Lenin's Body – The Forerunner

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• Publié par: siversonbernard87
• Publié le: 21 juin 2016
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• Langue: English

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Lenin's Body – The Precursor

Lenin's Body – The Forerunner

The prisoner’s name was Sergey Genadievich Nechayev, and he is almost forgotten today. Few populace comprehend his writings, and solitary 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 put forward 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 city, hardly better-quality than an overgrown village: it had not though blossomed into the authoritative manufacturing municipality of Ivanovo Voznesensk. His father was an innkeeper, sometime small merchant, artisan and factotum, who married the lass of a domicile painter from Kostroma. After the marriage he hunted his father-in-parameter’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 exhausted 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 vital to be reminded that the ‘childish father” ruled sternly and kindly over all the reaches of his empire. In Ivanovo conversely loyalty to the Tsar was gradually succumbing to the disloyalties that came in the wake of the industrial revolution. Kostroma was like a metropolis painted on a set, 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 home 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 cooperate; and it was remembered that he acted fit. He had a rasping voice, nevertheless he had a passionate sense of drama. Years subsequent he wrote in an summing up on revolutionary techniques: “This is the prologue. Let us act, my friends, in such a way that the occupy yourself will soon begin.”

The first act of the join in 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 single one purposeless murder, he knew that he could expect no mercy. In theory he was being tried for the murder of a adolescent student called Ivan Ivanov, still 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 armed forces of dissolution which destroy the realm.

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, together with a depiction written by the momentous 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 recognize the court! I do not be familiar with the Tsar! I do not make out the laws!” The president of the court would then order him to be silent, and Nechayev would be quiet for a while, inclination up and gazing at the gallery as then again searching for someone he knew, or drumming on the ledge. He had some data 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 compete 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 motion picture icy disdain toward their accusers. Nechayev had iron nerves. He was determined to employ all the weapons open to a defenseless man faced with the leverage of the homeland; his major weapon was contempt.

The crime for which he was accused was a peculiarly unpleasant one. Claiming to be the leader of a revolutionary development with four million members all over Russia, Nechayev was in fact the leader of three or four small groups, of which the major 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 better-quality than three or four hundred. Working in secrecy and under several names — at various times he called himself Ivan Petrov, Ivan Pavlov, Dmitry Fyodorov, Captain Panin and Special Agent Number 2664 — he was continually moving about between the compound groups, collecting dues, drawing up proclamations to be issued at some future time, compiling lists of noteworthy 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 important meeting of the Central Executive Committee which was being held in some remote place.

Ivan Ivanov was among a small development 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 Traditions has ordered it. Are you disobeying the Ethnicity?”

“I refuse to listen to the Traditions when it tells me to do completely senseless things.”

“Then you refuse to present to the Way of life?”

“Yes, when it behaves stupidly.”

Nechayev brooded over the refusal, conversely did nothing to punish Ivanov at the time. He vanished from Moscow and is believed to have exhausted the consequent two weeks in Tula, where grave 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 Way of life and being a traitor to its cause. A conference was held; Ivanov was solemnly condemned to death. It was struck 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 basic to look at 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 core-aged author, Ivan Prizhov, who solitary the year before had published his Description of Russian Taverns. Prizhov was a destitute author whose ambition was to write a account of destitution in Russia. Ivanov and Nikolayev walked into the cave, where it was pitch dark. Nechayev was unable to recognize between them, and hurled himself on Nikolayev, attempting to strangle him. Then, realizing his mistake, he turned his attentions to Ivanov, who struggled unfilled 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 mark 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, conversely found nothing incriminating. Ivanov seemed to stir — it was perhaps single the sudden sharp reflex clash of the dead — and Nechayev fired another shot in his effigy. 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; but 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 consequent day Nechayev left for St. Petersburg, and three days later the body rose to the surface.

When the police found the body, they did not at first suspect that it was anything higher than a common murder. They made inquiries among the friends of the dead student. Youthful by young they learned about the existence of a mystery traditions with its mysterious agents who were constantly on the pass through. In a Moscow bookshop they uncovered documents which seemed to relate to a enormous conspiratorial advance extending over the length and breadth of Russia. The trail led to St. Petersburg and then to Tula, and the discovery of a rule to seize the Imperial Armaments Factory was perhaps better 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 solitary 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 leave 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 many aliases and many disguises. Within a few days he was identified as Nechayev, and orders were given to arrest him, on the other hand 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 citizens were arrested in connection with the murder of Ivanov and the mysterious customs 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 immature students, boys and ladies in their late teens or early twenties, with a sprinkling of older adult males like Prizhov, males with time on their hands, radicals by instinct yet 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, nevertheless 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 motion picture that he had youthful part in it. Far higher momentous than the murder were the documents found in the bookshop. They could individual have been written by a man with an extraordinary facts of the weaknesses which reside in governments, all governments — a man who had pondered coldly and passionately on the matter of how governments could be overthrown by small groups of determined and dedicated revolutionaries.

The most major 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 crucial 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 single thought and the lone passion for revolution.

2. The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words though 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 by and large accepted conventions. He is their implacable rival, and if he continues to live with them it is lone in order to destroy them better-quality speedily.

3. The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows individual one science: the science of waste. For this reason, though single for this reason, he will exercise mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. Still all day and all night he studies the compulsory science of human beings, their characteristics and circumstances, and all the phenomena of the contemporary social order. The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order.

4. The revolutionary despises citizens opinion. He despises and hates the obtainable social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the win 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 battle to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.

6. Totalitarian toward himself, he must be oppressive 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 only-minded passion for revolution. For him there exists solitary one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction — the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have yet one thought, one aim — merciless waste. 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, authority 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, on the other hand single 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 total revolutionary waste.

9. It is superfluous to speak of solidarity among revolutionaries. The whole fitness of revolutionary labor lies in this. Comrades who possess the same revolutionary passion and understanding should, as much as possible, deliberate all momentous matters jointly 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 wreckage each one should act alone, never running to another for strategies and assistance except when these are needed 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 spent as economically as possible in order to derive from it the crucial possible profit. The real revolutionary should regard himself as capital consecrated to the triumph 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 starting place of sentiment, but solely in the interests of the revolutionary cause. Therefore it is de rigueur to weigh carefully the usefulness of the comrade against the expenditure of revolutionary forces de rigueur to save him, and the

decision must be made accordingly.

The Relations of the Revolutionary toward Way of life

12. The present member, having given proof of his loyalty not by words in spite of this by deeds can be received into the ethnicity lone by the unanimous agreement of all the members.

13. The revolutionary enters the world of the realm, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world lone for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and global wreckage. 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 traditions while pretending to be completely different from what he really is, for he must penetrate everywhere, into all the better and focus 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 several categories. The first category comprises those who must be condemned to death without delay. Comrades should compile a information bank 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 fact list 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 compulsory to pay attention to the hatred provoked by these people among the comrades or the populace. Hatred and the sense of outrage may even be useful in so far as they incite the masses to revolt. It is obligatory to be guided only 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 dynamic 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 authoritative manifold brutes in high positions distinguished neither by their cleverness nor their energy, while enjoying large choice, power, control 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 information must be ferreted out, and they must be transformed into slaves. Their influence, power and connections, their prosperity and their energy will form an inexhaustible treasure and a precious advantage in all our undertakings.

19. The fourth category comprises ambitious officeholders and liberals of many shades of opinion. The revolutionary must pretend to collaborate with them, blindly consequent them, while at the same time prying out their good tips 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 land.

20. The fifth category consists of those doctrinaires, conspirators and revolutionists who cut a commanding effigy on paper or in their cliques. They must be constantly driven on to make compromising declarations: as a happening the majority of them will be destroyed, while a minority will become genuine revolutionaries.

21. The sixth category is especially important: girls. They can be divided into three main groups. First, those frivolous, thoughtless and vapid ladies , whom we shall exploit as we operate the third and fourth category of adult men. Second, ladies who are avid, capable and avid, yet who do not belong to us because they have not in spite of this achieved a passionless and austere revolutionary comprehension; these must be used like the adult males of the fifth category. Finally, there are the girls who are completely on our side — i.e., those who are wholly dedicated and who have accepted our route in its entirety. We should regard these ladies as the most top rated of our treasures; without their improvement we would never victory.

The Attitude of the Culture toward the Public

22. The Traditions has no aim other than the complete liberation and happiness of the masses — i.e., of the people who live by manual exertion. Convinced that their emancipation and the achievement of this happiness can lone come about as a aftermath of an all-destroying popular revolt, the Way of life will make the most of all its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the evils and miseries of the public until at last their patience is depleted and they are driven to a general uprising.

23. By a revolution the Culture does not cruel an orderly revolt according to the classic western statuette — a revolt which

always stops short of attacking the rights of property and the established 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 state. The only form of revolution beneficial to the people is one. which destroys the entire land to the roots and exterminates all the country culture, institutions and classes in Russia.

24. With this end in view, the Culture therefore refuses to impose any prevailing organization from above. Any future organization will doubtless exertion its way through the advance and life of the populace; then again this is a focus for future generations to decide. Our practice is terrible, universal, international and merciless desolation.

25. Therefore, in drawing closer to the people, we must above all make common cause with those elements of the masses which, since the foundation of the country of Muscovy, have never ceased to whine, not single in words conversely in deeds, against everything directly or indirectly connected with the land: against the nobility, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the investors, and the parasitic kulaks. We must unite with the adventurous tribes of brigands, who are the lone genuine revolutionaries of Russia.

26. To weld the citizens into one solitary unconquerable and all-destructive power — this is our aim, our conspiracy and our practice.

*

Such is The Revolutionary Catechism, which was to have significant consequences for the world, since it was understand by Lenin and profoundly influenced him. Like Nechayev, Lenin was concerned superior with waste — terrible, worldwide, inclusive and merciless desolation — than with the creation of a modern world; and like Nechayev, too, he was determined that all the powers of the country 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, yet in all its essentials it would remain the plan of Lenin’s political activity. One of the characters of Dostoyevsky’s original The Possessed is made to say, “To level the hills is a good idea.” Nechayev showed succinctly, clearly, 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 devastation of an entire civilization: the ancient prophets had called for fire to descend from heaven, and better-quality recently the leaders of the eighteenth-century peasant rebellions had called for the desolation 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 adult men would once finer be forest dwellers “until, after compound centuries have elapsed, their wickedness and perversity will have disappeared beneath the rust of barbarism, and they will be ready once higher to become civilized.” The romantic vision of the ruin of civilization persisted all the way through 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. Nevertheless these were dreams and visions. Nechayev was saying, “It can be done.”

Though he was able to film with remarkable penetration how a small conspiratorial advance could fraudulent the government and take over force, Nechayev was not always a very convincing revolutionary. He mingled extraordinary cunning and ruthlessness with conjuring advice 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 escape the realm. He would not vacation in any ordinary way, then again in a blaze of glory, leaving behind the anecdote that he had been arrested and had escaped from prison. He employed a very straightforward ruse. He simply sent two letters to a juvenile youngster-student who was one of his fervent admirers, knowing that she would broadcast the letters to all her friends. The letters were unsigned and were enclosed in a solitary envelope. The first read:

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 fit-known handwriting, glance at:

They are taking me to the fortress. Do not lose focus, beloved comrades. Carry on to have faith in me, and let us hope we run into again.

Vera Zasulich was not an overly credulous person, nonetheless she believed the letters were genuine. There was nothing improbable in them, except perhaps the reference to the fortress, by which he could lone mean 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 chronicle of Nechayev’s arrest through the St. Petersburg colleges. The account swept through Moscow, where it encountered another anecdote — that Nechayev had made a breath-taking retreat from the Peter and Paul Fortress and had been seen in Kiev. The chronicle of Nechayev’s invincibility was single beginning. Vera Zasulich, too, became

a image of yarn among Russian students. On July 25, 1877, she attempted to assassinate General Trepov, the St. Petersburg biggest of police. She found him in the Home of Preliminary Detention, fired at him point-blank, and gravely wounded him. She was arrested, placed on trial, and to the surprise of everyone, including herself, she was acquitted. Then she fled the land, and ensuing joined armed forces with the babyish Lenin when he was editing Iskra (The Spark). She was the direct link between Nechayev and Lenin, yet there were various 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 knowledge 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 authoritative huge selection from a Russian nobleman. He edited revolutionary newssheets, stole Bakunin’s thriller journals, and acquired such influence over the daughter of Alexander Herzen that he was soon making her design banknotes — she was a gifted artist, and he had a scheme of flooding Russia with false 100-ruble notes. Nothing came of the scheme. On sale to poverty, he went into hiding in obscure villages in Switzerland, making an occasional living as a badge painter. The Tsar’s thriller 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 nevertheless 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 influence 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 Powerful 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, though once he was returned to his cell he was shackled to the iron bed. Weekly stories on his behavior were sent to the Tsar. On February 23, 1873, the narrative understand:

The prisoner in Cell No. 5 of the Alexis Ravelin has from February 16 to February 23 behaved quietly. He is at present schooling the Battle Gazette of the year 1871 and is normally content. Immunity is made under the date of February 19, the first day of Lent. Given Lenten supplies, 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 only at 1:30 in the morning.

So the days passed in a narrow, thick-walled cell: practice, pacing the floor, quietly testing himself against his adversaries. He announced that he meant to write a memoirs of the Tsardom, he asked for more and finer books, and on each book he convert he made the scarcely perceptible prisoners’ signs by which messages were conveyed to the next reader. His policy was straightforward. 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, in spite of this 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 movie the government methods of ruling 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 strong on them that eventually he was able to send messages out to the Narodnaya Volya (Citizens’s Freedom), the close-knit and expertly organized terrorist movement which was planning to assassinate the Tsar. There came a time when the Narodnaya Volya was acutely 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 gravely 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 state that the present Tsar was suffering from “a confusion of the mind” and it was therefore obligatory to say special prayers for him in mystery. So that the order should be communicated to the entire populace, Nechayev suggested that it should conclude with the seminar, “May this thriller 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 nearly 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 Potent. He was a little lion shaking the bars of his cage, terrifying everyone who venue eyes on him, strangely leading, then again 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 unsmiling. 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 little soup, with a half bottle of milk and a lemon each day, he was allowed solitary to

vanish into a final obscurity. His punishment was “global, terrible and merciless damage.”

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 picture 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 difficult by scurvy.

The hearsay of Nechayev’s death was kept secret, 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 understanding. He became a anecdote. He had been a blackmailer, a liar, a seducer, a murderer, then again all these sins were forgiven him for the control 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 head of the “Nechayev monster,” satisfied with nothing a reduced amount of than devastation on a overall scale.

How deeply Lenin was influenced by Nechayev we be on familiar terms with 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 almost put himself in Nechayev’s skin. To his close friends and associates he made no mystery of his debt to Nechayev. To his abiding friend Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, the secretary of the Council of Public’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 control:

Vladimir Ilyich often mentioned the cunning trick the reactionaries have fun with Nechayev through the light-fingered hands of Dostoyevsky. He thought The Possessed a work of genius, nevertheless sickening, for as a occasion public in revolutionary circles have started to treat Nechayev negatively, completely forgetting that this titanic revolutionary possessed such fitness 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 pull the soldiers around him in such a Way that they came wholly under his control.

People completely forget that Nechayev possessed a talent for organization, an ability to establish the special technique of conspiratorial employment 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 query “Which member of the reigning abode 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 power and the majority of the citizens, in one way or another, went to church, and everyone knew that “the responsory” intended all the members of the Romanov dynasty. “Which of them are to be destroyed?” the most straightforward reader would ask himself, and there at a glance is the answer: “The whole Romanov dynasty.” It is trouble-free to the point of genius. All of Nechayev should be published. It is necessary 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 various times.[2]