Peter Nikitch Tkachev: Tutor of Bolshevism 1844-1886
W.J. Fishman describes how Lenin adopted Tkachev's maxim: “to destroy Tsarism now and to establish the Socialist society before Capitalism took root.”
Revolutionary method and action, forged in the great French Revolution of 1789, culminated in the Bolshevik insurrection of October 1917.
Across revolutionary Europe, and over the borders of autocratic Russia, swept the force of revolutionary élitism conceived by Baboeuf. His Messianic call evoked response among his disciples, Buonarroti and Auguste Blanqui.
In turn the message was taken up in the Jacobinistic-Communism of the Russian Tkachev and was to achieve fulfilment with Lenin’s seizure of power. Of these great insurrectionists the least known, yet one of the most powerful links in the chain, was Peter Tkachev.
Born the son of a petty nobleman in Vilikye Luki, after the early death of his father he was despatched to boarding school in the capital, where he was soon caught up in the storm of political ideas that raged at the time in St. Petersburg.
The journal Souvremennik (The Contemporary) introduced him to radical ideas and in 1861, on entering the university, his involvement in student propaganda and demonstrations led to his first term of imprisonment, from October to December, in the Kronstadt fortress.
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