Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
—MACBETH, ACT I SCENE 1
It seemed to him that the entire world was doomed to be sacrificed to some terrible, unknown and unseen…pestilent ulcer. Now there were these trichnines, microscopic creatures that moved into people’s bodies…people who hosted them immediately became possessed and mad, but never had anyone felt as smart and unshakeable in the truth as did the diseased. People were killing one another in the grip of some meaningless anger.
—FEDOR DOSTOEVSKY, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
After the assassination attempt in 1866, many young people involved in the student riots had been expelled and went abroad to study. Most of them were not poor and could afford it.
On the platform seeing them off had been heartbroken parents and servants. They sighed for the times when people traveled by coach to Paris with none of these terrible crashes that were in the newspapers nowadays. The engine came into view. Shining black steel, menacingly large wheels, loud whistling and wheezing, steam belching from its tall chimney, the steam engine pulled into the station. A gendarme in a long coat walked along the platform. The second bell rang, followed by the alarming ringing of the station bell and the conductor’s piercing whistle. The train smoothly pulled out of the station. The parents stood still, wiping away their tears, while the servants ran along the platform, bowing their farewells.
It had become easy to move around Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The railroads were a great help to people with police problems, and they would do much (as did all technical advances) to aid insurgents all over the world.
Before settling down in the university of their choice, the young Russians, intoxicated by freedom, traveled around Europe. They did not rush to sinful Paris like their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did. Paris remained a city of conspirators, poets, pamphleteers, courtesans, salons, and secret societies—“the nerve center of European history, regularly sending dangerous impulses to Europe.” Napoleon III was wrong in thinking that he had brought order to the city.
But to discover the disorder one needed to get deep into the secret life of Paris, which was inaccessible to the Russian students. Another capital was much more attractive for the young nihilists, because the men who held sway over the minds of progressive youth lived there.
It was London, of course. Herzen lived there, a cult figure, considered so dangerous that corresponding with him was punishable by hard labor in Russia. He was a living symbol. Back in the eighteenth century, travelers in Europe felt bound to pay their respects to Voltaire. A hundred years later, a freethinking Russian abroad wanted to see the dangerous exile in secret.
Young Leo Tolstoy went abroad, and naturally met with Herzen. Tolstoy described how he approached the two-story building at the back of a small courtyard. Behind the house were trees with thin spring foliage. He heard rapid steps on the stone paving, overgrown with grass. Herzen was a small, fat man, full of energy and with quick movements.
Tolstoy saw Herzen every day he was in London. Later, the writer quoted Herzen’s bitter words, with which he agreed completely. “If people wanted to save themselves instead of saving the world and to free themselves instead of freeing humanity, they would do so much for saving the world and freeing humanity.”
But unlike Tolstoy, the young people coming from Russia did intend to save the world and free humanity. They found like-minded people in London. These were the young émigrés who left Russia after the fires of 1862 and the routing of Land and Freedom. The new arrivals were surprised to learn that Herzen was not highly regarded in these circles. He was not tough enough, and it was unfashionable to meet with the old man. Radical Europe had other idols. For instance, one of the fathers of European communism, the latest fad, often came to London. The illegitimate son of a laundress, Wilhelm Weitling was a former tailor. He gave up his trade and rushed by train from country to country, to share with the working classes his recipe for creating heaven on earth—communism. Raising a well-tailored trouser leg, he would show the marks of prison shackles, his payment for discovering that recipe.
According to Weitling, the construction of communism would begin in a very bloody manner. An army of criminals would have to lay the path to the coming paradise, by destroying the existing order. “Criminals are merely the product of the present social order, and under communism they will cease being criminals.”
After a general uprising, the united workers and criminals would start building a radiant future without private property. Society, the commune, would be the only capitalist in the communist state. “People freed from the shackles of property will be as free as birds in the sky.” All relationships would change. Since marriage was an exclusive form of private property, “women will leave marriage and become common property.” A new era of peace and joy would begin.
A much more serious proponent of communism also lived in London. He was the new star of European radicals, exiled from Prussia and many other European countries, the German genius Karl Marx. He had already warned, “A Specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism.” Marx naturally scoffed at the “vulgar communist,” the tailor Weitling. But he was kind to him, seeing in his speeches a childish “manifestation of the proletariat’s attraction to communism.” Weitling was a welcome guest in Marx’s house. Not for serious conversation, but for cards. Marx loved playing at night and the miserable “vulgar communist,” dying for sleep, had to hold up until morning playing with the indefatigable philosopher.
In Russia the nihilists knew that Marx had founded the mysterious Communist International, which was to bring a new messiah, the proletariat, to power. “Workers of the world, unite!” The world proletariat would create a happy classless society. But first there would be great bloodshed, the ruthless dictatorship of the proletariat. “Violence is the midwife of History,” Marx taught.
The new arrivals from Russia liked Marx’s grim thoughts. Marx was very popular among Russian émigrés, and a Russian section was formed in his International.
We can only imagine how, after long negotiations and consultation with other Russian émigrés (for he was suspicious), Marx agreed to receive the expelled students. They arrived at 9, Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, an expensive town house in the center of London.
He came out to greet them. He was short, stocky, and covered with thickets of hair—blue-black with a handsome streak of gray—a mane of hair on a leonine head, proudly held, with his chin hidden under an enormous beard (you can’t have a prophet without a beard). Even his stubby fingers were covered in black hairs. He held himself monumentally in an elegant jacket, buttoned wrong.
The group was invited into his legendary study, the place where the downfall of capitalism was to be directed and where the future happiness of humanity was being forged. It was a very cozy room, and despite the noon hour, a lamp with a green shade was lit, for the usual London fog had turned day into night.
The anticipated conversation began. It can’t be called a conversation, because Marx turned it into a monologue. He lisped, but that was quickly forgotten because his masterful tone was hypnotic—his absolute faith in his predestined role as master of men’s minds was clear.
A marble bust of Zeus, whom the host called Prometheus in conversation, looked down at the young men from the mantelpiece. Prometheus was a favorite image. His words in the ancient Greek drama, “In truth, I hate all gods,” formed the credo of Marx’s philosophy, directed against all gods, heavenly and earthly. Thus the severe question at the end of monologue directed at his guests: “Do you believe in God?”
The quick-witted young men denied God. They were praised and told that “communism makes all existing religions unnecessary and replaces them.”
Next to Prometheus on the mantle was a portrait of Chernyshevsky, which delighted the Russian guests. Marx explained that it had been a gift from a “Russian steppe landowner,” who had promised to give funds for the International but had not sent anything yet. Marx gave the young people a searching look, but they were silent. Their families did not give them extra money. Marx, who had heard they were wealthy, lost interest in them. Instead of giving money, the young people asked about the Communist International.
Marx readily told them the basics: Before him, philosophers merely explained the world, while his philosophy would change the world. That was the goal of the International, to overthrow the bourgeoisie, assure the victory of the proletariat, and found a society without classes or private property. “It is too soon to do it in Russia,” Marx warned them, “because there is no proletariat there yet.”
The young people sighed sadly, and they were instantly forgotten, because a conversation among great men had begun.
The great men had arrived while Marx was entertaining his Russian guests. One sat on the couch. His name was Friedrich Engels. The other stood by the window—Mikhail Bakunin, the father of Russian anarchism. He was an old giant with thick, unkempt hair and a child’s eyes. He had sent the young people to see Marx.
The scion of a wealthy aristocratic family, Bakunin graduated from the brilliant Mikhailovsky military school. Since the very thought of serving in the guards “brought on melancholy,” Bakunin quit his military career and left for Europe without telling his father. There, “like a savage thirsty for culture, he threw himself into the study of philosophy.” Young Bakunin quickly came to prefer the pistol to the pen. The admirer of great philosophers turned into a fearless revolutionary. Unlike Marx, who performed his exploits at his desk, Bakunin fought on all the barricades of European revolutions and spent time in the most horrible prisons.
In Prussia the Russian rebel was sentenced to death, but then the Prussians turned him over to the Austrians, who also condemned him to death. He tried to escape, so he was chained to the wall. He spent several months in chains. Then the Austrians turned him over to Nicholas I. The tsar personally interrogated him. Praising him for his courage on the revolutionary barricades, Nicholas sent him to the stone sack, solitary confinement in the Alexeyevsky ravelin in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. His influential relatives persuaded the tsar to commute the sentence to exile in Siberia. The giant escaped and soon after took part in the Polish uprising against Nicholas I.
After the Poles were quelled, Bakunin moved to Geneva. From there, this aficionado of Chopin’s music and of philosophy, tender and loving in person, called on Russia to start a bloody revolution. Naturally he was a member of every secret society and naturally he joined the International. But every visit to Marx turned into a verbal battle.
Tin mugs of porter and long clay pipes were laid out on the table. The old giant, quaffing mug after mug, smoked continually and talked continually. “The state of the proletariat is nonsense, for the state itself is an evil that must be destroyed. A communist state would be no better than a capitalist one, and leadership would still be concentrated in the hands of a few. And even if the country is led by workers, they would soon become just as corrupt and despotic as the tyrants they overthrew. Only anarchy can save the world, with power so diffused that no one could abuse it. That will be done in Russia. Everything will be determined by the Russian peasant revolution and the uprising of the Russian criminal world.”
Bakunin pinned his hopes for revolution in Russia on the national character, and on the hatred peasants felt for the nobility.
“The Russian people have an either childish or demonic love of fire…no wonder we burned down our capital during Napoleon’s invasion. It is easy to convince peasants that setting fire to the estate and their masters with all their riches is a just and God-pleasing act.”
Bakunin, himself a landowner and descendant of landowners, gleefully recalled the rebellions of Stepan Razin and of Pugachev, when landowners were hanged and estates burned. “The time is drawing nigh for the rebellions of Stenka Razin and Pugachev. We will prepare for the festivities,” Bakunin declared. Bandits were the main resource for the future Russian revolution, according to Bakunin. “Bandits are respected in Russia.”
Bakunin went on revealing the joyful horizons of the coming apocalypse. “Engulfing Russia, the fire will spread to the whole world. Everything will be destroyed that is deemed holy from the heights of modern European civilization, because it is the source of inequality, the source of all of man’s misery. Bringing into motion a destructive force is the only goal worthy of a rational man.”
His monologue was interrupted by Marx, first with sarcastic remarks, then with furious ones. Bakunin’s monologue was followed by another uninterrupted monologue by Marx. As he spoke, Marx paced back and forth in his small study.
Marx’s usual pacing while he waxed political was described by his friend, the great poet Heine:
He gallops, he jumps, he bounces,
As if to catch and pull down to earth
The enormous cover of the sky.
He shakes his monstrous fists, and screams
As if thousands of devils pull at his hair.
The big hair, small body, and the badly buttoned jacket rushed back and forth before the frightened young Russians standing by the fireplace. They heard the words, rather, the furious cries of Marx: “A peasant revolution in Russia is adventurism! Any child knows that! The bourgeois revolution must conquer first! Only the bourgeoisie will give birth to its gravedigger, the working class! And only the working class can solve all the problems of humanity. This is as simple as the alphabet…. While you and those like you waste time on projects of world revolution, day by day and night after night fooling yourselves with the motto: ‘It will begin tomorrow!’ we are spending our time in the British Museum, trying to gain knowledge and prepare weapons and material for the coming battle of the proletariat!”
Then the Russian students learned that their country was the greatest evil of Europe. “I began one of my articles with this story: Two Persian wise men argued over whether bears give birth to live cubs or lay eggs. One of them, apparently more educated, said, ‘That animal is capable of anything.’ That is the point, the Russian bear is capable of anything except revolution. The Eastern world in the image of Russia has not simply left the historical stage, but in some way is stuck in place and is keeping the rest of the world from moving forward!” shouted Marx.
Now he was not running around the room alone. His alter ego, Friedrich Engels, jumped up from the couch to join him. They made a ridiculous-looking couple. Marx was a small, dark-haired Jew with an enormous head, and Engels was a tall fair-haired Aryan with a very small head. But they had one thing in common. Both Engels and Marx were besotted by Marx.
The wealthy capitalist Engels supported the genius Marx in his fight against capitalism. A successful entrepreneur and fashion plate, member of elite clubs, who filled his cellars with expensive champagne and hunted during the annual Cheshire races, Engels supplied Marx with economic data for his books, which were going to destroy capitalism. He regularly sent Marx money secretly taken from the bank accounts of his company. He handled it so exquisitely that neither his father nor his partner ever noticed the losses. His money paid the rent on the London house.
Now all three men were shouting simultaneously—Marx, Engels, and Bakunin—gradually disappearing in the swirls of tobacco smoke, for they could not open a window: The strident argument would attract crowds outside.
Their faces disappeared, and words flew from the smoke. Gradually the words became unclear, too, as the trinity switched to their famous macaronic language. This was their great polyglots’ conspiracy language, a mix of Latin, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English.
The hungry students sadly watched the last meat pie enter Bakunin’s mouth. Tobacco smoke covered everything. The appearance of the “family dictator,” Helen Demuth, the small, neat servant, stopped the argument. Helen Demuth had lived in the Marx household for many years. She had an illegitimate son, fifteen-year-old Freddy, who bore a frightening resemblance to the great teacher of the world proletariat. (In 1962, Engels’s account was published explaining the reason for the resemblance: The father of revolution was, of course, Freddy’s father.)
At last, Bakunin remembered the young people he had sent to Marx, and they decided to move the conversation to a London pub, where they could be fed. In a Piccadilly pub, the company grew larger, with comrades from the International joining them. Marx decided to end the argument. The comrades must believe that no one dare argue with him except those he permitted to argue.
The conversation moved to frivolous topics, which meant that the main speaker was Friedrich Engels, the Casanova of scientific communism.
They came out of the pub after two in the morning. When Marx was tipsy and shamelessly merry, his exits from pubs could be rather turbulent. In his memoirs, Karl Liebknecht described a similar scene. “With quick steps we walked away from the pub, until one of Marx’s fellow drinkers tripped on a pile of stones being used for the roadway. He picked up a stone and—bang!—the gas lamp was shattered. Marx kept up and broke four or five lamps. It was around two in the morning and the streets were empty. But the noise attracted a policeman. We ran with three or four policemen chasing us. Marx demonstrated an alacrity I had not expected from him.”
After London, the young nihilists naturally headed for Geneva. In 1867 the city was lovely, with flower-covered balconies, and crying gulls flying low over the shore. A warm rain had fallen over night, but the morning fog was lifting as they arrived. The sun’s rays burst through, revealing boundless Lake Geneva and the spectral Savoy Mountains in the distance. It was the view seen by every famous revolutionary of Europe, for Geneva did not give up political criminals. Geneva was a Noah’s Ark, where all the participants of suppressed European revolutions had gathered.
The atmosphere stunned the young Russians. There was no permanent army, and very few uniforms, which were the main color effects seen on the streets of St. Petersburg. You could walk into a café and see the president of the canton having coffee. It wasn’t easy to notice him, for he sat like any ordinary citizen, waiting for the slow-moving waiters. No Cossack bodyguards surrounded him. There was no censorship and no struggle against any ideas. Yet for some reason, the revolution that had rocked Europe’s countries with their great armies and great bureaucracies had bypassed Geneva.
Whom could the young nihilists have seen in Geneva in 1867? The Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom was meeting there. All of Europe’s liberals had gathered to discuss how to prevent war. Despite their fiery speeches and wise resolutions, war would break soon between France and Prussia. But at the moment, the streets were lined with people waiting to see the chairman of the Congress. He arrived in an open carriage, the idol of liberal Europe, Giuseppe Garibaldi. He looked extremely colorful in a red shirt and Mexican poncho, standing and waving his hat to the applauding crowd. One of the most ardent applauders was a young woman, Anya, wife of the writer Dostoevsky.
They were on their honeymoon. The trip was the only way the writer could escape his creditors. Dostoevsky got an advance from his publisher for a new book, The Idiot. On that long, four-year trip, the simple and innocent girl experienced her husband’s intoxicating “Karamazov voluptuousness” and the genius’s epileptic fits and his gambling passion. He sometimes lost not only all their money, but even his suit and her dresses. They would have to stay put, penniless, waiting for help from his publisher in Russia.
Anya put up with all of it. Often, as he would go out to gamble, he would ask for her permission. She knew there was no point in refusing; he was possessed. “I told him I agreed to everything,” she wrote in her diary. “He must appreciate that agreement, and that I never argue with him about anything, but always try to agree as quickly as possible, so that we do not quarrel.”
For those four years his main interlocutors were his notebooks, where he held a conversation with himself, and kind Anya. “Last night we talked about the Gospels and Christ, we talked for a long time,” she wrote. “At night, when he came to say good night, he kissed me a lot, tenderly, and said, ‘I can’t live without you, look how we’ve grown into one person, Anya, you couldn’t separate us with a knife.’…Later, in bed, he said, ‘It’s for people like you that Christ came.’”
Throughout the entire journey he suffered from epileptic seizures, and he noted them carefully. “A half hour before the fit I took opii benzoedi: 40 drops in water. After total unconsciousness, i.e., already up from the floor, I sat and filled papirosy [rolled cigarettes with a cardboard tube filter], and I counted 4 that I filled, but not neatly, and I felt a terrible headache but could not figure out what was wrong with me.”
It was impossible to get used to the disease; the fits were terrible. He could die in a few minutes, in convulsions and—for him, most terribly—unconscious. He worked furiously under that sword of Damocles, without losing his sense of humor.
As he joked to Anya, “When we leave [this pension], they will start telling their friends, ‘Ah, we had Russians staying here, she was young, so pretty, always so cheerful…and an old idiot. He was so mean that he fell out of bed at night, and he did it on purpose!’”
By the fall of 1867, they had reached Geneva. Dostoevsky, completely unknown in Europe, worked on The Idiot in their small room in a cheap pension, while Anya took walks to be out of his way.
The next book after The Idiot would be based on another Russian visiting Geneva. Just eighteen months later, on the same shore in that city, the forerunner of the bloody Russian revolution and the hero of Dostoevsky’s next novel would appear—Sergei Gennadyevich Nechaev.
Dostoevsky would depict Nechaev in the novel The Devils under the name of Verkhovensky. But the real Nechaev was to the fictional character as the real devil was to a petty demon.
Sergei Nechaev, a young man of short stature and an ordinary round peasant face, had an amazing gaze. A contemporary woman (a relative of Herzen’s) wrote that she could never forget that subjugating, hypnotic stare. The descriptions of his stare are very similar to descriptions of Grigory Rasputin’s gaze. When Nechaev was incarcerated, the chief of gendarmes himself, head of the Third Department A. Potapov, came to his cell. He came to humiliate him and demand he become a stoolie. Nechaev responded by slapping Potapov in the face. And beneath his gaze, the chief of gendarmes, with slapped face, sank to his knees! Later, Potapov left, came to his senses, and got his revenge. But he had knelt—such was Nechaev’s power.
Nechaev created many legends about himself. In actuality, he was the son of a man who worked as a servant in inns. His profession served him badly. The “nouveaux gentlemen,” rich industrialists in Russia’s textile capital, Ivanovo, often hired him to serve tables at family weddings and parties. They paid very well. The easy money and constant drinking at weddings turned Nechaev’s father into an alcoholic.
Sergei Nechaev came to Moscow to attend the university. But something made him change his mind, and instead he moved to St. Petersburg and passed the exam to become a village schoolteacher. The atheist started teaching catechism in a small school.
He started going to the university as an auditor. From his first day there, he spoke of the inevitability of the revolution. The young religion teacher dreamed of serving it. Skinny, nervous, nail-biting, the youth attended all student gatherings. Like every young radical, he adored Chernyshevsky’s fictional hero, Rakhmetov. Nechaev had no property, and he slept in friends’ apartments, often on the floor. “Every one of us had something, he had nothing. He had only one idea, one passion—the revolution,” recounted one of his female adherents. His passion was accompanied by morbid hatred for life as it was.
Even back then he proclaimed the right of the revolutionary to use any means—blackmail, murder, lies, and constant provocation. Everything that Ishutin used to say before losing his mind in prison, Nechaev now repeated. He accepted the baton of Russian Jacobinism from Ishutin.
“The government does not scorn anything in its struggle with revolutionaries, particularly their Jesuitical methods of provocation, and what about us? It’s Jesuitism that we’ve lacked until now!” he said.
Provocation and lies became his companions, along with the idea of regicide on a mass scale. When asked which of the royal family should be killed, he laughed and replied, the whole ektinya (the prayer for the tsar’s family listing all the members). Young Ulyanov-Lenin would later be particularly fond of this phrase, and able to execute Nechaev’s dream.
Nechaev had furious energy and scary charisma. From the very beginning to the very end, he was surrounded by people ready to serve him unquestioningly. There were real leaders among them.
In 1868 he met a well-known radical, the writer Petr Tkachev. The son of a wealthy landowner, brilliantly educated, a follower of Blanqui and Machiavelli, Tkachev had served time in tsarist prisons but continued to dream of the revolution that would destroy his own class. This short and shy young man, slender and easily embarrassed, with a smiling cupid’s face, resembled a pretty girl (“pretty maiden” is what his friends called him). He hailed a centralized party dictatorship that would seize power and crush resistance through terror.
No, not humility, not love
Will save us from our shackles.
Now we need the axe,
We need the knife.
That was the pretty maiden’s poetry. Released yet again from the fortress, the pretty maiden, smiling shyly, told his astonished sister his new discovery: “Only people under twenty-five are capable of self-sacrifice, and therefore everyone over that age should be killed for the good of society.”
When asked how many would have to be killed in the revolution, he replied with the same shy smile, “We should be thinking about how many can be left.”
But when they met, the not very educated and unknown teacher Nechaev absolutely dominated the celebrated intellectual Tkachev, who subsequently never forgave him for it.
A new wave of student unrest exploded in the capital in 1868–69. It began at the Medical-Surgical Academy, which was under the auspices of the military ministry. Dmitri Milyutin, the minister of war, was one of the last remaining liberals in the government. Ignoring the ban of Minister of Education Dmitri Tolstoy, he permitted the students to have their own mutual aid credit union and to have meetings. This destroyed him. At their first meetings, the students announced that they didn’t like being part of the military ministry because “discipline is too harsh at the academy.” The rallies began. The academy was shut down, but the unrest moved to St. Petersburg University and from there to the Technological Institute. Those students didn’t like not having credit unions and the right to meetings. They demanded an end “to all confining and humiliating supervision from the university.”
The nervous little man with terrifying eyes, Nechaev, was behind the turmoil in St. Petersburg. He happily rushed from house to house, from club to club, from meeting to meeting. He frightened student leaders and instigated rebellion. Yet for all his activity, the police did not touch him. Some people began to wonder whether he was a provocateur. He was not a provocateur, but he obviously suited the needs of someone in the police, who could use Nechaev as a reason for more power and funding.
Nechaev actually wanted to be arrested. It was only after serving time that he could wield authority as a revolutionary leader. Fortune smiled upon him: He was called in for questioning. He went off, certain that he would be arrested. Soon afterward, the young revolutionary Vera Zasulich received an amazing letter.
The anonymous sender wrote: “When I was walking on Vasilyevsky Island today, I saw a carriage transporting prisoners. A hand reached out and threw a note from the window. A bit later I heard the following words: ‘If you are a student, deliver this to the address indicated.’ I am a student and consider it my duty to execute the request. Destroy my letter.” There was an enclosed note in Nechaev’s handwriting, asking Zasulich to inform their friends that he was arrested and being held in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.
A rumor followed that he had managed the incredible and escaped from the fortress and was headed for the West. He quickly became famous.
In fact, he had not been arrested. He was released the same day as his interrogation. He made up the story of his arrest and escape. He hid in his sister’s apartment while the rumors traveled through student circles.
The invented arrest was only the first step of his daring plan. Nechaev intended to start a national mutiny and burn Russia in the flames of rebellion. For that, he needed a powerful organization and money. He headed for Europe to find them.
On March 4, 1869, Nechaev illegally crossed the Russian border and made his way to Geneva. Back in Russia he had calculated who the most likely candidate was to become his faithful benefactor in the West. Naturally, it was the bloody dreamer and gentle, trusting man, Mikhail Bakunin.
Nachev went to see him, and that evening a sweet mirage arose in Bakunin’s Geneva dwelling. Nechaev told the old revolutionary about his incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where Bakunin had been imprisoned, and about his “escape.” Then he revealed to Bakunin that a very secret and powerful community existed in Russia. A network of secret circles had spread throughout the empire. The All-Russian Committee was at the head of the revolutionary network and controlled the mighty revolutionary forces. The committee consisted of Nechaev and other determined young people. They lacked serious experience in the political struggle, and they lacked funds. That’s why his comrades had sent him to Geneva, to see Bakunin and Herzen.
Bakunin was happy; his prophecy, which Marx mocked, seemed true, that a revolutionary fire was coming to Russia. His life had not been wasted. Nechaev’s ideas of the right to lie, to murder, and to create provocations in the name of the revolution intoxicated kindly Bakunin. Here was a true Jacobin. Bakunin fell in love with that uneducated, cruel Marat, just as later the intellectual Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would be enthralled by the wild revolutionary Dzhugashvili, known to history as Stalin.
Bakunin elatedly recommended “Tiger Cub” (as he tenderly called Nechaev) to the main figure of the Russian émigré community, Herzen, and then to Marx himself. The noble Herzen had an instinctual aversion to the Tiger Cub. “He’s fibbing,” Herzen said fastidiously of Nechaev’s tales. “I do not believe in the seriousness of people who prefer violence and crude force over development and deals…. We need apostles before swashbuckling sapper officers of destruction. Apostles who preach not only to their own, but to the foe. Preaching to the enemy is a great act of love,” wrote Herzen wisely.
Hating everyone who did not submit to him, Nechaev got his revenge on Herzen, by seducing his beloved daughter.
Marx did not believe the Tiger Cub, either. But in fact, Nechaev was fibbing only in part. There was no organization, but he had come to Europe in order to return with money and recommendations and to create it. He told the truth about his only dream and goal in life.
Bakunin sensed this and wrote, “He is one of those young fanatics who know no doubts, who fear nothing. They are believers without God, heroes without rhetoric.”
With Nechaev, Bakunin wrote incendiary proclamations addressed to the new revolutionary Russia. The proclamations, Bakunin’s letters, and revolutionary literature were sent into Russia to addresses Nechaev gave him. Those banned parcels were to be received throughout the European part of Russia.
Naturally, they were intercepted by the police. In St. Petersburg alone, letters addressed to 380 young people were seized. Bakunin had been fooled. Nechaev knew that the mail would be intercepted; in fact, he sent it so that all those recipients would end up in prison.
He had explained it very clearly back in Russia in a speech: “In the first two years, students rebel gleefully and enthusiastically. Then they get caught up in their studies, and by the fourth or fifth year, you see that yesterday’s rebel is house-trained, and upon graduation from university or academy, yesterday’s fighters for the people are turned into completely reliable physicians, teachers, and other officials. They become paterfamiliases. And looking at one of them, it is hard to believe that he is the same person who just three or four years ago had spoken with such fire about the suffering of the people, who thirsted for exploits and seemed ready to die for the people! Instead of a revolutionary fighter we see spineless scum. Very soon many of them turn into prosecutors, judges, investigators and together with the government they start to stifle the very people for whom they had intended to give their lives. What should be done? Here I have only one hope, but a very strong one, in the government. Do you know what I expect from it? That it put away more people, that students be kicked out of universities forever, sent into exile, knocked out of their usual rut, stunned by persecution, cruelty, injustice, and stupidity. Only that will forge their hatred for the vile government and the society that looks on indifferently at the brutality of the regime.”
His plan was to use the Third Department to forge future revolutionaries, to train cadres for the future militant party he dreamed of creating in Russia. For that party, a work was written in Geneva that all Russian revolutionaries damned publicly but followed in secret. It is one of the few truly revolutionary works. Historians still argue about the authorship, whether Bakunin or Nechaev wrote it, since there are elements of each man’s style and thought. Most likely, it was written by both in the month of their passionate friendship.
Catechism for the Revolutionary is the title of this revolutionary bible filled with demonic poetry. “The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no work, no feelings, no ties, no property, not even a name. Everything is subsumed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—revolution…. He has torn all ties with the general order, with the educated world, and with common morality…. He is for anything that promotes the triumph of revolution. Anything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.
“All tender feelings of family, friendship, love, gratitude, and even honor must be squashed in him by the sole passion for revolutionary work. For him there is only one solace, reward, and satisfaction—the success of the revolution. Day and night, he must have only one thought, one goal—ruthless destruction. Moving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward that goal, he must be prepared to perish himself and to kill with his own hands everything that is an obstacle…. The revolutionary organization must compile a list of people to be destroyed…first of all they must destroy people particularly harmful for the revolutionary organization.
“The revolutionary must lure people with money and influence into his nets and make them his slaves…. As for liberals, the revolutionary must pretend to follow them blindly while actually getting them in his power, mastering their secrets and compromising them so that there is no way back for them.”
Nechaev’s favorite refrain repeats throughout the work: “Our work is destruction, terrible, complete, pervasive, and ruthless.” Bakunin’s favorite thought is repeated as well: “We must join with the swashbuckling robber world, the true and only revolutionary in Russia.”
In The Rebel, Albert Camus wrote, “He elevated revolutionary expediency to the level of absolute good which would force all considerations of morality to retreat. In the interests of the revolution, for the definition of which he considered himself sole judge, any action was justified, any crime was legal, no matter how disgusting.”
The Catechism laid out the principles for creating a small organization that could take over a country. This was the organization Nechaev would start upon his return to Russia. Its foundation was the truly Russian principle of subordination, subordination, and more subordination—unquestioning obedience. The obedience that was in the blood of the people, inculcated over the millennia, would guarantee this subordination and ruthless discipline.
The organization would have revolutionaries of the first and second rank. The first rank could use the second rank as its capital to be spent on the needs of the revolution. If a revolutionary of the first rank decided to sacrifice the freedom or even the life of a revolutionary of the second rank, that was his right.
The time had come. The Tiger Cub announced he had to go back to Russia. Under Bakunin’s pressure, Herzen gave Nechaev money from a special revolutionary fund (the money had been given to Herzen to spend at his discretion by Bakhmetyev, a mad Russian landowner who went off to create a commune in the Azores).
Before leaving, Nechaev asked Bakunin to give him a letter of authorization from the nonexistent European Revolutionary Alliance. He explained that the idea of joining the mysterious European organization would push the Russian revolutionaries to greater levels of action. Bakunin, who would soon after abuse Nechaev for his shameless lies, readily acceded to this one. Nechaev was authorized as a “Plenipotentiary Representative of the Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance.” The mandate signed by Bakunin had a very impressive seal, with two crossed menacing axes.
In August 1869 the “plenipotentiary” returned to Russia and went to Moscow. At the Peter Agricultural Academy, where most of the students were trusting provincials, the awesome plenipotentiary created his organization. At a meeting of the candidates he had selected, Nechaev explained to the vacillating students that there was no going back. They were now part of the mighty European Revolutionary Alliance. Their large organization consisted of “fighting fives,” which would know nothing about each other (as demanded by the alliance). Only he, as their leader and member of the alliance’s mighty Central Committee, would know them all.
Now the members of the groups of five began to imagine others everywhere, which made them bold. That is how Nechaev created a secret society with the promising name of People’s Reprisal. He demanded absolute, blind obedience. He made them spy on one another. They all prepared for the uprising that would sweep away the existing regime. It was set for February 19, 1870, the ninth anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs.
Very quickly, Nechaev’s speeches and methods grew repulsive to one of the most talented members of the organization. He was an academy student with the amusing name Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov. Ivanov spoke out openly against Nechaev, casting doubt on the existence of the foreign Central Committee.
Nechaev saw this as an opportunity. He could show the members of the five what insubordinates could expect as punishment. He also needed to bind them in blood. He called a meeting and explained that Ivanov was “muddying the waters” because he intended to renounce them. “The time has come to prove to the Central Committee and to ourselves that we can be ruthless revolutionaries, bringing into practice what is written in the Catechism, that the blood of impure revolutionaries binds the organization.”
In the name of the committee, Nechaev ordered the “liquidation of Ivanov.” Sensing their hesitation and confusion, Nechaev reminded them that “anyone disobeying the decision of the European Committee must understand what that threatens him with.” Subjugated by his burning, hypnotic eyes, the students agreed.
The academy was located in the mansion of Count Razumovsky, nephew of the lover of Empress Elizabeth. The large grounds, preserved to this day, had ponds and an old grotto.
On the night of November 20, 1869, the wretched Ivanov was lured to the grotto. Members of the militant five attacked. The student Kuznetsov knocked Ivanov to the ground. The scrawny Nechaev and two others attacked him. Nechaev sat on Ivanov’s chest and choked him. Ivanov had stopped screaming, but he was still moving. Then Nechaev took out a revolver and put a bullet through Ivanov’s head. They drowned the body in a pond.
The killers were nervous, and they didn’t dispose of the body successfully. It floated up soon afterward, and an investigation was begun. Eighty-four “Nechaevites” were tried. Nechaev had worked hard, and had created an organization. But the work of the People’s Reprisal was limited to the murderous attack against one unarmed student.
Dostoevsky learned about this incident from the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News). He greedily read the Russian press while abroad. Not long before the killing, Anya’s brother came to see them in Dresden. He was a student at the Peter Agricultural Academy, and was a friend of the murdered Ivanov. Dostoevsky was stunned—the past had been resurrected. A former member of the Petrashevsky circle, he remembered the secret society, the bloodthirsty talk of the handsome Nikolai Speshnev, and the power that “Mephistopheles” had over him.
Dostoevsky wrote in horror, “No, I could never have become a Nechaev, but I can’t promise that I might not have become a Nechaevite in the days of my youth.” He was pursued by that vision of himself among killers, believing a devil. He began a new novel. It would be called The Devils.
While the members of Nechaev’s organization, the simple provincials he had turned into zombies, were on trial, Nechaev fled from Moscow to St. Petersburg. There he got a passport and in December 1869 he crossed the border, leaving his arrested comrades to perish. Apparently, according to his Catechism, they had been merely second-rate revolutionaries.
According to Nechaev, when Bakunin learned he was back, he jumped for joy “such that he almost cracked the ceiling with his old head.” But the joy did not last, because Bakunin learned the truth. He heard it from Petr Lavrov, another person who played a great role in the fate of Russia.
Lavrov was a tsarist colonel, professor of mathematics, and editor of the Encyclopedic Dictionary. He had been court-martialed for following “the dangerous direction of Chernyshevsky.” He was exiled from St. Petersburg and then escaped abroad. Lavrov lived in Paris, went through the Paris Commune, and befriended the communards. After the fall of the commune, he hurried to London, where, naturally, he met Marx and joined the International.
He told Bakunin and the other émigrés the truth about Nechaev. Bakunin learned that there was no underground organization covering all of Russia, only an organization that had killed one student. He also heard about the scar on Nechaev’s hand, the shameful mark made by the teeth of the struggling unarmed student, shot by the Tiger Cub.
Bakunin was stunned. He wrote to Nechaev, “Believing in you unconditionally while you were deceiving me systematically, made me a complete fool—this is bitter and shameful for a man of my experience and my age, and even worse I have ruined my position in the Russian and international cause.” Still, knowing the worst, Bakunin continued to love him. Yes, he lied, but it had been in the name of the revolution. As Lenin said, “You don’t make revolution in white gloves.” Yes, Nechaev had murdered, but he was dedicated to the revolution more than anyone. So Bakunin wrote, “You are a passionately devoted man; there are few like you; that is your power, your glory, your right…. If you change your methods, I would like to remain not only connected to you but to join you even more closely and strongly.”
Learning that the Russian government had demanded Nechaev’s extradition on criminal charges, Bakunin tried to get support from the émigrés for Nechaev. “The most important business at this moment is to preserve our lost and confused friend. Hating everyone, he remains a valuable person, and there are few valuable people in the world.”
The “valuable person,” finding himself without money, decided to turn to expropriation, robbing the bourgeoisie on the high road, that is, to become a bandit. Russian agents came to Geneva and found him. He was arrested in a small café and brought back to Russia in handcuffs.
Bakunin wrote, “I am deeply sorry for him. No one has ever done me as much intentional harm as he has. But I still pity him…. His outward behavior was disgusting enough, but his inner ‘I’ was not dirty…. An inner voice tells me that Nechaev, who is lost for the ages and certainly knows that he is lost…will now be calling from the abyss in which he now finds himself, reviled and despised, but not at all vile or ordinary, with all his primitive energy and valor. He will perish like a hero and will not betray anyone or anything. That is my conviction. We will see whether I am right.”
Bakunin was right. The trial was open to the public, and people were appalled by the details that emerged. Nechaev was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor, but Alexander crossed out the sentence, and wrote instead: “the fortress forever,” underlining “forever.”
The story Nechaev had made up about himself was now reality. He was in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, in the most terrible part, the Alexeyevsky ravelin, where Bakunin had once served his time. He would rot in his cell.
First he was given a civil execution. When he was moved to the square, he shouted furiously from the cart: “There will be a guillotine here soon…. Here all those gentlemen who brought me here will lose their heads.” And he laughed triumphantly. “I’ll bet your hearts are beating! Just wait two or three years, you’ll all be here! All! All!”
He was tied to the pillar and he continued to shout: “Long live liberty! Long live the free Russian people!” They took him to his cell. The Nechaev story seemed over “forever.”
Dostoevsky published The Devils in 1873, when he had returned to Russia. In explaining the novel, Dostoevsky wrote that The Devils was not specifically about the Nechaev case, but much wider. “My view is that these phenomena are not random, not isolated, and therefore my novel does not have copied events or copied persons.”
The Devils was a warning. The trouble sown in a single city by a pathetic group of five conspirators could turn up on a greater scale and affect all of Russia. The “pure of heart” who become tempted by the Nechaev devils pose a great threat. The ideas of universal equality (the eternal Russian dream) as interpreted by devils will end in universal slavery and could become Russia’s terrible future. He saw apocalyptic visions.
Dostoevsky’s novel elicited a storm of protest. The educated reading public was primarily liberal, and it saw the Nechaev case as an exception, a tragic episode. The Devils was universally panned. “The Nechaev case is a monster to such a degree that it cannot serve as a theme for a novel,” wrote one of the main critics, Nikolai Mikhailovsky. The novel marks a lapse in the author’s talent; it is a horrible caricature and slander on revolutionary youth. Russia rejected The Devils.
Dostoevsky himself, as he completed the novel, tried to persuade himself that the Nechaev case had been a horrible but now finished episode in the life of young Russia. After Nechaev’s sentencing and incarceration, the writer tried to believe that it was the end. The devil was captured, shackled, and was gone “forever.” This is why he chose as epigraph to the novel the biblical parable of the devils who on the command of Jesus fled a man they had possessed and settled into pigs. Dostoevsky wrote in a letter to the poet Maikov, “The devils have left the Russian man and went into a herd of pigs, that is, the Nechaevs, the Serno-Solovyoviches, and so on. They have drowned or will drown, probably, while the healed man whom the devils have left sits at the feet of Jesus. That is as it should be.”
But that is not how it was. The great prophet was mistaken. Everything would happen in exactly the opposite way—as he had predicted in the novel rather than in the epigraph. The future history of the Russian revolutionary movement would be imbued with Nechaevism. A few years would pass and the indignant readers of The Devils would see Russian terror born of the “pure of heart.”
The twentieth century would belong to the devil Nechaev, and the victory of Bolshevism would be his victory. In Bolshevik Russia, people were appalled when they read The Devils and the monologue of the book’s hero, Petr Verkhovensky (Nechaev), on the society he would create after the revolution: “Every member of society looks after the other and must inform on them. All are slaves and are equal in their slavery…. First of all, the level of education, science, and talent is lowered. A high level of science and talent can be achieved only by people with higher abilities, and we don’t need higher abilities! People with higher abilities have always seized power and were despots…. They are cast out or executed. Cicero’s tongue is cut out, Copernicus’s eyes are gouged out, and Shakespeare is stoned to death.”
The Bolsheviks implemented it all: Nikolai Bukharin, the main Bolshevik theoretician, called for “organized reduction of culture”; celebrated philosophers were forced to leave the country; there was equality in slavery; and universal informing was enforced. In the 1920s, a popular joke in Russia said that the Bolsheviks erected a monument to Dostoevsky with a plaque reading: “To Fedor Dostoevsky from the Grateful Devils.”
For a period, young Russians at home and abroad turned away from Nechaev, and took up different and astounding ideas. The serfs were free after 1861, but capitalism, so hated by Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov, Bakunin, and other Russian radicals, did not come to agriculture. The freed serf did not have the right to sell his land. All land was communal property, held by the obshchina, an ancient form of land owning destroyed in Western Europe. It remained in Russia: The land in Russian villages was owned by the “society,” obshchestvo, that is, by all the peasants together. All decisions were made collectively. Collective property, collective decisions: In this primitive collectivism Russian radicals saw embryonic socialism. These socialist instincts would allow Russia to bypass heartless capitalism and move directly into socialism, they hoped. All that was needed was to revolutionize the illiterate Russian muzhik, the peasant, awaken his consciousness, and then lead Russia to socialism.
This required agitators, the new apostles. Herzen’s magazine, The Bell, called “To the people! Be with the people!” The response was vast. Petr Lavrov wrote, “Every comfort in life that I use…is bought with the blood, suffering, and labor of millions…. Every ‘developed person,’ every ‘critically thinking personality’ must return the debt and take up enlightening the people and awakening them, so that the Russian people will be able to recognize their slavery, refuse to live in that slavery, and prepare themselves for a conscious rebellion against such a life.”
The young Russians who had been sent abroad picked up the idea. The Christian mission of serving the needy and returning its debt to the people captivated youth much more than the ideas of Bakunin and Marx.
The Russian government, in the meantime, worried by information on the influence of radical ideas on Russian youths abroad, ordered all students in the West to return to Russia. The hazardous boomerang sent to the West now came back. The young radicals were returning with the bizarre idea of going out to the people, to be with them and awaken them.