Nechayev, Sergei Geradievich

views updated

NECHAYEV, SERGEI GERADIEVICH

(1847–1882), Russian revolutionary terrorist.

Sergei Nechayev epitomizes the notion of using any means, however ruthless, to further revolution. He is perhaps best known for his coauthorship of what is commonly known as the Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869). From its initial sentence, "The revolutionary is a doomed man," to its twenty-sixth clause, calling for an "invincible, all-shattering force" for revolution, the Catechism has inspired generations of revolutionary terrorists. A public reading of the brief tract and the investigation of the murder of a member of his own organization at the trial of his followers in 1871 gave Nechayev instant notoriety. The notion that the end justified any means repelled most Russian revolutionaries, but others, then and later, admired Nechayev's total commitment to revolution. One of his admirers was Vladimir Lenin. Fyodor Dostoyevsky demonized Nechayev in the guise of Peter Verkhovensky in The Possessed (1873), but Rodion Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1866) has more psychological features in common with the real person.

Born in Ivanovo, a Russian textile center, the gifted Nechayev had little hope of realizing his ambitions there. In 1866 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he obtained a teaching certificate. He quickly involved himself in the lively student movement in the city's institutions of higher education, and he joined radical circles. The regime's policies had driven the most committed revolutionaries underground, where they formed conspiracies to assassinate Alexander II and to incite the peasants to revolt. In 1868 and 1869 Nechayev began to show his ruthlessness in his methods of recruitment. When a police crackdown occurred in March 1869, he fled to Switzerland to make contact with Russian emigrés, who published the journal The Bell in Geneva. Nechayev falsified the extent of the movement and his role in it in order to gain the collaboration of Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Ogarev, who, with Alexander Herzen, published the journal. The romantic Bakunin especially admired ruthless men of action, and his connection with Nechayev fore-shadowed future relationships between the theorists of revolution and unsavory figures. Before Nechayev's return to Russia in September 1869, he and Bakunin wrote the Catechism of a Revolutionary and several other proclamations heralding the birth of a revolutionary conspiracy, the People's Revenge. Bakunin's tie with Nechayev figured in the former's expulsion from the First International in 1872.

With vast energy and unscrupulous methods, Nechayev involved more than one hundred people in his conspiracy. Its only notable achievement, however, was the murder of Ivan Ivanov, who had tried to opt out. Nechayev and four others lured Ivanov to a grotto on the grounds of the Petrov Agricultural Academy in Moscow, where they murdered him on November 21, 1869. Nechayev escaped to Switzerland and remained at large until arrested by Swiss authorities in August 1872. They extradited him to Russia, where he was tried for Ivanov's murder and imprisoned in 1873. Nechayev died in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1882.

Some historians have presented Nechayev as an extremist who harmed his cause, while others have studied him as a clinical case. Early Soviet historians admired him as a Bolshevik type. In the period of glasnost and after, Russian writers saw in Nechayev a forerunner of Stalin and other pathologically destructive dictators.

See also: bakunin, mikhail alexandrovich; dostoyevsky, fyodor mikhailovich; herzen, alexander ivanovich; terrorism