Nechaev also flattered Bakunin’s vanity by encouraging him to co-author a Revolutionary’s Catechism. This advocated a lethal Spartanic asceticism: ‘The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.’ All bonds with the civilised world ‘of laws, moralities, and customs, and with its generally accepted conventions’, were severed. Only two things were worth studying: the sciences of destruction, and the psychology of those whom the revolutionary would abuse and exploit. How the words flowed from Bakunin’s pen: ‘Moved by the sober passion for revolution, he [the revolutionary] should stifle in himself all considerations of kinship, love, friendship, and even honour.’ Tyrannical towards himself, he would be tyrannical over others. Some revolutionaries were more equal than others, for only the first grade would possess gnosis, and could freely exploit grades two and three. They were ‘capital’ to be disposed of at will. In a novel departure, revolutionaries were to collaborate with the ultimate primitive rebels, the lumpen criminal underclass. Turning to a theme that animates many revolutionaries, Bakunin and Nechaev eagerly established who was to be first for the chop. Humanity was divided into those ‘to be liquidated immediately’, while various categories of usefully idiot liberals were to be exploited and discarded, including ‘empty-headed women’ whose salons Nechaev had adorned. A further pamphlet, The People’s Justice, began to fill the ranks of those to be liquidated with real names drawn from what Nechaev charmingly called ‘the scum of contemporary Russian learning and literature … the mass of publicists, hacks, and pseudo-scientists’. Reams of these tracts were malevolently mailed to Russian radicals, knowing that it would result in their arrest. The whole of this programme, whose goal was ‘terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction’, was notionally designed to benefit ‘the people’. In fact, things had to get worse before they got better because ‘the Society will use all its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the evils and miseries of the people until at last their patience is exhausted and they are driven to a general uprising’.
Equipped with a certificate endorsed by Bakunin announcing ‘The carrier of this is one of the World Revolutionary Alliance No. 2771’, Nechaev returned to Moscow in September 1868. There he established an eight-man revolutionary cell, grandiloquently called People’s Justice, consisting of young men like Ivan Ivanov and Peter Uspensky, and an older man called Ivan Pryzhov, an alcoholic down-at-heel writer, who earned a few kopecks explaining the meaning of life to fellow barflies. Even suicide eluded Pryzhov: when he threw himself and his dog into a lake, the dog dragged him out. The original eight each received a number – Ivanov was 2 – which then became the first digit used to identify each man’s recruits from an allocated sector of society. Nechaev went after army officers, Ivanov after students, while Pryzhov’s mission was to the underworld. True to the terms of the Catechism, Nechaev’s recruitment and fund-raising strategies were not subject to moral concerns. One student joined the conspiracy when Nechaev threatened him with a knife. Another man was invited to tea, given subversive tracts, and then arrested when he left by bogus policemen wearing false beards and wigs. This persuaded him to part with six thousand rubles on the spot.
These escapades took a more serious turn when on 16 November Nechaev informed his confederates that it was necessary to kill Ivan Ivanov, whom he suspected of being a police spy. In fact, Ivanov had merely demurred when Nechaev had ordered him to distribute incriminating literature among the innocent students of the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy. On the afternoon of 21 November, Ivanov was lured to the grounds of the Academy with claims that the conspirators had found some useful printing equipment concealed in a grotto a few yards from a frozen pond. At five in the afternoon, the five assassins bushwhacked the unsuspecting Ivanov, pinning him down while Nechaev strangled him. Although Ivanov was dead already, Nechaev shot him in the head. The five weighed the body down with bricks, broke a hole in the ice and dropped it into the pond. But this was ineptly done, and the corpse bobbed up shortly afterwards. As they had forgotten to take a library card which Ivanov had borrowed from one of his future murderers, the police were soon on the trail of the right men. All except Nechaev were quickly rounded up, but the instigator and chief murderer managed to flee abroad. He re-established contact with Bakunin, chillingly offering to kill a publisher who was harassing the anarchist for delivery of his translation of Marx’s Kapital. Nechaev then focused his sinister attentions on Natalia Herzen, the wealthy daughter of the deceased liberal exile. Luckily for her, she had a vigilant stepmother who knew what Nechaev was about. Moreover, his attempts to ‘blackmail and frighten’ ‘Tata’ were beginning to worry Bakunin, who began to compare the protégé he called ‘the boy’ with Savonarola and Machiavelli. In early 1872 Nechaev moved from Geneva to Zurich, where he began plotting bank robberies. Although most of the European socialist press swallowed Nechaev’s lies about his reasons for killing Ivanov, the Swiss authorities determined to extradite him to Russia for his criminal enterprises rather than his ‘political’ crime. He found himself confined to the Peter and Paul fortress of his fantasies.
What followed these events was, arguably, as disturbing as the deeds of Nechaev and his friends, which became the starting point for Dostoevsky’s great reckoning with his own revolutionary demons in The Possessed. With breathtaking stupidity, the authorities elected to dissolve the squalid essence of the charge relating to Ivanov’s murder by tacking on loosely related cases when the murderers came to trial. This meant that instead of five accused, there were eighty-seven, many with walk-on parts in the original conspiracy, or ironically, people whom Nechaev had himself framed when he sent them his incriminatory pamphlets. Not for the first or last time, elite alienation from what they regarded as a reactionary government meant that well-to-do liberal folk made the most grotesque apologists for murderers, blissfully unaware that when half a century later the Nechaevs came to power, their property would be looted while they disappeared into exile or Arctic concentration camps. Middle-aged and elderly dupes saw in Nechaev the wayward idealism of youth, rather than a psychopathic conman. The public gallery was filled with students, impressionable young ladies and artillery officers who lapped up the theatre unfolding before them, vicariously thrilled by the frisson of animal violence that Nechaev brought with him. The prosecutor was predictably inept, while the defence lawyers acted like activist demagogues, a recurrent pattern in the history of terrorism. The liberal-minded chief judge indulged the accused, allowing them to read newspapers and wave to their admiring audience. A squalid little gang of murderers were emboldened by whispers of ‘brave boys and girls, they do not lose heart’. In these circumstances, four of the accused received mild sentences of between seven and fifteen years’ hard labour. Twenty-nine others were given prison terms. The rest were acquitted. The chief demon was given twenty years. The authorities even botched this. Instead of sending Nechaev to a remote mine in Siberia, the tsar personally intervened to consign him to solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul fortress, thereby seeming to betray the terms of Nechaev’s extradition as a common felon. The murderer became a myth. Inevitably, a man of Nechaev’s indomitable will was able to suborn long-serving guards who identified more with their charges than with the world beyond. This enabled Nechaev to establish contacts with each new generation of revolutionaries, who, as his crimes faded into rosy memory, more keenly admired his ferocious energy and will. This endured long after Nechaev had expired in jail from dropsy, on the thirteenth anniversary of his murder of Ivanov.
Although the spirit of Nechaev lingered, the main thrust of Russian radicalism in the 1870s took the form of a redemptive Populist crusade, in which members of the liberal and radical intelligentsia descended among the people to serve and guide. There was something distastefully anthropological about this venture, as if the Populists were going among remote tribes, which in a profound sense they were. A rift quickly opened between the people as abstraction and the multifarious people themselves.
The service part of the agenda was entirely acceptable to the peasantry. From 1873 until the end of the decade, countless numbers of young idealists went on a ‘Pilgrimage to the People’. Vera Figner and her sister went to dwell in remote villages, where Vera worked as a peripatetic physician. This was challenging since ‘I had no idea how to approach a common person.’ Given that her knowledge of the common people was entirely derived