Letter to Paul Lafargue, about January 25, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 25 January 1885


First published in Cri du Peuple, No. 461, Paris, 31 janvier 1885
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE[1]

IN PARIS

[Excerpt]

[London, about 25 January 1885]

You know what efforts the Russian government has been making for years past to wrest from England and France — but from England in particular—their assent to the extradition of the heroic nihilists.[2] Once these two countries had been won over to such a cause, the rest of Europe was bound to follow suit. There was even reason to hope that America might also be moved to act in similar fashion.

Now, The Pall Mall Gazette of 15 January contained an article by Mme Novikov, devil's advocate of tsarism, appealing yet again to England to desist from giving asylum to the Gartmans, the Stepnyaks and all those who 'organise assassination in Russia'.[3] The English, she goes on, are now threatened with similar chemical attacks; the refuge they afford to the Russian dynamiters is likewise afforded by America to the Irish dynamiters. What England is asking of America is precisely what Russia is asking of England.

All this is plain enough. But there is better to come. On the morning of 24 January all the newspapers carried the text of an agreement, concluded through diplomatic channels, between St Petersburg and Berlin whereby the extradition of political offenders was to be extended to Germany and thence to the rest of Europe.[4]

And on the afternoon of that same day, the 24th of January, London was terrorised by a threefold explosion, one in the House of Commons, directed against the legislature, one in Westminster Hall directed against the judiciary, and one in the Tower, directed against the executive. This time it was no longer a matter of blowing up public lavatories or of frightening travellers on the underground railway.[5] Rather it was a concerted attack upon the three great powers of state, symbolised by the buildings in which they assemble.

Is this no more than an act perpetrated by a handful of Fenian hotheads? Might it not rather be the great coup tsarism needed to bring off if it was to compel England to join the ranks of its anti-revolutionary league? If the dynamite was of Russian origin, and handled by Russian agents, could it, I ask, have exploded at a time better calculated to prostrate a terrified and repentant John Bull at the feet of Alexander III?

  1. ↑ This letter, which Paul Lafargue passed on to Jules Guesde, formed the basis for Guesde's leading article in the newspaper Le Cri du Peuple, No. 461, 31 January 1885. The excerpt published here was included in the article in full, where it was stated that a letter written by 'one of the veterans of our great social battles' had been received from London. Engels examined the issue to which he refers in this excerpt in the article 'Real Imperial Russian Privy Dynamiters' carried by Der Sozialdemokrat, No. 5, 29 January 1885 (see present edition, Vol. 26). The where abouts of the original letter are unknown.
  2. ↑ Nihilists — a term used in the 1860s to describe the progressive-minded Russian intellectuals of different social estates. The Nihilists refused to recognise the domi nant ideology and morality, rejected religion and demanded freedom of the per sonality. They advocated equality between the sexes and called for the study of the natural and exact sciences. Towards the end of the 1860s the term almost com pletely disappeared from polemic writing, although it was used later on occasions by reactionary political commentators as a label for revolutionaries. In West Euro pean writing, the term was applied to participants in the Russian revolutionary movement of the 1870s and 1880s, notably the members of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will).
  3. ↑ O. Novikova, 'The Russification of England'.
  4. ↑ On 13 (1) January 1885 Russia and Prussia exchanged notes on the extradition of persons accused of criminal offences against the monarchs of the contracting par ties or members of their families, as well as of persons found guilty of manufactur ing or storing explosives. This was the subject of a report in The Times, 24 January 1885 (No. 31352) entitled 'Extradition by Russia and Prussia. Berlin, Jan. 23'.
  5. ↑ The series of explosions which Engels is writing about took place on Saturday, 24 January 1885. The investigation showed that the man responsible for the explosion in the Tower was the same one who had organised the explosion on the under ground railway two years previously, when bombs had been placed at Charing Cross and Praed Street stations. He was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment and hard labour. See also Note 251.