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Enemy of the State

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The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was certainly one of the most fascinating of Russia's many revolutionaries. Some of his contemporaries (especially Alexander Herzen) and later historians (notably E. H. Carr) have left us colorful portraits of this rebel. Like Peter the Great, Bakunin was unforgettable partly because of his great size and energy. He participated in revolutions from Paris to Prague from 1848 to 1849, when he was arrested, and then for eight years was successively imprisoned by three governments. Freed from Russian imprisonment in 1857, he was sent into Siberian exile, only to escape in 1861. He returned to Western Europe via Japan and the United States, and there resumed his ceaseless revolutionary activities. He had followers in various European countries and was comfortable speaking with them in a variety of languages including Russian, German, Italian, French and Spanish.

In his new biography of Bakunin, Mark Leier concentrates less on the anarchist's mesmerizing personality "or his appetites for tobacco, food, and alcohol, inevitably described as voluminous" and more on his ideas and the context in which they developed. This approach, featuring an in-depth analysis of Bakunin's writings in chronological order, as well as a detailed examination of Bakunin's relationship with Karl Marx, is less entertaining than Carr's biography. But Leier hopes it is more enlightening, for he is critical of most earlier presentations of Bakunin, including that by the playwright Tom Stoppard in his recent trilogy "The Coast of Utopia," due to be performed in Moscow next year. Leier directs the Centre for Labour Studies at Canada's Simon Fraser University and has written books on labor history. He views Bakunin favorably as one who was sympathetic to working men and women and critical of capitalism, which Leier also often criticizes with such terminology as "the particularly brutal capitalism we face today." He believes that Bakunin's writings still offer valuable insights and advice for modern-day rebels against capitalism, and his biography is filled with references to contemporary subjects, mainly American ones. For example, after referring to Tsar Nicholas I as "the leader of reaction and destroyer of nationalities," he adds, "roughly analogous, some argue, to George W. Bush at the beginning of the twenty-first century."

Leier is not a historian of Russia, does not use Russian-language sources and does make a few mistakes in referring to Russian history. For example, along with Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, Pyotr Chaadayev and others, he lists Kireyevsky (apparently referring to one of the two Slavophile brothers, Ivan or Pyotr) as a "Westernizer" who denied the Slavophile claim of Russian uniqueness and superiority, and he misstates some of the details surrounding what Fyodor Dostoevsky feared might be his execution in 1849.

To his credit, however, such mistakes are few, and Leier makes excellent use of Western sources on Russia including John Randolph's dissertation on the Bakunins from 1780 to 1840. His main primary source for Bakunin's ideas is the rebel's complete works in French, "Bakounine: Oeuvres completes." He also makes good use of recent works on Hegel and other German thinkers who had a strong influence on Bakunin, as they did on his contemporary, Marx. And his bibliography and endnotes are useful, though mention of some of the Internet sites containing Bakunin materials might have been helpful.

Leier points out both the similarities and differences in the ideas of Marx and Bakunin and seems to agree with Bakunin, who thought that "the chief difference between them could be summed up in two words: the state." Leier quotes Bakunin as stating in 1868, "Under the pretext of making men moral and civilized, the state has enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and corrupted them. I want the organization of society and collective, social property by free association from the bottom up, not by authority from the top down."


International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Bakunin expressed admiration for violent uprisings of the past, but Leier plays down the role of violence in the rebel's own ideas.
Bakunin criticized Marx for believing that when economic conditions were ripe workers could seize the state and establish a worker's government. He was much more suspicious of any state bodies, of hierarchies and of authorities, whether already existing or proposed for the future. He believed that freedom and equality could be achieved by workers and peasants organizing voluntary productive cooperatives and communes -- most Russian peasants already farmed in communes -- that would then federate on the local, regional, federal and even international levels. But first, of course, before such efforts could be completed, the rule of old states and the upper-class exploiters they supported had to be ended.

Although some anarchists like Leo Tolstoy advocated nonviolent methods to bring down centralized governments, Bakunin always expressed his admiration for rebels such as Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachyov, who led violent rebellions in the 17th and 18th centuries. But Leier insists that "nowhere in his work do we find calls for assassination; instead, there are warnings against the harm caused by revolutionary violence." Leier suggests that Bakunin believed that any killing that resulted from a revolutionary takeover would occur because of the regrettable opposition of the defenders of the old unjust order and the excessive fury of those who had been repressed so long. Downplaying Bakunin's support for the young radical Sergei Nechayev, he insists that the older radical had no hand in the writing of "The Catechism of a Revolutionary," a bloodthirsty document Leier deplores. The details surrounding its preparation remain murky, however, as does Bakunin's part in it. Leier also states that "the violence of capital and the state outweighs that of the anarchists on the order of millions to one. ... We may argue that many, perhaps most, wars have been waged to protect [capital's] interests."

Bakunin believed that religion, with its various prohibitions and aid to existing unjust social orders, was another source of oppression. To him, God and state were the chief abstractions for which people's freedom had been sacrificed, but there were also others. In "God and State" he wrote, "Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction -- God, country, power of State, national honor, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare." Leier quotes portions of this passage and also examines Bakunin's views on other subjects including education, private property, free will, reformism, various political events, pan-Slavism and the relationship of workers to radical intellectuals. He is seldom critical of Bakunin's ideas, and when he is, he tends to minimize the criticism. In dealing with some of Bakunin's anti-Semitic remarks, he writes, "His remarks make up a deplorable but miniscule part of his thought, never becoming a consistent theme in his writing or turning into generalized attacks on Jews."

Whether one shares Leier's admiration of Bakunin's ideas or, like the historian Isaiah Berlin, thinks them simplistic and shallow will depend partly on one's politics. But in the early 21st century it can certainly do no harm to call attention to passages such as those above from "God and State." After all the 20th century's wars and atrocities, including those of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Bakunin's words about sacrificing human lives "in honor of some pitiless abstraction" ring truer than ever.

Walter G. Moss teaches history at Eastern Michigan University and is the author of "A History of Russia" and "Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky."

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