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88 plans for the future was condemned, and condemned too therefore was all exclusively theoretical rational activity. The only knowledge to be tolerated was that which directly promoted practice, the practice of "radical and universal pandestruction." As for reconstruction, "to upbuild is not our work, but that of those who will come after us." The immediate concrete aim was "to sweep away the tsar with all his family." If, none the less, Alexander II was still permitted to live, this was merely because his proceedings were stimulating the revolutionary movement among the people. Nečaev was willing to leave his condemnation and punishment to the people's assize; the Russian folk was entitled to inflict a death sentence on the man who had deceived them with his lying reforms.

During 1869, Nečaev organised among the Moscow students a secret society which, under his leadership was speedily to shed blood. An alleged traitor, a student named Ivanov, was sentenced and murdered, the Bakuninist revolution having thus an ominous beginning with the assassination of one of its own adherents. Nečaev had an additional reason for this blood-letting in that he desired to intimidate his own followers, to knit them more closely together, and to promote the spread of the idea of pandestruction by the excitement which the murder would cause.

Bakunin condemned Nečaev in strong terms—though not until after Nečaev's "deed." In 1870 Bakunin spoke of Nečaev as a traitor, and in 1872 censured his Machiavellianism and Jesuitism. It is difficult to decide to what extent Nettlau is right in maintaining that Nečaev had fooled Bakunin and Ogarev. It was certainly characteristic of Bakunin that his plans for world-wide destruction laid him open to be befooled by such as Nečaev. From the very first Herzen distrusted Nečaev. In 1872 Nečaev was extradited from Switzerland as a common criminal, and in Russia was condemned to twenty years in a penitentiary, but was confined in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul where he died in 1882. Even had this not been his fate, he would have been unable to maintain his position in the revolutionary world. As Kropotkin shows in his Memoirs, Nečaev's program was promptly repudiated by Čaikovskii's adherents. Moreover, in Lavrov's program Nečaev's position is denounced. Above all, the later members of the Narodnaja Volja disapproved of Nečaev's methods.