Bakunin warned that a workers' state would become a party dictatorship
A Russian nobleman whose family estate held over 500 serfs became Europe's most famous anarchist. Mikhail Bakunin was sentenced to death, locked in fortresses, exiled to Siberia, escaped by way of Japan and America, and then fought Karl Marx for control of the First International, predicting that Marxist states would rule over workers.
Bakunin was born on 30 May 1814 at Pryamukhino in the Tver region, the eldest son among ten children of a former diplomat who raised them along lines inspired by Rousseau. He was sent to artillery school, grew bored, deserted in 1835 and escaped arrest only through family connections. In Moscow he joined Nikolai Stankevich's circle, produced the first Russian translation of Hegel, and befriended Belinsky, Turgenev and Alexander Herzen, who paid for him to study in Berlin in 1840.
Berlin's Young Hegelians pulled him toward politics, and his 1842 essay The Reaction in Germany called for the French Revolution to spread across Europe and Russia. In Paris he befriended Proudhon and met Marx. A 1847 speech urging Poles to overthrow tsarism made him famous and got him deported. He joined the 1848 Prague rising and the 1849 Dresden uprising, was condemned to death, extradited repeatedly, and held in solitary confinement in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress and then Shlisselburg. A grovelling confession he wrote to the tsar caused a stir when it surfaced some 70 years later.
Moved to Siberian exile in 1857, he married Antonia Kwiatkowska and in 1861 escaped east to Japan, crossed to San Francisco and reached London by the end of the year, where he worked with Herzen on Kolokol. In Italy in his early fifties he shaped his core idea: overthrow the state and replace it with free federations of producers. An association with the ruthless Sergey Nechayev later damaged him, though recent scholars credit Nechayev as the main or only author of their notorious Catechism.
He joined the International Workingmen's Association in 1868. At the 1872 Hague Congress, which Bakunin could not reach, Marx's side won and expelled him for allegedly running a secret faction; he responded with the Anti-Authoritarian International. His late works include God and the State, still in print. He died on 1 July 1876, having influenced Peter Kropotkin, the IWW and Spanish anarchists.
Source: Mikhail Bakunin
