Mikhail Bakunin

Lore & Background

Bakunin was born into a noble family in Pryamukhino, a family estate in the Tver Governorate. He studied in Moscow from 1833, then moved to Berlin in 1840, hoping to enter academia. His expertise on Hegel developed around 1838–1840, though he did not produce the first Russian translation of Hegel. Later in Paris, he met Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who deeply influenced him. His increasing radicalism ended hopes of a professorial career. He was expelled from France in December 1847 for a speech given on November 29, 1847, and left France in early 1848. After attending the Prague Slavic Congress in June 1848 and participating in the 1849 Dresden uprising, Bakunin was imprisoned, tried, sentenced to death,

Reader's Guide

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. His legacy endures as a foundational theorist of collectivist anarchism and a persistent critic of state-centered socialism.

Did You Know?

• Bakunin produced the first Russian translation of Hegel and was the foremost Russian expert on Hegel by 1837.
• He was sentenced in absentia to penal labor in Siberia after defying Russian orders to return from abroad.
• Bakunin wrote an autobiographical, genuflecting 'Confession' to the Russian emperor while imprisoned, which proved controversial upon its discovery 70 years later.
• He escaped from Siberian exile in 1861 via Japan and the United States before reaching London.

Origins and the Generational Fracture

The Russian nihilist movement grew out of a deep rupture between two intellectual generations. The older cohort of aristocratic reformers and the younger radical intelligentsia found themselves in irreconcilable opposition. By the mid-1850s, a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism was already crystallizing among young radicals who had grown thoroughly disillusioned with the social reformers who preceded them. The turning point in public consciousness arrived in 1862, when Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons. In that novel, the characters representing the 'sixties' generation—disillusioned by both the traditionalists and the progressive reformists of the 1840s—voluntarily took up the label of nihilist, declaring that negation was the most necessary act of their age. The novel's reception was sharply divided, yet the movement quickly seized upon the name, either embracing it or at minimum accepting it as their identifier. The context was charged: the 1861 emancipation of serfs had produced terms that many viewed as bitterly inadequate, fueling the sense that the old order's compromises were hollow.

Philosophical Architecture Beyond Mere Negation

Russian nihilism was far more than a blanket rejection of meaning. While it dismissed the prevailing morality, religion, aesthetics, and social institutions as worthless, it did not extend that negation to all ethics, knowledge, or human life. Instead, the movement wove together hard determinism, atheism, materialism, positivism, and egoism into a distinctive philosophical program aimed at recontextualizing Enlightenment thought for a Russian setting, deliberately shedding the Westernizer orientation of the previous generation. This produced an atmosphere of extreme moral skepticism that at times celebrated outright selfishness and championed individuals who claimed exemption from all moral authority. In its most developed forms, the movement denied the possibility of shared ideals, favoring a relativist and individualistic outlook. Yet contemporary scholarship has pushed back against reducing nihilism to mere skepticism, identifying instead a fundamentally Promethean character. The nihilists sought to unleash what they saw as the latent power of the Russian people, embodied in a class of new prototypical individuals—rational egoists, thinking proletarians, critically thinking personalities, or members of the intelligentsia, depending on which thinker one consulted.

Nihilism and the Question of Violence

Although Russian nihilism is most commonly associated with revolutionary activism, the reality was more nuanced. The majority of nihilists were not political actors; they regarded politics as an outdated stage of human development. Their core conviction was that until a destructive program had dismantled existing conditions, no constructive program could be properly articulated. Some did begin sketching communal principles, but these formulations remained deliberately vague. Nevertheless, the widespread revolutionary arson of 1862, the string of assassinations and attempted assassinations through the 1860s and 1870s, and ultimately the killing of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 led European observers to characterize Russian nihilism as a doctrine of political terrorism and violent crime. Kropotkin pushed back against this reading, arguing that violence was a product of the specific revolutionary context rather than an inherent feature of nihilist philosophy. Yet historian M. A. Gillespie countered that nihilism remained at the core of revolutionary thought in Russia throughout the lead-up to the Revolution. Professor T. J. J. Altizer went further, suggesting that Russian nihilism found its deepest twentieth-century expression in a Bolshevist nihilism.

The Making of a Label

The word 'nihilist' carries a complicated history of misapplication, particularly in Western discourse. Revolutionaries themselves typically identified as socialist revolutionaries or, more casually, as radicals. Yet from outside Russia, the term was misapplied to the entire revolutionary milieu. The probable first use in Russian publication is attributed to Nikolai Nadezhdin, who employed it synonymously with skepticism and even applied it to Pushkin. Vasily Bervi-Flerovsky and Vissarion Belinsky followed in similar usage. The term gained its negative political charge through the conservative journalist Mikhail Katkov, who framed nihilism as a revolutionary social menace precisely because of its negation of moral principles. It rose in popularity when accusations of materialism ceased to be sufficiently derogatory. Dmitry Pisarev offered an alternative label—realist—which carried the same rejection of metaphysics and sentimentality without the baggage of subjectivism and nothingness. Alexander Herzen, writing in a later political climate, presented nihilism as a product of the 1840s generation that the 1860s had inherited. The term's fluid history reveals how much of what we call 'nihilism' was shaped by its opponents as much as by its adherents.

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