Pisarev did not shrink from the idea of murdering his mother, and yet he managed to find the exact words to describe injustice. He wanted to enjoy life egoistically, but he suffered imprisonment and finally went mad. Such an ostentatious display of cynicism finally led him to an understanding of love, to be exiled from it and to suffer from it to the point of suicide, thus revealing, in place of the man-god he wanted to create, the unhappy, suffering old man whose greatness illuminates the pages of history.
Bakunin embodies, but in a manner spectacular in a different way, the very same contradictions. He died on the eve of the terrorist epic, in 1876. Moreover, he rejected in advance individual outrages and denounced «the Brutuses of the period.» He had a certain respect for them, however, since he reproached Herzen for having openly criticized Karakosov for his abortive attempt to assassinate Alexander II in 1866. This feeling of respect had its reasons. Bakunin influenced the course of events in the same manner as Bielinsky and the nihilists and directed them into the channel of individual revolt. But he contributed something more: a germ of political cynicism, which will congeal, with Nechaiev, into a doctrine and will drive the revolutionary movement to extremes.
Bakunin had hardly emerged from adolescence when he was overwhelmed and uprooted by Hegelian philosophy, as if by a gigantic earthquake. He buries himself in it day and night «to the point of madness,» he says, and adds: «I saw absolutely nothing but Hegel’s categories.» When he emerges from this initiation, it is with the exaltation of a neophyte. «My personal self is dead forever, my life is the true life. It is in some way identified with the absolute life.» He required very little time to see the dangers of that comfortable position. He who has understood reality does not rebel against it, but rejoices in it; in other words, he becomes a conformist.
Nothing in Bakunin’s character predestined him to that watchdog philosophy. It is possible, also, that his travels in Germany, and the unfortunate opinion he formed of the Germans, may have ill-prepared him to agree with the aged Hegel that the Prussian State was the privileged depositary of the final fruits of the mind. More Russian than the Czar himself, despite his dreams of universality, he could in no event subscribe to the apology of Prussia when it was founded on a logic brash enough to assert: «The will of other peoples has no rights, for it is the people who represent the will [of the Spirit] who dominate the world.»
In the 1840’s, moreover, Bakunin discovered French socialism and anarchism, from which he appropriated a few tendencies. Bakunin rejects, with a magnificent gesture, any part of German ideology. He approached the absolute in the same way as he approached total destruction, with the same passionate emotion, and with the blind enthusiasm for the «All or Nothing» which we again find in him in its purest form.
After having extolled absolute Unity, Bakunin enthusiastically embraces the most elementary form of Mani-chaeism. What he wants, of course, is once and for all «the universal and authentically democratic Church of Freedom.» That is his religion; he belongs to his times. It is not sure, however, that his faith on this point had been perfect. In his Confession to Czar Nicholas I, he seems to be sincere when he says that he has never been able to believe in the final revolution «except with a supernatural and painful effort to stifle forcibly the interior voice which whispered to me that my hopes were absurd.» His theory of immorality, on the other hand, is much more firmly based and he is often to be seen plunging about in it with the ease and pleasure of a mettlesome horse.
History is governed by only two principles: the State and social revolution, revolution and counterrevolution, which can never be reconciled, and which are engaged in a death struggle. The State is the incarnation of crime. «The smallest and most inoffensive State is still criminal in its dreams.» Therefore revolution is the incarnation of good. This struggle, which surpasses politics, is also the struggle of Luciferian principles against the divine principle. Bakunin explicitly reintroduces into rebellious action one of the themes of romantic rebellion. Proudhon had already decreed that God is Evil and exclaimed: «Come, Satan, victim of the calumnies of kings and of the petty-minded!»
Bakunin also gives a glimpse of the broader implications of an apparently political rebellion: «Evil is satanic rebellion against divine authority, a rebellion in which we see, never-‘ theless, the fruitful seed of every form of human emancipation.» Like the Fraticelli of fourteenth-century Bohemia, revolutionary socialists today use this phrase as a password: «In the name of him to whom a great wrong has been done.»
The struggle against creation will therefore be without mercy and without ethics, and the only salvation lies in extermination. «The passion for destruction is a creative passion.» Bakunin’s burning words on the subject of the revolution of 1848 in his Confession vehemently proclaim this pleasure in destruction. «A feast without beginning and without end,» he says. In fact, for him as for all who are oppressed, the revolution is a feast, in the religious sense of the word. Here we are reminded of the French anarchist Caeurderoy, who, in his book Hurrah, or the Cossack Revolution, summoned the hordes of the north to lay waste to the whole world.
He also wanted to «apply the torch to my father’s house» and proclaimed that the only hope lay in the human deluge and in chaos. Rebellion is grasped, throughout these manifestations, in its pure state, in its biological truth. That is why Bakunin with exceptional perspicacity was the only one of his period to declare war on science, the idol of his contemporaries. Against every abstract idea he pleaded the cause of the complete man, completely identified with his rebellion.
If he glorifies the brigand leader of the peasant rising, if he chooses to model himself on Stenka Razin and Pugachev, it is because these men fought, without either doctrine or principle, for an ideal of pure freedom. Bakunin introduces into the midst of revolution the naked principle of rebellion. «The tempest and life, that is what we need. A new world, without laws, and consequently free.»
But is a world without laws a free world? That is the question posed by every rebellion. If the question were to be asked of Bakunin, the answer would not be in doubt. Despite the fact that he was opposed in all circumstances, and with the most extreme lucidity, to authoritarian socialism, yet from the moment when he himself begins to define the society of the future, he does so— without being at all concerned about the contradiction—in terms of a dictatorship. The statutes of the International Fraternity (1864-7), which he edited himself, already establish the absolute subordination of the individual to the central committee, during the period of action.
It is the same for the period that will follow the revolution. He hopes to see in liberated Russia «a strong dictatorial power … a power supported by partisans, enlightened by their advice, fortified by their free collaboration, but which would be limited by nothing and by no one.» Bakunin contributed as much as his enemy Marx to Leninist doctrine. The dream of the revolutionary Slav empire, moreover, as Bakunin conjures it up before the Czar, is exactly the same, down to the last detail of its frontiers, as that realized by Stalin. Coming from a man who was wise enough to say that the essential driving-force of Czarist Russia was fear and who rejected the Marxist theory of party dictatorship, these conceptions may seem contradictory. But this contradiction demonstrates that the origins of authoritarian doctrines are partially nihilistic.
Pisarev justifies Bakunin. Certainly, the latter wanted total freedom; but he hoped to realize it through total destruction. To destroy everything is to pledge oneself to building without foundations, and then to holding up the walls with one’s hands. He who rejects the entire past, without keeping any part of it which could serve to breathe life into the revolution, condemns himself to finding justification only in the future and, in the meantime, to entrusting the police with the task of justifying the provisional state of affairs. Bakunin proclaims dictatorship, not despite his desire for destruction, but in accordance with it.
Nothing, in fact, could turn him from this path since his ethical values had also been dissolved in the crucible of total negation. In his openly obsequious Confession to the Czar, which he wrote in order to gain his freedom, he spectacularly introduces the double game into revolutionary politics. With his Catechism of a Revolutionary, which he probably drafted in Switzerland, with the help of Nechaiev, he voices, even though he denies it later, the political cynicism that will never cease to weigh on the revolutionary movement and which Nechaiev himself has so provocatively illustrated.
A less well-known figure than Bakunin, still more mysterious, but more significant for our purpose, Nechaiev pushed nihilism to the farthest coherent point. His thought presents practically no contradiction. He appeared, about 1866, in revolutionary intellectual circles, and died, obscurely, in January 1882. In this short space of time he never ceased to suborn the students around him, Bakunin himself, the revolutionary refugees, and finally
