Russian nihilist movement

This article is about the revolutionary philosophical movement in Russia, not to be confused with Political nihilism. For other uses, see Nihilism (disambiguation).

Portrait of a nihilist student by Ilya Repin
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The Russian nihilist movement[nb 1] was a philosophical, cultural, and revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from which the broader philosophy of nihilism originated.[1] In Russian, the word nigilizm (Russian: нигилизм; meaning 'nihilism', from Latin nihil 'nothing')[2] came to represent the movement's unremitting attacks on morality, religion, and traditional society. Even as it was yet unnamed, the movement arose from a generation of young radicals disillusioned with the social reformers of the past, and from a growing divide between the old aristocratic intellectuals and the new radical intelligentsia.

Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, as stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom."[3] As only an early form of nihilist philosophy, Russian nihilism saw all the morality, philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and social institutions which were in place as worthless and meaningless but did not necessarily see meaninglessness in all ethics, knowledge, and human life.[4] It did however, incorporate theories of hard determinism, atheism, materialism, positivism, and egoism[5] in an aim to assimilate and distinctively recontextualize core elements of the Age of Enlightenment into Russia while dropping the Westernizer approach of the previous generation.[6] Russian nihilism developed an atmosphere of extreme moral scepticism, at times praising outright selfishness and championing those who held themselves exempt from all moral authority.[7] In its most complete forms it also denied the possibility of common ideals, instead favouring a relativist and individualistic outlook.[8] Nihilists predictably fell into conflict with the Russian Orthodox religious authorities, as well as with prevailing family structures and the Tsarist autocracy.

Although most commonly associated with revolutionary activism, most nihilists were in fact not political and instead discarded politics as an outdated stage of humanity. They held that until a destructive programme had overcome the current conditions no constructive programme could be properly formulated, and although some nihilists did begin to develop communal principles their formulations in this regard remained vague.[9] With the widespread revolutionary arson of 1862, a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations of the 1860s and 70s, and the eventual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Russian nihilism was characterized throughout Europe as a doctrine of political terrorism and violent crime.[10][11] Kropotkin argues that while violence and terrorism were used, this was due to the specific revolutionary context and was not inherent to nihilist philosophy,[11] though historian M. A. Gillespie adds that nihilism was nevertheless at the core of revolutionary thought in Russia throughout the lead-up to the Russian Revolution.[12] Professor T. J. J. Altizer further states that Russian nihilism in fact had its deepest expression in a Bolshevist nihilism of the 20th century.[13]


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  1. ^
    • "Nihilism". Encyclopædia Britannica. February 13, 2024. Nihilism, (from Latin nihil, "nothing"), originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II.
    • Pratt, Alan. "Nihilism". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In Russia, nihilism became identified with a loosely organized revolutionary movement (C.1860-1917) that rejected the authority of the state, church, and family.
    • Lovell, Stephen (1998). "Nihilism, Russian". Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-E072-1. ISBN 9780415250696. Nihilism was a broad social and cultural movement as well as a doctrine.
  2. ^
  3. ^ "Nihilism". Encyclopædia Britannica. February 13, 2024. Peter Kropotkin, the leading Russian anarchist, defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom.
  4. ^ Petrov, Kristian (2019). "'Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation". Studies in East European Thought. 71 (2): 73–97. doi:10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4. S2CID 150893870. Russian nihilism did not imply, as one might expect from a purely semantic viewpoint, a universal "negation" of ethical normativity, the foundations of knowledge or the meaningfulness of human existence.
  5. ^
  6. ^
    • Lovell, Stephen (1998). "Nihilism, Russian". Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-E072-1. ISBN 9780415250696. The 1860s were once described by Trotsky as 'a brief eighteenth century' in Russian thought. The Nihilist thinkers sought to assimilate and resynthesize the main trends in Western materialism and positivism. As usual in Russia, imported ideas were treated selectively and deployed in quite distinctive intellectual formations.
    • Edie, James M.; Scanlan, James; Zeldin, Mary-Barbara (1994). Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture. University of Tennessee Press. p. 3. on the whole the Westernizers were an obsolete older generation in the eyes of the Nihilists
  7. ^ Frank, Joseph (1995). Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01587-2.
  8. ^ Kline, George L. (1967). "Pisarev, Dmitri Ivanovich (1840–1868)". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Reference USA.
  9. ^ Gillespie, Michael Allen (1996). Nihilism Before Nietzsche. University of Chicago Press. pp. 140, 143, 160. ISBN 9780226293486. First, the positive or constructive side of nihilism was never clearly defined. For some radicals, it was vaguely socialist, based on the idea of the village commune (mir). Others saw a managerial class as the basis for the new order. Most nihilists, however, were convinced that this positive goal could only be properly formulated when the chains of repression had been broken."; "This strange lack of concern was apparently the result of their belief that politics was linked to an outdated stage of humanity."; "The nihilists' neglect of politics, which they saw to be outdated, proved in this case to be their undoing.
  10. ^ "Nihilism". Encyclopædia Britannica. February 13, 2024. The philosophy of nihilism then began to be associated erroneously with the regicide of Alexander II (1881) and the political terror that was employed by those active at the time in clandestine organizations opposed to absolutism.
  11. ^ a b Kropotkin, Peter (1899). Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Houghton Mifflin. The movement is misunderstood in Western Europe. In the press, for example, nihilism is continually confused with terrorism. The revolutionary disturbance which broke out in Russia toward the close of the reign of Alexander II., and ended in the tragic death of the Tsar, is constantly described as nihilism. This is, however, a mistake. To confuse nihilism with terrorism is as wrong as to confuse a philosophical movement like stoicism or positivism with a political movement such as, for example, republicanism. Terrorism was called into existence by certain special conditions of the political struggle at a given historical moment.
  12. ^ Gillespie, Michael Allen (1996). Nihilism Before Nietzsche. University of Chicago Press. p. 285. ISBN 9780226293486.
  13. ^ Altizer, Thomas J. J. (1997). "Review: Nihilism before Nietzsche by Michael Allen Gillespie and Metaphysics by Michel Haar & Michael Gendre". The Journal of Religion. 77 (2). University of Chicago Press: 328–330. doi:10.1086/490005. JSTOR 1205805.