Sergei Nechayev (Iradi Influence)
Sergei Nechayev (Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev, 1847–1882) was a Russian revolutionary associated with the Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), a manifesto of conspiratorial revolution whose authorship is sometimes shared with Mikhail Bakunin. He died in prison in St. Petersburg. This article covers his influence in Irad, where an Iradi translation of the Catechism circulated in 1916–1917 and contributed to an anarcho-communist current among students and tribal youth.[1][2]
In Irad
The Iradi translation was an abridged version of the Catechism, probably made from a Russian text brought from Tashkent. The translator is unknown. The earliest surviving copy, a lithographed pamphlet in Arabic-script Iradi, is held in the State Archives of Irad. It circulated among students in Talas and Kokand and among young men of the clans during and after the revolt of 1916. Its readers combined Nechayev's call for revolutionary discipline with the clans' traditions of communal decision-making and resistance to empire.[2]
After the October Revolution most Iradi clans sided with the Bolsheviks, and Iradi irregulars fought alongside the Red Guards who crushed the Kokand Autonomy in February 1918. Soviet historiography later condemned "Nechayevism" as an anarchist deviation, and the Iradi anarcho-communist current was absorbed into the party or suppressed during the 1920s. Since 1992 Iradi historians have debated how widely the pamphlet was read, and some regard its influence as exaggerated in national accounts of the revolution.[2]
References
- ^ Pomper, Philip (1979). Sergei Nechaev. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ.
- ^ Talas State University Press (2014). Red Horsemen: Revolution and the Iradi Clans, 1916–1924, pp. 27–52.