Mikhail Bakunin

In Moscow, Bakunin studied philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists. His enthusiasm for the philosophy of Fichte, shared with his friends Stankevich and Belinsky, led Bakunin to translate, in 1836, Fichte's Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar). From Fichte, Bakunin went on to immerse himself in the philosophy of Hegel, then most influential thinker among German intellectuals.The young man wholeheartedly embraced Hegelianism, bedazzled by the famous maxim that "Everything that exists is rational" - even though it also served to justify the Prussian state. In 1839 he met Alexander Herzen and the latter's friend Nicholas Ogarev, who had returned from exile to Moscow; but their ideas and his were too divergent at the time for a meeting of minds. In 1840, aged twenty six, Bakunin went to St. Petersburgh and thence to Germany, to study and prepare himself for a professorship in philosophy or history at the University of Moscow. From Berlin, Bakunin moved in 1842 to Dresden, and eventually arrived in Paris, where he met George Sand, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx.§ He was eventually deported from France for speaking against Russia's oppression of Poland. In 1849 he was apprehended in Dresden for his participation in the Czech rebellion of 1848. He was turned over to Russia where he was imprisoned in Peter-Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. He remained there until 1857, when he was exiled to a work camp in Siberia.

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