714 Ch. 1 8 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalism
(Left) Michael Bakunin, professional anarchist. (Right) Karl Marx, founder of
Communism.
action seemed necessary to achieve their goals. In the 1860s, groups of
nihilists turned to violent revolution, plotting the assassination of state offi
cials and the tsar. The police infiltrated and drove groups like “Land and
Freedom” and “The Organization”—with its central committee called
“Hell”—underground, particularly after a student attempted to kill Tsar
Alexander II in 1866.
In the meantime, Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) became the most
famous anarchist of his or any other time. Anarchists rejected the very
existence of the state, thereby quarreling bitterly with socialists, who
wanted not to destroy the state but to take it over. A professional revolu
tionary who complained, “Karl Marx is ruining the workers by making
theorists out of them,” Bakunin left behind comfortable noble origins. He
was a man of enormous energy who slept only a couple of hours a day, eat
ing, drinking, and smoking cigars almost constantly, organizing and plot
ting between bites, gulps, and puffs. Once calling himself “the devil in the
flesh,” Bakunin defined the “social question” as “primarily the overthrow
of society.” That he set out to do. He led the police on a chase from Paris
in 1847 to Dresden and other stops in Central Europe in 1848, that year
of revolution. Arrested and imprisoned in Russia, he was exiled to Siberia,
managed to escape in 1861, reached Japan, and then arrived in London
via the United States.
Bakunin believed that “destruction is a creative passion” and, like the
nihilists, that the peasant masses had untapped revolutionary potential. Marx
insisted that peasants, unlike the industrial proletariat, could never be truly
revolutionary because they could not be class-conscious. Anarchists, in turn,
rejected Marx’s belief that a militant working class organized in a centralized