The Fortress by Robert Payne

Author:Robert Payne
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-05-20T21:00:00+00:00

The Shaking Of The Bars

“IF IT WERE desired to reduce a man to nothingness,” wrote Dostoyevsky in The House of the Dead, “it would be necessary only to give his work a character of uselessness.” In the gray twilight of his cell Nechayev was slowly dying of the disease of uselessness. Once a day a guard entered and silently removed the drawer of the commode; three times a day he was handed food through the bars; the bells of the cathedral chimed every day with terrible regularity; every day there was the dull boom of the noon gun and every midnight the bells in the cathedral spire chimed “God save the Tsar.” And so it would go on until the day when the guards would find him lying dead in a corner of his cell.

From the beginning Nechayev had decided to fight back, but there was little strength left in him. The skin at his wrists and ankles was suppurating. His face had the pale-blue color of prisoners who have been long buried in their cells. His lips quivered uncontrollably. Everything in the cell, the narrow iron bed, the brick stove, the commode, even his own body, was chained or bolted to the walls; he had become no more than an extension of the cell. Yet he was determined to fight on. At the first sign of government weakness, he would pit all his remaining strength against his enemies. He was waiting for a momentary accident, a moment of inattention when the warders were occupied elsewhere, but this moment was long in coming.

It was the misfortune of Nechayev that he represented in the eyes of the autocracy all the mysterious forces which were known by the name of terrorism. Alone, with only his cunning to guide him, he had inaugurated a secret society with ramifications through all strata of society. That the secret society had no further existence after Nechayev’s arrest seems never to have occurred to the Tsar’s ministers: they suspected its influence everywhere, and every new outbreak of terrorism was attributed indirectly to Nechayev.

But his greatest misfortune was that the years of his imprisonment coincided with a remarkable resurgence of revolutionary activity in Russia, and while the revolutionary activity was at its height, he could neither hope for redress nor exert his power over the movement. The years 1876-1879 marked the culmination of vast and carefully contrived outbreaks of terrorism. Bakunin died in July 1876. He had never enjoyed a very great influence in Russia. He belonged to an age when revolutionists thought the battle could be waged by inflammatory manifestoes alone. Now the time of the scientists and the engineers of revolution had come: the keyword was organization, and among the revolutionaries were the most knowledgeable experts on high explosives. Instead of Nechayev with his Revolutionary Catechism and his strange power over young students were men like Zhelyabov and Kibalchich, both experts in the use of explosives, the one a superb organizer, the other the possessor of one of the finest scientific brains then known in Russia.

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