Russian nihilist movement

Portrait of a nihilist student by Ilya Repin

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The Russian nihilist movement^{[note 1]} was a philosophical, cultural, and revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was the precursor to broader forms of the philosophy of nihilism.^[1] In Russian, the word nigilizm (Russian: нигилизм; meaning 'nihilism', from Latin nihil 'nothing at all')^[2] came to represent the movement's negation of pre-existing ideals. Even as it was yet unnamed, the movement arose from a generation of young radicals disillusioned with the social reformers of the past, and from a growing divide between the intelligentsia of the genteel and non-genteel social classes.

Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, as stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom."^[3] Though philosophically both nihilistic and skeptical, Russian nihilism did not target all ethics, knowledge, and human life as meaningless,^[4] but instead focused on what it saw as meaningless in the dominant hegemony of religion, morality, philosophy, aesthetics, and social institutions. It did however, incorporate theories of hard determinism, atheism, materialism, positivism, and rational egoism^[5] in an aim to assimilate and distinctively recontextualize core elements of European Enlightenment thought into Russia while rejecting the Westernizers of the previous generation.^[6] Nihilists fell into conflict with religious authorities from the Orthodox Church, as well as with prevailing rigid family structures and the Tsarist autocracy.

Although predominantly associated with revolutionary activism, most nihilists were not political—instead seeing politics as an outdated mode of society. They held that until a negation of current conditions had taken place the positive role of politics could not properly be formulated. Among some nihilists however, communal principles began to develop, though their formulations in this regard remained vague.^[7] With the widespread revolutionary arson of 1862, a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations of the 1860s and 70s, and the eventual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Russian nihilism was fiercely mischaracterized throughout Europe as political terrorism and violent criminality.^[8][9] As Kropotkin states, terrorism was particular to given historical conditions of the revolutionary struggle and not to nihilist philosophy itself,^[9] which in turn however, scholar Gillespie adds, was central to revolutionary thought in Russia throughout the lead-up to the Russian Revolution.^[10] Religious scholar Altizer states that Russian nihilism in fact had its deepest expression in a Bolshevist nihilism of the 20th century.^[11]

Definition[]

The term nihilism has been widely misused in the West when discussing the Russian movement, especially in relation to revolutionary activity. Criticizing this misterming by Western commentators, Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky stated that revolutionaries themselves simply identified as socialist revolutionaries, or informally as radicals. However, from outside Russia, the term nihilist was misapplied to the entirety of the country's revolutionary milieu.^[13] The Encyclopædia Britannica attributes the probable first use of the term in Russian publication to Nikolai Nadezhdin who, like and Vissarion Belinsky after him, used it synonymously with skepticism. Nadezhdin himself had applied the term to Aleksandr Pushkin. From there, nihilism was interpreted as a revolutionary social menace by the well-known conservative journalist Mikhail Katkov, for its negation of moral principles.^[14] The term came into favour when accusations of materialism proved no longer sufficiently derogatory.^[15]

The intellectual origins of the nihilist movement can be traced back to 1855 and perhaps earlier,^[16] where it was principally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism.^[17] However, it was not until 1862 that the term was first popularized, when Ivan Turgenev in his celebrated novel Fathers and Sons used nihilism to describe the disillusionment of the younger generation, the šestidesjatniki, towards both the traditionalists and the progressive reformists that came before them, the sorokovniki.^{[18][note 2]} This at a time when the terms faced by serfs under the emancipation reform of 1861 were seen as bitterly failing.^[19] The nihilist characters of Turgenev's novel take up the name of their own volition, stating that negation is the most necessary thing in the present age and as such they deny everything.^[20] Likewise, the movement very soon adopted the name, despite the novel's initial harsh reception among both the conservatives and younger generation,^[21] and wherever the term was not embraced it was at least accepted.^[22]

The term realist was used by Dmitry Pisarev to describe the nihilist position and was also the name of a literary movement, literary realism, which had flourished in Russia in the wake of Pushkin.^[23] Although Pisarev was among those who celebrated the embrace of nihilism, the term realism may have done away with the connotations of subjectivism and nothingness that burdened nihilism while retaining the rejection of metaphysics, sophistry, sentimentalism, and aestheticism.^[24] In a notably later political climate, Alexander Herzen instead presented nihilism as a product of the sorokovniki that the sestidesjatniki had adopted.^[25] Contemporary scholarship has challenged the equating of Russian nihilism with mere skepticism, instead identifying it with the fundamentally Promethean character of the nihilist movement.^[26] In fact, the nihilists sought to liberate the Promethean might of the Russian people which they saw embodied in a class of prototypal individuals, or new types in their own words.^[27] These individuals were seen by Nikolay Chernyshevsky as rational egoists, by Pisarev and Nikolai Shelgunov as the thinking proletariat, by Pyotr Lavrov as critically thinking personalities, by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky as the intelligentsia, and by others as cultural pioneers.^[28] Nihilism has also been attributed to a perennial temperament of the Russian people, existing long before the movement's nascency.^[29]

Overlapping with forms of Narodism,^[30] the movement has also been defined in political terms. Soviet scholarship, for example, often interchanges the designation revolutionary democrats.^[31] However, the role of politics was seen as not suited to the current environment by most nihilists.^[32] Rather, they disregarded politics,^[33] and those who notably held political views or socialist sympathies remained vague.^[34] Russian nihilism has also been defined in subcultural terms,^[35] in philosophical terms, and incorrectly as a form of political terrorism.^[36]

Formative period[]

Russian nihilism, as stated in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged".^[37] During this foundational period, the countercultural aspects of the movement scandalized the country and even minor indiscretions left nihilists imprisoned for lengthy periods or in exile to Siberia, where grittier revolutionary attitudes fermented.^[38]

At its core, Russian nihilism inhabited an ever-evolving discourse between the sorokovniki and the šestidesjatniki.^{[39][note 2]} While nihilism was not exclusive from them, the sorokovniki were on principle a generation given to idealism.^[40] "Their attraction to the airy heights of idealism was partly a result of the stultifying political atmosphere of the autocracy, but was also an unintended consequence of Tsar Nicholas I's attempt to Prussianize Russian society", writes historian Michael Allen Gillespie. "Their flight from the harsh reality of everyday life into the ideal was prepared on an intellectual level by the theosophy of Freemasonry, which exercised great intellectual force in Russian at the time, especially among those whose intellectual education had been shaped by Böhemian mysticism of the radical orthodox sects, the so-called Old Believers."^[41] Despite this, the sorokovniki provided the fertile soil for the šestidesjatniki's ideological advancements, even in their confrontations.^[42]

Russian materialism and early influences[]

Mikhail Bakunin, often regarded the forefather of Russian nihilism

Nikolay Chernyshevsky, leading nihilist theoretician and utopian socialist

Dmitry Pisarev, leading nihilist theoretician and natural science advocate

Russian materialism, as its own tradition, dawned in the period 1855–1866 under the influence of post-Hegelian German materialism and the delayed influence of the French Enlightenment, and came to be synonymous with Russian nihilism.^[43] The origins of this followed from Ludwig Feuerbach as a direct reaction to the German idealism which had found such popularity under the sorokovniki—namely the works of Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel and Johann Fichte.^[44] However, it was in fact those among the sorokovniki who were characterized as nihilists at first,^[45] and it was Left Hegelianism that the Schellingians began to define as nihilism.^[46] One such materialist who worked to bring a radical slant to Hegelian thought was Mikhail Bakunin, himself an anarchist and gentry sorokovnik.^[47] In his 1842 "Reaction in Germany", Bakunin espoused the radical dictum:

Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!^[48]

This celebration of destructive passion was almost in anticipation of the nihilist šestidesjatniki to come.^[49] Of those early materialists, Bakunin was of considerable influence to Russian nihilism, even contributing to its cause, though he denies a place among the nihilists himself and must be considered separate from radicals of the šestidesjatniki.^[50] As a Left Hegelian, and especially in his younger years, his political dedication stemmed from a more romantic, idealistic approach to the dialectical process of the Weltgeist.^[51] As well as this, Bakunin was a Westernizer—a group which on the whole was seen as obsolete to the nihilists.^[52] Despite this, Bakunin is often seen as among the first nihilists, a position he callously also assigns to the German philosopher Max Stirner.^[53]

Among the sorokovnik Westernizers was another significant impact on the history of Russian nihilism, Alexander Herzen.^[54] As early as the 1840s, Herzen involved in radical circles in Moscow where he circulated the ideas of socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in rejection of both utopian and Jacobin forms of socialism.^[55] Other preliminary figures of this generation include Ivan Turgenev and Vissarion Belinsky.^[56]

It was not until the death of Nicholas I in 1855, and the end of the Crimean War the following year, that this Feuerbachian materialist trend developed into a broad philosophical movement.^[57] Alexander II's ascent to the throne brought liberal reforms to university entry regulations and loosened control over publication, much to the movement's good fortune.^[58] Where those early thinkers such as Bakunin and Herzen had found use of Fitche and Hegel, the šestidesjatniki that followed were set on their rejection of idealism.^[59] German materialists Ludwig Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, and Carl Vogt became favourites. The ideas of John Stuart Mill, though his bourgeois liberalism was detested, lent notable influence to the movement. Later, Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck also gained importance.^[60]

Often considered the first of the šestidesjatniki, Nikolay Chernyshevsky became an admirer of Feuerbach, Herzen, and Belinsky towards the end of the 1840s. It was at this time that he drew towards socialist materialism and was in close contact with members of the Petrashevsky Circle. By the late 1850s however, Chernyshevsky had become politically radicalized and began to reject Herzen's social discourse, devoting himself instead to the revolutionary socialist cause.^[61] Alongside Chernyshevsky came Ivan Sechenov, who would later be credited as the father of Russian physiology and scientific psychology by Ivan Pavlov.^[62] Chernyshenvsky and Sechenov shared the argument that the natural sciences were wholly adequate to study human and animal life according to a deterministic model, and Sechenov lent particular influence to Chernyshevsky in this regard. This more subtle argument was favoured since state censorship made no allowance for outwardly challenging its religious doctrines.^[63]

Yet another šestidesjatnik, Nikolay Dobrolyubov, further elborated the ideas of Russian materialism and is at times seen as a leading nihilist.^[64] Dobrolyubov had in fact occasionally used the term nihilism prior to its popularization at the hands of Turgenev, which he had picked up from sociologist and fellow šestidesjatnik , who in turn had used it synonymously with skepticism.^[65] Together with Chernyshevsky, of whom he was a disciple and comrade, Dobrolyubov wrote for the literary journal Sovremennik—Chernyshevsky being its principle editor. With their contributions, the journal became the primary organ of revolutionary thought in its time.^[66] The two of them, later followed by Maxim Antonovich and Dmitry Pisarev, had taken up the Russian tradition of social criticism crossed literary criticism which Belinsky had begun. The discoursing of Russian literature allowed them the vehicle to have their ideas published that censorship would not have otherwise granted.^[67] Pisarev himself wrote at first for Rassvet and then for Russkoye Slovo—the latter of which came to rival Sovremennik in its influence over the radical movement.^[68]

Emergence of the raznočinnaja intelligentsia[]

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The raznočincy, which began as an 18th-century legal designation for those of miscellaneous lower-class, by the 19th century had become a distinct yet ambiguously defined social class and gave rise to the raznočinnaja stratum among the intelligentsia.^[69] The raznočincy, meaning 'of indeterminate rank', were neither peasants, foreigners, tributary natives, nor urban taxpayers such as merchants, guildsmen, and townsfolk, but instead included lower-class families of clergymen, civil servants, retired military servicemen, and minor officials.^[70] While many of the most prominent nihilist šestidesjatniki were raised free from the extremes of poverty and repression, instead born to genteel families or clergymen, a connection between radicals of the generation and the raznočincy has often been emphasized in comparison to the hegemony of the gentry intelligentsia among the previous generation.^[71]

As early as the 1840s, the raznočincy gained significant influence over the development of Russian society and culture,^[72] the intelligentsia of this class (or raznočinnaja intelligentsia) also being referred to as the revolutionary intelligentsia.^[73] Vissarion Belinsky and members of the Petrashevsky Circle were among these, being prominent figures of the movement to abolish serfdom.^[74] Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who was born to a priest, spent his years as a student during the 1840s.^[75] He began writing for the literary journal Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1853, and then for Sovremennik.^[76]

Bazarovism and student demonstrations[]

Ilya Repin's portrait of Ivan Turgenev, who popularized the term nihilism with his character Bazarov

Bazarovism, as popularized by Dmitry Pisarev, was the marked embrace of the style and cynicism of the nihilist character Yevgeny Bazarov from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, in which the term nihilism was first popularized. Pisarev graduated university in 1861, the same year as serfdom was abolished and the first major student demonstration was held in St. Petersburg.^[77] Turgenev himself notes that as early as 1862, the year of the novel's publishing, violent protestors had begun calling themselves nihilists.^[78] The surge of student activism became the backdrop for Alexander II's education reforms, under the supervision of education minister . These reforms however, while conceding an expansion of the raznočinnaja intelligentsia, refused to grant more rights to students and university admittance remained exclusively male.^[79] Historian Kristian Petrov writes:

Young nihilist men dressed in ill-fitting dark coats, aspiring to look like unpolished workers, let their hair grow bushy and often wore blue-tinted glasses. Correspondingly, the young women cut their hair shorter, wore large plain dresses and could be seen with a shawl or a big hat, together with the characteristic glasses. Such a nihilist could, however, above all be identified by a reversal of official etiquette; the men demonstratively refusing to act chivalrously in the presence of women, and the women behaving contrary to expectations. Both sexes hence sought to incarnate Bazarov’s roughness, his "cynicism of manner and expression".^[80]

Literary works and journals quickly became enrapt with polemical debate over nihilism.^[81] Nikolay Chernyshevsky for his part saw Turgenev's novel as a personal attack on Nikolay Dobrolyubov, and Maxim Antonovich excoriated it in his review.^[82] Pisarev famously published his own review at the time of the novel's release, where he championed Bazarov as the role model for the new generation and celebrated the embrace of nihilism. To him, Bazarovism was the societal struggle that must be toiled through rather than resisted—he attributed it to the exclusive and distinct spiritual strength of the young and their courage to face social disorder. The popularity of Pisarev's review rivaled that of even the novel itself.^[83]

The atmosphere of the 1860s had led to a period of great social and economic upheaval across the country and the driving force of revolutionary activism was taken up by university students in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mass arson broke out in St. Petersburg in the spring and summer of 1862 and, coinciding with insurrections in Poland, in 1863. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw Nikolay Chernyshevsky as responsible for inciting the revolutionaries to action and supposedly pleaded with him to bring a stop to it. Historian writes that while St. Petersburg faced threat of destruction, arson became rampant all throughout Russia.^[84]

Turgenev's own opinion of Bazarov is highly ambiguous, stating: "Did I want to abuse Bazarov or extol him? I do not know myself, since I don't know whether I love him or hate him!"^[85] Nevertheless, Bazarov represented the victory of the raznočinnaja intelligentsia over the gentry intelligentsia to which Turgenev belonged.^[86] Comparing to Ivan Goncharov's The Precipice, which he describes as a caricature of nihilism, Peter Kropotkin states in his memoirs that Bazarov was a more admiral portrayal yet was still found dissatisfying to nihilists for his harsh attitude, his coldness towards his old parents, and his neglect of duties as a citizen.^[87]

Climax of Russian materialism[]

With the death of Dobrolyubov in 1861 and the arrest of Chernyshevsky in 1862, the movement fell to Pisarev and others.^[88] Maxim Antonovich became head of Sovremennik's literary criticism department and entered into bitter disputes with other publications, namely with Pisarev at Russkoye Slovo. Tensions between the two journals boiled over into what Fyodor Dostoevsky deemed the schism between the nihilists, further pointing to Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin as giving the Sovremennik a now regressive character.^[89]

Chernyshevsky published his landmark 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? while being held at Peter and Paul Fortress as a political prisoner.^[90] Ironically, despite being the most openly revolutionary work of its time and a direct product of the suppression Chenryshevsky had faced, the book passed censorship by an extraordinary failure of bureaucracy and was published without issue.^[91] Chernyshevsky continued to write essays and literature while incarcerated. In 1864, he was sentenced and given a mock execution before being exiled to Siberia, where he served seven years in forced labour camps followed by further imprisonment.^[92] Chernyshevsky gained a legendary reputation as a martyr of the radical movement and,^[93] unlike Mikhail Bakunin, not once did he plead for mercy or pardon during his treatment at the hands of the state.^[94]

After struggling in the face of censorship, from which much of its core content is left unclear and obscured, Russian materialism among theoreticians would later be suppressed by the state after an attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866,^[95] and would not see a significant intellectual revival until the late nineteenth century.^[96] The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

The only strictly philosophical legacy of the materialists came in the form of their influence on Russian Marxism. Georgii Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin, the two thinkers most responsible for the development of Marxism in Russia, credited Chernyshevskii with having, respectively, 'massive' and 'overwhelming' influence on them. During the communist period of Russian history, the principal 'nihilist' theoreticians were officially lionized under the designation 'Russian revolutionary democrats' and were called the most important materialist thinkers in the history of philosophy before Marx.^[97]

Conspiratorial organizations[]

Revolutionary organizations during the 1860s took only the form of conspiratorial groups.^[98] From the revolutionary turmoil of the years 1859–1861, which had included peasant uprisings in Bezdna and , the secret society Zemlya i volya emerged under the strong influence of Nikolay Chernyshevsky's writings.^[99] Among its key members were Nikolai Serno-Solovyevich, his brother , , Nikolai Obruchev and Vasily Kurochkin. The full extent of the organization spanned St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, and several cities in Ukraine.^[100]

The group supported the intellectual development of social and political thought that expressed the critical interests of the Russian peasantry, and also worked to publish and disseminate prohibited revolutionary writings and ideas to commoners, intellectuals, and soldiers. Alexander Herzen, Nikolay Ogarev, and Mikhail Bakunin all kept contact with its leadership. Zemlya i volya accrued supporters within the Russian military and allied itself with revolutionary activity in Poland.^[100] In league with the organization was the , founded in Moscow in 1863, under the leadership of Nikolai Ishutin.^[101] Historian Shneer Mendelevich Levin writes:

During 1863, the revolutionary situation in Russia virtually exhausted itself. The general peasant uprising, toward which Zemlya i volya was oriented, did not take place, and the Polish uprising was suppressed. Under these conditions, the revolutionary work of Zemlya i volya began to die down. Many members of the society were arrested or were forced to emigrate, and by the spring of 1864, Zemlya i volya had dissolved itself.^[100]

After the disappearance of Zemlya i volya, the Ishutin Circle began to unite various underground groups in Moscow.^[102] The group arranged the escape of Polish revolutionary Jarosław Dąbrowski from prison in 1864. The same year, the group founded a bookbinding workshop, then in 1865, a sewing workshop, a tuition-free school, and a cotton wadding cooperative. They failed, however, in their attempts to arrange Chernyshevsky's escape from penal servitude. Ties were forged with Russian political émigrés, Polish revolutionaries, and fellow organizations in Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaluga Province, and elsewhere. The Circle then formed a steering committee, known as the Organization, and a sub-group within it known as Hell.^[103] Dmitry Karakozov, who was the cousin of Nikolai Ishutin, joined the Circle in 1866 and on April 4th of that year carried out an attempted assassination of Alexander II, firing a shot at the Tsar at the gates of the Summer Garden in Saint Petersburg. The attempt failed and Karakozov was sentenced to death.^[104] Nikolai Ishutin was also arrested and sentenced to be executed before ultimately being exiled to a life of forced labour in Siberia.^[105] In total, thirty-two members of the Circle were sentenced.^[106]

First wave of antinihilism[]

Russian nihilists tied to chairs on horse-drawn platforms and paraded past groups of soldiers on their way to execution in St. Petersburg

Following the attempted assassination of the Tsar in 1866, the political environment in Russia began returning to that of Nicholas I's rule.^[107] The two leading radical journals Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo were banned, liberal reforms were minimized in fear of reaction from the public, and the educational system was reformed to stifle the existing revolutionary spirit.^{[108][failed verification]}

In the meantime, extensive castigation of nihilism had found its place in Russian publication, official government documents, and a burgeoning trend of antinihilistic literature. Notable earlier works of this literary current include Aleksey Pisemsky's Troubled Seas (1863), Nikolai Leskov's No Way Out (1864), and Viktor Klyushnikov's The Mirage (1864).^[109] Also in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky published his novel Notes from Underground, countering and satirizing Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. In it, Dostoevsky offers a philosophical critique of Chernyshevsky's rational egoism yet from the perspective of a satirical protagonist, whom Dostoevsky posits as a more realistic portrayal of egoism—a dislikable glorifier of self-will rather than a magnanimous rationalizer of self-interest.^[110] "[Chenyshevsky's] virtuous fictional creations were not the genuine, flesh-and-blood egoists whose growing presence in Russia Dostoevsky feared", writes contemporary scholar James P. Scanlan. "Yet the doctrine these pseudo-egoists advanced–rational egoism–was a genuine danger, because by glorifying the self it could turn the minds of impressionable young people away from sound values and push them in the direction of a true, immoral, destructive egoism."^[111]

Dostoevsky published his following work, Crime and Punishment, in 1866, particularly in response to Pisarev's writings.^[112]

Revolutionary period[]

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Next followed the revolutionary period of the 1870s and early 1880s, when Sergei Nechayev's pamphlet Catechism of a Revolutionary heightened aggression within the movement and pressed for violent conflict against the tsarist regime, leading to dozens of actions against the Russian state.^{[113][verification needed]} Karl Marx quickly became interested in the revolutionary activity in Russia, even offering his support towards Nikolay Chernyshevsky's freedom from penal servitude, whom he considered the most original contemporary thinker and economist, though this was declined under fear that outside pressure may worsen the situation.^[114]

Sergey Nechayev's nihilist revolution[]

Sergey Nechayev, nihilist revolutionary most often associated with propaganda of the deed and terrorism

The shift from the formative period to the revolutionary period can be traced to the emergence of Sergey Nechayev and his impact on the movement. While the majority of nihilists have been equated to the lower middle class and desired an escalation of the discourse on social transformation, Nechayev was the son of a serf. He argued that – just as the European monarchies used the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli and the Catholic Jesuits practiced absolute immorality to achieve their ends – there was no action that could not be used for the sake of the people's revolution.^[115] A scholar^[who?] noted: "His apparent immorality derived from the cold realization that both Church and State are ruthlessly immoral in their pursuit of total control. The struggle against such powers must therefore be carried out by any means necessary".^{[116][who said this?]} Nechayev's social cachet was greatly increased by his association with Bakunin in 1869 and the use of resources from the Bakhmetiev Fund for Russian revolutionary propaganda.

The image of Nechayev is as much from his Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) as any actions that he actually took. His Catechism established the clear break between the formation of nihilism as a political philosophy and its transformation into a practice of revolutionary action. It documents the revolutionary as a much-evolved figure from the nihilist of the past decade. Whereas the nihilist may have practiced asceticism, they argued for an uninhibited hedonism. Nechayev assessed that by definition the revolutionary must live devoted to a singular aim, undistracted by emotions or attachments.^[117] Friendship was contingent on revolutionary fervor, relationships with strangers were quantified in terms of what resources they offered the revolution, and everyone had a role during the revolutionary moment that could be reduced to how quickly they would be lined up against the wall or when they would accept that they had to do the shooting. The uncompromising tone and content of the Catechism was influential far beyond the mere character Nechayev personified in the minds of the revolutionaries.^[118] It extended nihilist principles into a revolutionary program and gave the revolutionary project a form of constitution and weight that the "men of the sixties" did not.

Re-establishment of Zemlya i volya[]

Zemlya i volya was re-established in 1876,^[119] originally under the name Severnaia revoliutsionno-narodnicheskaia gruppa (Northern Revolutionary-Populist Group), by Mark Natanson and .^[120] As a political party, the organization became the first to separate itself from past conspiratorial groups with its open advocacy of revolution.^[121] The party was predominated by Bakuninists,^[122] though became the first truly Narodnik organization to emerge.^[123]

End of Nechayev and the first nihilist revolution[]

Bakunin, an admirer of Nechayev's zeal and success, provided contacts and resources to send Nechayev back to Russia to found a new secret cell based organization, called the People's Retribution (Russian: Narodnaya Rasprava), based on the principles of the Catechism.^[124] The organization had just a few dozen members when student Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov—one of Nechayev's first and most active followers—began to protest the leader's methods. This threat to his authority spurred Nechayev into action. He secretly gathered the group members closest to him, declared that the mysterious imaginary central committee possessed the evidence of Ivanov's betrayal, albeit not producible for security reasons, and obtained his death sentence.^[125] Author Ronald Hingley wrote: "On the evening of 21 November 1869 the victim [Ivanov] was accordingly lured to the premises of the Moscow School of Agriculture, a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment, where Nechayev killed him by shooting and strangulation, assisted without great enthusiasm by three dupes. [...] Nechayev's accomplices were arrested and tried",^[126] while he managed to flee. Upon his return from Russia to Switzerland, Nechayev was rejected by Bakunin for taking militant actions and was later extradited back to Russia where he spent the remainder of his life at the Peter and Paul Fortress.^[127] Due to his charisma and force of will, Nechayev continued to influence events, maintaining a relationship to Narodnaya Volya and weaving even his jailers into his plots and escape plans. In December 1881 69 members of the prison guard were arrested and Nechayev's prison regime was rendered exceedingly harsher. He was found dead of scurvy in his cell on 21 November 1882.^[128]

See also[]

• Anti-nihilistic novel
• Cynicism
• Narodniks
• Narodnaya Volya
• Nihilist Faction

Notes[]

References[]

Sources[]

Look up Nihilism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.