The Degaev Affair
Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia
by Richard Pipes
Yale University Press, 153 pp., $22.95 HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES, Richard Pipes commented a few years ago, "flourish because they read like novels," and in proof, the emeritus Harvard professor of history has authored "The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia," a tight little sketch of the 1880s terrorist Sergei Degaev that makes Russian revolutionary history accessible to people more used to reading novels--which is meant as an enormous compliment. Pipes tracks the journeys of Degaev and his enemy, co-conspirator, and victim, Georgii Sudeikin, head of the tsar's secret police, into their darkness of treason, terrorism, utopian scheming, betrayals, retribution, and murder.
Perhaps the most unlikely part of the story is that Degaev survived to achieve a personal redemption in the United States as another person under another name. Pipes's tale is thus both the story of Degaev's fall and his reemergence as a man saved by a change in geography as much as in political environment. When Degaev fled Russia--after double-crossing both the Russian police and the remaining leaders of the People's Will terrorist organization--his face was shown six different ways on a wanted poster. What followed was his unlikely rebirth on the American frontier as "Alexander Pell," beloved head of the mathematics department at the fledgling University of South Dakota, as well as founder and dean of the university's first college of engineering, from 1897 to 1908. After his first wife's death, he became mentor and husband to one of the early twentieth cen-tury's leading women mathema-ticians, Anna Johnson Pell-Wheeler, who went on to substantial influence at Bryn Mawr.
The question that Pipes asks to start his book is: Which was the true man? Was it "the kindly professor who in America would have been perfectly happy in a social environment where research was the dominating interest, or the revolutionary turncoat whose betrayals had sent scores of his comrades to prison in his native country and who had killed a man whose confidence he had gained?"
This is a puzzle of a story. Degaev-Pell's tale subtly juxtaposes man's responses in darkness and light: good things result from liberty, private property, and free speech, while attempts at utopia, equality of reward, and coercion are a prison of inevitable failure.
Pipes is hardly a stranger to controversy. He was, for instance, the target of an angry 1996 letter to the New York Times, signed by more than a hundred delegates to the Socialist Scholars Conference, for his review of a biography of Trotsky. And he is hardly a stranger to the world of intrigue. During the early 1980s, he was an adviser to President Reagan, serving as the director of Soviet and Eastern European affairs for the National Security Council. He was among those who helped shape some of the strategy, tactics, and operations that led to Solidarity's victory in Poland.
When I asked him about the description of his work given by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in their 1996 "His Holiness: John Paul II And The Hidden History Of Our Time," Pipes replied, "It is not correct . . . that I 'often' discussed covert operations with Reagan; I did not do it even once. But it is true that Reagan understood the vulnerabilities of the USSR, though it required some education."
WHILE HE ALSO denied several times that he was involved in covert action, Pipes noted that he was present during some of the planning to get printing presses and copy machines into Communist Poland. ("I did attend one or two meetings of the committee, chaired by the vice president, that discussed the financing of Solidarity printing presses, but as an observer only," he told me.) The printing press often plays an important role in Pipes's writings. In the story of Degaev-Pell, it is the possession of a printing press, outlawed under the tsar, that leads to Degaev's arrest--triggering a ricochet of events that unmask plotters against the tsar, both outside and inside the government.
Sudeikin, the secret policeman, convinced the arrested revolutionary to name hundreds of members of the People's Will terrorist organization. But the policeman himself held higher ambitions. Even while he was destroying the People's Will, he convinced Degaev he was a fellow revolutionary. The unlikely pair collaborated in plotting to assassinate top members of the tsar's government in order to facilitate Sudeikin's rise to become the most influential adviser to the tsar. From that perch, Sudeikin hoped, he would convince Nicholas III to adopt the reformist goals of the People's Will, and Degaev with his fellow revolutionaries would ultimately be successful.
That's not how history turned out. Degaev's betrayals were discovered by the People's Will. Forced to atone, Degaev plotted and carried through the murder of his quasi-ally, Sudeikin. But with his face on the government's wanted poster, and never forgiven by the remnants of People's Will, Degaev became a man without a country. He left Russia and eventually wound up on the University of South Dakota campus in Vermillion, where his second life began.
IN 1952, Dr. Anna Johnson Pell-Wheeler established an endowed account at the university to honor her late husband. The "Dr. Alexander Pell Scholarship" continues today. The story of Degaev-Pell was already known on campus to some faculty members before the publication of Pipes's "The Degaev Affair." Several decades ago, the mathematics professor Alexander Mehaffey researched the lives of the husband-wife team and made several public presentations. But, so far, no one is calling for the university to renounce Pell or the endowment made in his name for scholarships to promising students of mathematics.
It might seem odd to continue to honor such a man with such a past--but perhaps that is the point of both the scholarship and Pipes's book. It is not so much what Degaev was, but who he became: a final testament to the world of liberty and freedom that allowed him to be Alexander Pell.
Bob Mercer is a newspaperman covering state government and politics in Pierre, South Dakota.