Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist. He is among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major figure in the revolutionary socialist, social anarchist, and collectivist anarchist traditions. Bakunin's prestige as a revolutionary also made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, gaining substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe.
Bakunin grew up in Pryamukhino, a family estate in the Tver Governorate. From 1840, he studied in Moscow, then in Berlin, hoping to enter academia. Later in Paris, he met Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who deeply influenced him. Bakunin's increasing radicalism ended hopes of a professorial career. He was expelled from France for opposing the Russian Empire's occupation of Poland. After participating in the 1848 Prague and 1849 Dresden uprisings, Bakunin was imprisoned, tried, sentenced to death, and extradited multiple times. Finally, exiled to Siberia in 1857, he escaped via Japan to the United States and then to London, where he worked with Alexander Herzen on the journal Kolokol. In 1863, Bakunin left to join the insurrection in Poland, but he failed to reach it and instead spent time in Switzerland and Italy.
In 1868, Bakunin joined the International Workingmen's Association, leading the anarchist faction to rapidly grow in influence. The 1872 Hague Congress was dominated by a struggle between Bakunin and Marx, who was a key figure in the General Council of the International and argued for the use of the state to bring about socialism. In contrast, Bakunin and the anarchist faction argued for the replacement of the state by federations of self-governing workplaces and communes. Bakunin could not reach the Netherlands, and the anarchist faction lost the debate in his absence. Bakunin was expelled from the International for maintaining, in Marx's view, a secret organisation within the International, and founded the Anti-Authoritarian International in 1872. From 1870 until his death in 1876, Bakunin wrote his longer works such as Statism and Anarchy and God and the State, but he continued to directly participate in European worker and peasant movements. In 1870, he was involved in an insurrection in Lyon, France. Bakunin sought to take part in an anarchist insurrection in Bologna, Italy, but his declining health forced him to return to Switzerland in disguise.
Bakunin is remembered as a major figure in the history of anarchism and as an opponent of Marxism, especially of the dictatorship of the proletariat, arguing that Marxist states would be one-party dictatorships ruling over the proletariat, not ruled by the proletariat. His book God and the State has been widely translated and remains in print. Bakunin has had a significant influence on thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Herbert Marcuse, E. P. Thompson, Neil Postman and A. S. Neill as well as syndicalist organizations such as the IWW, the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and contemporary anarchists involved in the modern-day anti-globalization movement.
Life
Early life
On, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was born into Russian nobility. His family's Priamukhino estate, in the Tver region northwest of Moscow, had over 500 serfs. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin, was a Russian diplomat who had served in Italy. Upon returning to Priamukhino and marrying the much younger Varvara Aleksandrovna Muravyeva, the elder Bakunin raised his ten children in the Rousseauan pedagogic model. Mikhail Bakunin, their third child and oldest son, read the languages, literature, and philosophy of the period and described his youth as idyllic and sheltered from the realities of Russian life. As an early teenager, he began training for a military career at the St. Petersburg Artillery School, which he rejected. Becoming an officer in 1833, he availed himself of the freedom to participate in the city's social life, but was unfulfilled. Derelict in his studies, he was sent to Belarus and Lithuania as punishment in early 1834, where he read academic theory and philosophy. He deserted the school in 1835 and only escaped arrest through his familial influence. He was discharged at the end of the year and, despite his father's protests, left for Moscow to pursue a career as a mathematics teacher.Bakunin lived a bohemian, intellectual life in Moscow, where German Romantic literature and idealist philosophy were influential in the 1830s. In the intellectual circle of Nikolai Stankevich, Bakunin read German philosophy, from Kant to Fichte to Hegel, and published Russian translations of their works. Bakunin produced the first Russian translation of Hegel and was the foremost Russian expert on Hegel by 1837. Bakunin befriended Russian intellectuals including the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the poet Nikolay Ogarev, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the writer Alexander Herzen as youth prior to their careers. Herzen funded Bakunin to study at the University of Berlin in 1840. Bakunin's plans to return to Moscow as a professor were soon abandoned.
In Berlin, Bakunin gravitated towards the Young Hegelians, an intellectual group with radical interpretations of Hegel's philosophy, and who drew Bakunin to political topics. He left Berlin in early 1842 for Dresden and met the Hegelian Arnold Ruge, who published Bakunin's first original publication. Die Reaktion in Deutschland proposes a continuation of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe and Russia. Though steeped in Hegelian jargon and published under a pseudonym, it marked Bakunin's transition from philosophy to revolutionary rhetoric.
Revolutionary activity and imprisonment
Throughout the 1840s, Bakunin grew into revolutionary agitation. When his cadre aroused interest from Russian secret agents, Bakunin left for Zürich in early 1843. He met the proto-communist Wilhelm Weitling, whose arrest led Bern's Russian embassy to distrust Bakunin. Defying Russian orders to return, the Russian Senate stripped him of his rights as a nobleman and sentenced him in absentia to penal labor in Siberia. Without steady financial support, Bakunin became an itinerant, traveling Europe, meeting the people who had influenced him. He visited Brussels and Paris, where he joined international emigrants and socialists, befriended the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and met the philosopher Karl Marx, with whom he would later tussle. Bakunin only became personally active in political agitation in 1847, as Polish emigrants in Paris invited him to commemorate the 1830 Polish uprising with a speech. His call for Poles to overthrow czarism in alliance with Russian democrats made Bakunin known throughout Europe and led the Russian ambassador to successfully request Bakunin's deportation.When the French King Louis Philippe I abdicated during the February 1848 Revolution, Bakunin returned to Paris and basked in the revolutionary milieu. With the French government's support, he headed to Prussian Poland to agitate for revolt against Russia, but never arrived. He attended the 1848 Prague Slavic Congress to defend Slavic rights against German and Hungarian nationalism, and participated in its impromptu insurrection against the Austrian Habsburgs. Uncaptured, he wrote Aufruf an die Slaven at the end of the year, advocating for a Slavic federation and revolt against the Austrian, Prussian, Turkish, and Russian governments. It was widely read and translated.
After participating in both the Prague uprising and the 1849 Dresden uprising, Bakunin was imprisoned, tried, sentenced to death, extradited multiple times, and ultimately placed in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersberg, Russia, in 1851. Three years later, he transferred to Shlisselburg Fortress near St. Petersberg for another three years. Prison weathered but did not break Bakunin, who retained his revolutionary zeal through his release. He did, however, write an autobiographical, genuflecting Confession to the Russian emperor, which proved to be a controversial document upon its public discovery some 70 years later. The letter did not improve his prison conditions. In 1857, Bakunin was permitted to transfer to permanent exile in Siberia. He married Antonia Kwiatkowska there before escaping in 1861, first to Japan, then to San Francisco, sailing to Panama and then to New York and Boston, and arrived in London by the end of the year. Bakunin set foot in America just as the Civil War was breaking out. Speaking with supporters of both sides, Bakunin stated that his sympathies were with the North, although he claimed hypocrisy in their stated goal of slave liberation while also forcing the South to remain in the Union. Bakunin also viewed the Southern political system and agrarian character as freer in some respects for its white citizens than in the industrial North. Though a fierce critic and enemy of slavery, Bakunin held a deep admiration for the United States as a whole, referring to the country as "the finest political organization that ever existed in history."
Back in Europe
In London, Bakunin reunited with Herzen and Ogarev. Bakunin collaborated with them on their Russian-language newspaper but his revolutionary fervor exceeded their moderate reform agenda. Bakunin's 1862 pamphlet The Peoples Cause: Romanov, Pugachev, or Pestel? criticized the Russian tsar for not using his position to facilitate a bloodless revolution and forgo another Pugachev's Rebellion. In early August 1862, he briefly travelled to Paris. In Paris at this time, famous photographer Nadar took four famous photographs of him on August 7, 1862. After being photographed, he also signed Nadar's Livre d'Or, and wrote : "Watch out that liberty doesn't come to you from the north." In 1863, Bakunin joined in an unsuccessful effort to supply armed men for the Polish January Uprising against Russia. Bakunin, reunited with his wife, moved to Italy the next year, where they stayed for three years.Bakunin, in his early 50s, developed his core anarchist thoughts in Italy. He continued to refine these ideas in his remaining 12 years. Among this ideology was the first of many conspiratorial revolutionary societies, though none of these participated in revolutionary actions, chiefly the revolutionary toppling of the state, to be replaced by a free federation between voluntarily associated economic producers.
He moved to Switzerland in 1867, a more permissive environment for revolutionary literature. Bakunin's anarchist writings were fragmentary and prolific. With France's collapse in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Bakunin traveled to Lyon and participated in the fruitless Lyon Commune in which the citizens briefly occupied the city hall. Bakunin retreated to Switzerland.
In Switzerland, the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev sought out Bakunin for collaboration. Not knowing Nechayev's past betrayals, Bakunin warmed to Nechayev's revolutionary zeal and they together produced the 1869 Catechism of the Revolutionary, a tract that endorsed an ascetic life for revolutionaries without societal or moral bonds. Bakunin's connection with Nechayev hurt the former's reputation. More recent scholarship, however, challenges the catechism's authorship, crediting Nechayev as the primary or sole author. Bakunin ultimately disavowed their connection.