Word: nechaev
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...before he had succeeded in the execution of one of his comrades. Ivanov, a young student, was lured to a cave, beaten and shot to death. He had been told that a printing press was hidden there and needed to be brought out and put to use. Four of Nechaev's friends were tried for the murder and condemned to exile in Siberia. Nechaev fled to Geneva, where his presence caused the great revolutionary Bakunin to exclaim: "They are wonderful, these young fanatics. Believers without God." Bakunin issued to Nechaev a sort of party card or credential...
Thus, a figure of universal execration, he passed into history and literature. In Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Nechaev appears as the evil theoretician Shigalov and as a model for Verkhovensky, coldblooded manipulator of idealists. Nechaev and his dupes are portrayed as the dreadful Nihilist crew who were the progenitors of Bolshevism...
Restrict the Truth. Nechaev's distinction lies in the fact that his brief life exemplified the basic paradox at the heart of Communism's claims on the human spirit. "Beginning with the ideal of absolute freedom, you arrive at the necessity of absolute tyranny," was Nechaev's sinister aphorism. In these terms he invented the conception of a revolutionary elite, above all moral law because it acted in the name of "the people." He proclaimed the abstract virtue of the "party" above all claims of kin or human obligation, and-generations before it had become a commonplace...
...thesis of Biographer Prawdin that the Soviet academicians of the '20s were right about Nechaev: Lenin indeed owed as much to this peasant zealot as he did to the philosopher Marx. He convincingly argues that Stalin (who came closer than any other socialist to the ideal of absolute tyranny in the name of absolute freedom) was right in suppressing Nechaev on Nechaev's own principle that the truth should not be known except to the elite...
Thus would a prince who believed Machiavelli suppress The Prince. If Communism, as Marx said in 1848, is "a specter haunting Europe," then Nechaev, one of the devil's saints, is a specter haunting Communism...