Everybody knows that the Russian government is using every 
means at its disposal to arrive at treaties with the West European 
states for the extradition of Russian revolutionaries who have fled 
the country. 

Everybody also knows that its overriding concern is to obtain 
such a treaty from England. 

And the final thing that everybody knows is that Russian 
officialdom will shrink at nothing if only it leads to the desired 
end. 

Very well then. On January 13, 1885 Bismarck concludes an 
agreement with Russia, which provides for the extradition of every 
Russian political refugee the moment Russia sees fit to accuse him 
of being a prospective regicide, or prospective dynamiter.’”' 

On January 15 Mrs Olga Novikov issued an appeal to England 
in the Pall Mall Gazette, the selfsame Mrs Novikov who in 1877 
and 1878, before and during the war against the Turks, so 
magnificently duped the noble Mr Gladstone in the interests of 
Russia.' In it England is exhorted no longer to tolerate people 
such as Hartmann, Kropotkin and Stepniak conspiring on English 
soil “to murder us in Russia”, especially now that dynamite has 
become such a burning issue for the English themselves. And, she 
remarks, is Russia asking any more of England with respect to 
Russian revolutionaries than England itself is now obliged to ask 
of America with respect to Irish dynamiters? 

On the morning of January 24 the Prusso-Russian treaty is 
published in London.’ 

a See “Extradition by Russia and Prussia”, The Times, No. 31352, January 24, 
1885.— Ed. 

Real Imperial Russian Privy Dynamiters 293 

And on January 24 at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, three dynamite 
explosions go off in London within the space of a quarter hour, 
and they cause more damage than all the earlier ones taken 
together, wounding at least seven people, and according to other 
sources eighteen. 

The timing of these explosions is too opportune not to raise the 
question— Whose interests do they serve? Who has most to gain 
from these otherwise pointless shots of terror aimed at nobody in 
particular, to which not only lower-ranking policemen and 
bourgeois fall victtm but also workers and their wives and 
children? Who? The few Irishmen who were driven to desperation 
partially because of the brutality of the English government 
during their imprisonment, and who are assumed to have planted 
the dynamite? Or, on the other hand, the Russian government 
which cannot achieve its end—the extradition treaty—without 
putting the government and people of England under the most 
extreme pressure, pressure so great that it whips up_ public 
opinion in England into a blind rabid rage against the dynamiters? 

When the Polish refugees with very few exceptions, would not 
lower themselves, at the behest of the Russian diplomatic service 
and the police, to forge Russian banknotes, the Russian govern- 
ment sent agents abroad, including privy councillor Kamensky, to 
goad them into doing it, and when this too failed Messrs 
Kamensky and associates were obliged to forge Russian banknotes 
themselves. For a further detailed account see the pamphlet The 
Counterfeiters or the Agents of the Russian Government, Geneva, 
H. Georg, 1875.*—The police forces of Switzerland and London, 
and probably of Paris as well, can tell a tale or two about how, in 
tracking down the Russian forgers, their inquiries finally led them 
to people whom the Russian embassies would steadfastly refuse to 
have prosecuted. 

The history of the Balkan peninsula during the past one 
hundred years sheds enough light on the abilities of Russian 
officialdom in removing troublesome individuals by means of 
poison, the dagger, etc. I need refer only to the well-known 
Histoire des principautés danubiennes by Elias Regnault, Paris, 1855. 
The Russian diplomatic service constantly has at its disposal agents 
of all kinds, including the kind that are used to commit infamous 
deeds and then disowned. 

I do not hesitate, for the time being to lay the blame for the 
explosions in London on January 24, 1885 at the door of the 

a Published in Russian.— Ed. 

21* 

Russians. Irish hands may have laid the dynamite, but it is more 
than probable that a Russian brain and Russian money were 
behind it. 

The means of struggle employed by the Russian revolutionaries 
are dictated to them by necessity, by the actions of their opponents 
themselves. They must answer to their people and to history for 
the means they employ. But the gentlemen who are needlessly 
parodying this struggle in Western Europe in schoolboy fashion, 
who are attempting to bring the revolution down to the level of 
Schinderhannes, who do not even direct their weapons against real 
enemies but against the public in general, these gentlemen are in 
no way successors or allies of the Russian revolutionaries, but 
rather their worst enemies. Since it has become clear that nobody 
apart from Russian officialdom has any interest in the success of 
these heroic deeds, the only question that remains to be asked is 
which of them were coerced and which of them volunteered to 
become the paid agents of Russian tsarism. 

London, January 25, 1885 

Frederick Engels 
No. 5, January 29, 1885 paper 

time