The Affaire Nechaev

Abstract

But before following Bakunin into his life of retirement at Locarno, the biographer must first retrace his steps by some months; and the story of the slowly widening rift between Bakunin and Marx must be suspended while a new character is brought upon the stage. Bakunin’s energy had not been ex-clusively devoted, during the spring and summer of 1869, to those public or semi-public activities which have just been chronicled. A separate chapter, brief but significant, had opened in his life when, early in March 1869, there arrived at Geneva a young Russian called Sergei Nechaev.