Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [72]
With McKinley the era of Anarchist assassinations came to an end in the western democracies. Even Alexander Berkman in his prison cell recognized, as he wrote to Emma Goldman, the futility of individual acts of violence in the absence of a revolutionary-minded proletariat. This second disavowal sent his correspondent, who still believed, into “uncontrollable sobbing,” and left her “shaken to the roots,” so that she took to her bed, ill. Although she retained an ardent following, especially among the press, who referred to her as the “Queen of the Anarchists,” Anarchist passion on the whole passed, as it had in France, into the more realistic combat of the Syndicalist unions. In the United States it was absorbed into the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, although in every country there remained irreconcilables who stayed lonely and true to the original creed.
In the two countries on Europe’s rim, Spain and Russia, each industrially backward and despotically governed, bombs and assassinations mounted as the world moved into the Twentieth Century. When in Spain a bomb was thrown at King Alfonso and his young English bride on their wedding day in 1906, killing twenty bystanders, it spread a fearful recognition of the deep reservoir of hatred which could have impelled such a deed. The reciprocal hatred of the ruling class was confirmed in 1909, when as a result of an abortive revolt in Barcelona known as “Red Week,” the Government executed Francisco Ferrer, a radical and anticlerical educator, though not a true Anarchist. The case raised storms of protest in the rest of Europe, where, as usual, Spanish iniquities provided a vent for liberal consciences. In 1912 a Spanish Anarchist named Manuel Pardinas stalked the Premier, José Canalejas, through the streets of Madrid and shot him dead from behind as he was looking into the window of a bookstore in the Puerta del Sol. It was a poor choice, for Canalejas, carried into office in the wake of Ferrer’s death, was attempting some reforms of the unbridled power of Church and landlords, but it was evidence that in their continuing combat against society, Spanish Anarchists were moved, as Shaw wrote, by “consciences outraged beyond endurance.”
In Russia the tradition of revolution was old and deep and as full of despair as of hope. Each generation turned up new fighters in the long war between rebel and despot. In 1887, the year the Haymarket Anarchists were hanged, five students of the University of St. Petersburg were hanged for the attempted murder by bomb of Alexander III. Their leader, Alexander Ulyanov, justified the use of terror at his trial as the only method possible in a police state. He was one of three brothers and three sisters, all revolutionaries, of whom a younger brother, Vladimir Ilyich, swore revenge, changed his last name to Lenin, and went forth to work for revolution.
Increasing unrest during the nineties encouraged the revolutionists to believe that the time was ripening for insurrection. A new Czar who was that most dangerous of rulers, a weak autocrat, marked his accession as Nicholas II in 1895 by flatly dismissing all pleas for a constitution as “nonsensical dreams,” thereby causing democrats to despair and extremists to exult. In the cities, strikes by newly industrialized workers followed one upon another. Over all, exerting a mysterious intangible pull, like the moon upon the tides, loomed the approaching moment of the end of the century. There was a sense of an end and a beginning, of “a time to break.”
All the groups of discontent felt the need to prepare for a time of action, to gather