Sergey Nechayev - Early Life in Russia

Early Life in Russia

Nechayev was born in Ivanovo, then a small textile town, to poor parents—his father was a waiter and sign painter. His mother died when he was eight. His father remarried and had two more sons. They lived in a three room house with his two sisters and grandparents. They were ex serfs who had moved to Ivanovo. He had already developed an awareness of social inequality and a resentment of the local nobility in his youth. At 10, Nechayev had learned his father's trades—waiting at banquets and painting signs. His father got him a job as an errand boy in a factory. Nechayev's response was: "I won't wipe the boots of those devils." His family paid for good tutors who taught him Latin, German, French, History, Maths and Rhetoric.

In 1865 at age 18, Nechayev moved to Moscow, where he worked for the historian Mikhael Pogodin. A year later, he moved to St. Petersburg, passed a teacher's exam and began teaching at a parish school. From September 1868, Nechayev attended lectures at St. Petersburg University (as an auditor, he was never enrolled) and became acquainted with the subversive Russian literature of the Decembrists, the Petrashevsky Circle, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others, as well as the growing student unrest at the university. Nechaev was even said to have slept on bare wood and lived on black bread in imitation of Rakhmetov, the ascetic revolutionary in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?.

Inspired by the failed attempt on the Tsar's life by Karakozov, Nechayev participated in student activism in 1868–1869, leading a radical minority with Petr Tkachev and others. Nechayev took part in devising this student movement's "Program of revolutionary activities", which stated later a social revolution as its ultimate goal. The program also suggested ways for creating a revolutionary organization and conducting subversive activities. In particular, the program envisioned composition of the Catechism of a Revolutionary, for which Nechayev would become famous.

In December 1868 he met Vera Zasulich (who would make an assassination attempt on General Trepov, governor of St. Petersburg in 1878) at a teachers' meeting. He asked her to come to his school where he held candlelit readings of revolutionary tracts. He would place pictures of Robespierre and Saint-Just on the table while reading. At these meetings he plotted to assassinate the Tsar on the 9th anniversary of serfdom's abolition. The last of these student meetings occurred on January 28, 1869. Nechayev presented a petition calling for freedom of assembly for students. "Those that do not fear for their own skin, let them separate themselves from the rest; let them write their names on this petition." 97 did, though he wouldn't say what he'd do with the petition. Two days later, he handed it to the police, intending to radicalize the students through prison and exile.