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6 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
be gathered from Bakotinin's own words : "The end
of revolution can be no other," he declares, "than
the destruction of all powers — religious, monarchical,
aristocratic, and bourgeois
— in Europe. Consequently,
the destruction of all now existing States, with
all their institutions— political, juridical, bureaucratic,
and financial." (6) In another place he says: "It will be
essential to destroy everything, and especially and before
all else, all property and its inevitable corollary, the
State." (7) "We want to destroy all States," he repeats
in still another place, "and all Churches, with all
their institutions and their laws of religion, politics, jurisprudence,
finance, police, universities, economics, and
society, in order that all these millions of poor, deceived,
enslaved, tormented, exploited human beings, delivered
from all their official and officious directors and benefactors,
associations, and individuals, can at last breathe
with complete freedom." (8) All through life Bakounin
clung tenaciously to this immense idea of destruction,
"terrible, total, inexorable, and universal," for only
after such a period of destructive terror— in which every
vestige of "the institutions of tyranny" shall be swept
from the earth— can "anarchy, that is to say, the complete
manifestation of unchained popular life," (9) develop
liberty, equality, and justice. These were the
means, and this was the end that Bakounin had in mind
all the days of his life from the time he convinced himself
as a young man that "the desire for destruction is
at the same time a creative desire." (10)
Even so brief a glimpse into Bakounin's mind is likely
to startle the reader. But there is no fiction here ;
he is
what Carlyle would have called "a terrible God's Fact."
He was a very real product of Russia's infamy, and we
need not be surprised if one with Bakounin's great tal-