{Instead of the usual Saturday Lecture, I present the conclusion of the story of Nikolai Tchaikovsky, who is not to be confused with the other Nikolai Tchaikovsky who was related to the Tchaikovsky everyone has heard of.}
In 1877, Nikolai Tchaikovsky, for whom Russia’s elite intellectual-political “Circle of Tchaikovsky” had been named, and who had joined the “Godman” mystical cult of Alexander Malinkov, found himself traipsing through the American Midwest, heading east from Cedar Vale, Kansas to Philadelphia and hoping to find either employment or some sort of salvation. He left Cedar Vale with “nothing but ten dollars, a Russian chemistry degree, and a dilettante knowledge of carpentry.” His journey would take him three weeks, during which he traveled 420 miles.
“He could hardly have chosen a worse time to be on the tramp,” writes Alex Butterworth. “The spring of 1877 had seen heavy rains turn the roads of Kansas to a quagmire, after which prairie fires had swept the Chisholm Trail in the unseasonably harsh heat of early summer.”
More than the weather made the summer of 1877 uncomfortable. A three-year recession had tilted the American economy ever more in favor of the bosses, the industrialists, and particularly the railroad barons, who flourished by cutting employees' wages. On July 16, fed-up railroad workers of the Baltimore & Ohio went on strike; soon after, a striker was fatally shot by railway militiamen (i.e., the bosses’ private army). More strikes followed; up to 80,000 workers nationwide joined in. Troops were dispatched from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh; as the labor stoppages spread, troops were redeployed from Virginia, South Carolina, and even the Dakota Territory to enforce industrial order; and, in case the troops weren't up to the job, Alan Pinkerton and his Pinkerton detectives were brought in to help with “suppressing socialist reds and denying the basic economic rights of working men.” 1
Tchaikovsky should have felt right at home amidst the turmoil, so reminiscent of peasant revolts in Russia and of the brutality with which the ruling autocrats put them down. Indeed, according to Butterworth, “the support and sympathy shown towards the strikers in the small towns through which Tchaikovsky passed – by free laborers, farmers, and tradesmen, and even their sheriffs – was the stuff of which his St. Petersburg circle had dreamed.” But the support and sympathy did not carry the day. Pinkerton assessed the nationwide unrest and the threat of all-out class warfare, noting that ‘It was everywhere, it was nowhere. It was as if the surrounding seas had swept in upon the land from every quarter, or some sudden central volcano had belched forth burning rivers that coursed in every direction.’ Moreover, according to a Pinkerton report, ‘the strikes were the result of the communistic spirit spread through the ranks of railroad employees by communistic leaders and their teachings.’ Tchaikovsky, one might say, had heard this tune before.
Alex Butterworth tells us that “The storm subsided almost as quickly as it had gathered: the posting of army detachments along all the trunk lines broke the strikers’ will, and almost all had returned to work by 1 August,” meaning the entire episode had concluded in two weeks. That, however, was two weeks too many for the guardians of American law and order. Butterworth elaborates on their angry response:
Middle-class fear and outrage were stoked, while the police, militia, and army attacks that had provoked mob violence were speedily forgotten and the railroad bosses exonerated. The strikers were stigmatized as ‘un-American’ socialists unworthy of the care or protection of the law. They lacked due respect for property or for the hard-won wealth of men like the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Newspapers drew comparisons with France’s 1871 Commune and suggested ‘making salutary examples of all who have been taken red-handed in riot and bloodshed.’ The papers commissioned cartoonists to produce images of infernal destruction and diabolic strikers.”
Understandably, “After twenty-three days journeying through an embryonic civil war, Tchaikovsky’s fragile nerves were close to breaking. Having seen the viciousness of American class conflict he craved a speedy return home.” But he had no money to do so. Having made it to Philadelphia, he found work in the shipyards of nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, where twelve-hour shifts further wore him down to the point of exhaustion. Yet he stubbornly held to his convictions, conflicted as they may have been between politics and mysticism; “Religion is rising and so I shall seek it no matter where, even in the most outworn and dying Christianity.” He considered joining a utopian community (“Harmonists”) near Pittsburgh, but instead joined a group of Quakers in upstate New York (Sonyea, in Livingston County). It did not take him long to become disillusioned yet again; writes Butterworth, “He recoiled from their submission to Christian doctrine, feeling that they should have been searching instead for ‘the presence of divinity in themselves’: the only sure foundation, he now held, for successful communistic life.”
Enough was enough; it was time to escape America. Tchaikovsky managed to convince friends in Russia to send money for travel expenses; he reunited with his wife and daughters in New York City, from where they went to Liverpool. Afraid to return home to Russia, where many of his Narodnik comrades still languished in jail, he settled in London where he reunited with Peter Kropotkin and tried organizing workers. During Russia’s 1905 revolution, Tchaikovsky returned to America on a lecture tour, raising money for the anti-tsarist radicals. He finally returned to Russia in 1907 and was promptly arrested (on charges that were later dismissed); he spent eleven months in prison until being released on bail. He remained active in political activities, and in early 1917, after the tsar's abdication, Tchaikovsky was elected to the Petrograd Soviet, where he resisted the Bolshevik agenda. After Lenin’s coup of October 1917, Tchaikovsky sided with the “White Russian” forces in the ensuing civil war. 2
Nikolai Tchaikovsky died in England in 1926, while working on his memoirs. 3 He had lived long enough to see the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, but not long enough to witness the revolution he had in mind, one which would combine socialism with Russian Orthodox mystical spirituality; instead, he witnessed repeated failures of Narodnik groups, religious cults, and utopian communes, as well as the failure of American workers pitted against the capitalist bosses and their hired enforcers.
It is almost enough to make a person believe that Utopia is a lost cause. It may be unfair to say that Nikolai Tchaikovsky spent his life pursuing one doomed quixotic mission after another; but it would not be inaccurate.
-----------------------------------------------
Nikolai Tchaikovsky - Wikipedia
Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was
1 There is a bit of irony in Tchaikovsky’s proximity to the railroad workers’ strike. It happens that Nikolai Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the older brother of the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, was something of a big wheel in the Russian railroad industry: The reconstruction of the memorial of Nikolai Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow - RWM Capital
2 In the past century, it seems to have been forgotten that not only did Nikolai Tchaikovsky oppose Bolshevism, but that numerous other Russian socialists, communists, and Marxists did so as well; for that matter, not even all Bolsheviks agreed with Lenin’s policies or with the actions taken by the Bolsheviks after October 1917. The popular notion that “Bolshevism=Communism=Marxism” is simply untrue; Bolshevism cloaked itself in idealistic rhetoric, but it was little more than an even more onerous form of tsarism.
3 I can find no reference to the memoirs ever being published. I bet Alex Butterworth would know.
Sonyea, NY, where yet another communal experiment flourished withered away.
Posted by: |