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

Commentary on a passage by Stirner by Carlo Michelstaedter

'Man, your head is haunted; you have bats in your belfry! You're imagining big things and painting for yourself a whole world of gods that is there for you, a haunted realm to which you are called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am joking or speaking figuratively when I look upon those who cling to something higher, and, since this includes the vast majority, almost the whole human world, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What, then, is called a "fixed idea"?'

Max Stirner, the sad philosopher of anarchy, asks this question, and does not think that those fixed ideas bend man not because he is compelled by something that is outside him, but because he loves them. And if this love is not a necessity, it does not mean that outside of it there is no necessity. It is a part of the unified love, a perpetual reason for life, a perpetual necessity that is expressed in us, in all our desires, as in every beast, as in every plant, as in any part of nature. Our will is nothing but the act of this necessity passed through the "necessary" distance of our soul. And what about freedom? And what about free will then? ... All illusions for those who know no other state but slavery, to which therefore slavery does not exist. Such are the beasts. And so men believe in free will as they have settled into slavery so as to proclaim the only truth, the only love the chain that binds them to the wrists and the jailer - as they are beasts.

Whoever leaves this illusion immediately feels the weight of the yoke, feels the desperate pain of slavery. He could annihilate himself and be free in death. But before annihilating himself he must materially annihilate himself morally, killing the affections that bind him ... but here is the supreme mockery of the inexorable necessity. He cannot dissolve what he did not tie himself to. - I also want freedom, and I will be able to reach it ... or I will succumb. - And if I can no longer buy the illusion of freedom at the price of "enmity", nor can I stretch my back over a mountain peak irradiated by the sun, raise my eyes to the sky and contemplate, I want and can shape my life like a 'work of art, to feel in everything the infinite beauty of nature (in the broadest sense) and of the "first engine", as Leonardo da Vinci says, and to draw from every vision from every happy or sad feeling an exaltation of strength , an increase in my individuality and an increase in my vitality, and escape the necessity of things, idealizing them, ideally mastering them.

But sometimes I feel weak in the face of this ambitious dream, but free from what is commonly called ambition, a dream that does not give joy to me and to those who loved in me not the "man who lives" - that is, the one that only family members love, but the personality that transcends the petty terms of life ... I sometimes feel weak and small, and I see with horror the "animal transport" train that warns me that it should take me to the bourgeois world, triumphantly stupid ...

This short text shows Michelstaedter's own take on anarcho-egoism. Not at all unfamiliar to Stirner, but whereas Stirner is a sort of optimistic nihilist, seeing the world as his playground, a sort of "philosophy of enjoyment", Michelstaedter's egoistic vision is more pessimistic, taking a bit from Schopenhauer as well. 

Speech To The People by Carlo Michelstaedter

You beat me and you are in the right to do so! You'll kill me and you'll still be in the right! But my right is that of the free word, and your duty is to listen to me. For if the act was brutal and if it justifies the brutal expression of your surprise, it was not brutal the intentional, it was not your enemy. It is love for you, for the idea that today brings you together that has made me rebel and rebel against an enthusiasm that does not correspond to your will, O brothers, to that will that makes you strong against the tyranny of Spain. If tomorrow you still had to reunite and not with the indeterminate outrage of today, but with fresh indignation, with a fresh wound, with the threat present, if you were to meet here tomorrow and affirm your will to the end, to make success with the facts and in the present life, and for the personal interests in each and every single one of you - against the authority constituted by the law, against the authority constituted by money, against the government and the bourgeoisie - that ideal that moves you now, brothers, that marvelous instrument that you have now applauded would measure strength on you - and shots from above would respond from front, back and center; and at the sides other shots to sow death among your ranks, to drown your anger in blood, to bring down forever your most cherished hopes. As long as these hopes are vague and distant, as long as you suffer your material and social miseries in silence, you are an innocuous bunch of unhappy ones to be exploited; and bourgeois society exploits you, in peace and in silence; and as it holds on to the yoke of your need and your weakness, there is no need to make you feel the deadly force of your weapons.But it prepares its weapon in silence and peace and she knows how to cover them with the luminous appearances of humanity and progress, and you - you applaud them! ... But the day that you acquire full awareness of your rights and your strength, the day you will be gathered around your heroes, around the "Ferrer" [reference to Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, anarchist thinker and agitator] of your revolution, under the banner of liberty for the people, the day you want to affirm the beginning of a new life of justice and faith - that day, brothers, the humanity and the progress of the bourgeoisie will reveal their true face, they will hold you in a circle of iron and fire, without mercy for the slaves who rebel. - You will be slaves forever if you fail to unmask the miserable hypocrisy of the bourgeois power, which covers its defenses with flowers and hides the dagger in its bosom. But the power is yours, brothers, to you belongs the future, because you have "faith", and yours is the right. - Bourgeois society, because it has usurped power that does not belong to it, with the strength that comes only from your current weakness, since it has no other faith than the thirst for profit, no other right than tyranny, needs the science that encapsulates in it the opprobri of its arrogance, the science that gives her the immeasurable weapons of strength and devices of war that dominate the sea, the earth and the sky, needs the government that draws from your own ranks the men necessary to keep you slaves, guards, riflemen , soldiers. Brothers, you have applauded the symbol of the power that crushes you.- But you will shake yourself out of your inertia, you will all join together, you will each bear the contribution of your brotherly love and of your desperate strength, born out of daily suffering - and then you will be invincible, then this vain bourgeois power building that dominates you and that you respect, that dominates you only because you respect it, it will crumble with all its laws, its institutions, its vain science, its hypocritical morality, the armies of the preparers, the armies of the executors of the tyranny will disappear: scientists, clerks, soldiers will be extinct races, in this new world.- And it will be a world where "man" will reign, the man of work, the man who is sane of body and mind, the man who will not have a need for unjust laws, unjust because they're complicated, to be protected by his brother, not by militias and weapons laboriously devised to protect his enemies: but his faith, and the common work, and the close team of fraternal love, will be his government and law and defense in the realm of work and justice. Brothers, this man sleeps in each of you and waits for the day he will awaken-brothers, I may be a dark one, but in me sleeps the voice of that man. As soon as I go out and go back into the darkness, these are my first words and they will be my last. Tomorrow perhaps in the hands of bourgeois justice lurking around us I will suffer the fate that awaits Derrer. But if it can enlighten your conscience, hasten your awakening and approximate the advent of "man" and of the subrum, then I will be pleased with my death. Goodbye brothers - long live work and justice - death to the bourgeoisie

This speech, despite being hair-raising at times (such as briefly dismissing scientists as bourgeois), remains a rousing call for the masses to take up either Marxism or Anarchism (which one it isn't clear).

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