The prisoner who stood in the dock in the Moscow District Court on January 20, 1873 did not resemble the normal portrayal of a revolutionary. He was short, stocky and rather commonplace. He had a long dark expression, a flat nose, thick chestnut-colored hair, and piercing blue eyes. He was fragile, and he lived on his nervous energy. Stories were told of his extraordinary adventures; he had invented most of them, but those that really happened were unbelievable. In the court he wore a black jacket and a dirty waistcoat, and he held himself with an look of contemptuous disdain, rarely paying any notice to the judges, biting his fingernails. A bemused reporter at the trial wrote that the most extraordinary thing about him was that he was not in the least outstanding. He was twenty-four, and the court was in awe of him.
The prisoner’s name was Sergey Genadievich Nechayev, and he is all but forgotten today. Few people read his writings, and single a handful of students of nineteenth-century Russia have been concerned with his existence. In spite of this singlehandedly he hammered out a code of revolutionary conduct which was to have a convulsive effect on the world. He was one of those whom the Russian philosopher Chernyshevsky described as “the movers of the movers.” He was the shout that let loose the avalanche.
In his upbringing there was nothing to present there would ever come a time when even the Tsar would be afraid of him. He was born on September 20, 1847 at Ivanovo, near Vladimir, a hundred miles to the northeast of Moscow. In those days Ivanovo was a small textile metropolis, hardly better-quality than an overgrown village: it had not still blossomed into the influential manufacturing town of Ivanovo Voznesensk. His father was an innkeeper, sometime small merchant, artisan and factotum, who married the schoolgirl of a home painter from Kostroma. After the marriage he hunted his father-in-guideline’s trade. He was on good terms with the local gentry, attending weddings and putting up the decorations. He was a good worker and much sought after.
The boy useless some of his early years with his maternal grandparents in Kostroma, which even in the Fifties of the nineteenth century was a town of medieval splendor. In Kostroma, loyalty to the Tsar was as instinctive as breathing. No one required to be reminded that the ‘adolescent father” ruled sternly and kindly over all the reaches of his empire. In Ivanovo though loyalty to the Tsar was gradually succumbing to the disloyalties that came in the wake of the industrial revolution. Kostroma was like a town painted on a surroundings, all towers and battlemented walls and onion-shaped domes. Ivanovo, with its clicking shuttles and underpaid workers, was real and urgent. In his childhood the boy moved between the two towns.
From house painting Nechayev’s father went on to scene painting for the local theater attended by the gentry. Sometimes the boy would be given a role to take part in; and it was remembered that he acted hale and hearty. He had a rasping voice, conversely he had a keen sense of drama. Years succeeding he wrote in an abstract on revolutionary techniques: “This is the prologue. Let us act, my friends, in such a way that the amuse yourself will soon begin.”
The first act of the have fun had come to an end when Nechayev stood in the dock in the Moscow District Court. Although in the entire course of his life he had committed only one purposeless murder, he knew that he could expect no mercy. In theory he was being tried for the murder of a young student called Ivan Ivanov, yet both Nechayev and the court knew that this was not the real crime which was being debated in the courtroom. His real crime was that he had discovered the key to the box containing the martial of dissolution which destroy the country.
He knew this, and the court was perfectly aware that he knew it. Every day the minutes of the trial were laid before the Tsar, who studied them carefully, mutually with a narrative written by the noteworthy in charge of the security guards who watched over the prisoner. From time to time Nechayev would stir a babyish, thrust his hands deeper in his pockets, and with the attitude of a man who must do something to relieve his boredom, he would shout in his rasping voice, “I do not distinguish the court! I do not be aware of the Tsar! I do not distinguish the laws!” The president of the court would then order him to be silent, and Nechayev would be quiet for a while, tendency up and gazing at the gallery as though searching for someone he knew, or drumming on the ledge. He had some facts of music, and it is recorded that he played the flute hale and hearty. Once, while he was being questioned by the president of the court, he lost all interest and pretended to amuse yourself the piano on the ledge, using both hands.
There was method in Nechayev’s madness. He was deliberately provoking the court, and he was also acting out his role as the dedicated revolutionary, contemptuous of all laws, all judges and all courtrooms. Prisoners on trial for murder rarely show icy disdain toward their accusers. Nechayev had iron nerves. He was determined to make use of all the weapons to be had to a defenseless man experienced with the power of the nation; his prime weapon was contempt.
The crime for which he was accused was a peculiarly unpleasant one. Claiming to be the leader of a revolutionary change with four million members the whole time Russia, Nechayev was in fact the leader of three or four small groups, of which the leading was composed of students from St. Petersburg. There were groups in Moscow and Tula, where the Imperial Armaments Factory was situated. Altogether his adherents probably numbered no superior than three or four hundred. Working in secrecy and under several names — at several times he called himself Ivan Petrov, Ivan Pavlov, Dmitry Fyodorov, Captain Panin and Special Agent Number 2664 — he was continually moving about between the various groups, collecting dues, drawing up proclamations to be issued at some future time, compiling lists of momentous officials to be assassinated, and writing short pamphlets which the students were ordered to post up on the college bulletin boards, where as often as not they were torn down either by other students or by the police. Whenever Nechayev appeared at one of these groups, he would explain that he would shortly have to hurry away to an major meeting of the Central Executive Committee which was being held in some remote place.
Ivan Ivanov was among a small group of Nechayevs followers at the Petrovsky Agricultural College in Moscow. One day in November 1869 Nechayev ordered him to post an inflammatory pamphlet entitled “From Those Who Are United to Those Who Are Scattered” on the walls of the students’ dining hall. Ivanov refused.
“I tell you,” Nechayev said, “the Customs has ordered it. Are you disobeying the Ethnicity?”
“I refuse to listen to the Culture when it tells me to do completely senseless things.”
“Then you refuse to submit to the Culture?”
“Yes, when it behaves stupidly.”
Nechayev brooded over the refusal, still did nothing to punish Ivanov at the time. He vanished from Moscow and is believed to have washed-out the following two weeks in Tula, where sober preparations were being made for an molest on the Imperial Armaments Factory. When he returned to Moscow he decided to kill Ivanov for defying the Traditions and being a traitor to its cause. A conference was held; Ivanov was solemnly condemned to death. It was arranged that Ivanov should be invited to enter one of the caves in the park near the Petrovsky College on the pretext that a printing press had been hidden there and that he was de rigueur to evaluate it. A student, Nikolayev, was ordered to accompany him to the cave.
Nechayev was waiting inside the cave. He had a revolver and a length of rope. With Nechayev in the cave were two students, Kuznetsov and Uspensky, and a focus-aged author, Ivan Prizhov, who single the year before had published his Chronicle of Russian Taverns. Prizhov was a destitute author whose ambition was to write a story of destitution in Russia. Ivanov and Nikolayev walked into the cave, where it was pitch dark. Nechayev was unable to distinguish between them, and hurled himself on Nikolayev, attempting to strangle him. Then, realizing his mistake, he turned his attentions to Ivanov, who struggled offered and ran screaming out of the cave. Nechayev caught up with him, threw him to the ground and struggled with him. In the struggle Ivanov succeeded in biting Nechayev’s thumb, leaving a character which remained to the end of his life. Finally Nechayev killed him with a shot in the back of the neck. The body was then dragged to a neighboring pond. Nechayev searched the dead man’s pockets, nonetheless found nothing incriminating. Ivanov seemed to stir — it was perhaps lone the sudden sharp reflex clash of the dead — and Nechayev fired another shot in his icon. By this time the three other conspirators had lost their nerve. They were all running around aimlessly, and at least two were screaming. Nechayev and Nikolayev tied heavy stones to the neck and feet, and then threw the body into the pond, where it sank to the bottom. Nechayev had not quite finished, for he unexpectedly hurled Nikolayev into the lake; still whether this was a conscious and deliberate act or simply the meaningless act of an overwrought man, Nikolayev did not trouble to ask when he emerged. The murder accomplished, all the conspirators made their way to Kuznetsov’s apartment, where Nikolayev dried his clothes and Nechayev bandaged his bleeding thumb. The successive day Nechayev left for St. Petersburg, and three days successive the body rose to the surface.
When the police found the body, they did not at first suspect that it was anything better-quality than a common murder. They made inquiries among the friends of the dead student. Little by adolescent they learned about the existence of a thriller traditions with its mysterious agents who were constantly on the trek. In a Moscow bookshop they uncovered documents which seemed to relate to a vast conspiratorial group extending over the length and breadth of Russia. The trail led to St. Petersburg and then to Tula, and the discovery of a plan to seize the Imperial Armaments Factory was perhaps higher disturbing to the police than anything else. How far the conspirators had progressed in Tula was never made clear, nevertheless there was some evidence that they had made contact with adult males inside the factory and were single awaiting the signal of the revolutionary leader. The tone of the documents found in the bookshop was menacing and urgent, suggesting that the revolution would trip out at any moment. Gradually, as they examined the documents and interrogated the arrested students, the police came to the conclusion that all the mysterious agents creating revolutionary cells, giving orders, and collecting dues were one agent with numerous aliases and several disguises. Within a few days he was identified as Nechayev, and orders were given to arrest him, nonetheless he had vanished without a trace. He had returned from St. Petersburg and was in fact living quietly in Moscow under the noses of the police. A small circle of friends rallied round him, and in January he slipped across the frontier disguised as a woman.
Altogether 152 people were arrested in connection with the murder of Ivanov and the mysterious culture over which Nechayev ruled with a mixture of bluff and sheer personal domination. Of these, seventy-nine were put on trial on the charge of conspiracy to overthrow the government. They were mostly young students, boys and ladies in their late teens or early twenties, with a sprinkling of older males like Prizhov, gents with time on their hands, radicals by instinct though with no sense of discipline. Except for Nikolayev, Uspensky, Kuznetsov and Prizhov, all of whom had a share in the murder of Ivanov, there was scarcely one of the accused who could be regarded as a dedicated revolutionary. It was known as the trial of the Nechayevtsi. In fact Nechayev was on trial, on the other hand absent.
The Tsarist police were perfectly aware that the murder of Ivanov was one of those vulgar and commonplace murders which sometimes occur among quarreling students. Nor were they ever able to establish exactly what happened, for each of the four gave his own version and each was concerned to show that he had babyish part in it. Far higher significant than the murder were the documents found in the bookshop. They could solitary have been written by a man with an extraordinary knowledge of the weaknesses which reside in governments, all governments — a man who had pondered coldly and passionately on the subject matter of how governments could be overthrown by small groups of determined and dedicated revolutionaries.
The most significant and far-reaching of these documents was written in Russian, nonetheless in Latin letters and in code. It was called The Revolutionary Catechism; and it should be quoted in full, because it represents the extreme achievement of Nechayev as the expounder of revolutionary doctrine:
The Revolutionary Catechism
The Duties of the Revolutionary toward Himself
1. The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no topic affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the individual thought and the only passion for revolution.
2. The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not individual in words in spite of this also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities and society and with all its commonly accepted conventions. He is their implacable foe, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them higher speedily.
3. The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows solitary one science: the science of desolation. For this reason, still only for this reason, he will study mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. Nonetheless all day and all night he studies the obligatory science of human beings, their characteristics and circumstances, and all the phenomena of the recent social order. The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order.
4. The revolutionary despises people opinion. He despises and hates the vacant social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the be the victor of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way.
5. The revolutionary is a dedicated man, merciless toward the Land and toward the educated classes; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable encounter to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.
6. Totalitarian toward himself, he must be authoritarian toward others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude and even honor must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and solitary-minded passion for revolution. For him there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction — the load of the revolution. Night and day he must have then again one thought, one aim — merciless wreckage. Striving coldbloodedly and indefatigably toward this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.
7. The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all sentimentality, romanticism, infatuation and exaltation. All private hatred and revenge must also be excluded. Revolutionary passion, expert at every moment of the day until it becomes a habit, is to be employed with cold calculation. At all times and in all places the revolutionary must obey, not his personal impulses, though lone those which serve the cause of the revolution.
The Relations of the Revolutionary toward his Comrades
8. The revolutionary can have no friendship or attachment except for those who have proved by their actions that they, like him, are dedicated to revolution. The degree of friendship, devotion and obligation toward such a comrade is determined solely by the degree of his usefulness to the cause of comprehensive revolutionary devastation.
9. It is superfluous to speak of solidarity among revolutionaries. The whole fitness of revolutionary exertion lies in this. Comrades who possess the same revolutionary passion and familiarity should, as much as possible, deliberate all significant matters at once and come to unanimous conclusions. When the rule is finally decided upon, then the revolutionary must rely solely on himself. In carrying out acts of destruction each one should act alone, never running to another for points and assistance except when these are obligatory for the furtherance of the guiding principle.
10. All revolutionaries should have under them second-or third-degree revolutionaries — i.e., comrades who are not completely initiated. These should be regarded as part of the common revolutionary capital placed at his disposal. This capital should, of course, be depleted as economically as possible in order to derive from it the essential possible profit. The real revolutionary should regard himself as capital consecrated to the victory of the revolution; though, he may not personally and alone dispose of that capital without the unanimous consent of the fully initiated comrades.
11. When a comrade is in danger and the inquiry arises whether he should be saved or not saved, the decision must not be arrived at on the foundation of sentiment, in spite of this solely in the interests of the revolutionary cause. Therefore it is needed to weigh carefully the usefulness of the comrade against the expenditure of revolutionary military required to save him, and the decision must be made accordingly.
The Relations of the Revolutionary toward Ethnicity
12. The prevailing member, having given proof of his loyalty not by words nevertheless by deeds can be received into the traditions lone by the unanimous agreement of all the members.
13. The revolutionary enters the world of the country, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and macro desolation. He is not a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world. He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world.[1] He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.
14. Aiming at implacable revolution, the revolutionary may and frequently must live within customs while pretending to be completely different from what he really is, for he must penetrate everywhere, into all the greater and core classes, into the houses of commerce, the churches and the palaces of the aristocracy, and into the worlds of the bureaucracy and literature and the forces, and also into the Third Division and the Winter Palace of the Tsar.
15. This filthy social order can be split up into compound categories. The first category comprises those who must be condemned to death without delay. Comrades should compile a fact list of those to be condemned according to the relative gravity of their crimes; and the executions should be carried out according to the prepared order.
16. When a listing of those who are condemned is made and the order of execution is prepared, no private sense of outrage should be considered, nor is it crucial to pay attention to the hatred provoked by these populace among the comrades or the public. Hatred and the sense of outrage may even be useful in so far as they incite the masses to revolt. It is crucial to be guided lone by the relative usefulness of these executions for the sake of the revolution. Above all, those who are especially inimical to the revolutionary organization must be destroyed; their violent and sudden deaths will produce the utmost panic in the government, depriving it of its will to raid by removing the cleverest and most full of life supporters.
17. The second development comprises those who will be spared for the time being in order that, by a series of monstrous acts, they may drive the public into inevitable revolt.
18. The third category consists of a dominant multiple brutes in high positions distinguished neither by their cleverness nor their energy, while enjoying large choice, force, pull and high positions by virtue of their rank. These must be exploited in every possible way; they must be implicated and embroiled in our affairs, their dirty tricks must be ferreted out, and they must be transformed into slaves. Their influence, leverage and connections, their prosperity and their energy will form an inexhaustible treasure and a precious pro in all our undertakings.
19. The fourth category comprises ambitious officeholders and liberals of several shades of opinion. The revolutionary must pretend to collaborate with them, blindly successive them, while at the same time prying out their pointers until they are completely in his force. They must be so compromised that there is no way out for them, and then they can be used to create disorder in the country.
20. The fifth category consists of those doctrinaires, conspirators and revolutionists who cut a commanding bronze on paper or in their cliques. They must be constantly driven on to make compromising declarations: as a affair the majority of them will be destroyed, while a minority will become genuine revolutionaries.
21. The sixth category is especially noteworthy: girls. They can be divided into three prevalent groups. First, those frivolous, thoughtless and vapid women, whom we shall exploit as we exploit the third and fourth category of men. Second, girls who are devoted, capable and eager, though who do not belong to us because they have not however achieved a passionless and austere revolutionary comprehension; these must be used like the men of the fifth category. Finally, there are the ladies who are completely on our side — i.e., those who are wholly dedicated and who have accepted our program in its entirety. We should regard these women as the most highest rated of our treasures; without their lead we would never succeed.
The Attitude of the Way of life toward the Populace
22. The Way of life has no aim other than the complete liberation and happiness of the masses — i.e., of the populace who live by manual labor. Convinced that their emancipation and the achievement of this happiness can solitary come about as a affair of an all-destroying popular revolt, the Traditions will make use of all its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the evils and miseries of the people until at last their patience is tired and they are driven to a general uprising.
23. By a revolution the Society does not shameful an orderly revolt according to the classic western image — a revolt which always stops short of attacking the rights of property and the usual social systems of so-called civilization and morality. Until presently such a revolution has always limited itself to the overthrow of one political form in order to replace it by another, thereby attempting to bring about a so-called revolutionary country. The solitary form of revolution beneficial to the people is one. which destroys the entire homeland to the roots and exterminates all the state ethnicity, institutions and classes in Russia.
24. With this end in view, the Ethnicity therefore refuses to impose any present organization from above. Any future organization will doubtless labor its way through the advance and life of the citizens; yet this is a topic for future generations to decide. Our lecture is terrible, global, total and merciless desolation.
25. Therefore, in drawing closer to the populace, we must above all make common cause with those elements of the masses which, since the foundation of the land of Muscovy, have never ceased to criticize, not individual in words but in deeds, against everything directly or indirectly connected with the realm: against the nobility, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the traders, and the parasitic kulaks. We must unite with the adventurous tribes of brigands, who are the only genuine revolutionaries of Russia.
26. To weld the citizens into one individual unconquerable and all-destructive force — this is our aim, our conspiracy and our lecture.
*
Such is The Revolutionary Catechism, which was to have noteworthy consequences for the world, since it was glance at by Lenin and profoundly influenced him. Like Nechayev, Lenin was concerned finer with damage — terrible, global, large-scale and merciless devastation — than with the creation of a new world; and like Nechayev, too, he was determined that all the powers of the state should fall to the industrial workers led by a handful of dedicated revolutionaries, and that all the other classes should be abolished. The Revolutionary Cathechism would be restated in the arid terms of Marxist philosophy, then again in all its essentials it would remain the strategy of Lenin’s political activity. One of the characters of Dostoyevsky’s creative The Possessed is made to say, “To level the hills is a good idea.” Nechayev showed succinctly, observably, and almost without emotion how the leveling process could be carried out. Lenin carried it out.
Nechayev was not, of course, the first revolutionary to urge the desolation of an entire civilization: the ancient prophets had called for fire to descend from heaven, and bigger recently the leaders of the eighteenth-century peasant rebellions had called for the damage of whole cities “until not one stone lies on another”. Michelet, the nineteenth-century French historian, prayed that the cities would become forests and that males would once better be forest dwellers “until, after manifold centuries have elapsed, their wickedness and perversity will have disappeared beneath the rust of barbarism, and they will be ready once better to become civilized.” The romantic vision of the wreckage of civilization persisted all over the nineteenth century; even Robert Louis Stevenson prayed for the day when he would hear the sound of cities crackling in the flames after the long boredom of the Victorian era. In spite of this these were dreams and visions. Nechayev was saying, “It can be done.”
Then again he was able to movie with remarkable penetration how a small conspiratorial advance could crooked the government and take over control, Nechayev was not always a very convincing revolutionary. He mingled extraordinary cunning and ruthlessness with conjuring tricks and sleight of hand. In 1869, after a brief foray of revolutionary activity among the St. Petersburg students, he decided that his life was in danger and the time had come to rest the nation. He would not leave in any ordinary way, but in a blaze of glory, leaving behind the chronicle that he had been arrested and had escaped from prison. He employed a very undemanding ruse. He simply sent two letters to a juvenile youngster-student who was one of his eager admirers, knowing that she would broadcast the letters to all her friends. The letters were unsigned and were enclosed in a single envelope. The first study:
I was walking on Vasilyevsky Island this morning, and I passed the prison coach. As it went by, a hand appeared at the window and I heard the voice of a dear friend: “If you are a student, send this to the address given.” I feel it is my duty to fulfill what is demanded of me. Destroy this note in case the handwriting is recognized.
The other letter, scribbled in pencil in Nechayev’s in good physical shape-known handwriting, examine:
They are taking me to the fortress. Do not lose core, beloved comrades. Go on to have faith in me, and let us hope we run into again.
Vera Zasulich was not an overly credulous person, nevertheless she believed the letters were genuine. There was nothing improbable in them, except perhaps the reference to the fortress, by which he could solitary cruel the Peter and Paul Fortress overlooking the Winter Palace on the north bank of the Neva. It was the grimmest prison in all Russia, where individual the most dangerous country prisoners were held.
Vera Zasulich spread the yarn of Nechayev’s arrest through the St. Petersburg colleges. The yarn swept through Moscow, where it encountered another fairy-tale — that Nechayev had made a breath-taking leave from the Peter and Paul Fortress and had been seen in Kiev. The story of Nechayev’s invincibility was only beginning. Vera Zasulich, too, became a figure of narrative among Russian students. On July 25, 1877, she attempted to assassinate General Trepov, the St. Petersburg principal of police. She found him in the Residence of Preliminary Detention, fired at him point-blank, and acutely wounded him. She was arrested, placed on trial, and to the surprise of everyone, including herself, she was acquitted. Then she fled the homeland, and later joined armed forces with the childish Lenin when he was editing Iskra (The Spark). She was the direct link between Nechayev and Lenin, however there were several other links.
After the murder of Ivanov, Nechayev fled Russia for the second time. In Switzerland, France and England he lived the life of an exile, on terms of understanding with the old anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom he blackmailed. He described himself as the leader of a widespread revolutionary organization that was on the verge of acquiring controlling wealth from a Russian nobleman. He edited revolutionary newssheets, stole Bakunin’s mystery journals, and acquired such force over the young woman of Alexander Herzen that he was soon making her design banknotes — she was a talented artist, and he had a scheme of flooding Russia with false 100-ruble notes. Nothing came of the scheme. Low-priced to poverty, he went into hiding in obscure villages in Switzerland, making an occasional living as a indication painter. The Tsar’s mystery police were after him. Finally, on August 14, 1872, they caught up with him in a Zurich restaurant. The Swiss government, informed that he was wanted for murder, permitted him to be extradited. Brought to trial, he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in Siberia.
The Tsar conversely had no intention of letting him off so lightly. He had long ago decided that this small and unimpressive revolutionary possessed a relentless, destructive purpose — he was an explosive leverage which must be kept tightly boxed. He therefore ordered that Nechayev should be kept for the rest of his days in the sinister Alexis Ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was in this wing of the prison that Peter the Dominant murdered his son Alexis.
Henceforth Nechayev had no name; he was “the prisoner in Cell No. 5.” He was permitted to understand and to walk each day in the grass-grown courtyard, nevertheless once he was returned to his cell he was shackled to the iron bed. Weekly memories on his behavior were sent to the Tsar. On February 23, 1873, the picture glance at:
The prisoner in Cell No. 5 of the Alexis Ravelin has from February 16 to February 23 behaved quietly. He is currently study the Encounter Gazette of the year 1871 and is in general pleased. Discharge is made under the date of February 19, the first day of Lent. Given Lenten goods, he remarked: “I have no belief in God and none in Lent. So give me a plateful of meat and a bowl of soup, and I’ll be satisfied.” On February 21 he walked about continually, often lifted his hands to his icon, was thoughtful and went to sleep single at 1:30 in the morning.
So the days passed in a narrow, thick-walled cell: homework, pacing the floor, quietly testing himself against his adversaries. He announced that he meant to write a story of the Tsardom, he asked for bigger and greater books, and on each book he interpret he made the scarcely perceptible prisoners’ signs by which messages were conveyed to the next reader. His rule was undemanding. He would defy the Tsar to the end. He would widen every crack, unloosen every bar. Bakunin, when he heard of his arrest, said of him: “An inner voice tells me that Nechayev, who is irretrievably lost and who certainly knows it, will this time from the depths of his innermost being, which is chaotic, tainted, yet never base, summon up all his inherent courage and steadfastness — he will perish like a hero.”
Nechayev did exactly as Bakunin had prophesied. There seems to have been never a moment when he gave in or faltered. He wrote a letter to the Tsar in his own blood. He carried on curious negotiations with the prison governor, explaining how he was prepared to show the government methods of decree Russia which would make a revolution unnecessary. Once a general came into his cell. He slapped the general across the air and received no punishment. Gradually, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, he was able to suborn the guards, and he worked so in the pink on them that eventually he was able to send messages out to the Narodnaya Volya (Public’s Discharge), the close-knit and expertly organized terrorist pressure group which was planning to assassinate the Tsar. There came a time when the Narodnaya Volya was seriously discussing whether instead of killing the Tsar they should not bend all their energies to releasing Nechayev from prison. And when the plans had been discussed in thriller messages transferred by the guards, Nechayev just as fatally declared that he would prefer that they killed the Tsar rather than exclusion him. He suggested that immediately after the assassination of the Tsar there should be issued a thriller order, ostensibly from the Holy Synod, informing all the priests of the realm that the recent Tsar was suffering from “a confusion of the mind” and it was therefore needed to say special prayers for him in thriller. So that the order should be communicated to the entire public, Nechayev suggested that it should conclude with the warning, “May this secret be confided to no one.”
Wit, cunning, daemonic energy and endurance — Nechayev had all these in abundance. He pronounced himself a member of the Succession Party, spoke meaningfully of his princely origins, and basically convinced the guards that he would be the successor to the throne, as Prince Alexis would have been the successor to the throne of Peter the Dominant. He was a little lion shaking the bars of his cage, terrifying everyone who set eyes on him, strangely best rated, but weak.
The Narodnaya Volya assassinated Tsar Alexander II as he was riding through the snowbound streets of St. Petersburg on March 13, 1881.
For Nechayev it was the beginning of the end. Alexander II had been a comparatively mild Tsar; his successor, who soon learned of Nechayev’s connection with the Narodnaya Volya, was implacable. The guards who had taken his messages were arrested and punished; all privileges were removed from him; no one spoke to him; he lived in the silence of the humorless. He was moved to cell No. 1 and completely isolated. Plagued with tuberculosis, dropsy and scurvy, half-mad and suffering from hallucinations,-fed on bread, water and a youthful soup, with a half bottle of milk and a lemon each day, he was allowed single to vanish into a final obscurity. His punishment was “macro, terrible and merciless wreckage.”
On December 3, 1882 the prison doctor, having been summoned by an astonished warder, stepped into the quiet cell. Nechayev was lying dead in a corner. The doctor wrote a brief depiction to the prison governor:
I have the honor to inform you that the prisoner in Cell No. 1 of the Alexis Ravelin died on the morning of November 21 around 2 o’clock. His death was caused by dropsy hard by scurvy.
The intelligence of Nechayev’s death was kept mystery, however among the surviving revolutionaries of the Narodnaya Volya his memory remained alive. They remembered the Revolutionary Catechism and the singular audacity and courage of the man who was so dangerous that he became the Tsar’s special prisoner. They forgot the stupid and gratuitous murder of Ivanov, which took place thirteen years to the day before his own death. For them, he was a revolutionary hero, utterly uncompromising, superbly in command of himself, wise and data. He became a tale. He had been a blackmailer, a liar, a seducer, a murderer, on the other hand all these sins were forgiven him for the leverage of his audacity.
In The Possessed Dostoyevsky drew a haunting portrait of that revolutionary adventurer. Again and again in his notebooks Dostoyevsky returns to contemplate the sculpture of the “Nechayev monster,” satisfied with nothing less than devastation on a inclusive scale.
How deeply Lenin was influenced by Nechayev we distinguish from his actions, his way of thinking, his turns of phrase. He had made over the years a profound practice of Nechayev, until in the end he could all but put himself in Nechayev’s skin. To his close friends and associates he made no secret of his debt to Nechayev. To his continuing friend Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, the secretary of the Council of People’s Commissars, he spoke often about this “titanic revolutionary” who gave his thoughts “such startling formulations that they were forever printed on the memory.” Here is Bonch-Bruyevich remembering Lenin as he talked shortly after he came to pull:
Vladimir Ilyich often mentioned the cunning trick the reactionaries occupy yourself with Nechayev through the light-fingered hands of Dostoyevsky. He thought The Possessed a employment of genius, yet sickening, for as a episode citizens in revolutionary circles have started to treat Nechayev negatively, completely forgetting that this titanic revolutionary possessed such wellbeing of will and enthusiasm that even when he was in the Peter and Paul Fortress, submitting to terrible conditions, even then he was able to influence the soldiers around him in such a Way that they came wholly under his force.
People completely forget that Nechayev possessed a talent for organization, an ability to establish the special technique of conspiratorial labor everywhere, and an ability to give thoughts such startling formulations that they were forever printed on the memory. It is enough to recall his words in one of his pamphlets, where he replies to the question “Which member of the reigning residence must be destroyed?” He gives the neat answer: “The whole responsory.” And this is so simply and apparently formulated that it could be understood by everyone living in Russia at a time when the Orthodox Church was a effective pull and the majority of the public, in one way or another, went to church, and everyone knew that “the responsory” headed all the members of the Romanov dynasty. “Which of them are to be destroyed?” the most easy reader would ask himself, and there at a glance is the answer: “The whole Romanov dynasty.” It is effortless to the point of genius. All of Nechayev should be published. It is vital to learn and seek out everything he wrote, and where he wrote, and we must decipher all his pseudonyms, and collect and print everything he wrote.
And Vladimir Ilyich said these words numerous times.[2]
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