Unknown Soldiers by Matthew Carr pp 18-21 Nechaev's brief trajectory through Russian revolutionary politics began in 1866, when

he went to St Petersburg to become a schoolmaster. Having spent most of his life in the mediocrity of a small provincial town, Nechaev immersed himself in radical student politics, where he rapidly distinguished himself by his impatience with any form of theoretical discussion, describing his student companions as 'a corrupt and inane herd of babbling doctrinaires.' In a document entitled 'A Programme of Revolutionary Action', Nechaev wrote, 'If we think of our surroundings, we must inevitably conclude that we are living in the kingdom of the mad - so terrible and unnatural are people's relations to each other; so strange and unbelievable their attitude towards the mass of injustices, vileness and baseness that constitutes our social regime.' From Nechaev's perspective such a society could be transformed only by violent revolutionary action. For reasons known only to himself Nechaev decided that a nationwide insurrction would break out in 1870 on the ninth anniversary of the emancipation of serfdom. To prepare for the conflagration he created his own revolutionary society, the Narodnaya Rasprava, or People's Vengeance. The exact size of the society is not known, and Nechaev always exaggerated it. Nevertheless, it probably never amounted to more than a few hundred and its political impact was negligible. The man of action who once proposed cutting out the tongues of writers owes his lating reputation to his words rather than his deeds, in particular the notorious 'Catechism of the Revolutionist', in which he outlined the aims and methods of his society. The document begins by describing the structure of the organisation, with its hierarchal division into cells of five members, whose activities are to be kept secret from everybody its members and the central cell. In a section entitled 'Principles by which the Revolutionary Must Be Guided', Nechaev then defines the type of revolutionary personality that will make up the organisation. "1. The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion the revolution. "2. In the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken every tie with the civil order and the entire cultured world, with all its laws, proprieties, social conventions, and its ethical rules. He is an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that is only to destroy it more effectively" For Nechaev, the revolutionary was a tragic hero who suppressed his own humanity for the greater good:

"Hard toward himself, he must be hard toward others also. All the tender and effeminate emotions of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude, and even honor must be stifled in him by a cold and single-minded passion for the revolutionary cause...Night and day he must have one thought, one aim merciless destruction" Nechaev's vision of a secret terrorist organisation made up of ruthless amoral Jacobins was both a philosophical and a tactical innovation, in which the relationship between the ends and means posed no moral problems, since 'everything is moral which stands in its way.' What kind of society would these grim prototypes deliver if they ever came to power? ..... There was always something more to Nechaev's amorality than an altruistic desire to subjugate his better instincts on behalf of the revolution. On 21 November 1869 he and four members of the People's Vengeance brutally murdered a student, Ivan Ivanov, in St Petersburg. Though Nechaev was accused of being a police agent provocateur, Ivanov's real crime seems to hvae been that he questioned Nechaev's own authority. ... Some of the most revealing glimpses of his manipulative character are contained in Michael Confino's collection, published in 1974, of the letters between Nechaev, Bakunin and Natalie Herzen: Daughter of a Revolutionary. The correspondence took place during Nechaev's second visit to Switzerland, where he fled after the murder of Ivanov and resumed his plotting with Bakunin. In January 1870 Alexander Herzen died and Nechaev and Bakunin embarked on a sordid attempt to manipulate Herzen's daughter Natalie and his old comrade Nikolai Ogarev. The unmarried Natalie had recently recovered from a nervous breakdown and Nechaev seems to have exercised the same fascination over her as he did for so many of his contemporaries. Nechaev appears to have regarded Herzen's daughter as an aristocratic ingenue from whom he could extract money, and he almost succeeded in drawing her into his nebulous revolutionary conspiracies through a combination of seduction and appeals to her social conscience. When Nechaev professed his love for her, Natalie was nto fooled and expressed her incredulous amazement in her diary that 'this crude, half-savage ruffian could ever have uttered a single word about love.' Eventually she managed to break off the relationship and in 1872 Nechaev was arrested by the Swiss authorities and extradited back to Russia. The following year he stood trial for the murder of Ivanov. During the trial the 'Catechism" made a sensational public appearance when the prosecution produced it as evidence. By this time Nechaev was considered so dangerous that the tsar himself took a personal interest in the trial. Nechaev treated the proceedings with studied

contempt, drumming his fingers on the ledge and calling out periodically: 'I do not recognise the Court! I do not recognise the tsar! I do not recognise the laws!" The judges sentenced him to twenty years in Siberia, but Alexander recommended that Nechaev be imprisoned 'for ever' in the SS Peter and Paul fortress. In 1881 he managed to involve his guard at the fortress in a plot to help him escape. Using his contacts he also managed to to smuggle coded messages to the People's Will, to the amazement of its members, who believed him dead. The plot was discovered and Nechaev's privileges were withdrawn. on 21 November 1882 he died of scurvy at the age of 35, leaving nothing behind him but a handful of novels written in prison which have since been lost, and the grim template of the revolutionary destroyer.