3. RULES, REBELLION, AND ROMANCE

If politics is the art of the possible, even the tsar had little to work with; bound by serfdom, Russia was a country of few options or choices. For all Alexander Bakunin’s liberal ideas of education and idylls of Priamukhino, he had no thought of any career for his eldest son save service to the state. Court favors and military pay were essential to maintain the family’s status and wealth. Tradition insisted that the eldest son go to the military, and Alexander arranged for Michael to go to St. Petersburg to prepare for the entrance examinations necessary for admittance to the Artillery Cadet School. He commemorated the event with a poem:

Misha [Michael] I sent away to [military] school.
Young boys must become men
And be sons of the Fatherland
Fearing only of their consciences,
And serving the Tsar faithfully.
For them—the broad realm of service. [55]

While one hopes this loses a little something in the translation, Alexander’s intent was clear. After a tearful going-away party for the fourteen-year-old boy at the end of November 1828, Michael set out for the city. In an era before asphalt, rubber tires, shock absorbers, and Preparation H, the carriage trip from Priamukhino was an adventure in itself. Until the railway was built in the 1850s, it took the tsar himself, mustering all the resources of the Russian military and propelled by raisons d’etat as well as horses, about forty hours to cover the 460 miles between Moscow and St. Petersburg. While the Bakunins had less distance to travel and could take a more leisurely pace, it was not a journey to be taken lightly. Visits with relatives along the way made it less arduous as the young lad was fussed over and congratulated. He was looking forward to visiting the capital of the empire, and upon his arrival in St. Petersburg, he teased his sisters in a letter by allowing that the mighty Neva River that ran through the city was “a little different” from the quiet, meandering Osuga of home. They could take some comfort, however, in the knowledge that the gardens of Priamukhino were much more beautiful than those of the capital. Michael passed the entrance exams, and his mother was quick to announce that “Michel’s future is decided: he is to serve in the artillery.”[56]

While strictly accurate, her prophecy would not be fulfilled in quite the way she hoped. St. Petersburg was, and is, filled with art, culture, excitement, and intrigue. Little of this, however, was available to the young Bakunin. The intellectual action happened at the universities, not the military academies; the interesting possibilities of the city, at least those of interest to a young man from the country, happened in spite of bureaucracy, not because of it. As the capital of the empire, St. Petersburg tended to emphasize the regime’s bureaucratic face, as capitals often do. No one, after all, has ever accused Washington, D.C., of being a “city that never sleeps” and the torpor of Bonn was legendary. Nicholas I was dull, rigid, and conservative, and had no patience with unorthodoxy or abstract thought or controversy. His ideology was orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, that is, obedience and loyalty to the church, the tsar, and a romanticized notion of “the people.” Official St. Petersburg did its best to deliver these up, and officers’ school was hardly the place to find a vibrant counterculture.

At the same time, St. Petersburg was a big, modern city, and the shock registered by country-raised nobles upon encountering it is a standard motif in Russian literature. Built on the banks and islands of the Neva River, the city is rightly known as the Venice of the north. But neva is the Finnish word for “swamp,” and like all European cities of the day, it had little in the way of public sanitation. Animal and human waste was dumped into the streets and the alleys, where it froze during the winter. Spring thaw happens quickly in St. Petersburg, often overnight, and the new season was announced with an assault on the senses. Michael, fresh from the country and more than a little homesick, noted sarcastically that the “charms of the city in springtime” were mud and stench, so unlike the blossoms of Priamukhino.[57]

Education too suffered by comparison with home. Michael lived in St. Petersburg with his aunt and uncle Nilov before attending school, and their ideas on the education of young nobles differed considerably from those of Alexander Bakunin. He had stressed freedom and paid little attention to formal religion. Michael had received some religious instruction, but the chief benefit he took away from the lessons was a fondness for the sweets brought by the priest. The teaching itself had little impact, “neither positive nor negative, on my heart or my spirit,” he wrote, and Bakunin remained indifferent at best and skeptical at worst—or perhaps the other way around—to the claims of religion even as a young man.[58]

Uncle Nilov, however, insisted that Michael be given an orthodox religious education to undo the damage caused by the freethinking Alexander. He assigned Michael to read the Cheti Minei, an eighteenth-century telling of the lives, exploits, and miracles of Russian saints. Worse, he expected his nephew to believe the ridiculous stories and legends. Not surprisingly, the effect on the young cadet was to kill off whatever religious sentiment he still had.[59]

Military school and life in the barracks freed Michael from his overbearing uncle and aunt, and exposed him to new subjects to study. Other than that, it was hardly an improvement. The army’s ranks were filled with peasant conscripts who resented their twenty-five-year term of service and the officers who could turn a life sentence into a death sentence through whim, duty, or incompetence. Discipline was harsh and severe corporal punishment, often fatal, was administered for trivial offenses. Even in peacetime, men were paid poorly and were expected to scavenge and purchase much of their food themselves. Eighty-five years after Michael Bakunin joined up, life in the Russian army was still so frightful that a young man named Chomsky decided to flee his homeland rather than serve; as a result, his son Noam would be born in the United States.[60]

The resentment at the bottom flowed from the incompetence and inertia at the top. Little interested in the philosophy or grand strategy of warfare, Nicholas I was obsessed with the minutia of drill, parades, regulations, and uniforms. To be sure, drill was important for all European armies in this period. The standard military tactic was the concentrated musket volley, and that required moving large numbers of troops into precise position. Once there, they had to load, aim, and fire their weapons in the same direction at the same time, ideally with the first rank then crouching down to reload so the next could fire over their heads, and so on. The impact on the enemy was significantly lessened if the timing was off by a second or so and the deeper ranks blew the heads off their comrades in front. Yet even by the requirements of the day, the Russian army was noted for its intense, not to say neurotic, devotion to drill.

This reflected Nicholas’s personality but it was also forced on the army by the economic strain of the empire. The military was necessary for the survival of the regime, but it was also bankrupting it. Russia’s serf-bound economy meant the army had to rely on older technology; it could not innovate on the same scale as the English and French empires. As a result, the Russian military had to rely on masses of troops to outnumber and overwhelm the enemy. That required levies of serfs to fill the ranks, more weapons, and higher taxes to pay for it all. But taking labor and capital out of productive enterprise and putting it in the army crippled the economy. That made it impossible to modernize the army and so the problem continued to replicate itself.[61]

Officers fared better than enlisted men, but their life in the service held no guarantees of success or prosperity. Desperate to economize, the state expected its officers to supply much of their own food, even in combat. The job paid poorly: an ensign might have been paid 440 roubles a year at a time when tea sold for ten roubles a pound. A major-general in the cavalry might have pulled down eight thousand roubles a year, but had to pay for expensive dress uniforms, supply the officers’ mess, and cover incidental job expenses, such as his horse, out of that sum. Promotion brought higher pay, but rising through the ranks was not easy, for a successful officer needed family connections and patrons as much as ability. Promotion also required new positions to be available, and so rapid career advancement for the unconnected officer depended on slaughter on the battlefield. Such job openings were a good bet once hostilities began, but even the least self-reflective graduate of Nicholas’s mind-numbing schools could soon figure out that promotion was likely to be a good news/bad news story with the potential for a fairly nasty punch line.

The vastness of the empire that required such a large and expensive military meant that it was impossible to supply the army properly with arms, food, or medical supplies. Even victory came at a high price. The casualty rate of Russian soldiers during the eleven-hour battle at Borodino, for example, was not equaled until the battle of the Somme in 1916, where it took all the techniques of modern industry to set new records of death and destruction. The lack of food and medicine meant Russian soldiers were killed by disease at a rate double that of other European armies. A glorious death, or, even better, a glorious though not disfiguring wound acquired while leading valiant and snappily dressed troops in the service of the Tsar of All the Russias was one thing. Facing death doubled over a makeshift latrine while shitting your guts out with dysentery or typhoid or cholera was something else again.[62]

To create officers to serve in such an army, officer training schools used much the same brutal techniques to train the sons of the nobility as the military used to train peasant soldiers. The nature of military education is to remove observable differences from a large, disparate group of individuals—after all, they’re called “uniforms” for a reason. Hierarchy, exaltation of the unit, the service, and the nation, and unquestioning obedience have long been deemed crucial to the making of an efficient, effective army. Idiosyncrasies, original thinking, and flouting of rules may be tolerated if they are confined to the battlefield and are successful, but expressions of individuality and creativity are generally knocked out of recruits and students. What is required is obedience and complete interchangeability among officers and troops. The emphasis on perfecting meaningless rituals from spit-shining shoes to saluting is designed to inculcate these characteristics. No one needs discipline to agree with a reasonable or useful suggestion, after all. Discipline is necessary to make people obey unreasonable, inhumane, and dangerous orders that benefit someone else. The irony in our modern, free nations is that soldiers are ordered to fight for democracy while being denied any experience of the concept. Such reflection, however, was no more welcome at the St. Petersburg artillery school than it is at West Point.

When Michael Bakunin attended, Russian military schools were entrusted to the direct control of Nicholas I’s brothers, first Constantine and later Michael. The latter was considered “a petty and pedantic representative of the most narrow-minded military formalism,” and the schools reflected this. Such formalism was more than the tsar’s whim or military necessity; it was a calculated policy for political ends. Nicholas I was determined that future officers would not repeat the treason of the Decembrists. The best way to do that, he believed, was to stifle independent thinking and “infection” from the West. “Intellectual dressage,” not creativity, was the goal. This goal was accomplished with unforgiving codes of discipline, unbending attention to tiny details of dress and drill, and stifling regimentation. The purpose was to drive out free thought and to train cadres of conservative, loyal, and conformist officers.[63]

Thus, minor infractions were met with harsh, arbitrary, and swift punishment designed to break the spirit and instill unquestioning subordination. Officer cadets could be confined to barracks, stuck on endless, meaningless guard duty, jailed, beaten, and lashed for breaking the smallest of regulations. Running the gauntlet may be a quaint schoolboy penalty today, but in Bakunin’s time it could be fatal, for it meant receiving as many as five thousand kicks and punches from men who desired to appear highly motivated in front of their officers. So fearsome was the corporal punishment meted out for trivial offenses that it was not uncommon for erring students to attempt suicide rather than face the terrible penalty that awaited them. As the historian John Keep has observed, “it is hard to overestimate the psychological impact of the educational experience which young men went through” in the tsar’s officer schools; his observation that induction to the military was a “traumatic experience” sounds almost charitable. Even Nicholas’s own mother worried that military life would “coarsen” her little brute and make him a “brusque and crude” fellow. The cadet schools were one reason the Russian nobility was increasingly disinclined to see military service as a fitting career choice. Believing themselves to be the carriers of civilized virtue and values, they saw the barbaric conditions in the schools and in the field as an assault on their dignity and privilege. Even Alexander Bakunin admitted privately that the military “schools wrere insufficient for the education of all noble children,” but saw no alternative for his son.[64]

The system worked well enough on Michael in the beginning. As a young cadet, he thrilled to Pushkin’s patriotic poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia.” While Pushkin had written poetry radical enough to get himself exiled, this poem was a revanchist defense of Russia’s brutal suppression of the Polish uprising in 1831. Suggesting that Western Europeans hated Russia because it had stood up to Napoleon and “did not acknowledge the insolent will / Of him under whom you quaked,” the poet warned them that if they attempted to intervene and to send armies to defend the Poles, “There’s room for them in Russia’s fields / ‘Mid graves that are not strange to them.” The jingoistic verses appealed to the young Bakunin, who found them “delightful, full of fire and true patriotism.” Noting that the original title had been “Verses on the Address of General Lafayette,” Bakunin went on to denounce the hero of the American and French revolutions as an “old babbler” who tried to shake up the Russians with his nonsense. With what would prove to be delicious irony, he denounced Lafayette as a “destructive spirit.”[65] Such sentiments from the pen of the man who would later pledge his life to the overthrow of all tsars and kings were testimony to the values his father had worked hard to instill and the commitment of the cadet school to drive out independent thought from the heads of its students.

Michael’s letters home faithfully detail his studies, outline the workings of the school and its chain of command, and reproach his sisters and brothers for not writing more often. But the letters soon reveal his discontent. As time went on, he became more and more disillusioned with the school. Soon he was writing his sisters of how he envied his siblings at home who could play with each other under the warm gaze of their parents. About to turn seventeen, the boy who once eagerly looked forward to traveling to the capital now longed for home, eager to give up any dreams of travel to foreign cities “for the chance to spend my life with those dear to my heart.”[66]

Yet we should not make too much of his claims or accept that his experience was as traumatic as he sometimes averred and his critics have insisted. It was a common enough experience, and the theme of the lost happy childhood later became a staple in Russian literature.[67] Even the letters in which he was most emphatic about his isolation at school were calculated attempts to wheedle sympathy and money from his family. The art of the money-from-home letter lies precisely in suggesting one is bearing up admirably under tremendous strain, oh, and by the way, a few roubles would let me ace the exams. Bakunin hardly invented the genre, but he was an able practitioner.

He even found some small ways to resist the authority and discipline of the school. In any institution that demands obedience and punishes those who don’t obey or who cannot feign enthusiasm convincingly, passive-aggressive behavior is a common response. Indeed, the term was originally created by the U.S. War Department to categorize and stigmatize soldiers who responded to the banality and insanity of military life through performing at less-than-peak levels, procrastinating, sulking or arguing, doing inefficient work, complaining about demands superiors think reasonable, “forgetting” obligations, resenting useful suggestions, or criticizing authority figures. Anyone who has been a parent, boss, or teacher will immediately recognize these “symptoms” as the commonplace, if irritating, resistance employed regularly by their subordinates. At the same time, anyone who has been a child, employee, or student will recognize the categorizations as the inappropriate labeling of perfectly reasonable behaviors as pathology when they are simply a way of registering resistance to unreasonable, irritating, undemocratic, and arbitrary authorities who have considerable power to punish. It is a way of preserving some shred of autonomy in the face of tyranny, of mounting some small resistance that acknowledges the tyrant’s ability to punish while rejecting his right to command. Restaurant workers spit in the soup and more; those who lack imagination may rent the movie Fight Club for details. Soldiers “soldier” on the job, and young men in military school take their opportunities where they find them.

In time-honored tradition, Michael and his fellow students complained about their teachers and officers, blew off exams, avoided studying until the last minute, and promoted vague physical symptoms to major disease status to avoid unpleasant duties. Michael pulled all-nighters to make up for slacking off during the year, only to fall back into sloth after passing the exams. “During the three years of my studies at school, I hardly did anything,” he confessed. “I worked only during the last month of each year in order to pass the exams.”[68]

There were more open acts of resistance, though none stand out as particularly strident. Early in 1830, Michael’s second year at the school, one of the students was sent ten roubles. He set out to hand it over to the officer in charge of his division, according to the regulations, but was intercepted by the junior officer of the day, who took the money, claiming he would turn it over to the proper authority. The cadets were skeptical and started jeering. The day officer complained to his superior who called in the colonel-general, who demanded to know who had shouted. No one answered. Finally all the cadets in that section were confined to quarters over the holidays. Michael had not taken part in the shouting, but refused also to inform on his comrades and with them was confined to quarters. “I would rather be wrongly punished,” he wrote, “than commit such a sordid act” as informing.[69]

The following year a number of the cadets were confined to quarters for protesting the injustices and the brusque, offensive manner of their officers by complaining loudly and boisterously. Michael’s own response was more muted, at least as he told the story to his parents, but he was still confined to quarters for a day. Another weapon of self-defense for oppressed groups is of course to lie to the authorities. “A clever lie was not counted among our cadets as a vice, but was unanimously approved,” Michael noted, and he was not above using the tactic himself. He may not have been very good at it, however. In 1832, he was confined to his quarters for two weeks for lying to his superior officer in order to avoid punishment for some other infraction.[70]

Three episodes over three years hardly mark the beginning of the proletarian revolution or stamp Bakunin as a rebel. They are, however, indicative of the rigid code of the school and of the spirit of muted protest that existed despite it. This early experience may well have impressed itself on the future revolutionary who would argue that the possibility for rebellion always existed, even among the most oppressed, and who would always support revolt even when he believed it was doomed to failure. Whatever the material conditions, he would argue, the spirit of revolt made resistance, if not success, always possible.

Another form of resistance was to play hard. The Russian military historian John Keep has, rather tactfully, noted that officers occupied themselves with “carousing, gambling, and pursuing the fair sex,” and cadets did likewise. Michael sometimes claimed that he was above such pursuits, telling his parents that “I stayed away from most of the young folk, my comrades” because he was repulsed by their preoccupation with alcohol, cards, “and other pursuits that modesty keeps me from citing.” Returning to the theme some years after leaving the school and the military, he claimed that while his “soul and imagination had been pure and innocent, unstained as yet by evil” when he left Priamukhino, military school had shown him some trajectories more interesting than the parabolas traced by artillery shells. There was revealed to him “the dark, filthy, nasty side of life.” While his letters do not reveal just what these nasty pursuits were, it does not take too much imagination to reflect on what young men in such a setting might have gotten into.[71]

As E. H. Carr pointed out, if Michael told his parents that he steadfastly avoided such pursuits, we are not obliged to believe him. When he wrote of the vices of his comrades he was deeply in debt. He owed nearly two thousand roubles by 1833—about four and a half years’ pay for a junior officer. No doubt aware that his father would be disinclined to cover the debts if they were for “vice,” his letters portrayed Michael as an upstanding young naif led astray by a dishonest comrade and devious moneylenders who were quick to accept his promissory notes. Perhaps; but it is hard to imagine that a young man could get into so much debt while remaining alone and aloof with only a good book for company.[72]

He did manage to find some time to read. He was keen on the historical fiction of popular writers such as Faddey Bulgarin, Nicholas Grech, and Michael Zagoskin. Virtually unknown and unstudied today, they might be compared with G. A. Henty and Horatio Alger, for they wrote to instruct the young in the peculiar values those in charge found useful. Their popularity had less to do with their skill than with their patronage by the tsar, who rewarded them for their loyal service on the literary front. There they helped prop up the regime with their romantic novels and combated progressive literary critics. Bulgarin, for example, argued in the journals with Pushkin over the merits of censorship—he was in favor of it—and worked closely with Benckendorff and the Third Section to ensure that Russian literature was safe, conservative, and devoid of any literary merit. More daring was Bakunin’s reading of Alexander Bestuzhev, an exiled Decembrist who wrote romantic tales in the style of Byron under the pseudonym “Cossack Marlinsky.” Michael did have more serious tastes in literature, and he enthused over Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Schiller’s retellings of “William Tell” and Macbeth. Finding a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson was like coming across an old friend and later he would commend to his family James Fenimore Cooper’s sea story The Red Rover as “a very good novel,” and thought they would enjoy The Bravo. [73]

There was also time to enter the swirl of St. Petersburg parties and social events, largely through the graces of relatives and friends, especially the Lvov family, who had a daughter about Michael’s age and who treated him like kin. He enjoyed the time spent at country dachas, dinners, and concerts, though he was not, like the latter-day anarchist Emma Goldman, keen on dancing. Where Emma is alleged to have insisted “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” Michael offered some hope for those rebels unable to cut a mean rug, confessing in a letter to his sisters that he hated dancing. Still, there were trips to the country and quiet evenings spent in the homes of friends and relatives, where they would recite verse, read to each other, sing, make handicrafts, and do impersonations to while away the hours pleasantly. Michael’s letters mentioned upcoming exams, visiting relatives, pleasant and agreeable Christmas and Easter holidays, and school work “so varied and numerous that we have no time to be bored.” In short, his letters complain of the strictures and cruelties of military school even as they demonstrate how he made the best of it. [74]

His course of instruction ended in 1832, and at the end of that year he threw himself into studying for his examination. His cramming technique paid off yet again, and in January 1833 Bakunin was commissioned an ensign. He was now set to work studying fortifications, strategy, mathematics, physics, mechanics, Russian literature, and the German language. Allowed to live off campus, he returned to room with the Nilovs. No longer the frightened child from the country who could be set to reading hoary fairy stories and myths, but a strapping young man of nineteen years, successful, in a fashion, in his studies, accustomed to, if not appreciative of, the hardened life of military school, he “suddenly gained individual freedom” and took it on eagerly.[75]

Naturally, this meant falling in love. Now able to spend afternoons and evenings on his own, he spent more time with the Lvov family, and increasingly with Marie Voyekov, a distant cousin a few years his junior. Marie was pretty, charming, and shared—or reflected—his tastes in music, art, and discussion. It was not just a physical thing, he insisted to his sisters; he loved her charm, her even temper, her fine soul, her noble heart. The two discussed all the big themes that swelled romantic hearts in a romantic age: love, compassion, sentimentality, art, music, “and a thousand other things.” He accompanied her to soirees, where he reacted to the hypocrisy of “society” with all the scorn, self-righteousness, and alienation only an adolescent could muster. He scoffed at the smarmy toffs who offered up “the same compliments and spouted the same twaddle to each young lady,” and who despaired if they were not seen at the right affair in the right company. Worse, the same lounge lizards who made such a point of being seen with an important lady would later mock her when gossiping with their friends.[76]

They both had a passion for music, and while Mozart left him “enraptured” and “hardly able to breathe,” his favorite composer was Beethoven. In retrospect, it is an appropriate choice. Beethoven stressed the expression of feeling and his music was designed to evoke strong, visceral reactions. His work burst through the strictures of the classical period as he broke all the rules of composition and wrote music with a political edge. His Third Symphony, the Eroica, meaning “heroic,” for example, was written to celebrate the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, but when Bonaparte declared himself emperor, Beethoven denounced him as a tyrant and removed all references to him. The Ninth Symphony has a complicated political history, and the music has been claimed by revolutionaries and reactionaries, aristocrats and communists, Nazis and the European Union alike.[77]

Bakunin’s passion for Beethoven has given rise to an oft-repeated story that shows how badly the anarchist has been served by some of his historians. According to several biographers, Bakunin was overcome by emotion while listening to the Ninth Symphony with Marie. So wracked was he that Marie was frightened by the expression on his face, which looked, numerous scholars have repeated, as if “I were ready to destroy the entire world.” This statement has been used as an insight into the dark soul of the ferocious anarchist-to-be. As always, the intent is to imply or insist that his radical ideas stemmed neither from reality nor insight but from psychological torment and personal neurosis.

In fact, Bakunin does not use the French verb detruire, which is usually translated alternately as “to destroy,” “to demolish,” or “to raze.” Instead he chooses the verb devorer, usually translated as “to devour,” “to eat up,” “to consume,” even “to swallow or stifle.” It may be translated as “to destroy,” but this is very much a secondary meaning. To translate it as “to destroy” is an idiosyncratic and political choice. The entire story is from a long letter from Michael to his sister Varvara, and it takes up but a few lines in a section where he wrote about the effect Beethoven’s music had on him. The music seemed to help his soul escape from the body that imprisoned it, he wrote; it elevated him to the celestial regions and made him very happy even while it made him pity those for whom ambition and the thirst for riches rendered them incapable of appreciating its heavenly sounds. It is even unlikely that they were listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for Bakunin explains that it was “the storm [l’orage] of Beethoven that had transported me.” Of all of Beethoven’s works, only the Pastoral, the Sixth Symphony, contains a section named “The Storm,” and a powerful piece it is, coming right after the lilting “Merry Gathering of Country People” and announcing itself with a blast of horns and strings. This is a tiny matter, to be sure, but it does show how historians have been much too quick to read violence and destruction into Bakunin’s most innocent remarks.[78]

Whatever he thought about Beethoven, Bakunin and Marie were doomed lovers. She had to leave for Moscow, and in best romantic style, the two promised never to forget each other as they parted tearfully. He asked her for a token to console him in her absence, and she gave him the bead bracelet she always wore. He kissed her hand—”for the first time in my life I kissed her hand! And I was truly happy!” “Adieux, Michel! Do not forget me!” she called to him from her carriage, and “her voice was lost in the air, her image disappeared from my eyes, and St. Petersburg was empty to me.” He pined for a few weeks, pledging to make himself worthy of “She,” hoping that she remembered him, but as far as can be judged from his letters, he recovered quickly enough. He was diverted by the need to study, particularly German, French, Russian, and literature, and “a very interesting book,” Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. [79]

But it was increasingly clear to the young man that he did not fit the army and the army did not fit him. While the army was indifferent to this observation, Michael was not. The routines and drills of military life were boring. It was especially frustrating that one could not reason with one’s superior officers but had to obey orders even when they were stupid, futile, or irrational. At first he was prepared to put up with this, on the grounds that it was the only honorable pursuit open to him and the only way he could be of use to his country and his family.[80] Yet it is easy to trace in his letters his growing discontent and his dawning awareness of the gap between the expectations of his family—and himself—and his real interests, passions, and abilities.

Even life with the Nilovs was becoming confining, and he chafed under their rules and regulations. Reproved by his aunt for what she believed was too much indecorous attention paid to “She,” the young man bridled when she forbade him to leave the house without her permission. “I loved my good aunt,” he later reflected, but her orders seemed to him “despotic.” Conceding that the fight was childish, he still insisted that his need for liberty was natural, especially since he had so recently shed the shackles of the artillery school. She mistook his meditations for indolence and responded by scolding, sermonizing, and hectoring. When she accused him of stealing a book to get back at her for her reprimands, he was flabbergasted and outraged; it was exactly what he needed to make his first real proclamation of open rebellion, and he left the house, vowing to never to see her again.[81]

He at least had another place to stay, for his unit was being sent to Krasnoe Selo, some miles outside of St. Petersburg. Michael took with him the works of Dmitri Venevitinov, a Romantic poet and literary critic. It was a natural enough choice, given that his love affair with Marie had ended abruptly and tragically enough for a nineteen-year-old. But there was much more to it than that. Romanticism was a powerful intellectual current in Russia and would continue to be for several years.

The Russian interest in Romanticism has attracted a great deal of attention from historians, many of whom dismiss it as a sign of intellectual immaturity, political naivete, even psychological pathology. But Romanticism spread across Europe in roughly the same pattern as the economic and political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[82] To understand Romanticism, including its Russian variant, we need to understand the world that gave birth to it. It was a world of chaos, of rapid change, of struggles over power. The revolutions of 1776 and 1789 had turned it upside down, yet there was less order in that inversion than chaos and indeterminacy, for if old forms of oppression and power had lost their meaning, the new were still in flux and were on their way to creating new oppressions. The Industrial Revolution too wreaked havoc as it brought to power a new class of oppressors, the capitalists. It was a world of incredible wealth and astounding poverty. It was a world in which for a time everything seemed possible—at least to those who did not do the work that kept everything going, the peasants, workers, and native peoples. Caught between the possibilities opened up by the French Revolution and the terrible reality of the Terror, reaction, empire, and capitalism, it was clear the world could not—and should not—return to the old ways while the new ways offered up new forms of horror along with their promises.

Romanticism spoke to the chaos, promise, and betrayals of the age. In the English-speaking world, this was obvious in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who celebrated the possibility for freedom as he deplored the harsh reality of wage labor in field and factory. William Blake wrote of the “dark, Satanic mills,” while Byron’s first speech in the House of Lords, delivered in 1812, was a vigorous defense of the Luddites, those highly skilled weavers who smashed the machinery brought in to lower their wages and throw them out of work. Other writers reacted against industrialization as they saw how it turned human beings into factors of production, pressed children into factory labor, took peasants from the countryside and smashed them into those dark Satanic mills and foul, diseased, dank city boroughs. They saw full well the dislocation and rot of the new world order. They noted how the promise of rational enlightenment was betrayed not by its thinkers but by the pragmatic men of politics and business, who used the potential of political and economic revolution not to free humanitv but to imprison it with chains as hard and tight and short as any the aristocracy had ever forged. In a world where reason itself had been shackled to the loom, where art was now a mirror to reflect the fat faces of contented captains of industry, the Romantics shouted, “Stop!”

In Russia too, Romanticism was not a withdrawal into a dreamy, languid world of unrequited love, quixotic gesture, and heavy sighs. There, the failure of social change created much the same reaction among its educated young men and women as violent change had provoked in other parts of Europe. After all, what more graphic proof of the failure of the old regime could one ask for than the disaster of the French invasion? What regime in Europe offered less opportunity for its educated youth? Where had “the people” done so much to save the empire and received so little in return? Where were new ideas more fiercely burned out by secret police, imprisoned in dank dungeons, and suspended from the hangman’s noose? The inability of the regime to change and its retreat to orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality under Nicholas I pushed young Russian thinkers and artists to look to the West for inspiration. That meant Romanticism and its ideals, conflicted though they may have been.

Thus it was not odd that the foremost Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin, would take up Romantic themes, for everything in his experience confirmed the critique of the British Romantics. His work hearkened back to a mythic Russian past in The Bronze Horseman and praised the virtues and lamented the sufferings of the folk in The History of the Pugachev Rebellion. Though political thought was much less developed in Russia, Pushkin and other Russia Romantics such as Venevitinov, like Shelley and Byron, were deeply concerned with political questions. Pushkin’s 1820 “Ode to Liberty” was judged sufficiently rebellious to get him exiled to Southern Russia. Venevitinov had been arrested in 1826 for his connections to the Decembrists and had created a small society or circle called the “Society of Wisdom Lovers” that read and debated literature, philosophy, and politics. As a literary taste, as a way to make some sense of a troubled world, as an available commodity, as a rebellious attitude, Romanticism was as prevalent in Russia as anywhere and for all the same reasons, and it signaled an engagement with the real world, not a retreat from it.

Michael Bakunin was not making much of a political or philosophical statement when he took the volume of Venevitinov with him. But he was beginning to ask important questions about his life and surroundings; he was beginning to evolve into a rebel. Trapped between wanting to do what his family thought was right and what he needed to do to be true to himself, there was no clear or obvious way out of his dilemma in a regime that provided so few options. For Bakunin, it meant that soon the personal would become the political.

[55] Alexander Bakunin’s poem is from Randolph, page 195.

[56] Carr, page 10; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his aunts, 9 December 1828; for Michael’s initial delight, see Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his father, 15 December 1837; for the tsar’s dash, see Lincoln, pages 186–7; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, spring 1829; Varvara Bakunin cited in Randolph, page 199.

[57] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, 17 March 1830.

[58] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Histoire da ma vie,” 1871.

[59] Carr, page 10; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Histoire da ma vie,” 1871, letter to his father, 15 December 1837.

[60] See John L. Keep, Power and the People: Essays on Russian History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, especially “The Military Style of the Romanov Rulers,” pages 189 209, and “From the Pistol to the Pen: The Military Memoir as a Source on Social History of Pre-Reform Russia,” pages 239–66. See also his Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, pages 323–47. Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, Toronto: ECW Press, 1997, page 9.

[61] See Lincoln, Nicholas I, pages 54–62; Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, page 323; Keep, “The Military Style of the Romanov Rulers,” pages 190–1.

[62] See Keep, “From the Pistol to the Pen,” pages 253–6, for military salaries; Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, pages 335–40, for the costs of military service and the death rate from illness.

[63] This judgment of Michael is cited in Keep, “The Military Style of the Romanov Rulers,” page 196; Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, page 347.

[64] Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, page 243; Lincoln, pages 54–5; Keep, “From the Pistol to the Pen,” pages 256–60; Randolph, page 151.

[65] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 20 September 1831. For the translation of Pushkin, I have relied on Arndt, Pushkin Threefold, pages 44–5.

[66] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, spring 1831.

[67] See Marshall Shatz, “Mikhail Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle,” pages 7–8; Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

[68] For Russian military school students in general, see Keep, “From the Pistol to the Pen,” page 257. For Bakunin on his anxieties regarding his studies and his illnesses, see Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letters to his parents, 16 March 1830 and 6 December 1831. For other complaints and work habits, see letter to sisters, May 1832; letters to parents, April 1832, 27 May 1832, 17 June 1832, 17 September 1832, 5 November 1832, 17 January 1833, 12 July 1833, 15 December 1837.

[69] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 16 March 1830.

[70] For cadets and lies, see Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his father, 15 December 1837; also Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 30 August 1831; Mendel, page 20; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, April 1832.

[71] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 12 July 1833; letter to his father, 15 December 1837. See Marshall S. Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and His Biographers: The Question of Bakunin’s Sexual Impotence.”

[72] Carr, pages 10–11; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 12 July 1833.

[73] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, 2 March 1830; Mendel, page 5; Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, 16 April 1832, 2 February 1833.

[74] Contrary to popular belief and thousands of buttons and T-shirts, it appears Emma Goldman never made the famous remark. It is, however, certainly in keeping with her belief that revolution should be joyous rather than dour. For an account of how the slogan became attributed to Goldman, see Alix Kates Shulman, “Dances with Feminists,” Women’s Review of Books, 9, no. 3 (December 1991). For letters outlining Bakunin’s pastimes outside military school, see Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letters to his sisters, summer 1830 and 5 May 1831; letter to his parents, 29 December 1831; letter to his sisters, 6 January 1832; letter to his parents, 16 April 1832; letters to his sisters, 17 January 1833 and 2 February 1833; letter to his parents, 11 February 1833; letters to his sisters, 11 February 1833, 17 March 1830, summer 1830, and 5 May 1831; letters to his parents, 30 August 1831 and 6 December 1831; letters to his sisters, 29 December 1831 and 6 January 1832; letter to his parents, 6 February 1832. His dislike of dancing is in letter to his sisters, 28 August 1832.

[75] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 17 January 1833; letters to his sisters, 17 January 1833 and 28 March 1833; letter to his father, 15 December 1837.

[76] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letters to his sisters, 11 February 1833 and 28 March 1833; letter to Varvara, 5–8 March 1833.

[77] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 5–8 March 1833. Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, Richard Miller, trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

[78] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 5–8 March 1833.

[79] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 5–8 March 1833.

[80] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, April 1832.

[81] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his father, 15 December 1837.

[82] For the Romantics in general, see the splendid overview in Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, pages 307–35.