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Title: Letter to Sergey Nechayev
Author: Mikhail Bakunin
Date: 1870
Language: en
Topics: letter
Source: Retrieved on 2020-08-26 from https://sovversiva.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/bakunin-letter-to-sergey-nechayev/
Notes: From Michael Confino: “Daughter of a Revolutionary: natalie Herzen and the Bakunin/Nechayev Circle”, transl. by Hilary Sternberg and Lydia Bott. Library Press, LaSalle, Illinois 1974.

Mikhail Bakunin

Letter to Sergey Nechayev

2 June 1870 Locarno

DEAR FRIEND,

I now address you and, through you, your and our Committee. I trust that

you have now reached a safe place where, free from petty squabbles and

cares, you can quietly consider your own and our common situation, the

situation of our common cause.

Let us begin by admitting that our first campaign which started in 1869

is lost and we are beaten. Beaten because of two main causes; first –

the people, who we had every right to hope would rise, did not rise. It

appears that its cup of suffering, the measure of its patience, has not

yet overflowed. Apparently no self-confidence, no faith in its rights

and its power, has yet kindled within it, and there were not enought men

acting in common and dispersed throughout Russia capable of arousing

this confidence. Second cause: our organization was found wanting both

in quality and quantity of its members and in its structure. That is why

we were defeated and lost much strength and many valuable people.

This is an undisputable fact which we ought to realize without

equivocation in order to make it a point departure for further

deliberations and deeds.

You, and doubtless your friends as well, had realized it long before you

spoke to me about it. In fact one could say that you never spoke to me

about it and I had to guess it for myself from many abvious

contradictions in your talk and finally to convince myself by reference

to the general state of affairs which spoke so clearly that it was

impossible to hide it even from uninitiated friends. You more than half

realized it when you visited me in Locarno. But nevertheless you spoke

to me with complete assurance and in the most positive manner about the

imminence of the inevitable revolt. You decieved me, while I,

suspecting, or feeling instinctively the presence of deceit, consciously

and systematically refused to believe it. You continued to speak and act

as if you told me nothing but the truth. Had you shown me the real state

of affairs during your stay in Locarno, as regards both the people and

the organization, I would have written my appeal to the officers in the

same spirit but in different words. This would have been better for me,

for you and, most important, for the cause. I would not have spoken to

them about the impending rising.

I am not angry with you and I do not reproach you, knowing that if you

lie or hide the truth, you do it without self-interest and only because

you consider it useful to the cause. I, and all of us, love you

sincerely and have a great respect for you because we have never met a

man more unselfish and devoted to the cause than you are.

But neither love nor respect can prevent me telling you frankly that the

system of deceit, which is increasingly becoming your sole system, your

main weapon and means, is fatal to the cause itself.

But before trying, and I hope succeeding, in proving this to you, I must

say a few words about my attitude to you and to your Committee and will

try to explain why, in spite of all forebodings and rational or

instinctive doubts which increasingly forewarned me about the truth of

your words, up to my last visit to Geneva I spoke and acted as if I

believed them unreservedly.

It might be said that I have been separated from Russia for thirty

years. From 1840 to 1851 I was abroad, first with a passport, then as an

émigré. In 1851, after a two-year imprisonment in Saxon and Austrian

fortresses I was extradicted to the Russian government which held me

prisoner for another six years, first in the Alexeev ravelin of the

Peter and Paul Fortress, then in Schlüsselburg. In 1857 I was sent to

Siberia and spent two years in western and two in eastern Siberia. In

1861 I fled from Siberia and since then, obviously, I have not returned

to Russia. Therefore in the last thirty years I have only lived four

years (nine years ago) from 1857 to 1861 in freedom in Russia, i.e. in

Siberia. This of course gave me the opportunity of getting to know the

Russian people better, the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, the

merchants (specifically the Siberian merchants), but not the

revolutionary youth. In my time there were no other political exiles in

Siberia, except a few Decembrists and Poles. True, I knew also the four

Petrashevtsy: Petrashevsky himself, Lvov and Tol, but these people

represented only a sort of transition from the Decembrists to the real

youth – the were doctrinaire, bookish socialists, Fourierists and

pedagogues. I do not know the real youth in whom I believe, this

classless class, this hopeless phalanx of the people’s revolution about

whom I have written several times and only now gradually begin to learn.

The majority of Russians who came to London to do homage to Alexander

Herzen were either respectable people, or writers or liberally and

democratically inclined officers. The first serious Russian

revolutionary was Potebnya; the second was you. I shall not speak about

Utin and the other Geneva em igrants. Thus, before I met you, the real

Russian revolutionary youth remained for me terra incognita.

I did not need much time to understand your earnestness and to believe

you. I was convinced and still remain convinced that even if you were

few, you represent a serious undertaking, the only serious revolutionary

movement in Russia. Having been convinced of this, I said to myself that

my duty lay in helping you with all my power and means and in allying

myself as much as possible with your Russian cause. This decision was

all the easier for me because your programme, at least during the last

year, not only resembled but was identical with my programme, worked out

on the basis of the total experience of a rather long political life.

Let us define in a few lines this programme on the basis of which we

were completely united last year and from which you seem now to be

departing to a considerable extent, but to which I, on my side, have

remained faithful to a degree which would oblige me to break all

intimate political relations with you, if your convictions and your, or

your friends’, departure from it were completely final.

The programme can be clearly expressed in a few words: total destruction

of the framework of state and law and of the whole of the so-called

bourgeois civilization by a spontaneous people’s revolution invisibly

led, not by an official dictatorship, but by a nameless and collective

one, composed of those in favour of total people’s liberation from all

oppression, firmly united in a secret society and always and everywhere

acting in support of a common aim and in accordance with a common

programme.

Such was the ideal and such was the plan on the basis of which I joined

you and gave you my hand in order to realize it. You know yourself how

faithful I remained to the promise of the union which I recognized. You

know how much faith I had in you, having once convinced myself of your

earnestness and in the simularity in our revolutionary programmes. I did

not ask who your friends were, nor how many. I did not check your

strength; I took your word.

Did I believe out of weakness, out of blindness, or because of

stupidity? You know yourself that this is not so. You know very well

that I was never given to blind faith. That even last year when we

talket alone together, and once at Ogarev’s and in his presence, I told

you clearly that we ought not to believe you as you were quite capable

of lying when you thought that a lie might be useful to the cause. We

thus had no other guarantee of the truth of your words but your obvious

sincerity and undoubted devotion to the cause. This was an important

guarantee which, however, did not save you from mistakes and us from

blunders if we follow you blindly.

Despite this conviction of which I spoke to you several times, I stayed

in contact with you and helped you everywhere and as much as I could. Do

you want to know why I did it?

Firstly, because, up to your departure from Geneva for Russia, our

programmes were truly identical. I was convinced of this not only by our

daily conversations, but by the fact that all my writings, conceived and

printed while you were here, evoked in you a sympathetic response

precisely on the points which most clearly expressed our common

programme and because your writings, printed last year, bore the same

character.

Secondly, because acknowledging your real and indefatigable strength,

devotion, passion and power of thought, I considered you, and still

consider you, capable of uniting around yourself real forces, not for

your own sake but for the cause. I said to myself and to Ogarev that if

they are not yet united, they will necessarily be so shortly.

Thirdly, because of all the Russian people whom I knew I considered you

the most capable of carrying out this enterprise and I said to myself

and to Ogarev that there was no point in waiting for another man, that

we were both old and unlikely to meet another man more dedicated and

more able than you. That is why, if we want to be allied with the

Russian cause, we must be allied with you and with no one else. We do

not know your Committee, or your Society, and can form an opinion about

them only through you. If you are in earnest, why should your present

and future friends not be in earnest too? Your earnestness was for me a

guarantee that, on the one hand you would not admit worthless people to

your company and, on the other, that you will not remain alone and will

attempt to create a collective force.

You have, it is true, a weak point which astounded me from the first

days of our acquaintance and to which, I confess, I did not attach

sufficient importance. This is your inexperience, your ignorance of life

and people and, associated with this, a fanaticism bordering on

mysticism. Your ignorance of the social conditions, customs, morals,

ideas and usual feelings of the so-called educated world renders you

even now incapable of successful action in this environment even with a

view to its destruction. You do not know as yet how to acquire inluence

and power within it, which is bound to lead to inevitable blunders every

time the needs of the cause bring you in contact with it. This was

clearly demonstrated in your ill-fated attempt to publish Kolokol in

impossible conditions. But we shall talk about Kolokol later. This

ignorance of men leads to inevitable blunders. You demand too much and

expect too much from people, giving them tasks beyond their strength in

the belief that all people must be filled with the same passion which

animates you. At the same time you do not believe in them, and

consequently you do not take into consideration the passion which is

aroused within them, their orientation, their independently honest

devotion to your aim. You try to subdue them, frighten them, to tie them

down by external controls which mostly prove to be inadequate, so that

once they get into your hands they can never tear themselves free. And

at the same time they do escape, and will continue to escape as long as

you do not change your behaviour towards them, while you do not look

within them for the main reason for joining you. Do you remember how

cross you were when I called you an Abrek and your catechism a catechism

of Abreks? You said that all men should be such, that a complete

renunciation of self, of all personal wishes, pleasures, feelings,

affections and ties, should be a normal, natural, everyday condition of

everybody without exception. You wished, and still wish, to make your

own selfless cruelty, your own truly extreme fatanticism, into a rule of

common life. You wish for an absurdity, an impossibility, a total

negation of nature, man, and society. This wish is fatal because it

forces you to spend your strength in vain. always shooting to miss. No

man, however strong he is, and no society, however perfect its

discipline and however powerful its organization, can conquer nature.

Only religious fanatics and ascetics could try to conquer it – that is

why I was not very surprised, or suprised for long, when I recognized in

you a certain mystical, pantheistic idealism. In connection with your

characteristic orientation this seemed to me completely obvious, but

completely absurd. Yes, dear friend, you are not a materialist like us

sinners, but an idealist, a prophet like a monk of the Revolution, your

hero should not be Babeuf, not even Marat, but some sort of Savonarola.

According to your way of thinking, you are nearer to the Jesuits than to

us. You are a fanatic. This is your enormous and peculiar strength. But

at the same time this is your blindness, and blindness is a great and

fatal weakness; blind energy errs and stumbles, and the more powerful it

is, the more inevitable and serious are the blunders. You suffer from an

enormous lack of the critical sense without which it is impossible to

evaluate people and situations, and to reconcile means with ends.

All this I understood and realized last year. But for me all this was

balanced in your favour by two considerations. Firstly, I recognized

(and still recognize) in you a great and, one might say, perfectly pure

force, free of any admixture of self-love or vanity, such as I had never

met in any Russian. Secondly, I told and still tell myself that you are

still young and whole-hearted, and being without personal egoistical

whims and selfdelusions you cannot long remain on the wrong path and

under a delusion which is fatal to the cause. I am still convinced of

this.

Finally, I clearly saw and felt that you were far from having full

confidence in me and in many respects attempted to use me as a means to

immediate aims which were unknown to me. But this did not bother me at

all.

Firstly, I liked your silence about the people involved in your

organization, and the conviction that in such movements even the most

trusted people should know only as much as is practically necessary for

the success of their particular enterprise. You will do me the justice

of admitting that I never asked you indiscreet questions. Even if you

had, contrary to your duty, given me some names, I should not have known

the people to whom these names belonged. I would have had to judge them

on your word, and I believed and believe in you. Composed of people like

you who have earned your total trust, the Committee, should, I think, be

equally trusted by us.

The question is: Did your organization really exist, or were you only

going to create it somehow or other? If it did exist, was it large, did

it at least represent an embryo of power, or did this all exist only as

a hope? Did our holy of holies, the Committee itself, exist in the shape

you described and with the undoubted unity of forces for life or death –

or were you only going to create it? In a word, were you the only

representative of a quite respectable individual power, or of a

collective power already in existence? And if the society and the

Central Committee really existed, and assuming the participation in it

(particularly in the Committee) of only true, firm, fanatically devoted

and selfless people like you, still another question arises: Was, and

is, there in it sufficient common sense and knowledge, sufficient

theoretical training and ability to understand the conditions and

relationships of the Russian people and classes to make the

revolutionary Committee effective to cover the whole of Russian life and

penetrate all social strata with a really powerful organization? The

sincerity of the cause depends on the fervent energy of the

participants, its success on their common sense and knowledge.

In order to discover this both as regards actual and potential

development, i.e. in the spirit of your movement, I asked you many

questions and I must confess that your replies did not satisfy me in the

least. However much you wriggled and dodged, you told me, in spite of

yourself, that your society was still numerically insignificant and

lacked funds. It had as yet very little common sense, knowledge and

skill. But the Committee is created by you and certainly from people

like you, among who you are one of the best and most determined. You are

the creator and, up to now, leader of the society. All this, dear

friend, I understood and learned last year. But this did not in any way

prevent me from joining you, recognizing in you an intelligent and

passionately devoted activist of a sort which is rare, and being certain

that you had managed to find at least a few people like you and unite

with them. Also I was, and still am, certain that with experience and

sincere and tireless aspiration you would soon achieve that knowledge,

wisdom and skill without which no success is possible. And as I did not,

andx do not now, suppose that there can exist in Russia in addition to

your group another group as much in earnest as yours, I decided, in

spite of everything, to remain united with you.

I did not hold it against you that you always tried to exaggerate your

strength to me. This is an objective, often useful and sometimes bold

gesture of all conspirators. It is true that I saw your attempts to

deceive me as proof of your as yet insufficient knowledge of people. It

seemed to me that from our talks you ought to have understood that in

order to attract me there was no need to furnish proof of an already

existing and organized power, but only proof of an unbending and

reasonable determination to create such a power. I also understood that

you were appearing before me as if you were an envoy of an existing and

fairly powerful organization. Thus, it seemed to you, you put yourself

into a position to present your conditions as emanating from great

power, while you actually appeared before me as a person who was in the

process of collecting strength. You should have talket to me as an

equal, person to person, and submit for my [approval] your programme and

[plan] of action.

But this did not enter into your calculations. You were too fanatically

devoted to your plan and your programme to subject them to criticism by

anyone. And secondly you did not have enough faith in my devotion to the

cause, in my understanding of it, to show me the cause as it really was.

You were sceptical about all émigrés, and you were right. About me you

were probably less sceptical than about others, because I gave you too

many proofs of my readiness to serve the cause without any personal

demands or vainglorious calculations. But you still considered me as an

indalid whose counsels and knowledge might sometimes be useful, but no

more; whose participation in your fervent efforts would have been

superfluous and even harmful. I saw this very well but it did not offend

me. You knew this could not prompt me to break with you. It was not my

business to prove to you that I was not such a hopelessly unfit case for

an ardent, a real movement as you thought. I left it (and leave it) to

time and your own experience to convince me of the contrary.

At the same time there existed, and still exists, a special circumstance

which forced and forces me to be particularly careful in relation to all

Russian affairs and people. This is my total lack of funds. I have

struggled with poverty all my life, and every time I have managed to

undertake and do something more or less useful, I had to do it not with

my own, but with other people’s money. For a long time it has drawn down

on me a whole cloud of slander and reproach, particularly from Russian

blackguards.

These fellows have totally besmirched my reputation and thus paralyzed

my activities to a considerable extent. I needed all the genuine passion

and sincere determination which I recognize in myself, from experience

and not boastfully, to prevent me from breaking and discontinuing my

activities. You also know how untrue and ignoble are the rumours about

my personal luxury, about my attempts to make a fortune at the expense

of others and by duping them. In spite of this, the Russian émigré

blackguards, Utin and Co, dare to call me a swindler and a self-seeking

exploiter, me, who ever since I can remember have never lived or wanted

to live for my own pleasure and have always striven for the liberation

of others. Do not take this as boasting – I tell it to you and to

friends. I feel that it is necessary and right to say it to you once and

for all.

It is clear that in order to devote myself fully to the service of the

cause, I must have the means to live. I am getting old. Eight years of

imprisonment have led to a chronic illness and my impaired health

demands certain care and certain conditions so that I can usefully serve

the cause. I also have a wife and children whom I cannot condemn to

death by starvation. I try to reduce expenses to the minimum, but I

still cannot exist without a certain monthly sum. Where can I get this

sum if I give all my labour to the common cause?

There is another consideration. Having founded some years ago the secret

International Revolutionary Union, I cannot and will not abandon in it

order to devote myself entirely to the Russian cause. And besides, in my

opinion, the international and the Russian cause are one and the same.

Up to now the international cause did not provide me with the means of

existence, but only involved me in expense. This, in a few words, is the

key to my situation. You will understand that this poverty on the one

hand, and ignoble slander spread about me by the Russian émigrés on the

other, hamper me in relation to all new people and to all my activities.

You see how many reasons there were not to foist myself upon you, not to

demand your trust to a greater extent than you deemed useful; to wait

until you and your friends should finally be convinced of the

possibility, the usefulness, and the necessity of trust.

At the same time I saw and felt very keenly that in approaching me not

as an equal, not as a trusting person or as a trustworthy one, you

considered me, according to your system and obeying so to say the logic

of necessity, a three-quarters blind but experienced instrument for the

cause and used my name and my activity as a means. Thus, in fact,

lacking the power which you pretended to have, you used my name in order

to create power in Russia. So that many people do in fact think that I

stand at the head of a secret society about which, as you are aware, I

know nothing.

Should I have allowed my name to be used as a means of propaganda and in

order to attract people into an organization whoose plans and immediate

aims were three-quaters unknown to me? Without hesitation I reply in the

affirmative, yes, I could and should. Here are my reasons:

Firstly, I was always convinced that the Russian Revolutionary Committee

could and should act only within Russia, and it is an absurdity to the

lead the Russian revolution from abroad.

If you and your friends remained abroad for a long time, I should have

proclaimed you incapable of remaining members of the Committee. If you

become émigrés, you will have, as I have had, to accept orders, as far

as any Russian movement is concerned, from the undisputed leadership of

a new Committee in Russia recognized by you on the basis of mutually

discussed programmes and plans; while you yourself would have to create

a Russian Committee Abroad for independent management of all Russian

relations, activities, individuals and groups abroad, in full agreement

with the views of the Russian Committee, but with suitable autonomy in

the choice of men and methods of action and, most important, in complete

agreement with the International Union. In such case I would demand, as

my duty and right, full membership of this Russian Committee Abroad,

which I did, by the way, in my last letter to the Committee and to you,

recognizing the fact that the Russian Committee must be within Russia

itself. Obviously did I not wish, nor was I able, to return to Russia,

and so do not desire to be a member of that. I got to know its programme

and the general aims of its activity through you. I was in full

agreement with you and expressed my readiness and my firm resolution to

help and serve it by all means available to me. Since you considered my

name useful for attracting new people into your organization, I gave you

my name. I knew that it would be used for the cause and our common

programme and that your character was a guarantee of this, and was not

afraid that, as a consequence of mistakes and blunders, I might be

generally condemned – I am used to insults.

However, you remember that last summer we agreed that all Russian

efforts and persons abroad should be known to me, and nothing that was

done or undertaken abroad should be done without my knowledge and

consent. This was an essential condition. Firstly, because I know the

world abroad much better than any of you and, secondly, because and a

blind and dependent solidarity with you in actions and publications

abroad might conflict with my duties and rights as a member of the

International Union. This condition, as we shall see, was not carried

out by you and if it is not going to be carried out completely, I shall

be forced to break off all intimate political relations with you.

To begin with, my views are different in that they do not acknowledge

the usefulness, or even the possibility, of any revolution except a

spontaneous or a people’s social revolution. I am deeply convinced that

any other revolution is dishonest, harmful, and spells death to liberty

and the people. It dooms them to new penury and new slavery. But the

main point is that any other revolution has now become impossible and

unattainable. Centralization and civilization; railways, the telegraph,

new arms and new military organization; in general the techniques of

administration, i.e., the science of systematic enslavement and

exploitation of the masses of the people; and the science and

suppression of people’s and all other riots, carefully worked out,

tested by experiment and perfected in the last seventy-five years of

contemporary history – all this has at present armed the state with such

enormous power that all contrived secret conspiracies and non-popular

attempts, sudden attacks, surprises and coups – are bound to be

shattered against it. It can only be conquered by a spontaneous people’s

revolution.

Thus the sole aim of a secret society must be, not the creation of an

artificial power outside the people, but the rousing, uniting and

organizing of the spontaneous power of the people; therefore, the only

possible, the only real revolutionary army is not outside the people, it

is the people itself. It is impossible to arouse the people

artificially. People’s revolutions are born from the course of events,

or from historical currents which, coontinuously and usually slowly,

flow underground and unseen within the popular strata, increasingly

embracing, penetrating, and undermining them, until they emerge from the

ground and their turbulent waters break all barriers and destroy

everything that impedes their course.

Such a revolution cannot be artificially induced. It is even impossible

to hasten it, although I have no doubt that an efficient and intelligent

organization can facilitate the explosion. There are historical periods

when revolutions are simply impossible; there are other periods when

they are inevitable. In which of the two periods are we today? I am

deeply convinced that we are in a period of a general, inevitable

popular revolution. I will refrain from proving the truth of this

conviction because this will lead me too far. Furthermore, it is

unnecessary for me to prove it as I address a man and people who, I

think, fully share this conviction. I maintain that a popular social

revolution is inevitable everywhere within Europe as a whole. Will it

catch fire soon and where first? In Russia, or in France, or elsewhere

in the West? Nobody can foretell. Perhaps it will blaze up in a year’s

time, or even earlier, or perhaps in ten or twenty years. This does not

matter, and the people who intend to serve it honestly, do not serve for

their own pleasure. All secret societies who wish to be really useful to

it must, first of all, renounce all nervousness, all impatience. They

must not sleep; on the contrary, they must be as ready as possible every

minute of the time, alert and always capable of seizing every

opportunity. But, at the same time, they must be harnessed and

organized, not with a view to an imminent rising, but aiming at long and

patient underground work, taking as an example your friends the Jesuit

fathers.

I will confine my coonsiderations to Russia. When will the Russian

revolution break out? We do not know. Many, and I a sinner among them,

ezpected a people’s rising in 1870, but the people did not awake. Must

we conclude that the Russian people can do without the revolution, that

it will pass them by? No, this conclusion is impossible; it would be

nonsense. Whoever knows the desperate, indeed critical condition of our

people economically and politically and, on the other hand, the absolute

incapacity of our government and our state not only to alter it, but to

ameliorate it at all, an incapacity stemming not from one or another

characteristic of the individuals in our government, but from the very

essence of any government structture and our government in particular,

must conclude that the Russian people’s revolution is inevitable. It is

not only negatively but positively inevitable, because our people, in

spite of its ignorance, has historically arrived at an ideal which it

strives, consciously or not, to achieve. This ideal is the common

ownership of land with freedom from state oppression and all extortion.

The people tried to achieve this under the False Dimitris, under Stenka

Razin, and under Pugachev, and still tries by means of continual riots

which are, however, scattered and therefore always suppressed.

I have merely pointed out the two main features of the Russian people’s

ideal and do not claim the describe it fully in a few words. One does

not know what else exists in the intellectual aspirations of the Russian

people and what will emerge in the light of day with the first

revolution. At the moment it suffices for me to prove that our land is

not a blank page on which any secret society can write whatever it

wishes – for instance, say, your Communist Programme. It has worked out,

partly consciously, probably three-quarters unconsciously, its own

programme which the secret society must get to know or guess and to

which it would have to adapt itself if it wants to succeed.

It is an undisputable and well-known fact that under Stenka Razin and

also under Pugachev, every time the people’s rising succeeded for a

while, the people did one thing only: they took all the land into common

ownership, sent the landowning gentry and the Tsar’s government

officials, sometimes the clergy as well, to the devil and organized its

own free commune. This means that our people holds in its memory and as

its ideal one precious element which the Western people do not possess,

that is, a free economic community. In our people’s life and thought

there are two principles, two facts on which we can build: frequent

riots and a free economic community. There is a third principle, a third

fact, this is the Cossacks and the world of brigands and thieves which

includes both protest against oppression by the state and by the

patriarchal society and incorporates, so to say, the first two features.

Frequent riots, although they are always provoked by accidental

circumstances, nevertheless stem from general causes and express the

deep and general dissatisfaction of the people. They constitute, in a

way, an everyday and customary phenomenon of the Russian people’s life.

There is no village in Russia which is not deeply discontented which its

condition, which does not experience poverty, overcrowding, oppression,

and which does not hide, in the depth of its collective heart, the

desire to seize all the land belonging to the landslords and then that

of the richer peasants (kulaks), and the conviction that this is its

indubitable right. There is no village which, with skill, cannot be

induced to revolt. If the villages do not revolt more often, this is due

to fear or to a realization of their weakness. This awareness comes from

the disunity of peasant communes, from the lack of real solidarity among

them. If each village knew that when it rises all others will rise, one

could say for certain that there is no village in Russia which would not

revolt. Hence it follows that the first duty, purpose and aim of a

secret organization is to awaken in all peasant communities a

realization of their inevitable solidarity and thus to arouse the

Russian people to a consciousness of their power – in other words, to

merge the multitude of private peasant revolts into one general

all-people’s revolt.

One of the main means for the achievement of this aim, I am deeply

convinced, must and should be our free Cossacks, our innumerable saintly

and not so saintly tramps (brodiagi), pilgrims, members of ”beguny”

sects, thieves, and brigands – this whole wide and numerous underground

world wcich from time immemorial has protested against the state and

statism and against the Teutonic civilization of the whip. This was

expressed in the anonymous broadsheet Statement of the Revolutionary

Question which provoked a howl of indignation from all our vainglorious

chatterers who take their doctrinaire Byzantine words for deeds. This,

however, is quite correct and is confirmed by all our history. The world

of Cossacks, thieves, brigands and tramps played the role of a catalyst

and unifier of separate revolts under Stenka Razin and under Pugachev.

The tramping fraternity are the best and truest conductors of people’s

revolution, promoters of general popular unrest, this precursor of

popular revolt. Who does not know that tramps, given the opportunity,

easily turn into thieves and brigands? In fact, who among us in Russia

is not a brigand and a thief? Is it perhaps the government? Or our

official and private speculators and fixers? Or our landowners and our

merchants? For myself, I cannot tolerate either brigandage or thieving,

nor any other anti-human violence. But I confess, if I had to choose

between the brigandage and thieving of those occupying the throne and

enjoying all privileges. and popular thieving and brigandage, I would,

without hesitation, take the side of the latter. I find it natural,

necessary, and even, in some sense, legal. I must confess that the

popular world of brigands is far from beautiful from the truly human

point of view. But what is beautiful in Russia? Can anything be dirtier

than our respectable official or civilized bourgeois and decent world,

which hides under its smooth Western form the most horrible depravity of

thought, feelings, relationships and deeds, or at best a joyless and

inescapable emptiness! On the other hand, the people’s depravity is

natural, forceful and vital. By sacrifice over many centuries the people

have earned the right to it. It is a mighty protest against the root

cause of all depravity and against the state and, therefore, contains

the seeds of the future. That is why I am on the side of popular

brigandage and see in it one of the most essential tools for the future

people’s revolution in Russia.

I understand that this could enrage our scrupulous or even unscrupulous

idealists – idealist of all colours from Utin to Lopatin, who imagine

that they can force on the people their ideas, their will, and their

mode of action through an artificial secret organization. I do not

believe in this possibility and am convinced that as soon as the

All-Russian state is destroyed, from wherever this destruction comes,

the people will rise not for Utin’s, or Lopatin’s, or even for your

ideal, but for their own, that no artificial conspiratorial force will

be capable of containing or even altering its native movement – as no

dam can contain a turbulent ocean. You, my friends, will be sent flying

like chips of wood, if you cannot swim with the popular current. I am

certain that with the first big popular revolt, the world of tramps,

thieves and brigands, which is firmly imbedded in our life and

constitutes one of its essential manifestations, will be on the move and

will move powerfully and not weakly.

Be it good or bad, it is an undisputable and inevitable fact, and

whoever really wishes for a Russian popular revolution, wants to serve

it, help it, organize it, not on paper only but in deed, must know this.

Moreover, he must take this fact into account and not try to avoid it;

he must establish conscious and practical relations with it and be able

to use it as a powerful instrument for the triumph of the revolution. It

is no use being too scrupulous about it. He who wishes to retain his

ideal and virginal purity should stay in the study, dream, think, write

discourses or poetry. He who wants to be a real revolutionary in Russia

must take off his gloves; no gloves will save him from the deep and

all-embracing Russian mud. The Russian world, both privileged state and

poopular, is a terrible world. A Russian revolution will certainly be a

terrible revolution. Whoever is frightened of horrors or dirt should

turn away from this world and this revolution. He who wants to serve the

latter must know what he is facing, must strengthen his nerves, and be

preparing for anything.

It is not easy to use the world of brigandage as a weapon of the

people’s revolution, as a catalyst of separate popular revolts; I

recognize the necessity, but, at the same time, am fully conscious of my

incapacity for this task. In order to undertake it and bring it to a

conclusion, one must be equipped with strong nerves, the strength of a

giant, passionate convictions, and iron will. You might find such people

in your ranks. But people of our generation and with our upbringing are

incapable of it. To join the brigands does not mean becoming wholly one

of them, sharing with them all their unquiet passions, misfortunes,

frequently ignoble aims, feelings and actions; but it does mean giving

them new souls and arousing with them a new, truly popular aim. These

wild and cruelly coarse people have a fresh, strong, untried and unused

nature which is open to lively propaganda, obviously only if the

propaganda is lively and not doctrinaire and is capable of reaching

them. I could say much more on this subject sould our correspondence

continue.

Another precious element in the future life of the Russian people is, as

mentioned before, the free economic commune, a truly precious element

which does not exist in the West. The Western social revolution will

have to create this necessary and basic embryo of all future

organization, and its creation will give a lot of trouble to the West.

Here it is created already. Should revolution occur in Russia, should

the state with all its officials fall into ruin, the Russian peasantry

would organize itself without any trouble the same day. But Russia is

faced with a difficulty of another kind which does not exist in the

West. Our communes are terribly scattered, hardly know each other and

are often at enmity with each other, according to the old Russian

custom. Lately, thanks to the government’s financial measures, they are

becoming used to being joined into rural districts (Volosti) so that the

rural district is progressively acquiring some popular awareness and

content, but that is all. Rural districts do not know and do not want to

know anything about each other. In order to achieve revolutionary

success, to organize future popular liberty, it is essential that rural

districts should, of their own popular volition, join into larger

districts (Uezdy) and these into regions (Oblasti). Regions should set

up a free Russian Federation.

To awaken in our communes the consciousness of this necessity, for the

sake of their own liberty and advantage, is again the task of the secret

organization, since nobody else will want to take on this job which is

totally contrary to the interests of the state and all privileged

classes. This is no place to describe at length how to approach it, and

how and what to do to awaken in the communes this saving consciousness,

the only one promising salvation.

There, my friend, are the main lines of a whole programme for the

Russian popular revolution which is deeply imprinted on the people’s

instinct, on the whole situation of our people. He who wants to be at

the head of a popular movement must adopt it as a whole and execute it.

He who tries to foist his own programme on the people will be left

holding the baby.

As a result of its ignorance and disunity, the people are unable to

formulate the programme, to systemize it and to unite for its sake.

Therefore they need helpers. Where can one find these helpers? This is

the most difficult question in any revolution. In the West as a whole,

up to now, the helpers of the revolution came from the pprivileged

classes, and nearly always became its exploiters. In this respect also,

Russia is more fortunate than the West. There is in Russia an enormous

number of people who are educated, intelligent, and deprived at the same

time of any position and career and without a solution to their problem.

At least three-quaters of young persons studying at the present time

find themselves in this position, theological students, children of

peasants and petty bourgeoisie, children of junior officials and ruined

gentry… but need one speak about this, you know this world better than I

do. If one considers the people as a revolutionary army, here is our

General Staff, here is the precious material for a secret organization.

But this world must be really organized and moralized while your system

depraves it and prepares within it traitors to the system and exploiters

of the people. You must remember that there is very little true morality

within this world with the exception of a small number of strong and

highly moral crachters which have emerged, by Darwinian selection, from

sordid oppression and inexpressible poverty. They are virtuous, i.e.

they love the people and stand for justice against any injustice, for

all ooppressed against all oppressors, only because of their situation,

not consciously or deliberately. Choose a hundred people by lot out of

this world and put them in a situation which would enable them to

exploit and oppress the people – one can be sure that they will exploit

and oppress it. It follows that there is little original virtue in them.

One must use their poverty-stricken condition which makes them virtuous

in spite of themselves and, by constant propaganda and the power of

organization, arouse this virtue, educate it, confirm it in them and

make it passionately conscious. Whereas you do the opposite: following

the Jesuit system you systematically kill all personal human feeling in

them, all feeling of personal fairness – as if feeling and fairness

could be impersonal – educate them in lying, suspicion, spying and

denunciation, relying much more on the external hobbles with which you

have bound them, than on their inner courage. It follows that should

circumstances change, should they realize that the terror of the state

is stronger than the fear which you inspire, they would (educated by

you) become excellent state servants and spies. The fact is now

indisputable, my dear friend, that the overwhelming majority of our

comrades who have fallen into the hands of the police have betrayed

everything and everybody without any special efforts by the government

and without torture. This sad fact should open your eyes and make you

change the system if you are at all capable of amendment.

How can this world be made more moral? By arousing in it frankly and

consciously, by strengthening within its reason and heart one

all-embracing passion for the liberation of the people and all mankind.

This is the new and only religion which has the power to move sould and

create a collective force of salvation. From now on this must be the

exclusive content of our propaganda. Its immediate aim is the creation

of a secret organization, an organization which should, at one and the

same time, create a popular auxiliary force and become a practical

school of moral education for all its members.

Let us first of all define more exactly the aim, meaning, and purpose of

this organization. As I have mentioned several times above, according to

my system it would not constitute a revolutionary army – we should have

only one revolutionary army: the people – the organization should only

be the staff of this army, an organizer of the people’s power, not its

own, a middle-man between popular instinct and revolutionary thought. A

revolutionary idea is revolutionary, vital, real and true only because

it expresses and only as far as it represents popular instincts which

are the result of history. To strive to foist on the people your own

thoughts – foreign to its instincts – implies a wish to make it

subservient to a new state. Therefore, an organization sincerely wishing

only for a liberation of people’s life, must adopt a programme which

should express popular demands as fully as possible. It seems to me that

the programme delineated in the first number of The People’s Cause

(Narodnoe Delo) fully answers this purpose. It does not foist upon the

people any new regulations, orders, styles of life, but merely unleashes

its will and gives wide scope to its self-determination and its economic

and social organization, which must be created by itself from below and

not from above. The organization must accept in all sincerity the idea

that it is a servant and a helper, but never a commander of the people,

never under any pretext its manager, not even under the pretext of the

people’s welfare.

The organization is faced with an enormous task: not only to prepare the

success of the people’s revolution through propaganda and the

unification of popular power; not only to destroy totally, by the power

of this revolution, the whole existing economic, social, and political

order; but, in addition, having survived the success of the revolution,

to make impossible after the popular victory the establishment of any

state power over the people – even the most revolutionary, even your

power – because any power, whatever it called itself, would inevitably

subject the people to old slavery in a new form. Therefore our

organization must be strong and vital to survive the first victory of

the people and – this is not at all a simple matter – the organization

must be so deeply imbued with its principles that one could hope that

even in the midst of revolution it will not change its thoughts, or

character or direction.

Which, then, should be this direction? What would be the main purpose

and task of the organization? To help the people to achieve

self-determination on a basis of complete and comprehensive human

liberty, without the slightest interference from even temporary or

transitional power, i.e. without any mediation of the state.

We are bitter foes of all official power, even if it were

ultra-revolutionary power. We are enemies of all publicly acknowledged

dictatorship; we are social-revolutionary anarchists. But you will ask,

if we are anarchists, by what right do we wish to and by what method can

we influence the people? Rejecting any power, by what power or rather by

what force shall we direct the people’s revolution? An invisible force –

recognized by no one, imposed by no one – through which the collective

dictatorship of our organization will be all the mightier, the more it

remains invisible and unacknowledged, the more it remains without any

official legality and significance.

Imagine yourself in the midst of a successful spontaneous revolution in

Russia. The state and with it all socio-political order in ruins. The

people has risen, has taken all it needed and has chasen away all its

oppressors. Neither law nor power exist any longer. The stormy ocean has

burst all dams. This far from heterogenous, on the contrary extremely

varied mass, the Russian people, covers the illimitable space of the

Russian Empire. It has begun to live and act for itself as it really is,

and no longer as it was ordered to be, everywhere in its own way –

general anarchy. The enormous quantity of mud which has accumulated

within the people is stirred and rises to the surface. In various places

emerge a large number of new, brave, clever, unscrupulous and ambitious

people who, of course, attempt each in his own way to obtain the

people’s trust and to direct it to his own advantage. These people come

into collision, fight and destroy each other. It seems this is a

terrible and hopeless anarchy.

But imagine, in the midst of this general anarchy, a secret organization

which has scattered its members in small groups over the whole territory

of the Empire but, is nevertheless, firmly united: inspired by a common

ideal and a common aim which are applied everywhere, of course modified

according to prevailing conditions: an organization which acts

everywhere according to a common plan. These small groups, unknown by

anybody as such, have no officially recognized power but they are strong

in their ideal, which expresses the very essence of the people’s

instincts, desires and demands, strong also in their vlearly realized

purpose among a mass of people struggling without purpose or plan.

Finally, they are strong in their solidarity which ties all the obscure

groups into one organic whole, in the intelligence and energy of their

members who have managed to create around themselves a circle of people

more or less devoted to the same ideal and naturally subject to their

influence – these groups will be able to lead the popular movement

without seeking for themselves privileges, honours or power, in defiance

of all ambitious persons who are divided and fighting among themselves

and to lead it to the greatest possible realization of the

socio-economic ideal and to the organization of fullest liberty for the

people. This is what I call the collective dictatorship of the secret

organization.

The dictatorship is free from all self-interest, vanity, and ambition

for it is anonymous, invisible, and does not give advantage or honour or

official recognition of power to a member of the group or to the groups

themselves. It does not threaten the liberty of the people because it is

free from all official character. It is not placed above the people like

state power because its whole aim, defined by its programme, consists of

the fullest realization of the liberty of the people.

This dictatorship is not contrary to to the free development and

self-determination of the people, or its organization from below

according to its own customs and instincts for it acts on the people

only by the natural personal influence of its members who are not

invested with any power and are scattered like an invisible net in all

regions, districts, and rural communities and, each one in his own place

and in agreement with others, trying to direct the spontaneous

revolutionary movement of the people towards a general plan which has

been fully agreed and defined beforehand. This plan for the organization

of the people’s liberty must firstly be firmly and clearly delineated as

regards its main principles and aims in order to exclude any possibility

of misunderstanding and deviation by its members who will be called upon

to help in its realization. Secondly, it must be sufficiently wide and

human to embrace and take in all the inescapable changes which arise

from differing circumstances, all varied movements arising from the

variety of national life.

Thus the problem is at present how to organize from elements which we

know and to which we have access this secret collective dictatorship and

strength – which could, firstly, disseminate at present a wide popular

propaganda, a propaganda which would really penetrate among the people,

and by the power of this propaganda and by organization within the

people itself unite the divided strength of the people into a mighty

force which could break the state – and, secondly, which is capable of

remaining in being in the midst of revolution itself without breaking

apart or altering its directiion on the morrow of the people’s

liberation.

This organization, particularly its basic nucleus, must be composed of

persons who are most determined, most intelligent and as far as possible

knowledgable, i.e. intelligent by experience, who are passionately and

undeviatingly devoted, who have, as far as possible, renounced all

personal interests and have renounced once and for all, for life, or for

death itself, all that attracts people, all material comforts and

delights, all satisfaction of ambition, status, and fame. They must be

totally and wholly absorbed by one passion, the people’s liberation.

They must be persons who would renounce personal historical importance

while they are alive and even a name in history after their death.

Such complete self-denial is only possible in the presence of passion.

It cannot be arrived at by a consciousness of absolute duty, but even

less by a system of external control, of restriction and compulsion.

Passion alone can bring about this miracle within a man, this strength

without effort. Where does passion come from, and how does it arise in a

man? It comes from life and arises through an interaction of life and

thought; negatively, as a protest hating all that exists and oppresses;

positively, in the society of people of the same mind and with the same

feelings, as a collective creation of a new ideal. Nevertheless, one

must point out that this passion is only real and salutary when both

sides, the positive and the negative, are closely connected in it. Hate,

the negative side alone, does not create anything, does not even create

the power necessary for destruction and thus destroys nothing. The

positive side alone will not destroy anything since the creation of the

new is impossible without the destruction of the old, and will not

create anything, remaining always a doctrinaire dream or a dreaming

doctrine.

Deep passion which cannot be uprooted or shaken is, therefore, the

foundation of everything. Without it, even if he is the wisest of men,

if he is the most honest of men, he would not have the strength to carry

on to the end the fight against the terrible socio-political power which

oppresses us all. He would not have the strength to withstand all the

difficulties, possibilities, and (most of all) the disappointments which

await him and which he will meet without fail in this unequal and daily

struggle. A passionless man would not have the strength, faith, or

initiative; he would not have the courage; and this business cannot be

carried out without courage. But passion alone is not enough. Passion

engenders energy, but energy without sensible guidance is fruitless and

absurd. Allied to passion there must be reason, cold, calculating, real

and practical, but also based on theory, educated by knowledge and

experience, wide-ranging but not overlooking details, capable of

understanding and discerning people, capable of grasping the realities,

relationships and conditions of social life in all strata of society and

in all their manifestations, in their true aspect and sense and not

arbitrarily and in a dream, as is often done by my friend, namely, you.

Finally, it is necessary to know well both Russia and Europe and the

real social and political situation in both. Thus passion, while always

remaining the basic element, must be led by reason and knowledge, must

not rush aimlessly about but, without losing its inward fire, its

fervent inexorability, must become cold and thereby much stronger.

Here is the ideal of the conspirator destined to be a member of the

nucleus of the secret organization.

You will ask, where are we to find these people, are there many of them

in Russia, or even in the whole of Europe? The point is that according

to my system not many are needed. Remember that you do not have to

create an army but a revolutionary staff. You might find possibly ten

such people who are nearly ready, perhaps fifty or sixty capable of

becoming such men and preparing themselves for this role – this is more

than enough. I am deeply convinced that you yourself, in spite of all

blunders, regrettable and harmful mistakes, in spite of a series of

disgusting petty and stupid deceits, into which you were drawn only by a

false system, not by ambition, vanity, or self-interest, as many, too

many people begin to believe, you with whom I would be obliged to break

and have resolved to do so if you do not renounce this system – you

belong to the number of these rare people. This is the only reason for

my love for you, my faith in you in spite of everything, and my patience

with you, a patience which, however, is now exhausted. In addition to

all your terrible shortcomings and abortive thinking, I recognized and

continue to recognize in you an intelligent, strong and energetic man,

capable of cold calculation and, be it from inexperience, ignorance, and

frequently from false argument, capable also of complete self-denial. A

man passionately and wholly devoted and consecrated to the cause for

popular liberation.

Rebounce your system and you will become a valuable man; if, however,

you do not wish to renounce it, you will certainly become a harmful

militant, highly destructive not to the state but to the cause of

liberty. But I very much hope that the latest events in Russia and

abroad have opened your eyes and that you will want and understand the

necessity of joining hands with us on a basis of sicerity. In that case,

I repeat, we shall acknowledge you as a valuable man and will gladly

recognize you as our leader for all Russian activities. But if you are

as I described, then surely there will be found in Russia at least ten

people like you. I they have not yet been found, look for them and set

up a new society with them on the following principles and mutual

conditions:

1. To adopt fully, wholly and passionately the above-mentioned programme

in The People’s Cause (Narodnoe Delo), with additions and clarifications

which seem necessary to you.

2. Equality among all members and their unconditional and absolute

solidarity – one for all and all for one – with the obligation for each

and everyone to help each other, support and save each other to the

uttermost, in as mych as it is possible without danger of annihilation

to the society itself.

3. Complete frankness among members and proscription of any Jesuitical

methods in their relationship, of all ignoble distrust, all perfidious

control, of spying and mutual accusations, the absence and a positive

strict prohibition of all tattling behind members’ backs. When a member

has to say anything against another member, this must be done at a

general meeting and in his presence. General fraternal control of each

other, a control which should not be captious or petty and above all not

malicious. This type of control must take the place of your system of

Jesuitical control and must become a moral education, a support for the

moral strength of each member. It must be the basis of mutual fraternal

trust on which rests all the internal and, therefore, external power of

the society.

4. All weak-nerved, cowardly, ambitious and self-seeking people are

excluded from the society. They can be used as weapons by the society

without their knowledge, but on no account must they belong to its

nucleus.

5. In joining the society, every member condemns himself for ever to be

socially unknown and insignificant. All his energy and all his

intelligence belong to the society and must be directed not to the

creation of personal social strength, but to the collective strength of

the organization. Each must be convinced that personal influence is

powerless and fruitless and that only collective strength can overcome

the common enemy and achieve the common positive aim. Therefore

collective passion must gradually be substituted for personal passions

within each member.

6. Everyone’s personal intelligence vanishes like a river in the sea in

the collective intelligence and all members obey unconditionally the

decisions of the latter.

7. All members are equal; they know all their comrades and discuss and

decide with them all the most important and essential questions bearing

on the programme of the society and the progress of the cause. The

decision of the general meeting is absolute law.

8. In priciple each member has the right to know everything. But idle

curiosity is forbidden in the society as is aimless talk about the

business and aims of the secret society. Knowing the general programme

and the general direction of affairs, no member asks or tries to fins

out details which are not needed for better execution of that part of

the enterprise with which he is entrusted and, if it is not necessary in

practice, will not talk with any of his comrades about it.

9. The society chooses an Executive Committee from among their number

consisting of three or five members who should organize the branches of

the society and manage its activities in all the regions of the Empire

on the basis of the programme and general plan of action adopted by the

decision of the society as a whole.

10. This Committee is elected for an indefinite term. If the society – I

shall call it the People’s Fraternity – if the People’s Fraternity is

satisfied with the actions of the Committee, it will be left as such;

and while it remains a Committee each member of the People’s Fraternity

and each regional group have to obey it unconditionally, except for such

cases where the orders of the Committee contradict either the general

programme of the principal rules, or the general revolutionary plan of

action, which are known to everybody as all the Brothers have

participated equally in the discussion of them.

11. In such a case members of the group must halt the execution of the

Committee’s orders and call the Committee to judgement before the

general meeting of the People’s Fraternity. If the general meeting is

discontented with the Committee, it can always substitute another one

for it.

12. Any member and any group is subject to judgement by the general

meeting of the People’s Fraternity.

13. Since each Brother knows everything and knows even the personnel of

the Committee, the acceptance of a new member among them must be

conducted with extreme caution, difficulties and obstacles. One bad

cbhoice can ruin everything. No new Brother can be accepted without the

consent of all or at the very least three-quarters of all the members of

the People’s Fraternity.

14. The Committee divides the members of the Fraternity among the

Regions and constitutes Regional groups of leaderships from them. This

leadership could consist of one Brother alone, if there are too few

members.

15. Regional leadership is charged with organizing the second tier of

the society – the Regional Fraternity, on the basis of the same

programme, the same rules, and the same revolutionary plan.

16. All members of the Regional Fraternity know each other, but do not

know of the existence of the People’s Fraternity. They only know that

there exists a Central Committee which hands down to them their orders

for execution through Regional Committee which has been set up by it,

i.e. by the Central Committee.

17. As far as possible the Regional Committee is composed exclusively of

People’s Brothers appointed and replaced by the Central Committee, with

at least one People’s Brother. In such a case this Brother, with the

consent of the C.C., will appoint the two best members of the Regional

Fraternity to act jointly with himself as a Regional Committee; but

these will not have equal membershi rights in so far as only the eople’s

Brother will be in contact with the C.C. whose orders he will pass on to

his comrades of the Regional Committee.

18. People’s Brothers or Brothers in the regions will seek out from

among members of the Regional Fraternity people capable and worthy of

being admitted to the People’s Fraternity, and will introduce them

through the C.C. to the general meeting of the People’s Fraternity.

19. Each Regional Committee will set up District Committees from members

of Regional Fraternity and will appoint and replace them.

20. District Committees can, if necessary and only with the consent of

the Regional Committee, set up a third tier of the organization –

District Fraternity with a programme and regulations of the People’s

Fraternity. The programme and regulations of the District Fraternity

will not come into force until they are discussed and passed by the

general meeting of the Regional Fraternity and have been confirmed by

the Regional Committee.

21. Jesuitical control and a system of entanglement by police methods

and lies are totally excluded from all three tiers of the secret

organization, likewise from the District, Regional, and People’s

Fraternities. The strength of the whole society, as well as the

morality, loyalty, energy and dedication of each member, is based

exclusively and totally on the shared truth, sincerity and trust, and on

the open fraternal control of all over each one.

Here you have the main outline of a plan for the society such as I

conceive it to be. Obviously this plan must be developed, supplemented,

and sometimes altered according to circumstances and the character of

the environment and should be defined much more clearly. But I am

convinced that its essence must remain, if you wish to create a real

collective power which is capable of serving the cause of people’s

liberation and not initiate a new exploitation of the people.

The system of entanglement and of Jesuitical lies is totally excluded

from this plan as being harmful, divisive, and corrupting principle and

means. But parliamentary chatter and ambitious fussiness are also

excluded. Strong discipline of all members in their relations with the

Committees and all individual Committees in their relation with the C.C.

are retained. The right of judgement and control over members belongs to

Fraternities and not to Committees. New executive power is in the hands

of the Committees. The right of judgement over Committees, including the

Central, is the province of the People’s Fraternity alone.

According to my plan the People’s Fraternity will never consist of more

than fifty to seventy members. At first it will probably consist of ten

men or even less and will grow slowly, accepting one man after another,

submitting each one to the strictest and most thorough study and, if

possible, accepting him only with the unanimous consent of all members

of the People’s Fraternity, but in any case not less than three-quarters

of the Fraternity. It is impossible that in the course of two or three

years thirty or forty men cannot be found who would be capable of being

People’s Brothers.

Imagine the People’s Fraternity for the whole of Russia consisting of

forty, at most of seventy members. In addition there would be some

hundreds of members belonging to the second tier of the organization.

Regional Brothers – and you have covered the whole of Russia with a

mighty net. Your staff is set up. One has, as mentioned, assured within

it – in addition to strict caution and the exclusion of all chatter, all

ambitious and idle parliamentary debate – sincerity and mutual trust,

real solidarity, as the only moralizing unifying elements.

The whole society constitute’s one body and a firmly united whole, led

by the C.C. and engaged in unceasing underground struggle against the

government and against other societies either inimical to it or even

those acting independently of it. Where there is war, there is politics,

and there inescapably arises the necessity for violence, cunning, and

deceit.

Societies whose aims are near to ours must be forced to merge with our

society or, at least, must be subordinated to it without their

knowledge, while harmful people must be removed from them. Societies

which are inimical or positively harmful must be dissolved, and finally

the government must be destroyed. All this cannot be achieved only by

propagating the truth; cunning, diplomacy, deceit are necessary. Jesuit

methods or even entanglement can be used for this – entanglement is a

necessary and marvellous means for demoralizing and destroying the

enemy, though certainly not a useful means of obtaining and attracting a

new friend.

Thus this simple law must be the basis of our activity: truth, honesty,

mutual trust between all Brothers and towards any man who is capable of

becoming and whom you would wish to become a Brother – lies, cunning,

entanglement, and, if necessary, violence towards enemies. In this way

you will moralize, strengthen, and unite your own people and destroy the

strength of others.

You, my dear friend – and this is a terrible mistake – have become

fascinated by the system of Loyola and Machiavelli, the first of whom

intended to enslave the whole of mankind, and the second to create a

powerful state (whether monarchist or republican is of no importance, it

would equally lead to the enslavement of the people). Having fallen in

love with police and Jesuitical principles and methods, you intended to

base on them your own organization, your secret collective power, so to

say, the heart and soul of your whole society. You therefore treat your

friends as you treat your enemies, with cunning and lies, try to divide

them, even to foment quarrels, so that they should not be able to unite

against your tutelage. You look for strength not in their unity but in

their disunity and do not trust them at all. You try to collect damning

facts or letters (which frequently you have read without having the

right to do so, and which are even stolen), and try to entangle them in

every way, so that they should be your slaves. At the same time you do

it so clumsily, so awkwardly and carelessly, so rashly and

inconsiderately, that all your deceits, perfidies, and cunning are

exposed very quickly. You have fallen so much in love with Jesuit

methods that you have forgotten everything else. You have even forgotten

the aim which led you to them, the passionate desire for the people’s

liberation. You have so much in love with Jesuit methods that you are

prepared to preach their necessity to anybody, even to Zhukovsky. You

even wanted to write about them, to fill Kolokol (The Bell) with these

theories – reminding one of Suvorov’s saying, ”Thank goodness, he is not

cunning whom everybody knows to be cunning.” Briefly, you are playing

with Jesuit methods as a child plays with a doll or Utin at Revolution.

Now let us have a look at what you have achieved and have had time to do

in Geneva thanks to your Jesuit system. You were given the Bakhmetev

fund. This is the only real result which you have achieved. But Ogarev

gave it to you and I warmly advised that you should be given it, not

because you played the Jesuit with us, but because we felt and

recognized in you, in addition to your far-from-clever Jesuitism, a man

who is deeply, warmly, and earnestly devoted to the Russian cause. But

you know – this is bitter confession for me – I almost repent that I

advised Ogarev to give you the fund. Not because I could think that you

might use it dishonestly or for your own advantage – saints preserve me

from such an ignoble and simply inept thought! I am prepared to answer

with my life that you will never use one penny more than necessary for

yourself. No, I begin to repent because, observing your actions, I have

stopped believing in your political wisdom, in the earnestness and the

reality of your Committee and your whole society. The sum is not large,

but it is the only one and it will disappear in vain, uselessly, and

wantomly in mad and impossible activities.

You could have done a lot of useful things in Geneva with this modest

sum in your hands and with the help of a few people who met you with

complete sincerity and expressed their readiness to serve the common

cause without demands or claims, without vanity or ambition. You could

have set up a serious organ with an avowed social-revolutionary

programme and, attached to it, a foreign bureau for the management of

Russian activities outside Russia and in a certain, though not absolute

but positive […] to it. Your Committee, i.e. you, invited me to Geneva

for this purpose for the first time. What did I find in Geneva? First of

all, a mangled programme for Kolokol on which the Committee and you made

simply absurd and impossible demands. Do you know, I simply cannot

forgive my weakness in yielding to you on this question – I have to

answer for this poor Kolokol and for solidarity with you to all my

international friends, thanks on the one hand to Utin and on the other

to Zhukovsky, the first of whom slanders me and you maliciously, and the

second good-humouredly.

By the way, about Zhukovsky. You demonstrated with regard to him your

complete ignorance and your incomprehension of people, your inability to

attract them in a straight-forward, honest, firm way to your cause.

Knowing him intimately, I have described his character to you in detail,

his abilities and ineptitudes, so that it should not have been difficult

for you to establish serious relations with him. I described him to you

as a very kind and able man, far from stupid, although without any

intellectual initiative, accepting all ideas at second hand and capable

of popularizing them or chattering about them fairly eloquently, not so

much on paper as in conversation. As a man of artistic sensibility

fairly firmly committed to a certain orientation, but without much

cracter, in the sense that he does not like danger, he bows before

strong contradiction and easily succumbs to all sorts of influences. In

a word, he is a man very capable of being a conductor of propaganda, but

completely incapable of being a member of a secret society. You ought to

have believed me, but did not do so; and instead of attracting Zhukovsky

to our cause, alienated him from you and from me. You tried to enlist

and ensnare him, and having ensnared him, to make him your slave. To do

this you started to scold and ridicule me; but Zhukovsky has an instinct

for honesty which rebelled. He told me everything that you told him

about me, told it with indignation and scorn and had I been a vainer and

weaker man this would have been enough for me to break my connection

with you. You will remember that I contented myself with faithfully

repeating to you Zhukovsky’s words without comment. You did not reply,

and I did not think it necessary to continue this discussion. Then you

started to explain to Zhukovsky your favourite stae-communist and

police-Jesuit theories, and this finally estranged him from you.

Finally, there was this unfortunate gossip by Henry, and Zhukovsky

became your bitter and irreconcilable foe, not only your foe but almost

mine as well. And he might have been useful in spite of all his

weaknesses.

I must also confess, dear friend, that your system of blackmailing,

entangling and scaring Tata was extremely repugnant to me and I told you

about this several times. The result was that you instilled in her a

deep suspicion towards all of us and a conviction that you and I

intended to exploit [her] financial resources and to exploit them, of

course, for ourself and not for the cause. Tata is a truly honest and

truthful person incapable, it seems to me, of giving herself completely

to anyone or anything, therefore a dilettante if not by nature then by

perception, an intellectual and moral dilettante, whose word, however,

one can trust and who is capable of being, if not our friend, at least a

true well-wisher. She should have been treated in a straightforward and

honest manner, without resorting to the tricks which you think are your

strength, but which in fact show your weakness. While I considered it

possible and useful to speak to her directly and openly to try to

influence her free convictions, I did so. I did not wish to go any

further with you in this matter as I found it repugnant. As soon as I

heard from you that Natalya Alexeevna had slandered me, maintaining that

I had designs on Tata’s pocket and saw that Tata herself was doubtful,

not knowing whether this was true, I withdrew from her decisively.

By the way, you insisted several times that you heard from Tata herself

that Natalya Alexeevna and Tchorzewski claim everywhere, shout and write

to everybody, that I want to exploit Tata’s financial resources. Natalya

Alexeevna and Tchorzewski, on the contrary, maintain that they have

never written and said it, and Tata herself confirmed this. During your

visit to Geneva you told me that you heard from Serebrennikov (Semen)

that Zhukovsky had told him that I exploit Tata. I asked Serebrennikov

and found out that Zhukovsky said that not about me, but about you. You

also told me that Zhukovsky’s wife tried to persuade you to join Utin,

assuring you that an alliance with me was useless, impossible, and

harmful. She maintains the contrary: she did not speak about me to you;

she did not invite you to join Utin with whom she herself had more or

less broken, and that you, not she, proposed that you find funds to

achieve this alliance and she was waiting to receive these funds from

you.

You see how many unnecessary, stupid lies there are, and how easily they

are revealed. Yes, I must confess that my first vidit to Geneva had

already disappointed me and undermined my faith in the possibility of a

firm alliance and common action with you. In addition, not a sensible

word was said between us about the business for which I was summoned and

solely for which I came to Geneva. Several times I started a discussion

about the foreign bureau; you avoided it, awaiting some sort of final

answer from the Committee, which never arrived. Finally, I left, having

sent through you a letter to the Committee in which I demanded a clear

definition and explanation of the business for which I was summoned,

firmly intending not to return to Geneva unless I had received a

satisfactory reply.

In May you again started asking me to come to Geneva. I refused several

times; finally I came. The last trip confirmed all doubts and completely

shook my faith in the honesty and truthfulness of your word. Your

conversations with Lopatin in my presence on the evening of my arrival:

his direct and sharp accusations, which he made to your face with a

conviction which did not permit any doubt as to the veracity of his

words – words which showed your statements to be lies. His direct

contradiction of all details in the story written by you about your

escape. His direct accusations against your dearest friends, accusations

of ignoble, even stupid treachery before the commission of inquiry,

accusations which were not unsupported but based on their written

evidence which (according to him and confirmed by you later) he had a

chance to read. In particular, the contempt expressed by him about the

completely unnecessary denouncing of Pryzhov, of whom you spoke as being

one of your best and firmest friends. Finally, his direct and definite

denial of the existence of your Committee which was expressed in the

following words:

”N[echayev] can tell the story to you who live outside Russia. However,

he will not repeat all this in my presence, knowing full well that I am

familiar with all the groups, all the people and all attitudes and facts

in Russia. You see that he confirms by his silence the truth of all I

say both about his escape, the circumstances of which, as he is aware,

are only too well known to me, down to the smallest detail, and I know

also about his friends and imaginary Committee.”

And in fact you remained silent and did not attempt to defend yourself,

or any of your friends, or even the reality of the existence of your

Committee.

He triumphed; you retreated before him. I cannot express to you, my dear

friend, how hurt I was both for your sake and for mine. I could not

doubt the truth of Lopatin’s words any longer. It followed that you

systematically lied to us, that your whole enterprise was riddled with

rotten lies and was founded on sand. It meant that your Committee

consisted of you accounting for at least three-quarters of it, with a

following of two, three, or four people who are subordinate to you, or

at least under your predominant influence. It meant that the cause to

which you had entirely dedicated your life had burst, dissipated in a

puff of smoke, as a result of false and stupid orientation, as a result

of your Jesuitical system which had corrupted you and, even more, your

friends. I loved you deeply and still love you, Nechayev. I firmly, too

firmly, believed in you and to see you in such a position, so humiliated

in front of the chatterer Lopatin, was inexpressibly bitter to me.

I was lso hurt on my own account. Carried away by my faith in you, I

gave you my name and publicly esoused your cause. I tried as much as I

could to strengthen Ogarev’s sympathy towards you and his faith in your

cause. I continually advised him to give up to you all the money. I

attracted Ozerov to you and spared no efforts in order to persuade Tata

to join us, i.e. you, and to devote herself wholly to your cause.

Finally, against my better judgement, I persuaded Ogarev to agree to

publish Kolokol according to the wild and impossible programme invented

by you. Briefly, having complete faith in you, while you systematically

duped me, I turned out to be a complete fool. This is painful and

shameful for a man of my experience and my age. Worse than this, I

spoilt my situation with regard to the Russian and the International

causes.

When Lopatin left, I asked you: Is it possible that he told the truth,

that ecerything you told me was a lie? You evaded an answer. It was late

and I left. All the conversations and discussions with Lopatin the

following day finally convinced me that Lopatin told the truth. You were

silent. I awaited the result of your last talk with Lopatin; you did not

tell me about it, but I found it out from Lopatin’s letter which Ozerov

will read to you.

What I found out was enough to induce me to take measures against

further exploitation of myself and my friends by you. Accordingly I

wrote you an ultimatum which I hastily read to you at the Turks and

which you appeared to accept.

Since then I have not seen you.

The day before yesterday I finally received a letter from Lopatin from

which I gathered two rather sad facts: firstly you (I do not wish to use

any adlectives) you lied when you reported to me your talk with Lopatin.

Everything you told me about his alleged words were a complete lie. He

did not tell you that I gave him letters from Lyubavin: ”The old man

could not hold out, he is in our hands now and cannot do anything

against us, and we can now all…”, to which you were supposed to have

replied: ”If Bakunin was so weak as to give you Lyubavin’s letters, we

have other letters, etc.” You lied, you slandered Lopatin, and you

deliverately duped me. Lopatin is surprised that I believed you, and in

a polite form deduces from this fact a conclusion less than flattering

to my mental capacities. He is right. In this case I showed myself a

complete fool. He would not have judged me quite so severy had he known

how deeply, how passionately, how tenderly I loved you and believed in

you! You were able, and found it useful, to kill this belief in me – so

much the worse for you. How could I think that a man who was intelligent

and devoted to the cause, as you still remain in my eyes in spite of all

that has happened – how could I imagine that you would tell such

barefaced and stupid lies to me of whose devotion you could have no

doubts? Why did you not realize that your impudent lies would be

discovered and that I would demand, would have to demand, an explanation

from Lopatin, the more so because my ultimatum contained a clearly

expressed demand that the Lyubavin affair must be completely clarified?

Another fact: Lyubavin did not get my reply to his rude letter,

therefore he did not receive my receipt which I enclosed with this

reply. When I showed you my reply and receipt, you asked me to wait and

not send them. I did not agree, and you offered to post them but did not

do so.

This is enough, Nechayev – our old relationship and our mutual

obligations are at an end. You yourself have destroyed them. If you

thought and still think that you have bound me, entangled me morally and

materially, you are completely mistaken. Nothing on earth can bind me

against my conscience, against my honour, against my will, against my

revolutionary convictions and duty.

It is true that thanks to you my financial position is now very

difficult. I have no means of existence, and my only source of income,

translating Marx and the hope of other literary work connected with it,

has now dried up. I am aground and do not know how I shall manage to get

off, but that is the least of my troubles.

It is true that I have compromised friends and was compromised in front

of them. It is true that I am being slandered in connection with the

fund, in connection with Tata, and finally in connection with all the

recent events in Russia.

But all this will not deter me. In case of dire necessity I am prepared

for a public admission and confession of my stupidity, of which of

course I shall be very much ashamed, but which will reflect even more

upon you – but I shall not remain your unwilling ally.

Thus I give notice to you that all my horrid relationships with you and

with your cause are at an end. But in breaking them off I offer you new

relations on a different basis.

Lopatin, who does not know you as well as I do, would have been

surprised at my suggestion after all that has happened between us. You

will not be surprised, nor will my close friends.

There is no doubt that you have perpetrated many stupidities and many

dirty tricks, positively harmful and destructive to the cause. But it is

also clear to me that all your inept actions and terrible blunders were

not caused by your self-interest, greed, vanity, or ambition, but only

by your misunderstanding of the situation. You are a passionately

dedicated man; there are few like you. This is your strength, your

valour and your justification. You and your Committee, if the latter

really exists, are full of energy and are prepared to execute without

fuss anything you consider useful for the cause – this is valuable. But

neither your Committee nor you possess any common sense – this is now

obvious. You have taken to the Jesuit system like children, and seeing

in it your whole strength, success, and salvation have forgotten the

very essence and aim of the society: liberation of the people not only

from government but from you, from yourselves. Having adopted this

system you have carried it to a monstrously stupid extreme, have

corrupted yourselves by it and have disgraced the society throughout the

world by your only too obvious guile and incredible stupidities – like

your stern letters to Lyubavin and to Natalya Alexeevna which were

matched by your polite patience towards Utin; like your attempts to

ingratiate yourself with him while he slandered all of us loudly and

impudently; like your stupid communist programme and a whole series of

shameless deceits. All this proves an absence of common sense, an

ignorance of people, relationships, and things. It follows that one

cannot rely on your common sense, at least at present, in spite of the

fact that you are an extremely intelligent man, capable of further

development. This, however, gives hope for the future; at present you

are as clumsy and inept as a boy.

Having finally convinced myself of this, my position is now as follows:

I do not believe your words, your unsupported assurances and promises

which are not confirmed by facts, knowing that you would not hesitate to

lie if this seemed to you to be useful to the cause. Nor do I believe in

the justice or wisdom of what imagine to be useful, because you and your

Committee have given me too many proofs of your positive lack of sense.

But denting your veracity and your wisdom, I do not deny your energy and

your undoubted devotion to the cause, and believe that there are few

people in Russia equal to you in either. This, I repeat again, was the

chief, indeed the only basis of my love for you and my faith in you and

I am convinced it still remains a guarantee that you alone of all the

Russians I know are capable of serving the revolutionary cause in Russia

and destined to do so but only if you want and are able to alter the

whole system of your activities in Russia and abroad. However, if you do

not wish to change it, you will inevitably become a man highly harmful

to the cause as a result of those very qualities which are your

strength.

As a consequence of these connsiderations and in spite of all that has

happened between us, I would wish not only to remain allied with you,

but to make this union even closer and firmer, on condition that you

will change the system entirely and will make mutual trust, sincerity

and truth the foundation of our future relations. Otherwise the break

between us is inevitable.

Now here are my personal and general conditions. I will enumerate the

personal ones first:

1. You must shield and clear me entirely in the Lyubavin affair by

writing a collective letter to Ogarev, Tata, Ozerov and S. Serebrennikov

in which you will announce, as is indeed the truth, that I did not know

anything about the letter of the Committee and that it has been written

without my knowledge and consent.

2. hat you have read my reply to Lyubavin with the enclosed receipt for

300 rubles and having undertaken to send it, have either posted or not.

3. That I have never directly or indirectly interfered in the disposal

of the Bakhmetev fund. That you have received the whole of the monies at

various times: first from the hands of Herzen and Ogarev and the

remaining, larger part from the hands of Ogarev who, after the death of

Herzen, was the only one who had the right to dispose of it, and that

you received this fund in the name of the Committee whose manager you

were.

4. If you have not yet given Ogarev the receipt for this fund, then you

must do so.

5. You have to return as soon as possible the note from Danielson

through us and through Lopatin. If you have not got it (though I am sure

you have) you must in the same letter undertake to deliver it in the

shortest possible time.

6. You will abandon purposeless or, worse, positively harmful attempts

for a rapprochement with Utin, who most vilely slanders both of us and

all that is ours in Russia, and on the contrary will undertake, having

chosen the right time and occasion in order not to harm the cause, to

conduct open war against him.

These are my personal connditions; a refusal of one of them, in

particular of the first five and the first half of the sixth (i.e.

breaking off all ties with Utin) will be sufficient reason for me to

break all relations with you. All this has to be done by you generously,

frankly, honestly without any misunderstandings, reservations, hints and

equivocations. It is time we put our cards on the table.

Here are the general conditions:

• Without naming the names, which we do not need, you will show us the

actual state of your organization and cause in Russia, of your hopes,

your propaganda, your movements, without exaggeration and deceit.

• You will eradicate from your organization any use of police and

Jesuitical systems, confining their application to the government and

inimical parties and only when it is really necessary in practice and in

accordance with common sense.

• You will drop the absurd idea that revolution can be made outside the

people and without its participation, and will adopt as a basis of your

organization the spontaneous people’s revolution in which the people

will be the army and the organization only its staff.

• You will adopt as a basis of the organization the social-revolutionary

programme expounded in the first number of The People’s Cause [Narodnoe

Delo], the plan of organization and revolutionary propaganda expounded

by me in my letter, with such additions and alterations as we shall

together find necessary at a general meeting.

• All that has been agreed in our common discussion and unanimous

decisions will be proposed by you to all your friends in Russia and

abroad. Should they reject our decisions, you will have to decide for

yourself whether you wish to follow them or us, to break your ties with

them or with us.

• If they accept the programme, organizational plan, the rules of the

society, the plan for propaganda and for revolutionary action worked out

by us, you will, in your own and in their name, give us your hand and

your word of honour that from now on this programme, this plan of

organization, propaganda and action, will be absolute law and the

indispensable basis of the whole society in Russia.

• We shall believe you and will make a new firm bond with you – Ogarev,

Ozerov, S. Serebrennikov and I, possibly Tata, if she should so wish and

if you and all the others agree. We shall in truth be People’s Brothers

who live and act abroad. Therefore, without ever showing any undue

curiosity, we shall have the right to know and will indeed know actively

and in the necessary detail the situation of conspiratorial affairs and

immediate aims in Russia.

• Then we, all the above-mentioned, will set up a bureau abroad to deal

with all Russian affairs abroad, without exception, taking into

consideration the lines of Russian policy, but choosing freely methods,

people and means.

• In addition, Kolokol will be published with a clear revolutionary,

socialist programme, if this is necessary and if money for it is

available.

Here are my conditions, Nechayev. If you have been inspired by good

sense and sober judgement and if love of the cause is really stronger in

you than all other considerations, you will accept them.

And if you do not accept, my decision is inflexible. I shall have to

break all ties with you. I will act independently, taking nothing into

consideration except my own conscience, understanding and duty.

M. BAKUNIN