Sergey Nechayev: The 20th century belonged to him, and so will the 21st century

Sergey Nechayev  (1847 – 1882)  was a terrorist, an anarchist, an essayist and widely the single most reviled figure in all of anarchism. More than Max Stirner, more than Renzo Novatore, even more than the Bonnot gang. In the book Bakunin: The Creative Passion, Mark Leier writes:

"Bakunin’s careful thoughts on the nature of revolution and organization were, however, overshadowed by his relationship with one of the most repellent characters of the nineteenth-century revolutionary movements. His active work with Sergei Nechaev took up only a few months of Bakunin’s life, yet it would have immediate repercussions and would taint Bakunin and anarchism for generations to come."

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism also has some comments on the infamous bizarre Bakunin-Nechayev relationship:

"In his search for likely catalysts, Bakunin became involved at this time with a young revolutionary called Sergei Nechaev. It proved a disastrous relationship and did immense harm to the anarchist movement. Nechaev, who later inspired the character Peter Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, was an extraordinary character: despotic, power-hungry, egoistic, rude and yet strangely seductive. He exemplifies the unscrupulous terrorist who will stop at nothing to realize his aim.

Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev sorely tested Bakunin’s belief that society, not individuals, should be held responsible for crimes and transgressions. Nechaev stole money and reputation from the anarchist, inadvertently aided Marx in purging him from the International Working Men’s Association, and provided ample, if indiscriminate and inaccurate, munitions to the enemies of anarchism that they are still firing off today."

Furthermore, the book comments on his most lasting pamphlet, Catechism Of A Revolutionary:

"Whilst in Geneva with Bakunin, Nechaev wrote between April and August 1869 a Catechism of a Revolutionary which proved to be one of the most repulsive documents in the history of terrorism. The guiding principle of this work is that ‘everything is moral that contributes to the triumph of the revolution; everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.’ It calls upon the would-be revolutionary to break all ties with past society, to feel a ‘single cold passion’ for the revolutionary cause and to adopt the single aim of ‘pitiless destruction’ in order to eradicate the State and its institutions and classes."

There also exists a biography which I have not read because it is no longer available, but I know it considers its subject a psychopath from quotes about it in other articles. So, clearly, anarchists do not think very highly of Nechayev. But let's back up: Who was Sergey Nechayev? 

Nechayev was the son of a serf (somewhat unusual for a revolutionary, who mostly had noble backgrounds, such as Kropotkin or Bakunin) who, while by no means wealthy, were able to give him a decent education. In 1865, he moved to Moscow to study and take the examination to become an elementary school teacher. However, that failed, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There, he was radicalized by Karakozov's attempt to assassinate the Tsar. He found himself working with fellow revolutionaries and developed an highly ascetic theory of the revolutionary and terrorism (which we will touch on later). There, he manipulated students by telling them lies and exaggerations regarding his own background, convincing his comrades that he was arrested by the secret police, and had miraculously escaped the Peter and Paul fortress. Indeed, manipulation will prove to be a recurring theme in Nechayev's life. 

In fact, he was just planning to flee Russia, but this way he had created himself a backstory that would grant him street cred among fellow revolutionaries. This story was very helpful when he met Bakunin in Geneva, in March 1869. Bakunin, the old anarchist, had fell out with "the people" of Russia, and saw in Nechayev a new, youthful revolutionary spirit, "one of those young fanatics who doubt nothing and who fear nothing". The relationship proved extremely disastrous. But this is when Nechayev, with perhaps some help of Bakunin (how much Bakunin had an hand in Nechayev's essays is a source of bitter controversy), wrote several pamphlets. These essays are what got Bakunin an infamous reputation as an apostle of terrorism and nihilistic destruction. On Nechayev's merciless methods, Bakunin told him: 

Nechayev as a young man.

"People’s revolutions are born from the course of events, or from historical currents which, continuously and usually slowly, flow underground and unseen within the popular strata, increasingly embracing, penetrating, and undermining them until they emerge from the ground and their turbulent waters break all barriers and destroy everything that impedes their course. Such a revolution cannot be artificially induced. It is even impossible to hasten it, although I have no doubt that an efficient and intelligent organization can facilitate the explosion. There are historical periods when revolutions are simply impossible; there are other periods when they are inevitable."

Among many other bizarre episodes in his life, he would murder a fellow comrade for questioning whether Nechayev was truly the head of a secret revolutionary society (he wasn't). Another tale comes when Bakunin was paid in advance for translating Marx's Das Kapital into Russian. When Bakunin took the money and lazied up on the translation job, Nechayev sent the man who had paid him threatening him, along with pictures of a revolver and a knife. People thought Bakunin had done this, putting Bakunin in further trouble.

Not only that, but he helped Marx into getting Bakunin out of the First International.

When he was arrested for the murder, so manipulative was he, that he succeeded in manipulating the very guards who guarded him. The Tsar himself seemed to be afraid of him, demanding that his twenty year sentence was turned into a life sentence. So dedicated was he to revolution, as he puts it in his Catechism, that when fellow radicals Narodnaya Volya offered to take him out of jail, he refused, saying that they should use their resourced to assassinate the Tsar. And indeed, the Tsar was eventually murdered.

So, why all this? What made Nechayev so memorable as a character in anarchist history. Well, it is almost entirely due to his essay, Catechism Of A Revolutionary. It is very short, so I would simply link it here rather than try and summarize it.

The essay would prove to be incredibly destructive to the anarchist cause, with people to this very day using it as an example of "proof" that anarchism is inherently nihilistic. While it did influence fellow Russian nihilists as well as some Narodniks, it influenced no important figures in the history of anarchism. Kropotkin, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, criticizes Nechayev for his methods, in fact.

However, and this is a big however, it did influence one very important person: Lenin.

Several Lenin biographies record the following comment regarding Nechayev:

"He [Lenin] once told Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich: ‘People have completely forgotten that Nechayev possessed a special talent as an organiser, an ability to establish particular skills in illegal work…It’s enough to recall his precise reply to the question, who should be killed in the royal family? He said “the whole ektenia” [the entire list of Romanovs read out in a traditional Orthodox service]. So who should be killed? The entire house of Romanov…That was pure genius."

In other sources, he also had called Nechayev "a titan of the revolution", and said that everyone should read him and they should look for Nechayev's essays and have them published. So he was clearly familiar with Nechayev, but it is more fascinating still, to understand just how close Lenin's concept of a "professional revolutionary" that would fill the ranks in a vanguard party is to that of Nechayev's "doomed man".

Lenin argued, as a revolutionary tactician, for a vanguard party filled with professional revolutionaries. All these revolutionaries would have had professional discipline, just like the ascetic conspirators described in The Revolutionary Catechism. The Catechism describes a secret society of revolutionaries that operates with total devotion to the revolution. Since Lenin was aware of Nechayev and his Catechism, it is not at all a stretch to suggest that his model of a "vanguard party" was heavy influenced by this. Likewise, Nechayev's notion that "morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way." echoes several of Lenin's speeches. According to Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography:

They knew that he admired the notorious Pëtr Tkachëv’s journal Alarm and the proclamations of the still more notorious Sergei Nechaev (whose complicity in murder had caused the Swiss authorities to make a legal exception in 1872 and extradite him to St Petersburg). Lenin recommended his associates to read these materials and learn lessons from them.

Further, from Nechayev's essay The Fundamentals Of The Future Social System:

The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone. 

The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there.

For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.

This brutal view of anarchism (which I like to call "authoritarian anarchism"), called by Marx "Barracks Communism", bears an uncanny similarity to Lenin's War Communism, the Policies of the USSR before the NEP.

So, Nechayev's authoritarian anarchism bears a lot of similarities to Lenin's own ideology, and was almost certainly influenced by it. Seeing that the Red October was the single most important event of the 20th century,  this would mean Nechayev had a massive influence on the history of the 20th century. Every Leninist revolutionary, specially the Vietcong who were ideologically trained to never give up, is a "doomed man", whose personal interests, business affairs, emotions, attachments, property and name are second to revolution.

Furthermore, I wrote in a previous essay that the future will have a revolution, and it will be extremely brutal and costly. Nechayev has already had the 20th century, but he shall have the 21st century as well. Who else, if not the "doomed man", could carry out the atrocities, the terrorism, and specially the extermination (a word that Nechayev constantly used, saying at one point "Our task is one of extermination") of all the groups that oppose the revolution? Nechayev's Catechism was reprinted by the Black Panther Party and became a personal bible to some of its members, and in the future it will again become a personal bible to many revolutionaries.

Because of this, I argue, one should study the tactics, the story and the writings of Nechayev, if not just to understand history a little bit better, then to understand what is coming in the future. Likewise, there are several books written on Nechayev, including a biography, but none of these are available online and they are long since out of print. A reprint of these could help us. Perhaps too, it would help us to translate and reprint the essays of Nechayev. I am sure that they are in some Russian archives, somewhere.

He [Nechaev] was, in short, a Bolshevik before the Bolsheviks - Orlando Figes