Overview of Anarchism in Russian History
As the writers of the dictionary-reference book of the same name underline in the preface, “occupies a special place,” “interest in the history, philosophy and practice of Russian anarchism exists in the instant when this social phenomenon came into being. 
As a result of the fact that the desire for freedom, for emancipation, and criticism of the state and its power institutions that oppress the individual and society as a whole are fundamentally of a natural origin, it is practically impossible to “overcome” them using any kind of force or ideological methods. The anarchist doctrine, which was developed by the middle of the 19th century and continued to be spread throughout the entirety of the 20th century, did not lose its supporters at the beginning of the 21st century. The realities of the beginning of the 21st century include an interest in studying the history and theory of anarchism, as well as attempts to implement the social and philosophical principles of anarchism in the practice of intellectual pursuits and political activism.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin’s birth
The year 2014 saw the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin’s birth. Bakunin is widely regarded as the most influential revolutionary and thinker in Russian history. He is also known as the “apostle of anarchism.” Bakunin, along with Proudhon and Stirner, is considered to be the originator of anarchist doctrine. His social and revolutionary actions directly or indirectly had a considerable influence on developments in the socio-economic and political situation in the world in the second half of the 19th century.
To M. Mr. Bakunin, A. Personal photograph. 1838M.A. A. Bakunin. Postcard (Petrograd, Edition by N.Yu. Reznikov) The fifty-year anniversary of Bakunin’s death, which was enthusiastically honored in our nation in 1926, was generally considered to be his last celebration. When the 150th anniversary of Bakunin was commemorated all over the globe in 1964, and the “thaw” era had not yet ended, the Izvestia newspaper and the Voprosy istorii magazine strove to objectively depict his life and achievements. But the very following day – the centennial of his death in 1976, noted by many books, essays and scientific conferences abroad, remained unreported in our nation. The 200th anniversary of the revolutionary also did not garner much attention from researchers .
And yet, Alexander Blok was right when in 1906, in his anniversary piece dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Bakunin’s death, he wrote: “Officials spit and writhe, and we read Bakunin and listen to the whistle of fire. The moniker “Bakunin” is a fire that is not going out, possibly not yet scattered. Passionate disagreements around this fire – may they be just as fierce and lofty, so that petty dissension burns out!
Mother M.A. Bakunina Varvara Aleksandrovna, née Muravyova. From a watercolor by an anonymous artist. 1820sFather M.A. Bakunin Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin (1765/68 – 1854). From a watercolor by an anonymous artist. 1820sMikhail Alexandrovich was born into an ancient noble family on May 8 (20), 1814 in Pryamukhin, Tver region. His mother, Varvara Alexandrovna, belonged to the Muravyov family, extensively recognized in Russia.
Father, Alexander Mikhailovich, the provincial leader of the nobility of the Tver province, was a representative of an old noble family that held substantial estates in Novotorzhsky region. He, a diplomat, professor of philosophy at the University of Padua, was a European-educated, free-thinking person, conversant with many notable representatives of European science and philosophy. After retiring, Alexander Mikhailovich committed himself to raising children. The eldest of them, Mikhail, was allotted a military career according to nobility conventions. In 1829 M.A. Bakunin joined the St. Petersburg Artillery School, following which, in 1833, he went for a distant military station in Lithuania. But already in 1835 he quit, lived in Moscow and became a free student at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University.
Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich (1813 – 1840) – public figure, philosopher, poetVissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811 – 1848) – literary critic, journalist.Under the influence of a close friend of the Bakunin family, public figure and philosopher N.V. Stankevich, he is a member of the literary and philosophical group – the Stankevich circle.
The members of the group were connected by an interest in German philosophy, notably the writings of F. Schelling and G. Hegel, literature and history, hostility to serfdom, advocacy of humanistic ideas and Stankevich’s personal attractiveness. Bakunin’s closest pals in the group were with V.G. Belinsky, with whom he studied the philosophy of Hegel. Belinsky between 1836 – 1838 at one point he stayed with Bakunin in Moscow and twice spent the summer at the Novotorzhsky estate of the Bakunins. Belinsky named Bakunin his “philosophical friend,” noting his “wild power, restless, anxious and deep movement of the spirit, incessant striving into the distance, without satisfaction with the present,” “the ever-moving beginning of his spirit.”
In mid-1840, Bakunin moved overseas and resided in Berlin, the then seat of “German wisdom,” where at the University of Berlin he eagerly studied political economy, history, physics, but, above all, philosophy, listened to Werder’s lectures, and met Schelling.
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) – German materialist philosopher.Arnold Ruge (1802 – 1880) – German philosopher and publicist After encountering the Left Hegelians, especially its leader A. Ruge, Bakunin shifted to radical, revolutionary democratic beliefs. The radicalization of the worldview during this stage of Bakunin’s life was represented in the famous aphorism: “The passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion!” With which he ended his article “Reaction in Germany,” published in 1842 under the pseudonym Jules Elizard in the magazine A. Ruge “German Yearbooks”. This article brought M.A. Bakunin is widely recognized. A.I. greatly loved the innovative pathos of this piece. Herzen, calling it “an open, solemn cry of the democratic party.”
Transition to Anarchism and Conflict with Marx and Engels
Karl MarxF. EngelsDuring the same era, Bakunin got familiar with the philosophy of L. Feuerbach and became captivated with the concepts of his anthropological materialism. Bakunin’s connection with German radicals and socialist circles caused the Saxon authorities to exile him from Dresden outside Germany in 1843. In 1844 M.A. Bakunin settled in Paris, where he became close friends with Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Mickiewicz, Blanc, Beranger, George Sand, grew close to leaders of radical periodicals, became acquainted with the lives of workshop workers, and engaged in the work of the Polish emigration committee.
The tsarist authorities and the Third Section observed the ever-increasing radicalism of Bakunin’s beliefs. In December 1843, the commander of gendarmes ordered him to return to Russia, but Bakunin disobeyed this order, resolving to remain a political emigrant forever. Nicholas I signed an order stripping Bakunin of his rights, sentencing him if he returned to exile in Siberia. When this edict was published in Parisian newspapers in January 1845, the Russian emigrant issued an open letter in the publication Reforma, in which he offered a strong rebuke to tsarism.
Life proved that it was not science, not philosophy, but action, political battle that constituted the basis of his activities. Starting from the second half of the forties, M.A. Bakunin was continually at the center of the revolutionary fight till the end of his life.
Involvement in Pan-Slavic Movement and European Revolutions
He participated in the Pan-Slavist movement and in the revolutionary events of 1848–1849. in Paris, Prague, Dresden. On November 29, 1847, on the anniversary of the Polish revolt of 1830, Bakunin delivered a speech in which he called for Poles and Russian patriots to work together in the interests of the liberation of Poland and the construction of a pan-Slavic federation. His aggressive activities resulted his banishment from Paris by order of Prime Minister F. Guizot, who understood that such a “unbridled” personality was untenable even in France. Before the revolution of 1848, Bakunin returned to Paris, where he settled in the barracks of the workers defending the revolutionary prefect of police. His inflammatory remarks, chaotic actions and intervention in the internal affairs of France, caused the French revolutionary government to transfer his nation under the guise of a political mission to the Slavic territories.
Imprisonment and Writing “Confession”
Prague Uprising of 1848Dresden uprising of 1849Bakunin, with his characteristic ardor and ardor, took part in the Czech revolutionary movement of 1848, and then in the Dresden uprising in the spring of 1849, after the suppression of which, he was arrested and sentenced by the Saxon authorities to death, commuted to life imprisonment. When the inquiry into the Prague revolt began in Austria, he was extradited to the Austrian authorities in 1850, who, in turn, also condemned him to death. The punishment was not carried out and Bakunin, as a Russian national, was handed over to the Russian authorities. He was imprisoned initially in one of the casemates of the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress (1851 – 1854), then in the Shlisselburg Fortress (1854 – 1857).
Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Photo from the middle of the 19th century.Shlisselburg Fortress. Artist P. P. Svinin. 1820sOn March 12, 1854, Bakunin was taken to the Shlisselburg fortress with an order to the commandant: “Since Bakunin is one of the most important prisoners, then observe all possible caution in relation to him, have the most vigilant and strict supervision over him, keep him completely separate, do not allow him to no strangers to him and to remove news from him about everything that happens outside his premises so that his very presence in the castle is kept in the greatest secret.”
Bakunin had a hard difficulty sustaining solitary confinement. He was afflicted with scurvy, as a result of which he lost all his teeth. Subsequently, he informed Herzen about this time: “A terrible thing is life imprisonment. To drag out a life without a goal, without hope, without interest! With a horrible toothache that persisted for weeks… not sleeping for days or nights – no matter what I did, no matter what I read, even during sleep I felt… I am a slave, I am a dead man, I am a corpse…”
Bakunin’s lonely cell in the Shlisselburg stronghold.In the Shlisselburg fortress M.A. Bakunin published his “Confession”, in which he denounced his “sins”, “crimes” and praised God that his terrible “undertakings” remained unfulfilled. In “Confession,” Bakunin fairly frankly, comprehensively and accurately detailed his emigrant activities, defined the roots of his worldview, opinions on the situation of events in Russia and the Slavic nations. It expressed the dilemma of Bakunin’s left-Hegelian thinking. In “Confession” he repeatedly and plainly deviates from his prior thoughts and reveals loyal sentiments in the spirit of enlightened absolutism. But his desire to replace incarceration in the fortress with hard work continued without repercussions, and until the next Tsar, Alexander II, after another letter of apology from Bakunin, ordered him to settle in Siberia.
M.A. Bakunin and his wife Antonia. Irkutsk, June 3, 1861Since 1857, Bakunin stayed in Tomsk, and subsequently relocated to Irkutsk. Here in 1858 he married the daughter of an exiled Pole, Antonia Kwiatkowska.
Involvement in Revolutionary Propaganda
A.I. Herzen and N.P. Ogarev in London. 1860Having acquired permission to go for scientific purposes along the Amur, Bakunin flees to Europe. On January 1, 1862, he was already in London with Herzen and Ogarev, who knew him from Moscow, and was actively involved in revolutionary propaganda, published in Kolokol. In 1863 he took part in helping the Polish insurrection. Bakunin planned of organizing a Polish legion that would support the Polish insurgents, and for this purpose he went to Sweden. An attempt to arrange a naval expedition to support the rebels failed. After the defeat of the Polish revolt, Bakunin ultimately shifted to the viewpoint of anarchism. Rejecting any kind of governmental power, he felt that society should be structured “from the bottom up”, in the shape of a federation of self-governing communities, artels, organizations, regions, peoples. He envisioned the future society as the victory of freedom, in which the most complete development of all human faculties is conceivable.
When in 1864 in London Marx and Engels founded the International Workers’ Association – the First International, Bakunin met with Marx, joined the International and volunteered his services to promote his documents in Italy, where he lived at the time. There he met the Italian Freemasons and Garibaldi and founded a secret “International Brotherhood”, for which he prepared the “Revolutionary Catechism”. Having identified in the Freemasons an inherently bourgeois structure and having been convinced of the futility of his attempts to exploit the “brotherhood” for revolutionary goals, Bakunin withdrew to Switzerland.
In 1867, he joined the pacifist group “League of Peace and Freedom” and made a speech at its 1st congress, aiming to transform it into an anarchist society. In 1868, he broke with the League, joined the Geneva section of the First International, and at the same time organized the “Alliance of Socialist Democracy,” not much different from the anarchist “International Brotherhood.” Bakunin makes enormous efforts to ensure that the Alliance is accepted into the First International, and he succeeds on the condition that the Alliance as a union is dissolved. But he maintains a secret organization within the International and wages a fierce struggle with Mars and Engels on the most important political and theoretical issues, putting forward as the main provisions the equality of classes, the abolition of inheritance as the starting point of social progress, and abstinence from participation in the political movement.
S.G. Nechaev. Around 1870In 1869, Bakunin met S.G. Nechaev and comes under the sway of this adventurer from the revolution. Bakunin sought, through Nechaev, to promote the principles of the “Alliance” in Russia, where he portrayed his envoy as a representative of the non-existent “European Revolutionary Union”. But he immediately differed with Nechaev on the subject of the means of revolutionary warfare defined in the “Catechism of a Revolutionary” , as he deemed hoaxes, blackmail, provocations, and betrayal of comrades undesirable.
Formation of Anarchist International and Legacy
The schismatic actions of the Alliance drew harsh condemnation from members of the First International, and in 1872, during the Hague Congress of the International Workers’ Association, Bakunin was ejected from its ranks. Expulsion from the ranks of the International did not chill Bakunin’s anarchist claims to the theoretical justification of the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary fight. He forms an Anarchist International named the International Workers’ Association. The growth of the anarchist movement in Europe and America produces a furious conflict between K. Marx and F. Engels with the doctrine and practice of Bakunism.
Grave of M.A. Bakunin in Bern.In 1874, Bakunin proceeded to Bologna, where a peasant insurrection was planned, but the effort failed and he was forced to flee. For the previous two years, Bakunin has been living in Lugano, his financial position was very miserable. He survived mostly on different contributions, in addition, he was aided by A.I. Herzen, I.S. Turgenev, A. Vogt and A. Reichel, the brothers sent something.
On July 1, 1876, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin died in Bern at a hospital for the destitute. He was buried at the Berne cemetery, over the tomb there is a plain, coarsely processed granite stele, on which are etched two words – MICHEL BAKUNINE and the dates – 1814 – 1876.