Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin: The Nobleman Who Wanted the State Dead

In 1861 a heavy, dishevelled Russian walked away from his Siberian exile and went east — Japan, San Francisco, then by way of Panama to New York and finally London, arriving as the American Civil War began. He was forty-seven, had been condemned to death twice, and had spent years in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress. He had fifteen years left. In them he built the foundation of modern anarchism, wrecked the First International, and made one political prediction so accurate that Noam Chomsky would call it "one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true."

The Nobleman's Son

He was born on 30 May 1814 at Priamukhino, a family estate in the Tver region north-west of Moscow, third of ten children and eldest son. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin, was a former diplomat who ran an estate worked by more than five hundred serfs and raised his children on Rousseauean principles. Mikhail later called the childhood idyllic and sheltered from the realities of Russian life — a phrase that carries its own indictment.

Pushed into the St Petersburg Artillery School, he became an officer in 1833, hated it, and was posted to Belarus and Lithuania in 1834 for academic negligence. In 1835 he deserted, escaped arrest through family connections, and was discharged by year's end. Against his father's wishes he went to Moscow to teach mathematics.

Hegel First, Then the Fire

Moscow in the 1830s was saturated with German idealism, and Bakunin went in headlong. In Nikolai Stankevich's circle he read his way from Kant through Fichte to Hegel, produced the first Russian translation of Hegel, and by 1837 was recognised as Russia's leading Hegel expert. The friends he made there — Belinsky, Ogarev, Turgenev, Herzen — were none of them famous yet. Herzen paid for him to study at the University of Berlin in 1840, expecting a professor to come back. What came back instead was a revolutionary.

In Berlin he fell in with the Young Hegelians, and in early 1842, in Dresden, Arnold Ruge published his first original work, *Die Reaktion in Deutschland*. Written under a pseudonym and in dense Hegelian language, it argued for extending the French Revolution across Europe and Russia, and it contained the sentence that has followed him ever since: that the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

Russian agents took an interest. He fled to Zürich in 1843, met the proto-communist Wilhelm Weitling, refused an order home, and was stripped of his noble rights and sentenced in absentia to penal labour in Siberia. He became a stateless itinerant, and in Paris met the two men who would define his thinking by attraction and by repulsion: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx. In 1847 he told Polish émigrés to overthrow tsarism in alliance with Russian democrats; the Russian ambassador had him thrown out of France.

Barricades, and Then the Cell

When Louis Philippe abdicated in February 1848 Bakunin went back to Paris, and from there toward Poland to raise a revolt. He never arrived. Instead he turned up at the Prague Slavic Congress, defending Slavic interests against German and Hungarian nationalism, and joined the insurrection against the Habsburgs. He escaped and wrote *Aufruf an die Slaven* — "Appeal to the Slavs" — calling for a Slavic federation in revolt against four empires at once.

Then came Dresden, May 1849, where his luck ran out. He was sentenced to death by the Saxons, handed to the Austrians, sentenced to death again, and extradited to Russia, which put him in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1851 and moved him to Shlisselburg three years later. In prison he wrote a *Confession* addressed to Nicholas I — an abject document, rediscovered some seventy years afterwards, that has embarrassed his admirers ever since. It won him no leniency.

In 1857 the sentence was converted to permanent Siberian exile. He married Antonia Kwiatkowska, a Polish woman eighteen years younger with no interest in politics, and in 1861 made his escape around the world.

The War With Marx

In London he rejoined Herzen and Ogarev and wrote for *Kolokol*, though his appetite for revolution badly outran their reformism. He joined the doomed Polish expedition of 1863, then settled in Italy, where the anarchism he is remembered for finally took shape.

In 1868 he joined the International Workingmen's Association, and the anarchist faction grew fast under him. He respected Marx's learning and hated his manner; Marx thought him unpredictable and a Russian reactionary. The quarrel was not personal at bottom. Marx wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, organised workers holding state machinery until the state withered; Bakunin thought the machinery would eat the men holding it. Marx engineered his expulsion at the Hague Congress of 1872, which Bakunin could not attend. The split between Marxism and anarchism dates from that room.

The Doctrine

His mature position was a federation of freely associated producers, built from below — communes and delegates and independent municipalities, with no state left standing. Freedom required equality, including equal rights and social functions for women; humanity could only be free if everyone was free. He was ferociously anti-clerical: "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him." And he was categorical about the state, writing in 1873 that where there is a state there must be domination of one class by another, and therefore slavery. He was no blanket anti-expert — the bootmaker's authority on boots he accepted, provided the specialist could not convert knowledge into command.

Why Mikhail Is Called a Genius

Bakunin's gift was diagnostic, not systematic — and his own admirers concede the second half. He built no theoretical edifice; his writing is fragmentary, digression-prone, frequently unfinished, and most of his anarchist work went unpublished in his lifetime. *God and the State*, his most famous book, is a fragment printed six years after his death. What he had instead was an extraordinary nose for where power would relocate. In *Statism and Anarchy* (1873) he looked at Marx's proposed workers' state and predicted it would be run by autocrats pursuing their own gain while claiming to speak for the workers. He was describing the Soviet Union forty-four years before it existed. Britannica calls him the chief propagator of nineteenth-century anarchism; the quarrel he lost in 1872 organised the entire left for a century.

The counter-case is severe and largely internal. Paul Avrich's summary is the one that sticks: "a nobleman who yearned for a peasant revolt, a libertarian with an urge to dominate others, an intellectual with a powerful anti-intellectual streak." He preached unfettered liberty and demanded unconditional obedience from disciples. He founded secret societies and floated an "invisible dictatorship" that Peter Marshall thought could enable worse tyranny than the Blanquists, though Iain McKay reads it as a propaganda network and nothing more. The Nechayev association and the 1869 *Catechism of the Revolutionary* were a disgrace he later repudiated. Antisemitic passages run through his writing, and scholars from Mark Leier to Marcel Stoetzler disagree sharply over how central they are. He was a magnificent detector of other men's authoritarianism and a poor detector of his own.

Legacy

He died in Bern on 1 July 1876, aged sixty-two, after the failed Bologna insurrection of 1874 had gutted the Italian movement and his health with it. Almost everything that made him permanent was published afterwards. *Statism and Anarchy* fed the Russian Narodniks; his ideas ran through the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, and the New Left of the 1960s dug him up again for voluntary association against authoritarian socialism. His papers are scattered between Russian state archives and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam — a fittingly stateless afterlife.

Achievements

• Educated at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Mikhailovsky Artillery School