of the State of Moscow have never given up protesting, not just in words but in deeds, against anything directly or indirectly tied to the state; against the nobility, the bureaucracy, the priests, against the world of guilds and against the kulaks. We must ally ourselves with the doughty world of brigands, who in Russia are the only true revolutionaries.
Paragraph 26. All our organization, all our conspiracy, all our purpose consists in this: to regroup this world of brigands into an invincible and omni-destructive force.
In the fall of 1869, Nechaev returned to Russia and formed a clandestine group that could simultaneously spread the word and accomplish the deed. Notepaper of the still non-existent Central Committee of the People’s Justice, adorned with an interlocking axe, dagger and pistol, was used to intimidate opponents. Up to this point, Nechaev had been regarded as a courageous and charismatic character, with numerous stories about his adventures (many of them untrue) circulating in the Russian underground. Soon after his return to Russia, however, he fell out with Ivanov, another member of his group, for reasons that remain obscure. Nechaev accused Ivanov of being a police agent (for which there was no evidence), charged him with, among other things, a ‘breach of discipline’ (which probably meant a disagreement with Nechaev) and then ambushed and killed him. The discovery of Ivanov’s stabbed body a few days later created a huge sensation. Nechaev was accused of murder and, once again, fled into exile. Three hundred revolutionaries were arrested and seventy-four Nechaevites were tried in 1871, though many of them had not supported their leader’s more outlandish tactics. Bakunin had broken with him in the summer of the previous year for a variety of reasons. He was shocked by the murder, and his vanity was wounded: he had been abandoned by his ‘boy’, who had turned to seducing liberal women to help destroy the bourgeois family. The institution survived the onslaught, though various individual families found themselves the poorer. Nechaev ruthlessly employed blackmail to raise funds for the anarchist cause and, on this particular issue, had Bakunin’s support.
Sympathizers with the movement in Russia were horrified. One of them, Fyodor Dostoevsky, broke publicly and dramatically by devoting an entire novel, The Possessed, to the grisly episode. In the novel, the character Verkhovensky represents Nechaev, while Shatov is based on Ivanov. It’s a savage portrayal and largely justified, but it did not succeed in destroying the appeal of Nechaev, whom many continued to regard as a heroic figure and a courageous revolutionary, not completely without reason. In 1872, Nechaev’s whereabouts were betrayed to the Swiss police by a Polish revolutionary turned Russian spy. Due to the murder of Ivanov, the Swiss did not accept his status as a political exile this time and extradited him, as a criminal, to Russia.
Nechaev remained unbowed at his trial, refusing to accept the authority of the tsarist court. When he was taken for a mock execution, a quaint custom unique to tsarist Russia, he contemptuously rejected the services of a priest. As he was dragged away he shouted his defiance by invoking the peasant leaders Razin and Pugachev, who had strung up the Russian nobles as the French did much later. ‘Before three years are over’, he screamed, ‘their heads will be hacked off on this very spot by the first Russian guillotine. Down with the tsar. Long live Freedom. Long live the Russian people.’
Alexander II read the report of the mock execution and scribbled a marginal note:
As a result of this we have every right to have him tried again as a political criminal. But I don’t think that this would be of much use. And so the more prudent course is to keep him for ever [underlined by the tsar] in prison.
This was the sentence that Nechaev served.
The rest of his life was spent in isolation in cell number 5 of the Alexeyevsky dungeon in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, where he won over quite a few policemen, soldiers and warders. They were impressed by his intelligence and dignity. He used them to send supportive messages to various groups, including one to the central committee of the People’s Will, on the eve of their fateful, unanimous decision to assassinate Alexander II. As Vera Figner later recalled in her memoirs, they were amazed and excited to hear that Nechaev was still alive. They wanted to postpone the planned assault on the tsar and free Nechaev instead, but he vetoed the plan, insisting that they stick to their original intention. After they had carried out the act, he suggested, there were other imprisoned revolutionaries – including Leon Mirsky, who had tried to assassinate the chief of police – who deserved the honour much more than him.
On 1 March 1881, the decision made by the leadership of the People’s Will was carried out to the letter by a suicide bomber. The tsar, who had survived a number of attempts on his life, was duly assassinated. This emotionless account of the incident by Kropotkin sums up the story:
In February, 1881, Melikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Revolutionary Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II decided that a sort of deliberative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI, he described this gathering as an assembly of notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the Council of State, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a final warning by Loris Melikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Melikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine, and to carry her the welcome news. He is reported to have told her, ‘I have determined to summon an assembly of notables.’ However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been made public, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakoff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised the monarch not to get out, saying that he could still drive him in the slightly damaged carriage, Alexander insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakoff and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevetsky, threw a bomb between himself and Alexander II, knowing full well that both of them would be killed. They both survived but only for a few hours.
Alexander II lay upon the snow, bleeding profusely, abandoned by every one of his followers. All had fled. It was cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head with a cadet cap. And it was one of the terrorists, Emelianoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm and risking arrest and hanging, forgetting for these moments who he was, who rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. The entire operation had been masterminded by Sofia Perovskaya, who had given the signal for the attack.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met such a death at the hands of revolutionists. ‘To me’, wrote an intimate, ‘who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II, and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, – that of a born autocrat whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, of a man of strong passions and weak will, – it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland.’7
Nechaev lived on till December 1882. His behaviour in prison was exemplary, as attested to by many contemporaries who
