Finally exiled to Siberia in 1857, he escaped via Japan to the United States and then to London, where he worked with Alexander Herzen on the journal Kolokol (The Bell).

The 1872 Hague Congress was dominated by a struggle between Bakunin and Marx, who was a key figure in the General Council of the International and argued for the use of the state to bring about socialism.

From 1870 until his death in 1876, Bakunin wrote his longer works such as Statism and Anarchy and God and the State, but he continued to directly participate in European worker and peasant movements.

Bakunin sought to take part in an anarchist insurrection in Bologna, Italy, but his declining health forced him to return to Switzerland in disguise.

Upon returning to Priamukhino and marrying the much younger Varvara Aleksandrovna Muravyeva, the elder Bakunin raised his ten children in the Rousseauan pedagogic model.

[7] Mikhail Bakunin, their third child and oldest son,[9] read the languages, literature, and philosophy of the period and described his youth as idyllic and sheltered from the realities of Russian life.

[10] Bakunin lived a bohemian, intellectual life in Moscow, where German Romantic literature and idealist philosophy were influential in the 1830s.

[7] In the intellectual circle of Nikolai Stankevich, Bakunin read German philosophy, from Kant to Fichte to Hegel,[9] and published Russian translations of their works.

[12] Bakunin befriended Russian intellectuals including the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the poet Nikolay Ogarev, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the writer Alexander Herzen as youth prior to their careers.

[13] He left Berlin in early 1842 for Dresden and met the Hegelian Arnold Ruge,[13] who published Bakunin's first original publication.

Die Reaktion in Deutschland ("The Reaction in Germany") proposes a continuation of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe and Russia.

[11] Though steeped in Hegelian jargon and published under a pseudonym, it marked Bakunin's transition from philosophy to revolutionary rhetoric.

[11] He visited Brussels and Paris, where he joined international emigrants and socialists, befriended the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and met the philosopher Karl Marx, with whom he would later tussle.

[15] When the French King Louis Philippe I abdicated during the February 1848 Revolution, Bakunin returned to Paris and basked in the revolutionary milieu.

Uncaptured, he wrote Aufruf an die Slaven ("Appeal to the Slavs") at the end of the year, advocating for a Slavic federation and revolt against the Austrian, Prussian, Turkish, and Russian governments.

He did, however, write an autobiographical, genuflecting Confession to the Russian emperor, which proved to be a controversial document upon its public discovery some 70 years later.

He married Antonia Kwiatkowska there[17] before escaping in 1861, first to Japan, then to San Francisco, sailing to Panama and then to New York and Boston, and arrived in London by the end of the year.

[19] Bakunin also viewed the Southern political system and agrarian character as freer in some respects for its white citizens than in the industrial North.

After being photographed, he also signed Nadar's Livre d'Or (autograph albume), wrote that (leaf 161): "Watch out that liberty doesn't come to you from the north.

[26] Bakunin wrote his last major work, Statism and Anarchy (1873), anonymously in Russian to stir underground revolution in Russia.

[18] Bakunin's core political thought addressed emancipatory communities in which members freely develop their abilities and faculties without overpowering each other.

Bakunin unsuccessfully sought community in religion and philosophy through influences including Arnold Ruge (Left Hegelianism), Ludwig Feuerbach (philosophical humanism), Wilhelm Weitling (proto-communism), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (early anarchism).

[32] Bakunin saw the institutions of church and state as standing against the aims of emancipatory community, namely that they impose wisdom and justice from above under the pretense that the masses could not fully self-govern.

In combination with Bakunin's opposition to parliamentary politics, historian Peter Marshall wrote that such a secret party—its existence unknown and its policies beholden to none—had the potential for greater tyranny than a Blanquist or Marxist party and was hard to envision as presaging an open, democratic society.

[7] His foundational anarchist writings helped the movement stand in contrast to capitalism and Marxism and became more popular after his death, with some of his highest regarded works published posthumously and in new editions.

The 1960s New Left revived interest in his works and ideas of voluntary association and opposition to authoritarian socialism, with new editions and translations published.

As historian Paul Avrich put it, Bakunin was "a nobleman who yearned for a peasant revolt, a libertarian with an urge to dominate others, an intellectual with a powerful anti-intellectual streak", who professed support for unfettered liberty while demanding unconditional obedience from his followers.

[44] Sociologist Marcel Stoetzler argued the opposite, saying that the antisemitic trope of Jewish world domination was at the centre of Bakunin's political thought.

[45] Bakunin's anti-Jewish and anti-German resentment are most visible in the context of his attacks on Marx, but his antisemitism predated these passages.

[46][47] Scholar Marshall Shatz noted that there is a gap between Bakunin's egalitarian principles and his ethnic prejudices, even if this antisemitism and stereotyping was common among French radicals of the era[46] and shared by Marx himself.