Mikhail Bakunin i "polskaia intriga": 1840-e gody (review)

From the time he left Russia in 1840 to his arrest and imprisonment in 1849, Mikhail Bakunin served a kind of revolutionary apprenticeship in Europe. He developed his political thinking and sought active participation in conspiratorial movements. In particular, he became deeply immersed in the various efforts by Polish émigrés to undo the previous century's partitions of Poland. Iurii Arkad'evich Borisenok sets out to trace the relations between Bakunin and the Poles, a subject which has received less scholarly attention than other aspects of his activity, and reconstructs Bakunin's manifold contacts with Polish parties and groups in this formative period of his political career.

The book opens with a 52-page historiographical and bibliographical introduction that amply establishes Borisenok's qualifications for this project. While focusing on the 1840s, it is a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of works by and about Bakunin in both Russian and Western languages, including archival collections. Unlike most such bibliographies, it details Polish sources and secondary works, with which Borisenok is thoroughly familiar. Anyone working on Bakunin will profit by consulting this survey.

Three lengthy chapters then trace Bakunin's thoughts on Poland and the Poles and how they meshed with those of the Poles themselves; Bakunin's contacts with the Polish emigration, particularly its left wing as represented principally by the Polish Democratic Society (PDO in Russian, TDP in Polish); and his activities in the Central European revolutionary upheavals of 1848—49. Bakunin first became interested in Polish affairs during his brief army service in the early 1830s. While stationed in Lithuania, he had read up on the history of the region and begun the study of Polish. His earliest Polish contacts were with Polish students at the University of Berlin, where he took up the study of philosophy in 1840. His subsequent contacts with émigré Polish radicals were facilitated by a common intellectual grounding in German philosophy, especially Hegel, and French socialist thought. Most of the Poles, however, still thought in terms of a restoration of the Polish borders of 1772, while Bakunin became committed to the idea of a Slav federation in which all the Slavic nations, including Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia, would enjoy equality and autonomy. But both regarded as their highest priority the destruction of the existing order, and especially the rule of Tsar Nicholas I, and this enabled them to paper over their differences as to the ultimate objective of Polish liberation.

Thirsting for revolutionary experience, Bakunin was drawn to the Polish conspiratorial movement, which seemed to offer the most promising opportunity for practical activity. In Brussels in 1844 he made the acquaintance of Joachim Lelewel, a historian and participant in the 1830 insurrection against Russian rule. Lelewel advocated a revolutionary alliance of Russians and Poles against tsarism, an enterprise to which Bakunin subscribed. This relationship in turn enabled him to make contact with the Polish Democratic Society in Paris. Apparently Bakunin sought to impress the Poles by claiming to represent a revolutionary organization in Russia that would support a Polish uprising — "a typical Bakuninist mystification," as Borisenok puts it (170), which Bakunin would employ again in later years.

It was Bakunin's speech at a gathering in Paris in November 1847 to mark the 17th anniversary of the 1830 insurrection that put him on the map both as an adherent of the Polish cause and as a revolutionary of European note. In that speech he denounced tsarist despotism and called for joint revolutionary activity by Poles and Russians against their common oppressor. This was his first public statement as an exponent of revolution. Published in French, German, and Polish, it won him European-wide notoriety — as well as expulsion from France until the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1848.

The last...