Nikolai Sudzilovsky Nicholas Roussel. Russian president of the Hawaiian Islands - how a Russian revolutionary ruled in Hawaii

Vuyala is our hero.
Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky(aka Nicholas Roussel).
Born on December 15, 1850 in the city of Mogilev, died on 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 - an activist 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 educational establishments Tsarist Russia- “tools of police drill, where the head is filled with “metaphysical, linguistic and theological” rubbish. 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 an intelligent man. “An instrument of police drill,” he graduated from the Mogilev gymnasium with honors and in 1868 entered the law department of St. Petersburg University, from where he was expelled for participating in student riots. In 1869 he transferred to the Faculty of Medicine Kyiv University, since riot participants were prohibited from studying at 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 Russia.

From that time on, Sudzilovsky left childish fun and entered a serious international orbit.

Naturally, since 1875 it has been acquired in London. And naturally, he is not involved in any riots here. Having come to his senses, he works at St. George's Hospital and 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 name and moved to Turkey, Roussel took part in the April uprising in Bulgaria. From now on he calls himself Nicholas Roussel.
The Turks massacre the Bulgarians, Russia sends in troops, and the Balkan War of 1877-1878 begins. Roussel conducts revolutionary propaganda among the Russian troops.

The war is over. After checking in 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 of Roussel’s activities 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 against the Orthodox Bishop Vladimir, accusing him of embezzling church money and all sorts of mortal sins. At the same time, he communicates with other equally shady fraers E.E. Lazarev and L.B. Goldenberg on the topic of organizing regular escapes of political prisoners from Siberia to America.

In 1892, Roussel suddenly moved to the Hawaiian Islands. Then he calmed down and went up sharply. He became the owner of a coffee plantation and also practiced medicine.

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

Let's remember the story.

The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by English captain James Cook in 1778. The Europeans found several state entities, which in early XIX centuries merged into a single kingdom.
The development of interest in sugar cane production 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 of the 300 thousand Polynesian population.
In 1887, armed groups of whites forced the adoption of a “Constitution”, which remained in history under the name “Bayonet Constitution”. Since Liliuokalani, the last queen islands, tried to challenge the provisions of this “constitution”. Then a group of local American origins, calling for help from American sailors from a ship stationed in the bay, carried out 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 served in office from 1894 to 1900. His government survived several attempts to restore the monarchy, including the Wilcox Plot in 1895. The Republic of Hawaii was recognized by all states that recognized the kingdom at one time. In 1900, Hawaii received the status of a US territory, and Dole became its governor.

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

Roussel also uses the methods of the Russian “populists” here in Hawaii. And his “going to the people” is highly respected among the aborigines (Kanaks). Roussel will have a new nickname - Kauka Luchini (which means “Russian doctor”). He conducts explanatory conversations, teaches the aborigines about revolutionary struggle, and organizes the “Hawaii Self-Government Party” (Home Rulers), designed to fight for the interests of the indigenous people.

At this time, in Hawaii, another agent and truth-seeker is fighting against the growing United States right before our eyes - 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.

Royalist and Republican forces clashed at the foot of Diamond Head on January 6 and 7, 1895. Manoa was the battlefield on January 9th. Casualties were light and only Carter, a member of a prominent island family, was killed. The Royalists were quickly routed and Wilcox spent several days on the run before being captured. All royalist leaders were arrested on January 16, when Liliuokalani was taken into custody and imprisoned at Iolani Palace. Wilcox was arrested and convicted of treason. This time he was convicted on February 23, 1895 and sentenced to death penalty along with five other leaders. Some were released after 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 sentenced to death.
The queen was put on trial. The prosecutor accused her of treason, since she should have known that the weapons were intended to overthrow the republic. In response, the queen made a speech in which she regarded the events of 1893 as a coup d'etat, said that she had not sworn 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 benefit of of his people opposes violent actions. She was sentenced to five years in prison and labor, and fined $10,000. She served her sentence in a bedroom at Iolani Palace in Honolulu, which was under 24-hour 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 Hawaiian legislature gave her a pension of 4 thousand dollars a year, and also left her with 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 hymn Aloha Oe, as well as a book about the history of the country.
Thus ended the history of the Hawaiian royal family.

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

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

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

However, a third party, created by this time by Roussel-Sudzilovsky, suddenly joined the election fight.

In 1900, with the support of the indigenous population, Nikolai Sudzilovsky and a number of his supporters entered the Senate of the Hawaiian Islands, and in 1901 N.K. Sudzilovsky-Roussel was elected the first president of the Senate of the Hawaiian Islands. 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.

Having lost 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 Baltic Fleet. In 1903 he was arrested for revolutionary propaganda. How the “unreliable” 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, naturally, in England. From 1912 to 1913, the writer lived with M. Gorky in Capri. Winner of the Stalin Prize, 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. This was how 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 did not deign not to go to the USSR, which was made happy by the long-awaited Revolution. Bird of the wrong flight. He died on April 30, 1930 (at the age of 79) in Chongqing, China.

He spoke 8 European, Chinese and Japanese languages.

The author of this post reinvents the wheel. Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky (1850-1930) is not an “adventurer”, as he is called below (I was also awarded such a nickname by Nikolai Mitrokhin in the superficial book “Russian Party. Movement of Russian Nationalists in the USSR 1953-1985” published in 2003), but Russian passionary for whom the globe was too small. He is a patriot of Russia, and wherever he found himself, everyone turned to Russia - as he admitted, “I did not part with it for a minute.” And when in 1877, under conditions of revolutionary activity, he was forced to take a different surname, he chose “Rousselle,” which translated means “Russian.” He began as a populist of the seventies from the “active” faction, selflessly “went to the people”, founded the Kiev Commune of Revolutionaries, is considered the founder of the socialist movement in Romania, communicated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and with many other revolutionaries of Russia and Europe, was friends with the founder of the modern Chinese nation by Sun Yat-sen and the Japanese socialist Kotoku Denjiro. He became famous as an excellent doctor; he discovered the so-called. “Roussell bodies” that appear during inflammatory processes in the mucous membranes. He is one of the founders of agricultural physics. He is an inquisitive ethnographer. His philosophical-socialist and journalistic-political works are gaining new relevance in the current phase of globalization. Having won extreme popularity among the native Hawaiian Kanakas with his medical and political practice, he was elected from them to the local Senate and in 1901-1902 was the President of the Hawaiian Islands, fought for the annexation of this strategic and rich territory to the future progressive Russia, to whose just transformation he dedicated life.

At hand is one of the thorough books about him - Iosko Mikhail Ivanovich. Nikolai Sudzilovsky-Rousselle. Life, revolutionary activity and worldview (Minsk: Belorussian Publishing House state university, 1976. - 336 pp.). The epigraph is his words, an echo of the famous commandment of Jesus Christ (Gospel of Luke 9:60): “Whoever faces the past and not the future is not a revolutionary. Having left Russia in 1875, I did not stop defending my positions and at the same time saving my soul from the dominance of predators in different parts of the globe... I am happy that after 40 years of service to the cause of the revolution in Russia I lived to see the fall of our Bastille.”

By the way, Nikolai Sudzilovsky is not the first person from Russia to leave a glorious mark on the history of distant lands. For example, the Kamchatka exile Maurice Samuelovich Benevsky is known, who in 1771 raised an uprising in the Bolsherechensky prison, captured the St. Peter galley and, with a group of 70 comrades-in-arms, left for south seas, unsuccessfully tried to capture the island of Taiwan, settled for some time in France, there, from the remaining and joined Russians and French, he assembled a detachment of 21 officers and 237 sailors and in 1774 landed on Madagascar, where on October 1, 1776 local elders proclaimed him “the new Anpansakabe ", the supreme ruler of the island. The French killed him on May 23, 1786 during the assault on Mauritania (the capital of Madagascar, which he founded), and he was buried there next to two Russian comrades, with whom he escaped from Kamchatka. And Maurice Benevsky remained in history as the "Emperor of Madagascar".

The following somewhat lightweight post about Nikolai Sudzilovsky-Roussell is useful to read, especially since serious academic monographs are difficult to master. - The original was taken from leon_rumata How did a Russian revolutionary rule in Hawaii

You won't believe it, but it's true!
And this is the most amazing thing about this incredible story...
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Russian President of an American State

Presidential Palace in Honolulu, Frank Davey, 1898

On February 20, 1901, the Senate of the Territory of Hawaii was created by the US government. During the first elections in the young republic, first a senator, and then the president of the first republican government of the Hawaiian Islands, was elected Russian adventurer who fled from the Tsarist Secret Service - Nikolai Sudzilovsky, amazing scientist, geographer, chemist, leader of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Switzerland, England, Bulgaria, USA and China.

Nikolai Sudzilovsky - the son of a former large Mogilev landowner, forced to move to the Saratov province to live with relatives. While still a student at the Faculty of Medicine of Kyiv University, Nikolai joined the group of rebel-populist Vladimir Karpovich Debagoria-Mokrievich. Without finishing his fifth year, Sudzilovsky arrived on the Volga to conduct anti-government propaganda among workers and peasants. Nikolai Alexandrovich got a job as an office worker at the Pokrovsk railway station. He did his work diligently, conscientiously, without ostentatious fuss.

The head of the station had no idea that a young, intelligent-looking clerk under a uniformed railway jacket was bringing books, pamphlets, newspapers banned by the tsarist censorship to the station and reading them to the railway workers and peasants of the Pokrovskaya settlement in some empty freight car driven into a dead end ..

Knowing that the police, and not only the Pokrovskaya one, meticulously identify the identity of everyone who comes into their field of vision, Nikolai Konstantinovich considered it reasonable not to tease the geese and leave the Pokrovskaya Sloboda. Wherever Sudzilovsky went, everywhere he felt the breath of police bloodhounds catching up behind him. This circumstance forced the underground worker to move abroad illegally.

"On Globe“,” wrote Sudzilovsky, “it is unlikely that there will be another such fertile corner as the Hawaiian Islands...”

In Romania, Nikolai Konstantinovich again sat down to the medical textbooks he had once left behind in Kyiv in order to finally complete his interrupted education. When submitting an application to the local university to take the exams to become a doctor, Sudzilovsky was forced to hide the fact that his studies at Kiev University were interrupted due to his arrest.

The joy of receiving his doctor of medicine certificate was overshadowed by the news that the Russian police were again on his trail. Sudzilovsky changes his last name, now he is called Doctor Roussel.

Fleeing from the pursuit of agents of the Third Section, Nikolai Konstantinovich ends up in Turkey, then in France. Then Sudzidilovsky-Rousselle leaves overseas, to North America. Having settled in San Francisco, he, thanks to his excellent knowledge of medicine and conscientious attitude to business, soon acquired a wide practice among the local population.

And Nikolai Konstantinovich does not feel safe in San Francisco. Now he was afraid not only of bloodhounds Russian Empire, but also American justice, which he dared to criticize. I had to leave my habitable place once again.

“It is becoming a landmark of the island and is visited by foreign travelers. Including the Russian doctor Sergei Sergeevich Botkin"

In 1892, Nikolai Roussel got a job as a ship's doctor on a ship sailing to the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands. New land struck Nikolai Konstantinovich with her appearance, and diverse tropical vegetation, and the diversity of the sixty thousand population. “On the globe,” Sudzilovsky-Roussel wrote several years later in his essays published under a pseudonym in the Russian magazine “Books of the Week,” “it is unlikely that there will be another such fertile corner as the Hawaiian Islands...”

No more than half of all residents lived there; the remaining fifty percent were North Americans, British, French, Germans, Austrians, but there were especially many Japanese and Chinese. Dozens of families resettled from Russia settled on Sahu Island. 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 160 acres, built a house and started growing coffee. Then bananas, pineapples, lemons, oranges appeared on his plantations...

Blatant exploitation by the Americans indigenous people outraged Dr. Roussel. He, as before in Russia, began to organize a kind of revolutionary circles among the Kanaka natives, where he explained to the Hawaiians the lawlessness being committed against them.

“Roussel-Sudzilovsky himself understood that he would not be able to resist such a major power as America for long.”

Years passed. Kuaka-Lukini ("Russian Doctor") 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, and fairly dealt with their disputes and feuds. Kuaca Luquini, as a landmark of the island, is visited by foreign travelers; Russian doctor Sergei Sergeevich Botkin arrives.

In 1892, the Americans decided to form a republic in the Hawaiian Islands instead of a kingdom. In the election campaign, according to established custom, there was a struggle between the Republican and Democratic parties. But a man was found - Doctor Roussel - who became the head of the newly organized third national party. The new association called itself the “Independent Party.” The leader of the party, who had gone through the school of propaganda work in Russia, skillfully conducted propaganda among the Kanaks and enjoyed their endless trust. Therefore, when state elections were held in the Hawaiian Islands a year later, Kuala Lukini was elected first as a senator, then as president of the first republican government of the Hawaiian Islands.

“He was constantly looking for opportunities to personally participate in the revolutionary struggle.”

The islanders were not deceived in choosing a new president. The Russian doctor carried out several broad progressive reforms, significantly easing the plight of the Kanaks...

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

No matter what country Nikolai Roussel found himself in, the fate of the Motherland always worried him. He constantly looked for opportunities to personally participate in the revolutionary struggle. Moving away from the political life of the Hawaiians, Roussel goes to Shanghai to organize an armed detachment and free convicts in Siberia. Of course, this naive idea did not find the necessary support among Russian emigrants, and it had to be abandoned.

When the war between Russia and Japan began, Roussel had a new plan: whether to go to the theater of military operations to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian sailors. And he took advantage of this opportunity.

In Japan Sudzilovsky-Rousselle lived until 1930. All the time he lived abroad, he dreamed of a trip to Russia; he prepared for his departure for a long time and with difficulty. Finally, as an eighty-year-old old man, he decided to go to long journey. The trip was interrupted by a sudden illness, pneumonia. Death overtook Nikolai Konstantinovich on April 30, 1930 at the station in the foreign Chinese city of Chongqing... The Russian border was already very close...

The name of today's hero is Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky(pseudonym Nicholas Roussel, December 15, 1850 - April 30, 1930). The encyclopedias say about him - a learned ethnographer, geographer, chemist and biologist; revolutionary populist, one of the first participants in the campaign among the people. Activist of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Switzerland, England, France, Bulgaria, USA, Japan, China. One of the founders of the Romanian socialist movement, President of the Hawaii Senate.

He was born on December 3 (15), 1850 in the family of the secretary of the Mogilev Chamber of Civil and Criminal Court Konstantin Sudzilovsky. In total, the Sudzilovsky family had eight children. As the eldest of them, Nikolai Konstantinovich not only helped his mother with the housework, but also his father with his work.
While still just a teenager, Nikolai witnessed the brutal massacre of participants in the Polish uprising in 1863-64. These events had big influence on his future fate and choice life path.

Studying at the gymnasium (1864-1868) did not satisfy him, but at this time he became acquainted with the works of his “teachers”: N.G. Chernyshevsky, N.A. Dobrolyubov, D.I. Pisarev and A.I. Herzen . Otherwise, Sudzilovsky considered the educational institutions of Tsarist Russia “tools of police drill, incubators of bureaucracy,” where people’s heads are stuffed with various “metaphysical, linguistic and theological” rubbish.

In the fall of 1868, student unrest resumed in St. Petersburg, caused by the publication of a rule placing students under increased control of the authorities and the police. Together with university graduates, Institute of Technology and the Medical-Surgical Academy, first-year student Nikolai Sudzilovsky organizes meetings and participates in developing demands that will be rejected by the authorities.

On July 5, 1869, Sudzilovsky was forced to transfer to the medical faculty of Kiev University, since riot participants were prohibited from studying in other universities (and medicine attracted him more than law; remember Bazarov from Fathers and Sons).

In 1873-1874. he was one of the organizers of the Kyiv community, a socialist student organization. He took part in “going among the people”, having moved to the Volga (to Pokrovsk) for this purpose.

During these years, Sudzilovsky met Zhelyabov; Having got a job as a paramedic in a prison hospital in Nikolaevsk, Sudzilovsky tried to arrange an escape for prisoners. When his plan was revealed, hiding under the documents of a German colonist. 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.

From 1875 Sudzilovsky emigrated to London. He worked at St. George's Hospital.

Wanderings around Europe gave the young man a meeting with Karl Marx himself, after which his determination to fight tsarism became even stronger. Russian emigrants invited him to participate in the preparation of the uprising (1876), which was organized by Bulgarian revolutionaries. Nikolai accepted the offer, took the pseudonym Nicholas Roussel, and his house became a training center through which weapons and ammunition were supplied from different countries. During those years, he became close to the Bulgarian revolutionary Hristo Botev. In 1876, under the pseudonym Nicholas Roussel, he took part in the April uprising in Bulgaria, which was brutally suppressed by Turkish troops. Since then, Nikolai Sudzilovsky bore a new surname - Roussel.

Unlike many revolutionaries, Sudzilovsky had a profession by which he earned his living - he was a doctor. In 1877, at the University of Bucharest, he even defended his dissertation “On the antiseptic method used in surgery,” then headed the capital’s hospital. But his revolutionary essence did not change, and in 1879 Nikolai wrote a political pamphlet, masterfully disguised as a scientific treatise. He was among the organizers of the socialist movement in Romania. Conducted revolutionary propaganda among Russian troops during Russian-Turkish war 1877-1878.

In 1881, revolutionaries throughout Europe were preparing to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Paris Commune, the police were on alert, and there was no question of a legal gathering. In Russia, Emperor Alexander II died as a result of a terrorist attack - this was the occasion for a meeting of Russian emigrant revolutionaries, supposedly mourning the death of the emperor. However, during the meeting, one of them managed to hoist a red flag over a roadside tavern, which the gendarmes came to remove. Sudzilovsky was asked to leave Romania...

Little is known about the next years of Sudzilovsky’s life. He moves from one European country to another, living for some time in Bulgaria and then Greece.

In 1887, Nikolai Sudzilovsky moved to San Francisco. At that time, European doctors were well received in America, and Sudzilovsky, who had a doctorate in medicine, easily opened his own medical institution there. His wife and assistant was Leokadia Vikentievna Shebeko, who received a doctorate from the University of Bern (they met in Switzerland). A close relative of the leading officials of the empire (for example, Vadim Nikolaevich Shebeko from February 1913 would become the Saratov vice-governor; from October 1913, the Grodno governor, and from February 1916, the Moscow mayor), she broke with her family in order to share the fate of a political emigrant .

Having earned fame as a doctor, Sudzilovsky, however, could not calm his revolutionary temperament. In the report “Across California,” which the San Francisco newspapers refused to print, 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 to the extent that they are necessary for their personal pleasure and satisfaction... Relying on the omnipotence of their capital, like a walnut sponge, like a cancerous swelling, they absorb all the vital juices from environment without mercy".

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 issue him a passport, which would give him the opportunity to live under his own name in any country. “To this request,” he later recalled, “ I received an answer that, according to some manifesto, those political emigrants who expressed repentance were subject to amnesty, and since there was no repentance in my petition, they would refuse to issue me a passport".

Then he had a new opponent. In connection with the transfer of the diocesan administration of the Russian Orthodox Church Bishop Vladimir arrived in San Francisco in 1889. There are two versions further developments. According to one, Sudzilovsky “organized a campaign of persecution against the Orthodox Bishop Vladimir,” according to another, he was actually guilty of embezzlement of church money, cruel treatment of students of the local seminary and pedophilia.

The scandal split the small Russian community of San Francisco into two warring camps. Sudzilovsky sent the materials he collected to the chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod, K.P. Pobedonostsev, who was once his professor. In response, in January 1890, Bishop Vladimir, on behalf of the Orthodox Church, declared Sudzilovsky anathema and forbade Orthodox parishioners to be treated by him. Then Sudzilovsky filed a lawsuit against Vladimir in civil court demanding compensation. 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. Pobedonostsev himself sent a telegram to Sudzilovsky, informing him of the recall of the bishop.

Roussel also established contacts with Russian political emigrants who lived in the early 1890s. in USA. In San Francisco, he communicated and interacted with his old colleague Yegor Egorovich Lazarev. With the participation of another Russian revolutionary from New York, L.B. Goldenberg, they actively discussed 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 an important role as an intermediary between the Russian and American participants in the operation. In 1891, Sudzilovsky heard a lot of news about his revolutionary friends who filled the Siberian exile at that time from J. Kennan, who came to San Francisco to lecture on hard labor and exile in Siberia. However, it was not possible to establish escapes from Siberia.

In 1892, Sudzilovsky got a job as a doctor on a steamship supervising between San Francisco and Honolulu. During this period, he seems to be experiencing a “mid-life crisis” and wants to change his place and lifestyle.

Oh, if only I had wings, wings like a bird,
I would fly far, far...
I would build a nest for myself in the desert!
And I would have stayed there to rest forever!
(Poem by Sudzilovsky from that period)

In the same year, Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky settled in Hawaii. From here he wrote reports for Russian magazines.

Publishing one of the materials from the series of “Letters from the Sandwich Islands” by Dr. Roussel, the newspaper “Eastern Review” - the organ of Russian Orientalists - wrote on April 18, 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 (Hawaiian) Islands, several years ago, with his articles in “Books of the Week,” he aroused great interest among the Russian reading public in this abandoned somewhere among Pacific Ocean to a small and previously unknown archipelago".

"It's a tropical country without all the inconveniences of tropical countries.", wrote N.K. Sudzilovsky. There is no " any large predatory animals", "snakes and reptiles in general." "Under such conditions, - the article said, - You can walk through all the ravines, forests and slums with the same safety as in your own garden".

Initially, the Sudzilovskys settled on the island of Oahu. Sudzilovsky spends 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 Kauka Luchini - “good doctor”. Kauka Lukini, as a landmark of the island, is visited by foreign travelers; the famous Russian doctor Sergei Sergeevich Botkin arrives; The stepson of the famous novelist Stevenson, Lloyd Osborne, also a writer, bought a house nearby and settled there.

The authority of Kauka Luchini, who taught the population how to survive and manage a household, grew. This was also facilitated by the fact that he, of course, opposed the Americans, who were robbing and humiliating the islanders. The Americans' blatant exploitation of the indigenous population outraged Dr. Roussel. He, as before in Russia, began to organize among the Kanaka natives, as the Hawaiians were also called, a kind of revolutionary circles, where he explained to the Kanakas 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 populist revolutionaries.

Considering that he had rested enough, Sudzilovsky took part in the first parliamentary elections of the Hawaiian Republic and became a senator.

In defiance of the existing branches of the American Republican and Democratic parties in Hawaii, he creates a party of “independents”, whose program provides for independence from the United States, exemption of the poor from taxes, health care reform, regulation of the sale of alcohol, and construction of a conservatory. And in 1901, the “nihilist and materialist” cursed by the church, Nikolai Roussel, became the first president of the Senate (speaker) of Hawaii!
Roussel's bills were directed against the drunkenness of the natives, unsanitary conditions, and against the predatory tax system. The plans of the first speaker were to abolish the death penalty, introduce free public education, and plan to open a conservatory. Assessments of his activities, as usual, are polar opposites. Apparently, he really caught many interests.

Dr. Roussel served as president of the Hawaiian Senate until 1902. Intrigues and conspiracies were woven against him, and in the end he was forced to resign and leave for China.

Moving away from the political life of the Hawaiians, 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.

Sudzilovsky-Rousselle lived in Japan until 1930. All the time he lived abroad, he dreamed of a trip to Russia; he prepared for his departure for a long time and with difficulty. Finally, as an eighty-year-old old man, he decided to set off on a long journey. The trip was interrupted by a sudden illness, pneumonia. Death overtook Nikolai Konstantinovich on April 30, 1930 at the station in the foreign Chinese city of Chongqing... The Russian border was already very close...

Thank you Sergei Nekhamkin for materials used for this story.

Sources: Gennady Onufriev. Nikolai Konstantinovich Roussel-Sudzilovsky, 1850-1930. wiki, N.K. Sudzilovsky (Rousselle) // History of the city of Engels, list of heads of legislative bodies of Hawaii, Iosko M. I. Nikolay Sudzilovsky-Roussel. Life, revolutionary activity and worldview. Minsk, 1976.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Sudzilovsky was born on December 15, 1850 in Mogilev into the noble family of a minor judicial official, Konstantin Vladimirovich Sudzilovsky. The family was wealthy, but then went bankrupt and was forced to move to the estate of relatives, located near Novouzensk, Saratov province. The eldest of eight children, Nikolai helped his parents with housework since childhood.

After graduating from high school with honors, in 1868 he entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. While still in the gymnasium, having witnessed the massacre of participants in the Polish uprising of 1863–1864, and then having become acquainted with the works of the then fashionable A. I. Herzen and N. G. Chernyshevsky, Sudzilovsky early came to the conclusion that Russia is a “prison of nations”, and Russian higher educational institutions are “instruments of police drill,” and decided to devote himself to the fight for the rights of students.

In October-November 1868, he took part in several student demonstrations, for which he was expelled from the course. However, this did not particularly upset Sudzilovsky - by that time he had become disillusioned with jurisprudence, and was much more interested in medicine. The only university to which he was allowed to transfer was Kiev.

In 1873, 23-year-old Nikolai became the head of the so-called Kyiv Commune, one of the first socialist student associations in Russia. From reading emigrant literature and dreams of fighting despotism, the young people decided to get down to business: Nikolai took part in “going to the people” in the city of Pokrovsk (now Engels) in the Saratov province, and then got a job as a paramedic in the prison hospital of the city of Nikolaevsk (now Pugachev Saratov region) and participated in organizing the escape of prisoners: he added sleeping pills to the guards’ tea.

But one of them nevertheless raised the alarm, the escape failed, and a real hunt began for Sudzilovsky. The police report, where the name of the wanted man was listed as number 10, said: “About 25 years old; height is slightly below average; brown hair; face is clean; the nose is quite large; beard is small and sparse; dresses casually; in costume he looks like a craftsman.” Hiding under the name of a German colonist, through Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow and Odessa, Sudzilovsky fled abroad in 1875. His place of refuge was London, where the newly minted emigrant got a job at St. George's Hospital.

In 1876, emigrant circles involved Nicholas in preparing an anti-Turkish uprising in Bulgaria. Then Sudzilovsky took the pseudonym Nicholas Roussel, which eventually became his new name. In parallel with revolutionary activities, he continued to practice medicine, in 1877 he defended his dissertation “On antiseptic methods used in surgery” at the University of Bucharest, and then headed the hospital in Iasi. But in April 1881, after a gathering of local revolutionaries celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Paris Commune and at the same time the death of Alexander II, Sudzilovsky was expelled from Romania.

Nicholas Roussel began to travel around Europe - Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, France, Belgium... In 1887, at the invitation of his brother, he moved to San Francisco, where he opened his own clinic. His faithful assistant was his wife, Leokadia Vikentievna Shebeko. By 1891, the Sudzilovskys received American passports. Nevertheless, the revolutionary doctor spoke extremely skeptically about his new homeland. “The states represent a state based on extreme individualism,” he wrote. - They are the center of the world, and the world and humanity exist for them only to the extent that 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 absorb into themselves all the vital juices from surrounding life without mercy".

The year 1890 was marked by a major conflict between Sudzilovsky and Bishop of Aleutian and Alaska Vladimir (Sokolovsky-Avtonomov). Sudzilovsky began a real campaign of persecution against him, accusing the church hierarch of pedophilia and embezzlement of public funds. In response, the bishop anathematized the emigrant and forbade parishioners to be treated by him, Sudzilovsky filed a lawsuit... A huge scandal broke out, the Chief Prosecutor of the Synod, K. P. Pobedonostsev, intervened in the matter, and as a result, Bishop Vladimir was transferred from San Francisco on June 8, 1891. -Francisco to Voronezh. However, the long-term litigation put an end to Sudzilovsky’s American life - having become completely disillusioned with the USA, he got a job as a ship’s doctor on a ship sailing between San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands. He liked this remote American province so much that the family soon moved to the most civilized and densely populated of the Hawaiian Islands - Oahu.

Near an extinct volcano, the Sudzilovskys rented a plot of land measuring 160 acres, built a house, and acquired a small coffee plantation. At the same time, Sudzilovsky continued his medical practice, for which he received from local residents the honorary name “kauka lukini” - “good doctor”. Nikolai Konstantinovich quickly gained the trust of the natives and began to enjoy enormous authority among them.

The structure of life in Hawaii in many ways seemed unfair to Sudzilovsky, and he soon began to create a kind of revolutionary circles from the local residents, at the meetings of which he retold chapters from the works of Marx to the natives in his own words. Over time, this resulted in the creation of a party of “independents” who advocated independence of the islands from the United States, taxation and healthcare reform.

In 1900, in accordance with the decision of the US President, an administrative reform was carried out in the Hawaiian Islands - a bicameral parliament appeared there, consisting of a House of Representatives and a Senate. The “independents,” led by Sudzilovsky, entered the election struggle and, largely unexpectedly for themselves, achieved major success - first, Sudzilovsky became a senator, and in 1901, the first president of the Senate, that is, the head of the Hawaiian parliament. (Many sources call him the “President of Hawaii,” which is not true.)

As speaker of the Hawaiian parliament, Sudzilovsky intended to carry out truly revolutionary changes on the islands. They planned the abolition of the death penalty, the introduction of free secondary education, and a radical reform of the tax system. Such large-scale changes naturally affected the interests of local landowners and colonialists, and a serious behind-the-scenes struggle ensued in parliament. Sudzilovsky, inexperienced in the intricacies of legal politics, lost this battle and in 1902 was forced to leave his post. His next refuge after Hawaii was China.

While living in Shanghai, Sudzilovsky again “took up his old ways” - he began to hatch plans for an invasion of Russia by an armed detachment of emigrant revolutionaries, who were supposed to free political prisoners in Siberia. With the beginning Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905 he planned an even more ambitious action - to arm 40 thousand Russian prisoners of war with Japanese money and, landing them on Far East, capture the key stations of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then move on to Moscow. The most amazing thing is that Sudzilovsky practically managed to convince the Japanese government to release the prisoners and even provide ships to transport them to the continent!.. It is unknown how this adventure would have ended if Azev, and through him, the Russian government, had not become aware of Sudzilovsky’s plans. In addition, the war came to an end, and Sudzilovsky’s project simply became irrelevant. As a result, at the insistence of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the emigrant was deprived of US citizenship... for anti-American activities.

Disappointed by the failure of his idea, Sudzilovsky moved to the Philippines, where he founded a private hospital. After five years spent in Manila, he moved to the Japanese city of Nagasaki, where he also practiced medicine.

The news of the February Revolution of 1917 delighted the old emigrant. But he was even more delighted by the news about October events in Russia. "You did greatest revolution in October,” Sudzilovsky wrote to his brother Sergei in Samara. “If you are not crushed by the opponents of the revolution, then you will create an unprecedented society and will build communism... How happy you are, how I would like to be with you and build this new society.”

Relatives themselves called Nikolai Konstantinovich to return to his homeland, especially since, thanks to the petition of the Society of Former Political Prisoners, he, as a “veteran of the Russian revolution,” was assigned a government pension - 100 rubles in gold monthly. But, apparently, Sudzilovsky had serious doubts about whether it was worth coming to Soviet Russia. He referred to the fact that he had two adopted sons, whom he could not abandon to their fate. And Sudzilovsky’s third wife, Japanese Ohara, was not eager to go to a distant and incomprehensible country.

Only in 1930 did the elderly emigrant finally decide to move to the USSR. He notified his Samara relatives about this in a letter. But the health of the 79-year-old man could not withstand the long move. On April 30, 1930, having contracted pneumonia, Nikolai Konstantinovich died on the platform of the station in the Chinese city of Tianjin. The urn with his ashes was kept in the family until 1946, and then was buried in the family tomb of the Ohara family on the Japanese island of Amakuza.

The obituary on the death of N.K. Sudzilovsky, posted in the Soviet magazine “Katorga and exile”, said: “If we sum up his amazingly meaningful life and everything that he did and saw, of course, this content will not be more than enough.” for one hundred-year human life."