Mikhail Shishkin - Calligraphy Lesson

In October an accident occurred for which she blamed herself and which strongly affected how the peasants saw her. “I poisoned someone. An 80 year old man got drunk and since the liquor store was already closed and you couldn’t get your hands on vodka anywhere, he drank up the vial of medicine I had given him. Atropine eye drops. Tomorrow’s the funeral. Now his children and the whole village hate me. They stood under my window, screaming curses and threats. Again they’re all getting drunk and again at night I’ll try to fall asleep and tremble from fear.”

In another letter she told how a drunk was pestering her and how she had to grab an ax in self-defense. “He sobered up in a flash. But now I have to go to sleep with an ax by my bed because the lock’s loose.”

Again she’s plagued by uncertainty. “I remember how I dreamed in Zurich of the great goal of working among the people for the people, of sacrificing myself for them. This isn’t the same people they meant when they said Socialism lives in the heart of our people. So where is this Russian people. Take me to them!”

After working a year and a half in Vladimir Oblast, Lydia decided she must dedicate herself fully to the revolution.

“The more frustrated I am in what I’m doing, the more my hatred grows. It’s impossible to create anything here. It’s all a waste. One must first destroy this system which keeps people from living as humans. These people are like animals because they don’t know another way. Life in Russia corrupts them. You can’t survive here without the basest instincts. Remember we studied this! It’s natural selection. Here only the lowlife and parasites survive, the blockheads and boors. We need to alter life itself, down to the bare bones. This whole rotten system has to go. Yes, I hate this unjust world. Now my direction is clear!”

Thus, Lydia resolved to become a professional revolutionary.

“My darling,” she writes in late 1904. “Once again I feel strength and confidence in myself and my future. All the hesitations and depression are in the past. I often revisit in memory our Venice and the countless times I asked myself if I acted wisely then. And now I’m happy I made the right choice. And I know, my beloved, that you’ll support me.”

The following year, with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War and growing mass restlessness, Lydia decided she must take her place among those leading the Russian people against tsarism. She traveled to Switzerland, home to the headquarters of all the radical parties, and on the road from Petersburg sent Fritz an ebullient letter. “There’s revolution in the air at last! We, the entire Russian intelligentsia, believe and hope the Japanese will give it to the Russians. A defeat will shake the people’s trust in the government. All around us is discontent and a weakening State. Great moments in history come only once in a lifetime. Glorious revolutions only once in a century. What bliss to live to see it, to prepare it, to be part of it! Long live the revolution!”

She was closest to the Socialist Revolutionary Party and spent almost all of 1905 in Geneva, renting a room in the very same building that housed their headquarters. She met Party leaders and waited impatiently to return to her homeland with an important assignment. She frequented the circle of known revolutionaries, was friends with the radicals Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Vera Figner, and also got to know Vladimir Burtsev, activist and scholar, who would expose the double agent Yevno Azef. Burtsev really impressed her and she didn’t suspect the role he’d play in her fate. She was 33. She was happy to find her life’s purpose. Her letters to Zurich expressed this delight in her upcoming work and a twinge of sadness that she hadn’t as yet been sent to Russia.

Finally, when the revolution was already losing steam, she traveled to Saratov, assigned to resurrect the crippled Party organization and oversee the spread of revolutionary propaganda. She was also to supervise the preparation for land expropriations and peasant revolts. The Party directives called for immediate initiation of local riots, which would boil over into a full-blown revolution. From 1906 to 1908, Lydia was the Party representative in the Saratov province.

At first her letters from this place on the Volga were optimistic. Party membership inspired her. “It’s so important to feel yourself a part of something big, important, and meaningful. I’m happy as I never was before. If I pay for this for my life, that’s a small price to pay for what I now feel.”

The chance to be rid of one’s ego, to give it up, to meld into a great communal endeavor, gave meaning to her existence. She thought she had found what she was striving for all these years. “My family is my comrades. No matter where I am, I’m part of one great family—the Party. Most likely in this sense of belonging, of kinship, I’ve finally discovered what I was looking for all my life.”

As had Fritz, she compared this experience to a religious ecstasy. “Yes, indeed we truly resemble first century Christians—the same firm faith in the approaching, joyous salvation of the world, the same readiness to sacrifice, the same denial of the ego, of the philistine, of material things, of children, of everything that detracts from the grand idea. The difference being that religion is a lie and revolution, the truth!”

In a letter of 2 May, 1906, she described a boat trip along the Volga for an International Workers’ Day picnic on an island. “We returned at night. There was a huge moon, and my darling, I suddenly remembered our Venice and that moon of ours! And what an aching sadness welled up in me. I burst into tears. My comrades began to make fun of me and we broke into revolutionary songs. I tingled from tip to toe! My beloved! We’re so far from one another! And so close!”

At the end of May she reported excitedly about an assassination attempt on the Saratov prison’s warden. But in her next letter she sounded pensive. The accused, a 17-year-old apprentice to a metal worker in the railroad shops where Lydia’s comrades distributed proclamations, had failed. “Shatalov, the warden, recovered and got promoted and went to work for Prime Minister Stolypin. The prison has a new warden. They hung the boy. So now I can’t stop thinking—is this why that child was born and lived out his 17 years? He’s truly a hero and won’t be forgotten by progressive Russia. One day they’ll erect a monument to him, but I can’t bear to think of his last moments before the gallows. And what if he repented of his act? How terrible it was then for him to die!”

Still, in the following letter, Lydia cast off all her doubts. Her conscience troubled her for being a crybaby and that her faith was shaken. Once again she threw herself into revolutionary work. In the summer of 1906, she was sent by the Party to spread propaganda in the Atkarsk district of Saratov province. She was able to regulate the publication and distribution of leaflets and then became involved in the delivery of weapons and the organization of expropriations.

On 1 October, 1906, Lydia, euphoric, writes to Zurich from Atkarsk about the destruction of landed estates. “Expropriations going on throughout the whole province! Our people are the most marvelous on earth! Its soul is as close to Kropotkin’s anarchism as they come. Total disregard for the law, no understanding whatsoever of this word. The expropriations proceed so simply, with the effortlessness of those who have no compunctions when it comes to property, theirs and others, only communist instincts.”

But soon after, her disenchantment deepened. By the minute she awaited the start of a universal revolution. Her task was to organize militant peasant divisions and stir up revolts, but not only didn’t the revolution take hold, on the contrary, it burned out. Prime Minister Stolypin instilled order with his ruthless measures and formulated reforms. Because of the work of double agents, they arrested revolutionaries en masse.