A beloved and twice-elected nationalist president was assassinated and replaced by a passionate supporter of the British Empire and America was on its disastrous path to empire in Asia and war in Europe.

The strategic context of the murder of William McKinley is seldom discussed. The extraordinary and deeply disturbing parallels between his murder and the sadistic slaughter 20 years before of Russia’s heroic Tsar Alexander II, friend of Abraham Lincoln and liberator of 24 million slaves has, to my knowledge, never before been explored or even suggested by anyone. Yet the same dark mastermind and imperial interests can be clearly identified behind both assassinations.

McKinley ended a 20-year-long economic depression that started in 1873, the longest in American history. He was pulled reluctantly into war with Spain and into annexing the Philippines but was strongly opposed to any further moves towards empire.

On September 6, 1901 McKinley was shot and mortally injured while visiting the World’s Fair in Buffalo in New York State. He died eight days later. His assassin was a Polish-American former steel worker called Leon Czolgosz who had been taken up by leading figures in the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement led with great prominence and charisma by former Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin from his secure, protected haven in Britain.

It was just over 20 years since Tsar Alexander II, the liberators of the serfs and joint architect with Otto von Bismarck of the Russian-German alliance that ended the 30 years of unparalleled invasions and destructions of great nations around the world by Britain and France, was assassinated on March 13, 1881 by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, also known as Ignaty Grinevitsky, another Polish anarchist recruited by the tiny secret anarchist cell of that grandly called itself the Narodnaya Volya, the People’s Will.

Czolgosz, one of life’s losers had come only recently to revolutionary anarchism, which advocated the murder of national leaders as “the propaganda of the deed,” only three years before in 1898. He had been taken up by the deeply rooted anarchist cell in Buffalo. Czolgosz was personally counseled and taught in the movements ideals and methods by Emma Goldman, who remains a beloved romantic figure of the American Left to this day,

Goldman (1869-1940) was a Lithuanian Jewish anarchist who came to the United States and is revered by the American Left and feminists as Red Emma for championing free speech, labor protests, women’s rights and birth control. In reality, she played no discernible role in achieving any of them. She also openly advocated bomb throwing by anarchists and unsuccessfully attempted to murder industrialist Henry Clay Frick, the right hand man of Andrew Carnegie in his Pittsburgh steelmaking empire.

Czolgosz met Goldman for the first time during one of her lectures in Cleveland, Ohio in May 1901. By then, Goldman had already met Kropotkin often including during his most recent American tour the previous month. Czolgosz openly admitted that Goldman had been his inspiration in the anarchist movement and after listening to her, he was ready to do anything he could to advance the cause.

After Goldman gave her lecture in Cleveland, Czolgosz approached the speakers’ platform and asked for reading recommendations. On the afternoon of July 12, 1901, he visited her at the home of Abraham Isaak, publisher of the newspaper Free Society in Chicago and introduced himself as Fred Nieman, (which means “nobody” a clear sign he was already thinking in conspiratorial terms.) Goldman later admitted to introducing him to her anarchist friends who were at the train station.

After the assassination, Goldman refused to condemn Czolgosz. Highly suspicious police and federal officials questioned Goldman, already a national figure. She complained they had given her “the third degree” and later writers have uncritically taken her at her word. But this was certainly just her lifelong pattern of wild, melodramatic exaggerations and outright lies.

She praised Czolgosz as a “supersensitive being,” an unlikely poetic description from someone who claimed to have only casually met him for a few minutes. It was language more likely to have been used by a lover inspiring a man to some “heroic, great deed” and it is quite likely they had had intimate relations.

Far from igniting a passionate mass anarchist movement across America, the murder of President McKinley did the opposite and discredited anarchism forever in the United States after 25 years of popularity tirelessly fanned by Kropotkin. Socialism, which angrily rejected the anarchists’ love of violence and assassination, superseded it and Eugene Debs won a million votes when he ran as head of the Socialist Party for president in 1912 against Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Goldman was deported from the United States in 1919 after serving several short jail terms for minor offenses. She visited Russia but disapproved of the Soviet Union (she disapproved of everything she did not run or imagine) and eventually died in Canada in 1940.

Thirty years after her death, Goldman enjoyed a bizarre revival among American feminists which continues to this day. Adulation continues to pour down on her.

L. Doctorow’s pretentious, reverently praised and execrably bad 1975 novel “Ragtime” makes her the central, prophetic inspiring figure of the Ragtime era, a fantasy more unreal than Tolkien. The novel later became an embarrassingly awful though also acclaimed Broadway musical.

In real life, Goldman was an intimate friend and colleague for at least 30 years of the man who called himself Mephistopheles, after Goethe’s poetic version of Satan, Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who led the international anarchist movement for more than 40 years following the death of Mikhail Bakunin in 1876.

Goldman worshipped Kropotkin. She wrote of him: “We saw in him the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy, and progressive thought.”

So close were Kropotkin and Goldman that she visited him in Moscow in 1920 a year before his death and later attended his funeral. She always referred to him as “Peter.” It is likely they had been lovers. Her role in the McKinley assassination exactly parallels that of Sophia Perovskaya, the infamous, hate-crazed director of Hryniewiecki’s grenade murder attack on Tsar Alexander.

The most striking parallel with the murder of the Liberator Tsar was Kropotkin’s remarkable proximity to both crimes. As I have previously noted in these columns, Kropotkin is documented as having known Perovskaya in the notorious Nikolai Tchaikovsky Circle of Russian anarchists as early as 1872, nine years before the assassination. And he was later close to Goldman for the rest of the his long life (He lived to the age of 79.)

Czolgosz was apparently recruited in Cleveland by the anarchists and Goldman was his inspiration to do whatever he could for the movement.

Buffalo is not a large city and is relatively remote. It is 637 kilometers (about 400 miles) by road from New York City. Yet Kropotkin took the time to visit it and its anarchist cells for leisurely trips twice in close succession in 1897 and 1901. He spoke English fluently. His visit in late April 1901 at the end of a popular and very high-profile U.S. tour was only five months before the shooting of President McKinley in September. He had established warm personal ties with Buffalo’s anarchist leader Johann Most on his previous visit there three years before as documented in the study “Kropotkin in America” by Paul Avrich.

Avrich notes, “Kropotkin exerted an increasing influence on American anarchists, not to speak of socialists, Single Taxers and other reformers. During the 1880’s and 1890’s, his articles appeared in all the leading anarchist journals.”

It was much easier for violent anarchist cells in America to operate in small towns or obscure industrial cities where the police were far smaller, less well equipped, far less sophisticated and not attuned to the threat of revolutionary violence than in major metropolises like New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago.

All this Kropotkin knew well. In Buffalo, since his 1897 visit, his key contact was Most, a German expatriate who even in those circles was regarded as a wild and violent “firebrand,” according to Avrich. The World’s Fair had already been arranged to be held in Buffalo – a surprisingly remote and small location for such an event – and President McKinley was certain to visit it.

In other words, when poor, doomed President McKinley took his fatal train to obscure little Buffalo he was going to a stronghold of the most violent anarchist leader on the North American continent who had recently been in close personal contact with the movement’s international leader.

Kropotkin did not operate secretly or fearfully in the United States. He had enormous protection and influence. He was an honored guest in 1897 at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and gave a speech to the National Geographical Society in Washington, DC.

In 1901, Kropotkin stayed at the prestigious and luxurious Colonial Club in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was invited to the United States by the Lowell Institute. He also gave a guest lecture at Harvard. Goldman organized his busy and successful speaking schedule on the East Coast.

Like Tsar Alexander, McKinley was no evil tyrant but a successful reformer who had decisively improved terrible living conditions for scores of millions of people. He restored the U.S. economy by reviving the “national system ” of previous presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield (both also assassinated). He especially increased industrial tariffs to keep British and German industries from undermining the U.S. industrial base with floods of subsidized and artificially supported “dumped” exports.

McKinley also settled a miners’ strike giving the oppressed workers decent rights and significant improvements in pay and conditions, the first such successful development in U.S. history. He was at the same time a trusted partner to Wall Street in maintaining business confidence and favorable investment conditions.

All this changed when McKinley’s vice president, the youngest in U.S. history, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded to the presidency when McKinley succumbed to his wounds on September 14, 1901 after eight days of agony.

Roosevelt was named to the vice presidency supposedly to remove him from a position of real power as governor of New York State as the Wall Street moguls did not like or trust him. He filled the slot vacated by previous Vice President Garret Hobart, the highly capable former governor of Ohio, who died at the age of only 55 in 1899 after developing heart problems over that summer. Hobart’s death has been suggested but never seriously investigated as a possible poisoning. Had he lived, Roosevelt could never have been seriously considered as McKinley’s running mate in 1900.

Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations. But that is another story.

All this change was made possible by Czolgosz’s convenient two shots into President McKinley’s abdomen: Goldman lived in comfort and acclaim in different countries, always protected by the British Empire until her death in Canada in 1940 at the age of 71.

The International Anarchist Congress of London, from July 14 to July 20, 1881 was highly unusual in many ways, though it has almost totally been forgotten by history,  save as a curiosity.

It was the last such gathering to be held for more than a quarter of a century until the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam in August 1907. During that time, there were four other unsuccessful attempts to call international congresses, in Geneva in 1882, in Paris in 1889, in Chicago in 1890 and once again in Paris in 1900.

Those interested in the procedural minutiae of the congress can easily enough find obscure academic articles discussing theoretical intellectual positions held and debated at the Congress.

But as far as I have been able to find, no historians have given any serious study to the possibility that the Congress may have been used to coordinate or plan any program of “Propaganda of the Deed” – the assassination of important political leaders across Europe and the Americas, which was central to the achievement of the anarcho-syndicalist movement’s goals.

Nor is there any discussion anywhere – save in terms of abstruse and apparently harmless political theory – of the role that former Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most consistently high-profile and charismatic leader of the anarchist movement played in the convention.

Most striking of all, there appears never to have been any serious investigation conducted as to why the British government permitted its capital London, to be the host of the conference that on the surface stood for the destruction of everything that the British Empire, its traditions and institutions held dear.

The decision to permit the 1881 congress to gather in London was particularly striking – and from the Russian government’s point of view outrageous – because it opened only four months almost to the day after Tsar Alexander II, the Great Liberator who freed 24 million serfs from slavery and supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union through the U.S. Civil War, was assassinated by a specially designed shrapnel grenade thrown by Ignacy Hryniewiecki on Sunday, March 13, 1881.

That hideous crime was planned and committed by the Narodnaya Volya, “The People’s Will” itself a strange, tiny, conspiratorial group shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions to this day.

The name of the group suggests – as it was meant to – a mass popular movement, But the Narodnaya Volya was no such thing. The best estimates of Russian and Western historians alike put it at no more than 200 members. Almost none of these were from peasant backgrounds. They were almost all from favored, prosperous, professional middle class families and in some cases even from aristocratic backgrounds.

Interestingly, the followers of the late Osama Bin Laden in the first generation of al-Qaeda that carried out the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 exhibit an almost identical set of profiles, as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal bin Abdelaziz ibn Saud has pointed out.

The Narodnaya Volya was only founded in 1879. But it was totally crushed by 1884. Yet in the first two years of its existence, it operated with apparent impunity carrying out no less than eight attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander. No other tsar in Russian history including Alexander’s son and grandson after him was ever hunted so mercilessly and relentlessly by assassins.

The Narodnaya Volya never lacked for any of the financing it needed for its murderous schemes. The Russian internal security services, who proved extremely efficient and energetic in smashing the group after it carried out its bloody deed, seemed utterly helpless and inept against it until that point. This may in large part have been because the group was so tiny and so novel in its operational techniques.

Who led the Narodnaya Volya? Its documented leaders were Andrey Zhelyabov and Sofya  Perovskaya. Perovskaya came from an aristocratic background but showed little capability beyond her own murderously intense fanaticism and strange obsession with murdering the tsar. Other members of the group when arrested openly commented on her merciless hatred for the ruler who had liberated the serfs.

But Perovskaya from 1872 was personally very closely associated with the then handsome, dashing and charismatic anarchist leader Prince Peter Kropotkin. It is likely they were lovers.

The carefully (British) constructed image of Kropotkin that endures to this day is a tubby, kindly, smiling old, bearded Father Christmas. In his youth, however, he was darkly satanically handsome and was obsessed with Goethe’s devil figure Mephistopheles in  “Faust.”

For Perovskaya, Kropotkin would have been the dashing, aristocratic brilliant love of her life. For Kropotkin, the rather plain Perovskaya would have been a means to an end: The hunting and murder of the tsar.

Kropotkin came from one of the most aristocratic eminent families in Russia. He claimed descent from the House of Rurik, the original ruling family of Russia. He had actually been a personal page of Tsar Alexander II in his early years in power. He had been brutally bullied (or so he later claimed) when entering the Imperial corps of pages. For ever after, he maintained an intense personal hatred of the tsar, intensified by the years he spent as a prisoner for his subversive activities in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg starting in 1872. His escape was engineered by friends in 1876.

Kropotkin’s relationship with Perovskaya starting in 1872 in the Tchaikovsky (not the great musical composer) Circle is the key documented fact that links Kropotkin directly to the murder of the great tsar he so intensely personally hated. The group’s leader Nikolai Tchaikovsky, like Kropotkin found protection in Britain for most of his later life.

Kropotkin was a noted scientist in his day who contested Darwin and argued a version of evolution based on natural cooperation rather than natural selection. In fact it was superficial and crackpot but interestingly has recently been revived, along with his scientific reputation in British academic circles.

During the remainder of his own long life (he died in 1921 at the age of 79), Kropotkin was allowed to live in complete peace and security in Britain. Not coincidentally, Britain was the only major country in Europe not to suffer from the mysterious outbreak of assassinations that swept the continent and even the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.

As Matthew Ehret has noted, the anarchist assassinations seemed to disproportionately target major leaders who rejected free trade and a global economic order dictated by British financial interests from the City of London. Its victims included U.S. presidents James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), French President Sadi Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas (1897) and King Umberto I of Italy (1900).

In addition, in 1878 alone, anarchists attempted to kill Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany twice as well as the Kings of Spain and Italy. Kropotkin hailed all these efforts at “the Propaganda of the Deed.” Not coincidentally, all of these leaders, especially the old Kaiser, Bismarck’s patron and protector stood like Tsar Alexander II squarely opposed to British efforts at global financial domination.

Yet despite all these outrages – or more likely because of them – Kropotkin, the guiding figure of anarcho-syndicalism and the great champion of the murder of national leaders continued to enjoy a charmed life protected by the British Empire.

To this day, British historians and other writers have unanimously continued to swallow the approved line that Kropotkin was a kindly, brilliant, pacifist saint – belonging to the company of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King rather than that of Sergei Nechayev and Dostoyevsky’s “Devils.”

The hyper-energetic, much loved and woefully idiotic American popular historian Barbara Tuchman spread this Disneyworld fairy tale image of Kropotkin in her enormously popular and influential history of the pre-World War I world “The Proud Tower” in 1966. Typically, she won the Pulitzer Prize twice for writing other histories that got their central facts and theses wrong.

A serious study of the role of Kropotkin and his “Anarchist International” in the assassinations of the late 19th century is well over 100 years overdue.

But even in that age of carefully selected and discriminating terror, the hunting and murder of the great liberator Tsar Alexander stands out for its relentless nature and obsessive cruelty.

That age of assassinations and the Anarchists Congress that the British so incongruously hosted in July 1881 is not just a matter of abstract curiosity about a long forgotten and irrelevant past. It offers disquieting parallels to the use of targeted assassinations and the methodical destabilization of great nations in the name of free trade, democracy and human rights that continues at a feverish pace in our own time.

As the great American novelist William Faulkner rightly wrote in “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”