The World That Never Was
Alex Butterworth
(Vintage)
£8.99
“When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance,” said Theodore Roosevelt. Well, he should know: he obtained his position due to the assassination of his predecessor.
Butterworth’s hardback tome, neatly summed up by the subtitle, ‘A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents’ has just been released in paperback. It covers radical movements from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Western Europe, Russia and America. In the earlier times, these were more amorphous. Later, divisions grew between centralists and grass-roots activists (personified by Marx v. Bakunin) and in the debates over the use of terror. (Few doubted the inevitability of violence. The fate of the Paris Commune illuminated that. The French establishment, whether masquerading as republic or empire, never forgot nor forgave that scare.)
Out of all this emerged our well loved stereotype. Only recently has the hat and smoking bomb given ground to the ‘Islamist’. Yet, even then, the most spectacular events, probably Alexander II and Franz Ferdinand, were nothing to do with anarchists. To say nothing of the events perpetrated by nation states.
The book is racily and colourfully written, if the cast of thousands can begin to spin. Here are all the well known names. Kropotkin gets due attention with even some discussion of ideas amongst the melodrama. Louise Michel pops up continually, as she did. As did Kravchinsky (perhaps better known by his underground/activist pseudonym, Stepniak) and Malatesta. William Morris gets a fair hearing, although he could never quite bring himself to ally with the anarchism which was close to his views.
A continual sub-plot concerns the activities of the secret police (another topical reference, front paged in Freedom (29th Jan)). Some of these were hard-working and resourceful individuals, busily extracting funding from several governments (often at the same time) in order to run their own underground organisations, agents provocateur and turned ‘assets’. Russia, as prime target of radical (and liberal) loathing was particularly active. They were so exasperated by the inefficiency of the French Sûreté, that their agents set up what was, in effect, a Paris Branch of the Okhrana. All this is, perhaps, best summarised in The Secret Agent. It is still unclear how much inside information Conrad, the author, had.
This aspect had its own spectacular event, when Azef, the head of the Russian Social Revolutionary Combat Unit was revealed as a police spy. The shock was such that the person responsible for the unmasking after years of patient inquiry, Burtsev, was summoned before a tribunal of the international underground organisations. Here was Kropotkin, the supposed quietist, acting as what can only be called a ‘judge’, sitting on a panel which delivered a death sentence. (He seems to be the only panellist who argued for the benefit of the doubt. Burtsev was vindicated and continued his underground investigations, from a variety of political perspectives.)
An intriguing side figure is Jogand-Pages (and various aliases), who carried out large scale hoaxes, often exploiting the embarrassment of the French government over the corruption surrounding the Panama project.
The book has a number of obvious omissions, presumably justified by not being intended to be a history of anarchism. Ukraine cannot be missed entirely but there is no discussion of the wider movement there. There is no mention of Makhno. Similarly, no Mexico. Syndicalism is touched on, then skated over. In general, the book is recommended.
David Peers
» The World That Never Was is now available to buy at Freedom Bookshop here
Article originally appeared in Freedom #7207
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