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meanwhile, was tantalising radical-chic upper-class ladies with claims that, despite being illiterate until sixteen, he had nevertheless mastered the philosophy of Kant. Such liberal ladies were almost impossible to parody, although Dostoevsky managed it, as they recalled Nechaev fondly: ‘He loved to joke and had such a good-natured laugh.’ One can meet such people any night of the week in London, New York or Sydney. Nechaev looked like the US outlaw Jesse James, which was appropriate since he admired the ferocious bandits of Russian history, but the inexplicability of his malicious deeds, and the fine plots he wove, are more suggestive of the evil of Shakespeare’s Iago.11 His practical jokes included sending subversive materials to his enemies, knowing that it would be intercepted by the police. Resentment would be a great recruiting agent. In early 1869, Nechaev decided to embroider his revolutionary mystique by faking his own arrest. He sent a cryptic note to eighteen-year-old Vera Zasulich, towards whom he had clumsily professed his love, which sensationally claimed that he had been taken to the government’s most intimidating penal fortress. In fact, he was en route to Moscow, where sympathisers procured him a passport to go abroad. He left Odessa bound for Switzerland. There he quickly insinuated himself into illustrious exiled circles. The shambolic Bakunin, who, compensating for lifelong impotence with rhetorical violence, was an early fan: ‘They are magnificent these young fanatics. Believers without God, and heroes without phrases.’ Nechaev painted a colourful tale of flight from the Peter and Paul fortress, and of the imminent revolution his Committee was about to unleash. Bakunin mobilised the alcoholic Nikolai Ogarev and Herzen to transfer ten thousand francs to help Nechaev’s cause.

Nechaev also flattered Bakunin’s vanity by encouraging him to co-author a Revolutionary’s Catechism. This advocated a lethal Spartanic asceticism: ‘The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.’ All bonds with the civilised world ‘of laws, moralities, and customs, and with its generally accepted conventions’, were severed. Only two things were worth studying: the sciences of destruction, and the psychology of those whom the revolutionary would abuse and exploit. How the words flowed from Bakunin’s pen: ‘Moved by the sober passion for revolution, he [the revolutionary] should stifle in himself all considerations of kinship, love, friendship, and even honour.’ Tyrannical towards himself, he would be tyrannical over others. Some revolutionaries were more equal than others, for only the first grade would possess gnosis, and could freely exploit grades two and three. They were ‘capital’ to be disposed of at will. In a novel departure, revolutionaries were to collaborate with the ultimate primitive rebels, the lumpen criminal underclass. Turning to a theme that animates many revolutionaries, Bakunin and Nechaev eagerly established who was to be first for the chop. Humanity was divided into those ‘to be liquidated immediately’, while various categories of usefully idiot liberals were to be exploited and discarded, including ‘empty-headed women’ whose salons Nechaev had adorned. A further pamphlet, The People’s Justice, began to fill the ranks of those to be liquidated with real names drawn from what Nechaev charmingly called ‘the scum of contemporary Russian learning and literature … the mass of publicists, hacks, and pseudo-scientists’. Reams of these tracts were malevolently mailed to Russian radicals, knowing that it would result in their arrest. The whole of this programme, whose goal was ‘terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction’, was notionally designed to benefit ‘the people’. In fact, things had to get worse before they got better because ‘the Society will use all its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the