Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev

Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev (born Sept. 20 [Oct. 2, New Style], 1847, Ivanovo, Russia—died Nov. 21 [Dec. 3], 1882, St. Petersburg) was a Russian revolutionary known for his organizational scheme for a professional revolutionary party and for his ruthless murder of one of the members of his organization.

During 1868–69 Nechayev participated in the student revolutionary movement in St. Petersburg and composed his “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” which embodied his militant philosophy and a morality under which any means was justified that served the revolutionary end. In March 1869 he went to Geneva, where he met the exiled Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. A close collaboration between the two developed.

In September 1869 Nechayev returned to Moscow, where he founded a small secret revolutionary group, the People’s Retribution (Russian: Narodnaya Rasprava), also called the Society of the Axe, based on the principles of the Catechism and requiring its members to submit unquestioningly to the will of the leader. When I.I. Ivanov, a student member of the group, protested Nechayev’s methods, Nechayev organized his execution. The murder, committed in November 1869, was Nechayev’s work, although other members of the group were present. When the crime was discovered, Nechayev escaped to Switzerland, but 67 members of his organization were brought to trial. Nechayev resumed contact with Bakunin and participated in revolutionary intrigues until his unprincipled behaviour discredited him in the eyes of Bakunin and other Russian émigrés. At the request of the Russian government, Nechayev was arrested by the Swiss police in 1872 and extradited to Russia. He was tried and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in the Peter-Paul Fortress, where he died of undetermined causes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky used Nechayev as a model for the character Pyotr Verkhovensky in The Possessed.