Bit by bit I'll add the notable record next to the location. This will guide me when I come to write the actual notebooks.
London - Exiles settle.
Paris - Exiles meet, including Bakunin with Proudhon & Marx 1844; Commune 1871;
Lyon - 1870 Bakunin leads failed insurrection on principles of later Paris Commune
Switzerland - Gatherings & conferences (Geneva/Bern). Exiles, printing presses, smuggling and snatches by secret police. Bakunin retires (Lugano/Bern).
Neuchatel - Jura federation works out anarchist programme that Kropotkin takes up 1872.
Baden 1848 - Bakunin joins abortive attempt at insurrection.
Dresden 1849 - Bakunin organising barricades during insurrection.
Chemnitz 1849 - Bakunin captured for Russians.
Wroclaw - Marx circulates allegation that Bakunin's a state asset.
St.Petersburg -
Peter & Paul fortress - Kropotkin's notorious escape 1876. The rescue of the red balloon fails, but the rescue of the wild fiddler succeeds. His descriptions in the comments
Apraxin Dvor - fire story
Lake Baikal - 1866 Polish exiles revolt, and die. Kropotkin's account.
Irkutsk, administrative centre of Siberia & its exiles. 1857 plans for United States of Siberia. Bakunin escapes 1861.
Chita, Kropotkin's work-base 1862+. Watchtower parable.
The Amur River - 1863 Kropotkin's explorations and boat journeys.
Manchurian explorations - 1863 Kropotkin stories vs Chinese.
Ghirin - encounter with Chinese culture.
1865 Kropotkin exploring western Sayans etc..
Tom River crossing on ice, Kropotkin story 1863?
Finland - Kropotkin passes through in a northern loop.
Stockholm - Bakunin meets up with his wife.
Christiania - Kropotkin docks on his escape from Russia.
The Hague 1872 - Bakunin expelled by Marx from the IWMA
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Kropotkin's introduction to the Peter & Paul fortress:
ReplyDelete"THIS was, then, the terrible fortress where so much of the true strength of Russia had perished during the last two centuries, and the very name of which is uttered in St. Petersburg in a hushed voice.
Here Peter I. tortured his son Alexis and killed him with his own hand; here the Princess Tarakánova was kept in a cell which filled with water during an inundation,--- the rats climbing upon her to save themselves from drowning; here the terrible Minich tortured his enemies, and Catherine II. buried alive those who objected to her having murdered her husband. And from the times of Peter I. for a hundred and seventy years, the annals of this mass of stone which rises from the Nevá in front of the Winter Palace were annals of murder and torture, of men buried alive, condemned to a slow death, or driven to insanity in the loneliness of the dark and damp dungeons.
Here the Decembrists, who were the first to unfurl in Russia the banner of republican rule and the abolition of serfdom, underwent their first experiences of martyrdom, and traces of them may still be found in the Russian Bastille. Here were imprisoned the poets Ryléeff and Shevchénko, Dostoévsky, Bakúnin, Chernyshévsky, Písareff, and so many others of our best contemporary writers. Here Karakózoff was tortured and hanged.
Here, somewhere in the Alexis ravelin, is still kept Necháieff, who was given up to Russia by Switzerland as a common-law criminal, but is treated as a dangerous political prisoner, and will never again see the light. In the same ravelin are also two or three men whom, rumor says, Alexander II., because of what they knew, and others must not know, about some palace mystery, ordered imprisoned for life. One of them, adorned with a long gray beard, was lately seen by an acquaintance of mine, in the mysterious fortress.
All these shadows rose before my imagination. But my thoughts fixed especially on Bakúnin, who, though he had been shut up in an Austrian fortress, after 1848, for two years, chained to the wall, and then handed over to Nicholas I., who kept him in the fortress for six years longer, yet came out, when the Iron Tsar's death released him, fresher and fuller of vigor than his comrades who had remained at liberty. "He has lived it through," I said to myself, "and I must, too: I will not succumb here!"
"The need of new impressions is so great in prison that, when I walked in our narrow yard, I always kept my eyes fixed upon the high gilt spire of the fortress cathedral. This was the only thing in my surroundings which changed its aspect, and I liked to see it glittering like pure gold when the sun shone from a clear blue sky, or assuming a fairy aspect when a light bluish haze lay upon the town, or becoming steel gray when dark clouds obscured the sky.
ReplyDeleteDuring these walks I occasionally saw the daughter of the governor, a girl of eighteen or nineteen, as she came out from her father's apartment and had to walk a few steps in our yard in order to reach the entrance gate, the only issue from the building. She always hurried along, with her eyes cast down, as if she felt ashamed of being the daughter of a jailer. Her younger brother, on the contrary, a cadet whom I also saw once or twice in the yard, always looked straight in my face with such a frank expression of sympathy that I was struck with it and even mentioned it to some one after my release. Four or five years later, when he was already an officer, he was exiled to Siberia. He had joined the revolutionary party, and must have helped, I suppose, to carry on correspondence with prisoners in the fortress."
Kropotkin's route out via Finland,
ReplyDelete"from a foreign paper we had learned that all the frontier stations and railway termini in the Baltic provinces and Finland were closely watched by detectives who knew me by sight. So I determined to travel in a direction where I should be least expected. Armed with the passport of a friend, and accompanied by another friend, I crossed Finland, and went northward to a remote port on the Gulf of Bothnia, whence I crossed to Sweden."
"I crossed Sweden without stopping anywhere, and went to Christiania, where I waited a few days for a steamer to sail for Hull, ... As I went to the steamer I asked myself with anxiety, "Under which flag does she sail, --- Norwegian, German, English?" Then I saw floating above the stern the union jack, --- the flag under which so many refugees, Russian, Italian, French, Hungarian, and of all nations, have found an asylum. I greeted that flag from the depth of my heart."
How no longer true.