Word: nechaev
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...UNMENTIONABLE NECHAEV, by Michael Prawdin. Serge Nechaev was the student terrorist whom the Czar imprisoned and whom the Soviets would like to forget. This youthful fanatic became the model for the nihilist Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's classic study of the ethics and psychology of revolutionaries, The Possessed, and he devised the bleak dehumanized code of conspiracy and terror that became the model for Lenin's Bolshevik Party...
...UNMENTIONABLE NECHAEV, by Michael Prawdin. Serge Nechaev was the student terrorist whom the Czar imprisoned and whom the Soviets would like to forget. This youthful fanatic became the model for the dreadful nihilist Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's classic study of the ethics and psychology of revolutionaries, The Possessed, and he devised the bleak dehumanized code of conspiracy that became the model for Lenin's Bolshevik Party...
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...