Russian Anarchism and the Bolshevization of Bakunin in the Early Soviet Period

Russian Anarchism and the Bolshevization of Bakunin in the Early Soviet Period

The rise of anarchism, in its many different currents and doctrinal manifestations, became one of the distinctive characteristics of the Russian Revolution. Although recent research has shed new light on the fate of the anarchists under Soviet rule, the nature and extent of anarchist activity after 1921, as well as the Bolsheviks' struggle against it, remains beyond the scope of most studies.¹ Despite systematic repression by the state and its security organs, anarchist thought and propaganda continued to survive during the first decade of Soviet power in the pamphlets of the Voice of Labor (Golos truda) Publishing House as well as within legal institutions, principally the Kropotkin Museum. It saw its boldest expression in the anarchists' defense of their most legendary representative, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76).

Notwithstanding its fierce opposition to Marxian state socialism, the ideological legacy of Bakunin survived in the early Soviet period thanks not only to the anarchists but also to the need within early Soviet culture to elevate the Revolution's romantic, promethean impulse. Thus, at the same time that Bakunin inspired the anarchists with passionate rhetoric against authoritarianism, his words and deeds also provided official Soviet culture with an exemplary model of unrelenting libertarian struggle. In their efforts to appropriate Bakunin's legacy throughout the early 1920s, however, Bolshevik publicists had to seek strategies to commemorate Bakunin without implicitly challenging the notion of proletarian dictatorship. As I seek to demonstrate here, the publications and events surrounding Bakunin's 50-year jubilee in 1926, in particular, laid bare the contradiction inherent in the Bolsheviks' celebration of an anarchist legacy within an ever-strengthening state.

Early Soviet interest in Bakunin reflected the resumption rather than the beginning of controversy over his image. Before 1917, the formation of the Bakuninist legacy evolved consistently along two diverging trajectories. The first, positive dimension of Bakunin's profile emerged during his own lifetime, when he won the respect of younger Russian populists through his many acts of revolutionary valor.² Alongside the heroic moments, Bakunin's reputation preserved highly inauspicious moments as well, thanks mainly to his brief but direct collaboration with Sergei Nechaev, his suspected co-authorship of pamphlets advocating methods of terror, and his formation within the International Workingmen's Association of a secret, conspiratorial alliance explicitly opposed to the leadership of Marx, all of which severely damaged the credibility of Bakunin's theory and practice of revolution.³ By the turn of the century, violent manifestations of Bakuninist revolt made their reappearance in the "motiveless terror," armed expropriations, and other acts of "propaganda by the deed" carried out by the more militant factions of newly formed anarcho-communist groups in Russia. Responding to the growth of anarchist moods throughout the 1905 period, Georgii Plekhanov frequently reminded fellow Marxists of the harm and demoralization Bakunin caused to the proletarian movement through his preference for spontaneous social upheavals and his contempt for organized political struggle.⁴

The opposition between the heroic and the villainous aspects of the Bakuninist heritage naturally grew with the Bolsheviks' seizure and consolidation of power between 1917 and 1922. From the standpoint of many social democrats and other advocates of political gradualism, the dissolution of the Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly in the name of an immediate proletarian dictatorship suggested the triumph of a purely regressive doctrine. In 1917, they undoubtedly found further confirmation of a growing Bakuninist threat in the resurgence of anarchist groups that in effect provided at least indirect support to the Bolshevik cause through their agitation for the instant transfer of all political and economic authority to the laborers themselves. Echoing Plekhanov, who until his death identified "the pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Lenin" with "the...