n Russia traces of Anarchist views are found as far back as the stormy period of 1848-49. The extent of poverty, both mental and material, in the vast dominion of the Czar caused the Russian people to be less ready to accept and propagate political ideals of freedom than to comprehend the Socialist doctrines that were then first springing up in Western Europe. The great movement that seized upon and shook all Central and Western Europe died down in Russia to a few isolated centres of life, and was felt chiefly in secret debating societies which eagerly received and disseminated the writings of Considerant, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Blanc, and Proudhon.
The reading of Proudhon's works was even undertaken as a duty by the most important of these societies, the so-called "Association of Petraschewski." The extent to which his teaching impressed the thoughtful members of this society, which included among others Dostojewski, cannot easily be determined, since the companions of Petraschewski, like the Nihilists of to-day, have always liked to preserve a certain electicism. However, one trace of the influence of Proudhon's doctrines upon its members is distinctly visible. Thus, an associate, Lieutenant Palma of the Guards, had designed a book of laws, in which we are surprised to meet the following passage, quite in the Anarchist vein: "The chief distinctive feature of man is that he is a being endowed with a personality, i. e., with reason and freedom, which is an end in itself, and ought not under any circumstances to be regarded as a means or end for others. From the idea of personality is derived the idea of right. I may do everything that I please, because each of my actions is the result of my reason." Petraschewski himself, in a satirical Dictionary which he published under the pseudonym of Kirilow, praised as one of the merits of early Christianity the abolition of private property and so on. We can easily recognise here the elements of Proudhon's and Stirner's Anarchism.
In spite of the severe prohibitive system that came in force after 1848, the teachings of English and French Socialists penetrated into Russia even in this period, and were disseminated by such eminent men as Tschernichevsky, Dobrolinbow, Herzen, Ogarjow, and others, to wider circles, and again we see that interest is chiefly taken in Proudhon's doctrines. These found their way deep into the heart of the masses, even to the peasants. It must not be forgotten that to the Russian peasants, with their already existing collectivist village communities, Proudhon's ideas were far more easy to understand than an educated Frenchman or German found them. There is probably no country in the world where the principles of "federative Socialism," as taught by Proudhon and later by Bakunin, were better understood than in Russia, and Bakunin even denied the necessity of a Socialist propaganda among Russian peasants, because he said that they already possessed a knowledge of its elements.
The broad, subterranean stream of Nihilism, which, swelling from these small beginnings to a dread power and strength, has undermined both feet of the Colossus of the Russian Empire, disappears here from our view. We can only notice individual men who, separated from the main body of the movement, made ready the path of revolution in their native land while living as voluntary or involuntary exiles in Western Europe. It may appear superfluous to remark upon the important rôle played by Russians on the revolutionary committees of every country. And in no revolutionary movement have they gained such a disastrous influence or played such a leading part as in Anarchism. When, in the sixties, Socialism, with its organisation of the working-class movement, grew up side by side with the revival of political Liberalism, then, too, by a natural law, arose the extreme form of protest against the aggregation of human society by Communism; the Anarchist doctrine naturally rose up from the complete oblivion in which it had lain for ten years. But modern Anarchism celebrated its renascence in a totally different form: times and men had changed; the philosophic period was passed, Stirner was dead, and Proudhon near his end; Russian godfathers stood round the cradle of modern Anarchism. Men of lofty idealism, who, impregnated with Western culture, with bold violence, wished to anticipate by several ages the natural development of mankind, have given up to Anarchy, as the empire of perfect and free personality, their whole heart and mind. But those who gave to this doctrine—justified to some extent, like every other one-sided view, in spite of all its extravagance, contradictions, and inherent impossibility—the sanction of the dagger, the revolver, petroleum, and dynamite, were neither Frenchmen nor Germans, but the half-civilised barbarians of the East.
The older form of Anarchism is marked by that lofty idealism which was the general mental attitude of civilised Western Europe in the first half of this century. The modern Anarchism of Bakunin, Netschajew, Kropotkin, and others, is branded by the semi-civilised culture of Russia, whose only object is the destruction of every existing state of things, and indeed under existing circumstances it cannot be otherwise. Dislike of, and discontent with real or fancied grievances, combined with a stiff-necked, doctrinaire attitude unprepared for any sacrificio del intelletto, may indeed lead the children of Western civilisation to a logical denial of the existing order of society. But from this to the actual overthrow of all existing conditions is a still farther step; and the positive intention of annihilating the infinite mental and material inheritance which is the outcome of civilisation, and which is not even denied by Anarchists themselves, could only be conceived by a few degenerate individuals who could only wish to see themselves vis-à-vis de rien because of their own utter lack of moral, intellectual, or material possessions. Against these individuals there will always be arrayed an overwhelming majority, who are ready to pledge the whole weight of their superiority in culture for these possessions and guarantees of the undeniable progress of mankind.
It is different in Russia. The political and social, the mental and moral conditions of this large but barbarian empire do not afford much opportunity for the growth even of a moderate amount of conservatism. For what can there be to conserve, to maintain, or to improve in those lives that depend on the mere sign of a bloodthirsty and savage despotism, in that society that has hardly raised itself from the primitive tribal level, in those rotten national economics, trade and industry, in a spiritual life groaning under the banner of orthodoxy and an arbitrary police, of popes and Tschinowniks? Must not the only possible way, the inevitable presupposition of any possible improvement be a desire for a total and universal overthrow, a radical annihilation of all these conditions that render life and development impossible? The Russian need not shrink from the thought that all present conditions should be annihilated, for when he looks round about him he finds nothing that his heart would care to preserve; and the higher he ranks in the mental or social sphere, the stronger must this "Nihilist" feeling naturally become. We who are citizens of a State that, with all its faults, is yet richly blessed by civilisation, show our comprehension of these facts by regarding with a milder and more sympathetic glance the acts of a few desperate men in Russia, which we should condemn severely if they occurred under the happier circumstances that surround ourselves. In fact, nothing is more natural—lamentable as it may be—than that, under circumstances such as those of Russia, revolutionary Radicalism should assume this purely negative "Nihilist" and murderously destructive character in the desperate struggle of the individual against a society that is totally degenerate.
"Among us," says Stepniak,[26] "a revolution or even a rising of any importance, such as those in Paris, is absolutely impossible. Our towns contain barely a tenth of the total population, and most of them are merely great villages, miles and miles away one from another. The real towns, such as, e. g., those of from 10,000 or 15,000 inhabitants, contain only 4 or 5 per cent. of the total population—that is, about three or four million people. And the Government which rules over the military contingent of the whole people—that is, over 1,200,000 soldiers—can transform the five or six chief towns, the only places where any movement would be possible, into veritable camps, as is indeed the case. Against such a Government any means are permissible; for it is no longer the guardian of the people's will or even of the will of a majority. It is injustice organised; a citizen need respect it no more than a band of highway robbers. But how can we shake off this Camarilla that shelters itself behind a forest of bayonets? How can we free the country from it? Since it is absolutely impossible to remove this hindrance by force, as in other more fortunate countries, a flank movement was necessary in order to attack this Camarilla before it could make use of its power, which thus was made useless in fruitless positions. Thus Terrorism arose. Nurtured in hatred, suckled by patriotism and hope, it grew up in an electric atmosphere, filled by the enthusiasm that is awakened by a noble deed."
These same features were necessarily assumed in Russia by Anarchist doctrines, which from their very nature found a friendly and (as we have seen) an early reception, and were practically incorporated with Nihilism, but, as must be distinctly noted, without becoming identical with it, or even forming an essential and integral part of it. In fact, we find in avowed Nihilists and Panslavists, such as Herzen, the fundamental Anarchist ideas present just as much as in Bakunin and Kropotkin, whose Anarchism was superior to their Panslavism. In his book, After the Storm (Après la Tempête), composed under the impression made by the disappointed hopes and expectations of 1848, Herzen exclaimed: "Let all the world perish! Long live Chaos and Destruction"; and in a work that appeared almost at the same time, The Republic One and Indivisible, he attacked the Republican form of government as "the last dream of the old world," which yet could not succeed in carrying out the great fundamental law of social justice. Only when this has become really a truth, only when there is an end of men being devoured by men, will humanity, born again, rise free and happy from the ruins of this present cursed social structure: "Spring will come; young, fresh life will blossom on the graves of the races who have died as victims of injustice; nations will rise up full of chaotic but healthy forces. A new volume of the world's history will begin." The share of Nihilism in such ideas cannot be borrowed altogether from Western Anarchism. There was perhaps a mutual interaction of intellectual growth. But one gift Anarchism certainly did receive from Nihilism: "the propaganda of action" does not spring from the logical development of Proudhon's and Stirner's ideas, and cannot be extorted or extracted from it in any way; it is rather the consequence of the mixture of these ideas with Nihilism, a result of Russian conditions. This was the pretty embellishment with which the West received back Anarchism from Russian hands in the era of the sixties and seventies. Bakunin was entrusted with the gloomy mission of handing this gift over to us, and it is noticeable that in Bakunin—as in Nihilism generally—Anarchism by no means takes up that exclusively commanding position as in Proudhon, with whom he yet is so closely connected.
Michael Bakunin was born in 1814 at Torschok in the Russian province of Tver, being a scion of a family of good position belonging to the old nobility. An uncle of Bakunin's was an ambassador under Catherine II., and he was also connected by marriage with Muravieff. He was educated at the College of Cadets in St. Petersburg, and joined the Artillery in 1832 as an ensign. But either, as some say, because he did not get into the Guards, or, as others say, because he could not endure the rough terrorism of military life, he left the army in 1838, and returned first to his father's house, where he devoted himself to scientific studies. In 1841 Bakunin went to Berlin, and next year to Dresden, where he studied philosophy, chiefly Hegel's but was also introduced by Ruge into the German democratic movement. Even at that time he had come to the conclusion (in an essay in the Deutschen Jahrbücher on "The Reaction in Germany") that Democracy must proceed to the denial of everything positive and existing, without regard for consequences. Pursued by Russian agents, he went in 1843 to Paris, and thence to Switzerland, where he became an active member of the Communist-Socialist movement. The Russian Government now refused him permission to stay abroad any longer, and as he did not obey repeated commands to return to his native land, it confiscated his property. From Zürich, Bakunin returned a second time to Paris, and made the acquaintance of Proudhon. If here was laid the foundation for his later Anarchist views, we still find him active in another political direction. In a high-flown speech made at the Polish banquet on the anniversary of the Warsaw Revolution (29th November, 1847), Bakunin recommended the union of Russia and Poland in order to revolutionise the former. The Russian Government thereupon demanded his extradition, and set a price of ten thousand silver roubles on his head. In spite of this, Bakunin escaped safely to Brussels. After the Revolution of February, he returned to Paris, then went in March to Berlin, and in June to attend the Slav Congress in Prague.