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(b. May 30 [May 18, old style], 1814, Premukhine, Russia--d. July 1 [June 19, O.S.], 1876, Bern), chief propagator of 19th-century anarchism, a prominent Russian revolutionary agitator, and a prolific political writer. His quarrel with Karl Marx split the European revolutionary movement for many years.

Bakunin was the eldest son of a small landowner in the province of Tver. He grew up in idyllic surroundings, romantically devoted to four sisters who were nearer to him in age than his younger brothers. His lifetime of revolt began when he was sent to the Artillery School in St. Petersburg and later was posted to a military unit on the Polish frontier. In 1835 he absented himself without leave and resigned his commission, narrowly escaping arrest for desertion. For the next five years he divided his time between Premukhine, where he plunged into the study of the German philosophers Johann Fichte and Hegel, and Moscow, where he moved in the literary circles of the critic V.G. Belinsky, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the publicist Aleksandr Herzen. In 1840, his opinions still in a state of fluid turbulence, he journeyed to Berlin to complete his education. There he fell under the spell of the Young Hegelians, the radical followers of Hegel, and, having moved to Dresden, in 1842 published in a radical journal his first revolutionary credo, ending with the now-famous aphorism: "The passion for destruction is also a creative passion." This brought him a peremptory order to return to Russia and, on his refusal, the loss of his passport. After brief periods in Switzerland and Belgium, Bakunin settled in Paris, where he consorted with French and German Socialists, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx, and with numerous Polish émigrés who inspired him to combine the cause of the national liberation of the Slav peoples with that of social revolution. The February Revolution of 1848 in Paris gave him his first taste of street fighting; and after a few days of eager participation he travelled eastward in the hope of fanning the flames in Germany and Poland. In Prague in June 1848, he attended the Slav congress, which ended when Austrian troops bombarded the city; and later in the year, in the secure retreat of Anhalt-Köthen, in Germany, he wrote his first major manifesto, An Appeal to the Slavs. He denounced the bourgeoisie as a spent counterrevolutionary force; he called for the overthrow of the Habsburg Empire and the creation in central Europe of a free federation of Slav peoples; and he counted on the peasant and especially on the Russian peasant, with his tradition of violent revolt, as the agent of the coming revolution.

Tired of inaction, Bakunin once more plunged into revolutionary intrigues and, engaging in the Dresden insurrection of May 1849, failed this time to escape arrest. The Saxon authorities handed him over to Austria and Austria, after a further period of incarceration, to Russia. In May 1851 he was back on Russian soil in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. There, at the invitation of the chief of police, he wrote an enigmatic Confession, which was not published until 1921. Much of it consists of expressions of repentance for misdeeds and abject appeals for mercy. But it includes some gestures of defiance and plays heavily on Bakunin's devotion to the Slavs and hatred of the Germans -- sentiments that were noted with interest and approval by the Tsar. They did not, however, help the prisoner. He remained for three years in the Peter-Paul Fortress and for three further years in another fortress, the Schlisselburg, in conditions of rapidly deteriorating health. Finally, in 1857 he was released to live in Siberia. There he contracted a marriage, which was not consummated, with the daughter of a Polish merchant. The governor of Eastern Siberia was a cousin of Bakunin's mother, and it was probably through this connection that he obtained permission in 1861 to travel down the Amur, ostensibly on commercial business. Having reached the coast in a Russian ship, he transferred to an American vessel bound for Japan and travelled via the United States to Great Britain.

Bakunin's arrival in London at the end of 1861 reunited him with Herzen, whom he had last seen in Paris in 1847 and who now occupied a preeminent position among Russian émigrés as editor of Kolokol ("The Bell"). Bakunin's 14-month stay in London led to an irretrievable rift with Herzen, who had shed some of the revolutionary ardour of his youth and had already crossed swords with the critic and novelist Nikolay Chernyshevsky and other extreme radicals of the rising Russian generation. He now found Bakunin's financial, as well as political, irresponsibility hard to bear. When the Polish insurrection broke out early in 1863, Bakunin eagerly embarked with a shipload of Polish volunteers for the Baltic. He got only as far as Sweden, where he spent a fruitless summer. At the beginning of 1864 he established himself in Italy, which became his residence for four years. It was there that he framed the main outlines of the anarchist creed that he preached with unsystematic but unremitting vigour for the rest of his life. It was there, too, that he began to weave that complex network, part real, part fictitious, of interlocking secret revolutionary societies that absorbed his energies and bewildered the followers whom he enrolled in them.

The most famous episode of Bakunin's later years was his quarrel with Marx. In 1868, then settled in Geneva, he joined the First International, a federation of working-class parties aiming at transforming the capitalist societies into Socialist commonwealths and their eventual unification in a world federation. At the same time, however, he enrolled his followers in a semisecret Social Democratic Alliance, which he conceived as a revolutionary avant-garde within the International. The same organization could not hold two such powerful and incompatible personalities; and at The Hague congress in 1872 Marx, by an intrigue that had little relation to the causes of the quarrel, secured the expulsion of Bakunin and his followers from the International. The breach split the revolutionary movement in Europe for many years to come. Two of Bakunin's major writings, L'Empire knouto-germanique et la révolution sociale (1871) and Staat en anarchie (1873), directly reflected his conflict with Marx. Bakunin was as uncompromising a revolutionary as Marx and never ceased to preach the overthrow of the existing order by violent means. But he rejected political control, centralization, and subordination to authority (while making an unconscious exception of his own authority within the movement). He denounced what he regarded as characteristically Germanic ways of thought and organization and opposed to them the untutored spirit of revolt that he found embodied in the Russian peasant. Bakunin's anarchism took final shape as the antithesis of Marx's communism.

During his last years, which he spent in penury in Switzerland, Bakunin reverted to his preoccupation with central and eastern Europe. He was compromised by a short-lived enthusiasm for S.G. Nechayev, a young Russian nihilist who paraded his contempt for conventional morality, achieved notoriety by murdering a fellow conspirator whom he suspected of intending to betray or desert the cause, and for this crime was eventually extradited to Russia by the Swiss authorities. Bakunin consorted with Russian, Polish, Serb, and Romanian émigrés, among whom he found eager disciples; drafted proclamations; and planned revolutionary organizations. His health grew worse; his financial embarrassments became ever more acute, and he depended on the bounties of a few Italian and Swiss friends. But he never wholly lost the resilience of his revolutionary convictions.

Proudhon and Bakunin rank as the founding fathers of 19th-century anarchism. Bakunin formulated no coherent body of doctrine. His voluminous and vigorous writings were often left incomplete. But his fame and personality inspired a large and widely dispersed following. Small anarchist groups existed in Great Britain, Switzerland, and Germany, whereas the powerful anarcho-syndicalist wing of the French trade unions owed more to Proudhon than to Bakunin. Anarchist movements owing allegiance to Bakunin continued to flourish in Italy and especially in Spain, however, where as late as 1936 the anarchists were the strongest revolutionary party.

Adapted from Britannica Online.