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In-Depth Information
KUTUZOV
, the Soviet government created a naval
decoration, the Nakhimov Order, while naming
naval schools after Nakhimov.
ies should suppress any moral considerations,
raised some difficult issues for the Russian revolu-
tionary movement. The son of a waiter, Nechaev
was born in the town of Ivanovo, north of
Moscow. Like others of his generation, as a stu-
dent Nechaev took part in disturbances in St.
Petersburg and was compelled to emigrate to
Switzerland in 1869. In Geneva he met and
impressed the seasoned anarchist revolutionary
Mikhail
BAKUNIN
, 33 years his senior. Claiming
to be the head of a powerful clandestine organi-
zation, Nechaev enlisted Bakunin in writing sev-
eral propaganda brochures and in collaborating
on a pamphlet entitled “The Catechism of the
Revolutionary.” Authorship of this pamphlet
was debated for some time, but it seems that
most of the credit should go to Nechaev. In it,
Nechaev begins with the then widespread idea
that true revolutionaries should be exclusively
concerned with their one passion, revolution. He
further argued that revolutionaries should sup-
press all moral inhibitions and be prepared to
kill, manipulate, and compromise opponents
and those who stood in the way—ideas that cre-
ated a storm in what was still a highly idealistic
revolutionary movement. Nechaev also argued
for strict organizational rules, dictatorial central-
ization and secrecy in developing a revolution-
ary organization. These organizational ideas
placed him in the tradition of the Decembrist
Pavel Pestel, and would later resurface in the
writings of Petr
TKACHEV
and Vladimir
LENIN
.
Nechaev returned to Moscow in August 1869
and promptly founded a revolutionary organiza-
tion called People's Retribution. When one
member protested some of Nechaev's tech-
niques, he was murdered by Nechaev and four
of his colleagues. The case received much pub-
licity and shocked the Russian radical intelli-
gentsia. Nechaev was forced to flee again, but
this time he was ostracized by the revolutionary
émigrés, including Bakunin. In 1872 he was
extradited from Switzerland as a common crim-
inal, and sentenced to 20 years' hard labor.
Instead, he was held in solitary confinement in
St. Petersburg's
PETER AND PAUL FORTRESS
, where
he died, possibly a suicide.
Nazi-Soviet Pact
The name usually given to the 10-year Non-
Aggression Pact signed between the Soviet Union
and Nazi Germany on August 23-24, 1939.
Sometimes known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact, after the Soviet and German diplomats
who signed it, the pact dramatically changed the
geostrategic balance in Europe by removing the
threat to Germany of having to fight a two-front
war, as in World War I. The published compo-
nent of the pact merely stated that neither side
would join in an attack on the other for a period
of 10 years. The pact had a secret protocol, how-
ever, that promised the Soviet Union the east-
ern third of Poland and spheres of influence
over Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Under the
original terms of the pact, Lithuania was to fall
under Germany's sphere of influence. The secret
protocol also stated that the Germans would not
contest a Soviet claim to Bessarabia, a Roma-
nian province that had been part of Russia until
1918.
News of the pact shocked the outside world,
especially communist party members in western
Europe who had spent most of the 1930s fight-
ing fascist movements in places such as Austria,
Spain, and France. Many of them left their par-
ties at this time. Freed from concern over Soviet
intentions, Adolf Hitler launched the German
invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, start-
ing what became World War II. Soviet troops
marched into eastern Poland two weeks later
and annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in
1940. The Soviet Union admitted to the exis-
tence of the secret protocol only in 1989.
Nechaev, Sergei Gennadievich
(1847-1882)
revolutionary
Nechaev was a fanatic and controversial revolu-
tionary who, through his belief that revolutionar-
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