6. Returning to the
Revolutionary Fray

©2024 Michael Hughes, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0385.06

The trial and conviction of Vladimir Burtsev highlighted the declining sympathy in Britain for revolutionary opponents of the Russian government. The appeal of the ‘cause’ had for some years been damaged by growing concern about anarchism, along with the Salisbury Government’s determination to reduce the threat to public order supposedly posed by aliens living in Britain.1 Volkhovskii’s anger at the outcome of the Burtsev case was clear on the pages of Free Russia, where he was unusually trenchant in criticising not only the legal process, but other aspects of life in modern Britain as well. In May 1898, he wrote a piece condemning the poor quality of food and medical care in British prisons, arguing that ‘English prison life might be greatly improved by borrowing from Russia that humanitarian disposition and attitude of mind towards the fallen which characterises the Russian people’.2 Eighteen months later, at the Annual Meeting of the SFRF, he spoke dismissively of the ‘Podsnappian’ complacency that permeated public life in Britain (a reference to the character in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend who embodied smug insularity and reluctance to face unpleasant truths). He described how, at one of his lectures, the local mayor ‘patted him on the shoulder, and urged him never to go back to Russia since “there was no country above England”’. Volkhovskii told his audience that while he had:

nothing against “Mr Podsnap’s” pride in his country, he had everything against that gentleman imagining that any man of any nationality must be happy in being turned—forcibly, if necessary—into a Britisher. “Mr Podsnap” forgets, or does not understand that to every man his own country and his own personality is dear—whatever be the glory and advantages of England and the English.3

* * * *

Volkhovskii’s words partly reflected his disdain for the outburst of jingoism that erupted in Britain at the end of 1899, following the outbreak of the South African War,4 but they also hinted at wider changes in his outlook that shaped his activities during the last fifteen years of his life. While he never abandoned the campaign to influence perceptions of the Russian revolutionary movement abroad, Volkhovskii devoted less time to it in the years after 1900, focusing more attention on producing propaganda designed to foment revolutionary sentiment in Russia itself. He also became less concerned about reassuring his British audience about the essential moderation of the Russian opposition movement, acknowledging even on the pages of Free Russia that many revolutionaries like himself wanted to bring about not just political reform in Russia, but more far-reaching social and economic change as well.

Both the SFRF and Free Russia faced a major financial crisis by the end of the 1890s. Sales of the paper were poor and donations proved elusive in the wake of the Burtsev trial. Members of the Society sought to take advantage of the Russia ‘craze’ by organising exhibitions of Russian peasant crafts, including one in London’s New Bond Street, hoping that such initiatives could provide a useful source of income.5 Free Russia ran illustrated articles explaining how the Russian peasantry had for centuries supplemented their income by making a wide range of high-quality decorative goods.6 Volkhovskii approached Herbert Thompson, who chaired the SFRF branch in Cardiff, to see if he would provide the capital to fund the expansion of the venture. His answer was unpromising. Thompson noted that ‘Such an undertaking … would require … an able manager (or manageress) at its head devoting his whole time and energies to it and well-acquainted with the conditions of peasant industry in Russia and of the market for the goods in England. A manager with such qualities would be hard to find’.7 It was a shrewd assessment of the situation.

The situation in North America was no brighter, but Volkhovskii still hoped to increase sales of Free Russia there, as well as attract donations from wealthy sympathisers.8 In 1899, he corresponded at length with Edmund Noble, a leading figure in the American SFRF, discussing how to increase the appeal of Free Russia to an American audience. Noble replied noting pointedly that he could not himself provide financial support, adding that he lacked the right ‘social connections’ to seek philanthropic funding. He did however agree to write a regular letter ‘From Across the Atlantic’ reporting on developments in North America. Volkhovskii also discussed potential new publishing ventures with Noble, including a lavishly illustrated magazine depicting scenes of Russian life, as well as a series of ‘nihilist’ novels about the revolutionary struggle in Russia (a proposal that was less far-fetched than it sounds, given the success that authors including Stepniak and Le Queux had found in writing about Russian revolutionaries). Noble remained sceptical about the prospects for ‘making Russian material pay’.9 There was indeed something rather desperate about Volkhovskii’s efforts to put Free Russia on a stable footing. The paper appeared less regularly after 1900—typically between four and six editions a year—reflecting both the financial constraints and Volkhovskii’s involvement in other activities.

Many of the pieces Volkhovskii wrote for Free Russia following the Burtsev trial continued to attack the tsarist regime’s ‘militant and cannibalistic attitude towards its own people’.10 He condemned the ‘Philosophy of Reaction’ espoused by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who was widely considered by critics of the regime to exert great influence on the Tsar,11 dismissing Pobedonostsev himself as ‘a kind of wooden ruling machine in human shape, to whom the living units of mankind are nothing’.12 It was a striking image which characterised the tsarist government less as a relic of traditionalism and more as a modern manifestation of arbitrary power.¹³ Volkhovskii also continued to criticise the British press for providing too positive a coverage of Nicholas II. When the Tsar put forward proposals in the summer of 1898 for an international conference on disarmament, which attracted positive reactions around the world, he dismissed the idea as a publicity stunt, writing that, while Nicholas called for ‘peace on earth’, millions of his subjects had ‘no bread, no fuel, no fodder and no money; they do not know how to exist until the next crop’.14

Volkhovskii devoted much of Free Russia to developments in Finland, following the Tsar’s proclamation of a manifesto in February 1899 that weakened the authority of the Finnish Diet and promoted further Russification of the country.15 He had for some years been anxious about Russian ambitions to dominate Scandinavia, and hoped that unrest in Finland could resist such a move and foster opposition capable of destabilising the tsarist regime itself.¹⁶ Volkhovskii’s knowledge of developments was helped by his long-standing links with many Swedish and Danish socialists, who had for some years played a role in the dispatch of illegal literature into the Tsarist Empire,¹⁷ and shortly after the February Manifesto was issued he urged the leader of the Swedish Social Democrats, Hjalmar Branting, to adopt a stronger anti-Russian position.18 Volkhovskii described the assault on Finnish autonomy to readers of Free Russia as an example of ‘Russian Imperialism’, and criticised those in Britain, like William Stead and Charles Dilke, who tried to justify the new policy on the grounds that it would help the Russian state to manage ethnic tensions in the western borderlands.19

There are other elements in my country. There are Constitutionalists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists exercising now influence over thousands of factory workers. There are adherents of Local Self-Government. There are the Polish, Georgian, Oukrainien nationalists and other sections of the educated and semi-educated class, whose ideas about systems of government are decidedly different from those of Mr Pobyedonostsev and Company. And all these very large sections of the population have certainly more right to claim the representation of the National view than a handful of Reactionaries and Imperialists, who profit by their strong position at Court and in ruling circles to put a new blot on the honour of the Russian people.²⁰

While the harsh treatment of Finland made for excellent anti-tsarist propaganda, Volkhovskii was still more struck by the changing character of the opposition movement in Russia itself. The student unrest that broke out in Moscow and St Petersburg early in 1899 signalled the beginning of a long period of disruption in Russian universities. Student protests were hardly unprecedented in pre-revolutionary Russia—Volkhovskii himself had helped to foment student unrest when a young man—but the protests of 1899-1901 were notable for the sympathy they attracted from sections of the urban workforce.²¹ The disturbances also took place at a time of growing unrest in the Russian countryside. For Volkhovskii, as for many others, the start of the twentieth century seemed to mark the start of a new phase in the revolutionary struggle which brought together student and worker and peasant in a common front against the government. He was keen to explain the significance of developments to his Western readers.

In the spring of 1901, Volkhovskii published an article in Free Russia on ‘The Meaning of Recent Events’, telling his readers that

The change now was that ‘thousands of artizans, factory workers, cabmen and journeymen’ in cities across Russia responded to ‘the cry of the students for justice’. Volkhovskii also suggested that faith in the Tsar as the ‘little father’ of his people was fading rapidly in the countryside, as the peasantry began to understand how their poverty was rooted in the very structure of the existing social and economic order.22 Volkhovskii expanded on these ideas in an article on the ‘Russian Awakening’ that appeared in the Contemporary Review, in which he once again argued that students and workers were joined in close bonds of sympathy (‘a hearty compact’) against ‘horrible’ assaults by Cossack troops armed with whips and guns. He also described how the authorities were using force to suppress peasant unrest in provinces like Poltava and Kharkov, where many peasants had been shot or birched, suggesting that such repressive measures were bound to fail given the level of discontent.23 His views seemed to be confirmed in the spring of 1902, when further outbreaks of peasant unrest took place across the Empire, which Volkhovskii told readers of Free Russia was ‘a thing expected and only a matter of time’.24 He was confident that more extensive disorder would soon erupt in both the countryside and the city.

Many narodniki of the 1870s had believed that revolution could halt the development of capitalism in Russia and preserve intact the egalitarian instincts of the Russian peasantry.²⁵ Such hopes were by 1900 clearly untenable. Population growth in the countryside had created pervasive land hunger and poverty, as well as considerable economic differentiation, while the rapid growth of major urban centres created complex patterns of rural migration that disrupted traditional patterns of behaviour and belief.²⁶ It was for this reason that, by the closing years of the nineteenth century, several groups had emerged within the Tsarist Empire which—while more or less consciously identifying themselves as heirs to the narodnik tradition of a previous generation—recognised that the social and economic changes of the previous twenty years or so demanded new ideas and tactics.²⁷

The Union of Socialist Revolutionaries, led by A. A. Argunov, was sceptical about the revolutionary potential of the peasantry given its poverty and lack of education (the Union’s programme instead emphasised, in the tradition of Narodnaia volia, the importance of terror in the struggle against the tsarist state).28 The so-called Southern Party by contrast believed that the peasantry itself had a key role to play in the struggle for political freedom and economic transformation, not least because class divisions in the countryside had created a rural strata eager to bring about the destruction of the existing order.²⁹ Other smaller groups like the Worker’s Party for the Liberation of Russia, established by G. A. Gershuni, focused more on fomenting revolution among urban workers. Although these groups came together in 1901-2 to form the Socialist Revolutionary Party, many ideological and tactical divisions remained, reflecting different perspectives on such questions as the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry and the use of terror to bring about political and economic change. One distinguished historian of the Party has suggested that the membership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party was defined by a common ‘state of mind’ rather than any more tangible agreement.30 It was a verdict that could be applied to the SRs right down to 1917 and beyond.

The relationship between the nascent socialist revolutionary groups in Russia and the former narodniki in exile abroad was uncertain in the years before 1900, reflecting fragmentation on both sides, as well as the practical constraints imposed by police surveillance in Russia and Western Europe. The most important initiative to develop closer ties during the early years of the twentieth century came through the creation of the Agrarian-Socialist League, which was established following the death of Petr Lavrov in Paris at the start of 1900. While Volkhovskii had often disagreed with Lavrov during the previous decade, he recognised his central place in the Russian revolutionary pantheon, writing several poems in his honour including one that was recited at his funeral in Paris. A number of those who attended the funeral, including Volkhovskii, agreed to continue an initiative that Lavrov had set in motion before his death to create a new émigré organisation to support those seeking to foster revolutionary sentiment among the Russian peasantry.31 The founding members of the Agrarian-Socialist League included a number of former fundists—among them Shishko, Chaikovskii and Lazarev—as well as Volkhovskii himself.32 Viktor Chernov, who had arrived in Western Europe from Tambov province the previous year, and subsequently became the most important figure in shaping the ideology of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was also a founding member.33

The principal focus of the Agrarian-Socialist League, at least in its early days, was on developing propaganda for circulation in Russia. Its publications were often distributed through the networks built up by the Russian Free Press Fund over the previous decade (although the Northern Underground was used less than the route through Ukraine). The first publication to appear was headed an appeal ‘To Comrades in Thought and Deed’, which was printed together with an essay on ‘The Immediate Question of the Revolutionary Cause’ (written by Chernov). Volkhovskii was among the five signatories to the appeal, which began by noting that the Agrarian- Socialist League had been created to broaden ‘the revolutionary movement in general and the workers’s movement in particular by attracting ‘the working masses of the countryside’. It went on to list the key tasks of the League as:

1. The publication and distribution of popular revolutionary literature, suitable for the peasants as well as the urban factory and craft workers, especially those who have links to the countryside.
2. Familiarising Russian comrades with methods of socialist propaganda employed in the West among the working peasant masses (truodvye krest’ianskie massy), and with the forms of their organisation for the agrarian class struggle; assessing the historical experience of the ‘movement to the people’ by the Russian revolutionaries; studying all manifestations of social-political unrest among the contemporary peasantry; the theoretical development of general problems of agrarian socialism.
3. Practical and immediate aid of all kinds to Russian comrades whose activity corresponds to the programme of the Agrarian-Socialist League.

Members of the League were expected to acknowledge ‘the ability of the working mass of the Russian peasantry to participate in active movement and struggle that will contribute to the evolution of Russian life in the direction indicated by … the principles of international socialism’. They also had to accept the legitimacy of a revolutionary strategy focused on ‘carrying out appropriate social-revolutionary propaganda and agitation’ among the peasantry. The two principles taken together in effect recognised that successful revolutionary activity required careful guidance and planning while also needing to build on the energy of the narod itself.34 Chernov’s accompanying essay reinforced the idea that the countryside was an important site of revolution, arguing that propaganda and agitation should take place among the peasantry as well as the urban workers, a position that rejected the traditional Marxist view of the rural population as backward-looking and insular, while still acknowledging the critical role of the proletariat in forging revolution.35 The League’s subsequent publications marked a break with the populism of an earlier generation, acknowledging that economic relations in the countryside were already permeated by capitalism, with the result that the peasant commune was no longer necessarily a place where social relations were characterised by a spirit of egalitarian harmony.³⁶

Volkhovskii was determined that the League should attract a broad spectrum of members, reflecting his long-standing impatience with ideological and tactical disputes of the kind that were soon to lead to the division of the Social Democrats into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903 (his daughter Vera noted many years later that her father always sought to maintain good relations with Russian revolutionaries from all parties, regularly meeting them for dinner, and attending the same meetings in London and Switzerland).37 Volkhovskii was responsible for inviting David Soskice to join the League, even though his views at the time were closer to the Social Democrats, a move opposed by some other members.38 The League’s membership was nevertheless very small. Only fifteen people attended its first Congress at Geneva in 1902, including Lazarev and Shishko, while the total membership was just twenty-one. Volkhovskii was, for some reason, not present. The report of the Congress noted that the League had produced five pamphlets and organised the dispatch of a significant amount of material to Russia, although much of it had been seized by the tsarist authorities, following receipt of information from an agent who had established friendly relations with one of the League’s own members.39

The Congress also approved the production of material to train a cadre of ‘future leaders’, who were to come from the areas where they carried out agitation, ensuring they had an understanding of local (mestnoe) conditions that would allow them to take the lead in ‘revolutionising all the mass of the peasantry, cultivating in it a warlike spirit and preparation for struggle’.40 The aim of this struggle was the removal (ustranenie) of the tsarist government as the principal obstacle to ‘the freedom of the narod and the handing over of the land to the working people’. The programme said little about the situation in the towns and cities. Although Volkhovskii was not present at the Congress, he approved of the programme, which was in some ways more conventionally narodnik than the informal principles adopted by the Socialist Revolutionary Party the same year.41

The Congress also gave a good deal of attention to relations with the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party in Russia as well as more general questions of ideology and tactics. The Okhrana double agent Evno Azef told his superiors in St Petersburg at the end of 1901 that most of the League’s members wanted to merge with the SRs, reporting that there was already an agreement for the League to focus on producing agitational literature, while SR publications like Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia [Revolutionary Russia] and Vestnik russkoi revoliutsii [Herald of the Russian Revolution] would be aimed at the intelligentsia.42 Azef’s views were not altogether accurate. Volkhovskii had doubts about too hasty a union, believing the League should maintain its non-party character, although he also seems to have entertained hopes that it might at some point serve as the kernel of a new peasant socialist party in Russia.43 Some other stariki (party elders) including Shishko shared his views.44 Chernov was, by contrast, keen on union. His views eventually won out. The League and the SR Party were already cooperating closely in the spring of 1902 while a more formal federation took place a few months later.45

Some of the older émigrés may have struggled to accept that a new revolutionary generation had come to the fore in Russia, fearing their own influence was likely to be limited once the Agrarian-Socialist League merged with the SRs. Volkhovskii certainly disagreed with Chernov on various issues during this period. He was adamant that carrying out effective revolutionary work in the Russian countryside required strong direction, which he believed could only come from abroad, in effect asserting the leadership of the émigrés while casting doubt on the ability of those in Russia to conduct an effective campaign of agitation without firm guidance. Chernov was wary of such centralism. He had been in Russia far more recently than Volkhovskii, and his experience in areas like Tambov led him to take a more positive view of the capacity of local groups to develop a well-crafted programme of agitation. He also believed that it was impractical for ‘generals’ living abroad to run a revolutionary campaign from outside the country. The relationship between the two men at one point became very tense (Chernov accused Volkhovskii of using ‘bitter and unpleasant’ words about him). It is difficult to read the correspondence between them without sensing that Volkhovskii was out of touch with the way that things had changed in Russia since his flight from Vladivostok a decade earlier.46 Nor was he alone. The tension between locals and émigrés became a major theme in the development of the SR Party down to 1917.

While the League’s members recognised that peasant uprisings might involve violence, if only in response to official repression, the question of using terror as a revolutionary tactic was seldom addressed directly in its publications. The League was particularly cautious about ‘agrarian terrorism’—the use of violence against landlords, whether in the form of murder or destruction of property—instead stressing the pivotal role of strikes and boycotts in creating the kind of mass movement needed to bring about change. Nor did its programme say much about questions of political terror. One leading scholar has rightly noted that Chernov’s original essay outlining the League’s programme owed more to the second Zemlia i volia than to Narodnaia volia,47 although Chernov himself later contributed an article to Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia in 1903 endorsing ‘the implementation of terror’ as one of ‘many kinds of weapons’ to be used in the ‘assault on the government’,48 subsequently becoming the leading SR theorist defending the use of terror to bring about political reform.⁴⁹ The question of political terror does not, though, seem to have been a stumbling block in the discussions that led to federation between the League and the SR Party. Any differences were probably ones of degree. Volkhovskii was certainly not opposed to the use of terror against leading figures in the tsarist regime, believing that such attacks could weaken the state apparatus, although he was convinced that real change could only come about in Russia through popular revolution in both the city and the countryside.

The SRs use of terror did create something of a challenge for Volkhovskii when writing for a British audience. Although he had previously joined Stepniak in defending Narodnaia volia, both men repeatedly stressed on the pages of Free Russia that the Russian revolutionary movement had largely abandoned terrorism by the early 1890s, a claim that could no longer be made ten years later. The problem was made somewhat easier by the response of many leading British newspapers to the assassinations carried out by the Combat Organisation of the SR Party, which was headed first by Grigorii Gershuni and then, following his arrest, by Evno Azef. When the Minister of the Interior Dmitrii Sipiagin was assassinated in April 1902, the Times noted that although such an action was ‘regrettable and reprehensible … the odious system of government which continues in force cannot by any means be exonerated from its share of the blame’.50 It responded in a similar vein two years later to the murder of Viacheslav Pleve (who had replaced Sipiagin). An editorial in the paper noted that while ‘Murder as a political weapon is universally condemned by civilized man and the assassination of M. de Pleve cannot escape reprobation from the point of view of public and private morality’, his role in promoting harsh measures to preserve the autocratic system of government represented an ‘extreme provocation’ and ‘an explanation of what can never be ethically justified’.51 Many other papers took a similar line, suggesting that such actions were understandable, even if they were morally dubious.⁵² Anti-tsarist feeling in Britain still remained strong enough in the early 1900s to ensure there was at least some level of sympathy for the regime’s revolutionary opponents.

The murder of Pleve in July 1904 came just a few weeks after the assassination of the Governor-General of Finland Nikolai Bobrikov by a Finnish nationalist, a killing that also attracted sympathy (or at least understanding) in much of the British press, given his role in suppressing Finnish autonomy within the Tsarist Empire.53 Free Russia was only appearing quarterly by 1904—testimony to the perennial character of the financial challenges it faced—with the result that the shock of the Pleve assassination had faded by the time the July-October edition appeared. An unsigned editorial noted that the killing had been ‘as inevitable and natural as the explosion of gunpowder in an overheated oven … the great masses of the people have everything to lose and nothing to gain by further submission to the tyranny of their oppressors’. It added that autocracy was ‘at its last gasp’ and that the whole world would become more peaceful once the tsarist government was overthrown.54 The same edition carried, without any negative comment, a translation of the manifesto released by the SRs explaining that the assassination of Pleve was designed to remove ‘the omnipotent tyrant of Russia’ who had played a critical role in preserving ‘the barbarous mould of despotism’.55

The Combat Organisation that carried out the murder of Pleve operated with a high degree of autonomy within the SR Party. Émigrés like Volkhovskii knew little about its activities.56 He was however closely involved with the Foreign Committee of the SR Foreign Organisation (Zagranichnaia organisatsiia), which effectively absorbed many of the operations of the Agrarian-Socialist League following its merger with the SRs.57 The Foreign Organisation was tasked, among other things, with providing support for revolutionary activities in Russia, including the production and transport of revolutionary literature, although since it was made up of a number of national groups it was too unwieldy to operate effectively. As a result, the Foreign Committee was in practice responsible for carrying out much of the work. Volkhovskii himself continued to play a significant role in producing propaganda. He was not a regular contributor to the main SR publications Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia and Vestnik russkoi revoliutsii, although he contributed a long piece to the former in 1903, attacking Pleve’s policy towards Finland and criticising those in Britain, like William Stead, who were too ready to accept the principle of Russification.58 He also occasionally published verse in the two journals.⁵⁹ He was, though, still active in the years before 1905 in producing other revolutionary literature for illegal circulation in Russia.

Volkhovskii helped to edit the miscellany Narodnoe delo, which appeared irregularly in 1902–04 as a publication of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, contributing several pieces under his own name.60 Narodnoe delo was aimed at an audience of what the second issue called ‘urban and rural workers’, although the content was quite demanding, and more likely to appeal to a readership of students and intelligenty. The opening number contained an article describing how the private ownership of property was the principal cause of poverty among both workers and peasants.61 The third issue included long articles on urban unemployment and the development of new forms of economic ‘serfdom’ in the countryside.⁶² The fourth issue explored the historical and contemporary significance of 1 May for the workers’ movement in Russia and beyond, while the fifth included a long piece on the differences between the attitudes of the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries towards the peasantry.⁶³ Most numbers contained short stories and poems, reflecting Volkhovskii’s long-standing policy of including literary content in the journals he edited, while his main editorial role appears to have been the practical one of organising and reviewing submissions rather than setting down a firm ideological line for the journal.

Among the pieces Volkhovskii himself published in Narodnoe delo was ‘Pochemu armiane “buntuiut”’ (‘Why the Armenians Are Rebelling’),64 which was written shortly after violent protests broke out in Russian Armenia against the confiscation of the property of the Armenian Church. He accused the tsarist authorities of deliberately stoking up ethnic tension in the Caucasus, to keep the Armenians in a state of ‘slavish submission’, without ‘their own schools, libraries, newspapers … clergy and national property’. The Armenians were, Volkhovskii suggested, simply defending ‘their rights not to climb into the wolf’s mouth of the tsarist government’, and far from being the enemies of the Russian people, ‘are helping us … to free ourselves from the kulak, the landlord and the bureaucratic yoke. If all the peoples inhabiting Russia strike unanimously at these bloodsuckers, then it will be much easier for them to break the strength of the present … government’. Volkhovskii’s argument echoed his long-standing commitment to fostering greater cultural self-awareness among Ukrainians and Siberians, as well as the SR Party’s somewhat hazy commitment to a post-revolutionary federal order that recognised the autonomy of national minorities within a new socialist union.⁶⁵ It also reflected his view that the development of nationalist sentiment on the fringes of the Empire could strengthen opposition against the tsarist government.

Volkhovskii also sought to engage with a rather different audience during these years through writing fables and short stories. The ones he wrote for English children, including ‘The Story of the Clever Fox’ and ‘In the Sun’,66 were little more than entertaining pieces leavened with gentle warnings about the importance of cooperation and the pitfalls of deceiving the unwary. He also, though, wrote other stories aimed at a peasant readership in Russia that were far more radical in character. Volkhovskii’s experience in producing poems for children and satirical fantasies for adults had long convinced him that skilfully-written tales of magic and mystery could shape popular attitudes towards real social and political questions. In 1902, he published Skazanie o nespravedlivom tsare (The Tale of the Unjust Tsar), subsequently reprinted as ‘The Tale of Tsar Simeon’, which began in time-honoured fashion with the words ‘Once upon a time there lived an unjust tsar [who] was arrogant and merciless towards his people’.67 The story tells how a delegation of villagers sought the help of an old magician to ease their plight, who responds by transforming the appearance of the kindest man in the village, one Ivan Krasnoperov, to look exactly like the Tsar himself. The real Tsar, meanwhile, falls from his horse while out hunting, destroying both his finery and his memory, transforming him into a poverty-stricken tramp forced to beg for food and shelter. Five years pass, during which time Krasnoperov starts to behave like a ruthless and suspicious autocrat, flattered and deceived by his courtiers, while the true Tsar is chastened by witnessing the injustice and poverty that scar his kingdom. When the two men are changed back into their former selves, the Tsar refuses to return to his old role, while Krasnoperov slips away into the crowd and vanishes. The villagers are at first unsure what to do in the absence of a ruler, until they hear the wind whispering in the trees, telling them that ‘You are people not cattle. Help yourselves for nobody else will’. The moral of the skazka was clear. The failings of an autocratic system of government were not simply rooted in the character of the Tsar but were instead an inevitable consequence of giving unlimited power to any single person. A ‘good’ tsar would not, as many peasants still hoped, take action to end their poverty and improve their place in society.

Volkhovskii published a second story in Narodnoe delo, in 1904, that was reprinted a year later at the height of the 1905 Revolution. ‘Kak muzhik u vsekh v dolgu ostalsia’ (‘How the Peasant Owes Everyone’) tells how the devil created a kulak, a nobleman and a priest to trick an honest peasant out of his possessions.68 When the peasant refuses to hand over his land, the devil and his accomplices seek the advice of the mythical Baba Yaga, who tells them to find a magic egg in the forest and sit on it until it hatches out a tsar. The tsar then carves an army of soldiers and police from the nearby trees, who arrest the luckless peasant and seize his possessions, forcing him to survive by labouring in the kulak’s factory and working in the fields of the nobleman. The priest blesses the arrangement, in return for payment, with the result that ‘the muzhik from that time has been in debt with everyone: the kulak, the priest, the nobleman, and the tsar’. The fable offered no happy ending. It was instead designed to show how the existing social and political order was not ‘natural’ or divinely ordered. The figures of authority—tsar, nobleman, priest, kulak—were all rapacious exploiters rather than the protectors of the muzhik.

Volkhovskii’s stories were crafted to echo the motifs of a Russian folk-tale tradition that itself often challenged social and political hierarchies.⁶⁹ His approach was apparently successful. Both stories were reprinted many times, including in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution, when the SRs published 100,000 copies of the ‘The Tale of Tsar Simeon’ and 30,000 copies of ‘How the Peasant Owes Everyone’.⁷⁰ A significant number were also smuggled into Russia during the unrest of 1905 as part of the SR Foreign Organisation’s efforts to foment peasant uprisings. ‘The Tale of the Unjust Tsar’ was translated into Ukrainian in 1903, by the poet Lesia Ukrainka, and circulated widely in the south-western provinces of the Tsarist Empire. Ukrainka was the niece of the Ukrainian nationalist writer and historian Mykhailo Drahomanov, who had himself known Volkhovskii for many years, and been an important source of information for the fundists during the 1890s. While Ukrainka’s political sympathies lay with the Marxist Social Democrats rather than the Socialist Revolutionaries, she was astute enough to realise that the SRs were more positive about the cause of national self-determination, corresponding regularly with Volkhovskii in 1902–03 about how to promote political change that would allow Ukrainian culture to flourish.71

Volkhovskii also continued to write poetry throughout the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution, although the lyrical-pastoral turn that characterised his work in the 1880s was largely abandoned in favour of a return to the more overtly political verse he penned in the 1870s. He wrote several poems in homage to leading figures in the revolutionary movement, including a new 1902 poem praising the memory of Petr Lavrov, whose ‘grave is not silent’ but rather ‘a living source of inspiration’ for all those struggling for freedom.72 Two years earlier, in 1900, he had published a poem, ‘Maiak’ (‘The Lighthouse’), in honour of the narodnik theorist Nikolai Mikhailovskii, complete with laden metaphors of how words could be used to illuminate the world as light cut through fog.73 Volkhovskii also reworked some of his old poems, including ‘Duda’, originally published in the 1870s, in order to attract a wider audience, adding some scathing lines about money-grubbing priests (‘long-haired Satans’) who exploited the peasantry under the guise of holiness.74 The new version was intended to be sung to the well-known tune ‘Zdrastvui, milaia, khoroshaia moia’ (‘Greetings My Sweet Girl’). ‘Voina’ (‘War’)—which described the plight of soldiers sent thousands of miles from home—was set to music traditionally used to train soldiers to march in time (the poem was clearly designed to strike a chord with troops during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05).75 Whether such ‘song-poems’ circulated widely is difficult to say. Nor is it clear, as with the skazki, what lasting impact they had. Yet the time Volkhovskii spent on instilling radical motifs into poems and short stories designed to ape familiar forms of popular culture reflected a thoroughly narodnik desire to shape the political consciousness of peasants and workers by engaging with them in their own vernacular.

* * * *

Volkhovskii’s contribution to the neo-narodnik revival before 1905 was not limited to journalism and propaganda. In the early years of the twentieth century, he also became involved in procuring false passports for individuals wanting to travel to and from Russia illegally (he had indeed sought advice about how to get passports under a false name as early as 1895).⁷⁶ The Fabian Socialist and Quaker Samuel Hobson recalled many years later that ‘It was the mild and persuasive Volkhovsky who lured me into evil ways’ by asking him to obtain English passports to help Russian exiles flee Siberia. It was a practice that continued ‘off and on for years … Then a personal friend in the Foreign Office sent for me. “Sorry old chap, but we know about it. It must stop”’.77 Hobson believed the passports were destined for those fleeing Russia, but there was a more sinister side to the trade as well. Volkhovskii was almost certainly involved in 1904 in helping the journalist H. N. Brailsford procure passports for three Russians seeking to return to their country. One of the passports was later found on the body of a terrorist who died while planting a bomb in a St Petersburg hotel, leading the Russian government to make a formal protest to London, which in turn prompted an inquiry that resulted in Brailsford being tried and convicted for obtaining a passport under false pretences. Brailsford claimed that he obtained the passports at the request of someone ‘on the continent’ with close ties to the Russian revolutionary movement, who told him that they would be used to facilitate smuggling illegal literature into Russia,78 but declined to name his interlocutor. Despite the best efforts of his defence counsel—the future Liberal MP and Minister Sir John Simon—he was found guilty and fined £100. Volkhovskii for his part seems to have been unrepentant and continued his efforts to obtain passports for use by revolutionaries seeking to enter and leave Russia.79

Volkhovskii was also involved in several other attempts to support the opposition movement in Russia. He was by the early 1900s confident that fomenting revolution in areas on the periphery of the Empire could help to weaken the tsarist government (a conviction that had shaped his response to the unrest in Armenia and prompted his collaboration with Lesia Ukrainka to translate radical material into Ukrainian). Volkhovskii’s sympathy for Ukrainian nationalist aspirations also reflected something more than simple revolutionary pragmatism, given his long-standing interest in Ukrainian history and culture (during his later years he collected numerous photographs of Ukrainian villages and noted in one unpublished piece that ‘my thoughts … are Ukrainian’).80 Yet despite his Ukrainophilism, Volkhovskii believed that it was in Finland that nationalism was most likely to fuel revolutionary sentiment, given popular resentment against the Russification programme set in motion by Governor-General Bobrikov. Not all his contacts agreed. The Swedish journalist N. C. Frederickson, who in August 1903 interviewed Pleve about the government’s policies, warned Volkhovskii a few weeks later ‘that revolutionary movements as in Russia are and always will be impossible in Finland’. In another letter, Frederickson noted that moderate nationalists in Finland, like the jurist and academic Leo Mechelin, looked at the Russian revolutionary movement with considerable wariness.81 A rather different view of the Finnish opposition movement was taken by Konrad (Konni) Zilliacus, a charismatic Swedish-speaking Finnish nationalist and journalist, who had since the late 1890s been involved in smuggling literature into the Russian Empire through Scandinavia.82

Volkhovskii and Zilliacus probably first came into contact in the spring of 1899 at a time when they were both seeking to rally opinion in Sweden against the tsarist government.83 They certainly began to correspond regularly from the summer of 1902, initially discussing ways of preventing Swedish customs from seizing revolutionary literature sent from London for onward dispatch to Russia.⁸⁴ Volkhovskii became a regular contributor to publications edited by Zilliacus in Stockholm, including Fria Ord (Free Word), submitting pieces on subjects ranging from his revolutionary experiences through to the challenges facing Russian women.85 The two men quickly came to trust one another. There were also some striking similarities in their views, even though Zilliacus was first and foremost a nationalist and Volkhovskii a socialist. In 1902, Zilliacus published in Swedish a book describing the development of the Russian revolutionary movement,86 subsequently telling Volkhovskii that it was designed to do what Free Russia had done over the previous decade,87 presenting revolutionary opponents of the tsarist regime as reasonable people who only turned to violence in the face of oppression and cruelty. Volkhovskii was impressed enough to work with Zilliacus on producing an English version.88 He also shared Zilliacus’ view that opponents of the tsarist regime needed to set aside their ideological differences and cooperate more effectively. Zilliacus struggled, though, to persuade moderate figures in the Finnish opposition, like Mechelen, that their best hope for securing greater independence rested on cooperating with revolutionary groups across the Russian Empire.89 Despite his frustrations, he nevertheless told Volkhovskii in the spring of 1903 that he planned to launch an ambitious personal initiative ‘to come to an understanding about a concerted plan of action … with all the various elements of the Russian opposition’, including the Finns.⁹⁰

Zilliacus had, by the autumn of 1903, convinced at least some representatives of the Finnish constitutionalist movement to support the establishment of a news agency that would coordinate the propaganda activities of all groups that were critical of the tsarist autocracy (although he carefully downplayed the role of Russian revolutionary organisations). At the start of December, he told Volkhovskii that he was about to depart on ‘a pilgrimage through Europe to personally meet and become acquainted with representatives of all the [various] groups of the opposition against the present government in Russia’, in the hope of getting them to pull together ‘to overthrow the ruling order’.91 Two weeks later, Zilliacus was in Paris, meeting with the SRs Evno Azef and Ilia Rubanovich (a former member of Narodnaia volia who had worked closely with Lavrov during his final years). He followed this up with a trip to London where he met Volkhovskii, Chaikovskii and Kropotkin. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War a few weeks later made his task more timely than ever,92 since the conflict promised to exacerbate the social and political tensions that had been building up for many years, providing fresh hope to opponents of the tsarist government.⁹³ In the early March of 1904, Zilliacus told Volkhovskii that the time was ripe for revolutionary groups to submit a joint manifesto to the Tsar demanding concessions including freedom of speech and constitutional reform.94 Volkhovskii was sceptical about the wisdom of such a proposal, fearing that Zilliacus was too sensitive to the concerns of Russian and Finnish liberals, and wrote a detailed response arguing that Nicholas would never agree to such reforms. Zilliacus, in turn, replied that he had not meant to suggest that the course of action he proposed would be effective without holding out the possibility of more direct forms of action.95 The two men had previously discussed how best to provoke armed uprisings in the countryside, as a way of putting pressure on the Government, and Volkhovskii was convinced that only such radical action would bring about change.

Although he had been ill for some weeks, Zilliacus once again met with Volkhovskii and Chaikovskii in London, in April 1904, to discuss plans for a possible conference that would bring together revolutionaries, nationalists and liberals to discuss ways of overthrowing the tsarist regime.96 Volkhovskii was ready to consider any strategy that could weaken the government, although past experience made him fearful that divisions among Russian liberals made them unreliable collaborators.⁹⁷ The two most prominent figures among the liberals—Petr Struve and Pavel Miliukov—were both ready to cooperate with more radical groups, but as Zilliacus quickly discovered, others were uncertain about how far they should go in cooperating with the revolutionary parties. Zilliacus’ correspondence with Volkhovskii over the following months was full of irritation that he could not ‘bring them [the liberals] into line’.98 Among the points at issue was whether decisions by the planned conference would be binding on all the parties represented there (particularly any proposal to support an armed uprising). Miliukov was in principle happy to cooperate with revolutionary groups as part of his emerging ‘no enemies on the left’ strategy, while Struve acknowledged that the terror attacks mounted by the SRs were not ‘melodramatic whims’, but rather ‘the logical development of a dying autocracy’.99 Many other liberals were by contrast reluctant to support an armed uprising, a sentiment rooted both in ethical unease about the use of violence, as well as recognition that it would make them vulnerable to harsh repression by the authorities.

Zilliacus also struggled to win support among the Social Democrats for a conference (although Plekhanov in Geneva was unusually amenable to the proposal).100 The recent split of the Party into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks complicated discussions, while many Social Democrats were suspicious of claims for national autonomy made by the Finns and other minorities. Volkhovskii and Zilliacus corresponded over the summer of 1904 about the challenges involved in organizing a conference. The two men probably met in Geneva in the early summer of 1904. They certainly met in August at the sixth Congress of the Second International, in Amsterdam, where delegates from several European countries put pressure on their Russian colleagues to overcome their divisions.101 Zilliacus recalled that questions of political violence and terrorism loomed large in discussion with the various Socialist Revolutionaries present in Amsterdam.102 The subsequent report in Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia suggests that although many SR delegates were concerned about the principle of working with non-revolutionary opposition groups, most were ready to endorse such a strategy if it could advance the revolutionary cause.103

The ‘Conference of Oppositional and Revolutionary Organisations’ finally took place in the autumn of 1904 at the Hotel d’Orleans in Paris. Eight organizations sent delegations.104 The Social Democrats did not attend. Miliukov and Struve were among the representatives of the Union of Liberation (whose members sought various reforms including the establishment of a constitutional monarchy). Azef, Chernov and Natanson represented the SRs. The remaining six delegations were made up of representatives from the various nationalist parties. The Conference agreed a common program that committed participants to work for the overthrow of autocracy, the adoption of a new form of government based on full adult suffrage, and the principle of national self-determination.105 Articles in Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia noted that any agreement between revolutionaries and liberals could never be more than a temporary accommodation of convenience.106 Volkhovskii was not a delegate for reasons that are not entirely clear. He had already effectively handed over the editorship of Free Russia to David Soskice, in part so he could move to Switzerland for medical treatment, although he continued to travel quite extensively in the final months of 1904.107 While he was one of the main confidantes of Zilliacus, Volkhovskii had been hesitant in supporting the merger of the Agrarian-Socialist League with the Socialist Revolutionaries, which may have ruled him out as a Party delegate at the Paris Conference.108

There was a further dimension to Volkhovskii’s relationship with Zilliacus. Soon after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war at the start of 1904, Zilliacus established close links with the former Japanese Military Attaché in St Petersburg, Col. Akashi Motojiro, who had moved to Stockholm after the start of hostilities (Zilliacus himself had lived in Japan for two years in the 1890s which helped him to win Akashi’s trust). Over the next eighteen months or so, Akashi became a key figure in channelling funds from the Japanese government to the Russian opposition through Zilliacus, designed to foster popular unrest that could weaken the Russian war effort.109 The money that was eventually provided by the government in Tokyo was used to buy weapons for use in uprisings in St Petersburg and other major cities. Zilliacus for his part went to great lengths to conceal his links with Akashi, recognising that they would alienate some of the opposition parties he was trying to bring together, particularly members of the Union of Liberation. He was however ready to discuss the issue openly with Volkhovskii as early as March 1904, when he told his friend that although he could not say anything definite about procuring weapons for use by the SRs and other revolutionary parties in Russia, he would shortly meet ‘a man’ in Stockholm, presumably Akashi, after which he would be able to say more when he met Volkhovskii in April in London.110 There is no record of this latter meeting—where they were joined by Chaikovskii—but over the following weeks Zilliacus continued to liaise with Akashi to obtain money for purchasing weapons.

Zilliacus’ role was not an easy one, not least because the Japanese government was reluctant to make any money available until it was confident there was some degree of unity among the opposition (one of the reasons that Zilliacus was so anxious to secure agreement among potential participants at the planned Paris Conference). The Russian government was in any case well-aware of Akashi’s activities through the reports of Azef (Zilliacus himself was under almost constant observation by the Okhrana).111 Still more complex was the actual procurement and distribution of weapons. A letter that appears to be from Volkhovskii, written in Geneva in July 1904, gives an insight both into his own views and those of other SR comrades. He told Zilliacus that the situation in Russia was particularly febrile since the Government was calling out the reserves ‘at a time when agriculture work is most urgent’, adding that ‘This creates such a tension among the peasantry that there would be no difficulty in starting a successful agitation in terms of refusing to pay taxes as well as supplying recruits’. He went on to note that the situation in the towns was equally tense and that ‘Our party acknowledges the necessity of at once starting and pushing forward such an agitation in both towns & the country’. Volkhovskii told Zilliacus that the SRs were ready to

He went on to suggest that importing weapons would ‘cost us far more’ than obtaining them within the Russian Empire, adding that foreign weapons such as Browning revolvers were of limited value given the shortage of ammunition. Volkhovskii believed it would be more helpful to send money which could be used to buy weapons in Russia itself.112

Akashi was in the summer of 1904 still struggling to get Tokyo to commit major financial support to the Russian opposition movement, which meant that he was unable to provide Zilliacus with the money needed to buy arms in Russia. The talks between Zilliacus and Akashi did however lay the foundation for a separate scheme, launched several months later, to transport weapons to Russia from Britain in barrels of lard. The architect of the scheme was Chaikovskii, along with J. F. Green of the SFRF, who persuaded Samuel Hobson to set up a ‘dummy’ company exporting goods to Russia.113 Volkhovskii does not seem to have been directly involved. He left Geneva in August 1904 to go to Amsterdam, and from there returned for a time to London, but was back in Switzerland by the end of the year. Nor does he seem to have been involved in Zilliacus’ most ambitious effort to smuggle weapons into Russia, which took place the following year, when the Finn used a series of intermediaries to hire the steamship John Grafton to transport thousands of rifles and millions of cartridges from London to the Baltic (Chaikovskii was once again the main conspirator among the London emigration). The Russian authorities were well-aware of the plot through information supplied by Azef, and the crew were forced to scuttle the ship off the coast of Finland, with the loss of most of its cargo, after failing to rendez-vous with the individuals who were meant to collect the weapons.114 Whether Volkhovskii was aware of the scheme is uncertain, but it seems likely that he was, given that it was known to a number of revolutionaries in Switzerland where he was himself living at the time.¹¹⁵

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Free Russia noted slightly cryptically early in 1905 that its principal editor had ‘for a time’ stood down ‘to devote himself to the work of the Russian liberation movement at another centre’.116 Volkhovskii had in fact gone to Switzerland for medical treatment, which he had been planning for some months,¹¹⁷ but the move allowed him to play a bigger role in the SR Foreign Committee.118 The decision-making structure of the SRs was extraordinarily fluid and ill-defined right down to 1917, resulting in almost constant skirmishing between various committees and editorial boards, with a consequent lack of any clear hierarchy. The Foreign Committee was as noted earlier elected by local groups of the SR Foreign Organization, whose ‘statutes’ set out its role as the provision of financial and human support for the revolutionary struggle in Russia, but the Committee served in practice as a more general decision-making body of the Party in emigration from 1903 down until the middle of 1905 (it included most senior SRs in exile including Volkhovskii, Chaikovskii, Shishko and Chernov). There were often tensions between the Foreign Committee based in Geneva and SR groups in Russia. Volkhovskii himself was part of a small commission set up in 1904 to examine complaints that representatives sent by the Committee to Russia regularly behaved in an arrogant manner that alienated their ‘hosts’. While its report acknowledged the problem, the authors could not identify any positive ways to improve matters, and the gulf between exiles in Western Europe and party members in Russia festered for many years to come.119

Perhaps the most vexing question facing the Foreign Committee in 1904 was the issue of ‘agrarian terrorism’ (a term loosely applied to acts of violence and expropriation aimed against landowners and other symbols of rural authority). Chaikovskii noted at the second Conference of the Foreign Organisation, held in July 1904, that there were sharp differences within the Party about how best to foment unrest in the countryside.120 Three months later, in October, Chaikovskii and Volkhovskii both attended a meeting of the Geneva Group of the Foreign Organisation, at which they contributed to a draft resolution warning against

The local uncoordinated character of acts of ‘agrarian terror’, which makes their regulation and control by the party difficult, and, consequently, cannot prevent unwarranted excesses which may be harmful to the moral prestige of the movement; and the danger of the degeneration in the movement if the spread of an ‘agrarian-terrorist’ mood should outstrip the development of the social-revolutionary consciousness and organisation of the masses and turn the movement from a collective struggle for the socialisation of the land into a guerrilla struggle by individual groups for the immediate improvement of their own economic position.121

The fear that encouraging agrarian terror might undermine the long-term cause of revolution echoed the position adopted by the Agrarian-Socialist League at its 1902 Congress, but it was not shared by many of the younger SRs in Western Europe, and a majority of those attending the meeting in Geneva voted for an alternative resolution that endorsed the spontaneous seizure of property as an effective means of radicalising the peasantry. Volkhovskii was well respected by the new generation of revolutionaries like Vladimir Zenzinov, who later remembered him in Switzerland as ‘an old man’ with ‘a beard that was almost completely white’, but there was by 1905 significant resistance among many younger SRs to letting the stariki make all the critical decisions about how to conduct the struggle against tsarism.122 Volkhovskii was frustrated by what he saw as a lack of discipline. In early January 1905, he wrote to Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, who unlike him supported the young maximalists, lamenting that the supporters of agrarian terrorism wanted to create ‘a Party within a Party’.123 By the time she received the letters, though, the situation in Russia had been transformed by the events of Bloody Sunday, which sparked the 1905 Revolution and threatened for a time to sweep away the tsarist government.

The slaughter of unarmed demonstrators by imperial troops in front of the Winter Palace, in January 1905, shocked opinion both in Russia and abroad. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ protest was largely peaceful, although it had been infiltrated by revolutionaries, and the demands put forward by its leaders were distinctly radical, even if they were expressed in the conventional language of respect for the Tsar as the father of his people. In the weeks that followed, the government’s authority rapidly disintegrated, as waves of strikes brought thousands of workers on to the streets, and a new ‘Soviet’ was set up that served for a time as a kind of shadow government in the Russian capital. Zemstvo liberals demanded a national assembly with real powers, while strikes by middle-class professionals including lawyers and doctors symbolised the growing importance of the ‘third element’, frustrated by both the banality and brutality of the autocratic government.124 Tsar Nicholas responded with a characteristic mixture of stubbornness and inconsistency. By the autumn of 1905, he was forced to turn to his former Finance Minister, Sergei Witte, who advised the Tsar to issue a manifesto promising civil liberties and a new assembly elected on a wide franchise. The October Manifesto helped to win over a section of moderate opinion, although working-class unrest continued in the major cities until the end of the year, when an uprising in Moscow was brutally supressed, while the countryside remained in turmoil throughout 1906. Although order was gradually restored, the political reforms set in motion by the Manifesto, complete with the rhetoric and institutions of a quasi-liberal democratic system, ultimately failed to set the Russian political system on the path to a Western-style government.125

Volkhovskii’s activities during the 1905 Revolution and its immediate aftermath are hard to trace, in part because of a paucity of personal letters, while the SR archives themselves throw surprisingly little light on the subject.¹²⁶ Although his health was poor, he continued to correspond regularly with Zilliacus, seeing him early in 1905 to discuss arrangements for a second conference to coordinate the work of liberal and revolutionary groups, but when it eventually took place in Paris in early spring the meeting did nothing to create a more united opposition.127 The pace of events heightened still further the schism between SRs abroad and those living in Russia. Volkhovskii helped to oversee the dispatch of SR representatives to Russia on behalf of the Foreign Committee,128 but many of them failed to report back, with the result that party members in Western Europe found it increasingly difficult to keep up with developments. Members of SR organisations in Russia for their part often complained about lack of central direction, even as they rebelled against the idea of outside control, preferring to act according to their own volition. The Combat Organisation continued to be active, assassinating Grand Duke Sergei in February 1905, but SR terrorism increasingly assumed a spontaneous and chaotic character, sometimes taking the form of semi-criminal enterprises in which the ‘expropriators’ held on to the money they had liberated.129 Such activities owed little to the earlier narodnik tradition of ‘ethical terrorism’ and its emphasis on the selfless moral character of those who used violence to promote the welfare of the people.

The anxieties expressed by Volkhovskii and some other SR leaders in exile about agrarian terrorism were not rooted in any rejection of armed revolt per se. Nikolai Chaikovskii, whose views were usually close to his old friend, complained in the summer of 1905 that many SR leaders in Western Europe were if anything not sufficiently committed to supporting armed uprisings.130 Volkhovskii himself welcomed attacks on senior bureaucrats, including the murder of the Governor of Ufa in May 1905, along with the killing of tsarist officials in Baku. He also warmly praised Ivan Kaliaev’s killing of the Grand Duke Sergei. Volkhovskii had met Kaliaev in Switzerland, subsequently telling Vera back in England that the murder of the Grand Duke had been a work of ‘popular justice’, and that ‘an aura of eternal glory’ would forever ‘surround his [Kaliaev’s] blond head’.131 Yet while the SR newspaper Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia welcomed the first outbreaks of disorder in 1905, as evidence that workers and peasants were interested in something more than economic reform, both Chaikovskii and Volkhovskii feared that spontaneous local uprisings would have little impact unless they were carefully coordinated. The subsequent loss of the John Grafton and its cargo symbolised how difficult it was for SR leaders in emigration to provide any real support for the struggle in Russia itself. The debacle also made it harder for leaders abroad to assert their authority. The disorder that shook Russia to its core in 1905 created tensions and divisions within the SR Party, as its leaders attempted to apply existing ideological shibboleths and organisational practices to a rapidly changing landscape.

Volkhovskii continued to contribute to the SR Party’s propaganda work during 1905, although his activities were constrained both by his work for the Foreign Committee and his poor health. He nevertheless periodically made ‘fiery’ speeches at various Party meetings in Geneva,132 and took a leading role in organising the translation and dispatch of material to the Ukraine.¹³³ He also contributed two poems to Krasnoe znamia: sbornik na 1-e Maia 1905 (Red Banner: A Miscellany for 1 May 1905) published by the SR Party in Geneva.134 The first of Volkhovskii’s poems, ‘Pervoe Maia’ (‘The First of May’), was written in the rhythm of a march and proclaimed the day as ‘a festival of work and spring’, when the rays of the sun brought warmth and light like the struggle for ‘holy freedom’. It ended with a rousing declaration that ‘brothers we are many … / and before us is the whole world! / Justice is with us! Our strength lies in hope! / To battle as to a festive banquet’. His second poem, ‘Videnie’ (‘The Vision’), which had probably been written rather earlier, began with a description of the grim fortress of Shlissel’burg, before continuing with a hopeful description of how the political system it represented could soon be swept away (‘I hear the sound of the tocsin’). As well as contributing to Krasnoe znamia, Volkhovskii probably edited it as well, including in its pages warm tributes to several terrorists who had been executed for their actions, along with other material designed to persuade readers that the chaos that had erupted in Russia would soon mark the end of the tsarist government. The sbornik appeared at a time when it seemed that the hopes of those who had for years opposed the tsarist autocracy were about to come to fruition.

The 1905 Revolution transformed the environment in which all the Russian revolutionary groups operated. The reforms set in motion by the October Manifesto, including the creation of a new representative assembly (Duma), promised to expand the scope of legitimate political activity. So, too, did the end of censorship. Yet the scale of unrest in both city and countryside indicated that there was potential for more far-reaching social and economic change. In the event, developments in the years after 1905 proved unpredictable and uncertain, as the regime sought to maintain at least some of the traditional pattern of autocratic rule, pushing back on the changes set in motion by the launch of the constitutional experiment. Members of the SR Party in Russia and abroad had to respond to a new world in which familiar questions were raised in new forms. Divisions inevitably emerged in the Party as it sought to respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by a political environment that combined constitutional and autocratic elements in new and unfamiliar ways. The following chapter examines how Volkhovskii responded to these changes, at a time when he developed his role as a leading figure in producing SR propaganda, while continuing his efforts to shape attitudes in Britain towards the Russian government and the Russian revolutionary movement.