Sudzilovsky Nikolai Konstantinovich the eternal wanderer. Nikolay Sudzilovsky (1850–1930)

Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky

Sudzilovsky (Russel) Nikolai Konstantinovich (1850-1930) - Belarusian thinker, publicist, ethnographer, entomologist, chemist, biologist, the first and last encyclopedist of the 20th century. He spoke 8 European, Chinese and Japanese languages. First President of the Hawaiian Senate (1900). Member of the American Society of Genetics, a number of scientific societies in Japan and China. As a doctor, S. is known for his work in the field of surgery, methods of treating tuberculosis, and the theory of eye diseases. As a geographer, S. discovered a number of islands in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. His geographical descriptions of Hawaii and the Philippines, published in the 1890s, were included in anthologies and textbooks for schools and universities.

As a thinker and politician, S. went through a complex creative evolution. As a young man, he held positions nihilism, which subsequently constituted a significant element of populist ideology. The literary circle, created by student S., promoted the socialist ideal, seeing the ways of its realization in the moral improvement of man (1870). Trying to put it into practice, S. created a community built on these principles (the Kyiv community). In 1873, S. with a group of like-minded people (V.Debogoriy-Mokrievich, V.Donetsky) went to Zurich in order to organize a trip to North America to create communes there. He gets acquainted with the ideas of Bakunin and Lavrov, without completely sharing them. Lack of funds forced the group to return to Russia. S. continues his studies at the medical faculty of Kyiv University, then actively involved in political discussions and practical actions of populists ("going to the people", "Kyiv community"). After the process against the participants of "going to the people" (1877-1878), S. illegally leaves Russia and goes to London, where he meets the functionaries of the First International (Marx, Engels, V. Vrublevsky, Lavrov). Then he leaves for the Balkans, finishes his education at the University of Bucharest and organizes a "book expedition". In Bulgaria, S., together with H. Botev, takes an active part in organizing peasant uprisings. Analyzing the reasons for the defeat of the uprising, S. comes to the conclusion that Bakunin's thesis about the readiness of the people for a socialist revolution is not only not applicable to Russia in the 1870s, but is fundamentally wrong. The 1870s and 1880s marked a new stage in S.'s creative evolution and practical activity associated with Romania.

The populist ideology, which forms the basis of his worldview, is undergoing a significant transformation. According to S., a social revolution is a people's revolution, and revolutionary ideas cannot be imposed on the people; it happened in Bulgaria). (According to S., "... if a society wants to retain the ability to historical society and progress, it needs to orient the mental constitution of its members to the norms of behavior within the boundaries of democracy and free choice.") In 1877, S. defended his doctoral dissertation on the antiseptic method treatment in surgery. For the first time, a double surname (S.-Roussel) appeared on the doctoral diploma. This was due to the fact that Russia joined the war against Turkey and Russian troops passed through the territory of Romania, and he was still on the list of especially dangerous state criminals under No. 10. S. actively combined medical practice with revolutionary activities. For the treatment of the wounded, S. was awarded a gold medal, and for political ideas he was exiled to the provinces (1879). For organizing a civil funeral for the Romanian revolutionary Zubka-Kodryan, S. was exiled to Iasi, where he joined a socialist circle and became an ideologist and one of the editors of the socialist newspaper Bessarabia.

March 18, 1881 in Galati celebrated the day of the Paris Commune with rallies, for organizing these events S. was arrested and sentenced to exile in Turkey. S. with his wife and P. Axelrod managed to escape to Paris. S. travels around Europe, combining scientific research with revolutionary activities, working in the Emancipation of Labor group, but does not completely break with populism. 1883 is a year of losses for S: his wife and daughters return to Russia, his beloved father dies, his native estate is ruined, the revolutionary movement in Europe fades. S. falls into a severe depression, from which he comes out only after moving to the United States. In 1887, S. opened a private medical institution, became vice-president of the Greco-Russian-Slavic Society, and participated in the work of the Russian Society for Self-Education (which was transformed into the Russian Social Democratic Society in 1890). Actively engaged in journalism: "In the ocean village", "Letter from America", "On the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia", "Letters from the Sandwich Islands", "How to live in the Hawaiian Islands?" and others. A revolutionary not in words, but in deeds - S. was the first to debunk the US colonial policy in the Hawaiian Islands and became a real defender of the Hawaiian people. S. created a party of "Home Rulers" and in 1890 was elected a senator from the Kanaks (native inhabitants of Hawaii), and in 1891 became president of the Hawaiian Republic. The time of stormy reforms, anxieties, intrigues and betrayals began, which he experienced very painfully. When once again his supporters (Kanaks), having received bribes, voted against his bill, which could improve the life of the Kanaks themselves, he could not stand it and resigned. In May 1905, S. appealed to the Japanese Consul General with a request to give him a recommendation for a trip to Japan to visit the camps of Russian prisoners, the request was granted. In Japan, S. engaged in active propaganda among the soldiers, combining this with their treatment. He organized the dispatch of a group of Russian prisoners of war to Russia and wrote for them a special pamphlet "In captivity. A collection in memory of the war and captivity", which was a program of struggle for social and national liberation.

In April 1906, the East Asian Branch of the Russian Revolutionary Party and the newspaper Volya were founded in Nagasaki. In two years of work in this newspaper, S. wrote more than 50 articles. There was a demarcation of the revolutionary-democratic forces, which S. could not understand and accept: he tried to unite all the revolutionary forces in his party, the Union for Assistance to People's Liberation, the attempt failed. S. moved away from practical revolutionary activity in 1908: his journalistic activity was also narrowing, disappointments, years and illnesses began to affect. S. publishes the following works: "Thoughts aloud" (1910), "East and West" (1916), "Frank Words" (1917), S. took the February Revolution enthusiastically, and categorically rejected the October Bolshevik coup as a "zigzag of history" - this the work is directed against the latter), "German Culture in Russia", "Two Centuries of German Culture in Russia". After the civil war, S.'s views on the socialist revolution have changed, he declares this in the press, as a result he is forced to leave for China. In China, in 1921 S. created the "Committee for Assistance to the Starving in Russia," the first in Asia. In September 1923, S. received documents on the appointment of a personal pension for him as a veteran of the revolution - this is the only recognition of merit that the Soviet regime gave him. March 30, 1930 S. dies of pneumonia. R. Tagor called him the most interesting Slavic writer of the 20th century. In the homeland of S., in Belarus, the monographic work of M.I. Iosko was devoted to the study of his life and work; a number of studies were published abroad (in particular, a two-volume edition in Japanese).

T.K. Kandrichina, N.A. Kandrichin

The latest philosophical dictionary. Comp. Gritsanov A.A. Minsk, 1998.

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Philosophers, lovers of wisdom (biographical index).

This man was wanted by the police of several states. He was cursed by the rulers of many countries, for which he represented a mortal threat; he was idolized by the mere mortals of those countries, to whose relief he dedicated his life.

A talented doctor and a professional revolutionary, a tireless traveler and natural scientist, a brilliant publicist and... the President of the Hawaiian Republic!

This is our compatriot Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky - a man who wanted to make the world a better place. The future president of the exotic Pacific islands was born in 1850 in Mogilev, in an impoverished noble family.

In Russia (Nikolai I banned the very word "Belarus") was restless, peasant and student unrest multiplied. The family, which had 8 children, had a hard time. All this, as well as acquaintance with the works of Chernyshevsky and Herzen, shaped his worldview.

After graduating from the Mogilev gymnasium, Nikolai studied at St. Petersburg, then Kiev universities. In the latter, he organizes a "commune". "Kyiv Commune" brought a lot of trouble to the tsarist government. It was perhaps the strongest populist organization of that time.

In it they lived and studied the revolutionary craft, comprehended the cipher and "explosive" business. "Communards" also took on social projects. For example, in the village of Goryany, Polotsk district, Vitebsk province, a farm-school was organized. But the police were on their heels. I had to learn the wisdom of conspiracy.

In the memoirs of contemporaries, one can find colorful descriptions of "a person who called himself Nikolaev, dressed in the costume of a German colonist, with a long unshaven beard, in a blue shirt, with a pipe in his teeth and spoke Russian with great skill ..." Even those who knew Sudzilovsky well could not identify him in this person. However, when the "commune" was defeated, they had to hide. Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, Odessa... Nikolai works as a paramedic in the Kherson province, but when the secret police "figured him out" here, he moves to London.

"GALLOPING IN EUROPE" The Belarusian expressed his impressions of England in the phrase: "Of all the big cities of the world, you feel the most lonely in London." Foggy Albion gave him unforgettable meetings: at one of the rallies, Sudzilovsky spoke together ... with K. Marx and F. Engels, where he met the founders of Marxism. The restless soul of the revolutionary demanded active action, and now Nikolai Konstantinovich was on his way to Geneva, then to Bucharest.

On the trip, he was accompanied by his wife Lyubov Fedorovna, a support and adviser, who, however, increasingly disapproved of the dangerous activities of the "troublemaker". In Romania, he practices as a surgeon, defends his doctoral dissertation in medicine, on the title page of which for the first time appeared a new "secret" name of N.K. Sudzilovsky - Russel. He meets with the famous Bulgarian revolutionary Hristo Botev, creates a political party. According to Sudzilovsky's biographer M.I. Iosko, it is likely that the populist circles of Russia assigned a special role to Dr. II , who in 1878 was with the army in Romania.

But the plan of regicide has changed. "Hunting for Sasha", as the operation was called, was successfully completed later in Russia... The Romanian authorities offered the suspicious Dr. Roussel to leave for Turkey and, together with other political emigrants, they put him on a ship. He had no doubt that the Turkish police would extradite him to Russia, and then to Siberia. The exile managed to win over the captain of the ship. Using the experience ... Garibaldi, the conspirator, dressed in the uniform of a captain, accompanied by sailors, went ashore.

Soon, on the streets of the Bosporus, one could often see an elegant blond with a rare beard of light blond Mephistopheles, with an invariable pipe in the form of a Negro's head in his mouth. And then - new travels and adventures: France, Belgium, studies in science and practical medicine, a break with his wife. Having received an invitation from his brother, in 1887 Sudzilovsky left for the United States.

HAWAIIAN ANTICYCLONE Nikolai Konstantinovich very quickly became the most popular doctor in San Francisco. But Dr. Roussel was not delighted with a "free" America. He wrote: "The States represent a state based on extreme individualism. They are the center of the world, and the world and humanity exist for them only insofar as they are necessary for their personal pleasure and satisfaction ...

Relying on the omnipotence of their capitals, like a walnut sponge, like a cancerous tumor, they suck up all the vital juices from the environment without mercy. he, rebellious, asks for a storm!").

Sudzilovsky initiates a grandiose scandal, sharply speaking out against local priests mired in debauchery and gluttony. For which, along with Stenka Razin, Grishka Otrepiev, Emelka Pugachev, "Nikolka Sudzilovsky" was anathematized. Tired of America, in 1892 the frantic doctor decides to settle in a secluded place, in Hawaii, among the Kanaks, not spoiled by civilization. In this piece of paradise, which is distinguished by a smooth tropical climate (the so-called "Hawaiian anticyclone").

Sudzilovsky spent some time in the role of a planter, growing coffee, and at the same time treating local residents, for which he received from them the nickname Cauka Lukini - "good doctor". He also treated the family of the famous author of "Treasure Island" R. Stevenson. Other famous people in the world also visited him, for example, Dr. Botkin.

The authority of Kauki Luchini, who taught the population how to survive, how to run a household, grew. This was also facilitated by the fact that, of course, he opposed the Americans who robbed and humiliated the islanders. Considering that he had enough rest, Sudzilovsky takes part in the first parliamentary elections of the Hawaiian Republic, becomes a senator.

He creates a party of "independents", whose program provides for independence from the United States, the exemption of the poor from taxes, health care reform, streamlining the sale of alcohol, the construction of a conservatory. And soon the "nihilist and materialist" cursed by the church, Nikolai Roussel, becomes ... the first president of Hawaii! Washington is in shock... Needless to say, the activity of the rebellious president of industrial and financial aces has alarmed not only in America. Intrigues and conspiracies are woven against him, and in the end he was forced to resign as president and leave for China.

EASTERN LANDING In the East, Sudzilovsky takes actions that often border on an adventure. After the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, he ransoms Russian prisoners of war from the Japanese and sends them home. He is trying to organize an attack by the Honghuzi on the Siberian penal servitude in order to release political prisoners.

And what is the plan of Dr. Roussel for the invasion of Russian prisoners from Japan into Russia! A landing force of many thousands was to sweep away the tsarist troops in Manchuria and move in echelons to Moscow and St. Petersburg. He almost managed to convince the Japanese government not only to release the prisoners from the camps, but also to return their weapons and even provide ships to move to the mainland!

But "the devil pulled," as Sudzilovsky himself put it, to turn to the Socialist-Revolutionaries for help. Azef, who was in charge of them (familiar to our readers from the recent television series "Empire Under Attack"), gave the secret police the composition of the organization, he also passed on information about Dr. Roussel. Under these conditions, the landing meant the death of thousands of people, and Sudzilovsky abandoned his plan.

In 1906-1907, he worked a lot on articles, books, organized in China [ and in Japan, Nagasaki] publishing. He is fond of the writings of the English science fiction writer HG Wells with his technocratic ideas. Corresponds with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. But soon a series of deaths and misfortunes among loved ones plunges Sudzilovsky into an abyss of depression.

He loses faith in himself and contemplates suicide. "Where do the birds fly when night falls? .." - he asks in one of his poems of this period. He seeks salvation from painful thoughts in the Philippines, which for almost five years became a haven for an exile from Belarus. The habit of vigorous activity helps him restore peace of mind.

He creates a private hospital in Manila, publishes articles in newspapers. And soon he again moves closer to Russia, to Nagasaki, then to the Chinese city of Tianjin.

After the revolution in Russia, he increasingly thinks about returning to his homeland. "The time has come when it is time for me to finish my round-the-world trip by returning home ..." - he wrote. Preparing to leave, Sudzilovsky even plans to write something for the Belarusian magazine "Polymya", to which he once promised an article...

These plans were not destined to come true: falling ill with pneumonia, on April 30, 1930, Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky-Roussel died, according to his contemporaries, still strong and vigorous. According to Chinese custom, his youngest daughter lit the cremation fire...

1850-1930, populist. One of the organizers of the "Kyiv Commune". Since 1875 in exile Member of the revolutionary movement in the Balkans from 1887 he lived in America, in 1900 he was elected Senator of the Hawaiian Islands since 1904 in Japan

Russel-Sudzilovsky Nikolai Konstantinovich (1848-1930) - populist, publicist, natural scientist, emigrant, senator and president of the Senate of Hawaii (USA), honorary member of the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners Russian Army "Russian Army" - Russian white newspaper. The official body of the government adm. Kolchak in Siberia. Published in 1918-1919 in Omsk. Published government and military command documents

Sudzilovsky N.K.

In the story “Knockout”, the writer O. Sidelnikov continued the story about the life of the popular hero Ilf and Petrov. Ostap Bender, rummaging through his experiences, recalls one of the episodes of his zigzag life:

“... I, maddened by failures, rushed to the West. Here, too, relatively honest ways of withdrawing money were not quoted. I moved into the crystal dream of my childhood, Rio de Janeiro. A charming city, almost all the inhabitants, without exception - in white pants. However, the crystal dream was shattered, I suffered heavily under the yoke of capitalism ... In short, I left Guanabara Bay and found myself in a tiny banana republic. Here I am lucky. Three military men with mighty mustaches and protruding pockets, from which the necks of bottles of maize vodka looked out, turned to me for help, and I, using a fruit campaign, promptly organized another revolution for them. The military drank vodka and organized a military junta, and I found myself in the presidential chair. For seven hours and fifteen minutes I enjoyed power: I could declare war and make peace, invent laws, execute and pardon, erect monuments and destroy them. Another revolution has deprived me of everything...”

So, a subject of Russia is the president of a “tiny banana republic”. What is it, the author's fiction or a similar fact took place?

--------------------

When, in the spring of 1874, Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky, following the example of many revolutionary-minded young people, arrived in the Saratov province to “go to the people,” a group of ideologists of revolutionary populism headed by Porfiry Ivanovich Voynaralsky had already settled in this noisy, businesslike Volga city. From St. Petersburg to the Volga, twenty-four-year-old Sudzilovsky rode with some excitement. There, near Novouzensk, in a small estate of relatives, he spent his childhood.

Konstantin Sudzilovsky was in the past a large Mogilev landowner, the owner of the rich Sudzila family estate. But fate is changeable, and now he is already in the Volga region with his relatives who sheltered him. The impoverished landowner suffered from his humiliated position. He strove to give his children a decent education, so that they would again, like their father in the old days, become significant, independent people and wealthy landowners. But the four sons and daughter of Konstantin Sudzilovsky chose a different path in life. Nikolai, for example, while still a student at the medical faculty of Kyiv University, joined the group of the rebel-populist Vladimir Karpovich Debagoria-Mokrievich. He secretly, at night, read "sedition", admiring the intelligence and courage of the authors of the brochures, cautiously came to secret apartments to participate in student gatherings, more and more drawn into disputes about democracy and the social problems of the Russian Empire. The book left the greatest impression Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky “What to do?”, which at that time became the “bible” of fighters for the people's cause. Since then, Nikolai Sudzilovsky considered Chernyshevsky his teacher in life and struggle. Later, one of his articles in Romanian, Nikolai Konstantinovich gave the title “Che de facul?” - "What to do?".

Without completing his fifth year at the university, Sudzilovsky arrived on the Volga to conduct anti-government propaganda among the workers and peasants. Nikolai Konstantinovich got a job as an office worker at a railway stationPokrovsk. He performed his work diligently, conscientiously, without ostentatious fuss. The head of the station was unaware that a young, intelligent-looking clerk under a uniformed railway jacket was bringing to the station books, pamphlets, and newspapers banned by the tsarist censorship and reading them to the railway workers and peasants of the Pokrovskaya settlement in some empty freight car driven into a dead end. Thus were read the works of Karl Marx "The Civil War in France" and the first volume of "Capital", recently published in Russian translation.

Most of all, Nikolai Sudzilovsky loved Sunday meetings with workers and artisans of the settlement. These gatherings were held on the nearby Volga Islands. Here, in the wide open space of the river, it was possible to speak and argue about the most secret things in a loud voice, without fear of a long filer's ear. Sudzilovsky told the workers about the Decembrist uprising, about the circles of Herzen and Petrashevsky, about the works of the Saratov writer Chernyshevsky.

Living in Pokrovskaya Sloboda, Nikolai Sudzilovsky maintained constant contact with his three brothers and sister, who were also actively involved in the populist movement. Once, responding to the invitation of his brother Sergei, Nikolai Konstantinovich left the settlement and moved to the city of Nikolaevsk (now the cityPugachevSaratov region). Here, in search of work, Nikolai Sudzilovsky came to a local hospital. Dr. Kadian, meticulously examining the documents of the newcomer about his studies at the Faculty of Medicine, accepted him for the post of paramedic. Later, Nikolai Konstantinovich learned that Alexander Alexandrovich Kadyan, while still a student at the St. Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy, took part in the revolutionary unrest of the youth, was arrested. In 1873, after graduating from the academy, Kadyan went as a zemstvo doctor to the Nikolaevsky district, where he helped the populists.

Paramedic Sudzilovsky, in addition to caring for the sick, had other concerns. In the summer of 1874, his comrades attracted him to an action in the Nikolaev prison. Arranged on the recommendation of Kadyan in the prison department of the hospital, Nikolai Konstantinovich had to win over several sick prisoners to the side of the populists, with their help to rebel the rest of the prisoners and then open the doors of the prison. The beginning of the plan was carried out successfully and proceeded to its completion. On June 14, one of the sick prisoners invited the prison guards for a glass of tea. Such a tea party had happened before, therefore it did not arouse any suspicion. Drinking tea did not cheer up the guards, on the contrary, they were strongly drawn to sleep. The powder poured into the glasses by paramedic Sudzilovsky did its job. The prisoners released from their cells walked past the sleeping guards to the gates of the prison. Freedom was close, but at that time one of the soldiers woke up, raised the alarm, and the fugitives were detained.

The county police did not touch any of the underground workers: either there was not enough evidence, or the local bailiff was afraid of another reprisal against himself. Porfiry Voynaralsky had already taught him a lesson last winter. He ambushed the bailiff in the steppe, disarmed and whipped him.

In June 1874, Sergei Sudzilovsky invited his brother Nikolai to go to Samara, wanting to introduce him to the Ilyin family, whose daughter, Alexandra Alexandrovna, he was going to marry. At this time, a wave of devastation swept through the Volga region, the center of revolutionary populism in Russia. Dozens of Narodniks were arrested and illegal literature confiscated. The Saratov group of Voynaralsky and the Samara center suffered especially. Rumors about the arrests immediately reached the revolutionary-minded inhabitants of the Ilyins' house. Moreover, it became known that the police are also looking for the Sudzilovskys. Not wanting to take unnecessary risks, Nikolai Konstantinovich crossed over to Volsk, from there by boat to Nizhny Novgorod. Wherever Sudzilovsky went, everywhere he felt behind him the breath of catching up policemen. This circumstance forced the underground worker to illegally move abroad.

London, a short trip to America, then - Geneva, Sofia, Bucharest ... In Romania, Nikolai Konstantinovich again sat down at the textbooks of medicine left once in Kyiv in order to finally complete his interrupted education. Applying to the local university to take the exams for the title of doctor, Sudzilovsky was forced to hide the fact that his studies at Kiev University were interrupted due to arrest. The joy of receiving the certificate of a doctor of medicine was overshadowed by the news that the Russian police were again on his trail. Sudzilovsky changes his surname, now he is called Dr. Roussel.

In the Romanian city of Iasi, where Roussel moved with his family in 1879, he has a large medical practice, but, as the secret reports of the gendarmerie department of Russia note, "he pays a small part of his income for himself and his family, and uses the rest to support the party." Fleeing from the persecution of agents of the Third Branch, Nikolai Konstantinovich finds himself in Turkey, then in France. However, the spies follow him relentlessly. Then Sudzilovsky-Roussel leaves for the ocean, to North America. Having settled in San Francisco, thanks to his excellent knowledge of medicine and conscientious attitude to business, he soon gained authority among the local population. Elected vice-president of the Greek-Slavic charitable society, Russel-Sudzilovsky led a long and unsafe struggle against the bishop of the Aleutian and Alaska Vladimir, mired in dark, far from the most holy deeds, which, nevertheless, brought a solid income.

For several months Nikolai Konstantinovich collected documents exposing the rogue bishop, and then, under his chairmanship, a rally of parishioners took place, who sent the Russian Tsar a demand to recall the bishop, "mired in vices." Upon learning of this, Bishop Vladimir sent a formidable message to Dr. Roussel:

"... you hold on to materialistic convictions: you don't need the church, holy confession and communion, and put on the guise of a Christian for the best opportunity to exile a bishop to a monastery, you are an enemy of God on the principle. To avoid temptation, I forbid you from entering the bishop's house and the church. "

In San Francisco, Nikolai Konstantinovich does not feel safe. The fear of arrest constantly worries him. Now he was afraid not only of the bloodhounds of the Russian Empire, but also of American justice, which he dared to criticize. Once again, I had to leave the habitable place.

In 1892, Nikolai Russel got a job as a ship's doctor on a steamer bound for the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands. Novaya Zemlya struck Nikolai Konstantinovich with its appearance (there were forty volcanic peaks on eleven small islands), and with the diverse tropical vegetation, and with the diversity of its sixty thousand population. “On the globe,” Sudzilovsky-Roussel wrote a few years later in his essays published under a pseudonym in the Russian journal “Books of the Week,” “it is unlikely that another such fertile corner will be found as the Hawaiian Islands ...”

Native Hawaiians lived there no more than half of all residents, the remaining fifty percent were North Americans, British, French, Germans, but there were especially many Japanese and Chinese. It was they, along with the Hawaiians, who represented the main labor force on sugar plantations, in the collection of bananas and pumpkins, and in fishing. Dozens of families who have migrated from Russia have settled on the island of Sahu. The Roussel family also joined them. Then, seeking solitude, Nikolai Konstantinovich moved to the island of Hawaii. Near one of the extinct volcanoes, he rented a plot of one hundred and sixty acres, built a house and started growing coffee. Then bananas, pineapples, lemons, oranges appeared on his plantations.

Roussel had a lot of work to do. Hard hours of work on the plantations with poor food led the workers to extreme exhaustion, to diseases for which the doctor had too few medicines to treat. Workers often died. Their place was taken by new half-starved and sick.

The outright exploitation by the Americans of the native population resented Dr. Roussel. He, as before in Russia, began to organize among the native Kanaks, as the Hawaiians were also called, a kind of revolutionary circles, where he explained to the Kanaks the lawlessness being committed against them. From memory, in his own words, Nikolai Konstantinovich retold entire chapters from the books of Karl Marx and articles by Russian revolutionary populists.

Years passed. Kuaka-Lukini (Russian doctor), as Roussel-Sudzilovsky was called by the Kanaks, became the most popular person on the islands. He not only restored the health of the sick, but also gave a lot of business advice to the natives, fairly understood their disputes and strife, was an honorary judge at numerous tournaments in national wrestling, fisticuffs, running and swimming. Kuaka Luchini, as a landmark of the island, is visited by foreign travelers, the famous Russian doctor Sergey Sergeevich Botkin comes, the stepson of the famous novelist Stevenson, Lloyd Osborne, also a famous writer, bought a house nearby and settled.

In 1892, the Americans decided to form a republic in the Hawaiian Islands instead of a kingdom in the best traditions of their democracy. In the pre-election campaign, according to established custom, there was a sharp struggle between the two American parties - the Republican and the Democratic. But there was a man, it was Dr. Roussel, who stood at the head of the newly organized third national party, who convinced the locals to reject the dubious promises of the American Republicans and Democrats. The new association called itself the “Party of Independents”. The leader of the “independents,” Dr. Roussel, who had gone through the school of propaganda work in Russia, skillfully conducted propaganda among the Kanaks and enjoyed their endless confidence. Therefore, when state elections were held on the islands of Hawaii a year later, Kuaka-Lukini was elected first as a senator, then as president of the first Republican government of the Hawaiian Islands. Together with the president, the republic was led by three more ministers and fourteen members of the state council.

The islanders were not deceived in choosing their president. The Russian doctor carried out several broad progressive reforms, greatly easing the fate of the Kanaks. At the same time, the rights of the colonialists were reduced, which caused indignation among the Americans, the British and the French. The bills of the Roussel government were directed against the drinking of the natives, unsanitary conditions, and against the predatory tax system. The plans of the first president were to abolish the death penalty, to introduce free public education, and it was planned to open a conservatory.

However, Roussel-Sudzilovsky understood that he would not be able to resist such a major power as America for a long time. It was difficult for him not only to defend the republic, but to defend himself personally. The Hawaiian state did not have its own army, only a police detachment led by a colonel maintained order on the islands. Yet Dr. Roussel presided until 1902. During this time, he managed to do a lot of good for the native population.

While abroad, Roussel-Sudzilovsky closely followed the political life of Russia. Of course, the foreign press could not give a reliable idea of the mass popular uprisings in his homeland, the struggle of political parties, arrests and executions. Some gaps in this regard were covered by letters from former party comrades, from acquaintances and relatives from Nikolaevsk and Samara, with whom Nikolai Konstantinovich and sister Evgenia never broke off relations. Constant, with short breaks, Dr. Roussel kept correspondence with an old friend from Nikolaevsk, doctor Kadyan. Alexander Alexandrovich spent the past years in an underground struggle, sued in the well-known trial of the 193s, having served his exile, he settled in Samara and from 1879 for eight years was the attending physician of the Ulyanov family.

Sister Evgenia Konstantinovna, Volynskaya by her husband, now lived here, on the Hawaiian Islands. She, like her brothers, was persecuted by the Russian police for anti-government activities. Evgenia Konstantinovna, earlier than other members of the Debagoria-Mokrievich circle, took up practical work and for some time traded in a shop, at the same time she conducted revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. Forced to hide, she left Russia and found protection from her brother-president.

In whatever country Nikolai Russel finds himself, the fate of the long-suffering Motherland always worried him. He constantly looked for opportunities to personally participate in the revolutionary struggle. Moving away from the political life of Hawaii, Roussel goes to Shanghai to organize an armed detachment and free political prisoners in Siberia. Of course, this naive idea did not find the necessary support among Russian emigrants, and it had to be abandoned.

In these weeks, the war between Russia and Japan has begun, and Roussel is born with a new plan. Shouldn't he go to the theater of operations to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian soldiers and sailors? On May 5, 1905, an announcement appeared in the capital's Hawaiian newspaper: “The estate is being sold cheaply due to the need for an early departure. A separate cottage of two rooms with a Russian-style veranda”. Having finished his business in Hawaii, Russel-Sudzilovsky moved to the Japanese city of Kobe, where a large number of Russian prisoners of war gathered after the Tsushima battle. One of them was the future famous writer Alexei Silych Novikov-Priboy, who took part in the battle near Tsushima Island, which was exceptional in its dramatic intensity, as a sailor on the battleship Eagle.

“In Japan, when many of our prisoners accumulated there,” Novikov-Priboy recalled, “Dr. Roussel, the president of the Hawaiian Islands, and in the past a long-standing Russian political emigrant, arrived. He began publishing a magazine for the prisoners, Japan and Russia, on the pages of which I also sometimes printed small notes. For tactical reasons, the magazine was very moderate, but then gradually became more and more revolutionary.

Talking about Roussel's journal, Aleksey Silych made an inaccuracy. "Japan and Russia" began to appear even before Roussel's arrival in Japan. The creator of the magazine and the initiator of revolutionary education among the prisoners was an old friend of Russia and a supporter of its liberation movement, the American journalist George Kennan, who was in Japan as a correspondent for the Washington magazine. Kennan began publishing the propaganda magazine "Japan and Russia" at the very beginning of the war. When the number of Russian prisoners in Japan increased significantly, Nikolai Konstantinovich Russel-Sudzilovsky, sent by the American Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, arrived to help Kennan. Beginning with the ninth issue, Roussel's articles began to be regularly published in the journal Japan and Russia, which gave the publication a special revolutionary edge. In addition to writing harsh articles denouncing the Russian autocracy, Dr. Roussel began distributing illegal literature among the prisoners. One of his intermediaries in this matter was the captive Novikov-Priboy.

“In Kumamota, this literature was obtained in my name,” the writer recalled. - People came to me from all the barracks, took brochures and newspapers. The land units read them with caution, still afraid of the future punishment, the sailors were bolder. The penetration of revolutionary ideas into the broad military masses alarmed some of the officers who lived in another Kumamot camp. They began to spread various rumors among the captive lower ranks, saying: everyone who reads obscene newspapers and books has been rewritten: upon returning to Russia, they will be hanged.

But the threats had little effect. Huge transports of illegal literature sent by various revolutionary committees of Russia, through Dr. Roussel, quickly spread among the prisoners of war and did their job. The mass of soldiers turned out to be surprisingly receptive to propaganda: political circles were formed among them, and they spread the acquired social-revolutionary views to hundreds of different villages, where they then poured after the conclusion of peace with Japan.

“An old man as white as a harrier, kind in soul and hot in energy, like not every young man,” - this was how Nikolai Konstantinovich was seen by soldiers and sailors. But the Russian officers, who were in Japan, considered him impudent and extremely dangerous for the Russian throne. Complaints poured into the US capital, and in response to them, Foreign Secretary Ruth demanded that Roussel stop "malicious activities", to which he said: "Not being in government service, I have the right to freedom of action in a foreign country."

Meanwhile, Roussel was already hatching a bold new plan for a military campaign against the Russian Empire. He prepared forty thousand revolutionary-minded prisoners in Japan to move to Siberia in order to, having mastered the junction stations of the Trans-Siberian Railway, move to Moscow. Along the way, he planned to replenish the ranks of his army with soldiers from the Far Eastern divisions and proletarian detachments. Seeking support for his plan in the depths of Russia, Nikolai Konstantinovich turned for help to the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, among whom were many of his former comrades in the populist movement. Roussel's plan became known to the Socialist-Revolutionary Azef, an agent of the tsarist secret police, and through him to the government. After that, starting an uprising meant leading people to certain death.

When the Russian prisoners left Japan in small groups and without weapons, Russel-Sudzilovsky stopped publishing his journal. Now he lived in Nagasaki, but thoughts of Russia still overwhelmed him. He subscribed to Russian newspapers, maintained relations with many compatriots by correspondence. He offered Leo Tolstoy assistance in resettling those persecuted for their religious beliefs in Hawaii, negotiated cooperation with Korolenko in the journal Russian Wealth, Maxim Gorky encouraged him to participate in the work of the Russian press.

Roussel had no idle life. Through Ussuriyskaya Gazeta, he introduced the people of Russia to the life and way of life of the Japanese and Filipinos, wrote scientific and philosophical articles, opened a hospital for the natives in the Philippines, and then a library.

The news of the October Revolution in Russia found Roussel in Japan. Joy and sorrow filled his soul. Joy for what has happened and bitterness from the consciousness that he is far from the raging Motherland. That year, Nikolai Konstantinovich wrote a letter to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in which he expressed his admiration for the victory of the Russian proletariat. In 1918, relatives on the Volga received a similar letter from him:

“You made the greatest revolution in October. If you are not crushed by the opponents of the revolution, then you will create an unprecedented society and build communism ... How happy you are, how I would like to be with you and build this new society.

Roussel is sincere in this desire. And brother Sergei from Samara urges him: “Life in the new Russia has become very interesting, a lot can be done useful for the people.” But Nikolai Konstantinovich is not sure whether he will be accepted in his homeland, which he left many years ago. Indeed, in February 1917, the Provisional Government made it clear that it did not need it. But in Russia they remember him. The Society of Former Political Prisoners petitions the Council of People's Commissars for permission to return Roussel from exile. “You have been assigned a personal pension, as a veteran of the revolution, 100 gold rubles,” write members of the society.

And another reason kept Nikolai Konstantinovich from an immediate return to Russia. In 1910, after the death of his wife, in order to brighten up his senile loneliness, he took on the upbringing of two Japanese orphaned boys. “I have become so accustomed to them that I cannot leave them to the mercy of fate,” he wrote to Alexander Kadyan.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky-Roussel prepared for a long and difficult time to return to his homeland. Finally, in 1930, an eighty-year old man decided to go on a long journey, informing his Samara relatives about this. The trip was interrupted by a sudden illness - pneumonia. Death overtook him on April 30 at the train station in the foreign Chinese city of Chongqing. The Russian border was already very close ...

Materials used: Mishin G.A. Events and destinies plexus. - Saratov: Privolzhskoe book publishing house, 1990.

It's amazing how history repeats itself. You simply marvel at how sometimes the fates and actions of other heroes in our great history are similar. And the statements of our “liberals” about the rejection of the country, the authorities are no longer so striking, they are no longer surprised by their hope for the help of the West in overthrowing the “anti-people” regime. All this, alas, has already happened. And more than once.

For example, the doctor Nikolai Sudzilovsky in 1905-07 collected an army from Russian prisoners of war in Japan. ransomed them from captivity. He cared and supported them in every possible way. Let me remind you that at that time there was an extremely unsuccessful war with the northern neighbor. And he did all this in order to land troops in Vladivostok, and by rail on echelons to move this new army across Siberia to Moscow and St. Petersburg in order to support an armed uprising, to take part in the battle with "damned tsarism"! And a little earlier, the Chinese Honghuzi, who rushed across the border, under the leadership of Sudzilovsky, were supposed to free the Siberian convicts! Neither more nor less.

It differs from the current crooked "democrats", for whom their "political struggle" is a profitable business, one important fact. Nikolai Konstantinovich was an honest man. Utterly sincere in his monstrous delusions.

So, this amazing person, an outstanding doctor, ethnographer, linguist, writer, poet, future first president of the Senate of the Hawaiian Islands, a member of the American Association of Geneticists and a criminal wanted by the governments of several states, was born on December 3, 1850 in Mogilev.

His father, a hereditary nobleman, a ruined large landowner, in particular, he owned the Sudzily estate near Mogilev, was a collegiate assessor, secretary of the Mogilev Chamber of Civil and Criminal Court. In addition to our hero, there were seven more children in the family. With a meager official salary, life was not easy. There was no wealth in the family. Nikolai graduated with honors from the Mogilev gymnasium and entered St. Petersburg University, following in the footsteps of his father, at the Faculty of Law.

The remains of the church of the 19th century in the village of Sudzily, Klimovichi district, Mogilev region, the family estate of the Sudzilovskys.

From his high school years, Nikolai reads a lot. Even as a child, he witnessed the harsh suppression of the Polish uprising in 1963-64, and as a Pole by blood, this made a strong impression on him. Therefore, like any "advanced" young man of those, N. Chernyshevsky with the novel "What to do", D. Pisarev, V. Belinsky, A. Herzen become his idols. That is, a complete set of subversives of the existing order. Peter is engulfed in student unrest, against the "hated regime". Students overthrow everything, demand freedom and justice. Everything is as usual. And Nikolai Sudzilovsky, of course, is in the forefront of the rioters, he is repeatedly detained by the police for distributing anti-government literature. The freshman is delicately asked to leave St. Petersburg University, but is given the opportunity to continue his education in Kyiv. The local university was considered more lenient in relation to naughty students.

He applied for a transfer to the medical faculty of Kyiv University. By linking himself to the end of his days with medicine and becoming an outstanding scientist in his field. Any doctor knows about the so-called Roussel bodies discovered by him.

Roussel is one of Sudzilovsky's pseudonyms in revolutionary activity.

RUSSEL'S BODIES (Russel), round hyaline bodies of various sizes, often found in inflammatory processes in the mucous membrane of the stomach, intestines, bladder, etc .; named after the author who first described them.
(Medical Encyclopedia)

But this, as they say, is poetry. In Kyiv, Sudzilovsky is already becoming a real enemy of the authorities. He gets close to the populists, organizes a secret circle to study the works of Lavrov, Kropotkin and other anarchists. It is interesting that the circle is called "American", since one of the tasks was the organization of agricultural free communes in the USA. At the same time, in this Kiev circle they study chemistry, which is so important for the practical implementation of revolutionary ideas. I mean the part of science that deals with the development of bombs. Then, as it was customary to say in a revolutionary environment, the “hunt for Sasha” had already begun. That is, the preparation of an assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander II. The mind cannot comprehend that vinaigrette that was in the minds of the then students. Sublime agricultural labor of free people mixed with bloody terror.

Between the construction of bombs and medical studies, he travels to Switzerland, where he personally meets the leaders of world anarchism, Peter Lavrov and Mikhail Bakunin. Returning, he continues to chemically explosives already together with another legendary person, the "grandmother of Russian anarchism", the famous terrorist Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya. “Grandmother” she became, of course, much later.

The police finally got on the trail of the terrorists, but just before the search in his apartment, where the infernal workshop was located, he manages to escape.

Faculty of Medicine in Kyiv, he never graduated. A fifth-year student had to think about his own safety.

After wandering, being in an illegal position and being on the wanted list, Sudzilovsky in the spring of 1874 was announced in the Saratov province, on the Volga. His arrival in the outback is the embodiment of the plans of the then revolutionaries about "going to the people." To inspire ordinary people with revolutionary ideas, stuff them with relevant literature. Of course, the spread of literacy among the peasants was also their task. But only in order to read the relevant revolutionary books by Chernyshevsky and Bakunin. True, many "walkers" could hardly take their feet from the people who did not understand their happiness and returned from the villages with broken faces, but that's another story.

He gets a job as a clerk at a railway station. And he distributes among the railway workers the latest works of Karl Marx "The Civil War in France", "Capital". He regularly conducts conversations of an appropriate plan with the railway workers, tells them about the Decembrist uprising, about the anti-government circles of Herzen and Petrashevsky. As a result, he is fired from his job. The indefatigable Nikolai goes to the city of Nikolaev and gets a job as a paramedic in the hospital. He also has an incomplete medical education. Dr. Kadyan, who hired him, in the future the attending physician of the Ulyanov family for many years, was himself a moderate populist revolutionary. There, serving the local prison, Sudzilovsky is preparing the escape of political prisoners through criminals.

The prisoners were already pouring sleeping pills into the guards' tea, handed over by Sudzilovsky, the police had already fallen asleep, already released from the cells were going to the gates of the prison ... but an unfortunate oversight, one of the criminals betrays. Everyone is being detained. But paramedic Sudzilovsky slips away again.

Then wandering around Russia. Nizhny Novgorod, Kherson, Moscow. Everywhere there is revolutionary agitation, assistance in the preparation of terrorist acts, and the distribution of illegal literature. In the memoirs of contemporaries, his descriptions were preserved: “a person who called himself Nikolaev, dressed in the costume of a German colonist, with a long unshaven beard, in a blue shirt, with a pipe, in the form of a Negro’s head in his teeth and spoke Russian with great skill ... »

Until the end of his life, Sudzilovsky was one of the most wanted state criminals of the Russian Empire, although at the age of 25 he fled Russia and never returned to his homeland.

By the spring of 1875, he arrives in Geneva, where he meets P. Axelrod, the future leader of the Mensheviks, an opponent and friend of Lenin. Together with him, he compiled and printed the "Golden Letter", an appeal to the peasants of Russia, calling for a fight against the autocracy. In the same year he moved to the center of anti-Russian emigration - London. Works at St. George's Hospital. At one of the Social Democratic rallies, he speaks with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Meet theorists and support their ideas. Until the end of his life, he will be proud of this friendship. But London seems to him too calm, the well-fed life of a political emigrant at the British expense is not for him. He rushes into the thick of things, to real people. He writes: "Of all the great cities of the world, London is the most lonely."

He leaves for Romania. Arranges for the transport of revolutionary literature across the border to Russia. Recovered at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bucharest, under the name of John Roussel, on a fictitious American passport. Receives a medical degree.

In 1876, Russian emigrants invited him to participate in the preparation of the uprising in Bulgaria, which was organized by the Bulgarian revolutionaries. Nikolai accepted the offer, and his house became a training center through which weapons and ammunition were supplied from different countries. In those years, he became close to the Bulgarian revolutionary Hristo Botev. Nikolai Konstantinovich, as a doctor, personally takes part in the April uprising in Bulgaria, brutally suppressed by Turkish troops. Sudzilovsky remained alive in the bloody mess arranged by the Turks. And in 1877 he defended his doctoral thesis on the most important topic in military medicine: "Antiseptic method of treatment in surgery." Further, he headed the Bucharest Central Hospital.

At the same time, he travels to the theater of operations, to the Russian troops who are fighting on Shipka with the Turks for the independence of Bulgaria. It is natural to agitate against the autocracy. By the way, it is believed that it was Sudzilovsky who was assigned one of the main roles in preparing the assassination attempt on Alexander II, who was in the army in those years. But it failed. "Hunting for Sasha" was completed by another Pole - Grinevitsky, who killed the emperor already in St. Petersburg.

In the Romanian city of Iasi, where Russel (Sudzilovsky) moved in 1879, he becomes a famous doctor, he has a large medical practice. But as they write in the secret reports of the gendarmerie department of Russia, "he pays a small part of his income for himself and his family, and uses the rest to support the party."

He participates in the creation of the Social Democratic and Peasant Party in Romania. Edits the radical socialist magazine "Bessarabia". In 1880, the Romanian Senate deprived him of the right to hold public office. He is fired from the hospital. In 1881, he is arrested for organizing a demonstration in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Paris Commune and celebrating the death of Emperor Alexander II at the hands of his comrades.

After a month's imprisonment, he was expelled from Romania to Constantinople, where he was to be extradited to the Russian authorities. The ship with him on board sailed to the Turkish shores. And then, of course, Siberia, hard labor. There are many accusations, ranging from organizing riots to preparing for the assassination of Alexander II. But then a miracle happened, more appropriate for Dumas' novels. He attracts the captain of the ship to his side, he gives him his uniform and the unrecognized Sudzilovsky disappears in the port of Constantinople. Where the gendarmes were waiting for him unsuccessfully.

Further, he flees to Bulgaria. There, in 1885, together with Dimitar Blagoev, he founded the Social Democratic Party of Bulgaria. Then, Paris, where he leads the People's Will terrorist group. Then, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland. There he works in leading clinics in Europe. And becomes a recognized authority in the field of antiseptics.

In 1887 Sudzilovsky left for the USA. He settles in San Francisco. At that time, European doctors were well received in America. Especially, the luminaries of his level. Sudzilovsky (Rusesel) opens his own medical institution there. His wife and assistant was Leokadiya Vikentievna Shebeko, who received a doctorate from the University of Bern. A close relative of the leading officials of the empire (for example, Vadim Nikolaevich Shebeko, her uncle, became the governor of Grodno in 1913, and in February 1916 the mayor of Moscow), she broke with her family in order to share the fate of a political emigrant.

The new doctor has no end to clients. He is truly a top notch professional. However, America itself does not cause delight in him. Here is what he wrote in the report “Around California”, which all the “free” newspapers of San Francisco refused to print: “The States represent a state based on extreme individualism. They are the center of the world, and the world and humanity exist for them only as much as they are necessary for their personal pleasure and satisfaction ... Relying on the omnipotence of their capital, like a walnut sponge, like a cancerous tumor, they suck up all the vital juices from the environment without mercy.

But still, he is the most popular doctor in the city. The Russian consul in San Francisco was also treated by the Sudzilovskys. At his suggestion, in 1889, Nikolai Konstantinovich turned to St. Petersburg with a request to return Russian citizenship to him. “To this request,” he later recalled, “I received an answer that, according to some manifesto, those political emigrants who expressed repentance are subject to amnesty, and since there was no remorse in my petition, they refuse to issue me a passport” .

He is elected vice-president of the Greek-Slavic charitable society. Here he has a new enemy. In connection with the transfer of the diocesan administration of the Russian Orthodox Church to San Francisco in 1889, Bishop Vladimir of the Aleutian and Alaska arrived here. There are two versions of further events. According to one, Roussel organized the unreasonable persecution of the Orthodox Bishop Vladimir, according to another, he, in fact, was guilty of embezzling church money and mistreating the students of the local seminary.

The scandal split the small Russian community in San Francisco into two warring camps. The state criminal Sudzilovsky, wanted by the police, sends a letter of complaint not to anyone, but immediately to Emperor Alexander III and the all-powerful Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod K.P. Pobedonostsev. The latter was once his professor at Petersburg University. Surprisingly, Pobedonostsev answers him. In January 1890, Bishop Vladimir, on behalf of the Orthodox Church, declared Sudzilovsky anathema and forbade Orthodox parishioners to be treated by him.

Bishop Vladimir writes as follows: “... you hold on to materialistic convictions: you don’t need church, holy confession and communion and donned the guise of a Christian for the best opportunity to exile a bishop to a monastery, you are an enemy of God by principle. To avoid temptation, I forbid you from entering the bishop’s house and the church."

Then Sudzilovsky sued Vladimir in a civil court demanding compensation for material damage caused by such a ban. As a result of the ugly scandal, the reputation of the church and the Russian community itself suffered. As a result, Pobedonostsev personally recalls the bishop back to Russia.

Meanwhile, Roussel established contacts with Russian political emigrants who lived in the early 1890s. in the USA. He actively promotes the idea of organizing regular escapes of political prisoners from Siberia to North America. Roussel, who already had an American passport by 1891, was assigned the important role of an intermediary between the Russian and American participants in the operation.

But a little later, Sudzilovsky himself was forced, under pressure from local authorities, who did not like his non-medical activities, to leave San Francisco.

Here are his lines from those years. The restless revolutionary weakened for a second.

Oh, if I had wings, wings like a bird,
Far, far away I would fly...
I would make a nest in the desert!
And I would stay there forever!

Hawaiian Islands.

But instead of the desert, in 1892, Nikolai Russel got a job as a ship's doctor on a ship, and went to the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands. This, of course, was a real paradise. “On the globe,” wrote Sudzilovsky-Roussel, in essays published under a pseudonym in the Russian journal “Books of the Week,” “it is unlikely that another such fertile corner as the Hawaiian Islands will be found ... This is a tropical country without any inconvenience of tropical countries ... Here there are no large predatory animals, snakes and reptiles in general. Under such conditions, one can walk through all the ravines, forests and slums with the same safety as in one's own garden.

He settles in Hawaii. Near one of the extinct volcanoes on the island of Hawaii, Sudzilovsky rents a plot of one hundred and sixty acres, builds a house and grows coffee. Then bananas, pineapples, lemons, oranges appeared on his plantations. He writes a lot in Russian magazines, as a scientist, studies the flora, fauna, geology of the islands.

Placing one of the materials of the series “Letters from the Sandwich Islands of Doctor Roussel”, the organ of Russian Orientalists, the Vostochnoye Obozreniye newspaper, wrote in April 1903: “The author of these letters has long been known in Russian modern literature as an expert on America ... Having finally settled on the Sandwich Islands ( Hawaiian Islands, several years ago, with his articles in "Books of the Week," he aroused great interest among the Russian reading public in this small and previously unfamiliar archipelago, abandoned somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

What was Hawaii like at the end of the nineteenth century? Legally, an independent kingdom. In fact, a US colony. No more than half of all residents lived there, the rest were Americans, British, French, Germans, but there were especially many Japanese and Chinese. It was they, along with the Hawaiians, who represented the main labor force on sugar plantations, in the collection of bananas and pumpkins, and in fishing. There was real slavery.

Along the way, our hero, of course, works as a medical practitioner. Here, the doctor Roussel had a lot of work. Hard hours of work on the plantations with poor food led the workers to exhaustion, to diseases for which the doctor had too few medicines to treat. Workers often died. Their place was taken by new half-starved and sick.

The outright exploitation by the Americans of the indigenous population resented the doctor. He, following the example of Russia, began to organize among the native Kanaks, a kind of revolutionary circles, where he explained to them the lawlessness being committed against them. From memory, in his own words, Nikolai Konstantinovich retold entire chapters from the books of Karl Marx and articles by Russian revolutionary populists. Phantasmagoric plot. Half-naked illiterate Kanaks and the theory of surplus value! Imagine the Gauguin paintings of the Hawaiian cycle, only instead of shells, the natives have a volume of Marx's Capital.

Years passed. Kuaka-Lukini (the good doctor), as Roussel-Sudzilovsky was called by the Kanaks, became the most popular person on the islands. He not only treated, but also gave a lot of worldly advice to the natives, understood their disputes and strife, was, as it were, a people's judge of the world. Kuaka-Lukini, as a landmark of the island, is visited by foreign travelers, the famous Russian doctor Sergey Sergeevich Botkin comes. His follower is the stepson of the famous writer Robert Stevenson, whose family he also treated - Lloyd Osborne, also a famous writer.

In 1892, the Americans decide to create a republic in the Hawaiian Islands instead of a kingdom in the best traditions of their pseudo-democracy. In the election campaign, there was supposed to be a "sharp struggle" between the two pro-American parties - the Republican and the Democratic. But suddenly, a third force entered the fight. National Party founded by Dr. Roussel. The new association called itself the “Party of Independents”. The authority of the "good doctor", a long-term school of political struggle around the world, did their job. "Kuaka-Lukini" was elected first as a senator, then as president of the Senate of the first Republican government of the Hawaiian Islands.

The Russian doctor immediately carried out several reforms that greatly facilitated the hard labor of the Kanaks. At the same time, the rights of the colonialists were reduced, which caused indignation among the Americans, the British and the French. Roussel's bills were directed against the drinking of the natives, unsanitary conditions. It was supposed to declare complete independence from the United States, to abolish the death penalty, to introduce free public education, it was planned to open a conservatory. Washington was in a hurry.

Page from the official website of the state government of Hawaii. List of Presidents of the Hawaiian Senate.

However, Roussel-Sudzilovsky understood that America would not tolerate him for a long time. The Hawaiian state did not have its own army, only a police detachment led by a colonel maintained order on the islands. Yet Dr. Roussel ruled the islands until 1902. Then the Americans got tired of the blond man with the same pipe in the shape of a Negro's head in his teeth, they pressed him hard and he was forced to leave for China.

Moving away from the political life of Hawaii, Roussel goes to Shanghai to organize an armed detachment of hunghuz, these are some kind of mafia organizations, rigidly organized bandits, and free political prisoners in Siberia. This reckless idea did not find support even among the adventurers from among the Russian emigrants, and it had to be abandoned.

In 1905, the Russo-Japanese War begins. At the same time, an armed uprising breaks out in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Roussel comes up with a new plan. Shouldn't he go to the theater of operations to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian soldiers and sailors? He moves to the Japanese city of Kobe. There, after the tragic Battle of Tsushima, when our fleet was destroyed by the Japanese, a large number of Russian prisoners of war gathered. One of them was the future famous writer Alexei Silych Novikov-Priboy, who took part in the battle near Tsushima Island, which was exceptional in its dramatic intensity, as a sailor on the battleship Eagle.

Here the writer was wrong. A magazine promoting revolutionary ideas for Russian prisoners of war was created by the Americans. In particular, the American journalist and intelligence agent George Kennan, who was in Japan. He has long worked in the field of destruction of Russia. Kennan began publishing the propaganda magazine "Japan and Russia" at the very beginning of the war. And later, according to the official version, Nikolai Konstantinovich Russel-Sudzilovsky, sent by the American “Society of Friends of Russian Freedom”, arrived to help Kennan. The magazine was a masterpiece of propaganda thought of the time. There were no direct appeals and cheap agitation. It was told about the devastation in the country, about embezzling ministers, about the willfulness of the police. There are also Russian lessons, folk songs, sincere poems, and, in the meantime, articles about the "anti-people regime." Practically, everything is as it is now somewhere on Ekho Moskvy. In addition to writing articles denouncing the Russian autocracy, Dr. Roussel began distributing illegal literature among the prisoners. One of his intermediaries in this matter was the captive writer Novikov-Priboy.

Huge transports of illegal literature sent by various revolutionary committees of Russia, through Dr. Roussel, quickly spread among the prisoners of war and did their job. The mass of soldiers turned out to be surprisingly susceptible to propaganda.

What happens next is complete fantasy. Roussel is developing a plan for a military invasion of the Russian Empire. Behind him is already forty thousand revolutionary-minded army, agitated by him prisoners. He negotiates with the Japanese government on the return of weapons to them, the provision of transport ships. For landing in Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok. Then, according to the plan, they capture the junction stations of the Trans-Siberian Railway, move to Moscow. Support an armed uprising in both capitals, the so-called revolution of 1905. Along the way, he planned to free the prisoners in hard labor in Siberia and replenish the ranks of his army with soldiers from the Far Eastern divisions and proletarian detachments.

Russian prisoners of war in Japan.

As Sudzilovsky himself later recalled: “I prepared to move to Siberia with 40 thousand revolutionary prisoners in order to cut off Linevich (the general who led the army in the Far East) from the base and drive to Moscow with the Vladivostok garrison of 30 thousand people.”

This course of events is even difficult to imagine. But all this existed in reality. Roussel was ready to start a civil war on an unprecedented scale, with Japanese money and the support of the ubiquitous Americans! Yevno Azef, a well-known double agent of the tsarist security department and one of the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, Yevno Azef, saved everyone from the rivers of blood then, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. The most famous traitor, in fact, saved Russia then. Sudzilovsky in Japan needed support on the mainland, in Russia. And he established contacts with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Azef. Who immediately handed over Roussel's plans to the government. In short, Russian units were already waiting for his army on the shore. As the annoyed Sudzilovsky later wrote, “The devil pulled me to turn to the Socialist-Revolutionaries for help!” Realizing that the landing under the thunder of Russian guns will lead to the death of thousands of his supporters, the humanist Roussel abandons his plan.

And there is one more thing to remember. In 1906 there was a riot in Vladivostok. And it's premature. Not when Roussel expected him. General Selivanov was killed. He had a briefcase with the most valuable documents - plans for the fortifications of the Russky Island. For Vladivostok, the Russian island is like Kronstadt for St. Petersburg. Capture it and the city is practically disarmed. These plans fell into the hands of crooks who had heard a lot about Roussel's plans. And they offered them to him. In case of refusal to buy, they intended to sell them to the Japanese or Americans, whose intelligence agencies had long been hunting for secret papers that cost fabulous money.

Sudzilovsky by this time had already abandoned the plan of his landing in Russia. However, he takes the papers. In his environment, there are disputes about what to do with them. It can be sold to the Americans, and the huge money raised can be used to continue the revolutionary struggle. What is a man doing who a few days ago wanted to unleash a civil war in Russia and send an army to Moscow?

“Revolutionaries are enemies of the Russian government, but not of the people, and they will never sell the interests of the people for any money. I have changed my mind,” Roussel said. “If I take the plan, you may suspect that I will make some use of it. And therefore, I believe that the best thing will be if we now destroy it in front of everyone's eyes.

And he burns the most valuable plans, not wanting to betray Russia. Really amazing person.

The epic with the failed campaign against Moscow was the peak of the phantasmagoric fate of Nikolai Sudzilovsky. Further, he led a more or less measured life. He works a lot on articles, books, organizes publishing in China. He is fond of the writings of the English science fiction writer HG Wells with his technocratic ideas. Corresponds with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. He offered Leo Tolstoy assistance in resettling those persecuted for their religious beliefs in Hawaii. With the famous writer Korolenko negotiated cooperation in the journal "Russian wealth", Maxim Gorky encouraged him to participate in the work of the Russian press. Roussel had no idle life. Through Ussuriyskaya Gazeta, he introduced the people of Russia to the life and way of life of the Japanese and Filipinos, wrote scientific and philosophical articles, opened a hospital in the Philippines, and then a library.

His wife dies, he marries a Japanese woman. There were children from this marriage. He also adopts the children of his Japanese friend. Increasingly, he thinks about returning to his homeland. Moreover, in 1917 there was a revolution. That year, Nikolai Konstantinovich wrote a letter to Lenin, in which he expressed his admiration for the victory of the proletariat. He welcomes the revolution. In one of his letters to his relatives in Russia, he writes: “You made the greatest revolution in October. If you are not crushed by the opponents of the revolution, then you will create an unprecedented society and build communism ... How happy you are, how I would like to be with you and build this new society.

The Soviet government did not forget about the fiery revolutionary. And appointed a pension of 100 gold rubles. A huge amount, in those days. And soon Nikolai Konstantinovich again moved closer to Russia, to the Chinese city of Tianjin.

"The time has come when it is time for me to finish my round-the-world trip by returning home ..." - he wrote. Preparing to leave, Sudzilovsky even plans to write something for the Belarusian magazine "Polymya", to which he once promised an article...

Finally, in 1930, an eighty-year old man decided to go on a long journey, informing his Samara relatives about this. The trip was interrupted by a sudden illness - pneumonia. Death overtook him on April 30 at the train station in the foreign Chinese city of Chongqing.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky-Roussel died, according to his contemporaries, still strong and vigorous. According to Chinese custom, his youngest daughter lit the cremation fire.

The extraordinary fate of an extraordinary man. It is not clear how the broadest outlook, intellect, humanism (the New Philosophical Dictionary called him “The Last Encyclopedist of the 19th Century”) combined with bloody plans to assassinate the Tsar, an attempt to plunge Russia into a monstrous civil war by Japanese-American hands back in 1906.

Patriot of Russia? Undoubtedly. Enemy of Russia? Also, no doubt. It's amazing that it's the same person.

Vladimir Kazakov

Vuyala is our hero.
Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky(aka Nicholas Roussel).
Born December 15, 1850 in the city of Mogilev, died April 30, 1930 in the city of Chongqing (China).
Big man! Senator of the Territory of Hawaii(since 1900), Senate President Territories of Hawaii (from 1901 to 1902).
And at the same time - the leader of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Switzerland, France, Bulgaria, USA, Japan, China, one of the founders of the socialist movement in Romania.
And also an ethnographer, geographer, chemist and biologist, a member of the American Society of Genetics.

Born into an impoverished noble family. In the gymnasium, I read Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev and Herzen and realized that the educational institutions of tsarist Russia were "tools of police drill, where the head is stuffed with" metaphysical, linguistic and theological "stuff. Both of his sisters, Nadezhda and Evgenia, also became revolutionaries. The brothers turned out to be resistant to propaganda and were not noticed in revolutionary activities.
Sudzilovsky was a bully, but he was a smart man. "Police Drill Tool", Mogilev Gymnasium, he graduated with honors and in 1868 entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, from where he was kicked out for participating in student riots. In 1869, he transferred to the medical faculty of Kyiv University, since it was forbidden to train rioters in other universities.
In 1873-1874 he got a job as a paramedic in a prison hospital in Nikolaevsk and tried to arrange an escape for prisoners. His plan was discovered, he went into hiding and fled from Russia.

Since that time, Sudzilovsky leaves childish amusements and enters a serious international orbit.

Since 1875, naturally, in London. And of course, here he is not involved in any riots. Having taken up his mind, he works in the hospital of St. George, communicates with Karl Marx.

Wikipedia says that in 1877 Sudzilovsky graduated from the university in Bucharest. In total, he hung around as a student from 1868 to 1877 - in St. Petersburg, Kyiv, London and Bucharest.
He was among the organizers of the socialist movement in Romania.

In 1876 he took a new surname and moved to Turkey, Roussel took part in the April uprising in Bulgaria. Since that time, he calls himself Nicolas Roussel.
The Turks slaughter the Bulgarians, Russia sends troops, the Balkan War of 1877-1878 begins. Roussel conducts revolutionary propaganda in the Russian troops.

The war is over. Checking out in Bulgaria and Greece, Agent Roussel returns to Romania. But not for long. For subversive activities, the Romanian government expels him from the country. Romania is an ally of Russia in the Balkans, so up to this point, all the activities of Roussel can be reduced to the formula "Anything, just to somehow harm the hated Motherland."

To begin with, in 1887 Roussel moved to San Francisco. Here he organizes a campaign of persecution of the Orthodox Bishop Vladimir, accusing him of wasting church money and all kinds of mortal sins. At the same time, he communicates with other such muddy fraers E.E. Lazarev and L.B. Goldenberg on the topic of how to organize regular escapes of political prisoners from Siberia to America.

In 1892, Roussel suddenly moved to the Hawaiian Islands. Here he settled down and sharply went up. Became the owner of a coffee plantation, also engaged in medical practice.

What's interesting about this story is this. There is no visible connection between Russia and Hawaii. Hawaii is a completely different article of British politics. Question: Why did Roussel suddenly go to Hawaii in 1892?

Let's remember history.

The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by English captain James Cook in 1778. Europeans found several state entities on the Hawaiian Islands, which at the beginning of the 19th century merged into a single kingdom.
The development of interest in the production of sugar cane made the United States concerned about the progress of democracy in Hawaii.
Wikipedia says that the local population, faced with infections brought from outside, to which it had no immunity, died out: by the end of the century, about 30 thousand people remained from the 300,000th Polynesian population.
In 1887, the armed detachments of the whites forced the adoption of the "Constitution", which has remained in history under the name "Bayonet Constitution". Since Liliuokalani, the last queen of the islands, tried to challenge the provisions of this "constitution". Then a group of local American origin, calling for help from American sailors from a ship in the bay, made a coup in 1893 and overthrew the queen. On July 4, 1894, the Republic of Hawaii was proclaimed by the provisional government. The first and only President of the Republic was Sanford Dole, who held the office from 1894 to 1900. His government held out after several attempts to restore the monarchy, including the Wilcox Plot in 1895. The Republic of Hawaii was recognized by all the states that recognized the kingdom at one time. In 1900, Hawaii received the status of a US territory, and Dole took over as its governor.

Now the reader, I think, already understands why our Roussel was suddenly overcome in 1892 by the desire to become a planter in Hawaii! Indeed, right in front of his eyes, predatory American imperialism was finally taking Hawaii out of the British sphere of influence.

Roussel uses the methods of the Russian populists here in Hawaii. And his "going to the people" is highly respected among the natives (Kanaks). Roussel has a new nickname - Kauka Lukini (which means "Russian doctor"). He conducts explanatory talks, teaches the natives about revolutionary struggle, and organizes the "Hawaii Home Rule Party" (Home Rulers), designed to fight for the interests of the natives.

At this time, in Hawaii, another agent and truth-seeker is fighting against the strengthening right before the eyes of the United States - Robert William Wilcox, nicknamed the Iron Duke of Hawaii, desperately trying to prevent the inevitable absorption of the Hawaiian Islands by the States. Wilcox acts as a supporter of the deposed Queen Liliuokalani and raises the peoples oppressed by the Americans to fight against the hated American colonialism.

Royalists and Republican troops clashed at the foot of Diamond Head on January 6 and 7, 1895. Manoa was the battlefield on 9 January. Losses were few and only Carter, a member of the island's prominent family, was killed. The Royalists were quickly routed, and Wilcox spent several days on the run before being taken prisoner. All royalist leaders were arrested on January 16, when Liliʻuokalani was taken into custody and imprisoned in Iolani Palace. Wilcox was arrested and convicted of treason. This time he was convicted on February 23, 1895, and sentenced to death along with five other leaders. Some of them were released in connection with testifying against others, and his sentence was commuted to 35 years in prison. On January 1, 1898, he was pardoned by Sanford Dole, President of the Republic, who pressured Liliuokalani to renounced claims to the throne in exchange for the life and freedom of those who were sentenced to death.
The queen was put on trial. The prosecutor accused her of treason, as she must have known that the weapon was intended to overthrow the republic. In response, the queen delivered a speech in which she regarded the events of 1893 as a coup d'état, said that she did not swear allegiance to either the provisional government or the Republic of Hawaii, that she did not recognize the right of the republic to judge her, but that she did not know about the conspiracy and for the good of of his people oppose violent action. She was sentenced to five years in prison and labor, and fined $10,000. She served her sentence in a bedroom at the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, which was under round-the-clock security. Eight months later, by order of Dole, she was transferred to house arrest, and a year later she was amnestied and left for Washington.
There she started a lawsuit with the federal government over crown lands; in the end, the legislature of Hawaii wrote her a pension of 4 thousand dollars a year, also left her income from a sugar plantation of 24 km². She died in 1917 from a stroke.
Liliuokalani is known as a writer and songwriter; while in prison, she wrote the Hawaiian anthem Aloha Oe, as well as a book about the country's history.
Thus ended the history of the Hawaiian royal family.

In 1898, at the height of the Spanish-American War, the US annexed Hawaii and in 1900, US President William McKinley signed the Hawaiian Territory Government Act (also known as the Hawaiian Organic Act), which created:

the institution of the Governor of the Territory, appointed by the current President of the United States,
a bicameral Legislature of the Territory, consisting of an elected House of Representatives and a Senate,
Supreme Court.

The US gives local residents the choice between the Republican and Democratic parties.

However, a third party, created by this time by Russel-Sudzilovsky, suddenly joins the election campaign.

In 1900, with the support of the indigenous population, Nikolai Sudzilovsky and a number of his supporters entered the Hawaiian Senate, and in 1901 N. K. Sudzilovsky-Roussel was elected the first president of the Hawaiian Senate. In this position, he managed to carry out reforms in support of indigenous people, but could not resist the influence of the United States.
In 1902, he was forced to leave his post after the betrayal of his supporters.

The Hawaiian epic is the undoubted apogee of our hero's biography.

After losing the last battle for Hawaii, Agent Roussel is again transferred to the Russian front. He is heading to Japan, which is soon to start a war with Russia (1904).
During the Russo-Japanese War, he actively promoted socialist propaganda among Russian prisoners of war in Japan. Publishes the newspaper "Russia and Japan".
One of his newspaper employees is Alexei Novikov-Priboy, who later wrote a book about the Tsushima battle.
This Novikov-Priboy is a sailor of the Baltic Fleet. In 1903 he was arrested for revolutionary propaganda. As "unreliable" he was transferred to the 2nd Pacific squadron on the battleship "Eagle". Participated in the Battle of Tsushima, was taken prisoner by Japan, and returning from captivity to his native village in 1906, Novikov wrote two essays about the Battle of Tsushima: "Mad and fruitless sacrifices" and "For other people's sins", published under the pseudonym A. Zatyorty. The brochures were immediately banned by the government, and in 1907 Novikov was forced to go underground, as he was threatened with arrest. He fled first to Finland, and then, of course, to England. From 1912 to 1913 the writer lived with M. Gorky in Capri. Laureate of the Stalin Prize of the second degree (1941).

But let's go back to the beginning of the century. After the beginning of the revolution of 1905, Roussel and Priboi hatched the idea of arming and sending 60,000 prisoners to Russia to help the rebels. At the insistence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sudzilovsky was deprived of American citizenship - for "anti-American activities."

An unusual alignment for the Soviet worldview: The US and Russia are natural allies against a common enemy, British mistress of the seas. And so it was until 1917.

He spent the last years of his life in the Philippines and China, where he crossed paths with Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Soviet government since 1921 suddenly paid him retirement, as a personal pensioner of the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners. Roussel was never in hard labor or in exile, but he peed in the magazine "Katorga and exile".

But Sudzilovsky, who was made happy by the long-awaited Revolution of the USSR, did not deign to go. Wrong flight bird. He died on April 30, 1930 (aged 79) in Chongqing, China.

He spoke 8 European, Chinese and Japanese languages.