Russian Nihilist Movement

Based on Wikipedia: Russian nihilist movement

In 1881, a bomb tore through the streets of St. Petersburg and killed Tsar Alexander II, the man who had freed Russia's serfs. The assassins called themselves nihilists. To the rest of Europe, this confirmed everything they feared about the movement: nihilism was terrorism, pure and simple, a philosophy of destruction and death.

They were wrong.

The story of Russian nihilism is far stranger and more interesting than a simple tale of political violence. It was a generational rebellion, a philosophical earthquake, and a cultural revolution that would eventually shake the foundations of the Russian Empire itself. The bombs came later, almost as an afterthought. What came first was something more dangerous to the established order: young people who believed in nothing—or rather, who refused to believe in anything they couldn't touch, measure, or prove.

The Children Against Their Fathers

Every generation thinks it invented rebellion. But the Russian nihilists of the 1860s had a peculiar advantage: they had a name for what they were doing, courtesy of one of Russia's greatest novelists.

Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862, and the book scandalized everyone. The novel introduced a character named Bazarov, a young medical student who declares himself a nihilist—from the Latin nihil, meaning "nothing." When asked what a nihilist believes, Bazarov answers simply: a nihilist is someone who doesn't bow down before any authority, who doesn't accept any principle on faith, no matter how respected that principle might be.

The conservatives hated the book because they thought Turgenev was celebrating Bazarov. The young radicals hated it because they thought he was mocking them. But here's the remarkable thing: despite all the outrage, within months young Russians were proudly calling themselves nihilists. The name stuck. Sometimes the best way to define a movement is to give it an enemy's insult and watch it wear the term like a badge.

The generation gap that Turgenev captured was real and bitter. The older generation—the men of the 1840s, known in Russian as the sorokovniki—had been dreamers and idealists. They read German philosophy, debated abstract concepts in Moscow salons, and believed that Russia could be reformed through gradual progress and the adoption of Western ideas. They were liberals in the classical sense: they wanted to abolish serfdom, embrace science, and bring Enlightenment values to their homeland.

The younger generation—the men of the 1860s, the shestidesjatniki—looked at their elders and saw failure. All that philosophizing, all those grand theories, and what had changed? The serfs were still bound to the land. The Tsar still ruled with absolute power. The church still controlled minds with superstition. The reformers had accomplished nothing.

So the young turned their backs on idealism entirely.

What the Nihilists Actually Believed

Here's where Western accounts of Russian nihilism usually go wrong. The nihilists weren't primarily political revolutionaries. Most of them didn't care about politics at all. They considered government and political reform to be relics of an outdated way of thinking—stages humanity needed to pass through and discard.

What they believed in was materialism. Not materialism in the modern sense of wanting expensive things, but philosophical materialism: the view that only physical matter exists. No souls. No spirits. No God. No abstract ideals floating somewhere in the realm of pure thought. Just atoms and forces, flesh and blood, cause and effect.

This might sound like standard atheism, but the nihilists pushed it further. They rejected not just religion but aesthetics, traditional morality, and social convention. Why should I respect my elders? Because tradition says so? Tradition is just accumulated prejudice. Why should I appreciate art? Because critics say it's beautiful? Beauty is a subjective illusion. Why should I obey moral rules? Because society demands it? Society is a collection of self-interested hypocrites.

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin, writing later for the Encyclopædia Britannica, defined nihilism as "the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom." That's the charitable interpretation. The less charitable interpretation is that nihilism meant radical selfishness elevated to a philosophical principle.

The movement embraced what philosophers call hard determinism—the view that every event, including every human choice, is completely determined by prior causes. Free will is an illusion. We're all just biological machines following the laws of physics. Combined with atheism and materialism, this created a worldview that was deeply unsettling to traditional Russian society.

And that was precisely the point.

The Thinking Proletariat

One thing that made Russian nihilism distinctive was its social composition. The movement drew heavily from a class called the raznochintsy—a wonderfully Russian term that literally means "people of various ranks."

In Russia's rigid social hierarchy, the raznochintsy were the people who didn't quite fit anywhere. They weren't aristocrats, but they weren't peasants either. They weren't merchants or guildsmen. They were the sons of minor officials, low-ranking civil servants, poor clergymen, and retired military officers—educated enough to have intellectual aspirations but without the wealth or status to pursue them comfortably.

Before the 1840s, Russian intellectual life had been dominated by the aristocracy. You could afford to sit in Moscow salons debating Hegel if your family owned estates and serfs. The raznochintsy couldn't afford such luxuries. They had to work. They had to struggle. And their philosophy reflected their circumstances.

The leading nihilist theorists gave various names to the type of person they were trying to create. Nikolay Chernyshevsky called them "rational egoists." Dmitry Pisarev and Nikolai Shelgunov called them "the thinking proletariat." Pyotr Lavrov called them "critically thinking personalities." Whatever the label, the idea was the same: a new kind of human being who had thrown off the shackles of inherited belief and custom, who thought for themselves based on reason and evidence alone.

These "new people," as they were sometimes called, were supposed to be the vanguard of human progress. Not through political revolution—remember, most nihilists considered politics obsolete—but through personal transformation. Change yourself first. Strip away every assumption you inherited from your parents, your teachers, your priests. Examine everything with cold scientific rationality. Only then could you begin to build something better.

The German Connection

Russian nihilism didn't emerge from nowhere. It had deep roots in German philosophy, though the nihilists would have cringed at the admission.

The story begins with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the towering German philosopher whose system of dialectical idealism dominated European thought in the early nineteenth century. Hegel believed that history was the unfolding of Absolute Spirit—a cosmic mind working out its own self-understanding through the development of human civilization. It was heady stuff, abstract and mystical, and Russian intellectuals of the 1840s loved it.

But Hegel had dangerous students. The "Left Hegelians," as they came to be called, took their master's dialectical method and turned it against his idealist conclusions. The most important of these was Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that Hegel had gotten everything backward. Spirit didn't create matter; matter created the illusion of spirit. God didn't create man; man created God as a projection of his own highest qualities. Religion was alienation—humanity worshipping its own image without recognizing it as such.

Feuerbach's materialism hit Russia like a thunderbolt. Here was a respectable German philosopher—heir to Hegel himself—saying that the material world was the only reality. The Russian radicals of the 1850s seized on this with enthusiasm. Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, both sons of noblemen, were among the first to develop Left Hegelian ideas in Russia.

Bakunin, who would later become one of the founders of anarchism, wrote a famous passage in 1842 that captures the spirit of what was to come:

Let us therefore trust the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion too!

That phrase—"the passion for destruction is a creative passion"—would echo through Russian radical thought for decades. Before you can build something new, you must first tear down the old. Before construction, destruction.

The Brief Spring

The nihilist movement flowered in a peculiar window of Russian history. Tsar Nicholas I, whose reign had been marked by strict censorship and political repression, died in 1855. His son Alexander II came to the throne promising reform. Censorship loosened. University regulations relaxed. Publications that would have been suppressed under Nicholas were suddenly possible.

It was in this atmosphere that journals like The Contemporary and The Russian Word became the organs of nihilist thought. Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev—the leading theorists of the movement published prolifically, pushing the boundaries of what could be said in print.

Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, written while he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, became a bible for young radicals. The book depicted communes of "new people" living according to rational principles, free from the superstitions and hypocrisies of traditional society. It was stilted as literature but explosive as propaganda. A young Vladimir Lenin would later take the title for his own revolutionary pamphlet.

The nihilists shocked respectable society with their behavior as much as their ideas. Women cut their hair short, smoked cigarettes, and studied science. Men refused to observe social niceties, dressed sloppily, and treated everyone—from peasants to aristocrats—with the same blunt directness. They formed communes and cooperatives. They rejected marriage as a bourgeois institution. They scandalized their parents.

All of this happened in the context of one of the most momentous events in Russian history: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Alexander II's reform freed millions of peasants from legal bondage, but the terms were bitterly disappointing to radicals. The freed serfs had to pay for their land through redemption payments that would last for decades. They were freed into poverty and debt.

For the nihilists, the failure of emancipation proved their point. Reform from above was hopeless. The system couldn't be fixed; it could only be destroyed.

From Philosophy to Violence

In 1862, a wave of mysterious fires swept through St. Petersburg. The arsonists were never definitively identified, but the government blamed radical students. The reaction was swift and harsh. The Contemporary was suspended. Chernyshevsky was arrested. The brief spring of relative freedom was ending.

Then, in 1866, a young man named Dmitry Karakozov tried to shoot Tsar Alexander II. He missed. But the attempted assassination transformed the political landscape. The government cracked down hard on radical activity. Many nihilists were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia.

Exile, paradoxically, radicalized the movement further. In the harsh conditions of Siberia, theoretical nihilism gave way to revolutionary practice. The question was no longer whether the system should be destroyed, but how to destroy it.

The next two decades saw a series of revolutionary organizations, each more radical than the last. The most famous was Narodnaya Volya—"The People's Will"—which pioneered the tactics of political terrorism. They believed that assassinating the Tsar would spark a popular uprising. They were wrong about the uprising, but they succeeded in the assassination.

On March 1, 1881, members of Narodnaya Volya threw bombs at Alexander II's carriage in St. Petersburg. The first bomb wounded his guards but left the Tsar unharmed. Alexander made the fatal mistake of getting out of his carriage to check on the wounded. A second bomber threw his device at the Tsar's feet. Alexander II, the liberator of the serfs, died hours later.

The assassination horrified Europe and gave nihilism its lasting reputation as a doctrine of terrorism. But this was always a misunderstanding. Most nihilists were never terrorists. Most weren't even political. The revolutionaries who killed Alexander II called themselves socialist revolutionaries, or simply radicals. The term "nihilist" was imposed on them by outsiders who didn't understand the distinction.

The Children of Nihilism

Russian nihilism as a distinct movement lasted only about a decade, from roughly 1855 to 1866. But its influence extended far beyond those years. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as "the intellectual pool out of which later radical movements emerged."

The most important of those later movements was Marxism. Georgi Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, credited Chernyshevsky with having "massive" influence on his thinking. Vladimir Lenin said Chernyshevsky's influence on him was "overwhelming." When the Bolsheviks came to power after the 1917 revolution, they officially honored the nihilist theorists as "Russian revolutionary democrats"—the most important materialist thinkers in history before Marx.

This connection has led some scholars to argue that Soviet communism was essentially nihilism by another name. The theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer claimed that Russian nihilism found its "deepest expression" in twentieth-century Bolshevism. The historian M. A. Gillespie argued that nihilism was "at the core of revolutionary thought in Russia throughout the lead-up to the Russian Revolution."

Whether or not you accept these connections, there's no denying that the nihilists raised questions that still resonate. What happens when a generation loses faith in all inherited values? What fills the void when God is dead and tradition is exposed as mere prejudice? How do you build a new society when you've torn down all the foundations of the old one?

The nihilists had confident answers to these questions. Science would replace religion. Reason would replace tradition. The "new people" would create a better world from scratch. History suggests they were too optimistic. The twentieth century would show just how dangerous it could be when people believed they could remake humanity according to a rational plan.

The Opposite of Nothing

There's a final irony to Russian nihilism that deserves attention. The movement that called itself "nothing" was actually brimming with passionate conviction.

The nihilists believed fervently in science, in progress, in human perfectibility. They were convinced that reason could solve all problems, that superstition could be swept away, that a new kind of human being could emerge from the wreckage of the old society. This wasn't skepticism so much as a new kind of faith—faith in materialism, faith in determinism, faith in the redemptive power of negation.

Dostoevsky, who had been arrested as a young man for involvement with radical circles, understood this paradox better than anyone. His great novels—Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov—are all, in different ways, responses to nihilism. He saw that the nihilists were not empty; they were full to bursting with a terrible certainty. And he feared what would happen when that certainty collided with the real world.

In Demons (sometimes translated as The Possessed or The Devils), Dostoevsky created a portrait of revolutionary nihilism that still disturbs. The novel's radicals are not heroic freedom fighters but twisted ideologues, capable of murder in the name of abstract principles. One character delivers a chilling prophecy:

Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.

The history of the twentieth century would prove Dostoevsky grimly prophetic. The passion for destruction, it turned out, was not always creative. Sometimes it was just destructive.

The Perennial Temptation

Some scholars have suggested that nihilism represents something deeper than a nineteenth-century Russian movement—that it reflects a "perennial temperament of the Russian people," a recurring pattern in Russian culture. Whether or not that's true, there's something universal about the nihilist impulse.

Every generation, it seems, produces young people who look at the world their parents built and find it wanting. Every generation produces radicals who want to tear everything down and start over. The specific targets change—religion, capitalism, patriarchy, tradition—but the underlying drive remains the same: the conviction that the existing order is corrupt beyond repair, that only destruction can clear the way for something better.

The Russian nihilists were among the first to articulate this impulse in modern philosophical terms. They gave it a name, a vocabulary, a set of theoretical justifications. They also demonstrated, with tragic clarity, where it could lead.

Their story is worth remembering—not as a simple cautionary tale, but as a complex chapter in the history of human thought. The questions they asked were real questions. The problems they identified were real problems. Their answers may have been wrong, even catastrophically wrong, but the questions remain.

What do we believe, and why? What values deserve our allegiance? What happens when faith collapses? These are the questions the nihilists posed, in their crude and uncompromising way. We're still trying to answer them.