Statism And Anarchy

Front matter

Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought

Bakunin

Marshall Shatz

Contents

Editor’s note Introduction

Principal events in Bakunin’s life Bibliographical note Note on the translation

Statism and Anarchy

II

26-33: the imminence of social revolution in Spain and Italy; 33-45: the weaknesses of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the historical conflict between Slavs and Germans; the anti-state nature of the Slavs; pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism; 45-51: social revolution and the liberation of the Slavs; 51-56: the case of Serbia; 56-60: the Czechs.

III

60-77: German strength and Russian weakness; the dangers of pan-Slavism to the Russian state; 77-83: the character of the German military; 83-88: the Poles as a source of Russian vulnerability; 89-97: the rise of German power on the Baltic; 97-103: the folly of Russian expansion in the East.

IV

103-06: the character of the German people; 106-12: the French Revolution and the revival of Prussia; 112-29: the rivalry of Austria and Prussia: liberalism and reaction in Germany, 1815-48.

V

129-33: the influence of Hegelianism and the failure of revolution in Germany; 133-36: life, not thought, as the basis of anarchism;

136-38: Hegelianism, statism, and Marxism.

VI

138-43: the coming of the revolution of 1848 to Germany; the character and early activity of Marx; 143-63: Germany in 1848: the liberals’ choice of a pan-German state over liberty; 163-68: the bankruptcy of German liberalism.

VII

168-73: the character and objectives of Bismarck; 173-77: the character and objectives of Lassalle; 177-81: Marx’s program of state dictatorship; 181-89: Lassalle, Marx, and the Social-Democratic Party; the schism in the International; 189-97: the German nation’s support for the pan- German empire.

Appendix A

198-203: what the friends of the people should do; 203-12: the imminence of social revolution in Russia; the people’s ideal and its defects: patriarchalism; 212-17: the

revolutionary youth and popular insurrection.

Appendix B

218-20: The Program of the Slavic Section of Zurich.

Biographical and other notes on the text Index

Editor’s Note

The preparation of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. I am grateful to the Endowment and its staff for their support and encouragement.

I wish to express my thanks to Professor Paul Avrich of Queens College of the City University of New York, and Professor Paul Gagnon of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who generously took the time to read parts of the manuscript and shared their wisdom with me.

Introduction

The reign of Nicholas I, it has often been noted, displays a curious paradox: one of the most repressive periods in the history of imperial Russia, it was also a time of remarkable intellectual and cultural creativity. In the 1830s and 1840s, under the very noses of the Third Section (Nicholas’s political police), Westernizers, Slavophiles, liberals, and even socialists were discussing and developing their ideas. Some of the greatest classics of Russian literature were also being composed and published. Michael Bakunin’s long intellectual journey, which would culminate in Statism and Anarchy of 1873, his last major work, had its beginnings in this bracing atmosphere.

Bakunin, as well as Peter Kropotkin, his successor as the foremost theorist of Russian anarchism, were both scions of the landed nobility, the most privileged class in the Russian Empire. They were not exceptional in this respect. Until about the 1860s nearly all of Russia’s radicals and revolutionaries were nobles. In autocratic Russia, where no individual had political rights or even secure civil liberties or guarantees of free expression, even nobles could suffer oppression, if not of an economic kind. With the bulk of the Russian population enserfed until 1861 and the country as a whole socially and economically backward in comparison with Western Europe, only nobles had the education and exposure to Western ideas that enabled them to criticize existing conditions in ideological terms and articulate a vision of a freer and more just order of things. Thus, for much of the nineteenth century, the Russian intelligentsia, as such educated critics came to be called, consisted largely of sons (and some daughters) of the nobility. Bakunin stands as an extreme, but not untypical, example.

The contradictory social, political, and psychological conditions that generated the intelligentsia collided early in Bakunin’s own life. Michael (Mikhail Aleksandrovich, to give him his full Russian name) Bakunin was born on May 18, 1814 - May 30 by the Western calendar, which was twelve days ahead of the Russian calendar then in use - at the family estate of Priamukhino (or Premukhino, as it is sometimes spelled), in Tver province, northwest of Moscow. His father, Alexander, had been sent to Italy at the age of nine and educated there, taking a doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Padua. He subsequendy served as a Russian diplomat in Italy. Having retired to his estate, at the age of forty he married the eighteeen-year-old Varvara Muraveva, a member of the prominent and far-flung Muravev clan. They proceeded to have ten children, of whom Michael, the first son, was the third oldest. The Bakunins were a well-off and well-established gentry family, but they were neither illustrious nor rich. Though they owned some 500 “souls,” or male serfs, their income was not lavish, especially when it came to providing education and dowries for so many children, and the family correspondence of Michael’s early years is filled with references to financial worries.

The elder Bakunin educated his children at home, according to the principles of Rousseau and other Enlightenment figures in whose thought he himself had been steeped. The atmosphere of Priamukhino was idyllic, rich in intellectual stimulation, appreciation of art and nature, and spiritual elevation; it was also fraught with contradictions, for it had little to do with actual Russian life. In an autobiographical fragment composed shortly before his death, Bakunin wrote that he and his brothers and sisters were raised in a Western rather than a Russian spirit. “We lived, so to speak, outside Russian conditions, in a world full of feeling and fantasy but devoid of any reality.”1

Like most educated Russians of his generation, the elder Bakunin was unperturbed by this contradiction. Having elevated the consciousness and self-consciousness of his sons and daughters, he nevertheless expected them to fulfill uncomplainingly their traditional duty to their family, class, and tsar. That meant careers as military officers or landowners for the boys, and as wives of military officers or landowners for the girls. Consciousness and reality soon came into sharp conflict for Michael, and to some extent for his sisters as well.

In 1828, at the age of fourteen, Bakunin was sent to St. Petersburg to prepare for entry into the Artillery School. It was not a happy encounter, either for Bakunin or for the Russian army. Although he received his officer’s commission he was dismissed from the Artillery School in 1834 for disciplinary reasons and was sent to serve in a provincial garrison. He detested military life, and his letters of the time are filled with expressions of disgust for it. Although he referred on several occasions to the coarseness and crudeness of officer life, which contrasted so painfully with the cultured (and sheltered) upbringing he had had at Priamukhino, it appears to have been the constraints and petty discipline of military service that particularly grated on him. Finally, in 1835, much to his father’s consternation, he left the military for good.

Having liberated himself from the shackles of military service, he also sought to liberate his sisters from the shackles of marriages, or prospective marriages, that he considered unworthy of them. As the oldest boy in the family, and the only male of the first five children, Michael became the leader of the older “cohort” of Bakunin offspring. He was possessive of his sisters, and rather domineering in regard to them, but his intention was not to keep them from marrying - on the contrary, he would later try to match them up with some of his Moscow friends. His objection was to the kind of marriage to conventional gentry husbands that their parents had in mind, marriages in which neither love nor intellectual compatibility was considered relevant. His sisters, whose sensibilities had been cultivated as much as his, shared these qualms, although with more ambivalence. (In the end, he had only limited success in arranging their marital lives.) His quest for personal autonomy and self¬ development led him inexorably into rebellion against his father - who, it should be noted, was by no means a tyrant, and whom Bakunin genuinely loved and respected.

Bakunin’s years at Priamukhino left a lasting mark on him. He was the center of a tight-knit family circle consisting of his four sisters, a few like-minded friends, and himself. It was a close, warm, and highly selfconscious little company, nurtured on the German romantic prose, poetry, and philosophy that was so popular with educated Russians of the 1830s. Bakunin’s letters, and those of the other members of the Priamukhino Circle, are filled with lofty philosophical concepts combined with more traditional religious sentiment. The rhetoric is abstract and romanticized, and not untypically adolescent in its self-centered introspection. What comes through clearly is the difficulty these young people faced in trying to reconcile their search for self-realization with the traditional patriarchal world in which they lived. Bakunin’s solution was to create an alternative, ideal world of love and spiritual harmony, its intimacy and fraternal devotion sanctified by romantic literature and philosophy and intensified by its sense of embattlement against insensitive elders. He refers to the Priamukhino Circle in such terms as “our holy union,” “this holy fraternity,” “our little circle linked by holy love.” The seeds of Bakunin’s succession of intimate conspiratorial associations in later life, as well as his vision of the small, fraternal anarchist community, may well have been planted here.2

For all its warmth and emotional support, the world of Priamukhino was too small to contain Bakunin’s restless spirit. He now completed the task of scandalizing his father by moving to Moscow and proclaiming his intention to study philosophy while earning his living as a mathematics tutor. Bakunin in fact gave very few lessons, subsisting instead on an allowance from his father and the assistance of friends. He did, however, immerse himself in the study of philosophy.

In Moscow, he became part of a circle of young intellectuals absorbed in the philosophical currents of the day. It was headed by Nicholas Stankevich, whose compelling personality and early death outshone any specific accomplishments, and it included the brilliant literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. In Moscow, Bakunin also made the acquaintance of such future luminaries as Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev, who were to achieve renown as radical journalists in emigration and remained his lifelong friends. The intellectuals in Moscow were just beginning to divide into the two camps of “Westernizers,” who believed Russia should follow the general course of political and social development already laid down by the West, and the “Slavophiles,” who believed Russia should build on her own native culture and institutions, which had best been preserved by the unspoiled peasantry. Both groups would have their impact on Bakunin, for his later thought, like that of many nineteenth-century Russians, was to some degree an amalgam of the two: he would look to the “backward” but uncorrupted Russian peasants, and the Slavs in general, to be the first to put into practice the most advanced Western principles of socialism.3

Most of all, in his Moscow years, he studied Hegel, who now replaced Fichte as the philosopher in whom he sought the key to wisdom. As he says in Statism and Anarchy, in what is unmistakably an autobiographical remark, one had to have lived in those times to understand the passion with which Hegel’s philosophy was embraced. Bakunin made a very serious study of at least parts of Hegel’s doctrines, and his first original publication, in the journal Moscow Observer, was a Preface to his translation of two of Hegel’s five Gymnasium Lectures. (He had previously published a translation of Fichte’s lectures On the Vocation of the Scholar.)

Hegel’s influence on his young Russian readers was twofold and contradictory. Some drew from Hegel’s dictum “everything that is real is rational, and everything that is rational is real” a conservative, quietistic justification of the status quo. Others, however, drew from it precisely the opposite conclusion: if everything that is rational is real, then those elements of everyday life that are patently irrational, such as repression, or backwardness, are “unreal” and are destined to be swept away by the inexorable unfolding of the dialectic of history. In Herzen’s famous phrase, the latter found in Hegel’s philosophy “the algebra of revolution.” From the perspective of the Anglo-American political tradition, Hegelian philosophy may seem an exceedingly abstract and circuitous way of arriving at a radical critique of the existing order. It must be recalled, however, that in the rigid autocracy of Nicholas I no autonomous political life was allowed, and any attempt to create one was treated as subversion. Lacking the opportunity for political activity or even political expression, those who wished to question the existing system had to find another, indirect approach. Since the young intellectuals of the day had no power other than the power of thought, Hegelianism, and idealist philosophy in general, with the primacy it gave to mind and consciousness, offered the most satisfying possibility, however abstract it may have been.4 Thus, in a way that would undoubtedly have astonished its creator, Hegelian philosophy had the capacity to generate, or at least to validate, radicalism.

In general terms, the impact of Hegelianism in Russia was similar to its impact in Germany, where the Young, or Left, Hegelians - including Marx - were beginning to emerge. It has long been thought that it was only after he arrived in Berlin in 1840 and came in contact with Left Hegelian circles that Bakunin was “radicalized,” and that he left Russia still a political conservative, or at most apolitical. In his 1838 Preface he had, after all, called for a “reconciliation with reality.” A closer scrutiny of that article and of his other writings of the period, however, has brought this view into question and provided evidence that his Hegelianism had already begun to serve as a bridge between knowledge and the criticism of concrete reality, between philosophy and social action.5 If so, then his later revolutionary stance was a logical result of a philosophical development that began well before he left Russia, rather than an abrupt, and inexplicable, transformation upon his arrival on German soil. Bakunin, who tended to deprecate his early interest in philosophy, a few years later characterized German philosophy as “the spiritual opium of all those who thirst for action and are condemned to inactivity.”6 The fact remains, however, that through such abstractions energetic young men like Bakunin found their way to revolution. This in turn helps to explain why devotion to abstract ideas could sometimes be a punishable offense in Nicholas’s Russia.

In 1840, after a lengthy campaign, Bakunin persuaded his father to help finance a period of study in Berlin. His plan was to familiarize himself with German philosophy at its source, and then return to Russia to pursue a career as a university professor. His father was duly skeptical of his son’s ability to setde down and embrace the pleasures of academic life, but he concluded that he had lithe choice but to agree. Since his family lacked sufficient funds to subsidize him fully, however, Bakunin arranged for a subvention from the wealthy and generous Herzen. Even in Moscow he had already acquired his lifelong habit of living off the benefactions of others - as did his later rival Marx, it should be noted. Perhaps it was fitting that a sworn enemy of the existing economic order should help to undermine it by observing so lithe bourgeois punctiliousness in regard to money matters. It was a practice that had unpleasant and sometimes unsavory consequences, however. For the rest of his life Bakunin would be trailed by an ever swelling chorus of unpaid creditors whose “loans” he never repaid. (Herzen, it should be emphasized, was not among them and always aided Bakunin unstinhngly.) His behavior hardly stemmed from a lust for creature comforts - he never sought more than the bare minimum required to keep body and soul together and at times made do with less - nor can it be attributed simply to childlike fecklessness. Rather, it would seem that Bakunin, again like Marx, had such confidence in his destiny and in his mission that he was willing to endure the humiliation of depending on others to foot the bill.

That sense of mission was to drive him for the rest of his life, but as yet it had no specific content or objective. There is, for example, no indication in his early letters or writings that he gave Russia’s peasants a thought, even though he had been raised on a serf estate. Like so many educated Russians of his time, he lived side by side with the peasants but in a world apart from them. What he took with him from Russia was a personal and intellectual framework within which concrete political and social ideals would begin to develop as a result of his sojourn in Western Europe. A few years later, in his famous “confession” to Nicholas I, to which we will return below,

Bakunin provided an excellent formulation of his lifelong credo: “To look for my happiness in the happiness of others, for my own worth in the worth of all those around me, to be free in the freedom of others - that is my whole faith, the aspiration of my whole life.”7 Throughout his life Bakunin would seek to liberate both himself and others from all external constraints on the development of their personalities, just as he had sought to liberate himself, his sisters, and their friends from the narrow conventions of family and caste. This effort, given shape and direction by the myriad experiences and thoughts of subsequent years, would culminate in his anarchist ideology.

Once settled in Berlin, where for a time he shared a flat with the future novelist Ivan Turgenev, he attended only briefly to his philosophical studies. Instead, he was drawn to the Left Hegelians, and in October 1842 the first fruit of his leftward movement appeared. It was an article in the Left Hegelian journal Deutsche Jahrbucher fur Wissenschaft und

Kunst entitled “The Reaction in Germany: A Fragment from a Frenchman.” He signed it with the pseudonym Jules Elysard, so as not to attract the attention of watchful Russian diplomats, and for good reason. Most of the article was cast in the abstract terminology of Hegelian dialectics, but its subject was the contemporary conflict between reaction and revolution. The last few pages were overfly political, with references to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and to the “spirit of revolution.” Even in Russia, he asserted, “dark clouds are gathering, heralding storm.” The article ended with the famous statement that became the virtual hallmark of his subsequent career: “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.”8

In this article Bakunin referred briefly to the rights of the poor, and he now began to examine the social question. Moving from Germany to Switzerland, then to Paris, he became acquainted with the various currents of socialism that were making increasing headway in Europe at this time. He met almost everyone who was anyone in European revolutionary and socialist circles of the 1840s, but it was in Paris that he encountered the two men whose views, in different ways, proved most crucial to him. One was Karl Marx, whom Bakunin first met in 1844. For all their bitter personal relations in later years, Bakunin had great respect for Marx’s intellect, and adopted many of his criticisms of capitalism. In fact, he may have been the first Russian to familiarize himself closely with Marx’s ideas.9 The other was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom Bakunin became fast friends. Proudhon was the first to combine the critique of capitalism with anarchism’s hostility to the state, and although Bakunin would later reject much of Proudhon’s program he assimilated many of Proudhon’s basic positions into his anarchist ideology. Meanwhile, the Russian government had learned that he was hobnobbing with

European radicals and ordered him to return home. When he refused, he was stripped of his noble status and sentenced in absentia to hard labor in Siberia. By 1844 he had burned his bridges to his native land, though he still maintained contact with his family at Priamukhino.

The other issue on which he began to focus in the 1840s was the liberation of the Slavs, and particularly the Poles. In 1847, at a banquet in Paris commemorating the seventeenth anniversary of the Polish uprising of 1830-31, he gave an impassioned speech urging reconciliation between Poles and Russians in a joint revolutionary effort against their common enemy, the despotism of Nicholas I. By the time the revolutions of 1848 broke out, the social and national commitments to which he would henceforth adhere were firmly in place. Their precise definition, and the relationship between them, would be refined further in later years, but they continued to form the major axes of his revolutionary oudook.

Poland was a particularly sore spot for the Russian government, and at the instigation of the Russian ambassador Bakunin was expelled from France. The outbreak of the February Revolution in Paris found him in Brussels, but with the overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the installation of the provisional government he immediately returned to Paris. The upheavals of 1848 and 1849 at last gave him the opportunity for action, and he avidly pursued revolutions all over Europe. In Paris he immersed himself in radical circles. To quote his “confession” once again, he found the revolutionary atmosphere there “a feast without beginning and without end.”10 Equipped with funds and passports by the provisional government, he soon set off for the Duchy of Poznan, in the Prussian part of Poland, to agitate the Poles, but was prevented from reaching it. In June he participated in the Slav Congress in Prague, which had been called by the Czech leadership in response to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt to defend the interests of the Slavs against

German as well as Hungarian expansion. He also participated in the insurrection which brought the congress to an end, although his role seems to have been a small one.

In December of 1848 he published an Appeal to the Slavs, the work that first drew the attention of a broad European public. Unlike the Czech leaders of the Slav Congress, who thought in terms of achieving national rights within a restructured Austrian Empire, Bakunin called for the overthrow of the despotic regimes in Prussia and Turkey, Austria and Russia, and their replacement by a free federation of Slavic peoples, or even a federation of European republics. “Our whole salvation lies in revolution, and nowhere else,” he wrote.11 Published in Leipzig as a pamphlet in German and Polish versions, it was also translated into Czech and French and was widely read and debated.12

Bakunin’s overall objective in this period was to bring together the democratic forces of the Slavs, Hungarians, and Germans in a concerted revolutionary assault on the existing order throughout Central and Eastern Europe. After leaving Prague, Bakunin returned to Germany, while retaining contacts among the Czechs. At the beginning of May 1849, white living in Dresden, he was drawn into an insurrection that broke out against the king of Saxony.

The composer Richard Wagner became closely acquainted with Bakunin in Dresden, and although his account is not completely reliable he paints a vivid portrait of him in his autobiography. Wagner captures particularly well the magnetic attraction which this huge and self-assured man exerted on so many people who came in contact with him.

I was immediately struck by his singular and altogether imposing personality. He was in the full bloom of manhood, anywhere between thirty and forty years of age. Everything about him was colossal, and he was full of a primitive exuberance and strength . . . His general mode of discussion was the Socratic method, and he seemed quite at his ease when, stretched on his host’s hard sofa, he could argue discursively with a crowd of all sorts of men on the problems of revolution. On these occasions he invariably got the best of the argument. It was impossible to triumph against his opinions, stated as they were with the utmost conviction, and overstepping in every direction even the extremest bounds of radicalism.

According to Wagner, although Bakunin disapproved of the insurrection, which he found ill-conceived and inefficient, once it broke out he committed himself to it fully and behaved with “wonderful sangfroid.” Wagner states that Bakunin proposed bringing all the insurgents’ powder stores to the Town Hall to be blown up at the approach of the attacking troops. (Bakunin confirms this in his “confession,” where he states also that he would not have boggled at setting fire to the city, for he could not understand why one should feel sorrier for houses than for people.14) Refusing as a matter of honor to flee even when the situation became hopeless, Bakunin was arrested with other leaders of the insurrection. The Saxon authorities tried him and sentenced him to death, then commuted the sentence and turned him over to the Austrians. They in turn tried him for his part in the Prague insurrection, sentenced him to death once again, commuted the sentence and extradited him to Russia. In May of 1851 he was conveyed in chains to St. Petersburg and placed in solitary confinement in the Peter- Paul Fortress, the main Russian prison for political offenders.

A few months later, Bakunin wrote one of his most controversial works, his “confession” to Nicholas I. He was informed that Nicholas wanted him to write an account of his transgressions “as a spiritual son writes to his spiritual father.” Bakunin agreed and penned a “letter” ninety-six pages in length. After the Russian Revolution the document was found in the tsarist archives and published. Some have interpreted it as the abject apology of a man who had “cracked” under the strain of more than two years of incarceration. A closer examination of the “confession,” however, reveals that that was far from the case. Nicholas seems to have wanted two things: repentance, and information on Bakunin’s revolutionary accomplices, especially Poles. Bakunin disappointed him on both counts. While conceding that his actions had been criminal from Nicholas’s point of view, and signing the document “a repentant sinner,” Bakunin retracted none of his convictions. Furthermore, he explicitiy refused to incriminate others and was careful to divulge only information he was sure Nicholas had from other sources.

Why, then, did Bakunin agree to write such a lengthy and detailed account of his thoughts and activities from the time of his arrival in Western Europe to the time of his arrest? Although we can hardly hope to enter into the state of mind of someone in Bakunin’s position, part of his motivation appears to have been self-scrutiny, a desire to take stock of his life and his goals to date. The “confession” contains a number of introspective passages in which Bakunin seems to be addressing himself as much as Nicholas. In addition, he seems to have been taken with the idea of educating Nicholas. After all, how often did the Emperor of All the Russias have an opportunity to read an authentic revolutionary credo from a direct source? Bakunin probably had few illusions about persuading Nicholas of his views - although this cannot be entirely dismissed, for the idea of “revolution from above” died hard in many Russians, including Bakunin. Primarily, however, Bakunin appears to have wished to enlighten Nicholas, for whatever good it might do, as to the true nature of the progressive forces at large in contemporary Europe. Hence, in the guise of a letter of repentance, we find a detailed account of Bakunin’s education in radicalism and his participation in efforts to topple governments across Europe.

In the course of the narrative, several themes appear that henceforth remain constant in Bakunin’s thought in one form or another. Slav unity is one, coupled with an increasing strain of anti -Germanism, here directed mainly against the Austrian Empire. Anti¬ parliamentarism is also a prominent feature, for the events of 1848 and 1849 had deeply disillusioned Bakunin, like many other

European radicals, as to the value of “bourgeois democracy” and constitutionalism. In turn, his disappointment at the failure of democratic revolution in Germany, which he analyzes at considerable length in Statism and Anarchy, may have reinforced his growing anti-German sentiment. In an odd passage that seems to reflect the very accusation he would later hurl against Marx, he told Nicholas that he favored a strong dictatorial government, especially for Russia, whose purpose would be to educate the people to the point that such dictatorship became unnecessary.15 (He did not specify who was to head such a dictatorship, but this theme would recur several times in the course of his career.) He also admitted to harboring a “passion for destruction,” reiterating the famous phrase from his article of 1842.16

The “confession,” then, with due account taken of the circumstances in which it was written, stands as a detailed and self-revealing account of a vital period in Bakunnin’s life. That it elicited no mitigation of his sentence is not surprising. (In 1854, during the Crimean War, the government, apparendy fearing an attack on St. Petersburg, moved him to the more remote Schlusselburg Fortress.) Bakunin claimed that Alexander II, Nicholas’s son, who came to the throne in 1855, upon reading his “letter” said that he saw no repentance in it at all, 7 and Nicholas seems to have been of the same mind. They were right, for Bakunin emerged from his long confinement with the same political views he held when he began it. This is clearly documented in a letter he smuggled past the prison censors to his family in 1854. Even after five years of solitude and physical deterioration, he declared that prison, far from altering his previous convictions, had made them “more fiery, more decisive, and more unconditional.”18 The rest of his life would bear out the truth of those words.