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The land of the knout and the pogrom. Tsarist Russia – patriarchal, sumptuous, barbaric – buttressed ideologically by the Orthodox Church (with its genetic anti-Semitism) and its own self-belief, defended militarily by stiff-necked braggadocio and geometric garrison towns, dominated economically by huge estates and a nobility dependent on the goodwill of a savagely oppressed peasantry, had long avoided both the revolutionary upheavals that had transformed England, Holland and France as well as the radical structural reforms from above that later united Germany. Because of this, Russia was rarely free from a dissent that sometimes emerged in the highest places. And the lowest. Russian absolutism created its opposites.

Later, over the course of the long nineteenth century, an oppositional intelligentsia (the word itself of Russian origin) emerged and continuously provided the country with liberal, Populist, anarcho-terrorist, pacifist, nationalist, socialist and Marxist thinkers who became a vital force in the history of Europe. It was a century that had given birth in Western Europe, Japan and North America to an accelerated industrial capitalism and its offshoot, imperialism. In normal conditions, there would be a reconciliation with the rising bourgeoisie whereby the latter would help to individualise the intelligentsia and in return would be provided with the bare necessities of civilised discourse. In Russia, however, the process was explosively uneven.

The outcome for the tsarist empire was dramatic: three revolutions – January 1905, February 1917 and October 1917 – within the first two decades of the twentieth century. Just as defeat in the Crimean War had pushed the tsar towards reforms, so the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 helped pave the way for what Lenin described as the dress rehearsal of 1905. The ‘Great’ War of 1914–18 made February 1917 inevitable. Lenin ensured the success of October.

An idealized depiction of serfs after the

Emancipation. In fact conditions remained grim.

The apex of the system was the court. The tsar, whether in Moscow or St Petersburg, exercised control of virtually every aspect of life. He was assisted by a despised bureaucracy, membership in which often altered class locations by opening the gates to the lowest levels of the nobility. This upward mobility, designed to ensure stability, occasionally had the opposite effect. Everything was relative. The peasants and, later, the intelligentsia wondered whether the next ruler would be a good or a bad tsar.

In 1796, understandably panicked by the tumbrils in Paris, Catherine’s grandson and tsarevitch Grand Duke Alexander confessed to his French tutor ‘that he hated despotism everywhere … that he loved liberty … that he had taken the greatest interest in the French revolution; that while condemning its terrible mistakes, he hoped the Republic would succeed and would be glad if it did.’ The French Revolution was never too far from the thoughts of rulers and ruled in Russia.

A few years later Alexander conspired in a palace coup that did away with his father Paul I and dismantled some of the more odious structures of his reign. Alexander ordered the removal of gallows from public squares, authorised the import of foreign books and ended the state monopoly on the establishment of printing presses. He lived to regret the latter. Nothing fundamental changed. Despotism was inbred. The autocracy needed it to survive. For a while, however, Alexander was the best example of the ‘good tsar’ as far as many of his subjects were concerned.

Ever since the legal code of 1649 – a time when England was already engulfed in a bourgeois revolution – forbade peasants from leaving the land without authorisation, serfdom had gradually become entrenched in the absolutist system. Overnight, millions of people became tied to the land. This Russian form of servitude adversely affected the country on many levels, cutting it off from developments in Western Europe and delaying capitalism and modernisation till the twentieth century. When an 1861 imperial proclamation ended legal bondage, it was almost time to mark the centenary of the French Revolution.

Unlike the African slaves in North and South America or the West Indies, the Russian serfs lived in their own villages and were responsible for reproduction and the sharing of communal lands. In many other ways, however, their suffering was not dissimilar to that of slaves elsewhere. Contemporary historians argue that the serfs, unlike slaves, had 153 holidays a year, but leaving aside Easter, Christmas and numerous saint days, this probably had much more to do with the inclement Russian winters than a more benign dispensation on the part of their landlords. In 1800, for instance, the price of a serf fluctuated depending on the market and natural calamities but never rose higher than that of a pedigree dog, especially one imported from France or Germany. Young women were sold in the marketplace alongside horses, cows and used carriages. Advertisements such as the following in Moscow were common elsewhere in the country: ‘For sale at Pantaleimon’s, opposite the meat market: a girl of thirty and a young horse.’ Liveried serfs worked in the households of rich families in huge numbers: the Sheremetievs had 300 house-serfs; the Stroganoffs, 600; the Razumovskys, 900. A similar pattern was repeated on different scales throughout the country. While some of the domestic serfs (the ‘house niggers’, in Malcolm X’s memorable description of their Afro-American counterparts) shared the prejudices of their masters, many others imbibed a deep sense of bitterness and hatred. Serf memoirs published in the literary press after the abolition of legal bondage contain numerous details concerning the treatments to which they were regularly subjected. Sexual oppression against women and children was common. When the time came to rebel, serfs’ congealed anger did not remain hidden. Class fought against class. And the serfs’ numbers were huge. The 1825 census revealed that out of a total population of 49 million, a large majority – 36 million – were serfs. Anti-Semitism and pogroms were rife, reaching fever pitch when the autocracy felt threatened by serf unrest.

The roll-call of significant events in Russian history includes two giant jacqueries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by a semi-insurrection launched by radical army officers in St Petersburg in December 1825. These three events became deeply embedded in the historical memory of the entire country, their imprint reaching far beyond the more radical segments of the population. Each side of the social divide learnt its own lesson: the revolts were warnings of the destructive nature of the working class, or examples of their liberatory potential. Russian backwardness, as symbolised by the serf economy, had produced its own variant of upheavals. These did not, as in England and France, lead to full-blown revolution, but they established a pattern and strongly influenced Populist and anarcho-terrorist groups, especially the secret societies, that organised and carried out acts of terror against tsars, dukes, generals and senior bureaucrats in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. These were the early expressions of Russian Marxism that slowly developed into the Emancipation of Labour group and later the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, with its Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) factions.

The peasant revolts grew out of a long tradition of rural discontent starting after the final victory over the Tatars in the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo and the birth of a Russia-wide tsarist autocracy. As the new absolutism grew in size and scale, it was accompanied by small peasant outbreaks, usually confined to clusters of small villages and bands of déclassé Tatars and their dependents that included ethnic Russians. All people of Mongol origin – Tatars, Kirghiz, Kalmuks – were treated as an inferior race and deprived of rights, and could be legally forced into serfdom by members of the Russian nobility, some of whom exercised this privilege. More popular with merchants was the legalised slave trade, formally prohibited only in 1828, that sanctioned the sale of children of Mongol origin throughout the empire and, no doubt, abroad. These conditions were instrumental in inciting the two large-scale rebellions that would make such a strong impression on peasants’ political consciousness.

1918: Lenin dedicates a statue honouring

Stenka Razin.

The insurrections were led by the Don Cossacks: Stepan (Stenka) Razin (1667–71) and, a century later, Emilian Pugachev (1773–75), who took on Catherine II. The Cossack core of both insurrectionary groups rapidly expanded and embraced discontents of every sort. Both were ultimately defeated. Interestingly, both Razin and Pugachev had been born in the same South Russian village of Zimoyevskaya. Of the two, Razin was showier and more adventurous, a Cossack Robin Hood much given to tormenting and mocking his captives and extending his adventures to neighbouring Persia. Pugachev was more politically astute, pretending to be a popular deposed prince to whom he bore a resemblance. Mass movements in those days, not only in Russia, flourished on such myths. Pugachev took Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, today Volgograd), laid unsuccessful siege to Simbirsk (where Lenin was born), claimed to be defending a good tsar against the bad boyars and won the support of the Cossack krug, a representative though unelected assembly, for a march to the North. This triggered a wave of peasant uprisings en route, greatly enlarging the size of the army. After four years on the road and a betrayal by Cossack elders loyal to the tsar, Pugachev was captured and publicly decapitated in Moscow’s Red Square. Some months later, his brother and elderly parents were eliminated in similar fashion. Punishing families to prevent revenge killings in the future is an old tradition.

The Volga rebellions typified the revolutionary traditions of the Russian peasantry, and radical poets and minstrels would glorify them for centuries to come. For all that the most popular jacqueries (as in China and India) linked themselves to a national history of resistance, they rarely transformed the living conditions of the people, offering temporary respite at best. Razin, for instance, pledged to ‘wipe out the boyars and the nobles’, but his efforts failed at a time when Russian cities were strongholds of reactionary sentiment, dominated by nobles and their retainers, state bureaucrats of every kind and the army. ‘That is why’, wrote Trotsky, ‘after each of these grandiose movements … the Volga washed the bloodstains into the Caspian Sea, and the tsar’s and landlord’s oppression weighed heavier than ever.’¹ Few decades that followed were unaccompanied by localised peasant risings.

The 1825 Decembrist uprising was the first major sign of urban discontent, a military revolt whose most radical leader, Pavel Pestel, was hugely influenced by the Jacobins and the French Revolution: Rousseau and Robespierre, Babeuf and Buonarotti. The ideological links between revolutionary Paris and the most radical sections of the Russian intelligentsia lasted for over a century following the Decembrist defeat; references to 1789, 1793 and 1815 are ubiquitous in the texts of Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky and others. The impact of the December rebellion was electric. It enlarged the size of a small but active radical intelligentsia based in universities and literary circles. Pushkin, who had close friends among the Decembrist plotters, originally sent the eponymous hero of Eugene Onegin, badly disappointed in love, to join the Decembrists. Circumstances, however, compelled Pushkin to burn some of his verses and suppress others. This description of the vengeful tsar survived and was included in later editions:

A ruler, timorous and wily,

A balding fop, of toil a foe,

Minion of Fame by chance entirely,

Reigned over us those years ago.

We knew him not at all so regal,

When cooks, who were not ours, were sent

To pluck our double-headed eagle,

Where Bonaparte had pitched his tent.

The Decembrist mutiny was savagely crushed. Executions and imprisonment followed. Pushkin was distraught, but helpless. He was deeply touched when Maria Volkonskaya, a young woman he had known (possibly in the biblical sense) some years before in Tashkent, ignored the entreaties of her noble family and insisted on joining her imprisoned Decembrist husband, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, in Siberia. Pushkin knew she did not love Volkonsky, who was twice her age, but that only made her melancholic and courageous decision even more impressive in his eyes. It was, he reflected, the purest form of solidarity. He composed ‘Message to Siberia’ for Maria and, a week after her departure, pressed it into the hands of the wife of another Decembrist who was leaving Moscow to join her husband in internal exile:

Deep in the Siberian mine

Keep your patience proud

The bitter toil shall not be lost,

The rebel thought unbowed …

The heavy-hanging chains will fall,

And walls will crumble at a word,

And freedom greet you in the light,

And brothers give you back the sword.²

Rural unrest and urban dissidence made reform inevitable. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, while retaining the other structures of absolutism, abolished serfdom. A wave of joy engulfed the countryside, till the dark side of the ruling began to sink in: the former serfs were burdened with redemption payments to their former masters, for the land they had obtained after abolition as well as the lands they had worked for centuries. The redemption payments could not be enforced, however, and the peasants’ spirits rose once again. The landlords were compelled to liquidate properties, marry into merchant families and invest in railways and factories in order to stay financially solvent, aiding the development of capitalism in Russia. The cities grew bolder and richer. Many began to ask why the creators of serfdom had not been abolished as well and, as is often the case, the reform led to more radical demands. In the countryside itself, half the peasants had never owned land as individuals, only as a village collective. Consequently, many peasants had little incentive to improve the land and became poorer as time went by. Simultaneously, social differentiation in the countryside began to sharpen, producing a group of wealthier peasants (the kulaks).

The end of serfdom was not accompanied by similar political reforms. Apart from a slight improvement on the judicial level, there was, uniquely for a European power approaching the twentieth century, no form of popular representation whatsoever. The tsar was the supreme ruler, appointing and dismissing ministers at will and wielding the power of life and death. Most courtiers appeared genetically sycophantic. A cumbersome and inert state bureaucracy carried out the instructions of the tsar. Police officers saw themselves as servants of power, not justice. Where was the opposition? What was the people’s will?

In 1860 the intelligentsia – an educated elite unconnected with the royal court – was infinitesimal, numbering between 20,000 and 25,000 in a largely peasant population of 60 million people. This social stratum began to regard itself as the only possible opposition to the autocracy. Its education, its ideals, its desire to do good, its passion for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution all created the basis for its politics in the decades that lay ahead. Many believed that the only way out was via ‘the propaganda of the deed’. Terrorism was carried out by individuals or tiny groups of conspirators, but support for it was much broader. In 1866, the first attempt on Alexander II’s life failed. The would-be-assassin, Karakazov, was in police custody when the tsar appeared. The conversation was brief but to the point.

‘Why did you shoot at me?’

‘Because’, responded an unabashed Karakazov, ‘you promised the peasants freedom and you deceived them.’

Lenin was born four years later in 1870. His generation grew up at a time when tsarist Russia was saturated with anarchist and radical ideas; women’s emancipation and an end to patriarchy (detested parental control of young women) were frequently discussed within intellectual circles, and terrorist acts against the powerful were viewed with awe and sympathy. Much of this was a consequence of the absolutist political structures, which provided the Russian segment of the newly developing Social Democratic movement with its unique characteristics. But there were other and larger fish in the pond.

The late nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of radical anarchism on virtually every continent. For almost half a century prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the dominant tendency on the radical left in Europe and elsewhere was anarchism rather than Marxism or socialism. Prince Kropotkin and Enrico Malatesta were more popular than Marx and Engels. Activists were far more drawn to the direct-action philosophy preached by Bakunin and Nechaev; the principles of The Revolutionary Catechism were viewed by many radicals as much more attractive than the message of The Communist Manifesto. Targeted assassinations of tsars and princes, presidents and prime ministers cheerfully carried out by individuals or small groups were considered by young activists of the period to be far more glamorous and effective than building a radical political party.

Primitive ‘anarchism’ in rural Russia had long predated any theorist in the country or elsewhere. Individual responses to institutionalised brutality were not uncommon. It was not the big landlords who were usually the targets, but their intermediaries. Bakunin, Kropotkin and Nechaev arrived much later. The first two of this remarkable triumvirate imbibed anarchism during long years of exile. Both came from the nobility. Prince Kropotkin was born two decades before the abolition of serfdom and, in his wonderful Memoirs of a Revolutionist, describes vividly how his close and warm relations with the serfs belonging to his family opened his eyes to Russian realities and, much later, his mind to radical anarcho-Populist ideas. Kropotkin was descended from the princes of Smolensk and the house of Rurik that ruled Muscovy before the Romanovs. His father was one of the favourite generals of Nicholas I; Kropotkin’s precociousness as a child attracted the tsar’s attention at a royal gathering. Nicholas I ordered that Prince Kropotkin be enlisted in the Corps of Pages, the most exclusive military academy in the empire.

Kropotkin did well and was soon appointed the personal page of the new tsar Alexander II. When the latter issued the historic declaration that emancipated the serfs, Kropotkin’s fondness for his new master turned to hero-worship. But not for long. His doubts began to emerge as soon as it became clear that members of the landed nobility were utilising the serfs’ freedom to bleed them dry. As the mist clouding Kropotkin’s political eyesight cleared, he began to notice the seamier aspects of court life: the endless intrigues, the jostling for power, the nauseating sycophancy, the embedded anti-Semitism. Gradually, his ambivalence turned to outright hostility. Collaboration with the autocracy became impossible. The Russian army lost a gifted future commander, and the radical intelligentsia was about to gain an illustrious new recruit.

Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist

theoretician, whose history of

the French Revolution formed an

entire generation.

Kropotkin became close to the Populists, was imprisoned and went into exile, where he was greatly influenced by Bakunin’s ferocious debates with Marx, even though one such debate revolved around Bakunin’s agreement to translate Capital into Russian and subsequent failure to do so. It was ‘too boring’, he insisted, while refusing to return the advance he had received for the translation.

Kropotkin was much less attracted to the violent side of anarchism. Bloody revolutions, he argued, were sometimes necessary (and here he was thinking of the English, American and French revolutions), but were ‘always an evil’; the means always infected the ends. His own description of anarchist utopia, as published in the much celebrated, cerebral 1911 version of the Encyclopædia Britannica, was elegant, couched in polite language and far removed from the terrorist conspiracies and violent prose of Bakunin and Nechaev as well as the actions of the anarchists on horseback, Durutti and Makhno:

ANARCHISM (from the Gr. ἄυ, and άρχη, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international, temporary or more or less permanent – for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary – as is seen in organic life at large – harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.³

The main carriers of anarchism were the newly rising intelligentsia, emerging in the 1860s, no longer confined to the nobility or the church, but increasingly dominated by less privileged sections of the urban population, the result of an education system that produced literates who could be of use to the regime.⁴ Disregarding the tiny working class, some intellectuals began to refer to themselves as the ‘intellectual proletariat’ and saw their task as liberating the peasantry from the ideological and economic chains of absolutism. Razin and Pugachev had lacked knowledge and understanding. They had not experienced the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. The new intelligentsia could make up for these shortcomings, and lead the peasants to make a revolution that would get rid of the tsar and the nobility while bypassing the cities, dominated by merchants.

The ‘To the People’ movement was not a success. It had concentrated on the traditional zones of peasant unrest; neither the Don, the Dnieper nor the Volga regions were receptive. It was too soon after the 1860 reform. Most peasants trusted in God and the tsar and, despite the insatiable monkish greed for money, food and sex, the Orthodox Church remained a central point of reference. Consequently, the peasants were hostile to the city folk, the gentry, students and radicals of any sort. The city 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.

Paragraph 4. He despises public opinion; he despises and hates the existing social ethic in all its demands and expressions; for him, everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.

Paragraph 5. The revolutionary is a lost man; with no pity for the State and for the privileged and educated world in general, he must himself accept no pity. Every day he must be prepared for death. He must be prepared to bear torture.

Paragraph 6. Hard with himself, he must be hard towards others. All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, of love, gratitude and even honour must be stifled in him by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause. For him there is only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, and one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Day and night he must have one single thought, one single purpose: merciless destruction. With this aim in view, tirelessly and in cold blood, he must be always prepared to die and kill with his own hands anyone who stands in the way of achieving it.

Paragraph 7. The character of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, sentimentality, enthusiasm or seduction. Nor has it any place for private hatred or revenge. This revolutionary passion which in him becomes a daily, hourly passion, must be combined with cold calculation. Always and everywhere he must become not what his own personal inclination would have him become, but what the general interest of the revolution demands.

The other paragraphs in the Catechism, more hair-raising in their details, deal with a variety of subjects, including how to treat each stratum of Russian society and the degree of hatred that must be expended on the upper echelons. The most intelligent personnel in high places pose the biggest threat to the revolution. For these worthies there is a single solution: extermination. Those who are of lesser intelligence should be left alone for the time being, since their stupidity only leads them to make decisions that enrage the people and push them in the direction of revolution. The majority of dignitaries are mere ‘animals’, in constant fear of losing their power and privileges; their punishment (outlined in Paragraph 19) is simple blackmail: ‘We must get hold of their dirty secrets and so make them our slaves.’

The pamphlet concludes with a call to destroy the old state and for a revolution that ‘annihilates all State traditions, order and classes in Russia’. The final paragraphs set out the parameters of what is required and how it should be achieved:

Paragraph 25. To do this we must draw close to the people: we must ally ourselves mainly with those elements of the people’s life which ever since the foundation of the State of Moscow have never given up protesting, not just in words but in deeds, against anything directly or indirectly tied to the state; against the nobility, the bureaucracy, the priests, against the world of guilds and against the kulaks. We must ally ourselves with the doughty world of brigands, who in Russia are the only true revolutionaries.

Paragraph 26. All our organization, all our conspiracy, all our purpose consists in this: to regroup this world of brigands into an invincible and omni-destructive force.

In the fall of 1869, Nechaev returned to Russia and formed a clandestine group that could simultaneously spread the word and accomplish the deed. Notepaper of the still non-existent Central Committee of the People’s Justice, adorned with an interlocking axe, dagger and pistol, was used to intimidate opponents. Up to this point, Nechaev had been regarded as a courageous and charismatic character, with numerous stories about his adventures (many of them untrue) circulating in the Russian underground. Soon after his return to Russia, however, he fell out with Ivanov, another member of his group, for reasons that remain obscure. Nechaev accused Ivanov of being a police agent (for which there was no evidence), charged him with, among other things, a ‘breach of discipline’ (which probably meant a disagreement with Nechaev) and then ambushed and killed him. The discovery of Ivanov’s stabbed body a few days later created a huge sensation. Nechaev was accused of murder and, once again, fled into exile. Three hundred revolutionaries were arrested and seventy-four Nechaevites were tried in 1871, though many of them had not supported their leader’s more outlandish tactics. Bakunin had broken with him in the summer of the previous year for a variety of reasons. He was shocked by the murder, and his vanity was wounded: he had been abandoned by his ‘boy’, who had turned to seducing liberal women to help destroy the bourgeois family. The institution survived the onslaught, though various individual families found themselves the poorer. Nechaev ruthlessly employed blackmail to raise funds for the anarchist cause and, on this particular issue, had Bakunin’s support.

Sympathizers with the movement in Russia were horrified. One of them, Fyodor Dostoevsky, broke publicly and dramatically by devoting an entire novel, The Possessed, to the grisly episode. In the novel, the character Verkhovensky represents Nechaev, while Shatov is based on Ivanov. It’s a savage portrayal and largely justified, but it did not succeed in destroying the appeal of Nechaev, whom many continued to regard as a heroic figure and a courageous revolutionary, not completely without reason. In 1872, Nechaev’s whereabouts were betrayed to the Swiss police by a Polish revolutionary turned Russian spy. Due to the murder of Ivanov, the Swiss did not accept his status as a political exile this time and extradited him, as a criminal, to Russia.

Nechaev remained unbowed at his trial, refusing to accept the authority of the tsarist court. When he was taken for a mock execution, a quaint custom unique to tsarist Russia, he contemptuously rejected the services of a priest. As he was dragged away he shouted his defiance by invoking the peasant leaders Razin and Pugachev, who had strung up the Russian nobles as the French did much later. ‘Before three years are over’, he screamed, ‘their heads will be hacked off on this very spot by the first Russian guillotine. Down with the tsar. Long live Freedom. Long live the Russian people.’

Alexander II read the report of the mock execution and scribbled a marginal note:

As a result of this we have every right to have him tried again as a political criminal. But I don’t think that this would be of much use. And so the more prudent course is to keep him for ever [underlined by the tsar] in prison.

This was the sentence that Nechaev served.

The rest of his life was spent in isolation in cell number 5 of the Alexeyevsky dungeon in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, where he won over quite a few policemen, soldiers and warders. They were impressed by his intelligence and dignity. He used them to send supportive messages to various groups, including one to the central committee of the People’s Will, on the eve of their fateful, unanimous decision to assassinate Alexander II. As Vera Figner later recalled in her memoirs, they were amazed and excited to hear that Nechaev was still alive. They wanted to postpone the planned assault on the tsar and free Nechaev instead, but he vetoed the plan, insisting that they stick to their original intention. After they had carried out the act, he suggested, there were other imprisoned revolutionaries – including Leon Mirsky, who had tried to assassinate the chief of police – who deserved the honour much more than him.

On 1 March 1881, the decision made by the leadership of the People’s Will was carried out to the letter by a suicide bomber. The tsar, who had survived a number of attempts on his life, was duly assassinated. This emotionless account of the incident by Kropotkin sums up the story:

In February, 1881, Melikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Revolutionary Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II decided that a sort of deliberative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI, he described this gathering as an assembly of notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the Council of State, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a final warning by Loris Melikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Melikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine, and to carry her the welcome news. He is reported to have told her, ‘I have determined to summon an assembly of notables.’ However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been made public, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.

It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakoff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised the monarch not to get out, saying that he could still drive him in the slightly damaged carriage, Alexander insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakoff and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevetsky, threw a bomb between himself and Alexander II, knowing full well that both of them would be killed. They both survived but only for a few hours.

Alexander II lay upon the snow, bleeding profusely, abandoned by every one of his followers. All had fled. It was cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head with a cadet cap. And it was one of the terrorists, Emelianoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm and risking arrest and hanging, forgetting for these moments who he was, who rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. The entire operation had been masterminded by Sofia Perovskaya, who had given the signal for the attack.

Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met such a death at the hands of revolutionists. ‘To me’, wrote an intimate, ‘who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II, and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, – that of a born autocrat whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, of a man of strong passions and weak will, – it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland.’⁷

Nechaev lived on till December 1882. His behaviour in prison was exemplary, as attested to by many contemporaries who saw him at close quarters in the fortress. The short stories, memoirs and political pamphlets that he wrote disappeared. General Potapov, the head of the tsarist secret police, realising how useful this prisoner might be in dismantling the terror networks, visited him in his cell after the tsar’s assassination and offered financial rewards and other inducements if Nechaev agreed to become an informer. The enchained prisoner rose to his feet, steadied himself, and used the entire weight of one arm to strike Potapov across the face, drawing much blood. Both his hands and feet were chained and he began to rot. Literally. Within two years Nechaev was dead. He was thirty-five years old.

Nineteenth-century Russian literature is rich in depictions of nihilists, terrorists, revolutionaries. As in life, so in fiction: a single character usually encompassed all three. In Dostoevsky, they were treated severely. Russian novelists did not shy away from politics. They regarded themselves and were seen by their readers as public intellectuals. The 1861 reform heightened the tempo. In the following year, Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons. The distillation of politics into art transpired without any fuss and with tremendous effect. The novel depicts a generational conflict between liberalism and nihilism. The central character, Bazarov, marked a break for Turgenev. Till now his women had been strong and the men slightly pathetic, weak and self-centred (as in some of Pushkin’s work). Turgenev identified himself and a majority of his peers as Hamlets, incapable of action, which was reflected in his work. Bazarov is a partial exception. He displays a sense of character and is a strong man, but even he, endlessly subjected to the patronizing and smug conceit of his father, is not allowed to triumph. No victory for the brave. Resigned to his fate, he dies passively, much to the anger of Turgenev’s younger readers. By contrast, Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece, Oblomov, is the self-portrait of an entire social stratum and pitiless in its depiction. Lenin loved this novel. The average Russian nobleman is lazy, indolent, empty-headed and beyond redemption. The novel’s success was celebrated by the entry of a new word into the Russian lexicon: oblomovism, used by liberals, anarcho-Populists and Marxists alike. In The Precipice (1869), Goncharov pillories a nihilist (a word invented by Turgenev as a virtual synonym for a radical student) without restraint. There is not the least trace of sympathy.

The emergence of a social-realist school of writers and critics was partially a response to these liberal writers and largely an attempt to connect with the growing movement of the razochyny. The two most prominent representatives of this increasingly radical wing of the intelligentsia were the essayist, historian and novelist N. G. Chernyshevsky and the fierce literary critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Both were sons of respected priests, both recorded happy childhoods; even as they rejected religion and the Orthodox Church in favour of science and materialism, they retained an affection for the moral atmosphere that had prevailed in their respective homes. It was the fierce honesty of their fathers that appealed to them. They loathed hypocrisy on every level: social, political, sexual. And their stinging prose left its mark. On one occasion, Turgenev accosted Chernyshevsky simply to inform him: ‘You are a snake, but Dobrolyubov is a rattlesnake.’

Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is to Be Done? was written in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he had been incarcerated because of his political beliefs. The hero is a dedicated and ascetic revolutionary (who could not be more different to Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, or the real-life Nechaev) who sacrifices all for the cause. Even his name, Rakhmetov, was chosen with care. He descends from a thirteenth-century Tatar family of the high nobility; the novelist paints a four-page pen portrait of the origins and history of the family. He took for granted that his readers were only too aware that many Tatars (who had by then turned Muslim) had fought under Pugachev against the tsar. A forebear had married a Russian woman, a common occurrence, and the resulting dynasty had retained many positions within the state apparatus. The fictional Rakhmetov’s fictional grandfather had accompanied Alexander I to Tilsit. Given Chernyshevsky’s deep knowledge of Russian history, it’s likely that the character was based on a real person. What we are not told is that the name Rakhmet is of Arab origin, and means ‘mercy’.

While the novel lacked the literary power of Dostoevsky, Turgenev or Tolstoy, it became the bible of the new generation in Russia, the ‘young people’ entering the struggle against the autocracy. It’s difficult to recall a work of fiction that had an analogous impact on political consciousness elsewhere though, half a century ago, an American critic proposed a fascinating comparison.⁸

The fact that Lenin titled his first major political essay ‘What Is to Be Done?’ is not coincidental. He would have been amazed if a friend had predicted that one day, people would try to read the original in order to better understand its successor. The novel, too, was a call to action and written precisely for that purpose. Judged by its own criteria, it was a huge success. Its sympathetic treatment of women, in particular, was widely noted in a country where patriarchy, little different from contemporary Saudi Arabia, ruled supreme. In contrast to that unfortunate country, however, many women joined secret societies and participated in the acts decided upon by terrorist organisations.⁹ As we shall see in a later chapter, revolutionary feminists openly acknowledged their debt to the ideas contained in Chernyshevsky’s masterwork, including the role and function of the family and monogamy.

Lenin’s text, first published in 1902, was an attempt to both critique and move beyond the tactical and strategic limitations of prior revolutionary organisations. A break was necessary. The Executive Committee of the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) had scored its biggest success on 1 March 1881 by assassinating Alexander II, but also its biggest failure. It had successfully targeted the heart of the regime, but had burnt itself out in the process. The repression was heavy, the hanging chains of Siberia heavier still and though many young suicide terrorists were queuing up to join, the organisation was beginning to disintegrate. Its own leader, Zhelyabov, confessed that ‘we are using up our capital’ and while small groups spontaneously emerged in different parts of the country, they were, in the main, ignored by the radical intelligentsia. The reason was not simply fear (though that played its part) but a feeling that the basic outline of the original programme was, to put it at its mildest, faulty. The aim of the terror was to rouse the people from their torpor and trigger a mass uprising based on previous models (Razin/Pugachev), but this time under new conditions and in order to completely destroy the autocracy and its institutions. It never worked out and, in a grumpy mood, Lenin once characterised terrorists as liberals with bombs, suggesting that both held the opinion that propaganda alone, of deed or word, would be sufficient for the task that lay ahead. For the most part terrorist acts scared people and legitimated government repression.

Till now the Executive Committee had won the admiration and financial support of many intellectuals who felt that they were on the right track. Key members of the committee were at the house of Gleb Uspensky, a major pro-Populist writer, on 1 March, waiting for news of the operation. They drank to success and then withdrew to compose a powerful open letter to the dead man’s son. The opening paragraph was suitably defiant, even while misjudging the writers’ own strength. They informed Alexander III that ‘the bloody tragedy which took place along the Catherine Canal was not just the result of chance and was not unexpected. After everything that has been happening for the last ten years, it was inevitable.’ They warned him that their struggle against the autocracy would continue, unless political prisoners were released and a national assembly convened via elections based on proportionality and without any restrictions whatsoever, including freedom of speech, press, assembly and electoral programmes. This would enable Russia to develop peacefully: ‘We solemnly declare before our beloved Fatherland and the entire world that our party will of its own accord unconditionally submit to the decisions of a National Assembly.’

The initial reaction of the court to the death of the tsar was fear. When the open letter reached him, the new monarch burst into tears and had to be comforted by his tutor. But the autocracy was soon back on course. Tsarist ministers and advisers had noted the absence of uprisings or popular assemblies anywhere in the country. And the hard-line councillors of Alexander III turned their back on concessions of any sort and accelerated the counterreformation. A chain of legal proclamations sought to seal off free thought of any kind. Violations of these ordinances led to swift and brutal punishments. The mood in the country became despairing.

Having isolated themselves, the People’s Will was dismantled by the repression and by the rapid dwindling of popular support. The end for leading members of the Executive Committee came in the month that followed the assassination of the tsar. Only one of them recanted. The others walked to the gallows with their heads held high:

Sofia Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Gesia Gelfman and Mikhailov, all confirmed the ideas for which they had sacrificed their lives. Sofia Perovskaya was outstandingly brave, Kibalchich revealed his true worth, and showed himself a man of genius, always concerned with the technical problem of the relations between ends and means. In his prison cell he went on designing a plan for a flying machine, which he regretted not being able to finish before he was hanged. Only Rysakov said that he was a peaceful socialist and he felt remorse for his terrorist activities … At 9.50 in the morning of 3rd April 1881, Rysakov, Zhelyabov, Mikhailov, Kibalchich and Sofia Perovskaya climbed the scaffold. With the exception of Rysakov they all embraced for the last time. Then they were hanged.¹⁰

There is a postscript to this story. Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist philosopher, was living in comfortable exile in England when the Russian Revolution erupted. Seventy-five years of age now, the old man was incredibly excited and decided to go back. He went first to visit his old haunts in Petrograd, but decided not to stay there and moved instead to Moscow. He arrived quietly without any fuss or fanfare. His daughter tried to persuade him to move back to the old family house in the country, but Kropotkin wanted to live in the capital. His daughter went to the offices of Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars) and met with V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, secretary for the organisation and Lenin’s personal secretary. She described all the problems she had encountered trying to find modest accommodation for her aged father. Despite the chaos, it was an unwritten law that revolutionaries returning from exile would be provided with permanent accommodation.

Bonch-Bruevich informed Lenin of the problem, who instructed him to find accommodation for the old man immediately. Bonch-Bruevich then visited Kropotkin to welcome him back. Kropotkin’s views came as a pleasant surprise. He supported the revolution and declared that it had ‘proved to everybody that a social revolution was possible’. He was totally hostile to the White Guards and anti-Soviet forces and commended the Bolsheviks for having moved on from February to October. As an anarchist, naturally, he did not agree with the organisation of the Soviet state or the role of the party, but was interested in reading Lenin’s State and Revolution:

I was told that Vladimir Ilyich wrote an excellent book about the State which I have not yet read, in which he puts forward a prognosis that the State would in the end wither away … By this single shaft of light thrown boldly on the teaching of Marx, Vladimir Ilyich has earned the deepest respect … I regard the October revolution as an endeavour to achieve the transition to communism and federalism.

Lenin asked to see Kropotkin and the two men met at the Sovnarkom offices in early May 1919. Bonch-Bruevich was present and his record of the meeting is instructive. Lenin admired Kropotkin not for his anarchism, but for his history of the French Revolution that had educated two generations of Russian radicals. Lenin regarded this book by Kropotkin as an indispensable classic and wanted it reprinted and placed in every library. The discussion opened with an exchange of views on the cooperative, with both men explaining their positions on this subject. Kropotkin complained of bureaucratic harassment of genuine cooperatives by local authorities, ‘perhaps even people who yesterday were revolutionaries, changed as all authorities do, into bureaucrats, into officials, who want to twist their subordinates and who think that the whole population is subordinated to them.’

Lenin’s response was immediate:

We are against officialdom always and everywhere. We are against bureaucratisation, and we must pull up bureaucracy by its roots if it still nestles in our new system. But you know perfectly well that it is extremely difficult to remake people and that, as Marx used to say, the most inaccessible fortress is the human skull.

Kropotkin countered by pointing out that this explanation did not make things easier for citizens, since ‘authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.’

Lenin replied by stressing that

you cannot make a revolution in white gloves … We are still making many, many mistakes; we correct all that can be corrected; we admit our mistakes – which sometimes result from plain stupidity … You should help us, let us know when you see that something is wrong; you can be assured that we shall welcome your remarks with the greatest attention.

After further debate on cooperatives, Lenin explained that ‘we need enlightened masses and it would be good if, for example, your book on the great French revolution were published in a very large edition. This book is so useful for all.’

Kropotkin was flattered, but suspicious.

‘But who would publish it? I cannot let the State Publishing House do it.’

‘No, no,’ interrupted Lenin. ‘Why, of course not the State Publishing House, but a cooperative publisher.’

‘Oh well,’ said Kropotkin, ‘if you find the book interesting and valuable, I agree … Perhaps one could find such a cooperative enterprise.’

‘One can find it, one certainly can,’ nodded Lenin. ‘I am sure of this.’

The deal was done.

During the course of this conversation Lenin explained his views on anarchism and the decisive factor that helped him to solve the dilemma between anarchism and socialism.

It was the necessity of ‘a mass struggle’, he informed Kropotkin:

We do not need individual terroristic attempts and the anarchists should have understood long ago. Only with the masses, through the masses … All other methods, including those of the anarchists, have been relegated to the limbo of history – nobody needs them, they are no good, and they do not attract anybody – they only demoralise people who in one way or another have been drawn on to that old worn-out path.

When Kropotkin died a few years later he was given a state funeral. His remains were laid in the Hall of Columns in the House of Trades Unions. Tens of thousands paid their respects and attended his funeral.

It was the last state funeral of a non-Bolshevik.

Kropotkin had not agreed with the terrorist wing of anarchism but, like Lenin and others, he was part of its shared history. It is to the history of what came after that we must now turn.