Bakunin’s Confession

Our comrade Victor Serge, who has for some time been subjected to the insults of French anarchists, who do not forgive his loyal and sincere adherence to communism, was recently attacked with slanders and insults under the following evil pretext:

Victor Serge wrote an article on November 7, 1919, concerning the “Confession of Bakunin,” a document unknown to the public to this day and whose existence we only know of through the allusions made to it by James Guillaume in his biographical notice (volume II of the Oeuvres de Michel Bakunin, Paris, 1907). Victor Serge’s commentaries, respectful to the memory of Bakunin and historical truth alike, in no way presented the sacrilegious or iconoclastic character that unworthy adversaries later attributed to them, as the reader now, thanks to us, can judge.

Under what circumstances was this article translated, deformed, denatured, and reproduced in Germany? Victor Serge is unaware of this, as are we. I will not hide the painful surprise I experienced in learning that the Herzog’s Forum had published a fiddled text. I am not going to linger over the successive alterations the article suffered in the various translations, retranslations, and reproductions in Switzerland and Italy. The essential fact is that Victor Serge’s thoughts and expression were falsified against his will.

None of this was necessary to provide his adversaries with a pretext for defamations that I would blush to discuss. The only deplorable fact is that our respected fiend Séverine was led into error by the campaign carried out against Victor Serge and published statements about him that are occasionally unjust. This is why, in order to put an end to all tendentious interpretations and malevolent deformations I think it necessary to publish here the authentic text of Victor Serge’s article with the certainty that Séverine, that all readers will render our collaborator the justice he is due and the homage deserved by an upright writer, a disinterested revolutionary, a devoted and conscientious militant. Victor Serge addressed a response to Séverine that I hope the Journal du Peuple will publish.

—Boris Souvarine

THE SECRET ARCHIVES OF THE RUSSIAN POLICE CERTAINLY CONTAIN MANY documents of the greatest interest. We must count among them Bakunin’s Confession, whose publication will unquestionably sadden a great number of comrades. According to all those who read this “confession,” to which Professor Illinsky dedicated an article in the Viestnik Literatoury of Petrograd (no. 10, 1919), it casts a new, unexpected, and painful light in Bakunin’s personality.

After his participation in the revolutionary movement in Russia, France, and Germany (1848–49) Bakunin was imprisoned in the Czar’s jails, first in the Peter and Paul Fortress, then at Schlüsselbourg. Later exiled to Siberia, he was only able to escape from there in 1861.

The documents brought to light in the archives of the Russian police deal with the period of his life passed in Siberia and in the dungeons of the autocrat of all the Russias. The man of steel, the irreconcilable revolutionary who was briefly the dictator of insurgent Dresden, who’d been chained to the wall in the citadel of Olmütz, whose head was disputed by two dictators, and who until the final day of his life was to remain the initiator and inspirer of an elite of rebels: this spiritual father of anarchism seems to have passed through a terrible moral crisis that he didn’t come through unharmed. It was perhaps a near thing that the oak wasn’t uprooted and didn’t fall. Some—he still has so many enemies, even though he’s been dead for fifty years—will even speak of “Bakunin’s fall” with a wicked glee.

Bakunin wrote several letters from Siberia to his friends Alexander Herzen and Ogarev in which we find brief allusions to his Confession. Nicolas I, via Count Orlov, had proposed to him that he write to him “in the way a spiritual son writes to his spiritual father.” (The Emperor, it must be noted, was entirely within his role in proposing this to his prisoner. Leader of the Orthodox Church, he considers himself the spiritual father of his subjects.) Bakunin writes: “Having given some thought to the matter, I thought that in front of a jury during a public trial I would play my role to the bitter end. But imprisoned behind four walls, in the power of the Bear, I could without any shame, round off the rough edges …”

“Round off the rough edges” looks to a reader of the Confession (and other documents) like a euphemism. In this notebook of ninety-six pages of tiny handwriting found in the archives of the Third Section of the ministry of the interior (department of police) Bakunin boasts of laying out for the Emperor “his entire life, all his thoughts, all his feelings.” He writes to the Bear: “I will confess to you as to a spiritual father, from whom a man awaits pardon not in this world, but in the other.”

And from the pen of the atheist these lines take on a strange meaning.

He describes his acts as fantastic projects, hopes devoid of any foundation, criminal plans. Recounting his life in foreign lands he declares that he has only “knowingly sinned” since 1846. The tone of the entire confession is that of someone who has been defeated, who humiliates himself, and who finds a bitter pleasure in flagellating himself.

“I was both fooler and fooled; I misled others and was myself misled, as if I did violence to my own spirit and the good sense of my listeners; a situation that was against nature, inconceivable, in which I placed myself and which at times obliged me to be a charlatan despite myself. There has always been much Don-Quixotism about me.”

To be sure, it would be difficult for a man of conscience and action to speak of himself with more bitter harshness. Professor Illinsky, commenting on this passage, sees in it “the tragedy of a man of action who has arrived at doubting his work and becoming aware of his insincerity.” But isn’t the last phrase, which is justified by the quoted text, fundamentally unjust? Can’t we oppose his entire tumultuous rebel life—both before and after this Confession—to these lines that Bakunin wrote in the grave in which he was buried alive? A man of action, and even more a leader—and Bakunin was truly a leader—is often forced to exaggerate. Going too far, exaggerating, accentuating, inflating some acts to the detriment of others, are the psychological necessities of all propaganda, augmented by the passion of the militant, augmented precisely because he is sincere. Later, in the gloomy meditation of the prison, in the depression of defeat, his severity toward himself perhaps imputed a lack of sincerity to what was simply his having been carried away by quotidian thoughts and deeds. Alas, we are forced to defend Bakunin against himself!

It seems that on each page of the Confession reasoning of this kind is needed if we’re not to be dismayed. Bakunin is disenchanted with himself alone. The entire European movement in which he took so stormy a part now seems to him pathetic and vain. “All of Europe lives on lies,” he says. He is “disgusted, nauseated,” with the Germans. The revolution of 1848 demonstrated to him the “impotence of secret societies.” “None of the current social theories (in England, in France, in Belgium) is capable of standing up to the test of three days of existence.” He only remains truly faithful to his pan-Slavism. The Slavic peoples, in contrast to the degenerate nations of Western Europe, are the only ones to have remained healthy, the only ones who are communist by origin and temperament. Uniting them would produce a magnificent power, a new “Empire of the East” whose capital would be Constantinople. In order for Russia to be able to place itself at the head of the pan-Slavic movement and fulfill its mission, it requires a profound transformation. And here Bakunin again becomes a revolutionary confronting the Czar, dreaming, perhaps despite himself, of a new revolutionary autocrat in whom the genius of Peter the Great would be reborn. At the current moment certain lines of the Confession are especially interesting. There is no question that Bakunin profoundly loved, knew, and understood Russia. He was farsighted about its destiny; he prophetically understood what history had determined was necessary for it.

Representative, constitutional power, parliamentary aristocracy, and the so-called balance of powers in which the forces are so skillfully divided up that none of them can act: in a word, this entire narrow, crafty, indecisive catechism of European liberals has never inspired in me either veneration, profound interest, or even respect. I thought that in Russia more than anywhere else a powerful dictatorial power would be necessary that would occupy itself exclusively with enlightening the masses and elevating their moral level. What is needed is an authority free in its aspirations and sprit, but without parliamentary forms, which would publish free works but without freedom of the press; that would be surrounded with men of conviction and guided by their counsels, strengthened by their freely given assistance that no one and nothing can limit.

This is truly prophetic. Lenin couldn’t describe the proletarian dictatorship any better and contrast it to the democracy of French and English radicals with any greater scorn. This unlimited power, dictatorial and libertarian, supported by men with fervent convictions, exists: it is called the Republic of the Soviets. In 1848 Bakunin already predicted Bolshevism, and shortly thereafter he advised Nicolas I about these methods. The ironies of history!

And so, when it comes to his intelligence, his Confession is in no way humiliating. Aren’t the pages in which he expresses doubt compensated for by those where he prophesies with astounding lucidity? We can’t contest the value of methods and acts; we can’t contest that Bakunin saw things amazingly clearly.

The general tone of the “confession” is clearly defined in the following lines:

Having lost the right to describe myself as a faithful subject of Your Imperial Majesty I sign with a sincere heart, “the repentant sinner, Mikhail Bakunin.”

More than the Czar-judge, I stand now before the Czar-confessor and I must open to him the most secret sanctuaries of my thought …

I did not deserve this grace [that of writing this confession] and I blush at the thought of all I dared write and say of Your Imperial Majesty’s severity.

If we attribute the tone and appearance of the Confession to a period of depression and crisis, to a period of despair, to the fact that this man of exceptional energy was imprisoned, isolated, condemned to death; was living face-to-face with the thought of imminent death and felt useless and worn, then how could we explain certain of his entreaties sent from Siberia, where he lived in relative freedom and whose tone, as a person who studied them said, is servile? It’s certain that Bakunin suffered under a great torture. “Every day,” he said, “one feels oneself becoming more stupid.” In entreaties like this one all that can be heard is the cry of a man being tortured: “Don’t allow me to die imprisoned for life. Imprisoned all you can do is remember, remember without cease and without fruit. Thought and memory become unspeakable tortures. One lives a long time despite oneself and, not dying, one feels oneself dying a bit every day in distress and idleness.”

He humiliated himself, he weakened, to be sure, but he didn’t betray. On one point he was unshakable and this, in the eyes of Nicolas I, was essential. He wrote: “Don’t demand that I confess the sins of others … I saved little in this shipwreck: my honor, and the knowledge that I never eased my lot through a betrayal.”

When this painful book is finally published, studied line by line, and placed in context in the critical biography of the great anarchist, we will be able to draft a new judgment of Bakunin’s personality. According to Professor Illinsky, who expresses himself with the greatest moderation, his character as a revolutionary will come out of this “diminished.” Bakunin, wrote to the Siberian authorities applying for a post as a civil servant and hid this fact from his friend Herzen by engaging is a falsehood. “Without my consent …” he wrote, “Hasfor, the governor of Siberia, obtained the authorization for my assuming the post …”

During the first disputes between the socialists and anarchists in the International, the episode of the slanders against Bakunin by some of Marx’s overzealous friends and which, according to some, Marx himself was not a stranger to, was a sad one. Rumors circulated concerning vague relations between Bakunin and the Czar, between Bakunin and the Czar’s police. The discovery of the “confession” casts light on this subject. The slanders must have been rooted in the intentional semi-revelations of the imperial police of the confidential document the Czar had filed in its archives. The Russian government even planned to publish it in order to discredit its adversary who, having escaped, had once again become its irreconcilable enemy.

If it was a question of an ordinary man, of an obscure revolutionary militant, then this crisis, Olmütz, Peter-and-Paul, Schlüsselbourg, the death penalty, isolation, and Siberia would suffice to explain it. But Chernyshevsky imprisoned and exiled for twenty years, constantly skirting madness, didn’t weaken. But Vera Figner and Morozov, who left Schlüsselbourg after twenty years, didn’t “repent” in this way. But all those, famous or unknown, who went mad or who died in the Czar’s jails, even if they suffered a passion a thousand times longer than that of Christ, even if they sometimes doubted themselves and their work, even if they sometimes faltered, remained silent, and their executioners knew nothing about it. To these people and those who inherited their spirit, Bakunin’s Confession will cause pain. At that moment of his life Bakunin stumbled. He wasn’t superhuman. More energetic, more impetuous, more ardent, more clear-sighted, more imaginative than most, he was nevertheless not unshakable. Just as he dominated his generation, he still dominates ours, but we would have preferred that he be inflexible so that his legend would later be more noble, for he is among those who leave behind a legend. This recently discovered human document teaches us that, like almost every man, he had his moments of defeat and that, greater than most, he was also more broken.

Victor SERGE

Petrograd, November 7, 1919

(Bulletin Communiste 56, December 22, 1921)