{Taking a break from sparring with Eric Voegelin, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has found yet more Russian history to explore. While alternate spellings of the name ‘Tchaikovsky’ abound (most commonly ‘Chaikovsky’), Pascal and I have gone exclusively with ‘Tchaikovsky’ regardless of which spelling my sources preferred. To our knowledge, this Tchaikovsky was not related to that other Tchaikovsky, the one with the overtures and such.}
Who was Nikolai Tchaikovsky and why is he of any interest?
As to the first question, Wikipedia gets right to the point, stating confidently: “Nikolai Vasilyevich Tchaikovsky (1851–1926) was a Russian revolutionary.” That tersely accurate statement fails to do justice to a man who rubbed elbows with the likes of Mark Natanson, Peter Kropotkin, Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, and other luminaries of the late-1860s radical Russian intelligentsia.
What would become known as the Circle of Tchaikovsky began in St. Petersburg in 1868 as a Russian literary society for self-education, featuring proscribed books smuggled in from abroad, books written by the likes of Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Darwin. Appalled by the extremism of contemporary anarchists and nihilists, members of the Circle attempted to set higher moral standards for themselves; however, they also opposed liberals’ struggle for political freedoms, which, in their view, were only advantageous to the rising Russian bourgeoisie. With an informal membership of about sixty, plus another forty or so in an associated Circle in Moscow, the Tchaikovsky Circle amounted to perhaps one hundred individuals in all, including some members of a female self-education group (most notably, Alexandra Kornilova) with which the Circle merged in 1871.
Along with reading and discussing the subversive ideas found in their imported books, the Circle’s members sought to unite students of Petersburg and other cities and to conduct propaganda among workers and peasants with the intent of fomenting a social revolution. In 1872, the Circle began organizing circles of urban workers with the purpose of training propagandists for work in the countryside. These activities were most successful in Petersburg and Odessa, where the circles comprised around 400 workers, some of whom would later become the founders of Russia’s first proletarian organizations.
The Tchaikovsky Circle became associated with the Russian Narodniks (Populists); they helped organize and implement the famously unsuccessful “Going to the People” campaign of 1872-73. That campaign, with students and urban workers arriving uninvited in rural villages and taking advantage of the hospitality of their involuntary hosts, met with disinterest at best and resentment at worst. The peasants either ignored the Narodniks or reported them to the authorities, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many members of the Tchaikovsky Circle, some of whom were later prosecuted in 1874 in the notorious “Trial of the 193.”
Having escaped arrest, Nikolai Tchaikovsky was just getting started. As Alex Butterworth explains (in his invaluable The World That Never Was), “While the other members of the circle that bore his name were still risking arrest in their struggle to galvanize the peasant masses, Tchaikovsky had succumbed to a growing sense of alienation from precisely the ‘adventurism of the intelligentsia’ that he himself had done so much to foster in the preceding years. Plunged into a maelstrom of spiritual self-doubt, Tchaikovsky had experienced an epiphany while passing through the provincial town of Oryol in the spring of 1874, when he had chanced to meet Alexander Malinkov, the charismatic leader of a religious cult. 1 ‘In every man there is a divine element,’ Malinkov taught. ‘It is sufficient to appeal to it, to find the God in man, for no coercion to be necessary. God will settle everything in people’s souls and everyone will become just and kind.’ Amidst the growing attrition that surrounded the populist project, Tchaikovsky found deep consolation in the message. Tchaikovsky’s old associates greeted news of his conversion with incredulity.”
Tchaikovsky was not simply trying to avoid the fate of his Narodnik comrades. In fact, as his Circle became more and more a revolutionary and terrorist association, Tchaikovsky found himself alienated, which led him to join Malinkov’s group, named the “God-men” because its members tried to find in themselves a reflection of God. However, they were still followers of Russian Orthodoxy.
Tchaikovsky’s conversion shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone; the radicalism of the Russian intelligentsia always had a religious or spiritual tinge to it, and Russian religion was a continuing source of messianic and utopian visions. In that sense, Tchaikovsky and Malinkov were a match made in heaven; having met in Russia, their heavenward aspirations would take them first of all to Kansas, in the southern part of which one William Frey (aka Wilhelm Frei, aka Vladimir Geins, his birth name) had established, in 1871, a “Progressive Communist Community.”
In the travels of Nikolai Tchaikovsky, the next stop will be Cedarvale.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Circle of Tchaikovsky - Wikipedia
1 I have been unable to unearth any information about Alexander Malinkov or his cult, which is disappointing. Malinkov sounds like a kinder, gentler version of Rasputin...
Posted by: |