles demanding “peace, bread and freedom” for the “war-​weary people” and calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government.20 When he arrived at Petrograd’s Finland station, he delivered an incendiary speech to the delegation of revolutionary activists who greeted him with pleas to support the democratic gains of February. “We don’t need a parliamentary republic, we don’t need bourgeois democracy, we don’t need any Government except the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ deputies!” He added that the social revolution now imminent in Russia would eventually sweep the world.21 Over the spring and summer of 1917, he continued to elaborate on his vision of the revolutionary future. He envisioned a Soviet state modeled on the Paris Commune, which would abolish the police and military, nationalize banks, and catalyze the formation of a new International.22 This program drew heavily on the abstract utopia that Lenin had formulated in wartime Switzerland, which saw the apocalypse of war as an invitation for revolutionary change. However, Lenin was quick to recognize that the political context in which he operated bore little resemblance to that which he had known in Europe. He was no longer struggling for a dominant position in small institutions and close-​knit networks, but for control of the world’s largest country. A master of political improvisation, he quickly grasped the transformative power of Russia’s newborn mass politics, even as many of his émigré comrades recoiled from them in fear. From the moment of his arrival he spoke directly to workers, soldiers, and peasants, in whom he produced “nothing but rapture.”23 Affirming

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

213

the dreams of the populace, he gave voice to their deep anger and frustration, promising to “suppress the exploiters” and to crush them “by force.”24 Throughout 1917 Lenin constantly adjusted his platform, tactics, and rhetoric to take advantage of the evolving demands of revolutionary politics. He gratuitously coopted programs that he had denounced abroad, including the SRs’ calls for land expropriation. He borrowed from the anarchists as well, describing the postrevolutionary Commune State as “democracy from below, democracy without officialdom, without police, without a standing army” and envisioning the “withering away” of the state as the end result of proletarian dictatorship.25 Renowned in emigration for the emphasis that he placed on central organization and on the activism of conspiratorial cadres, he endorsed programs of emancipation from below that he had once described as separatist. For example, he suggested revisions to the party program that emphasized the special needs of female workers and affirmed the striving for autonomy on the part of non-​ Russian nations.26 Lenin was unapologetic about his evolution. “If you cannot adapt to circumstances,” he explained, “if you cannot go crawling on your belly in the mud, you are not a revolutionary, but a windbag.”27 His ex-​émigré rivals were more critical. Recalling the fetish for schism that he had displayed abroad, they denounced his ideological evolutions as pure cynicism. One Menshevik whom Lenin had excoriated for “bare-​face lying” when they had crossed paths in Paris in 1914 expressed shock when the Bolshevik warmly greeted him upon returning to Russia.28 An SR who had spent years in France lamented that Lenin had devolved into a “primitive anarchist” who spread the “poison of decomposition [razlozhenie]” among workers.29 What Lenin’s critics did not understand, however, is that his newfound lack of concern for ideological purity was his most crucial insight. The doctrinalism and petty personal grievances that flourished in the hothouse environment of the colonies had consistently undermined their achievements. The return to Russia, which offered the literal and metaphorical space in which multiple emancipatory projects could coexist, liberated revolutionary politics from their claustrophobic confines. In this new setting, Lenin’s thinking grew more expansive and less doctrinaire, allowing him to harness the most inspiring elements of émigré culture—​its insistence that a better world was possible, and that it could be accessed through everyday life. Lenin’s notoriously fluid principles did not undermine or contradict his unwavering belief in the imminence of worldwide revolution; on the contrary, these two faces of his thought represented two sides of the same coin. It was precisely his willingness to adapt exile thought to the demands of its new setting that allowed him to rescue the utopian project of the colonies.

 

214

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

It took time for Lenin’s comrades to understand the genius of this breakthrough; indeed, leading Bolsheviks spent much of the spring attempting to protect Marxist doctrine from the party’s leader. Kamenev, the editor of Pravda, retorted that it was impossible to establish a Commune-​state before the bourgeois-​democratic revolution was complete. Accordingly, he excised the most inflammatory attacks on the Mensheviks and Provisional Government before printing Lenin’s manifestos.30 At an April conference, another senior party official defied Lenin’s claims that Russia was prepared to launch a worldwide revolution. Russia, the “most petty-​bourgeois nation in Europe,” was incapable of leading the world toward communism; the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe would necessarily play the leading role in the revolutionary process.31 The masses, however, immediately responded to Lenin’s utopian vision—​ and his rage. Between April and June 1917, the membership of the Bolshevik party doubled, rising from 16,000 members to 32,000.32 As one SR grudgingly admitted, Lenin’s ravings at demonstrations, though ideologically incoherent, “were not stupid at all, because they were not speeches, but sails designed to catch the wild maelstroms of revolution.”33 A Menshevik sympathizer later made a similar point, observing that Lenin’s liberation of radical tradition from the “self-​restricting dogma” that had long constrained it played a crucial role in his rise to power.34 Lenin’s success in expanding the party also won over many ex-​émigrés who had regarded him with skepticism. Trotsky was among the new recruits drawn to Lenin’s “audacity.”35 Meanwhile, a growing number of Bolsheviks reconciled themselves to his vision. By July, the Bolshevik Central Committee distanced itself from the radical parties that supported the gains of the February revolution and announced its support for a more “creative” brand of Marxism—​that is, a Marxism that rejected the “dogmatic” belief that social revolution in Europe must necessarily precede proletarian insurrection in Russia.36 By September, Lenin concluded that the time had come to seize power. Trotsky, still preaching his theory of “permanent revolution,” concurred.37 Kamenev and Zinoviev resisted, arguing that an uprising was premature and thus destined for failure. Ultimately, Lenin’s passion carried the day, winning over the Bolshevik leadership except for the recalcitrant duo. In mid-​October, the Bolsheviks issued a call to arms and began mobilizing regiments of armed workers to seize power during the Congress of Soviets, scheduled for later that month.38 On October 24 and 25 Bolshevik soldiers seized telegraph wires and government buildings, and on the morning of the 25th, Lenin announced that power now rested in the Bolsheviks’ hands. The Congress of Soviets, which had just opened, descended into chaos. An outraged Martov denounced the Bolshevik

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

215

coup, demanding a “peaceful solution” and an “all-​inclusive” government. He stormed out of the conference to thunderous applause, leading a bevy of Mensheviks, Bundists, and right SRs.39 In spite of these protests, Lenin, working closely with Trotsky, immediately set about forming a Bolshevik government that excluded “petty bourgeois parties”—​meaning not only liberal and right-​ wing groups, but also the revolutionaries who opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power.40 The October revolution was a major turning point, but it marked only the first chapter of what would become a long struggle to consolidate power. The infant Soviet regime would immediately find itself beset by myriad difficulties: ferocious domestic opposition, civil war, invasions from hostile foreign forces, and the challenge of building the world’s first socialist society. Networks and collective practices that the Bolsheviks imported from abroad helped them manage these trials, but also presented the new regime with heavy burdens.

Family Ties Although the return to Russia had freed the utopian tradition of living the revolution from the confines of the émigré colonies, the elite ranks of revolutionary politics remained dominated by a small group of former exiles who had lived and worked together for decades. About three-​quarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee elected in 1917 and two-​thirds of the first generation of Commissars had resided in the colonies for at least a year. So had all of the party’s leading ideologists (Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Bukharin) except for Stalin.41 The material reminders of émigré life were omnipresent:  Lenin traveled the streets of Petrograd wearing a coat that many comrades recognized from Zurich; Shliapnikov appeared at mass meetings in the uniform of a Parisian worker; and former émigrés staved off hunger by hawking the meager possessions they had acquired abroad on the black market.42 The shadows of this émigré heritage haunted the Bolshevik party. The long histories that one-​time exiles shared and the close quarters in which they worked meant that the entanglement of personal and doctrinal conflicts constantly threatened to produce schisms. Immediately after the seizure of power, it appeared that a break in the party was imminent. Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and Lunacharskii joined Kamenev and Zinoviev to protest the exclusion of non-​ Bolsheviks from the government, warning that one-​party rule threatened to incite civil war and that it marked a dangerous first step toward dictatorship.43 Meanwhile, Bukharin and Kollontai, among others, criticized the negotiations that began in late 1917 to reach a separate peace with Germany. Lenin, they observed, had long celebrated the war’s potential to give rise to worldwide civil

 

216

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

conflicts that would end in revolution. Why had he now retreated from this goal?44 Lenin, reprising a tactic that he had used to manage interparty conflict during World War I, declined to create a schism over these issues. Instead, he insisted that Kamenev, Shliapnikov, and other dissident Bolsheviks resign from the government, although he allowed them to return after they repented. This compromise maintained the party’s integrity, but offered a tacit admission that it would remain a complex alliance of factions for the immediate future.45 Although the intimacy between party elites intensified internecine disputes, it could also neutralize the centrifugal forces within the party. Lenin surrounded himself with trusted party workers with whom he had worked for decades, relying especially heavily on the original cohort of Geneva Bolsheviks. He appointed Vladimir Bonch-​Bruevich to head the administration department of Sovnarkom, the executive arm of the state, Lidiia Fotieva as its secretary, and Panteleimon Lepeshinskii to run the state historical museum and to preside over the party’s efforts to write its own history. Former exiles appointed to high-​ ranking positions used their own networks formed abroad to staff their agencies. Lunacharskii filled his Commissariat of Enlightenment with Vpered! comrades from his Paris days.46 One young woman, born abroad to two of the party’s original Bolsheviks, vividly described this system of émigré patronage. When she returned to Russia, she was warmly greeted by comrades who had known her since childhood, who placed her in a high-​ranking secretarial position.47 Having lived and worked together for decades, these new Bolshevik elites, in the words of one observer, “understood one another so well, by the merest hints, that they seemed to think collectively.”48 Their preservation of émigré traditions of collective living and labor reinforced this sense of cohesion. In Petrograd, the party elite lived and worked at the Smol’nyi Academy and in the Hotel Astoria, which also boasted a canteen. When the government moved to Moscow in 1918, Lenin’s inner circle moved into apartments in the Kremlin, while others decamped to nearby hotels, which they called “Houses of Soviets.” The Bolshevik leadership worked around the clock, ate and drink sparsely, and found little time for leisure.49 Continuing the communalism and asceticism that had become part of quotidian practice in emigration, this lifestyle also modeled the values that the Bolshevik elite hoped to promote in the new order. Indeed, Krupskaia’s vision for the new collective life that would emerge in Soviet Russia explicitly cited as models the colonies’ mutual aid organizations, cafeterias, and communes.50 New Soviet institutions, like the émigré libraries and mutual aid societies of the colonies, served as germs of the collective society that the Bolsheviks struggled to bring to life. Sovnarkom, for example, encouraged its employees to work “in a friendly manner, as one living organism.” The staffs of the various

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

217

Commissariats occupied the same building, encouraging them to mingle in the halls and in the canteen run by yet another of Lenin’s associates from the Geneva days. The institution intentionally modeled egalitarian principles, paying commissars the same as their employees and hosting comfortable public reception spaces that encouraged ordinary people to bring their concerns directly to Soviet leaders.51 Bolsheviks sometimes spoke of the party as a loving family.52 In many cases, the metaphor actually described social reality. Decades of emigration meant that many revolutionary elites had become entangled through marriage: this is how Trotsky’s sister, Olga, for example, became Kamenev’s wife. The practice of endogamy continued in the first years of the new regime, as Old Bolsheviks married off their children to those of their comrades.53 The familial nature of the party elite was further enhanced by the fact that Bolshevik functionaries often placed their family members in government positions—​another strategy to staff crucial agencies with trusted personnel. Lunacharskii’s Commissariat of Enlightenment became especially famous for employing the female relatives of party functionaries, including Krupskaia, Lenin’s sister, and the wives of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bonch-​Bruevich.54 Although women were represented in the party and the new state it had created, the Bolshevik family remained patriarchal in character. As one Sovnarkom employee put it, “Lenin was not merely a chairman but a recognized chief to whom everyone brought his thorny problems. The commissars quarreled among themselves in their daily work, but here Lenin had the last word; and all alike left these meetings reassured, as though their quarrels had been those of children now pacified by a parent.”55 Eventually, the new elites internalized Lenin’s fatherly presence, invoking his demands for unity even in his absence. One former exile recalled the rebukes an acquaintance had received upon expressing exasperation with party policy: “A Bolshevik does not leave his party. And anyway, where would you go? You have to face it, there is no one but us.”56 Bonds of familial love and the need for paternal approval unified the party elite in lieu of ideological conformity. Networks and relationships forged abroad thus proved invaluable assets for the infant Soviet state. But of course, not all members of the émigré clan supported the Soviet government. The Mensheviks, the Bund, and the right wing of the SRs all vehemently opposed the seizure of power, demanding a “government of all the socialist parties.”57 The key question that faced these dissidents was how to move forward. Some quickly concluded that they had no future in Bolshevik Russia. Aksel’rod, who described Bolshevism as a “savage and pernicious throwback to Bakuninism, Nechaevism, and Blanquism,” left for Germany in 1918; Burtsev, arrested for anti-​Bolshevik agitation, eventually fled to France, where he founded an anti-​Soviet newspaper. Plekhanov and Zasulich

 

218

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

also became sharp critics of the Bolsheviks, but both died within two years of the revolution.58 Other critics of the Bolsheviks hoped to exert influence by remaining engaged in the political process. Chiding the Bolsheviks for having chosen “the path of anarchy and elemental struggle for utopian goals,” the Mensheviks and the Bund used their presence in Soviets and workers’ unions to push for the democratization of government and for incremental progress.59 The right SRs invested heavily in electoral politics, engaging in aggressive agitation in the countryside. This strategy appeared to have paid off when they won 60 percent of the seats to the Constituent Assembly, which convened in January 1918 with Chernov presiding.60 In some cases, the long histories that the Bolsheviks shared with leading oppositionists intensified these conflicts. One Menshevik activist recalled that Mark Liber, one of the most impassioned critics of the new regime within the Bund, was motivated by deeply personal resentments against Lenin. Eager to avenge the attack that he and his party had suffered at the 1903 party congress, Liber was “rapaciously on the lookout for what he could do or say or invent, that would destroy or harm or annoy the Bolsheviks.”61 Martov and Dan, by contrast, showed surprising deference to their Bolshevik opponents. They demanded freedom of association, conscience, and the press, but they also insisted on the importance of keeping their struggle peaceful. Noting that they shared many of the same goals as the Bolsheviks, they argued that it was wrong for Marxists to employ force against other Marxists.62 The Bolsheviks did not show the same regard for their radical adversaries, whom they denounced as “traitors of the revolution  .  .  .  imbued by the miasma of the decaying corpse of bourgeois society.”63 Such overheated rhetoric had long been a distinguishing feature of Bolshevik discourse in emigration, but now the party’s leaders could back up their verbal threats with physical violence. The Cheka, the Soviet political police, was incorporated six weeks after the October revolution. Like most of the arms of the new state, it was dominated by exile networks. Its chief, Feliks Dzierżyński, a Polish veteran of the Bolshevik party school on Capri, staffed his organization with fellow former émigrés who hailed mostly from Poland and the Baltic states. He selected the Latvian Iakov Peterss, who had been tried in England in connection with the Sidney Street siege, as his deputy.64 In addition to persecuting liberal and reactionary enemies of Soviet rule, Dzierżyński and his comrades tormented the radical critics of the Bolsheviks. In December 1917 Cheka agents began to close Menshevik papers, and in January they disbanded the SR-​dominated Constituent Assembly, forcing Chernov, who vehemently denounced the body’s dismissal, into hiding. Bolshevik violence was largely improvisational, responding to emergent threats that challenged the party’s monopoly on power.65 However, it was

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

219

sometimes employed to settle personal grudges accrued abroad. The treatment of double agents such as Malinowski provides one such example. As late as March 1917, Lenin had defended the police informant, referring to continued rumors about his spying as an attempt to “drown our party in slander and filth.” But once ongoing investigations provided incontrovertible evidence of his guilt, this approach became unsustainable. Nikolai Krylenko, the chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal and a one-​time émigré betrayed by Malinowski, issued a death sentence against the double agent, who was executed in the gardens of the Kremlin in November 1918.66 In other cases, the Bolsheviks employed violence to resolve interpersonal dramas. In the summer of 1918, an informant for British intelligence reported that a one-​time émigré who had worked as a coat-​cutter in the East End had recently returned to Moscow, where he ran into Peterss, his old friend from London. Peterss, overjoyed to see his comrade, offered him a position in the Red Army. However, the newcomer declined, stating that he wished to lead a peaceful life; furthermore, he was still awaiting the return of his wife and child. Outraged at his friend’s lack of revolutionary fortitude, Peterss allegedly arrested the man, interred him in the notorious Butyrka prison, and eventually signed the warrant for his execution.67 The fact that some targets of Bolshevik violence had such long common histories with their persecutors intensified the emotional impact of the brutality for both victims and witnesses. A Bolshevik activist who had spent years in the colonies provided a vivid description of the shocking scene that unfolded when the Mensheviks were expelled from the Congress of Soviets in 1918. Martov, convulsing with rage, erupted into a coughing fit brought on by emotional stress and his worsening tuberculosis, while supporters of the Mensheviks rose from their seats, “screaming curses of dictator, Bonapartist, usurper, invader.” The Bolsheviks in the hall burst into mocking laughter as Martov struggled to place his shaking arm into the sleeve of his coat. “You will regret making merry,” the Menshevik cried. “In scarcely three months, you will find yourselves in the same position.” Lenin, “extremely pale, froze and glared at Martov” as the Menshevik leader staggered out of the hall. This account highlights the extreme cruelty of this encounter. Not only had Martov been informed that he could no longer participate in the revolution that he had worked for his entire life to realize, but he was also subjected to mockery of his frailty and psychological distress. Upon witnessing this disturbing scene, the author immediately reflected on Martov and Lenin’s decades of shared history:  their early work in the St. Petersburg Liberation of Labor, their collaboration on Iskra, and finally, their ill-​fated collision at the 1903 Second Party Congress. It took years, she recalled, for the significance of the differences that emerged at that meeting to become clear, but there was no question about its

 

220

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

consequence: one position in that debate had become “the starting point of revolution; the other, of counterrevolution.”68 On the one hand, the confrontation that unfolded at the conference represented the culmination of decades of émigré skloki, the transformation of these personal conflicts into a world-​historical battle. On the other hand, it was clear to observers that the battle marked the end of an era, extinguishing the last hopes that the leaders of the family feud that had torn Russian Marxism apart for decades could be reconciled. The Bolsheviks’ repression of their adversaries aspired to wipe out resistance, but it had the opposite effect, radicalizing the opponents of the Soviet regime. By the spring of 1918, a civil war had broken out that pitted the Red Army against Cossacks, liberals, reactionaries, non-​Russian nationalists, and multiple foreign governments. Many radical critics of the Bolsheviks soon joined in the hostilities. By 1918 SRs Chernov and Savinkov, Bundist Liber, and Menshevik Potresov had concluded that the “path of violence” was the only acceptable response to Bolshevik dictatorship. A Bolshevik who had been friendly with both Liber and Potresov in emigration seethed that his old friends had joined the camp of the reactionary “black hundreds.”69 Martov and Dan honored their promise not to join the military struggle against the Bolsheviks, but Cheka arrests of striking Menshevik workers and the expulsion of their party from the Soviets led the pair to denounce the Bolsheviks as the enemies of the working class.70 Yet even as one-​time members of the émigré clan employed violence against one another, resilient feelings of affection and camaraderie occasionally mitigated the brutality. Lenin and other high-​ranking Bolsheviks repeatedly intervened to help former comrades who had evolved into critics of the regime to receive special treatment, financial support, or to evade punishment.71 Fedor Dan, for example, found work in the Commissariat of Health through friends, Lidiia Dan, in the Russian Red Cross, and multiple Bundists and SRs found employment in Lunacharskii’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.72 The fact that some of the most prominent radical critics of the Bolsheviks were connected to party members through marriage also shielded them from violence: Bundist Mark Liber, for example, likely evaded the clutches of the Cheka due to his decades-​long friendship with Dzierżyński, who had married Liber’s sister.73 The intimate culture of the colonies had always been a double-​edged sword. It had created a revolutionary family, both literal and figurative, while simultaneously producing endless schisms and personal betrayals. Far from resolving the contradictions of émigré intimacy, early Bolshevik culture intensified them. Émigré networks, friendships, and traditions of collective labor proved valuable resources for the infant state. At the same time, long-​running disputes born in the colonies exploded into existential ideological struggles that would determine the future of the revolution. With a growing police state at the disposal of the Bolsheviks, these conflicts were quickly evolving into matters of life and death.

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

221

Revolutionary Contradictions Emigration had produced a rich tradition of utopian experimentation that the Bolsheviks effectively harnessed in 1917. However, exile politics had always departed from an acknowledgment of its practitioners’ estrangement from the formal mechanisms of power. Indeed, it was precisely the colonies’ ability to subvert dominant cultures and to define alternative modes of living that produced their political promise. The Bolshevik seizure of power created an entirely new dilemma for the party: how to live the revolution without existing in a state of dispossession. Moreover, the Bolsheviks struggled to reconcile the contradictory models of emancipation bequeathed by the émigré experience:  to what extent should the revolutionary transformation of society be defined from the bottom up, and to what extent must it be guided by the party and state? At first, the Bolsheviks pursued multiple emancipatory strategies at once. Given that the party had always emphasized the importance of centralized leadership, it was natural for its leaders to use their newfound power to promote social and political transformation from above. Within weeks of the October revolution, the new government began nationalizing banks and expropriating property. The state further expanded its powers to cope with the emergency precipitated by the Civil War. War Communism, introduced in mid-​1918 to promote ideological discipline and to control economic production, placed all industries under state management, rationed food and commodities, and subjected workers to military order.74 Unmoved by complaints from adversaries that this mode of governance was Jacobin, Bolshevik elites retorted that it was proof of their revolutionary fortitude. As Bukharin remarked, “One must rule with iron when one cannot rule by law.”75 Yet at the same time, the Bolsheviks encouraged emancipation from the ground-​up. They urged youth to form communes; organized mass festivals that created new collective rituals; enlisted artists and intellectuals to redefine the limits of human potential; and encouraged scientists and engineers to rationalize the home and workplace and to perfect the human soul.76 Many schemes for popular liberation drew on the utopian experiments of emigration—​including several that the Bolsheviks had once decried as particularist. The emancipation of women, for example, emerged as a central preoccupation of the infant Soviet state. Kollontai, who joined the party’s Central Committee and served as the first Commissar of Social Welfare, used her newfound authority to found Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the party for which she had lobbied for a decade. Endeavoring to destroy patriarchal structures and to more fully engage women in politics, she oversaw the creation of welfare programs to support working women, the legalization of abortion, and mass literacy campaigns. She also advocated for a new sexual morality that

 

222

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

avoided the pitfalls of bourgeois love and recognized the fundamental equality of men and women.77 The Bolshevik leadership took a similar approach to non-​Russian nationalities. Within weeks of the revolution, Lenin affirmed that the struggle for “complete and unlimited freedom” on the part of oppressed nations was an integral element of the revolutionary process.78 And in 1919 Stalin, the Commissar of Nationalities, presided over the passage of a resolution expressing support for national self-​determination under the auspices of a federal state. The measure melded elements of the anti-​colonial project that Lenin had articulated in exile with strong federalist traditions that had been defined from the bottom up in exile. Indeed, several disgruntled Bolsheviks who opposed the resolution noted that its legitimation of the national struggle and its vision of a decentralized state resembled the federalist platform of the Bund.79 The Bolsheviks’ newfound willingness to acknowledge the validity of particularist concerns and to respect local initiative deepened the party’s support in non-​Russian borderland regions, changing the face of what had once been an overwhelmingly Russian organization. Soon, only one-​quarter of Bolsheviks hailed from the central Russian heartland.80 The Bolsheviks were particularly successful at coopting a broad range of activists and styles of organizing when it came to the “Jewish question.” The collapse of the tsarist regime had produced a Jewish “cultural renaissance,” catalyzing the migration of millions from borderland shtetls to central Russian cities as well as the launch of new artistic and political endeavors that imagined a better future for Russian Jews.81 Initially, the Bolsheviks showed little interest in these developments—​a byproduct of the party’s longtime antipathy toward any expression of Jewish particularism and the fact that only 4  percent of its members were Jewish in 1917.82 Instead, Zionists, Bundists, and other Jewish parties primarily benefitted from this efflorescence of activism. However, the party soon changed course. In the spring of 1917 Semen Dimanshtein, a veteran of the Pletzl’s Yiddish labor movement, urged his Bolshevik comrades to attend to the special concerns of Russia’s Jews. Swayed by his arguments, the party leadership launched its first Yiddish-​language paper in December 1917. Over the course of the next year, the party’s Yiddish-​ language publications expanded to include dozens of newspapers and political pamphlets as well as translations of Lenin’s speeches. Dimanshtein also played a catalytic role in the 1918 creation of Evkom, an agency overseeing Jewish affairs under the aegis of the Commissariat of Nationalities, and Evsektsiia, the Jewish section of the Communist party.83 After pogroms swept Ukraine in 1918–​19, these organizations convinced Lenin to issue a full-​throated denunciation of antisemitism and to convene a central commission devoted to eradicating it.84

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

223

These initiatives, which aspired to wrest the “Jewish street” from the clutches of Zionists and Jewish socialists, greatly benefited the Bolsheviks. But they were utterly dependent on the experience of former émigrés who brought their own insights and agendas to this campaign. Evkom and Evsektsiia relied on activists who had acquired experience in Yiddish-​language mass agitation in London and Paris. Most of these figures were not Bolsheviks but veterans of Jewish socialist groups, including the Bund, Labor Zionists, and London’s Yiddish-​speaking anarchists.85 Under the influence of these figures, the Bolsheviks evolved from a party that dismissed Jewish concerns as “separatist” to one that took them seriously, harnessing the rich tradition of émigré Jewish socialism and the “Jewish Renaissance” for their own advantage.86 By mid-​1918, Jewish activists sympathetic to the Bolsheviks had split Bundist organizations in several cities, where left-​wing Jewish socialists declared their loyalty to the Communist cause.87 In 1919–​20, the left flank of the Bund’s central leadership formed the Kombund, a new party that supported the Soviet state.88 Ultimately, more than half of the members of the Bund’s 1917 central committee joined the Kombund; by the early 1920s, former Bundists accounted for a full 10 percent of Russia’s Communist party.89 “We managed to produce a schism in the Jewish socialist parties,” boasted Dimanshtein, “and the best elements joined us in the [Bolshevik] party, helping us to further carry out our Jewish work.”90 The Bolshevik cooptation of Jewish socialism, which Lenin and other leading party figures had once so vehemently opposed, was among the most important developments of the early Soviet years. It catalyzed the creation of a new culture that was simultaneously Jewish and Soviet, as well as the rapid entry of Jews into the new cultural and political elite.91 Meanwhile, newly converted Jewish Communists provided the muscle behind the Soviet state’s assault against traditional religion, Zionism, and Jewish socialist parties that opposed the Bolsheviks. As one Kombund leader boasted, “We Jewish Communists are the great broom that will sweep . . . your whole petit bourgeois culture . . . off the Jewish workers’ street.”92 The decades-​long conflict between Jewish radicalism and Russian Marxism appeared to have been resolved on terms that bore a striking resemblance to those proposed by the first generation of émigré Jewish socialists. The Bolsheviks drew Jewish proletarians into the party by approaching them on their own terms, affirming the role of Yiddish as a language of revolutionary discourse, and addressing the special needs of Jews. In a paean portraying Jews as the vanguard of the revolutionary movement and as an inspiration to their Russian comrades, writer Maksim Gor’kii invoked the famous aphorism of Hillel the Elder to describe the motivations of Jewish Communists: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?”93 Gor’kii’s use of this phrase, which had been the motto of London’s Yiddish anarchist paper Arbeter fraynd,

 

224

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

testified to how warmly the Bolsheviks had embraced the traditions of Jewish radicalism against which they had long fulminated. The party’s acknowledgment of the particularity of Jewish culture served as a powerful force of integration, drawing millions of Russian Jews into the party’s universalist struggle to transform humanity. The fact that the Bolsheviks promoted multiple programs of emancipation that operated on several distinct registers supported their claims that they were capable of leading all mankind toward liberation. However, it also produced tensions in their revolutionary program. Visions of emancipation from above often contradicted democratic strivings articulated from below. For example, Shliapnikov, the Commissar of Labor, openly questioned how the principles of collegial governance and worker democracy that had attracted many proletarians to the party were to be reconciled with the one-​man direction ushered in by War Communism.94 Meanwhile, even as many Bolsheviks worked to harness particularism in pursuit of universal transformation, they also took pains to ensure that the emancipation of individual groups did not challenge the integrity of the party or state. Although Bolshevik activists strove to integrate women into the party, they stopped short of reforming its patriarchal culture. Women were severely underrepresented in the party’s elite ranks: Kollontai and Elena Stasova, who sat on the Central Committee in the revolutionary period, would be removed by 1920, and a woman would not rejoin the body until Khrushchev’s Thaw. A similar tendency was evident in the revolutionary state, in which female telegraphers and typists played crucial support roles, but mostly behind the scenes.95 The pattern was replicated at the local level, where women were encouraged to defend revolutionary ethics and to reinforce the home front rather than to join the ranks of party leadership.96 It was in the realm of national politics that the question of how to emancipate oppressed peoples without unleashing centrifugal forces was discussed most openly. Lenin clarified that national autonomy was not a goal in its own right; instead, the ultimate aim was to transcend the bourgeois idea of the nation altogether through the full “merging [of formerly oppressed nations] with the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic.”97 This formulation distinguished between healthy forms of nationalism that promoted popular emancipation in pursuit of Marxist universalism, and “aggressive” manifestations of nationalism that merely advanced the interests of particular groups. The regime did not hesitate to employ violence against the latter, invading Ukraine and Georgia to prevent their independence, as well as newly sovereign Poland, which opposed Bolshevik power.98 Jewish Communists proved especially susceptible to charges that they promoted dangerous forms of particularism. Rank-​ and-​ file party workers

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

225

complained that former Bundists had acquired a dominant position in the party and monopolized its resources.99 Leading Bolsheviks expressed their own concerns about the loyalty of the Jews who had flocked to the party. Trotsky, for example, claimed that many Jews had been drawn to Bolshevism by the dream of national liberation, not worldwide social revolution. “These are, of course, not the best Communists,” he complained.”100 Lenin added that “special supervision” was necessary to ensure that the rapid influx of Jews into the party and bureaucracy did not destroy the character of both.101 Some Bolshevik elites went further still, arguing that the obliteration of Jewish difference was necessary to assure the welfare of the Soviet collective. Lunacharskii, who cochaired the state-​sponsored commission to eradicate antisemitism, argued that Russian “Jewry” remained especially prone to speculation, treachery, and separatism. Anti-​Jewish prejudice, he added, would only be vanquished when Jews could be convinced to abandon their own interests in pursuit of the greater good. “We understand the striving for national pride among long-​abused Jewry, but it interferes with our internationalist cause,” he wrote.102 Lunacharskii’s assessment, which is strikingly similar to the descriptions of Bundist perfidy used by prominent Russian Marxists at the turn of the century, reveals the resilience of the ideas produced in the course of encounters in the colonies decades before. By shedding the fetters of dogma, the Bolsheviks had coopted the full utopian heritage of emigration—​and the multiple visions of liberation that had unfolded abroad. But ironically, the tensions between these projects, which had produced so much conflict in the colonies, also posed new doctrinal dilemmas for the Soviet regime. Could the party embrace dreams of popular liberation without undermining its long-​standing concern for discipline and centralization? Could disadvantaged groups hoping to gain freedom through Soviet rule escape persistent accusations of selfishness? In the first years of the new regime, the answers to these questions remained entirely unclear.

“The Infinite Distance of Europe” The Soviet regime’s famously Janus-​faced relationship with the outside world was the final significant inheritance of emigration. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks thought of themselves as the guardians of an international revolutionary tradition and dreamed of exporting their revolution across borders. On the other hand, they expressed deep suspicion of and hostility toward the outside world. This ambivalence is usually traced to the experience of foreign invasion during the Civil War, which played a crucial role in the creation of the Soviet worldview. However, the Bolsheviks’ years of personal experience abroad—​and the

 

226

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

fact that tens of thousands of Russians were still living in foreign exile at the time of the October revolution—​profoundly influenced their engagements with and opinions of the outside world. The February revolution had elicited unanimous joy from Russians living abroad. When residents of the Pletzl learned of the autocracy’s collapse, large groups of Russian Jews ran down the streets chanting, “Long live Russia!”103 In London, émigrés joined suffragists, anti-​ colonial activists, and British revolutionaries at public celebrations.104 The October revolution, by contrast, produced intense discord. One Paris-​based “old socialist” cursed the “blood-​ thirsty Bolshevik gang,” while other anti-​Bolshevik radicals raised armies to return home and fight for power.105 However, some colony residents sided with the Bolsheviks, conducting agitation on the party’s behalf in cafés, clubs, and workers’ unions.106 In December 1917, the new Soviet state established a Paris-​ based press agency that enhanced its ability to reach Russian audiences residing abroad.107 By 1918, Paris police noted that Bolshevik propaganda efforts were succeeding in swaying Russians abroad as well as European workers. Such reports panicked European politicians, who worried that the proliferation of revolutionary ideas would undermine the ongoing war effort.108 By the summer of 1918, these fears led Britain and France to close their borders to all Russian citizens except credentialed diplomats.109 Another consequence of Europe’s Red Scare was a rapid deterioration in the situation of Russians living abroad, as governments drew up lists of alleged Bolshevik sympathizers. Some exiles were fired by employers who accused them of being “Red” agitators, while others reported being ejected from stores by hostile proprietors. Émigré groups compiled protests complaining that “peaceable people uninvolved in any criminal activity” had become victims of police dragnets and popular prejudice.110 Different states took different approaches to managing Russians suspected of subversion. In 1918–​19, Swiss officials expelled hundreds of Russians whom they accused of harboring Bolshevik sympathies.111 The British initially pursued a similar strategy. A  series of police raids in the spring of 1918 targeted the East End as well as the favorite haunts of radical intellectuals in north and west London, identifying several hundred Bolsheviks for deportation. MI5 later admitted that many of the deportation orders had included a great deal of “incorrect or overstated” information.”112 By mid-​1918, however, the British government changed its policy, opting to detain the most dangerous Russians under special war powers and only allowing those who could prove they would “work whole-​heartedly in favour of the Allies” to return home.113 The French also interred “undesirable” Russian citizens until the cessation of the war, when they would face deportation. There too, decisions were often made on the basis of flimsy evidence, as the case of one Ivan Chavikchvili reveals.

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

227

A  Georgian who had emigrated to Paris in 1907, Chavikchvili found himself in Austria when the war began. Initially threatened with internment as an enemy alien, he was ultimately deported to Switzerland after prominent Social Democrats intervened on his behalf. By 1915 Chavikchvili had made his way to Nice. In early 1918, he was arrested, accused of espionage, and sent to an internment camp. A Sûreté agent admitted that the case was flimsy: “I do not have sufficient evidence to establish in a formal way that Chavikchvili has damaged our national security.” Nevertheless, argued the agent, the fact that the émigré “likely agreed to share intelligence with our enemies, his shady way of living in Switzerland, his revolutionary ideas, his mistrust of the Russians who are still in favor of the war against Germany, his idleness in Nice, and the unknown origin of his resources make him very suspect from the national point of view.”114 The agent’s belief that Chavikchvili’s cultural difference was proof of his subversive intent was reminiscent of the discourse about Russians at the height of the anarchist panic of the 1890s, which treated radicalism as an inherited trait. And indeed, just as Russian Jews had been subjected to special scrutiny then, they were intensely surveilled in this period. In the last years of the war, they were frequently accused of draft dodging and Germanophilism.115 Moreover, Paris police claimed that the Jewish workers of the Marais were fanatical followers of Trotsky.116 The surnames on the watch lists of Bolsheviks compiled by European police are overwhelmingly Jewish, and these reports repeatedly mention the heritage of the accused as evidence of their Bolshevik sympathies.117 The notion that Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy transcended police circles, finding support from wide swathes of Western society. Winston Churchill himself described the Bolshevik revolution as a Jewish plot that aimed at “the overthrow of civilization and . . . the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.”118 Native-​born residents of districts frequented by Russian Jews complained that their immigrant neighbors “are striving to become our masters” and begged the government to “sanitize [assainir]” these communities “by expelling all the Russians.”119 The Red Scare and the Judeo-​Bolshevik legend were byproducts of the unprecedented paranoia and xenophobia that accompanied the war, but they proliferated so quickly precisely because they built on much older patterns of thought. The hostility experienced by Russians living abroad transformed some one-​ time detractors of the Bolshevik project into supporters of it. Anarchist Victor Serge saw France’s Red Scare as evidence of the collapse of “modern civilization’s guarantees of individual freedom.” Europe, he concluded, had shown itself incapable of organizing “a positive peace” or increasing the “prosperity, liberty, safety and dignity of mankind.” In spite of his misgivings about the Bolsheviks, he ultimately decided to return to his homeland to help them build a revolutionary

 

228

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

state: “They were doing what was necessary tenaciously, doggedly, with magnificent ardor and a calculated passion.”120 Zimmerwaldist Anzhelika Balabanova made a similar calculation and joined the Bolshevik party, in spite of her disapproval of its use of terror.121 Charles Rappoport, an SR who had been jailed for his anti-​war activism in France, recalled that his extreme disgust with Western leaders, “who regarded the Bolsheviks as cannibals,” drove him into the arms of the Soviet state. He too objected to the Bolsheviks’ violent tactics, but ultimately concluded that “the most important thing was the socialization of all the means of production, the conquest of power by the working class, and the existence of the first proletarian state across one sixth of the globe!”122 Even as the Bolsheviks waged war on multiple fronts, party leaders never retreated from this ambitious dream. As Zinoviev assured his comrades, “history cannot stop halfway.”123 Events in Central Europe soon vindicated their claims. The armistice of November 1918 was accompanied by revolutions that toppled monarchies in Germany and Austria-​Hungary. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, newly released from prison, established a Communist party and began organizing workers’ councils modeled on the Soviets and calling for land expropriation and the creation of Red Guards.124 In March 1919 Béla Kun, who had discovered Bolshevism as a prisoner of war in Russia, led a Communist revolution in Hungary. The Bolsheviks cheered both of these events and dispatched Bukharin and Radek to Europe to support the radical insurgencies.125 Lenin claimed that the European revolutions were positive portents for workers the world over.126 However, many radical alumni of the colonies disagreed. Aksel’rod, by then living in Germany, fulminated against the “Asiatically savage and medievally anarchic Bolshevik regime” and worked to mobilize German Social Democrats against it.127 Anarchist Rudolph Rocker became another vehement critic of the Bolsheviks and their efforts to export revolution. Released from a British prison at the end of the war, he returned to his native Germany, where he engaged in anti-​Soviet agitation within the trade union movement.128 One-​time émigrés who had returned to Paris, including Burtsev and Savinkov, openly consorted with Western military and intelligence services as well as Poles and Ukrainians working to topple the Bolsheviks.129 Karl Kautsky, once a mentor to and financial supporter of Russian Social Democrats, emerged as the most forceful revolutionary critic of Bolshevism. Bolshevik terror, he lamented, had produced “anarchy and complete ruin” in Russia, creating a dictatorship over the proletariat rather than a dictatorship by the proletariat. Moreover, the German revolution had harmed, not helped, the cause of socialism, terrifying the progressive bourgeoisie and chasing it into the camp of reaction. Worldwide revolution, Kautsky insisted, could only be accomplished through democratic progress, not through coups or political violence.130

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

229

Kautsky and Lenin had clashed on many previous occasions, but Bonch-​ Bruevich recalled that Kautsky’s attack plunged the Bolshevik into unprecedented fury: “He was literally burning with anger,” “sitting up every day till late at night” working on a response.131 He ultimately published “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” which accused Kautsky of having evolved into a “common liberal.” “By means of patent sophistry, Marxism is stripped of its revolutionary living spirit; everything is recognized in Marxism except the revolutionary methods of struggle, the propaganda and preparation of those methods, and the education of the masses in this direction.” As for Kautsky’s denunciation of Soviet centralism, Lenin responded, “Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.”132 In the close quarters of the Russian colonies, Lenin had often proved his own revolutionary mettle by juxtaposing his strength to the putative weakness and corruption of his rivals. The polemics with Kautsky served the same purpose, revealing the differences in the two men’s understandings of revolution, only now on a larger stage. Kautsky chided Lenin for frequently comparing himself to the Paris Communards of 1871, charging that the Bolshevik was not a revolutionary, but a Bonapartist. (Kautsky admitted one difference between Lenin and Napoleon: the Russian, unlike the Frenchman, would destroy his country rather than aggrandize it.) Furthermore, Kautsky portrayed Bolshevism as a retrograde force. “During the whole of the nineteenth century we can observe a progressive humanizing taking place among the working classes. Now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Revolution in Russia and Germany has come, and has given rein to massacres that remind us of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century.”133 Lenin’s understanding of what was at stake was entirely different. If Kautsky celebrated the democratic spirit of the Paris Commune, Lenin saw its lack of central direction as its greatest fault, cursing the Communards for their hesitation to march on Versailles and stamp out their enemies. Likewise, the years that Kautsky saw as a period of progress and improvement, Lenin viewed as an era of complacency and hypocrisy. “During the decades of comparatively ‘peaceful’ capitalism between 1871 and 1914,” he wrote, “the Augean stables of philistinism, imbecility, and apostasy accumulated in the socialist parties, which were adapting themselves to opportunism.”134 Elsewhere, he put it even more bluntly: “There is no middle course anywhere in the world, nor can there be. Either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (masked by ornate Socialist-​ Revolutionary and Menshevik rhetoric about a people’s government, a constituent assembly, liberties, and so on), or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Whoever who has not learned this from the whole history of the nineteenth century is a hopeless idiot.”135 The two men’s divergent understandings of the immediate past reflected their different experiences of this era. Lenin’s adult life,

 

230

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

unlike Kautsky’s, had not unfolded in the bourgeois comfort of Prague, Vienna, and Berlin, but in the impoverished and conflict-​ridden Russian colonies on the margins of Europe’s great cities. Lenin frequently conflated the threats he faced from his critics of Russian origin and from foreign adversaries. His denunciation of “ornate Socialist-​ Revolutionary and Menshevik rhetoric” treated these phenomena as dangers to the revolutionary cause worldwide. Similarly, his polemics against Kautsky are laced with comparisons between the German’s deference to “imperialist bourgeois government” and the Mensheviks’ platform.136 Lenin’s critics only encouraged this pattern of thinking by rushing to Kautsky’s defense. Martov, for example, chided Lenin for “spitting in Kautsky’s grey beard,” and accused him of misinterpreting Marxist doctrine as well as the legacy of the Commune.137 The decades-​long competition between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks to claim the mantle of Russian Social Democracy had become entangled with larger geopolitical concerns and international debates about the future of the revolution. By 1919–​20, the enemies of the Bolsheviks appeared to be gaining the upper hand. The Communist revolutions in both Germany and Hungary had been crushed by military force, leading to the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and Kun’s flight to Soviet Russia. In 1920, the Red Army was forced to retreat from Poland, stalling the Bolshevik effort to export the revolution. Furthermore, Kautsky and other Marxist critics of the Bolsheviks resurrected the Second International in Bern, which rejected the Bolshevik dictatorship of the proletariat and its calls for world revolution. Strengthening the nexus between the domestic and foreign critics of the Soviet regime, Aksel’rod spoke at the conference, urging socialists around the world to unite against the Bolshevik dictatorship.138 For those who sympathized with the Soviet regime’s efforts to transform mankind, these developments proved that an “infinite distance” separated “the Bolshevik mentality” from that of foreign radicals. In the words of Victor Serge, “The Russians had no further hopes for the traditional Socialist parties of Europe. They judged that the only possible course was to work for splits that would break with the old reformist and Parliamentary leaderships, thereby creating new parties.”139 One month after the Bern conference, Lenin announced the creation of the Communist International, or Comintern, under the direction of Zinoviev. It claimed to defend Social Democracy from the “conglomerate of eternal vacillators”—​that is, Kautsky, the Mensheviks, and other members of the Second International.140 It also confirmed Soviet Russia’s role as the birthplace of a new radical tradition opposed to the allegedly bourgeois inclinations of the SPD and the vacillating style of French trade unionists, whom Lenin decried as the “Mensheviks of the West.”141

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

231

Western governments had greeted the Bolshevik revolution with shock and horror, wondering how Russia’s “backward society” had produced the world’s first socialist revolution. But in fact, many of the ideas and networks that undergirded Soviet efforts to export the revolution had first taken shape on European soil. Russian exiles’ longstanding alienation from Western politics and society, intensified by the catastrophe of the war and the trauma of the Red Scare, played a crucial role in the articulation of the Bolsheviks’ new world-​ historical mission. Anzhelika Balabanova, who served as the Comintern’s secretary, noted that that group’s vision of the Third International was founded on the ultra-​radical program of the left Zimmerwaldists, itself a response to the suffering that its founders had experienced in wartime Europe.142 But if the Bolshevik program had been indelibly shaped by the traumas of life in Europe, exile had also equipped the party with the practical knowledge and networks that it needed to bring its dreams to fruition. Rappoport founded the Comintern-​affiliated Parti Communiste Français in 1920. Lozovskii, the Bolshevik who had acquired experience organizing the Jewish workers of the Pletzl before the war, was appointed head of Profintern, the Comintern’s effort to infiltrate foreign trade unions. German members of the left Zimmerwald group led outreach for the Comintern in that nation.143 Meanwhile, the Comintern’s efforts to encourage communist revolution in colonized nations were spearheaded by an ex-​émigré who leveraged the contacts he had made with Arab, East Asian, and Indian activists while living in Paris in the early 1900s.144 The “infinite distance” between Russian revolutionaries and Western societies was, at least in part, a byproduct of their long-​entangled histories.

Steel and Dynamite By 1920 the Civil War was drawing to an end: against the odds, the Bolsheviks had managed to build a revolutionary state and an army capable of defending it, pushing anti-​Soviet forces to the periphery of Soviet Eurasia. However, the impending victory brought the Bolsheviks to a moment of reckoning about the complex inheritances of emigration that had inserted doctrinal contractions into the very heart of their state. Was the emancipation of humanity through labor to be accomplished through worker democracy, or through the activism of a powerful state? Did revolutionary comrades who disagreed with the party’s program have a place in Soviet society? If the Bolsheviks were to succeed in creating their own concrete utopia, they would need to affirm some emancipatory projects while foreclosing on the future of others. Questions about the nature of the revolutionary state and the party that presided over it had acquired growing urgency by 1918–​19. Although

 

232

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

Sovnarkom had sought to cultivate a warm, familial spirit, the Commissariats turned out to be families that tended toward dysfunction. Ideological differences and personal rivalries emerged within them, crippling their inner workings and reviving the scourge of doctrinalism.145 The crisis within the state coincided with another in the party. The revolution and Civil War had transformed the Bolshevik party from a small conspiracy of professional revolutionaries into a mass organization of peasants and workers, many barely literate. Lenin responded to these challenges by introducing new mechanisms of central control. Arguing that “conditions had ripened for the establishment of strict discipline and responsibility” in the mechanisms of the state, he weakened the institutions of collegial governance. The Ninth Party Congress in 1920 formally abolished it, replacing the collective practices that had once guided the Commissariats with one-​man management.146 Although Lenin applauded the influx of proletarians into the Bolshevik party, he insisted that more experienced members must carefully monitor new recruits to ensure their proper ideological development and warned that periodic purges may be necessary.147 Soviet campaigns to emancipate oppressed populations continued through the 1920s, but the architects of these programs grew ever more insistent that they required direction from above to ensure that they promoted the universalist goal of integrating these groups into the socialist body politic. The first decade of Soviet rule witnessed ambitious campaigns to lure women into the workplace and attract them to the party, to free them from domestic obligations, and to unveil the Muslim women of Central Asia. At the same time, leading Bolsheviks reasserted the party’s strongly masculinist character after the end of the Civil War, associating women—​and struggles for their emancipation framed in a particularist vein—​with reaction. Lenin, for example, vigorously critiqued Kollontai’s ideas about free love, which he described as “un-​Marxist . . . an extension of bourgeois brothels.”148 The Bolshevik nationality policy that took shape in the 1920s followed a similar logic. By 1921, the state had begun to delimit federal borders and to create nationally autonomous regions. However, it became ever clearer that this process was not intended to reify nations, but to transcend them altogether, by accelerating the movement of the “backward” peoples who lacked national traditions through the developmental stages that necessarily preceded Communism.149 The emerging consensus around this more rigidly universalist stance was accompanied by intensified efforts to eradicate the putative national separatism of Jews. Several rounds of purges, the first of which occurred in 1924, dramatically reduced the representation of one-​time Bundists in the party. Meanwhile, a second generation of Jewish party activists who had not been affiliated with the Bund became active in the mid-​1920s, replacing older members

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

233

who had been purged. They displayed a more hostile attitude toward Yiddish than their predecessors and had a stronger authoritarian bent, treating enlightenment as a gift to be bestowed from above.150 Many non-​Bolsheviks who had supported the Soviet campaign to transform humanity expressed deep misgivings about the party’s increasingly evident obsession with central control. One prominent anarchist who returned to revolutionary Russia concluded that Lenin’s liberationist rhetoric masked his real aim—​the “absolute supremacy and exclusive power” of the state.151 Yiddish cultural activists, once attracted by the state’s investment in Jewish emancipation, lamented that their activities were increasingly directed from above, a sign of the government’s disrespect for “free civil and private initiative and energy.”152 On multiple occasions, Anzhelika Balabanova flouted orders that in her view contradicted principles of democratic governance, leading to her removal from the Comintern’s executive committee.153 The Mensheviks offered the most coherent critique of Bolshevik centralism, employing their intimate knowledge of their rivals to discredit them. Martov insisted that Lenin’s dictatorial tendencies had been a striking feature of his conduct ever since 1903. “During the long struggle for power within the party, the Leninists perfected the demagogic skills and methods which they used . . . to carry on a war to the death against the entire Social Democratic party, with the deliberate intention of exploiting its difficulties in order to seize exclusive political power for themselves. They did all this under the banner of Marxism, which they had betrayed at every step even before the Revolution began.”154 Suggesting that the Bolsheviks had forsaken, not advanced, the struggle to live the revolution, the Mensheviks presented themselves as the carriers of the democratic mantle of the revolutionary movement. Along with the Bund’s anti-​Bolshevik right wing, they issued full-​throated calls for universal suffrage, freedom of the press, the end of the death penalty, and the abolition of the Cheka.155 The Bolsheviks responded to this challenge with more serious repression of their political rivals than ever. The last Menshevik paper was closed in 1919, and a mass trial of twenty Mensheviks was held in 1920. The defendants, found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities, were sentenced to labor camps. At times, the intimacies forged in emigration continued to mitigate this violence:  non-​ Bolsheviks occasionally received assistance from Bolshevik comrades, including prior warnings of impending police searches.156 However, these resilient expressions of solidarity were typically overpowered by the brutality of the police state. Martov lamented to Aksel’rod that it had become substantially more difficult to survive under the Soviet regime than it had been under tsarist rule.157 1920 witnessed several dramatic confrontations between one-​time émigrés who defined the revolutionary tradition in vastly different ways. At a congress attended by representatives of the British Labour Party, Chernov emerged

 

234

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

from hiding to deliver an excoriating critique of the Bolsheviks as “despots, oppressors, heresy-​hunters, inquisitors of consciences and jailers of bodies and spirits.”158 He managed to evade the Cheka agents who rushed into the hall to arrest him, but in retaliation the authorities detained his daughters and held them as hostages.159 That same year, Martov and Zinoviev had what would turn out to be their last meeting at an international socialist conference in Halle. Martov described the Mensheviks as the inheritors of the democratic spirit of the Polish insurrections and the Paris Commune, and as the defenders of the Russian revolution from “imperialist intrigues,” counterrevolution, and dictatorship.160 Zinoviev, representing the Comintern, branded the Mensheviks the party of the left-​wing bourgeoisie and pledged to purge international Social Democracy of their corrupt influence.161 It was no accident that both of these confrontations occurred in the presence of foreign observers, for all participants in these debates understood that their outcome would define the future of international Social Democracy. Both sides in this revolutionary drama displayed an awareness that their decades of shared history were rapidly coming to an end. The Menshevik newspaper launched in Berlin in 1921 argued that if Zinoviev truly believed that his rivals represented the interests of the bourgeoisie, then there could be no hope for a reconciliation with the Bolsheviks.162 Serge recalled a conversation with a Bolshevik functionary who had asked him in a hurt tone, “Do you imagine that we can just forget that we used to be in the same party as the Mensheviks and used to work together? We shall never have the same attitude to the Mensheviks as, say, to the SRs and anarchists.”163 For many members of the opposition, returning to foreign exile seemed the best option. Savinkov managed to escape to Paris, while other SR leaders who had been fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia exited Russia via the Pacific.164 Martov remained in Germany after the Halle conference, never to step foot in his homeland again. By 1920, an exodus of Jewish activists was underway. Many of the Yiddish authors and critics who had initially applauded the revolution concluded that they were likely to be consumed by it, as did a number of Bundists from the center and right wings of the party. Among them was Vladimir Medem, who emigrated to New York, where he built a powerful anti-​Bolshevik Jewish labor movement.165 In 1920–​21, the proponents of party democracy made their last stand. Kollontai and Shliapnikov led a “Workers’ Opposition” group that agitated against the system of one-​man management and for the reinstatement of worker control in industry.166 In the spring of 1921, sailors stationed on the island of Kronstadt outside Petrograd, who had played a crucial role in the October revolution, rose up to demand a return to the revolutionary tradition of emancipation from the bottom up. Calling for freedom of speech, press, and assembly, the

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

235

devolution of “all power to the Soviets,” and the dissolution of the Cheka, the Kronstadt rebels consciously modeled their uprising and their slogans on the Communards of 1871.167 Bolshevik leaders conflated the internal opposition expressed within the party with anti-​Soviet agitation spearheaded by revolutionaries who had returned abroad. Trotsky claimed that the Kronstadt sailors had been incited by SR and Menshevik émigrés and warned that the island would serve as a staging point for an anti-​Bolshevik invasion of Russia. Lenin denounced his foreign and domestic radical critics as the architects of a “petty bourgeois counterrevolution” that was even more dangerous than the threats that Russia had faced from armed adversaries.168 There were indeed loose connections between opponents of Bolshevik rule in Russia and abroad. The Mensheviks’ Berlin newspaper openly supported the Kronstadt rebels, and the sailors’ demands for the democratization of the party echoed the platform of the Workers’ Opposition.169 Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ association between emigration and grand counterrevolutionary conspiracies reflected the party’s sense of encirclement—​and its newfound fear of the cross-​border networks that it had once used so effectively—​more than objective reality. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, which coincided with the Kronstadt events, Lenin offered a decisive response to these challenges. Congress delegates declared the Workers’ Delegation an “anarcho-​syndicalist, petty-​bourgeois deviation,” outlawed its activity, and ordered Shliapnikov and Kollontai to avoid “further outbursts.”170 In the midst of the Party Congress, the Bolsheviks crushed the Kronstadt rebellion. An initial assault by bombardment was followed by an invasion of the island by thousands of Red Army troops, which took more than ten thousand lives. The morning after the last rebels were liquidated, March 18, 1921, happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of Paris Commune. Parades celebrated the memory of the French rebels, and Bolsheviks marched through the streets singing the Internationale.171 In the wake of the repression of the Kronstadt sailors, the Soviet regime moved swiftly to eliminate the last centers of opposition in Soviet Russia. The Menshevik party, accused of aiding the Kronstadt rebels, was outlawed, and the remaining members of its Central Committee were arrested en masse. Fedor Dan sardonically noted that he was initially interred in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he had visited an imprisoned Trotsky in 1906.172 In 1922, the SR Central Committee was prosecuted in the first Soviet show trial, accused of conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The death sentences handed down were commuted to long terms of internal exile and hard labor only after an outcry from foreign socialists.173 Radical critics of the Bolsheviks reacted to the new party dogma with horror. Many, like Kautsky, remarked on the dissonance between the Bolsheviks’ claims

 

236

Part III: Revolutionary Repercussions

to defend the Commune’s democratic mantle and internationalist ambitions and their continued reliance on repression and violence. Martov insisted that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the entire revolutionary tradition launched in 1789 and continued by the Communards: they were not revolutionaries at all, but vandals who would stop at nothing before they destroyed European civilization.174 A disillusioned anarchist described the cheerful revolutionary music piped through the streets of Petrograd on the morning after the Kronstadt rebels were crushed as the “funeral dirge for humanity’s flaming hope.”175 The Bolsheviks, by contrast, saw the creation of a one-​party state through force not as the antithesis of the decades-​long struggle to live the revolution, but as its culmination. “Revolution is revolution only because it reduces all contradictions to the alternative of life or death,” wrote Trotsky. “We were breaking up the resistance of the old rocks with the help of steel and dynamite.”176 “Those who renounce terrorism in principle, who reject the suppression and intimidation of fierce and armed counterrevolutionary forces, necessarily renounce the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship,” he explained elsewhere. “Those who renounce the dictatorship of the proletariat also renounce the social revolution and dig the grave of socialism.” Far from destroying the spirit of the Commune, the Bolsheviks believed, violence advanced its goals—​and avenged its defeat.177 The multiple visions of emancipation that had emerged from the colonies had often caused conflict and schisms, but they had also inspired new political movements, informed practices of internationalism, and provided the foundations for the greatest revolutionary experiment of all—​the Bolshevik state. In decimating the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt rebels, the Bolsheviks ended the multivalence of the revolutionary tradition. They declared themselves the sole arbiters of what freedom meant and how to live the revolution, foreclosing on alternative definitions. This new dogmatic clarity left those who rejected the Bolshevik interpretation of the revolutionary process to make an agonizing choice:  whether to accommodate themselves to Soviet power or not. Kollontai and Shliapnikov ultimately reconciled with their comrades, preserving a modicum of independence by mostly working abroad. Kollontai joined the Soviet foreign legation, serving in several countries before being appointed ambassador to Norway, while Shliapnikov spent much of the 1920s in Paris, negotiating the normalization of Franco-​Russian relations. Victor Serge, who had been deeply shaken by the “ghastly fratricide” of Kronstadt, made a similar choice, moving to Berlin, where he served on foreign missions for the Comintern.178 Several prominent Menshevik activists of the period concluded

 



R evolution f rom  Abroad

237

that they could not survive life in the underground and reluctantly joined the Bolsheviks.179 Other ex-​émigrés-​turned-​dissidents were unwilling to make this compromise. Following protests from Western Marxists about the Bolsheviks’ persecution of their rivals, leaders of opposition parties were offered the choice between internal and foreign exile. Among those who chose the former were Martov’s brothers, Vladimir Levitskii and Sergei Ezhov, and Mark Liber, the anti-​Bolshevik Bundist. All would spend the rest of their lives condemned to isolated settlements in Siberia and Central Asia.180 Others opted to return abroad. Chernov emigrated to Paris, where his family eventually managed to join him.181 Balabanova moved to Vienna, where she was expelled from the Bolshevik party in absentia.182 In 1922, a train carrying Dan and other deported members of the Menshevik Central Committee crossed into Germany, “taking us to that banishment abroad which we had experienced so often in tsarist times. We would not have expected it now, though, in the fifth year of the revolution.”183 Given the importance of space and personal relationships in the creation of revolutionary utopias from the beginning, it is fitting that this final break in émigré history was accompanied by physical estrangement. The Bolsheviks and their radical critics, who had once worked together in common cause and defined their revolutionary programs in dialogue with one another, forever ruptured the bonds that had once united them. Although both sides would continue to develop their respective programs to emancipate humanity, they would do so independently, divided by international borders and the distance of forced internal exile.

 

 

Epilogue Émigré Clans

One-​time émigrés who pledged their loyalty to the Soviet state and those who fled it would grapple with the inheritances of their prerevolutionary exile for the rest of their lives. Both would continue to debate what it meant to live the revolution and to pursue this goal in the context of the new settings that they occupied, and both remained profoundly influenced by the transnational networks that they had created abroad. But of all the legacies of emigration, the intimacies formed in the colonies proved the most significant and complex, remaining a source of inspiration as well as frustration long after the destruction of the communities that had nourished them. The former émigrés who returned abroad after 1921 joined a migration many times larger than any which had preceded the revolution: some 1.5 million left Russia between 1917 and 1921. The immense number of travelers fleeing the revolution increased the Russian population of cities with long émigré histories, such as Paris and Berlin, many times over. It also led to the emergence of exile communities in places where they had not previously existed, including Harbin, San Francisco, and Istanbul.1 As in the prerevolutionary period, foreign exile provided opportunities for political organization. Contingents of SRs, anarchists, and Bundists remained active in Poland, France, Germany, and the United States, where they continued to agitate against the Bolsheviks. The Menshevik Central Committee, which resettled in Berlin, declared itself the sole legitimate voice of the RSDRP and the leader of the struggle against Bolshevik usurpation.2 However, the size and global dispersion of the postrevolutionary emigration meant that for most of these groups, political activism was not expressed through the life of a community. Rather, it was confined to the realm of abstract thought. Utopia’s Discontents. Faith Hillis, Oxford University Press (2021). © Faith Hillis. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066338.003.0010

 

240

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

The Menshevik party offered an exception to this rule. Its leaders, who had spent their entire adult lives abroad—​except for the brief period between 1917–​ 1922—​resurrected many elements of prerevolutionary exile culture during their second stint of emigration. They maintained the party’s integrity by closing its ranks shortly after they fled to Berlin, admitting only members who had joined before 1917. In addition to saving the party from infiltration by Soviet agents, this decision affirmed the importance of love and intimacy in revolutionary life and preserved longstanding traditions of collective living and labor. The party survived severe disruptions, including the rise of Hitler, which forced it to move to Paris, and the Nazi invasion of France, which compelled it to relocate to New York. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, aging Mensheviks resided together in New York’s Morningside Heights, took joint vacations in the summer, maintained mutual aid funds to support each other through difficult times, and took the minutes of what they still referred to as the RSDRP in black-​and-​white marble notebooks purchased from dime stores. This remnant of nineteenth-​ century intelligentsia culture, transplanted to mid-​century Manhattan, endured as long as its members: Lidiia Dan, one of the last survivors of the original cohort, died in 1963.3 The Mensheviks were also successful in using the international connections they had established in their first emigration to advance their agendas. Upon their move to Berlin they resumed their close relations with German and Austrian Social Democrats, becoming towering presences in interwar Social Democracy. They would later acquire prominent roles in France’s Popular Front and in New York labor organizations.4 Through the 1920s, party activists used connections in the German and Latvian embassies to launch secret missions into the Soviet Union and to maintain contact with the small circles of underground activists remaining there. Just as they had before the revolution, party members managed to smuggle substantial runs of their newspaper into Russia, which played a crucial role in maintaining communications across borders.5 Other parties, however, found it difficult to recapture the collective cohesion and sense of purpose that they had enjoyed before the revolution. Partially a result of the geographic dispersion of the emigration, this was also a side effect of the fracturing of Russian politics brought about by the trauma of the revolution. Radical émigrés were now vastly outnumbered by liberal and reactionary opponents of the Bolshevik regime; indeed, if there was one single driving impulse that united the new generation of émigrés, it was a culturally conservative project of preservation and reclamation.6 Powerful currents of right-​wing thought, many of which revolved around dreams of a monarchical restoration in Russia and promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Bolshevik revolution had been a plot to obtain world domination, coursed through émigré

 

Ep ilog ue

241

communities, influencing many one-​time radicals.7 Vladimir Burtsev cursed the Bolsheviks as violent usurpers and plunderers of Russia’s national wealth, employing antisemitic tropes to discredit his adversaries.8 Former SR terrorist Boris Savinkov, who compared Russia to the crucified Christ, joined British intelligence plots to overthrow the Soviet regime until he was lured back to his homeland and executed in 1925.9 The feature of prerevolutionary émigré life that remained the most resilient in the postrevolutionary period was its ability to produce intense skloki. The old doctrinal debates that had divided radicals before 1917 remained for the most part unresolved, and many had been further complicated by new dilemmas resulting from the Bolshevik seizure of power. As in prerevolutionary times, these conflicts led to devastating schisms. The right wing of the Mensheviks, which had taken to arms against the Bolsheviks, ultimately estranged itself from the Berlin-​based Central Committee, which condemned these tactics. Intense debates about the legitimacy of the anti-​Jewish agitation in which some émigré SRs had engaged during the Civil War fractured that party.10 Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, ex-​émigrés continued the task of transforming their homeland into a Communist concrete utopia. However, the triumph of the Bolshevik party accelerated its transformation as an institution. In 1919 more than three-​quarters of delegates to the party congress had been Old Bolsheviks who joined before 1917, most of whom had spent substantial time in foreign emigration. By 1920, however, the majority of delegates had joined after the fall of tsarism; many of these were workers and peasants who had entered the party in the midst of the Civil War.11 The 1922 appointment of Stalin to the newly created post of general secretary began to change the demographics of elite apparatchiks as well. Stalin surrounded himself with younger party activists from humble backgrounds, who like him had spent little if any time abroad. Appointing them to key positions in the police, military, and bureaucracy, he began to create an alternate center of power distinct from the émigré networks that had heretofore dominated the Soviet political elite.12 The émigré clan was no longer the preeminent force in the Bolshevik party. Nevertheless, it remained extremely influential. In 1922, 69 of the party’s original members convened to form the Society of Old Bolsheviks, which aspired to protect the unique culture forged in emigration and the radical underground. The organization replicated the cultural infrastructure of the émigré colonies, establishing a club in the Kremlin with its own cafeteria, as well as a library that contained tens of thousands of volumes and dozens of periodicals, including many in foreign languages. It also built collective housing projects for members and organized mutual aid endeavors.13 In addition to indulging the nostalgia of the original Bolsheviks, the group aspired to guide official policy. Presenting itself as the conscience of the party, the Society instructed its members to educate

 

242

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

young recruits about the “strong comradely cohesion” that had connected the first generations of revolutionaries and shaped their revolutionary consciousness.14 Former exiles exercised influence in several other corners of the state and party as well. Istpart, the historical commission charged with creating a cohesive history of the revolutionary movement and the 1917 revolution, was dominated by one-​time émigrés, including several members of Lenin’s original Geneva inner circle.15 The Society of Old Bolsheviks in fact began its existence as an annex of Istpart, and the group’s cafeteria remained a popular place for members to gather.16 Semen Dimanshtein presided over similar efforts to document the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement under the auspices of Evsektsiia.17 These publications devoted substantial attention to the experience of life in the colonies, celebrating the remarkable accomplishments of émigrés. However, these accounts were also replete with distortions and silences about the exile experience. Non-​Bolsheviks received short shrift in these official histories, and the Mensheviks in particular were portrayed as cowardly counterrevolutionaries.18 Meanwhile, the darker moments of émigré history were suppressed and in some cases rewritten. For example, early Soviet editions of Lenin’s collected writings expurgated his most vicious fulminations against the Bund and his vigorous defenses of the agent provocateur Malinowski. His writings on these issues would remain unpublished until Khrushchev’s Thaw—​ and in some cases, until the fall of the Soviet Union.19 Dominant in the state historical apparatus, former émigrés also played crucial roles in defining the Soviet Union’s relationship with the outside world. Many joined foreign legations, and veterans of the colonies assumed leadership positions in VOKS, the All-​Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Kamenev’s wife, Olga, chaired the organization, which aimed to attract “fellow travelers,” especially from the advanced capitalist nations. Kameneva and her staff not only benefited from the language skills and cultural knowledge that they had acquired abroad, but also built on prerevolutionary networks. Groups such as the Society of Friends, a Comintern-​affiliated organization for Western activists, drew on the networks created by the SFRF and other groups that had lobbied for the rights of Russian émigrés. Indeed, some of the most ardent Western enthusiasts of the Soviet experiment, including George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, had earlier been SFRF members.20 International networks formed before the revolution influenced one other element of Soviet statecraft: policing. In 1923–​24, the OGPU (the successor to the Cheka) boasted that it had managed to coopt prerevolutionary police networks to inform on anti-​Bolshevik activists living abroad.21 Indeed, the Soviets employed one of the Old Regime’s most important agents in Paris: Henri Bint, a Frenchman who had served the Okhrana since 1881 and stalked Tikhomirov, Lenin, Burtsev, and countless other exiles abroad. Although information about

 

Ep ilog ue

243

Bint’s activities in this period is fragmentary, it is clear that the Soviet regime benefited from his longstanding knowledge about the personal networks of one-​ time émigrés who had again fled abroad.22 Bonds of trust and networks formed abroad thus retained a vital role in Bolshevik culture and statecraft. However, the skloki of emigration acquired new life in Soviet high politics. Lenin had been the heart and soul of the Bolshevik party for its entire existence. But in 1922, he suffered from a devastating stroke from which he never fully recovered. His resulting absence from the political scene, culminating in his death in 1924, plunged the party and the revolutionary state into deep crisis, inaugurating a struggle for power among his would-​be successors. Trotsky was the first to act. Presenting himself as the guardian of Lenin’s radical legacy, he argued that the party had forsaken its radical utopian vision in the aftermath of the Civil War, when it had legalized certain forms of capitalist activity and abandoned its goal of world revolution in exchange for the goal of “socialism in one country.” Kamenev and Zinoviev, who formed a bloc against Trotsky with Stalin, used their decades of intimate acquaintance with the oppositionist as a cudgel against him. Producing multiple volumes that chronicled his émigré feuds with Lenin, they insisted that far from a Leninist, Trotsky was in fact a crypto-​Menshevik.23 Trotsky struck back with his own effort to discredit Kamenev and Zinoviev, noting in his 1924 Lessons of October that the pair had opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power.24 The triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev ultimately defeated Trotsky, whose “left opposition” movement was formally denounced at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Before long, however, Stalin turned against his erstwhile allies, accusing Kamenev and Zinoviev of leading a separate oppositionist bloc. He began to replace the pair’s protégés with his own loyalists and incited his allies on the Central Committee against them. The struggle for control of the party also trickled down to its rank and file, as local officials worked to identify and purge oppositionists from party cells. By 1927–​28, Stalin had emerged triumphant:  Trotsky was exiled to Central Asia and eventually deported, and Kamenev and Zinoviev, stripped of their positions, fell into political inactivity.25 The intraparty struggles of the 1920s made the cultural gulf between Stalin and his henchmen, on the one hand, and the former exiles, on the other, more evident than ever. At the first meeting of the Society of Old Bolsheviks in 1922, Stalin expressed anxiety that the group sought to set the party’s founders apart from its rank and file, warning that it encouraged an unwanted “tint of privilege.”26 In a later interview with a German journalist who explicitly asked if his paltry experience abroad placed him at a disadvantage in the party, Stalin responded with a mix of defensiveness and disdain for émigré culture. “Living abroad is not at all a decisive factor in studying European economies, technique, the cadres of the labor movement. . . . On the contrary, I know many comrades

 

244

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

who were abroad twenty years, lived somewhere in Charlottenburg or in the Latin Quarter, spent years in cafés drinking beer, and didn’t manage to study Europe or understand it.”27 A 1927 philippic by a young functionary loyal to Stalin placed the exile experience in a still darker light. It accused Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Shliapnikov, Radek, and other former émigrés of being parties to a grand plot to destroy the Communist state that included Menshevik activists in Berlin and stretched back to the days of the Kronstadt revolt. This conspiracy had supposedly aimed to produce factions in the party, then to drive it to schism in a bid to legalize political opposition.28 By this account, the intimate histories that one-​time émigrés shared, their foreign experiences and contacts, and their tendencies for doctrinal schisms were existential threats to the Soviet state. In spite of the suspicion that followed ex-​émigrés, most rallied behind Stalin in his campaign against the opposition. Denunciations of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev played conspicuous roles in the celebrations of the revolution’s tenth anniversary organized by Istpart.29 Furthermore, the Society of Old Bolsheviks conducted purges to root out suspected oppositionists, whom members saw as threats to the “traditions of the old Leninist guard and its party line.”30 What explains this puzzling behavior? Former exiles agreed with their critics about the imminent dangers of schism within the party. In 1926, Dzierżyński remarked that virtually every commissariat had developed its own ideological line. Members of the Society of Old Bolsheviks expressed similar concerns about the prospect of a party split.31 One historian of that group convincingly argues that its members unified behind Stalin because they concluded that he was best situated to provide the strong leadership necessary to keep peace among its various factions.32 Given their fractious history, it was rational that one-​time émigrés would be desperate to avoid the damaging influence of destructive skloki. What they could not possibly foresee at the time is that their efforts to assure their party’s survival would lead to their own demise. Having consolidated power, Stalin launched a revolution of his own in 1928 that led the Bolshevik struggle for concrete utopia in a new direction. He introduced the first Five Year Plan, which called for the breakneck industrialization of the country and the complete collectivization of peasant agriculture. In addition, he set the Soviet Union on a new cultural course. Abandoning the cosmopolitan worldview that had long guided the Bolshevik party, he now pursued “Socialism in One Country” and autarky. Diminishing the power vested in theoretically engaged intellectuals, he emphasized the importance of practical work and mass engagement. This last preference had a momentous impact on the writing of party history, for Stalin favored accounts that championed the heroism of the Leninist vanguard over those that focused on the party’s intellectual development, international engagements, or internal debates.33

 

Ep ilog ue

245

However, Stalin’s revolution intensified opposition within the party—​ most of which originated from former émigrés. Trotsky remained defiant in exile. Working through intermediaries, he established contact with Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, and other prerevolutionary exiles, with whom he hoped to form a unified anti-​Stalin front.34 Meanwhile, Nikolai Bukharin emerged as the leader of a new opposition movement—​the so-​called right opposition—​ which expressed concern about the brutality of the collectivization campaign and other abuses of power.35 Although many members of the Society of Old Bolsheviks continued to stand by Stalin, the group expressed growing discontent with the direction of Soviet politics. It demanded a greater role in policy creation, requested access to confidential party documents, and expressed its concern over the growing bureaucratism of Stalin’s state and the human costs of his collectivization campaign.36 Sensing the threat posed by the former exiles’ shared cultural orientation and strong fraternal bonds, Stalin began an all-​out assault against the bastions of émigré power in the early 1930s. He obligated the Society of Old Bolsheviks to accept hundreds of young, proletarian members, many of whom had joined the party only after 1917. The influx doubled its membership between 1930 and 1932 and obviated its original raison d’être.37 Istpart was also dealt a blow in 1931, when Stalin published a searing rebuke of an article that had appeared in its journal, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia. The author of the article had painstakingly reconstructed Lenin’s complex relationship with the SPD in the lead-​up to World War I, showing that he had only advocated a definitive break with it after the beginning of the conflict.38 Objecting to the article’s depiction of Lenin as a multidimensional (and not necessarily heroic) character as well as its arcane analysis of the finer points of Marxist theory, Stalin decried the author as a “falsifier of our party’s history,” a Trotskyite, and an agent of the “counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.”39 This attack was accompanied by numerous other attempts to rewrite history. Party historians began to portray Stalin as a major force in the Bolshevik party since its founding and as Lenin’s chief deputy in 1917, and they rebuked former émigrés for “incorrect” memories that contradicted the party’s new historical narratives.40 Stalin had become the arbiter of revolutionary history—​ including the history of emigration, which he had only witnessed in passing. In 1934, Stalin appeared to have again triumphed over his rivals. After a series of ritualized apologies for their misdeeds, Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were welcomed back into the party. Meanwhile, members of the Society of Old Bolsheviks and Istpart engaged in organized self-​criticism and adjusted their behavior to comply with Stalin’ s expectations.41 In a speech before the so-​called Congress of Victors, Stalin rejoiced that all political opposition movements had been “smashed and scattered,” permitting the party to continue the march toward Communism united.42 However, the peace proved short-​lived. Later in

 

246

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

1934, Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party boss and one of Stalin’s protégés, was assassinated. Almost immediately, Stalin accused Kamenev and Zinoviev of the crime, supposedly a result of an intricate conspiracy that also involved Trotsky, Nazi intelligence, and foreign reactionaries. Stalin’s top police official concluded that Trotsky’s transnational opposition network had undoubtedly established “a center somewhere in the USSR.”43 The party’s task now was to uncover it. Suspicion immediately centered on ex-​émigrés, and the traditional centers of their power were among the first to face retribution. The Society of Old Bolsheviks was liquidated; shortly thereafter, local Istpart organizations and Evsektsiia were disbanded and absorbed into the party.44 In 1936, Kamenev and Zinoviev, along with sixteen Old Bolsheviks, were prosecuted in a show trial, becoming among the first victims of what would become known as the Great Terror.45 Historian Golfo Alexopolous argues that the purges of the late 1930s were guided by the belief that the political opposition was a product of hostile clan networks (rody).46 This logic meant that one investigation of accused “enemies of the state” eventually uncovered others. The clan of prerevolutionary émigrés was unusually well-​placed, closely interconnected, and had already attracted scrutiny. Consequently, as soon as suspicion fell on a few of its members, others were quickly implicated. The trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev and a second trial of Old Bolsheviks in 1937 led to an investigation of Bukharin, who was accused of writing a tract critical of Stalin and distributing it abroad.47 Within months, virtually all of the Old Bolsheviks became entrapped in an expanding web of putative “Zinovievist-​Kamenevist and Trotskyist-​W hite Guard” conspiracies.48 Shliapnikov was shot in 1937; Bukharin, Dimanshtein, and Iakov Peterss in 1938; Karl Radek in 1939; Olga Kameneva in 1941. Kollontai managed to survive, perhaps because she remained abroad. Trotsky was not so lucky, assassinated in Mexico City by a blow to the head with an ice axe in 1940. The last remnants of the non-​Bolshevik revolutionary parties active between 1917 and 1921 were also destroyed by Stalin’s terror. What was left of the Menshevik underground was decimated in a show trial in 1931, and the Mensheviks living in foreign exile were stripped of their Soviet citizenship the following year.49 Martov’s brothers, Ezhov and Levitskii, who had chosen life in exile over deportation, were shot in 1941. Bund activist Mark Liber, who had been imprisoned since 1923, was likely executed in 1937.50 Former Bundists—​ even those who had eventually joined the Bolshevik party and made crucial contributions to its victory—​shared a similar fate. So did thousands of Jewish activists who had no connections with the Bund but were nevertheless charged with “deviant” nationalist behavior or suspected of being Trotskyites—​a charge that was disproportionately lodged against Communists of Jewish origin.51

 

Ep ilog ue

247

The impetus behind Stalin’s purges remains one of the most debated topics in Soviet history; to the extent that a single scholarly consensus exists, it is that the terror was a product of multiple, intersecting forces. Stalin’s personal paranoia and his fear of geopolitical encirclement played a crucial role in the creation of his murderous police state.52 That said, it is also clear the terror did not unfold in a linear fashion and was instead characterized by numerous false starts and premature stops, periods of acceleration followed by retreat.53 Although the original impetus for the violence emerged from above, it became a mass participatory event, driven by social factors, a broader culture of brutalization, and true belief in the regime.54 Understanding the history of émigré utopias and the discontents that they produced sheds new light on the complex conjuncture of forces and events that produced the terror. On the one hand, it reveals the enduring power of the bonds formed abroad, and the real risks that the determination to preserve them posed to Stalin’s revolution. As one former émigré put it, “Our crime as Oppositionists lay simply in existing, in not disowning ourselves, in keeping our friendships and talking freely in one another’s company.”55 On the other hand, the dysfunctions of the émigré family facilitated its own destruction. Decades-​old skloki and fears of a party schism divided one-​time exiles upon themselves, enabling the rise of the man who would destroy them all. Standing outside of the émigré clan, Stalin was ideally situated to recognize the threats it posed as well as its vulnerabilities, which he manipulated for his own purposes. Yet Stalin’s fixation on his émigré rivals also suggests that he regarded them with a sense of awe. Some scholars have puzzled over how the real threats that oppositionists posed to his regime gave rise to the belief that they were participants in a global conspiracy that united underground dissidents in the Soviet Union, anti-​Soviet émigrés and foreign intelligence services.56 Once the remarkable story of the emigration comes into focus, it becomes easier to understand why former residents of the Russian colonies so alarmed Stalin. As a young man, Stalin had watched as isolated pockets of clandestine activity gave rise to a robust international network that changed the nature of radical politics, built functional parties, and produced new solidarities across ethnic, linguistic, class, and gender divides. From afar, Stalin watched the exiles, who had few resources at their disposal besides their audacious dreams, return home, topple the world’s largest state, and change the course of world history. Stalin’s image of the émigré clan as an all-​powerful network with limitless potential was paranoid, but it was not entirely unfounded. It was not only the culture and networks of one-​time émigrés that threatened his supremacy, but the astonishing fertility of their political imaginations—​and their proven ability to transform once fanciful dreams into concrete realities. Stalin’s eradication of the

 

248

U t o p i a’s D i s c o n t e n t s

émigré clan might thus be read as an attempt to avoid a reprise of the Finland Station scenario, in which persecuted revolutionaries’ unyielding faith in the possibility of a better future allowed them to triumph against the odds. This is the final and most tragic irony of émigré history—​that the transformative vision of one-​time colony residents mandated their destruction.

 

NOTES

Introduction 1. Vladimir Bonch-​Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow, 1969), 24–​ 25; Helen Rappoport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York, 2012), 99–​100. 2. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (Philadelphia, 1949), 58; The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann (London, 1972), 3: 26–​27, 127 (on the university); 219, 298 (on Landolt). 3. Quote from Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-​Napoleonic Europe (New  York, 2014), 19. For a brilliant elucidation of the connections between demands for emancipation emanating from different nations, see Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton, NJ, 2018), 72–​95. 4. Sabine Freitag and Rudolph Muhs, eds., Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-​ Victorian England (New York, 2003); Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-​Napoleonic Era (Oxford, 2009); Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés: Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris, 2010). 5. Ilham Khuri-​Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–​1914 (Berkeley, 2010); Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–​ 1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalization (Liverpool, 2013); Julia Nicholls, Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871–​1885 (Cambridge, 2019). 6. Karl Marx, “Heroes of the Exile,” https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​download/​pdf/​heroes_​exile.pdf. 7. Treatments of this utopian bent include Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (New  York, 2003); Lesley Chamberlain, Arc of Utopia:  The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution (London, 2017). 8. Michael G. Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften und soziale Räume:  Osteuropäische Einwanderer in Paris 1880–​1940 (Frankfurt, 2012), 214; Aline Masé, “Student Migration of Jews from Russia to the Universities of Berne and Zurich, 1865–​1914,” in East European Jews in Switzerland, ed. Tamar Lewinsky and Sandrine Mayoraz (Berlin, 2013), 99. 9. For example, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 173–​86. 10. This book, like Rebecca Kobrin’s work on émigrés from Bialystok, examines how local consciousness provided a foundation for the creation of a transnational diasporic identity. The radical diaspora forged in the colonies, however, was explicitly multiethnic. Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington, IN, 2010). 11. The quote is Lenin’s: V. I. Lenin, “Dve utopii,” PSS (Moscow, 1961), 22: 117. 12. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 1: 144–​45. See also Ruth Levitas, “Educated Hope:  Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990):  13–​26; Uri Gordon, “Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise,” Political Studies 66, no. 2 (2018):  521–​37. Maria Todorova’s examination of Bulgarian socialism, published just as this book went into production, similarly uses Bloch’s 249

 

250

N o t e s t o p a g e s 4– 15

writings to explore socialism as a practice and not merely an idea. Maria Todorova, The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins, 1870s–​1920s (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 13. The classic text is Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991). For applications of Lefebvre’s insights that identify the city as a particularly generative space, see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-​and-​Imagined Places (Oxford, 1996); David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, 2000), 133–​81. 14. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework 36 (1989): 15–​23; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York, 2019); Homi K. Bhabha, The Communication of Culture (London, 1994), 152–​69, 171–​97. 15. For example, Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier:  The Visionary and His World (Berkeley, 1986), 355–​496; Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-​Century America (Ithaca, NY,1991); Ellen Wayland-​Smith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-​ Set Table (New York, 2016). 16. Sarah Badcock, A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism (Oxford, 2016), 82–​90; Katy Turton, Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (London, 2017), 31–​70, 91–​120; Christopher Ely, Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2016). 17. For example, Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State:  Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–​1929 (New  York, 1985); Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–​1921 (Cambridge, MA, 2002). 18. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000); Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2017). 19. The dilemma of the radical intelligentsia is described in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New  York, 1955), 20–​ 21. See also Martin Malia, “What is the Intelligentsia?” and Richard Pipes, “The Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia,” both in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed., Richard Pipes (New York, 1961), 1–​18, 47–​62. 20. Khuri-​Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 109–​30; Kostis Karpozilos, “Transnational Socialism within a Nation State: The Un-​Greekness of the ‘Greek Left,’” unpublished manuscript, 2019. 21. Michel Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française (Paris, 1967), 500–​36; S. Ia. Karp and Larry Wolff, eds., Le mirage russe au XVIIIe siècle (Ferney-​Voltaire, 2001). 22. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent:  Europe’s Twentieth Century (New  York, 2000); Paul A. Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe:  The Myth of Judeo-​Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 2018),  22–​93. 23. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams:  Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New  York, 1989); Mark D. Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905–​1921 (New York, 2017). 24. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994).

Chapter 1 1. N. G. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let: Vospominaniia Lavrista (Newtonville, MA, 1976), 11–​ 12, quote at 45. 2. Élie Reclus, La Commune de Paris au jour le jour 1871 (Paris, 1908), 48. 3. G. A. Kuklin, Materialy k izucheniiu istoriia revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii (Geneva, 1905), 385–​440; Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland (Seattle, 1984), 24–​64; 105–​31. 4. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley, 1973), 46–​47; V. S. Pecherin, The First Russian Political Émigré: Notes from beyond the Grave, or Apologia pro Vita Mea, trans. Michael Katz (Dublin, 2008), 8; Dmitry Shlapentokh, The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009), 82–​87. 5. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–​1855 (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 99–​133. 6. Iu. Mann, V kruzhke stankevicha (Moscow, 1983); John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, NY, 2007).

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 15– 19

251

7. P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs, trans. Arthur P. Mendel (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 176. 8. This point is made eloquently in William G. Atwood, The Parisian Worlds of Frédéric Chopin (New Haven, CT, 1999), 378–​80. 9. M. A. Bakunin, “Reaktsiia v Germaniia,” in Sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1828–​1876 (Moscow, 1935), 3: 126–​48. 10. Quote from M. A. Bakunin, letter to the editor of La Réforme, January 27, 1845, in Sobranie sochinenii, 3:  242. See also Shlomo Barer, The Doctors of Revolution:  19th-​Century Thinkers Who Changed the World (New York, 2000), 771–​80, 802–​14. 11. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York, 1994), 261–​305; Wiktoria Šliwowska, “Un émigré russe en France: Ivan Golovine, 1816–​1890,” Cahiers du monde russe 11, no. 2 (1970): 221–​ 43. The quote is from Ivan Golovine, La Russie sous Nicolas Ier (Paris, 1845), 56–​60, 99. 12. Krzysztof Marchlewicz, Wielka emigracja na wyspach brytyjskich (1831–​1863) (Poznań, 2008), 24. 13. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 381–​82; Confession of Mikhail Bakunin, 44. 14. A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1955), 5: 141. 15. Michał Sokolnicki, Les origines de l’émigration polonaise en France, 1831–​ 1832 (Paris, 1910), 74–​140; V. F. Ratch, Pol’skaia emigratsiia do i vo vremia poslednogo miatezha (Vil’na, 1866),  10–​68. 16. Marceli Handelsman, Adam Czartoryski (Warsaw, 1948), 1: 207–​313. 17. See https://​utopiasdiscontents.com/​itineraries. 18. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 383, 531. 19. Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism (Oxford, 1982), 116; Cadot, La Russie, 476–​91. 20. Pecherin, The First Russian Political Émigré, 59. 21. Cadot, La Russie,  21–​50. 22. Victoria Frede, “A Radical Circle Confronts a Radical Woman: M. L. Ogareva, the Westernizers, and the Problem of Individualism in the 1830s–​1840s,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 2 (2006): 161–​89; Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles (Boston, 1961), 58–​79. 23. Patrick Waddington, “Turgenev and Pauline Viardot:  An Unofficial Marriage,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 26, no. 1 (1984):  42–​64; Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev, His Life and Times (New York, 1978), 49, 72. 24. See for example Bakunin’s 1843 essay, “Kommunizm,” Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 222–​31. 25. Aileen Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 237. 26. Šliwowska, “Un émigré russe,” 228, 232, 237. 27. Gertsen, “Pol’sko-​russkii revoliutsionnyi soiuz,” Sobranie sochinenii, 12: 213. 28. Stites, The Four Horsemen, 328. 29. Golovine, La Russie; Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 261–​305. 30. Kelly, Bakunin, 76–​150. The quote is from “Reaktsiia v Germanii,” 3: 148. 31. Cited in Cadot, La Russie,  30–​31. 32. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 529–​54; Kelly, Discovery of Chance, 365–​67. 33. Michael Futrell, Northern Underground:  Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport and Communications through Scandinavia and Finland, 1863–​1917 (London, 1963), 30–​34. 34. Cited in Stites, The Four Horsemen, 20. 35. Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries (London, 1999), 291. 36. Cadot, La Russie, 338–​57; John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Cambridge, MA, 1950). 37. Antoine N. Kościakiewicz, Souvenirs de l’émigration polonaise (Paris, 1858), 51; Sokolnicki, Les origines, 223; Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia, 119. 38. La pologne et la france en 1830–​31 (Paris, 1831), 31–​32; Victoire des polonais, et programme de la fête des journées de juillet (Besançon, 1831). The quote is from: Ustawy Komitetu narodowego polskiego. Statuts du comité national polonais, in AN, C/​2758. 39. Feliks Napoleon Żaba, The Polish Exile (Edinburgh, 1833) 6–​9; “Address of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland,” in AN, C/​2761, 13.

 

252

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9– 22

40. Quote M. le Baron Charles, “Opinion sur la pologne,” Extrait du moniteur universel, January 16, 1846; see also petition from General Agency for the Defense of Religious Freedom to the Chamber of Deputies, 1831, AN, CC/​448; Bouteron, Pologne romantique, 176–​83. 41. Madame Grabowska, Esquisses polonaises, ou fragmens et traits détachés, pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de Pologne actuelle (Paris, 1831), 1. 42. Kościakiewicz, Souvenirs, 14. 43. Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace:  Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (New York, 2015), 50–​57; Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-​Victorian Politics (New York, 1979), 68–​74. 44. Bade, Migration in European History, 130–​48; Gérard Noiriel, La Tyrannie du national:  Le droit d’asile en Europe, 1793–​1993 (Paris, 1991), 36–​80; Greg Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and Its Refugees (Basingstoke, 2008), 47–​122. The figure on payments is from Kuklin, Materialy, 425. Further information on payments is found in TNA, PMG, 53/​6; AN, F15/​3881. 45. Burgess, Refuge, 49; Noiriel, Réfugiés,  32–​39. 46. Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 11–​12; Gleason, Origins of Russophobia, 107–​34. 47. Lloyd S. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), 253–​73. Quote from 257. 48. Report of gendarmes of Coulommiers, February 2, 1832, AN, F7/​6783; Police reports of June 8, 1831 and June 26, 1831 and “Bulletin de Paris,” January 28, 1831, all in AN, F7/​3885; S. L., “Une autre parisienne. Concert aux Wauxhall pour les polonais” (Paris, 1831), 6–​7; “Bulletin de Paris,” February 4, 1831 and March 10, 1831 in AN, F7/​12329. 49. Dorothée de Dino, Chronique de 1831 à 1862 (Paris, 1909), 1: 9–​10. 50. The quote is from a description of one such meeting: “The Poles,” A Penny Paper for the People, February 4, 1831, 7. 51. C. M. Wakefield, Life of Thomas Attwood (London, 1885), 204, 236; Antonia Fraser, Perilous Question:  The Drama of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 (London, 2013), 223–​24; Weisser, British Working Class, 84–​125. 52. Kuklin, Materialy, 427; Zamoyski, Holy Madness, 300; quote from Stites, Four Horsemen, 328. 53. Prefecture of Police to Chief of Municipal Police, June 17, 1871, APP, BA 1098. 54. For example, M. A. Bakunin, speech of November 29, 1847 in Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 270–​71; Ivan Golovin, The Russian Sketch-​Book (London, 1848). 55. The best reconstruction of the radical milieu in these years is Barer, Doctors of Revolution, 909–​75. 56. For Herzen’s account of one such meeting, see Aleksandr Herzen, 27 fevralia 1855 g. Narodnyi skhod v pamiatʹ perevorota 1848 v St. Martinʹs Hall (London, 1855). 57. Kuklin, Materialy, 364. 58. Annenkov, Extraordinary Decade, 184. 59. M. A. Bakunin, speech of November 29, 1847 in Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 273, 279. 60. Quote is from Bakunin, Confession, 55. 61. A good synthetic treatment is: Barer, Doctors of Revolution, 1049–​94. 62. Kuklin, Materialy, 439. 63. “Mirovoe znachenie fevral’skoi revoliutsii,” La Réforme, March 13, 1848, reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 294, 296. Emphasis in original. 64. This desperation is palpable in the petitions sent to the French Senate: AN, CC/​455. 65. Ratch, Pol’skaia emigratsiia, 349–​ 68; Marchlewicz, Wielka emigracja, 116–​ 17; Kuklin, Materialy, 352. 66. Frede, “A Radical Circle:” 187–​88. 67. A. I. Gertsen, “An die Redaktion der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung,” July 25, 1852, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 390. 68. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, 47–​121, 154–​85. 69. Burgess, Refuge, 73–​78; Sokolnicki, Origines, 164–​68. 70. Petition of Poles in Toulouse, February 12, 1834, AN, CC/​617, folder 5; for additional petitions, see AN, CC/​455. 71. Burgess, Refuge, 78–​88; “Session 1837,” in AN, C/​2765, 23.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 23– 26

253

72. See Robert Bielecki, Polacy w legii cudzoziemskiej, 1831–​1879 (Warsaw, 1992); Pologne romantique, 219–​21. 73. Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 67. 74. Address of the Literary Association, 17–​19, 33, 37–​41; Marchlewicz, Wielka emigracja, 68–​72,  280. 75. Burgess, Refuge, 91; Marchlewicz, Wielka emigracja, 286–​87. 76. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 139–​40. 77. Kelly, Bakunin, 120. 78. Letter from Paris, September 1, 1848, in Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 153–​76. 79. I. S. Turgenev, “Nashi poslali. Epizod iz istorii iun’skikh dnei 1848 v parizhe,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich (St. Petersburg, 1915), 10: 143–​54. 80. Burgess, Refuge, 114–​21. 81. Kuklin, Materialy, 364–​65. 82. Kelly, Bakunin, 120. 83. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, 230. 84. Herzen’s letter of June 1, 1849, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:  178–​80. See also Herzen, Past and Thoughts, 391–​97, 356–​57. 85. Bakunin, Confession, 39. 86. Barer, Doctors of Revolution, 1081–​83; Kelly, Bakunin, 130–​33, 151–​53. 87. For example, “Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie,” 1850–​51, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 16–​132; Letter to Michelet, 1851, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 271–​306; Letter to W. Linton, February 20, 1854, in Sobranie sochinenii, 12: 149–​65. 88. McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles, 32; Barer, Doctors of Revolution, 1150. 89. Kelly, Bakunin, 118. Bakunin reciprocated by claiming that Marx had denounced him to the German police who arrested him in 1848. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 472–​73. 90. Carr, Revolutionary Exiles, 208–​209. 91. Christopher Ely, Underground Petersburg (DeKalb, IL, 2016), 59–​86; Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia:  Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–​1930 (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 64–​114. 92. Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism:  A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, CA, 1988). 93. Petr Vitiazev, “P. L. Lavrov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov,” Golos minuvshego 10 (1915): 113–​14. 94. Peter Collmer, Die Schweiz und das Russische Reich, 1848–​1917 (Zurich, 2004), 185–​207. 95. “Russkie nepriznannye reformatory za granitsei ili ‘Russkie revoliutsionery za granitsei,’” 1873, GARF, f. 109a, op. 1, d. 446, ll. 10–​15. 96. “Foreign Refugees,” TNA, FO 412/​2. 97. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 270–​78; Kelly, Discovery of Chance, 378; Schapiro, Turgenev, 198, 260–​63. 98. Kelly, Bakunin, 164–​78. Quote from 177. 99. For a hagiographic account through the eyes of one radical, see Zemfir Ralli, “Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin,” Minuvshee gody 1, no. 10 (1908): 150–​51; “Iz moikh vospominanii o M. A. Bakunine,” Istoricheskii sbornik: O minuvshem (St. Petersburg, 1909), 295–​98. 100. Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-​Western Societies (Chicago, 2010), 42–​78, quote at 65. 101. Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–​ 1914 (Oxford, 2001), 25–​ 26, 31–​ 32; McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles,  6–​9. 102. Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice, 1848–​ 1923 (Cambridge, 1992), 49. 103. Bader, Doctors of Revolution, 1137. 104. Itenberg, Pervyi internatsional, 15, 35–​37; Kelly, Bakunin, 180–​83. 105. McClellan, The Revolutionary Exiles, 201. 106. Ralli, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, 153–​55; McClellan, The Revolutionary Exiles, 83–​ 107, 128; Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia,  42–​49. 107. Ralli, Mikhail Bakunin, 157; Herzen, Past and Thoughts, 582. 108. Vera Zasulich, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1930), 57.

 

254

N o t e s t o p a g e s 2 7– 31

109. Paul Avrich, Bakunin & Nechaev (London, 1974); Michael Confino, Violence dans la violence (Paris, 1973). 110. Quotes from Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London, 2015), 39, 11. Also, Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre, 1871 (Paris, 1971), 194–​247. 111. K. N. Berkov, Parizhkaia kommuna i russkie revoliutsionery (Moscow, 1926); B. S. Itenberg, Rossiia i Parizhskaia kommuna (Moscow, 1971). 112. Ross, Communal Luxury,  23–​29. 113. P. L. Lavrov to E. A. Shtakenshneider, BACU, Boris Sapir Papers, Box 34, “Lavrov and the Commune de Paris” folder. 114. Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871 (New York, 1999), 80–​98; John M. Merriman, Massacre (New York, 2014), 201–​41. 115. Quoted in McClellan, Revolutionary Émigrés, 113. 116. A. Iu. Andreev, Russkie studenty v nemetskikh universitetakh (Moscow, 2005). 117. See, for example, “Piat’desiat let nazad. Osnovanie russkoi chital’ni v Geidel’berge v 1862 godu,” BACU, S. G. Svatikov Papers, Box 74, Folder 1. 118. E. Likhacheva, Materialy dlia istorii zhenskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, 1856–​ 1880 (St. Petersburg, 1901), 472–​83. 119. “40 letnii iubilei Nadezhdy Prokof ’evny Suslovoi,” in P. N. Ariian, ed., Pervyi zhenskii kalendar’ na 1908 g. (St. Petersburg, 1908), 32–​34. 120. Verena E. Müller, “Die Medizinische Fakultät,” in Ebenso Neu als Kühn:  120 Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität Zürich, ed. Katharina Belser (Zurich, 1988), 147; Likhacheva, Materialy, 489. 121. Monika Bankowski-​ Züllig, “Nadezhda Prokof ’evna Suslova (1843–​ 1918)—​ Die Wegbereiterin,” in Ebenso Neu, 121–​ 22. For an overview of women’s education in Switzerland, see Das Frauenstudium an den schweizer Hochschulen (Zurich, 1928). 122. Daniela Neumann, Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz (1867–​1914) (Zurich, 1987), 12. 123. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 32. 124. M. P. Sazhin, “Russkie v Tsiurikhe,” Katorga i ssylka 10, no. 95 (1932): 41. The data on the origins of Zurich students is based on my geo-​spatial analysis conducted in ArcGIS. For an interactive visualization, see https://​utopiasdiscontents.com/​zurich-​colony. 125. Bankowski-​Züllig, “Nadezda Prokof ’evna Suslova,” 121–​22. 126. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 12. 127. Käthe Schirmacher, Züricher Studentinnen (Leipzig, 1896), 4–​5. 128. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 1872–​1876 (Moscow, 1924), 3–​9, quote at 9. 129. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let,  17–​23. 130. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 10. 131. Petr Vitiazev, “P. L.  Lavrov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov,” Golos minuvshego 10 (1915): 141; Figner, Studencheskie gody,  31–​32. 132. Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York, 1968), 269; Kuliabko-​ Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 12, 27; Figner, Studencheskie gody,  19–​31. 133. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 12, 25–​26. These were the early days of Yiddish literature, so the “Jewish” materials were likely in Hebrew. 134. Figner, Studencheskie gody,  32–​33. 135. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 13; Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 16. 136. Sazhin, “Russkie v Tsiurikhe:” 47–​49. 137. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 19–​24,  97–​98. 138. Ben Eklof and Tatiana Saburova, A Generation of Revolutionaries:  Nikolai Charushin and Russian Populism from the Great Reforms to Perestroika (Bloomington, IN, 2017), 102–​104. 139. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 128; Franziska Tiburtius, Erinnerungen Einer Achtzigjährigen (Berlin, 1923), 92, 104. 140. Ely, Underground Petersburg, 47, 83. 141. “Vypiska iz pis’ma E.  Ia. k Zhemchuzhniku N.  A.  v Samare,” September 1872, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 437; Eliiasha Shtein to Grigorii Puder, March 8, 1872, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 429, l. 1. 142. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 34–​35, 52; Kropotkin, Memoirs, 260.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 31– 36

255

143. Figner herself first learned of the existence of the Zurich colony from a “thick journal.” Figner, Studencheskie gody, 4. 144. Vitiazev, “P. L. Lavrov:” 124; Ralli, “Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin:” 163–​65; “Svodka agenturnkyh donesenii iz Shveitsarii,” October 28, 1872, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 438, ll. 1–​2. 145. “Unknown chapters in the history of Vpered!” BACU, Sapir Papers, Box 34, Folder “Vpered! Neperiodicheskii sbornik,” 7. 146. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 27–​28; Sazhin, “Russkie v Tsiurikhe:” 31–​35. 147. Report of agent in Zurich, May 10, 1872, GARF, f.  109, op.  157, 3-​aia eks., d.  80, l.  23; “Agenturnaia zapiska o trudnosti priobresti roman Chernyshevskogo N.  I. Chto delat?,” September 1, 1870, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 422, l. 1. 148. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 73–​ 89; Petr Vitiazev, “P. L.  Lavrov v Vospominaniiakh Sovremennikov. Iz Razskazov M. P. Sazhina,” 129. 149. Sazhin, “Russkie v Tsiurikhe:” 53–​55. 150. Letter of unidentified writer to P. A. Kropotkin, December 16, 1870, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 426, ll. 3–​4. 151. Mariia T. to P. I. Verdin, November 27, 1872, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 440, l. 2. 152. Boris Sapir, “Liberman et le socialisme russe,” International Review for Social History 3 (1938): 27; Report from Moscow, June 12, 1873, GARF, f. 109, op. 157, d. 215, t. 1, l. 114; Pavel Aksel’rod, Perezhitoe i peredumannoe (Berlin, 1923), 106–​10. 153. Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-​Century Russia (Cambridge, 1985), 42–​73; Ely, Underground Petersburg, 107–​12. On the connections between the Chaikovtsy and the Zurich colony, Kropotkin, Memoirs, 304–​309; J. M. Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution: The Russian Colony in Zuerich (Assen, 1955), 80–​83; L. B. Goldenberg, “Vospominaniia,” Katorga i ssylka 3, no. 12 (1924): 106–​11. 154. Petr Lavrov, Parizhskaia kommuna (Moscow, 1922), 268. 155. Mikhail Bakunin, “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State.” https://​www.marxists. org/​reference/​archive/​bakunin/​works/​1871/​paris-​commune.htm. 156. Figner, Studencheskie gody,  34–​36. 157. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 64–​ 68; Vitiazev, “P. L.  Lavrov:” 134–​ 38; Figner, Studencheskie gody,  36–​41. 158. Tiburtius, Erinnerungen, 124–​25. 159. Mariia T. to P. I. Verdin, November 27, 1872, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 440. 160. Agent’s report from June 6, 1872, GARF, f. 109, op. 157, 3-​aia eks., d. 80, l. 53. 161. Report of the Chief of the Bessarabia Oblast’ Gendarme Directorate, October 30, 1872; “Svedenie o litsakh vyekhavshikh iz Tavricheskoi gubernii v Tsiurikhe;” Report of Chief of the Podoliia Gendarme Direction, November 7, 1872, all in GARF, 1872, f. 109, op. 157, d. 215, t. 1, ll. 40, 76, 48–​49. 162. “O Russkikh poddannykh, prozhivaiushchikh v Tsiurikhe i slushaiushchikh kursy v tamoshnem universitete,” GARF, f. 109, op. 157, d. 215, t. 1, ll. 84, 88–​89. 163. The decree is cited in:  Swiss Federal Council to M.  A. Gorchakov, January 22, 1875, in Danièle Tosato-​Rigo et al., eds., Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 1813–​1955: Kontakty i razryvy (Bern, 1994), 189. 164. “Russkim tsiurikhskim studentkam,” GARF, f. 973, op. 1, d. 208, l. 2. 165. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 67. 166. For example, Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 71–​81; Sazhin, “Russkie v Tsiurikhe:” 25–​79. 167. For examples of this nostalgia, see Vitiazev, “P. L. Lavrov:” 141; Kropotkin, Memoirs, 269. 168. “Donesenie v III otdel. neizvestnogo litsa, pribyvshego iz-​za granitsy,” December 22, 1869, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 414, ll. 1–​3. 169. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 469–​506. 170. On the mystery, Ely, Underground Petersburg, 115–​17; for the explanation, Eklof and Saburova, A Generation of Revolutionaries,  59–​61. 171. Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, 128–​31. 172. L. G. Deich, Khodzhdenie v narod (Petrograd, 1920), 6–​8; S. G. Svatikov, “Evrei v russkom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii,” in Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia, ed. Oleg Budnitskii (Moscow, 1999), 48–​53; Stephen F. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social

 

256

N o t e s t o p a g e s 3 6– 42

Democracy, 1883–​1917 (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 38–​42; W. H. Roobol, Tsereteli, a Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography (The Hague, 1976), 2–​7. 173. L. G. Deich, Sixteen Years in Siberia; Some Experiences of a Russian Revolutionist (London, 1903), 6. 174. A. Ul’ianovskii, Zhenshchiny v protsesse 50-​ti (Saint Petersburg, 1906), 1:  19–​25. Richard Stites estimates that women constituted a little less than one-​fifth of the populist activists. Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, 139. 175. Sapir, “Liberman:” 27–​30; Haberer, Jews and Revolution,  74–​78.

Chapter 2 1. L. A. Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 2003), 185. 2. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 558–​720. 3. Charles A. Ruud, Sergei A. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police (Montreal, 1999), 38–​56; Jonathan Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia (DeKalb, IL, 1998), 27–​48. 4. M. Dolbilov and A. Miller, Zapadnye okrainy rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow, 2006), 209–​300, 318–​31. 5. For a list of institutions open to women, see P. N. Ariian, Pervyi Zhenskii Kalendar’ na 1903 god (St. Petersburg, 1903), 237–​54. 6. A. Press, “Bor’ba za vysshee obrazovanie evreev pri Nikolae II,” Evreiskaia letopis’ 3 (1924): 137. 7. Peter Collmer, Die Schweiz und das Russische Reich, 1848–​1919: Geschichte einer Europäischen Verflechtung (Zurich, 2004), 231. This figure does not include the 2,500 Russian subjects who were naturalized between 1900 and 1916 or the sizable populations of students. Ibid., 238. 8. Quote from L. G. Deich, Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia 70-​kh godov (St. Petersburg, 1920), 3. Also A. Ia. Kiperman, “Glavnye tsentry russkoi revoliutsionnoi emigratsii 70-​80-​kh godov XIX v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski 88, no. 1 (1971): 263. 9. Michael Graetz, “Die russisch-​jüdischen Studenten an den Universitäten in Deutschland und der Schweiz—​eine ‘Subkultur’ um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Krisenwahrnehmungen im Fin de siècle: jüdische und katholische Bildungseliten in Deutschland und der Schweiz, ed. Aram Mattioli and Graetz (Zurich, 1997), 141; Daniela Neumann, Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz (1867–​1914) (Zurich, 1987), 14–​16. 10. Alfred Erich Senn, Nicholas Rubakin:  A Life for Books (Newtonville, MA, 1977), 23. For an interactive map of the Russian colonies, see https://​www.utopiasdiscontents.com/​ explore-​the-​russian-​colonies. 11. Kiperman, “Glavnye tsentry:” 276; Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution, 164. 12. Norbert Lallié, Choses de Russie (Lyon, 1895), 180. The student population also grew steadily. By the early twentieth century, seven hundred tsarist subjects were enrolled at the Sorbonne alone. “Les réfugiés révolutionnaires russes à Paris,” AN, F7/​12894. 13. S. T. Arkomed, Istoricheskie zametki (Tiflis, 1929), 1: 12–​15. 14. J. Tchernoff, Dans le creuset des civilisations (Paris, 1936), 2: 126. 15. Vladimir Medem, Vladimir Medem, the Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist (New York, 1979), 285. 16. Robert Service, “Russian Marxism and its London Colony before the October 1917 Revolution,” in Personality and Place in Russian Culture, ed. Simon Dixon (London, 2010), 359–​65. 17. J. Munro of Scotland Yard to Undersecretary of State, May 17, 1887, TNA, FO 65/​1310/​A 46747/​4,  175. 18. Kiperman, “Glavnye tsentry,” 280. 19. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: Eastern European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York, 1987), 108. In 1878, for example, there were around 50 Russian subjects studying in Berlin. Perlustrated correspondence, October 21, 1877, GARF, f. 102, op. 1, d. 706, l. 1. 20. “Vypiska ob uchrezhdenii politseiskogo nadzora za Russkimi v Prage,” 1870, GARF, f. 109, op 1a, d. 418; Correspondence of Berlin Police Chief Stieber and Third Division, 1870, GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 414a; “Nihilistische, sozialische, und revolutionäre Bewegung,” 1878–​80, LB, A Pr.Br.Rep.030, 13106; “Massregeln gegen Nihilisten,” 1889–​1892, in PAAA, R 10618.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 42– 47

257

21. Lev Deich, “Kak Plekhanov stal Marksistom,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia 7 (1922): 98–​100. 22. While a student in Zurich, for example, the Lavrovist N.  K. Kuliabko-​Koretskii visited Mulhouse with comrades to study a planned workers’ development there. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 186. 23. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 312–​13; Alexandra A. Smugge Memoir, BACU, Smugge Papers, 14. 24. Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 86–​87. 25. Report of Paris Prefect of Police to French Ministry of the Interior, May 26, 1889, AN, F7/​ 12894. 26. For example, Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 177; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 417; Kuliabko-​ Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 15, 95, 184. 27. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 217. For similar observations, see F. Dan, “Sovremennaia politicheskaia emigratsiia,” Novaia zhizn’ 2 (1911):  173; Misha in Bern to Klementiia Shlemenzon, December 1, 1903, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb7, folder 6. 28. Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 214; Press, “Bor’ba:” 137; Neumann, Studentinnen, 18; Aline Masé, “Student Migration of Jews from Russia to the Universities of Berne and Zurich, 1865–​ 1914,” in East European Jews in Switzerland, 99. 29. Iu. D. Filipov, Emigratsiia (St. Petersburg, 1906), 81–​90. On passport costs: Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 94. 30. In some regions, illegal crossings were even more common. Officials in Chernigov sheepishly admitted that emigration from that province “happens exclusively through illegal means.” Zagranichnye pasporta i emigratsiia (St. Petersburg, 1914), 1. 31. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 375; Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 175–​77. 32. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 206–​12. 33. For example, Vitiazev, “P. L. Lavrov:” 122–​23; Kropotkin, Memoirs, 365–​77; L. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’ (Moscow, 1977), 139–​40. 34. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 99. 35. V. A. Maklakov, Vlast’ i obshchestvennostʹ na zakatie staroi Rossii:  vospominaniia (Paris, 1936), 1: 93. 36. Weizmann, Trial and Error, 30. 37. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 206–​12. 38. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (New York, 1966), 1: 59; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 145; Selma Cantor Berrol, East Side/​East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870–​1920 (Westport, CT, 1994), 8. 39. Ianovskii and Kastelianskii, Spravochnaia kniga, 154–​ 55, 206; Zagranichnye pasporta i emigratsiia, 2.  For more on illicit border crossing and human trafficking, see Philippa Hetherington, “Victims of the Social Temperament: Prostitution, Migration and the Traffic in Women from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, 1885–​1935” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), especially 31–​148. 40. Maklakov, Vlastʹ i obshchestvennostʹ, 1: 95–​96. 41. Il’ia Erenburg, “Liudi, gody, zhizn’,” Novyi mir 8 (1960): 57. 42. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York, 2012), 5. 43. Police report of April 28, 1887, in AN, F7/​12520A; Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 2: 8; S. M. Stepniak-​Kravchinskii, V londonskoi emigratsii (Moscow, 1968), 411, fn 471. 44. “Historique de l’émigration,” AN, F7/​12894, 4. 45. Kalendar narodnoi voli, 1883, APP, BA 196, 340. Examples of anti-​religious agitation include: report of October 4, 1887, AN, F7/​12519; “Au sujet des incidents à l’église russe de Genève,” April 18, 1906, AN, F7/​12521. 46. P. N. Ariian, ed., Pervyi Zhenskii Kalendar’ na 1913 god (St. Petersburg, 1914), final page of unpaginated text. 47. Arkomed, Istoricheskie zametki, 1: 5–​21; “Les réfugiés,” AN, F7/​12894, 20, 23; report of July 2, 1907, AN, F7/​12520A. 48. A. S. Kudriatsev et al., eds., Lenin v zheneve: pamiatnye mesta (Moscow, 1985), 174. 49. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 274. 50. “Historique de l’émigration,” AN, F7/​12894, 4. 51. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 219–​ 20; Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 206–​ 207; A. Shchepetov, “Russkie v Parizhe,” Russkaia mysl’ 8 (1912): 148.

 

258

N o t e s t o p a g e s 4 7– 51

Arkomed, Istoricheskie zametki, 1: 27–​29. Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (New York, 1938), 68–​69. The quote is from: Stepniak, Underground Russia (New York, 1883), 19. “Zhozefina Ioteiko,” 108–​10, and “Zinaida Mitrofanovna Kochetkova,” 111, in Pervyi Zhenskii Kalendar’ na 1912 god. 56. N. A. Pal’chevskii, “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk Turgenevskoi obshchestvennoi Biblioteki v Parizhe,” 1954, BACU, N. A. Pal’chevskii papers, Turgenev Library subject file; report of Annemasse railroad police, October 16, 1882, AN, F7/​12521; “Conférence russe,” April 4, 1886, APP, BA 1144. 57. Pavel Aksel’rod, Perezhitoe i peredummanoe (Berlin, 1923), 138; I. S. Dzhabadari, “Protsess 50-​ti,” Byloe 9/​21 (1907): 177, 182. 58. Dzhabadari, “Protsess:” 183. 59. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 424; Petr Lavrov, Gody emigratsii (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 2: 328–​ 64. Lavrov also promoted Idel’son’s medical career: 2: 349. 60. Charles Rappoport, Une vie révolutionnaire, 1883–​1940 (Paris, 1991), 328. 61. Aksel’rod, Perezhitoe, 142–​43. 62. Ben-​Ami, “Moi snosheniia s M. Dragomanovym i rabota v ‘vol’nom slove,’” Evreiskaia starina 7, 3–​4 (1915): 359. 63. “Mendelson, Stanisław,” Polski słownik biograficzny (Warsaw, 1975), XX:  421–​27; Blit, The Origins of Polish Socialism (Cambridge, 1971), 28–​38. On the socialist emigration more broadly, Feliks Perl, Dzieje ruchu socjalistycznego w zaborze rosyjskim (Warsaw, 1958), 27–​ 40, 64–​84; Jerzy W. Borejsza, Emigracja polska po powstaniu styczniowym (Warsaw, 1966), 354–​70. 64. Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Z pochyniv ukrains’koho sotsialistychnoho rukhu (Vienna, 1922), 42–​ 44, 103–​50. 65. “Spravka na Dragomanov, Mikhaila,” GARF, f. 109, op. 230, d. 1234. 66. Arkomed, Istoricheskie zametki, 1: 7–​10; Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (Berkeley, 2019), 72–​83,  93–​94. 67. Hrushevs’kyi, Z pochyniv, 167–​69. On federalist currents in emigration, “Ob organizatsii sotsial’no-​revoliutsionnogo soiuza mezhdu evreiami v Rossii,” in Istoriko-​revoliutsionnyi sbornik, ed. V. I. Nevskii (Moscow, 1924), 1: 47; Dzhabadari, “Protsess:” 178–​79. 68. “Ot gruppy sotsialistov-​evreev,” in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii N. P Dragomanova (Paris, 1906), 2:  320–​29. Also, N. A. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Leningrad, 1925), 41–​42; A. Kirzhnits, “Nachalo sotsialisticheskoi pechati na evreiskom iazyke v Rossii,” Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev, ed. S. Dimanshtein (Moscow, 1930), 209–​14. 69. Dzhabadari, “Protsess:” 177. 70. Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 1: 47–​57; Martov, Zapiski sotsial-​demokrata (Berlin, 1922), 13–​17, 20–​27; John Mill, Pionern un boyer (New York, 1946), 1: 18–​19. 71. Sapir, Iz arkhiva L. O. Dan (Amsterdam, 1987), 3. 72. Cited in Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogrom Crisis of 1881–​1882, 157–​58. 73. On incitement, “Iz derevni,” Listok narodnoi voli 2, no. 1 ( July 22, 1881):  5; “Vnutrennye obozrenie,” Listok narodnoi voli 2, no. 6 (October 23, 1881): 9–​11. On reactions, Haberer, Jews and Revolution, 206–​24; G. Plekhanov, “Neudachnaia istoriia ‘Partii Narodnoi Voli,’” Sovremennyi mir 5 (1912): 173. 74. Graetz, “Die russisch-​ jüdischen Studenten,” 141; Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 2:  100; Rappoport, Une vie révolutionnaire, 103. 75. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia, 37. 76. For example, “Iz Vil’na,” Vpered!, September 1, 1875, 503–​507; “Iz Belostoka,” Vpered!, February 15, 1876, 81–​86. 77. BACU, Sapir papers, Box 15, Folder “Liberman i russkii sotsializm,” 13–​14. 78. Petr Lavrov, Gosudarstvennyi element v budushchem obshchestve (London, 1876), 167; Police report of January 30, 1882, APP, BA 1144. 79. Sapir, “Jewish Socialists”; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–​1917 (New York, 1981), 261. 52. 53. 54. 55.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 51– 56

259

80. Khaim Zhitlovsky, Evrei k evreiam (London, 1892), 46, 57. On Zhitlovsky’s project, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 258–​87. 81. “O zadachakh evreisko-​sotsialisticheskoi intelligentsii,” in Iz arkhiva Akselroda, 2: 215–​29. 82. Weizmann to Martin Kraus, February 20, 1908, Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, 5: 77; also, Shmarya Levin, Youth in Revolt (New York, 1930), 220–​57. 83. Vera Weizmann, The Impossible Takes Longer (London, 1967), 1. 84. Ibid., 13–​14; Weizmann, Trial and Error, 51–​58; Levin, Youth in Revolt, 248–​50. Dmitry Shumsky similarly emphasizes the multiethnic, imperial milieu in which Russian Zionism emerged. Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-​State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-​Gurion (New Haven, CT, 2018). 85. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002); Haberer, Jews and Revolution; Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 64–​165. 86. Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto:  The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–​1870 (Syracuse, 1998), 42–​56. 87. Unidentified clipping from Tribune de Genève, January 24, 1888; report of Agent Séal, “Le parti nihiliste à Genève,” January 5, 1891, both in AN, F7/​12521; Perl, Dzieje, 35. 88. Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 2: 162. 89. George Brandes, “Vpechatleniia o Londone,” in Stepniak, V Londonskoi emigratsii, 349. 90. Report of Agent Séal, “Le parti nihiliste à Genève,” January 5, 1891, AN, F7/​12521. For my study and visualization of publications produced in the colonies, see https://​ utopiasdiscontents.com/​publishing-​abroad. 91. These collections include: S. G. Svatikov Papers, BACU; Nicolaevsky Collection, HIASU. 92. “Nakonets-​to,” Obshchee delo, December 18, 1878, 1, in LB, A.Pr.Br.Rep.030, 12555, 116. 93. Senn, Nicholas Rubakin, 7. 94. Report of Prefect of Police to Sûreté, September 13, 1887, AN, F7/​12519; Perlustrated letter addressed to Bern, 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 313, d. 17, l. 2; Report of Prefect of Police to Sûreté, July 6, 1887, AN, F7/​12520/​A . 95. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 68–​69; Senn, N. A. Rubakin, 25. For the catalogue, see Katalog Russkoi biblioteke v Zheneve (Geneva, 1876). 96. “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk Turgenevskoi obshchestvennoi Biblioteki v Parizhe,” BACU, Pal’chevskii papers, Turgenev library subject file, 2–​5; “Novoe pomeshchenie Turgenevskoi biblioteke v Parizhe,” BACU, Svatikov papers, Box 82, Folder 4. 97. “Les Russes du quartier Latin,” Le Temps, October 18, 1888, in APP, BA 1144. 98. BACU, Alexandra A. Smugge Memoir, 14; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 224. 99. Weizmann, Trial and Error, 49. 100. Balabanoff, My Life, 17. 101. Pal’chevskii, “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk Turgenevskoi obshchestvennoi Biblioteki,” 5–​6. 102. Rappoport, Une vie, 132. 103. Senn, N. A. Rubakin, 14. 104. “K emigrantskoi kolonii,” GARF, f. 508, op. 1, d. 53, l. 141. 105. “Hartmann on Nihilism,” The Nottingham Evening Post, October 28, 1880, 2. 106. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 214. 107. V. I. Sukhomlin, “Iz epokhi upadka partii ‘Narodnaia volia,’” KiS 25 (1926): 41. 108. M. Drahomaniv, Shvaitsars’ka [sic] respublika (L’viv, 1899). 109. HIASU, Reports on Commune refugees, Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 441, folder 8, reel 336; Kropotkin, Memoirs, 274–​81; Report of June 12/​24, 1880, in GARF, f.  109, op. 3a, d. 711, ll. 27–​29ob; Report of April 28, 1887, AN F7/​12520/​A . The papers were Le Travailleur and Le Révolté. 110. Aksel’rod, Perezhitoe, 126–​36. 111. L. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponiia,” Delo 10, no. 10 (1876): 133–​34. 112. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 29–​92; Nicholls, Revolutionary Thought, 249–​56. 113. For example, V.  Butskii of Geneva to Elizaveta Berg of Odessa, November 13/​25, 1878, GARF, f. 109, op. 1, d. 475, l. 1; V. Ivanovskii of Berlin to V. K. Kravtsev of Odessa, 1878, GARF, f. 109, op. 1, d. 462, l. 1; Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 232. 114. O. Piatnitsky, Memoirs of a Bolshevik (New York, 1939), 57–​58.

 

260

N o t e s t o p a g e s 5 6– 61

115. V. I. Zasulich, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1931), 81. 116. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 95–​97, 103–​105, 140–​41; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 38. For an interactive map of smuggling routes, see https://​utopiasdiscontents.com/​ traversing-​borders. 117. Tobias, The Jewish Bund, 23. 118. T. M. Kopel’zon, “Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie kontsa 80-​kh i nachala 90-​kh godov,” in Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, ed. Dimanshtein, 65–​66; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics,  37–​39. 119. “Spisok pozhertvovanii, postupivshikh v kassu ‘Zagran. Otd. Obshch. Krasn. Kr. Narodnoi voli,’” Na rodine (London, 1882), 1: 71–​72; Report of Prefect of Police to Sûreté, July 6, 1887, AN, F7/​12520/​A . 120. Clipping from Nakanune, February 1902, No. 37, AN, F7/​12521. 121. Hrushevs’kyi, Z pochyniv, 154–​61, quote at 163. 122. Deich, “Kak Plekhanov stal marksistom:” 110–​11. 123. Rappoport, Une vie, 113–​23; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 224–​32; “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk,” BACU, Pal’chevskii papers, Turgenev library subject file, 9. 124. Hrushevs’kyi, Z pochyniv, 167. 125. M. Dragomanov, “Evreiskii vopros na Ukraine,” Vol’noe slovo 2, no. 45 (September 15, 1882): 7; Mykhailo Pavlyk, Lysty Mykhailo Drahomaniva do redaktoriv rosiiskoho sotsiialʹno-​ revoliutsiinoho vydania “Vpered” (1876–​1878) (L’viv, 1910), 14–​15. 126. For example, “Sushchnost’ antisemiticheskogo dvizheniia,” Vol’noe slovo, December 1, 1882, 7; also “Dragomanov,” GARF, f. 109, op. 230, d. 1234, l. 13. 127. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 310–​12. Quote from 312. 128. Ben-​Ami, “Moi snosheniiia:” 351, 362–​64. 129. Quote from P. N. Ariian, Pervyi zhenskii kalendar’ na 1909 god (St. Petersburg, 1909), 255; also “Pechal’naia istoriia odnoi iz truzhenits nauki,” Zhenskoe obrazovanie 6, no. 2 (1881): 133–​41. 130. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 21–​22, 189–​98. 131. Ibid., 120–​23. 132. “Perepiska shefa zhandarmov grafa Shuvalov P. A. c grafom Levashovym N. V.,” 1871–​1874, GARF, f.  973, op.  1, d.  207; Fal’shivye monetchiki ili agenty russkogo pravitel’stva (Geneva, 1875). British, French, and Swiss asylum laws provided strong protections to Russians who had committed politically motivated crimes in these years, limiting prosecution to civil crimes, such as counterfeiting. 133. Collmer, Die Schweiz, 163–​72. 134. Undated Memorandum to M. T. Loris-​Melikov, GARF, f. 109, op. 3a d. 711, ll. 10ob-​11. 135. L. T. Senchakova, “’Sviashchennaia druzhina’ i ee sostav,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta 2 (1967): 62–​83; S. G. Beliaev, “Parizhskaia agentura ‘Sviatoi druzhiny’ i russkaia emigratsii,” in Russkaia emigratsiia do 1917 goda:  laboratoriia liberal’noi i revoliutsionnoi mysli, ed. Iu. Sherrer and B. V. Anan’ich (St. Petersburg, 1997), 104–​11. 136. Shmuel Galai, “Early Russian Constitutionalism, ‘Vol’noe Slovo,’ and the ‘Zemstvo Union.’ A Study in Deception,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 22, no. 1 (1974): 45–​47. In a description of his meeting with Drahomanov, a Geneva-​based agent of the Holy Brotherhood boasted that he had “worked out a plan of action” with the Ukrainian. E.  I. Nevinskii to Count Shuvalov, June 24, 1881, GARF, f. 1766, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 174–​75. 137. Vasilii Sidoratskii to Pravda, November 18, 1882, GARF, f. 1766, op. 1, d. 1, l. 145; Zasulich, Vospominaniia, 99–​112. 138. Z. I. Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk Rossii, 1880–​1917 (Moscow, 2000), 141. 139. On the operations of the agency, see Frederic S. Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernising World (New York, 2002); Undated deposition of Henri Bint, GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 34, l. 11. 140. “Kar’era P. I. Rachkovskogo. Dokumenty,” Byloe 30, no. 2 (1918): 78–​79; “V 3 otdelenie EIVk 13 avgusta 1879,” GARF, f. 102, op. 1, d. 2586, ll. 1–​2. 141. V. D. Novitskii to head of Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1894, GARF, f. 102, op. 314, d. 657, ll. 9–​17; “Spisok chlenov obshchestva Sviashchennaia druzhina,” GARF, f.  1463, op.  1, d. 187, l. 31.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 61– 64

261

142. For the details on this raid, see “Ob unichtozhenii narodovol’cheskoi tipografii,” GARF, f. 102, op. 83, d. 412. 143. Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 241; L. G. Deich, Provokatory i terror (Tula, 1926). 144. “Po voprosu o dostavlenii dvorianina L’va Tikhomirova na Germanskuiu granitsu i o vydache ego nashim vlastiam,” 1884, GARF, f.  102, op.  80, d.  1001; Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 290–​91; P. Lavrov, Pis’mo tovarishcham v Rossii po povodu broshiury L.  A. Tikhomirova (Geneva, 1888). 145. For example, Ian Shuster to Department of Police, April 2, 1913, GARF, f.  5802, op.  2, d. 205, ll. 1–​4. 146. Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Azev the Spy, the Terrorist, and Police Stool (Garden City, NY, 1934),  24–​25. 147. Undated deposition in GARF, f. 508, op. 1, d. 36, ll. 48–​50, quote from 48. 148. V. K. Agafonov, Zagranichnaia Okhranka (Petrograd, 1918), 3–​ 4; Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia, 209, 219. 149. Samoubiistvo Liudviga Savitskogo (Geneva, 1893), 7–​19, in AN, F7/​12520/​B. 150. Prefect of Police to Minister of Interior, May 14, 1887, AN, F7/​12520/​A . 151. Blit, Origins, 42, 46; Perlustrated correspondence to Glauze in Bern, 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 313, d. 17, ll. 1–​2. 152. Abraham Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 79,  82–​84. 153. Deich, “Kak Plekhanov stal marksistom:” 128–​37. 154. Karl Marx to Vera Zasulich, March 8, 1881, https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​ works/​1881/​zasulich/​reply.htm. 155. The earliest extant edition of this work is: S. Dikshteyn, Fun vos eyner lebt (Geneva, 1905). For more on Diksztajn’s significance, see Deich, Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia,  35–​41. 156. Perl, Dzieje, 64–​99; Blit, The Origins of Polish Socialism, 45–​50, 78–​118. 157. Arkomed, Istoricheskie zametki, 1: 5–​11,  33–​49. 158. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 171–​72. 159. For example, Report of Agent Luxembourg, February 25, 1903, APP, BA 1709; Report of November 26, 1893, APP, BA 1709. 160. See Tsemakh Kopelzon, “Di ershte shprotsungen (zikhroynes),” Arbeter-​luekh III (1922): 55–​69; Kopel’zon, “Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie,” in Dimanshtein, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, 65–​71; Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii,  44–​50. 161. Joshua D. Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–​1914 (Madison, 2004), 18, 25. 162. Iu. Martov, Zapiski sotsial-​demokrata (Berlin, 1922), 129–​48. 163. “Pis’ma P. B. Aksel’roda k rabochim i s.-​d. kruzhkam,” in Iz arkhiva P. B. Aksel’roda (Berlin, 1924), 2: 231–​48; Martov, Zapiski sotsial-​demokrata, 161. 164. Martov, Zapiski sotsial-​demokrata, 133, 138–​39, 161; “O Kopel’zone,” 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 226, d. 581, ll. 3–​5. 165. Service, Lenin, 102–​104. 166. “O zadachakh evreisko-​sotsialisticheskoi intelligentsia,” in Iz arkhiva Aksel’roda, 2: 215–​29 Quote from 217. 167. Blit, Origins of Polish Socialism, 46–​ 47; Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality,  19–​22. 168. Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality, 29–​33; Timothy Snyder, Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 58–​102; Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 1: 70–​79. 169. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 1: 83, quote at 176. 170. Quote from Dzhabadari, “Protsess:” 186; also Arkomed, Istoricheskie zametki,1: 7–​9. 171. Rappoport, Une vie, 113; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 220–​21; Gabriella Safran, “Some Russian-​Jewish Writers in Switzerland, and the Valorization of the Jewish Argument Style,” in East European Jews, 87. The intensity of this dispute was even more remarkable given that Zhitlovsky, though a populist, admired elements of Marx’s thought. I am indebted to Andrew Sloin for this insight.

 

262

N o t e s t o p a g e s 6 4– 69

172. “Le Terrorisme russe et la conception idéaliste de l’histoire,” clipping from Le Socialisme, date illegible, AN, F/​7/​16000/​1. 173. Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–​ 1934 (New  York, 2014), 8–​23; Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–​1886 (New York, 1989), 152–​77. 174. Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 2:  100; A.  A. Tarasov in Charlottenburg to Ageev in Saratov, November 1, 1901, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb7, folder 6. 175. Reprinted in Petr Kropotkin, The Commune of Paris (London, 1909), 3–​4.

Chapter 3 1. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 196–​97. 2. “Zapiska po voprosu ob emigratsii,” 1910, GARF, f. 102, op. 67, d. 8 ch. 4, l. 1; B. Gornberg, Zur Emigrationsfrage (Geneva, 1907), 37. 3. Calculated from the statistics provided in Alien Immigration: Reports on the Volume and Effects of Recent Immigration from Eastern Europe into the United Kingdom (London, 1894), 16–​20. Paris police estimated that some three-​quarters of that city’s Russian population were Jews. “Historique de l’émigration,” AN, F7/​12894, 16. 4. On the strength of local identities, see Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok. 5. Leah Platt Boustan, “Were Jews Political Refugees or Economic Migrants? Assessing the Persecution Theory of Jewish Emigration, 1881–​1914,” in The New Comparative Economic History: Essays in Honour of Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 267–​90; Yannay Spitzer, “Pogroms, Networks, and Migration: The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States, 1881–​1914” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2013). 6. Anastasiia Strakhova, “Imagining Emigration:  Crossing the Borders of Russian Jewry during the Era of Mass Migration, 1881–​1914” (PhD diss., Emory University, in progress); Emigranten un agenten: nit keyn oysgetrakhte mayses (St. Petersburg, 1912). 7. “Po donoseniiu nashego general’nogo Konsula v Berline o zamechaemom v vostochoi Prussii dvizhenii protiv russkikh evreev,“ 1895, GARF, f.  102, op.  52, d.  3, ch. 14; Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 11–​74; Ianovskii and Kastelianskii, Spravochnaia kniga, 93. 8. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-​ Jewish Consciousness, 1800–​1923 (Madison, 1982), especially 3–​57; Sonja Weinberg, Pogroms and Riots: German Press Reactions to Anti-​Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia (New York, 2010), 181–​218. 9. For general background on the Alliance, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–​ 1925 (Bloomington, IN, 1990); Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity:  The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-​Century France (Stanford, CA, 2006). 10. “Relief of Russo-​Jewish Fugitives,” HJEC, Folder 15, 65; Memorandum of Central Committee, October 22, 1882, YIVO, AI, folder 2, 114; Memorandum of Central Committee, June 1, 1891, YIVO, AI, folder 67, 2953. 11. P. N. Ariian, Pervyi Zhenskii Kalendar’ na 1903 god (St. Petersburg, 1904), 254. 12. On the role of the Jewish press and charities, see David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-​Jewry (New  York, 1994); David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews:  Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–​1914 (New Haven, CT, 1994), 291–​352; Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the “Belle Epoque” (New York, 1986), 50–​67. 13. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (London, 1904), 1: 546. 14. Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–​1917 (London, 2001), 143–​47; V. D. Lipman, “Jewish Settlement in the East End of London, 1840–​1940: The Topographical and Statistical Background,” in The Jewish East End, 1840–​1939 (London, 1981), 17–​40; William Fishman, East End 1888 (London, 2005), 25–​48. 15. Booth, Life and Labour, 1: 35. 16. Green, Pletzl, 68–​78; Marcel Hirsch, “Une colonie de juifs russes à Paris,” Le Figaro, August 4, 1892, 1; “Historique,” AN, F7/​12894, 6; Paul Pottier, “Essai sur le proletariat juif en France,” Revue des Revues XXVIII (March 1, 1899): 484.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 69– 73

263

17. Nancy L. Green, “The Modern Jewish Diaspora:  Eastern European Jews in New  York, London, and Paris,” in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (Boston, 1996), 269, 265. 18. Booth, Life and Labour, 1: 481–​500; Léon Bonneff, La vie tragique des travailleurs: enquêtes sur la condition économique et morales des ouvriers et ouvrières d’industrie (Paris, 1908), 331–​33; Green, Pletzl,  29–​41. 19. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 178–​79. 20. Green, Pletzl, 80–​87; Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 187–​98. 21. This phrase “ethnic economy” is drawn from Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 67–​71. For a reconstruction of the physical infrastructure of these communities, see https://​www. utopiasdiscontents.com/​explore-​the-​russian-​colonies. 22. David Mazower, Yiddish Theatre in London (London, 1996), 13–​16; Green, Pletzl, 78–​90; Selig Brodetsky, Memoirs: From Ghetto to Israel (London, 1960), 34. 23. “Di yidishe arbeters in London,” PY, August 8, 1884, 11; Zosa Szajkowski, Etyudn tsu der geshikhte fun ayngevandertn Yidishn yishev in Frankraykh (Paris, 1937), 49–​60. See the files on mutual aid organizations contained in APP, BA 1708. 24. Emanuel Litvinoff, Journey Through a Small Planet (London, 1972), 9. 25. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System (London, 1888) 1: 341. 26. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 21–​27; Brodetsky, Memoirs, 19; Nancy L. Green, “To Give and to Receive: Philanthropy and Collective Responsibility Among Jews in Paris, 1880–​1914,” in The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-​Century Metropolis, ed. Peter Mandler (Philadelphia, 1990), 212. 27. Gur Alroey, ed., Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear:  Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Detroit, 2011), 92, 144. 28. David F. Schloss, “The Jew as a Workman,” The Nineteenth Century XXIX, no. CLXVII (1891): 98–​99; “The Dwellings of the Jewish Poor,” JC, October 1, 1880, 9–​10; “The Jews of Russia,” JC, July 29, 1881, 12; Rabbi S. Singer, “The Russo-​Jewish Immigrant,” The English Illustrated Magazine 96 (September 1891): 845. 29. For example, “The Assassination of the Czar,” JC, March 18, 1881, 4; Ad. Franck, “Les juifs dans la société moderne,” AI 47, no. 41 (October 14, 1886) : 321–​22. 30. “The Russian Emigrants,” JC, November 11, 1881, 8. 31. On relief efforts, Céline Leglaive-​Perani, “Le comité de bienfaisance israélite de Paris et les Juifs russes immigrés (1882–​1914),” in Terre d’exil, terre d’asile, ed. Colette Zytnicki and Nancy Green (Paris, 2010), 19–​28; Gartner, Jewish Immigrant,  49–​56. 32. Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East-​End Tenement Block (London, 2003); Michael Robert Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971), 66–​67. 33. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 220–​40; Harold Pollins, “East End Working Men’s Clubs,” in The Jewish East End, 1840–​1939, ed. Aubrey Newman (London, 1981), 177–​78. 34. “The ‘Minor’ Congregations,” JC, February 25, 1881, 8–​9; Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 187–​219; Saskia Coenen Snyder, Building a Public Judaism (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 132–​41; 225–​31. 35. Quotes from Univers Israélite, as cited in Green, “The Modern Jewish Diaspora” 271; “The Work to Be Done,” JC, August 12, 1881, 9. 36. Brodetsky, Memoirs, 39. 37. Alien Immigration, 38. 38. Brodetsky, Memoirs, 28–​30; Maurice Michaels, “Memories of the Jews’ Free School, Bell Lane,” in Newman, The Jewish East End, 155–​61. 39. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 280; Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France:  A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 135. For an argument that foregrounds the integration and social mobility of immigrants, see David Feldman, “Mr. Lewinstein Goes to Parliament: Rethinking the History and Historiography of Jewish Integration,” East European Jewish Affairs 47, no. 2–​3 (2017): 134–​49. 40. Brodetsky, Memoirs, 50. 41. Litvinoff, Journey, 132–​34.

 

264

N o t e s t o p a g e s 7 3– 76

42. Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 4: 246, 3: 16. 43. Ibid., 3: 15. See also 2: 88, 4: 142. 44. “Osnovanie sotsial’no-​revoliutsionnogo obshchestva evreiskikh rabotnikov v Londone,” Vpered!, July 15, 1876, 453–​56; “Ob organizatsii sotsial’no-​revoliutsionnogo soiuza mezhdu evreiami v Rossii,” in Istoriko-​revoliutsionnyi sbornik, 1:  47; W. J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals (London, 1975), 97–​134. Quote from Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 39. 45. “Iz Vil’na,” Vpered! September 1, 1875, 505. 46. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizhenii, 37–​ 39; Kirzhnits, “Nachalo sotsialisticheskoi pechati,” 207–​208. 47. Melech Epstein, Profiles of Eleven (Detroit, 1965), 24–​28. 48. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 153–​55; Rudolf Rocker, The London Years (London, 1956), 122–​41. 49. J. H. Mackay, The Anarchists (New York, 1894), 184. 50. N. A. Bukhbinder, “Iz istorii anarkhicheskogo dvizheniia,” Evreiskaia letopis’ 4 (1926): 141–​ 42; “Fest-​mitings,” AF, March 7, 1890, 3. 51. Rocker, The London Years, 98–​100. 52. “Fareyne un farzamlungen,” AF, January 4–​11, 1889, 6. 53. The quote is from: “The Jewish Unemployed,” The Standard, March 18, 1889, 3; also, “Arbets-​ angelegenhayten,” AF, March 15–​22, 1889, 2–​3. 54. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 216–​26 (quote at 217); Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 163–​84. 55. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 182–​83. 56. Thomas B. Eyges, Beyond the Horizon: Story of a Radical Emigrant (Boston, 1944), 94. 57. Poylishe yidl and Arbeter fraynd, for example, ran regular columns on social movements around the world. For example, “Nayes fun der yidishen velt,” PY, August 8, 1884, 12; “Di sotsiale bavegung,” AF, March 28, 1890, 6. 58. Tony Michels, A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA, 2005). Michels emphasizes the role of the Lower East Side’s German Social Democrats in radicalizing Jewish migrants, but his analysis also shows the influence of émigrés who had accomplished their first organizational successes in London and then moved on to New York. For example, 84–​85, 88–​89, 97–​100, 125–​28,  181. 59. E. Tcherikower, “Peter Lavrov and the Jewish Socialist Émigrés,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science VII (1952): 134–​36; Ia. Rombro, “Mimokhodom. Evreiskoe rabochee obshchestvo v Parizhe,” Nedel’naia khronika voskhoda 40 (October 9, 1883): 624–​26. 60. Rappoport, Une vie révolutionnaire, 103–​104. 61. Szajkowski, Etyudn, 105–​15. 62. Bonneff, La vie tragique, 382–​87; Green, Pletzl, 125–​48. 63. Rombro, “Mimokhodom,” 624–​26. 64. “Un scandale,” L’Humanité, January 13, 1906, 3. 65. “The unemployed and the Jewish board of guardians,” JC, January 19, 1894, 6. 66. “Sabbath addresses to Jewish Working Men and Women,” JC, March 22, 1889, 7; “Police,” The Times, March 19, 1889, 4. 67. “The East End Disturbances,” JC, September 23, 1904, 7; Rocker, The London Years, 154–​56. 68. Report of Agent Star from London, February 8, 1882, APP, BA 196. 69. Sh. Yanovsky, Ershte yorn fun Yidishn frayheytlekhn sotsializm (New York, 1948), 134–​237. 70. Rocker, The London Years, 162–​65; Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 229–​86. 71. Report of May 17, 1902, AN, F7, 12521. 72. This is the clear impression conveyed by reports on the meetings contained in APP, BA 1811. On anarchists, Report of January 1, 1892; Report of February 8, 1892, both in APP, BA 1709; and Report of Agent Robin, October 21, 1907; Report of Agent Robin, December 4, 1907; “Au sujet du groupe anarchiste russe de la rue des Écouffes” February 28, 1908, “Au sujet d’un groupe terroriste russe,” July 23, 1913, all in APP, BA 1709. 73. Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 59. 74. Stuart Cohen, English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-​Jewry, 1895–​ 1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1982), 8–​10.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 76– 83

265

75. “Réunion sioniste,” May 12, 1899, APP, BA 1811; “Au sujet des groups d’israélites,” January 13, 1892, APP, BA 1709; Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 3: 53–​79. 76. Quotes from David J. Goldberg, To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought from Its Origins to the Modern State of Israel (London, 1996), 107; Ahad Ha’am’s famous essay of the same name. 77. Goldberg, To the Promised Land, 59; Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New  York, 2003), 114. On the peculiarities of Russian Zionism more broadly, see David Vital, Zionism, the Formative Years (Oxford, 1982), 190–​202. 78. Nachman Syrkin, Vozzvanie k evreiskoi molodezhi (London, 1901), 4, 16. 79. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 329–​64. 80. Lachs, Whitechapel Noise, 114–​22. 81. For example, “Sofia Perovski,” AF, March 15–​22, 1889, 8; “Es lebe di komune!” AF, March 14, 1890, 1. 82. Rocker, The London Years, 179. 83. Quote from report of July 27, 1904, AN, F7, 12521. Also, Rombro, “Mimokhodom:” 625; Szajkowski, Etyudn, 105–​15. 84. Report of October 7, 1901, APP, BA 1811; “Une soirée révolutionnaire russe à Londres,” September 18, 1905, AN, F7, 12521; Report of Agent Luxembourg, February 25, 1903, APP, BA 1709. 85. Report from London, December 10, 1903, AN, F7/​12521. 86. Rocker, The London Years, 143; “The London Anarchists,” The Graphic, September 3, 1892; “Réunion organisée par le groupe des ouvriers israélites de Paris,” March 23, 1902, APP, BA 1811. 87. “Haunts of the East End Anarchist,” Evening Standard, October 2, 1894; and “Notice to Tailors and Tailoresses,” reprinted in Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 315, 321. 88. Graur, An Anarchist “Rabbi,”  77–​78. 89. Green, Pletzl, 149–​71; Rocker, The London Years, 219–​25. 90. Report from London, May 17, 1902; “Les reunions révolutionnaires russes à Londres,” March 7, 1903; report of January 30, 1904, all in AN F7/​12521. 91. “Personal Politics,” The Penny Illustrated Paper, May 7, 1892, 288–​91. 92. For example, Report of February 8, 1892; “Réunion tenue, 49, rue de Bretagne,” January 28, 1908, both in APP, BA 1709; report of November 28, 1903, AN, F7/​12521. 93. “Conférence organisée par le cercle d’études sociales des ouvriers Israélites,” December 22, 1901, APP, BA 1811. 94. “The London Anarchists,” The Graphic, September 3, 1892, 286–​87. 95. For a brilliant analysis of Winchevsky’s poetry, see Lachs, Whitechapel Noise, 91–​108. 96. A few titles that remain extant include: Sergey Stepniak, Dos Unter-​irdishe Rusland (London, 1896); P. Kropotkin, Broyt un Frayhayt (London, 1906). 97. Tony Michels, “Exporting Yiddish Socialism:  New  York’s Role in the Russian Jewish Workers’ Movement,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (2009): 4. 98. Graur, An Anarchist “Rabbi,” 87; Lachs, Whitechapel Noise, 184–​89. 99. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 155. 100. For example, one radical activist described socialism as a form of “salvation” (geule). “Fareyne un Farzamlungen,” AF, January 4–​11, 1889, 6. On religious imagery in radical literature, see Anna Elena Torres, “‘Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border’: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature” (PhD diss., University of California–​Berkeley, 2016), 15–​16,  76–​77. 101. Lachs, Whitechapel Noise, 187. 102. “Caisse des émigrés russes,” April 6, 1914, APP, BA 1708; “Le local situé rue Geoffroy-​ Lasnier, 12, fréquenté par des révolutionnaires russes,” February 23, 1906, APP, BA 1709. 103. Report of October 12, 1915, APP, BA 1709. 104. “Réunion tenue, 49, rue de Bretagne,” January 28, 1908, APP, BA 1709. 105. “Réunion organisée par le groupe des prolétaires israélites,” July 21, 1901, APP, BA 1811. 106. Tcherikower, “Petr Lavrov,” 139–​43; quote from 142. 107. “Conférence organisée par le cercle d’études sociales des ouvriers israélites,” March 31, 1901, APP, BA 1811.

 

266

N o t e s t o p a g e s 8 3– 88

108. Report of February 1, 1905, AN, F7/​12521. 109. Report of May 19, 1905, AN, F7/​12521; Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 194. 110. J. Munro to Office of Undersecretary of State, May 17, 1887, TNA, FO 65/​1310/​A46747, 4. In this case, the institution in question was an anarchist club that émigrés had originally established in Soho. 111. Rocker, The London Years, 188–​242; Perlustrated letter of Aleksei Teplov in London to Ivan Kashintsev, May 20, 1899, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb7, folder 6. 112. Report of February 27, 1906, AN, F7/​12521. 113. Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 24, 133. 114. Many examples are mentioned in APP, BA, 1708. 115. Green, Pletzl, 77. 116. “Au sujet du groupe anarchiste russe de la rue des Écouffes, February 23, 1908, APP, BA 1709; Report of Agent Foureur, March 23, 1902, APP, BA 1811. 117. Dan, “Sovremennaia politicheskaia emigratsiia,” 188. 118. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 156–​57, 259; “Historique,” AN, F7/​12894, 5; “Yom kipur in Berner st. Klub,” AF, September 21, 1888, 2–​3. 119. Jerry White, “Jewish Landlords, Jewish Tenants,” in The Jewish East End, 205–​15; Green, Pletzl, 128. 120. “Organized importation of Hebrew tailors,” The Pall Mall Gazette, October 12, 1889, 1. 121. Yanovsky, Ershte Yorn, 151–​55; “Labour demonstrations,” The Standard, September 28, 1891, 3; “East-​End Tailor’s Meeting,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, November 29, 1891, 2. 122. Report of February 23, 1906, APP, BA 1709; Report of April 26, 1916, APP, BA 1708; Green, Pletzl,  79–​80. 123. Report of Prefect of Police to Minister of Interior, April 30, 1910; Report of Agent Robin, May 31, 1909; Report of Agent Robin, June 10, 1909, all in APP, BA 1709. 124. Litvinoff, Journey, 9. 125. Quote from Rombro, “Mimokhodom:” 626. 126. Di geshikhte fun Bund (New  York, 1960), 46–​90; Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale:  The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge,  1970). 127. Józef Piłsudski, Walka rewolucyjna w zaborze rosyjskim (Krakow, 1903), 11–​12, 24–​115; Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, 21–​31, 89. 128. Kopel’zon, “Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie,” 71–​73; Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, 25–​31, 44. 129. Kopelzon, “Di ershte shprotsungen:” 67. On the influence of foreign literature more generally, see also Mill, Pionern un boyer, 1: 101–​105; Martov, Zapiski, 208, 240. 130. Martov, Zapiski, 206; Tobias, The Jewish Bund,  29–​33. 131. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia,  59–​67. 132. Arkadii Kremer, Ob agitatsii (Geneva, 1896), 17–​23. For a fuller analysis of the significance of the text, see Zimmerman, Poles, Jews,  47–​52. 133. Tobias, The Jewish Bund,  27–​31. 134. Kirzhnits, “Nachalo,” 235. 135. Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Melbourne, 1967), 19–​29; Report of Lenin Institute, July 2, 1926, Nicolaevsky Collection, HIASU, Box 67, Folder 9, Reel 57, 9–​11. 136. Fedor Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (New York, 1964), 199–​202. 137. Kirzhnits, “Nachalo sotsialisticheskoi pechati,” 223–​27. 138. Kremer, Ob agitatsii, 42. Also, Ascher, Pavel Axelrod, 125–​30. 139. Henry Shukman, “The Relations between the Jewish Bund and the RSDRP, 1897–​1903” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1961), 22. Quote from Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 204. 140. On the crucial role of the Bund in the founding of the RSDRP, see Dan, Origins of Bolshevism, 207–​208; Shukman, “Relations,” 28–​36. 141. L. Martov, Povorotnyi punkt v istorii evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia (Geneva, 1900), 19–​20. 142. Chetvertyi s’’ezd Vseobshchago evreiskogo rabochego soiuza v Litve, Pol’she i Rossii (Geneva, 1901), 10. 143. Sandrine Mayoraz, “The Jewish Labor Bund in Switzerland,” East European Jews in Switzerland,  54–​69.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 88– 94

267

144. Shukman, “Relations,” 40–​43; Chetvertyi s’’ezd, 3. 145. The precise figure on publications is from: Tobias, The Jewish Bund, 94. See also: Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia, 178. 146. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 301–​302. 147. Report from London, March 24, 1904, AN F7/​12521; “La bounda,” APP, BA 1709; Report of Agent Dublin, December 23, 1912, APP, BA 1709. 148. Tobias, The Jewish Bund, 92–​94, 137, 159; Claudie Weill, Les cosmopolites:  Socialisme et judéité en Russie (1897–​1917) (Paris, 2004), 132–​38. 149. Petr A. Garvi, Vospominaniia sotsial-​demokrata (New York, 1946), 50–​51; Grigorii Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’ (New  York, 1961), 2, 6–​8; “O Kopel’zone,” 1898, GARF, f.  102, op. 226, d 581, l. 5. 150. Deiatel’nost’ bunda za poslednie 2 goda. Ot IV-​go do V-​go s’’ezda (London, 1903), 3, 30. 151. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 215–​24; Michels, A Fire in their Hearts, 125–​36; Joshua Myers, “To Dance at Two Weddings:  Jews, Nationalism, and the Left in Revolutionary Russia” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2018), 29–​30. 152. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia, 178; Report from London, June 25, 1903, AN, F7/​12521; report of December 24, 1904, BA 1811. 153. The document is included in AN, F7/​12520B. 154. “Conférence organisée par le cercle d’études sociales des ouvriers israélites,” October 7, 1901; Report of December 24, 1904, both in APP, BA 1811. 155. Iu. Steklov, “V ssylke i v emigratsii (Ideinye konflikty),” Proletarskaia revoiliutsiia 5, no. 17 (1923): 211–​12. 156. Dan, Origins of Bolshevism, 204–​209. For an example of a Yiddish-​language advertisement for a meeting from the SDs in London, see “Mas miting” in AN, F7/​12521. 157. “Adres russko-​evreiskikh rabochikh N’iu-​Iorka peterburgskim stachechnikam,” Rabotnik 3–​4 (1897), n.p. 158. Shukman, “Relations,” 44–​46; French police report from London, February 17, 1904, AN, F7/​12521. 159. For example, “Rapport. Surveillance des révolutionnaires russes,” August 3, 1904, AN, F7/​ 12520A. 160. Weizmann, Trial and Error, 51, 68; Kalman Marmor, Mayn lebns geshikte (New York, 1959), 2: 464–​66. 161. Report from London, December 14, 1909, in AN, F7, 15976/​1. 162. “Di mentshayt tsvishn tsvey ganovim,” undated pamphlet, AN, F7/​12521; Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, 126–​32. Quote at 112. 163. For example, the London-​based organs Di Yidishe frayhayt and Dos naye lebn, launched in 1904 and 1906, respectively. 164. Report of June 25, 1903, in AN, F7/​12521. 165. “Réunion tenue, 49, rue de Bretagne,” January 28, 1908, APP, BA 1709. 166. Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries, 180–​81. 167. Deiatel’nost’ bunda, 7–​9; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 261; quote from Weizmann, Trial and Error, 50. 168. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 311. 169. For example, report of March 21, 1915, APP, BA 1709. 170. Chaim Weizmann to Leo Motzkine, November 23, 1901, Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, 1: 208. Emphasis in original. 171. Hillel Halkin, Jabotinsky: A Life (New Haven, CT, 2014), 18. 172. G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1927), 12: 101–​102. 173. Martov, Zapiski, 396–​412; Jonathan Frankel, Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895–​1903 (Cambridge, 1969), 17–​43; Ascher, Pavel Axelrod, 161–​67. 174. Quote from Weizmann, Trial and Error, 50. 175. Tobias, The Jewish Bund, 65–​72; Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 255–​71. 176. Shukman, “Relations,” 29–​34; O. A. Ermanskii, Iz pereshitogo (Moscow, 1927), 31–​36. 177. P.  B. Akselrod to V.  I. Lenin, October 5, 1900, in L. B. Kamenev, ed., Leninskii sbornik (Moscow, 1925), 3: 83.

 

268

N o t e s t o p a g e s 9 7– 102

Chapter 4 1. Quotes from Annie Besant, “Russian Storm Cloud,” Our Corner 8 ( July 1886): 48; “Summary,” The York Herald, April 19, 1881, 1; also, Collmer, Die Schweiz, 323. 2. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-​de-​siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), 120; Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance (New York, 2008), 283. 3. Useful treatments of liberalism across national borders include Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (Princeton, NJ, 2006), especially 88–​207; Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton, NJ, 2014). 4. Balabanoff, My Life, 18. 5. J. H. Rosny, “Nihilists in Paris,” Harper’s Magazine LXXXIII ( June-​November 1891): 429–​30. 6. Louis Barron, “La colonie russe de Montmartre,” National, October 4, 1882, in HJEC, Folder 15, 41; George R. Sims, “Russia in East London,” Living London (London, 1902), 1: 24–​28. 7. Quote from Lynn Ellen Patyk, Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture (Madison, 2017), 5. This impression testified to the success of terrorist propagandists, who used the new technology of dynamite to attack another modern marvel, railway lines, in order to draw attention to their cause. Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, “Attacking the Empire’s Achilles Heels: Railroad and Terrorism in Tsarist Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 (2010): 232–​53. 8. “La morale anarchiste,” Le petit parisien, March 16, 1887, in APP, BA 196; Le monde illustré, March 26, 1881, 200; “Das Attentat auf den Kaiser von Russland in Moskau,” Illustrirte Zeitung, December 27, 1879, 556; Le monde illustré, January 19, 1884, 37. 9. Fritz Cunliffe-​Owen, “Russian Nihilism,” The Eclectic Magazine XXXI (1880): 303–​304. 10. Ernest Lavigne, Introduction à l’histoire du nihilisme russe (Paris, 1880), 347–​51; quote from J. E. Muddock, “The Story of the Assassination of Alexander II,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 264 ( January 1888): 19. 11. “Étudiants russes,” La Lanterne, June 13, 1888, 2; “Les Russes du quartier Latin,” Le Temps, October 18, 1888, in APP, BA 1144; “Die Berliner russische Kolonie,” Berline Zeitung, February 12, 1904, in LA, A PrBrRep030 12707/​1, 269. 12. “Russia,” The Times, April 7, 1881, 5. 13. “Vera Zassoulitch,” Le Gaulois, February 28, 1880, 1. 14. Barry Hollingsworth, “The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom:  English Liberals and Russian Socialists, 1890–​1917,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 3 (1970): 45–​64; Ron Grant, “British Radicals and Socialists and Their Attitudes to Russia, c. 1890–​1917” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1984), 18–​54. 15. “Les massacres de Russie,” HJEC, Folder 16, 97. 16. Stepniak, Underground Russia,  40–​41. 17. La revue des femmes russes 1–​7 (1896). 18. “Russian Women,” The Anglo-​Russian IX, no. 12 (1906): 1031. 19. Described in Barry C. Johnson, ed., Olive & Stepniak: The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett 1893–​1895 (Birmingham, 1993), 100–​101. 20. Edgar Bonjour, Swiss Neutrality, its History and Meaning (London, 1946); Burgess, Refuge, 130–​32; Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace. 21. Quote from: “Fearful Ill-​Treatment of Nihilists,” Western Mail, July 29, 1879, 3. Also R. Brion, “La prison de Moscou,” L’Univers illustré, May 21, 1881, 331–​33; Norbert Lallié, Choses de Russie (Lyon, 1895), 164–​65. 22. “A Nihilist on nihilism,” PMG, July 18, 1879, 1–​2. 23. The Persecution of the Jews in Russia (London, 1890), 1–​34; “Lettre de Russie,” L’Economiste français, June 4, 1881, in HJEC, Folder 15, 10. Quote from Conférence Molé Tocqueville, June 9, 1882, YIVO, AI, Folder 2, 64. 24. “Jews in Russia,” Illustrated London News ( June 4, 1881), 550. 25. A.  F. Hamburger to N.  K. Giers, March 15/​28, 1884, in Tosato-​Rigo, Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 1813–​1955, 206. 26. Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 162–​66; Extradition treaty with Russia, November 24, 1886, TNA, FO 93/​81/​53.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 02– 108

269

27. The Persecution of the Jews of Russia. Public Meeting at the Mansion House (London, 1882); “À nos concitoyens,” HJEC, Folder 15, 22. 28. “The Persecution of the Jews in Russia,” HJEC, folder 15, 3. 29. Bonneff, La vie tragique des travailleurs, 377. 30. Nebelspalter 31, 7 (1905). 31. Balabanoff, My Life,  61–​62. 32. “Anarchism in London,” The Speaker 8 (December 30, 1893): 715–​16. 33. Choi Chatterjee, “Imperial Incarcerations:  Ekaterina Breshko-​ Breshkovskaia, Vinayak Savarkar, and the Original Sins of Modernity,” Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (2015): 850–​72. 34. Lev Deich, Sixteen Years in Siberia (London, 1903), 273–​74, 280–​82; Jakoff Prelooker, Heroes and Heroines of Russia (London, 1908), 129–​35. George Kennan devoted several chapters of his bestselling exposé of the Siberian penal colonies to the Kara camp. George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (New York, 2012), 131–​277. 35. Johnson, Olive and Stepniak, 26, 36; see also Donald Senese, “Felix Volkhovsky in London,” in From the Other Shore:  Russian Political Emigrants in Britain, ed. John Slatter (London, 1984),  73–​74. 36. Petr Lavrov and Vera Zasulich, “To the English People,” APP, BA 196. 37. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 36. 38. Prelooker, Heroes and Heroines, 268. 39. “Anarchist morality,” in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger N. Baldwin (New York, 1927), 92, 95, 99. 40. “Anarchism: Its philosophy and ideal,” in ibid.,141. 41. Anatole Leroy-​Beaulieu, L’empire des tsars et les russes (Paris, 1893), 2: 531–​32. 42. “A nihilist on nihilism,” 1–​2. 43. Leroy-​Beaulieu, L’Empire, 2: 150, 154. 44. William Westall, “Nigilist u sebia doma,” in Stepniak, V londonskoi emigratsii, 363–​64. 45. William Eleroy Curtis, The Land of the Nihilist (New York, 1888), 267, 264. 46. Quotes from Lallié, Choses de Russie, 188–​89; also, Rosny, “Nihilists in Paris,” 442, 430. 47. For example, Ernest Lavigne, Le Roman d’une nihiliste (Paris, 1879); Oscar Wilde, Vera, or the Nihilists (Boston, 1943); M. L. Gagneur, A Nihilist Princess (Boston, 1886). 48. Alphonse Daudet, Tartarin on the Alps and Tartarin of Tarascon (Boston, 1900), 182, 210, 254. 49. “Notes sur Paris—​Nihilisme,” Evénément, February 29, 1880, APP, BA 196. 50. “The Nihilisms and Socialisms of the World,” The Eclectic Magazine LII (September 1890): 374. 51. For example, G. Valbert, “Le procès de Vera Zassoulitch,” Revue des deux mondes 3, no. 27 (1878):  216–​27; “L’assassinat du général Mesentsew,” Le monde illustré (August 31, 1878): 134. 52. Cited in Donald Senese, S. M.  Stepniak-​Kravchinskii, the London Years (Newtonville, MA, 1987), 36. For more on Kropotkin’s influence, see Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-​Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 44–​52. 53. Maurice Didion, Les salariés étrangers en France (Paris, 1911), 17–​27; David F. Schloss, “The Jew as a Workman,” The Nineteenth Century XXIX, no. CLXVII ( January 1891): 106–​109. 54. Sir Walter Besant, East London (New York, 1901), 199–​200. 55. Coenen Snyder, Building a Public Judaism. The population numbers are from: Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 134; Sam Johnson, Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s “Jewish Question,” 1867–​1925 (New York, 2012), 2. 56. “Motion présentée le 3 février 1882,” YIVO, AI, folder 2, 52. Also, N. S. Joseph, “The Jews in Russia,” The Times, November 24, 1890, 13. 57. Leela Gandhi, Anticolonial Thought, Fin-​de-​Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC, 2006). 58. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, 2004). 59. James Mavor, My Windows on the Street of the World (London, 1923), 2: 99. For more on the exiles’ social circles, see ibid., 2: 95–​96; Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York, 1932),  75–​77. 60. Juliet M. Hueffer Soskice, Chapters from Childhood (New York, 1922), 236.

 

270

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 0 8– 112

61. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (New York, 1892), 31. 62. Margaret James Bolsterli, The Early Community at Bedford Park (London, 1977), 105; Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth-​Century England (New York, 1979), 155–​210. Other treatments of collectivism include:  “Les Russes du quartier Latin”; “Gartman on Nihilism,” The Nottingham Evening Post, October 28, 1880, 2. 63. George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution (London, 1894), 147. 64. Ibid.,  28–​29. 65. Barry Cornish Johnson, ed., Tea and Anarchy: The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett, 1890–​ 1893 (London, 1989), 126. 66. Griffith, Angel, 375. For more on the Jewish-​revolutionary nexus, “En Russie,” Le Monde illustré, March 13, 1880, 166; Muddock, “The Story,” 25, 27. 67. “L’assassinat du général Mesentsew,” Le monde illustré, August 31, 1878, 134; G. Valbert, “Le procès de Vera Zassoulitch,” Revue des deux mondes 3, no. 27 (May–​June 1878): 216. 68. Oscar Wilde, Vera, 5. 69. Free Russia, February 1, 1895, 16. 70. Susan Hinley, “Charlotte Wilson, the ‘Woman Question,’ and the Meanings of Anarchist Socialism in Late Victorian Radicalism,” IRSH (2011):  24; Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (London, 1991). 71. Victor Böhmert, “Das Frauenstudium nach den Erfahrungen an der Zürcher Universität,” in Das Arbeiterfreund (Berlin, 1874), 305–​17; Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 269. 72. Sonya Kovalevsky: Her Reflections of Childhood (New York, 1895), 172, 290. For the novel, see Sofia Kovalevskaia, Nihilist Girl, trans. Mary Zirin (New York, 2001). 73. Annie Besant, Annie Besant:  An Autobiography (London, 1920), 311–​12; Anat Vernitski, “Russian Revolutionaries and English Sympathizers in 1890s London:  The Case of Olive Garnett and Sergei Stepniak,” Journal of European Studies 35, no. 3 (2005): 299–​314. 74. Anglo-​Russian I,1 (December 1897): 72; Johnson, Tea and Anarchy, 141; “Votes for Women,” XI, no. 10 (April 1908): 1176. 75. Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette (New  York, 1911), 91; Kevin Grant, “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 1 ( January 2011): 113–​16. 76. Soskice, Chapters from Childhood, 236. 77. Johnson, Tea and Anarchy, 131, 83. 78. Ibid.,  125. 79. Isabel Meredith, A Girl among the Anarchists (London, 1903), 13–​18, quote from 17. 80. Ibid., 56, 19. 81. Johnson, Tea and Anarchy, 163. 82. Meredith, A Girl, 177. 83. Johnson, Tea and Anarchy, 84, 155. 84. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York, 1926), 109. 85. Sarah A. Tooley, “The Growth of a Socialist:  An Interview with Mrs. Sidney Webb,” The Young Woman 29 (February 1895):  145–​48. A  thorough treatment of Webb’s intellectual and personal evolution can be found in Deborah Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (Amherst, 1985). 86. Free Russia, April 4, 1895, 29; “From the Sunny Caucasus,” The Anglo-​Russian V, no. 5 (November 1901): 533–​34. 87. “Meeting de protestation contre l’agression de la Russie contre la Perse,” December 20, 1911, AN, F7/​12894, folder 4. 88. Report of Agent Star, May 20, 1884; Report of Agent 20, August 7, 1886, both in APP, BA 196, 331, 372. 89. Michael Newton, “‘Nihilists of Castlebar! Exporting Russian Nihilism in the 1880s and the Cast of Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or the Nihilists,” in Russia in Britain, 1880–​1940, ed. Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (Oxford, 2013), 35–​52. 90. Khuri-​Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 22, 89, 97, 103; Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, 93–​208. 91. M. Pavlovich, “Revoliutsionnye siluety: Indusskaia emigratsiia v Parizhe, 1909–​1914,” Novyi vostok 1, no. 7 (1925): 152–​63; Harindra Srivastava, Five Stormy Years: Savarkar in London (New York, 1983), 74–​81.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 12– 116

271

92. Ole Birk Laursen, “‘I have only One Country, it is the World’:  Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-​Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–​17,” History Workshop Journal 90 (2020): 10–​13. 93. Prem Bahadur Sinha, The Indian National Liberation Movement and Russia (New Delhi, 1975), 191–​205; Report of December 1907, AN, F7/​12894; see also Chandra Kanungo, Account of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal, ed. Amiya K. Samanta (Delhi, 2015), 184–​85, 204–​22. 94. Griffith, Angel, 384, 393. 95. Karl Marx, “The Paris Commune,” in The Civil War in France https://​www.marxists.org/​ archive/​marx/​works/​1871/​civil-​war-​france/​ch05.htm; Karl Marx to Dr. Kugelmann, April 12, 1871 https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1871/​letters/​71_​04_​12.htm. 96. Serge, Memoirs,  15–​16. 97. La révolution en Russie,” L’Intransigeant, November 30, 1880, 2; “Moeurs nihilistes,” L’Intransigeant, October 29, 1880, 2. On the journal, Janine Neboit-​Mombet, L’image de la Russe dans le roman français (Clérmont-​Ferrand, 2005), 260. 98. Bach Jensen, The Battle,  16–​25. 99. Mykhailo Drahomanov, Le tyrannicide en Russie et l’action de l’Europe occidentale (Geneva, 1881),  12–​13. 100. “Crown Prosecution of the ‘Freiheit,’” The Times, April 1, 1881, 10. 101. “La revanche des nihilistes,” L’Intransigeant, March 15, 1881, 1. 102. Karl Kautsky, ed., Aus der frühzeit des marxismus (Prague, 1935), 32. For more on the influence of Russian terrorism, see Marks, How Russia Shaped,  17–​37. 103. Friedrich Engels to Vera Zasulich, April 23, 1885 https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​ works/​1885/​letters/​85_​04_​23.htm. 104. Karl Marx to Jenny Longuet, April 11, 1881 https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​ works/​1881/​letters/​81_​04_​11.htm. 105. Friedrich Engels to August Bebel, December 11–​12, 1884 https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1884/​letters/​84_​12_​11.htm. 106. Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-​Western Societies (Chicago, 2010), 196–​236; also Haruki Wada, “Marx and Revolutionary Russia,” in Late Marx and the Russian Road, ed. Teodor Shanin (London, 1983), 40–​75. 107. Louise Dornemann, Clara Zetkin:  Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1957), 31–​78; Clara Zetkin, Arbeiterinnen—​und Frauenfrage der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1889), especially 14–​22. 108. Hinley, “Charlotte Wilson,” 21; Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (London, 1925), 48–​49, 189–​90. 109. James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London (Oxford, 1970), 33; H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (New York, 1984), 87–​88, quote at 266. 110. Pease, History, 66, 94. 111. Hulse, Revolutionists, 83, also 120–​21. 112. Senese, S. M. Stepniak-​Kravchinskii, 39. 113. Balabanoff, My Life,  24–​41. 114. Lewis Lyons, “East End Workers,” Commonweal 1, no. 3 (April 1885): 1; Bantman, French Anarchists, 34. Montmartre’s Café Charles, favored by radical Jewish workers, also became a haven for international anarchists. Police report, January 13, 1892, APP, BA 1709; APP, BA 1507. 115. “Pervyi congress. Birzh truda,” and “Kongress angliiskikh tred unionov,” in Zosa Szajkowski Collection, BACU, Box 1, Folder 2. 116. For example, report on December 17, 1913 meeting, APP, BA 1506; “Réunion organisée par les travailleurs de l’habillement occupés aux Galeries Lafayette,” March 7, 1913, in APP, BA 1394. 117. Protokoll des Internationalen Arbeiter-​Congresses zu Paris (Nurnberg, 1890), 62, 35, 2. 118. On Parvus’s early history, see Winfried Scharlau, “Parvus-​Helphand als Theoretiker in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie und seine Rolle in der ersten russischen Revolution” (PhD diss., University of Muenster, 1964), 1–​57. 119. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 111–​65. 120. M. Liadov, Iz zhizni partii v 1903–​1907 godakh (Moscow, 1956), 7–​20; N. S. Rusanov, V emigratsii (Moscow, 1928), 191–​200.

 

272

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 6– 120

121. Z. A. B. Zeman and Winfried B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution (London, 1965), 27–​30. 122. Naarden, Socialist Europe, 102–​106. Quote from 106. 123. Quote from Zeman and Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution, 34. See also H. Tudor, ed., Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896–​1898 (New York, 1988), 174–​ 204; Antonia Grunenberg, Die Massenstreikdebatte (Frankfurt, 1970), 46–​95. 124. Rosa Luxemburg, Speech at Stuttgart Congress, October 3, 1898 https://​www.marxists. org/​ archive/​luxemburg/​1898/​10/​04.htm; “The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case,” 1899 https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​luxemburg/​1899/​11/​dreyfus-​affair.htm. 125. Karl Kautsky, “Was nun?” in Grunenberg, Die Massenstreikdebatte, 96–​121. 126. Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 104. 127. K. Kautsky, “Slaviane i revoliutsiia,” Iskra 18, March 10, 1902, 1–​2. 128. Hsi-​huey Liang, The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War (New York, 1992), 120–​34. 129. Dépeche très secrete de M.  de Kotzebue au Chancelier de l’Empire, April 17/​29, 1879, GARF, f. 109, op. 157, d. 215. t. 2, l. 196. 130. Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State:  The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London, 1987). 131. Louis Andrieux, Souvenirs d’un préfet de police (Paris, 1885), 1: 185–​200. See also Konstitutsiia Loris-​Melikova i ego chastnye pis’ma (St. Petersburg, 1906), 49–​51. 132. Andrieux, Souvenirs, 1: 194–​98. 133. “Expulsion,” APP, BA 1144. 134. M. Chistakova, “Kropotkin i franko-​russkaia diplomatiia,” Zven’ia. Sborniki materialov i dokumentov (1933): 2: 634–​35. 135. See the early conversations in GARF, f. 109, op. 3a, d. 711. 136. For an overview of this relationship, see “La police russe en France,” AN, F7/​14605; AN, F7/​12520/​A ; also, Zuckerman, Tsarist Secret Police Abroad, 77–​85, 102–​106, 126–​32. 137. “Instruction à M. de Hambourger à Berne,” October 1879, GARF, f. 109, op. 164, d. 614, ll. 15–​15ob. 138. For examples of Russia’s aggressive tactics, see Lord Granville to E. Thornton, April 4, 1883, TNA, FO 65/​1325, 138; Collmer, Die Schweiz, 300–​305. 139. J. Dubs to L. Pioda, February 23, 1870; M. A. Gorchakov to A. M. Gorchakov, September 7/​ 19, 1872 and November 11/​23, 1872, in Tosato-​Rigo, Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 157–​58, 176–​77. 140. Collmer, Die Schweiz, 313–​14. 141. Memorandum of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, October 20, 1879, GARF, f.  109, op.  164, d. 614, l. 3ob. 142. “The Right of Asylum,” The Legal News IV, 30 ( July 23, 1881): 236. 143. “Note sur l’affaire Gartman,” 1880, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 144. Chistakova, “Kropotkin i franko-​russkaia diplomatiia,” 634–​35. 145. Home Office to Salisbury, October 15, 1878, HO 45/​9473/​A60556. 146. Chistakova, “Kropotkin i franko-​russkaia diplomatiia,” 634–​35. 147. Arthur Desjardins, “La loi de 1849 et l’expulsion des étrangers,” Revue des deux mondes 3, no. 50 (1882): 657–​80; Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 157–​86. 148. Quote from T. P. O’Connor, House of Commons Debate, June 23, 1882, in Hansard, vol. 271, cc 301. See also speech of Mr. Callan, House of Commons Debate, March 17, 1881, in Hansard, vol. 259, cc. 1247. Both sources accessed online at http://​hansard.millbanksystems. com/​. 149. “Libéraux mais mouchards,” May 11, 1882, Le citoyen, in APP, BA 196, 284. 150. “Le nihilisme à Genève,” Tribune de Genève, April 9, 1887, in AN, F7/​12521. 151. Chistakova, “Kropotkin”: 647; Albert Bataille, “Gazette des tribuneaux,” Figaro, January 10, 1883, 6. 152. “Tribute to Captain Rees, of the Steamship Ashlands,” The Times, January 19, 1891, 7; “Arrest of Russian Refugees in Turkey,” The Times, January 20, 1891, 13. 153. For a legal defense of expulsions, see Desjardins, “La loi de 1849.” 154. Geneva Department of Justice and Police to Prosecutor of Swiss Federation, December 14, 1891, in Tosato-​ Rigo, Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 211; Michael Robert Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1985), 26.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 20– 127

273

155. E. M. Makarenkova, “Novye dokumenty o L. N. Gartmane,” Voprosy istorii 3 (1990): 166–​70. 156. For example, “Report of the Lancet Special Sanitary Commission on the Polish Colony of Jew Tailors,” The Lancet, May 3, 1884, 217–​18; Beatrice Potter, “East London Labour,” The Nineteenth Century 24, no. 138 (1888): 161–​83; Maurice Lauzel, “Un étrange quartier de Paris,” La Revue de Paris 19, no. 1 (February 1912): 777–​93. 157. Potter, “The Jewish Community,” in Booth, Life and Labour, 3: 181–​82. 158. Tooley, “The Growth of a Socialist,” 149; Potter, East London Labour, 161–​78. 159. Quote from: “The Labour Struggle,” Commonweal 4, no. 106 ( January 21, 1888): 22. Also, Z. Shaykovski, Antisemitizm in der frantseyzisher arbeter-​bavegung (New York, 1948), 24–​38. 160. “Law and Lawlessness,” JC, June 12, 1891, 11; “Chronique de la semaine,” AI 46, no. 40 (1885): 318. 161. “The Work to be Done,” JC, August 12, 1881, 9. 162. Alien Immigration, 42. 163. Ibid.,  35–​37. 164. Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 126–​28. 165. “Visitation work,” JC, February 26, 1886, 10. For a similar effort to differentiate the racial characteristics of eastern and Western Jews, see Schloss, “The Jew as a Workman:” 97–​98. 166. Bernard Lazare, “La Solidarité Juive,” Entretiens politiques et littéraires (October 1, 1890): 227, 231. 167. Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 159–​60. 168. David Feldman, “Was the Nineteenth Century a Golden Age for Immigrants?” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-​War Period, ed. Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil (New York, 2003), 171. 169. “Visitation work,” JC, February 26, 1886, 10. This call for immigration restriction predated similar demands from non-​Jews, which emerged only in the last years of the century. See John A. Garrard, The English and Immigration, 1880–​1910 (New York, 1971), 23–​47; Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London, 1905), 60. 170. Lazare, “La Solidarité juive”: 232.

Chapter 5 1. Jensen, The Battle, 62–​130; Laurent Dornel, La France hostile: socio-​histoire de la xénophobie, 1870–​1914 (Paris, 2004); Garrard, English and Immigration,  23–​84. 2. W. T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review 49 (May 1886): 653–​74. 3. Andrieux, Souvenirs, 2: 56–​57; quote from Kropotkin, Memoirs, 479. 4. V. Ia. Bogucharskii, Iz istorii politicheskoi bor’by v 70-​kh i 80-​kh gg. XIX Veka (Moscow, 1912), 303. 5. W. T. Stead, The M. P. for Russia (London, 1909), 1: 7–​50; Joseph O. Baylen, “Madame Olga Novikov, Propagandist,” American Slavic and East European Review 10, no. 4 (1951): 255–​71. 6. Quote from Olga Novikoff, Is Russia Wrong? (London, 1878), viii. Also, Olga Novikoff, Russia and England from 1876 to 1880:  A Protest and an Appeal (London, 1880); Madame Olga Novikoff, “Why Cannot England and Russia Shake Hands?” PMG, September 28, 1886, 1–​2. 7. For general biographical information, see George F. Kennan, “The Curious Monsieur Cyon,” The American Scholar 55, no. 4 (1986): 449–​75. 8. I. Tsion, Nigilisty i nigilizm (Moscow, 1886), 14–​19. 9. Élie de Cyon, La Russie Contemporaine (Paris, 1892), 15. Also, Élie de Cyon, Études Sociales: Nihilisme et Anarchie (Paris, 1892); Russie et liberté (Paris, 1889). Although the latter work was published under a pseudonym, its extended excurses about physiology and other textual similarities to Cyon’s signed works suggest that he was the author. 10. Élie de Cyon, La guerre à Dieu et la morale laïque (Paris, 1881). 11. “Madame Olga de Novikoff,” Northern Echo, January 7, 1881, 7; “Salon Novikovy,” Novoe vremia, April 9/​21, 1896, SULSC, Emil J. Dillon papers, Series 1, Box 22, Folder 12. 12. Joseph O. Baylen, “W. T.  Stead, Apologist for Imperial Russia, 1870–​1880,” International Communication Gazette 6 (1960): 281–​97.

 

274

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 7– 131

13. Report of agent H—​, July 1, 1882; Unidentified newspaper clipping, October 25, 1881; report of Agent Dumont, August 5, 1892, all in APP, BA 1023, 15, 7, 54. 14. Élie de Cyon, Histoire de l’entente Franco-​Russe, 1886–​1894 (Paris, 1895), 228–​34; Report of August 11, 1889; Report of August 28, 1889, both in APP, BA 1023, 40, 45. 15. Anne Hogenhuis-​Seliverstoff, Juliette Adam, 1836–​1936: L’Instigatrice (Paris, 2001), 67–​122; Montjoyeux, “Indiscrétions Parisiennes,” Le Gaulois, October 1, 1879, 1. 16. “Un dîner chez M. de Girardin,” Le Gaulois, October 20, 1879, 1; Cyon, Histoire, 163–​64. 17. Juliette Adam, Après l’abandon de la revanche (Paris, 1910), 147. See also Joseph O. Baylen, “Mme. Juliette Adam, Gambetta, and the Idea of a Franco-​Russian Alliance,” Arts and Sciences Studies 57, no. 15 (1960): 176–​82. 18. Louis Andrieux, À travers la République (Paris, 1926), 157. 19. Jules Hansen, Les coulisses de la diplomatie (Paris, 1880), 180; Jules Hansen, L’alliance Franco-​ Russe (Paris, 1897), 18–​21. 20. These works include:  P. Ivanov, Confession d’un nihiliste (Paris, 1887); Kalikst Wolski, La Russie Juive (Paris, 1887); Jehan-​Préval, Anarchie et Nihilisme (Paris, 1892); P. Denisow, Anglais et nihilistes alliés (Geneva, 1892). Wolski was a real person, but it is unlikely that La Russie juive, which was published after his death and had little in common with his other work, was his creation. 21. The fragmentary records of the Okhrana press agency can be found in: HIASU, ZO, Index IXb, Box 66, Folders 1–​1C, and Index IXa, Box 65, Folder 1A. 22. For example, P.  V. Orzhevskii to A.  N. Nikiforaki, August 25, 1880, GARF, f.  110, op.  24, d. 1197, ll. 4–​4ob; Department of Police to Rachkovskii, June 22, 1886, GARF, f. 102, op. 82, d. 395, l. 11. 23. “Kar’era P. I. Rachkovskogo. Dokumenty,” Byloe 30, no. 2 (1918): 80. 24. See the notes attached to the 1902 scrapbook of clippings in HIASU, ZO, Index IXa, Box 65, Folder 1b. 25. V. K. Agafonov, Zagranichnaia Okhranka (Petrograd, 1918), 34–​36. 26. La Russie juive plagiarizes from (among other sources): Count Lamsdorff, “La Question Juive en Russie,” LNR 5, no. 22 (1883): 283–​305. 27. Ivanow, Confession, 18, 9. 28. Anatole Leroy-​Beaulieu, “Du parti révolutionnaire,” LNR 4, no. 17 (1882): 764–​65, 775. 29. O. K., “Une voix:” 950. 30. For example, “O russkom revoliutsionnym dvizhenii”; Undated memo to Director of Department of Police, HIASU, ZO, Index IXb, Box 66, Folder 1; I. U. Delevskii and A. V. Kartashev, Protokoly sionskikh mudrestov: istoriia odnogo podloga (Berlin, 1923), 123–​57. 31. Ivanow, Confession, 5. 32. De Wolski, La Russie juive, v. 33. Rachkovskii’s report from Paris, 1886, GARF, f. 102, op. 82, d. 395, l. 9ob. 34. Sergei Svatikov, “Vokrug tsionskikh protokolov,” in Budnitskii, Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia, 179–​84; V. S. Brachev, Mastera politicheskogo syska dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1998), 64–​90. 35. Undated deposition of Alber’t Mikhailovich Orlov, GARF, f. 508, op. 1, d. 36, ll. 74–​77. 36. “Anarchists: Their Methods and Organization,” The New Review 56 ( January 1894): 6, 10–​13; “L’invasion nihiliste en France,” Le Gaulois, November 2, 1882, 1. 37. De Wolski, La Russie juive, 3–​19, also 253–​58. 38. Jehan-​Préval, Anarchie, 134–​38, 176–​78, 229. 39. De Wolski, La Russie juive, 241–​43, 2. 40. Quotes from O. K., Skobeleff, 338; Cyon, Nihilisme, 290. Defenders of the tsarist regime often pointed to the emancipation of the serfs as a progressive reform that could not have been accomplished without autocratic initiative. 41. W. T. Stead, Satan’s Invisible World Displayed; or, Despairing Democracy. A  Study of Greater New York (London, 1898), 160. 42. Jehan-​Préval, Anarchie, 124, 107. 43. Cyon, La Russie, 150. 44. Wolski, La Russie, vi; see also Jehan-​Preval, Anarchie, 202–​204. 45. Un gentilhomme, Russie et liberté, 35.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 32– 136

275

46. E. Drumont, “Le Panama russe,” LLP, April 26, 1897, 1; Édouard Drumont, Le testament d’un antisémite (Paris, 1891), 143; “Bulletin officiel de la ligue antisémitique de France,” January 1, 1898, in AN, F7/​12459. 47. Édouard Drumont, La France juive (Paris, 1886), 1: 450–​52; “La Mort du Tsar. La Trahison du Juif Dreyfus,” and “Alexandre III,” LLP, November 2, 1894, 1. 48. For example, Jean de Ligneau, Juifs et Antisémites en Europe (Paris, 1891), 323–​66; Docteur Martinez, Le juif, voilà, l’ennemi! (Paris, 1890), 104, 127–​31, 222–​4; August Rohling, Le juif salon le Talmud (Paris, 1889), 121; A. Puig, La race des vipères (Paris, 1897), 133; Henri Delassus, Le problème de l’heure présente:  antagonisme des deux civilisations (Lille, 1905) 1: 631–​40. See also Marks, How Russia Shaped, 150–​60. 49. Faith Hillis, “The Franco-​Russian Marseillaise:  International Exchange and the Making of Anti-​Liberal Politics in Fin-​de-​Siècle France,” Journal of Modern History 89 (2017): 39–​78. 50. Camille Ducray, Paul Déroulède, 1846–​1914 (Paris, 1914), 156–​68. 51. Saad Morcos, Juliette Adam (Beirut, 1962), 505. 52. “M. Paul Déroulède,” Le Drapeau, September 18, 1886, 448; Charles Chanu, La Ligue des patriotes (Paris, 1916), 110–​12; Russophilos, Le Skobeleff français (Paris, 1887). 53. For example, Etienne Hennet de Goutel, “Katkov et le nationalisme russe,” Action Française, June 15, 1909, 437–​45; Georges Valois, D’un siècle à l’autre (Paris, 1921), 160–​92. Léon Daudet, Maurice Barrès, and Charles Maurras had all participated in Adam’s circle and thought of themselves as her intellectual successors. See Daudet, L’entre-​deux-​guerres, 231; Charles Maurras, L’idée de la décentralisation (Paris, 1898), 21–​22. 54. Arrête du Conseil fédéral,” May 11, 1889, Bundesblatt 2, no. 21 (1889): 831–​33. 55. Report of Agent Séal, “Le parti nihiliste à Genève,” January 5, 1891; Report of Special Railroad Police, Annemasse, April 28, 1889, both in AN, F7/​12521. 56. “Le procès des nihilistes russes,” L’éclair, July 3, 1890, 1–​2; “Chronique judiciare,” Le Radical, July 4, 1890, 3. 57. “Exécution d’un policier,” Egalité, November 24, 1890 in AN, F7/​12520A. 58. “The Murder of General Seliverstoff,” Daily News, November 21, 1890, 3. 59. “The Deus ex Machina,” The Speaker, December 20, 1890, 677; “How Seliverstoff Died,” New York Times, January 4, 1891, 14. 60. “Les bombes de Zurich,” Le Rappel, April 5, 1889, 2; “Les bombes de Zurich et ‘Le Figaro,’” Tribune de Genève, April 2, 1889, both in AN, F/​7 12521; “Arrestation des révolutionnaires russes,” Le Temps, June 2, 1890, 2; Commissariat spécial de police, Bellegarde to Sûreté, June 6, 1890, AN, F7/​12520A. 61. “Nouvelles scientifiques,” La science illustrée 131 ( June 1, 1890): 96; Le Petit journal illustré, June 2, 1907, back cover. 62. Jehan-​Préval, Anarchie et Nihilisme, 96–​97; “Arrest of the Nihilists in Paris,” PMG, May 30, 1890, 4; “The Paris Nihilists and their Bombs,” PMG, June 2, 1890, 4. 63. Vladimir Burtsev, “Franko-​russkoe shpionstvo i franko-​russkii soiuz,” Byloe 8 (1908): 58–​64. 64. “O nagrazhdenii potomstvennogo pochetnogo grazhdanina Arkadiia Gartinga chinom Kollezhskogo Registratora,” 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 22, d. 231, ll. 46–​47; “Biograficheskie dannye o Landezene,” GARF, f. 1762, op. 4, d. 644. 65. “Surveillance des nihilistes,” March 24, 1889, AN, F7/​12521; “Les révolutionnaires russes,” Le Temps, July 5, 1890, in AAPA, R 10609. 66. “Les nihilistes,” L’éclair, November 22, 1890, in AN, F7/​12519; “Kar’era:” 79–​80. 67. On anxiety:  Jensen, Battle, 31–​36. Examples of efforts to stoke fear:  “Anarchists:  Their Methods and Organization”: 10–​12; Denisow, Anglais et nihilists, 16. 68. The first argument can be found in Cyon, Études sociales; the second in “Not anarchists, but assassins,” ROR V ( June 29, 1892): 527. 69. Rachkovskii to Alexandre Ribot, June 13, 1890, GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 16ob-​17. 70. “Mr. Mendelssohn and the Franco-​Russian Police,” PMG, December 27, 1890, 6. 71. “Arrest of the Nihilists in Paris,” PMG, May 30, 1890, 4. 72. Drumont, Testament, 154. 73. Ambassador Laboulaye to Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandre Ribot, June 24, 1890, AN, F7/​12520A.

 

276

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 3 6– 139

74. “L’assemblée socialiste de protestation,” clipping from unidentified newspaper, May 16, 1889; clipping from Le Démocrate, May 16, 1889, both in AN, F7/​12521; “Les révolutionnaires russes,” L’egalité, June 1, 1890, 1–​2. 75. For just a few examples:  “The Trial of the Eight Russians,” The Times, July 7, 1890, 9; “Arrestation de terroristes russes,” Le Petit Parisien, May 31, 1890, 2; “Arrestations des anarchistes,” L’Univers illustré, June 7, 1890, 358–​59; Berliner Tageblatt, May 30, 1890, in AAPA, R 10609. 76. Johann Langhard, Das Recht der Politischen Fremdenausweisung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Schweiz (Leipzig, 1891), 87–​88; Johann Langhard, Die anarchistische Bewegung in der Schweiz von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart und die internationalen Führer (Berlin, 1903), 312; Louis Proal, La criminalité politique (Paris, 1895), 42–​43. 77. Clipping from Journal de Genève, April 11, 1889, in AN, F7/​12521. 78. “Rapport de M. Vallens,” July 18, 1907, in AN, F7/​12520/​A . 79. “Lästige Ausländer,” February 19, 1904, Berliner Morgenpost, LB, A  PrBrRep030 12707/​ 1, 133. 80. “France,” The Morning Post, December 23, 1890, 5; “France,” Le Démocrate, June 3, 1890, in AN, F7/​12520A; “The Revival of Nihilism,” Western Daily Press, March 30, 1889, 5; “Russian Conservative View of the Siberian Atrocities,” The Times, March 14, 1890, 1. 81. Le Monde illustré, November 29, 1890, 460. 82. Clipping from Journal de Lausanne, June 8, 1904, in in AN, F7/​12521. 83. Clipping from Tribune de Genève, April 17, 1889, in AN F7/​12521; “The trial of the eight Russians,” The Times, July 7, 1890, 9; “The Latest news of nihilism.” 84. Report of Grenoble Railroad Police, June 3, 1890, AN F7/​12519. 85. Alexis Trébaux to Russian embassy, June 8, 1890; Adélaide Mathon to Russian embassy, September 18, 1890, in HIASU, ZO, Index XIIIb (1), Outgoing dispatches, Folder 1. 86. Rachkovskii to Ribot, June 13, 1890, GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 16ob-​17. 87. E. Odier to Federal Public Minister, October 30, 1903, in Tosato-​Rigo, Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 226. 88. V. N. Lamsdorf to V. V. Zhadovskii, November 12/​25, 1902, in ibid., 223. 89. E. Odier to Federal Public Minister, cited in ibid, 226. On Swiss agents, see P. Straehl to Russian Embassy, February 20, 1891, HIASU, ZO, Index XIIIb (1), Outgoing dispatches, Folder 1; GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 57. 90. For example, Mohrenheim to Minister of Foreign Affairs, January 20, 1896, AD, CPC Nouvelle série, 195CPCom/​32; HIASU, ZO, Index Vb, Box 28, folder 6; “Doklad,” March 26, 1892, GARF, f. 102, op. 100, d. 1, t. 1, ll. 61–​62. 91. “La police russe en France,” AN, F7/​14605, 1–​2; “La police russe à Paris,” November 28, 1901, AN, F7/​12519. 92. Rachkovskii to Department of Police, July 18/​30, 1890, GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 8, l. 8; “Liste des personnes avant rendu des services dans l’affaire des terroristes russes à Paris,” HIASU, ZO, Index Vb, Folder 1. 93. “La police russe en France,” 1. 94. For example, “Le parti nihiliste à Genève,” January 5, 1891 and “Menées anarchistes,” April 25, 1902, both in AN, F7/​12521; Prefect of Police to Minister of Interior, May 26, 1889, in AN, F7/​12520A; Report of Prefect of Police to Sûreté, June 5, 1890, in AN, F7/​12519. 95. Minister of Foreign Affairs to Minister of Interior, February 11, 1908, AN, F7/​12521. 96. A. Press, “Bor’ba za vysshee obrazovanie evreev pri Nikolae II,” Evreiskaia letopis’ 3 (1924): 137. 97. The treaty can be found in TNA, FO 93/​81/​53. 98. Report of Commissioner of Police, January 16, 1893, TNA, HO 144/​587/​B2840C/​15, f. 41. 99. “London Nihilists appeal,” The Morning Leader, April 4, 1893, 3–​4; “A Warning,” FR (December 1890): 3–​4; “The Pro-​Jewish Movement,” FR (December 1890), 3; “Persecution of the Jews,” FR (March 1892), 11. 100. See Rachkovskii’s undated 1892 reports from England in GARF, f. 102, op. 100, d. 1, t. 1, ll. 63–​64; GARF, f. 102, op. 88, d. 332, t. 1, ll. 62–​63. 101. On the Okhrana’s early operations in England, see HIASU, ZO, Index IIb, Box 7, folders 1–​2. 102. M. de Staal to Marquis of Salisbury, March 5, 1892; also April 4, 1892; May 6, 1892, all in TNA, FO 65/​1429, ff. 87–​88, 322, 324.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 40– 144

277

103. For example, Salisbury to de Staal, June 18, 1892, in ibid., f. 126. A full reconstruction of this correspondence and an analysis of its import can be found in:  Robert Henderson, “Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian Revolutionary Emigration:  Surveillance of Foreign Political Refugees in London, 1891–​1905” (PhD diss., University of London, 2008), 96–​ 102. Salisbury also communicated information about tsarist subjects in Germany to that nation’s police: “Note verbale,” June 6, 1892, AAPA, R 10612. 104. Henderson, “Vladimir Burtsev,” 178. 105. For example, Assistant Commissioner of Police to Undersecretary of Home Office, May 24, 1892, TNA, HO 144/​587/​B2840C/​8, f. 48; “Expulsion from France to England of persons obnoxious to the French Govt.,” March 1897, TNA/​144/​587/​B2840C/​3A, f. 53. 106. For Melville’s own account of his relationship with Rachkovskii, see his report of November 25, 1904, in TNA, KVG/​47. 107. See Henderson, “Vladimir Burtsev,” 188–​203; TNA, HO 144/​272/​A59222. 108. “The Queen v.  Bourtzeff and Wierzbicki,” February 15, 1898; Memorandum of Home Office, February 15, 1898, both in TNA, HO 144/​272/​A59222B, f. 2, f. 5. 109. “Anarchists:” 1–​16; Denisow, Anglais et nihilistes. 110. “Anglichane i russkie chitateli,” 1893, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIa, Box 189, Folder 1; Denisow, Anglais, 11–​12, 28. 111. “Projet d’entente,” 1895, AD, 85PAAP/​1, 124. 112. For accounts of these encounters, see Emil Dillon’s description of January 3, 1890 meeting in SULSC, Emil J. Dillon Papers, Box 22, Folder 11; Account of meeting of January 5, Box 22, Folder 12; Stead to Dillon, July 1, 1890, Box 27, Folder 1. 113. Stead, The M.P., 2: 315–​18; quote from 2: 331. 114. “Les nihilistes à Londres,” HIASU, ZO, Index XVIa, Box 189, Folder 1. 115. “La bible et la bombe! La perfide albion?” HIASU, ZO, Index XVIa, Box 189, Folder 3. 116. Quote from Olga Novikoff, “The Jews in Russia,” The Times, November 22, 1890, 9. 117. Garrard, The English and Immigration, 24; “The Destitute Foreigner at the East-​End,” PMG, September 27, 1889, 7. 118. “Amongst the Jews at the East-​End,” PMG, August 7, 1885; “The Jews in East London,” PMG, April 19, 1887, 6. 119. J. Laister, “A Judenhetze brewing in East London,” PMG, February 18, 1886, 2. 120. PMG, February 6, 1886, 7; “Jews and the Oath,” PMG, February 3, 1893, 3; “The Peers and the Sweaters,” PMG, May 12, 1888, 2–​3. 121. “Amongst the Jews.” 122. “Another theory of the East-​End Murders,” PMG, November 28, 1888, 7. 123. “The Horrors of the East End,” PMG, September 8, 1888, 8. 124. “More Horrors in the East End,” PMG, October 1, 1888, 7. 125. East London Observer, cited in Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 73. For an analysis of how anxieties about class and immigration influenced public perceptions of the Whitechapel murders, see Judith R. Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (1982): 543–​74. 126. “Occasional notes,” PMG, October 12, 1888, 5. 127. “The Jews in East London”; “The Alleged East End Anti-​Jewish Movement,” PMG, March 11, 1890. 7. 128. “The Invasion of England,” PMG, May 7, 1888, 1; “Can We Exclude Foreign Paupers?” ROR 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 131. 129. Stead, The M.P., 2: 286. 130. White, “Pauper Foreigners,” The Times, May 30, 1887, 3; Arnold White, The Modern Jew (London, 1899), 13–​15. 131. Sam Johnson, “‘A Veritable Janus at the Gates of Jewry:’ British Jews and Mr. Arnold White,” Patterns of Prejudice 47, no. 1 (2013): 47. 132. “Jewish Immigration,” The Times, June 20, 1891, 11. 133. Quotes from: “Russian Conservative View of the Siberian Atrocities,” The Times, March 14, 1890, 13; “Books of the Week,” The Times, November 29, 1894, 4. At least one hostile piece cited an article placed by Rachkovskii’s press agency: “Anarchism in London,” The Speaker, December 30, 1893, 715–​16.

 

278

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 4– 149

134. Grant Allen, “The Dynamiter’s Sweetheart,” Strand Magazine, July 8, 1894, 137–​48. 135. “Russian conservative view;” “The Revival of Nihilism,” Western Daily Press, March 30, 1889, 5; “Moral Blood-​Poisoning,” JC, September 20, 1901, 15. 136. W. Holt White, The Earthquake:  A Romance of London in 1907 (London, 1906), 333. For more on the nativist turn in literature, see David Glover, Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-​de-​Siècle England (New York, 2012), 47–​121. 137. William Henry Wilkins, The Alien Invasion (London, 1892), 42–​49. 138. Arnold White, The Destitute Alien in Great Britain (London, 1892), 86–​88; Beatrice Potter, “East London Labour,” The Nineteenth Century 24, no. 138 (1888): 178–​80. 139. Gainer, Alien Invasion, 104–​106, 174–​78. 140. “Alien Immigration Commission,” The Times, May 15, 1902, 5; “Alien Immigration Commission,” The Times, April 29, 1902, 14; Garrard, The English and Immigration,  27–​34. 141. Gainer, The Alien Invasion, 144–​98. 142. Garrard, The English and Immigration, 106. 143. The quote is from “Die Jüdischen Anarchisten in London,” Die Post, May 19, 1908, LB, APrBrRep030 12556/​27, 119; also, “Cité anarchiste,” Le matin, May 9, 1893, 1. 144. For example, Georges Grison, “Un campement juif,” Le Figaro, August 24, 1892, 2; Paul Pottier, “Essai sur le proletariat juif en France,” Revue des Revues XXVIII (March 1, 1899): 485–​86; “Le crime de la rue de Turenne,” La presse, May 29, 1904, 2. 145. Sweeney, At Scotland Yard, 304–​29; quote from 312. See also “Nihilistes russes arrêtés,” APP, BA 926; “Russische Revoliutionäre,” BAR, E21/​14011. 146. For example, “Les réfugiés révolutionnaires russes à Paris,” AN, F7/​12894, 16; Report of E. Jornot, November 21, 1903, in Tosato-​Rigo et al., Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 227. 147. “Le Nihilisme et les nihilistes,” AN, F7/​12519. 148. “Rapport. Gopelson,” April 18, 1896; report of September 2, 1896; “Au sujet de l’anarchiste surveillé Gopelson, Emmanuel,” December 13, 1901, all in APP, BA 1098. 149. “Au sujet de l’anarchiste Gopelson Maurice,” November 11, 1902, in ibid.; “Nouvelles diverses,” L’univers israélite 54, 41 ( June 30, 1899): 475–​76. 150. George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York, 1984); A. F. Ostal’tsev, Anglo-​Russkoe soglashenie 1907 goda (Saratov, 1977); Jennifer Siegel, For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars (New York, 2014). 151. This point is made in Helga Deininger, Frankreich, Russland, Deutschland, 1871–​1891: Die Interdependenz von Aussenpolitik, Wirtschaftsinteressen und Kulturbeziehungen im Vorfeld des Russisch-​Französischen Bündnisses (Munich, 1983). See also Hillis, “The Franco-​Russian Marseillaise.” 152. For example, Philippe Deschamps, Le livre d’or de l’alliance Franco-​Russe (Paris, 1898), 395; Daudet, L’entre-​deux-​guerres, 233–​38. 153. “M. De Cyon and the Francorussian Alliance,” The Times, September 14, 1895, 5. 154. Hansen, L’alliance, 56–​57; Pierre Albin, La paix armée. L’Allemagne et la France en Europe (Paris, 1913), 276–​77. 155. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance, 112, 167. 156. For example, Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–​1917 (Oxford, 1995), 47, 84–​96. 157. A. N. Zashikhin, “Uil’iam Sted i proval ego ‘missii’ v Rossii osen’iu 1905 goda,” in Nauchnaia Biografiia—​Vid istoricheskogo issledovaniia, ed. V. I. Startsev and A. V. Smolin (Leningrad, 1985),  69–​70. 158. Circular of Gabriel Hanotaux, October 24, 1896, AD, CPC, Nouvelle série, 195CPCom/​ 32, 128. 159. E. Henry to Undersecretary of State, February 1, 1905, TNA, HO 45/​10315/​125890. 160. Cecil Spring-​Rice to Sir Edward Grey, May 12, 1906, TNA, FO 371/​125, 41. 161. Cyon, Études sociales, 315. 162. Henri Rollin, L’apocalypse de notre temps (Paris, 2005), 488–​90. 163. Stead, The M.P., 2: 397–​406. 164. For the records of this commission, see “O deiatel’nosti prozhivaiushchego za granitsei Deistvitel’nogo Statskogo Sovetnika Tsiona,” 1895, GARF, f. 102, op. 52, d. 66.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 49– 157

279

165. Agafonov, Zagranichnaia Okhranka, 34–​ 36; “Soobshcheniia sotrudnika Manuilova iz Parizha,” 1898, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, d. 1, ch. 13, l. A; Sekretnyi zhurnal OO, June 15, 1912, GARF, f. 5802, op. 2, d. 205, ll. 168–​74. 166. W. T. Stead, The United States of Europe on the Eve of the Parliament of Peace (New York, 1899). This is not to suggest that the Hague conference was purely a result of Stead and Novikova’s agitation, only that they played an early and active role in promoting it. On the legal impetus behind the conference, which was distinct from the turn of events reconstructed here, see Peter Holquist, “The Russian Empire as a ‘Civilized State’: International Law as Principle and Practice, 1874–​1878,” NCEEER Working Paper, 2004. 167. “The Peace Conference,” The Times, May 15, 1899, 7; George Herbert Perris, A History of the Peace Conference at The Hague (London, 1899), 28–​29. 168. Cited in Liang, The Rise, 171. 169. Jensen, The Battle, 131–​84; Liang, The Rise, 163–​66. 170. Cited in Liang, The Rise, 162. 171. Ibid., 166; “Minute on Undertaking given on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government at the Conference at Rome in 1898,” TNA, FO 412/​68, 2–​3. 172. “Annexe au procès-​verbal de la quatrième séance,” in Conférence internationale de Rome pour la défense sociale contre les anarchistes, AD, C86, folder 2, 109–​10. 173. Quote from Marquess of Lansdowne’s confidential memo of January 21, 1902, TNA, FO 83/​1970. See also the discussions in FO 412/​68. 174. Memorandum of January 7, 1902, TNA, FO 83/​1970. 175. “Pro memoria,” 1900, TNA, FO 83/​1970. 176. For a copy of the protocol, see German Embassy to Marquess of Lansdowne, April 28, 1904, TNA, FO 83/​1970. 177. For example, Undersecretary of State’s office to Foreign Office, May 30, 1904, TNA, FO 83/​1970; Marquess of Lansdowne to Count Beckendorff, June 17, 1904, TNA, FO 881/​ 9281D. 178. “Copie d’une note du Conseil Fédéral Suisse au Ministre de Russie à Berne en date du 31 mars 1904,” TNA, FO 83/​1970; Liang, Rise of Modern Police, 173; Jensen, The Battle, 331. 179. Porter, The Origins, 149–​60. See also the surveillance files on the 1908 Russian socialist congress: TNA, FO 371/​518. 180. “Notes sur les polices étrangères fonctionnant en France,” 1914, AN, F7/​14605, 7. Records of the private agency, Bint and Sambain, can be found in GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 15. For a visualization of the travels of Henri Bint, the founder of this agency, see https://​ utopiasdiscontents.com/​itineraries. 181. Quote from V. N. Lamsdorf to V. V. Zhadovskii, November 12/​25, 1902, in Tosato-​Rigo, Suisse-​Russie, 221. 182. Cited in Jensen, The Battle, 293.

Chapter 6 1. For example, Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists & the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 1955); F. Dan, Origins; Malia, Soviet Tragedy,  51–​80. 2. Slezkine, House of Government. 3. Bonch-​Bruevich, Vospominaniia, 20. 4. L. Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia prezhde i teper’,” Sovremennyi mir 11 (1909): 54–​58 (second pagination). 5. Agafonov, Zagranichnaia Okhranka, 3. 6. Chuzhestranets, “Iz deiatel’nosti politseiskogo internatsionala,” Zagranichnaia gazeta 2, March 23, 1908, 6. 7. Iu. Steklov, “V ssylke i v emigratsii (Ideinye konflikty),” Proletarskaia revoiliutsiia 5, no. 17 (1923): 217–​19. 8. Weizmann to Vera Weizmann, February 7, 1905 and April 14, 1905, Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann 4: 29, quote at 77. 9. Weizmann, Trial and Error, 162.

 

280

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 5 7– 163

10. IV-​yi s’’ezd Vseobshchego evreiskogo rabochego soiuza v Litve, Pol’she i Rossii, YIVO, Bund Foreign Committee, RG 1401, Box 1, Folder 2, 15, 10. For broader context, Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 210–​46. 11. IV-​yi s’’ezd,  16–​19. 12. V. I. Lenin, “Kak chut’ ne potukhla ‘Iskra,’”PSS 4:  338–​39. This unbecoming passage was omitted from the first version of this essay published in the Leninskii sbornik of the early 1920s, and only published in full after Khrushchev’s thaw. 13. Kamenev, Leninskii sbornik, 3: 83, 222. 14. Lidiia Dan interview in Leopold H. Haimson, The Making of Three Revolutionaries (New York, 2004), 133. 15. Goldberg, To The Promised Land, 66; Vital, Zionism, 182, 191–​93. The best overview of Zionist networks in these years is Gur Alroey, An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford, CA, 2014). 16. Manfred Hildermeier, Die Sozialrevoliutionäre Partei Russlands (Cologne, 1978), 109–​40; B. V. Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist (New York, 1931), 1–​149. 17. N. Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin (London, 1968), 23. 18. Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’, 8–​ 9. See also Garvi, Vospominaniia sotsialdemokrata, 37,  50–​51. 19. Stephen F. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–​ 1917 (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 56–​70. 20. V. Zenzinov, Iz zhizni revoliutsionera (Paris, 1919), 6. 21. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 115. 22. Martov i ego blizkie, 39, 45. 23. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 105. 24. Ibid.,  390. 25. Statistics from A. S. Kudriavtsev et al., eds., Lenin v Zheneve (Moscow, 1985), 250; Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 69; S. Kliachko, “Iz emigrantskoi zhizni v Shveitsarii,” Katorga i ssylka 4, no. 25 (1926): 191. 26. Report of I. F. Manasevich-​Manuilov, December 5, 1904, GARF f. 102, OO, op. 316, d. 1, ch. 5, t. 2, l. 44. 27. By the early twentieth century, French police estimated that some 40,000 Russians had settled in the country. “Chez les révolutionnaires russes résidant en France,” AN, F7/​13372, 1. For more on demographic shifts: A. Harting report, May 1902, HIASU, ZO, Index XIIIb (1), box 117; “Überwachung bzw. Ausweisung russischer Staatsangehöriger,” 1910–​11, LB, A PrBrRep030, 12727. 28. On Russian Vienna and smuggling networks, see GARF, f. 505, op. 1, d. 1–​9. 29. “Colonie russe,” July 16, 1908, AN, F7/​12521. 30. Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 16, 1908, 1; Van, “Vena,” in ibid., 7. 31. Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia:” 51. See also Tchernoff, Dans le creuset, 2: 188. 32. Report of Annemasse Railroad Police, June 22, 1901, AN, F7/​125219. 33. Quote from M. Sukennikov, Pervyi kongress russkikh studentov i studentok, uchashchikhsia zagranitsei (Berlin, 1902), 44; also, N. Straidov, Ob’’edinimsia! Pis’mo studenta-​revoluitsionera (Geneva, 1902). 34. Iu. Steklov, “V ssylke i v emigratsii:” 193–​200. 35. Martov, Zapiski, 400–​408; Haimson, The Making, 117; N. K. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow, 1957), 45. 36. Haimson, The Making, 99. 37. Lars T. Lih, Lenin (London, 2012), 67–​69. 38. Quote from Medem, Vladimir Medem, XVIII. See also Martov, Zapiski, 412; Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 1: 85–​87. 39. Rappaport, Conspirator, 23; quote from “Kak chut’ ne potukhla ‘Iskra,’ ” 4: 337. 40. Dan, Origins, 230–​34. 41. Willi Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant in der Schweiz (Zurich, 1973), 32. 42. L. L. Muravʹeva and I. I. Sivolap-​Kaftanova, Lenin in London (Moscow, 1983), 12–​13, 37, 84. 43. Sapir, Iz arkhiva L.O. Dan, 38–​43; Trotskii, Moia zhiznʹ, 147. 44. Haimson, Making, 109.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 63– 170

281

45. Piatnitsky, Memoirs, 52; N. N. Surovtseva and R. Z. Iunitskaia, eds., Vospominaniia o II s’’ezd RSDRP (Moscow, 1973), 73; Haimson, Making, 108. 46. Murav’eva and Sivolap-​Kaftanova, Lenin in London, 110. 47. Quote from Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin, 42; also, Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant, 53. 48. Report of Lenin Institute, July 2, 1926, HIASU, Nicolaevsky Papers, Box 67, Folder 9, Reel 57; Andrew Rothstein, Lenin in Britain (London, 1970), 12–​14; V. M. Semenov, Po leninskim mestam v Londone (Moscow, 1960), 19–​35. The best account of the London years is Robert Henderson, The Spark That Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics that Changed the World (London, 2020). 49. Haimson, Making, 122. 50. G. I. Kramol’nikov, “Iz vospominanii delegata III s’’ezda partii,” in O Vladimire Il’iche Lenine, ed. N. Petrov et al. (Moscow, 1963), 45. 51. “Vul’garnyi sotsializm i narodnichestvo, voskreshaemye sotsialistami-​ revoliutsionerami,” Iskra, November 1, 1902, 43–​50; Shukman, “Relations,” 83–​88. 52. Lenin to I. I. Radchenko, July 16, 1902, LS, 8: 258. 53. Dan, Origins, 236–​43. 54. Report of Lenin Institute, 10. 55. Shukman, “Relations,” 56–​58; V. Levitskii, Za chetvert’ veka (Moscow, 1926), t. 1, ch. 2, 3–​47. For a map of smuggling networks, see https://​utopiasdiscontents.com/​traversing-​borders. 56. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 135; Piatnisky, Memoirs, 58. Dan’s reflections from Sapir, Iz arkhiva, 35. 57. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 157. 58. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered (Boston, 2006), 111–​58. 59. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 57–​59; Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 147–​48; M. Liadov, Iz zhizni partii v 1903–​1907 godakh (Moscow, 1956), 14. 60. “Vybory v tsiurikhskii gorodskoi sovet,” Iskra, July 1, 1901, 2; P. Aksel’rod, “Itogi mezhdunarodnoi sotsial-​demokratii,” Iskra, December 1, 1900, 20–​23; G. V. Plekhanov, “Iz Briuselia,” Iskra, January 15, 1902, 17. 61. Iskra, September 1, 1901, prilozhenie. 62. “Uroki krizisa,” Iskra, August 1, 1901, 1–​2. 63. These concepts are drawn from Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 100. 64. “Po povodu odnoi proklamatsii,” Poslednie izvestiia, January 13/​28, 1903, 1–​2. 65. Otvet “Iskry” po povodu stat’i ee o Bunde v no. 33, in HIASU, Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 68, folder 3, reel 57. 66. Lenin, “Nuzhna li ‘Samostoiatel’naia politicheskaia partiia’ evreiskomy proletariaty?” Iskra, February 15, 1903, 121–​22; on the broader context, Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia, 265–​72. 67. Getzler, Martov,  50–​57. 68. “O manifeste ‘soiuza armianskikh sotsial-​demokratov’,” PSS, 7: 104; “Natsional’nyi vopros v nashei programme,” PSS, 7: 234, 236. 69. Liadov, Iz zhizni,  20–​21. 70. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 154–​57; Krupskaia, Vospominaniia,  44–​47. 71. Haimson, The Making, 122; Getzler, Martov,  63–​66. 72. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 51. 73. “Rasskaz o II s’’ezde RSDRP,” PSS 8: 5, 7–​10. 74. “Proekt rezoliutsii o terrore,” and “Proekt ustava RSDRP,” PSS 7: 251, 256. 75. Lenin to G. M. Krzhizhanovskii, April 3, 1903, PSS 46: 284. 76. “Proekt rezoliutsii o meste bunda v RSDRP,” PSS 7: 245–​46. 77. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia,  71–​75. 78. Quote from Ch. Panavas, Bor’ba bol’shevikov protiv opportunisticheskoi teorii i politiki Bunda (Moscow, 1972), 23; also Vtoroi ocherednoi s’’ezd Ross. Sots.-​Dem. Rabochei Partii (Geneva, 1903),  56–​59. 79. Vtoroi ocherednoi s’’ezd, 43–​44, 70, 65, 63. 80. Ibid., 63, 84–​85, 99. 81. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 290. 82. “Rasskaz,”  6–​7. 83. Letter to I. V. Babushkin, January 16, 1903, PSS 46: 256.

 

282

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 0– 177

84. “Rasskaz,” 13–​18. Quote from 13. 85. Lenin to Aleksandra Kalmykova, September 30, 1903 and September 7, 1903, PSS 46: 301, 292–​93. 86. Quote from “Rasskaz,” 19; also “Rech’ pri vyborakh redaktsii “Iskry,” PSS 7: 305–​308. 87. Lenin to Aleksandra Kalmykova, September 7, 1903, PSS 46: 292–​93. 88. “Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad,” PSS 8: 398. 89. Ibid., 8: 347–​48. 90. Valentinov, Encounters, 122, 136. 91. Rappaport, Conspirator, 87. 92. Quote from Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 165. Also, Service, Lenin: A Political Life, 1: 107–​10. 93. L. A. Fotieva, Iz zhizni Lenina (Moscow, 1956), 16. 94. “Doklad internatsional’nomu sotsialisticheskomu kongressu v Amsterdame,” YIVO, BFC, Box 1, Folder 3, 3. 95. Cited in Lih, Lenin, 90. 96. Report of February 4, 1904, AN F/​7/​15978/​1. 97. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia,  80–​81. 98. M. Essen, “Vstrechi s Leninym,” Vospominaniia o Vladimire Il’iche Lenine (Moscow, 1956), 1: 254. 99. The words are Petr Struve’s: “My Contacts and Conflicts with Lenin, pt 1,” Slavonic and East European Review 12, no. 36 (1934): 591–​92. 100. “Dve taktiki sotsial-​demokratii v demokraticheskoi revoliutsii,” PSS 11: 63, 100. 101. “Tri konspekta doklada o Parizhskoi kommune,” PSS 8: 486. 102. “Shag vpered,” 401–​402. 103. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 423. 104. Valentinov, Encounters, 200–​201. 105. Surveillance générale des révolutionnaires russes,” February 18, 1905, AN, F7/​15978/​1; Kudriavtsev, et al., Lenin v zheneve, 83, 33. 106. Drabkina, Chernye sukhari, 21. 107. Kudriavtsev, et al., Lenin v Zheneve, 124–​28. The quote is from “Ko vsem!” January 28, 1904 pamphlet, distributed with Iskra. 108. Fotieva, Iz zhizni, 10, 13; Carter Elwood, “What Lenin Ate,” Revolutionary Russia 20, no. 2 (2007): 136, 139. Eric Naiman goes further still, identifying misogyny as a central component of Bolshevik (and other radical) utopias: Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 27–​44. 109. Dan in Haimson, The Making, 123; Rappaport, Conspirator, 57. 110. Carter Elwood, “Lenin and Armand: New Evidence on an Old Affair,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 43, no. 1 (2001): 49–​65. 111. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 44. 112. Fotieva, Iz zhizni, 8. 113. A. V. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia (Moscow, 1968), 91–​92. 114. Drabkina, Chernye sukhari, 19. 115. Essen, “Vstrechi,” 1: 249. 116. P. N. Lepeshinskii, “Na rubezhe,” Vospominaniia o Vladimire Il’iche Lenine, ed. G. N. Golikov (Moscow, 1969), 2: 74. See also G. M. Krzhizhanovskii, “O Vladimire Il’iche,” in ibid., 24. 117. Erenburg, “Liudi, gody, zhizn’:” 58. 118. Cited in Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant, 53. The activist is Nikolai Vol’skii. 119. Ascher, Pavel Axelrod, 211; also 193. 120. Parvus to Aksel’rod, mid-​Feb 1905, in Sotsial-​demokraticheskoie dvizhenie v Rossii, ed. A. N. Potresov and B. I. Nikolaevskii (Moscow, 1928), 1: 153. 121. Leon Trotsky, “Our Political Tasks” (1904), https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​trotsky/​ 1904/​tasks/​. Also Garvi, Vospominaniia, 395; Valentinov, Encounters, 128. 122. “Shag vpered,” 370. 123. Fotieva, Iz zhizni, 6–​7, 15. 124. Pis’ma P.B. Aksel’roda i Iu.O. Martova (The Hague, 1967), 87–​ 141; Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo,  75–​77. 125. Haimson, The Making, 180–​81.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 77– 181

283

126. Valentinov, Encounters, 33. For more on the logic of these choices, see Garvi, Vospominaniia, 380; Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo, 70. 127. Valentinov, Encounters, 36. 128. Krzhizhanovskii, “O Vladimire Il’iche,” 23; Garvi, Vospominaniia, 391; Piatnitsky, Memoirs, 59–​60; Katy Turton, Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (London, 2018), 69. 129. Valentinov, Encounters, 132. 130. Quote from Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo 68–​69. Also, Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunostʹ, 17–​18; Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, 33. 131. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 391–​96, quote from 395; “Svedenie Berlinskoi agentury,” March 5, 1905, HIASU, Index XIIIb (1), box 117. 132. Bonch-​Bruevich, Vospominaniia, 20. 133. M. V. Khanin, “O stat’e V.  I. Lenina ‘Revoliutsiia i rossiia,’” in O Vladimire Il’iche Lenine (Moscow, 1963), 25. 134. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 396–​97. 135. Khanin, “O stat’e,” 26. 136. Fotieva, Iz zhizni, 24. 137. Report of July 7, 1905, AN, F7/​12520B. 138. “Svedenie Berlinskoi agentury.” 139. For a few examples, report from London, February 2, 1905, AN F7/​12521; report of October 10, 1906, AN, F7/​12520A. 140. Report of Agent Luxembourg, May 16, 1906, APP, BA 1709; Report of June 20/​July 3, 1914, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb, folder 3. 141. Quote from Circular of Dr. Grigorieff, Landesarchiv, PrBrRep 030 12556/​24, 78. Also APP, BA, 1708. 142. “Svedenie Berlinskoi agentury”; Report of Trusevich to Berlin Police President, December 7/​21, 1906, Landesarchiv, A.Pr.Br.Rep, 030 12725/​1; Report of December 18, 1905, AN, F7/​12521. 143. Z. Sheinis, Maksim Makimovich Litvinov (Moscow, 1989), 52–​67. 144. Zeman and Scharlau, Merchant of Revolution,  76–​79. 145. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, 36–​ 38; “Avtobiografiia G.  E. Zinov’ev,” Voprosy istorii 7 (1990):  59; Hugh D. Phillips, Between the Revolution and the West (Boulder, CO, 1992),  8–​9. 146. Haimson, Making, 189–​90; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 356–​74; V. Zenzinov, Iz zhizni revoliutsionera (Paris, 1919), 16–​33. 147. Stuart Finkel, “The ‘Political Red Cross’ and the Genealogy of Rights Discourse in Revolutionary Russia,” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 1 (2017):  79–​118; “Komitet pomoshchi katorzhanam,” GARF, f. 6813, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1. 148. “Gegen den russischen Spitzel,” Berliner Tageblatt, February 12, 1902, in LB, A PrBrRep030, 12707/​1, 114; “Le movement révolutionnaire russe en angleterre,” July 12, 1907, AN, F7/​ 12521. 149. See “Affaire Landesen-​Harting,” AN, F7/​12894, dossier no. 2. 150. Report from London, February 4, 1905, AN, F7/​12520A. 151. S. G. Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left: Memoirs of a Modern Revolutionist (New York, 1938), 127. 152. For example, “Universitäten als Departments der politischen Polizei,” Vorwärts, February 18, 1904, LB, A PrBrRep 030 12707/​1, 131; “English-​russische ‘Entente,’” Vorwärts, May 26, 1907, LB, A.Pr.Br.Rep 030, 12725/​1, 285. 153. Quote from report of January 4, 1907, AN, F7/​15976/​1. For more political reports on the situation in France, see AN, F7/​12520A. 154. For example, reports of February 6 and 15, 1905, AN, F7/​12521; “Russen in Genf,” 1905, BAR E21/​14016. 155. Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk, 149. 156. The internal discussions about the controversy are in TNA, FO 371/​126. 157. Rappaport, Conspirator, 114–​16. 158. “Rabochaia partiia i ee zadachi,” PSS 12: 150–​53. 159. “Dve taktiki,” PSS 11: 44.

 

284

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 1– 189

160. Pervaia obshcherusskaia konferentsiia partiinykh rabotnikov (Geneva, 1905), 18–​19, 23–​24; Dan in Haimson, Making,194–​96. 161. Liadov, Iz zhizni, 46–​47; Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’,  17–​18. 162. Essen, “Vstrechi,” 1: 257–​58. 163. Nicolaevsky inverview in Haimson, Making, 253, 260–​70, 278, 290. 164. Statistics from Rothstein, Lenin in Britain, 22. On differentiation, see Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunost’, 39; Fotieva, Iz zhizni, 32, 46. 165. Dan, The Origins, 259.

Chapter 7 1. Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo, 90. 2. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 130, 167–​68. 3. Lidiia Dan interview in Haimson, The Making, 204–​13. 4. On 1905 as a seminal moment in Jewish politics, see Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, CA, 2012); Inna Shtakser, The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement (New York, 2014). 5. Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, 228–​44; Zvi Y. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–​1930 (Princeton, NJ, 1972), 53–​64. 6. Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo, 90–​91, 94. Also, Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia,  38–​41. 7. Rappoport, Conspirator, 142–​54. 8. Herbert T. Fitch, Traitors Within (Garden City, NY, 1933), 24–​27. Also Andrew Rothstein, Lenin in Britain (London, 1970), 24–​25. 9. Quote from:  Piatyi (Londonskii) s’’ezd RSDRP (Moscow, 1963), 491; also, M. Gorkii, “V. I. Lenin,” Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow, 1956), 1: 370. 10. Balabanoff, My Life, 72. 11. Lih, Lenin, 92. 12. Garvi, Vospominaniia, 383, 390. 13. “Révolutionnaires russes,” October 10, 1908, and “Oulianoff, Wladimir,” April 19, 1916, in AN, F7/​15978/​1. 14. Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–​1937 (New York, 2015), 34–​39. Fragmentary documents from Lozovskii’s organization can be found in BACU, Zosa Szajkowski Papers, Box 1, Folder 2. 15. The words are Aksel’rod’s, quoted in Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks (Boulder, CO, 1987), 5. 16. Haimson, The Making, 210, 212. 17. N. I. Bukharin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1988), 35. 18. “Po povodu dvukh pisem,” PSS, 17: 294; “S’’ezd ital’ianskikh sotsialistov,” PSS 21: 409. 19. N. A. Semashko, Prozhitoe i perezhitoe (Moscow, 1960), 46–​50. 20. Report of September 18, 1907, AN, F7/​12894; “Au sujet de la tentative d’extorsion de fonds commise à Lausanne par les terroristes russes,” AN, F7/​12521; S. Kliachko, “Iz emigrantskoi zhizni v Shveitsarii.” KiS 4, no. 25 (1926): 190–​201. 21. L. Martov, Spasiteli ili uprazdniteli? Kto i kak razrushal R.S.D.R.P. (Paris, 1911), 3, 6. 22. The quote is Stalin’s: “Londonskii s’’ezd rossiiskoi sotsial-​demokraticheskoi rabochei partii,” I. Stalin: Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946), 2: 49. 23. Gorkii, “V. I. Lenin,” 1: 370–​71; Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 141. 24. “Bulletin des Russ. Inform. Bureau,” June 19, 1907, LB, A PrBrRep030 12556/​27. 25. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 212–​15. 26. Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (Cambridge, 2012). 27. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 115–​17, 216–​17; Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–​23 (New York, 1999), 13–​16. 28. “Tezisy referata po nationsial’nomu voprosu,” PSS 24: 382–​95; “Critical remarks on the national question,” republished in Vladimir Lenin, Lenin on the Jewish Question (New  York, 1974), 105. 29. “Tezisy referata,” 383, 394. See also Yohanan Petrovsky-​Shtern, Lenin’s Jewish Question (New Haven, CT, 2010), especially 78–​82.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 89– 195

285

30. Weill, Les cosmopolites,  41–​60. 31. Stalin, “Londonskii s’ezd,” 50–​51. This joke is an allusion to the self-​professed “truly Russian” right-​wing groups that perpetrated hundreds of pogroms across the Russian empire. 32. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 189. 33. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 8. 34. Pis’mo Lenina “K russkoi kolonii v Parizhe,” 1912, GARF, f. R-​6154, op, 1. d. 11, l. 1. 35. “Rapport,” December 6, 1912, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIa, Box 189, Folder 2; Report of Agent Robin, May 31, 1909, APP, BA 1709; Vl-​ov, “Iz zhizni bezpartiinikh rabochikh organizatsii za granitsei,” Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 16, 1908, 1. 36. Alexander Granach, There Goes an Actor (Garden City, NY, 1945), 142. 37. “Kratkie kruzhkovye zaniatiia,” 1907, BAR, E21/​14018, 325. 38. Report of December 4, 1907, APP BA, 1709. On the Serge incident:  John M. Merriman, Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits (New York, 2017), 209–​25. 39. Report of June 8, 1907, AN, F7/​12519. 40. Shchepetov, “Russkie v Parizhe:” 141; Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia,” 77. 41. “Le premier mai fut calme,” Le Matin, May 2, 1907, 1. 42. Colin Rogers, The Battle of Stepney (London, 1981), 212. 43. “Copie d’un rapport du Préfet de Police,” March 19, 1909, AN, F7/​15978/​1; Report of Agent Robin, December 12, 1907, APP, BA 1709. 44. Rogers, Battle of Stepney. 45. On the activities of informants, see GARF, f. 102, op. 314, d. 24. 46. Nicolaevsky, Aseff, 28–​34; B. V. Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist (New York, 1931), 316–​28. 47. GARF, f. 5802, op. 2, d. 205, l. 78; S. Kliachko, “Iz emigrantskoi zhizni v Shveitsarii,” KiS 4, no. 25 (1926): 195–​96. 48. Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovsky (Newtonville, MA, 1977), 11; GARF, f. 102, OO, 1913, d. 20, ch. 57, l. 33. 49. Nicolaevsky, Aseff, the Spy, 27; Savinkov, Memoirs, 85, 90. 50. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 140. 51. Vladimir Burtsev, “Iuda Lenin,” HIASU, N.A. Bazili papers, Box 25, Folder 8, 5–​6. 52. Nicolaevsky, Aseff, 268–​72; Report of February 19, 1912, AN, F7/​12894. 53. Olga Chernov Andreyev, Cold Spring in Russia (Ann Arbor, 1978), 38. 54. Elwood, Roman Malinovsky,  52–​56. 55. Quote from Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunostʹ, 100–​101; see also Gerald D. Surh, “Russian Jewish Socialists and Antisemitism: The Case of Grigorii Aronson,” Patterns of Prejudice 51, no. 3–​4 (2017): 253–​68. 56. Quotes from Anita Shapira, Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life (Stanford, CA, 2015), 69, 160. 57. Weizmann, Trial and Error, 50. 58. Report of June 4/​17, 1914, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb7, folder 3. 59. Report of March 14/​27, 1914, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb7, folder 2. 60. Medem, Vladimir Medem, 222, 251; report of Prefecture of Police, February 11, 1909, AN, F7/​15978/​1. 61. Andreyev, Cold Spring,  39–​43. 62. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 136–​37, 139, 166. 63. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, 41–​45; on his activities in Paris, see his police file in AN, F7/​ 15980. 64. Valentinov, Encounters, 60, quote from 245–​26; also Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 40. 65. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, 49–​50; Memorandum of April 12, 1912, APP, BA 1708. 66. Stalin to C. S. Bobrovskaia, January 24, 1911, RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 29, l. 1; “Pis’mo v TsK partii iz sol’vychegodskii ssylki,” in I. Stalin, 2: 210. For context, Erik Van Ree, “Stalin’s Bolshevism: The First Decade,” International Review of Social History 39, no. 4 (1994), 377–​81. 67. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, 43; Garvi, Vospominaniia, 415–​16; Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, 234–​44. 68. Report from Paris, February 18/​March 3, 1910, HIASU, ZO, Index XVIb7, Folder 3; Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 584–​86. 69. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 228–​30; S. Agurskii, Evreiskii rabochii v kommunisticheskom dvizhenii, 1917–​1921 (Minsk, 1926), 14–​15.

 

286

N o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 5– 198

70. Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington, IN, 1979), 40–​81. 71. Report of December 1907, AN, F7/​12894. 72. Nicolaevsky, Aseff, 128–​33. 73. Cited in Turton, Family Networks, 70. 74. Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia,” 70. See also Aronson, Revoliutsionnaia iunostʹ, 31; Granach, There Goes an Actor, 143. 75. Quote from: Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia,” 71–​72. See also “Korrespondentsiia,” Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 16, 1908, 7; “Bericht über die Versammlungen in der russischen Tschechow-​Lesehalle, ” March 23, 1907, LA, APrBrRep 030 12725/​1, 267–​68. 76. For one example, Mark Mazower, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (New York, 2017), 53–​62. 77. Zeman and Scharlau, Merchant of Revolution, 112, 124; Myers, “To Dance,” 60. 78. Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia,” 71–​72. 79. Shapira, Yosef Haim Brenner, 131–​38, 167. 80. Weizmann to Ahad Ha’am, March 7, 1909, in Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann (London, 1974), 5: 105. 81. “Mouvement sioniste,” June 23, 1917, APP, BA 1811. 82. Quote from Comte d’Aunay to Pichon, June 11, 1907, AN, F7/​12521; Kliachko, “Iz emigrantskoi zhizni:” 192. 83. “Les anarchistes russes en Suisse,” La Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne, June 16, 1906, 2. 84. Unidentified press clipping: “Russland am Spree,” June 19, 1907, LA, APrBrRep 030 12725/​ 1, 325. 85. “Les étrangers chez nous,” Feuille d’avis de Lausanne, December 5, 1905, 8. 86. Deposition of Ernest Dreger, TNA, MEPO 3/​191; “London Aliens’ Under-​world,” The Cornishman, December 29, 1910, 3; “Why the Police Were Murdered,” Penny Illustrated Paper, December 31, 1910, 856; “The Power Behind the Anarchists,” The Evening Telegraph and Post, January 11, 1911, 4. 87. Ministry of Interior to Polizeipräsident of Berlin, February 26, 1908, LA A  PrBrRep030 12727, 15; “Massenverhaftung russischer Studenten in Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt, May 24, 1907, LB, A.Pr.Br.Rep. 030 12725/​1, 277; “Les réfugiés,” AN, F7/​12894, 2. 88. Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers,  61–​69. 89. Quote from report of Bethnal Green station, December 22, 1910, TNA, MEPO 3/​191. Also “Our Defenceless Police,” Daily Mail, December 19, 1910, 6; “The Battle of Sidney Street,” Truth, January 11, 1911, in TNA, MEPO 3/​191. 90. Zagranichnaia gazeta, March 16, 1908, 8; BACU, Sergei Svatikov Papers, Box 74, Folder 2. 91. “Russland am Spree.” 92. “Sidney Street Jury and Alien Immigration,” The Courier and Argus, January 19, 1911, 4. See also Rogers, The Battle of Stepney, 123. 93. “Silence parlant,” L’Humanité, 1; “Grand meeting de protestation contre l’extradition du russe Wassilieff,” July 25, 1908, AN, F7/​12521. 94. For example, “Pis’mo K.  Kautskomu,” June 1911, in V. I. Lenin:  Neizvestnye dokumenty (Moscow, 1999), 63–​83; “Surveillance générale des révolutionaries russes,” February 27, 1905, AN, F7/​15978/​1. 95. Dietrich Geyer, Kautskys Russisches Dossier (Frankfurt, 1981), 246–​49. 96. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 163–​64, 167–​68; Garvi, Vospominaniia, 399. 97. I. M. Maiskii, Journey into the Past (London, 1962), 177. 98. Rothstein, Lenin in Britain, 27. 99. Grigorii Zinoviev, “The Tendency Struggle at the Stuttgart Congress,” in Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, ed. John Riddell (New York, 1984), 43–​44. 100. “Stuttgart Resolution on War and Militarism,” in Riddell, Lenin’s Struggle, 33. Also, V.  I. Lenin, “The International Socialist Conference in Stuttgart,” in ibid., 38; Balabanoff, My Life,  79–​90. 101. Cited in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford, 1972), 91–​92.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 99– 203

287

102. Lev Kamenev, “Na Bazel’skom kongresse,” in Mezhdu dvumia revoliutsiiami (Moscow, 1923), 625. 103. Zinoviev, “The Tendency Struggle,” in Riddell, Lenin’s Struggle,  44–​45. 104. Julia Nicholls, Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune (New York, 2019), 209–​38; Haupt, Socialism, 135–​60. 105. The quote is from the Polish activist Julian Marchelewski, “Congress Debate on Colonial Policy,” in Riddell, Lenin’s Struggle, 11. 106. Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries, 160–​77. 107. Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism:  Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia,” Die Welt des Islams 50, no. 3/​4 (2010): 438–​41. 108. Lev Kamenev, “Slavianstvo i proletariat,” in Mezhdu dvumia revoliutsiiami, 603–​607. 109. Lev Kamenev, “Revoliutsiia na vostoke,” in ibid., 608–​13. 110. V. I. Lenin, “Chemu ne sleduet podrazhat’ v nemetskom rabochem dvizhenii,” April 1914, PSS, 25: 106–​10. On Indians, Srivasta, Five Stormy Years, 140–​41. 111. Lenin, “Two Worlds,” Riddell, Lenin’s Struggle, 67. 112. Lars Lih, “’The New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel, and the Outbreak of World War I,” in Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anievas (Chicago, 2014), 369–​71. 113. “Probuzhdenie Azii,” and “Otstalaia Evropa i peredovaia Aziia,” PSS 23: 145–​46; 166–​67. 114. Liadov, Iz zhizni partii, 208; Geyer, Kautskys, 116–​50. 115. Quote from “Le resurrection de l’Internationale,” APP, BA 1626; also, A. S. Kudriavtsev et al., eds., Lenin v Zheneve (Moscow, 1985), 191–​92. 116. Kleinbort, “Politicheskaia emigratsiia,” 64. 117. “O referatakh V. I. Lenina za granitsei,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 5 (1955): 5. 118. Kotkin, Stalin, 1: 133; “Marksizm i natsional’nyi vopros,” in I. Stalin, 290–​367. 119. “O natsional’noi programme RSDRP,” 1913, PSS 24: 223–​29, quotes at 224–​25. 120. Quotes from Lenin to Inessa Armand, April 1, 1914, PSS 48:  277–​28; on Latvians and Caucasians, “Tezisy referata.” 121. “Tezisy referata,” 392, 394; “Critical remarks,” 107. Stalin echoed these views: “Marksizm,” 1: 332–​47. 122. Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade:  Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 33–​35. 123. For a vivid account of the travails of enemy aliens, see A. S-​ch, 1914: V Berline vo vremia voiny (Petrograd, 1914). Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 228–​37; Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 225–​28. 124. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist,  83–​84. 125. “Russian refugees and military service,” BACU, Mary Bridges-​Adams Collection, Box 1, Folder 17. 126. “Defence of the realm acts,” March 7, 1917, in ibid.; Circular of Minister of Interior to Prefects, August 4, 1916 and Circular of June 8, 1916, in AN, Fond Moscou, 19940494/​111. 127. See the reports on HIASU, Index IIf, Box 10, Reel 21, 33; “Kopiia protesta soiuza protiv frantsuzskoi tsenzury,” 1916, GARF, f. R-​6153, op. 1, d. 11, ll. 1–​2. 128. “Les organisations adhérantes au Comité,” GARF, f.  508, op.  1, d.  24, ll. 6–​7; see also materials in BACU, Zosa Szajkowski Collection, Box 1, Folder 1. 129. For example, “Oyfruf zu di yidn in Pariz,” December 10, 1915, APP, BA 1811. 130. Nation, War on War, 21–​23; Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-​Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, eds., France and the Great War (New York, 2003), 25–​28. 131. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York, 2012), 56. 132. Sovremennoe slovo, August 26/​September 8, 1914, in LS 14 (1930), 115–​16. Also, Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 230–​31; Maiskii, Journey, 118. 133. “V. L. Burtsev,”1932, HIASU, Basily Papers, Box 25, Folder 6. 134. Kropotkin, “Anti-​Militarism. Was it properly understood?” Freedom (November 1914): 82. 135. Memos to Department of Police, August 29/​September 11, 1914 and September 26/​October 9, 1914; report of September 7, 1914, all in HIASU, ZO, Index IIe, Reel 19, 316, 317–​21, 322. 136. “Deklaratsiia i zaiavlenie gruppy russkikh revoliutsionerov dobrovol’no vstupivshikh v riady frantsuzskoi armii,” 1917, GARF, f. R-​6154, op. 1, d. 12, l. 4.

 

288

N o t e s t o p a g e s 2 0 3– 208

137. Kriegs-​und Friedensprobleme der Arbeiterklasse, excerpted in Ascher, Mensheviks,  79–​83. 138. “Rapport sur la propagande pacifiste,” AN, F7/​13372, 31. 139. Graur, Anarchist Rabbi, 112–​19. 140. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet,” https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​luxemburg/​ 1915/​junius/​index.htm. 141. Nation, War on War, 35–​36. For primary sources on Lenin’s speeches and writings, see LS 14: 134–​40. 142. Trotsky, “The War and the International,” 1914, https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​trotsky/​ 1914/​war/​index.htm. 143. Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 25. 144. “Sotsializm i voina,” PSS, 26: 335–​42 (quotes at 311, 323); letter to Vorwärts, LS, 14: 144; “O lozunge soedinennykh shtatov Evropy,” PSS, 26: 351–​55. 145. Andreyev, Cold Spring, 65; quote from Khrestomatiia po oktiabr’skoi revoliutsiia, quoted in Ascher, Mensheviks, 97. 146. Nation, War against War, 36; Smith, Bolsheviks,  15–​18. 147. Allen, Shlyapnikov, 57; Senn, Russian Revolution, 204. 148. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, 50; Nation, War on War,  42–​45. 149. “K russkim soldatam vo Frantsii,” June 1916, GARF, f. 508, op. 1, d. 53, ll. 142–​42a; “Fête Russe au profit de l’Union professionnelle des gens de lettres de Russie,” January 17, 1916, APP, BA 1710. 150. Report of Agent 308, April 13, 1915; Report of Agent 309, April 9, 1915, both in APP, BA 1709. Detailed documentation on wartime events and groups in Paris’ Russian colony is contained in APP, BA, 1708–​11. 151. Fitch, Traitors Within, 48. 152. Report on Serge Bagotsky, October 10, 1915, TNA, KV2/​569. 153. Notes on 1916 meeting of Mebarsseth Sion, APP, BA 1811. 154. Report of Agent 309, April 6, 1915, APP, BA 1709; “Chez les révolutionaries russes résidant en France,” AN, F7/​13372, 3; Memo of Director of Department of Police, February 1917, GARF, f. R-​6153, op. 1, d. 11, ll. 1–​2; Undated report, GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 57, l. 27. 155. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 88; “Rappoport,” April 30, 1930, AN, F7/​16000/​1. 156. “Comité d’émigration,” GARF f.  508, op.  1, d.  24, ll. 1–​5; Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 235–​36; 248–​50. 157. Graur, Anarchist Rabbi, 120–​28. 158. Report of June 28, 1915, APP, BA 1709. 159. Quotes from letter of August 28, 1917, GARF, f. 508, op. 1, d.124, 1. 4ob. 160. “O proteste russkikh politicheskikh emigrantov protiv privlechenii ikh k voennoi sluzhbe,” February 1917, GARF, f. 102, op. 308, d. 228, l. 1. 161. “La propagande pacifiste,” AN, F7/​13372, 5–​8. 162. “Proekt rezoliutsii,” LS, 14: 166–​69, quote at 166. 163. Nation, War against War, 109–​30. 164. Quote from Senn, Russian Revolution, 147, 151; Nation, War against War, 131–​43. 165. John Riddell, ed., The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (New York, 1986), 14, 22. 166. Balabanoff, My Life, 144. 167. Nation, War Against War, 35. 168. Iu. O. Martov to P. B. Aksel’rod, September 21, 1916, in Pis’ma P. B. Aksel’roda, 357. 169. Senn, Russian Revolution, 131, 106. 170. “Doklad o revoliutsii 1905 goda,” PSS, 30: 328. 171. Lenin to A. M. Kollontai, March 5, 1917, PSS, 49: 394. 172. L. Trotzki, “Vi azoy Nikolai balebotevet in der frayer Frankraykh,” Forverts, January 30, 1917, 4. 173. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 271. 174. Lenin to A. I. Kollontai, March 16, 1917, PSS, 49: 399–​400. 175. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, 273.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 09– 214

289

Chapter 8 1. Fitch, Traitors Within, 67. 2. See, for example, “Materialy komiteta pomoshchi politicheskim emigrantam, vozvrashchaiushchimsia v Rossiiu (g. Parizh),” GARF, f. 508, op. 1, d. 53. 3. “À la colonie russe de Paris,” August 1, 1917, AN, F7/​12895. 4. Home Office to Foreign Office, May 4, 1917, TNA, HO 144/​13339, f. 89. 5. Trotskii, Moia zhiznʹ, 271–​80. 6. Elisabeth Heresch, Geheimakte Parvus:  die gekaufte Revolution (Munich, 2000), 117–​271; 379–​89. 7. Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (New York, 2017), 122–​216. 8. V. A. Karpinskii to V. I. Lenin, April 5, 1917, in Bolʹshevistskoe rukovodstvo, ed. A. V. Kvashonkin (Moscow, 1996), 23–​25; Balabanoff, My Life, 146; R. Abramovitsh, In tsvey revolutsyes:  di geshikhte fun a dor (New York, 1944), 2: 17–​24. 9. Olga Chernov Andreyev, Cold Spring in Russia (Ann Arbor, 1978), 69–​70. 10. HIASU, ZO, Index IIf, boxes 9–​10, reel 20. 11. On the revolution as an emotional experience, see Steinberg, Russian Revolution, 68–​91. On antisemitic sentiment, “Antisemitizm,” Evreiskaia nedelia, April 30, 1917, 31; Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, 2019), 19–​37. 12. Aleksandr Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god (Petrograd, 1923), 3: 246 (here quoting Plekhanov); “An Open Letter of Peter Kropotkin to the Western Workingmen,” The Railway Review, June 29, 1917, 4. 13. “RSDRP/​Men’sheviki v pervye gody revoliutsii,” BACU, Sapir Papers, Box 15, Folder “Nicolaevsky. Menshevizm v periode voennogo sotsializma,” quotes at 13–​14, 27–​28. 14. M. Rafes, Ocherki po istorii “Bunda” (Moscow, 1923), 255–​83; Myers, “To Dance,” 70–​183. 15. On Chernov’s views, Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 305–​307. 16. Quote from Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 284; also, Myers, “To Dance,” 89–​94. 17. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin (New York, 2014), 1: 190–​91. 18. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi, 2: 146. 19. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 104–​107. 20. “Pis’ma iz daleka,” PSS 31: 16, 20–​21. 21. N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 272–​82. Quote at 282. 22. “O zadachakh proletariat v dannoi revoliutsii,” PSS 31: 113–​18. 23. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 285. 24. V. I. Lenin, “Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia,” PSS 33: 89–​91. 25. N. Lenin [sic], “S’’ezd krest’ianskikh deputatov,” Pravda, April 16, 1917, 3.; V. I. Lenin, “Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia,” PSS 33: 89–​91. 26. V. I. Lenin, “Materials Related to the Revision of the Party Program,” https://​www.marxists. org/​archive/​lenin/​works/​1917/​reviprog/​ch04.htm. 27. “Sed’moi ekstrennyi s’’ezd RKP(b),” PSS, 36: 18. 28. Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 279. 29. Zenzinov, Iz zhizni revoliutsionera, 89. 30. Lars Lih offers a revisionist account of these events, arguing that the Bolsheviks were more united in 1917 than the conventional wisdom suggests, and that the purpose of the edits in Pravda was to enhance the force of Lenin’s argument. See Lars Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context,” Russian History 38, no. 2 (2011): 199–​ 242; Lars T. Lih, “Letter from Afar, Corrections from Up Close: The Bolshevik Consensus of March 1917,” Kritika 16, no. 4 (2015): 799–​834. However, Kamenev’s frank discussion of the party’s divisions undermines Lih’s argument: “Nashi raznoglasiia,” Pravda, April 8, 1917, 4. 31. The speaker is Aleksei Rykov. Sed’’maia (aprel’skaia) Vserossiiskaia konferentsiia (Petrograd, 1917), 105–​106. For more on these debates, see Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, IN, 1968), 36–​41. 32. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 231. 33. Fedor Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia (Moscow, 1995), 340. 34. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks,  14–​15.

 

290

N o t e s t o p a g e s 2 1 4– 220

35. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1932), 2: 311. 36. Shestoi s’’ezd RSDRP (Bol’shevikov) (Moscow, 1958), 233–​34, 250. The speaker of the quoted words was Stalin. 37. L. Trotskii, “Itogi i perspektivy,” Rabochii, September 7, 1917, 2–​5. 38. Alexander Rabinovitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York, 1976), 191–​223. 39. Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–​1921 (New York, 2017), 185–​86. 40. Vladimir N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October:  Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 24. 41. Biographies compiled from Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii:  bio-​biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 1927–​1934). T. H. Rigby’s estimate is somewhat lower because he requires individuals to have lived abroad for nine years before considering them an émigré. T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–​1922 (New York, 1979), 146–​48. 42. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 93, 119, 144. 43. Engelstein, Russia in Flames, 188; Brovkin, Mensheviks, 25. 44. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 140–​42; Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1971), 62–​69. 45. On the Bolsheviks as a party of factions, see Moshe Lewin, “Leninism and Bolshevism,” in The Making of the Soviet System (New York, 1985), 191–​208. 46. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment (New York, 1970), 11. 47. Elizaveta Drabkina, Chernye sukhari (Moscow, 1961), 51. 48. Serge, Memoirs, 158. 49. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 325–​26, 330–​31; Bonch-​Bruevich, Vospominaniia, 129–​37. 50. Krupskaia, O bytovykh voprosakh (Moscow, 1930), 27, 30–​31. 51. Lara Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government (London, 2018), 104–​15, quote at 67. 52. Joshua Sanborn, “Family, Fraternity, and Nation-​Building in Russia,” A State of Nations, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York, 2001), 103–​106. 53. Slezkine, House of Government, 234–​35. 54. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat,  11–​13. 55. S. Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (New York, 1945), 13. 56. Serge, Memoirs, 149. 57. Quote from a Menshevik resolution, cited in BACU, Sapir Papers, Box 15, Folder: “Ms: The last chapter.” See also “Bund ob Oktiabr’skom perevorote,” in Rafes, Ocherki, 421–​22. 58. Abraham Ascher, ed., The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1978), 128; Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 311. 59. “Rezoliutsiia soveshchaniia pri TsK Bunda,” in Bund:  Dokumenty i materialy, 1103. This quote is from the Bund. Similarly, V. O. Levitskii to P. Aksel’rod, June 16, 1918, and R. A. Abramovich, “Iu. O Martov i mirovoi men’shevizm,” in Martov i ego blizkie: sbornik (New York, 1959), 66, 77–​78. 60. Andreyev, Cold Spring in Russia,  95–​98. 61. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 229. 62. BACU, Sapir Papers, Box 15, Folder “Nicolaevsky. Menshevizm v periode voennogo sotsializma” 36; also Fedor Dan, Two Years,  13–​15. 63. Drabkina, Chernye sukhari, 145. 64. The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, 1999), 62. For more on Peterss, see his British police file: TNA, KV 2/​1025. 65. The Black Book, 53–​70, esp. 61. 66. Elwood, Roman Malinovsky, quote from 62. 67. G. M. Goldsmith to MI5, July 18, 1918, TNA, KV 2/​1025. 68. Drabkina, Chernye sukhari, 149–​50. 69. Zenzinov, Iz zhizni revoliutsionera, 104–​106, quote at 100; Iu. Steklov, “Zhalkie uvertki,” Izvestiia, September 20, 1918, 1. 70. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks,  72–​86. 71. Lenin to M. I. Kalinin, September 16, 1920 and Lenin to N. A. Semashko, September 25, 1920, PSS, 51: 283, 287; Lenin to V. M. Molotov, June 11, 1921, PSS 52: 271–​72; Lenin to L. B. Kamenev, January 1, 1922, PSS, 54: 104.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 20– 226

291

72. André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 89–​90; Fitzpatrick, Commissariat, 18. 73. On the ties between the families, see Robert Blobaum, Feliks Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL: A study of the Origins of Polish Communism (Boulder, CO, 1984), 40, 74–​77. 74. Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–​1921 (New York, 1985). 75. Cited in Cohen, Bukharin, 79. 76. For more on utopias from below, see Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 79–​83, 135–​40; Andy Willimott, Living the Revolution (London, 2016). 77. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 148–​77. 78. For example, “Rech’ na pervom Vserossiiskom s’’ezda voennogo flota,” PSS 35: 115–​16. 79. Kotkin, Stalin, 1: 350–​51. See also Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 2–​9. 80. Riga, The Bolsheviks, 16. 81. Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2009). 82. Budnitskii, Russian Jews, 80. 83. Agurskii, Evreiskii rabochii, 34–​57, quote at 50. 84. McGeever, Antisemitism, 53–​87, 112–​39. 85. Ibid., 54–​60; Agurskii, Evreiskii rabochii, 28–​29, 39, 115–​16. 86. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 217–​79; Gitelman, Jewish Nationality, 233–​442. 87. Agurskii, Evreiskii rabochii, 65, 120 88. Anderson, Bund, 1163–​80. 89. Smith, The Bolsheviks, 114. 90. N. Lenin, O evreiskom voprose Rossii (Zaporozh’e, 1924), 15. The quote is from Dimanshtein’s introduction. 91. See Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington, IN, 2000); Slezkine, The Jewish Century; Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture and the Soviet Union 1923–​1939 (Bloomington, IN, 2006). 92. Cited in Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 231. See also Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington, IN, 2013), 63–​123; Andrew Sloin, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Bloomington, IN, 2017), 117–​80. 93. M. Gor’kii, O evreiakh (Petrograd, 1919), 7–​8. Gor’kii slightly misquoted the original saying, writing, “If you are not for yourself, who is for you? But if you are only for yourself, what are you?” 94. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 132–​56. 95. A. D. Chernev, ed., 229 kremlevskikh vozhdei:  Politibiuro, Orgbiuro, Sekretariat TsK Kommunisticheskoi partii v litsakh i tsifrakh (Moscow, 1996); T. H. Rigby, “The Soviet Political Elite 1917–​1922,” British Journal of Political Science 1, no. 4 (1971): 424; Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government,  58–​60. 96. Wood, The Baba, 59–​67, 100–​101. 97. “Proekt tezisov TsK RKP(b) o politike na Ukraine,” V. I.  Lenin:  Neizvestnye dokumenty (Moscow, 1999), 306. 98. Quote from Kotkin, Stalin, 1: 400. 99. Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews, 66; Sloin, Jewish Revolution, 147–​80. See also Robert Weinberg, “Demonizing Judaism in the Soviet Union during the 1920s,” Slavic Review 67, no. 1 (2008): 120–​53. 100. Leon Trotsky, “Problems of Building the Army,” 1919, https://​www.marxists.org/​archive/​ trotsky/​1919/​military/​ch20.htm. 101. “Proekt tezisov,” 307. 102. A. V. Lunacharskii, Ob antisemitizme (Moscow, 1929), 46. For more on how Bolshevik efforts to include Jews in a new universalist culture often emphasized their difference, see McGeever, Antisemitism, 183–​210; Weinberg, “Demonizing Judaism.” 103. “Za rubezhom,” Evreiskaia nedelia, April 30, 1917, 38. 104. Report of Scotland Yard, March 27, 1917 TNA, HO 144/​13339, f. 4. 105. Letter of A. Kirshin, March 21, 1918, HIASU, Russia. Posol’vsto. France, Box 14, Folder 8; Report of December 22, 1917, APP, BA 1711. For more on protests, see Director of Sûreté to Prefect of Police, December 3, 1917, AN, F7/​12895.

 

292

N o t e s t o p a g e s 2 2 6– 230

106. “À la colonie russe de Paris, November 14, 1917 and “Rapport mensuel,” December 1917, AN, F/​7/​12895; Report from Geneva, June 8, 1918, AN, F/​7/​14607; Report of Scotland Yard, January 22, 1918, HO 144/​13339, f. 67. 107. “À la colonie russe de Paris,” December 17, 1917, AN, F/​7/​12895. 108. “Réunion privée organisée par la fédération socialiste de la Seine,” November 25, 1918, APP, BA 1710; “La propagande pacifiste parmi les troupes russes en France,” AN, F/​7/​12895; Report of Agent Forichon, June 8, 1918, AN, F7/​14607. 109. Home Office to Approved Ports, Scotland Yard, MI5, etc., August 28, 1918, TNA, HO 144/​ 13339, f. 109; Circular of Ignat’ev to Military Agents, January 15/​29, 1918, AN, F7/​14607. 110. “Comité général de la colonie russe à Paris,” February 23, 1919, HIASU, ZO, Box 10, Folder 9. 111. For example, lists of February 5 and February 14, 1919, AN, F/​7/​13506. 112. Lists in HO 144/​13339, quote from report of January 2, 1919, f. 118. 113. Quote from R. Graham to Secretary of Local Government Board, March 27, 1918, TNA, T1/​12203/​38048,  f. 50. 114. Report of March 26, 1918, AN, 19940503/​22, Folder 17280. 115. On draft dodging, “Chez les révolutionaries russes,” 1; Memo of Director of Department of Police, February 1917, GARF, f.  102, op.  308, d.  228, l.  2. On Germanophilism:  “Les groupes russes germanophiles et le club communiste de Londres,” February 24, 1917 and “Les socialistes russes de Paris,” February 1917, both in AN, F7/​12895. 116. “À la colonie russe de Paris,” December 5, 1917, AN, F/​7/​12895. 117. For example, “Au sujet du mouvement bolcheviste en Suisse,” AN, F7/​13506; “Bolshevisme dans le monde,” AN, F7/​12895; files in BAR E21/​14021. 118. Churchill, “Zionism vs. Bolshevism,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, 5. 119. Quote from Report of December 7, 1917, AN, F7/​12895. See also Sharman Kadish, “Bolsheviks and British Jews:  The Anglo-​Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution,” Jewish Social Studies 50, no. 3/​4 (1988): 239–​52. 120. Serge, Memoirs, 89, 133. 121. Balabanoff, My Life, 183. 122. Rappoport, Une vie, 356–​57. 123. Serge, Memoirs, 84. 124. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Beginning,” in Riddell, The German Revolution,  79–​81. 125. Gleb J. Albert, Das Charisma der Weltrevolution:  Revolutionärer Internationalismus in der frühen Sowjetgesellschaft 1917–​1927 (Cologne, 2019), 88–​107. 126. “Rech’ na demonstratsii v chest’ avstro-​vengerskoi revoliutsii,” PSS 37: 131. 127. David Dallin, “Between the World War and the NEP,” in The Mensheviks: From the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War, ed. Leopold H. Haimson and David J. Dallin (Chicago, 1974), 229. 128. Graur, Anarchist Rabbi, 132–​41. 129. For example, IISH, ARCH 01237, Savinkov Papers, Inv. Nr. 26, 27; Inv. Nr. 53, 54; Inv. Nr. 131, 132. 130. Karl Kautsky, Die Diktatur des Proletariats (Vienna, 1918); Karl Kautsky, Terrorismus und Kommunismus (Berlin, 1919), quotes at 147, 149–​50. 131. Cited in PSS, 37: 589. 132. “Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii,” PSS 37: 238, 257. 133. Kautsky, Terrorismus, 42–​84, 137, 142. Quote at 85. 134. “Proletarskaia revoliutsiia,” 37: 264. 135. “Pis’mo k rabochim i krest’ianam po povodu pobedy nad Kolchakom,” PSS, 39: 158. 136. “Proletarskaia revoliutsiia,” 291–​300. 137. R. A. Abramovich, “Iu. O. Martov i mirovoi men’shevizm,” in Martov i ego blizkie, 77, 80. 138. P. Axelrod, “Rede auf der internationalen sozialistischen Konferenz in Bern,” in Tseriteli and Woytinsky, Die russische Revolution und die sozialistishe Internationale ( Jena, 1932), 168–​72,  176. 139. Serge, Memoirs, 122, 125.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 30– 237

293

140. Letter of invitation reprinted in Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (New York, 1997), 220–​21; “ECCI Statement on the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic,” The Communist International, 1919–​1943, Documents, ed. Jane Degras (New York, 1965), 1: 65. 141. V. I. Lenin, “Left-​Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder (Moscow, 1981), 37. 142. Balabanoff, My Life, 209–​18. Quote at 209. 143. David-​Fox, Showcasing, 38. 144. Kemper, “Red Orientalism,” 440–​52; Birk Laursen, “’I have only One Country’ ”: 13–​14. 145. Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 67–​70, 109–​24. 146. Ibid., 125–​48, quote at 108. 147. “Pis’mo P. A. Zalutskomu, A. A. Sol’tsu i vsem chlenam Politbiuro o chistke partii i usloviiakh priema v partiiu,” PSS 44: 283–​84. 148. Alexandra Kollontai, Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (New York, 1926), 43–​44; Naiman, Sex in Public, 79–​123. Quote from Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Woman Question (New York, 1934), 12–​13. 149. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations:  Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2006). 150. Sloin, Jewish Revolution, 162–​67. 151. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York, 1931), 2: 777, 860–​61, 882–​83. Quote at 781. 152. Moss, Jewish Renaisssance, 278. 153. Balabanoff, My Life, 241–​45. 154. “Tov. P. B. Axelrod o bol’shevizme i bor’be s nim,” SV, April 20, 1921, 4–​5. 155. Ascher, The Mensheviks, 111–​17; “Rezoliutsii i spisok delegatov XI konferentsii Bunda,” in Anderson, Bund, 1135. 156. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 51; Dan, Two Years, 86; Andreyev, Cold Spring, 235. 157. Dallin, “Between the World War and the NEP,” Menshevism, 211. 158. Cited in Dan, Two Years, 194. 159. Andreyev, Cold Spring, 211. 160. L. Martov, Bol’shevizm v Rossii i v Internatsionale: rechʹ, proiznesennaia na sʺezde nezavisimoi sotsialisticheskoi partii Germanii v Galle 15-​go oktiabria 1920 goda (Berlin, 1923), 5, 19–​20. 161. Martov, Bol’shevizm, 33. 162. “Poslednie stroke Martova,” SV, April 24, 1923, 13–​14. 163. Serge, Memoirs, 187. 164. Zenzinov, Iz zhizni, 119. 165. Rafes, Ocherki, 311. 166. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 132–​56; Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 179–​83. 167. Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 157–​61. 168. “Tov. Trotskii o sobytiiakh v Kronshtadte,” Pravda, March 16, 1921, 1; V. I. Lenin, “X s’’ezd RKP (b),” PSS 43: 24. 169. Avrich, Kronstadt, 89–​130. 170. Quotes from Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 252, 218. 171. Avrich, Kronstadt, 193–​217. 172. Dan, Two Years, 113. 173. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 449–​51. 174. Martov to Aksel’rod, April 5, 1921, in Martov i ego blizkie,  52–​61. 175. Goldman, Living My Life, 2: 886. 176. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, 450–​51. 177. Lev Trotskii, “Terrorizm i kommunizm,” in Sochineniia (Moscow, 1925), 12: 26, 88. 178. Serge, Memoirs, 152. 179. Dallin, “Between,” in Mensheviks, 252–​53. 180. Martov i ego blizkie, 41, 47. 181. Andreyev, Cold Spring, 281. 182. Balabanoff, My Life, 294–​301. 183. Dan, Two Years, 192.

 

294

N o t e s t o p a g e s 2 3 9– 244

Epilogue 1. The literature is immense, but a few exemplary studies include: Karl Schlögel, Russische Berlin, Ostbahnhof Europas (Munich, 1998); Felix Patrikeef, Russian Politics in Exile (New  York, 2002); Katherine Foshko, “France’s Russian Moment: Russian Émigrés in Interwar Paris and French Society” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008). 2. “Tov. P. B. Aksel’rod o bol’shevizme i bor’be s nim,” SV, May 4, 1921, 4–​5. 3. André Liebich, “At Home Abroad:  The Mensheviks in the Second Emigration,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 37, no. 1–​2 (1995): 1–​13. For the records of the Mensheviks in emigration in later years, see Sapir Papers, BACU, Boxes 67–​68. 4. Liebich, From the Other Shore, 101–​103; BACU, Sapir Papers, Box 15, “The Last Chapter,” 926–​ 30; R. A. Abramovich, “Iu. O Martov i mirovoi men’shevizm,” in Martov i ego blizkie,  83–​84. 5. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 121–​23. 6. Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad:  A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–​ 1939 (New York, 1990). 7. Robert Williams, Culture in Exile:  Russian Emigrés in Germany, 1881–​1941 (Ithaca, NY, 1972); Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism:  White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–​1945 (Cambridge, 2005). 8. V. L. Burtsev, Prokliatie vam, Bol’sheviki! (Stockholm, 1918), 8–​9. 9. Boris Savinkov, “Le Calvaire de la Russie,” February 5, 1919, BACU, S. G. Svatikov Papers, Box 31. 10. O. V. Budnitskii, Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–​1920 (Philadelphia, 2012), 173; Simon Wolin, “The Mensheviks under the NEP and in Emigration,” in The Mensheviks, ed. Leopold H. Haimson and David J. Dallin (Chicago, 1974), 275–​76. 11. Rigby, “The Soviet Political Elite:” 419. 12. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin (New York, 2014), 1: 411–​71. 13. Cited in Nikita Pivovarov, “Iz zhizni ‘staroi gvardii.’ Obshchestvo starykh bol’shevikov kak opyt politicheskoi adaptatsii revoliutsionerov (1922–​1935 g.g.)” Rossiia XXI 1 2018, 50–​ 81. See also T. Z. Korzhikhina, “Obshchestvo starykh bol’shevikov,” Voprosy istorii KPSS 11 (1989): 50–​65. 14. Protocol of January 28, 1922, RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 3, l. 2. 15. On the founding members, M. Ol’minskii, “Vozniknovenie istparta i zhurnala ‘proletarskaia revoliutsiia’,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia 5 (1930): 154–​55. 16. Protocol of January 28, 1922, ll. 2–​2ob. 17. For example, N. A. Bukhbinder, Materialy dlia istorii evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1923); Dimanshtein, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie. 18. For example, 25 let RKP (bol’shevikov), 1898–​1923 (Moscow, 1923), especially 108–​19. For broader context, Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2004), 97–​174. 19. R. C. Elwood, “How Complete is Lenin’s Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii?” Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (1979): 97–​105; V. I. Lenin: neizvestnye dokumenty, 1891–​1922 (Moscow, 1999). 20. Michael David-​Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Union, 1921–​1941 (New York, 2012), 71–​83, 215–​19. 21. Nikolai Sidorov, “Riad inostrannykh razvedok deistvuet po nashim ukazaniiam,” Istochnik 4 (1995): 76–​79. 22. For Bint’s correspondence with his Soviet handlers, see GARF, f. 509, op. 1, d. 72, l. 75. 23. Lev Kamenev, Leninizm ili trotskizm? (Moscow, 1925); G. Safarov, ed., Trotskii o Lenine i leninizme (Moscow, 1925). 24. Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October 1917 (London, 1925), 27–​35, 45–​47. 25. Kotkin, Stalin, 1: 517–​33, 613–​60. 26. “Vystuplenie t. I. V. Stalina na uchreditel’nom zasedanii “Obshchestva starykh bol’shevikov,” January 28, 1922, RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 2240, l. 1. 27. “Beseda s nemetskim pisatelem Emilom Liudvigom,” I. V. Stalin. Sochineniia (Moscow, 1951), 13: 120. 28. V. Kirshon, Emigratsiia i oppozitsiia (Moscow, 1927), 65, 67. 29. Corney, Telling October, 179.

 



n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 44– 247

295

30. Quote from Resolution of August 27, 1925, RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 4, l. 184; also Pivovarov, “Iz zhizni ‘staroi gvardii,’ ” 74–​76. 31. “Pis’mo F. E. Dzerzhinskogo,” July 3, 1926, Kommunist 7 (1988): 104; “O deiatel’nosti biuro obshchestva starykh bol’shevikov za otchetnii period s 2-​go oktiabria-​26 g. po 1-​e oktiabria 27g.,” RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 2, l. 17. 32. Korzhikhina, “Obshchestvo starykh bol’shevikov,” 58. 33. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front (Ithaca, NY, 1992). On history in particular, David Brandenberger, “Stalin’s Rewriting of 1917,” Russian Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 675–​79. 34. J. Arch Getty, “Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International,” Soviet Studies 38, no. 1 (1986): 24–​35; B. Ia. Frezinskii, Trotskii, Kamenev, Bukharin: Izbrannye stranitsy zhizni, raboty i sudʹby (Moscow, 2015), 132–​33, 147. 35. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1973), 270–​336. 36. For document requests, RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 359, l. 68, 76, 102. For complaints, Protocol of December 16, 1928 meeting, RGASPI, f. 124, op. 3, d. 8, ll. 336ob-​38. 37. Statistics from Pivovarov, “Iz zhizni ‘staroi gvardii,’ ” 64–​66. 38. A. Slutskii, “Bol’sheviki o germanskoi S-​D v period ee predvoennogo krizisa,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia 6 (1930): 38–​72. 39. “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma” in Stalin:  Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946), 13: 84,  98–​99. 40. Politburo decree of March 3, 1932, in The Road to Terror, ed. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov (New Haven, CT, 1999), 105; Brandenberger, “Stalin’s Rewriting,” 673–​79; David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis:  Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–​1941 (Stanford, CA, 2011), 125–​50. 41. Pivovarov, “Iz zhizni ‘staroi gvardii,’ ” 77. 42. I. V. Stalin, “Report to the 17th Party Congress,” in The Road to Terror, 129–​34. 43. Quote from Ezhov’s report to regional party secretaries, September 25, 1935, in The Road to Terror, 200. On the broader conspiracy, “Concening the terroristic activity of the Trotskyist-​ Zinovievist counterrevolutionary bloc,” July 29, 1936, in ibid., 250–​55. 44. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality, 472–​81. 45. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin (New York, 2017), 2: 218–​37. 46. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–​1940s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (2008): 91–​117. 47. Cohen, Bukharin, 365–​66. 48. Quote from N. I. Ezhov, “Concerning Comrade Yenukidze,” June 6, 1935, in The Road to Terror, 161. 49. Liebich, “At Home,” 201–​18. 50. J. S. Hertz, Doyres bundistn (New York, 1956), 1: 223–​25. 51. Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews, 202–​206; Sloin, Jewish Revolution, 188–​237. 52. The geopolitical element is stressed in Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 2. 53. J. Arch Getty, “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in Stalinist Terror, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning (New York, 1993), 40–​62. 54. Wendy Z. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2011); Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial:  Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York, 2017). 55. Serge, Memoirs, 319. 56. This question is posed eloquently by Gabor Rittersporn, “The Omnipresent Conspiracy,” in Stalinist Terror, 99–​115.

 

 

SELECTED BIBLIO GR APH Y

For full bibliographical information, visit https://​www.utopiasdiscontents.com

Archives Consulted Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Le Pré-​Saint-​Gervais (APP) Archives Diplomatiques, La Corneuve (AD) Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-​sur-​Seine (AN) Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, New York (BACU) Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow (GARF) Harvard Jewish Ephemera Collection, Widener Library, Cambridge (HJEC) Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto (HIA) The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew (TNA) International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam (IISH) Landesarchiv, Berlin (LB) Politisches Archiv-​Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin (PAAA) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-​Politicheskoi Istorii, Moscow (RGASPI) Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, Bern (SB) Stanford University Library Special Collections, Palo Alto (SULSC) YIVO Archive and the Center for Jewish History, New York (YIVO)

Periodicals Arbeter fraynd (AF) Archives Israélites (AI) Free Russia (FR) Jewish Chronicle (JC) Katorga i ssylka (KiS) Kolokol L’Intransigeant La Nouvelle Revue (LNR) Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) Pervyi zhenskii kalendar’ Poylishe yidl (PY) Review of Reviews (ROR) Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (SV)

297

 

298

Selected Bibliography

Selected Primary Sources 25 let R.K.P. (bolʹshevikov), 1898–​ 1923:  illiustrirovannyi iubileinyi sbornik. Moscow:  Gos. izd-​vo,  1923. À l’opinion publique; au sujet de la situation des réfugiés russes en France. Paris, 1916. Abramovitsh, R. In tsvey revolutsyes:  Di geshikhte fun a Dor. 2 vols. New  York:  Workmen’s Circle, 1944. Adam, Juliette. Après l’abandon de la Revanche. Paris: A. Lemerre, 1910. Adam, Juliette. Impressions françaises en Russie. Paris: Hachette, 1912. Adam, Juliette. Mes sentiments et nos idées avant 1870. Paris: A. Lemerre, 1905. Adam, Juliette. My Literary Life. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904. Adam, Juliette. Nos amitiés politiques avant l’abandon de la revanche. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1888. Address of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland to the Poles. London: E. Detkens, 1850. Agafonov, V. K. Zagranichnaia okhranka. Petrograd: Kniga, 1918. Agurskii, S. Evreiskii rabochii v kommunisticheskom dvizhenii, 1917–​1921. Minsk:  Gos. izd-​vo Belorussii, 1926. Aksel’rod, P. B. Iz arkhiva P.  B. Aksel’roda. Materialy po istorii russkogo revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia. Berlin: Russkii revoliutsionnyi arkhiv, 1924. Aksel’rod, P. B. Perezhitoe i peredumannoe. Berlin: Z. I. Grzhebina, 1923. Aksel’rod, P. B., I. G. Tsereteli, and W. S. Woytinsky. Die russische revolution und die sozialistische Internationale. Jena: Karl Zwing, 1932. Aksel’rod, P. B., and Iu. O. Martov. Pis’ma P.  B. Aksel’roda i Iu. O.  Martova. Berlin:  Russkii revoliutsionnyi arkhiv, 1924. Alien Immigration. Reports to the Board of Trade on Alien Immigration. London, 1894. Allen, Julian. Autocrasy in Poland and Russia. London: John Wiley, 1854. Almanach de la ligue des patriotes pour 1889. Paris: Ligue des Patriotes, 1889. Almanach des patriotes et du “Drapeau.” Paris: Le Drapeau, 1899. “Anarchism in London.” The Speaker 8 (December 30, 1893): 715–​16. “Anarchists: Their Methods and Organisation.” The New Review X, no. 56 ( January 1894): 1–​16. Anderson, K. М., ed. Bund: dokumenty i materialy, 1894–​1921. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010. Andreyev, Olga Chernov. Cold Spring in Russia. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978. Andrieux, Louis. À Travers la République. Paris: Payot, 1926. Andrieux, Louis. Souvenirs d’un préfet de police. Paris: J. Rouff, 1885. Annenkov, P. V., and Arthur P. Mendel. The Extraordinary Decade:  Literary Memoirs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Arkomed, S. T. Istoricheskie zametki. Period studenchesta ot 1886 g. do 1890 g. Tiflis, 1929. Aronson, Gregor. Revoliutsionnaia iunost’: vospominaniia, 1903–​1917. New York, 1961. Bakunin, M. A. The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin: With the Marginal Comments of Tsar Nicholas I. ed. Lawrence D. Orton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Bakunin, M. A. Sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1828–​1876. 4 vols. Moscow: Izd-​vo Vsesoiuznogo ob-​ va politkatorzhan i ssylʹno-​poseletsev,  1934. Balabanoff, Angelica. My Life as a Rebel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938. Baldwin, Roger N. Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets. New York: Vanguard, 1927. Ben-​Ami. “Moi snosheniiia s M. Dragomanovym i rabota v ‘Vol’nom Slove’.’” Evreiskaia Starina 8, no. 9 (1916): 75–​101. Bernstein, Eduard. Usloviia vozmozhnosti sotsializma i zadachi sotsialʹ-​demokratii. London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1900. Besant, Annie. Annie Besant; an Autobiography. London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1920. Besant, Sir Walter. East London. New York: Century Co., 1901. Besant, Sir Walter. London. London: Chatto & Windus, 1892. Betskii, K., and P Pavlov. Russkii Rokambol’. (Prikliucheniia I.  F. Manasevicha-​ Manuilova). Leningrad: Byloe, 1925.

 



Selected Bibliography

299

Bischoff, T. L. W. Das Studium und die Ausübung der Medicin durch Frauen. Munich: Literarisch-​ Artistische Anstalt, 1872. Böhmert, Victor. “Das Frauenstudium nach den Erfahrungen an der Zürcher Universität.” In Das Arbeiterfreund, 305–​17. Berlin: L. Simon, 1874. Bonch-​Bruevich, Vladimir. Vospominaniia o V.  I. Lenine, 1917–​1924 gg. Moscow:  Izd-​vo Akad. nauk SSSR, 1963. Bonneff, Léon. La vie tragique des travailleurs, enquêtes sur la condition économique et morale des ouvriers et ouvrières d’industrie. Paris: M. Rivière, 1914. Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London. London: Macmillan, 1904. Bourdeau, J. Le socialisme allemand et le nihilisme russe. Paris: F. Alcan, 1892. Bournand, François. Les juifs et nos contemporains (l’antisémitisme et la question juive). Paris:  A. Pierret, 1899. Brodetsky, Selig. Memoirs: From Ghetto to Israel. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960. Broido, Eva. Memoirs of a Revolutionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Broido, Vera. Lenin and the Mensheviks:  The Persecution of Socialists under Bolshevism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. Bukharin, Nikolai. Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Moscow: Izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1988. Bukhbinder, N. A. Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii. Po neizdannym arkhivnym materialam. Leningrad: Akademicheskoe izd-​vo, 1925. Bukhbinder, N. A. “Iz istorii anarkhicheskogo dvizheniia sredi evreev v anglii.” Ereiskaia Letopis’ 4 (1926): 141–​42. Bukhbinder, N. A. Materialy dlia istorii evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii. Moscow: Gos. izd-​ vo Aticot, 1970. Burtsev, V. L. “Franko-​Russkoe Shpionstvo i Franko-​Russkii Soiuz.” Byloe, no. 8 (1908): 58–​64. Burtsev, V. L. Prokliatie vam Bol’sheviki. Paris: Union, 1919. Burtsev, V. L. “Protokoly Sionskikh Mudretsov” Dokazannyi Podlog. Paris: O. Zeluk, 1938. Canu, A. Henri. M. Paul Déroulède et sa Ligue des patriotes: La Vérité. Paris, 1889. Chistiakova, M. “Kropotkin i franko-​russkaia diplomatiia.” Zvenʹia, no. 2 (1933): 629–​57. Chudnovskii, Solomon Lazarevich. Iz davnikh let:  vospominaniia. Moscow:  Izd-​vo Vses. ob-​va politkatorzhan i ssyl’no-​poselentsev, 1934. Coeurderoy, Ernest. Hurrah!!! Ou la Revolution par les Cosaques. London, 1854. Congrès international de l’intervention des pouvoirs publics dans l’émigration et l’immigration tenu à Paris, les 12, 13 et 14 août 1889. Paris: Bibliothèque des annales économiques, 1890. Corneilhan, Georges. Juifs et opportunistes: le judaisme en Egypt et en Syrie. Paris: L. Sauvaitre, 1889. Cunliffe-​Owen, Fritz. “Russian Nihilism.” Eclectic Magazine 31 (1880): 300–​307. Curtis, William Eleroy. The Land of the Nihilist. Russia: Its People, Its Palaces, Its Politics. A Narrative of Travel, in the Czar’s Dominions. Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1888. Cyon, Élie de. Études Sociales; Nihilisme et Anarchie. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1892. Cyon, Élie de. La guerre à Dieu et la morale laïque, réponse à M. Paul Bert. Paris: Le Gaulois, 1881. Cyon, Élie de. Histoire de l’entente Franco-​Russe, 1886–​1894; Documents et Souvenirs. Paris:  A. Charles, 1895. Cyon, Élie de. Où la dictature de m. Witte conduit la Russie. Paris: Haar et Steinert, 1897. Cyon, Élie de. La Russie contemporaine; Études politiques. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1892. Dan, F. “Sovremennaia Politicheskaia Emigratsiia.” Novaia Zhizn’, no. 2 (1911): 168–​88. Dan, Lidiia, ed. Martov i ego blizkie: sbornik. New York: Rausen Bros., 1959. Dan, Lidiia, and Boris Sapir, eds. Iz arkhiva L.  O. Dan. Amsterdam:  Stichting Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1987. Danevsky, V. Opinion impartiale d’un Russe sur l’extradition des nihilistes. Paris:  Philosophie positive, 1881. Daudet, Alphonse. Tartarin on the Alps and Tartarin of Tarascon. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co, 1900. Daudet, Ernest. Histoire diplomatique de l’alliance Franco-​ Russe, 1873–​ 1893. Paris:  P. Ollendorff, 1894.

 

300

Selected Bibliography

Daudet, Ernest. Souvenirs et Révélations. Histoire Diplomatique de l’alliance Franco-​Russe, 1873–​ 1893. Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1894. Daudet, Léon. L’entre deux guerres. Paris: Grasset, 1932. Daudet, Léon. Souvenirs Littéraires. Paris: G. Crès, 1925. Degras, Jane, ed. The Communist International: Documents. 3 vols. London: Cass, 1971. Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii:  bio-​bibliograficheskii slovarʹ. 5 vols. Moscow:  Izd-​vo Vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssyl’no-​poselentsev, 1927. Deiatel’nost’ Bunda za poslednie 2 goda: ot IV-​go do V-​go s’’ezda. London, 1903. Deich, L. G. Khozhdenie v narod: iz vospominanii. Petrograd: Gos. izd-​vo, 1920. Deich, L. G. Provokatory i terror: po lichnym vospominaniiam. Tula, 1926. Deich, L. G. Sixteen Years in Siberia; Some Experiences of a Russian Revolutionist. London, J. Murray, 1903. Deininger, Helga. Frankreich, Russland, Deutschland, 1871–​ 1891:  Die Interdependenz von Aussenpolitik, Wirtschaftsinteressen und Kulturbeziehungen im Vorfeld des Russisch-​ Französischen Bündnisses. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1983. Denisow, P. Anglais et nihilistes alliés: révélations dédiées à la jeunesse russe. Geneva, 1892. Deschamps, Philippe. France-​Russie, 1891–​1898. Livre d’or de l’alliance franco-​russe. Paris:  A. Lemerre, 1899. Didion, Maurice. Les Salariés Étrangers en France. Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1911. Dikshteyn, S. Fun vos eyner lebt. Geneva:  Algemeyner idisher arbeyter-​bund in lite, poylen un rusland, 1905. Dimanshtein, S. Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi Evreev:  sbornik. Moscow:  Izd-​vo Vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssyl’no-​poselentsev, 1930. Dino, Dorothée de. Chronique de 1831 à 1862. Paris: Plon, 1909. Docteur Martinez. Le juif: Voilà l’ennemi! Paris: Albert Savine, 1890. Doklady mezdunarodnomu revolutsionnomu rabochemu kongressu 1900 goda. London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1902. Drabkina, Elizaveta. Chernye sukhari. Moscow: Khudozh. lit., 1970. Drage, Geoffrey. “Alien Immigration.” Fortnightly Review LVII, no. CCCXXXVII ( January 1895): 37–​46. Dragomanov, M. P. Shvaitsarsʹka [sic] respublika. L’viv: Hromads’kyi Holos, 1899. Dragomanov, M. P. Le tyrannicide en Russie et l’action de l’Europe occidentale. Geneva: Rabotnik et Hromada, 1881. Dragomanov, M. P. Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii. Paris:  Société nouvelle de Librairie et d’édition, 1905. Drahomaniv, Mykhailo Petrovych. Lysty Mikhaila Drahomanova do redaktoriv rosiiskoho sotsiial’no-​ revoliutsiinoho vydania ‘Vpered’ (1876–​1878). L’viv: Z arkhiva ‘Vpereda,’ ” 1910. Drumont, Édouard. Édouard Drumont. Le Testament d’un antisémite. Paris: E. Dentu, 1891. Drumont, Édouard. La Fin d’un Monde: Étude Psychologique et Sociale. Paris: Savine, 1889. Drumont, Édouard. La France Juive:  Essai d’histoire contemporaine. Paris:  C. Marpon and E. Flammarion, 1886. Drumont, Édouard. Les juifs contre la France: Une nouvelle Pologne. Paris: Librairie Antisémite, 1899. Ducray, Camille. Paul Déroulède, 1846–​1914. Paris: Ambert, 1914. Dyche, J. A. “The Jewish Immigrant.” Contemporary Review, no. 75 (March 1895): 379–​99. Dzhabadari, I. S. “Protsess 50-​ti,” Byloe 21–​22 (1907): 169–​92. Emigranten un agenten (nit keyn oysgetrakhte mayses). St. Peterburg:  Yidishe kolonizatsion-​gezelshaft,  1912. Engels, Friedrich. Aus der Frühzeit des Marxismus; Engels Briefwechsel mit Kautsky. Prague: Orbis-​verlag,  1935. Erenburg, Il’ia. “Liudi, Gody, Zhizn’.” Novyi Mir 8 (1960): 24–​60. Ermanskii, O. A. Iz perezhitogo: 1887–​1921. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo, 1927. Eyges, Thomas B. Beyond the Horizon:  The Story of a Radical Emigrant. Boston:  Group Free Society, 1944.

 



Selected Bibliography

301

Falʹshivye monetchiki ili agenty russkogo pravitelʹstva. Geneva: H. Georg, 1875. Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System. London: Henry Hansard and Son, 1890. Figner, Vera. Studencheskie Gody, 1872–​1876. Moscow: Golos truda, 1924. Filipov, Iu. D. Emigratsiia. St. Petersburg: V. F. Kirshbaum, 1906. Finn, Ralph Leslie. No Tears in Aldgate. Bath: C. Chivers, 1973. Fitch, Herbert T. Traitors Within: The Story of the Special Branch, New Scotland Yard. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1933. Flourens, E. Alexandre III: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre. Paris: E. Dentu, 1894. Ford, Ford Madox. Return to Yesterday. New York: Liveright, 1932. Fotieva, L. A. Iz zhizni Lenina. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1956. Fouju, P.-​L.-​G. Le Sommeil du Despote: À La Légion Parisienne, Belge et Polonaise. Paris: Imprimerie de Guiraudet, 1831. Gagneur, M. L. A Nihilist Pricess. Boston, 1886. Garvi, Petr A. Vospominaniia sotsialdemokrata:  statʹi o zhizni i deiatelʹnosti P.  A. Garvi. New York: Fond po izdaniiu literaturnogo nasledstva P. A. Garvi, 1946. Gertsen, A. I. Sobranie sochinenii. 30 vols. Moscow: Nauka, 1954. Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. New York: Knopf, 1931. Golikov, G. N., ed. Vospominaniia o Vladimire Ilʹiche Lenine:  v piati tomakh. 5 vols. Moscow: Politizdat, 1969. Golovin, Ivan. Esprit de l’économie politique. Paris: F. Didot, 1843. Golovin, Ivan. La Russie sous Nicolas Ier. Paris: Capelle, 1845. Golovin, Ivan. The Russian Sketch-​Book. London: T. C. Newby, 1848. Gor’kii, Maksim. Gezamelte Ertsehlungen. London: Arbeter fraynd, 1903. Gor’kii, Maksim. O Evreiiakh. Petrograd:  Izd. Petrogradskogo soveta rabochikh i krasn. deputatov, 1919. Gornberg, B. Zur Emigrationsfrage an den internationalen sozialistischen Kongress zu Stuttgart. Geneva: Imprimerie israélite, 1907. Goron, Marie-​François. Les Mémoires de M.  Goron, Ancien Chef de la Sûreté. Paris:  E. Flammarion, 1897. Grabowska, M., and Léonard Chodźko. Esquisses polonaises ou fragmens et traits détachés, pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de Pologne actuelle. Paris: Hector Bossange, 1831. Granach, Alexander. There Goes an Actor. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1945. Hansen, Jules. À Travers La Diplomatie (1864–​1867). Paris: E. Dentu, 1875. Hansen, Jules. L’alliance Franco-​Russe. Paris: Flammarion, 1897. Hansen, Jules. Ambassade à Paris du Baron de Mohrenheim (1884–​ 1898). Paris:  E. Flammarion, 1907. Hansen, Jules. Les coulisses de la diplomatie. Paris: J. Baudry, 1880. Herzen, Aleksandr. 27 Fevralia 1855 g. Narodnyi Skhod v Pamiat’ Perevorota 1848 v St. Martinʹs Hall, Long Acre, v Londone. London: Volʹnaia russkaia knigopechatnia, 1855. Herzen, Aleksandr. From the Other Shore. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956. Herzen, Aleksandr. Letters from France and Italy, 1847–​1851. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Herzen, Aleksandr. My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Hobson, S. G. Pilgrim to the Left; Memoirs of a Modern Revolutionist. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1938. Hrushevs’kyi, Mykahilo. Z pochyniv ukrains’koho sotsialistychnoho rukhu. Mikh. Drahomanov i zhenevs’kyi sotsiialistychnyii hurtok. Vienna: Institut sociologique ukrainien, 1922. Hugo, Victor. Œuvres complètes de Victor Hugo. Paris: L. Hébert, 1885. Hyndman, H. M. The Record of an Adventurous Life. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911. Hyndman, H. M. “The Dawn of a Revolutionary Epoch.” The Nineteenth Century XLVII ( January 1881): 1–​18.

 

302

Selected Bibliography

I. Stalin: Sochineniia. 18 vols. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo politicheskoi literatury, 1946. Ianovskii, S. Ia., and A. I. Kastelianskii, eds. Spravochnaia kniga po voprosam emigratsii. St. Petersburg: I. Lur’e i Ko., 1913. II sʺezd Rossiiskoi s.-​d. r. partii: otchet delegatsii Bunda. London: Tipografiia Bunda, 1903. “Inostrannye Obozrenie.” Vestnik Evropy 25, no. 2 (February 1890): 865–​77. “In Praise of the Alien.” Review of Reviews 86, no. XXXLI ( June 1905): 615. Ivanov, P. Confession d’un nihiliste, précédée d’une étude sur les nihilistes en général. Paris: L. Sauvaitre, 1887. IV-​yi s’’ezd Vseobshchego evreiskogo rabochego soiuza v Litve, Pol’she i Rossii. Geneva: Tip. Soiuza russkikh sotsial’-​demokratov, 1901. J. N. La démocratie européenne et la question polonaise. Paris: Imprimerie de Maulde et Renou, 1848. Janowski, J. N. O Początku demokracyi Polskiéj: Krótka viadomość. Paris, 1862. Jehan-​Préval. Anarchie et Nihilisme. Paris: Albert Savine, 1892. Johnson, Barry C. Olive & Stepniak: The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett 1893–​1895. Birmingham: Bartletts, 1993. Johnson, Barry C. Tea and Anarchy! The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett, 1890–​1893. London: Bartletts Press, 1989. Julvecourt, Paul de. Les Russes à Paris. Brussels, 1843. Kahn, Zadoc. Sermons et allocutions. Paris: A. Durlacher, 1886. “Kak Plekhanov stal marksistom.” Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia 7 (1922): 97–​140. Kamenev, Lev, ed. Leninskii sbornik. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo, 1925. Kamenev, Lev. Leninizm ili trotskizm? Khar’kov: Izd-​vo “Proletarii,” 1925. Kamenev, Lev. Mezhdu dvumia evoliutsiami: sbornik statei. Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1923. Kantor, Ruvin Moiseevich. “Neopublikovannaia rech’ P. L. Lavrova na sobranii evreev-​rabochikh.” Evreiskaia Letopis’ 4 (1926): 137–​40. Kantor, Ruvin Moiseevich. V Pogone za Nechaevym. Leningrad: Gos. Izd., 1925. Kanungo, Hem Chandra. Account of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal. Calcutta:  Setu Prakashani, 2015. Katalog russkoi biblioteki v Zheneve. Geneva: Tip. gazety “Rabotnik,” 1876. Kirshon, V. Emigratsiia i oppozitsiia. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927. Kleinbort, L. “Politicheskaia emigratsiia prezhde i teper’.” Sovremennyi Mir 11 (1909):  49–​82 (second pagination). Kliachko, S. “Iz Emigrantskoi Zhizni v Shveitsarii.” Katorga i Ssylka 4, no. 25 (1926): 190–​201. Kollontai, A. Kak boriutsia rabotnitsy za svoi prava i sotsialisticheskoe dvizhenie rabotnits v razlich. stranakh. London: 1919. Kollontai, A. Rabotnitsa-​matʹ. London, 1914. Kolokol: pribavochnye listy k Poliarnoi zvezde. London: Trübner, 1860. Konstitutsiia Loris-​Melikova i ego chastnye pis’ma. St. Petersburg: Svobodnaia mysl’, 1906. Kopelzon, T. “Di ershte sprotsungen.” Arbeter Luekh III (1922): 49–​69. Kościakiewicz, Antoine N. Souvenirs de l’émigration polonaise. Paris: 1858. Kovalevskaia, S. V. Nihilist Girl. Trans. Mary Zirin. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001. Kovalevskii, Maksim. “Stranichki iz vospominanii; Russkaia koloniia v Parizhe.” Vozrozhdenie 15 ( June 1951): 71–​80. Kovalevsky, Sonya. Sonya Kovalevsky:  Her Recollections of Childhood. Trans. Isabel P. Hapgood. New York: Century Company, 1895. Krasinski, Valerian. Russia, Poland, and Europe; or, The Inevitable Consequence of the Present War. London, 1854. Kremer, Aron Iosifovich. Ob agitatsii (k massovoi rabote). Geneva, 1896. Kronika Emigracji Polskiej. Paris: A. Pinard, 1834. Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. The Commune of Paris. London: Freedom, 1909. Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. La Vérité sur les Exécutions en Russie: Suivie d’une Esquisse Biographique sur Sophie Perowskaya. Geneva, 1881.

 



Selected Bibliography

303

Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: Grove Press, 1968. Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. “Russian Revolutionary Party.” Fortnightly Review CLXXXV (May 1, 1882): 654–​71. Krupskaia, Nadezhda. Klara Tsetkin. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1933. Krupskaia, Nadezhda. O bytovykh voprosakh:  sbornik statei. Moscow:  Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo, 1930. Krupskaia, Nadezhda. Vospominaniia o Lenine. Moscow: Politicheskoi literatury, 1957. Kuklin, G. A. Materialy k izucheniiu istorii revoliutsionnago dvizheniia v Rossii. Geneva: Kuklin, 1905. Kuliabko-​Koretskii, N. G. Iz Davnikh Let:  Vospominaniia Lavrista. Newtonville, MA:  Oriental Research Partners, 1976. “The Labour Struggle.” Commonweal 4, no. 106 ( January 21, 1888): 22. La Pologne et la France en 1830–​31. Le Comité Français en Faveur des Polonais. Paris, 1831. Lallié, Norbert. Choses de Russie. Lyon: E. Vitte, 1895. Langhard, Johann. Die anarchistische Bewegung in der Schweiz von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart und die internationalen Führer. Berlin: O. Häring, 1903. Langhard, Johann. Das Recht der politischen Fremdenausweisung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Schweiz. Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1891. Lauzel, Maurice. “Un Étrange Quartier de Paris.” Revue de Paris, January 1912, 777–​93. Lavigne, Ernest. Introduction à l’histoire du nihilisme russe. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880. Lavigne, Ernest. Le roman d’un nihiliste. Paris, 1879. Lavrov, P. L. Gosudarstvennyi element v budushchem obshchestve. London:  Nabornia zhurnala Vpered, 1876. Lavrov, P. L. Narodniki-​propagandisty, 1873–​1878 g.g. Leningrad: Izd-​vo “Golos,” 1925. Lavrov, P. L. Parizhskaia Kommuna, 18 marta 1871 goda. Moscow, 1922. Lavrov, P. L. Pis’mo tovarishcham v Rossii po povodu broshiury L. A. Tikhomirova. Geneva: Vol’naia russkaia tip., 1888. Lavrov, P. L., Boris Sapir, V. N. Smirnov, and G. A. Lopatin, eds. Lavrov-​-​gody emigratsii: Arkhivnye materialy v dvukh tomakh. Boston: Reidel, 1974. Lazare, Bernard. Juifs et antisémites. Paris: Editions Allia, 1992. Lazare, Bernard. “La Solidarité Juive.” Entretiens Politiques & Littéraires, October 1890, 222–​32. Lee, H. W. Social-​Democracy in Britain; Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement. London: The Social-​ Democratic Federation, 1935. Le-​ Flo, Gen. “Imperator Aleksandr II i Frantsiia v 1875 g.” Russkaia Starina 23, no. 1 (1892): 197–​216. Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. Lenin:  “Left-​Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder. Moscow:  Progress Publishers, 1981. Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. Lenin on the Jewish Question. New York: International Publishers, 1974. Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. O Evreiskom voprose Rossii. Zaporozh’e, 1924. Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 58 vols. Moscow:  Gos. izd-​vo polit. lit-​ry, 1958–​1965. Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. V. I. Lenin: neizvestnye dokumenty, 1891–​1922. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999. Leroy-​Beaulieu, Anatole. L’empire des Tsars et les Russes. Paris: Hachette, 1882. Levinsohn, Isaac. The Russo-​Polish Jew: A Narrative of the Conversion from the Darkness of Judaism to the Light and Liberty of the Gospel of Christ of Isaac Levinsohn. London: Banks, 1878. Levitskii, Vladimir Osipovich. Za chetvertʹ veka:  revoliutsionnye vospominaniia, 1892–​1917 g.g. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd-​vo, 1926. Liadov, M. Iz Zhizni partii v 1903–​1907 godakh. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1956. Liberman, S. Building Lenin’s Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945. Liebknecht, Wilhelm. Protokoll des Internationalen arbeiter-​ congresses zu Paris. Nürnberg: Wörlein, 1890. Ligneau, Jean de. Juifs et antisémites en Europe. Paris: Tolra, 1891. Likhacheva, E. Materialy dlia istorii zhenskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii. 2 vols. St. Peterburg:  M. M. Stasiulevich, 1899.

 

304

Selected Bibliography

Litvinoff, Emanuel. Journey through a Small Planet. London: Joseph, 1972. Lunacharskii, A. V. Ob antisemitizme. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo, 1929. Lunacharskii, A. V. Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1968. Lyons, Lewis. “East End Workers.” Commonweal 1, no. 3 (1888): 1–​19. Mackay, John Henry. The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Boston: B. R. Tucker, 1891. Maiskii, I. M. Journey into the Past. London: Hutchinson, 1962. Makarenkova, E. M. “Novye Dokumenty o L. N. Gartmane.” Voprosy Istorii 3 (1990): 166–​70. Maklakov, V. A. Vlastʹ i obshchestvennostʹ na zakate staroi Rossii: vospominaniia. Paris, 1936. Markova, R., ed. Chetvertyi (Obʺedinitelʹnaia) Sʺezd RSDRP. Moscow:  Gos. izd-​ vo polit. lit-​r y,  1955. Marmor, Kalman. Mayn Lebns-​geshikhte. New-​York: Ikuf, 1959. Martin, Louis. L’Anglais, Est-​Il Un Juif? Moeurs Anglaises. Paris: A. Savine, 1895. Martov, L. Bolʹshevizm v Rossii i v Internatsionale. Berlin: Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 1923. Martov, L. Povorotnyi punkt v istorii evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia. Geneva: Izd. Soiuza russkikh sotsial-​demokratov,  1900. Martov, L. Spasiteli ili Uprazdniteli? Kto i kak razrushal R.S.D.R.P. Paris: Gnatovsky, 1911. Martov, L. Zapiski sotsial-​demokrata. Berlin: Izd-​vo Z. I. Grzhebina, 1922. Maurras, Charles. L’idée de la décentralisation. Paris: Revue encyclopédique, 1898. Mavor, James. My Windows on the Street of the World. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1923. Mchedlov, Miran Petrovich, ed. Vospominaniia o Vladimire Ilʹiche Lenine:  v piati tomakh. Moscow: Izd-​vo Politicheskoi literatury, 1984. Mechnikov, L. “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponiia.” Delo 10, n. 10 (1876): 133–​70. Medem, Vladimir. Vladimir Medem, the Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist. New York: Ktav Pub. House, 1979. Menshchikov, Leonid Petrovich. Russkii politicheskii sysk za granitsei. Paris:  L. Menstschikoff, 1914. Meredith, Isabel. A Girl among the Anarchists. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Mickiewicz, Ladislas. La question polonaise. Paris: E. Dentu, 1863. Mill, John. Pionern un Boyer. New York: Der Wecker, 1946. Muddock, J. E. “The Story of the Assassination of Alexander II.” The Gentleman’s Magazine 264 ( January 1888): 19–​29. Nevskii, V. I., ed. Istoriko-​revoliutsionnyi sbornik. 3 vols. Moscow:  Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo, 1924. “The Nihilisms and Socialisms of the World.” The Eclectic Magazine LII (September 1890): 373–​80. “Nouvelles Scientifiques.” La Science Illustrée 131 ( June 1, 1890): 96. Novikoff, Olga. Is Russia Wrong? A  Series of Letters, by a Russian Lady. London:  Hodder and Stoughton, 1878. Novikoff, Olga. Russia and England from 1876 to 1880: A Protest and an Appeal. London: Longmans, Green, 1880. Novikoff, Olga. Russian Memories. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917. Novikoff, Olga. Skobeleff and the Slavonic Cause. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883. “O referatakh V. I. Lenina za Granitsei.” Istoricheskii Arkhiv 5 (1955): 1–​25. Ol’minskii, M. “Vozniknovenie Istparta i Zhurnala ‘Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia.’” Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia 5 (1930): 154–​55. “Otkrytoe pis’mo Viktora Giugo frantsuzskomu pravitel’stvu o nevydache L. N. Gartmana.” Byloe 2, no. 4 (April 1907): 191. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–​ 1910. New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1911. Panteleev, L. F. Vospominaniia. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo khudozh. lit-​r y, 1958. Parkhomovskii, Mikhail, and D. Iu. Guzevich, eds. Russkie evrei vo Frantsii:  statʹi, publikatsii, memuary i esse. Jerusalem:  Nauchno-​issledovatelʹskii tsentr “Russkoe evreistvo v zarubezhʹe,” 2001.

 



Selected Bibliography

305

Pavlovich, M. “Revoliutsionnye Siluety:  Indusskaia Emigratsiia v Parizhe, 1909–​1914.” Novyi Vostok 1, no. 7 (1925): 152–​63. “Pechal’naia istoriia odnoi iz truzhenits nauki.” Zhenskoe Obrazovanie 6, no. 2 (February 1881): 133–​41. Pecherin, V. S. The First Russian Political Emigré: Notes from beyond the Grave, or Apologia pro Vita Mea. Trans. Michael R. Katz. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2008. Perris, George Herbert. A History of the Peace Conference at The Hague. London:  International Arbitration Association, 1899. The Persecution of the Jews in Russia. London, 1890. Piatnitskii, O. Memoirs of a Bolshevik. New York: International Publishers, 1933. Piatyi (Londonskii) S’’ezd RSDRP: Aprel’-​Mai 1907 Goda. Protokoly. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1959. Pielgrzym Polski. Dziennik Narodowy, Polityczny i Literacki. Paris: A. Pinard, 1833. Piłsudski, Józef. Walka rewolucyjna w zaborze rosyjskim. Fakty i wrażenia z ostatnich lat dziesięciu. Krakow: Nakł. wydawn. “Naprzodu,” 1903. “Pis’ma ispolnitel’nogo komiteta partii narodnoi voli k amerikanskomu narodu, L’vu Gartmanu, Karlu Marksu i k A. Roshforu.” Byloe 23, no. 1 (1917): 50–​55. “Pis’mo F. E. Dzierzhinskogo.” Kommunist 7 (1988): 103–​104. Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich. “Neudachnaia Istoriia ‘Partii Narodnoi Voli.’” Sovremennyi Mir 5 (1912): 147–​76. Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich. Sochineniia. 24 vols. Moscow:  Gosudartstvennoe izdatelʹstvo, 1923. Pol’skaia sotsialisticheskaia partiia o evreiskom rabochem dvizhenii. London:  Izd. Vseobshchego Evreiskogo Rabochego Soiuza v Litve, Pol’she i Rossii, 1903. Pottier, Paul. “Essai sur le proletariat Juif en France.” Revue des Revues XXVIII (March 1, 1899): 482–​92. Potresov, A. N., and Boris I. Nikolaevskii. Sotsial-​demokraticheskoe dvizhenie v Rossii. Moscow, 1928. Potter, Beatrice. “East London Labour.” The Nineteenth Century 24 (1888): 161–​83. Pravda o Gomel’skom pogrome. London: Tipogr. Bunda, 1903. Prelooker, Jaakoff. Heroes and Heroines of Russia; Builders of a New Commonwealth. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1908. Press, A. “Bor’ba za vysshee obrazovanie Evreev Pri Nikolae II.” Evreiskaia Letopis’ 3 (1924): 135–​41. Press, A. “O Prosvititel’nom Fonde.” Novyi Voskhod 11 (1914). “Prikliucheniia I.  F. Manuilov. Po arkhivnym materialam,” Byloe 27–​28, no. 5–​6 (December 1917): 236–​86. Proal, Louis. La criminalité politique. Paris: F. Alcan, 1895. Proekt programy rossiiskoi sotsialdemokraticheskoi rabochei partii:  vyrabotannyi sotsialdemokraticheskoi organizatsiei “Zhizn’”. London, 1902. Protokoly pervoi obshchepartiinoi konferentsii P.S.-​R . Paris: Tribune Russe, 1906. Puig, A. La race de vipères et le rameau d’olivier: solution de la question juive. Paris: Delhomme et Briguet, 1897. Radziwill, Catherine. France from behind the Veil:  Fifty Years of Social and Political Life. London: Cassell and Co., 1914. Radziwill, Catherine. Memories of Forty Years. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1915. Radziwill, Catherine. My Recollections. New York: J. Pott, 1904. Rafes, M. Dva goda revoliutsii na Ukraine. Moscow, 1920. Rafes, M. Ocherki po Istorii “Bunda.” Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1923. Raffalovich, Arthur. L’abominable Vénalité de la Presse. Paris: Librairie du travail, 1931. Ralli, Zamfir. “Iz moikh vospominanii o M. A. Bakunine.” Istoricheskii Sbornik: O Minuvshem, 287–​ 352. St. Petersburg: B. M. Vul’f, 1909. Ralli, Zamfir. “Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. Iz Moikh Vospominanii.” Minuvshee Gody 1, no. 10 (1908): 142–​68.

 

306

Selected Bibliography

Rappoport, Charles. Une vie révolutionnaire, 1883–​ 1940. Paris:  Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1991. Raspail, F.-​V. De la Pologne sur les bords de la Vistule et dans l’émigration. Paris: Chez l’éditeur, 1839. Ratch, Vasilii Fedorovich. Pol’skaia Emigratsiia do i vo Vremia Poslednogo Miatezha. Vil’na:  R. M. Romm, 1866. Rech’ Izrailia Zangvilia na Mitinge v Teatre Pavil’on. Odessa: Izdatel’, 1907. “Report of the Lancet Special Sanitary Commission on the Polish Colony of Jew Tailors.” The Lancet, May 3, 1884, 217–​18. Riddell, John, ed. The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power:  Documents, 1918–​ 1919: Preparing the Founding Congress. New York: Anchor Foundation, 1986. Riddell, John, ed. Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International:  Documents, 1907–​1916, the Preparatory Years. New York: Monad Press, 1984. “The Right of Asylum.” The Legal News IV, no. 30 ( July 23, 1881): 236. Rochefort, Henri. Les aventures de ma vie. Paris: P. Dupont, 1896. Rocker, Rudolf. The London Years. London: Robert Anscombe & Co., 1956. Rohling, August, A. Montigny, and Édouard Drumont. Le Juif selon le Talmud. Paris:  Albert Savine, 1889. Rombro, I. “Mimokhodom. Evreiskoe Rabochee Obshchestvo v Parizhe.” Nedel’naia Khronika Voskhoda 40 (October 9, 1883): 624–​26. Rosny, J. H. “Nihilists in Paris.” Harper’s LXXXIII (1891): 429–​42. Rossiiskaia sotsial-​demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia, ed. Pervaia Obshcherusskaia konferentsiia partiinykh rabotnikov. Geneva: Tip. partii, 1905. Rossiiskaia sotsial-​demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia, ed. Polnyi tekst protokolov vtoroi ocherednoi s’’ezd Ross. sots.-​dem. rabochei partii. Geneva: Tip. partii, 1903. Rusanov, N. S. Revoliutsiia ili evoliutsiia? Geneva: Vol’naia russkaia tipografiia, 1888. Rusanov, N. S. V emigratsii. Moscow, 1928. Russophilos. Le Skobeleff français. Paris: E. Dentu, 1887. Safarov, Georgii Ivanovich, ed. Trotskii o Lenine i Leninizme. Leningrad: Izd. Priboi, 1925. Sapir, Boris. “Liberman et Le Socialisme Russe.” International Review for Social History 3 (1938): 25–​88. Sapir, Boris. “Vpered !” 1873–​ 1877:  Materialy iz Arkhiva Valeriana Nikolaevicha Smirnova. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970. Savinkov, B. V. Memoirs of a Terrorist. New York: A. & C. Boni, 1931. Sazhin, M. P. “Russkie v Tsiurikhe.” Katorga i Ssylka 10, no. 95 (1932): 20–​78. Sazhin, M. P. Vospominaniia 1860–​1880-​kh g.g. Moscow:  Vses. ob-​ vo polit. Katorzhan i ssyl’no-​poselentsev,  1925. Schirmacher, Käthe. Züricher Studentinnen. Leipzig: T. Schröter, 1896. Schloss, David F. “The Jew as a Workman.” The Nineteenth Century XXIX, no. CLXVII ( January 1891): 996–​109. Schloss, David F. “The Sweating System.” Fortnightly Review, November 1887, 835–​56. Sedʹmaia (aprelʹskaia) Vserossiiskaia konferentsiia RSDRP (bolʹshevikov). Petrograd, 1917. Semashko, N. A. Prozhitoe i perezhitoe. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1960. Semenov, E. “Iz Zapiskoi knizhki zhurnalista.” Novoe Slovo 5, no. 10 (October 1910): 50–​57. Serebriakov, E. A. Otkrytoe pis’mo L’vu Tikhomirovu, avtoru: Pochemu ia perestal’ byt’ revoliutsionerom. Geneva: Vol’naia russkaia tip., 1900. Sereda, A. I., S. I. Shulʹga, and Institut marksizma-​ leninizma, eds. O Vladimire Ilʹiche Lenine: vospominaniia 1900–​1922 gody. Moscow: Gos. Izd-​vo politlit-​r y, 1963. Serge, Victor. Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Trans. Peter Sedgwick. New York: New York Review Books, 2012. Severtsev-​Popilov, G. T. “Na odnoi skam’e s imperatorom Vil’gel’mom.” Istoricheskii Vestnik 31, no. 119 (1910): 114–​61. Shchepetov, N. “Russkie v Parizhe.” Russkaia Mysl’ 8 (1912): 138–​54. Shestoi sʺezd RSDRP (bolʹshevikov), avgust 1917 goda: protokoly. Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958.

 



Selected Bibliography

307

Shevtsov, N. S. Vtoroi s’’ezd RSDRP: uchebnoe posobie. Moscow: Izd-​vo Moskov. univ., 1900. Shliapnikov, A. G. Semnadtsatyi god. 3 vols. Moscow: Gos. izdat., 1923. Sidorov, Nikolai. “Riad inostrannykh razvedok deistvuet po nashim ukazaniiam.” Istochnik 4 (1995): 72–​80. Sims, George R. Living London: Its Work and Its Play. London: Cassell, 1902. Sims, George R. The Mysteries of Modern London. London: Pearson, 1906. Singer, Rabbi S. “The Russo-​Jewish Immigrant.” The English Illustrated Magazine 96 (September 1891): 842–​46. S. L. Une Autre Parisienne. Concert aux Wauxhall pour Les Parisiens. Paris, 1831. Sobranie tsirkuliarov ministerstva inostrannykh del po departamentu vnutrennikh snoshenii:  1840–​ 1888. Saint Petersburg: V. Kirshbaum, 1888. Sobranie tsirkuliarov ministerstva inostrannykh del po departamentu vnutrennikh snoshenii: Prodolzhenie, 1888–​1894. Saint Petersburg: V. Kirshbaum, 1895. Sokolnicki, Michał. Les Origines de l’émigration Polonaise en France, 1831–​ 1832. Paris:  F. Alcan, 1910. Stachka i boikot. London: Tip. Zhizni, 1902. Soskice, Juliet M. Chapters from Childhood; Reminiscences of an Artist’s Granddaughter. London: Selwyn & Blount, ltd., 1921. Srivastava, Harindra. Five Stormy Years: Savarkar in London, June 1906–​June 1911: A Centenary Salute to Swatantrayaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1983. Stead, Estelle W. My Father, Personal & Spiritual Reminiscences. London: W. Heinemann, 1913. Stead, W. T. “Government by Journalism.” Contemporary Review 49 (May 1886): 653–​74. Stead, W. T. The M. P. for Russia. London: A. Melrose, 1909. Stead, W. T. Truth about Russia. London: Cassell & Company, 1888. Stead, W. T. The United States of Europe on the Eve of the Parliament of Peace. New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1899. Stefanovich, Ia. Dnevnik Kariitsa. Saint Petersburg: Novyi mir, 1906. Stepniak, S. Dos under-​irdishe Rusland. London, 1896. Stepniak, S. A Female Nihilist. Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1886. Stepniak, S. The Russian Storm-​Cloud, or, Russia in Her Relations to Neighbouring Countries. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1886. Stepniak, S. Underground Russia; Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. New  York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1883. Stepniak, S., M. E. Ermasheva, and Vera Filippovna Zakharina. V londonskoi emigratsii. Moscow: Nauka, 1968. Stepun, Fedor. Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia. Moscow: Progress-​Litera, 1995. “Strannye Protivorechiia.” Otechestvennye Zapiski, otd. 2, no. 8 (August 1874): 123–​56. Striadov, I. Ob”edinimsia! Pis’mo studenta-​revoliutsionera. Geneva, 1902. Struve, Peter. “My Contacts and Conflicts with Lenin: I.” Slavonic and East European Review 12, no. 36 (1934): 573–​95. Struve, Peter. “My Contacts and Conflicts with Lenin: II.” Slavonic and East European Review 13, no. 37 (1934): 66–​84. Sukennikov, M. Pervyi Kongress russkikh studentov i studentok, uchashchikhsia zagranitsei. Berlin: Izd. Ioanna Rede, 1902. Sukhanov, N. N. The Russian Revolution, 1917:  A Personal Record. Trans. Joel Carmichael. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Sukhomlin, V. I. “Iz epokhi upadka partii ‘Narodnaia Volia.’” Katorga i ssylka 25 (1926): 29–​45. Svatikov, S. G. Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii (1700–​1895). Rostov-​na-​Donu:  Donskaia rech’, 1905. Svatikov, S. G. Recueil de documents secrets, tirés des archives de l’ancien Ministère des affaires étrangeres russe. Geneva: Editions de la “Nouvelle internationale,” 1917. Svatikov, S. G. Russkaia obshchestvennaia biblioteka imeni I.  S. Turgeneva v Parizhe, 1875–​1925. Paris, 1926.

 

308

Selected Bibliography

Svatikov, S. G., and Elfriede Wischhöfer, eds. Russische Studenten in Heidelberg: unveröffentlichte Texte. Heidelberg: Inst. für Ubersetzen und Dolmetschen, Russ. Abt., 1997. Svobodnaia pechatʹ i russkaia emigratsiia. Geneva: M. Elpidine, 1889. Sweeney, John. At Scotland Yard. London, 1904. Sypniewski, D. O. An Appeal to the Civilized World; or, The Wrongs of My Country. London:  N. F. Mullin, 1842. Syrkin, Nachman. Vozzvanie k evreiskoi molodezhi. London: Izdanie sionistov-​sotsialistov, 1901. Tainy nashei gosudarstvennoi politiki v Polshe: sbornik sekretnykh dokumentov. London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1899. Tarde, Gabriel de. L’opinion et la foule. Paris: F. Alcan, 1904. Tarle, E. “Vydacha L.  G. Deicha (po neizdannym dokumentam).” Byloe 3 (25) (September 1917): 192–​95. Tchernoff, J. Dans le creuset des civilisations. Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1936. Tiburtius, Franziska. Erinnerungen Einer Achtzigjährigen. Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke, 1923. Tikhomirov, L. A. Conspirateurs et policiers: souvenirs d’un proscrit Russe. Paris: A. Savine, 1887. Tikhomirov, L. A. Vospominaniia. Moscow: GPIB, 2003. Tissot, Victor. La Russie et les Russes; Indiscrétions de Voyage. Paris: E. Dentu, 1882. Tissot, Victor. Russes et Allemands. Paris: E. Dentu, 1881. Tooley, Sarah A. “The Growth of a Socialist. An Interview with Mrs. Sidney Webb.” The Young Woman 29 (February 1895): 145–​51. Toutain, Edmond. Alexandre III et la République Française, Souvenirs d’un Témoin, 1885–​1888. Paris: Plon, 1929. Trotsky, Leon. The Lessons of October 1917. London: Labour Pub. Co., 1925. Trotsky, Leon. Moia zhiznʹ : opyt avtobiografii. Moscow: Panorama, 1991. Trotsky, Leon. Sochineniia. Moscow: Gos. Izd-​vo, 1922. Trotsky, Leon. Stalin:  An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. New  York:  Harper and Collins, 1941. Trotsky, Leon, and Max Eastman. The History of the Russian Revolution. New  York:  Simon and Schuster, 1932. Trotsky, Leon, Iurii Felʹshtinskii, and Mikloś Kun. Portrety revoliutsionerov. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1991. Tsion, I. Nigilisty i Nigilizm. Moscow: V Universitetskoi tip., 1886. Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Saint Petersburg: Izd. A. F. Marksa, 1898. Turgenev, Nikolai. La Russie en présence de la crise européenne. Paris:  Comptoir des imprimeurs-​unis,  1848. Turgenev, Nikolai. La Russie et Les Russes. Paris: Comptoir des imprimeurs-​unis, 1847. Ulʹianovskii, A. Zhenshchiny v protsesse 50-​ti. Saint Petersburg: Izd-​vo O. N. Popovoi, 1906. Un avocat. Opinion sur la guerre de l’absolutisme contre la liberté, et la Russie contre la Pologne. Paris: Contant-​Chanptie,  1831. Un gentilhomme russe. Russie et liberté. Paris, A. Savine, 1889. Un Russe. Les “Mille et Un” Mensonges Sur La Russie. Paris: Revue russe, 1904. V s’’ezd Vseobshchego Evreiskogo Rabochego Soiuza v Litve, Pol’she i Rossii. London:  Izd. Zagranichnago komiteta Bunda, 1903. VI-​oi Sionisticheskii Kongress v Bazele. London: Tipogr. Bunda, 1903. Valbert, G. “Le Procès de Vera Zassoulitch.” Revue des deux mondes 3, no. 27 ( June 1878): 216–​27. Valentinov, N. Encounters with Lenin. London, 1968. Valk, S. “G. G. Romanenko.” Katorga i Ssylka, no. 48 (1928): 36–​59. Valois, Georges. D’un siècle à l’autre; chronique d’une génération (1885–​1920). Paris:  Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1921. “Vestnik Ob’’edinennogo komiteta russkikh kooperativnykh organizatsii v Londone,” 1919. Victoire Des Polonais, et Programme de la Fête des Journées de Juillet. Besançon, 1831. Vitiazev, Petr. “P. L. Lavrov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Iz Razskazov M. P. Sazhina.” Golos Minuvshego 10 (1915): 111–​47.

 



Selected Bibliography

309

Vitte, S. Iu. The Memoirs of Count Witte. Trans. Sidney Harcave. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990. Vospominaniia o Vladimire Il’iche Lenine. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1956. Wakefield, C. M. Life of Thomas Attwood. Harrison & Sons, 1885. Webb, Beatrice. My Apprenticeship. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926. Weizmann, Chaim. The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann. Edited by Meyer Wolfe Weisgal and Barnet Litvinoff. 25 vols. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1968. Weizmann, Chaim. Trial and Error. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949. Weizmann, Vera. The Impossible Takes Longer: The Memoirs of Vera Weizmann, Wife of Israel’s First President. London: H. Hamilton, 1967. White, Arnold. The Destitute Alien in Great Britain: A Series of Papers Dealing with the Subject of Foreign Pauper Immigration. London: S. Sonnenschein & Company, 1892. White, Arnold. The Modern Jew. London: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1899. White, Arnold. The Problems of a Great City. London: Remington and Company, 1887. White, W. Holt. The Earthquake: A Romance of London in 1907. London: E. Grant Richards, 1906. Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man under Socialism. New York: Humboldt Publishing Co, 1892. Wilde, Oscar. Vera, or the Nihilists. New York: Harper Collins, 2014. Wilkins, William Henry. The Alien Invasion. Methuen & Company, 1892. Wolski, Kalikst. La Russie Juive. Paris: A. Savine, 1887. Yanovsky, Sh. Ershte yorn fun yidishn frayheytlekhn sotsializm: oytobiografishe zikhroynes fun a pioner un boyer fun der yidisher anarkhistisher bavegung in England un Amerike. New  York:  Fraye arbeter shtime, 1948. Żaba, F. N. The Polish Exile, Being an Historical, Statistical, Political, and Literary Account of Poland. Edinburgh, 1833. Zagranichnye Pasporta i Emigratsiia. St. Petersburg: M. Volkovich, 1914. Zaitsev, V. A., and M. K. Elpidin. Nechto o Shpionakh. Geneva: E. K. Elpedin, 1904. Zasulich, V. I. Vospominaniia. Moscow:  Izd-​ vo Vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssylʹno-​poselentsev,  1931. Zenzinov, V., В. Iz zhizni revoliutsionera. Paris, 1919. Zetkin, Clara. Die Arbeiterinnen—​und Frauenfrage der Gegenwart. Berlin:  Berliner Volks-​Tribüne, 1889. Zetkin, Clara. On the Woman Question. New York: International Publishers, 1934. Zhitlovskii, Khaim. Evrei k Evreiam. London, 1892. Zinov’ev, Grigorii. God Revoliutsii. Leningrad: 1925.

Selected Secondary Sources Agafonov, V. K. Zagranichnaia Okhranka. Petrograd: Izdatelʹtsvo “Kniga,” 1918. Albert, Gleb J. Das Charisma der Weltrevolution: Revolutionärer Internationalismus in Der Frühen Sowjetgesellschaft 1917–​1927. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019. Albin, Pierre. La Paix Armée. L’Allemagne et La France en Europe (1885–​1894). Paris, 1913. Alexopoulos, Golfo. “Stalin and the Politics of Kinship:  Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–​1940s.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (2008): 91–​117. Allen, Barbara C. Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–​1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Alroey, Gur. Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Alroey, Gur. An Unpromising Land:  Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Alroey, Gur. The Quiet Revolution: Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2008. Anderson, Kevin. Marx at the Margins:  On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-​Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Andreev, A. Iu. Russkie Studenty v Nemetskikh Universitetakh XVIII-​Pervoi Poloviny XIX Veka. Moscow: Znak, 2005.

 

310

Selected Bibliography

Anievas, Alexander. Cataclysm 1914. Chicago: Brill, 2015. Aronson, Irwin Michael. Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-​Jewish Pogroms in Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Ascher, Abraham. The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1976. Ascher, Abraham. Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1972. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–​1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Atwood, William G. The Parisian Worlds of Frédéric Chopin. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1999. Avrich, Paul. Bakunin & Nechaev. London: Freedom Press, 1974. Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt, 1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. Avrich, Paul. Russian Anarchists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Avrutin, Eugene M., Harriet Murav, and John Klier, eds. Jews in the East European Borderlands: Essays in Honor of John D. Klier. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. Bade, Klaus J. Migration in European History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Balmasov, S. S. Inostrannyi Legion. Moscow: EKSMO, 2004. Bantman, Constance. The French Anarchists in London, 1880–​1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Barer, Shlomo. The Doctors of Revolution:  19th-​ Century Thinkers Who Changed the World. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Baylen, Joseph O. “Mme Juliette Adam, Gambetta, and the Idea of a Franco-​Russian Alliance.” Arts and Sciences Studies. 57, no. 15 (May 20, 1960). Baylen, Joseph O. “Madame Olga Novikov, Propagandist.” American Slavic and East European Review 10, no. 4 (December 1, 1951): 255–​71. Baylen, Joseph O. “W. T.  Stead, Apologist for Imperial Russia, 1870–​1880.” International Communication Gazette 6 (1960): 281–​97. Baylen, Joseph O., and Virginia M. Crawford. “An Unpublished Note on General Georges Boulanger in Britain, June, 1889.” French Historical Studies 4, no. 3 (April 1, 1966): 344–​47. Belser, Katharina, ed. Ebenso Neu Als Kühn:  120 Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität Zürich. Zurich: eFeF-​Verlag,  1988. Bemporad, Elissa. Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Benbassa, Esther. The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Berkov, K. N. Parizhkaia kommuna i russkie revoliutsionery. Moscow:  Vsesoiuznoe ob. Politkatorzhan i SS. Poselentsev, 1926. Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age:  Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Berlin, Isaiah. “Russia and 1848.” Slavonic and East European Review 26, no. 67 (April 1, 1948): 341–​60. Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Berrol, Selma Cantor. East Side/​East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870–​ 1920. Westport: Praeger, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bielecki, Robert. Polacy w Legii Cudzoziemskiej, 1831–​1879. Warsaw: PWN, 1992. Birk Laursen, Ole. “‘I have only One Country, it is the World’: Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-​Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–​17.” History Workshop Journal 90 (2020): 1–​20. Blit, Lucjan. The Origins of Polish Socialism, the History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist Party, 1878–​1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

 



Selected Bibliography

311

Blobaum, Robert. Feliks Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Bogucharskii, V. Ia. Iz Istorii politicheskoi bor’by v 70-​kh i 80-​kh gg. XIX veka. Moscow: Russkaia mysl’, 1912. Bolsterli, Margaret Jones. The Early Community at Bedford Park: “Corporate Happiness” in the First Garden Suburb. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977. Bonjour, Edgar. Swiss Neutrality, Its History and Meaning. London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1946. Boustan, Leah Platt. “Were Jews Political Refugees or Economic Migrants? Assessing the Persecution Theory of Jewish Emigration, 1881–​1914.” In The New Comparative Economic History:  Essays in Honour of Jeffrey G.  Williamson, 267–​90. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2007. Borejsza, Jerzy W. Emigracja polska po powstaniu styczniowym. Warsaw:  Państwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1966. Bouteron, Marcel. Pologne Romantique. Paris: A. Colin, 1937. Brachev, V. S. Mastera politicheskogo syska dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Saint Petersburg: Nestor, 1998. Brachev, V. S. Zagranichnaia agentura Departamenta politsii, 1883–​1917. Saint Petersburg: Izd-​vo “Stomma,” 2001. Brandenberger, David. Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–​1941. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2011. Brandenberger, David. “Stalin’s Rewriting of 1917.” Russian Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 667–​89. Brock, Peter. Z Dziejów wielkiej emigracji w Anglii. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1958. Brovkin, Vladimir N. The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Brown, Edward J. Stankevich and His Moscow Circle: 1830–​1840. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Brückenhaus, Daniel. Policing Transnational Protest:  Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–​1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Budnitskii, O. V. Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia:  materialy i issledovaniia. Moscow:  Izd-​vo “Gesharim,” 1999. Budnitskii, O. V. Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–​1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Budushchego net i ne mozhet byt’ bez nauk. Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2005. Burgess, Greg. Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and Its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787–​1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Cadot, Michel. La Russie dans la Vie Intellectuelle Française, 1839–​1856. Paris: Fayard, 1967. Cahm, Caroline. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–​ 1886. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Carr, Edward Hallett. The Romantic Exiles; a Nineteenth-​Century Portrait Gallery. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Case, Holly. The Age of Questions, or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Cassedy, Steven. To the Other Shore:  The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Cesarani, David. The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-​Jewry, 1841–​1991. New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1994. Chamberlain, Lesley. Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Chatterjee, Choi. “Imperial Incarcerations: Ekaterina Breshko-​Breshkovskaia, Vinayak Savarkar, and the Original Sins of Modernity.” Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (2015): 850–​72. Chernev, A. D. 229 kremlevskikh vozhdei: Politbiuro, Orgbiuro, Sekretariat TsK Kommunisticheskoi partii v litsakh i tsifrakh. Moscow: Rodina, 1996.

 

312

Selected Bibliography

Clements, Barbara Evans. Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Coenen Snyder, Saskia. Building a Public Judaism:  Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-​ Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Cohen, Deborah. “Who Was Who? Race and Jews in Turn-​of-​the-​Century Britain.” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 4 (2002): 460–​83. Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution:  A Political Biography, 1888–​1938. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Cohen, Stuart. English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-​Jewry, 1895–​1920. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Collmer, Peter. Die Schweiz und das Russische Reich 1848–​1919:  Geschichte einer europäischen Verflechtung. Zurich: Chronos, 2004. Confino, Michael. Violence dans la Violence. Paris: François Maspero, 1973. Cook, Andrew. M: MI5’s First Spymaster. New York: The History Press, 2011. Corney, Frederick C. Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Courtois, Stéphane, and Mark Kramer. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Daly, Jonathan W. Autocracy under Siege:  Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–​1905. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. Dan, Fedor. The Origins of Bolshevism. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. David-​Fox, Michael. Revolution of the Mind:  Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–​1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. David-​Fox, Michael. Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Union, 1921–​1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Delevskii, Iu., ed. Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov: istoriia odnogo podloga. Berlin: Epokha, 1923. Di Geshikhte Fun Bund. 5 vols. New York: Undzer Zayt, 1960. Dolbilov, M. D., and A. I. Miller. Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. Dornel, Laurent. La France hostile:  socio-​histoire de la xénophobie, 1870–​1914. Paris:  Hachette littératures, 2004. Dornemann, Luise. Clara Zetkin: Ein Lebensbild. Berlin: Dietz, 1957. Douds, Lara. Inside Lenin’s Government:  Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Dyhouse, Carol. No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–​1939. London: UCL Press, 1995. Eklof, Ben, and T. A. Saburova. A Generation of Revolutionaries:  Nikolai Charushin and Russian Populism from the Great Reforms to Perestroika. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Elwood, Ralph Carter. “How Complete Is Lenin’s Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii?” Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (1979): 97–​105. Elwood, Ralph Carter. “Lenin and Armand: New Evidence on an Old Affair.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 43, no. 1 (2001): 49–​65. Elwood, Ralph Carter. Roman Malinovsky, a Life without a Cause. Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1977. Elwood, Ralph Carter. “What Lenin Ate.” Revolutionary Russia 20, no. 2 (2007): 137–​49. Ely, Christopher David. Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-​Era Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames:  War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–​1921. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2018. Epstein, Melech. Profiles of Eleven: Profiles of Eleven Men Who Guided the Destiny of an Immigrant Society and Stimulated Social Consciousness among the American People. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965.

 



Selected Bibliography

313

Esch, Michael G. Parallele Gesellschaften und Soziale Räume: Osteuropaische Einwanderer in Paris 1880–​1940. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2012. Fahrmeir, Andreas, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil. Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-​War Period. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. Farcy, Jean-​Claude. Les camps de concentration français de la première guerre mondiale. Paris: Anthropos, 1995. Fawcett, Edmund. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Fedyashin, Anton A. Liberals under Autocracy:  Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–​ 1904. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Feldman, David. Englishmen and Jews:  Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–​1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Feldman, David. “Mr. Lewinstein Goes to Parliament: Rethinking the History and Historiography of Jewish Integration.” East European Jewish Affairs 47, no. 2–​3 (2017): 134–​49. Fink, Carole. Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–​1938. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Finkel, Stuart. “The ‘Political Red Cross’ and the Genealogy of Rights Discourse in Revolutionary Russia.” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 1 (2017): 79–​118. Fishman, W. J. East End 1888:  A Year in a London Borough among the Labouring Poor. London: Duckworth, 1988. Fishman, W. J. East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–​1914. London: Duckworth, 1975. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. “Liberalism and Empire in Nineteenth‐Century International Law.” The American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 1, 2012): 122–​40. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Commissariat of Enlightenment:  Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–​1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Foshko, Katherine. “France’s Russian Moment:  Russian Emigres in Interwar Paris and French Society.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2008. Fox, Frank. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Shadowy World of Elie de Cyon.” East European Jewish Affairs 27, no. 1 (1997): 3–​22. Frankel, Jonathan. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–​1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Frankel, Jonathan. Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895–​1903: The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and a Short History of the Social Democratic Movement in Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Fraser, Antonia. Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013. Frede, Victoria. “A Radical Circle Confronts a Radical Woman: M. L. Ogareva, the Westernizers, and the Problem of Individualism in the 1830s-​1840s.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 2 (2006): 161–​89. Freitag, Sabine. Exiles from European Revolutions:  Refugees in Mid-​ Victorian England. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. Frezinskii, B. Ia. Trotskii, Kamenev, Bukharin:  Izbrannye stranitsy zhizni, raboty i sudʹby. Moscow: AIRO-​XXI,  2015. Futrell, Michael. Northern Underground:  Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport and Communications through Scandinavia and Finland, 1863–​ 1917. London:  Faber and Faber, 1963. Gainer, Bernard. The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905. London: Heinemann Educationnal Books, 1972. Galai, Shmuel. “Early Russian Constitutionalism, ‘Vol’noe Slovo’ and the ‘Zemstvo Union’. A Study in Deception.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 22, no. 1 ( January 1, 1974): 35–​55.

 

314

Selected Bibliography

Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities:  Anticolonial Thought, Fin-​De-​Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Garrard, John. The English and Immigration 1880–​1910. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Gartner, Lloyd P. The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–​1914. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001. Gasparian, A. S. OGPU Protiv ROVS: Tainaia voina v Parizhe, 1924–​1939 gg. Moscow: Veche, 2008. Gautschi, Willi. Lenin als Emigrant in der Schweiz. Zurich: Einsiedeln, 1973. Getty, J. Arch. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-​Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–​1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Getty, J. Arch. “Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International.” Soviet Studies 38, no. 1 (1986): 24–​35. Getty, J. Arch, and Roberta Thompson Manning, eds. Stalinist Terror:  New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Getzler, Israel. Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967. Geyer, Dietrich. Kautskys russisches Dossier: deutsche Sozialdemokraten als Treuhänder des russischen Parteivermögens 1910–​1915. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1981. Gitelman, Zvi Y. Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–​1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Glad, John. Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics. Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1999. Gleason, J. H. The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain; a Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Glover, David. Literature, Immigration and Diaspora in Fin-​de-​Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Goebel, Michael. Anti-​Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Goldberg, David J. To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought from Its Origins to the Modern State of Israel. London: Penguin, 1996. Goldman, Wendy Z. Inventing the Enemy:  Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Gomolinski, Olivia. “Un Modèle de Médiation Culturelle et Politique: La Période Parisienne de Solomon Abramovitch Dridzo, Dit Alexandre Lozovsky (1909–​1917).” Archives Juives 34, no. 2 (2001): 17–​29. Gordon, Uri. “Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise.” Political Studies 66, no. 2 (2017): 521–​37. Grant, Kevin. “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 1 (2011): 113–​43. Grant, Ron. “British Radicals and Socialists and Their Attitudes to Russia, c. 1890–​1917.” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1984. Graur, Mina. An Anarchist “Rabbi”: The Life and Teachings of Rudolf Rocker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Green, Abigail. “The British Empire and the Jews:  An Imperialism of Human Rights?” Past & Present 199, no. 1 (May 1, 2008): 175–​205. Green, Nancy L. “To Give and to Receive: Philanthropy and Collective Responsibility Among Jews in Paris, 1880–​1914.” In The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-​Century Metropolis, edited by Peter Mandler, 197–​226. Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Green, Nancy L. The Pletzl of Paris:  Jewish Immigrant Workers in the “Belle Epoque.” New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986. Griffith, George Chetwynd. The Angel of Revolution. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1897. Grunenberg, Antonia. Die Massenstreikdebatte. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970. Guarneri, Carl. The Utopian Alternative:  Fourierism in Nineteenth-​ Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

 



Selected Bibliography

315

Guchet, Yves. Georges Valois:  L’Action Française, Le Faisceau, La République Syndicale. Paris: Erasme, 1990. Haberer, Erich. Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth Century Russia. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995. Haimson, Leopold H. The Russian Marxists & the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Haimson, Leopold H., and David J. Dallin, eds. The Mensheviks: From the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Haimson, Leopold H., Ziva Galili y Garcia, and Richard Wortman, eds. The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Halfin, Igal. From Darkness to Light:  Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Halkin, Hillel. Jabotinsky: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Hanebrink, Paul A. A Specter Haunting Europe:  The Myth of Judeo-​Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Hardy, Dennis. Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England. New York: Longman, 1979. Harris, Ruth. Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:  Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: Norton, 2019. Haupt, Georges. Socialism and the Great War:  The Collapse of the Second International. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Heller, Klaus. Revolutionärer Sozialismus und nationale Frage:  das Problem des Nationalismus bei russischen und jüdischen Sozialdemokraten und Sozialrevolutionären im Russischen Reich bis zur Revolution 1905–​07. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1977. Henderson, Robert. The Spark that Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics that Changed the World. London: I. B. Tauris, 2020. Henderson, Robert. “Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian Revolutionary Emigration: Surveillance of Foreign Political Refugees in London, 1891–​1905.” PhD diss., University of London, 2008. Heresch, Elisabeth. Geheimakte Parvus:  die Gekaufte Revolution:  Biographie. Munich:  Langen Müller, 2000. Herts, Y. Sh. Doyres Bundistn. 3 vols. New York: Undzer Tsayt, 1956. Hetherington, Philippa. “Victims of the Social Temperament:  Prostitution, Migration and the Traffic in Women from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, 1885–​1935.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014. Hildemeier, Manfred. Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei Russlands: Agrarsozialismus und Modernisierung im Zarenreich (1900–​1914). Köln: Böhlau, 1978. Hillis, Faith. “The ‘Franco-​Russian Marseillaise’:  International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin-​de-​Siècle France.” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 1 (2017): 39–​78. Hinely, Susan. “Charlotte Wilson, the ‘Woman Question,’ and the Meanings of Anarchist Socialism in Late Victorian Radicalism.” IRSH 57, no. 1 (2012): 1–​34. Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Hoerder, Dirk, and Leslie Page Moch, eds. European Migrants:  Global and Local Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Hogenhuis-​Seliverstoff, Anne. Juliette Adam, 1836–​ 1936:  l’instigatrice. Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 2002. Hollingsworth, Barry. “The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English Liberals and Russian Socialists, 1890–​1917.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 3 (1970): 45–​64. Holquist, Peter. “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-​European Context.” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 415–​450.

 

316

Selected Bibliography

Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution:  Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–​1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Holquist, Peter. “The Russian Empire as a ‘Civilized State’:  International Law as Principle and Practice, 1874–​1878.” NCEEER Working Paper, 2004. hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework 36 (1989): 15–​23. Hulse, James W. Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Irvine, William D. The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Isabella, Maurizio. Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-​ Napoleonic Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Itenberg, Boris Samuilovich. Pervyi Internatsional i Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia. Moscow: Myslʹ, 1964. Itenberg, Boris Samuilovich. Rossiia i Parizhskaia kommuna. Moscow: Nauka, 1971. Janowski, Maciej. Polish Liberal Thought up to 1918. Budapest:  Central European University Press, 2002. Jedlicki, Jerzy. A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-​Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization. New York: Central European University Press, 1999. Jensen, Richard Bach. The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–​1934. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Jensen, Richard Bach. “The International Anti-​Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the Origins of Interpol.” Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 2 (April 1, 1981): 323–​47. Johnson, Sam. “Confronting the East.” East European Jewish Affairs 36, no. 2 (December 1, 2006): 199–​211. Johnson, Sam. Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s “Jewish Question,” 1867–​1925. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Johnson, Sam. “‘A Veritable Janus at the Gates of Jewry:’ British Jews and Mr. Arnold White.” Patterns of Prejudice 47, no. 1 (2013): 41–​68. Jones, Stephen F. Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–​1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Kadish, Sharman. “Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-​Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution.” Jewish Social Studies 50, no. 3/​4 (1988): 239–​52. Kapp, Yvonne. Eleanor Marx. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972. “Kar’era P. I. Rachkovskogo. Dokumenty.” Byloe 30, no. 2 (February 1918): 78–​87. Karp, S. Ia. and Larry Wolff, eds. Le mirage russe au XVIIIe siècle. Ferney-​Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2001. Karpozilos, Kostis. “Transnational Socialism within a Nation State:  The Un-​Greekness of the ‘Greek Left.’ ” Unpublished manuscrupt, 2019. Kartsov, Iu. S. Za Kulisami Diplomatii. St. Petersburg: Nadezhda, 1908. Katz, Jacob. Out of the Ghetto:  The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–​1870. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Kaufman, A. E. “Za Kulisami Pechati.” Istoricheskii Vestnik CXXXIII ( July 1913): 97–​130. Kauffmann, Grégoire. Édouard Drumont. Paris: Perrin, 2008. Kautsky, Karl. Die Diktatur des Proletariats. Vienna: Brand & Co., 1918. Kautsky, Karl. “Slaviane i Revoliutsiia.” Iskra 18 (March 10, 1902): 1–​2. Kautsky, Karl. Terrorismus und Kommunismus. Berlin: Neues Vaterland, 1919. Kellogg, Michael. The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–​1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kelly, Aileen, M. The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Kelly, Aileen, M. Mikhail Bakunin:  A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Kemper, Michael. “Red Orientalism:  Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia.” Die Welt des Islams 50, no. 3 (2010): 435–​76.

 



Selected Bibliography

317

Kendall, Walter. The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–​21: The Origins of British Communism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–​1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Kennan, George F. “The Curious Monsieur Cyon.” The American Scholar 55, no. 4 (1986): 449–​75. Kennan, George F. The Fateful Alliance:  France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Kennan, George F. “The Mystery of the Ferdinand Documents.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 26, no. 3 ( January 1, 1978): 321–​52. Kennan, George F. Sibirʹ i ssylka. London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1901. Kern, Louis J. An Ordered Love:  Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias:  The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Khuri-​Makdisi, Ilham. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–​ 1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Kiperman, A. Ia. “Glavnye tsentry russkoi revolutsionnoi emigratsii 70-​80x godov XIX v.” Istoricheskie Zapiski 88, no. 1 (1971): 257–​95. Klier, John. Russians, Jews, and the Pogrom Crisis of 1881–​1882. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kobrin, Rebecca. Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Konishi, Sho. Anarchist Modernity:  Cooperatism and Japanese-​Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin. 2 vols. New York: Penguin Press, 2014–​2017. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Kowalski, R. “‘Fellow Travellers’ or Revolutionary Dreamers? The Left Social Revolutionaries after 1917.” Revolutionary Russia 11, no. 2 (1998): 1–​31. Kramer, Lloyd S. Lafayette in Two Worlds:  Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Krauss, Charlotte. La Russie et les Russes dans la fiction française du XIXe Siècle (1812–​1917): D’une image de l’autre à un univers imaginaire. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Krauss, Charlotte, and Tatiana Victoroff. Figures de l’émigré Russe en France au XIXe et XXe Siècle: Fiction et Réalité. New York: Rodopi, 2012. Kruhlashov, Anatolii. Drama Intelektuala: Politychni Idei Mykhaila Drahomanova. Chernivtsi, 2000. Kudriavtsev, A. S., L. L. Muravʹeva, and I. I. Sivolap-​Kaftanova. Lenin v Zheneve: pamiatnye mesta. Moscow: Izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1985. Kvashonkin, A. V. Bolʹshevistskoe rukovodstvo. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996. Lachs, Vivi. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–​1914. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. Laity, Paul. The British Peace Movement, 1870–​1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Leff, Lisa Moses. Sacred Bonds of Solidarity:  The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-​ Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Lerner, Marc H. A Laboratory of Liberty:  The Transformation of Political Culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750–​1848. Boston: Brill, 2012. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Levitas, Ruth. “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia.” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 13–​26. Lewin, Moshe. Lenin’s Last Struggle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System:  Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Lewinsky, Tamar, and Sandrine Mayoraz, eds. East European Jews in Switzerland. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2013.

 

318

Selected Bibliography

Liang, Hsi-​huey. The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Liebich, André. “At Home Abroad: The Mensheviks in the Second Emigration.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 37, no. 1–​2 (1995): 1–​13. Liebich, André. From the Other Shore:  Russian Social Democracy after 1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Lih, Lars T. “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism:  The Debates of April 1917 in Context.” Russian History 38, no. 2 (2011): 199–​242. Lih, Lars T. Lenin. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Lih, Lars T. Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Lih, Lars T. “Letter from Afar, Corrections from Up Close: The Bolshevik Consensus of March 1917.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 4 (2015): 799–​834. Lohr, Eric. Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Löwe, Heinz-​Dietrich. The Tsars and the Jews:  Reform, Reaction, and Anti-​Semitism in Imperial Russia, 1772–​1917. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. Malia, Martin E. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–​1855. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Malia, Martin E. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–​1991. New York: Free Press, 1994. Malle, Silvana. The Economic Organization of War Communism: 1918–​1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mann, Iu. V kruzhke Stankevicha: istoriko-​literaturnyi ocherk. Moscow: Detskaia lit-​ra, 1983. Marchlewicz, Krzysztof. Wielka emigracja na wyspach brytyjskich (1831–​1863). Poznan: Instytut Historii UAM, 2008. Marek, Edmond. Quand toute la France devint polonaise: L’insurrection de novembre 1830 et l’opinion française. Lille: Club Polonia-​Nord, 1994. Marks, Steven. How Russia Shaped the Modern World:  From Art to Anti-​Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Marrus, Michael Robert. The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Marrus, Michael Robert. The Unwanted:  European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​ 1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Mattioli, Aram, and Michael Graetz, eds. Krisenwahrnehmungen im Fin de siècle:  jüdische und katholische Bildungseliten in Deutschland und der Schweiz. Zurich: Chronos, 1997. Mayhall, Laura E. The Militant Suffrage Movement:  Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–​ 1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mazón, Patricia M. Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–​1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Mazower, David. Yiddish Theatre in London. London: Jewish Museum, 2003. Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Mazower, Mark. What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home. New York: Other Press, 2017. McClellan, Woodford. Revolutionary Exiles:  The Russians in the First International and the Paris Commune. London: Cass, 1978. McDermott, Kevin, and Jeremy Agnew, eds. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. McGeever, Brendan. Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Meijer, Jan Marinus. Knowledge and Revolution:  The Russian Colony in Zuerich (1870–​1873); A Contribution to the Study of Russian Populism. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1955.

 



Selected Bibliography

319

Melancon, Michael S. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-​War Movement, 1914–​ 1917. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990. Mendelsohn, Ezra. Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Merridale, Catherine. Lenin on the Train. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. Merriman, John M. Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits:  The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Époque Paris. New York: Nation Books, 2017. Merriman, John M. Massacre:  The Life and Death of the Paris Commune. New  York, Basic Books, 2014. Michels, Tony. “Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York’s Role in the Russian Jewish Workers’ Movement.” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (2009): 1–​26. Michels, Tony. A Fire in Their Hearts:  Yiddish Socialists in New  York. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2005. Miller, Sally M. “The Russian Student Colony in Zurich, 1870–​1873.” MA Thesis, University of Chicago, 1963. Moch, Leslie Page. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Morcos, Saad. Juliette Adam. Beirut: Dar al-​Maaref-​Liban, 1962. Moskovich, Wolf, V. Khazan, and S. Breuillard, eds. Evrei Rossii—​ Immigranty Frantsii. Moscow: Mosty kulʹtury, 2000. Moss, Kenneth B. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009. Muravʹeva, L. L. and I. I. Sivolap-​ Kaftanova, eds. Lenin in London:  Memorial Places. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983. Myers, Joshua. “To Dance at Two Weddings: Jews, Nationalism, and the Left in Revolutionary Russia.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2018. Naarden, B. Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia:  Perception and Prejudice, 1848–​1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale:  The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Nation, R. Craig. War on War:  Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Neilson, Keith. Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–​1917. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Nettl, John Peter. Rosa Luxemburg. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Neumann, Daniela. Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz (1867–​1914). Zurich: H. Rohr, 1987. Newman, Aubrey, ed. The Jewish East End, 1840–​1939. London:  Jewish Historical Society of England, 1981. Newton, Michael. “Nihilists of Castlebar! Exporting Russian Nihilism in the 1880s and the Case of Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or the Nihilists.” In Russia in Britain, 1880–​1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2013. Nicholls, Julia. Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871–​1885. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Nicolaevsky, Boris I. Aseff, the Spy, Russian Terrorist and Police Stool. New  York:  Kraus Reprint, 1970. Noiriel, Gérard. La Tyrannie du National:  Le Droit d’asile en Europe, 1793–​ 1993. Paris: Calmann-​Lévy,  1991. Noiriel, Gérard. Réfugiés et sans-​papiers:  la République face au droit d’asile, XIXe-​XXe siècle. Paris: Pluriel, 2012. Nolʹde, B. E. L’alliance Franco-​ Russe:  Les Origines du système diplomatique d’avant-​ guerre. Paris: Droz, 1936.

 

320

Selected Bibliography

Nord, Deborah Epstein. The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. Ostalʹtseva, Alevtina Fedorovna. Anglo-​russkoe soglashenie 1907 goda. Saratov:  Izd-​vo Sarat. Universiteta, 1977. Panavas, Ch. Borʹba bolʹshevikov protiv opportunisticheskoi teorii i politiki Bunda. Moscow: Mysl,  1972. Paperno, Irina. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Passet, Joanne. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2003. Patrikeeff, Felix. Russian Politics in Exile:  The Northeast Asian Balance of Power, 1924–​1931. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Patyk, Lynn Ellen. Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861–​ 1881. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. Pease, Edward R. The History of the Fabian Society. London: Allen & Unwin, 1925. Peregudova, Z. I. Politicheskii sysk Rossii: 1880–​1917. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000. Perl, Feliks. Dzieje ruchu socjalistycznego w zaborze rosyjskim: do powstania PPS. Warsaw: Ksia̜żka i Wiedza, 1958. Petrovsky-​Shtern, Yohanan. Lenin’s Jewish Question. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Phillips, Hugh D. Between the Revolution and the West: A Political Biography of Maxim M. Litvinov. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. Pivovarov, Nikolai. “Iz Zhizni ‘Staroi Gvardii’. Obshchestvo Starykh Bol’shevikov kak opyt politicheskoi adaptatsii revoliutsionerov (1922–​1935 g.g.).” Rossiia XXI 1 (2018): 50–​81. Poitevin, Pierre. La mutinerie de la Courtine:  les régiments russes révoltés en 1917 au centre de la France. Paris: Payot, 1963. Poliakov, Léon. The History of Anti-​Semitism. 5 vols. Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Popplewell, Richard J. Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–​1924. Portland: Frank Cass, 1995. Porter, Bernard. The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War. Rochester: Boydell Press, 1991. Porter, Bernard. The Refugee Question in Mid-​Victorian Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Praisman, Leonid. Terroristy i Revoliutsionery, Okhranniki i Provokatory. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001. Pravilova, Ekaterina. A Public Empire:  Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Rabinowitch, Alexander. Prelude to Revolution; the Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Raeff, Marc. Russia Abroad:  A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–​ 1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Randolph, John. The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Rappaport, Helen. Conspirator: Lenin in Exile. London: Hutchinson, 2009. Riga, Liliana. The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rigby, T. H. Lenin’s Government:  Sovnarkom 1917–​1922. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1979. Rigby, T. H. “The Soviet Political Elite 1917–​1922.” British Journal of Political Science 1, no. 4 (1971): 415–​36. Rodrigue, Aron. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–​1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Rogers, Colin. The Battle of Stepney: The Sidney Street Siege: Its Causes and Consequences. London: R. Hale, 1981. Romanowski, Andrzej, ed. Polski słownik biograficzny:  przeszłość, teraźniejszość, perspektywy. Krakow: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 2010.

 



Selected Bibliography

321

Roobol, W. H. Tsereteli, A  Democrat in the Russian Revolution:  A Political Biography. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976. Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso,  2015. Rothstein, Andrew. Lenin in Britain. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1970. Rougerie, Jacques. Paris libre, 1871. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971. Ruud, Charles A., and S. A. Stepanov. Fontanka 16:  The Tsars’ Secret Police. Montreal:  McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 1999. Ryan, James. “‘Revolution is War’: The Development of the Thought of V. I. Lenin on Violence, 1899–​1907.” Slavonic and East European Review 89, no. 2 (2011): 248–​73. Saunders, David. “The 1905 Revolution on Tyneside.” In The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives, edited by Anthony Heywood and Jonathan D. Smele. New York: Routledge, 2005. Schapiro, Leonard. Turgenev, His Life and Times. New York: Random House, 1978. Scharlau, Winfried. “Parvus-​Helphand als Theoretiker in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie und seine Rolle in der ersten russischen Revolution (1867–​1910).” PhD diss., University of Muenster, 1964. Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. “Attacking the Empire’s Achilles Heels:  Railroads and Terrorism in Tsarist Russia.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 (2010): 232–​53. Schlögel, Karl. Berlin—​ Ostbahnhof Europas:  Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert. Berlin: Siedler, 1998. Schults, Raymond L. Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities:  Early Mass Culture in Fin-​ de-​ Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Schweizerischer Verband der Akademikerinnen. Das Frauenstudium an den schweizer Hochschulen. Zürich: Rascher, 1928. Semenov, V. M. Po leninskim mestam v Londone. Moscow: Gos. izd-​vo polit. lit-​r y, 1960. Senchakova, L. T. “’Sviashchennaia druzhina’ i ee Sostav.” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 2 (1967): 62–​83. Senese, Donald. S. M.  Stepniak-​Kravchinskii, the London Years. Newtonville, MA:  Oriental Research Partners, 1987. Senn, Alfred Erich. Nicholas Rubakin:  A Life for Books. Newtonville, MA:  Oriental Research Partners, 1977. Senn, Alfred Erich. The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 1914–​1917. Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Service, Robert. Lenin, a Political Life. 3 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Service, Robert. “Russian Marxism and Its London Colony before the October 1917 Revolution.” Ed. Simon Dixon. In Personality and Place in Russian Culture: Essays in Memory of Lindsey Hughes, 359–​76. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2010. Shanin, Teodor. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism”: A Case. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983. Shapira, Anita, and Anthony Berris. Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Shaw, Caroline. Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Shchegolev, P. E. Okhranniki i avantiuristy. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo politkatorzhan, 1930. Sheinis, Z. Maksim Litvinov. Moscow: Progress, 1990. Sherrer, Iu., and B. V. Ananʹich, eds. Russkaia emigratsiia do 1917 goda: Laboratoriia liberalʹnoi i revoliutsionnoi mysli. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 1997. Shlapentokh, Dmitry. The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, 1865–​ 1905. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009. Shpayer-​Makov, Haia. “The Reception of Peter Kropotkin in Britain, 1886–​1917.” Albion:  A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 19, no. 3 (1987): 373–​90.

 

322

Selected Bibliography

Shtakser, Inna. The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement: Community and Identity during the Russian Revolution and Its Immediate Aftermath, 1905–​07. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Shternshis, Anna. Soviet and Kosher:  Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Shukman, H. “The Relations between the Jewish Bund and the RSDRP, 1897–​1903.” PhD diss., Oxford University, 1960. Siegel, Jennifer. For Peace and Money:  French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Siljak, Ana. Angel of Vengeance:  The Girl Assassin, the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Sinha, P. B. Indian National Liberation Movement and Russia (1905–​ 1917). New Delhi: Sterling, 1975. Slatter, John. From the other Shore:  Russian Political Emigrants in Britain, 1880–​ 1917. London: Cass, 1983. Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Šliwowska, Wiktoria. “Un Émigré Russe en France:  Ivan Golovine, 1816–​1890.” Cahiers Du Monde Russe et Soviétique 11, no. 2 (1970): 221–​43. Sloin, Andrew. The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia:  Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Sloin, Andrew. “The Politics of Crisis:  Economy, Ethnicity, and Trotskyism in Belorussia.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 1 (2014): 51–​76. Smith, Jeremy. The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–​23. New  York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Snyder, Timothy. Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe:  A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-​Krauz, 1872–​1905. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace:  Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-​ and-​ Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Sokolov, B. V. Parvus: denʹgi i krovʹ revoliutsii. Moscow: Veche, 2016. Spitzer, Yannay. “Pogroms, Networks, and Migration:  The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States, 1881–​1914.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2013. Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Steger, Manfred B. The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism. New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1997. Steklov, Iu. “V Ssylke i v Emigratsii (Ideinye Konflikty).” Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia 5, no. 17 (1923): 193–​250. Steinberg, Mark D. The Russian Revolution, 1905–​1921. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Stites, Richard. The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-​Napoleonic Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams:  Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stites, Richard. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–​1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia. New York: Grove Press, 2003. Strakhova, Anastasiia. “Imagining Emigration: Crossing the Borders of Russian Jewry during the Era of Mass Migration, 1881–​1914.” PhD diss., Emory University, in progress. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-​Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Surh, Gerald D. “Russian Jewish Socialists and Antisemitism:  The Case of Grigorii Aronson.” Patterns of Prejudice 51, no. 3–​4 (2017): 253–​68.

 



Selected Bibliography

323

Surovtseva, N. N, and R. Z. Iunitskaia. Vospominaniia o vtorom s”ezde RSDRP. Moscow: Izd-​vo polit, lit-​r y, 1973. Szajkowski, Zosa. Antisemitizm in der Frantseyzisher arbeter-​bavegung:  fun Furyerizm bizn sof Drayfus-​afere, 1845–​1906. New-​York, 1948. Szajkowski, Zosa. Etyudn tsu der geshikhte fun ayngevandertn yidishn yishev in Frankraykh. Paris: Sh. Fridman, 1937. Tcherikower, E. “Peter Lavrov and the Jewish Socialist Emigres.” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 7 (1952): 132–​45. Tobias, Henry Jack. The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972. Todorova, Maria. The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins: Imagining Utopia, 1870s-​1920s. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Tombs, Robert. The Paris Commune, 1871. London: Longman, 1999. Torres, Anna Elena. ““Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”:  Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature.” PhD diss., University of California–​Berkeley, 2016. Tosato-​Rigo, Danièle, et  al, eds. Shveitsariia-​Rossiia, 1813–​1955:  Kontakty i Razryvy. Berne:  P. Haupt, 1994. Tudor, H., and J. M. Tudor, eds. Marxism and Social Democracy:  The Revisionist Debate, 1896–​ 1898. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Turton, Katy. Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1870–​ 1940. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Ulrich, Jürg. Kamenev:  Der gemässigte Bolschewik:  Das kollektive Denken im Umfeld Lenins. Hamburg: VSA-​Verlag,  2006. Ury, Scott. Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Van Ree, Erik. “Stalin’s Bolshevism: The First Decade.” International Review of Social History 39, no. 3 (1994): 361–​81. Veidlinger, Jeffrey. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater:  Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Venturi, Franco. Roots of Revolution; a History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. New York: Knopf, 1960. Vernitski, Anat. “Russian Revolutionaries and English Sympathizers in 1890s London: The Case of Olive Garnett and Sergei Stepniak.” Journal of European Studies 35, no. 3 (2005): 299–​314. Viola, Lynne. Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial:  Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Vital, David. Zionism, the Formative Years. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Waddington, Patrick. “Turgenev and Pauline Viardot: An Unofficial Marriage.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 26, no. 1 (1984): 42–​64. Walicki, Andrzej. Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Walkowitz, Judith R. “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (October 1, 1982): 543–​74. Wandycz, Piotr S. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–​1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984. Wayland-​Smith, Ellen. Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-​Set Table. New York: Picador, 2018. Weill, Claudie. Les cosmopolites: socialisme et judéité en Russie, 1897–​1917. Paris: Syllepse, 2004. Weill, Claudie. Étudiants russes en Allemagne, 1900–​1914: quand la Russie frappait aux portes de l’Europe. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Weinberg, Robert. “Demonizing Judaism in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.” Slavic Review 67, no. 1 (2008): 120–​53. Weinberg, Sonja. Pogroms and Riots: German Press Responses to Anti-​Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia (1881–​1882). New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Weisser, Henry. British Working-​Class Movements and Europe: 1815–​48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975.

 

324

Selected Bibliography

Wertheimer, Jack. “The Auslanderfrage at Institutions of Higher Learning.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27 (1982): 187–​215. Wertheimer, Jack. “Between Tsar and Kaiser:  The Radicalization of Russian-​Jewish University Students in Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 28 (1983): 329–​50. Wertheimer, Jack. Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. White, Jerry. Rothschild Buildings:  Life in an East End Tenement Block, 1887–​ 1920. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Wiener, Joel H., ed. Papers for the Millions:  The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Williams, Robert Chadwell. Culture in Exile:  Russian Emigrés in Germany, 1881–​1941. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972. Willimott, Andy. Living the Revolution:  Urban Communes & Soviet Socialism, 1917–​ 1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Wolfe, Bertram. Three Who Made a Revolution. New York, Dell, 1964. Wood, Elizabeth A. The Baba and the Comrade:  Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Woodcock, George. The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. New York: Kraus Reprint Co, 1970. Zamoyski, Adam. Holy Madness:  Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776–​ 1871. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999. Zeman, Z. A. B., and Winfried B. Scharlau. The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helpland (Parvus) 1867–​1924. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Zimmerman, Joshua D. Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–​1914. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernising World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

 

INDEX

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page number. Action Française, 132 Adam, Juliette, 127–​28, 132; and Drumont, 131, 132; and Franco-​Russian alliance, 147–​48; and Rachkovskii, 129–​30 Adler, Hermann (Chief Rabbi), 75, 121–​22 Adler, Victor, 91f agents provocateurs. See double agents Aksel’rod, Nadezhda, 48 Aksel’rod, Pavel: as artisanal kefir maker, 46; on Bolshevism, 217–​18, 228, 230; on Bund, 93, 94, 157–​58; conversion to Marxism, 61; vs. Drahomanov, 56; on European labor movement, 54; in Geneva, 38–​40; in Iskra group, 170–​71; on Jewish question, 50, 63; and Kautsky, 61, 186; on Lenin, 176–​77; Lepeshinskii on, 176; and Martov, 233–​34; and Mensheviks, 184, 188; outbreak of World War I and, 203; solidarity of colony life and, 54; and Vil’na radical circle, 87; wife of, 48 Aleksinskii, G. A., 206 Alexander II (tsar of Russia): assassination of, 38, 79–​80, 113, 119; reforms under, 25, 28; and Zurich colony, 34–​35 Alexander III (tsar of Russia), 59 Alexopolous, Golfo, 246 Aliens Act of 1905, Britain, 145, 197 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 67, 75, 122 anarchism/​anarchists: Bakunin and, 17–​18, 25, 26, 31–​32; bomb plots and public concerns about, 133, 135, 136; expropriation tactic adopted by, 190–​91; internationalism of, 2–​3; Jack the Ripper portrayed as, 143; Jewish, in London, 92; Kropotkin and, 63–​64, 104–​5, 113; Lenin borrowing from,

213; vs. Marxists, 135, 157; mass media used to discredit, 126; packaging for bourgeois citizens, 104–​5; party superstructures created by, 190; Proudhon and, 15; Rocker and, 73; Rome Conference on threat of (1898), 149–​50; Russian colonies and, 1–​2; Russian Jews and, 75–​76, 76f; schisms in early 20th century, 195; spread to Zurich colony, 31–​ 32; St. Petersburg Conference on threat of (1904), 150, 151; terrorist attacks in early 1890s, 124; women, 114; World War I and demise of, 205; vs. Zionism, 93 Anarchy and Nihilism (pamphlet), 131 Andrieux, Louis, 118, 119, 126, 128–​29, 138 Angel of Revolution, The, 108, 112 Annenkov, Pavel, 15, 20–​21, 23 Ansky, S., 50 anti-​colonialism/​anti-​imperialism: Bolshevism and, 7, 200–​1; Lenin and, 199–​200, 222; Russian colonies and, 5–​6, 54–​55, 111, 199–​ 200; Second International and, 199 antisemitism: and assault on refugee rights, 139, 144–​45; Bakunin and, 49; and blame for bomb plots of 1889-​90, 135–​36, 137f; Bolsheviks and, 225; and conspiracy theories, 130–​31, 132, 227–​28, 240–​41; European, 121, 131–​32; Jewish particularism blamed for, 50; Lenin on, 167–​68, 223; Okhrana and, 141–​ 42, 158; political mobilization in early 20th century and, 159; pro-​tsarist agitators and, 130–​32, 135–​36, 141–​44; radicals and, 49, 50; rise in 1880s, and Western Jews’ anxieties, 121; Russian-​Jewish migrants and, 67; Russian Marxists and, 157–​58. See also pogroms

325

 

326 I n d e

Arbeter fraynd (newspaper), 73–​76; demise of, 205; Lavrov on, 115; motto of, 224; on Paris Commune, 79; and revolutionary culture, 78, 81; Russian revolutionary classics in, 80–​81 Armand, Inessa, 175–​76, 201 Armenians, in émigré communities, 41, 48–​49; critique of imperialism, 199; expanding networks of, 190; factionalism of, 63, 195; in Geneva, 48–​49, 61–​62; Marxist circle of, 61–​62; in Paris, 40 Aronson, Grigorii, 192–​93 asylum regimes, in Europe, 20–​21, 98, 101–​ 3; in 1830s, 19–​20; in 1880s, 38–​40; administrative expulsions as subversion of, 120; anxieties about radical refugees and, 119–​20, 139–​40; European public’s support for, 132, 138–​39; failed revolutions of 1848 and, 23; Russian efforts to undermine, 118–​ 19, 139–​44, 149–​51; self-​serving aspects of, 102–​3, 103f. See also specific countries Austria: and Polish émigrés, 23; Russian communities in, 41, 160–​61; Russian residents in, World War I and, 201–​2; in World War I, 210–​11, 227. See also Vienna Austro-​Marxists: and Bund, 89–​90, 157; Lenin’s critiques of, 200. See also Kautsky, Karl autocracy. See tsarist regime Azev, Evno, 60, 191, 192 Bakunin, Mikhail, 14–​15; antisemitism of, 49; deported to Russia, 23; disillusionment with Western Europe, 23–​24; European revolutions of 1848 and, 21–​22, 23; on failure of Paris Commune, 33–​34; life in exile, 15–​16, 20–​21, 23, 35; and Marx, 17, 24, 25–​26, 114; and Nechaev, 26–​27; Paris Commune and, 27; political program of, 17–​ 18, 21, 24, 25; rivalry with Lavrov, 33–​34, 35; younger generation of émigrés and, 25, 26; and Zurich colony, 31–​32, 33–​34 Balabanova, Anzhelika, 46; and Bolshevik party, 228, 237; and Comintern, 231, 233; and Italian socialist party, 115; on Lenin, 206; radicalization of, 53; return to life in exile, 237; on RSDRP’s fifth congress (1907), 185–​ 86; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205 Basel, Switzerland: Russian émigrés in, 116, 160; Second International in (1912), 198–​99 Bebel, August, 91f, 200 Bedford Park experimental community, London, 108 Belarus: radical agitation in, 158–​59. See also Minsk Belgium: RSDRP’s second congress in, 169; Russian colony in, 41, 44, 195–​96 Berlin, Germany: mass expulsion of Russian Jews from, 197; Russian colony in, 160, 168, 196–​ 97; Russian émigrés in, after Revolution of 1917, 239; Russian students in, 41

x

Bern, Switzerland: Lenin in, 201–​2; Russian colony in, 38–​40, 41–​42, 57–​58; Second International in (1920), 230 Berner Street Club, Whitechapel, 73–​74, 75–​76, 80, 115; murder associated with, 143; Okhrana agents infiltrating, 139 Bernstein, Eduard, 61, 116–​17 Besant, Annie, 99, 109–​10 “Bible and the Bomb, The” (short story), 141–​42 Bint, Henri, 242–​43 Bismarck, Otto von, 116 Bloch, Ernst, 4 Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 172, 194 Bolshevik regime (Soviet state): challenges facing, 215; Civil War and, 220, 221; colonies as model for, 216–​17, 218, 221; as concrete utopia, 8, 228; conflicts within, 8, 215–​16, 243–​44; contradictions of, 221, 224, 226, 231–​32; efforts to export revolution, 9, 226, 228, 230, 231; emancipation campaigns of, 222, 232–​33; emigration from, 237, 239–​41; émigré heritage and, 215, 241–​42; exclusion of non-​Bolshevik parties from, 215–​16; Kronstadt rebellion and, 235; nationality policy of, 233; October Revolution of 1917 and, 214–​15; official histories of, 242; and one-​party state, creation of, 235–​37; radical critics of, 217–​18, 228–​30, 233–​36, 237; relations with outside world, 226, 231, 242; repression of political rivals, 218–​20, 233–​34, 235–​36, 237; show trials under, 235–​36, 246; use of violence by, 218–​20, 228, 235, 236 Bolshevism/​Bolsheviks: activists of Jewish origin and, 188, 189, 225, 233; anti-​colonial platform of, 7, 200–​1; assimilationist stance of, 188–​89; cooptation of Jewish socialism by, 223–​24; crisis of Russian colonies and, 184; dogmatic clarity of, 236–​37; double agents in, 191, 192; and emancipatory campaigns, 195, 201, 213, 221–​26; émigré heritage and, 7–​8, 155–​56, 209–​10, 213, 215–​17, 220–​21, 225–​26, 231–​32, 241–​42; expropriation used by, 187–​88, 196–​97; February Revolution of 1917 and, 211; growth in Russia, 181, 214, 232; internationalism of, 226; internment during World War I, 226–​27; as Jewish conspiracy, theory of, 227–​28, 240–​41; Jewish question and, 192–​93, 222–​24, 225; Krakow as new intellectual center of, 194–​95, 200, 201–​2, 204; Lenin and, 155–​56, 170–​71, 172–​74; Marxist ideology and, 155; membership among émigrés, 228; membership in Russia, 181, 214; vs. Mensheviks, 174, 177–​78, 181–​82, 185–​90, 233–​34; as millenarian cult, theory of, 155; national question and,

 



Index

188–​89, 192–​93, 200–​1, 224–​25, 233; non-​Marxist parties emulating, 190–​91; and October Revolution of 1917, 214–​15; original members of, 172, 173f, 176, 188; origins of, explanations for, 8–​9; origins of term, 170–​71; Paris as intellectual center of, 186; patriarchal culture of, 173f, 175–​76, 217, 224, 232–​33; in post-​1905 period, 184; purges of Jewish members of, 233; rhetorical violence of, 189–​90; Russian colonies and, 1–​2, 7, 8–​9, 155–​56; schisms within, 194–​95, 215–​16; scholarship on, 7; severe discipline of, 186–​87, 216; surprising victory in Russia, 209–​10; and Third International, 9, 231; transformation in 1920s, 241; universalism of, 192–​94, 233; victory in Civil War, 231–​32; women in, 175–​76, 217, 224; and women’s rights, 195, 201, 213. See also Bolshevik regime; Old Bolsheviks Bonch-​Bruevich, Vladimir, 155–​56, 172, 174–​75, 178, 216 Borochov, Ber, 77 Boulanger, Georges, 127, 132 Brenner, Yosef Chaim, 193, 196 Britain: Aliens Act of 1905 in, 145, 197; asylum policies of, 19–​20, 25, 40, 101–​2, 119, 139–​ 40; left in, revival in 1880s, 114–​15; Okhrana activities in, 139, 140–​42; open borders by late 19th century, 44; police in, on Bolshevik success, 209; police surveillance of émigré communities in, 117–​18; Polish exiles in, after revolt of 1830, 19–​20, 23; public opinion of Russian émigrés in, 102–​3; public opinion of Russian émigrés in, shift in, 137, 141, 144–​ 46, 197; Red Scare in, 226–​27; relocation of Russian émigrés to, 138–​39, 140; repatriation of Russian émigrés after February Revolution of 1917 and, 210; Rome Conference on anarchist threat (1898) and, 149–​50; and Russia, cooperation between, 147–​48, 185; Russian colonies in, 3–​4; Russian exiles in, outbreak of World War I and, 204–​5; Russian government’s pressure on, 119; Russian-​ Jewish migrants in, 67, 145; St. Petersburg Conference on anarchist threat (1904) and, 150. See also London Brodetsky, Selig, 71–​72 Brussels, Belgium: RSDRP’s second congress in, 169; Russian colony in, 44, 195–​96 Bukharin, Nikolai: and Bolshevik regime, 215–​ 16, 221, 228; on Bolshevism, 186–​87; on nationalism, 204; radical insurgencies after World War I and, 228; and right opposition, 245; Stalin’s purges and, 245–​46 Bulgaria, Russian colony in, 41 Bund (Jewish Labor Bund): Austro-​Marxists and, 89–​90, 157; Bolshevik seizure of power and,

327

217–​18; and cross-​border smuggling networks, 88–​89, 90, 159, 164; disillusioned Bolsheviks joining, 192–​93; double agents in, 191; in early Soviet state, 223, 233, 246; economist newspapers published by, 158–​59; émigré heritage and, 88; February Revolution of 1917 and, 211–​12; Foreign Committee of, 88–​89; impact on non-​Marxist parties, 92; infiltration by police, 88; vs. Iskra group, 167–​68, 169; Lenin’s critiques of, 163–​64, 167–​68, 189, 200; vs. Liberation of Labor group, 93, 94, 157–​58, 161, 162; membership in Russia, 89, 181; and Mensheviks, 195; nationalist turn in, 87–​88, 89–​90, 94, 157; origins of, 84–​85, 87–​88; outbreak of World War I and, 204; Plekhanov’s critiques of, 93, 94, 157–​58, 167–​68; poster of revolutionary heroes, 90, 91f; after Revolution of 1905, 184–​85; rifts within, 93–​94, 195; and RSDRP, 90, 92, 93, 157, 167–​68, 179, 185; at RSDRP’s second congress, 169; and Russian Marxism, 87, 90, 157–​58; and worker mobilization, 161; vs. Zionists, 93, 157 Burtsev, Vladimir: investigation of double agents by, 192; investigation of Okhrana by, 180; on Lenin as double agent, 192; Okhrana’s attempts to capture, 120, 140–​41; opposition to Bolshevik regime, 217–​18, 228, 240–​41; outbreak of World War I and, 202–​3 By What Does Man Live? (Diksztajn), 61, 80–​81, 85 Cama, Madame, 112 Canada, Trotsky in, 210 Caucasian activists: and Bolsheviks, 188; and Bund, 195; in Geneva colony, 49; Lenin on, 200–​1; on national question, 169, 188–​89, 195; in Zurich colony, 30, 31, 36. See also Georgians Caucasus: first Marxist publication in, 159; smuggling networks through, 164. See also Caucasian activists central party structure: Bolsheviks and, 221, 233; Lenin and, 155–​56, 161, 213, 232, 233; Liberation of Labor group and, 161; Marxists and, 62–​64, 195 Chaikovtsy, 33, 36, 38 Chartism,  20–​21 Chatterjee, Choi, 102–​3 Chavikchvili, Ivan, 227 Cheka (Soviet political police), 218; repression by, 218, 220, 234; successor to, 242–​43 Chernov, Viktor, 189, 194; in civil war, 220; and Constituent Assembly, 218; critique of Bolsheviks, 234; life in exile, 211, 237; outbreak of World War I and, 203, 204; and Provisional Government, 211–​12; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211–​12; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205

 

328 I n d e

Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 91f; Siberian exile of, 25; What Is to Be Done?, 24–​25,  31–​32 Chicago, Haymarket bombing in (1886), 135 Chopin, Frédéric, 16 Churchill, Winston, 191, 197, 227–​28 Citroën, André, 71–​72 Civil War, Russian, 220, 221; end of, 231–​32; and Soviet worldview, 226 colonial subjects: Russian émigrés’ defense of, 111, 112; Russian émigrés distinguished from, 102–​3. See also anti-​colonialism colonies (kolonii), Russian, 1; in 1860s, 3–​4, 29; in 1870s-​1880s, 38–​42; alternative lifestyles of, influence on host societies, 97; and anti-​colonial activism, 5–​6, 54–​55, 111, 199–​200; and Bolshevism, 1–​2, 7, 8–​9, 155–​56; communal infrastructure of, 5, 53–​54; complexity of, 4; as concrete utopias, 4–​5, 6, 10, 13–​14, 31, 36, 37, 247–​48; conflicts in, 2, 6–​7, 37, 56–​58, 63–​64, 94, 157, 158, 159, 189–​90, 194, 213, 236–​37; crisis in early 20th century, 155–​58, 161, 183–​84, 201; cross-​border networks of, 5–​6, 41, 55–​56; cross-​cultural exchanges in, 61; defining elements of, 29, 42; demographics of, 41–​42, 160; double agents infiltrating, 58–​60, 130, 191–​92; egalitarianism of, 29–​30, 46; emancipated women in, 5, 13, 46–​48, 47f, 99, 109–​10, 114; and emancipatory campaigns, 2, 5, 6–​7, 9, 46–​52, 53–​54, 78–​79, 86, 107–​12, 157; European liberalism and, 5–​6, 9, 32, 36, 98, 107–​9, 122–​23; expansion in early 20th century, 159–​61; experimental community modeled on, 108; and host societies, 94, 97–​98, 122; internationalism of, 5–​6, 54–​55, 108, 111–​12; Jews in, 41–​42, 45–​46, 49–​51; legacies of, 10, 239; and Lenin’s thought, 164–​65, 166, 230; liminality as source of empowerment of, 5; literary culture in, 52–​ 54, 55–​56; and Marxism, 1–​2, 8–​9, 61–​62, 63; as model for Soviet Russia, 216–​17, 218, 221; mutual aid associations in, 5, 30, 44–​45; and nationalist struggles, 48–​49, 54, 111–​12; non-​Russian ethnic minorities in, 48–​51; October Revolution of 1917 and, 226; origins of term, 5; police surveillance of, European, 117–​18, 124, 138, 146, 156; police surveillance of, tsarist, 7, 58–​60; and revolutionary activism, 1–​2; and Revolution of 1917, 13–​14, 209–​10; Russian diplomatic campaign against, 118–​19; Russophile activists’ campaign against, 124–​32, 133–​35; secularism of, 44; and socialism, 1–​2, 113; and Society of Old Bolsheviks, 241–​42;

x

solidarities of, 5, 6, 29–​30, 32, 44–​46, 51–​ 52, 53–​54; spatial elements and utopian potential of, 5–​6; transformations in early 20th century, 151, 194, 195–​96; tsarist regime and, 38; unification initiatives of, 160–​61; university students and, 28–​31, 38–​40; use of term, 4; violent turn in early 20th century, 190–​92; Western observers’ interest in, 97–​98; and working-​class Jewish immigrants, 65, 66, 72–​84; World War I and, 201–​3, 204–​5; and Zionism, 1, 7, 51, 196. See also specific colonies/​cities Commissariat(s), Soviet: dysfunction of, 232; émigré heritage and, 216–​17, 220; one-​man management replacing, 232 communal life: in Bedford Park experimental community, 108; in Iskra group, 162–​63; in Russian colonies, 5, 53–​54; in Soviet Russia,  216–​17 Communist International (Comintern), 231; affiliates of, 231; creation of, 231. See also Third International Communist Manifesto (Marx), 15, 81, 89 concrete utopia(s), 4; Paris Commune as, 27; Russian colonies as, 4–​5, 6, 10, 13–​14, 31, 36, 37, 247–​48; Siberian exile camps as, 6; Soviet state as, 8, 228; working-​class immigrants and, 66 Confession of a Nihilist, The (pamphlet), 129–​30 conflicts (skloki): agents provocateurs and, 60; alternative lifestyles and, 22; within Bolshevik party/​regime, 8, 194–​95, 215–​16, 243–​44; between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, 174, 177–​78, 181–​82, 185–​90, 233–​34; within Bund, 93–​94, 195; emancipatory campaigns and, 57–​58, 157–​58, 192–​94; between émigrés and host nations, 22–​24, 196–​98; exile and, 2–​3; Iskra group and, 167–​71; among Jewish political activists, 83–​84, 93–​94; Lenin and, 2, 156; Marx and, 2–​3, 24; Marxists and, 63–​64, 155–​56, 157–​58, 161; within Menshevik party, 184, 195, 206, 207f, 241; national question and, 56, 206; within non-​Marxist parties, 195; Paris Commune and, 27; among Polish émigrés, 63; among postrevolutionary émigrés, 241; among radical émigrés in Geneva, 26–​27; in radical networks, outbreak of World War I and, 204, 206; and restoration of revolutionary potential, Lenin on, 204, 206; after Revolution of 1905, 180–​81, 182, 184–​85; after Revolution of 1917, 8, 215–​16, 243–​ 44; in RSDRP, 157, 177–​78, 183–​84, 204; Russian colonies and, 2, 6–​7, 37, 56–​58,

 



Index

63–​64, 94, 157, 159, 189–​90, 194, 213, 236–​37; within Second International, 198–​ 99; within SPD, 116–​17; and Stalin’s rise to power, 243, 247; in working-​class Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, 83–​84; in Zurich colony, 31–​32, 33–​34, 35 Congress of Soviets: Mensheviks expelled from, 219–​ 20; October Revolution of 1917 and, 214–​15 Conrad, Joseph: Secret Agent, The, 144; Under Western Eyes, 98, 144 conspiracy theories: exiles’ commitment to emancipation of Jews and, 7; on Jewish kahal, 130–​31, 132; on Jews and Bolshevism, 227–​28,  240–​41 Constituent Assembly, 218 Corday, Charlotte, 106 courts: in Russian colonies, 5; in Soviet state, show trials by, 235–​36, 246 Cyon, Élie de (Il’ia Tsion), 126–​27, 128, 130, 149; on anarchist terror, 135; on autocracy as ideal form of government, 131; on Catholic-​ Orthodox reconciliation, 148–​49; and Franco-​Russian alliance, 147–​48; and League of Patriots, 132 Czartoryski, Adam, 16 Dan, Fedor, 177; Bolshevik regime and, 218, 220, 235–​36; Mensheviks and, 177, 184, 188; outbreak of World War I and, 203; return to life in exile, 237 Dan, Lidiia, 49; Bolshevik regime and, 220; emigration to New York, 240; in Iskra group, 162–​63, 168; on Lenin, 164, 168; on Mensheviks, 186; Revolution of 1905 and return to Russia, 179 Dashnak party, 63 Daudet, Alphonse, 105–​6 Déroulède, Paul, 132 dialectical materialism, Marxism and, 4, 63 dictatorship of proletariat: Kautsky on, 229; Lenin on, 230; Second International’s rejection of, 230; Trotsky on, 236 Diksztajn, Szymon, 61, 80–​81, 85 Dimanshtein, Semen, 223, 242, 246 discussion circles (kruzhki), radical, 14–​15, 30, 31 Dmitrieva, Elizaveta, 27 double agents (agents provocateurs): Bolshevik regime’s treatment of, 218–​19; and Paris bomb plot of 1890, 133–​36; in Russian colonies, 58–​60, 130, 191–​92 Drabkina, Feodosiia, 172, 176 Drahomanov, Mykhailo: and emancipation of women, 48; and federalist schemes, 54; in Geneva, 38–​40, 48–​49; Holy Brotherhood and, 59; on Jewish question, 57; polemics

329

against Lavrov, 56, 57, 58; on revolutionary terrorism, 113; visit to Zurich colony, 31 Drumont, Édouard, 131, 132, 135–​36 Dumas, Alexandre (fils),  127–​28 Dzierżyński, Feliks, 218, 220 East End (Whitechapel) neighborhood, London, 67–​68; Anarcho-​Communists in, 92; Berner Street Club in, 73–​74, 75–​76, 80, 115; Bundists in, 89; close-​knit community of, 69; efforts to reform, 121; emancipation dreams in, 69; ethnic economy of, 65, 69; Jack the Ripper in, 67–​68, 143; Lenin’s agitation in, 163; libraries/​reading rooms in, 78, 80f, 90; media campaign targeting, 143, 145–​46; Okhrana agents infiltrating, 139; philanthropy in, 70, 71, 75; progressive European women and, 110–​11; public opinion on, shift in, 144–​45; resettlement of inhabitants to North America, 122; revolutionary agitation in, 82–​83, 163; Sidney Street Siege in, 191, 196–​97; socialists in, 75–​76; strikes in, 73–​74; Western observers on, 98, 106; working-​class Jewish immigrants in, 65–​66, 68–​69 economism/​economists, 86; growing strength of, 90; vs. Marxists, 93, 116, 157; Vil’na radical circle and, 86, 87 egalitarianism: of Russian colonies, 29–​30, 46; socialist ideas and, 72–​73 Eisner, Clara, 114. See also Zetkin, Clara Eliot, George, 109 emancipation (emancipatory campaigns): Bolsheviks and, 195, 201, 209–​10, 213, 221–​26; and doctrinal conflicts, 57–​58; emigration and, 18, 21–​22, 37, 42–​46; Marxist position on, 63; Paris Commune and, 27; Russian colonies and, 2, 5–​7, 9, 46–​52, 78–​79, 86, 107–​12; Russian exiles of 1830s-​1860s and, 20–​22; Soviet state and, 222, 232–​33; vs. universalism, 6–​7, 63, 93. See also specific campaigns emancipation of Jews: in 18th-​century Europe, 51, 130–​31; Aksel’rod on, 50, 63; Bolsheviks on, 192–​93, 222–​24, 225; Bund’s position on, 87–​88, 89–​90, 94; diverse approaches to, 50–​ 51; doctrinal disputes regarding, 57, 157–​58, 192–​94; exiles’ commitment to, and Jewish conspiracy theories, 7; Marxists on, 157–​58; Russian colonies and, 5, 49–​51, 53–​54, 157; Russian émigrés and struggle for, 20–​22, 92–​ 93; vs. universal emancipation, 93; working-​ class immigrant neighborhoods and, 69–​70. See also Jewish nationalism emancipation of serfs, in Russia, 25; calls for, 16

 

330 I n d e

emancipation of women: activism of 1860s and, 24–​25; Bolsheviks and, 195, 201, 213; Jewish proletarians and, 78–​79, 110–​11; Menshevik position on, 195; Paris Commune and, 27; personal cost of, 58; resistance to, 57–​58; Russian colonies and, 5, 13, 46–​48, 47f, 53–​54, 99, 109–​10, 114; Russian exiles of 1830s-​1860s and, 17, 22; Soviet state and, 222, 232–​33; in Zurich universities/​colony, 13, 28–​29, 30–​31, 34–​ 35. See also feminism emancipation of workers: Paris Commune and, 27; Polish Socialist Party (PPS) on, 63 emigration: emancipatory potential of, 18, 21–​22, 37, 42–​46; legacies of, 239. See also émigré heritage émigré(s): German, in Switzerland, 61; political, in 19th-​century Europe, 2–​3; use of term, 4; and utopias, 3, 4, 247–​48. See also émigrés, Russian; Polish émigrés émigré heritage: and Bolsheviks, 7–​8, 155–​56, 209–​10, 213, 215–​17, 220–​21, 225–​26, 231–​ 32, 241–​42; and Bund, 88; and Soviet state, 215,  241–​42 émigrés, Russian: asylum protections for, 20–​21, 98, 101–​3; Bolshevik regime and, 237; bomb plots of 1889-​1890 and attitudes toward, 136; and European hosts, relationship of, 23–​ 24, 94, 196–​98; European public’s opinion of, shift in, 129–​30, 131, 137–​38, 144–​47, 151; European public’s support for, 44, 101–​3, 104–​5, 132; and European radicals, 17, 107–​8, 112–​17, 132, 197–​98, 200; failed revolutions of 1848 and, 23–​24; February Revolution of 1917 and, 207–​8, 209, 210, 226; first generation of (1830s-​1860s), 3, 15–​18, 20–​22, 23–​24, 25–​28; and Jewish emancipation, struggle for, 20–​22, 92–​93; journeys westward, 42–​43; Marx and, 20–​21, 24, 61; October Revolution of 1917 and, 226, 239; and Polish exiles, alliances of, 16–​17, 21; postrevolutionary, 183–​84, 237, 239–​41; Red Scare and, 226–​28, 231; repatriation after February Revolution of 1917, 210–​11; restrictions on rights of, 23–​24, 67, 145, 197; after Revolution of 1905, 183–​84; Russian diplomatic campaign against, 118–​19; Russophile activists’ campaign to discredit, 124–​32; second generation of (1860s-​ 1880s), 3, 25, 38; subaltern consciousness of, 201; Western liberal discourse on, 97–​104, 105–​6, 107–​9, 114–​15; World War I and, 201–​3, 204–​5. See also colonies Engels, Friedrich, 20–​21, 27–​28, 91f; on revolutionary terrorism, 113; Russian perspectives and evolution of theories of,  113–​14

x

England. See Britain ethnic minorities. See non-​Russian ethnic minorities Europe: asylum regimes in, 19–​21, 38–​40, 98, 101–​3; defenders of tsarist regime in, 124–​25, 126–​28; emancipation of Jews in, 51, 130–​31; illiberal turn in late 19th century, 122–​23, 124–​25; political ideas from, influence on Russian intellectuals, 14–​15, 16; public opinion of Russian émigrés in, shift in, 129–​30, 131, 137–​38, 144–​47, 151; radicals in, Russian émigrés and, 17, 107–​8, 112–​17, 132, 197–​98, 200; Red Scare in, 226–​28; restrictive policies toward immigrants, 22–​23, 67, 145, 197; revolutionary terrorism in, alarm over, 133–​ 38, 134f; revolutions of 1848 in, 8, 21–​22, 23; revolutions of 1918-​19 in, 228–​29; and Russia, anti-​anarchist accords with, 149–​50, 151, 156; and Russia, entangled history of, 9, 14–​15; Russian émigrés’ disillusionment with, 23–​24; support for Russian émigrés in, 44, 101–​3, 104–​5, 132. See also liberalism; specific countries Evkom, 223 Evsektsiia, 223, 242, 246 exile(s): conflict associated with, 2–​3; and opportunities for political organization, 239; use of term, 4. See also émigré(s) expropriation tactic: Bolsheviks and, 187–​88, 196–​97; European hosts’ response to, 196–​ 97; non-​Marxist parties adopting, 190–​91; Soviet state and, 213 Ezhov, Sergei, 159, 237, 246 Fabian Society, 99, 111, 114–​15 family: exiles’ attempts to reform, 17, 22, 30–​31, 47–​48, 78–​79; ties among Old Bolsheviks, 217 Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 99 February Revolution of 1917, 207; émigré response to, 207–​8, 209, 210, 226; and Lenin’s return to Russia, 2, 209, 210–​11 feminism: in early 1840s’ Europe, 15; Russian colonies and, 5–​6, 109–​10, 114; Russian revolutionaries and, 99, 100, 104, 105–​6 Figner, Vera, 29, 30, 31, 35, 47–​48, 58 First International, 25–​26 Five Year Plan, first, 244 Flaubert, Gustave, 127–​28 Ford, Ford Madox, 107–​8 Ford, Isabella, 109–​10, 180 Foreign Committee of the Bund, 88–​89 Fotieva, Lidiia, 172, 176, 178–​79, 216 France: arrests of Russian radicals in, 118, 119–​20, 125f; asylum policies of, 19–​20, 23, 101–​2, 119, 120; bomb plots of 1889-​1890 and, 124,

 



Index

133–​36; emancipation of Jews in, 130–​31; expulsion of Russian radicals from, 140; extreme right in, pro-​tsarist agitators and, 132; July Monarchy in, 19, 20; Okhrana activities in, 128–​30, 133–​36, 180; open borders by late 19th century, 44; police in, cooperation with Okhrana, 118, 119–​20, 138, 150–​51; police surveillance of émigré communities in, 117–​18, 124, 197, 207; Polish cause championed in, 20; Polish exiles in, 19–​20, 22–​23, 25; public opinion of Russian émigrés in, shift in, 137; Red Scare in, 226, 227, 228; revolution of 1789 in, 14–​15, 130–​31; revolution of 1830 in ( July revolution), 18, 19; rise of nationalism in, 128; Rome Conference on anarchist threat (1898) and, 149–​50; and Russia, formal alliance of (1892), 147–​48; Russian colonies in, 3–​4; Russian émigrés in, after 1917, 239; Russian exiles in, outbreak of World War I and, 205; Russian government’s pressure on, 119; Russian-​Jewish migrants in, 67; Second Republic in, 21–​22; St. Petersburg Conference on anarchist threat (1904) and, 150. See also Paris France, Anatole, 127–​28 freedom. See emancipation Free Economic Society, St. Petersburg, 159 Free Russian Press Fund, London, 56 French revolution (1789), 130–​31; impact on Russian empire, 14–​15 Fritschi, the: Lavrov and, 34; in Paris, 40; in Zurich, 30–​31, 32, 35, 36 Gambetta, Léon, 127–​28 Gandhi, Leela, 107 Garnett, Constance, 109 Garnett, Olive, 108, 109, 110–​11 Gaulois, Le (newspaper), 127, 130 Gekkel’man, Abram (Landesen), 130; and British secret service, 140; and Paris bomb plot of 1890, 133–​35, 180; and Zurich bomb incident of 1889, 135 Gel’fand, Izrail’. See Parvus Gel’fman, Gessia, 91f Geneva, Switzerland: as bastion of free thought, 38–​40; Bund leaders in, 88–​89; Communards exiled to, 54–​55; Lenin’s circle in, 172, 173f, 176, 216; nationalist activists in, 48–​49; Russian Marxists in, 25–​27; Russian students in, 39f, 137–​38,  159–​60 Geneva colony, 1, 38–​40; Bolsheviks in, 172–​76; Café Landolt in, 1–​2, 7; conflicts between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in, 177–​78; expansion in early 20th century, 160; library in, 53, 174–​75; newspapers published by, 52; women in, 47f,  47–​48

331

Geneva Liberation of Labor group. See Liberation of Labor group, Geneva Georgians, in émigré communities, 41; and Bolsheviks, 188; brand of Marxism of, 159; factionalism of, 63; and Mensheviks, 188 German émigrés, in Switzerland, 61 German Idealism, 14–​15 German Social Democrats. See SPD Germany: alarm about rise of, and Russian alliances with France and Britain, 147; anti-​ socialist laws in, 112–​13, 116; Bolshevik regime’s negotiations with, 215–​16; in Franco-​Prussian war, 128; Lenin in, 162; and Lenin’s return to Russia (1917), 210–​11; Marxists’ return to, 116; police harassment of émigré communities in, 197; Polish exiles in, after revolt of 1830, 19; progressive Russian gentry in (1830s-​1840s), 15; revolution of 1918-​19 in, 228, 229–​30; Russian communities in, in late 19th century, 41, 116; Russian émigrés in, after 1917, 239; Russian-​ Jewish migrants in, 67; Russian residents in, World War I and, 201–​2; Russian students in, 28, 41, 136, 197; smuggling rings through, 43; and tsarist regime, 41. See also specific cities Germinal (Zola), 98 Gide, Charles, 91f Gladstone, William, 127 Goldman, Emma, 78–​79 Golovin, Ivan, 15, 17–​18, 20–​21, 23 Gopelson, Emmanuel, 146–​47 Gor’kii, Maksim, 224 Great Terror, 246–​48 Gusev, S. I., 172, 176 Ha’am, Ahad, 76–​77 Halle, Germany, Russian students in, 41 Hansen, Jules, 128; and Franco-​Russian alliance, 147–​48; and Rachkovskii, 129, 141 Harting, Arkadii, 133–​35. See also Gekkel’man, Abram Haymarket bombing, Chicago (1886), 135 Heidelberg, Germany, Russian students in, 28, 41 Herwegh, Georg, 17, 20–​21, 22 Herzen, Aleksandr, 14–​15; death of, 31–​32; disillusionment with Western Europe, 23–​24, 166; European revolutionaries and, 17, 24; European revolutions of 1848 and, 21–​22, 23–​24; family life of, 17, 22; first impressions of France, 16, 23; life in exile, 15–​16, 20–​21, 23, 25; and Nechaev, 26; political program of, 17–​18, 24; and Russian Free Press, 18, 56; salon of, 16; on solidarity between Russians and Poles, 17; younger generation of émigrés and, 25 Herzen, Nataliia, 17, 22

 

332 I n d e

Herzl, Theodor, 76–​77 Hillel ( Jewish sage), 81, 224 Holy Brotherhood, 59–​60 Hromada (journal), 48–​49 Hueffer, Juliet, 107–​8, 110 Hugo, Victor, 18, 119–​20 human trafficking, Jews accused of, 144–​45 Hunchak party, 61–​62, 63 Hungary: Communist revolution in (1919), 228, 230; pogroms in, 143 hunger strike: Russian émigrés and, 112; suffragettes and, 109–​10 Hyndman, Henry, 114, 180 Idel’son, Rozaliia, 48 Indian activists, Russian revolutionaries and, 112, 199 intellectuals, Russian: European political ideas of 1830s-​1840s and, 14–​15, 16; and Jewish workers, 65, 66, 72–​84; radicalism of, origins of,  8–​9 internationalism: Bolsheviks and, 226; Paris Commune and, 27; political exile and development of, 2–​3; pro-​Russian activists’ brand of, 148–​49; Russian colonies and, 5–​6, 54–​55, 108, 111–​12; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 79–​80 International Socialist Conference, Amsterdam (1904), 171 International Socialist Conference, Paris (1900), 94 International Working Men’s Association (First International),  25–​26 Irish nationalists: bombings by, 117–​18; and Russian émigrés, 111–​12 Iskra (newspaper), 162; criticism of Western socialists in, 164–​65, 166f; Lenin’s essays in, 164; Western radicals’ support for, 163 Iskra group, 162–​63; Berlin circle of, 179; vs. Bund, 167–​68, 169; Bundist smuggling networks and, 164; communal life of, 162–​ 63; conflicts involving, 167–​71; influence in Russia, 164; Lenin and, 162, 163–​64, 171; Liberation of Labor group and, 162, 163–​64, 168; new revolutionary doctrines developed in, 164, 165–​66; self-​destruction of, 171; vs. Zionists, 167, 168 Istpart, 242, 244, 245–​46 Italy: Risorgimento in, 2–​3, 21–​22, 25; Rome Conference on anarchist threat (1898), 149–​ 50; Russian colony in, 41; socialist party in, Russian émigrés and, 115; SR headquarters in, 194; Vpered! group in, 194 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 93 Jack the Ripper, 67–​68, 143 Jewish Communists, distrust of, 225

x

Jewish France (Drumont), 131 Jewish Labor Bund. See Bund Jewish nationalism: Bolshevik opposition to, 192–​ 94, 233; Bund and, 87–​88, 89–​90, 94, 157; intensification in early 20th century, 157–​58; Lenin on, 200–​1; vs. universal emancipation, 93, 192–​93. See also emancipation of Jews Jewish question. See emancipation of Jews Jewish Russia (pamphlet), 130–​31, 132 Jewish Workers’ Society, Paris, 74–​75, 78, 114, 115 Jews, attacks on. See antisemitism; conspiracy theories; pogroms Jews, Russian: and anarchism, 75–​76, 76f; Bolshevik regime and, 222–​24, 225, 234–​35; British restrictions on, 145; in Chaikovtsy, 33; in colonies, 41–​42, 45–​46, 49–​51, 193–​94; diverse backgrounds of, 68–​69; doctrinal disputes among, 83–​84, 93–​94; efforts to acculturate, 70–​72, 75; exodus from Soviet state, 234–​35; February revolution of 1917 and, 226; German restrictions on, 67; integration into Russian society, 51; in leadership of radical parties, 92, 188, 193–​ 94; Lenin’s position on, 167–​68, 189; mass expulsion from Berlin, 197; mass migration of 1860s, 3; mass migration of late 19th-​ early 20th century, 65–​67; media campaign targeting, 143, 144–​46; in Menshevik leadership, 188, 189; in New York, 74, 234–​ 35; outbreak of World War I and, 202; purges under Stalin, 246; Red Scare and, 227; resettlement to North America, 122; and revolutionary terrorism, blame for, 135–​36, 137f, 144–​45, 146, 147; as students in foreign universities, 38, 51; suffering endured by, European media on, 101; suffering endured by, Lavrov on, 82; universalist views of, 50; in Vil’na radical circle, 49–​50, 55; Western Jews and, 70–​72, 75, 76–​77, 106–​7, 121–​22; work ethic of, contradictory perceptions of, 120–​ 21. See also Pale of Settlement; working-​class Jewish immigrants Jews’ Free School, London, 70, 71–​72 Jogiches, Leon, 62, 63, 92 Judaism, socialist reimagining of, 81 kahal, conspiracy theories regarding, 130–​31, 132 Kamenev, Lev, 188; and Bolshevik regime, 215–​ 16; critiques of global imperialism, 199; February Revolution of 1917 and, 210, 212; and Lenin, 172, 194, 210, 214; outbreak of World War I and, 204; in power struggle after Lenin’s death, 243, 245; prosecution in show trial, 246; on Second International’s response to World War I, 198–​99; Stalin’s campaign against, 244, 245–​46; wife of, 217, 242

 



Index

Kameneva, Olga, 217, 242, 246 Kapital, Das (Marx), 25–​26, 61 Kara penal colony tragedy (1888-​89), 104, 109–​10 Katz, Jacob, 51 Kautsky, Karl, 91f; and Aksel’rod, 61, 186; on Alexander II’s assassination, 113; on Bolshevik regime, 229, 236; influence of, 89, 158–​59; and Lenin, 199–​200, 229–​30; and Marxism, 116; on mass strikes, 117; and Parvus, 116; on Russian revolutionary movement, 117; and SPD, 164–​65 Key, Ellen, 109 Khatsman (Weizmann), Vera, 47f, 51 Kiev, Ukraine: Jewish population of, 68–​69, 171; pogrom of 1881 in, 101; Rachkovsii in, 59–​60; Zurich commune’s influence in, 31, 33 Kirov, Sergei, 245–​46 Kishinev pogrom of 1903, 92 Kollontai, Aleksandra, 195; and Bolsheviks, 204, 215–​16, 222, 224, 235, 237; February Revolution of 1917 and, 207–​8, 212; and Lenin, 204, 232–​33; outbreak of World War I and, 201–​2, 205; on Second International’s response to World War I, 198–​99; and Shliapnikov, 212; Stalin’s purges and, 246; and women’s rights, 201; and Workers’ Opposition group, 235 Kolokol (journal), 18 Kombund,  223–​24 konspiratsiia, new revolutionary doctrine of, 161, 163, 164–​65, 191 Kopel’zon, Timofei, 85, 88–​89 Kossuth, Lajos, 20–​22 Kovalevskaia, Sofiia, 109 Koven, Seth, 107 Krakow, Poland, as new Bolshevik intellectual center, 194–​95, 200, 201–​2, 204 Krantz, Philip, 74–​75 Kravchinskii, Sergei (Stepniak): assassination by, 38; bestselling books of, 99, 100, 114; death of, 52; life in exile, 38–​41, 108, 118–​19; and Plekhanov, 44; Western commentators on, 105, 108, 110, 114–​15; and working-​class Jewish immigrants, 79–​ 81; on Zasulich, 104 Kremer, Arkadii, 85, 196; On Agitation, 86–​87; and Bund, 87; emigration of, 88–​89 Kronstadt rebellion, 235; suppression of, 235, 236, 237 Kropotkin, Petr: and anarchism, 63–​64, 104–​5, 113; arrest and trial in France, 118, 119–​20; bestselling books of, 99, 114; in Chaikovtsy, 33; disciples of, 114; life in exile, 38–​41, 120, 211; outbreak of World War I and, 202–​3; on Paris Commune, 64; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211–​12;

333

visit to Zurich colony, 31, 32–​33; Western commentators on, 102–​3, 106, 107–​8, 110–​ 11, 114–​15; wife of, 45–​46, 48; and working-​ class Jewish immigrants, 79–​81 Krupskaia, Nadezhda: and Bolsheviks, 176, 217; on émigré struggles after 1905, 183; February Revolution (1917) and, 207–​8; and Iskra commune, 162–​63; and Lenin, 171–​72, 175–​76; in London, 164–​65; outbreak of World War I and, 201–​2; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211; Siberian exile of, 162; vision for collective life in Soviet Russia, 216; and women’s journal, 201; on Zasulich, 175–​76 Krylenko, Nikolai, 218–​19 Kuliabko-​Koretskii, Nikolai, 32; escape from Russia, 43, 55; in London, 65, 66; in Zurich, 13, 29, 30 Kun, Béla, 228, 230 Kvali (periodical), 159 labor movement: European, Russian émigrés and, 54, 115; Russian, in 1880s, 84–​85. See also strikes; trade unions Labor Zionism (Poale/​Poalei Zion), 77, 184–​85,  223 Lachs, Vivi, 81 Lafayette, Marquis de, 20 Landesen. See Gekkel’man, Abram land expropriation: German communists’ calls for, 228; in Soviet state, 213 landslayt associations, 69 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 89, 91f Latvians: Bolsheviks and, 188, 190; in émigré communities, 41; Lenin on, 200–​1; in London, and Sidney Street Siege, 191; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205 Lausanne, Switzerland: Bolshevik expropriation in, 187–​88, 196–​97; Russian students in, 136,  159–​60 Lavrov, Petr (Piotr), 91f; and contraband network, 55; double agent infiltrating circle of, 130; expulsion from Paris, 118; on failure of Paris Commune, 33–​34; and Idel’son, 48; influence in Russia, 33; and Jewish particularism, 90; and Jewish Workers’ Society, 74–​75; and Liberman, 49–​50; move to London, 35, 40–​41; move to Paris, 25, 40; Paris Commune and, 27; polemics with Drahomanov, 56, 57, 58; provincial exile of, 25; rivalry with Bakunin, 33–​34, 35; at Second International, 115; on terrorist attacks, justifications for, 104; and Vpered! (newspaper), 40–​41, 65; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 65, 82; and Zurich colony, 31–​32,  33–​34 Lazare, Bernard, 121–​22

 

334 I n d e

League of Patriots, 132 League of the Rights of Man, 99 Ledru-​Rollin, Alexandre, 24 Left-​Hegelians,  17 legal Marxism, 159 Leipzig, Germany: Russian émigrés in, 1, 43; Russian students in, 41, 114 Lemberg, Ukraine: Polish and Ukrainian activists in, 41; Russian bookstores in, 56; Zionist activism in, 196 Lenin, Vladimir: and anti-​colonialism, 199–​200, 222; on antisemitism, 167–​68, 223; arrival in Petrograd (2017), 209, 210; and Bolshevik party expansion, 214; and Bolshevism, 155–​56, 170–​71, 172–​74; and Bund, critiques of, 163–​64, 167–​68, 189, 200; and centralized party organization, 155–​56, 161, 213, 232, 233; challenges to leadership of, 194; collected writings of, omissions in, 242; colonies’ influence on thought of, 230; and Communist International, 231; concrete utopia created by, 156; conflicts catalyzed by, 2, 156; dejection and rage of, 171–​72, 207; denunciation of radical critics, 235; dictatorial tendencies of, criticism of, 229–​30, 233; as double agent, suspicion of, 192; émigré heritage and, 213, 215; émigré milieu and, 163, 164–​65; European revolutions and, 228; evolving thinking of, return to Russia and, 213; February Revolution of 1917 and, 207–​8, 209; in Geneva, 1–​2, 7, 172–​73, 175–​76; Geneva circle of, 172, 173f, 176, 216; illness and death of, 243; inflammatory rhetoric of, 189, 204; inner circle of, 216; introduction to Marxist texts, 62; and Iskra group, 162, 163–​64, 168, 171; on Jewish Communists, 225; and Kautsky, 199–​200, 229–​30; and konspiratsiia doctrine, 161, 163, 164–​65, 191; in Krakow, 194–​95, 200, 201–​2; “Lessons of a Crisis, The,” 165–​66, 167; in London, 155, 162, 163, 164–​65; lover of, 175–​76, 201; and Malinowski, 191, 192, 218–​19, 242; and Martov, 168, 170, 171–​72, 220; vs. Martov, 177, 181, 206, 219–​20, 233; on Mensheviks, 170–​73, 174, 185, 189–​90, 230; in Munich, 162, 163; national concerns and, 188–​89, 200–​1, 203–​4, 213, 222, 224–​25; and October Revolution of 1917, 214–​15; “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” 170–​71, 177; open letter to Paris colony, 190; opportunism of, 187–​88, 205, 206, 212, 213–​14; outbreak of World War I and, 201–​2, 203–​4, 206; in Paris, 186; on Paris Commune, 172–​73, 181, 203–​4, 206, 212, 229–​30; patriarchal power of, 173f, 175–​77, 217, 232–​33; personality of, 168,

x

170, 172, 186–​87; and Plekhanov, 62–​63, 161, 162, 163–​64, 171; populist appeal of, 212–​13, 214; power struggle after death of, 243; Provisional Government overthrown by, 209; radical youth’s devotion to, 164; return abroad in 1907, 183; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 2, 209, 210–​11; return to Russia after Revolution of 1905, 179, 181; and RSDRP, conflicts with, 164, 171; at RSDRP’s second congress, 168–​69, 170; on Second International’s response to World War I, 198; Siberian exile of, 94, 155, 161–​62; sister of, 217; on SPD, 199–​200, 231; and Stalin, 194–​95, 200; and Trotsky, 177, 181, 203, 214–​15; ultra-​ radical tendencies of, 166, 174, 200, 205–​6, 212; universalist stance of, 192–​93; utopian vision of, 204, 206, 209, 212–​14; and Vil’na radical circle, 86–​87; and Vperedists, 194–​95, 204; Weizmann on, 193; What Is to Be Done?, 164, 165–​66; and women’s rights, 201; on World War I’s transformative potential, 203–​4, 205–​6, 212–​13, 215–​16; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205–​6; in Zurich,  201–​2 Leo XIII, Pope, 148–​49 Lepeshinskaia, Olga, 172, 174–​75, 176 Lepeshinskii, Panteleimon, 172; anti-​Menshevik cartoons by, 174, 175f, 181; in Bolshevik regime, 216; Geneva canteen operated by, 174–​75; on Lenin, 176 Leroy-​Beaulieu, Anatole, 105 “Lessons of a Crisis, The” (Lenin), 165–​66, 167 Levitskii, Vladimir, 159, 237, 246 Liber, Mark, 169, 218, 220, 237, 246 liberalism/​liberals, European, 98; anti-​anarchist accords and, 151, 156; class and racial hierarchies and, 102–​3; destabilization in late 19th century, 122–​23, 124; failed revolutions of 1848 discrediting, 8; pro-​tsarist agitators’ attacks on, 130–​31, 132; and Russian colonies, 5–​6, 9, 32, 36, 98, 107–​9, 122–​23; Russian radicalism and, 9, 98, 106 Liberation of Labor group, Geneva, 61; vs. Bund, 93, 94, 157–​58, 161, 162; and centralized party organization, 161; doctrinal ruptures in, 157; on economism, 90; and Iskra group, 162, 163–​64, 168; and SPD, 116; vs. SRs, 161; and Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, 61–​62, 90; and Vil’na radical circle, 87 Liberation of Labor group, St. Petersburg, 62–​63, 86–​87, 161, 220 Liberman, Aron, 49–​50, 55, 72–​73, 90 libraries (reading rooms), in Russian colonies, 5, 53–​54; in Brussels, 195–​96; factional wars in, 57; in Geneva, 53, 174–​75; in Paris, 78,

 



Index

84; and radicalization of students, 30, 53; in Zurich, 30, 31–​32, 34, 53 libraries (reading rooms), in working-​class Jewish neighborhoods, 78, 80f, 84, 90 Liebknecht, Karl, 91f, 163; assassination of, 230; Communist party established by, 228; and Spartacus League, 203, 206 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 115 Lih, Lars, 161 literary culture, of Russian colonies, 52–​54, 55–​56. See also libraries Lithuania: Jewish proletarians in, 85; national rights of, Bund on, 157, 171; radical workers’ circles in, 84–​85 Litvinov, Maksim, 172, 179, 188; Revolution of 1905 and, 179; and Tiflis bank robbery,  187–​88 London, England: Bedford Park experimental community in, 108; Herzen’s salon in, 16; Iskra group in, 162–​63; Jewish anarchists in, 92; RSDRP’s fifth congress in (1907), 185, 198; RSDRP’s second congress in (1903), 169; Russian Free Press in, 18; tailors’ strike in (1889), 83–​84; working-​class Russian Jews in, 65–​66, 67–​69, 75. See also East End (Whitechapel) neighborhood; London colony London colony, 40–​41, 65; expansion in early 20th century, 160; Free Russian Press Fund in, 56; Jews in, 49–​50, 196 Louis-​Philippe (French “citizen-​king”), 18, 20,  21–​22 Lozovskii, Solomon, 186, 231 Lunacharskii, Anatolii: and Bolshevik regime, 215–​16, 217; on Krupskaia, 176; and Lenin, 172, 194, 204; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211; return to Russia after Revolution of 1905, 179; on Russian Jews, 225 Luxemburg, Rosa: assassination of, 230; Communist party established by, 228; journey out of Russia, 43; PPS faction led by, 63; and SDKP, 92, 195; on Second International’s response to World War I, 198; and Spartacus League, 203, 206; and SPD, 116–​17,  166 L’viv, Ukraine. See Lemberg Maklakov, Vasilii, 43 Malia, Martin, 165–​66 Malinowski, Roman: as double agent, 191, 192; execution of, 218–​19; Lenin and, 191, 192, 218–​19,  242 Marais neighborhood, Paris: ethnic economy of, 69; working-​class Russian Jews in, 68. See also Pletzl neighborhood Marat, assassin of, 106

335

Martov, Iulii (Iulii Tsederbaum): Bolshevik regime and, 218, 219–​20, 233–​34, 236; brothers of, 159, 237, 246; and Bund, 87–​88, 167; emigration of, 162; expulsion from Congress of Soviets, 219–​20; introduction to Marxist texts, 62; in Iskra group, 162, 163, 164, 168; on Jewish nationalism and socialism, 89–​90; and Lenin, 168, 170, 171–​72, 220; vs. Lenin, 177, 181, 206, 219–​20, 230, 233; Lepeshinskii on, 176; and Mensheviks, 184, 188, 206, 207f, 234; October Revolution of 1917 and, 214–​15; outbreak of World War I and, 203, 204; return to foreign exile, 234–​35; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211; return to Russia after Revolution of 1905, 179; at RSDRP’s second congress, 169; on Second International’s response to World War I, 198; Siberian exile of, 161, 162; and Vil’na radical circle, 86–​87; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205 Marx, Karl, 91f; and Bakunin, 17, 24, 25–​26, 114; Bernstein’s critique of, 116; Communist Manifesto, 15, 81, 89; conflicts with revolutionary adversaries, 2–​3, 24; exile of, 2–​3, 15; and First International, 25–​26; and Herzen, 27; on industrial proletariat, 165–​ 66; Kapital, Das, 25–​26, 61; Lenin’s revisions of theories of, 165–​66; on Paris Commune, 112–​13; Polish revolt of 1863 and, 25–​26; on revolutionary terrorism, 113; and Russian exiles, 20–​21, 24, 61; Russian perspectives and evolution of theories of, 113–​14; Russian radicals’ theories contradicting, 24; works of, smuggled into Russia, 158–​59; and Zasulich, 61 Marxism/​Marxists: vs. anarchists, 135, 157; and Bolshevism, 155; centralization of, 62–​64, 195; and dialectical materialism, 4, 63; vs. economists, 93, 116, 157; émigré, chronic infighting among, 155–​56, 157–​58, 161; global dissemination of, factors leading to, 114; internationalism of, 2–​3; legal, 159; mass movement of, Jewish proletarians and, 88; and nationalism, debates on, 63, 188–​89; origins of, explanations for, 8–​9; vs. populism, 61–​62, 63–​64; rival movements energized by, 63–​64; Russian colonies and, 1–​2, 8–​9, 61–​62, 63; vs. Socialist Revolutionaries, 157; spread to Russia, 62–​63, 158–​59; universalist orientation of, 63; vs. utopian thinking, 4; and Zionism, 77; Zurich colony’s hostility toward, 32. See also Russian Marxists Maximalists (SR faction), 195 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 17, 18, 20–​22, 24 Mechnikov, Lev, 54–​55

 

336 I n d e

Medem, Vladimir: on Bern colony, 41–​42, 57–​58; emigration to US, 234–​35; journey out of Russia, 43; on solidarity of colony life, 54 media, European: campaign targeting working-​ class Jewish immigrants, 143, 144–​46; critical of tsarist regime, 101; pro-​tsarist, 126, 127, 128–​32; on radical Russian émigrés, 97, 99, 105–​6; on revolutionary terrorism, 133, 134f, 136 media campaigns: Okhrana and, 129–​30, 131; Soviet state and, 226 Melville, William, 140–​41, 150 Mendelson, Stanisław, 48, 50; expulsion from Switzerland, 133; and Jewish proletarians, mobilization of, 85; Marxism and, 61, 62; and Paris bomb plot of 1890, 133, 135–​36; and Polish Socialist Party (PPS), 61–​62; relocation to London, 138–​39; and Seliverstov’s assassination, 135–​36 Menshevism/​Mensheviks: Bolshevik official histories on, 242; vs. Bolsheviks, 174, 177–​ 78, 181–​82, 185–​90, 233–​34; Bolshevik seizure of power and, 217–​18, 219–​20; and Bund, 195; and European Social Democrats, 186; expulsion from Congress of Soviets, 219–​20; expulsion from Soviet state, 237, 239; Jews in leadership of, 188, 189; Kronstadt rebels and, 235–​36; Lenin on, 170–​73, 174, 185, 189–​90, 230; Lepeshinskii’s cartoons of, 174, 175f; membership in Russia, 181; and national question, 188–​89; October Revolution of 1917 and, 214–​15; origins of term, 170–​71; outbreak of World War I and, 202–​3; Paris headquarters of, 186; platform of, 185, 186; and Provisional Government, support for, 211–​12; repression by Bolshevik regime, 218, 233–​34, 235–​36, 246; return to life in exile, 239, 240; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211–​12; rifts within, 184, 195, 206, 207f, 241; and RSDRP, 180–​81, 185; Stalin on, 189, 206; in Switzerland, 187f; on women’s rights, 195 Michel, Louise, 78–​79, 110–​11 Mickiewicz, Adam, 16 Mikhailov, Aleksandr, 91f Mill, John (Yosef Mil), 88–​89 Millerand, Alexandre, 165 minorities. See non-​Russian ethnic minorities Minsk, Belarus: Marxist conference outside of (1898), 87; Zionist conference in (1902),  158–​59 Montagu, Samuel, 71 Morris, William, 114–​15 Moscow, Russia: Bolshevik government in, 216; students from, 29; workers’ uprising in (1905), 183; Zurich commune’s influence in, 33

x

Most, Johann, 113 Munich, Germany: Iskra group in, 162–​63; Lenin in, 162, 163 mutual aid associations: in Russian colonies, 5, 30, 44–​45; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 69 Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin compared to, 229–​30 Napoleonic wars, reactionary lethargy following, 14 nationalism (national struggles): Bolsheviks and, 188–​89, 192–​93, 200–​1, 224–​25, 233; Bukharin on, 204; Bund and, 87–​88, 89–​90, 94, 157; Central Powers’ plan to support, 210–​11; vs. federalism, 63; in France, rise of, 128; healthy vs. aggressive, Bolsheviks on, 224–​25; Lenin on, 188–​89, 200–​1, 203–​4, 213, 222, 224–​25; Marxism and, debates on, 63, 188–​89; Plekhanov on, 195; Russian colonies and, 48–​49, 54, 111–​12; socialism and, debates on, 56; Stalin on, 200; Trotsky on, 206. See also Jewish nationalism Nechaev, Sergei, 26–​27, 118–​19 newspapers: Russian colonies and, 52; Yiddish-​ language, 73–​76, 78, 80–​81, 84, 92. See also media; specific newspapers New York: Mensheviks in, 240; Russian Jews in, 74, 234–​35; Trotsky exiled in, 207, 210; Yiddish-​language press in, 75 Nicholas I (tsar of Russia), 14, 15 Nicholas II (tsar of Russia), 139–​40, 149 nihilists: arrests in 1890, 125f; European observers on, 100, 105–​6, 107–​8; “Irish,” 111–​12; police surveillance of, 117–​18; Russian radicals as, 99 non-​Russian ethnic minorities: anti-​imperialist campaign of, 199; Bolshevik support for, 213, 222; doctrinal disputes among, 57; mass migration of 1860s and, 3; and revolutionary movements, 8–​9; in Russian colonies, 48–​ 51; in “to the people” movement, 36. See also Jews North America: anarchists immigrating to, 133; Jewish immigrants in, 65, 122; Russian colonies in, 3–​4. See also Canada; United States Nouvelle revue, La (journal), 127–​28, 129–​30 Novikova, Olga, 126, 127–​28, 130, 131, 141, 143–​44; and Anglo-​Russian alliance, 148; and campaign for international disarmament,  148–​49 October Revolution of 1917, 214–​15; efforts to export, 9, 226, 228, 230, 231; emigration after, 239; émigré response to, 226; factional warfare following, 8, 215–​16, 243–​44; Kronstadt sailors and, 234–​35; Russian

 



Index

colonies and, 13–​14, 209–​10; Western governments’ response to, 226, 231 Ogarev, Nikolai, 17, 25, 31–​32 Ogareva, Mariia, 17, 22 OGPU,  242–​43 Okhrana, 59–​60; abolition of, 211; activities in Britain, 139, 140–​42; activities in France, 128–​30, 133–​36, 180; antisemitic arguments used by, 141–​42, 158; Burtsev’s revelations regarding, 180; creation of, 38, 59; double agents of, 130; and European police, collaboration of, 149–​51, 156; and French police, 118, 119–​20, 138, 150–​51; infiltration of Jewish Labor Bund, 88; liberals’ resistance to, 120; media campaign of, 129–​30, 131; and Paris bomb plot of 1890, 133–​36; Rachkovskii and, 128–​29; and revolutionary terrorism, 135–​36; Soviet police compared to, 242–​43; Swiss police and, 137–​38 Old Bolsheviks, 241–​42; family ties among, 217; purges of, 8, 244; show trials of, 246; Society of, 241–​42; Stalin and, 243–​44, 245 On Agitation (Kremer), 86–​87 “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (Lenin), 170–​71,  177 Padlewski, Stanislaw, 133, 135 Pale of Settlement: Jewish revolutionaries from, gathering of, 86; literature smuggled in, 70, 87, 89, 159; Marxists’ influence in, 159; Okhrana propaganda regarding, 141–​42; songs circulating in, 80–​81; Western media on, 101 Pall Mall Gazette, 105, 126, 127, 144; antisemitic reportage in, 135–​36, 142–​44 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 109–​10 Paris, France: bomb plot of 1890 in, 124, 133–​36, 180; Herzen on, 16; Jewish Workers’ Society n, 74–​75, 78, 114, 115; Lenin’s move to, 186; Menshevik headquarters in, 186; Polish émigrés in, 16; Soviet activities in, 226, 242–​43; Vpered! group in, 194; working-​class Russian Jews in, 65, 66, 68–​69, 74–​75. See also Paris colony;, Pletzl neighborhood Paris colony, 40; cooperative cafeteria in, 53–​54; ethnic diversity of, 41; expansion in early 20th century, 160; Jewish residents in, 41–​42; Lenin’s open letter to, 190; Okhrana operations and, 59–​60; Paris Communards compared to, 64; police surveillance of, 124, 156; after Revolution of 1917, 210, 239; secularism of, 44; solidarity in, 53–​ 54; Turgenev library in, 53, 57; Western observers on, 98, 105; and working-​class Jewish immigrants, 83 Paris Commune, 13, 27; aftermath of, 40, 112–​13; demise of, 27, 112–​13; failure of, debates on

337

causes of, 33–​34, 112–​13; fiftieth anniversary of, 235; former participants exiled to Geneva, 54–​55; Kropotkin on, 64; Lenin on, 172–​73, 181, 203–​4, 206, 212, 229–​30; Marx on, 112–​13; Russian exiles and, 13, 27; Soviet state modeled on, Lenin’s vision of, 212; Yiddish press on, 78, 79f; Zurich colony compared to, 13–​14, 31 Paris Émigré Committee, 202 parliamentary democracy: failure of, Russian radicals on, 201; Lenin’s opposition to, 164, 185, 212; Marxist rejection of, 116–​17; Menshevik support for, 185, 186; and SPD, 116. See also liberalism Parti Communiste Français, 231 Parvus (Izrail’ Gel’fand), 116; on Lenin, 176–​77; and Mensheviks, 184; move to Istanbul, 196; and plan to cripple Russia’s war efforts, 210–​ 11; and SPD, 116–​17, 166 passports, false, 41–​42, 43 patriarchal culture: Bolsheviks and, 175–​76, 217, 224, 232–​33; Lenin and, 173f, 175–​77, 217,  232–​33 Pavlovich, M. P., 199 peasants, Russian, revolutionary potential of: Bakunin and Herzen on, 24, 26; Dmitrieva on, 27; Lavrov on, 31–​32, 33–​34; Lenin on, 165–​ 66, 180–​81; Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party on, 63–​64; “to the people” movement on, 35–​36; Zurich colony’s belief in, 32–​33 Pease, Edward, 99 People’s Will: calendar published by, 44, 45f; founding of, 38; in Geneva, 60; in Paris, 40; in Ukraine, 49 Peterss, Iakov, 218, 219, 246 Petit Parisien, Le (newspaper), 126, 129 Petrograd: Bolshevik elites in, 215, 216; émigrés’ arrival in, 210, 211, 215; February revolution in (1917), 207, 212; Kronstadt rebellion and, 234–​36; Lenin’s arrival in, 209, 211, 212. See also St. Petersburg Petrograd Soviet: and Lenin, 181; and Trotsky, 210 Petrovskaia, Sofiia, 91f philanthropy, European Jews and, 70, 71, 75, 106–​7,  121 Plekhanov, Georgii: and Balabanova, 53; conversion to Marxism, 61; critiques of Bolshevik regime, 217–​18; critiques of Bund, 93, 94, 157–​58, 167–​68; expulsion from Switzerland, 120, 133; Kravchinskii’s support for, 44; and Lenin, 62–​63, 161, 162, 163–​64, 171; life in exile, 38–​40, 211; and Mensheviks, 184; on national struggles, 195; outbreak of World War I and, 202–​3; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211–​12; at Second International, 115; vanity of, 161; Weizmann on, 193; wife of, 48; vs. Zhitlovsky, 63–​64

 

338 I n d e

Pletzl neighborhood, Paris: Bundists in, 89; close-​knit community of, 69; and colony of political émigrés, 83; efforts to reform, 121; and labor movement, 115; libraries (reading rooms) in, 78, 84; narrative of criminality regarding, 146–​47; philanthropy in, 70, 71; Social Democrats in, 75–​76; Vperedists in, 194; Western observers on, 98, 106; working-​class Russian Jews in, 68–​69; Zetkin in, 114 Poale/​Poalei Zion. See Labor Zionism pogroms: of 1881-​1882, 38, 101, 102; of 1905, 184–​85; of 1918-​1919, 223; European media on, 101; February Revolution of 1917 and fears of, 211; Kiev pogrom of 1881, 101; Kishinev pogrom of 1903, 92; People’s Will and, 49; political mobilization in early 20th century and, 159 Poland: Bolsheviks in, 194–​95, 200, 201–​2, 204; Jewish proletarians in, 85; radical workers’ circles in, 84–​85; revolt of 1830 in, 14, 15–​16, 19; revolt of 1863 in, 24–​26; revolutionary tradition in, 14; Russian émigrés in, after 1917, 239. See also specific cities Poles: Bolsheviks and, 190, 200–​1; in Russian colonies, 41, 48. see also under Polish police, European: harassment of émigré communities, 197; Okhrana and, 149–​51, 156, 185; outbreak of World War I and, 204–​ 5; surveillance of Russian colonies, 117–​18, 124, 138, 146, 156 police, Soviet: Cheka, 218, 220, 234; prerevolutionary networks and, 242–​43 police, tsarist: infiltration of Jewish Labor Bund, 88; political mobilization in early 20th century and, 159; surveillance of Russian colonies, 7, 34–​35, 58–​60. See also Okhrana Polish émigrés: asylum protections for, 19–​20; conversion to Marxism, 61; as cult figures in struggle against oppression, 19, 20; factionalism of, 63; new restrictive policies toward, 22–​23; revolt of 1830 and, 15–​16, 19–​20; revolt of 1863 and, 25, 48; and Russian exiles, alliances of, 16–​17, 21 Polish Literary Society, 16 Polish Marxists, 63 Polish Socialist Party (PPS): creation of, 61–​62; critique of Bund, 94; on emancipation of proletariat, 63; Jewish leaders in, 92; and Jewish proletarians, 85; Luxemburg’s faction of, 63, 195; membership in Russia, 181; and smuggling operations, 88–​89; Yiddish-​ language journal of, 92 populism: collapse of, 61; doctrinal disputes regarding, 56; Lenin and, 212–​13, 214; vs. Marxism, 61–​62, 63–​64; Russian

x

colonies and origins of, 8–​9; “to the people” movement and, 35–​36, 38 Potresov, A. N., 62; in civil war, 220; in Iskra group, 162, 164, 170–​71; and Mensheviks, 184; outbreak of World War I and, 202–​3; Siberian exile of, 161, 162 PPS. See Polish Socialist Party printing presses, Russian émigrés and: in Geneva, 60, 88–​89; in London, 18, 56; in Zurich, 31–​32,  33 Profintern, 231 proletariat: Bolshevik position on, 200, 201, 212; dictatorship of, 180–​81, 229, 230; industrial, Marx on, 165–​66; industrial, Russia’s lack of, 24, 62; Jewish, Bund as voice of, 87–​88, 157, 167, 169; Lenin on, 165–​66, 230; Menshevik position on, 180–​81, 185; metaphysical, 165–​66, 200, 201, 204. See also working-​class Jewish immigrants Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 132 Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph, 15, 17, 20–​21 Provisional Government, in Russia: and amnesty for political criminals, 210, 211; Bolshevik calls for removal of, 212; Menshevik support for, 211–​12; reforms under, 211; removal of, 209; and Soviets, 210, 211 purges: of Jewish members of Bolshevik party, 233; under Stalin (Great Terror), 246–​48 Rachkovskii, Petr, 59–​60, 149; activities in Britain, 139–​41; activities in France, 128–​29, 133–​ 36, 138; activities in Switzerland, 137–​38; and Adam, 129–​30; antisemitism of, 130; on Catholic-​Orthodox reconciliation, 148–​ 49; and Franco-​Russian alliance, 147–​48; informants recruited by, 137–​38; media campaign of, 128–​30; and Nicholas II, 139–​40, 149; and Paris bomb plot of 1890, 133–​36,  180 Radek, Karl, 195; radical insurgencies after World War I and, 228; return to Russia after February Revolution, 211; and Trotsky conspiracy, 245; as victim of Stalin’s purges, 246; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 206 Rappoport, Charles: and Bolshevik party, 228; outbreak of World War I and, 201–​2, 205; and Parti Communiste Français, 231; and Socialist Revolutionary party, 63–​64, 92 reading rooms. See libraries Reclus, Elysée, 54–​55 Red Army: in Civil War, 220, 231–​32; Kronstadt rebellion and, 235; retreat from Poland, 230 Red Cross, 56 Red Scare, impact on émigrés, 226–​28, 231 religion: Jewish, socialist reimagining of, 81; replaced with revolutionary morality, 44

 



Index

Renan, Ernest, 119–​20 Revolution of 1905, 178; failures of, 183; hardening of conflicts following, 180–​81, 182, 184–​85; and renewed unity among exiles, 178–​81; twelfth anniversary of, 207 Revolution of 1917. See February Revolution of 1917; October Revolution of 1917 revolutions, European: of 1848, 8, 21–​22, 23; of 1918–​19, 228–​30. See also specific countries Risorgimento, 2–​3, 21–​22, 25 Rochefort, Henri, 113 Rocker, Rudolph: critique of Bolshevik regime, 228; outbreak of World War I and, 203, 205; partner of, 73, 78–​79, 205; in Whitechapel, 73 Romania: pogroms in, 143; Russian colony in, 41 Rome Conference on anarchist threat (1898),  149–​50 Rossetti, Helen, 110–​11 Rossetti, Olivia, 110–​11 Rossetti, William Michael, 110 Rothschild family, 70, 71–​72, 127 RSDRP (Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party): Bund and, 90, 92, 93, 167–​68, 179; conflicts in, 157, 177–​78, 183–​84, 204; double agents in, 191; fifth congress of (1907), 185–​86, 198; founding congress of (1898), 87–​88, 167; fourth congress of (1906), 183, 185, 188; Iskra and renewed hope in, 164; Jewish leaders in, 92; Lenin’s conflicts with, 164, 171; Lenin’s efforts to consolidate power in, 168–​69, 171; reorganization on federalist principles, push for, 157; second congress of (1903), 168–​70; third congress of (1905), 179, 180–​81,  183 Russia/​Russian empire: backlash against political radicalism in, 38; and Britain, formal alliance of (1907), 147–​48; as colonial formation, Lenin on, 200; colonies’ communicative networks with, 55–​56; and Europe, entangled history of, 9, 14–​15; and France, formal alliance of (1892), 147–​48; illegal literature smuggled into, 158–​59; impact of French revolution on, 14–​15; political ferment in early 20th century, 158–​59; radical centers in, émigré colonies and, 159; revolutionary activism of 1860s in, 24–​26; spread of Marxism to, 62–​63; “to the people” movement in, 35–​36, 38; working-​class Jews in, 66; in World War I, plan to cripple, 210–​11; Zionist activism in, 158–​59; Zurich colony’s influence in, 32–​33, 35–​36. See also Pale of Settlement; tsarist regime; specific cities Russian Free Press, London, 18, 56 Russian language, use in colonies, 44–​45

339

Russian Marxists: in 1870s, 25–​27, 61; in 1900s, 1, 183–​84; antisemitism of, 157–​58; Bund and, 87, 90, 157–​58; conflicts with Marx, 26; response to World War I, 198–​99; and SPD, 197–​98; Vil’na radical circle and, 84–​87 Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. See RSDRP Russo-​Japanese war,  159–​60 Saint-​Simonianism, 14–​15,  17 Salisbury, Lord, 139–​40, 144, 145 Sand, George, 15, 17, 22, 127–​28 Savinkov, Boris, 192, 220, 228, 234–​35, 240–​41 scientific materialism, Marxism and, 4, 63 SDKP (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland), 63, 92, 94 SDKPiL, 195, 205 Second International: congress in Basel (1912), 198–​99; congress in Bern (1920), 230; congress in Stuttgart (1907), 198, 199; on imperialism, 199; inaugural meeting of (1889), 114, 115; outbreak of World War I and, 198–​99, 202 Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 144 Seliverstov, Mikhail, assassination of, 133, 135–​36,  137f Serge, Victor, 44, 202; anarchist activities of, 190–​ 91; and Bolsheviks, 228, 231, 234, 237; on colony life, 44 sexuality, exiles’ attempts to reform, 17, 22, 30–​31,  47–​48 SFRF. See Society of Friends of Russian Freedom Shaw, George Bernard, 99, 180, 242 Shliapnikov, Aleksandr, 186, 215; Bolshevik regime and, 215–​16, 224, 235, 237; February Revolution of 1917 and, 212; outbreak of World War I and, 204; as victim of Stalin’s purges, 246; and Workers’ Opposition group, 235 show trials, Soviet, 235–​36, 246 Siberian exile: camps in, as concrete utopias, 6; of Chernyshevskii, 25; European lectures on, 104; of Lenin, 94, 155, 161–​62 Sidney Street Siege, London, 191, 196–​97, 218 Singer, Paul, 91f skloki. See conflicts Slavic federalism, 17–​18 Slezkine, Yuri, 155 Smith, Adam, 104–​5 smuggling rings: Bund and, 88–​89, 90, 159, 164; and emigration, 43; and literary culture, 55; Marxist émigrés and, 158–​59; Revolution of 1905 and, 179; Russian colonies and, 5–​6,  41–​42 Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), 63, 92, 94 Social Democratic Federation, Britain, 114

 

340 I n d e

Social Democrats: and economism, 90; Lenin on, 199–​200; Mensheviks and, 240; and Vil’na radical circle, 87; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 75–​76; vs. Zionists, 93. See also German Social Democrats socialism/​socialists: French, in 1830s-​1840s, 14–​15; internationalism of, 2–​3; Jewish, rise in Russia, 88; and Jewish nationalism, 89–​90; nationalism and, debates on, 56, 89–​90; outbreak of World War I and, 198–​99, 202; Russian, emergence of, 17–​18; Russian, vs. Western European, 198; Russian colonies and, 1–​2, 113; schism needed to restore revolutionary potential of, Lenin on, 204, 206; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 72–​73, 75–​76; Yiddish language and, 80–​81; Zionism and, 77 Socialist League, 114–​15 Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party: Bolshevik regime and, 217–​18, 235–​36; vs. Bolsheviks, 189; double agents in, 191, 192; expanded networks of, 190; expropriation tactic adopted by, 190–​91; fracturing in early 20th century, 195, 241; headquarters in Italy, 194; and land expropriation, calls for, 213; vs. Marxists, 157; origins of, 63–​64, 92; outbreak of World War I and, 202–​3; terrorist attacks in Russia, 158–​59; Yiddish language used by, 92 Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), 99, 107–​8, 139; attacks on, 113, 139, 141, 144; lectures hosted by, 104; and Soviet regime, 242; women in, 109, 111 Society of Old Bolsheviks, 241–​42; liquidation of, 246; purges of, 244; Stalin and, 243–​44,  245–​46 solidarity: asylum regimes and, 102; of Jewish workers and Russian revolutionaries, 65, 66, 72–​84, 115; of Russian and Polish exiles, 16–​ 17, 21; of Russian colonies, 5, 6, 29–​30, 32, 44–​46, 51–​52, 53–​54; of Russian émigrés, outbreak of World War I and, 202 Soviets (workers’ councils): February Revolution of 1917 and, 211; and Provisional Government, 210, 211; Revolution of 1905 and, 179. See also Congress of Soviets; Petrograd Soviet Soviet state. See Bolshevik regime Sovnarkom, 216–​17,  231–​32 Spartacus League, 203, 206 SPD (German Social Democrats): creation of, 116; doctrinal disputes in, 116–​17; Kautsky’s transformation of, 164–​65; Lenin’s repudiation of, 199–​200, 231; and Mensheviks, 186; outbreak of World War I and, 202; political exile in 19th century, 2–​3; relations with Russian exiles, 41, 116–​17, 200; return to homeland, 116; Revolution of

x

1905 and, 180; and Russian Marxists, 197–​ 98; and Spartacus League, 203; women’s bureaus in, 195 Spencer, Herbert, 119–​20 spies. See double agents SR. See Socialist Revolutionary party Staal, E. E. de, 139–​40 Stalin, Joseph: as arbiter of revolutionary history, 245; and Bolsheviks, 188, 215; consolidation of power by, 244–​46; criticism of émigré dysfunction, 194–​95; February Revolution of 1917 and, 212; and first Five Year Plan, 244; vs. former émigrés, 243–​44, 245–​48; as general secretary of Bolshevik party, 241; Great Terror under, 246–​48; and Lenin, 194–​95, 200; on Mensheviks, 189, 206; on national self-​determination, 222; rise to power, 243, 247; at RSDRP’s fifth congress (1907), 185; and Tiflis bank robbery, 187–​ 88; vs. Trotsky, 244, 245–​46 Stankevich, Nikolai, 14–​15 Stasova, Elena, 224 Stead, W. T., 126, 127, 131, 135, 141; and Anglo-​ Russian alliance, 148; and campaign for international disarmament, 148–​49; and campaign to restrict immigration, 143–​44; Pall Mall Gazette of, 126, 135–​36, 142 Stepniak. See Kravchinskii, Sergei St. Petersburg, Russia: Free Economic Society in, 159; students from, 29; workers’ uprising in (1905), 178; Zurich commune’s influence in, 33. See also Petrograd St. Petersburg Conference on threat of anarchism (1904), 150, 151 St. Petersburg Liberation of Labor group, 62–​63, 86–​87, 161, 220 strikes: by Jewish immigrants, 73–​75, 79–​80; Jewish Labor Bund and, 89; by Polish workers, 62 students, Russian, in foreign universities, 28; and bomb plots, 133, 135–​36; characteristics of, 29–​30; and colonies, 28–​31, 38–​40; female, 28–​29, 38–​40, 39f; in France, 40, 136; in Germany, 28, 136; Jewish, 38, 51; Jewish Labor Bund and, 89; mass migration of 1860s and, 3, 28; mass migration of 1880s and, 38, 39f; mass migration of 1900s and, 159–​60; measures to reduce numbers of, 197; radicalization of, 8–​9, 30, 53; restrictions on, in early 20th century, 137–​ 38; in Switzerland, 28–​33, 34–​35, 38–​40, 39f, 137–​38, 159–​60, 197; unification initiatives of, 160–​61; and Zionism, 51 Stuttgart, Germany, Second International congress in (1907), 198, 199 suffragettes, Russian colonies and, 109–​10, 114 Suslova, Nadezhda, 28, 29

 



Index

Switzerland: asylum policies of, 19–​20, 25, 38–​40, 44, 101–​2, 103f, 118–​19, 120; crackdown on Russian radicals in, 120, 133, 137–​38; federation of Slavic nations modeled on, idea of, 54; German émigrés in, 61; police surveillance of émigré communities in, 117–​18; Polish exiles in, after revolt of 1830, 19–​20, 23; public opinion of Russian émigrés in, shift in, 137; Red Scare in, 226–​27; Rome Conference on anarchist threat (1898) and, 149–​50; Russian colonies in, 3–​4, 38–​40; Russian exiles in, outbreak of World War I and, 205; Russian government’s pressure on, 118–​19, 137–​38; Russian students in, 28–​33, 34–​35, 39f, 137–​ 38, 197; St. Petersburg Conference on anarchist threat (1904) and, 150. See also specific cities Syrkin, Nacham, 77, 93 Tartarin in the Alps (Daudet), 105–​6 terrorism, revolutionary, 38, 40; anarchists and, 124; backlash against, 59, 135–​36; doctrinal disputes regarding, 56; European media on, 99, 100, 105, 106; European public’s alarm over, 133–​38, 134f, 144–​46, 196–​97; European radicals’ response to, 113; growth in early 20th century, 190–​91; Jews blamed for, 135–​36, 137f, 144–​45, 146, 147; justifications for, 104; Marx and Engels on, 113; Maximalists on, 195; Paris bomb plot of 1890, 124, 133–​36; pro-​ Russian propagandists on, 133–​36; Russians associated with, 98; Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party and, 158–​59; Zurich bomb incident of 1889, 133, 135, 136 Third International: Bolsheviks and, 9, 231; Lenin on, 205. See also Communist International Tikhomirov, Lev: double agent infiltrating circle of, 130; in Geneva, 37, 38–​40; in Paris, 40; and People’s Will, 38, 49; return to Russia, 60; strains of exile life and, 37 Tikhomirova, Katia, 37 Times, The (newspaper), pro-​Russian contributions to, 126, 142, 144 “to the people” movement: in Geneva, 38–​40; in Russia, 35–​36, 38 trade unions: Comintern’s effort to infiltrate, 231; Lenin’s repudiation of, 231; Mensheviks and, 180–​81; Russian revolutionaries and, 115; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 69, 73–​75, 79–​80, 81, 82, 115 trials: mass, of populists in late 19th-​century Russia, 38; show, Soviet regime and, 235–​36, 246 Trotsky, Leon: assassination of, 246; and Bolshevik regime, 215; and Bundists, 206; February Revolution of 1917 and, 209, 210, 211–​12; imprisonment in 1906, 235–​36; in Iskra group, 164; on Jewish Communists, 225; on Kronstadt rebels, 235; and Lenin, 177, 181,

341

203, 214–​15; as Lenin’s would-​be successor, 243; Lepeshinskii on, 176; life in exile, 194, 201–​2, 207, 210; and Mensheviks, 184; national question and, 206; and October Revolution of 1917, 214–​15; outbreak of World War I and, 201–​2, 203–​4, 205; Revolution of 1905 and, 179; at RSDRP’s second congress, 169, 170; sister of, 217; vs. Stalin, 244, 245–​46; Weizmann on, 193; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205 tsarist regime (autocracy): antisemitism in campaigns to support, 130–​32, 135–​36, 141–​44; European defenders of, 124–​25, 126–​28, 132, 147–​49; European media campaigns in support of, 126, 127, 128–​32, 141–​44; European media on abuses of, 101; as ideal form of government, arguments for, 131; progressive gentry’s opposition to, 15; Russian colonies and, 38; Western reportage on (1830-​1860), 19; and world peace, visions of, 148–​49. See also police, tsarist Tsederbaum, Iulii, 62. See also Martov Tsion, Il’ia. See Cyon, Élie de Turgenev, Ivan, 14–​16; failed revolutions of 1848 and, 23; Fathers and Sons, 99; Paris library founded by, 53, 57; political program of, 17–​18; sexual conventions challenged by, 17; younger generation of émigrés and, 25 Ukraine: People’s Will in, 49; pogroms in, 92, 101, 223; Zurich commune’s influence in, 31, 33. See also Kiev; Lemberg Ukrainians: doctrinal conflicts with Jews, 57; in émigré communities, 41, 48–​49; nationalist activists, Lenin on, 200–​1 Ul’ianov, Vladimir, 62. See also Lenin underground circles (kruzhki): Russian labor movement and, 84–​85. See also Vil’na radical circle Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 98, 144 Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, 61–​62,  90 Union of Russian Workers, 74–​75 United States: anarchists immigrating to, 133; Haymarket bombing in (1886), 135; Russian émigrés in, after 1917, 239, 240. See also New York universalism: Bolsheviks and, 192–​94, 233; vs. emancipatory politics, 6–​7, 93; Marxism and, 63; Russian émigrés and, 44; Russian Jews and, 50 utopia(s): abstract vs. concrete, 4; apocalyptic, of Zimmerwald left, 206; émigrés and, 3, 4, 247–​48; February Revolution of 1917 and, 207–​8; Lenin and, 156, 204, 206, 209, 212–​ 14; powers of inspiration and destruction in, 10. See also concrete utopia(s)

 

342 I n d e

Velichkina, Vera, 172 “Vera, or the Nihilists” (Wilde), 108–​9, 111–​12 Vienna, Austria: Balabanova in, 237; Russian colony in, 160; Russian students in, 41; Trotsky in, 194, 201–​2 Vil’na radical circle, 55, 84–​87; and economism, 86, 87; Lavrov’s writings and, 33; and Liberman, 49–​50, 55; Marxism embraced by, 62; pilgrimages abroad, 62–​63; and “to the people” movement, 36 violence: Bolshevik regime and, 218–​20, 228, 235, 236; expropriation tactics and, 190–​ 91; Stalin’s use of (Great Terror), 246–​48; utopian pursuits and use of, 10. See also terrorism, revolutionary VOKS, 242 Vol’noe slovo (newspaper), 59 Vpered! (newspaper), 40–​41, 49–​50, 55 Vpered! group (Vperedists), 194–​95, 204 War Communism, 221, 224 Webb, Beatrice, 99, 109–​10, 111, 114–​15, 120–​21,  242 Webb, Sidney, 111, 242 Weizmann, Chaim: alienation from Russian comrades, 157, 193; on Bund, 93; dream for Zionist university, 196; escape narrative of, 43; in Geneva, 1–​2, 7, 39f, 53; opposition to Zionist politics of, 2; on university students and Zionism, 51; wife of, 47f, 51 Weizmann, Vera, 47f, 51 What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevskii), 24–​25,  31–​32 What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 164, 165–​66 White, Alfred, 144, 145 Whitechapel neighborhood, London. See East End Wilde, Oscar, 107–​9, 111–​12 Wilson, Charlotte, 114–​15 Winchevsky, Morris, 73, 75–​76, 78; and Jewish particularism, 90; poems of, 80–​81 Witcop, Milly, 78–​79, 205 women, Russian: in Bolshevik party, 175–​76, 217; in Chaikovtsy, 33; in foreign universities, 28–​29, 38–​40, 39f; in Geneva colony, 47f, 47–​48; in Iskra group, 162–​63; and literary culture, 55; in Menshevik party, 187f; in Paris Commune, 27; revolutionary, European fascination with, 99, 100, 104, 105–​6, 108–​9; sexual conventions challenged by, 17, 22, 30–​ 31, 47–​48; terrorist activities of, 38, 99, 104; in “to the people” movement, 36; in Zurich colony, 13, 28–​29, 30–​31, 34–​35 women, Western: in anarchist movement, 114; engagement with émigré communities, 109–​ 11; suffragettes, 109–​10, 114 women’s rights. See emancipation of women workers. See emancipation of workers; proletariat

x

Workers’ Opposition group, 235 working-​class Jewish immigrants: characteristics of, 69; close-​knit communities of, 69; communication networks among, 74; conflicts among, 83–​84; diverse backgrounds of, 68–​69; double agents among, 130, 139; efforts to acculturate, 70–​72, 78; emancipation dreams of, 69–​70; and emancipation of women, 78–​79, 110–​11; European public’s opinion of, shift in, 144–​ 47; in Germany, 67; and internationalism, 79–​80; and Jewish Labor Bund, 88, 89; in liberal imagination, 106; Liberman’s efforts to mobilize, 72–​73; libraries/​reading rooms of, 78, 80f; in London, 65–​66, 67–​69; media campaign targeting, 143, 144–​46; in Paris, 65, 66, 68–​69, 74–​75; push factors for, 66–​ 67; radicals of Russian colonies and, 65, 66, 72–​84; and revolutionary culture, 77–​78; and revolutionary terrorism, 135–​36; in sweating industry, anxieties about, 120–​21; and trade unions, 69, 73–​75, 79–​80, 81, 82; Western Jews and, 70–​72, 75, 106–​7, 121–​ 22; Western observers on neighborhoods of, 98; and Zionism, 76–​77 World War I: armistice of November 1918, 228; Bolshevik regime’s negotiations with Germany in, 215–​16; and conflicts within radical networks, 204, 206; European revolutions following, 228–​29; impact on Russian colonies, 201–​3, 204–​5; internment of Bolsheviks during, 226–​27; outbreak of, 201–​2, 204–​5; repatriation of Russian émigrés during, 210–​11; Russian participation in, plan to cripple, 210–​11; Second International’s response to, debates over, 198–​99; transformative potential of, Lenin on, 203–​4, 205–​6, 212–​13, 215–​16 Yanovsky, Shaul, 75–​76 Yiddish language: Bolshevik publications in, 223; Communist Manifesto translated into, 81, 89; Lenin on, 167–​68; newspapers in, 73–​76, 78, 80–​81, 84, 92; and revolutionary agitation, 72–​73, 74, 80–​81, 85–​86, 92; second generation of Jewish activists and, 233; and socialist ideas, 80–​81; Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party and, 92; working-​ class Russian Jews and, 66, 69; Zionists on, 196 Young Europe, 20 Zangwill, Israel, 71–​72 Zasulich, Vera, 91f; attempted assassination by, 38, 104; critiques of Bolshevik regime, 217–​18; expulsion from Switzerland, 133; fame of, 97, 99, 106, 108–​9; in Geneva, 38–​40; in

 



Index

Iskra group, 162–​63, 164, 170–​71; Krupskaia on, 175–​76; and Marx, 61; at RSDRP’s second congress, 170; on terrorist attacks, justifications for, 104 Zetkin, Clara, 114, 116, 200, 203 Zetkin, Osip, 74–​75, 114 Zheliabov, Andrei, 91f Zhenotdel, 222 Zhitlovsky, Chaim, 50, 51–​52; on Jewish nationalism, 89–​90; vs. Plekhanov, 63–​64; and Socialist Revolutionary party, 63–​64, 92 Zhordania, Noe, 159 Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205–​6 Zimmerwald left: apocalyptic utopia of, 206; and Comintern, 231 Zinoviev, Grigorii, 188; and Bolshevik regime, 215–​16, 228; and Comintern, 231, 234; criticism of Mensheviks, 234; and Lenin, 172, 194, 203–​4, 214; in power struggle after Lenin’s death, 243, 245; prosecution in show trial, 246; return to Russia after February Revolution of 1917, 211; return to Russia after Revolution of 1905, 179; on Second International’s response to World War I, 198–​ 99; Stalin’s campaign against, 244, 245–​46; at Zimmerwald conference (1915), 205, 206 Zionism/​Zionists: vs. anarchists, 93; vs. Bund, 93, 157; Bund’s influence on, 92;

343

conflicts in Russian colonies and, 157; vs. Iskra group, 167, 168; and Marxism, 77; opposition to, 2; in Russia, 158–​59; Russian colonies and, 1, 7, 51, 196; vs. Russian radicals, 193–​94; vs. Social Democrats, 93; and socialism, 77; university students and, 51; working-​class Jewish immigrants and, 76–​77 Zola, Emile, 98 Zundelevich, Aron, 91f Zurich, Switzerland: bomb incident of 1889 in, 133, 135, 136; Lenin’s move to, 201–​2; Russian students in, 28–​33, 34–​35, 138 Zurich colony, 13, 28–​36, 38–​40; as concrete utopia, 13–​14, 31, 36; conflicts in, 31–​32, 33–​34, 35; demise of, 35; egalitarianism of, 29–​30; emancipated women in, 13, 28–​29, 30–​31, 34–​35; fame of, 31; influence in Russia, 32–​33, 35–​36; intimate space of, 32, 36; library/​reading room in, 30, 31–​32, 34, 53; mutual aid associations in, 30; Paris Commune compared to, 13–​14, 31; printing presses in, 31–​32, 33; radical émigrés joining, 31–​32, 33–​34; revolutionary culture of 1860s and, 31; Swiss liberalism and, 32, 36; and “to the people” movement, 35–​36; tsarist persecution and, 34–​35; university students and origins of, 28–​31