Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  “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 y
outh 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.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Lonely Palace Cliff

  On September 1, 1870, Emperor Napoleon III and his large army suffered a defeat at Sedan and surrendered to Bismarck’s Prussian forces. Another Napoleon was brought down. Alexander II could have called it retribution and said that his father had been avenged. The German Empire was recognized in the Mirror Gallery of Versailles. Uncle Wilhelm was now emperor of Germany.

  Alexander and Gorchakov had prepared for this outcome. Since the victor of the Crimean War no longer existed, the Treaty of Paris could be declared null and void. Gorchakov sent a circular about this to the Russian ambassadors.

  England called this a violation of international agreements, but Russia was supported by the new superpower, the German Empire. Russia and England signed the Treaty of London, which rescinded the humiliating limitations on the Black Sea. Alexander had gotten back Russia’s main sea, and without bloodshed. He was exultant and Gorchakov was made a Serene Prince.

  The newspapers praised only Gorchakov. It had become unfashionable to praise the tsar, for he had become unpopular.

  Alexander seemed oblivious, the years passing by as they do for fifty-year-olds. While the youth prepared for an unprecedented movement, with society in its usual ferment, the tsar lived tranquilly in his palace redoubt. Medieval ceremonies continued, with solemn big and small entrances by the tsar, endless celebrations of birthdays and shared saint’s days, anniversaries of the founding of regiments, important dates in the life of the tsar and his parents, and numerous church feast days. Basically, they celebrated everything, even the first time the enemy bombed Sevastopol, “although there wouldn’t seem to be anything to celebrate” (Nikolai Milyutin).