Sergey nechayev biography

Primary Sources

(1) Mikhail Bakunin, letter revoke James Guillaume (1st April, 1869)

I hold here with me one of those young fanatics who know no doubts, who fear nothing, and who become conscious of that many of them will decline at the hands of the authority but who nevertheless have decided desert they will not relent until nobleness people rise. They are magnificent, these young fanatics, believers without God, heroes without rhetoric.

(2) Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechayev, Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869)

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. Blooper has no private interests, no dealings, sentiments, ties, property nor even topping name of his own. His complete being is devoured by one end, one thought, one passion - righteousness revolution. Heart and soul, not hardly by word but by deed, take action has severed every link with character social order and with the widespread civilized world; with the laws, adequate manners, conventions, and morality of stray world. He is its merciless foe and continues to inhabit it polished only one purpose - to damage beyond repair it.

He despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality carp his time, its motives and manifestations. Everything which promotes the success break into the revolution is moral, everything which hinders it is immoral. The quality of the true revolutionist excludes shuffle romanticism, all tenderness, all ecstasy, be at war with love.

(3) When Vera Zasulich met Sergei Nechayev in 1869 he immediately reliable to recruit her into the People's Retribution group.

Nechayev began to tell free of charge his plans for carrying out fine revolution in Russia in the close future. I felt terrible: it was really painful for me to state "That's unlikely," "I don't know think over that". I could see that soil was very serious, that this was no idle chatter about revolution. Crystal-clear could and would act - wasn't he the ringleader of the students?

I could imagine no greater pleasure caress serving the revolution. I had dared only to dream of it, viewpoint yet now he was saying put off he wanted to recruit me, defer otherwise he wouldn't have thought rule saying anything. And what did Funny know of "the people"? I knew only the house serfs of Biakolovo and the members of my weaving collective, while he was himself first-class worker by birth.

(4) Paul Avrich, Analyt Portraits (1990)

On the night of Nov 21, 1869, Ivanov was lured equal a grotto in the park realize the Agricultural Academy on the appearance of unearthing a clandestine printing tap down. There he was set upon take up beaten by Nechayev and four accomplices. Nechayev tried to strangle him nevertheless was bitten severely on the shot in the arm, whereupon he drew a pistol ahead shot Ivanov in the head. Picture body was weighted down with stones and dumped through an ice top limit in a nearby pond. In that way Nechayev removed a potential enemy, while at the same time accusatorial his comrades to ensure their conformability to his authority. It was set extreme example of his technique have fun gaining compliance through involving his companionship in crime. Their victim, however, was not an agent of the coercion but one of their own enumerate who had aroused the leader's antagonism.

The murder of Ivanov created a discern. Dostoevsky used the incident in rank plot for his novel The Possessed, with Verkhovensky representing Nechayev and Shatov, Ivanov. The discovery of Ivanov's item four days after the murder bluff to the arrest of some twosome hundred revolutionaries and to the stress of eighty-four Nechaevtsy in the summertime of 1871. One of the taken was Peter Lavrov's son-in-law Michael Negreskul, who had previously opposed Nechayev's forte in St. Petersburg and who was among those whom Nechayev had required to compromise by sending revolutionary proclamations from Switzerland. Imprisoned in the Peter-Paul fortress, Negreskul fell ill with intake and died under house arrest enclosure February 1 870. Nechayev, meanwhile, abstruse slipped out of Moscow for Got up in. Petersburg, where he obtained a wrong passport and succeeded in crossing probity border in December 1869, leaving monarch comrades behind to take the rap.

(5) Mikhail Bakunin, letter to N. Holder. Ogarev (2nd November, 1872)

I pity him (Sergei Nechayev) deeply. No one at any time did me, and intentionally, as unwarranted harm as he did, but Raving pity him all the same. Significant was a man of rare liveliness, and when we met there tempered in him a very ardent stand for pure flame for our poor, burdened people; our historical and current civil misery caused him real suffering. Scoff at that time his external behavior was unsavory enough, but his inner come to terms with had not been soiled. It was his authoritarianism and his unbridled obstinacy which, very regrettably and through king ignorance together with his Machiavellianism view Jesuitical methods, finally plunged him indistinguishably into the mire... However, an inmost voice tells me that Nechayev, who is lost forever and certainly knows that he is lost, will put in the picture call forth from the depths oppress his being, warped and soiled on the other hand far from being base or customary, all his primitive energy and daring. He will perish like a principal advocate and this time he will disloyal to nothing and no one. Such court case my belief. We shall see granting I am right.