The great novelist Ivan Turgenev had coined the name “Nihilists,” for them; their models or intellectual masters were the venerable anarchist writer and apostle of terrorism, Mikhail Bakunin, Serge Nechayev, the monstrous prototype of the conscienceless revolutionary in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, and Peter Tkachev, the theoretician of revolution through professionally organized conspiracy, to whom Lenin, among others, owed a great intellectual debt. (Tkachev once recommended that every Russian over the age of twenty-five be put to death as incapable of moving with the times.)
Democrats today in america would like them
