Sergei Nechaev

Lore & Background

Nechaev was born in Ivanovo to poor parents—his father was a waiter and sign painter. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried, having two more sons. They lived in a three-room house with their two sisters and grandparents, all ex-serfs. At age 10, Nechaev learned his father's trades—waiting at banquets and painting signs.

His father got him a job as an errand boy in a factory, but he refused the servant's job. His family paid for tutors who taught him Latin, German, French, history, mathematics, and rhetoric. Aged 18, Nechaev moved to Moscow, working for historian Mikhael Pogodin. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg, passed a teacher's exam, and began teaching at a parish school.

From September 1868, he attended lectures at Saint Petersburg University as an auditor (never enrolled) and became acquainted with subversive Russian literature of the Decembrists, the Petrashevsky Circle, and Mikhail Bakunin, as well as growing student unrest. He was even said to have slept on bare wood and lived on black bread in imitation of Rakhmetov, the ascetic revolutionary in Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. Inspired by Dmitry Karakozov's failed attempt on the Tsar's life, Nechaev participated in student activism in 1868–1869, leading a radical minority with Pyotr Tkachev and others. He took part in devising the 'Program of revolutionary activities,' which stated a social revolution as its ultimate goal and suggested ways for creating a revolutionary organization, including composition of the Catechism of a Revolutionary.

Reader's Guide

Nechaev's significance lies in his extreme revolutionary ideology, encapsulated in the Catechism of a Revolutionary, written in late spring 1869. Its main principle—the ends justify the means—became his slogan. He saw ruthless immorality in the pursuit of total control by church and state and believed the struggle must be carried out by any means necessary. The catechism states: 'A revolutionary is a doomed man.

He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property, nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution.' A revolutionary 'must infiltrate all social formations including the police' and 'ally himself with the savage world of the violent criminal, the only true revolutionary in Russia.' The book influenced generations of radicals and was re-published by the Black Panther Party in 1969, one hundred years after its original publication. It also influenced the formation of the militant Red Brigades in Italy the same year.

Nechaev's methods included the murder of Ivan Ivanov on 21 November 1869, after Ivanov disagreed about distribution of propaganda. Nechaev and several comrades beat, strangled, and shot Ivanov, hiding the body in a lake through a hole in the ice. This incident was fictionalized by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his anti-nihilistic novel Demons, where the character Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is based on Nechaev. Arrested in Switzerland in 1872, Nechaev was extradited to Russia, where he received a twenty-year sentence and died in prison on 3 December 1882.

Did You Know?

• Nechaev spread false rumors of his own arrest in Saint Petersburg in January 1869 before leaving for Moscow and then abroad.
• He pretended to be a representative of a revolutionary committee who had fled from the Peter and Paul Fortress to win the confidence of Mikhail Bakunin in Geneva.
• Nechaev had a list of 387 people who were sent 560 parcels of leaflets for distribution between April and August 1869.