Catechism of a Revolutionary

Among the ‘nihilists’…an ascetic mentality made its appearance…Without that ascetic spirit a heroic revolutionary struggle would have been impossible. Intolerance and isolation of self from the rest of the world grew much stronger. This led to Nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism.
— Nicholas Berdyaev

Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882) was an extraordinary young Russian revolutionary whose scheme for a highly disciplined, professionally-organised revolutionary movement is outlined in his Catechism of a Revolutionary (1868). Nechaev argued that just as the European monarchies used the ideas of Machiavelli and the Catholic Jesuits practiced absolute immorality to achieve their ends, there was no action that could not be used to for the sake of the people’s revolution. He founded a small revolutionary group known as The People’s Retribution (Narodnaya rasprava), which was outlawed in Russia after the murder of one of its own members in 1869. Nechaev was eventually gaoled in 1872. He died in prison ten years later.

 Peter Marshall, in his book A History of Anarchism, describes Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary as “one of the most repulsive documents in the history of terrorism.”

The Catechism reflected a significant portion of Russian revolutionary thinking. Bolshevic leader V.I. Lenin admired the Catechism, while the Russian writer Dostoevsky partly modelled the character Verkhovensy in The Possessed on Nechaev. After the Bolshevic Revolution several books and poems were published in Russia in which Nechaev is presented as an epic Russian hero. In the 1960s the Catechism was revived by the Afro-American revolutionary group the Black Panthers, and Eldridge Cleaver wrote favourably of it in his controversial Soul on Ice.

The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin found himself seduced by young Sergei Nechaev’s pure fanaticism, confiding to a friend, “They are charming these young fanatics, believers without a god, and heroes without flowering rhetoric.” To Bakunin, Nechaev with his extreme energy and dedication, appeared to be a reincarnation of the legendary Russian bandits Stenka Razin and Pugachev.

The Russian philosopher and former Marxist, Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948) offers one of the most illuminating insights into Sergei Nechaev and his Catechism of a Revolutionary. Berdyaev says that Nechaev “was a real ascetic and a hero of the revolutionary idea, and in his Revolutionary Catechism writes, so to speak, an instruction for the spiritual life of the revolutionary and requires from him a denial of the world.”

The importance of Sergei Nechaev’s thought is its radical transvaluation of values and open defiance of the prevailing morality. On the surface Nechaev’s words may indeed appear repulsive and dangerously threatening, but there remains a deeper meaning capable of inspiring revolutionary struggle. Nechaev exuded a mystical courage and a religious passion to change reality. In this he was not too far from the mystics of the middle ages who stood in opposition to all organised religious and social laws. His apparent immorality derived from the cold realisation that both Church and State are ruthlessly immoral in their pursuit of total control. The struggle against such powers must therefore be carried out by any means necessary.

Nechaev’s Catechism, on the inner level, can be read as an indictment of a Control System that can only be changed through unconditional, all-consuming struggle. And although written in the 19th century the essence of Sergei Nechaev’s Catechism is relevant today. The immoral Control System is still in place, only its forms have changed. Therefore a secret, largely invisible Centre of New Resistance is needed, linked not by rigid organisational framework, but by subtle bonds and hidden contacts. New means of struggle and non-conformity are necessary in the 21st century. Today the computer hackers who penetrate and disrupt the System’s computer databases engage in the same struggle as the barbarian tribes who overran the decaying Roman Empire. The System relies on conspiracies, intrigues, disinformation, and manipulation to keep people in bondage. We need to turn the System’s weapons against it. Maybe we can learn something from young Sergei Nechaev.

Catechism of a Revolutionary

 The Attitude of the Revolutionary Towards Himself

1. A revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interests, no dealings, feelings, attachments or property, not even a name. Everything in him is solely directed towards one exclusive concern, one thought, one sole passion — revolution.

 2. Within the very depths of his being, not just in word but in deeds, he has broken all connection with the social order and the intellectual world with all of its laws, moralities, customs and accepted conventions. He is an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that is only to destroy it more effectively.  

 3. The revolutionary despises all doctinairism and has rejected the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only a single science: the science of destruction. For this purpose and this purpose only, he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry and perhaps medicine. Towards this end, night and day he will study the living science of men, their characters, positions and all the circumstances of the present social order on all its levels. The purpose is only one: the quickest and most sure destruction of this filthy system.

 4. He despises public opinion. He despises and hates the present public morality in all its forms. For him only that is moral which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. All that obstructs this is immoral and criminal.

 5. A revolutionary is a doomed man. Merciless towards the state and the entire educated society, he in turn should expect no mercy from them towards himself. Between them and him there exists a concealed, continual and irreconcilable war for life or death. He must be ready for death on any day. He should train himself to withstand torture.

 6. Severe with himself, he must also be severe towards others. All the tender and soft feelings of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude and even honour must be extinguished in him by the sole cold passion for revolotionary success. For him there must exist only one consolation, reward and pleasure — the triumph of the revolution. Day and night he should have but one thought, one purpose — merciless destruction. Striving cold bloodedly and indefatigably toward this goal, he must always be ready to perish, and to destroy with his own hands everything that obstructs his achievement.

 7. The nature of the real revolutionary excludes his having any romanticism, feelings, exaltations, or infatuations. It even excludes his having any personal hatred or desire for revenge. The revolutionary passion, though it becomes habitual, must be combined with cold calculation. At all times and places, the revolutionary must not be impelled by his personal impulses but must be directed by the common interests of the revolution.

The Relationship of a Revolutionist Towards His Revolutionary Comrades

8. A friend or amiable person to a revolutionary may only be one who has proved by his deeds that he too is a revolutionary. The measure of friendship, dedication and other obligations to that friend must be determined by his usefulness in the cause of the all-destructive, practical revolution.

9. Solidarity among revolutionaries needs no discussion. The total strength of the revolutionary work is based upon it. Revolutionary comrades who are on the same plane of revolutionary understanding and passion should, in so far as is possible, discuss all major events together and reach unanimous conclusions. In accomplishing whatever plan is decided upon, however, everyone should, in so far as is possible, rely upon himself. In carrying out various destructive actions, everyone must act alone and should seek advice or aid from his friends only if that is necessary for success.

 10. Every comrade should have at hand several revolutionists of second or third rank, not as fully dedicated as himself. He must look upon them as part of the common revolutionary capital put at his disposal from which he should strive to extract the greatest possible use. He should look upon himself as capital doomed to be expended for the success of the revolutionary cause, but he has no right to personally dispose of that capital without the consent of the fully initiated comrades.

 11. When a comrade gets in trouble, and the question is whether or not to save him, the revolutionary should not be guided by his personal feelings but entirely by the interests of revolutionary success. Therefore, he must carefully weigh the comrade’s usefulness against the revolutionary expenditure of force needed to rescue him, and he must decide which over-balances the other.

The Revolutionary’s Relationship Toward Society

 12. The acceptance of a new member into the organisation, one who has proved his loyalty not through words but through deeds, can only be decided upon through unanimous consent.

13. A revolutionary enters the world of the state and its so-called intellectual world, and he lives in that world with the sole purpose of its complete and speedy destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he feels sympathy for anything in that world or if he halts before the destruction of any situation, relationship, or person belonging to that world in which all must be equally hated. It is all the worse for him if he has family, friendship, or love relationships; he is not a revolutionary if they can stay his hand.

 14. With the purpose of merciless destruction the revolutionary may and often must live in society, pretending to be something he is not. The revolutionary must penetrate everywhere: into the highest and the middle classes; into the merchant’s store; into the church; into the mansion of the aristocrat; into the worlds of bureaucracy, the military, and literature; into the Third Division [the secret police]; and even into the Winter Palace [of the Czar].

 15. All this filthy society should be split into several categories. The first category consists of those condemned to death without delay. The organisation of comrades should make up a list of the condemned, considering their harm to the success of the revolution, with those ranking highest being eliminated first.

 16. Putting together such lists, and thus ordering the condemned, consideration should be given to neither the personal villainy of the man nor the hatred provoked by him among the comrades and the people. This villainy and this hatred can even be partially and temporarily useful in contributing to the arousal of the masses to revolt. It is necessary to be guided by the degree of usefulness that his death might create for the revolutionary cause. First of all, you must destroy those people who are most harmful to the revolutionary organisation, and such people whose sudden and violent deaths would bring the most terror to the government, shaking its might and depriving it of its most clever and energetic members.

 17. The second group is composed of such persons to whom life is temporarily conceded so that their terrible deeds will bring the people to inevitable revolt.

18. The third category includes a multitude of highly placed persons, animals, having neither great intelligence nor energy, but having through their social positions wealth, connections, influence, and power. You must exploit them by every possible means and in every manner, implicate them, confuse them, and obtain, in so far as possible, their dirty secrets to make slaves of them. Their power, influence, connections, wealth, and might will in this way become an inexhaustible treasury and help for many revolutionary enterprises.

 19. The fourth category is composed of ambitious office-seekers and liberals of different shades. You can conspire with them, pretending to blindly follow them; but at the same time you must take them under your control, obtaining all their secrets, compromising them to the utmost, so that their return to favour would be impossible, and making it so that they will pollute the state with their own hands.

 20. The fifth category is composed of doctrinaires, conspirators, and revolutionaries who merely talk idly before gatherings and on paper. You must constantly push and pull them forward towards practical, headbreaking statements, the results of which will leave no trace but the complete destruction of the majority of them but which will still produce a few true revolutionaries.

 21. The sixth and a very important category consists of women, and these should be divided into three categories. First, those empty-headed, senseless, and soulless women who can be used in the same ways as the third and fourth categories of men. Next, women who are warm, devoted, and talented but not our own since they have not yet worked themselves up to a real, austere, revolutionary understanding, must be used as would be men of the fifth category. Finally, there are those women completely ours, i.e., those who are completely dedicated and have accepted our program. They are our comrades, and we must look upon them as our most precious treasure without whose help we could not succeed.

The Attitude of the Organisation Towards the People

 22. The Organisation has no other goal than the full liberation and happiness of people, i.e., the common workingman. But convinced that liberation and the obtaining of happiness is only possible by means of a fully destructive, popular revolution, the Organisation will, with all its might and resources, encourage the development and intensification of those calamities and evils which will exhaust the people’s patience and drive them into a total uprising.

23. By “revolution,” our Organisation does not mean a regulated pattern in the classical, western sense, a movement that always stops and bows with respect before private property rights and before traditions of public order and so-called civilisation and morality – one which until now has limited itself to overthrowing one political form to replace it with another that tried to create a so-called revolutionary-state. The only revolution that could be beneficial for the people would be that revolution which destroyed at its roots any elements of the state and which would exterminate all the state traditions, social order, and classes in Russia.

 24. The Organisation thus does not intend to impose on the people any new organisation from above. The future organisation will without doubt grow out of the popular movement and from life, but this is the task of future generations. Our task is terrible, complete, universal and merciless destruction.

 25. Therefore, to get closer to the people, we must unite with those elements of popular life that, from the time of the beginnings of Moscow’s state power, have never stopped protesting, not only with words but with deeds, against everything that directly or indirectly is bound with the state: against the nobility, against the bureaucrats, against the clergy, against the guilds, and against the exploiting kulaks [rich peasant farmers]. Let us join together with the fearless bandits, the only true revolutionaries in Russia.

 26. To unite this world into one unconquerable, unbending force, that is the goal of our organisation, our conspiracy, our task.