Chen Guangcheng and the romance of the Great Escape.

There is something beautiful and breathtaking about watching a hero of human rights make a clean getaway. The hero may go on to other troubles, and the shadows may triumph in the end. But not yet! Meanwhile, you catch a glimpse of that fleeting thing, freedom, as it goes loping around the corner. And the soul exults.

The classic text on this most up-to-date of themes was written by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which he composed for The Atlantic Monthly in 1898 and 1899. Kropotkin was, formally speaking, a prince, with a rank sufficiently high to allow him to serve the czar as a page. But he was drawn to the grandeurs of the Russian populist cause of the 1870s, and the grandeurs led to arrest and imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.

Prison damaged his health. The wardens transferred him to a prison hospital. A sympathetic soldier, whispering, advised him to request a walk. The doctors assented. He went for a daily supervised stroll in the prison yard—and he noticed that, from time to time, the gate opened to allow carts to make deliveries. His health recovered, but, in order to keep on strolling about the yard, he feigned otherwise—all the while smuggling notes to his comrades. The comrades rented a bungalow across from the gate. A violinist remained inside, ready to strike up a tune whenever the look-outs in the streets gave the all-clear signal. Inside the yard, Kropotkin removed his hat, in token of his own readiness. He heard the rumble of a carriage outside the gate. The violin played. Only, by then he was at the wrong end of the yard, and, when his medically approved sick man’s stroll brought him to the gate, the violin stopped playing:

More than a quarter of an hour passed, full of anxiety, before I understood the cause of the interruption. Then a dozen heavily loaded carts entered the gate and moved to the other end of the yard.

Immediately, the violinist—a good one, I must say—began a wildly exciting mazurka from Kontsky, as if to say, “Straight on now,—this is your time!” I moved slowly to the nearer end of the footpath, trembling at the thought that the mazurka might stop before I reached it.

When I was there I turned around. The sentry had stopped five or six paces behind me; he was looking the other way. “Now or never!” I remember that thought flashing through my head. I flung off my green flannel dressing-gown and began to run.



Kropotkin jumped into the waiting carriage. A comrade diverted a guard. The carriage brazened it out past a couple of policemen and disappeared down Nevsky Prospekt. His friends took him to a fashionable restaurant, where he was least likely to be sought, and then shuttled him from house to house until he was out of the country and able to board a ship that flew the Union Jack—the flag of welcome to political refugees of every sort. “I greeted that flag from the depth of my heart.” And away he sailed. His brother and the brother’s wife had already been sent to Siberia, and now his sister was arrested, too, together with the sister of his brother’s wife. The family paid the price. But those pages in Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist are thrilling.

Or are they too thrilling? In the field of human emotion, the populist movement in Russia was a gigantic earthquake, which, having begun to tremble in the late nineteenth century, kept on trembling until the czar had fallen and the Communists had established their new dictatorship, and still the seismic tremors went on spreading, until imitation communists had arisen in every corner of the world and sometimes established their own dictatorships. The anti-communists of the ultra-right went on to launch their horrible wars. And so it went—quite as if the emotional earthquake that had gotten started in places like the Peter and Paul Fortress ultimately proved to be all too violent for poor, distraught mankind to endure, and half the world ended up going insane.