Sergey Nechayev - Return To Russia

Return To Russia

Having left Russia illegally, Nechayev had to sneak back to Moscow via Romania in August 1869 with help from Bakunin's underground contacts. On the way he met Christo Botev, a Bulgarian revolutionary. In Moscow he lived an austere life, spending the fund only on political activities. He pretended to be a proxy of the Russian department of the "Worldwide Revolutionary Union" (which didn't exist) and created an affiliate of a secret society called Narodnaya Rasprava (Народная расправа, "People's Reprisal"), which, he claimed, had existed for quite some time in every corner of Russia. He spoke passionately to student dissidents about the need to organise. Marxist writer Vera Zasulich (whose sister Alexandra sheltered him in Moscow) recalls that when she first met Nechayev, he immediately tried to recruit her:

Nechayev began to tell me his plans for carrying out a revolution in Russia in the near future. I felt terrible: it was really painful for me to say "That's unlikely," "I don't know about that". I could see that he was very serious, that this was no idle chatter about revolution. He could and would act - wasn't he the ringleader of the students? ... I could imagine no greater pleasure than serving the revolution. I had dared only to dream of it, and yet now he was saying that he wanted to recruit me... And what did I know of "the people"? I knew only the house serfs of Biakolovo and the members of my weaving collective, while he was himself a worker by birth.

Many were impressed by the young proletarian and joined the group. However, the already fanatical Nechayev appeared to be becoming more distrustful of the people around him, even denouncing Bakunin as doctrinaire, "idly running off at the mouth and on paper". One Narodnaya Rasprava member, I. I. Ivanov, disagreed with Nechayev about the distribution of propaganda, and left the group. On November 21, 1869, Nechayev and several comrades beat, strangled and shot Ivanov, hiding the body in a lake through a hole in the ice. This incident was fictionalised by writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his political novel, Demons, published three years later, in which the character, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, is based on Nechayev.

The body was soon found, and some of his colleagues arrested, but Nechayev eluded capture, and left for Saint Petersburg in late November where he tried to continue his activities to create a clandestine society. On December 15, 1869, he fled the country, heading back to Geneva.