How Bad Writing Destroyed the World by Adam Weiner

Author:Adam Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

6

Rakhmetov lives!

Herzen had been the check on Ogarev and Bakunin in their collaboration with Nechaev, and when Herzen died in January of 1870, they cast caution to the wind and joined forces with Nechaev. Bakunin positively rejoiced at the news of Nechaev’s imminent return to Geneva. Upon his arrival the three of them launched a second wave of proclamations. “The Chief Foundations of the Social Structure of the Future” appeared in the second issue of The People’s Reprisal. There and in his prison writings, Nechaev described the society that he intended to bring about after the obliteration of the czarist regime. In terms of repressive brutality it anticipates the novels of Zamyatin and Orwell. After destroying the old order, soaked in the blood of its victims, Nechaev’s “Committee” would aggregate all power and wealth to itself and create a new order. Humanity would be organized into trade unions according to people’s skills and proclivities. If you did not want to work, the committee would not compel you, but it would deny you shelter, food, tools, even the right to travel. Dissidents would quickly die off in a “soft kill.” Elected representatives from each union would report to a regional “Office,” which would facilitate the exchange of goods; regulate production and consumption; publish labor and production statistics; run dining halls, schools, dormitories, and hospitals; oversee construction and maintenance of infrastructure; and, of course, collectively raise the children. Mothers who wished to bring up their own children might apply to the Office for the right to do so, provided they had fulfilled their work quota. By means of a similar procedure scientists or artists might apply to the committee for the right to be excused from the labor norms in order to produce various works of genius.1 Marriage would be banned as an oppressive relic, and people could come together and go their separate ways by mutual consent and under no contractual obligation. Nechaev’s socialist utopia enforces just relations, levels all people, and fosters ideal conditions for personal development. In other words, Nechaev is essentially dictating happiness to the people—or death should they obstinately refuse to be happy. There is no need for police, courts, or prisons.

While tinged with Marxist ideas, this despotic rubbish horrified Marx himself, who called it “barracks communism.” It is easy to see in Nechaev’s horrifying vision of the future a further, more sinister, elaboration of Chernyshevsky’s Fourierist fantasies from his novel of seven years before. Especially redolent of Chernyshevsky is Nechaev’s reform of sexual and romantic relations. But unlike Chernyshevsky, Nechaev was a violent and angry man, and he turned Chernyshevsky’s happy-go-lucky Crystal Palace into a miserable dungeon. The real reason Nechaev can dispose of the criminal and justice system is that his appalling “Committee” constitutes a police state that enforces a singular law: be productive and happy or die.

In his other proclamations, which were if possible even uglier, Nechaev created mutually exclusive mystifications. One proclamation, published in the deceased Herzen’s Bell in the spring of 1870,

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