The reign of Nicholas I, it has often been noted, displays a curious paradox: one of the most repressive periods in the history of imperial Russia, it was also a time of remarkable intellectual and cultural creativity. In the 1830s and 1840s, under the very noses of the Third Section (Nicholas's political police), Westernizers, Slavophiles, liberals, and even socialists were discussing and developing their ideas. Some of the greatest classics of Russian literature were also being composed and published. Michael Bakunin's long intellectual journey, which would culminate in Statism and Anarchy of 1873, his last major work, had its beginnings in this bracing atmosphere.

Bakunin, as well as Peter Kropotkin, his successor as the foremost theorist of Russian anarchism, were both scions of the landed nobility, the most privileged class in the Russian Empire. They were not exceptional in this respect. Until about the 1860s nearly all of Russia's radicals and revolutionaries were nobles. In autocratic Russia, where no individual had political rights or even secure civil liberties or guarantees of free expression, even nobles could suffer oppression, if not of an economic kind. With the bulk of the Russian population enserfed until 1861 and the country as a whole socially and economically backward in comparison with Western Europe, only nobles had the education and exposure to Western ideas that enabled them to criticize existing conditions in ideological terms and articulate a vision of a freer and more just order of things.

Today there is only one truly sovereign state left on the entire continent of Europe, and that is Germany. Indeed, of all the continental powers – we are referring, of course, only to the great powers, since it is obvious that the small and medium-size states are inescapably doomed first to utter dependence, and then, after a short time, to extinction – of all the first-rank states, the German Empire alone fulfills all the conditions of complete independence, while the others are reduced to dependence on it. That is not only because it won brilliant victories in recent years over Denmark, Austria, and France; because it seized all of the latter's arms and military supplies and forced it to pay 5 billion francs; and because with the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine it assumed a superb military position, defensive as well as offensive, vis-à-vis France. It is not only because the German army now unquestionably surpasses all the armies of Europe in numbers, weaponry, discipline, organization, and the efficiency and military knowledge not only of its officers but of its non-commissioned officers and soldiers, not to mention the undeniable superiority of its general staff. It is not only because the mass of the German population consists of literate, industrious, productive, and relatively well-educated, not to say learned, individuals, who are also submissive and obedient to the authorities and the law.

In the 1830s and 1840s, however, their pseudo-revolutionism, as yet untested in any way, found widespread credence. They believed in it themselves, though they manifested it for the most part in writings of a highly abstract character, so that the Prussian government paid no attention to it. Perhaps the government understood even then that they were working in its behalf.

On the other hand, the government was striving resolutely toward its principal objective – first the establishment of Prussian hegemony in Germany, then the outright subjection of all Germany to Prussia's undivided sway – through the use of a method which it felt to be incomparably more advantageous and appropriate than liberal reforms or even the encouragement of German science. This was the economic method, which would win it the heartfelt sympathy of the rich commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the Jewish financial world of Germany, since both required extensive state centralization in order to flourish. We see a new example of this today in German Switzerland, where the big merchants, industrialists, and bankers are already beginning to voice open support for a very close political union with the vast German market – meaning the pan-German empire, which exerts the magnetic attraction (or suffocating pressure) of a boa constrictor on all the small countries around it.

The idea of a Customs Union came initially not from Prussia but from Bavaria and Wurttemberg, which formed such a union in 1828. But Prussia quickly seized upon the idea and its implementation.

But if not France, then what other state in Europe can compete with the new German Empire?

Certainly not Great Britain. In the first place, England has never been a state in the strict, modern sense of the word, that is, in the sense of military, police, and bureaucratic centralization. Rather, England represents a federation of privileged interests, an autonomous society in which a landed aristocracy predominated at first and a monied aristocracy now predominates along with it, but in which, just like France though in somewhat different forms, the proletariat clearly and threateningly strives for the equalization of economic conditions and political rights.

England's influence on the political affairs of continental Europe has always been great, to be sure, but it was based much more on wealth than on the organization of military force. Today, as everyone knows, it has diminished considerably. A mere thirty years ago, England would not have tolerated with such equanimity the Germans' conquest of the Rhine provinces, or the restoration of Russian predominance on the Black Sea, or the Russians' campaign against Khiva. Such systematic acquiescence on its part demonstrates its unmistakable political bankruptcy, which grows with each passing year. The main reason for that bankruptcy is the antagonism between the world of the common laborers and the world of the exploiting, politically dominant bourgeoisie.

In England, social revolution is much more imminent than people think, and nowhere else will it be as fierce, for nowhere else will it encounter such desperate and well-organized resistance.

Prince Bismarck is the most powerful man in Europe today. He is a Pomeranian nobleman of the purest sort, with a quixotic devotion to the royal house, a typical cold and military bearing, and an arrogant, dryly polite, for the most part scornful and sarcastic manner in dealing with bourgeois-liberal politicians. He does not get angry at being called a “Junker,” that is, an aristocrat, usually replying to his opponents: “be assured, we will know how to uphold the honor of the Junkers.” An extraordinarily intelligent man, he is completely free of Junker prejudices or of any other kind.

We have called Bismarck the direct political disciple of Frederick II. Like the latter, he believes first of all in power and then in intelligence, which wields power and frequently increases it tenfold. A statesman through and through, like Frederick the Great he does not believe in God or the devil, in humanity or even the nobility – they are all merely tools as far as he is concerned. In pursuit of his statist objectives he will not hesitate before divine or human laws. He does not recognize morality in politics: base deeds and crimes are immoral only when they are not crowned with success. Colder and more impassive than Frederick, he is just as unceremonious and arrogant. A nobleman who owes his rise to the noble party, he is systematically suppressing it for the benefit of the state and curses it just as he previously cursed liberals, progressives, and democrats.

At the same time another orientation was taking root in Berlin, one more serious, more firmly grounded, and incomparably more characteristic of the German spirit. As often happens in history, Hegel's death, which occurred shortly after the July Revolution, confirmed the domination of his metaphysical thought, the reign of Hegelianism, in Berlin, in Prussia, and then throughout Germany. Prussia, at least for the time being and for the reasons set forth above, had renounced the unification of Germany by means of liberal reforms. It could not and would not, however, completely renounce moral and material hegemony over all the other German states and lands. On the contrary, it constantly strove to become the intellectual and economic focal point of all Germany. To this end it employed two methods: the development of the University of Berlin, and a Customs Union.

In the last years of the reign of Frederick William III, the minister of culture was Privy Councillor von Altenstein, a statesman of the old liberal school of Baron Stein, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the others. In opposition to all of his ministerial colleagues and to Metternich, who, by systematically extinguishing all intellectual light hoped to consolidate the reign of reaction in Austria and throughout Germany, Altenstein remained true to the old liberal traditions insofar as it was possible in that reactionary period. He tried to gather all the progressive figures, all the luminaries of German scholarship, at the University of Berlin.

The International Working Men's Association, which came into being scarcely nine years ago, has now attained such influence on the practical development of economic, social, and political issues throughout Europe that no political commentator or statesman can henceforth deny it his most serious, and frequently anxious, attention. The official, semi-official, and bourgeois world in general, the world of the fortunate exploiters of manual labor, views it with the kind of inner foreboding one experiences at the approach of a still mysterious and ill-defined but highly threatening danger. It regards the International as a monster that will surely devour the entire social, economic, and state order unless a series of energetic measures is taken simultaneously in all the countries of Europe to put an end to its rapid progress.

As we know, upon the conclusion of the recent war, which shattered the historic supremacy of the French state in Europe and replaced it with the even more odious and pernicious supremacy of state-supported pan-Germanism, measures against the International became a favorite topic of intergovernmental discussions. This is perfectly natural. By nature mutually antagonistic and utterly irreconcilable, states can find no other grounds for joint action than the concerted enslavement of the masses who constitute the overall basis and purpose of their existence. Prince Bismarck, of course, has been and will remain the chief instigator and moving spirit behind this new Holy Alliance. But he was not the first to come forward with his proposals.

Is it not true, reader, that Russia has made unprecedented progress in every respect since the now happily reigning Emperor Alexander II came to the throne?

If we want to measure the progress Russia has made in the last twenty years, let us compare the distance that separated it in all areas from Europe in, say, 1856, with the distance between them now: the progress indeed has been astonishing. Russia has not risen so high, it is true, but rather Western Europe, official and semi-official, bureaucratic and bourgeois, has declined considerably, so that the gap between them has decidedly diminished. What German or Frenchman, for example, will dare speak of Russian barbarism or butchery after the horrors perpetrated by the Germans in France in 1870 and by the French forces against their own Paris in 1871? What Frenchman will dare talk about the baseness and venality of Russian officials and statesmen after all the dirt that has come to light and practically buried the French bureaucratic and political world? No, when they look at the French and the Germans, Russia's scoundrels, boors, thieves, and butchers have no cause at all to blush. In respect to morality, throughout official and semi-official Europe brutishness, or at least an astonishingly brute-like form of behavior, has firmly established itself.

It is a different matter in regard to political power, although even here, at least in comparison with the French state, our kvass patriots can plume themselves, for politically Russia is without doubt more independent than France and ranks higher.

1. The Slavic Section, while fully accepting the fundamental statutes of the International Working Men's Association adopted at its first Congress (Geneva, September 1866), sets itself the special objective of propagating the principles of revolutionary socialism and the organization of popular forces in the Slavic lands.

2. It will struggle with equal energy against the aspirations and manifestations of pan-Slavism, that is, the liberation of the Slavic peoples with the aid of the Russian Empire, and pan-Germanism, that is, their liberation with the aid of the bourgeois civilization of the Germans, who are now striving to organize themselves into a huge pseudo-popular state.

3. Adopting the anarchist revolutionary program, which alone, in our opinion, reflects all the conditions for the real and total liberation of the masses, and convinced that the existence of the state in any form whatsoever is incompatible with the liberty of the proletariat, that it does not permit the fraternal international alliance of peoples, we want to abolish all states. For the Slavic peoples in particular, that abolition is a question of life and death, and at the same time it is the sole method of reconciliation with peoples of other races, such as the Turks, Magyars, or Germans.

4. Along with the state, everything that bears the name of juridical law must inescapably perish, every structure created from above downward by means of legislation and government and never having any objective but the establishment and systematization of the exploitation of the people's labor for the benefit of the ruling classes.

To avoid misunderstanding, we feel it necessary to remark that what we call the people's ideal has nothing to do with those political and social constructs, formulas, and theories which bourgeois scholars or semi-scholars devise at their leisure, in isolation from popular life, and graciously offer to the ignorant crowd as the necessary form of their future organization. We have no faith whatsoever in those theories, and even the best of them seem to us Procrustean beds, too narrow to encompass the broad and powerful sweep of popular life.

Even the most rational and profound science cannot divine the form social life will take in the future. It can determine only the negative conditions, which follow logically from a rigorous critique of existing society. Thus, by means of such a critique, social and economic science rejected hereditary individual property and, consequently, took the abstract and, so to speak, negative position of collective property as a necessary condition of the future social order. In the same way, it rejected the very idea of the state or of statism, meaning the government of society from above downward in the name of some imaginary right – theological or metaphysical, divine or intellectual and scientific.

Prologue

It is certainly a difficult matter to recognise the truth and to attack those errors of obscurity or carelessness which most frequently spoil its clear expression. For truly what is more righteous than the examination of unknown matters? The knowledge of such matters, the path to which does not guide those contemptuous of them, stimulates the sting of justice in the punishment of wrongdoers. Therefore, the first step in philosophising – the very genus of those matters it is proper to discuss – is that of prudently understanding what is true of particulars; the second step is that of faithfully comprehending the truth in everything, which illuminates the particulars. But this philosophical preparation is only accessible to those who, in opposition to the kingdom of vanity, freely proclaim they are freed when they are the children of truth, and who serve the Holy Spirit by leading away iniquity and injustice yoked by the neck. For ‘whenever there is the spirit of God, in that place there is liberty’; servility to fear and assent to vice exterminate the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, it is the Holy Spirit which speaks of and is not ashamed by equity in the inspection of rulers and which chooses between spiritually impoverished kings and those who aim to harmonise with God and who learn to know, speak and do the truth. He who does not wish to hear or speak the truth is alienated from the truth of the Spirit.