The Russian, whom Lev Shestov defined as ‘hanging in the void’ after being ‘torn from the community’, replaced the German in the second half of the nineteenth century as the boldest explorer of spiritual and political dilemmas among late-modernizing peoples. The Russian radical in particular anticipated the appeal of apocalyptic goals, and the disembodied ideal of freedom, found among the angry young men of our own times.
For Dostoyevsky, the ‘Nechaev affair’ underscored the dangers of an intellectual radicalization that goes with a near-total absence of political and economic reform and near-total political impotence. Sergei Nechaev, an educated provincial from the lower middle-class who, lacking talent and charm, and feeling marginalized by the cosmopolitan city, develops a penchant for violence, was a classic example of the sick, spiteful and unattractive Underground Man he had already described. Nechaev’s hatred, as a contemporary of his wrote, ‘was directed not only against the government and exploiters, but against society as a whole and against educated society’. Arriving in Saint Petersburg in 1866, the same year as an attempted assassination of the Tsar, Nechaev moved very quickly to form his own radical group. He presented himself to Bakunin in Geneva in early 1869 as the leader and delegate of a revolutionary movement of students. Bakunin took a great liking to the young man: an exemplar, he seemed, of Russia’s ardent young generation, who had the will to destruction. He helped the Russian to get some money from Herzen (who himself would have nothing to do with the young firebrand).
The new friends then co-authored various pamphlets, advocating an elemental violence and terror. Herzen, who came down to Geneva to see his old friend, was alarmed. He wrote in a letter, ‘The mastodon Bakunin roars and thunders … Everywhere he preaches universal destruction. Meanwhile the Russian youth take his programme au pied de la lettre. Students are beginning to form bands of brigands. Bakunin is advising them to burn all documents, destroy property and not to spare people…’
Nechaev returned to Russia late in 1869 to establish secret cells. All seemed to be going well for Bakunin until the Moscow press revealed some months later that Nechaev had murdered a student on the grounds of the Agricultural Academy in Moscow (where Dostoyevsky’s brother-in-law was a student). Bakunin himself was mentioned, along with his advice to the younger generation to nurture that ‘fiercely destroying and coldly passionate fervour that freezes the mind and stops the blood in the veins of our opponents’.
It turned out that Nechaev had ordered a member of his radical cell, who disagreed with him, to be killed on suspicion of being an agent of the Russian police. He himself had strangled the young man to death. It also came out later that he had invented the accusation merely in order to get rid of a rival.
Bakunin had refused to believe the rumours circulating in émigré circles about the murder, and Nechaev’s basic dishonesty. To friends, he tried to justify Nechaev as someone forced to seek short cuts by a desperate political situation: someone who wanted to strike a great blow for freedom in order to jolt people out of their ‘historical backwardness’, ‘apathy’ and ‘sluggishness’. In public, however, he angrily repudiated his collaborator. Nechaev was guilty, he wrote in a long epistle, of a ‘fanaticism bordering on mysticism’.
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The modern terrorist tradition has many such instances of zealous pupils exceeding their masters’ brief: most recently, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who, radicalized in a Jordanian prison by a radical Salafist scholar, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, went on to win the label ‘sheikh of slaughterers’ in Iraq. Zarqawi’s brutishness provoked his spiritual guide to issue several censorious disavowals on Al Jazeera; he complained in particular about Zarqawi’s ignorance of Islam.
Maqdisi now issues fatwas against Zarqawi’s offspring, ISIS, depicting it as a den of Saddam Hussein’s secular and socialist Baathists, who have ‘just discovered Islam’. He has been denounced in turn by ISIS’s chief propagandist, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, as one of ‘the donkeys of knowledge’. ‘The only law I subscribe to is the law of the jungle,’ Adnani asserts, and Nechaev would have agreed. The means do not matter so long as they achieve the desired end of universal destruction. In many ways, figures like Zarqawi and Adnani represent the death of traditional Islam rather than its resurrection.
Certainly, for Dostoyevsky, a ruthlessly egocentric and unscrupulous partisan of action like Nechaev embodied the consequences of the death of God. In his novel Demons (1872) he famously used the ‘Nechaev affair’ as a salvo against the phenomenon of active nihilism. But Dostoyevsky also admitted that he himself might have become ‘a Nechaevist … in the days of my youth’. What he had tried to show in Demons, he explained, was that ‘even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offence’. He believed that:
no ant-heap, no triumph of the ‘fourth estate’, no abolition of poverty, no organization, will save humanity from abnormality and, consequently, from guilt and transgression. It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness that evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that abnormality and sin arise from the soul itself; and finally that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there cannot be either physicians or final judges.
The First Phase of Global Jihad
Responding to critics who had condescendingly labelled him ‘poet of the Underground’, Dostoyevsky said ‘Silly fools, it is my glory, for that is where the truth lies … The reason for the Underground is the destruction of our belief in certain general rules: “Nothing is sacred.”’ Certainly – and this accounts for the swift and deep popularity of Dostoyevsky in Europe – this ‘underground’ world of demonic will was not something confined to Russia or what Joseph Conrad called the ‘Russian temperament’, whose ‘moral and emotional reactions’ could be ‘reduced to the formula of senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny’.
It is true that rigidly autocratic Russia had developed a degree of repression whose counterpart was insane rebellion. In a country without a public sphere, where educated young men were trapped between an oppressive elite and a peasantry they had no contact with or means of knowing, violence came to seem attractive – the only available form of self-expression. But many intelligent young men elsewhere, too, were breaking their heads against the prison walls of their societies.