chapter 3 The Wanderings of a Globetrotter and the Metamorphosis of a Bakuninist

‘After all, who knows if even us, the nihilists, by winning, wouldn’t have become egoistical ourselves?’ , 1896.

Nicolae Codreanu’s closest friend, Nicolae Russel (John Russel/ Nicholas Russel) (1850-1930), had been born Nikolay Sudzilovsky in the Mogilev region, in the (now Belarus), into an impoverished noble Polish family.1 As a medical student, he got caught in the revolutionary undercurrents that were moving students’ lives in the Russian universities. He entered the University of St. Petersburg, from which he was expelled for participating in the student movements of 1868-69. When he was allowed to re-enter University, he moved to Kiev where he was amongst the founders of a student ‘commune’ that got more and more revolutionary in its list of readings, discussions and actions.2 In 1873 he traveled to both Zurich and to meet the very influential but opposed mentors of revolutionary activity in exile: and Pyotr Lavrov, apparently inclining more towards a Bakuninist ‘action through deeds’ approach. Employing different styles and means, these two were coordinating the revolutionary movement from exile. However, the fact that he was able to bridge the two opposed revolutionary strategies created an important mediat- ing position for Russel while in , but also during his very long exile. Back in Kiev, Russel re-organized the student circle as an offshoot of the St. Petersburg Tchaikovsky Circle, the Grand Society (Bolshoye obshchestvo propagandy) – created mainly as a reaction to the Jacobin and even terrorist outlook of Sergey Nechayev’s organization and actions – and, from 1874, became involved in the ‘going to the people’ movement in the re- gions of Kherson and Nikolayev, where he engaged in propaganda and worked

1 I am using, in the presentation of Russel’s biography, Ios’ko Nikolai Sudzilovsky-Russel; I.I. Popov, ‘Nikolai Konstantinovich Russel’-Sudzilovskii’; Ghelerter ‘Din viața și activitatea’ and Haupt, ‘Revoluționari ruși în Romînia’, 193-212. Unfortunately, I had no access (physically and linguistically) to Wada Haruki, Nikorai rasseru kokkyō o koeru narōdoniki [Nikolai Russel, a border-crossing narodnik], 2 vols. Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha. 2 In 1873, Russel was a member of the Kiev Commune with noble origins (dvoryiane). His sister was a member too. See Hay, Revolutionary Movement, 65.

© Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020 | doi:10.30965/9783657704897_005 The Wanderings of a Revolutionary 67 among peasants.3 As the secret police hunted the social and the peasants seemed less willing than expected to revolt, or at least protect the , Russel was forced to emigrate. On a most-wanted list, issued by the Russian police, Russel was described as: ‘former student of Kiev University, son of a retired official of the provincial city of Mogilev. Age: 25; height: a little lower than average; hair: light brown; face: clear; nose: rather large; small, sparse beard; untidily dressed; his clothes resemble a factory-hand outfit’.4 He reached and from there left for the United States, following a long trail of Russian and Polish revolutionaries who attempted to organize socialist rural communities in the new world. During the same year (1874), he returned to Geneva, where he got in touch with anarchist and Narodnik groups and with those who fled from Russia after the failure of ‘going to the people’. From there, he relocated to the United Principalities (Romania). The Russian revolutionary exiles were interested in the disturbances developing in neighboring Bulgaria, as a possible revolutionary ferment that could have been imported to Russia. The social-revolutionaries in Romania were not able to ignite or influence a Bulgarian uprising and they gradually became focused more on the local social and political conditions. Russel lived in Romania from 1875 until 1881, when he, together with other revolutionaries, was expelled.5 1874-1875 was the moment when Romania became an important asylum for Russian revolutionary refugees on their way to , France, England or the United States, and an important interface of the contraband with socialist and anarchist literature to Russia, under the lenient watch of the Romanian liberal government. As Hay shows, there were three major routes by which lit- erature could be brought directly from the émigrés into Ukraine and South Russia. One route was by steamships from London, via Constantinople, to Odessa. The second was from Switzerland, via Vienna, to the Galician frontier and on to Kiev. The last main route also went via Vienna, but then to Bucharest and on to Iași from where the transport would cross the Russian border.6 Upon his relocation to Romania, Russel directly coordinated the local contraband with revolutionary literature, as he was a representative of the Narodnik circles of both Russia and Western Europe. Constantin Dobrogeanu- Gherea and the Arkadsky brothers, who were linked to Nicolae Codreanu and

3 For S. Nechayev see Avrich, Bakunin and Nechaev. 4 Popov, ‘Nikolai Konstantinovich Russel’-Sudzilovskii’, 168. 5 Ghelerter, ‘Din viața și activitatea’. For the importance of the exiled Bulgarian revolutionary presence in Romania see Zaharia, Liuben Karavelov and Perry, Stefan Stambolov. 6 Hay, Revolutionary Movement.