Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Tue, 21 Jul 1992 15:14:43 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Anarchism

   I hate to have to remind Jim Emmons of this but Nihilists and Anarchists
were not just labels or abstractions but real people in real Russian history.
Nihilists were cultural-intellectual precursors of the Populists who overlapped
somewhat with Anarchism in their spawning of terrorism. This was a complicated
process; Nihilism was the beginning of it. They were *anlogous* - not *like*,
but analogous - to the Beat Generation of the late 1950s in relation to the
Early New Left of the 1961-1965 period, except for what they did in classrooms.

   A Nihilist was typically a spoiled brat university student of the middle
1850s to early 1860s. He, almost always a he, given the gender imbalance in
Tsarist Russian universities, came from a family of gentry whose father was
preoccupied with such vital matters as hunting dogs. He despised the State
which he was being educated to serve because it lacked Modern things like
elections, constitutions, civil liberties, and freedom from forced labor.

[Half of all Russians were still serfs, known to their Betters as "Dark
People," and Russia itself was an Evil Empire ruled by real Evil Emperors.
Because the system of government called itself Samoderzhavie, translated
"autocracy," the particular mental illness of the Supreme Autocrat becomes
relevant. Nicholas I, whose 30-year reign was called "a waste of time," was
a manic, suspicious, paranoid, rigid, a dynamo of energy if stupid, and
ran the country like a parade ground; he did not allow backtalk. He lost a
war with Britain and France, 1854-5, dropped dead. His son was depressive,
preferred to let the system run itself as much as possible so it wouldn't
bother him, he did not have the energy. To this end he had to make sweeping
reforms such as freeing the serfs and issuing a legal code with guarantees
of civil liberties, within reason of course.]

   Nihilists made a fetish of Revolution wherever it broke out, and also of
Science as it was fancied to be carried on in the West. Everything Russian
was sneered at, was thought to stink of backwardness. Monarchist professors
were harassed in classrooms regardless of competence. One who was competent
was Ilya Tsion, first and only Jew appointed to the Faculty of Medicine of
St. Petersburg University, who as a Monarchist - *of course* - was harassed
until he quit and possibly went mad. (For his subsequent career, see Geroge
Kennan, The Collapse of Bismarck's European Order.)

   Nihilists did not on the whole attempt to rouse the toiling masses with
whom they had only abstract sympathy. They had fantasies of being heroic
freedom fighters like the hero of Turgenyev's On The Eve. Or they wallowed
in, even died of, their own futility, like Bazarov in the same author's
Fathers and Sons.

   Anarchism is associated with the teachings of Mikhail Bakunin, who was
Marx's opponent within the First International, founded by Marx and a few
buddies in 1862; essentially dissolved under pressure from Bakunin in 1872.
What Bakunin taught was that Marxists, should they ever come to power, would
do exactly what Lenin, more so Stalin, later did in Russia, that is, institute
a ruthless dictatorship more despotic than the Tsarism that would be overthrown
by the Revolution Marxists and Anarchists alike wanted. Please make no mistake
about that, by the way. The difference between Marxists and Bakuninists inside
Russia at this time was that there *were* no Marxists inside Russia at this
time. Bakuninists taught that it was imperative not to rebuild a state after
any Social Revolution, since a State disposing of science and the brains of
educated intellectuals could make mincemeat of the People in whose name it
ruled. People, because there was no working class yet, only peasants.

   Once you have the most rudimentary comparative knowledge of Revolutions,
you see theat all of them, except the Bolivian, went through a stage of
Revolutionary Dictatorship, going back to the English Revolution of the 1640s
if not to the Hussites of the fifteenth century. In the French Revolution, the
Last War the Marx and Bakunin were fighting over, there was the horrible
example of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, 1793-1794. How was
it possible to prevent some such thing from happening again? It wasn't; the
prophetic powers of Bakunin were limited to predicting that water will run
downhill.

   That Bakunin ever encouraged terrorism was controversial. A madman named
Nechayev, an avowed subversive, who hallucinated a vast impersonal conspiracy,
was blamed on Bakunin's influence, but this was not Bakunin's doing. For
obvious reasons, Anarchists ramained, to the end, when shot by Lenin in Russia
or by Franco in Spain, impossible to keep disciplined. Those who were
terrorists had their organizations, those who were syndicalists had trade
unions. Nobody ever had a right to say that somebody wasn't an Anarchist.
So anything done by somebody claiming to be an Anarchist was what it was,
period.

Daniel A. Foss
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU