The New Criterion

Apr 22, 2008 01:04 AM

Vera and the Nihilists

by Michael Weiss

Tom Stoppard owns the patent on English dramatization of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries. But the Irish one belongs to Oscar Wilde, whose flop of a first play, "Vera, or the Nihilists," was loosely based on the story of Vera Zasulich, about whom a new unconventional and thoroughly tantalizing biography has been published. In Wilde's drama, a comely peasant girl discovers her brother, sent off to Moscow to train as a lawyer, has been arrested and dispatched to Siberia for joining a revolutionary cadre of Nihilists. She later joins up with this same group and falls in love with an unlikely member, the disguised Czarevitch Alexis, whose sympathies are with the people against his paranoid and tyrannical father, Czar Ivan.

Wilde depicted the bloody-minded throng of rebels as he would any mob; for them a rush to judgment was reason in itself, and means and ends were as confused as the grammar of their many turgid manifestos. (Of particular note is that the "Wildean" character in this play is Prince Paul, one of the Czar's wittiest and most opportunistic ministers who sells out to the enemies of his erstwhile court.) Yet there was no mistaking the socialist republican playwright's own sympathies in this cri de coeur loosed by his lovelorn and politically fraught protagonist:

O God, how easy it is for a king to kill his people by thousands, but we cannot rid ourselves of one crowned man in Europe! What is there of awful majesty in these men which makes the hand unsteady, the dagger treacherous, the pistol-shot harmless? Are they not men of like passions with ourselves, vulnerable to the same diseases, of flesh and blood not different from our own? What made Olgiati tremble at the supreme crisis of that Roman life, and Guido's nerve fail him when he should have been of iron and of steel? A plague, I say, on these fools of Naples, Berlin, and Spain! Methinks that if I stood face to face with one of the crowned men my eye would see more clearly, my aim be more sure, my whole body gain a strength and power that was not my own! Oh, to think what stands between us and freedom in Europe! a few old men, wrinkled, feeble, tottering dotards whom a boy could strangle for a ducat, or a woman stab in a night-time. These are the things that keep us from liberty.

Vera goes on to assassinate the governor of Archangel, shortly before Michael, another member of her radical groupuscule, kills the Czar himself--mainly to impress her since he's had a thing for her ever since their shared peasant youth. Then, in a highly un-Russian and all-too-Shakespearean twist, she commits suicide rather than plunge a dagger into the heart of her beloved, who now wears the Imperial crown with the intent to emancipate his subjects, release all political prisoners from jail or exile, and usher in an age of democracy from the steppes to the taiga. Vera thus violates the "oath" she pledged to Nihilism never to pardon monarchy and always to fight for the revolution. (That Nihilists had such an oath to begin with was an irony tailor-made for Wilde, and later the Coen brothers.)

The real Vera was not so successful in her attentat, nor was she ever so soft or conflicted as her theatrical counterpart. In the Moscow Times, Virginia Rounding reviews Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World:

Comrades of Vera, but not Vera herself, now ended up at St. Petersburg's House of Preliminary Detention, a model prison based on London's Pentonville, where political prisoners were detained prior to their trials and where occurred the event that sparked Vera's decision to assassinate the city's governor. Trepov had arrived unexpectedly one day for an inspection, been horrified by the lax regime he found in place and, almost as a reflex action, ordered one of the inmates, a man called Bogolyubov, to be flogged. Such treatment was normally never meted out to the young intellectuals held in the "Prelim," and riots ensued. Vera herself had never met Bogolyubov, but she decided to avenge him anyway, and to become a martyr for the revolution in the process.

Siljak recounts the story of Vera's trial in detail and with a lively sense of drama. In his summing up, the judge asked the jury to consider not only whether Vera had shot Governor Trepov (about which there was really no doubt), but also whether she had intended to kill him. It took only 30 minutes for the jury, sympathetic to Vera's stated aim "to prove that no one should be sure they are beyond punishment when they violate human dignity," to clear her of all charges. Pandemonium broke out, and the stunned Vera found herself cast in the role of heroine and founding mother of Russian terrorism.

Siljak's book is unconventional because its climax -- Zasulich's attempted murder of Trepov and her subsequent trial -- are treated as a narrative post script on hundreds of pages of historical backstory. The author is more concerned with the intellectual-political firmament out of which Zasulich fell to earth and into bloody immortality.

Left out of Rounding's review is that after Zasulich repudiated terrorism and retired to Geneva, she joined the editorial board of a vibrant little Russian exile newspaper called Iskra, the "Spark." The rest of the masthead included Georgi Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism and coiner of the term "dialectical materialism;" Julius Martov, the future ill-starred head of the Menshevik Party; and Vladimir Lenin. (Trotsky joined later).

Zasulich was thus the knot that bound two tendencies of Russian revolutionism: the frayed disorder of Nihilism and the taut organization of Bolshevism. She was a disciple of Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882), the disaffected student cum terrorist high priest of the so-called Raznotchinsky or "Generation of the Sons." They were the violent upstarts who, impatient with top-down reform or a milder form of village socialism, set about undoing the humane legacy of great radicals and moralists like Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. Together with his comrade Peter Tkachev -- who later prefigured the strategies and tactics of Leninism -- Nechaev drafted the Program for Revolutionary Action, which defined the role of the "professional revolutionary" as that of a self-abnegating agent of social upheaval; the member of a hive, in other words, in which the individual was utterly and completely subordinated to the revolutionary collective.

Nechaev fled Russia in 1869 in order to drum up money and support for a non-existent revolutionary committee of which he was the self-proclaimed head. Though he had disavowed all ties to kith and kin, he was charismatic and intelligent enough to prey upon the gullibility of a few sympathizers. The historian E.H. Carr, in his brilliant, tragic history of the Herzen family, The Romantic Exiles, summarized Nechaev's short but influential life like this:

He deceived everyone he met, and when he was no longer able to deceive, his power was gone. His audacity was unbounded; and he carried personal courage to the extreme limit of foolhardiness. He is an unparalleled and bewildering combination of fanatic, swashbuckler, and cad.

Chief among his admirers and dupes was Mikhail Bakunin, whom he met in Switzerland. Nechaev persuaded the shaggy mastodon of anarchism to revert to a colder, steelier course of revolution. Bakunin's politics was the stuff of clownish whimsy, yet he had a rare ability to raise resources for his many fool adventures (Herzen was an indulgent, if wary, benefactor in this regard). Now that he had a vicious machiavellian guiding his actions, Bakunin could do great harm indeed. He and Nechaev co-wrote the famous "Catechism of a Revolutionary," which hymned destruction for its own sake and famously began:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.

Bakunin eventually extricated himself from this doomed friendship and claimed "[t]he man of [his] dreams turned out to be a figure from a nightmare." But while back in Russia, agitating for yet another phantom cadre, this one with alleged cross-continental reach, Nechaev managed to ensnare the next generation of intelligentsia in his flame-and-steel messianism. His rhetoric captivated the young Zasulich, who said she was made to feel weak against the older outlaw's decisiveness: "He could and would act - wasn't he the ringleader of the students? ... I could imagine no greater pleasure than serving the revolution. I had dared only to dream of it, and yet now he was saying that he wanted to recruit me...."

Nechaev murdered his own comrades, most notoriously I.I. Ivanov, who refused to truckle to his authority. Ivanov's body was discovered days later in a lake, and Dostoevsky fictionalized the event The Devils. No doubt this eagerness to devour his own contingent lent legitimacy to Nechaev's historical status as an ideological godfather to Bolshevism. Ironically, he was anathematized in the Soviet Union when Stalin had his named erased from the Russian “family tree” -- because surely there was no room on any of its branches for a mendacious killer and impostor. Soviet psychologists might have termed this "projection," and the great Russo-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely (about whom I wrote for TNC last October) concluded:

It is one of the minor ironies of the Russian Revolution that the final destruction of Nechaev’s reputation should have occurred at the height of the Great Purge of 1936-1938: an event which he would probably have wholeheartedly approved, conducted in accordance with the principles he himself had formulated. The possessed had devoured their prototype.

Zasulich opposed the October Revolution, having become something of a moderate Marxist in the decades prior to her demise in 1919. Trotsky wrote of her that she "remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. [Her] articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death."

So of the parturition of the totalitarian monster that engulfed Russia in the 20th century, Zasulich acted as both midwife and failed abortionist.

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