of the International. Bakunin and Lavroff were both in Zurich, and in
the year 1872 there were 239 Russian students, male and female, in
Zurich alone. These young people were, of course, in continual
intercourse with the older refugees. Bakunin and Lavroff both held
stated and formal lectures on socialism and revolution, which were
always succeeded by open and animated discussions of the subject treated
in them. A little later there were, according to Professor Thun, four
distinct groups among the Russian revolutionists in Zurich, some of them
caused by personal quarrels. But from the first there were always two,
one of whom swore by Bakunin, and the other by Lavroff.
Bakunin was an anarchist--an "amorphist" even, as we have seen--and he
believed in the propaganda of deeds. Every little village, he thought,
should make its own revolution; and if it could not make a revolution,
it might always be making a riot, or an explosion, or a fire, or an
assassination of some official, or something else to raise panic or
confusion. All this seemed to Lavroff and his friends to be unmitigated
folly. They too believed in revolution; but in their view revolution, to
be successful, must be organized and simultaneous; it must, above all,
first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad
and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was
manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it--that is, an
itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the
coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian
revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to
dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society would
eventually be able to do without any central authority, but not at
first, nor for a considerable time, the length of which could not now be
more precisely determined. In this Lavroff and his party stood much
nearer the Social Democrats of Germany than other Russian nihilists, and
they have come nearer still since then. They have cast off the Russian
commune, of which the early nihilists made so great an idol. They see
that it is an old-world institution doomed to dissolution, and rapidly
undergoing the process.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account