Mikhail Bakunin

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive. He had already been sentenced to death. He had already been extradited once and tried again. And yet, when he finally walked out of that fortress in 1857, his revolutionary convictions were intact. What kind of man survives all that and still wants to topple every government on earth?

  Bakunin was born into Russian nobility in 1814, the son of a diplomat, the heir to an estate worked by more than five hundred serfs. He died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1876, having never succeeded in a single armed uprising but having reshaped the entire left-wing political landscape of Europe. His book God and the State has remained in print long after his death. His arguments about what socialist power would actually become proved, in the judgment of thinkers like Noam Chomsky, to be among the most accurate predictions in the social sciences.

  How does a Russian aristocrat become the most feared anarchist in Europe? What drove his decades-long feud with Karl Marx? And why do his ideas keep returning, from the Spanish Civil War to the New Left of the 1960s to modern anti-globalization movements? Those are the questions this documentary will trace.

• 2. Aristocrat and Runaway

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  The Priamukhino estate, in the Tver region northwest of Moscow, was where Bakunin grew up, and he later described those years as idyllic. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin, had served as a Russian diplomat in Italy before returning home to raise ten children according to the Rousseauan pedagogic model. The estate ran on the labor of more than five hundred serfs. That gap between an idealized childhood and the violent machinery beneath it would follow Bakunin his entire life.

  He was sent to the St. Petersburg Artillery School as a teenager and became an officer in 1833. The freedom of city life suited him, but the work did not. Sent to Belarus and Lithuania as punishment for neglecting his duties in early 1834, he filled his time reading academic philosophy. He deserted in 1835, escaped arrest only because of his family's connections, and was discharged at the end of that year. Despite his father's protests, he left for Moscow to become a mathematics teacher.

  In Moscow, Bakunin found his real education. German Romantic literature and idealist philosophy dominated the city's intellectual scene in the 1830s, and Bakunin moved into the circle of Nikolai Stankevich, where he read Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. He produced the first Russian translation of Hegel and was considered the foremost Russian expert on that philosopher by 1837. Among his new friends were the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the poet Nikolay Ogarev, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the writer Alexander Herzen, all of them on the cusp of notable careers. It was Herzen who funded Bakunin's move to the University of Berlin in 1840, a city that would pull him away from philosophy and toward something far more combustible.

• 3. From Philosophy to Revolution

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  Berlin's Young Hegelians drew Bakunin toward political radicalism. This group took Hegel's philosophy and pointed it at the existing order, arguing for fundamental change rather than philosophical contemplation. Bakunin left Berlin for Dresden in early 1842 and met the Hegelian Arnold Ruge, who published Bakunin's first original piece of writing. Die Reaktion in Deutschland, or "The Reaction in Germany," called for extending the French Revolution across Europe and into Russia. It appeared under a pseudonym and was dense with Hegelian language, but its direction was clear: Bakunin was no longer interested in translating philosophy. He wanted to act on it.

  His radicalism brought immediate consequences. Moving to Zurich in early 1843, he encountered the proto-communist Wilhelm Weitling. When authorities arrested Weitling, the Russian embassy's suspicion fell on Bakunin. He defied orders to return home, and the Russian Senate stripped him of his noble rank and sentenced him in absentia to penal labor in Siberia. Without financial support, he became a wanderer across Europe.

  In Paris, he found the company he had been searching for. He befriended the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who deepened his thinking about authority and freedom, and he met Karl Marx. The two men would shadow each other for the next three decades. Bakunin only moved into direct political agitation in 1847, when Polish emigrants in Paris invited him to speak at a commemoration of the 1830 Polish uprising. His call for Poles and Russian democrats to unite against czarism made him famous across Europe and got him deported by the Russian ambassador's request within days.

• 4. Uprisings, Prisons, Escape

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  The revolutions of 1848 swept across Europe and pulled Bakunin into their center. When King Louis Philippe I abdicated during the February Revolution in Paris, Bakunin returned to the city and then pushed onward, trying to reach Prussian Poland to stoke revolt against Russia. He never arrived. Instead, he attended the Prague Slavic Congress in 1848, which had gathered to defend Slavic rights against German and Hungarian nationalism. When that congress broke into an impromptu uprising against the Austrian Habsburgs, Bakunin was there. By year's end he had written Aufruf an die Slaven, or "Appeal to the Slavs," calling for a Slavic federation and insurrection against the Austrian, Prussian, Turkish, and Russian governments. It was widely read and translated across Europe.

  The 1849 Dresden uprising brought his arrest. After that, his life became a sequence of prisons, trials, and extraditions. He was sentenced to death, then extradited, then tried again, then finally placed in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg in 1851. Three years later he was transferred to Shlisselburg Fortress near the capital for another three years. During this time he wrote a Confession to the Russian emperor, an autobiographical document with a genuflecting tone that would become a source of controversy when it was discovered publicly some seventy years later. The letter did not improve his conditions.

  His release came in 1857 in the form of permanent exile in Siberia, where he married Antonia Kwiatkowska, a Polish woman eighteen years old and twenty-six years his junior. In 1861 he escaped, traveling first to Japan, then to San Francisco, then sailing through Panama to New York and Boston, finally reaching London by the end of that year. He arrived in America just as the Civil War was beginning. He stated that his sympathies lay with the North, though he called it hypocritical to claim slave liberation while forcing the South to remain in the Union by military power. Despite those reservations, he described the United States as, in his own words, "the finest political organization that ever existed in history."

• 5. The Battle Inside the International

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  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formed the International Working Men's Association in the 1860s. Bakunin joined in 1868, and his anarchist faction grew quickly. The two men had crossed paths in Paris in 1844 and London in 1864, but it was inside this organization that their conflict became definitive.

  Bakunin respected Marx's intellectual rigor and his commitment to socialism. He found Marx's personality authoritarian and arrogant. Marx, for his part, distrusted what he saw as Russian reactionism and Bakunin's refusal to accept organizational discipline. Beneath the personal friction lay a genuine ideological divide. Bakunin believed the primary goal after revolution was a federation of self-governing workplaces and communes, led by the peasantry and poorest workers, with no transitional state of any kind. Marx believed the workers needed to seize the existing state apparatus, use it to consolidate power, and allow it to wither away over time as production conditions changed. Bakunin regarded that withering-away as a fantasy. He argued that any revolutionary placed in state power would become worse than the ruler he replaced, and he wrote that "liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality."

  The rupture came at the Hague Congress in 1872. Marx had Bakunin and his followers expelled, charging that Bakunin maintained a secret organization within the International. Bakunin could not even reach the Netherlands to defend himself. His expulsion broke the First International apart, splitting the Marxist and anarchist wings of the socialist movement permanently. Bakunin founded the Anti-Authoritarian International the same year. His ideas spread into the Spanish labor movement and among the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura Federation, both of whom would carry the anarchist tradition into the next century.

• 6. The Shape of His Thought

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  Bakunin first called himself an anarchist in 1867. His thinking developed over years of drafts, fragments, and unfinished manuscripts rather than through a single systematic work. He wrote that political organization itself was "the source of oppression and exploitation," and his solution was not to reform the state but to abolish it entirely, replacing it with free federations of communes organized, as he put it, "from below upward."

  His most famous text, God and the State, was published posthumously in 1882, assembled from a fragment found after his death. It argues that both the church and the state serve the same function: imposing authority from above under the pretense that ordinary people cannot govern themselves. He wrote that "to exploit and to govern mean the same thing." His vision extended to representative democracy, which he regarded as a paradox. Elected politicians, he argued, inevitably represent abstractions rather than the actual will of the people, because power corrupts those who hold it regardless of how they obtained it. He described anarchists as rightly being "enemies of all power, knowing that power corrupts those invested with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it."

  Bakunin's thinking on expertise deserves attention on its own terms. He did not reject science or specialists. He wrote of referring to the authority of the bootmaker on boots, and to savants for their fields of knowledge, and listening to them freely in respect for what they know. The distinction he drew was between voluntary deference and imposed subordination. A specialist's knowledge should be open to criticism and censure, not treated as a license to govern. Authority, in his framework, should be in continual voluntary exchange rather than a fixed hierarchy.

  His thinking on freedom carried an insistence on equality. He argued that freedom required community, meaning humanity could only be free if everyone was free, and that equality included equal rights and equal social functions for women. These ideas first took shape in his engagement with Polish emigrants and the Prague Slavic Congress in the 1840s, but they shifted after the failed 1863 Polish naval expedition from national liberation toward something more universalist: the emancipation of communities of free, independent people across all borders.

• 7. Legacy and Contradictions

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  Bakunin died in Bern on the 1st of July, 1876, after his health had forced him back to Switzerland from a failed attempt to join an anarchist insurrection in Bologna, Italy, in 1874. That Bologna failure was a serious blow to the Italian anarchist movement. His retirement and death came quietly, at odds with the decades of tumult that preceded them.

  His influence, however, outlasted his lifetime by a long margin. His Statism and Anarchy shaped the Russian Narodnik movement of peasant socialism. Anarchists drew on his ideas during the Spanish Civil War. The 1960s New Left revived his arguments about voluntary association and the dangers of authoritarian socialism, prompting new translations and editions of his works. Thinkers including Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Herbert Marcuse, E. P. Thompson, Neil Postman, and A. S. Neill all acknowledged his influence, as did syndicalist organizations like the IWW.

  Noam Chomsky described Bakunin's prediction in Statism and Anarchy that Marxist regimes would become dictatorships as one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true. Historian Paul Avrich captured the tension that ran through Bakunin's entire life: a nobleman who wanted a peasant revolt, a libertarian with a drive to dominate, an intellectual with a strong anti-intellectual streak. He demanded unconditional obedience from followers while professing unfettered liberty as his goal.

  The question of antisemitism in Bakunin's writing has drawn sustained scholarly attention. Bakunin biographer Mark Leier noted that the question arises every time he speaks about Bakunin. Scholars hold conflicting positions: some argue it was incidental and common among French radicals of the era, others that anti-Jewish tropes were more central to his political thought. The Spanish militant Anselmo Lorenzo wrote that Bakunin's use of Marx's Jewish identity "had a disastrous effect on me" and stood against their principles of fraternity without differences of race or creed.

  Bakunin's archives are held across multiple institutions in Russia and Europe, including the International Institute of Social History, where researchers continue to work through the fragments and drafts of a man who rarely finished what he started but whose unfinished arguments kept arriving at questions that the 20th century could not avoid.