Chapter 6 (6)

Next day Bakunin was with me in the morning. He was displeased with me, thought I had been too cold, as though I did not trust them.

‘Whatever more do you want? The Poles have never made such concessions. They express themselves in other words which are accepted among them as an article of faith; they can’t possibly at the first step, as they hoist the national flag, wound the sensitive popular feeling.’

‘I fancy, all the same, that they really care very little about the land for the peasants and far too much about the provinces.’

‘My dear fellow, you will have a document in your hands corrected by you and signed in the presence of all of us; whatever more do you want?’

‘I do want something else though!’

‘How difficult every step is to you! You are not a practical man at all.’

‘Sazonov used to say that before you said it.’

Bakunin waved his hand in despair and went off to Ogaryov’s room. I looked mournfully after him. I saw that he was in the middle of his revolutionary debauch, and that there would be no bringing him to reason now. With his seven-league boots he was striding over seas and mountains, over years and generations. Beyond the insurrection in Warsaw he was already seeing his ‘Glorious and Slav Federation’[43] of which the Poles spoke with something between horror and repulsion; he already saw the red flag of ‘Land and Freedom’ waving on the Urals and the Volga, in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, possibly on the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul fortress, and was in haste to smooth away all difficulties somehow, to blot out contradictions, not to fill up ravines but to fling a skeleton bridge across them.

‘_There is no freedom without land._’

‘You are like a diplomat at the Congress of Vienna,’ Bakunin repeated to me with vexation, when we were talking afterwards with the representatives of the Polish Committee in his room. ‘You keep picking holes in words and expressions. This is not an article for a newspaper, it is not literature.’

‘For my part,’ observed G., ‘I am not going to quarrel about words; change them as you like, so long as the main drift remains the same.’

‘Bravo, G.,’ cried Bakunin, gleefully.

‘Well, that fellow,’ I thought, ‘has come prepared for every emergency; he will not yield an inch in fact, and that is why he so readily yields in words.’

The manifesto was corrected, the members of the Committee signed it. I sent it off to the printing-press.

G. and his companions were fully persuaded that we represented the centre of a whole organisation in Russia which depended upon us and would at our command join them or not join them. For them what was essential lay not in words nor in theoretical agreements; they could always tone down their _profession de foi_ by interpretations which would dim its vivid colours and change them.

That the first nucleus of an organisation was being formed in Russia there could be no doubt. The first threads could be discerned with the naked eye; from these threads, these knots, a web on a vast scale might be woven, given time and tranquillity. All that was true, but it was not there yet, and every violent shock threatened to ruin the work for a whole generation and to tear asunder the first lacework of the spider’s web.

That is just what, after sending the Committee’s letter to the press, I said to G. and his companions, telling them of the prematureness of their rising. Padlewski knew Petersburg too well to be surprised by my words—though he did assure me that the vigour and number of branches of the League of Land and Freedom went much further than we imagined; but G. grew thoughtful. ‘You thought,’ I said to him, smiling, ‘that we were stronger? You were right. We have great power and influence, but that power rests entirely on public opinion, that is, it may evaporate all in a minute; we are strong through the sympathy with us, through our harmony with our own people. There is no organisation to which we could say, “Turn to the right or turn to the left.”’

‘But, my dear fellow, all the same ...’ Bakunin was beginning, walking about the room in excitement.

‘Why, _is_ there?’ I asked him.

‘Well, that is as you like to call it; of course if you go by the external form, it is not at all in the Russian character, but you see....’

‘Allow me to finish; I want to explain to G. why I have been so insistent about words. If people in Russia do not see on your standard “Land for the Peasants” and “Freedom for the Provinces,” then our sympathy _will do you no good at all but will ruin us_; because all our strength rests on their hearts beating in unison with ours. Our hearts may beat more strongly and so be one second ahead of our friends; but they are bound to us by sympathy and not by duty!’

‘You will be satisfied with us,’ said G. and Padlewski.

Next day two of them went off to Warsaw, while the third went off to Paris.

The calm before the storm followed. It was a hard and gloomy time, in which it kept seeming as though the storm would pass over, while it drew nearer and nearer. Then came the decree tampering with the levying of recruits; this was the last straw; men who were still hesitating to take the final and irrevocable step dashed into the fray. Now even the _Whites_ began to go over to the side of the rebellion.

Padlewski came again; the decree was not withdrawn. Padlewski went off to Poland.

Bakunin was going to Stockholm quite independently of Lapinski’s expedition, of which no one dreamed at the time. Potyebnya turned up for a brief moment. A plenipotentiary from ‘Land and Freedom’ came from Petersburg _via_ Warsaw at the same time as Potyebnya; he described with indignation how the Poles who had summoned him to Warsaw had done nothing. He was the first Russian who had seen the beginning of the rebellion; he told us about the murder of the soldiers, about the wounded officer who was a member of the society. The soldiers thought that this was treachery and began furiously beating the Poles. Padlewski, who was the chief leader in Kovno, tore his hair, but was afraid to act openly in opposition to his followers.

The plenipotentiary was full of the importance of his mission and invited us to become the _agents_ of the League of Land and Freedom. I declined this, to the extreme surprise not only of Bakunin but even of Ogaryov. I said that I did not like this hackneyed French term. The plenipotentiary treated us as the Commissaires of the Convention of 1793 treated the generals in the distant armies. I did not like that either.

‘And are there many of you?’ I asked him.

‘That is hard to say: some hundreds in Petersburg and three thousand in the provinces.’

‘Do you believe it?’ I asked Ogaryov afterwards. He did not answer. ‘Do you believe it?’ I asked Bakunin.

‘Of course; but,’ he added, ‘_well, if there are not as many now there soon will be_!’ and he burst into a roar of laughter.

‘That is another matter.’

‘The whole point is to give support to what is beginning; if they were strong they would not need us,’ observed Ogaryov, who was always displeased with my scepticism on these occasions.

‘Then they ought to come to us frankly admitting their weakness and asking for friendly help instead of proposing the silly position of agents.’

‘That is youth,’ Bakunin commented, and he went off to Sweden. And after him Potyebnya went off too. With heartfelt sorrow I said good-bye to him. I did not doubt for one second that he was going straight to his death.

A few days before Bakunin’s departure Martyanov came in, paler than usual, gloomier than usual; he sat down in a corner and said nothing. He was pining for Russia and brooding over the thought of returning home. A discussion of the Polish rebellion sprang up. Martyanov listened in silence, then got up, preparing to go, and suddenly standing still, facing me, said gloomily:—

‘You must not be angry with me, Alexandr Ivanovitch; that may be so or it may not, but anyway you have done for the _Kolokol_. What business had you to meddle in Polish affairs? The Poles may be in the right, but their cause is for their gentry, not for you. You have not spared us. God forgive you, Alexandr Ivanovitch; you will remember what I say. I shall not see it myself, I am going home. There is nothing for me to do here.’

‘You are not going to Russia, and the _Kolokol_ is not ruined,’ I answered him.

He went out without another word, leaving me heavily weighed down by this second prediction and by a dim consciousness that a blunder had been made.

Martyanov did as he had said; he returned home in the spring of 1863 and went to die in penal servitude, exiled by his Liberal Tsar for his love for Russia and his trust in him.

Towards the end of 1863 the circulation of the _Kolokol_ dropped from two thousand or two thousand five hundred to five hundred, and never again rose above one thousand copies. The Charlotte Corday from Orlov and the Daniel from the peasants had been right.

_Written at Montreux and Lausanne at the end of 1865._

LETTERS FROM OGARYOV AND BAKUNIN TO THE RUSSIAN OFFICERS WHO TOOK PART IN THE POLISH REBELLION.

‘FRIENDS,—With deep love and deep sorrow we bid farewell to
this comrade as he sets off to join you; only the secret hope
that this rebellion will be postponed brings us some comfort
as regards your future and the fate of the whole cause. We
understand that you cannot but join the Polish rebellion
whatever form it may take; you give yourselves as atonement
for the sins of the Russian Tsardom; moreover, to leave Poland
to be beaten without any protest from the Russian militant
party would have the fatal appearance of Russia taking a dumbly
submissive, immoral part in the butchering for which Petersburg
alone is responsible. Nevertheless, your position is hopeless
and tragic. We see no chance of success. Even if Warsaw were
free for one month, it would only mean that you had paid a debt
by your share in the movement of _national independence_, but
to raise the Russian socialist banner of “Land and Freedom” is
not vouchsafed to Poland; while you are too few.

‘This premature rebellion will obviously mean the ruin of
Poland, while the Russian cause will be drowned for years to
come in the flood of national hatred which goes hand in hand
with devotion to the Tsar, and it will only rise again later,
long years later, when your heroic deed will have become the
same sort of tradition as that of the 14th of December and will
stir the hearts of a generation not yet begotten. The moral of
this is clear: put off the rebellion till a better time, when
forces are united; put it off by your influence on the Polish
Committee and by your influence on the Government itself, which
may yet be alarmed into removing the unhappy decree; put it off
by every means within your power.

‘If your efforts are fruitless there is nothing else for
you but to submit to your fate and accept your inevitable
martyrdom, even though its consequence will be ten years’
stagnation for Russia. Anyway, as far as possible be sparing
of men and of strength, that elements may be left from this
unhappy defeated struggle for victory in the distant future.
But if you succeed and the rebellion is deferred, then you
ought to adopt a firm line of conduct and not to depart from it.

‘Then you ought to keep one object in view: to make the
Russian cause a general one and not exclusively Polish, to
create a complete unbroken chain of secret alliance between
all the militant forces in the name of “Land and Freedom” and
of the National Assembly, as you say in your letter to the
Russian officers. For that, it is essential that the Russian
Officers’ Committee should be independent, and therefore its
centre should be outside Poland. You ought to organise a
centre outside yourselves to which you will owe allegiance,
then you will be in a commanding position and at the head of
a well-organised force which will take part in the rebellion,
not in the name of Polish nationality exclusively, but in the
name of “Land and Freedom,” and will take part in it not in
accordance with the needs of the moment, but at the time when
all forces have been reckoned and success is assured.

‘To us this plan seems so clear that you too cannot but
recognise what must be done. Accomplish it whatever labour it
may cost.

‘N. OGARYOV.’

‘FRIENDS AND BROTHERS,—The lines written by our friend
Nikolay Platonovitch Ogaryov are full of true and boundless
devotion to the great cause of our national and indeed Panslav
emancipation. One cannot but agree with him that the premature
and partial rising of Poland threatens to interrupt the general
steady advance of the Slav, and especially of the Russian,
progressive movement. It must be owned that in the present
temper of Russia and of all Europe there is too little hope
of success for such a rebellion, and that the defeat of the
progressive party in Poland will inevitably be followed by the
temporary triumph of the Tsarist despotism in Russia. But on
the other hand, the position of the Poles is so insufferable
that they can hardly be patient for long.

‘The Government itself by its infamous measures of cruel
and systematic oppression is provoking them, it seems, to a
rebellion, the postponement of which would be for that very
reason as good for Poland as it is essential for Russia. To
defer it till a much later date would undoubtedly be the
salvation of them as well as of us. You ought to devote all
your efforts to bring this about, without, however, failing
to respect their sacred rights and their national dignity.
Persuade them so far as you can and so far as circumstances
permit, but yet lose no time, be active in propaganda and
organisation, that you may be ready for the decisive moment;
and when, driven beyond the utmost limit of possible patience,
our unhappy Polish brothers rise, do you rise too, not against
them but for them; rise up in the name of Russian honour, in
the name of Slav duty, in the name of the Russian people, with
the battle-cry, “Land and Freedom”; and if you are doomed to
perish, your death will serve the common cause ... and God
knows! Perhaps in opposition to every calculation of cold
prudence your heroic deed may unexpectedly be crowned with
success....

‘As for myself, whatever may await you, success or death, I
hope that it may be my lot to share your fate.

‘Good-bye—and perhaps till we meet again soon.

‘M. BAKUNIN.’