9. BARRICADES PILED UP LIKE MOUNTAINS

The differences between Bakunin and Marx soon transcended theory and personality to manifest themselves in political action. The tensions in Europe had been evident for years; Bakunin had pointed them out in 1842, and other observers could not fail to notice that something was happening there, even if it wasn’t exactly clear. Crop failures, notably of potatoes in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany, and of wheat in other areas led to food shortages and riots. Attracted by the higher rate of profit offered by manufacture, landowners shifted capital from agriculture to industry. This neutral-sounding, rational business decision masked a brutal reality. Peasants and tenant farmers were thrown off the land and forced to move to cities where they could choose between unemployment and overwork at starvation wages. The new industries and factories forced household and small-scale producers to the wall, and inflation and financial crises wracked even the well off. If these problems appeared in different forms in different nations and empires, the solutions were increasingly seen as political. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat alike understood that the necessary changes could not take place under king, tsar, prince, or empire. The first of the dual revolutions, capitalism, spread almost by accident, but the second, parliamentary democracy, required will and action and could be defeated much more easily. Nor did workers and peasants understand revolution the same way political reformers and employers did. Some hoped revolution would dethrone kings and emperors and replace them with elected assemblies. Others had equally passionate but less articulate hopes to empower the people economically and politically. Still others simply sought bread and work, but these too were radical demands. What was different about 1848 was that so many different social groups across the continent turned to revolution, despite very different social conditions and very different political alignments. They were united less by specific grievances and solutions than by a general demand for liberty common enough that peasants in Galicia, farm laborers in Sicily, workers in Germany and France, and many others rose within days of each other to topple governments, expel kings and ministers, and change the face of Europe forever. Even in Switzerland, where four hundred years of brotherly love, democracy, and peace combined to produce the cuckoo clock, civil war raged briefly in a prelude to 1848.

But it was in France that real revolution first erupted. The monarchy had been restored in 1814. Though the July Revolution of 1830 forced Charles X, the last of the Bourbons, to abdicate, his replacement, Louis-Philippe, and his chief minister, Francois Guizot, ruled firmly if warily. When public disturbances broke out in Palermo against Ferdinand II, king of Naples and Sicily, in early January 1848, they refused to heed the sign. Others were not so sanguine. Alexis de Tocqueville spoke in the French Chamber of Deputies of “the working classes ... forming opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government but society itself,” and cautioned “that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano.” [196] He was treated as a Cassandra, gloomily warning of disaster that never came. But Cassandra’s curse was not that she was a doomsayer. The ancient Greeks were much more sophisticated than that. Her curse was to be a true prophet who was never believed.

De Tocqueville’s volcano soon erupted as French workers and intellectuals stepped up a campaign of leaflets and revolutionary banquets. When they announced a Paris march and banquet for 22 February 1848, Guizot and the king decided that a show of strength was needed, and forbade the public gatherings. When the organizers declared they would hold the banquet regardless of the government’s order, people gathered in the streets to support them. Support turned to active protest as the police clashed with the demonstrators. They had dispersed similar crowds before with little consequence, but this time was different. Workers throughout Paris rushed into the streets, overturning carts and stalls to create makeshift barricades and prying up paving stones to use as projectiles. Police and protestors fought in the streets for two days. At the end, the regime’s last best hope, the National Guard, comprised largely of “respectable” citizens of the middle class, refused to fire on protestors or even to cheer for the king when called out on parade, and Paris belonged to the people. Louis-Philippe dismissed Guizot, hoping this sacrifice would satisfy the protestors. It did not. With no hope of restoring his control, the king exercised his royal prerogative and handed the throne over to his grandson, then caught the next carriage out of town. On 24 February, workers, artisans, middle-class republicans, democrats, and radicals declared the end of the monarchy and proclaimed the Second Republic. They organized a people’s militia, headed by Marc Caussidiere, to replace the police and defend the revolution, abolished capital punishment, held elections under universal male suffrage, and declared work for all an essential right that the government had to uphold.

News of the success of the February Revolution flashed across Europe. Within days popular uprisings broke out across Germany. By the middle of March, revolution had spread to Vienna and Austria’s Prince Metternich, chief architect of forty-five years of intrigue and reaction, was on the lam to England. By the end of the month, constituent assemblies had been created in Vienna and Berlin, Frankfurt had called for a parliament, and Milan and Venice were in revolt. That revolution could spread so quickly, at a time when it took news a week to travel from Paris to Berlin, is perhaps the most convincing evidence of the widespread unrest and anger on the continent.

For Bakunin, it was the best of times, it was the ... no, it was the best of times, full stop. Or rather, full speed ahead, as he threw himself into the tumult. He could take little credit for predicting or fomenting the February Revolution but it surely proved he was in tune with the spirit of the age. Revolution was no longer an idealistic or metaphysical concept. It was a living, breathing reality, just as he had insisted. Securing a false passport, he headed back to France, only to find that passports were now irrelevant: the new Republic had no use for such artifacts from the old regime. Instead, he found his passage stalled not by the police but by the workers themselves, who had cut the railway lines. Despite the difficulties, he arrived in Paris on 26 February, where he discovered that the city, the “center of European enlightenment, had suddenly been turned into the wild Caucasus: On every street, almost everywhere, barricades had been piled up like mountains, reaching the roofs, and on them, among rocks and broken furniture ... workers in their colorful blouses, blackened from powder and armed from head to foot.” He described the revolution in words reminiscent of George Orwell’s description of anarchist Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, noting that “all the hated social lions with their walking sticks and lorgnettes had disappeared and in their place my noble workers in rejoicing, exulting crowds, with red banners and patriotic songs, reveling in their victory!” The workers were “forgiving, sympathetic, loving of their fellow man—upright, modest, courteous, amiable, witty,” in short, all he knew they could be once their chains were cast off.

He took his place among Caussidiere’s militia for several days and found much that would shape his future anarchism. “These simple, uneducated people,” he exclaimed, “always will be a thousand times better than all their leaders!” The world was turned upside down, yet with no laws and no compulsion, the people developed their own discipline and selflessly took on the work of defending and building the revolution. The streets were filled with “meetings, gatherings, clubs, processions, outings, demonstrations,” and Bakunin took part in all of it. The slogan of Paris ‘68 was “Be realistic: demand the impossible!” In the Paris of ‘48, Bakunin saw that “the practical men of the old regime have today become the utopians and the utopia of yesterday is now the only possible, reasonable, practical thing ... The inconceivable had become the usual, the impossible possible, and the possible and the usual unthinkable.”[197]

If the revolution were to survive, however, it had to spread. “Unless royalty completely vanishes from the surface of Europe,” he warned, “the revolution will perish.” The urgent task now was for the peoples of the empires to overthrow their Prussian, Austrian, and Russian masters, for these governments were poised to crush the revolution. Of these, Russia was the most formidable bulwark of reaction. That had been its historic role since Napoleon, and the tsars proudly wore the title of “gendarme of Europe.” Napoleon was right, Bakunin concluded: “Europe will be republican or Cossack.” [198] Russia’s soft underbelly was Poland, and Bakunin decided to leave Paris for Poznan, a Polish city under the control of Prussia. Caussidiere supplied him with two different passports: if France was no longer concerned with such bureaucratic measures, other governments now intensified the scrutiny at the border as they desperately sought to hold the revolution at bay. Bakunin secured some two thousand francs from the provisional government that now included his old comrades Louis Blanc and Ferdinand Flocon, editor of La Reforme, and headed off.

He made his way to Frankfurt by early April in time to observe its Pre-Parliament, called by democrats and rebels to try to coordinate a German national assembly. Here he had his first doubts about the fate of the revolution. The Pre-Parliament quickly moved from the sublime to the ridiculous, ending up as little more than a talking society dominated by moderates who failed to understand that the real threat to the revolution came no longer from the kings and princes, but from the bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie was preparing to cut off the revolution once its own ascendancy had been secured. Now the social revolution and “the triumph of democracy” were at risk as the “philistines” played with elections and readied themselves to take “all measures possible against the people.” Worst of all, the German liberals and bourgeoisie were prepared to ally with the hated Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to retake Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark by force of arms and to carve up Polish Poznan, all in the name of German nationalism. If Bakunin needed further instruction in the relationship of class and ideology, the German liberals provided a doctorate. The machinations of the German bourgeoisie reinforced his understanding that nationalism could be used in the service of reaction as well as revolution unless it was firmly and irrevocably linked to the masses and the social revolution. This insight would guide his politics for the rest of his life.

Despite the efforts of the moderates and liberals to choke off the revolution, Bakunin believed, or perhaps, more accurately, hoped that it would continue. His old acquaintance Herwegh organized a legion of some eight hundred German workers in Paris to invade from the west and aid the revolution; there were encouraging signs that the German proletariat and peasantry were mobilizing. But the farce of the Frankfurt assembly made it even more imperative to expand the revolution to Russia to prevent the “gendarme” from quelling popular revolt in Europe, and, increasingly important, to forestall a united, bourgeois Germany from launching an imperialist adventure against the Slavic nations and people. The only hope of the revolution, Bakunin believed, now lay in a pan-Slavic revolution that would break up the Russian and Austrian empires and simultaneously stave off any attempt by Germany to take their places.[199]

He left Frankfurt, hoping to get to Poznan by way of Cologne and Berlin. In Berlin, he was mistaken for Herwegh and arrested; his two passports raised the eyebrows of the German police and he spent a day in jail. He was released after promising to stay out of Poznan and headed instead for Breslau, arriving in the Polish city in May. Along the way, he tutored his old friend Arnold Ruge on parliamentary democracy. The two met up in Leipzig, where the former Left Hegelian was campaigning for a seat in the Frankfurt assembly. Bakunin convinced him to invest his time in a more suitable enterprise: drinks at the Hotel de Pologne. The two talked the evening away until Ruge was informed that he had lost the election. All to the good, Bakunin cheerily consoled his friend, for nothing useful could come from the assembly anyway.[200]

Little useful came from Breslau either, and the news from other parts of Europe was disheartening. The German bourgeoisie had succeeded in curtailing the revolution and channeling its energy into parliamentary debates. Herwegh’s legion had failed miserably at Baden. Poznan was, as Bakunin had feared, betrayed by Prussia; even in Paris, the revolution was barely holding its own. In Breslau itself, the lack of arms and the lack of unity disabled the rebels. When a Czech professor at the University of Breslau told him of a pan-Slavic congress assembling at Prague, Bakunin decided to attend, hoping to find there “an Archimedean fulcrum for action.”[201] The Slav congress, however, needed more than a simple machine to lever it into action. There is an old joke about left-wing sectarianism. Question: How many Marxists does it take to go fishing? Answer: Fifty—one to hold the pole and forty-nine to find the correct line.

The difficulty was compounded among the Slavs. While to a ruler in St. Petersburg or Vienna or Berlin a Slav is a Slav is a pain in the ass, they were divided by language, history, and class. Bakunin listed some of the attending groups: Poles, Ruthenes, Silesians, Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Dalmatians. The Russian Slavs, by far the biggest population, had only two representatives, and one, Bakunin, had not been in Russia for the better part of a decade. The Slavs were also divided by empire. Those under the rule of Turkey looked to the tsar for aid; Polish Slavs had no such illusions about his imperial majesty’s beneficence. Czech Slavs looked to Austria for protection from Germany and Russia, while Magyars chafed under its rule and Austrian Slavs remained indifferent to Russian imperialism. Though the chief Magyar spokesman, Lajos Kossuth, fought for national independence, he had little interest in sharing power with the Ukrainians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, and Slovaks who lived in Hungary. To further complicate things, each empire skillfully played the different nationalities against each other, encouraging rebellion in other empires when useful and smashing revolts in their own territories.

As the congress debated and argued, workers and students took matters into their own hands. Following the pattern of Paris, Berlin, and the other cities of ‘48, they filled the public squares, established barricades, and demanded a provisional government. They were answered not with abdications and constitutions, but with cannon and grapeshot. While most of the congress delegates scurried for cover as the Austrian army rained shot and shell into the city, Bakunin fought on the hastily improvised fortifications and urged the insurrectionists to seize the town hall to prevent the politicians from treating with the Austrians. But the ill-planned uprising was doomed and as the flag of surrender was raised, Bakunin slipped out of the city before he could be arrested.

The events of 1848 reinforced his belief that revolution was as much an “instinct as a thought,” as much an emotional, immediate response as an intellectual, deliberative one. Certainly it broke out and spread as an expression of anger and despair and hope rather than a calculated rational exercise. The events of that year also confirmed his suspicions of politicians and the gut feeling that liberals and industrialists were part of the problem, not part of the solution. In a letter to Herwegh, Bakunin declared that he had little interest in “parliamentary debates; the time of parliamentary life, constituent assemblies, national assemblies, and so on, is finished ... I believe neither in constitutions nor laws. Even the best constitutions will not satisfy me. We need something else: spirit and vitality, a new world without laws and thus free.”[202]

Chased from city to city by the authorities, with the Russians demanding he be turned over to them, he found a temporary refuge in the German city of Koethen. There he developed his ideas more carefully in a thirty-five-page article entitled “Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot.” Contrary to those historians who argue that the failure of 1848 represents the victory of patriotism over class, Bakunin thought that nationalism and socialism could be linked in struggle. The article also demonstrated his awareness that nationalism had to be part of a larger social revolution, else it would serve reaction. A simple choice faced the Slavs: “an old world in ruins,” or “the new world,” with its “penetrating light” that belonged to the “generations and periods to come.” For the world was now split in two: revolution and counterrevolution. Returning to one of the themes of “The Reaction in Germany,” he insisted there was no middle road, no way to negotiate or compromise: it was impossible to remain neutral and impossible to “grant some small concession to each of the great parties in this struggle to appease them and thus prevent the explosion of the necessary, inevitable conflict.” Unity now was crucial, and it was imperative that the Slavs not treat with the same diplomats and politicians who had betrayed Poland and who now used all the arts of their trade to carry on the old tactic of “divide and rule.” It was too much to expect the enemy “to work for the birth of a new world that would mean its condemnation and death.” It was necessary to seek real allies, determined by class, not nationality. “Extend your hand to the German people,” he implored, “but not to the German pedants or the professors at Frankfurt or the sinister men of letters,” not to the “petit bourgeois Germans who rejoice at each misfortune that befalls the Slavs. But extend your hand to the German people,” especially those who are “pursued and oppressed as we are,” and they would respond in kind. Nationalism could not be ignored, but it had to be harnessed to revolution and class.

There was ample proof for his argument. Europe had already seen how the pent-up “hatred against the old politics of the oppressors” was released “at the first sign of life from the revolution,” followed by a “cry of sympathy and love for all the oppressed nationalities.” The revolution demonstrated that “the enchanted seal was broken and the dragon that guarded the painful lethargy of so many of the living dead lay there, struck fatally and in its death throes.” The people understood, if only viscerally, that they were subjected, but they had not lost the desire to fight. They required only the inspiration and hope that revolution brought.

Like de Tocqueville, Bakunin used the metaphor of the volcano to illustrate his meaning: even when there was no observable fire, resistance raged under the ground, ever ready to erupt. Such an eruption might appear spontaneous to those who paid no attention to the rumblings, but of course it was nothing of the sort. The revolt of Galician peasants in 1846 was a concrete example, and if the subjugated people of Russia were to explode, “the resplendent star of revolution would rise to the heavens from an ocean of blood and fire and become the polestar for the good of all free humanity.”[203]

Stripped of its flourishes and rhetorical excess, the “Appeal” came to a plain and logical conclusion. The revolution had to be more than a political revolution that exchanged one set of rulers for another and continued the exploitation of workers and peasants by new means. It had to be a social revolution that would destroy private property as well as states and empires. These were the “two grand questions spontaneously posed in the first days of the spring ... the social emancipation of the masses and the liberation of the oppressed nations.” And it was the “admirable instinct of the masses” that raised these two questions above all others, insisting that they be resolved immediately. Clearly, “the social revolution presents itself as a natural, inevitable consequence of the political revolution,” for “liberty was only an illusion when the vast majority of the population is reduced to leading a miserable existence, when it is deprived of education, of leisure, and bread, when it is fated to serve as a stepping-stone for the powerful and rich.” No textbook solution, no insulated system could resolve these questions, for it was necessary to “overturn the material and moral conditions of our present existence, to completely overthrow this decrepit society that has become impotent and sterile and can neither restrain nor allow such freedom ... The social question is primarily the question of the overthrow of society.”[204]

It was this insistence on what Herzen and others would call the “permanent revolution” that led Marc Caussidiere to help Bakunin leave Paris for Poland and to exclaim of him, “What a man! What a man! On the first day of the revolution he is simply a treasure, but on the day after he ought to be shot!” For his part, Herzen replied dryly that the difference between the two splendid fellows was that Caussidiere should be shot the day before the revolution. Such were the political divisions on the barricades.[205]

Bakunin understood all too well that when the permanent revolution turned on property, it would draw the harshest measures from those who owned property. Usually completely indifferent to the rest of humanity, they had “no opinion, no religion, no conviction, no preference: monarchy or republic, freedom or slavery, native land, national independence or the yoke of the foreigner: all to them is exactly the same, provided they are left in tranquility.” But threaten their “property or money, their sole passion,” and these gentle souls “become as fierce as tigers,” and were easily capable of “sacrificing the lives of ten men to save a few francs.” Even the liberals among the bourgeois democrats would quickly go over to the side of reaction if their material interests were threatened by the social revolution.[206]

He was right. There were few representatives of the middle class among the dead on the barricades of Europe in 1848. Like most wars, it was overwhelmingly the peasantry and the working class who fought and died for the cause the respectable, the educated, and the privileged had bawled so loudly for. When the barricades went up, the middle classes quickly sought compromise and alliance with the old order in order to protect their privileges. For its part, the aristocracy was delighted to learn that the parliamentary democracy sought by the bourgeoisie was less of a threat than it had seemed and could be turned nicely against peasants and proletarians.

While the sound of marching, charging feet had turned Bakunin into a street fighter, Marx and Engels headed for Cologne to edit another newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Some of the most insightful analysis of the revolutionary period 1848 appeared in their paper. They also used their editorial desks to take up a polemic against Bakunin. In July, they printed an unsubstantiated rumor passed on from their Paris correspondent and fellow Communist League member, Herman Ewerbeck, that George Sand had documents proving Bakunin was a Russian spy and was responsible for the arrest of several Polish radicals. There could be no more serious charge leveled against an activist, then or now. When Caussidiere had discovered a spy in Paris, he handed the wretch a pistol so he could do the honorable thing and blow his own brains out. When he refused, Caussidiere solicitously offered him a choice of poisonous libations to send him on the path of righteousness. No spy could expect better. The unfounded accusation against Bakunin, made as he was on the run from police and still under the tsar’s sentence of exile and hard labor, left him dumbfounded. It was not the first such accusation made against him. Real police agents often dropped such charges and countercharges to sow discord within the movement. Too often revolutionaries themselves falsely accused their rivals to eliminate and silence them. To publish such a story without a shred of evidence, however, was irresponsible and had potentially fatal consequences. Bakunin fired off letters to newspapers and to George Sand, urging her to refute the lie. She did so, writing Marx that the communiqué from Ewerbeck was “totally false” and had not the slightest appearance of truth to it. Furthermore, she had not the “slightest doubt” regarding Bakunin’s loyalty and the “sincerity of his convictions,” and she hoped Marx’s “honor and conscience” would lead him to publish her letter immediately. He did so, claiming the newspaper had discharged both its duty to scrutinize public figures and its duty to give Bakunin a chance to set the record straight. This was disingenuous at best, for the decision to print the unsubstantiated rumor was little more than irresponsible character assassination that could easily have led to a real assassination.[207]

With the publication of his “Appeal to the Slavs,” Marx and Engels renewed their political and theoretical attacks against Bakunin. The “Appeal” was first published in Germany, then quickly reprinted in a Czech newspaper. La Reforme serialized it, and Proudhon’s newspaper, Le Peuple, reviewed it favorably. Polish émigrés in Paris applauded the article, and it impressed General Dubbelt of the Third Section, who considered having his secret agents kidnap Bakunin and return him to Russia.[208] But Bakunin’s draft was heavily edited by the publisher. The version that saw print omitted all references to the “social question.” Stripped of its crucial arguments on class, the abolition of property, and revolution, it was relatively easy for Engels to criticize the pamphlet along lines Bakunin himself would agree with. Nor did Engels seem to appreciate that the “Appeal” was not an effort to answer large questions about the meaning and movement of history. That was an exercise best left for the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Instead, the “Appeal” was a call to action, written to revitalize the revolution and move it forward in the face of repression. The attack in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was inappropriate; it was as if someone responded to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech by insisting recent neurological research had proven that dreams were merely the random firings of synapses.

“Bakunin is our friend,” Engels began, apparently unaware that friends don’t call friends spies without a little evidence. From there, he attacked Bakunin’s use of abstract words such as “freedom,” “justice,” “equality,” “liberation.” If they “sound very fine,” such words “prove absolutely nothing in historical and political questions.” What was needed was an analysis of the “actually existing obstacles” and the understanding that “all pious wishes and beautiful dreams are of no avail against the iron reality.” “If the thing is impossible,” he continued, “it does not take place and in spite of everything remains an empty figment of a dream.” The key to determining iron reality from empty dreams was to understand that history was a succession of stages and that one had to back the winner. The invasion of Mexico by the United States, Engels elaborated, should not be deplored as “a war of conquest,” for it was “waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization.” It was romantic sentimentalism to complain that it was “unfortunate that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it.” No, the revolutionary had to support the U.S., for “the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization, and for the third time in history give the world trade a new direction.” True, “the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places ‘justice’ and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?” History moved in progressive stages of economic development and it was folly to oppose even war and empire if they were on the side of the new economic order.

The implication of this for Slavic independence was obvious, at least to Engels. With the notable exception of the Poles, the Slavs “all belong to people which are ... necessarily counterrevolutionary owning to the whole of their historical position, or, like the Russians, are still a long way from revolution and therefore, at least for the time being, are still counterrevolutionary.” They had no “future,” for they lacked “the primary historical, geographical, political, and industrial conditions for independence and viability.” The Slavs had no history, either, he continued, and empire was the best thing that could have happened to them. Either they had come “under foreign sway” after they had achieved only “the first, most elementary stage of civilization,” or they had been “forced to attain the first stage of civilization only by means of a foreign yoke,” and thus were “not viable and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence.” Furthermore, even if the Slovenes and Croats could carve out independent states, “Germany and Hungary cannot allow themselves to be cut off from the Adriatic Sea.” Nor could Austria be cut off from the Adriatic or the Mediterranean, for then “the eastern part of Germany would be torn to pieces like a loaf of bread that has been gnawed by rats! And all that by way of thanks for the Germans having given themselves the trouble of civilizing the stubborn Czechs and Slovenes, and introducing among them trade, industry, a tolerable degree of agriculture, and culture!” No, the German conquest from the Elbe to the Warthe “was to the advantage of civilization.” And, he noted, if eight million Slavs had suffered “the yoke imposed on them by the four million Magyars, that alone sufficiently proves which was the more viable and vigorous, the many Slavs or the few Magyars!” “Big monarchies had become a historical necessity,” he intoned, and in uniting “all these small, stunted, and impotent little nations into a single big state,” the empires had “enabled them to take part in a historical development from which, left to themselves, they would have remained completely aloof.” Nor was that process over, for now, “as a result of the powerful progress of industry, trade, and communications, political centralization has become a much more urgent need than it was then in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What still has to be centralized is being centralized.” It is difficult to know what historical crime could not be justified by such logic. For Engels, “these ‘crimes’ of the Germans and Magyars against the said Slavs are among the best and most praiseworthy deeds which our and the Magyar people can boast in their history.” [209]

It got worse. The Slavs were doomed by history and the development of civilization, he continued; they were doomed also by their own actions. If they, like the intellectuals who could divine the course of history, had ever embarked on “a new revolutionary history,” that would have redeemed them. But with the sole exception of the Poles, the Slavs “were always the main instruments of the counterrevolutionaries” and thus were “the oppressors of all revolutionary nations.” For that reason, “hatred of Russians was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans.” True, he admitted, the Germans had also aided reaction, though Engels did not clearly distinguish between those who served reaction because they had been drafted into the tsar’s army and those who consciously set out to create a German empire for themselves. But the Germans had rehabilitated themselves in 1848, he suggested, for “a single courageous attempt at a democratic revolution, even if it were crushed, extinguishes in the memory of the peoples whole centuries of infamy and cowardice.” The Slavs lacked even that. Their recent insurrections did not count, for with the Slavs, “nationality takes precedence over revolution.” Therefore, he concluded, the Slavs deserved “the most determined use of terror” against them.

All in all, it was a foul little screed and its argument could be used to justify virtually any conquest and any conqueror. It was a particularly raw version of the ideas Engels and Marx had already advanced about the nature of history; at times it was little more than the argument that might made right. It was less sophisticated than Bakunin’s “Appeal,” for unlike Engels he had carefully distinguished between people and governments and avoided labeling any ethnic group as inherently reactionary. Bakunin agreed with Engels on several points, as was obvious even in the bowdlerized version that made it to print. He too insisted that the choice before Europe was revolution or reaction and Bakunin sided unequivocally with revolution. Like Engels, he saw nothing positive in the constituent assemblies and congresses, though he understood that the Prague convention had rhetorical value. Sadly, the deleted portions of his draft outlined his position on the social revolution; with those gone, it was understandable enough that Engels would go after the tepid arguments that remained. Still, his attack on Bakunin was an example of spiteful academic arrogance and of historical materialism at its absolute, most vulgar worst.

Their disagreement was much more than a narrow debate about the nature of Slavic society. It reflected differences over issues in philosophy, the nature of history, political strategy, and personal experience. Bakunin held that history could move rapidly in times of revolution and that humanity did not have to move through specific economic stages in proper order. The development of the economy was connected to, but not synonymous with, freedom. Where Marx and Engels saw the expansion of economic production as the essential ingredient in human freedom and thus supported the U.S. over Mexico and Germany over the Slavs, Bakunin argued that it was possible to create freer societies regardless of the level of the economy. It was possible for less developed societies to take up the social revolution and remove those obstacles, those social systems and structures of empire, state, church, lord, and capitalist, that prevented the people from controlling their own lives. Peasants did not need to replace the lord with the capitalist and exchange serfdom for a wage, Bakunin held; workers did not have to remain exploited until the productive capacity had reached a certain level. They could reorganize society, “from top to bottom ... on the basis of complete economic and social equality,” in the here and now. Might, even economic might, was not the same as right. To argue otherwise was to doom humanity to the yoke and to insist that the intellectual, not the people themselves, should lead the revolution.

It was an argument both sides would pursue over nearly thirty years and that their followers would carry on. Each tended to present the other’s argument in the harshest, most exaggerated form, then debate the absurd conclusions no one had ever advanced. One sees similar exchanges in academic journals and publications such as The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books, where “my esteemed colleague” and “my learned friend” are genteel and formal declarations of war to the death. New ideas are often kindled through overstatement and rebuttal, though the bemused spectator may be forgiven for thinking more heat than light is given off. While Bakunin and Marx and Engels did have substantive and important disagreements on many topics, it is easy to exaggerate them. Bakunin had declared early on that the two were essentially right in their theory of historical materialism, while Marx and Engels would refine and make more subtle their original ideas. The year after Bakunin’s death in 1876, Marx explicitly warned against interpreting his ideas as a “historico-philosophical theory of the general path of development prescribed by fate to all nations.” Indeed, he came around to Bakunin’s position and argued that Russia itself had a chance to bypass capitalist development and thus avoid “all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.” When Russian revolutionaries asked him in 1881 to amplify this statement, and in particular to address the question of whether the peasant commune rather than capitalist property could lead to socialism, he concluded that it could well be the “mainspring of Russia’s social regeneration.”[210] For his part, Engels would rethink his crude verdict in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung forty years later, writing that “according to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this.” This was not strictly true, as his exchange with Bakunin indicates, but he did confess that “Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it.” The fault lay in the need “to emphasize the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place, or the opportunity to give their due to the other factors.” The excesses of later Marxists who applied the theory without understanding its nuances and subtleties had led to “the most amazing stuff” that needed to be criticized and corrected.[211]

In the meantime, there was work to be done. Bakunin wrote several newspaper articles for the radical press on subjects ranging from the need to organize revolution in the face of Russian and Austrian reaction, to answering the outrageous charge that he was a spy, to conditions in Russia, to the need to forestall war between Germany and Russia. Still dodging the authorities, he was constantly on the move throughout central Europe as the barricades were torn down by troops, constituent assemblies waffled and compromised, and time, always the best weapon of the old order, ground away. In March, the Frankfurt parliament, frightened by its audacity and now desperately seeking a conciliatory compromise to avoid further conflict, voted in favor of a constitution that outlined a united Germany, an elected legislature, provisions for public education and universal suffrage, and a restricted role for the monarchy. It then voted to beseech the king of Prussia to take the throne. Friedrich Wilhelm IV understood the offer for what it was: a sign of weakness. He rebuffed the offer, dismissing it as a “crown picked up from the gutter,” and waited, confident he could win on his own terms.

By May 1849 Bakunin was in Dresden, in the German kingdom of Saxony. Its makeshift parliament had voted to accept the Frankfurt constitution, only to have their own king veto the resolution, dismiss the parliament, and request the Prussians to send in troops to help him put an end to all the talk about reform and change. In what was about the last replay of Paris ‘48, the people of the city threw up the barricades, raided the arsenal, and destroyed the railway lines. The people took the streets, the king took a powder, and another provisional government was hastily and nervously declared. But the rebellion was ill-prepared and the provisional government was made up of the same liberals who had sold out the proletariat on virtually every other occasion. Convinced they would soon abandon the barricades, Bakunin contented himself with leisurely inspections of the defenses, rating them in his professional opinion as inefficient, slovenly, and naive, according to his Dresden acquaintance and fellow activist, the composer Richard Wagner. He swallowed his misgivings, however, when it was clear that the people would fight, and drew up strategies and helped strengthen the ramparts. He urged the provisional government not to trust to negotiations and parleys, for these were calculated to lull them while fresh troops were brought up. It was no time for retreat, for the regimes, “having once successfully started a reactionary movement, would not stop halfway and would not rest until the old order, destroyed by the revolution of 1848, was completely restored.”[212]

Even Engels would comment that Bakunin was “an able and cool-headed commander” at Dresden. He appeared all over the city, giving advice and orders, shouting encouragement, organizing troops, and preparing for counterattacks. “I did all I could to save the ruined and obviously dying revolution,” he recalled. “I did not sleep, I did not eat, I did not drink, I did not even smoke.” With the arrival of the Prussian troops, however, the position was hopeless. In five days of street fighting, their muskets and cannon did their foul work, killing about 250 of the rebels in a frenzy that appalled even the hardened Bakunin. He organized a careful retreat to forestall the rout that would leave even more dead, and made his own way out of the city at the end of the last day of fighting.[213]

He headed for Chemnitz, rejoining Wagner along the way, on the strength of rumors that the city was about to rebel. The rumors were ill-founded, and instead of rebellion, Bakunin found a posse made up of the mayor and several other good citizens of Chemnitz who arrested him. “Exhausted, drained not only physically but even more so morally,” Bakunin was “completely indifferent to what happened to me” after he had destroyed the incriminating notes and papers in his possession.[214] His captors, however, were not indifferent to his fate. He was handed over to the army and taken back to Dresden; there he and the other captured leaders were put in chains and taken to the same Königstein castle in which the Saxon king had holed up during the uprising. Bakunin, still shackled, was kept in solitary confinement for eight months awaiting trial. Although one cannot commit treason against a country other than one’s own, such a legal nicety escaped the Saxon court, which convicted the Russian of treason and sentenced him to death. The sentence was commuted, for unlike those governors and presidents and Mafia chieftains who insist on the death penalty, some nineteenth-century rulers understood that the occasional show of mercy was a far more subtle demonstration of their power.

But Bakunin’s tribulations were not over, and neither were his trials, for the Austrian authorities demanded that he be turned over to them for judgment. In June 1850, Bakunin was bundled up and sent to Prague under heavy guard. The Austrians charged him under the code of martial law, not civil law, which meant he had no access to legal counsel and could neither receive nor send mail. He was again thrown into solitary confinement, again shackled constantly in his tiny cell for nine months as the police put together the case against him. In March 1851, he was taken to another prison, this time in Olmutz, where his captors found it convenient to keep him chained to the wall. Finally, two years almost to the day after he had been captured, he was found guilty of treason by another country that had no such jurisdiction and again sentenced to death.

Now the Russians insisted on their turn, and the Austrian authorities duly passed Bakunin over. One of the nice things about being an autocrat is one doesn’t have to bother with boring, costly trials. Since Bakunin had years earlier been sentenced without trial to hard labor in Siberia, it took only the stroke of a pen to change that to indefinite imprisonment in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, the same dank, foul prison where Peter the Great had tortured and killed his own son, where the Decembrists had been entombed, where Dostoevsky had undergone his mock execution, and where revolutionaries such as Chernyshevsky and Kropotkin would be thrown in later years. “From the times of Peter I,” Kropotkin would write, “for a hundred and seventy years, the annals of this mass of stone which rises from the Neva in front of the Winter Palace, were annals of murder and torture, of men buried alive, condemned to a slow death, or driven to insanity in the loneliness of the dark and damp dungeon.”[215]

Bakunin would spend the next three years there. It is only in the context of his two years of solitary confinement and his sentence in the Peter and Paul fortress that we can evaluate a piece of writing that has puzzled and dismayed Bakunin’s allies, and to their discredit delighted his foes: the confession he wrote to Nicholas I.

Two months after his internment in the fortress, Count Orlov, now the head of the Third Section, came to visit the prisoner. Unlike previous interrogations made under the threat of torture and worse, this new inquisitor made no demands for information, no menaces, no half-promises of aid in return for names of accomplices. He simply offered Bakunin the chance to unburden himself, to “write to the sovereign as though you were speaking with your spiritual father.” Bakunin agreed with an unseemly alacrity and over the next month, he wrote out a detailed account of his life and activities from his arrival in Germany in 1840 to his meeting with Orlov. He filled ninety-six pages with his cramped handwriting, demonstrating his acute memory and considerable insight into politics and his own personality.

Why would he do it? Revolutionaries are supposed to hurl defiance at their oppressors, not spill their guts in a missive that started, “Your Imperial Majesty, Most Gracious Sovereign!” Had prison broken him? Was he bored? Did he want to repent? Did he hope a sincere confession would convince the tsar to reduce his sentence? Did he calculate that an insincere confession would fool the tsar into freeing him? Was he seeking the approval of the tsar to replace that of his father? Buried in prison, facing an indefinite sentence, did he seek to leave some trace of his existence for posterity? Historians have argued for each of these positions and for every possible combination of them, including “all of the above.” His supporters have stressed the very real horrors of the prison, while his detractors have accused him of cowardice and hypocrisy.

That he would write to the tsar is less startling than it might appear, even without the spur of jail. Bakunin, though stripped of his rank, still saw himself as a noble with a traditional right to appeal to the tsar and likely saw nothing contradictory or hypocritical in availing himself of this right. We might also recall his comments in “The Reaction in Germany.” While all reactionaries had to be struggled against, the revolutionary could respect the “consistent” reactionary as someone who genuinely desired the good but was simply unable to understand it. That is to say, the consistent reactionaries, unlike the mediating ones, could be seen as worthy opponents to whom notions of chivalry could be extended; they could be respected. Certainly there was no more consistent reactionary than Nicholas I.

Later generations of Russian revolutionaries came from other classes and ranks, and so their code of honor and silence evolved later and in very different circumstances. The precedent that Bakunin had before him was that of the Decembrists. They had used their interrogation as an opportunity to outline all of the critical problems that Russia faced, not with defiance or insolence but with sincerity and the hope that their sacrifice would at least impress upon the tsar the need for reform and change. It had some effect. Their confessions were compiled into a digest and given to Nicholas I, who read it carefully and kept it close to hand ever after. In following their lead, Bakunin wrote not so much a “confession” as an avowal. It was not a confession of the sort one sees on TV crime dramas where the victim turns over Mr. Big in return for a deal from Jerry Orbach. Bakunin revealed no conspirators, turned over no accomplices, ratted out no one; he made it clear to the tsar that he would not “confess to you the sins of others.” The tsar himself noted dourly that Bakunin’s refusal to name names cast doubt on the sincerity of the confession, for it “destroys all confidence: if he feels all the weight of his sins, then only a pure, complete confession, and not a conditional one, can be considered a confession.”[216]

Bakunin revealed nothing about himself that was not already well-known or insignificant. Instead he used the confession to clarify his political ideas and to criticize the regime. While he often couched his criticisms in flowery homages to the tsar and Russia, he explained clearly and forcefully why he wanted revolution:

When you travel about the world you find everywhere much evil, oppression, and injustice, in Russia perhaps more than in other states. It is not that people in Russia are worse than in Western Europe; on the contrary, I think the Russian is better, kinder, and has greater breadth of soul than the westerner. But in the West there is a specific against evil: publicity, public opinion, and finally freedom, which ennobles and elevates every man. This remedy does not exist in Russia.

This freedom often made the West seem worse, for every evil, every injustice, every grievance was exposed. But in reality, such openness was healthier for the body politic, for

in Russia all illnesses turn inward and eat away the innermost structure of the social organism ... Russian social life is a chain of mutual oppressions: the higher oppresses the lower, the latter suffers, does not dare complain, but he in turn squeezes the one who is still lower, who also suffers and also takes revenge on the one subordinate to him. Worst of all is it for the common people, the poor Russian muzhik [peasant], who, at the very bottom of the social ladder, has no one to oppress and must suffer oppression from all; as the Russian proverb says, “Only the lazy man does not beat us.”

In such an oppressive society, he continued, “the prime mover is fear; and fear kills all life, all intelligence, all noble movement of the soul.” But fear was not enough to maintain a society. Fear led to silence, and silence to complicity in widespread corruption. From top to bottom, “thievery and injustice and oppression live and grow in Russia like a thousand-armed polyp that, slash and cut it as you will, never dies.” Instead, the problem had to be attacked at its very base. Russia needed

nobility of feeling, independence of thought, the proud fearlessness of a clear conscience, respect for human worth in oneself and in others, and finally, public contempt for all dishonorable, inhuman people, social shame, a social conscience! But these qualities, these forces, bloom only where there is free scope for the soul, not where slavery and fear prevail. These virtues are feared in Russia not because people might admire them but out of fear that free thoughts might come with them.

He then addressed the two most profound social evils in Russia: serfdom and empire. He declared his sympathy for “the good Russian muzhik who is oppressed by everyone,” and asked pointedly,

What might these people be if they were given freedom and property, if they were taught to read and write! And I asked: Why does the present government—autocratic, armed with boundless power, not limited by statute or in fact by any outside law or any competing power—why does it not use its omnipotence for the liberation, elevation, and enlightenment of the Russian people?

Bakunin then answered his own question, employing a clever rhetorical device to press home his point without openly courting further punishment. First he suggested that what he should have answered was that affairs of state were none of his business, or perhaps that politics was a difficult craft and he could not see all sides to a question and thus could not determine the correct answers. He then reminded the tsar of what he had actually said:

The government does not free the Russian people, first, because with all its omnipotent power, not limited by law, it is in fact limited by a multitude of circumstances, it is bound in invisible ways, it is bound by its corrupt administration, and finally it is bound by the egotism of the nobility. And even more, because it actually does not want freedom for or the enlightenment or elevation of the Russian people, seeing in them merely a soulless machine for its conquests in Europe!

That led him directly to a critique of empire, again posing it as questions he had asked and answered himself:

What benefit is there for Russia in her conquests? ... What is the final goal of its expansion? What will the Russian tsardom give to the enslaved peoples in place of the independence of which they have been robbed? There is no point in even speaking of freedom, enlightenment, and national prosperity; perhaps it will give them its total national character, oppressed by slavery!

The result would be that Russia would become “abhorrent to all other Slavs as she is now abhorrent to the Poles. She will not be a liberator but an oppressor of her own Slav family.”

Following this train of thought, Bakunin had “assured myself that Russia—in order to save her honor and her future—must carry out a revolution, overthrow your tsarist authority, destroy monarchical rule, and, having thus liberated herself from internal slavery, take her place at the head of the Slav movement.” At that point, Russia could lead the revolt against the empires of Austria, Prussia, and Turkey and create a free Slav society.

What should replace the autocracy? Bakunin acknowledged bluntly that the revolutionaries had been “called to destroy and not to build; others better, more intelligent, and fresher than we will build.” He had no schematic for the future. Nor could there be one at the present, because Russia’s “tongue and all her movements are constrained. Let her but arise and speak and then we will learn both what she is thinking and what she wants; she herself will show us what forms and what institutions she needs.”

Bakunin did know that he wanted a democratic form of government and not a parliamentary or representative system. He had already seen how such constitutional governments paid lip service to “the people” while looking after the interests of a few. Such a system in Russia might represent the gentry and the merchants, but “the huge mass of the people, the real people ... would remain without representatives and would be oppressed and humiliated by that very same gentry which now humiliates them.”

A socialist but not yet an anarchist, Bakunin believed that the state would still be necessary once the monarchy was abolished. Perhaps, he mused, Russia would require a “strong dictatorial government” for a time. Bakunin’s detractors have pounced on this statement with glee to insist that he was the father of fascism and Stalinism. Even some Bolsheviks have argued that Bakunin was the prophet of the vanguard party. All of them have excited themselves unnecessarily. This was Bakunin’s first attempt to resolve the questions of revolutionary tactics, strategy, and organization, not his last. Yet even here it is obvious that his idea of a “dictatorship” bore no resemblance to fascism or vanguardism. In 1851 “dictatorship” meant something rather different than it does now. It referred to the Roman practice of giving a magistrate limited, extraordinary powers in an emergency. This was the sense in which Bakunin used the term, for in his view, such a government “must strive to make its existence unnecessary as soon as possible, having in view only the freedom, independence, and gradual maturing of the people.” That distinguished it from the monarchy, which, “on the contrary, must endeavor to prevent its existence from ever becoming unnecessary, and therefore must maintain its subjects in unalterable childhood.” Later he would move even further from the notion of a benevolent dictatorship as his thinking became more sophisticated and subtle and as he understood that no one could be trusted to give up power once it had been placed in their hands and that paternalism created infants, not adults. Freedom was not a reward for responsible behavior; instead, freedom was necessary to develop responsibility.

Was he not worried that a Russian revolution would unleash “the drunken fury of the unbridled mob”? Would not an uprising of the peasants revisit the terrors of the Pugachev Rebellion? Indeed it might, he noted, but he justified such violence on the grounds that “sometimes even a terrible evil is necessary.” Such thoughts, he admitted, were “criminal,” even “stupid”; no doubt they deserved “the most severe punishment,” but there they were.[217] Bakunin had placed his critique of the regime under the eyes of the tsar himself. He had not forsaken his comrades nor, despite the flowery language and stock phrases of deference, his ideas. He made that plain in a letter to his sister Tatiana three years later, confirming that he had not wavered in his convictions; rather, the enforced period of reflection had reinforced them, though he would perhaps temper his radical activities with forethought if he ever again had the chance to act. Later, in a letter to Alexander Herzen, Bakunin scoffed at the memory of the tsar’s fond hope that he would register repentance.[218] The confession does show that Bakunin, like all of the radicals and revolutionaries of 1848, had no foolproof plan for revolution. It reveals that his political ideas were developing as he struggled with the questions of how to make not a putsch or a coup d’etat but a social revolution and of how to represent the interests of the people in the face of counterrevolution and erstwhile allies who would abandon them as soon as their own narrow interests were obtained.

Despite his optimistic note to Tatiana, prison had its calculated effect on Bakunin. Isolated from other prisoners, allowed only three visits from his family over three years, he was deeply affected by desperation and depression that threatened to overwhelm him. Even the prisoner’s traditional solace—tobacco and tea, the nineteenth-century Russian equivalent of cigarettes and coffee, the pleasures of which should not be underestimated by the contemporary smug health fanatic—was difficult to obtain. By the time of his transfer to Schlusselburg prison in 1854, after five years in German, Austrian, and Russian prisons, his physical health was broken. He was plagued with hemorrhoids—another point of commonality with Marx, though Marx could at least avail himself of a hot bath for occasional relief. Bakunin suffered from fever, severe headaches, and tinnitus, a roaring in his ears that he compared to the sound of boiling water; he had difficulty in breathing, likely the result of heart disease brought on by the lack of exercise and a diet that provided calories but little else.[219]

The prison diet resulted in another disease as well: scurvy. As anyone who has read a seafaring novel knows, and as medical science knew as early as 1750, a small portion of citrus fruit prevents scurvy. As a result, today one hears the word usually in pseudo-pirate patois, that is to say, in growled expressions like, “Avast there, ye scurvy dogs!” It is, however, a serious disease with terrible symptoms and effects. Without vitamin C, collagen, the protein that connects cells together, breaks down. The walls of the small blood vessels, or capillaries, collapse and blood leaks into cells throughout the body, causing open sores on the skin and mucous membranes. Hemorrhaging into the joints, muscles, and bone tissue causes excruciating pain; as the gums hemorrhage and the dentin of the teeth breaks down, the teeth themselves loosen and fall out, leaving only bloody sockets. The victim may suffer from rapid breathing, diarrhea, and anemia. Untreated, the disease is fatal.

By July 1854, the disease had ravaged Bakunin. Now forty years old, his teeth were gone, and the world passed him by.[220] His father died that same year, nearly ninety years old, without having seen his eldest son in fifteen years. By then 1848 was a distant memory, and if the revolution had not succeeded, Europe nonetheless looked significantly different than it had when Bakunin left it. Even the geography of cities changed, as working-class districts were broken up and subjected to “urban renewal,” with the streets widened to prevent barricades and to make it easier for troops to form and attack protestors. Yet serfdom was abolished throughout the Austrian empire; most of Germany had representative governments complete with the constitutions Bakunin had railed against. Taken together, all these changes throughout Europe did not make the social revolution, and revolutionaries from Bakunin to Marx to Herzen to Proudhon reflected bitterly on how far from their mark they had fallen. History might be kinder to them than they were to themselves, however, for they drastically changed the nature of politics and protest. No one, not even kings, could ignore the people any longer. Politicians now had to court workers and peasants. If the bourgeoisie and aristocracy would soon learn how to manipulate the political process to channel protest from the streets to the back rooms and hallways of legislatures, the people too would learn how to use parliaments and legislatures and votes. The clearest example of this was France, where Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected president of the Republic after capturing the votes of peasants and workers with a campaign that promised them protection from the rich, hinted at radicalism, and appealed to nationalism. His election demonstrated that those who had made the revolution in 1848 would have to be taken into account in ways unheard of before. That he would soon proclaim himself emperor showed clearly how the revolution had failed and that Bakunin was right to argue that constitutions and elections did not empower the masses. But 1848 had changed Europe forever, and whatever progress was made over the next century owed much to that revolutionary year.

In 1854, the Crimean War broke out, as Russia moved into territories the decaying Ottoman Empire was unable to defend and France and England set out to check the tsar. The Charge of the Light Brigade was only the most famous of the blunders and catastrophes of that war. Not even Florence Nightingale could mop up all the gore as more than six hundred thousand died, most of disease, over two years of fighting. All of the old problems, from inadequate weapons to incompetent commanders to insufficient supplies, ensured that Russia had the worst of it despite its numerical superiority in the field. The tsar himself was a casualty: Nicholas I died from disease at St. Petersburg in 1855, only fifty-nine years old.

His death brought as much rejoicing as mourning. Far away in London, Alexander Herzen popped open champagne and hired street children to chant “Emperor Nicholas is dead!” The emperor’s son took the throne as Alexander II, and Bakunin’s family used the occasion to ask the new tsar for clemency. Bakunin’s most eloquent advocate was his mother, and she stepped into the traditional role of Russian noblewomen to exert what influence she could on behalf of her son. Bakunin himself, left by disease and “melancholy” with “only one prayer: liberty or death,” petitioned the tsar himself in the hope that he could breathe the air of freedom once more.[221] Early in 1857, the tsar relented and commuted the sentence to permanent exile in Siberia. He even granted Bakunin’s request that he be allowed to visit Priamukhino to say good-bye to his family. The reunion was brief and painful: The tsar’s mercy extended to a single day and Bakunin remained under heavy guard. It was a measure of the horrors of prison that the once vital, brash, and energetic man now stood before his family moody and mute, unable to find any joy at Priamukhino or with his family, or even the effort to feign it. The next day, his guards escorted him to the horse-drawn sleigh and they began the three-week journey to Siberia.

[196] Cited in Charles Breunig, The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789–1850, New York: Norton, 1977, pages 254–5.

[197] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to La Reforme, March 1848; Bakunin, Confession, pages 54–7.

[198] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to La Reforme, March 1848.

[199] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to P. V. Annenkov, 17 April 1848.

[200] Carr, pages 154–5.

[201] Bakunin, Confession, page 67.

[202] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, Letter to Herwegh, 1–15 August 1848.

[203] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Appeal to the Slavic Peoples by a Russian Patriot,” October-November 1848.

[204] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Appeal to the Slavic Peoples by a Russian Patriot,” October-November 1848.

[205] Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, volume 3, page 1353.

[206] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Appeal to the Slavic Peoples by a Russian Patriot,” October-November 1848.

[207] Karl Marx, George Sand, Bakounine et les autres, 20 July and 3 August 1848, pages 136–7.

[208] Lawrence D. Orton, “The Echo of Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slavs (1848),” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, X, no. 4 (winter 1976), pages 489–502.

[209] Engels, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 14 February 1849, Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 8, page 362.

[210] Marx, letter to the editorial board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877, in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Progress Publishers, third rev. ed., 1975, pages 291–4; Marx to Vera Zasulich, McLellan, pages 623–4.

[211] Engels to Joseph Bloch, 21–2 September 1890, in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, pages 394–6.

[212] Bakunin, Confession, page 135.

[213] Engels, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, volume 1, page 381; Bakunin, Confession, page 146.

[214] Bakunin, Confession, page 148.

[215] Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, reprint, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989, page 320.

[216] Bakunin, Confession, page 33. See Orton’s introduction for a sophisticated analysis of the confession and its historians.

[217] Bakunin, Confession, pages 82–95.

[218] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Tatiana, February 1854; letter to Alexander Herzen, 8 December 1860.

[219] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letters to Tatiana, beginning of May 1854 and February 1854.

[220] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 19 July 1854.

[221] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Alexander II, 14 February 1857.