Nechaevshchina
네차예프시나
A critical term for Sergei Nechaev's revolutionary methodology, which holds that the end justifies any means: embracing deception, blackmail, and murder as legitimate instruments of revolution, and demanding the revolutionary's total self-annihilation into the cause. Marx and Engels condemned Nechaev's 'Main Foundations of the Future Social System' (1870) as the archetype of 'barracks communism,' and Dostoevsky immortalized it in Demons. Lenin called Nechaev a 'titan of the revolution,' but the methodology was widely judged to have endangered clandestine organizations and harmed the revolutionary movement as a whole. During perestroika, the term was revived as a reference point for criticizing Stalinist methods.
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Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) Nechaev's methods, later called Nechayevshchina, were viewed to have caused harm to the Russian revolutionary movement; Dostoevsky's Demons based on Nechaev; Lenin called him a 'titan of the revolution'; barracks communism link.
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian Wikipedia entry defining нечаевщина as an explicitly pejorative term for Nechaev's methods of action.
- encyclopedia.com Encyclopedia of Russian History entry: the Catechism's influence on generations of revolutionary terrorists; the end-justifies-means doctrine repelled most Russian revolutionaries but Lenin admired him; perestroika-era writers saw Nechaev as a forerunner of Stalin.
- Marxists Internet Archive Full text of the Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869): the revolutionary is a doomed man with no personal interests, severed from all social bonds; the science of destruction is his only science.
- booksite.ru Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry on Barracks Communism (казарменный коммунизм): Marx and Engels used Nechaev's article as the occasion for the concept; нечаевщина characterized as apology for treachery, lies, intimidation, and violence, an extreme bourgeois immorality.