Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814–1876) was a Russian revolutionary and one of the founders of modern anarchism. His confrontation with Karl Marx inside the First International defined the split between authoritarian and libertarian currents of the European socialist movement.

Bakunin was born in the village of Pryamukhino in Tver Province into a noble family of liberal sympathies. He entered the Imperial Artillery School in Saint Petersburg, served briefly as an officer, and resigned to study philosophy. In Berlin and Dresden in the 1840s he moved from Hegelian idealism toward revolutionary politics, taking part in the 1848 uprisings in Paris, Prague, and Dresden. After the Dresden insurrection failed in 1849 he was sentenced to death twice, in Saxony and in Austria, before being handed over to Russia, where he spent six years in the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Shlisselburg fortress and a further period in Siberian exile.

He escaped from Siberia in 1861 by way of Japan and the United States to London, joining the European revolutionary émigré world. In the late 1860s he developed the doctrine of collectivist anarchism, arguing for the abolition of the state, the church, and inherited property and for federations of self-managed workers' associations. His writings include Statism and Anarchy and God and the State, the latter published after his death.

His expulsion from the First International in 1872 marked the formal break with the Marxists. He died in Bern.

The given name Mikhail is the Russian form of Michael, from the Hebrew Mikha'el, meaning 'who is like God'. It has been one of the most common masculine names in Russia for centuries. He carried it through a life of permanent revolution.