Thread by @MattCarr55

In a week in which #therailwaychildren returned to British screens, I wonder how many people are aware that the author of one of the great children's novels, was what in 21st century eyes, would be described as an 'apologist for terrorism?'

If you don't, then bear with me...

You may remember the ‘Russian gentleman’ who the Waterbury family take in, in Nesbitt's novel, who was sent to Siberia for writing a ‘beautiful book about poor people and how to help them.’

The inspiration for that character was the Russian anarchist revolutionary Sergei Kravchinsky (1851-1895) alias ‘Stepniak’ – son of the Steppes.

Kravchinsky wasn't the most obvious material for a sweet Edwardian children's novel. The son of a Russian artillery officer, he waged guerrilla war against the Ottomans in Bosnia in 1876.

In 1877 he took part in an anarchist revolt in south Italy, posing as an English tourist.

In Russia Kravchinsky became a member of the People's Will - a terrorist offshoot of the Narodnik movement. In1878 he stabbed to death General Mesentzov, the head of the Russian secret police The Third Section, while Mesentzov was buying sweets.

Forced into exile, Kravchinsky settled in London, where his friends included William Morris, George Bernard Shaw and…E. Nesbitt. In exile, he became the most well-known propagandist for the People’s Will, largely as a result of his bestselling book Underground Russia.

In it, he wrote eulogistically and romantically of his comrades, who were locked in a life and death struggle with the Russian state, and when I say romantically, I mean VERY romantically.

Kravchinsky regarded his terrorist comrades as heroes. For him, the terrorist was a new historical figure, ‘noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero.’

This terrorist revolutionary was David against the autocratic Goliath , who ‘illuminated by a light as of hell, with lofty bearing , and a look breathing forth hatred and defiance,’ stands up to tyranny when no one else will.

Strange as it may sound to 21st century ears, he saw terrorism was a selective form of violence which replaced ‘massive revolutionary movements…where a nation kills off its own children’ with ‘a series of individual political assassinations, which always hit their target.’

In this struggle, the terrorist movement delivers a 'blow to the centre' in order to lure a more powerful regime into a debilitating confrontation in which the regime ‘is vanquished, not by the arms of his [terrorist]adversary, but by the continuous tension of his own strength.’

So Underground Russia was not exactly a ‘ book about the poor and how to help them’ – unless you accept that sometimes assassination and murder are necessary to ‘help’ the poor. Many British opponents of Tsarism did share that view.

Underground Russia book was published in 1880, at a time when The People Will were hunting down Tsar Alexander II even as his regime was hunting them. That year they placed a bomb in the Winter Palace, which failed to kill the Tsar.

With his usual purple prose, Kravchinsky celebrated this explosion, ' the infernal character of which seemed to surpass everything the imagination could conceive.'

The following year, on 1 March 1881, Kravchinsky's comrades finally managed to kill Alexander, after throwing a bomb at his carriage in St Petersburg.

The great struggle Kravchinsky and his comrades hoped for did not materialise. The People’s Will were annihilated, the Tsar’s executioners imprisoned, hanged or exiled in Siberia.

In 1895, Kravchinsky was knocked down by a train, in what might have been suicide or an accident. The Railway Children was published in 1906, one year after the first revolutionary struggles erupted across the Russian Empire.

That struggle may have shaped Nesbitt's memory of the ‘Russian gentleman.’ Mr. Szczepansky, who the Waterbury family look after, with his 'kind face, now that it was no longer frightened, and he smiled at the children whenever he saw them.’

In any case, it shows once again that 'terrorism' is often a matter of perspective, and sometimes these perspectives can be startling and surprising. The essential strategy that Kravchinsky popularised has been replayed again and again, in far bloodier forms than he imagined.

And it's doubtful that many viewers who shed a tear when Bobbie runs after her daddy will wonder what led an Edwardian novelist to present a sympathetic view of one of the most influential terrorist propagandists of his day.

The end.

@threadreaderapp please unroll