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 becam
e 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 abou
t 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.
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