Sergei Kravchinsky

Sergei Kravchinsky, the son of an army doctor, was born in Kherson Governorate on 1st July, 1851. He attended the Military Academy and the Artillery School before joining the Russian Army. He reached the rank of Second Lieutenant before resigning his commission in 1871.

In 1874 Kravchinsky went to the Balkans to assist revolt of Southern Slavs against the Turks. Olga Liubatovich met him for the first time in 1876: "There were a number of people in the room by the time Kravchinsky walked in, but I felt my attention shift involuntarily to his strong, manly figure and distinctive face. He carried a top hat and was dressed like a gentleman; his Napoleonic goatee made him look like a foreigner. Although several other women were present, he walked directly toward me and extended his hand in a free, comradely gesture. He was older than me and had more experience among the people; I regarded him as a senior comrade. Although I was extremely shy with people in my youth, we somehow struck up a sincere, unconstrained conversation; and as we talked, I glanced freely at his open, bold face, a face in which ugly, irregular features and broken lines became beautiful. We became friends immediately."

In 1876 Vera Zasulich found work as a typesetter for an illegal printing press. A member of the Land and Liberty group, when Zasulich heard that one of her fellow comrades, Tatiana Lebedeva, had witnessed one of the prisoners, Alexei Bogoliubov, take a terrible beating at the hands of Dmitry Trepov, the Governor General of St. Petersburg, she decided she must take revenge.

Kravchinsky attended the trial on 14th March, 1877, of a group of women who had been distributing political pamphlets to factory workers in Moscow. He quoted one of the defendants, Sophia Bardina, who stated in court: "All of these accusations against us would be terrible if they were true. But they are based on misunderstanding. I do not reject property if it is acquired by one's own labour. Every person has a right to his own labour and its products. So why do our masters give us only one-third of our labour-value? As for the family, I also do not understand. Is it the social system that is destroying it, by forcing a woman to abandon her family and work for wretched wages in a factory, where she and her children are inevitably corrupted; a system that drives a woman into prostitution through sheer poverty, and which actually sanctions this prostitution as something legitimate and necessary in any well-ordered society? Or is it we who are undermining it, we, who are attempting to eliminate this poverty, which is the chief cause of all our social ills, including the destruction of the family? As to religion, I have always been true to the principles established by the founder of Christianity, and have never propagandized against these principles. I am equally innocent of attempting to undermine the State. I do not believe any one individual is capable of destroying the State by force. If it is to be destroyed, it will be because it bears within it the embryo of its own destruction, holding as it does the people in political, economic and intellectual bondage."

In his book, Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles (1883) he argued: "Before this trial only young people had known socialists. Now an amazed public witnessed the radiant faces of these girls, with their childishly sweet smiles, calmly going to where there was no return, no hope - they were going to the central prisons, to long years of hard labour." Kravchinsky reported that Sophia Bardina and Olga Liubatovich were sentenced to nine years hard labour in Siberia, whereas Gesia Gelfman and Lydia Figner got five years's hard labour in factories.

In July 1877, Vera Zasulich heard that one of her fellow comrades, Tatiana Lebedeva, had witnessed one of the prisoners, Alexei Bogoliubov, take a terrible beating at the hands of Dmitry Trepov, the Governor General of St. Petersburg, she decided she must take revenge. She later recalled that she went to Trepov's office with a revolver hidden under her cloak: "The revolver was in my hand. I pressed the trigger - a misfire. My heart missed a beat. Again I pressed. A shot, cries. Now they'll start beating me. This was next in the sequence of events I had thought through so many times. I threw down the revolver - this also had been decided beforehand; otherwise, in the scuffle, it might go off by itself. I stood and waited. Suddenly everybody around me began moving, the petitioners scattered, police officers threw themselves at me, and I was seized from both sides."

Zasulich was arrested and charged with attempted murder. During the trial the defence produced evidence of such abuses by the police, and Zasulich conducted herself with such dignity, that the jury acquitted her. When the police tried to re-arrest her outside the court, the crowd intervened and allowed her to escape. Zasulich commented: "I could not understand this feeling then, but I have understood it since. Had I been convicted, I should have been prevented by main force from doing anything, and I should have been tranquil, and the thought of having done all I was able for the cause would have been a consolation to me."

Kravchinsky argued that Vera Zasulich was a new kind of hero: "On the horizon appeared the outlines of a sombre figure, illuminated by some kind of hellish flame, a figure with chin raised proudly in the air, and a gaze that breathed provocation and vengeance. Passing through the frightened crowds, the revolutionary enters with proud step on to the arena of history. He is wonderful, awe-inspiring and irresistible, for he unites the two most lofty forms of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero."

Vera Figner, a fellow revolutionary, later blamed Kravchinsky for producing a generation of martyrs: "Kravchinsky... declared that all methods were fair, but they created a cult of dynamite and the dagger, and crowned the terrorist with a halo. Murder and the scaffold acquired a magnetic charm and attraction for the youth of our country, and the weaker their nervous system, the more oppressive the life around them, the greater their exultation at the thought of revolutionary terror. For since the effects of ideas are hardly perceptible to a revolutionary during the brief span of his lifetime, he wishes to see some concrete palpable manifestation of his will, of his own strength."

In 1878 Kravchinsky joined the Land and Liberty group. Along with Nikolai Morozov and Olga Liubatovich, Kravchinskii, edited the party journal Land and Liberty. Kravchinskii became convinced that individual acts of political terrorism would help persuade Alexander II to introduce democratic reforms. According to Liubatovich he believed that a campaign of terror was the best strategy: "All of us knew from our personal experience, he argued, that extensive work among the people has long been impossible, nor could we expect to expand our activity and attract masses of the people to the socialist cause until we obtained at least a minimum of political freedom, freedom of speech, and the freedom to organize unions."

Kravchinsky was very interested in the role of women in the Russian revolutionary movement. He argued: "With us, the emancipation of women was not confined to the petty right of 'free love', which is nothing more than the right of always selecting her master. It was soon understood that the important thing was to have liberty itself, leaving the question of love to individual will, and as there is no liberty without economic independence, the struggle changed its aspect, and became one of acquiring free access to superior institutions and the professions followed by educated men. The struggle was long and arduous, for our barbarous and medieval family life stood in its way. It was maintained very bravely by our women, and had the same passionate character as most of our recent social struggles. The women finally vanquished. The government itself was forced to recognize it."

In August, 1878, Kravchinsky assassinated General Nikolai Mezentsov, the head of the country's secret police with a dagger in the streets of St Petersburg. After the killing, he left Russia and eventually settled in London. Kravchinsky established the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and the Russia Free Press. He published a series of books including Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles (1883), A Female Nihilist (1885) and Russia Under the Tsars (1886).

Sergei Kravchinsky was knocked down and killed by a train in London in 1895.

Primary Sources

(1) Olga Liubatovich first met Sergei Kravchinsky in 1876.

There were a number of people in the room by the time Sergei Kravchinsky walked in, but I felt my attention shift involuntarily to his strong, manly figure and distinctive face. He carried a top hat and was dressed like a gentleman; his Napoleonic goatee made him look like a foreigner. Although several other women were present, he walked directly toward me and extended his hand in a free, comradely gesture.

He was older than me and had more experience among the people; I regarded him as a senior comrade. Although I was extremely shy with people in my youth, we somehow struck up a sincere, unconstrained conversation; and as we talked, I glanced freely at his open, bold face, a face in which ugly, irregular features and broken lines became beautiful. We became friends immediately.

(2) Sergei Kravchinsky, Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles (1883)

With us, the emancipation of women was not confined to the petty right of "free love", which is nothing more than the right of always selecting her master. It was soon understood that the important thing was to have liberty itself, leaving the question of love to individual will, and as there is no liberty without economic independence, the struggle changed its aspect, and became one of acquiring free access to superior institutions and the professions followed by educated men. The struggle was long and arduous, for our barbarous and medieval family life stood in its way. It was maintained very bravely by our women, and had the same passionate character as most of our recent social struggles. The women finally vanquished. The government itself was forced to recognize it.

(3) Sergei Kravchinsky, Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles (1883)

Before this trial only young people had known socialists. Now an amazed public witnessed the radiant faces of these girls, with their childishly sweet smiles, calmly going to where there was no return, no hope - they were going to the central prisons, to long years of hard labour.

(4) Sergei Kravchinsky, Russia Under the Tsars (1886)

On the horizon appeared the outlines of a sombre figure, illuminated by some kind of hellish flame, a figure with chin raised proudly in the air, and a gaze that breathed provocation and vengeance. Passing through the frightened crowds, the revolutionary enters with proud step on to the arena of history. He is wonderful, awe-inspiring and irresistible, for he unites the two most lofty forms of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero.

(5) Sergei Kravchinsky, Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles (1883)

Sophia Perovskaya is a living reflection of the continuous efforts which this life cost, maintained for months and months in this terrible place, exposed to the prying of so many thousand police spies ... Are not these people, I thought, the real representatives of the Party? Is this not the living picture which typifies the whole struggle? A feeling of enthusiasm fired my heart. We are invincible, I thought, while the source is unexhausted whence springs so much anonymous heroism, the greatest of all heroism.

(6) Sergei Kravchinsky, Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles (1883)

She did everything, letter-carrier, messenger, sentinel; and often her work was so heavy that it exhausted even her strength, although she was a woman belonging to the working classes. How often had she returned home late at night, worn out and at the end of her strength, having for fourteen hours walked all over the capital, throwing letters into various holes and corners with the proclamations of the Executive Committee! But on the following day she would rise and recommence her work ... There are unknown heroines, obscure toilers, who offer up everything upon the altar of their cause, without asking anything for themselves. They assume the most ungrateful parts, sacrifice themselves for the merest trifles; for lending their names to the correspondence of others; for sheltering a man, often unknown to them; for delivering a parcel without knowing what it contains ... such precisely is the story of Gesia Gelfman.

(7) In her autobiography Olga Liubatovich described how Vera Zasulich and Sergei Kravchinsky reacted to the news that Alexander Soloviev had attempted to kill Alexander II.

In the spring of 1879, the unexpected news of Alexander Soloviev's attempt on the life of the Tsar threw Geneva's Russian colony into turmoil. Vera Zasulich hid away for three days in deep depression: Soloviev's deed obviously reflected a trend toward direct, active struggle against the government, a trend of which Zasulich disapproved. It seemed to me that her nerves were so strongly affected by violent actions like Soloviev's because she consciously (and perhaps unconsciously, as well) regarded her own deed as the first step in this direction.

Other émigrés were incomparably more tolerant of the attempt: Stefanovich and Deich, for example, merely noted that it might hinder political work among the people. Sergei Kravchinsky rejected even this objection. All of us knew from our personal experience, he argued, that extensive work among the people has long been impossible, nor could we expect to expand our activity and attract masses of the people to the socialist cause until we obtained at least a minimum of political freedom, freedom of speech, and the freedom to organize unions.

(8) Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1927)

Kravchinsky... declared that all methods were fair, but they created a cult of dynamite and the dagger, and crowned the terrorist with a halo. Murder and the scaffold acquired a magnetic charm and attraction for the youth of our country, and the weaker their nervous system, the more oppressive the life around them, the greater their exultation at the thought of revolutionary terror. For since the effects of ideas are hardly perceptible to a revolutionary during the brief span of his lifetime, he wishes to see some concrete palpable manifestation of his will, of his own strength.