Mikhail Bakunin

In 1857, he married Antonia Kwiatkowska, the daughter of a Polish merchant.

He died at the age of 62 in Bern, Switzerland and is interred at Bremgarten cemetery, Bern, Switzerland.

Mikhail Bakunin was born in a humble family in the village of Pryamukhino, Moscow and was the eldest of nine siblings.

He received military training at the age of fourteen at the Artillery School in Saint Petersburg, before which he was home-schooled.

In 1832, he served as a junior officer in the Russian Imperial Guard for a brief period. Soon, he abandoned both military and civil service, to study philosophy.

In 1835, he travelled to Moscow to study philosophy and the following year he translated German philosopher Johann Fichte’s works - ‘Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar's Vocation’ and ‘The Way to a Blessed Life’.

In 1840, he moved to Berlin after getting a teaching offer in the department of philosophy. Here, he became part of the German intellectual group ‘Young Hegelians’ and also became a supporter of the socialist movement in Berlin.

In 1842, he authored the well-known essay, ‘The Reaction in Germany-A Fragment by a Frenchman’, which put forth the ideas of the prevalent social and political revolution.

In 1844, as a consequence of his strong socialistic ideals, the Russian government stripped off his status of a noble, curbed his privileges and confiscated his property, after which he was banished to Siberia.

On November 29, 1847, he gave a political speech that supported the Polish Independence movement. As a result, he was forced to leave France on the order of the Russian Ambassador and soon, shifted to Brussels.

Published in 1873, ‘Statism and Anarchy’ was one of his seminal works written in Russian that helped pave the foundation of the Russian anarchist movement. In Switzerland alone, over 1200 copies were sold in the first week of its release.

He is the founder of the ‘Theory of Collective Anarchism’, also known as ‘anarcho-collectivism’, a doctrine that advocates the abolition of state and private ownership of the means of production. This theory has inspired many people including, Noam Chomsky, an American writer and activist and Bhagat Singh.