An Army Like That of Gideon: Communities of Transnational Reform on the Pages of Free Russia

Abstract

This article explores how a transnational network of reformers used the short-lived newspaper Free Russia to help sustain a movement to topple Russia's czarist government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prominent American reformers and writers of the era, including Mark Twain and Julia Ward Howe, subscribed and contributed to the newspaper, which was edited by exiled Russian revolutionaries in London. Free Russia helped buoy movement actors and establish a movement narrative, much like nineteenth-century abolitionist newspapers. The article also illustrates the international impulses of American and European reformers at the turn of the century, particularly in their efforts to reshape pre-revolutionary Russia.

Notes

“Our Plan of Action,” Free Russia, June 1890, 1.

A primary concern of Free Russia's editors was the newspaper's credibility, for good reason. Reportage in many of the earlier revolutionary publications from Russia was thought to have been fictional. Likewise, much of the literature consumed in the West about the early revolutionaries was indeed fiction, such as Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. For more on this, see Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York: Viking, 1977). On Turgenev: Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Ibid., p. 3.

This idea of “human interdependence” is prevalent in the writings of many Progressive Era reformers, and beginning in the 1890s it began to take on a much more international flavor. See, for example, Marjorie N. Feld, “An Actual Working Out of Internationalism: Russian Politics, Zionism, and Lillian Wald's Ethnic Progressivism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 2 (April 2003): 119–149. See also Daniel Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

On abolitionism and the press (particularly The Liberator), see, for example, David Paul Nord, “Tocqueville, Garrison, and the Perfection of Journalism,” Journalism History 13 (Summer 1986): 56–64; Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: Little Brown, 1963); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin's, 1998); Roger Streittmatter, Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and John Thomas, “Romantic Reform in America: 1815–1865,” American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965).

John A. Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald, Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). On Habermas: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

See, for example, Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). On digital communication and the public sphere, see Manuel Castells, “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks and Global Governance,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (March 2008): 78–93.

Barry Hollingsworth, “The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English Liberals and Russian Socialists, 1890–1917,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 3 (1970): 45–64.

Carol Peaker, “We Are Not Barbarians: Literature and the Russian Émigré Press in England, 1890–1905,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 3 (2006). See also Carol Peaker, “Reading Revolution: Russian Émigrés and the Reception of Russian Literature in England, c. 1890–1905” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2006).

George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (New York: The Century, 1891). For more on Kennan, see Frederich F. Travis, George Kennan and the American–Russian Relationship (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990). Boston reformer Margaret Deland, who had hosted Russian revolutionaries in her home, wrote of Russian works that she believed in the “value of novels to awaken sympathy.” In Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1954).

See Anne Pedler, “Going to the People: The Russian Narodniki in 1874–5,” Slavonic Review 6, no. 16 (1927): 130–141; Margaret Maxwell, Narodniki Women: Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for the Dream of Freedom (Elmsford, NY: Pergamon, 1990).

Cosmopolitan, April 1, 1889, 557.

For example, Tolstoy's novel Resurrection, which was published in 1899 and uses religious fables to tell the story of imprisonment and oppression in Siberia, was widely read in the United States.

Sergius Stepniak, “What Americans Can Do for Russia,” North American Review 153 (1891): 601. A key figure in the translation of Russian literature in the late 1890s and early 1900s was Constance Garnett, who was mentored in Russian by Russian radicals, including Sergius Stepniak. She was one of the first English translators of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. See Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991).

Census figures from L. P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (London: Simon, 1960), 421. For a firsthand account of Jewish life in New York at this time, see Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1902).

Historian Mina Carson argues that the settlement house movement in Chicago, Boston, and New York, in particular, brought young Progressives who worked in them in direct contact with new immigrants. This contact, combined with connections to young reformers at settlement houses in London, England, helped buttress the growing sense of internationalism. She helps illustrate this connection with a brief description of a trip Hull House founder Jane Addams made to see Tolstoy in Russia in 1896. See Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 151–152.

Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1.

Donald J. Senese, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, the London Years (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1987). See also John E. Bachman, Sergei Mikhailovich Stepniak-Kravchinskii: A Biography from the Russian Revolutionary Movement on Native and Foreign Soil (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1971); and James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1970). Senese has published the only biography of Kravchinsky in English. Works in Russian include Evgeni i a Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii—Revoliutsioner I Pisatel (Moscow: Khudozh. Lit., 1973). Most of Kravchinsky's papers were donated to the Soviet Union. A small collection that focused on his London years was published as S. Stepniak, M. E. Ermasheva, and Vera Filippovna Zakharina, V Londonskoi Emigratsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1968).

S. Stepniak, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1883).

Ibid., 3.

Pease's History of the Fabian Society, in which he served as secretary for twenty-five years, is still considered a standard work on the subject. Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916).

Senese is quoting from the self-published work of a fourth person on hand for the meeting. See W. Earl Hodgson, A Night with a Nihilist, printed for private circulation in 1886; Senese, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 37.

Pease to Kravchinsky, January 10, 1889, in Stepniak, Ermasheva, and Zakharina, V Londonskoi Emigratsii, 43.

On Burt, see Aaron Watson, A Great Labour Leader: Being a Life of the Right Hon. Thomas Burt. M.P (London: Brown Langham, 1908).

Whitman Bassow, The Moscow Correspondents: Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost (London: William Morrow, 1988). For insight into a correspondent's life in St. Petersburg at the time, see Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Cheerful Giver: The Life of Harold Williams (London: P. Davies, 1935). This book is a biography of journalist Harold Williams, one of the few permanent correspondents in Russia during the 1905 revolution. A New Zealander and polyglot, he worked for the Manchester Guardian in St. Petersburg.

Free Russia, June 1890, 7. Peaker, “Reading Revolution.”

Senese, S.M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 48.

Free Russia, June 1890, 18. See also ibid., 48.

Kennan published several articles in The Century Magazine, which funded his trip to Siberia and the Russian Far East. They combined the articles into the book Siberia and the Exile System mentioned earlier. One article that was particularly popular was George Kennan, “The Convict Mines of Kara,” The Century Magazine, June 1889. George Kennan should not be confused with George Frost Kennan, the elder Kennan's great-nephew and Russia expert who came to prominence later in the century.

Louis J. Budd, “Twain, Howells, and the Boston Nihilists,” New England Quarterly 32, no. 3 (September 1959): 351.

S. Stepniak, Felix Volhovsky, and Robert Spence Watson, Nihlism as It Is: Being Stepniak's Pamphlets (London: T.F. Unwin, 1894).

Free Russia, September 1890, 15.

“Nihlist Stepniak Here,” New York Times, December 31, 1890, 6.

Free Russia, June 1891, 7. See also Travis, George Kennan and the American–Russian Relationship.

Stepniak, “What Americans Can Do for Russia,” 596.

Free Russia, March 1891, 10.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 9. See also Travis, George Kennan and the American–Russian Relationship.

The process of hectographing, which was invented in Russia, was useful to produce low-tech banned publications. It used gelatin and dye to make a small number of copies—usually twenty to eighty in a run. The ink of a master paper copy was applied to a sheet of gelatin, the ink was transferred to the gelatin, and paper could be pressed against the sheet to make a copy. See Mats Fridlund, “Imprinting Terror: Underground Presses, Hectographs and 19th Century Print Terrorism” (Paper presentation, Annual Meeting of the Danish Philosophical Society, Roskilde, 2012).

See, for example, Free Russia, April 1894, 3.

These newspapers were owned and edited by publishers, usually nobles, who were sympathetic to the Czar.

Free Russia, May 1891, 7.

Free Russia, August 1891, 3. On Garrison and the Liberator, see D. P. Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

Free Russia, August 1891, 3.

Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

The well-known English artist and book illustrator Walter Crane designed the new masthead, which Peaker argues reflected Volkhovsky's interest and bringing a more artistic quality to the newspaper's appearance and content. See Peaker, “We Are Not Barbarians,” 8.

Free Russia, February 1905, 16.

Ibid., 23.

Ibid., 28.

Free Russia, February 1890, 2.

On Breshkovskaya's visit to the United States, see Jane E. Good and David R. Jones, Babushka: The Life of the Russian Revolutionary Ekaterina K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia (1844–1934), Russian Biography Series, No. 9 (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1991). On her speeches, see, for example, “Russian Exile Thrills Boston,” Boston Herald, December 15, 1904, 2. See also Ekaterina Konstantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaia and Alice Stone Blackwell, The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution; Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky (Boston: Little, Brown, 1917).

Free Russia, April 1910, 1.

Ibid., April 1910, 4.

Ekaterina Breshkovskaya, Hidden Springs of the Russian Revolution: Personal Memoirs of Ekaterina Breshkovskaya (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931).

Free Russia, January 1912, 1–2.

Ibid., November 1901, 90. During this period, Free Russia numbered its pages differently. The page numbers continued counting in each successive issue.

Prospectus, “The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom,” November 1889.

Dawley, Changing the World; John A. Thompson, Reformers at War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Senese, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 71.

On Alexander Herzen and Kolokol, see Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Monica Partridge, “Alexander Herzen and the English Press,” Slavonic and East European Review 36, no. 87 (June 1958): 453–470. On Lenin and Iskra, see Allan K. Wildman, “Lenin's Battle with Kustarnichestvo: The Iskra Organization in Russia,” Slavic Review 23, no. 3 (September 1964): 479–503. Iskra was aimed primarily at workers and radicals inside Russia.

See James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

Very little scholarly work has been published on the New York Call. For a brief, contemporary account of its early history, see William Morris Fiegenbaum, “Ten Years of Service, 1908–1918: A History of the New York Call to Commemorate the Tenth Anniversary of Establishment,” New York Call, May 30, 1918, 5. Also William Goldwater, Radical Periodicals in America, 1890–1950: A Bibliography with Notes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1964). On The Masses, see Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

Sidney G. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd ed., Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 46. On Benedict Anderson, see Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991); Nord, Communities of Journalism.

Alexander Kerensky, Catherine Breshkovsky (1844–1934), Slavonic and East European Review 13, no. 38 (January 1935): 428–431.