Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Russian: Михаил Александрович Бакунин,
Michel Bakunin on the grave in Bern), (May 8 (30 N.S.), 1814 – June 19
(July 1 N.S.), 1876) was a well-known Russian revolutionary, and often considered the "father of modern anarchism".[1]
Born in the Russian Empire to a family of Russian nobles, Bakunin spent his youth as a
Junior Officer in the Russian army but resigned his commission in 1835. He went to school in Moscow to study philosophy and began
to frequent radical circles where he was greatly influenced by Alexander Herzen.
Bakunin left Russia in 1842 for Dresden, and eventually Paris where he met George Sand,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx.
He was ordered back to Russia in 1844 by Emperor Nicholas I, but he refused. As
a result, his noble status was revoked and he was sentenced, in absentia, to hard labor in Siberia. He was eventually deported
from France for speaking against Russia's oppression of Poland. In 1849 he was apprehended in Dresden for his participation in
the Czech rebellion of 1848. He was turned over to Russia where he was imprisoned in Peter-Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. He remained there until 1857, when he was exiled to a work camp in Siberia.
He was able to escape via Japan and the USA, and ended up in London for a short time where he worked with Alexander Herzen on
the radical journal, The Bell. He ultimately left in 1863 to join the insurrection in Poland. He, however, failed to reach
his destination and spent some time in Switzerland and Italy. Despite his criminal status, Bakunin gained great influence with
radical youth in Russia, and all of Europe. In 1870, Bakunin was involved in the insurrection in Lyon, which foreshadowed the
Paris Commune.
In 1868, Bakunin joined the International Working Men's
Association, also known as the First Internationale, a federation of radical and trade union organizations with sections
in most European countries. The 1872 Congress was dominated by a fight between a faction around Marx who argued for participation
in parliamentary elections and a faction around Bakunin who opposed such participation. The faction around Bakunin lost the vote
on this issue but at the end of the congress Bakunin and several others of that faction were expelled for supposedly maintaining
a secret organisation within the international. The anarchists insisted the congress was rigged and so held their own conference
of the International at Saint-Imer in Switzerland in 1872. Bakunin continued to be very active in this and the European socialist
movement. In the years between 1870 and 1876 he wrote much of his seminal work such as Statism and
Anarchy and God and the State. Despite his declining health he attempted to
take part in an insurrection in Bologna, but was forced to return to Switzerland in disguise and settled in Lugano. Bakunin
remained active in the Radical movement of Europe until further health problems cause him to be moved to a hospital in Berne,
Switzerland, where he died in 1876.
Biography
Early years
In the spring of 1814, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was born to an aristocratic family in the village of Pryamukhino (Прямухино) between
Torzhok (Торжок) and Kuvshinovo (Кувшиново), in
Tver guberniya, northwest of Moscow. At the age of 14 he left for St. Petersburg, receiving military
training at the Artillery University. He completed his studies in 1832, and in 1834 was commissioned a junior officer in the Russian Imperial
Guard and sent to Minsk and Gardinas in Lithuania (now Belarus). That summer, Bakunin became embroiled in a family
row, taking his sister’s side in rebellion to an unhappy marriage. Though his father wished him to continue in either the
military or the civil service, Bakunin abandoned both in 1835, and made his way to Moscow, hoping
to study philosophy.
Interest in Philosophy
In Moscow, Bakunin soon became friends with a group of former university students, and engaged in the systematic study of
Idealist philosophy, grouped around the poet Nikolay
Stankevich, “the bold pioneer who opened to Russian thought the vast and fertile continent of German metaphysics”
(E. H. Carr). The philosophy of Kant initially was
central to their study, but then progressed to Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. By autumn of
1835, Bakunin had conceived of forming a philosophical circle in his home town of Pryamukhino; a
passionate environment for the young people involved. For example, Vissarion Belinsky
fell in love with one of Bakunin’s sisters. Moreover, by early 1836, Bakunin was back in Moscow,
where he published translations of Fichte’s Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar's Vocation and The Way to a Blessed
Life, which became his favorite book. With Stankevich he also read Goethe, Schiller, and E.T.A. Hoffmann.
At this time he embraced a religious but extra-ecclesiastical immanentism:
| “ |
Let religion become the basis and reality of your life and your actions, but let it be
the pure and single-minded religion of divine reason and divine love, and not … that religion which strove to disassociate itself
from everything that makes up the substance and life of truly moral existence. … Look at Christ, my dear friend; … His life was
divine through and through, full of self-denial, and He did everything for mankind, finding His satisfaction and His delight in
the dissolution of His material being.
… Because we have baptized in this world and are in communion with this heavenly love, we feel that we are divine creatures,
that we are free, and that we have been ordained for the emancipation of humanity, which has remained a victim of the instinctive
laws of unconscious existence. … Absolute freedom and absolute love—that is our aim; the freeing of humanity and the whole
world–that is our purpose.
|
” |
He became increasingly influenced by Hegel and provided the first
Russian translation of his work. During this period he met slavophile Konstantin Aksakov, Piotr Tschaadaev and the socialists Alexander Herzen and
Nikolay Ogarev. In this period he began to develop his panslavic views. After long wrangles with his father, Bakunin went to Berlin
in 1840. His stated plan at the time was still to become a university professor (a “priest of
truth,” as he and his friends imagined it), but he soon encountered and joined radical students of the so-called “Hegelian Left,”
and joined the socialist movement in Berlin. In his
1842 essay The Reaction in Germany, he argued in favor of the revolutionary role of
negation, summed up in the phrase
| “ |
the passion for destruction is a creative passion.[2] |
” |
After three semesters in Berlin Bakunin went to Dresden where he became friends with
Arnold Ruge. Here he also read Lorenz von Stein's
Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreich and developed a passion for socialism. He abandoned his interest in an academic career, devoting more and more of his time to promoting
revolution.The Russian government, becoming aware of his radicalism, ordered him to
return to Russia. On his refusal his property was confiscated. Instead he went with Georg
Herwegh to Zürich, Switzerland.
Switzerland, Brussels and Paris
During his six month stay in Zürich, he became closely associated with German
communist Wilhelm Weitling. Until 1848 he remained on friendly terms with the German communists, occasionally calling himself a communist and writing
articles on communism in the Schweitzerische Republikaner. He moved to Geneva in western
Switzerland shortly before Weitling's arrest. His name had appeared frequently in Weitling's correspondence seized by the police.
This led to reports being circulated to the imperial police. The Russian ambassador in Berne ordered Bakunin to return to Russia,
but instead he went to Brussels, where he met many leading Polish nationalists, such as Joachim Lelewel. However he clashed with
them over their demand for a historic Poland based on the borders of 1776 as he defended the right of autonomy for the non-Polish peoples in these territories. He also did not support
their clericalism and they did not support his calls for the emancipation of the
peasantry.
In 1844 Bakunin went to Paris, then a centre for European radicalism. He established contacts
with Karl Marx and the Anarchist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, who greatly impressed him and with whom he formed a personal bond. In December 1844, Emperor Nicholas issued a
decree stripping Bakunin of his privileges as a noble, denying him civil rights, confiscating
his land in Russia, and condemning him to life long exile in Siberia should the Russian
authorities ever get their hands on him. He responded with a long letter to La Réforme, denouncing the Emperor as a despot
and calling for democracy in Russia and Poland (Carr, p.139). In March 1846 in another letter to
the Constitutionel he defended Poland, following the repression of Catholics there. Some Polish refugees from Kraków, following the
defeat of the uprising there, invited him to speak[3] at the meeting in November 1847 commemorating the Polish November Uprising of 1830.
In his speech, Bakunin called for an alliance between the Polish and Russian peoples against the Emperor, and looked forward
to "the definitive collapse of despotism in Russia." As a result, he was expelled from France and went to Brussels. Bakunin's
attempt to draw Alexander Herzen and Vissarion
Belinsky into conspiratorial action for revolution in Russia fell on deaf ears. In Brussels, Bakunin renewed his contacts
with revolutionary Poles and Karl Marx. He spoke at a meeting organised by Lelewel in February 1848
about a great future for the slavs, whose destiny was to rejuvenate the Western world. Around this
time the Russian embassy circulated rumours that Bakunin was a Russian agent who had exceeded his orders.
As the revolutionary movement of 1848 broke out, Bakunin was ecstatic, despite
disappointment that little was happening in Russia. Bakunin obtained funding from some socialists in the Provisional Government,
Ferdinand Flocon, Louis Blanc, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin and Albert
L'Ouvrier, for a project for a Slav federation liberating those under the rule of Prussia, Austro-Hungary and Turkey.
He left for Germany travelling through Baden to Frankfurt and
Köln.
Bakunin supported the German Democratic Legion led by Herwegh in an abortive attempt to join
Friedrich Hecker's insurrection in Baden. He broke with
Marx over the latter's criticism of Herwegh. Much later in 1871 – Bakunin was to write: “I must
openly admit that in this controversy Marx and Engels were in the right. With characteristic insolence, they attacked Herwegh
personally when he was not there to defend himself. In a face-to-face confrontation with them, I heatedly defended Herwegh, and
our mutual dislike began then.”[4]
Bakunin went on to Berlin, but was stopped from going to Posen by the police, which was part of
Prussian occupied Poland where a nationalist insurrection was taking
place. Instead Bakunin went to Leipzig and Breslau,
then to Prague where he participated in the First Pan Slav Congress. The Congress was followed by
an abortive insurrection that Bakunin had sought to promote and intensify but which was
violently suppressed. He returned to Breslau, where Marx republished the allegation that Bakunin was an imperial agent, claiming
that George Sand had proof. Marx retracted the statement after George Sand came to Bakunin's
defense.
Bakunin published his Appeal to the Slavs[5] in
the fall of 1848, in which he proposed that Slav revolutionaries unite with Hungarian, Italian and German revolutionaries to
overthrow the three major European autocracies, the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Prussia.
Bakunin played a leading role in the May Uprising in Dresden in
1849, helping to organize the defense of the barricades against Prussian troops with
Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Heine. He was captured
in Chemnitz and held for thirteen months before being condemned to death by the government of
Saxony. As the governments of Russia and Austria were also after him, his sentence was commuted
to life. In June 1850, he was handed over to the Austrian authorities. Eleven months later he received a further death sentence,
but this too was commuted to life imprisonment. Finally, in May 1851, Bakunin was handed over to the Russian authorities.
Imprisonment, Confession, and Exile
Bakunin was taken to the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress. At the beginning
of his captivity, Count Orlov, an emissary of the Emperor, visited Bakunin and told him that the
Emperor requested a written confession[6] hoping that the
confession would place Bakunin spiritually as well as physically in the power of the Russian state. Since all his acts were
known, he had no secrets to reveal, and so he decided to write to the Emperor:
| “ |
You want my confession; but you must know that a penitent sinner is not obliged to
implicate or reveal the misdeeds of others. I have only the honor and the conscience that I have never betrayed anyone who has
confided in me, and this is why I will not give you any names. |
” |
On reading the letter, Emperor Nicholas I, remarked, "He is a good lad, full of spirit, but he is a dangerous man and we must
never cease watching him." This Confession, which was only published following its discovery
in the imperial archives, has proved to be quite controversial, and is sometimes analysed within the context of a specifically Russian literary form.
After three years in the underground dungeons of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, he spent another four years in the
castle of Shlisselburg. It was here that he suffered from scurvy and all his teeth fell out as a result of the appalling diet. He later recounted that he found some relief
in mentally re-enacting the legend of Prometheus. His continuing imprisonment in these awful
conditions led him to entreat his brother to supply him with poison.
Mikhail Bakunin and Antonia Kwiatkowska, circa 1861
Following the death of Nicholas I, the new Emperor Alexander II personally
struck Bakunin's name off the amnesty list. However in February 1857, his mother's pleas to the
Emperor were finally heeded and he was allowed to go into permanent exile in the western Siberian city of Tomsk. Within a year of arriving in Tomsk, Bakunin married Antonia Kwiatkowska, the daughter of a Polish merchant.
He had been teaching her French. In August of 1858 Bakunin received a visit from his second cousin, General Count
Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who had been Governor of Eastern Siberia for ten years.
Muravyov was a liberal and Bakunin, as his relative, became a particular favourite. In the spring of 1859, Muravyov helped
Bakunin with a job for Amur Development Agency which enabled him to move with his wife to Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia. This enabled Bakunin to be
part of the circle involved in political discussions centred on Muravyov's colonial headquarters. Resenting the treatment of the
colony by the St Petersburg bureaucracy, including its use as a dumping ground for malcontents, a proposal for a United States
of Siberia emerged, independent of Russia and federated into a new United States of Siberia and America, following the
example of the United States of America. The circle included Muravyov's young
Chief of Staff, Kukel—who Kropotkin related had the complete works of Alexander Herzen — the civil governor Izvolsky, who allowed Bakunin to use his address for
correspondence, and Muravyov's deputy and eventual successor, General Alexander
Dondukov-Korsakov.
When Herzen criticised Muravyov in The Bell, Bakunin wrote vigorously in his patron's defence.[7] Bakunin tired of his job as a commercial traveller, but thanks to
Muravyov's influence, was able to keep his sinecure (worth 2,000 roubles a year) without having to perform any duties. However
Muravyov was forced to retire from his post as governor general, partly because of his liberal views and partly due to fears he
might take Siberia towards independence. He was replaced by Korsakov, who perhaps was even more sympathetic to the plight of the
Siberian exiles. Korsakov was also related to Bakunin, Bakunin's brother Paul having married his cousin. Taking Bakunin's word,
Korsakov issued him with a letter giving him passage on all ships on the river Amur and its
tributaries as long as he was back in Irkutsk when the ice came.
Escape From Exile and Return to Europe
On June 5 1861, Bakunin left Irkutsk under cover of company business, ostensibly employed by a Siberian merchant to make a trip to
Nikolaevsk. By July 17 he was on board the Russian
warship Strelok bound for Kastri. However, in the port of Olga, Bakunin managed to persuade the American captain of the SS Vickery to take him on board. Despite
bumping into the Russian Consul on board, Bakunin was able to sail away under the nose of the Russian Imperial Navy. By August 6 he had reached Hakodate in the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaidō and was
soon in Yokohama. In Japan Bakunin met by chance Wilhelm
Heine, one of his comrades-in arms from Dresden. He also met the German botanist Philipp Franz von Siebold who had been involved in opening up Japan to Europeans (particularly Russians and the Dutch) and was a friend of
Bakunin's patron Muraviev.[8] Von Siebold's son wrote some
40 years later:
| “ |
In that Yokohama boarding-house we encountered an outlaw from the Wild West Heine,
presumably as well as many other interesting guests. The presence of the Russian revolutionist Michael Bakunin, in flight from
Siberia, was as far as one could see being winked at by the authorities. He was well-endowed with money, and none who came to
know him could fail to pay their respects. |
” |
He left Japan from Kanagawa on the SS
Carrington, one of nineteen passengers including Heine, Rev. P. F. Koe and Joseph
Heco. Heco was a Japanese American, who eight years later played a significant
role giving political advice to Kido Takayoshi and Itō
Hirobumi during the revolutionary overthrow of the feudal Tokugawa shogunate.[9]
They arrived in San Francisco on October
15. In the period before the trans-continental railroads had been completed, the quickest way to New York was via Panama.
Bakunin boarded the Orizaba for Panama, where after waiting for two weeks he boarded the Champion for
New York.
In Boston, Bakunin visited Karol Forster, a partisan of
Ludwik Mieroslawski during the 1848 Revolution in Paris, and caught up with other
"Forty-Eighters", veterans of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, such as Friedrich Kapp.[10] He then sailed
for Liverpool arriving on December 27. Bakunin immediately went to London to see Herzen. That
evening he burst into the drawing-room where the family was having supper. "What! Are you sitting down eating oysters! Well! Tell
me the news. What is happening, and where?!"
Bakunin's move to Italy
Having re-entered Western Europe, Bakunin immediately immersed himself in the revolutionary movement. In 1860, while still in
Irkutsk Bakunin and his political associates had been greatly impressed by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his expedition to Sicily, during which
he declared himself dictator in the name of Victor Emmanuel II. Following his return to London, he wrote to Garibaldi on 31 January
1862:
- "If you could have seen as I did the passionate enthusiasm of the whole town of Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, at
the news of your triumphal march across the possession of the mad king of Naples, you would have
said as I did that there is no longer space or frontiers"[11].
Bakunin asked Garibaldi to participate in a movement encompassing Italians, Hungarians and South
Slavs against both Austria and Turkey. Garibaldi was then
engaged in preparations for the Expedition against Rome. By May Bakunin's
correspondence was focussing on Italian-slavic unity and the developments in Poland. By June, he
had resolved to move to Italy, but was waiting for his wife to join him. When he left for Italy in August, Mazzini wrote to
Maurizio Quadrio, one of his key supporters that Bakunin was a good and dependable person. However, with the news of the failure
at Aspromonte Bakunin paused in Paris where he was briefly involved with
Ludwik Mierosławski. However Bakunin rejected Mieroslawski's chauvinism and refusal
to grant any concessions to the peasants. Bakunin returned to England in September and focussed on Polish affairs. When the
Polish insurrection broke out in January 1863, he sailed to Copenhagen where he hoped to join
the Polish Legion. They planned to sail across the Baltic
in the SS Ward Jackson to join the insurrection. This attemot failed, and Bakunin met his wife in Stockholm before returning to London. Now he focussed again on going to Italy and his friend Aurelio Saffi
wrote him letters of introduction for Florence, Turin
and Milan. Mazzini wrote letters of commendation to Frederico
Campanella in Genoa and Giuseppe Dolfi in Florence. Bakunin
left London in November 1863 travelling by way of Brussels, Paris and Vevy (Switzerland) arriving in Italy on 11 January 1864. It was here that he first began to develop his
anarchist ideas.
He conceived the plan of forming a secret organization of revolutionaries to carry on propaganda work and prepare for direct
action. He recruited Italians, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, and Slavs into the International Brotherhood, also called the Alliance
of Revolutionary Socialists.
By July 1866 Bakunin was informing Herzen and Ogarev about the fruits of his work over the previous two years. His secret
society then had members in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, England, France, Spain, and Italy, as well as Polish and Russian
members. In his Revolutionary Catechism of 1866, he opposed religion and the state,
advocating the
| “ |
absolute rejection of every authority including that which sacrifices freedom for the
convenience of the state.[12] |
” |
Bakunin's membership card of the
League of Peace and Freedom
During the 1867–1868 period, Bakunin responded to Emile Acollas's call and became involved in the League of
Peace and Freedom (LPF), for which he wrote a lengthy essay Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism[13] Here he advocated a federalist socialism, drawing on the
work of Proudhon. He supported freedom of association and the right of secession for each unit of the federation, but emphasized
that this freedom must be joined with socialism for: "Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without
liberty is slavery and brutality."
Bakunin played a prominent role in the Geneva Conference (September 1867), and joined the
Central Committee. The founding conference was attended by 6,000 people. As Bakunin rose to speak:
| “ |
the cry passed from mouth to mouth: 'Bakunin!' Garibaldi, who was in the chair, stood up, advanced a few steps and embraced him. This solemn meeting of two
old and tried warriors of the revolution produced an astonishing impression... Everyone rose and there was a prolonged and
enthusiastic clapping of hands.[14] |
” |
At the Berne Congress of the League (1868) he and other
socialists (Élisée Reclus, Aristide Rey, Jaclard,
Giuseppe Fanelli, N. Joukovsky, V. Mratchkovsky and others) found themselves in a
minority. They seceded from the League establishing their own International Alliance of Socialist Democracy which adopted a
revolutionary socialist program.
The First International and the Rise of the Anarchist Movement
In 1868, Bakunin joined the Geneva section of the First
International, in which he remained very active until he was expelled from the International by Karl Marx and his followers at the Hague Congress in
1872. Bakunin was instrumental in establishing branches of the International in Italy and
Spain.
In 1869, the Social Democratic
Alliance was refused entry to the First International, on the grounds that it was an international organisation in itself,
and only national organisations were permitted membership in the International. The Alliance dissolved and the various groups
which it comprised joined the International separately.
Between 1869 and 1870, Bakunin became involved with the Russian revolutionary Sergey
Nechayev in a number of clandestine projects. However, Bakunin broke with Nechaev over what he described as the latter’s
“Jesuit” methods, by which all means were justified to achieve revolutionary ends.[15]
In 1870 Bakunin led a failed uprising in Lyon on the principles
later exemplified by the Paris Commune, calling for a general uprising in response to the
collapse of the French government during the Franco-Prussian War, seeking to
transform an imperialist conflict into social revolution. In his Letters to A Frenchman on the Present Crisis, he argued
for a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the peasantry and set forth his formulation of what was later to
become known as propaganda of the deed:
| “ |
we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most
popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.[16] |
” |
Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Paris Commune of 1871, which was brutally suppressed by
the French government. He saw the Commune as above all a “rebellion against the State,” and commended the Communards for
rejecting not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.[17] In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Commune and the First International against the
Italian nationalist
