ABSTRACT
Never having had any unity, the Russian émigrés in the West enthusiastically began to choose sides between the two factions that were struggling for supremacy in the International. In part this reflected the passion—always pronounced in Russia—of the politically-minded intellectual for disputation. Such zealotry flourishes (little else can) in periods of repression, and in Russia the government reintroduced the ‘white terror’ to curb the student disorders of early 1869 in St Petersburg and Moscow. Many revolutionaries went to prison or to exile in Siberia; a few fled abroad. Underground organizations quietly disbanded. Russia again fell silent, but in that brooding, sullen stillness she was more troubled than ever. 1 Those who escaped to the West, and those already there, searched desperately for the instruments with which to perform radical surgery upon a discredited political and social system. That search led to the International.
