Sergey Gennadievich Nechaev is a revolutionary and nihilist. Leader of the People’s Reprisal. He represented such a direction as Russian revolutionary terrorism. He was arrested and imprisoned for the murder of student Ivanov. The article will present a short biography of the revolutionary.
Childhood
Nechaev Sergey Gennadievich was born in Ivanovo in 1847. The boy's family was poor. My father worked as an artist and a waiter. Mother died when Sergei was eight years old. Father married a second time, and the future revolutionary soon had two brothers. They lived in a three-room house with grandparents and sisters. In his youth, Nechaev already knew what social inequality is. As soon as Sergei was ten years old, his father taught him how to serve banquets and arranged for the factory as an “errand boy”. But the hero of this article did not want to work as a servant.
Study
In 1865, Nechaev Sergey Gennadevich moved to Moscow. There, the young man got a job as an assistant to the historian M.P. Pogodin. A year later, Sergei went to the Northern capital, passed the exam for a teacher and began teaching at a parish school. Since the fall of 1868, the young man became a volunteer at St. Petersburg University. It was there that he met Russian anti-government literature. Nechaev learned about Mikhail Bakunin, Petrashevists and Decembrists. Soon, Sergei fell into one of the student circles and realized that this was his native element. He left all sorts of affairs, almost abandoned the service and completely surrendered to a new passion. A twenty-year-old vocation student and a teacher by profession formulated his life goal - “political and social revolution”.
Search for associates
Nechaev Sergey Gennadievich perfectly understood that a coup cannot be accomplished alone. Therefore, the young man needed companions. But this turned out to be very problematic: Sergey almost did not know people and could not communicate well. Nechaev lacked decisiveness and energy, but he could not recruit students. He scared with his fearlessness and passion, thoughtless fervor and calls for demonstrations. As a result, a moderate portion of freethinking students announced a boycott for him.
Geneva
Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev, whose biography is familiar to all lovers of the history of revolutions, decided to use a different approach for the recruitment of associates. As you know, people follow those who have authority. And to get it, you need to be in prison. To speed up the process, you can stage the arrest and imprisonment. So Nechaev did - he threw a note from a police carriage allegedly taking him to prison. Well, Sergei himself went to Geneva (Switzerland), where he hoped to enlist the support of Ogaryov, Herzen and Bakunin. The first two did not want to engage in extremism in their old age, calmly criticizing the Russian government through the Kolokol newspaper. But M.A. Bakunin had a more active position. Indeed, at one time this revolutionary almost lost his head due to his participation in the Dresden and Prague popular uprisings. Mikhail Alexandrovich developed his own philosophy - anarchist. It envisaged the replacement of countries by free autonomous societies governed by a bottom-up principle. Bakunin dreamed of implementing this idea for many years. All that was needed was to find volunteers capable of destroying the state.
Naturally, Mikhail Alexandrovich considered in Sergey the man with whose hands he could bring the saving fire of anarchy to Russia. Well, Nechaev simply allowed the thinker to see what he wanted - a large and powerful secret society, under the strict control of Sergei and at any moment ready for rebellion. For this, Bakunin procured from the Ogaryov and Herzen funds from the Bakhmetyev Fund and provided theoretical support to the young man. In particular, the anarchist helped the hero of this article release the famous "Catechism of the Revolutionary."
But the main thing is that Mikhail Alexandrovich wrote a false mandate to Nechaev. This document gave Sergey the right to act on behalf of "members of the Russian department of the international revolutionary union." Below was a genuine signature of Bakunin. Having received such an authoritative sponsor, Nechaev returned to Russia, feeling himself a real revolutionary. He did not think about the future at all and he was not interested in Bakunin's anarchism. Nechaev Sergey Gennadievich was guided only by the postulates of his Catechism, one of which said: “A revolutionary despises any doctrine. He is indifferent to worldly science. He leaves her for trial to future generations. A revolutionary knows only one science - the science of destruction. ”
Unfortunately, Nechaev was able to deceive not only fellow students, the gendarmerie and Geneva emigrants, but himself as well. The young man believed in his own power over an omnipotent revolutionary organization. Upon his return to the capital, she counted only a couple dozen green students.
The crime
In 1869, the revolutionary organized the assassination of his associate I. I. Ivanov. This fact describes any of his biography. Sergei Nechaev did this for the student’s refusal to comply with his order. The young man acted on behalf of the People's Reprisal society with a head center in Geneva, which, of course, did not exist in nature. Thus, Sergey created a feeling of involvement in the common cause. And there was only one way out of it - death. Nechaev, along with his comrades-in-arms, lured the unfortunate Ivanov to a wasteland, where he was strangled. They tried to drown the corpse of a student in the Neva. The crime was committed in an amateurish manner, so investigators uncovered it in just a couple of months. All participants were arrested and put on trial. Only the main culprit managed to escape abroad.
Sentence and death
The revolutionary Nechaev Sergey Gennadievich, whose biography was presented above, again arrived in Switzerland. The young man tried to resurrect among the Russian emigrants his previously created hoax. The bloodhounds pursuing him from the political counter-police perforce contributed to strengthening the revolutionary reputation of Nechaev. But everyone remembered how Sergey had deceived Bakunin and tried to blackmail the heirs of the late Herzen. Therefore, the revolutionary could not inspire confidence in the then public. At the end of July 1872, according to a denunciation, Nechaev was caught and sent to Russia.
The court sentenced him to 20 years of hard labor and civil execution. But Nicholas II overturned this decision with a stroke of the pen, deciding to imprison Sergey in the fortress for life. Exactly 13 years after the murder, the revolutionary died in a prison cell, exhausted by loneliness, malnutrition and illness.