Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

In the spring of 1869, during his Geneva exile, Bakunin met a young Russian revolutionary named Sergei Nechaev and embraced him enthusiastically, calling him 'my boy.' Nechaev falsely claimed to have escaped from the Peter and Paul Fortress, and Bakunin saw in him the authentic voice of Russian youth: 'the most revolutionary in the world.' Together with Nikolai Ogarev, they launched a propaganda campaign into Russia financed by the Bakhmetiev Fund. Nechaev's Catechism of a Revolutionary, which declared the revolutionary a 'doomed man' with no private interests, feelings, property, or even name, acting on the principle that the ends justify the means, was long misattributed to Bakunin himself.

In November 1869, Nechaev and several comrades beat, strangled, and shot Ivan Ivanov, a fellow member of the secret 'People's Reprisal Society' who had questioned his methods, dumping the body through a hole in the ice. The murder became the inspiration for Dostoevsky's novel Demons. After fleeing back to Geneva, Nechaev began stealing letters and private papers to blackmail Bakunin and the other exiles. Bakunin broke with him, writing that Nechaev was 'nearer to the Jesuits than to us,' a fanatic whose blindness was 'a great and fatal weakness.' But the damage was done: at the 1872 Hague Congress, the Marx faction used the Nechaev affair, together with Bakunin's secret 'International Brotherhood,' as the principal grounds for expelling him from the International. The Nechaev affair endures as a historical touchstone exposing the tension between anarchist ethics, which reject unlimited means, and revolutionary Machiavellianism.

At the heart of the split that tore the First International apart was the question: what replaces the old order after revolution? Bakunin fused Proudhon's federalism with his own collectivism, advocating collective ownership of land and means of production organized into a free federation of self-governing workers' communes, built from below. Where Marx treated the abolition of inheritance as a natural consequence of abolishing private property, Bakunin regarded inheritance law as a legal mechanism that perpetuated class inequality and demanded its immediate, total abolition. At the 1869 Basel Congress, Bakunin's resolution on abolishing inheritance received 32 votes to 23, short of the required majority. But Marx's General Council counter-proposal for higher inheritance taxes was crushed 19 to 37, marking a symbolic victory for the Bakuninist camp.

The deeper fault line was state power. Marx held that the dictatorship of the proletariat was an unavoidable transitional phase from capitalism to socialism. Bakunin, in Statism and Anarchy (1873), warned that 'the people's state imagined by Marx would in essence be nothing but the dictatorship of a privileged minority ruling over the masses.' He argued that state power, whatever ideology it wore, inherently reproduces a new ruling class, and that revolution must bypass state capture entirely: moving directly to the dissolution of the state into a federation of autonomous communes. On organization, where Marx's supporters emphasized disciplined party-led political struggle, Bakunin defended direct mass action by workers and peasants and the sovereign autonomy of the International's sections. At the 1872 Hague Congress, Bakunin was expelled on grounds of maintaining the secret 'International Brotherhood' and complicity in the Nechaev affair, a decision that effectively dissolved the International. This split became the archetypal fault line defining all subsequent genealogies of socialist, communist, and anarchist movements.