Mikhail Bakunin

Biography

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (30 May 1814 – 1 July 1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and political philosopher, recognized as one of the key figures in anarchist theory and practice. He was born in Priamukhino, a family estate in the Tver Governorate of Russia, and came from a noble family whose comfortable life couldn't satisfy his intellectual and political ambitions. He initially received military training at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School but left that path for philosophy and radical politics. Moving to Moscow and then to Berlin, he studied at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and delved into the German idealist tradition, especially the works of Hegel, which influenced his later radicalism.

In Paris in the early 1840s, Bakunin met Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. These relationships were significant even though they later became rivals. His political involvement grew quickly, and he was expelled from France for opposing the Russian Empire's occupation of Poland. He took part in the Prague uprising of 1848 and the Dresden insurrection of 1849, leading to his arrest, imprisonment, and multiple extraditions. Although initially sentenced to death, he was eventually exiled to Siberia in 1857. His escape from Siberia through Japan and the United States to London became a famed story of nineteenth-century revolutionary activity. In London, he worked with Alexander Herzen on the emigre journal Kolokol, expanding his influence among Russian radicals.

Bakunin developed his ideas into collectivist anarchism, advocating that the state was inherently oppressive and must be completely dismantled instead of reformed or taken over. This stance led to a serious conflict with Marx and his supporters in the International Workingmen's Association, which Bakunin joined in 1868. At the 1872 Hague Congress, the split between the Marxist and anarchist groups became very clear. Marx supported using state power as a step toward socialism, while Bakunin believed any use of state power would revive domination. Bakunin couldn't attend the congress, and his group lost the vote, resulting in his expulsion from the International for allegedly running a secret organization within it.

Some of his important works include God and the State, Revolutionary Catechism, and Statism and Anarchy. These works explored his opposition to religious authority, political centralization, and the Marxist approach. In God and the State, he argued that religious and political authorities were interlinked systems of control that needed to be dismantled together. Statism and Anarchy, written in Russian, critiqued Marx's idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, suggesting it would turn into a new form of class rule. These writings were widely read by European and Latin American radicals for years after his death.

Bakunin spent his last years in Switzerland, staying involved in radical politics despite his declining health. He died in Bern on 1 July 1876. His marriage to Antonia Kwiatkowska, whom he married in Siberia, lasted through his challenging final years. Although he didn't leave an organized legacy, his ideas significantly influenced the anarchist and syndicalist movements that spread across Europe and the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.