Freedom within us: nihilist fighters
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociopolitical contradictions in the Russian Empire led to the gradual spread of revolutionary ideas and the growth of the activity of organizations practicing them in the most diverse regions of the country. The “red hundreds” of Gurian partisans fought in Georgia, the anarchist terrorist attacks did not stop in Yekaterinoslav and Bialystok, the Social Democrats were more active in Moscow and St. Petersburg with their orientation towards the labor movement. Did not stay aside and the Crimea.
Revolutionary Sevastopol
Sevastopol - the legendary city of Russian naval glory - in 1905-1908. became one of the centers of the revolutionary movement on the Black Sea coast. Firstly, a fairly large proletariat was concentrated in the city, working at shipyards. Secondly, revolutionary propaganda was carried out among the sailors of the Black Sea fleetwho in those years excelled the famous Baltic people in their revolutionism. So, from the beginning of the 1904th century, the activities of the Social Democrats unfolded in the Black Sea Fleet, in April XNUMX they created the underground Sevastopol Party Organization (also known as the “Sevastopol Centralnaya”).
In turn, the tsarist authorities sought by all means to prevent revolutionary propaganda among sailors, coastal artillery soldiers and ship repair workers. All who did not inspire confidence, followed. But, despite the authorities' attempts to crush the revolutionary movement in the bud, representatives of almost all the revolutionary parties and organizations operating in the empire — the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionaries, and the anarchists — campaigned in Sevastopol. A lot was written about the activities of the Social Democrats in the Black Sea Fleet back in Soviet times, presenting the RSDLP as the only force that used among sailors and workers to have real political influence. At the same time, Soviet sources preferred not to spread strongly about the Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists, although the latter had a very noticeable influence both in Sevastopol and in the Crimea as a whole. Thus, in 1906, an anarchist group composed of A. Dmitriev, I. Kostruby, H. Leikin, and others was formed in Sevastopol, focused on the commission of terrorist acts and expropriations in the city and its environs. The famous sailor Athanasius Matyushenko adjoined anarchism. Anarchist ideas were very common among the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, but also the anarchist and Socialist-Revolutionary ideas and the marginal part of the Sevastopol population were laborers and odd laborers living in shelters.
Disputes about tramps
Among the revolutionaries, attitudes toward the "tramp", as the then lumpenized strata of society were simply called, were quite ambiguous. Marxists lumpen revolutionism completely denied. For them, the representatives of the “social bottom”, who were not involved in the production process, were nothing more than a “reaction tool”. The disciples of Karl Marx liked to cite as an example the experience of the French revolutions, when the authorities used “mobiles” - units of the National Guard, staffed by hired thugs from marginal groups of the population to suppress the insurgents. The pupils of the famous opponent of Marx Mikhail Bakunin looked at the lumpen proletariat in a completely different way. The latter called the “robber element” one of the driving forces of the revolution. If Marxists were not attracted to the productive processes by the “bottom”, then it appealed to anarchists, since it testified to the “freedom-loving” of the lumpen, who denied the laws of the state and society.
Practice has only confirmed the theory - by the beginning of the twentieth century almost all anarchist groups had a considerable number of representatives of marginal groups in their ranks. Often frank criminals also took the path of anarchist activity. So, in Odessa, the famous (“criminal authority” Yaponchik (Mikhail Vinnitsky)) joined the anarchists, in Bialystok - the pickpocket Movsha Spindler, nicknamed “Golden Pen”, and in Moldova - Gregory Kotovsky, who later became famous during the Civil War . In Sevastopol, it was precisely the lumpen-proletariat that was oriented to a certain degree to a unique organization, during the 1906-1908. representing a source of increased terrorist danger for the authorities, not only the city of maritime glory, but also the entire peninsula of Crimea.
Andreev - "Junk"
In the autumn of 1906, a young man appeared in Sevastopol, known among the urban working youth and the outcasts, nicknamed "Dzhonka". In search of supporters, he bypassed the pubs near the enterprises, city shelters. Andrei Nikiforovich Andreev was born in 1882 in Kiev, where his father was a peasant from the Kaluga province Nikifor Andreevich Chernov, he moved to work as a carpenter. In the family of Nikifor Chernov (family members received the surname Andreev by mistake - apparently, this was the father’s middle name), there were 14 children, of whom seven died in childhood. Andrei Andreev grew up in deep poverty, was able to finish parochial school and two-year urban school. Andreev began working at the age of sixteen, moreover, as a competent person, he settled into a construction accountant as an accountant.
Despite the peasant origin, he was able to enroll in general education courses at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. At the same time he was thoroughly engaged in self-education, and not only in the direction of popular revolutionary ideas, but also in broader aspects - he studied religion, the world history, social philosophy. In the 1900 year, Andreev became interested in revolutionary ideas and in June 1902 joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Having become a professional propagandist, Andreev went to agitate in the interests of the RSDLP in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, then was arrested and placed in Vladimir prison. 8 November 1904 g. Andreeva amnestied and sent to Kiev under police supervision.
As the experience of the prison in the country moved, Andreev became increasingly radicalized and became convinced of the need for more decisive measures in the fight against the existing system. Appearing in the Sevastopol doss-house in 1906, he created a group of ten “tramps” and with them joined the local fighting squad of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The group created by Andreev was called the Sevastopol Revolutionary Battle Squad, “Freedom Within Us” (hereinafter referred to as the “DBMS”). The meaning of the name was that each person can be free “within himself”, not subject to state and social orders. The DBMS began its journey by organizing a strike in the port of Sevastopol on the occasion of the arrest of sailors who were sent to hard labor.
Militia from the shelter
However, as far as activity in the Socialist Revolutionary ranks, Andreev again disappointed in the party, which consists of and leaves the AKP. He is not satisfied with the “dictatorship of intellectuals” in the Social Revolutionary environment - according to Andreev, the revolution must be made, first of all, by the most oppressed and disadvantaged segments of the population. Those who live in shelters, earn extra money on loading and unloading operations in the port, on construction sites, are interrupted by odd jobs. In the summer of 1907, together with thirty associates, Andreev forms the independent Freedom Safety Database “Freedom within Us”. Its ideology is a bizarre mixture of PA Anarcho-communist views. Kropotkin with the anarcho-individualism of Max Stirner who asserted absolute freedom.
The influence of the ideas of the Polish revolutionary Jan-Vatslav Makhayskiy, who preached revolutionary hatred of the intelligentsia as a class of exploiters and of the revolutionary parties as an instrument in the hands of the intelligentsia, was also obvious. The task of the workers Makhaysky saw the creation of a secret organization called "Workers' Conspiracy", which would carry out a general strike and stop the exploitation of workers by means of property and knowledge. Naturally, in this general strike, in the opinion of Makhaysky and his supporters, there should have been no place for intellectuals and revolutionary parties staffed by representatives of intellectuals.
However, Mikhail Bakunin perceived the “people of knowledge” quite negatively. The classic of anarchism saw in exploitation and knowledge the instruments of exploitation, with the help of which the classes of exploiters dominate the social lower classes, using the lack of education of the latter. The overall ideology of “Freedom within Us” is traced with anarchists - bezachachaltsy from the group “Bezchinachie” - this is both an orientation to the “robber element” and marginals as a revolutionary class, and a commitment to terrorist methods of struggle, and a positive attitude to acts of non-motivated terror, victims which could be, in fact, any representatives of the “non-skewing” part of the population, not to mention minor officials, police officers or military personnel.
The ideology of hatred and suspicion of the intelligentsia, non-motivated terrorist acts, denial of social foundations quite impressed the marginal layers, among which the Sevastopol revolutionary fighting squad hoped to gain new like-minded people. At least, the life credo of a significant part of the "tramps" themselves differed little from the slogans that were put forward by supporters of the Mahai group and the Beginning Group and adopted by the militants of the Freedom Within Us organization.
By the way, the legendary sailor Afanasy Matyushenko - one of the leaders of the famous uprising on the battleship "Potemkin" - adhered to similar positions in relation to the intelligentsia. In particular, he accused the Western anarchists, whom he had met during emigration, of neglecting the interests of the working people and focusing on the minor, in the opinion of the sailor, problems of pacifist, ecological, feminist activities. As we can see, the ideas of the Makha residents, beznachaltsev and “Freedom within us” were widely spread among sailors, laborers, underclassmen.
The first action of the squad in independent quality is the robbery of the Sevastopol post office on 18 thousand rubles. The organization’s estimate of the expenses of all money received as a result of the expropriation has been preserved. From 17 986 rubles were spent: for the needs of the Sevastopol Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries - 7 329 rubles, for weapon - 1 412 rubles, equipment - 860 rubles, conspiracy - 378 rubles, new business - 100 rubles, Red Cross - 300 rubles, for travels to comrades - 696 rubles, assistance to families of those arrested - 70 rubles, life of comrades - 3 192 rubles, loans: GB - 150 rubles, DG - 500 rubles, all spent - 14 486 rubles, in the remainder - 5 000 rubles (obviously, 2000 still existed at the cash desk of the organization prior to expropriation). This document gives an idea of how the funds obtained as a result of expropriations were spent by the revolutionary groups of the anarchist and Social Revolutionary type. As we can see, most of the funds went, nevertheless, to meet the needs and requirements of the organizations themselves, although there could well have been any attempts to direct the money received for recreation, entertainment, personal enrichment of individual activists - but they were, as a rule, denounced in most radical organizations.
Thanks to this expropriation, the squad acquired its own printing house - by the way, the best at that time among all Russian illegal printing houses. The printing house began issuing combat leaflets with a total circulation in 30 of thousands of copies that were distributed among workers and "tramps" of Sevastopol, sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, peasants of the Kherson province, as well as among the marginal strata in Odessa, Taganrog and Elizavetgrad. In the villages, as a result of the propaganda of “Freedom within us,” several cases of arson of landlord estates were noted. The squad had its own bomb-making laboratory, which was led by the German settler Karl Shtalberg, nicknamed “Volny”.
Forty-year-old Karl Stahlberg lived in a farm near Sevastopol and used his household not only to house a laboratory of bombs, but also for the periodic concealment of fugitive revolutionaries. The large family of this German farmer, a colonist, also took part in revolutionary activities, performing the functions of sentries and messengers. About Stalberg, in particular, is remembered in his memoirs even by Boris Savinkov, the legendary leader of the Social Revolutionary militant organization. On the night of 17 on July 1906, Savinkov and his colleagues, having escaped the day before from prison, found themselves in the Stalberg farm, where they hid until July 25 and then went to sea in a boat, reaching Constanta. Stalberg left with Savinkov, visited Europe, but then returned to the Crimea and was arrested in 1907 year, having died some time later in prison.
By the spring of 1907, the number of revolutionary combat guards was 30 people, completely switched to the lifestyle of "professional revolutionaries." For a year and a half, militants killed 18 government officials from affluent sections of the population. But if the Social Revolutionaries dealt with the governor-generals and ministers — that is, people who could at least be blamed for the social problems of then-Russia, the “tramps” from the Sevastopol revolutionary fighting squad chose victims easier. Thus, among the citizens killed by the militants, an organization was a police watchman, the owner of a wine cellar, the watchman of the 2 beacon. However, the organization also had large-scale actions - not only the expropriation of the post office, but also the organization of the 21 escape from a prisoner from the Sevastopol prison 15 on June 1907.
The authorities, seeking to restore order in Sevastopol, have begun active measures to find revolutionaries - terrorists. They managed to arrest several militants. 27 September 1907 was hung 31-year-old worker Timofey Bazdyrev, 1 November of the same year - “Unknown”, 25 April 1908 of the year - M. Kucherov, about the same time - M. Martintsov. Feeling the closeness of the “end”, the militants of the squad decide to move to Kiev - the city where Andreev grew up and spent his youthful years, but the move does not save “Freedom within us” from police harassment.
In April, 1908, the remaining militants of the squad were arrested. Among them, 24 April 1908, fell into the hands of the police and Andreev. In November - December of 1908, a trial was held in Sevastopol on the case of the Freedom within Us Sevastopol Revolutionary Military Brigade. The 16 man appeared before the court. Three of them were acquitted, eight were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and five (A.N. Andreev, M.L. Pyrkin, F.Ya. Yatsenko, F.L. Levchenko and P.S. Tkachenko) were sentenced to death . By a separate court in the Kherson province, N. Skrypnichenko and E. Romanovsky were sentenced to execution.
For a set of crimes committed by the militia, the death penalty for the leader of the organization Andreev, it seemed, was inevitable. But the famous action movie "smiled fortune" - and not the first and not the last time. The death penalty was replaced by life penal servitude. It seemed to be bound hand and foot, he had to disappear in the casemates of Kherson prison convict, where he was serving a nine-year term. But in March 1917, after the February Revolution, Russian prisons opened the gates for political prisoners. Andreev came to freedom - "Junk". The thirty-five-year veteran of the revolutionary movement immediately plunged into the political struggle of post-revolutionary Russia. Already in March, he, as part of the delegation of the Committee of amnestied political prisoners of the city of Kherson, left for Petrograd for talks with the Minister of Justice of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky on the amnesty issue for self-freed criminals (political amnesty was implied after the revolution itself, but no one was to release and amnesty the political prisoners) .
Neo-nihilism
Having settled in Kiev, he began campaigning among revolutionary-minded young people, hoping to revive the Freedom Within Us organization. In May 1917 in Kiev, together with P.A. Arsentiev, Andreev created the Kiev Association of Free Anarchists (CASA). 8 May 1917 in Kiev released the first issue of the journal of this organization - “Freedom within us”. Revolutionary Andreev theory questions are now interested not less than practical work. Fortunately in prison, he was able not only to “pull up” his knowledge, but also to think over the contours of the concept that he was going to “throw at the masses”.
The post-revolutionary newspaper Svoboda within us announced the birth of a new trend in Russian anarchism — neo-nilism. Neo-nihilism was a modified version of the old ideological concept of the Sevastopol revolutionary militant squad, that is, a combination of anarcho-individualistic and anarcho-communist ideas. It is significant that subsequently similar views spread in the second half of the twentieth century — among European leftists. Firstly, Andreeva's neo-nihilism suggested the rejection of any coercion. A person should have been freed from any oppression by the state and society, respectively - and any political or public organizations. At a time when many anarchists, inspired by the success of the Bolsheviks, began to seriously talk about creating a disciplined anarchist revolutionary party that could compete with Marxists, Andreev and his neonigilists categorically denied any possibility of creating any centralized organization that, in their opinion, from the very beginning it would become an instrument of coercion of personality. Naturally, any political parties and even anarchist federations were denied as tools for the exploitation of workers and the oppression of the individual by public institutions.
Andreev called himself "a cosmopolitan anarchist" and argued that his ideals do not lie in the creation of another anarchist federation or confederation, but in the creation of a global "unorganized association", that is, a modification of the "union of egoists", about which German philosopher Max Stirner wrote - One of the pillars of anarcho-individualism. As a selfish person, Andreev considered a truly free person, guided only by his own interests, which included, thus, the creation of a similar opportunity — to be guided by his own interests and to be completely free — and for any other people.
Secondly, Andreev was a categorical opponent of forced labor and a supporter of the voluntary nature of any work activity. In this, he disagreed not only with the Marxists who spoke for the society of the working people, but also with the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists who followed Kropotkin who held similar positions. Throughout the history of mankind, according to A.N. Andreev, faced the independence of the individual and social obligations. As a result, an active minority seized power and goods, gaining a certain independence, and the proletariat was forced to work and, moreover, to understand their work as a public duty. In the article “Anarchists - Trudoviks,” Andreev said that an anarchist should not work, because by working for the bourgeoisie, he will inevitably maintain the existing social order, cease to be an egoist and become a slave. “If I don’t produce, then I don’t buy, but only expropriate and destroy, disorganize - and this is the true meaning of anarchy,” wrote Andreev. Naturally, the concept of neonigilism, denying the work, strongly encouraged and promoted methods of expropriation - ranging from large raids on banks and ending with the theft of products from stores.
The refusal to work was considered by Andreev as the first step of the beginning revolutionary on the way to complete “freedom within himself”. In this, the anti-labor stance of Andreev came close to the much later in time and distant in appearance regions of the concepts of European and American left-wing critics of labor - Raul Vaneygem, Bob Black and Ken Nabba. In opposition to the communist model, “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his needs,” Andreev put forward his own slogan: “From each according to his wishes, to each according to his wishes!” The desire in the concept of neo-nihilism became the main stimulus and engine of social development and the basic principle of the distribution of social and economic benefits. Andreev saw the social system quite in the spirit of Kropotkin - as a federation of anarchic communes and communities, but the final result of the construction of such a society was not considered the approval of the public good, but the maximum satisfaction of the individual freedoms of each individual person.
However, in the years of the Revolution and the Civil War, the neo-nihilistic concept was not seriously spread even in a revolutionary environment. Several small groups were created in Kiev, Kharkov and several other Little Russian cities. Mostly the groups consisted of “green” students and students, as well as sagitized representatives of the urban marginal environment, who understood the slogans of freedom and negation of the existing social order as an excuse for permissiveness, including a criminal one. Some “autonomous” detachments of partisan warlords could have been influenced by the group, but on the whole, Andreev’s views did not seriously influence the course of revolutionary events and remained a marginal phenomenon even within the anarchist movement (which, however, does not detract from the originality of these theoretical calculations and their significance to study the history of revolutionary events and the transformation of revolutionary ideas).
The fate of the anarchist
Andreev himself, however, tried to actively participate in the activities of Russian anarchists, if not as an ideologue, then as a practitioner. Thus, at the All-Russian Anarchist Conference of 18-ti cities held in Kharkov, 22-17 July, Andreeva was elected secretary of the Provisional Informative Bureau of Anarchists of Russia ”- a kind of information and organizational body. At the same time he met with his companion and wife Zora Gandlevskaya. In the years of the First World War, a twenty-year-old girl worked as a nurse in a military hospital, but under the influence of revolutionary propaganda she decided to become a “professional revolutionary”. Together with Gandlevskaya, Andreev is trying to organize an anarchist underground in Sevastopol occupied by Denikin, then in 1920 he moves to Moscow.
The further activity of Andreev is striking in the grandeur of his plans with a low probability of their implementation. Thus, in 1921, a group of five anarchists headed by Andreev left for Tashkent, where they decided among the prisoners of war - the Indians who served in the British forces - to create an organization called the Anarchism Propaganda Bureau in the East. Naturally, Andreev and his associates were arrested and sent back. In the middle of 1920's. Andreev was in charge of the Voice of Labor anarcho-syndicalist publishing house, and participated in the activities of the Committee to Perpetuate the Memory of P.A. Kropotkin, Society of political prisoners and deportees.
What is surprising is that the Soviet authorities did not deal with Andreev, who never concealed his sharply negative attitude towards the Bolshevik government. During the second half of the 1920's. Andreeva and Gandlevskaya are arrested several times, although for now everything ends safely - with links to Novosibirsk, Astrakhan. During the next exile, Andreev and his wife managed to escape and settle in Ossetia, then they were arrested - but not shot and not even sentenced to long terms, and again exiled - this time to Saratov, where Andreev worked at the regional radio committee. However, in 1937, Mr .. Andreev and Gandlevskaya still received eight years in prison.
Nevertheless, the spouses managed to survive the years of Stalin’s rule and live to a ripe old age. Andreev died in 1962 at the age of eighty, and Gandlevskaya died in 1987 at the age of ninety, having even been a member of the dissident movement. Moreover, the aged Andreev in 1950-1960-i returned to the business of his life - the development of the foundations of the concept of neo-nihilism. He wrote several handwritten works, where he tried to explain the basics of his concept, adapting them to modern conditions. For example, the western anarchists Andreev accused of collaborating with the bourgeoisie, advocated daily revolutionary actions, a total boycott of political and public institutions — expropriations, refusal to work, pay taxes, serve in the army. To the Soviet system, apparently because of the reluctance of the next problems with the KGB, Andreev was more loyal, although he did not forget to accuse her of usurping social benefits by the nomenklatura, prohibiting the anarchist movement.
The theoretical and practical legacy of Andreev and his associates turned out to be practically forgotten - by all but a few specialists - historians. However, it is impossible not to trace the parallels between the ideology that the Freedom within Us group preached more than a century ago and the views of many modern left-wing groups, also opposing any social obligations, against labor, for the priority of personal freedoms over the interests of society. Obviously, nihilism as a worldview that denies the social order, the existing ethical and behavioral norms and attitudes, is as eternal as a person’s denial of the state or private property. Another thing is that either ideally-oriented young men and women, by virtue of age, prone to total denial of everything and everything, or representatives of the social bottom, who see nihilistic attitudes to justify their own social position and lifestyle, will always follow this ideology, or such “professional nihilists”, of whom Andrei Andreev was the main character of this article.
Revolutionary Sevastopol
Sevastopol - the legendary city of Russian naval glory - in 1905-1908. became one of the centers of the revolutionary movement on the Black Sea coast. Firstly, a fairly large proletariat was concentrated in the city, working at shipyards. Secondly, revolutionary propaganda was carried out among the sailors of the Black Sea fleetwho in those years excelled the famous Baltic people in their revolutionism. So, from the beginning of the 1904th century, the activities of the Social Democrats unfolded in the Black Sea Fleet, in April XNUMX they created the underground Sevastopol Party Organization (also known as the “Sevastopol Centralnaya”).
In turn, the tsarist authorities sought by all means to prevent revolutionary propaganda among sailors, coastal artillery soldiers and ship repair workers. All who did not inspire confidence, followed. But, despite the authorities' attempts to crush the revolutionary movement in the bud, representatives of almost all the revolutionary parties and organizations operating in the empire — the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionaries, and the anarchists — campaigned in Sevastopol. A lot was written about the activities of the Social Democrats in the Black Sea Fleet back in Soviet times, presenting the RSDLP as the only force that used among sailors and workers to have real political influence. At the same time, Soviet sources preferred not to spread strongly about the Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists, although the latter had a very noticeable influence both in Sevastopol and in the Crimea as a whole. Thus, in 1906, an anarchist group composed of A. Dmitriev, I. Kostruby, H. Leikin, and others was formed in Sevastopol, focused on the commission of terrorist acts and expropriations in the city and its environs. The famous sailor Athanasius Matyushenko adjoined anarchism. Anarchist ideas were very common among the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, but also the anarchist and Socialist-Revolutionary ideas and the marginal part of the Sevastopol population were laborers and odd laborers living in shelters.
Disputes about tramps
Among the revolutionaries, attitudes toward the "tramp", as the then lumpenized strata of society were simply called, were quite ambiguous. Marxists lumpen revolutionism completely denied. For them, the representatives of the “social bottom”, who were not involved in the production process, were nothing more than a “reaction tool”. The disciples of Karl Marx liked to cite as an example the experience of the French revolutions, when the authorities used “mobiles” - units of the National Guard, staffed by hired thugs from marginal groups of the population to suppress the insurgents. The pupils of the famous opponent of Marx Mikhail Bakunin looked at the lumpen proletariat in a completely different way. The latter called the “robber element” one of the driving forces of the revolution. If Marxists were not attracted to the productive processes by the “bottom”, then it appealed to anarchists, since it testified to the “freedom-loving” of the lumpen, who denied the laws of the state and society.
Practice has only confirmed the theory - by the beginning of the twentieth century almost all anarchist groups had a considerable number of representatives of marginal groups in their ranks. Often frank criminals also took the path of anarchist activity. So, in Odessa, the famous (“criminal authority” Yaponchik (Mikhail Vinnitsky)) joined the anarchists, in Bialystok - the pickpocket Movsha Spindler, nicknamed “Golden Pen”, and in Moldova - Gregory Kotovsky, who later became famous during the Civil War . In Sevastopol, it was precisely the lumpen-proletariat that was oriented to a certain degree to a unique organization, during the 1906-1908. representing a source of increased terrorist danger for the authorities, not only the city of maritime glory, but also the entire peninsula of Crimea.
Andreev - "Junk"
In the autumn of 1906, a young man appeared in Sevastopol, known among the urban working youth and the outcasts, nicknamed "Dzhonka". In search of supporters, he bypassed the pubs near the enterprises, city shelters. Andrei Nikiforovich Andreev was born in 1882 in Kiev, where his father was a peasant from the Kaluga province Nikifor Andreevich Chernov, he moved to work as a carpenter. In the family of Nikifor Chernov (family members received the surname Andreev by mistake - apparently, this was the father’s middle name), there were 14 children, of whom seven died in childhood. Andrei Andreev grew up in deep poverty, was able to finish parochial school and two-year urban school. Andreev began working at the age of sixteen, moreover, as a competent person, he settled into a construction accountant as an accountant.
Despite the peasant origin, he was able to enroll in general education courses at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. At the same time he was thoroughly engaged in self-education, and not only in the direction of popular revolutionary ideas, but also in broader aspects - he studied religion, the world history, social philosophy. In the 1900 year, Andreev became interested in revolutionary ideas and in June 1902 joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Having become a professional propagandist, Andreev went to agitate in the interests of the RSDLP in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, then was arrested and placed in Vladimir prison. 8 November 1904 g. Andreeva amnestied and sent to Kiev under police supervision. As the experience of the prison in the country moved, Andreev became increasingly radicalized and became convinced of the need for more decisive measures in the fight against the existing system. Appearing in the Sevastopol doss-house in 1906, he created a group of ten “tramps” and with them joined the local fighting squad of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The group created by Andreev was called the Sevastopol Revolutionary Battle Squad, “Freedom Within Us” (hereinafter referred to as the “DBMS”). The meaning of the name was that each person can be free “within himself”, not subject to state and social orders. The DBMS began its journey by organizing a strike in the port of Sevastopol on the occasion of the arrest of sailors who were sent to hard labor.
Militia from the shelter
However, as far as activity in the Socialist Revolutionary ranks, Andreev again disappointed in the party, which consists of and leaves the AKP. He is not satisfied with the “dictatorship of intellectuals” in the Social Revolutionary environment - according to Andreev, the revolution must be made, first of all, by the most oppressed and disadvantaged segments of the population. Those who live in shelters, earn extra money on loading and unloading operations in the port, on construction sites, are interrupted by odd jobs. In the summer of 1907, together with thirty associates, Andreev forms the independent Freedom Safety Database “Freedom within Us”. Its ideology is a bizarre mixture of PA Anarcho-communist views. Kropotkin with the anarcho-individualism of Max Stirner who asserted absolute freedom.
The influence of the ideas of the Polish revolutionary Jan-Vatslav Makhayskiy, who preached revolutionary hatred of the intelligentsia as a class of exploiters and of the revolutionary parties as an instrument in the hands of the intelligentsia, was also obvious. The task of the workers Makhaysky saw the creation of a secret organization called "Workers' Conspiracy", which would carry out a general strike and stop the exploitation of workers by means of property and knowledge. Naturally, in this general strike, in the opinion of Makhaysky and his supporters, there should have been no place for intellectuals and revolutionary parties staffed by representatives of intellectuals.
However, Mikhail Bakunin perceived the “people of knowledge” quite negatively. The classic of anarchism saw in exploitation and knowledge the instruments of exploitation, with the help of which the classes of exploiters dominate the social lower classes, using the lack of education of the latter. The overall ideology of “Freedom within Us” is traced with anarchists - bezachachaltsy from the group “Bezchinachie” - this is both an orientation to the “robber element” and marginals as a revolutionary class, and a commitment to terrorist methods of struggle, and a positive attitude to acts of non-motivated terror, victims which could be, in fact, any representatives of the “non-skewing” part of the population, not to mention minor officials, police officers or military personnel.
The ideology of hatred and suspicion of the intelligentsia, non-motivated terrorist acts, denial of social foundations quite impressed the marginal layers, among which the Sevastopol revolutionary fighting squad hoped to gain new like-minded people. At least, the life credo of a significant part of the "tramps" themselves differed little from the slogans that were put forward by supporters of the Mahai group and the Beginning Group and adopted by the militants of the Freedom Within Us organization.
By the way, the legendary sailor Afanasy Matyushenko - one of the leaders of the famous uprising on the battleship "Potemkin" - adhered to similar positions in relation to the intelligentsia. In particular, he accused the Western anarchists, whom he had met during emigration, of neglecting the interests of the working people and focusing on the minor, in the opinion of the sailor, problems of pacifist, ecological, feminist activities. As we can see, the ideas of the Makha residents, beznachaltsev and “Freedom within us” were widely spread among sailors, laborers, underclassmen.The first action of the squad in independent quality is the robbery of the Sevastopol post office on 18 thousand rubles. The organization’s estimate of the expenses of all money received as a result of the expropriation has been preserved. From 17 986 rubles were spent: for the needs of the Sevastopol Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries - 7 329 rubles, for weapon - 1 412 rubles, equipment - 860 rubles, conspiracy - 378 rubles, new business - 100 rubles, Red Cross - 300 rubles, for travels to comrades - 696 rubles, assistance to families of those arrested - 70 rubles, life of comrades - 3 192 rubles, loans: GB - 150 rubles, DG - 500 rubles, all spent - 14 486 rubles, in the remainder - 5 000 rubles (obviously, 2000 still existed at the cash desk of the organization prior to expropriation). This document gives an idea of how the funds obtained as a result of expropriations were spent by the revolutionary groups of the anarchist and Social Revolutionary type. As we can see, most of the funds went, nevertheless, to meet the needs and requirements of the organizations themselves, although there could well have been any attempts to direct the money received for recreation, entertainment, personal enrichment of individual activists - but they were, as a rule, denounced in most radical organizations.
Thanks to this expropriation, the squad acquired its own printing house - by the way, the best at that time among all Russian illegal printing houses. The printing house began issuing combat leaflets with a total circulation in 30 of thousands of copies that were distributed among workers and "tramps" of Sevastopol, sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, peasants of the Kherson province, as well as among the marginal strata in Odessa, Taganrog and Elizavetgrad. In the villages, as a result of the propaganda of “Freedom within us,” several cases of arson of landlord estates were noted. The squad had its own bomb-making laboratory, which was led by the German settler Karl Shtalberg, nicknamed “Volny”.
Forty-year-old Karl Stahlberg lived in a farm near Sevastopol and used his household not only to house a laboratory of bombs, but also for the periodic concealment of fugitive revolutionaries. The large family of this German farmer, a colonist, also took part in revolutionary activities, performing the functions of sentries and messengers. About Stalberg, in particular, is remembered in his memoirs even by Boris Savinkov, the legendary leader of the Social Revolutionary militant organization. On the night of 17 on July 1906, Savinkov and his colleagues, having escaped the day before from prison, found themselves in the Stalberg farm, where they hid until July 25 and then went to sea in a boat, reaching Constanta. Stalberg left with Savinkov, visited Europe, but then returned to the Crimea and was arrested in 1907 year, having died some time later in prison.
By the spring of 1907, the number of revolutionary combat guards was 30 people, completely switched to the lifestyle of "professional revolutionaries." For a year and a half, militants killed 18 government officials from affluent sections of the population. But if the Social Revolutionaries dealt with the governor-generals and ministers — that is, people who could at least be blamed for the social problems of then-Russia, the “tramps” from the Sevastopol revolutionary fighting squad chose victims easier. Thus, among the citizens killed by the militants, an organization was a police watchman, the owner of a wine cellar, the watchman of the 2 beacon. However, the organization also had large-scale actions - not only the expropriation of the post office, but also the organization of the 21 escape from a prisoner from the Sevastopol prison 15 on June 1907.
The authorities, seeking to restore order in Sevastopol, have begun active measures to find revolutionaries - terrorists. They managed to arrest several militants. 27 September 1907 was hung 31-year-old worker Timofey Bazdyrev, 1 November of the same year - “Unknown”, 25 April 1908 of the year - M. Kucherov, about the same time - M. Martintsov. Feeling the closeness of the “end”, the militants of the squad decide to move to Kiev - the city where Andreev grew up and spent his youthful years, but the move does not save “Freedom within us” from police harassment.
In April, 1908, the remaining militants of the squad were arrested. Among them, 24 April 1908, fell into the hands of the police and Andreev. In November - December of 1908, a trial was held in Sevastopol on the case of the Freedom within Us Sevastopol Revolutionary Military Brigade. The 16 man appeared before the court. Three of them were acquitted, eight were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and five (A.N. Andreev, M.L. Pyrkin, F.Ya. Yatsenko, F.L. Levchenko and P.S. Tkachenko) were sentenced to death . By a separate court in the Kherson province, N. Skrypnichenko and E. Romanovsky were sentenced to execution.
For a set of crimes committed by the militia, the death penalty for the leader of the organization Andreev, it seemed, was inevitable. But the famous action movie "smiled fortune" - and not the first and not the last time. The death penalty was replaced by life penal servitude. It seemed to be bound hand and foot, he had to disappear in the casemates of Kherson prison convict, where he was serving a nine-year term. But in March 1917, after the February Revolution, Russian prisons opened the gates for political prisoners. Andreev came to freedom - "Junk". The thirty-five-year veteran of the revolutionary movement immediately plunged into the political struggle of post-revolutionary Russia. Already in March, he, as part of the delegation of the Committee of amnestied political prisoners of the city of Kherson, left for Petrograd for talks with the Minister of Justice of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky on the amnesty issue for self-freed criminals (political amnesty was implied after the revolution itself, but no one was to release and amnesty the political prisoners) .
Neo-nihilism
Having settled in Kiev, he began campaigning among revolutionary-minded young people, hoping to revive the Freedom Within Us organization. In May 1917 in Kiev, together with P.A. Arsentiev, Andreev created the Kiev Association of Free Anarchists (CASA). 8 May 1917 in Kiev released the first issue of the journal of this organization - “Freedom within us”. Revolutionary Andreev theory questions are now interested not less than practical work. Fortunately in prison, he was able not only to “pull up” his knowledge, but also to think over the contours of the concept that he was going to “throw at the masses”.
The post-revolutionary newspaper Svoboda within us announced the birth of a new trend in Russian anarchism — neo-nilism. Neo-nihilism was a modified version of the old ideological concept of the Sevastopol revolutionary militant squad, that is, a combination of anarcho-individualistic and anarcho-communist ideas. It is significant that subsequently similar views spread in the second half of the twentieth century — among European leftists. Firstly, Andreeva's neo-nihilism suggested the rejection of any coercion. A person should have been freed from any oppression by the state and society, respectively - and any political or public organizations. At a time when many anarchists, inspired by the success of the Bolsheviks, began to seriously talk about creating a disciplined anarchist revolutionary party that could compete with Marxists, Andreev and his neonigilists categorically denied any possibility of creating any centralized organization that, in their opinion, from the very beginning it would become an instrument of coercion of personality. Naturally, any political parties and even anarchist federations were denied as tools for the exploitation of workers and the oppression of the individual by public institutions.
Andreev called himself "a cosmopolitan anarchist" and argued that his ideals do not lie in the creation of another anarchist federation or confederation, but in the creation of a global "unorganized association", that is, a modification of the "union of egoists", about which German philosopher Max Stirner wrote - One of the pillars of anarcho-individualism. As a selfish person, Andreev considered a truly free person, guided only by his own interests, which included, thus, the creation of a similar opportunity — to be guided by his own interests and to be completely free — and for any other people.
Secondly, Andreev was a categorical opponent of forced labor and a supporter of the voluntary nature of any work activity. In this, he disagreed not only with the Marxists who spoke for the society of the working people, but also with the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists who followed Kropotkin who held similar positions. Throughout the history of mankind, according to A.N. Andreev, faced the independence of the individual and social obligations. As a result, an active minority seized power and goods, gaining a certain independence, and the proletariat was forced to work and, moreover, to understand their work as a public duty. In the article “Anarchists - Trudoviks,” Andreev said that an anarchist should not work, because by working for the bourgeoisie, he will inevitably maintain the existing social order, cease to be an egoist and become a slave. “If I don’t produce, then I don’t buy, but only expropriate and destroy, disorganize - and this is the true meaning of anarchy,” wrote Andreev. Naturally, the concept of neonigilism, denying the work, strongly encouraged and promoted methods of expropriation - ranging from large raids on banks and ending with the theft of products from stores.
The refusal to work was considered by Andreev as the first step of the beginning revolutionary on the way to complete “freedom within himself”. In this, the anti-labor stance of Andreev came close to the much later in time and distant in appearance regions of the concepts of European and American left-wing critics of labor - Raul Vaneygem, Bob Black and Ken Nabba. In opposition to the communist model, “From each according to his ability, and to each according to his needs,” Andreev put forward his own slogan: “From each according to his wishes, to each according to his wishes!” The desire in the concept of neo-nihilism became the main stimulus and engine of social development and the basic principle of the distribution of social and economic benefits. Andreev saw the social system quite in the spirit of Kropotkin - as a federation of anarchic communes and communities, but the final result of the construction of such a society was not considered the approval of the public good, but the maximum satisfaction of the individual freedoms of each individual person.
However, in the years of the Revolution and the Civil War, the neo-nihilistic concept was not seriously spread even in a revolutionary environment. Several small groups were created in Kiev, Kharkov and several other Little Russian cities. Mostly the groups consisted of “green” students and students, as well as sagitized representatives of the urban marginal environment, who understood the slogans of freedom and negation of the existing social order as an excuse for permissiveness, including a criminal one. Some “autonomous” detachments of partisan warlords could have been influenced by the group, but on the whole, Andreev’s views did not seriously influence the course of revolutionary events and remained a marginal phenomenon even within the anarchist movement (which, however, does not detract from the originality of these theoretical calculations and their significance to study the history of revolutionary events and the transformation of revolutionary ideas).
The fate of the anarchist
Andreev himself, however, tried to actively participate in the activities of Russian anarchists, if not as an ideologue, then as a practitioner. Thus, at the All-Russian Anarchist Conference of 18-ti cities held in Kharkov, 22-17 July, Andreeva was elected secretary of the Provisional Informative Bureau of Anarchists of Russia ”- a kind of information and organizational body. At the same time he met with his companion and wife Zora Gandlevskaya. In the years of the First World War, a twenty-year-old girl worked as a nurse in a military hospital, but under the influence of revolutionary propaganda she decided to become a “professional revolutionary”. Together with Gandlevskaya, Andreev is trying to organize an anarchist underground in Sevastopol occupied by Denikin, then in 1920 he moves to Moscow.
The further activity of Andreev is striking in the grandeur of his plans with a low probability of their implementation. Thus, in 1921, a group of five anarchists headed by Andreev left for Tashkent, where they decided among the prisoners of war - the Indians who served in the British forces - to create an organization called the Anarchism Propaganda Bureau in the East. Naturally, Andreev and his associates were arrested and sent back. In the middle of 1920's. Andreev was in charge of the Voice of Labor anarcho-syndicalist publishing house, and participated in the activities of the Committee to Perpetuate the Memory of P.A. Kropotkin, Society of political prisoners and deportees.
What is surprising is that the Soviet authorities did not deal with Andreev, who never concealed his sharply negative attitude towards the Bolshevik government. During the second half of the 1920's. Andreeva and Gandlevskaya are arrested several times, although for now everything ends safely - with links to Novosibirsk, Astrakhan. During the next exile, Andreev and his wife managed to escape and settle in Ossetia, then they were arrested - but not shot and not even sentenced to long terms, and again exiled - this time to Saratov, where Andreev worked at the regional radio committee. However, in 1937, Mr .. Andreev and Gandlevskaya still received eight years in prison.
Nevertheless, the spouses managed to survive the years of Stalin’s rule and live to a ripe old age. Andreev died in 1962 at the age of eighty, and Gandlevskaya died in 1987 at the age of ninety, having even been a member of the dissident movement. Moreover, the aged Andreev in 1950-1960-i returned to the business of his life - the development of the foundations of the concept of neo-nihilism. He wrote several handwritten works, where he tried to explain the basics of his concept, adapting them to modern conditions. For example, the western anarchists Andreev accused of collaborating with the bourgeoisie, advocated daily revolutionary actions, a total boycott of political and public institutions — expropriations, refusal to work, pay taxes, serve in the army. To the Soviet system, apparently because of the reluctance of the next problems with the KGB, Andreev was more loyal, although he did not forget to accuse her of usurping social benefits by the nomenklatura, prohibiting the anarchist movement.
The theoretical and practical legacy of Andreev and his associates turned out to be practically forgotten - by all but a few specialists - historians. However, it is impossible not to trace the parallels between the ideology that the Freedom within Us group preached more than a century ago and the views of many modern left-wing groups, also opposing any social obligations, against labor, for the priority of personal freedoms over the interests of society. Obviously, nihilism as a worldview that denies the social order, the existing ethical and behavioral norms and attitudes, is as eternal as a person’s denial of the state or private property. Another thing is that either ideally-oriented young men and women, by virtue of age, prone to total denial of everything and everything, or representatives of the social bottom, who see nihilistic attitudes to justify their own social position and lifestyle, will always follow this ideology, or such “professional nihilists”, of whom Andrei Andreev was the main character of this article.
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