10. WITHOUT ORGANIZATION, WE WILL NEVER GAIN VICTORY

At roughly the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska, present-day Tomsk is an energetic city of nearly five hundred thousand people. Its industrial base ranges from mining to farming to pharmaceuticals to power generation. Founded as a military outpost by Boris Godunov in 1604, it is now a hub city well served by a road network, railways, an airport, and a river port. It is the oldest city in Siberia, and with its universities and technical schools, a medical school and a pedagogical institute, it has the highest ratio of students per capita of any city in Russia and bills itself as the “Siberian Athens.”

They called it another A-word when Bakunin began his life sentence there in 1857. The town’s outer buildings formed a rough square reminiscent of the original walls of the fort, and the winters were cold enough to freeze solid the meat, poultry, and fish offered for sale in the outdoor markets. Its inhabitants picked their way carefully along unpaved streets to their small wooden houses and huts. But it was a major trading center, at least by the standards of Siberia, which meant there was a steady trickle of visitors that made it possible to get news and amenities and keep the samovar full. Traders, government officials, and political exiles, in roughly equal numbers, along with their families made up a population of about twenty thousand people. The status, ranks, and public identities that would have kept them separated socially and physically in Moscow or St. Petersburg were of less importance compared to the shared reality of Siberia, and they coexisted peacefully in a rough solidarity as they tried to maintain some of their Russian culture and customs. Compared to the Peter and Paul Fortress, the freezing temperature was invigorating, the social interaction almost overwhelming, the taste of freedom rejuvenating.

Still, political exiles had to fend for themselves. They had to support themselves, and Bakunin’s resume—former occupation: revolutionary; hobbies: extracting teeth, killing lice; future plans: destruction of civilization as you know it—was unlikely to secure a suitable position, even in Tomsk. Bakunin had few skills and his money-management abilities had not improved. He received some funds from home, but these were insufficient to set up housekeeping, even for someone more accustomed to the meager comforts provided to long-term guests of his imperial majesty. He began tutoring French, a pleasant enough occupation that pushed his mind to work again and brought him into regular contact with others. In particular, it brought him in contact with Antonia Kwiatkowski, the elder daughter of a Polish business-man in the gold industry. It is hard to believe that Bakunin, now forty-four years old, swept the seventeen-year old Antonia off her feet, but the two were wed in October 1858. The difference in their ages was about that of Bakunin’s own parents, and there seem to have been no objections to the marriage from Antonia’s family or the church in which they were married. This has scandalized later generations of historians, and no doubt one of Bakunin’s reasons for marrying was to confound the sexual dysfunction theorists. In a letter to Alexander Herzen, Bakunin expressed another reason. “I fell passionately in love with her, and she with me, and so we married,” he explained. “It is good to live not for oneself but for another, especially when the other is a dear woman. I gave myself to her entirely, and, for her part, she shares in heart and spirit all my aspirations.” In letters throughout his life, Bakunin wrote of his love and affection for Antonia, and clearly she felt strongly for him. She would leave her family to join him in Western Europe, with no prospect of a comfortable or easy life, and would stay with the errant anarchist until his death.[222]

The two moved to Irkutsk near the Mongolian border, about forty miles from the shores of Lake Baikal. About the size of Tomsk, it was the capital of Eastern Siberia and thus more of a cultural center. Its streets were paved, the climate was better, and it was even possible, though not without some difficulty, to get copies of Herzen’s radical newspaper, Kolokol, or The Bell. There were other political exiles there, including Petrashevsky himself, along with other members of his circle, though Bakunin kept himself apart, regarding them as “only a sort of transition from the Decembrists to the real youth—they were doctrinaire, bookish socialists, Fourierists, and pedagogues.” [223] The move was made possible by the intervention of yet another of Bakunin’s well-connected relatives, this time his mother’s cousin, Nicholas Muraviev, the governor of Eastern Siberia. Muraviev met Bakunin in Tomsk late in 1858, and the two became friends. Later, the governor gave Bakunin and Antonia permission to leave Tomsk and helped secure Bakunin a position in a trading company. Muraviev also occasioned Bakunin’s return to political life.

The governor was an imperialist and a Russian patriot. He had been largely responsible for the annexation of large parts of China north of the Amur River, and for his efforts was known as Muraviev-Amur sky, roughly, “Muraviev of the Amur.” He extended Russian trading networks along and beyond the river and colonized new territories for the tsar. At the same time, he regarded himself as a liberal, and in the context of nineteenth-century Russia, he was. He appreciated American democratic institutions and deplored serfdom, and if his professed political beliefs were often contradicted by his actions, he at least talked the talk, and Bakunin saw in him the potential for revolution, or at least reform, from the top down. This echoed the argument he had made in his confession for a powerful leadership cadre that could act for the people when they were unable to act for themselves. In theory, such a leadership could cut through the waffling and compromise of parliaments and directly represent the masses. It was precisely this notion that led many on the left, including some anarchists, to initially endorse Italian fascism in the 1920s, when the failure of representative democracy seemed clear to all. It was a hideous error in the 1920s and the 1860s, but in both cases, the idea was not to create a totalitarian state but to represent the people directly and so counter the power of the middle classes and bourgeoisie. Muraviev seemed to have both the ideas and the power to radically change Russia at a time when it seemed to Bakunin, long cut off from political circles, that there was little other hope for change.

Thus when Herzen’s newspaper attacked Muraviev for his imperialist ventures and colonial schemes, Bakunin sprang to his defense. In a series of letters to Herzen, he claimed that Muraviev represented the best, not the worst, that Russia had to offer, that Muraviev was in fact one of them. He had the energy, the commitment, and the desire to carry the nation into the future. Muraviev advocated, Bakunin insisted, the freeing of the serfs with title to land, jury trials, public education, freedom of the press, and the “administration of the people by themselves,” meaning by that the “abolition of the bureaucracy and the eventual decentralization” of government. Others shared Bakunin’s view. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin recorded years later that due to Muraviev’s efforts, Eastern Siberia’s administration “was far more enlightened and far better all round than that of any province of Russia proper.” Muraviev held “advanced views,” he continued, and was “very intelligent, very active, extremely amiable, and desirous to work for the good of the country.” However, he was also, “like all men of action of the governmental school, a despot at the bottom of his heart.” Bakunin himself was not yet an anarchist, and he favorably contrasted Muraviev with those who mouthed “grand words and beautiful phrases,” including those exiled in faraway London. Unlike the “parliament of babbling aristocrats,” Muraviev acted decisively. He could create a “provisional dictatorship of iron” in order to abolish the futile government in St. Petersburg and set the people free.[224]

Bakunin was right to see some possibilities of reform from the top. Soon after his article appeared, nearly four years before the United States would pass the Thirteenth Amendment forbidding slavery, Tsar Alexander II announced the emancipation of the serfs of Russia. This proclamation of March 1861 was widely anticipated, not as an act of charity, of course, but of necessity. Russia’s staggering losses in the Crimean War had shown yet again how the country lagged behind Europe, and it was obvious to all that the labor of serfs could not compete with that of wage workers or create and attract sufficient capital for rapid development. Many among the nobility belatedly concluded that not only was serfdom unprofitable, it was also immoral. Their spiritual awakening was hastened by the actions of the serfs themselves, whose increasing militancy convinced the tsar that if serfdom were not abolished from above, it would be dismantled from below. It is usually better to jump than to be pushed, and if the tsar acted, the pace and extent of the emancipation could be controlled.

Serfs were granted formal freedom, but they remained tied to their commune and forced to pay a head tax. While they could now legally claim for their own about half of the land they had tilled, roughly that portion they had worked for themselves, in practice they received about one-fifth less than they were entitled to. Nor were they given the land they had formerly used for themselves. It had to be purchased from the lords, who kept the most productive acres for themselves. Since few peasants had cash to purchase the land outright, they took out loans from the government. But loans come with interest, and freed serfs paid half again what their land was worth by the time the accounts were squared. Finally, freeing the serfs meant “freeing” them from the land, that is, taking from them their means of production and subsistence. As the lands they actually worked for themselves shrank with emancipation, as labor now became a commodity that was bought and sold, and as the traditions of the commune were uprooted, the freed serfs encountered a new problem: unemployment.

Nonetheless, emancipation suggested the possibility of reform from the top, though Bakunin’s appraisal of his cousin was, at best, woefully optimistic and hopelessly idealistic. While he fancied himself a liberal, in keeping with current sentiment, Muraviev was little inclined, and far from powerful enough, to do much for the people. Bakunin’s defense of his relative reflected his own isolation from contemporary Russian politics and thought; he was largely unaware of the struggles of a new generation of thinkers such as Chernyshevsky. It also represented not the first stage of Bakunin’s anarchism, but the last stage of his belief that radical change could come from the top. Perhaps it seemed plausible enough after the failures of 1848, at least to one so isolated and out of touch, but soon he would abandon this naive belief.

He would also abandon Siberia. When Muraviev was recalled to St. Petersburg, Bakunin hatched a fantastic plan to escape. His position with the trading company and the governor’s good graces gave him considerable freedom to travel in Siberia. In January 1861, he decided to make a break for it. It was a little more complicated than tunneling under a wall or climbing a fence, for it was impossible to leave on the roads that had brought him to Irkutsk and the ocean was two thousand miles away. His escape required all his charm, audacity, and presence of mind, as well as great dollops of luck and some useful turns of history.

The first bit of luck was the appointment of Michael Korsakov as the replacement for Muraviev. Korsakov, like Bakunin, was a cousin of Muraviev’s and had served under him. Even more fortunate, Bakunin’s brother Paul had just married yet another of Korsakov’s cousins. While such genealogical connections may strike contemporary readers as shaky or insubstantial, in Russia in the 1860s they counted rather more. Equally important, Korsakov was, if anything, more liberal than Muraviev.

The first step in Bakunin’s escape was to make it down the two thousand miles of the Amur River from Irkutsk to Nikolaevsk, just across the Okhotsk Sea from Sakhalin Island. This required permission, and Korsakov granted it when Bakunin, in his role as merchant, asked to travel for his company, promising to return before winter made the river impassable. He set out on 5 June 1861, and after four weeks on a steamboat, arrived at the port. So far, so good. Technically, he had not escaped or broken his promise. Getting out of Nikolaevsk, however, was trickier. The moment he set foot on a ship, he was violating the terms outlined in his traveling papers and was subject to arrest. Furthermore, Nikolaevsk was a small port and he had to wait a week for a suitable ship to take him further south. Worse, though Bakunin did not know it, word of his escape had leaked out and the Russian officials were trying frantically to apprehend him. Minutes before the port was sealed, however, Bakunin hopped aboard the departing Russian ship Strelok.

He may have been aided by an acquaintance from the days of the Moscow and St. Petersburg circles, Vassily Bodisco. Bodisco had been a member of Herzen’s circle, and stayed in contact with him over the years, at some risk to himself. Likely he knew Bakunin from the 1840s. In 1861, he was with the government service and stationed in Nikolaevsk. He was close to the governor’s chief of staff in the port, and may well have prevailed upon him to issue Bakunin the papers he needed to extend his “business trip” and managed to delay the plans to nab him.

Bakunin got another break. The Strelok, a steamship, came to the aid of a becalmed U.S. sailing vessel and took it in tow. Bakunin used the chance encounter to hitch a ride on the American ship and when it cast off from the Strelok, he stayed with it until it berthed at Olga. From there, he caught a ship to the Japanese port of Hakodate, where he was invited to dinner with the ship’s captain. To his great shock, another of the hospitable captain’s guests was the newly appointed Russian consul. Go big or go home is sometimes a useful strategy, and Bakunin went big. He introduced himself, announced that he was on a sightseeing tour, with, he assured the consul, all the necessary permissions, and would be returning to Siberia via China after he had toured Japan. He won him over, and they parted friends as Bakunin prudently hopped the next ship to Yokohama. Another chance encounter was much more pleasant than his narrow escape from the consul, for he met Wilhelm Heine, an old comrade from the Dresden barricades. On 17 September, Bakunin left Japan on the SS Carrington for San Francisco and freedom.

As the historian Philip Billingsley has observed, Bakunin had more to thank than his talents and connections for his escape. Japan had only been opened to foreigners, thanks to Admiral Perry’s cannon, fewer than ten years before Bakunin’s escape; before then, no foreign ship could have landed him there. Ten years after his escape, the telegraph connected Russia and Japan, and he could not have outrun electricity. As it was, the consul in Hakodate was not alerted until seventeen days after Bakunin had left for Yokohama and San Francisco.[225]

Just before he left Japan he mailed a letter to Korsakov, writing that he understood he was unlikely ever to return to Russia but that he left “full of love for my country.” He expressed his pleasure that the tsar had loosened the reins he held over the serfs of Russia, but regretted that his majesty did not have the courage to go further. At the same time, he expressed his “contempt and hate” for the tsar’s “malfeasant, stupid government” that kept Russia backward and in the abyss. These were the beliefs that had guided “all that I have said, written, and done,” he added, and he hoped that the years that remained to him would not slip away in vain. It was hardly an apology for escaping, but it was an attempt to have Korsakov understand that Bakunin was motivated by an ideal to accomplish some great work, not merely to escape from exile. In that sense, it was a gesture of respect for the governor-general and an assumption that good men could understand and respect each other, despite their political opposition and their positions of jailer and prisoner. It was a characteristic attitude of Bakunin’s, and one he would keep even in his most heated battles with Marx in the years to come. Thus what may appear audacious to the observer seemed only reasonable to Bakunin: he next asked Korsakov not to prevent his wife from leaving Siberia and to look after her family. Bakunin appealed to him in his official capacity as governor to be sure, but more importantly, as a man “good and noble” who understood that Bakunin must “listen to his convictions.” With that, he bid the governor of Siberia “adieu.”[226]

Bakunin had accomplished the hardest part of his journey. It only remained to cross the Pacific Ocean to reach San Francisco, then travel either across land by coach—the railway would not span the continent until 1869—or continue by sea to the Panama isthmus, cross overland there to the Atlantic and take another ship up to the U.S., where he could then sail across the Atlantic to England ... Compared to the escape to Japan, these legs were more of a vacation. He struck up a shipboard friendship with an English clergyman about fifteen years his junior, Frederick Pemberton Koe, who was escorting a young charge on a voyage around the world. Koe had been packed off on the errand by friends and family who sought to prevent the Anglican from committing a most grievous crime: courting and marrying a Catholic woman. Koe’s diary has only a few pages devoted to Bakunin, but it reinforces the often expressed opinion of Bakunin as a kind, open man, keen and able to strike up meaningful friendships quickly, and with a talent for drawing out others and nudging their political sensibilities without alarming them unduly. Koe jotted down a serviceable, short biography of Bakunin, sketching the broad outlines of his life in the military and his becoming a “strong revolutionary.” He noted in particular Bakunin’s two-week hunger strike while in Konigstein. The two spent much of the voyage in conversation, and Koe found Bakunin “a man of mind [who] interests me very much” and with whom he shared a general agreement on the “second or inner self-world or life” in which “friendships are made.” Not surprisingly, they talked often of religion, and Bakunin chided him softly about his dilemma of whether to marry a Catholic. The Russian observed that his own wife was a Catholic, but advised that “under gentle treatment she begins to think she is becoming Protestant.” Bakunin pushed the point further, gently suggesting that Koe would find a visit with Herzen in London instructive, even though, or perhaps precisely because, Herzen was “a rabid atheist.” Koe enjoyed Bakunin’s singing of Russian songs, and by the end of the trip was “sorry to part with him. He has been more like a friend than any one I have met for a long time.” Koe even was “glad” to lend Bakunin three hundred dollars, though he must have suspected his chances for repayment were exceedingly slim, and he was pleased when the two met up again in New York. There Bakunin reminded him of their discussions on interfaith marriages, suggesting gently that Koe’s ambivalence “proceeds from pride.” It was a brief encounter, but clearly one that touched Koe deeply, and it demonstrates a side to Bakunin that is often neglected in narratives about the fiery anarchist and fierce polemicist. Bakunin extended friendship and solidarity to a man he had very little in common with and tried to educate him in a kindly and helpful fashion.[227]

Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Bakunin fired off a letter to Herzen announcing that he had escaped Siberia and was keenly anticipating returning to active duty as a revolutionary. He asked Herzen to inform his family that he was safe and sound, and to make some housing arrangements for himself and Antonia, who, he believed, would be arriving in London shortly. He also made a request for money, as the journey had left him broke and the trip to the East Coast was expensive. He had decided to go via the Panama isthmus, as the prospect of another wintry voyage across a vast barren land five months after the U.S. Civil War had broken out was not appealing. For his part, Herzen announced to the world, on the front page of The Bell, “Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin is in San Francisco. He is FREE!”[228] Bakunin made his way to the isthmus and booked passage to New York. On the first day out of Panama, one of his fellow passengers, Union general Edwin Vose Sumner, arrested three Confederate sympathizers, but the ship continued the voyage without further incident and Bakunin arrived at New York on 15 November 1861, five months almost to the day after he had left Irkutsk.

There he met up with two other veterans of 1848, Reinhold Solger and Freidrich Kapp. Solger had marched with Herwegh’s ill-fated legion, and he and Kapp knew Bakunin and Herzen from the Paris days. They had immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of the revolution and were now successful writers and radical republicans, active in the campaign to abolish slavery. From New York, Bakunin prepared to take Boston by storm, armed not with bombs or bullets, but with letters of introduction from his two old comrades. The letters granted him access to other veterans of ‘48 and to progressives and liberals of Solger’s acquaintance, including the governor of Massachusetts, senators, and business leaders. One was Martin Kennard, who left his impressions of Bakunin in an essay written some years later. This “stormy petrel of the troubled waters of European politics,” Kennard wrote, was “in bearing noble, in personage genial and attractive ...” Bakunin had a “free and easy manner,” and a “cosmopolitan complaisance that bespoke an intelligent and affable gentleman and energetic man of affairs.” The two spoke of 1848 at length, and Kennard was impressed that Bakunin’s “courage was still undaunted and his ardour in no wise abated.” The Boston jeweler was surprised that Bakunin spoke English “with a fair facility,” and had read a great deal of American literature, including James Fennimore Cooper. Even more surprising, given that his guest had been in prison and exile, Bakunin was very well informed about American politics, with a knowledge that “seemed intuitive.”

Kennard also told a story of a coincidence of the sort that now seemed to be commonplace in Bakunin’s life. His business partner asked a visiting Austro-Hungarian military officer if he had ever heard of Michael Bakunin. He had indeed, the officer replied, and wondered why his host had asked. When told that Bakunin was in the next room, the officer replied that it was impossible, for Bakunin had been exiled and had long been reported dead. Anyone claiming to be the famous prisoner must be an impostor. When the officer was invited to see for himself, he strolled casually past the door and was astonished to recognize Bakunin. He then revealed that he had been one of the guards who had escorted Bakunin, then under sentence of death, from the Prague courthouse to prison.[229] Less cosmic, but undoubtedly more congenial, was Bakunin’s reacquaintance with an old friend from Switzerland, Louis Agassiz, who had been at Harvard since 1848, where he established its Museum of Comparative Zoology. Bakunin’s next visit was with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poet, grief-struck by the tragic death of his wife just four months earlier, nonetheless pronounced Bakunin “an interesting man ... of education and ability ... with a most ardent, seething temperament.” Longfellow’s youngest daughter, Annie, the “Laughing Allegra” of his poem “The Children’s Hour,” recorded a rather different impression. As the six-year-old came down for dinner, she saw at her usual place at the table “this big creature with a big head, wild bushy hair, big eyes, big mouth, a big voice and still bigger laugh.” She recognized the creature instantly from her close appreciation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. It could only be, she realized, an “ogre ... I had no doubts. Some things you don’t have to be told, you just know. No entreaties or persuasion could induce me to cross the threshold of that door. I stood petrified and while I resented his having my place at dinner, what was dinner to me as long as he didn’t make his dinner off me? So I vanished dinnerless.” No doubt the encounter scarred both for life. But Bakunin and Annie pressed on, and as far as can be determined, only Bakunin was driven to anarchism as a result of the trauma. In the meantime, anxious to continue his journey, eager to see Antonia and start a new life, Bakunin left for England on 14 December, taking with him his few belongings and an autograph of George Washington given to him by Kennard. [230]

Thirteen days later, he arrived at Herzen’s house in London. His escape had left him heavily in debt, as he outlined in a letter to his family. The travels from Irkutsk to London had cost about two thousand roubles, which came to about seventy-six hundred francs, or roughly fifteen hundred dollars, perhaps three years’ pay for a U.S. carpenter or printer, most of which he had borrowed. His short stay in Yokohama, “where life is fabulously expensive,” had drained his funds; he had exchanged francs into “Mexican dollars” for some unknown reason at a most disadvantageous rate; he had less than thirty dollars in hand when he arrived in San Francisco. But Bakunin’s return from Siberia in 1861 rekindled the flames of youthful nostalgia and revolutionary solidarity among his old friends. Herzen and Botkin were independently wealthy, Turgenev was now a successful and well-off writer, and they were pleased to lend Bakunin money, though they were mistaken if they thought prison and exile had reformed his casual attitude toward debt. As a result, he was constantly changing residences: his longest stay in London was at 10 Paddington Green and lasted less than a year. Herzen noted with an admixture of fondness and alarm that Bakunin was still “despising money, scattering it on all sides when he had it,” still “prepared to give to anyone his last penny, reserving for himself only what was necessary for cigarettes and tea.” Attention to personal detail was never his strong suit, and poverty meant all his suits were in disrepair. A favorite red flannel shirt soon became so dirty that one acquaintance attempted one night to kidnap it for cleaning, only to discover that the revolutionary slept in it, too. Hopes that Bakunin would write his memoirs soon vanished, though there was considerable interest in his adventures and likely he would have found a ready publisher and market. Herzen had assured him he could likely make twenty or thirty thousand francs from them; he was never good, however, at writing about himself and while he attempted to put the story of his life on paper a few times over the next ten years, little came of it. His comrades talked of establishing a permanent trust for him, and though it probably would have been cheaper in the long run, nothing came of it, in part because Bakunin’s politics soon alienated them. Turgenev in particular had abandoned politics altogether and was disconcerted to find that renewed contact with the revolutionary drew the attention of the Russian secret police to him. Bakunin’s promise to his wife, Antonia, that if she could escape Russia and join him that they would live “neither in opulence nor poverty,” proved only half right. His hope, that when she joined him he would be “freer, more peaceful, and stronger,” too proved illusory. Even finding the funds to secure her passage proved difficult, and certainly he had found no peace; by the time Antonia managed to make her way out of Russia in 1863, she had to follow in his revolutionary wake not to peaceful London but to Stockholm where he had again taken up the revolution.[231]

While his family had taken Antonia in for a time at Priamukhino and helped her secure passage to Europe, it could offer Bakunin little assistance. The estate secured a living but little spare cash, and the family had other problems to deal with. Two of Bakunin’s brothers had metaphorically followed in his footsteps and taken up politics. Protesting that the tsar’s emancipation of the serfs did not go nearly far enough, Nicholas and Alexis signed a petition calling for better terms for the peasants. That led them to follow literally in their older brother’s footsteps, straight to the Peter and Paul fortress, where they spent several months in prison. Another brother, Alexander, came to visit in London on the rebound from a spectacularly unsuccessful love affair that had led him to attempt suicide, and Bakunin wrote that their reunion “touched me profoundly.” But he made little attempt to follow up on this contact with his family as he threw himself into politics. Undoubtedly he feared that communication would subject them to investigation by the Third Section; at the same time, after so many years of estrangement, he preferred to look ahead rather than back. Nearly fifty by the time he escaped Siberia, Bakunin determined to make up for lost time, and it was politics, not family, that concerned him.[232]

In London, Bakunin took up political work with a passion that approached frenzy. He fired off letters and notes, met incessantly with Polish and Russian émigrés and Italian nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, and argued politics long into the night. Many of the arguments were with Herzen, as Bakunin insisted that The Bell was not radical enough. Herzen, for his part, complained that Bakunin had come out from prison “as though out of a faint,” picking up where he had left off in 1849. “The European reaction did not exist for Bakunin,” Herzen wrote; “the bitter years from 1848 to 1858 did not exist for him either.”[233] There was some truth to this, but it was equally true that Herzen had been greatly disillusioned by the aftermath of the revolution. Personal tragedy too had left him cautious and restrained: his wife had long been ill and died shortly after giving birth to a son; the baby lived only a few days, and disease carried away two other children. He was in any case less interested in political action than political journalism. He believed in the power of the pen and printing press, and his hope was The Bell would reach into the Winter Palace itself to influence the tsar as much as it did young radicals, intellectuals, and émigrés.

Even when he and Bakunin shared the same goals, they often differed drastically over means and expression. Herzen was quick to pontificate on what should be done, quick to judge the tactics and strategies of others. Bakunin had a rather different view. Revolutionaries cannot be “doctrinaires,” he wrote in early 1862. “We do not compose in advance constitutions or pose as the legislators of the people. We understand that our mission is quite different. We are not the teachers of the people, only their precursors; it is our job to mark out a path, and our destination is not one of theory but of practice.”[234] He and Herzen differed on another issue as well. One of Bakunin’s “strong qualities,” Herzen ruefully admitted, was “as soon as he had grasped two or three features of his surroundings, he singled out the revolutionary current and at once set to work to carry it farther, to expand it, making of it the burning question of life.” This was, surely, he concluded, “a sign of greatness.” If it meant that Bakunin “looked only toward the ultimate goal, and took the second month of pregnancy for the ninth,” Herzen was in danger of missing the blessed event entirely.[235]

Such was the case in 1862, when radicals in Russia published a manifesto entitled “Young Russia.” It was the work of a small group of students, and while they had read and respected Herzen, Blanc, and Proudhon, they were convinced that propaganda was not enough. Herzen was a man of the 1840s, and those days were long gone. “Russia is entering the revolutionary state of its existence,” they proclaimed in the manifesto, but Herzen’s “revolutionary fire” had been extinguished by the failure of a few revolts. Having “lost all faith in violent upheavals,” he was, in their view, content “to run a review of liberal tendencies and nothing more.”[236] Young Russia was tired of talk and had no hope that the tsar could be convinced by an editorial to give the peasants land and liberty. These young Jacobins were prepared to lead peasants into action, and urged “revolution, a bloody and pitiless revolution, a revolution which must change everything down to the very roots, utterly overthrowing all the foundations of the present society and bringing about the ruin of all who support the present order.” If that included Herzen, so much the worse for him.[237]

The manifesto brought to a head a very real problem that many social movements continue to face: how to combine the experience, wisdom, and resources of older radicals with the rebel energy of the younger generation. Must every generation repeat the mistakes of the previous one? Must experience lead to reformism and paternalism? When does caution become cowardice? Herzen and Young Russia weighed each of these and came to very different conclusions.

Herzen had already been dueling in the press with the new generation of radicals—soon to become known as the “men of the ‘60s,” just as Herzen was a “man of the ‘40s.” The new generation believed he was out of touch and fooled by the cautious reforms of Alexander II. Herzen replied that

we differ from you not in ideas but in methods; not in principles but in ways of acting. You are only the extreme expression of our own position ... Our indignation is as young as yours, and our love for the Russian people is as alive now as it was in the years of our youth. But we will not call for the axe [the traditional weapon of the peasant], for that oppressive ultima ration [final argument] so long as there remains one reasonable hope of a solution without the axe.[238]

While Herzen was largely correct in pointing out that the differences between the two sides were less than the polemics suggested, the paternalism of his reply did nothing to build unity. Instead, it emphasized their political differences, their very different generational experiences, and their different class origins. Herzen was from the aristocracy, from “society”; he was cultured, comfortable, rich, and respectable. The new generation was largely made up of the children of a very different stratum, the raznochintsy, “those of other ranks.” They were the sons and daughters of merchants, of low-level civil servants, of poor landowners, of professionals such as doctors and advocates, and, in the case of two of the most prominent radicals, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov, of priests. They had a very different outlook than the Herzens and Ogarevs, one at once less refined and more practical and more antagonistic to the old regime at a very personal level. The conflict had been foreshadowed in the 1840s with the tumultuous relationship between Belinsky, who, it will be remembered, was the son of a doctor, and Botkin, the son of a merchant, and the aristocratic Bakunin. In the 1860s, Herzen would decry Chernyshevsky as uncultured and crude; for his part, Chernyshevsky would find Herzen pretentious and irrelevant.

Bakunin made a more measured appraisal that saw value and mistakes on both sides. He agreed with Herzen that the two generations were not as far apart as they seemed, but insisted that it was important to acknowledge the revolutionary situation as it actually existed in Russia. To do otherwise was to risk irrelevance. At the same time, the experience he and Herzen possessed was not valueless. In his lengthy article, “The People’s Cause: Romanov, Pugachev, or Pestel?” Bakunin outlined three different models for change in Russia. Hearkening back to his confession and his defense of Muraviev, he suggested it could come from the top. It could also erupt from below, as a peasant uprising similar to that of the Pugachev rebellion during the reign of Catherine the Great. Finally, it could come from a movement of the elite, typified by Pestel and the Decembrists. It was an important article, for in it he elaborated his conception of the relationship of the revolutionary to the masses in ways that began to move more decisively toward anarchism.

His article was given some urgency by events in Russia. During the spring of 1862, a series of mysterious fires broke out in several Russian cities. Coming just after the “Young Russia” manifesto, these events gave the government a pretext to crack down on radicals. Their newspapers and journals were shut down, and leading writers and activists were arrested. Among them was Chernyshevsky, who was condemned to exile, first in Siberia and then in Astrakhan, until 1889. He died four months after he was allowed to return to his home, aged sixty-one. His most famous work, the novel What Is To Be Done? was written while he was in prison, and like Bakunin until his anarchist period, he was equally famous as a revolutionary prisoner and as an activist.

Even at the time, many thought the fires were set by the tsar’s agentsprovocateur or other reactionaries. Several of the arsons turned out to be “copycat” crimes conveniently blamed on radicals but actually committed to settle old scores or to collect the insurance. Bakunin insisted that the revolutionaries were not responsible, and pointed out that the tsar had used the ensuing panic to his own advantage. By blaming the fires on the radicals, he had won considerable public opinion to his side. That did not, however, mean that revolution was impossible or that the masses were inherently reactionary, Bakunin argued. In fact, he suggested, it might be possible to use this popular support for the tsar to pressure him to make widespread and fundamental changes. Specifically, this meant land and liberty: land to the peasants and liberty for all. The slogan “Land and Liberty” was taken from Herzen and used by Russian radicals who in 1861 launched a political party under that name, and it was this popular call that Bakunin echoed in his article. The people demanded no less. The only question was whether the revolution would be peaceful or violent. If, Bakunin held, the tsar moved quickly and gave land to the peasants and created a grassroots, popular assembly—the zemstvo—it would be possible to prevent an “insurrection of all the people” that would have the “character of a pitiless slaughter.” Half measures would not suffice. The tsar would have to give the people real autonomy and self-administration. Bureaucratic rule could no longer hold the regime together, for “the functionary is odious to the people,” and “bureaucratic centralization, with its violence, can only destroy unity.” “Real integrity and freedom will only return to Russia,” he continued, “when the administration of functionaries is replaced by the self-administration of the people.”

At the present moment, Bakunin continued, only the tsar had the trust of the people. They distrusted the bureaucracy and the nobility and so there was no chance that a Pestel could mobilize them. After all, in their daily lives, it was the priest and the clerk and the government official and the landlord who directly oppressed them, not the tsar himself. Furthermore, there was nothing to be gained from dissing the tsar, for most people still believed that he genuinely wanted to protect them from the bureaucrats and lords, that he sincerely wished to grant them freedom and land but was held in check by others. This moral authority was the key to the tsar’s rule. So powerful was it that it had even been used successfully to whip up support for war, always under the pretext of “Holy Russia” and saving the Russian way of life. That was obviously a lie, but the point was that war remained the regime’s ultimate safety valve. All the opposition to the regime could be swept away in the face of an external threat, even a bogus threat.

At the same time, Bakunin calculated, such loyalty meant that the tsar could use his moral authority to create the zemstvo against the protest of the bureaucracy and the nobility. If he did that he could rely on widespread, popular support from the people. But such moral authority, Bakunin warned, would not last forever. While the people’s attachment to the tsar had the character of “faith” and “religion,” this faith was “not celestial but terrestrial” and sought rewards on earth, not heaven. If the tsar did not act quickly, firmly, and radically, the faith would evaporate. Would he act? Bakunin had strong doubts. For the tsar “feared the people” and did not trust them. In part this was because the tsar believed that they were under the influence of the “young avant-garde,” the “young revolutionary.” Oh that it were so! Bakunin exclaimed. In fact, he pointed out, the tsar had nothing to worry about on that score. It was time to admit openly that radical propaganda, and here he included himself along with Herzen, had not reached the people and had not shaken their faith in the tsar. In reality, a “huge gulf” separated the radicals from the people. Thus while the radicals were ready to work with the people, the people would, at the moment, march with the tsar against the revolutionaries. If the tsar were smart, he could take advantage of this and undermine the radicals with a program of land and liberty. That would be preferable to bloodshed and ruin, and Bakunin hoped it were possible.

To this point, his article was a plea for caution and reform that largely echoed Herzen’s. But unlike Herzen, Bakunin declared his support for the youth movement. While it was important to make every effort to avoid violence, he believed that it was unlikely the tsar would act decisively. If he did not, if he were only half smart and applied half measures, then “our young avant-garde, our hope and our strength, will undoubtedly finish beating a path to the people and extend their hand across the gulf.” That alliance would drown the tsar and the nobility in blood, for the “young people” were essentially correct in their critique of the regime and the liberal wing of the radical movement symbolized by Herzen. If the young radicals lacked experience, it did not follow that they were therefore “mistaken in their ideas.” The “expression of their ideas” might be overblown and impetuous, but in their fundamental beliefs and idealism “they are rarely mistaken.” They were on the “side of life and truth,” and had proven with their deeds that they were ready “to sacrifice all for the people.” To those who insisted that the young radicals were carried away by “abstract revolutionary ideas,” Bakunin conceded that this had a

degree of truth to it, but that it was a “superficial explanation” at best. More to the point, “doctrinaires of all types,” and he seems to have included Herzen here, were angry because the youth movement fled from them and their “odor of pedantic self-righteousness.” Its lack of experience might alarm some, but it was also a huge asset, for “youth ignores insurmountable obstacles,” and “the people, themselves young and passionate, will recognize this sooner or later” and would seek alliance with those who had gone before.

The pressing task of the youth movement was to understand its own role in the revolution and the nature of the people. It was, Bakunin argued, crucial to understand that the new Russian movement was more than a revitalized Decembrist one of the “educated and privileged.” Such people were useful and had something to offer. They could point out the “bitter experience of the West” and help avoid repeating its mistakes. Education provided a person with the ability to determine facts accurately and to generalize from them, to go beyond anecdote and local familiarity, and this was all to the good. But the contemporary movement was principally a mass movement of peasants and workers who did not live by “abstract principles” and who were not moved by impractical theory. They had, after all, survived a very long time in the harshest of conditions and had a wealth of experience, traditions, and customs that they would not abandon just because someone, either tsar or revolutionary, told them to. If the peasants seemed “coarse, illiterate,” they had learned much from their historical development and had much to teach. Radicals had to abandon the “odious and ridiculous role of the schoolmaster,” and needed to see the people not as a “means, but an end; we must not treat them as the raw material for a revolution made according to our ideas.” On the contrary, the revolutionary was to be the “servant” of the cause—if the people consented.

Bakunin acknowledged that this role was not an easy one. It required sincerity, openness, and a complete absence of duplicity. Young Russia had some distance to go in that direction; to date, it had shown too much of the pedantry and condescension toward the people that it so rightly despised in Herzen. It was too given to abstraction, and that led to misjudgment, for in “the world of theory, anything is possible.” In the real world, theory had to give way to practical politics, since “without discipline, without organization, without humility in the face of the grandeur of the goal, we will only amuse our enemies and we will never gain victory.

Instead of abstract ideas, Bakunin outlined a political program that reflected the goals of the people and the aspirations of Young Russia. In essence, it was a program of Land and Liberty. All land was to be given to the Russian people, held collectively so no one was deprived of it or could profit from the labor of others. Centralized government was to be replaced with “popular self-administration,” starting at the level of the local commune then in expanding free associations of the district, region, and nation. Russia’s empire was to be dissolved, with Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Finland, and other nations given the right of self-determination. Russia would seek a “fraternal alliance” with these new nations to protect each and all from the encroaching empires of Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, and to work to free the Slavic people already under their yoke; it would seek alliances with the Italian principalities and the Magyar people to win their self-determination as well.

He then returned to the theme of his title. Would such a program come about from the tsar, from a social revolution, or a putsch? As he had indicated earlier, it was possible that the tsar would come to understand that his only salvation lay in leading the revolution. If he did, Bakunin claimed, he himself would gladly follow Alexander II. For revolutions caused great suffering, both to their thousands of victims and to the cause itself. The French Revolution gave ample proof of that. At the same time, he insisted that revolutions became “absolutely necessary thanks to human stupiditv.” If the tsar acted stupidly, the blood would be on his hands. For the moment, however, “we are not his friends and we are not his enemies; we are the friends of the popular cause of Russia and the Slavs.” For his part, Bakunin promised he would follow the cause wherever it led.

If the tsar betrayed Russia, there remained two other ways to conceive of the revolution: Pugachev or Pestel, social revolution or Jacobin coup. It was impossible to predict which would follow, and each had its strengths and weaknesses. In either case, however, the present need was obvious: Young Russia had to organize and make itself worthy of joining the people.[239]

The essay brought together several themes and ideas that Bakunin had considered throughout his life. From Fichte came the importance of action. Unlike Herzen, Bakunin made it plain that he would always side with the revolutionaries and the people, even if they appeared to be wrong. To do otherwise might be prudent, might be reasonable, but his place would always be with the people and the revolution, even if he disagreed with their tactics and their calculation of the chances of success. From Hegel came the understanding of the need for change and the progression of history with all its excesses and extremes. His own insistence, dating from “The Reaction in Germany,” on complete and radical change remained, but it was tempered by his experience of the misery of actual revolution and the price paid by the defeated. No one in Young Russia had yet paid the price he had, and Bakunin’s hope that revolution might be instigated from above reflected his bitter experience of counterrevolution and repression. It reflected too his experience of the betrayal of the revolution by parliamentary institutions and the reformers who filled them. At the same time, he understood that it was likely an exercise in wishful thinking to hope that the tsar would act progressively. Bakunin had moved some distance from his position, outlined in the confession and his defense of Muraviev, that the best hope for change was from above. Clearly, the tsar only acted when pressured from below, and if he would now do the right thing, it would not be because of principle or ideals. Furthermore, no matter how enlightened, the self-interest of tsar, noble, and capitalist was not the same as that of the student, peasant, and worker, and the demands of the people were what ultimately mattered. And their demands did not require interpretation or implementation by others. Bakunin had learned that from Weitling and Proudhon, and, more recently from Peter Martyanov, a freed Russian serf who had made his way to London where he worked with Herzen and Bakunin before returning to face arrest, imprisonment, and exile. The revolutionary was to learn from the masses, not teach them; the revolutionary had skills to put at the service of the cause, not divine revelations with which to lead it.

The essay also signaled Bakunin’s break with Herzen. Herzen refused to publish it in The Bell, and refused to offer Land and Liberty the same support Bakunin did, believing the movement was much too weak and reckless. He despised the cockiness of its representative sent to enlist his aid. But “that is youth,” Bakunin retorted, and it was with youth and revolution that he sided. The alternative? Herzen maintained his position, and saw his influence dwindle and the circulation of The Bell plummet by 80 percent. Whatever lessons experience and wisdom had to impart could not be taught by hectoring and lecturing.[240]

For his part, Bakunin was no longer interested in analyzing revolution from afar. As it had in 1847, Poland provided him an entry point to practical politics. Its struggle for national independence broke out once again in 1862, though the movement was split. Some Polish nobles believed national freedom consisted largely of the freedom to expand their landholdings and to exploit the laborers who tilled it. They saw their best chance in cooperating with the Russian government, and hoped only for national autonomy in a state they would control. Other Poles, organized into the Central National Committee, understood with Bakunin that nationalism meant freedom only for the elite if it were not part of the social revolution. This group called for the overthrow of both tsar and Polish landlord, cautiously explored links with the Russian radicals of Land and Liberty and with Herzen and Bakunin, and plotted furiously. So active were their organizing efforts that the Third Section was able to learn all about their plans and to provoke them into premature action. In January 1863, the Russian government ordered a levy of Polish men for military service—in other words, the draft. The order specifically called up workers in the cities, to drain off those who would form the active fighting force of any revolutionary activity, just as poverty and the volunteer army perform the same function today in the United States. In response, the Polish radicals launched an assault on the garrisons.

For many, including Bakunin, it signaled the beginning of a new revolutionary era. Herzen grudgingly agreed, and even Marx and Engels looked for Russian peasants to join with the Poles in a general uprising.[241] For his part, Bakunin secured a passport in the name of a French-Canadian professor, Henri Soulié, and left for Poland by way of Denmark. In Copenhagen he learned that a legion of Polish soldiers had left London in a chartered ship, the Ward Jackson, and he hastened to join them in Helsingberg. But the Russian spy network knew all about the Ward Jackson and its shipment of men and arms; worse, as the captain became increasingly aware of the risks he was taking, he refused to proceed past Sweden. The Swedish authorities seized the ship, and the vaunted Polish legion was dispersed without firing a shot or even seeing its homeland. The rebels in Poland fared no better. The Russian peasants and workers did not join them and the insurrection was put down firmly. The Russian government, after all, had some experience in that line.

After a short stay in Sweden, where Antonia finally caught up with him, Bakunin decided he had had enough of Poles, Swedes, and winter. Like his father so many years before, he had long thought Italy would provide a more suitable climate, and at the beginning of 1864, he and Antonia headed to Florence. They visited Giuseppe Garibaldi, the patriot soldier who had fought in 1848 first as a republican then as a supporter of Italian King Victor Immanuel II to free Sicily and Naples from the Austrian empire. Garibaldi continued to fight for a unified Italy until Victor Immanuel II, fearing outside intervention, ordered him to abandon his campaign to take Rome and the Papal States and sent the Italian army to defeat Garibaldi at the battle of Aspromonte. Immediately amnestied, Garibaldi was in semiretirement on his island of Caprera when the Bakunins stopped over.

Bakunin too was in semiretirement from revolutionary activities. Herzen’s careful plan to influence public opinion had produced little and the Polish insurrection had collapsed. The Russian radicals had been rounded up, and their failure showed that the peasants and workers needed more than a single spark to ignite their revolutionary fervor. Reform was out of the question in nations and empires that had no effective political process. Where the possibility of reform did exist, as in England, it usually served to forestall radical change and undercut revolution. The tsar had made it plain that he would not lead a revolution from above, and national liberation movements did little more than put a native son on thrones vacated by a foreign emperor. Garibaldi’s campaign was proof of that; France and its Second Empire too were proof that nationalism was more likely to serve reaction than reform or revolution. It was a time for reflection and writing, and for reconsidering tactics and strategy.

Bakunin had joined the Freemasons in Paris in the 1840s, and he rejoined in Italy. While today’s Freemasons are best known, at least in North America, for the fezzes and minibikes of the freewheelin’ Shriners, in nineteenth-century Europe they were highly political, reformist, and even revolutionary, challenging the authority of king and pope equally. Bakunin had worked with radical members from several countries while he was in London and he became a member of the Scottish Rite, one of the chapters of the fraternal order; soon, he became a thirty-second-degree Mason. Like becoming a karate black belt, this is usually given much more significance by those unfamiliar with the society than by those in it. The passage through the rites of Masonry is not automatic, but it is not onerous. It indicates that the candidate has proven himself trustworthy, memorized the accompanying rituals, and gone through the appropriate initiation ceremonies. It does not confer secret powers or reveal profound and arcane mysteries of the universe or entry into the cabal that actually runs the world from its undersea headquarters at the North Pole. It was a way to meet like-minded people, to engage in serious but not strenuous political activity, and likely, to have some fun.

His brief involvement with the Freemasons did push Bakunin to reevaluate the relationship of religion and politics. It was a theme he had addressed much earlier, concluding that the state needed religion, if only in the broad sense of a belief that bound people together. Then he had acknowledged that he believed in God and rather than split hairs and his audience, often found it convenient to express a general religious sense or feeling, while the God he referred to might be love, humanity, freedom, nature, or the revolution. Now, however, he rejected the notion entirely, and a passionate atheism would remain part of his revolutionary project. Whatever its alleged ideas, in practice, Bakunin maintained, religion “translates into the tutelage of the church and state, the despotism of princes, and the brutal and hypocritical exploitation of the popular masses for the profit of a corrupt minority. The fundamental principle of all religion, and especially the Christian church, is that the mass of humanity is stupid, wicked, ignorant, anarchic, incapable of producing or sustaining social order, and thus for its own good it must be silenced and governed with a firm hand.” Therefore, he concluded, “if God exists, then man is a slave. Man can, must be, free; therefore, there is no God. It is impossible to escape this dilemma—now let us choose.” He made his choice. While maintaining a “religious respect” for the right of the individual to hold any belief, Bakunin argued that “the idea of God is incompatible with reason, justice, morality, dignity, and human liberty.” In short, “to proclaim the existence of a just and true God,” was “to proclaim the universal and permanent enslavement of humanity.”[242]

His ideas on religion now resolved, Bakunin moved with Antonia to Sorrento in May 1865 to meet up with his brother Paul and Paul’s wife, Natalie, for a short time. The visit was cordial enough, but did nothing to bring Michael back into the family. It was hardly surprising; the two men had never been close. After all, Paul had been only eight when his older brother left for military school, and it had been his sisters Michael had relied upon in those early years. Nonetheless, Antonia painted a pleasant picture of the time in Sorrento. “Life here flows peacefully and regularly as before,” she wrote. “We rise early, Michael bathes, then has coffee and grapes ... The entire morning Michael writes, while I read.” At three, he would put down his pen, she her book, to take a short nap followed by a swim. At six they would dine, then go for a leisurely walk, return for tea at nine before Michael would resume writing until one or two in the morning.[243] A few months later, the two moved to Naples, where they would spend perhaps the most pleasant two years of their lives. There Bakunin met Zoe Obolensky, a Russian noble born into one of the wealthiest and most influential families and married into another. However, she loved neither her homeland nor her husband, a prominent general, and took her children with her to Italy, where her personality, love of radical politics, and money soon created an amiable circle of admirers, thinkers, and hangers-on, including the Bakunins. From Naples they accompanied Obolensky to the island of Ischia, near Capri, where they went sailing and Bakunin organized picnics, fired off letters in all directions, and held late-night meetings with mysterious visitors. All in all, it must have seemed like heaven to the revolutionary.[244]

Unlike Florence, radical politics had some following in Naples; there was even a newspaper, II Popolo d’Italia, for which Bakunin wrote a few articles. He then founded the International Brotherhood, consisting of a few Italians, including the lawyer Carlo Gambuzzi, and some Slavic radicals. While the activity of the International Brotherhood itself amounted to very little, its members would learn their anarchism well and do much to spread the word. One member, Giuseppe Fanelli, would go on to create branches of Bakunin’s later revolutionary organization, the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries, in Madrid and Barcelona; Gambuzzi would start another in Naples. Furthermore, the Brotherhood gave Bakunin the opportunity to write a powerful political manifesto that made public for the first time his essentially anarchist program. While he had written a similar document in Stockholm, nothing seems to have come of it. However, his Italian piece, “Principles and Organization of the International Revolutionary Society,” written in 1866, is widely cited as a founding document for the anarchist movement. Better known as the “Revolutionary Catechism” and often confused with a later piece with a similar name, it is an ambitious essay, part critique, part call to arms, and part how-to manual for social change. In it Bakunin wrestled with some of the fundamental questions of political philosophy. What is the relationship between the individual and society? How can the inherent conflict between the rights of the individual and the rights of the group be resolved? How can society ensure the freedom of the individual while pursuing collective goals? How can organizations be democratic and efficient? What is, and what should be, the basis of morality? What would a new society based on anarchist ideas and principles look like?[245]

The essay proclaimed the objective of the secret society was “the triumph of the principle of revolution in the world, and consequently the radical overthrow of all presently existing religious, political, economic, and social organizations and institutions and subsequently of world society on the basis of liberty, reason, justice, and work.” In fifty-six pages, Bakunin outlined his principles and ideas and showed how far his politics had evolved since his escape from Siberia. The catechism was much more than a list of do’s and don’ts; it was a philosophical treatise that pulled together many themes Bakunin had considered over the years. The first of these was the “denial of the existence of a real, extraterrestrial God, and consequently also of any revelation and any divine intervention in the affairs of the human world.” Instead of God, “human reason” would be the single “criterion of truth”; “human conscience” that of justice, and “individual and collective liberty as the only creator of order for humanity.” What was liberty? This abstraction had been foremost in his ideas and actions for thirty years. Now he defined it as “the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek no sanction for their actions except their own conscience and reason, to determine them only of their own free will, and consequently to be responsible for them to themselves first of all, and then to the society of which they are a part, but only insofar as they freely consent to be part of it.” No idea would be censored or forbidden. The only constraint would be the “natural corrective power of public opinion,” tempered with the concomitant freedom to disagree and disavow. Morality too would be an individual matter, and even those associations that aimed at destroying individual and public liberty would be allowed. Obviously in a society without compulsion or force or coercion, such ideas could pose no threat. No one would be forced to work, or even forbidden from “exploiting charity or individual trust,” providing only that such “charity and trust be voluntary” and given by adults only.

Would some take advantage of this? Possibly; but the use of legislation and coercion to forbid any activity would lead to a worse problem: the end of liberty. “Liberty cannot and should not defend itself except by means of liberty,” Bakunin argued, “and it is a dangerous misconception to advocate its limitation under the specious pretext of protection.” Any restriction of liberty in the name of protecting it obviously infringes upon it, a sentiment he shared with Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Furthermore, Bakunin observed, immorality and crime were caused by society, either through poor education, lack of equal opportunity, or unjust organization. “Repression and authoritarianism” could not cure the problem; they could only suppress the symptoms temporarily. The cure was to “moralize society” by tearing down “that entire political and social organization which is built on inequality, privilege, divine authority, and contempt for humanity. Once having rebuilt it on the basis of the utmost equality, justice, work, and an education inspired exclusively by respect for humanity,” the root cause of most crime and antisocial behavior would be eliminated.

Still, humanity was not perfect, and it was entirely possible that someone could engage in behavior that infringed on the freedom of others. How could society protect itself from that? First, Bakunin believed, public opinion, not expressed by polls or surveys but by active political life, would exert considerable pressure. Second, while he insisted that all “cruel and degrading punishments, corporal punishment, and the death penalty,” would be abolished along with “indefinite or protracted punishments,” that implied some punishments would remain. The individual, however, could avoid the imposed sentence by declaring complete independence from the society, at which point society could withdraw from the individual, offering neither shelter nor comfort nor means of life.

Philosophers before and after Bakunin have asserted that the freedom of the individual is limited and bounded by the freedom of others in society. He argued the contrary, that the individual could only be free when all were free, while the “enslavement of any one man on earth ... is a denial of the liberty of all.” Thus liberty required economic equality, for inequality granted one power over another. That meant land and resources would be shared by all so no one could command another to work for him or profit from another’s labor. But “equality,” he stressed, “does not mean the leveling down of individual differences, or intellectual, moral, and physical uniformity among individuals. This diversity of ability and strength, and these differences of race, nation, sex, age, and character, far from being a social evil, constitute the treasure house of humanity.” Nor did it mean the “leveling down of individual fortunes,” as long as these were the product of the “ability, productive energy, and thrift” of the individual, not the labor of others or inheritance. For that matter, inheritance would cease to be meaningful in a society that provided for all. His point remained: political equality was irrelevant in the face of economic inequality, and from that observation, Bakunin turned to consider the question of labor.

Sharing the observation of Adam Smith as well as Karl Marx, Bakunin proclaimed “labor is the sole producer of wealth.” More, it was the “fundamental basis of dignity and human rights, for it is only by means of his own, free, intelligent work that man becomes a creator in his turn, wins from the surrounding world and his own animal nature his humanity and rights, and creates the world of civilization.” Yet under feudalism and capitalism, labor was reduced to a “purely mechanical task, no different from that of a beast of burden.” Manual labor left the masses “crushed,” for their work was designed “more to deaden than develop their natural intelligence.” The separation of labor into intellectual labor, including managerial functions, and manual labor had to be ended. To live off the labor of others was to be a “parasite, an exploiter ... and a thief,” while intellectual labor in present society granted privilege even as it left its practitioners “learnedly asinine,” since they rarely had any practical knowledge to complete their academic learning. Such a division also weakened society as a whole, for brutalized workers and impractical intellectuals could not produce as much as integrated labor. “When the thinker works and the worker thinks, free, intelligent labor will emerge as humanity’s highest aspiration, the basis of its dignity and law, and the embodiment of its human power on earth—and humanity will be instituted,” Bakunin concluded. It was an argument very similar to the one Marx and Engels made in “The German Ideology,” where, decrying the division of labor, they wrote that “as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.” In a communist society, “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes,” and the well-rounded, unalienated human could “do one thing today and another thing tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”[246]

In the new society, Bakunin argued, labor would likely be social and collective rather than individual, for in combination humans are much more productive and create more goods in less time. With such free associations of producers, “human labor, emancipating each and every man, will regenerate the world,” ending scarcity and providing leisure for real culture and civilization. In a later article, he would make his position even more explicit. “The isolated labor of a single person, however strong and capable, is never enough to counteract the collective labor of the many who are associated and well organized. What is called individual labor in industry today is nothing but the exploitation of the collective labor of the workers by individuals who are privileged holders either of capital or learning.” Even intellectual production was, he maintained, collective and social production. “The mind of the world’s greatest genius” was entirely “the product of the collective intellectual and industrial labor of all past and present generations.” If this was not readily apparent, he suggested an experiment. Put the “genius” on a desert island as an infant. Would it survive? Would it be little more than a beast if it did? The thought experiment demonstrated more than that it takes a village to raise a child or that you should thank a teacher and the taxpayers who paid for salary and school if you can read this. It showed that whatever potential abilities someone was born with would “remain dead unless they are fertilized by the potent and beneficial activity of the collectivity. We shall say more: The more endowed by nature an individual is, the more that person takes from the collectivity; from which it follows, in all justice, that more must be repaid.”[247]

Though he used masculine pronouns throughout the “Revolutionary Catechism,” Bakunin included “woman,” who, “differing from man but not inferior to him, intelligent, industrious, and free like him, is declared his equal both in rights and in all political and social functions and duties.” The “legal family,” sanctioned and enforced by law, would be replaced by free marriage, that is, union in which both partners were free and equal, not one that bound women in positions of subservience. No doubt remembering the struggles of his sisters, he insisted “neither violence, passion, nor the rights freely granted in the past may excuse any infringement by one party of the other’s liberty, and any such infringement shall be considered criminal.” This was much more than a token assertion of equality. While Bakunin usually agreed with Herzen and Ogarev that the people had much to teach intellectuals and others, shortly after writing the “Revolutionary Catechism,” Bakunin criticized both men for their failure to understand that the primitive socialism of the peasant commune did not extend to women’s rights. The mir was host to “the scandalous degradation of women,” and whatever the virtues of peasant life, the “absolute negation and total incomprehension of the rights and honor of women” amounted to a “patriarchal despotism” that the revolutionary had to confront.[248] The “Revolutionary Catechism” also included ideas on raising children. Children could be raised by their birth parents, though society would remain responsible for providing for mother and child. But “children belong neither to their parents nor to society but to themselves and their future liberty.” They needed to be protected and would not be granted complete license, but they would be nurtured to be independent, rational, and moral, and given more and more freedom to the degree they could make informed decisions.

Bakunin’s commitment to women’s equality and his radical ideas on liberty and equality put him in the vanguard of progressive thinkers in the nineteenth century, and they stand today as stinging rebukes to the contemporary reign of capital and empire that has some way to go to catch up with him. At the same time, the “Revolutionary Catechism” signaled an end to his short retirement from radical politics. Political events and his own restlessness ensured he would soon make a return engagement on the world stage.

[222] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Alexander Herzen, 8 December 1860. See also Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and His Biographers,” for a detailed analysis of the marriage and how Bakunin’s biographers have depicted it.

[223] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Sergei Nechaev, 2–9 June 1870.

[224] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letters to Alexander Herzen, 7–15 November 1860 and 8 December 1860; Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, page 158.

[225] See Philip Billingsley, “Bakunin in Yokohama: The Dawning of the Pacific Era,” International History Review, 20, no. 3 (September 1998), pages 532–70. Several details in this paragraph are from this account.

[226] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Michael Semenovich Korsakov, 10 September 1861.

[227] Robert M. Cutler, “A Rediscovered Source on Bakunin in 1861, The Diary of F. P. Koe and Excerpts from the Diary of F. P. Koe,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, 35, nos. 1–2 (March-June 1993).

[228] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Herzen, 15 October 1861, cited in Paul Avrich, “Bakunin in the United States,” Anarchist Portraits, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, page 16.

[229] Oscar Handlin, “A Russian Anarchist Visits Boston,” New England Quarterly, 15, no. 1 (March 1942), pages 104–9; See also Robert M. Cutler, “An Unpublished Letter of M. A. Bakunin to R. Solger,” International Review of Social History, no. 33 (1988), pages 212–7. The letter is also in Bakounine: Oeuvres completes.

[230] David Hecht, “‘Laughing Allegra’ Meets an Ogre,” New England Quarterly, 19, no. 2 (June 1946), pages 243–4. See also Avrich, “Bakunin in the United States,” pages 16–31.

[231] Herzen cited in Carr, page 243; Carr relates the shirt story on page 248; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Antonia Bakunin, 21–7 October 1862. Bakunin’s travel expenses and the hope that his memoirs would prove profitable are in Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his family, 3 February 1862.

[232] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Alexander Bakunin, 7 December 1862.

[233] Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, volume 3, page 1352.

[234] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Aux Russes, Polonais, et tous les amis slaves,” 2 February 1862.

[235] Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, volume 3, pages 1357 and 1366.

[236] Cited in Venturi, pages 292–3.

[237] Cited in Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s, New York: Viking Press, 1980, page 172.

[238] Cited in Gleason, page 110. See also Herzen’s article, “The Superfluous and the Jaundiced,” first printed in The Bell in 1860, and in My Past and Thoughts, volume 4, pages 1574–84.

[239] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “La cause du people: Romanov, Pugachev, ou Pestel?” June-July 1862.

[240] Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, volume 3, pages 1370–1.

[241] Carr, page 278; Engels to Marx, 11 June 1863, Selected Correspondence, pages 131–2.

[242] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Fragments d’ecrits sur la Franc-Maconnerie,” summer and fall 1865, fragment E. He made similar arguments in 1864—see Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Societe internationale secrete de la Revolution. Programme provisoirement arette par les freres fondateurs,” September-October 1864.

[243] Antonia Bakunin, cited in Mendel, page 299.

[244] See Carr, page 315.

[245] Michael Bakunin, “Principles and Organization of the International Brotherhood,” Selected Writings, Arthur Lehning, ed., Steven Cox, trans., London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, pages 64–93; and Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Principes et organisation de la societe internationale revolutionnaire,” March 1866. It is called “Revolutionary Catechism,” 1866, in the Dolgoff collection, pages 76–97.

[246] Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” Selected Works, volume 1, pages 35–6. The manuscript was written in 1845–1846 but remained unpublished until 1932. That Bakunin would raise very similar arguments suggests how close he and Marx often were in their thought. Furthermore, “The German Ideology” was a key document in the humanist revisiting of Marx that placed more emphasis on his ideas about alienation than historical materialism and political economy, and thus suggests how readings of Marx other than the strictly orthodox ones favored by Soviet and German Social Democratic Marxists move toward anarchism.

[247] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Les endormeurs,” June-July 1869; I have also used the translation in Robert M. Cutler, The Basic Bakunin: Writings, 1869–1871, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992, page 78.

[248] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Herzen and Ogarev, 19 July 1866. See Shatz, “Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle,” pages 27–8.