The Skeleton Key

THE UNMENTIONABLE NECHAEV by Michael Prawdin. 198 pages. Roy. $4.

One of history's truly horrifying figures was a now forgotten Russian named Sergei Nechaev, who died in St. Petersburg at the age of 35 in the top security section of the Czar's Peter-Paul Fortress.

He has been deliberately forgotten by the Soviets, but for a while in the '20s, Soviet historians sought in Nechaev's ideas and life a native Russian source for the brilliant success of Lenin's revolutionary theories. Since Stalin's time, he has been the No. 1 skeleton in the congested Soviet closet of historical horrors. According to Michael Prawdin, a Russian emigre living in London, Sergei Nechaev is also a "key to Bolshevism."

Turning Ideals. Prawdin leaves the reader with the haunting notion that perhaps some kind of devil is the spiritual father of Soviet Communism. Sergei Nechaev, son of a serf, grew up in St. Petersburg at a time when poor students chafed and brooded under Russia's vast and manifest injustices. Ideals of universal love, liberty and truth gained currency among the crust-fed scholars of the imperial universities. It was Nechaev's peculiar vocation to batten upon these noble spirits and convert their intentions into their logical and ethical opposites--hatred, subservience and lies. With the energy given only to monomaniacs, Nechaev went from group to group demanding as a first principle the ritual assassination of the visible enemies of freedom: the Czar's officials, and ultimately the Czar himself. As a corollary, they were told that they themselves must be willing to die, and to kill, when necessary, each other.

Looking for 2,770. Some of his adherents fell away, but not before he had succeeded in the execution of one of his comrades. Ivanov, a young student, was lured to a cave, beaten and shot to death. He had been told that a printing press was hidden there and needed to be brought out and put to use. Four of Nechaev's friends were tried for the murder and condemned to exile in Siberia. Nechaev fled to Geneva, where his presence caused the great revolutionary Bakunin to exclaim: "They are wonderful, these young fanatics. Believers without God." Bakunin issued to Nechaev a sort of party card or credential of the "International Alliance," bearing the serial number 2771. As a consequence, the Czar's agents and half the police of Europe were looking for at least 2,770 conspirators. When Nechaev was extradited from Switzerland, he was treated as the head of a huge conspiracy. Shackled, in solitary confinement in Peter-Paul's deepest dungeon, Nechaev was able to convert his guards to the revolution; he even convinced them that he had engineered the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Thus, a figure of universal execration, he passed into history and literature. In Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Nechaev appears as the evil theoretician Shigalov and as a model for Verkhovensky, coldblooded manipulator of idealists. Nechaev and his dupes are portrayed as the dreadful Nihilist crew who were the progenitors of Bolshevism.

Restrict the Truth. Nechaev's distinction lies in the fact that his brief life exemplified the basic paradox at the heart of Communism's claims on the human spirit. "Beginning with the ideal of absolute freedom, you arrive at the necessity of absolute tyranny," was Nechaev's sinister aphorism. In these terms he invented the conception of a revolutionary elite, above all moral law because it acted in the name of "the people." He proclaimed the abstract virtue of the "party" above all claims of kin or human obligation, and--generations before it had become a commonplace of totalitarian revolutionaries of left or right--he extolled the virtues of the lie as an instrument of the higher truth.

It is the thesis of Biographer Prawdin that the Soviet academicians of the '20s were right about Nechaev: Lenin indeed owed as much to this peasant zealot as he did to the philosopher Marx. He convincingly argues that Stalin (who came closer than any other socialist to the ideal of absolute tyranny in the name of absolute freedom) was right in suppressing Nechaev on Nechaev's own principle that the truth should not be known except to the elite.

Thus would a prince who believed Machiavelli suppress The Prince. If Communism, as Marx said in 1848, is "a specter haunting Europe," then Nechaev, one of the devil's saints, is a specter haunting Communism.

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