THE ALLIANCE IN RUSSIA

1. THE NECHAYEV TRIAL

The Alliance’s activities in Russia were revealed to us by the political trial known as “the Nechayev affair” which took place in July 1871 before the Court of Justice in St. Petersburg. For the first time in Russia, a political trial took place before a jury and in public. All the accused, numbering over eighty men and women, belonged, with a few exceptions, to the student youth. From November 1869 to July 1871, they were kept in detention in the dungeons of the fortressa in St. Petersburg, with the result that two of them died and several others went insane. They were brought out of prison to be condemned to the Siberian mines, to penal servitude, and to imprisonment for fifteen, twelve, ten, seven and two years. And those acquitted by the public tribunal were then exiled as an “administrative measure”.

Their crime was that they had belonged to a secret society which had usurped the name of the International Working Men’s Association, to which they had been affiliated by an emissary of the international revolutionary committee who carried mandates stamped with a fake seal of the International; and this emissary had forced them to commit a series of frauds and had obliged several of them to help him in an assassination. It was this assassination which put the police on the trail of the secret society; but, as always, the emissary disappeared. The police showed such perspicacity in their investigations that it was possible to assume a detailed denunciation. Throughout the whole of this affair, the role of the emissary was highly ambiguous. This emissary was Nechayev, who carried a certificate-mandate to the following effect:

“The bearer of this certificate is one of the authorised representatives of the Russian branch of the World Revolutionary Alliance.— No. 2771.”

a Peter and Paul Fortress.— Ed.

This certificate carried: 1) a stamp, in French: “European Revolutionary Alliance. General Committee”; 2) date—May 12, 1869; 3) signature—Mikhail Bakunin.*

In 1861, as a result of the fiscal measures intended to deprive poor young people of a higher education, and as a result of disciplinary steps aimed at subjecting them to arbitrary police control, the students made a vigorous and unanimous protest which they took from their meetings out into the streets to be expressed in impressive demonstrations. St. Petersburg University was then closed for a time and the students were imprisoned or exiled. This government move drove the young people into secret societies which inevitably resulted in large numbers of the members being imprisoned, banished, or sent to Siberia. Others, to provide the necessary means for the poor students to continue their studies, founded mutual aid funds. The more serious of them decided not to give the government any further pretext for suppressing these funds, which were organised so that business matters could be discussed at small meetings. These business meetings provided the opportunity to discuss political and social questions at the same time. Socialist ideas had penetrated so deeply among the Russian student youth, who were mainly the sons of peasants and other poor people, that they already dreamed of putting them immediately into practice. Every day, this movement spread further in the educational institutions and injected into Russian society poor young people of plebeian origin who were instructed in, and permeated with, socialist ideas. The heart and soul of this movement’s theoretical aspect was Chernyshevsky, now in Siberia.370 It was at this point that Nechayev, profiting by the International’s prestige and the enthusiasm of the young, tried to convince the students that the time had passed for concern with such trivialities, now that there existed a huge secret society affiliated to the International and occupied in fomenting world revolution and ready for immediate action in Russia. He managed to hoodwink a few young people and inveigle them into committing criminal acts, which gave the police the pretext for

crushing the whole of this student movement, so dangerous to official Russia.

In March 1869, there arrived at Geneva a young Russian who tried to ingratiate himself with all the Russian emigrants by posing as a delegate from the St. Petersburg students. He introduced himself under various names. Some of the emigrants knew positively that no delegate had been sent from that city; others, after talking to the supposed delegate, took him for a spy. In the end, he let himself be known by his real name, which was Nechayev. He said that he had escaped from the St. Petersburg fortress, where he had been incarcerated as one of the chief instigators of the disorders which had broken out in January 1869 in the capital’s educational institutions. Several of the emigrants, who had suffered long spells of detention in this fortress, knew from experience that all escape was impossible, and so they were aware that on this point Nechayev was lying; on the other hand, since the newspapers and letters which they received with the names of wanted students never mentioned Nechayev, they regarded his alleged revolutionary activity as mere legend. But Bakunin took up Nechayev’s cause and made a tremendous fuss about it. He proclaimed to all and sundry that this was the “envoy extraordinary of the great secret organisation existing and active in Russia”. Bakunin was beseeched not to disclose to this person the names of his acquaintances whom he could compromise. Bakunin gave his word; how he kept it will be shown by the documents of the trial.

During an interview that Nechayev requested of a refugee,a he was forced to admit that he was not the delegate of any secret organisation, but he had, he said, comrades and acquaintances whom he wished to organise, adding that it was essential to gain control over the old emigrants in order to influence the young people with their prestige and to profit by their printing press and their money. Shortly afterwards, Words came out, addressed to the students by Nechayev and Bakunin.b In it, Nechayev repeated the legend of his escape and appealed to the young people to devote themselves to the revolutionary struggle. In the student unrest Bakunin discovers “an all-destroying spirit opposed to the State ...

a N. I. Utin.— Ed.

b The reference is to Bakunin’s leaflet НЪсколъко словъ къ молодымъ братьямъ въ Россги and Nechayev’s Студентамъ университета, академги и технологического] института въ ПетербургЪ, Geneva, 1869.— Ed.

which has emerged from the very depths of the people’s life”*; he congratulates his “young brethren on their revolutionary tendencies.... This means that the end is in sight of this infamous Empire of all the Russias!” His anarchism served him as a pretext to take a swipe at the Poles, accusing them of only working

“for the restoration of their historic state” (!!).— “They dream, therefore, of a new enslavement of their people”, and should they succeed “they would become our enemies as much as the oppressors of their own people. We shall fight them in the name of the social revolution and liberty for the whole world”.

Bakunin is clearly in agreement with the tsar on this issue: The Poles must be prevented at all costs from managing their internal affairs as they think fit. During all Polish insurrections, the official Russian press has always accused the Polish insurgents of being “the oppressors of their own people”. A touching point of agreement between the organs of the Third Department ** and the archanarchist of Locarno!

The Russian people, Bakunin continues, are at present living in conditions similar to those that forced them to rise under Tsar Alexei, father of Peter the Great. Then it was Stenka Razin, the Cossack brigand chief, who placed himself at their head and showed them “the road” to “freedom”. In order to rise today the people are waiting only for a new Stenka Razin; but this time he

“will be replaced by the legion of déclassé young men who already live the life of the people... Stenka Razin, no longer an individual hero but a collective one” (!) “consequently they have an invincible hero behind them. Such a hero are all the magnificent young people over whom his spirit already soars.”

To perform this role of a collective Stenka Razin, the young people must prepare themselves through ignorance:

“Friends, abandon with all speed this world doomed to destruction. Leave its universities, its academies, its schools [...] and go among the people,” to become “the mid-wife of the people’s self-emancipation, the uniter and organiser of their forces and efforts. Do not bother at this moment with learning, in the name of which they would bind you, castrate you... Such is the belief of the finest people in the West... The world of the workers of Europe and America calls you to join them in a fraternal alliance.”

* It shall be noted that these Words were published at the very moment of the persecutions and sentences, when the young people were doing their utmost to moderate their movement which the police themselves found it so advantageous to exaggerate.

** The Third Department of the Imperial Russian Chancellory is the Central Bureau of the secret political police in Russia.

In its secret statutes, the Alliance tells its third-grade members that

“the principles of this organisation ... shall be even more explicitly exposed in the programme of the Russian socialist democracy”.a

We have here the beginnings of this promise’s fulfilment. In addition to the habitual anarchist phrases and the chauvinistic hatred of the Poles that Citizen B. has never been able to conceal, we see him here for the first time acclaiming the Russian brigand as the type of the true revolutionary and preaching to Russian young the cult of ignorance, under the pretext that modern science is merely official science (can one imagine an official mathematics, physics or chemistry?), and that this is the opinion of the finest people in the West. Finally he ends his leaflet by letting it be understood that through his mediation the International is proposing an alliance to these young people, whom he forbids even the learning of the Ignorantines.371

This evangelical Word played a great part in the Nechayev conspiracy. It was read secretly to every neophyte before his initiation.

At the same time as this Word (1869), anonymous Russian publications came out: 1) The Setting of the Revolutionary Questionb; 2) The Principles of Revolution; 3) Publications of the “People’s Judgment” Society (“Narodnaya Rasprava”) No. 1, summer 1869, Moscow.c — All these writings were printed in Geneva, as is proved by the fact that the type was identical with that used for other Russian publications in Geneva—furthermore, this fact was a matter of public notoriety among all the Russian emigrants,— which did not prevent these publications from carrying on their first page the stamp: “Printed in Russia—Gedruckt in Russland”, to mislead the Russian students into thinking that the secret society possessed considerable resources in Russia itself.

The Setting of the Revolutionary Question gives away its authors at once. The same phrases, the same expressions as those used by Bakunin and Nechayev in their Words:

“Not only the state must be destroyed, but also revolutionaries of the State and the cabinet. We are certainly for the people.”

a See this volume, p. 573.— Ed.

b [M. Бакунин,] Постановка революцгоннаго вопроса. Here and below the titles of Bakunin’s and Nechayev’s works, as well as those of some other authors, are given in the original in French.—Ed.

c Начала Революцги. (Written by M. Bakunin or S. Nechayev), Geneva, 1869.— Ed.

d Издангя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 1.— Ed.

By the law of anarchist assimilation, Bakunin assimilates himself to the student youth:

“The government itself shows us the road we must follow to attain our goal, that is to say, the goal of the people. It drives us out of the universities, the academies, the schools. We are grateful to it for having thus put us on such glorious, such firm ground. Now we have ground under our feet, now we can do things. And what are we going to do? Teach the people? That would be stupid. The people know themselves, and better than we do, what they need” (compare the secret statutes which endow the masses with “popular instincts”, and the initiates with “the revolutionary idea” a). “Our task is not to teach the people but to rouse them.” Up to now “they have always rebelled in vain because they have rebelled separately... We can render them extremely valuable assistance, we can give them what they have lacked so far, what has been the principal cause of all their defeats. We can give them the unity of universal movement by rallying their own forces.”

a See this volume, p. 576.— Ed.

This is where the doctrine of the Alliance, anarchy at the bottom and discipline at the top, emerges in all its purity. First by rioting comes the “unleashing of what today are called the evil passions” but “in the midst of popular anarchy, which will constitute the very life and energy of the revolution, unity of revolutionary idea and action should find an organ”. That organ will be the world Alliance, Russian section, the Society of the People’s Judgment.

But Bakunin is not to be satisfied merely with youth. He calls all brigands to the banner of his Alliance, Russian section.

“Brigandage is one of the most honourable forms of the Russian people’s life. The brigand is a hero, a protector, a people’s avenger, the irreconcilable enemy of the state, and of all social and civil order established by the state, a fighter to the death against the whole civilisation of the civil servants, the nobles, the priests and the crown... He who fails to understand brigandage understands nothing of Russian popular history. He who is not in sympathy with it, cannot be in sympathy with Russian popular life, and has no heart for the measureless, age-long sufferings of the people; he belongs to the enemy camp, among the supporters of the state... Brigandage is the sole proof of the vitality, the passion and the strength of the people... The brigand in Russia is the true and only revolutionary—the revolutionary without phrases, without rhetoric culled from books, an indefatigable revolutionary, irreconcilable and irresistible in action, a popular and social revolutionary, not a political or class revolutionary... The brigands in the forests, in the towns and in the villages scattered all over Russia, and the brigands held in the countless gaols of the empire make up a single, indivisible, close-knit world—the world of the Russian revolution. It is here, and here alone, that the real revolutionary conspiracy has long existed. He who wants to undertake real conspiracy in Russia, who wants a people’s revolution, must go into this world... Following the road pointed out to us now by the government, which drives us from the academies, the universities and schools, let us throw ourselves, brethren, among the people, into the people’s movement, into the brigand and peasant rebellion and, maintaining a true and firm friendship among ourselves, let us rally into a single mass all the scattered outbursts of the muzhiks” (peasants). “Let us turn them into a people’s revolution, meaningful but ruthless.” *

In the second leaflet, The Principles of Revolution, we find a development of the order given in the secret statutes that “not a stone shall remain standing” b. All must be destroyed in order to produce “complete amorphism”, for if even “one of the old forms” be preserved, it will become the “embryo” from which all the other old social forms will be regenerated. The leaflet accuses the political revolutionaries who do not take this amorphism seriously of deceiving the people. It accuses them of having erected

“new gallows and scaffolds where the surviving brother revolutionaries have been done to death... So it is that the people have not yet known a real revolution... A real revolution does not need individuals standing at the head of the crowd and commanding it, but men hidden invisibly among the crowd and forming an invisible link between one crowd and another, and thus invisibly giving one and the same direction, one spirit and character to the movement. This is the sole purpose of bringing in a secret preparatory organisation and only to this extent is it necessary.”

Here, then, the existence of the international brethren, so carefully concealed in the West, is exposed to the Russian public and the Russian police. Further the leaflet goes on to preach systematic assassination and declares that for people engaged in practical revolutionary work all argument about the future is

“criminal because it hinders pure destruction and hampers the advent of the beginning of the revolution. We believe only in those who show their devotion to the cause of revolution by deeds, without fear of torture or imprisonment, and we renounce all words that are not immediately followed by deeds. We have no further use for aimless propaganda that does not set itself a definite time and place for realisation of the aims of revolution. What is more, it stands in our way and we shall make every effort to combat it... We shall silence by force the chatterers who refuse to understand this.”

* To mystify his readers Bakunin confuses the leaders of the popular uprisings of the 17th and 18th centuries with the brigands and thieves of the Russia of today. As regards the latter, the reading of Flerovsky’s book The Condition of the Working Class in Russia would disillusion the most romantic souls concerning these poor creatures from whom Bakunin proposes to form the sacred phalanx of the Russian revolution. The sole brigandage — apart from the governmental sphere, of course — still being carried out on a large scale in Russia is the stealing of horses, run as a commercial enterprise by the capitalists, of whom the “revolutionaries without phrases” are but the tools and victims.

a H. Флеровскш, Положепге рабочаго класса въ Россги. Наблюдены и изслЬдованш, St. Petersburg, 1869.— Ed.

b See this volume, p. 573.— Ed.

These threats were addressed to the Russian emigrants who had not bowed to Bakunin’s papal authority and whom he called doctrinaires.

“We break all ties with the political emigrants who refuse to return to their country to join our ranks, and until these ranks become evident, with all those who refuse to work for their public emergence on the scene of Russian life. We make exception for the emigrants who have already declared themselves workers of the European revolution. From now on we shall make no further repetitions or appeals... He who has ears and eyes will hear and see the men of action, and if he does not join them his destruction will be no fault of ours, just as it will be no fault of ours if all who hide behind the scenes are cold-bloodedly and pitilessly destroyed, along with the scenery that hides them.”

At this point we can see right through Bakunin. While enjoining the emigrants on pain of death to return to Russia as agents of his secret society—like the Russian police-spies who would offer them passports and money to go there and join in conspiracies—he grants himself a papal dispensation to remain peacefully in Switzerland as “a worker of the European revolution”, and to occupy himself composing manifestos that compromise the unfortunate students whom the police hold in their prisons.

“While not recognising any other activity but that of destruction, we acknowledge that the forms in which it manifests itself may be extremely varied: poison, dagger, noose, etc. The revolution sanctifies all without distinction. The field is open!—Let all young and healthy minds undertake at once the sacred work of destroying evil, purging and enlightening the Russian land by fire and sword, uniting fraternally with those who will do the same thing throughout Europe.”

Let us add that in this sublime proclamation the inevitable brigand figures in the melodramatic person of Karl Moor (from Schiller’s Robbers), and that No. 2 of The People’s Judgment,a quoting a passage from this leaflet, calls it straight out “a proclamation of Bakunin’s”.

Number 1 of the Publications of the “People’s Judgment”* Society begins by proclaiming that the general uprising of the Russian people is imminent and close at hand.b

“We, that is to say, that part of the popular youth which have reached a certain stage of development, we must clear the way for it; in other words, we must eliminate all the obstacles to its progress and prepare favourable conditions for it... In view of the imminence of the uprising, we deem it necessary to unite into a single indissoluble whole all revolutionary efforts scattered all over Russia. That is why we have decided to publish, on behalf of the revolutionary centre, leaflets in which every one of our coreligionaries scattered all over Russia, every one of the workers for the sacred cause of the Revolution, although unknown to us, will always see what we want and where we are going.”

* Bakunin and Nechayev always translate this expression as “justice populaire”, but the Russian word “rasprava” means not justice, but judgment, or rather revenge.

a «Кто не за насъ, тотъ противъ насъ», Издамя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 2, St. Petersburg, 1870.— Ed.

b «Всенародное возсташе», Издангя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 1, Moscow, 1869.— Ed.

The leaflet then states:

“Thought has value for us only inasmuch as it serves the great cause of universal pan-destruction. The revolutionary who studies the revolution in books will never be good for anything... We have no more faith in words. The word has value for us only when it is followed by action; but not all is action which bears the name. For example, the modest and too circumspect organisation of secret societies which have no external manifestations is, in our view, nothing but ridiculous and disgusting child’s play. By external manifestations, we mean only a series of acts positively destroying something, a person, a thing, an enchainment which hinders popular emancipation... Without sparing our lives, without stopping before any threat, any obstacle, any danger, etc., we must, by a series of audacious and, yes, arrogant attempts, burst into the life of the people and inspire them with faith [...] in their own powers, awaken them, rally them and urge them on to the triumph of their own cause.”

But suddenly the revolutionary phrases of the Judgment turn into attacks on The People’s Cause,3 a Russian newspaper published in Geneva which defended the programme and organisation of the International. It was, as we see, of the greatest importance for the Alliance propaganda that Bakunin was carrying out in Russia in the name of the International, that a newspaper unmasking his fraud should be silenced.

“If this newspaper continues in the same fashion, we shall not hesitate to express and demonstrate to it what our relations with it must be... We are convinced that all serious men will now lay aside all theory, and the more so all doctrinairism. We can prevent the publication of writings which, though sincere, are nevertheless contrary to our banner, by various practical means at our disposal.”

After these threats to its dangerous rival, the People’s Judgment continues:

“Among the leaflets lately published abroad, we recommend, almost without any reserve, Bakunin’s appeal to the déclassé student youth... Bakunin is right when he advises to leave the academies, the universities, and the schools, and to go among the people.”

Bakunin noticeably never lets slip the occasion to offer himself a swing of the censer.

The second article is entitled: “A glimpse at the past and present notions of the cause.”* We have just seen Bakunin and Nechayev threatening the Russian organ of the International abroad. In this article, we shall see them descend on Chernyshevsky, the man who, in Russia, had done most to draw into the socialist movement the student youth whom they claimed to represent.

“Certainly, the peasants have never engaged in imagining forms of the future social order; nevertheless, after the elimination of all obstructions (that is, after the pan-destructive revolution, which is the first thing to be accomplished and consequently the most important one for us), they will be able to arrange their lives with more sense than can be found in the theories and projects of the doctrinarian socialists who want to impose themselves on the people as teachers and, even worse, directors. In the eyes of people not corrupted by the spectacles of civilisation, the tendencies of these unwanted teachers are only too obvious. They seek, under the pretext of science and art, etc., to prepare cosy little niches for themselves and their kind. Even if these tendencies were disinterested and naive, even if they were but the inevitable fruit of all order imbued with modern civilisation, the people would gain nothing by them. The ideal goal of social equality was incomparably better achieved in the Cossack society organised by Vasily Us in Astrakhan after the departure of Stenka Razin, than in Fourier’s phalansteries, the institutions of Cabet, Louis Blanc and other socialist savants” (!), “or in the associations of Chernyshevsky.”

Here follows a page of invective against the latter and his comrades.

The cosy little niche that Chernyshevsky was preparing for himself was presented to him by the Russian government in the form of a prison cell in Siberia, whereas Bakunin, relieved of this danger in his capacity as worker for the European revolution, limited himself to demonstrations from without. And it was at the very time when the government severely forbade the mere mention of Chernyshevsky’s name in the press, that Messrs Bakunin and Nechayev attacked him.

Our “amorphous” revolutionaries continue:

“We undertake to demolish this rotten social edifice... We come from the people with our skins rent by the teeth of the existing order; we come guided by hatred for all that is not of the people, having no notion of moral obligations or of any kind of honesty towards this world which we hate and of which we expect nothing but evil. We have but one single invariable and negative plan: that of merciless destruction. We categorically renounce the elaboration of future conditions of life, this task being incompatible with our activities, and for that reason we regard as futile all purely theoretical brain work... We undertake exclusively the destruction of the existing social order.”

a «Взглядъ на прежнее и нынЬшнее понимаше дЬла», Издангя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 1.— Ed.

These two demonstrators from without are insinuating that the attempted assassination of the tsar3 in 1866 was one of a “series of pan-destructive acts” committed by their own secret society:

“It was Karakozov who began our sacred work on April 4, 1866. Only since that time has the consciousness of their revolutionary powers been stirring to life among the young people... It was an example, a deed! No propaganda can be of such great significance.”

They then draw up a long list of “creatures” condemned by the committee to immediate death. Several “will have their tongues torn out” ... but

“we shall not touch the tsar ... we shall save him for the judgment of the people, of the peasants; this right belongs to all the people ... so let our executioner live until the moment of the popular storm... ”

No one will venture to doubt that these Russian pamphlets, the secret statutes, and all the works published by Bakunin since 1869 in French,b come from one and the same source. On the contrary, all these three categories complement one another. They correspond to some extent to the three degrees of initiation into the famous organisation of pan-destruction. The French brochures of Citizen B. are written for the rank and file of the Alliance, whose prejudices are taken into account. They are told of nothing but pure anarchy, of anti-authoritarianism, of a free federation of autonomous groups and other equally harmless things: a mere jumble of words. The secret statutes are intended for the international brethren of the West; there anarchy becomes “the complete unleashing of people’s life ... of evil passions”, but underneath this anarchy there lies the secret directing element—the brothers themselves; they are given only a few vague indications on the morality of the Alliance, stolen from Loyola, and the necessity of leaving not a stone standing is mentioned only in passing, because these are Westerners brought up on philistine prejudices and some allowances have to be made for them. They are told that the truth, too blinding for eyes not yet accustomed to true anarchism, will be fully revealed in the programme of the Russian section. Only to the born anarchists, to the people elect, to his young people of Holy Russia does the prophet dare to speak out openly. There anarchy means universal pan-destruction;

a Alexander II.— Ed.

b The reference is to the following Bakunin’s works: Programme de la Section de l’Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste; Quelques paroles—A mes jeunes frères en Russie; Lettres à un Français sur la crise actuelle. Septembre 1870; L’Empire knouto-germanique et la révolution sociale.—Ed.

the revolution, a series of assassinations, first individual and then en masse; the sole rule of action, the Jesuit morality intensified; the revolutionary type, the brigand. There, thought and learning are absolutely forbidden to the young as mundane occupations that could lead them to doubt the all-destructive orthodoxy. Those who persist in adhering to these theoretical heresies or who apply their vulgar criticism to the dogmas of universal amorphism are threatened with a holy inquisition. Before the youth of Russia the Pope need feel no restraint either in the form or substance of his utterances. He gives his tongue free play and the complete absence of ideas is expressed in such grandiloquent verbiage that it cannot be reproduced in French without weakening its comic effect. His language is not even real Russian. It is Tartar, so a native Russian has stated.a These small men with atrophied minds puff themselves up with horrific phrases in order to appear in their own eyes as giants of revolution. It is the fable of the frog and the ox.b

What terrible revolutionaries! They want to annihilate and amorphise everything, “absolutely everything”. They draw up lists of proscribed persons, doomed to die by their daggers, their poison, their ropes, by the bullets from their revolvers; they “will tear out the tongues” of many, but they will bow before the majesty of the tsar. Indeed, the tsar, the officials, the nobility, the bourgeoisie may sleep in peace. The Alliance does not make war on the established states, but on the revolutionaries who do not stoop to the role of supernumeraries in this tragicomedy. Peace to the palaces, war on the cottages! Chernyshevsky was libelled; the editors of The People's Cause were warned that they would be silenced “by various practical means at our disposal” ; the Alliance threatened to assassinate all revolutionaries who were not with it. This is the only part of their pan-destructive programme which they began to carry out. We shall now describe the first exploit of this nature.

After April 1869, Bakunin and Nechayev began preparing the ground for the revolution in Russia. They sent letters, proclamations and telegrams from Geneva to St. Petersburg, Kiev, and other cities. They knew, however, that they could not send letters and proclamations, much less telegrams, to Russia without the “Third Department” (the secret police) knowing about them. All this could have no purpose other than that of compromising others. These cowardly tricks of men who risked nothing in their fine city of Geneva resulted in the arrest of a great many persons in Russia. However, they were warned of the danger that they were causing. We have in our hands proof that the following passage in a letter from Russia was communicated to Bakunin:

“For mercy’s sake, let Bakunin know that if he holds anything sacred in the revolution, he must stop sending his lunatic proclamations, which are leading to searches in several cities and to arrests, and are paralysing all serious work.”372

Bakunin replied that it was all nonsense and that Nechayev had left for America. But, as will be seen later, Bakunin’s clandestine code makes it obligatory to

“compromise completely ... the ambitious men and liberals of different shades ... so that retreat becomes impossible for them, and make use of them”. (The Revolutionary Catechism,373 § 19.)a

Here is one proof. On April 7, 1869, Nechayev wrote to Mme. Tomilova, wife of a colonel who later died of grief after the arrest of his wife, that “there is an enormous amount to be done in Geneva” , and he urged her to send a reliable man for talks with him.

“The cause on which we must take counsel does not concern only our trade, but that of all Europe. Things are in ferment here. There’s a soup boiling up that Europe will never manage to swallow. So make haste.”

Then comes the Geneva address. This letter did not reach its destination; it was confiscated in the post by the secret police, and resulted in the arrest of Mme. Tomilova, who only learned about it during the investigation. (Report of the Nechayev trial, St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 187, 1871.*)

Here is another fact which demonstrates Bakunin’s circumspection in organising a conspiracy. Mavritsky, a student at the Kiev Academy, received proclamations which had been sent to him from Geneva. He immediately handed them over to the government, which hastened to send to Geneva a trustworthy man, that is, a spy. Bakunin and Nechayev formed a close association with this delegate from the south of Russia, supplied him with proclamations and the addresses of persons whom Nechayev claimed to know in Russia, and gave him what could only be taken as a letter of confidence and recommendation (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 187).

* All the facts cited by us in connection with the Nechayev conspiracy are extracts from the reports of the trial as published in the St. Petersburg Gazette. We shall quote the number of the issue from which they have been taken.

a See this volume, p. 547.— Ed.

On September 3 (September 15, new style), 1869, Nechayev introduced himself in Moscow to Uspensky, a young man he had known before going abroad, as emissary of the World Revolutionary Committee in Geneva, and showed him the mandate quoted above. He told Uspensky that emissaries from this European Committee would be coming to Moscow furnished with similar mandates, and that he, Nechayev, had been given the mission of

“organising a secret society among the student youth ... to provoke a popular uprising in Russia”.

On Uspensky’s recommendation, Nechayev, in order to find a safe refuge, went to the Agricultural Academy, which was some distance from the city, and contacted Ivanov, one of the students best known for their devotion to the interests of the young and the people. Henceforth, the Agricultural Academy was to be Nechayev’s centre of activity. First, he introduced himself under a false name and told how he had travelled a great deal in Russia; that the people were ready to rise everywhere and would have done so long ago had not the revolutionaries advised them to wait patiently until the completion of their great and powerful organisation, which was going to combine all the revolutionary forces of Russia. He urged Ivanov and other students to join this secret society, headed by an all-powerful Committee in whose name everything was done, but whose composition and locale must remain unknown to its members. This Committee and this organisation constituted the Russian Branch of World Union, of the Revolutionary Alliance, of the International Working Men’s Association! *

Nechayev began by distributing the above-mentioned Words among the students to show them that Bakunin, the celebrated revolutionary of 1848 who had escaped from Siberia, was playing an important role in Europe, that he was the chief plenipotentiary of the workers, that he signed the mandates issued by the General Committee of the World Association, and that this hero advised them to give up their studies, etc. To give them a striking example of devotion unto death, he read them a poem by Ogarev, Bakunin’s friend and the editor of Herzen’s Kolokol, entitled The Student, it was dedicated to his “young friend Nechayev”.374 In it, Nechayev was represented as the ideal student, as the “indefatigable fighter since childhood”. Ogarev sang of how Nechayev suffered in his early years for the sake of the living work of science; how his devotion to the people had grown; how, pursued by the vengeance of the tsar and by the fear of the Boyars, he took to a life of wandering (skitanye, or vagabondage); how he went on a pilgrimage to cry out to the peasants from east to west: “Assemble together, rise up courageously”, etc. etc.; how he ended his life in penal servitude amid the snows of Siberia; how, being no hypocrite, he remained faithful all his life to the struggle; and how, till his last breath, he repeated: “All the people must conquer their land and their liberty!” This Alliance poem was published in the spring of 1869, when Nechayev was amusing himself in Geneva. Batches of it were sent to Russia along with the other proclamations. It would seem that the mere act of copying out this poem had the effect of inspiring a feeling of self-sacrifice in the neophytes, for, on the Committee’s instructions, Nechayev had it copied out and distributed by each new initiate (statements by several of the defendants).

* It should be noted that in Russian the words for association, union and alliance (obshchestvo, soyuz, tovarishchestvo) are more or less synonymous and can often be used indiscriminately. Similarly, the word for international is mostly rendered by “world” (vsemimy). In the Russian press, “International Association” is thus often translated by words which could equally well be rendered into French as “Alliance universelle”. It was by making use of this confusion in terms that Bakunin and Nechayev succeeded in exploiting our Association’s name and in ruining about a hundred young people.

Music seems to be the only thing which was to escape the amorphism to which universal pan-destruction reduced all the arts and sciences. On behalf of the Committee, Nechayev ordained that propaganda should be carried out by means of revolutionary music, and tried hard to find a tune to which this poetic masterpiece could be sung by the young people (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 190).

The mystic legend of his death did not prevent him from hinting that Nechayev might well be still alive, or from telling, under oath of secrecy, that Nechayev was in the Urals as a worker and that he had founded workers’ associations there. (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 202). He disclosed this mainly to those who were “good for nothing”, that is, to those who dreamed of founding working men’s associations, in order to inspire them with admiration for this fabulous hero. Finally, when the legends of his imaginary escape from the St. Petersburg Fortress3 and of his

poetic death in Siberia had sufficiently prepared their minds and he believed that the initiates were well enough versed in the catechism, he finally brought about his evangelical resurrection and announced that he was Nechayev in person! But it was no longer the Nechayev of old, ridiculed and despised by the students of St. Petersburg, as is affirmed by the witnesses and the defendants; this was the plenipotentiary of the World Revolutionary Committee. The miracle of his transformation had been engineered by Bakunin. Nechayev had complied with all the conditions demanded by the statutes of the organisation he preached; he had “distinguished himself by actions known and appreciated by the Committee” ; he had, in Brussels, organised and directed an important strike by members of the International; the Belgian Committee had sent him as delegate to the Geneva International, where he had met Bakunin, and since, to use his own expression, “he disliked resting on his laurels”, he had returned to Russia to begin “revolutionary activities”. He gave an assurance that a whole general staff of sixteen Russian refugees had come with him.*

Uspensky, Ivanov, and four or six other young people appear to have been the only ones in Moscow who let themselves be taken in by this balderdash. Four of these initiates were ordered to recruit new adherents and to form circles or small sections. The plan of organisation is to be found in the documents of the trial; it conforms in almost every point to that of the secret Alliance. The “general rules of the organisation” were read out before the court, and not one of the principal initiates disputed their authenticity. Furthermore, issue No. 2 of The People’s Judgment edited by Bakunin and Nechayev admitted the authenticity of the following articles:

“The organisation is based on trust in the individual.— No member knows to which grade he belongs, that is to say, whether he is far from or near the centre.— Obedience to the Committee’s orders must be absolute, without any objections.— Renunciation of all property in favour of the Committee, which can dispose of it.—Any member who has recruited a certain number of proselytes to our cause and who has proved by his deeds the degree of his strength and abilities, may familiarise himself with these rules and, later, with the society’s statutes to a greater or lesser extent. The degree of his strength and abilities is assessed by the Committee.” a

* None of the Russian refugees re-entered Russia, and in any case there are no sixteen Russian political refugees to be found in the whole of Europe.

a «ИзвЬщеше и предостережете отъ Комитета», Издангя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 2, St. Petersburg, 1870.— Ed.

To hoodwink the Moscow members, Nechayev told them that the organisation in St. Petersburg was already an enormous one, whereas in reality not a single circle or section existed there. In a moment of forgetfulness, he exclaimed to an initiate*: “In St. Petersburg, they have been faithless to me like women and have betrayed me like slaves.” When in St. Petersburg, however, he said that the organisation was making admirable progress in Moscow.

When, in this latter city, they asked to see a member of the Committee, he invited a young St. Petersburg officer,5 who was interested in the student movement, to come with him to Moscow and see the circles there. The young man agreed, and on the way Nechayev consecrated him “ delegate extraordinary of the Committee of the International Association of Geneva".

“You could not,” he said, “be admitted to our meetings if you were not a member, but here is a mandate certifying that you are a member of the International Association, and as such you will be admitted.”

The mandate bore a French stamp and read: “The bearer of this mandate is the plenipotentiary representative of the International Association.” The other defendants affirm that Nechayev assured them that this stranger was the “true agent of the Geneva Revolutionary Committee” (St. Petersburg Gazette, Nos. 225 and 226).

Dolgov, a friend of Ivanov, testifies that

“when speaking of the secret society organised with the aim of supporting the people in the event of an uprising and of directing the insurrection so as to ensure its success, Nechayev also spoke of the International Association and said that Bakunin was serving as a contact with it” (No. 198).

Ripman confirms that

“to divert him from his ideas on cooperative associations, Nechayev told him that there was an International Working Men’s Association in Europe, and that to attain the goal pursued by the International, it was enough to join this Association, a section of which already existed in Moscow” (No. 198).

Further on, we see from the statements of the defendants that Nechayev was misrepresenting the International as a secret society and his own society as a branch of the International. He also assured the initiates that their Moscow section was going to proceed by strikes and associations on a large scale, just like the International. When the accused Ripman asked him for the society’s programme, Nechayev read him several passages from a French leaflet on the aims of the society. The defendant understood that this leaflet was the International’s programme and added:

“Since there had been a lot of talk about this society in the press, I did not see anything very criminal in Nechayev’s proposition.”

Kuznetsov,3 one of the chief defendants, said that Nechayev had read the programme of the International Association (No. 181). His brotherb stated that

“he had seen them at his brother’s place copying out a French leaflet which must have been the society’s programme” (No. 202).

The defendant Klimin declared that he had been read

“the programme of the International Association with a few lines written as a postscript by Bakunin ... but as far as I remember, this programme was couched in very vague terms and said nothing about the means of achieving the aim, but spoke only of equality in general” (No. 199).

The defendant Gavrishev explained that the

“French leaflet, insofar as it was possible to grasp its meaning, contained an exposition of the principles held by the representatives of socialism who had had their Congress at Geneva”.

Finally, the deposition of the defendant Svyatsky completely clarifies for us the nature of this mysterious French leaflet: during the search, he was found in possession of a leaflet written in French and entitled: Programme de l’Alliance internationale de la démocratie socialiste.

“Much had been said about the International Association in the newspapers,” he said, “and I was interested to know its programme for purely theoretical purposes” (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 230.)

These depositions prove that the secret programme of the Alliance had been passed off in manuscript as the International’s programme. That the World Revolutionary Committee, of which Nechayev said he was an emissary, and the Central Bureau of the Alliance (Citizen B.) were identical is proved by the deposition of the chief defendant, Uspensky, who declared that he had collected together all the minutes of the circle’s meetings “in order to send an account to Bakunin in Geneva”. Pryzhov, one of the principal defendants, testified that Nechayev had ordered him to go to Geneva with a report for Bakunin.

Owing to lack of space, we are not going to mention here all the lies, stupidities, swindles, and acts of violence on the part of Bakunin’s agent which were brought to light by the trial. We will only take note of the more striking examples.

Everything was a mystery in this organisation. Dolgov said that

“before joining this society, he would have liked to know its organisation and means. Nechayev had replied that that was a secret and he would get to know it later” (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 198).

When the members ventured to ask questions, Nechayev shut them up, saying that in accordance with the statutes, no one had the right to know anything until he had distinguished himself by some act (No. 199).

“As soon as we had agreed to become members of the society,” declared one of the accused,3 “Nechayev began to terrorise us with the power and might of the Committee which, according to him, existed and directed us. He said that the Committee had its own police, and that if anybody broke his word or acted contrary to the orders of individuals who were more highly placed than our circle, the Committee would have recourse to vengeance.” The defendant confessed that “having noticed Nechayev’s swindles, he informed him that he intended to withdraw completely from this business and go to the Caucasus to recover his health. Nechayev told him that this was not allowed, and that the Committee could punish him with death if he dared to leave the society. He also ordered him to go to a meeting and speak there of the secret society in order to recruit new members, and to read the poem on Nechayev’s death. When the defendant refused, Nechayev threatened him. ‘You’re not here to discuss matters,’ he shouted. ‘You’re obliged to obey the Committee’s orders without objection’ ” (No. 198).

If this were only an isolated instance, there might be grounds for doubt; but several of the defendants, who could not possibly have come to an understanding with one another, testify to exactly the same thing.—Another declared that the circle’s members, on realising that they had been tricked, wanted to leave the society but did not dare do so for fear of the Committee’s revenge (No. 198).

One witness, speaking of one of his accused friends, said: The accused Florinsky did not know how to shake off Nechayev, who was preventing him from getting on with his work. The witness advised him to leave Moscow and go to St. Petersburg, but Florinsky replied that Nechayev would find him in St. Petersburg just as he did in Moscow; that Nechayev was outraging the convictions of a great many young people by terrorising them, and that what Florinsky seemed to fear was a denunciation on Nechayev’s part.

“It was said, and I heard it,” testified Likhutin, “that Nechayev was sending very violent letters from abroad to his acquaintances to compromise them and get them arrested. This way of acting was one trait of his character” (No. 186).

Yenisherlov stated even that he was beginning to regard Nechayev as a government agent.

During the meeting of a small circle, one of the members, Klimin, in reply to a stranger who was present as emissary of the Committee and expressed his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the circle, said that

“they themselves were also dissatisfied; that at the beginning the recruits were told that each section could act more or less independently without passive obedience being demanded of its members; but subsequently things had been run quite differently and the Committee was reducing them to the state of slaves” (No. 199).

Nechayev used to issue his orders on pieces of paper stamped: “Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance. Form for the public”, and he formulated his instructions as follows: “The Committee orders you to...” carry out such-and-such, go to such-and-such a place, etc.

One young officer, who had become disillusioned, wanted to leave the society. Nechayev seemed to agree to this, but he demanded compensation. The officer had to obtain for him a bill for 6,000 rubles (nearly 20,000 frs.) signed by Kolachevsky. In 1866, Kolachevsky, after Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate the tsar, had been detained with his two sisters3 for a long period. At the time of the present incident, one of them was serving a second term in prison for a political offence. The whole family was under rigorous police surveillance and Kolachevsky could expect to be arrested at any moment. Nechayev made use of this situation. On his orders, the young officer mentioned above invited Kolachevsky to his own place under a false pretext, entered into conversation with him, and gave him some proclamations, which the other took out of curiosity. No sooner had Kolachevsky gone out into the street, than he was accosted by an officer who ordered the other to follow him, announcing that he was working for the Third Department (secret police), and that he knew that Kolachevsky had on his person proclamations of a seditious nature. Now the possession of these alone is enough to lead to years of detention and penal servitude for a man if he has had the misfortune already to have been compromised in a political matter. The self-styled agent of the Third Department invited Kolachevsky to

get into a carriage, and, once they were inside, offered him the chance to buy himself off by signing on the spot a bill for 6,000 rubles. Forced to choose between this offer and the prospect of going to Siberia, Kolachevsky signed. The next day, another young man, Negreskul, on learning of this business, suspected Nechayev of being involved, immediately sought out the supposed agent of the Third Department, and demanded an explanation of his swindle. The latter denied everything; the bill had been hidden and was not retrieved until later during the search. The discovery of the conspiracy and Nechayev’s flight made it impossible for him to cash the note.—Negreskul had known Nechayev for a long time and had been the victim of one of his swindles in Geneva. Bakunin had then tried to recruit him. Later, they had extorted a hundred rubles from him (No. 230). He had ended up by being compromised by Nechayev, although he detested him and thought him capable of any villainy. He was arrested and died in prison.

We have seen that Ivanov had been one of Nechayev’s first recruits. He was one of the most beloved and most influential students at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. He devoted himself to bettering the lot of his comrades and organised aid societies and dining rooms where poor students could eat free of charge and which served as a cover for meetings at which they discussed social questions. He devoted all his spare time to teaching the children of peasants living near the Academy. His comrades testify that he threw himself passionately into all these activities, giving away his last kopek and quite often sacrificing his own hot meals.

Ivanov was struck by the stupidity of the terrorist proclamations issued by Nechayev and Bakunin. He could not understand why the Committee kept ordering the distribution of Words, Ogarev’s Song of Death, The People’s Judgment and, finally, Bakunin’s Appeal to the Russian Nobility, a purely aristocratic proclamation.* He

* Here are some extracts from the Appeal to the Russian Nobility,375 a proclamation published by Bakunin: “What privileges have we received for having, during the first half of the 19th century, been the mainstay of the throne which has been shaken to its very foundations so many times; for having, in 1848, during the storms of popular madness unleashed over Europe, saved by our noble deeds the Russian empire from the socialist utopias that threatened to invade it?... What have we been accorded for having saved the Empire from dismemberment, for having extinguished in Poland the flames of the conflagration which threatened to set all Russia on fire, for having, to this very moment, worked with unsparing energy and with unparalleled courage to destroy the revolutionary elements in Russia? — Was it not from our midst that there came Mikhail Muravyov, that gallant man whom Alexander II himself, for all his feeble-mindedness, named the saviour of his country? — What have we gained from all this? For all these inestimable services, we have been skinned of everything we possess... Our present appeal is a declaration by a vast majority of the Russian nobility which has long been ready and organised... We feel our strength in our right, we boldly throw down the gauntlet before the despot, the German princeling Alexander II Saltykov-Romanov, and we challenge him to a noble and knightly combat which must be taken up in 1870 between the descendants of Rurik and the party of the Russian independent nobility.”

“Muravyov, that gallant man”, is nothing but the executioner of Poland.

began to lose patience and to ask where this Committee was, what it was doing, and what sort of a Committee it was that invariably put Nechayev in the right and the other members in the wrong. He expressed a desire to see someone from this Committee. He had acquired the right to this, since Nechayev himself had promoted him to a rank equivalent to that of member of a national committee of the secret Alliance. It was then that Nechayev extricated himself from this predicament by staging the comedy, as described above, of the emissary from the Geneva International.

One day, Nechayev ordered the transfer to the Committee of money intended for the students’ mutual aid society. Ivanov protested, and a quarrel ensued. Other comrades urged Ivanov to submit to the Committee’s decision, since they had accepted the statutes which demanded this submission. Ivanov gave way to their insistences and grudgingly complied. Nechayev then began thinking out a plan for getting rid of this man whom he probably regarded as a doctrinaire revolutionary deserving death. He engaged Uspensky in theoretical conversations on punishment, on the elimination of disloyal members who, by their rebellion, could compromise and ruin the whole vast secret organisation.

The manner in which Nechayev ran his secret society was such as to engender doubts concerning the serious nature of the organisation. The sections had to hold regular sittings to examine the academic registers of the names of all the students, to mark those who were considered likely recruits, and to investigate means of procuring money. One such means was subscription lists for “students who have suffered”, that is, who had been administratively banished. The proceeds from these lists went straight into the Committee’s pocket, that is to say, Nechayev’s. The sections had to obtain all kinds of clothes which were kept in a safe place and were used by Nechayev as disguise during his flight. But the principal occupation consisted in copying out the Song of Death and the proclamations cited above. The members of the conspiracy had to write down as accurately as possible everything that was said at their meetings, and Nechayev threatened them with the Committee, which had its spies everywhere, in the event of them daring to hide anything. Each had to bring to the circle written reports on everything that he had been doing in between meetings, and these reports had to be compiled into a summary for despatch to Bakunin.

All these puerile and inquisitorial practices made Ivanov doubt the very existence of the Committee and the much vaunted powers of this organisation. He began to suspect that it all boiled down to preposterous exploitation and a colossal hoax. He confided to his close friends that if things stayed as they were and if they were given nothing better to do than these silly tasks, he would break with Nechayev and would found a serious organisation himself.

It was then that Nechayev took a decisive step. He gave the order for his proclamations to be put up in the students’ dining rooms. Ivanov realised that the posting up of these proclamations would lead to the closing of the dining rooms, the banning of meetings, and the dispersal of the best students. He therefore opposed the measure (this is, in fact, what happened: the students’ dining room was closed down and all the delegates appointed to manage it were exiled). A quarrel flared up over this, during which Nechayev kept repeating his stereotyped statement: “It’s the Committee’s orders!”

Ivanov was in utter despair. On November 20, 1869, he approached a member of the section, Pryzhov, and informed him that he was quitting the society. Pryzhov communicated this statement to Uspensky who, in his turn, hastened to inform Nechayev and, a few hours later, these three met at Kuznetsov’s place, where Nikolayev also had lodgings. Nechayev announced that Ivanov must be punished for rebelling against the Committee’s orders, and that he must be eliminated to prevent him from doing them any more damage. Kuznetsov, Ivanov’s close friend, apparently did not grasp Nechayev’s intention, and so the latter declared that Ivanov must be killed. Pryzhov shouted to Kuznetsov: “Nechayev is mad, he wants to kill Ivanov, he must be prevented.” Nechayev put a stop to their hesitation with his habitual statement: “Do you also want to rebel against the Committee’s orders? If there’s no other way of killing him, I’ll go to his room tonight with Nikolayev and we’ll strangle him.” He then suggested luring Ivanov that night to a grotto in the Academy park under pretext of digging up a printing-press which had been hidden for a long time, and they would assassinate him there.

Thus, even at this supreme moment, Nechayev himself paid tribute to Ivanov’s loyalty. He was sure that, in spite of his resignation, Ivanov would come and help to dig up the printing-press, and that he was incapable of betraying him since, if he had been harbouring any such intention, he would have carried it out before leaving the society or immediately afterwards. If Ivanov had wanted to denounce Nechayev to the police, he had the chance to get them caught in the act. Quite to the contrary, Ivanov was delighted to have positive proof at last that this organisation actually existed, a tangible sign that it possessed the means of action, even if it were only printer’s type. Forgetting all the threats so often made by Nechayev to the unfaithful, he hastened to leave a friend with whom he was having tea and at whose place Nikolayev had called on Nechayev’s orders, and off he went in obedience to the summons.

In the darkness of the night, Ivanov went unsuspectingly towards the grotto. Suddenly, a cry rang out. Someone had jumped on him from behind. A terrible struggle began, with nothing to be heard but the grunting of Nechayev and the groans of his victim, whom he was strangling with his bare hands. Then a shot rang out, and Ivanov fell down dead. Nechayev’s revolver bullet had pierced Ivanov’s skull. “Quick, rope and stones,” shouted Nechayev, rummaging through the dead man’s pockets for papers and money. They then threw him into a pond.

On returning to Kuznetsov’s place, the assassins took measures to hide the traces of their crime. They burned Nechayev’s blood-stained shirt. The accomplices were gloomy and uneasy. Suddenly, a second revolver shot rang out and a bullet whistled past Pryzhov’s ear. Nechayev apologised for “having wanted to show Nikolayev how his revolver worked”. The witnesses unanimously testified that this had been another assassination attempt. Nechayev had wanted to kill Pryzhov because the latter had dared in the morning to protest against the murder of Ivanov.

Immediately afterwards, Nechayev rushed from Moscow to Petersburg with Kuznetsov, leaving Uspensky to act in Moscow. At Petersburg, he made a pretence of always being busy with his organisation; but, to his great astonishment, Kuznetsov noted that there was even less of an organisation there than in Moscow. He dared to question Nechayev: “Where is the Committee, then? Would it be you, by any chance?” — Nechayev denied this again and assured him that the Committee existed. He returned to Moscow and admitted to Nikolayev that since Uspensky had already been arrested, the same would happen to all the others very soon, and that “he did not know what he ought to do any more”. It was then that Nikolayev, his most faithful follower, decided to ask him if the famous Committee really existed, or if Nechayev himself was its sole embodiment.

“Without giving a positive reply to this question, he told me that all means were permissible for drawing people into such a cause, that this rule was also practised abroad, that this rule was followed by Bakunin just as by others, and that if such men submitted to this rule, it was entirely natural that he, Nechayev, should act in the same manner” (No. 181).

He then ordered Nikolayev to go with Pryzhov to Tula and fraudulently extort a passport from a worker who was an old friend of Nikolayev’s. He later went to Tula himself, where he entreated a Mme. Alexandrovskaya to accompany him to Geneva; it was absolutely necessary for him.

Mme. Alexandrovskaya had been seriously compromised during the disturbances of 1861 and 1862. She even had been committed to prison, where her conduct had left much to be desired. In a fit of frankness, she had written a confession to her judges, and this confession had compromised many people. After all this, she was interned in a provincial town under police surveillance. As she was afraid of not being able to obtain a passport, Nechayev procured one for her, no one knows how. It might be asked why Nechayev had sought out for his travelling companion a woman whose company alone would be enough to get him arrested at the frontier. However, he arrived in Geneva safe and sound with Mme. Alexandrovskaya at his side and, while his wretched dupes were being thrown into prison cells, he and Bakunin set about preparing the second issue of The People’s Judgment Bakunin, unbelievably proud to see the Journal de Genève a mention the Nechayev conspiracy with himself as having played the principal part, forgot that his The People’s Judgment claimed to be published in Moscow, and he inserted in it a whole page of the article from the Journal de Genève in French. As soon as the journal was ready, Mme. Alexandrovskaya was given the task of taking it into Russia with other proclamations. At the frontier, an agent of the Third Department, who was waiting for Mme. Alexandrovskaya, confiscated the parcel. After her arrest, she gave him a list of names which could not have been known except to Bakunin alone.—One

a “On s’occupe...”, Journal de Genève, No. 3, January 5, 1870. Reprinted from Издатя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 2, the article Вь послЪднихъ числахъ...» — Ed.

of the accused in the Nechayev affair, and one of his closest friends,3 admitted to the tribunal that “he had hitherto considered Bakunin an honest man, and he could not understand how he and others could have subjected this woman in such a craven fashion to the danger of arrest”.

If Bakunin evaded the necessity of himself going to Russia in order to direct in person the great revolution whose imminent explosion he predicted, at least he worked in Europe as if he had “the devil in his flesh”. Le Progrès of Locle, the organ of the Swiss Alliance, published long excerpts from The People’s Judgment.b In it, Guillaume praised the great successes of the great Russian socialists,c and declared that his abstentionist programme was identical to that of the great Russian socialists.* At the Congress of La Chaux-de-Fonds, when Utin attempted to disclose Nechayev’s nefarious deeds, Guillaume interrupted him by saying that to speak of these men was espionage.d As for Bakunin, he was writing in La Marseillaise as if he had just returned from “a long journey through distant lands which are not reached by free newspapers” e so as to create the impression that matters in Russia were taking such a revolutionary turn that he considered his presence there essential.

We now come to the dénouement of the tragi-comedy of the Russian Alliance. In 1859, Herzen had received a bequest of 25,000 frs. from a young Russian to carry on revolutionary propaganda in Russia.3 7 7 Herzen, who had never wanted to release this sum to just anybody, nevertheless let himself be caught by Bakunin, who managed to relieve him of it by assuring him that Nechayev represented a vast and powerful secret organisation. Nechayev therefore thought himself entitled to demand his share. But the two international brethren, whom the assassination of Ivanov had failed to split, began quarrelling over a money matter. Bakunin refused. Nechayev left Geneva and published in London, in the spring of 1870, a Russian newspaper The Commune (Obshchina) in which he publicly claimed from Bakunin the rest of the capital which the latter had received from the then deceased Herzen.a Here, indeed, is proof that the international brethren “never attack one another, nor settle their differences in public”.b

* In 1868, less than two years before the Congress of La Chaux-de-Fonds at which the Alliance members had their doctrine of political abstention sanctioned, Bakunin deploring, in La Démocratie of Chassin,376 the political abstention of the French workers, wrote: “Political abstention is a stupidity invented by scoundrels to deceive idiots.”

a Alexei Kuznetsov.— Ed.

b “Événements de Russie”, Le Progrès, No. 6, February 5, 1870.— Ed.

c [J. Guillaume,] “Le congrès de la Chaux-de-Fonds”, Le Progrès, No. 14, April 2, 1870.— Ed.

d “Procès-verbaux du Congrès Romand”, L’Égalité, No. 18, April 30, 1870.— Ed.

e M. Bakounine, “Herzen”, La Marseillaise, No. 72, March 2, 1870.— Ed.

a С. Нечаевъ, «Письмо къ Огареву и Бакунину», Община, No. 1, London, 1870.— Ed.

b See this volume, p. 568.— Ed.

The leading article in the second issue of The People’s Judgment contains yet another funeral dirge in poetic prose on Nechayev, that hero always dead and always living.c This time, the hero had been strangled by the gendarmes who were taking him to Siberia. Disguised as a workman, he had been arrested at Tambov while drinking in a tavern. This arrest had led to extraordinary unrest in government circles. They could speak of nothing but “Nechayev in disguise ... denunciations ... secret societies ... Bakuninists ... revolution”. On the occasion of Nechayev’s death, the governor of Perm has sent a telegram to Petersburg. The text of this telegram is quoted in full. Another telegram, also quoted in full, was sent to the Third Department, and The People’s Judgment knew that “having received this telegram, the chief of police jumped in his chair and smiled an evil smile all that evening”. Thus it was that Nechayev died a second time.

Ivanov’s murder is admitted in the article, which describes it as “an act of vengeance by the society on a member for any deviation from his duties. The stern logic of true workers for the cause must not stop at any act leading to the success of the cause, much less at acts which may save the cause and avert its ruin”.

For Bakunin, the “success of the cause” was the imprisonment of eighty young people.

The second article is entitled: “He who is not for us, is against us”,d and contains an apologia for political assassination. The fate of Ivanov, who is not mentioned by name, is promised to all revolutionaries who do not adhere to the Alliance:

c «Въ послЪднихъ числахъ...», Издангя Общества «Народной Расправы», St. Petersburg, 1870.— Ed.

d «Кто не за насъ, тотъ противъ насъ», Издангя Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 2.— Ed.

“The critical moment has come ... military operations between the two camps have commenced ... it is no longer possible to remain neutral: to abide by the golden mean is out of the question, for this would mean being caught in the cross-fire between two hostile armies which have begun shooting at one another; this would mean exposing oneself pointlessly to death, it would mean falling under fire from both sides without a chance of defending oneself. It would mean suffering the lashes and tortures of the Third Department, or falling under the bullets of our revolvers.”

Next come expressions of gratitude, apparently ironical, to the Russian government for its “cooperation in the development and the rapid advance of our work, which is approaching its much-desired goal at a headlong speed”.

At the very time when the two heroes were thanking the government for speedily bringing closer “the much-desired goal”, all the members of the so-called secret organisation were under arrest.—Then the article makes a new appeal. It “welcomes with open arms all fresh and honest forces”, but warns them that once they have submitted to these embraces, they must yield to all the exigencies of the society:

“Any renunciation, any withdrawal from the society, made knowingly through lack of faith in the truth and justice of certain principles, leads to removal from the list of the living”.

And our two heroes ridicule those who have been arrested; they are nothing more than petty liberals; the true members of the organisation are protected by the secret society, which does not allow them to be apprehended.

The third article is entitled: The Fundamental Principles of the Social Order of the Future.a This article shows that if the ordinary mortal is punished like a criminal for even thinking about the social organisation of the future, this is because the leaders have arranged everything in advance.

“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.

a «Главныя основы будущаго общественнаго строя», Изданы Общества «Народной Расправы», No. 2.— Ed.

“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.”

Each artel will elect from its members an assessor (“otsenshchik”), who regulates the work, keeps the books on production and consumption and the productivity of every worker, and acts as a go-between with the general office of the given locality. The office, consisting of members elected from among the artels of the locality, conducts exchange between these artels, administers all the communal establishments (dormitories, canteens, schools, hospitals) and directs all public works:

“All general work is managed by the office, while all individual work requiring special skills and craftsmanship is performed by special artels."

Then comes a long set of rules on education, hours of work, feeding of children, freeing of inventors from work and so on.

“With full publicity, knowledge and activity on the part of everyone all ambition, as we now know it, all deception will disappear without a trace, will vanish forever... Everyone will endeavour to produce as much as possible for society and consume as little as possible; all the pride, all the ambition of the worker of those times will rest in the awareness of his usefulness to society.”

What a beautiful model of barrack-room communism! Here you have it all: communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, our committee, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme director. This is indeed the purest anti-authoritarianism.

To give this absurd plan of practical organisation the semblance of a theoretical basis, a small note is attached to the very title of this article:

“Those who wish to know the complete theoretical development of our principal theses, will find them in the writing published by us: Manifesto of the Communist Party."

In fact, the Russian translation of the Manifesto (German) of the Communist Party, 1847,3 7 8 was announced, price one franc, in every issue of the Kolokol in 1870, alongside Bakunin’s Appeal to the Officers of the Russian Armya and the two issues of The People’s Judgment. The very Bakunin who abused this Manifesto to lend weight to his Tartar fantasies in Russia, had it denounced by the Alliance in the West as an ultra-heretical writing preaching the baleful doctrines of German authoritarian communism (see the resolution of the Rimini Conference,b Guillaume’s address at The Hague,3 7 9 Bulletin jurassien No. 10-11,c the Federacion of Barcelona,d etc.)

a M. Бакунинъ, Къ офицерамъ русской армгги— Ed.

b See this volume, pp. 502-03.— Ed.

c “Réponse à M. Lafargue”, Bulletin de la Fédération jurasienne..., No. 10/11, June 15, 1872.— Ed.

d “El Congreso de La Haya”, La Federacion, No. 164, October 5, 1872.— Ed.

Now that the common herd knows the role “our committee” is destined to perform, it is easy to understand this competitive hatred of the state and of any centralisation of the workers’ forces. Assuredly, while the working class continues to have any representative bodies of its own, Messrs. Bakunin and Nechayev, revolutionising under the incognito of “our committee”, will not be able to put themselves in possession of the public wealth or reap the benefit of this sublime ambition which they so ardently desire to inspire in others — that of working much to consume little!

2. THE REVOLUTIONARY CATECHISM

Nechayev took great care of a booklet written in cypher and called The Revolutionary Catechism. He claimed that the possession of this book was the special privilege of any emissary or agent of the International Association. According to all the depositions and the strong evidence provided by the lawyers, this catechism had been written by Bakunin, who never dared to deny paternity. Furthermore, the form and the content of this work clearly show that it came from the same source as the secret statutes, the Words, the proclamations, and The People’s Judgment, which we have already mentioned. The revolutionary catechism was only a supplement to these. These pan-destructive anarchists, who want to reduce everything to amorphism in order to create anarchy in morality, push bourgeois immorality to the limit. We have already been able to assess, from a few examples, the worth of this Alliance morality whose dogmas, purely Christian in origin, were first drawn up

in meticulous detail by the Escobars of the 17th century.380 The only difference being that the Alliance exaggerated the terms to the ridiculous and replaced the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church of the Jesuits with its arch-anarchist and pan-destructive “holy revolutionary cause”. The revolutionary catechism is the official code of this morality, formulated systematically and quite openly this time. We are publishing it in extenso, just as it was read before the tribunal during the sitting of July 8, 1871.

The revolutionary’s duties to himself

§ 1. The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has neither personal interests, nor affairs, nor feelings, nor attachments, nor property, nor even a name. Every part of him is absorbed by one sole interest, one sole thought, one sole passion: the revolution.

§ 2. In the depths of his being, not only in words, but in deeds, he has severed all ties with civil order and with the entire civilised world, with laws, decencies, morality, and the conventions generally accepted in that world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, it is only to destroy it more surely.

§ 3. A revolutionary despises all doctrinairism and renounces worldly science, leaving it for future generations. He only knows one science: that of destruction. For that purpose and none other, he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. With the same goal, he studies living science day and night—men, characters, positions, and all conditions of the existing social order in all possible spheres. The goal remains the same: the destruction, as quickly as possible and as certainly as possible, of this foul (poganyi) order.

§ 4. He despises public opinion. He despises and hates the existing social morality with all its instincts and in all its manifestations. For him, everything is moral that favours the triumph of the revolution, and everything is immoral and criminal that impedes it.

§ 5. The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no mercy for the State in general or for the entire civilised class of society, and he should no more expect mercy for himself. Between him and society there is a struggle, open or concealed, but always incessant, irreconcilable, and to the death. He must accustom himself to withstand torture.

§ 6. Strict with himself, he must be the same with others. All feelings of affection, all the softening feelings of kinship, friendship, love and gratitude must be stifled in him by a unique and cold passion for the revolutionary cause. For him, there is only one joy, one consolation, one reward and one satisfaction: the success of the revolution. Night and day, he must have only one thought and one goal—implacable destruction. Pursuing this goal coldly and without respite, he must himself be ready to perish and to destroy with his own hands all that which obstructs the achievement of this goal.

§ 7. The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all romanticism, all sensitivity, all enthusiasm, and all involvement; it even excludes personal hatred and vengeance. Revolutionary passion, having become with him a habit every day and every moment, must be combined with cold calculation. Everywhere and always he must obey not his personal impulses, but whatever is prescribed to him by the general interests of the revolution.

Duties of the revolutionary to his comrades in revolution

§ 8. The revolutionary can only have friendship and affection for the man who has proved by his deeds that he is, like him, a revolutionary agent. The degree of friendship, devotion, and other obligations towards such a comrade are only measured by the degree of his usefulness in the practical work of the pan-destructive (vserazrushitelnaya) revolution.

§ 9. It is superfluous to speak of solidarity among revolutionaries, for in it lies all the strength of the revolutionary cause. The revolutionary comrades who find themselves at the same level of revolutionary consciousness and passion must, as much as possible, deliberate in common on all important matters and make their decisions unanimously. In the execution of a matter thus decided, each must rely on himself as much as possible. In the execution of a series of destructive acts, each must act on his own and not have recourse to the assistance or advice of his comrades, unless it is indispensable for success.

§ 10. Each comrade should have at hand several revolutionaries from the second and third rank, that is, from those who have not been fully initiated. He must consider them as part of the general revolutionary capital placed at his disposal. He must expend his share of the capital economically and try to extract from it as much profit as possible. He regards himself as capital destined to be expended for the triumph of the revolutionary cause, but it is capital which he cannot dispose of alone and without the consent of all the fully initiated comrades.

§ 11. When a comrade finds himself in danger, then in order to decide whether or not he should be saved, the revolutionary must not consider any personal feeling, but solely the interest of the revolutionary cause. Consequently, he must calculate, on the one hand, the degree of usefulness furnished by his comrade and, on the other, the quantity of revolutionary forces necessary to rescue him; he must see which way the scales tip and he must act accordingly.

Duties of the revolutionary to society

§ 12. A new member, after having proved his worth, not by words, but by deeds, can only be accepted by the association unanimously.

§ 13. A revolutionary enters the world of the State, the world of the classes, the so-called civilised world, and lives in it solely because he has faith in its imminent and total destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he holds on to anything whatever in this world. He must not hesitate before the destruction of any position, tie or man belonging to this world. He must hate everything and everybody equally. So much the worse for him if he has in this world ties of kinship, friendship, or love; he is not a revolutionary if these ties can stay his hand.

§ 14. With the aim of implacable destruction, a revolutionary can, and often must, live in society, while pretending to be entirely different from what he really is. A revolutionary must penetrate everywhere, into the upper and the middle classes alike, into the merchant’s shop, into the church, into the aristocratic palace, into the bureaucratic, military and literary world, into the Third Department (secret police), and even into the imperial palace.

§ 15. The whole of this foul society must be divided into several categories. The first consists of those who are condemned to death without delay. The comrades should draw up lists of these condemned men in the order of their relative harmfulness to the success of the revolutionary cause, so that the first numbers may be disposed of before the others.

§ 16. In drawing up these lists and in establishing these categories, no influence should be exerted by the personal villainy of a man, or even by the hatred which he inspires in the members of the organisation or in the people. This villainy and this hatred may even be useful to some extent in stirring up a popular revolt. The only consideration should be taken of the measure of profit for the revolutionary cause which may result from the death of a certain person. Consequently, the first to be destroyed must be those who are most dangerous to the revolutionary organisation and whose violent and sudden death can most frighten the government and break its strength by depriving it of energetic and intelligent agents.

§ 17. The second category should consist of people who are allowed to live provisionally (!) so that by a series of monstrous acts they will drive the people to the inevitable revolt.

§ 18. The third category covers a large number of highly placed brutes or individuals who are remarkable neither for their minds nor for their energy, but who, by virtue of their position, have wealth, connections, influence, and power. We must exploit them in every way possible, outwit them, confuse them, and, wherever possible, by possessing ourselves of their filthy secrets, make them our slaves. In this way, their power, connections, influence and wealth will become an inexhaustible treasure and an invaluable help in various enterprises.

§ 19. The fourth category is composed of various ambitious men in the State service, and liberals of different shades. We can conspire with these on their own programme, putting up an appearance of following them blindly. We must get them into our hands, seize their secrets, compromise them completely, so that retreat becomes impossible for them, and make use of them to cause trouble within the State.

§ 20. The fifth category consists of doctrinaires, conspirators, revolutionaries, all those who babble at meetings and on paper. They must be constantly encouraged and inveigled into practical and dangerousa demonstrations which will have the effect of eliminating the majority, while making true revolutionaries out of some.

§ 21. The sixth category is very important—the women, who must be divided into three classes: first, useless women without spirit or heart, who must be exploited in the same way as the third and fourth categories of men; second, fervent, devoted and capable women, who are nevertheless not with us because they have not yet arrived at a practical and phraseless revolutionary awareness; they must be used like the fifth category of men; finally, women who are entirely with us, that is to say, who have been fully initiated and who have accepted our programme in its entirety. We must treat them as the most valuable of our treasures, for without their help we can do nothing.

Duties of the Association to the people

§ 22. The Association has no goal other than the total emancipation and the happiness of the people, that is to say, manual workers (chemorabochi lyud). But, convinced that this emancipation and this happiness cannot be achieved except by means of a people’s revolution which will destroy everything, the Association will employ all its means and all its forces to magnify and increase the ills and evils which must finally exhaust the patience of the people and stir them to a mass uprising.

§ 23. By a people’s revolution, the Society does not mean a movement directed after the classic model of the West, which, always hesitating before property and the traditional social system of so-called civilisation and morality, has hitherto restricted itself to the overthrow of one political form in order to replace it with another and to creating a so-called revolutionary State. The only revolution which can be beneficial to the people is that which will destroy from bottom to top the whole idea of the State and will turn upside-down all the traditions, state system, and classes in Russia.

§ 24. To this end, the Society has no intention of imposing on the people any kind of organisation from above. The future organisation will undoubtedly emerge from the movement and life of the people, but that is the concern of future generations. Our concern is terrifying, total, implacable and universal destruction.

§ 25. Consequently, in drawing closer to the people, we must above all join up with the elements of the people’s life which, since the foundation of the Muscovite State, have not ceased to protest, not only with words, but with their deeds, against everything which is directly or indirectly tied up with the State, against the nobility, against the bureaucracy, against the clergy, against the businessa world, and against petty tradesmen, the exploiters of the people.b We must join the adventurist world of the brigands, who are the true and unique revolutionaries in Russia.

§ 26. To concentrate this world into a single pan-destructive and invincible force—that is the whole meaning of our organisation, our conspiracy, and our task.

To criticise this masterpiece would be to weaken its comic impact. It would also mean taking too seriously this amorphous pan-destroyer who succeeded only in making a single personage of Rodolphe, Monte-Christo, Karl Moor and Robert Macaire. We shall limit ourselves to stating, with the aid of a few comparisons, that the spirit and even the terms of the catechism, without counting the laborious exaggerations, are identical to those of the secret statutes and other Russian works of the Alliance.

The three grades of initiation defined in the Alliance’s secret statutes are reproduced in § 10 of the catechism, where mention is made of “revolutionaries from the second and third rank... who have not been fully initiated”.—The duties of the international brethren as defined in Article 6 of the rules are the same as those enjoined by §§ 1 and 13 of the catechism.—The conditions under which the brethren can accept governmental posts as defined in Article 8 of the rules “are even more explicitly defined”c in § 14 of the catechism, where they are given to understand that they may join the police if so ordered.—The advice given to the brethren (Rules, Article 9) to consult one another, is reproduced in § 9 of the catechism.—Articles 2, 3 and 6 of the programme of the international brethren attribute to the revolution precisely the same character as §§ 22 and 23 of the catechism.—The Jacobins

a In the Russian text: “golovolomnye” (lit. “breakneck”).—Ed.

b In the Russian text: “kulaka-miroyeda” (“the bloodsucker kulak”).—Ed.

c See this volume, p. 568.—Ed.

of Article 4 of the programme become, in § 20 of the catechism, a subdivision of “the fifth category of men”, condemned to death in both documents.—The ideas expressed in Articles 5 and 8 of the programme on the progress of a truly anarchist revolution are the same as those in § 24 of the catechism.

The condemnation of science in § 3 of the catechism recurs in all the Russian publications. The idealisation of the brigand as the type of the revolutionary, which does not exist in the Words except in embryo, is openly affirmed and preached in all the other writings: The “fifth category” of § 20 of the catechism is applied, in The Setting of the Revolutionary Question, to “Revolutionaries of the State and the Cabinet”. Here, as in §§ 25 and 26, it is stated that the first duty of the revolutionary is to throw himself into brigandage. It is only The Principles of Revolution and The People’s Judgment that begin to preach the pan-destruction ordained by §§ 6, 8 and 26 of the catechism, and systematic assassination in §§ 13, 15, 16 and 17.

3. BAKUNIN’S APPEAL TO THE OFFICERS OF THE RUSSIAN ARMY

Bakunin, however, tried to leave no room for doubt over his complicity in the so-called Nechayev conspiracy. He published a proclamation: To the Officers of the Russian Army, dated “Geneva, January 1870” and signed Mikhail Bakunin.3 This proclamation, “price one franc”, was announced as Bakunin’s work in all the issues of the Kolokol for 1870. Here are some extracts.

It begins by declaring, as Nechayev had done in Russia, that

“the hour of the last struggle between the house of Romanov-Holstein-Gottorp and the Russian people is approaching, the struggle between the Tartar-German yoke and the broad liberty of the Slavs. Spring is on our threshold, and the battle will commence in the first days of spring ... the revolutionary force is ready and its triumph is assured in the presence of the profound and general mass discontent now reigning all over Russia”.

An organisation exists to direct this imminent revolution, for a secret organisation is like the general staff of an army, and this army is the entire people.6

“In my appeal to the young Russian brothers, I said that Stenka Razin who will put himself at the head of the masses during the destruction, so clearly at hand, of the Russian Empire, will no longer be an individual hero, but a collective Stenka Razin.3 Every man who is not a fool will easily understand that I was speaking of a secret organisation existing and acting already at this moment, strong in the discipline, devotion, and passionate self-sacrifice of its members and in their passive obedience to all the instructions of an unique committee which knows everything and is known by no one.

“The members of this committee have achieved total self-renunciation. This is what gives them the right to demand absolute renunciation from all the other members of the organisation. They have to such an extent renounced everything most coveted by vain, ambitious, and the power-seeking men, that, having finally renounced personal property, public or official power, and, in general, all fame in society, they have condemned themselves to eternal oblivion, ceding to others glory, external appearances, and the renown of the cause, and only keeping for themselves, and even then always collectively, the very essence of this cause.

“Like the Jesuits, only not with the aim of enslaving, but with that of liberating the people, each of them has even renounced his own will. In the committee, as in the whole organisation, it is not the individual who thinks, wishes and acts, but the collective. Such a renunciation of his own life, his own thought and his own will may seem impossible, even revolting, to many. It is, in fact, difficult to achieve, but it is indispensable. It will seem particularly difficult to the novices, to those who have only just joined the organisation, to men who have not yet lost the habit of wordy and futile bragging, to men who play at honour, personal dignity and right, to those who in general let themselves be diverted by the wretched phantoms of a supposed humanity, behind which can be seen, in Russian society, a general servility towards the most vile and abject realities of life. This renunciation will seem painful to those who seek in a great cause the satisfaction of their vanity and an occasion for phrase-making, and who love the cause not for its own sake, but for the drama which it confers on them personally.”

“Each new member joins our organisation voluntarily, knowing in advance that once he has become a part of it, he belongs to it entirely and not to himself any more. Entry into the organisation is voluntary, but to leave it is impossible, since every member who resigns will undoubtedly endanger the very existence of the organisation, which must not depend on the irresponsibility, the whims or discretion, however great or small it may be, or on the honesty and the strength of one or several individuals... Consequently, whoever wishes to join must know in advance that he is giving himself to it entirely, with all that he possesses by way of strength, means, knowledge and life, unreturnably... This is clearly and precisely expressed in its programme, which has been published and is obligatory for all members of the committee and for all those who do not belong to it... If a member is truly inspired by” (revolutionary) “passion, everything that the organisation demands of him will seem easy. It is a known fact that passion acknowledges no difficulties; it recognises nothing as impossible, and the greater the obstacles are, the greater is the screwing up of the will, strength, and knowledge of the man moved by passion. There is no room for minor personal passions in a man possessed by this passion; he does not even need to sacrifice them, because they do not exist in him any more. A serious member of the association has stifled in himself all feeling of curiosity, and he remorselessly persecutes this failing in all others. Although he recognises himself as worthy of all confidence, and precisely because he is worthy of it, that is to say, because he is a serious man, he does not seek, and does not even want to know, more than is necessary for him to fulfil as well as possible the mission entrusted to him. He only discusses business with persons who have been allocated to him, and he says nothing which has been forbidden by the orders he has received, and in general he conforms strictly and unconditionally to the orders and instructions which come down to him from above, without ever asking, or even wanting to ask about the position of the organisation to which he belongs, since he naturally wishes to be entrusted with as many tasks as possible, but he nevertheless waits patiently for the moment when it will be entrusted to him.

“So rigid and so absolute a discipline may astonish and even shock the novice; but it will neither astonish nor offend a serious member, a man truly strong and sensible. On the contrary, it will afford him pleasure and guarantee his security, provided that he is under the influence of that absorbing passion, which I have already mentioned: for the people’s triumph. A serious member will realise that such discipline is an indispensable pledge of the relative impersonality of each member, a sine qua non of the common triumph; that this discipline alone is capable of forming a true organisation and of creating a collective revolutionary force which, basing itself on the elemental power of the people, will be in a condition to conquer the formidable force of the State organisation.

“You may ask: how can you submit to the dictatorial control of a Committee unknown to you? But the Committee is known to you: first, by its published programme, which has been drawn up with such clarity and precision, and which is explained in even greater detail to every member who joins the organisation. Secondly, it recommends itself to you by the blind confidence placed in it by persons whom you know and respect—the confidence which makes you give preference to this organisation rather than to any other. It makes itself known even still more fully to the active members of the organisation by its indefatigable and determined activity, which extends everywhere and always conforms to the programme and goal of the organisation. And everybody submits voluntarily to its authority, becoming more and more convinced, through practical experience, on the one hand, of its truly astonishing foresight, of its vigilance, of its energy so full of wisdom and of its ability to match its instructions to the sought-after goal; and, on the other hand, of the necessity and salutary effect of such discipline.

“I could be asked: if the identity of the personnel constituting the Committee remains an impenetrable mystery to everyone, how were you able to find out about it and convince yourself of its real worth?—I will answer this question frankly. I do not know a single member of this Committee, nor the number of its members, nor its place of residence. I know one thing: it is not abroad, but is in Russia itself, as is only right; for a Russian revolutionary committee abroad would be an absurdity, the very idea of which could only occur to those empty-headed and stupidly ambitious phrasemongers who belong to the emigration and who hide their conceited and evilly intriguing inactivity behind the sonorous name of The People’s Cause.*

“After the Decembrist conspiracy of the nobility (1825),381 the first serious attempt at organisation was made by Ishutin and his comrades.382 The existing organisation is the first organisation of revolutionary forces in the whole of Russia which has truly succeeded. It has profited by all preparations and experience; no reaction will force it to dissolve; it will survive all governments, and it will not cease to act until its entire programme has become daily life in Russia and everywhere else in the world.

“About a year ago, the Committee thought it would be useful to inform me of its existence and it sent me its programme, together with an exposition of the general plan of revolutionary action in Russia. Completely in agreement with both of these, and having assured myself that the enterprise, like the men who had taken the initiative with it, was truly serious, I did what, in my opinion, every honest refugee ought to do: I submitted unconditionally to the authority of the Committee as the sole representative and controlling body of the revolution in Russia. If I am addressing you today, I am only obeying the Committee’s orders. I cannot say more to you about this. I will add one more word on this subject. I know the organisation’s plan sufficiently well to be convinced that no force is capable of destroying it. Even if, in the imminent struggle, the popular party has to suffer a new defeat—which none of us fears, since we all believe in the forthcoming triumph of the people—but even if our hopes should be dashed, in the midst of the most appalling reprisals, in the midst of the most savage reaction, the organisation will still remain safe and sound...

“The basis of the programme is the widest and most humanitarian possible: complete liberty and complete equality of all human beings, based on communal ownership and communal labour and equally obligatory to all except, of course, those who would rather die of hunger than work.

“This is the present programme of the working people in all countries, and it fully corresponds to the age-old demands and the instincts of our people... In submitting this programme to the lower ordersa of the people, the members of our organisation are astounded to notice how immediate and broad is their grasp of it, and with what eagerness they accept it. This means that the programme is ready. It is unvarying. He who is for this programme will come with us. He who is against us is the friend of the people’s enemies, the tsar’s gendarme, the tsar’s executioner, our own enemy...

“I have told you that our organisation is solidly built and now I add that it has taken root so strongly among the people that, even if we suffer a defeat, the reaction will be powerless to destroy it...

“The servile press, obedient to the orders of the Third Department, is trying to persuade the public that the government has managed to seize the conspiracy by its very roots. It has not seized anything whatever. The Committee and the organisation are intact and always will be, the government will soon be convinced of this, for the explosion of the people is near at hand. It is so near, that everyone must now decide if he wishes to be our friend, the friend of the people, or our enemy instead and that of the people. To all friends, to whatever place or position they belong, our ranks are open. But how are we to find you, you will ask? The organisation, which surrounds you on all sides, which counts among you its numerous adherents, will itself find him who seeks with sincere desire and strong will to serve the cause of the people. He who is not with us, is against us. Choose.”

In this pamphlet signed with his name, Bakunin pretends not to know the place and composition of the Committee on whose behalf he speaks and on whose behalf Nechayev acted in Russia. However, the only authority which the latter had to act on the Committee’s behalf was signed by Mikhail Bakunin, and the only man who received reports on the activity of the sections was, once again, Mikhail Bakunin. And so when Mikhail Bakunin vows

passive obedience to the committee, it is to Mikhail Bakunin himself that he swears obedience.

We consider it useless to insist that the trend and even the language of this work signed by Bakunin are entirely identical with the other anonymous Russian documents. What we want to point out is the manner in which Bakunin applied the morality of the catechism here. He commences, first, by preaching it to the Russian officers. He tells them that he and the other initiates have simultaneously carried out a duty and filled a gap in setting themselves up as the Jesuits of the revolution and that, as far as the Committee is concerned, they have no more personal will than the celebrated “corpse” of the Society of Jesus. In order that the officers should not be shocked by the murder of Ivanov, he tries to make them understand the necessity of assassinating every member who would like to leave the secret society. He then applies this same morality to his own readers by lying flagrantly to them. Bakunin knew that the government had arrested not only all the initiates in Russia, but ten times more that number of persons who had been compromised by Nechayev for belonging to the famous “fifth category” of the catechism; that there was no longer so much as the shadow of an organisation in Russia; that its Committee no longer existed there and never had existed apart from Nechayev, then with him in Geneva; furthermore, that this pamphlet would not bring in a single recruit in Russia; that it could only furnish the Government with a pretext for fresh persecutions. Yet he proclaimed that the Government had seized nothing whatever; that the Committee was still holding sessions in Russia and was displaying indefatigable and determined activity that extended everywhere, truly astounding foresight, vigilance, energy full of wisdom, and staggering ingenuity (the statements made at the trial testify to this); that his secret organisation, the only serious one that had existed in Russia since 1825, was intact; that it had penetrated down to the lower orders of the people, who were eagerly accepting its programme; that the officers were surrounded by it; that the revolution was imminent and would break out in a few months, in the spring of 1870. It was purely to give himself the pleasure of the drama which it conferred on him personally in front of his false international brethren and in front of his mirror that Bakunin, who pretended to have “renounced his own life, his own thought, and his own will”, to be superior to the “wordy and futile bragging” of “men who play at honour, personal dignity, and right”, that he, Mikhail Bakunin, addressed the Russians with these lies and this bragging.

This same man who in 1870 preaches to the Russians passive, blind obedience to orders coming from above and from an anonymous and unknown committee; who declares that Jesuitical discipline is the condition sine qua non of victory, the only thing capable of defeating the formidable centralisation of the State—not just the Russian state but any state; who proclaims a communism more authoritarian than the most primitive communism—this same man, in 1871, weaves a separatist and disorganising movement into the fabric of the International under the pretext of combating the authoritarianism and centralisation of the German Communists, of introducing autonomy of the sections, a free federation of autonomous groups, and of making the International what it should be: the image of the future society. If the society of the future were modelled on the Alliance, Russian section, it would far surpass the Paraguay of the Reverend Jesuit Fathers,383 so dear to Bakunin’s heart.