Copyright 1963-2004 NYREV, Inc

Two different book reviews of The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia (Richard Pipes, Yale University Press) connect Sergei Degaev with Washington University.

Reviewed by Orlando Figes
Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London University.

Copyright 1963-2004 NYREV, Inc.
The New York Review of Books

Volume 51, Number 6 7 April 8, 2004

How should we explain [the terrorist's] murderous impulse? That is the question at the heart of The Degaev Affair, Professor Pipes's short book about the extraordinary life of the terrorist Sergei Degaev (1857-1921).

Pipes dismisses the common explanation, that terrorists are born out of frustration with "political oppression and/or poverty." Referring to the 1960s and 1970s, he points to the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany and to the United States (where "a similar movement...resorted to terrorism") as illustrations of this violent impulse in countries as "rich and as free and law-abiding as any society in history." For Pipes the explanation is rather to be found in a moral sickness (an "overpowering destructive urge which, at the same time, exhibits self-destructive symptoms") that seizes hold of "a sizable body of the young" in modern societies "from time to time." When this happens, the ostensible objective an ideal political and social order serves but as a pretext for resort to violence: violence, ostensibly the means to an end, becomes an end in itself.

Pipes appears to be suggesting that we should see the violent revolutionary as a pathological type of the sort Dostoevsky wrote about in The Possessed. It is a view he has advanced on a grander scale in The Russian Revolution (1990), where the Bolsheviks were basically depicted as a band of fanatics, driven, like Petr Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin in The Possessed, to their murderous deeds by their hatred of society and deluded vision of its future. This may not be convincing as an explanation of a mass movement like the Bolsheviks. But
there is a certain type of revolutionary that Pipes has found and brought to life in his fascinating tale of Sergei Degaev.

[Sergei] Degaev was born to a middle-class family in Moscow. It was, Pipes tells us, a "romantic" family with "exalted if unfocused ambitions" and close connections to the revolutionaries. Degaev had a high opinion of himself, and he strived to make his mark. As a student in St. Petersburg, he joined the People's Will. But he lacked the temperament to carry out its dictates to murder in cold blood. In 1881, Degaev was one of many radicals arrested following the assassination of Alexander II. In the House of Preliminary Detention he was interrogated by the head of Russia's security police, Lieutenant Colonel Georgi Sudeikin, who persuaded him to become an informant and to infiltrate the People's Will. Released from jail, Degaev betrayed his comrades in the revolutionary movement, providing information that led to the arrest of Vera Figner, whom Degaev despised. He played along with Sudeikin's plan to "run the revolution" by having Figner replaced by himself, Degaev, at the head of a police-sponsored People's Will.

Sudeikin was a mirror image of the revolutionaries. He fought them without principles, and as he once confessed, he could have just as readily been one of them. Born to a poor gentry family, Sudeikin sought adventure and personal advancement in the Gendarmes Corps. After the assassination of the Tsar, in 1881, he was transferred from Kiev to the capital, where he was the first to develop the technique of using informants to infiltrate the revolutionaries.

Sudeikin was dissatisfied with his success. Not promoted to a general, he thought the new tsar, Alexander III, had failed to recognize the value of his work. Sudeikin dreamed up a fantastic plan. By controlling Degaev, he would use the revolutionaries in a campaign of assassinations against leading members of the court, so that he would be awarded extra powers by the frightened Tsar. According to Pipes, Sudeikin was plotting a coup d'etat to become "de facto ruler of the empire."

Sudeikin's plan was soon undone. Degaev was exposed as an informant and he was forced by the revolutionaries to expiate his sin by killing Sudeikin. On
December 16, 1883, Degaev lured Sudeikin to his apartment, where two accomplices lay in hiding. As Sudeikin entered the study, Degaev shot him in the back and then, as the victim staggered to the door, watched as one of his accomplices battered him to death with a crowbar.

Degaev fled to France. Three years later he arrived with his wife in North America. He worked for a while in St. Louis, studied mathematics at Washington University, and in 1891 became a naturalized American, registered as Alexander Pell. With a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, Pell later became a professor of mathematics at the University of South Dakota, where he was remembered, after his death in 1921, as a popular teacher and colleague, much loved for his friendship and warm human qualities.

Thus Pipes ends his fascinating tale, leaving readers to ponder on the reasons for such contradictory behavior: Did Degaev-Pell suffer from a split personality? Was his dissimilar behavior on the two continents the natural result of maturation of a man who was in his early twenties when living in Russia, and in his forties when in South Dakota? Or was he perhaps trying in middle age, with good deeds, to atone for the evils he had committed in his youth? Were the conditions of freedom which he encountered in America so different from the ones he had known in Russia as to transform him into a different human being? Or perhaps was Joseph Conrad right in saying that the Russian personality is so enigmatic that a Westerner cannot hope to penetrate it?

Reviewed by J. Bottum
Books & Arts Editor at the Weekly Standard and Poetry Editor of First Things.
Copyright (c) 2003 First Things 135 (August/September 2003): 51-54.

Once upon a time—well, actually, it was in 1897, on the campus of the public university that the citizens of South Dakota had just built in the town of Vermillion to express their pride in their recently achieved statehood. But fairy tales generally need to avoid those kinds of specifics if they’re going to keep their universality. The story of Little Red Riding Hood loses something when it begins: “On or about April 23, 1748, a vulpine suspect (a.k.a. ‘Big Bad Wolf’; see cross-indexed casefiles ‘Pigs, The Three Little’ and ‘Wolf, Peter and the’) was observed feloniously entering a thatched-roof domicile in the Black Forest administrative region, in contravention of the Bavarian Public Safety and Control of Animals Act of 1694, section 2, subsection 3.”

The specifics of this fairy tale set at the University of South Dakota revolve primarily around a Russian revolutionary named Sergei Degaev. That is, of course, an unlikely combination. St. Petersburg is a long way from Vermillion, and Degaev was, as it happens, an astonishingly slippery triple agent in Tsarist Russia who somehow managed to escape death despite doing such normally suicidal things as betraying to his fellow revolutionaries the names of the police agents to whom he had just betrayed his fellow revolutionaries—among whom were several police agents masquerading as revolutionaries.

In a slim but marvelously written new book called The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia, Richard Pipes, the well-known historian of the Russian Revolution at Harvard, has gathered what little can be discovered about Degaev’s life. The result is nearly indescribable. Imagine Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment rewritten as a farce or, even better, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent retold as a fairy tale. There’s a reason Pipes begins The Degaev Affair with an epigraph from Conrad: “For who, with us in Russia, is to tell a scoundrel from an exceptionally able man?”

In fact, the life of Sergei Degaev really is something of a fairy tale—a little murderous and bloody perhaps, but that’s true of many of the best fairy tales. (See the police files on the famous “Little Red Riding Hood” case, for instance.) The only way to understand Degaev’s life is to begin it with “Once upon a time”—and, really, that’s the way his story starts: once upon a time, a man named Alexander Pell arrived in Vermillion, South Dakota, to take up his duties as a mathematics professor at the newly formed university of which the young state of South Dakota was so proud.

The forty-year-old scholar with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins quickly made himself a fixture on campus. The school newspaper dubbed him “Jolly Little Pell.” The students of 1904 elected him their class “father” and told stories of his fighting alongside the students when supporters of another college’s football team tried to steal the school colors. Along the way, Pell published in national and international mathematics journals and managed to persuade the university’s trustees in 1905 to start an engineering department, of which he became the first dean.

After the death of his first wife, he resigned from the university and married one of his students (who would live to become chair of the mathematics department at Bryn Mawr and one of America’s leading women mathematicians). After teaching a few years at the Armour Institute in Chicago, Alexander Pell died in 1921, a mild, well-respected man—the recipient of a good and gentle life, beloved by his students and admired by his colleagues. His widow established a small mathematics scholarship at the University of South Dakota that continues to this day.

Of course, no one in Vermillion knew that jolly little Alexander Pell had started life as Sergei Degaev, the Russian revolutionary who, on December 16, 1883, achieved international fame for murdering Georgii Sudeikin, the all-powerful head of the Tsar’s secret police.

Actually, his story is much worse than that, for Degaev agreed to undertake Sudeikin’s murder only when his fellow revolutionaries in the “People’s Will” movement discovered that he had already betrayed most of them to the police. And Sudeikin wasn’t your usual run of secret policeman. He seems to have been, in fact, a determined reformist who had turned Degaev into a double agent in pursuit of a plan to use the People’s Will to assassinate the minister of the interior, a royal governor, and several other people, all to turn himself into the new Rasputin and the power behind Alexander III’s throne—from which position he imagined he could carry out many of the reforms the revolutionaries demanded.

The strangest part is how close Sudeikin came. His plan was reasonable enough, in those strange Russian days, that it may have been thwarted only by the fact that Degaev decided to save his own neck by assassinating his police patron. By turning Degaev into a triple agent and aiming him back at Sudeikin, the dying People’s Will movement managed to eliminate its best chance to achieve some of its goals. But, then, “who, with us in Russia, is to tell a scoundrel from an exceptionally able man?” Neither the People’s Will nor the Tsar’s secret police ever entirely recovered from their experience of Sergei Degaev.

In The Degaev Affair, Richard Pipes insists that the People’s Will movement has contemporary echoes. It was a group of educated young Russians who joined together in 1879 “for the specific purpose of assassinating the reigning Tsar, Alexander II,” Pipes writes. (Degaev helped dig the tunnel used in one attempt; they succeeded at last with a thrown bomb in 1881.) “It was the first organization in history dedicated to systematic political terrorism.” He goes on to compare the movement with the Weathermen, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and even al-Qaeda. “People were condemned to death not for what they did but for what they were, namely, representatives of a regime regarded by its very nature to be criminal.”

But Degaev’s story doesn’t actually need any immediate application to make it sell—for it is a fairy tale less about revolutionary politics than about what happens to revolutionary politics when it encounters someone like Degaev. Pipes is right that the murderous naiveté of the People’s Will ought to remind us just how much blood always gets shed when innocents decide to set themselves above the law. But he was even more right to demote Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia to his subtitle and to take the man’s name as his main title.

After Sudeikin’s murder, Degaev managed to escape, first to Paris, then to London. Eventually, realizing that—contrary to his quite bizarre expectations—the revolutionary movement in Russia was not going to forgive his betrayals and elevate him as its greatest hero, he emigrated to St. Louis, where he found work as a superintendent at a chemical firm. Naturalized under the name “Alexander Pell” (for no as-yet understood reason), he studied in his spare time at Washington University—from which he was sent on to Baltimore for his doctorate. When the trustees of the University of South Dakota asked the Johns Hopkins professor Lorrain S. Hulburt to recommend a teacher, he answered, “Yes, I have a mathematician for you. He would get a good position almost anywhere here in the East were it not for the Russian brogue with which he speaks.” Vermillion wired back, “Send your Russian mathematician along, brogue and all.”

The question at the center of Pipes’ book is: “Which was the true Degaev-Pell: the kindly professor . . . or the revolutionary turncoat?” Was America different enough from Russia “to transform him into a different human being”? “Or perhaps was Joseph Conrad right in saying that the Russian personality is so enigmatic that a Westerner cannot hope to penetrate it?”

I tend toward the theory that Degaev was simply one of those people doomed to be a bad actor on a big stage and a good actor on a small one. For a revolutionary intellectual, it’s hard to imagine a greater stage than St. Petersburg in those days, and Sergei Degaev seems to have ruined everyone whose life he touched there. It’s hard to imagine a smaller stage than Vermillion, South Dakota, in those days, and Alexander Pell seems to have found, on those windswept Dakota plains, a measure of the gentleness and peace he once imagined only murder and revolution could bring about. That’s the real moral of Richard Pipes’ fairy tale.

A bit more information is available from MAA Online:

Alexander Pell earned his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University in 1897. In his fortieth year, he was somewhat old to be taking a doctorate there, but age did not prevent him from immediately securing the headship of the Department of Mathematics at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. Pell remained in South Dakota until 1908, creating in 1907 and serving as the first Dean of the University's School of Engineering, participating in meetings of the American Mathematical Society, pursuing new ideas in differential geometry, and publishing the fruits of his researches in the pages of the Society's Transactions as well as in Hopkins's American Journal of Mathematics. In 1907, he also married his student, Anna Johnson, during her study tour in Gottingen. A year later, he took a position at the Armour Institute in Chicago when she began her graduate work in mathematics at the nearby University of Chicago. Alexander followed Anna once again in 1913 this time to Mt. Holyoke, where she got her first faculty position, and then again in 1918 to Bryn Mawr, where she chaired the Department of Mathematics. He died in Pennsylvania three years after their move there.

Sergei Degaev was born in Moscow in 1857. The son of a military physician, he was a member of the Russian upper middle class, attended a series of military, artillery, and engineering-oriented academies, and participated actively in the revolutionary group, the People's Will, which aimed to assassinate Tsar Alexander II. From 1879 and the founding of the People's Will to 1881 and the assassination of Alexander to 1884 and his flight from Russia, Degaev "played an intricate and equivocal game to keep at bay alike the police and the terrorists" (p. 88). Sergei Degaev and his Russian revolutionary wife, Liubov Nikolaevna Ivanova, took the names Alexander and Emma Pell upon their naturalizations as United States citizens on 21 September, 1891. They shared a new life in America until Emma's death in 1904.

Alexander Pell received a Ph.D. in 1897 from Johns Hopkins. His dissertation: "The Focal Surfaces of the Congruence of Tangents to a Given Surface." MathSciNet lists 3 papers:

Evaluation of a definite integral. Ann. of Math. (2) 1 (1899/00), no. 1-4, 144-146.

"$D$" lines on quadrics. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 1 (1900), no. 3, 315--322.

Solution of the differential equation $dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 =3D ds^2$ and its application to some geometrical problems. Ann. of Math. (2) 20 (1919),
no. 3, 142-148.

See also Alexander Pell in MacTutor HIstory of Math Archive