Fix Russian hero’s home, plus skinny-dipping
[Inside the historical Bakunin family mansion, Giulio Spiazzi, an anarchist from Verona, Italy, points to graffiti on a stairwell.]
PRYAMUKHINO, Russia—If there is a natural place to bring anarchists to order, it’s around a crumbling mansion here, which is where Sergei Kornilov tries to do it every summer.
It is the historical family home of Mikhail Bakunin, the father of modern anarchism, who was born here in 1814 and whom Mr. Kornilov describes as “our inspiration, a candle for what could be a better life.”
Each year, to keep Bakunin’s memory alive, 77-year-old Mr. Kornilov organizes a convocation, Pryamukhino Readings, that typically draws 50 to 100 anarchists to the hamlet 150 miles west of Moscow, where they lecture one another and argue about the latest anarchist trends.
Uniting anarchists is a tough challenge in Russia, where they are facing headwinds. The Kremlin, with its well documented authoritarian streak, has met their cause with increasing hostility. Beyond that, of course, is their own penchant for disorder and disagreement.
The Pryamukhino organizers print a conference summary each year. Their best seller, from five years ago: “Anarchists Against Anarchy and Anarchism.”
The first huddle, 15 years ago, was populated heavily by gray-bearded academics, Mr. Kornilov said. That gave way to a livelier crowd over the next decade that included punk activists, some of whom squatted in an abandoned log cabin, where they flew a black flag and scandalized locals by skinny-dipping in the river and dancing naked around a bonfire. These days, originals mix with what tends to be a more sedate crowd.
The strength of various anarchist groups has ebbed and flowed with global events—anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-environmentalists, anarcho-activists promoting setting fire to luxury cars.
Mr. Kornilov said he hasn’t pushed hard for a consensus on what type to promote.
Attendees gather with featured speakers in school classrooms or on the grass outside to consider the year’s theme. This year, it was anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. A previous year, the question was whether anarchists should be anarchists in just their own lives or should spread anarchy in the lives of others.
In the closing vodka toast last year, Mr. Kornilov exhorted: “I expect you all to go out and behave by the highest human standards, that is, like anarchists.”
[An exterior wall of the Bakunin mansion sports an image of Mikhail Bakunin, the father of modern anarchism.]
Every year, organizers also form a volunteer brigade that cleans up the Bakunin estate’s grounds. In its heyday, the mansion was a gathering place for Russian literati. A plaque names guests including writers Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky.
Now, the brigades shore up the mansion’s rotting beams and roof.
“Anarchists can be difficult to unite,” said Nikolai Malinin, a Ph.D. student from Moscow who calls himself an anarcho-individualist, one who avoids joining anarchist groups. “But here, there was a specific thing we could work on—to try to keep the house from collapsing.”
They have stabilized parts of the house. In some years, the repair brigades have faltered when anarchists objected to other anarchists giving them direction.
A contested agenda might have appealed to Bakunin, who never left behind a calibrated philosophy but inspired millions with his peripatetic participation in European revolutions of the 1800s, when he penned his famous phrase: “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
His calls for upending order made him a suspect of Kremlin powers. In czarist Russia, he was jailed until his teeth fell out. Soviet leaders didn’t like him much either, because of his clashes with Karl Marx, whom he called “from head to foot an authoritarian.”
Bakunin’s fans expected a sea change after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, but were quickly disappointed, Mr. Kornilov recalled. A blueprint for a massive park in the village was ignored; it is tacked on Mr. Kornilov’s log-cabin wall.
The Bakunin mansion, a large part of which peasants pried apart for firewood after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and which later was used as a dormitory, began to crumble as its owner, the regional government, failed to renovate it.
The decay sparked those first anarchist gatherings. Volunteers began to converge each summer to try to preserve what was left. Mr. Kornilov moved to the village in 1999 and two years later began the readings. A museum to the Bakunin family opened in a corner of the village school.
Attendance at the conferences got a fillip two years ago, when about 200 people converged from as far as the U.S. and Japan for Bakunin’s 200th birthday.
Russian anarchists of all stripes have faced rising nationalism and a crackdown on demonstrations after the return of Vladimir Putin to power in 2012.
And there have been disagreements among anarchists about the way forward, said Mr. Malinin, the Ph.D. student. Russia’s largest anarchist group, he said, was riven by dissent between anarcho-activists and anarcho-platformists who wanted the group “to be more organized and rigid like in a party model.”
[An anarchist-conference participant looks down from the attic of the Bakunin home through a hole in the ceiling into the second floor.]
The village may be an incubator for free thought today, Mr. Kornilov said, because the nearest police station is nearly 25 miles away over badly paved roads.
Attendance is also limited by Mr. Kornilov’s leanings toward anarcho-primitivism, which eschews many trappings of civilization. He has only one outhouse that can be overwhelmed by too many guests. The school allows a few guests to stay in a dormitory. Privileged ones get to sleep in Mr. Kornilov’s hayloft.
The trip is worth it for the likes of Giulio Spiazzi, who came this year from Verona, Italy, to deliver a lecture on anarchist education.
[An anarchist-conference attendee climbs playground equipment outside the Pryamukhino school where the Bakunin family museum is located.]
“There is a big history of thinkers here, and that is wonderful,” said Mr. Spiazzi, who runs a libertarian-leaning school for children outside Verona. He noted that “for the moment they do not have the opportunity to come down to the ground and practice.”
The museum, set aside in three rooms of the village school, has shifted sails amid flagging interest in anarchy, devoting less space to Bakunin and more to his better-behaved siblings and cousins, some of whom had successful careers in the arts and medicine.
“In Russia there is this fear of anarchy,” said Mr. Kornilov. “I don’t know where it comes from.”