Nechaevshchina

A pejorative label

"Nechaevshchina" (Russian: нечаевщина) is a disapproving name for the methods of action of the Russian revolutionary Sergei Gennadiyevich Nechaev, not a neutral scholarly category. That character is built into the term from the start; the Russian-language reference literature uses it only as a label of censure.

The practices it names

Nechaev's Catechism of a Revolutionary demanded that revolutionaries suppress all human feeling and sanctioned murder, the compromising of the upper strata of society, and blackmail and provocation (шантаж и провокации) against oppositional elements. Its organizational principle was dictatorial centralism: complete candor from members toward the organizer, but no questions from members to the organizer, and rank-and-file revolutionaries were to know only the part of the work assigned to them.

Condemned from within the movement

These methods were rejected inside the Russian revolutionary movement itself. Excluded from the anarchist milieu around him and officially disowned by the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, which said he had abused its name, Nechaev was criticized by Marx and Engels and condemned by figures of many currents of the 1870s and 1880s, including Vera Zasulich and Pyotr Lavrov. Nechaevshchina thus became a byword for pseudo-revolutionariness and militant ignorance that fought the filth of the old world with its own dirty means.

Weaponized from both sides

The label also became a weapon in political argument. The reaction used Nechaev's image and the term to discredit revolutionaries, while Soviet historiography accused some Western writers of tracing one of the "roots of Bolshevism" to Nechaev. Inside the Russian emigration, "Nechaevshchina" and "Nechaevists" were used as near-abusive words, including against those who favored proletarian seizure of power, armed insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin's own view differed. According to Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich's 1934 memoir, Lenin called Nechaev a "titan of the revolution" and urged that his writings be read and studied. That is a judgment about the man; the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1969–1978) held instead that Nechaev "acted using methods unacceptable for a revolutionary and brought great harm to the Russian revolutionary movement."

Literature and historiography

Dostoevsky's Demons (1873) fictionalized the murder of the student Ivanov and became a major channel through which the label spread. Some early Soviet historians idealized Nechaev as a Bolshevik type. The term returned to wide circulation during glasnost and perestroika, when Russian writers invoked Nechaev as a forerunner of Stalin and other destructive dictators.

Related concept

Marx and Engels took Nechaev's article "The Fundamentals of the Future Social System" (1870) as the occasion for their concept of "barracks communism," characterizing the proposed means as an apology for treachery, lies, intimidation and violence, and as bourgeois immorality carried to an extreme.