was not to be trusted. Not yet.
The first attempt was a disaster for the new radical-Populist vanguard: two large show trials, the ‘Case of the 50’ and the ‘Case of the 193’, meted out harsh punishments as a deterrent to others who might travel down the same path. But the rulings pushed the radicals in a different direction. One group decided that the previous experiment had failed because of attempts to lead the peasants and too-brief visits to the countryside. They would return and this time serve the people: educate them, teach basic hygiene, help in their daily labours and become part of their lives. Bakunin’s ideas would have to wait.5
But the rapid growth of revolutionary circles in the cities brought the propaganda of the deed to the fore. Its principal ideologue was a provincial teacher, Sergei Nechaev, whose daytime job was teaching theology in a parish school. At night he devoured the texts of the French Revolution and won himself over to the anarchist cause. In 1866, he left his job and moved to St Petersburg to meet like-minded people. The city was still buzzing with a series of clandestine pamphlets titled Young Russia and distributed in the name of Peter Zaichnevsky, yet another admirer of the Jacobins, Mazzini and the Italian Carbonari, the leading exponents of ‘revolutionary conspiracy’ and terrorism. To this group must be added the name of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French author of What Is Property? – the answer to which became more famous than the essay. It was Proudhon who first proposed the idea of a decentred socialism against a centralised state. Zaichnevsky had been translating Proudhon into Russian when he was arrested. His own particular contributions would have shocked poor Proudhon, not to mention Tolstoy and Kropotkin. Herzen, the intellectual father of Russian Populism, declared such views utterly repellent.
In Young Russia, Zaichnevsky recalled the heroism of Razin and Pugachev and called for a ‘bloody and pitiless’ revolution that went beyond the limited aims of their peasant forebears. Now, he argued, in his own version of the friend/enemy dichotomy, it was time to calmly and mercilessly exterminate the tsarist royal family, their courtiers and the nobility that sustained them:
We will cry ‘To your axes’ and then we will strike the imperial party without sparing our blows just as they do not spare theirs against us. We will destroy them in the squares, if the cowardly swine dare to go there. We will destroy them in their houses, in the narrow streets of the towns, in the broad avenues of the capital, and in the villages. Remember that, when this happens, anyone who is not with us is against us, and an enemy, and that every method is used to destroy an enemy.
This was the political atmosphere of the 1860s in the bohemian and political cellars of the Russian underground. The former theology teacher approved strongly of what was being proposed. Nechaev was one of the most charismatic, if somewhat unhinged, characters produced by Russian anarchism and the competition on this front was always fierce. He became a close collaborator of Bakunin and, according to George Woodcock (one of the more distinguished historians of anarchism), possibly his lover.6 The combined political-sexual-emotional hold that Nechaev (in his early twenties) had on his ageing comrade is held responsible for Bakunin’s ultraleftism and joint authorship of the Catechism. The authorship is disputed because of the violence of the language, the ultra-nihilism and political amorality, but the work was far from unpopular at the time. Nechaev, a fantasist in many ways, was not a loner, but a product of the dominant political culture of the period. The Catechism contained fanatical passages that offended some, but its tone and rhetoric were not so far removed from those of other clandestine pamphlets that circulated at the time. Numerous activists were lodged in the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg and others were suffering in Siberia after the anarchist Karakazov had, in an audacious dress rehearsal, fired a few shots at the tsar. The legend of Nechaev was based partly on falsehood: he claimed he had escaped from the Peter and Paul Fortress and it was this that necessitated exile. No such escape had or could have taken place, as Nechaev was not being held there. Bakunin believed him and helped to carefully construct his reputation. He persuaded Ogarev to write a poem in praise of the young man (a work that circulated widely in Russia) while Bakunin produced his own profile of Nechaev, portrayed unambiguously as the prototype of the 1860s revolutionary:
[He is] one of those young fanatics who know no doubts, who fear nothing and who have decided quite definitely that many, many of them will have to perish at the hands of the government but who will not let this stop them until the Russian people arises. They are magnificent, these young fanatics, believers without God, heroes without rhetoric.
The Catechism itself was probably written by Bakunin, based on the actions of Nechaev and others. It expresses emotions, ideas and rules which are then given enormous power by the author’s literary and political abilities, not all that different from those of his rival Marx but with one important difference. The Communist Manifesto is a distillation of the ideas of Marx and Engels, assembled partially from what they had learnt and rejected from Fichte and Hegel and from the theory and practice of the French Revolution, but largely from a synthesis that was working its way through Marx’s brain based on analysing the development of capitalism. It was conceived as an internationalist text. The Manifesto was a call to delayed action when conditions were rotten-ripe; the transfer of power and authority from one social class to another, while it would require a revolution, would then lead rapidly to a new mode of production and distribution. The transition itself would be painless.
The Catechism is effectively a Russian text, written with the express purpose of recruiting new activists. Its most powerful feature, as in much of Bakunin’s work, is a sense of urgency, of immediatism which itself is the consequence of a burning hatred for the tsarist autocracy and its dark realities. The text resounds with a call to destroy this system by a series of well-organised acts of terror, like those of the peasant leaders of past rebellions, that would arouse the masses. Bakunin often referred to this past in his many calls to action: ‘The times of Stenka Razin are drawing near.’ ‘It is unlikely that there will be another popular hero like Stenka Razin; his place will be taken by the legions of youth without caste or name … collective and therefore invincible.’ Who would carry out these actions? The revolutionary, the main subject of this incendiary pamphlet. To be such a person required a break with every aspect of bourgeois society, all its norms and taboos. There are no means towards such a pure end that were not permissible. Omnia munda mundis.
Mikhail Bakunin – revolutionary anarchist and
Marx’s great political and theoretical rival.
The Revolutionary Catechism, as its name suggests, was a secular instruction manual for radical activists. Its first seven paragraphs (out of a total of twenty-six) concern psychology rather than political economy, a psychology that has reappeared in the twenty-first century and can be observed in full play, although Bakunin and Nechaev’s caste of anarchist warriors differs in several important ways from current jihadi terrorist groups. These groups, who invoke Islam to carry out their deadly acts in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and elsewhere, have no clearly stated political aims and veer from one local potentate to another. The prevailing socioeconomic system poses no problems for them unless it prevents them from taking power. They often target the common people, including those of their own faith. As the paragraphs below indicate, though, there are more than a few analogies between these twenty-first-century jihadis and nineteenth-century anarchists:
Paragraph 1. The revolutionary is a lost man; he has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings; he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion – the revolution.
Paragraph 2. In the very depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions and generally accepted conditions, and with the ethics of this world. He will be an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that will only be so as to destroy it the more effectively.
Paragraph 3. The revolutionary despises all doctrinairism. He has rejected the science of the world, leaving it to the next generation; he knows only one science, that of destruction.