Nechaev was even said to have slept on bare wood and lived on black bread in imitation of Rakhmetov, the ascetic revolutionary in Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?.

[4] Inspired by the failed attempt on the Tsar's life by Dmitry Karakozov, Nechayev participated in student activism in 1868–1869, leading a radical minority with Pyotr Tkachev and others.

[5] Nechayev took part in devising this student movement's "Program of revolutionary activities" which stated later a social revolution as its ultimate goal.

In December 1868, Nechayev met Vera Zasulich (who would make an assassination attempt on General Fyodor Trepov, governor of Saint Petersburg in 1878) at a teachers' meeting.

In Geneva, Switzerland, he pretended to be a representative of a revolutionary committee who had fled from the Peter and Paul Fortress and won the confidence of revolutionary-in-exile Mikhail Bakunin (who called him "my boy")[9] and his friend and collaborator Nikolai Ogarev.

He saw ruthless immorality in the pursuit of total control by church and the state and believed that the struggle against them must therefore be carried out by any means necessary, with an unwavering focus on their destruction.

The individual self is to be subsumed by a greater purpose in a kind of spiritual asceticism which for Nechayev was far more than just a theory, but the guiding principle by which he lived his life, claiming: A revolutionary is a doomed man.

[15] Having left Russia illegally, Nechayev had to sneak back to Moscow via Romania in August 1869 with help from Bakunin's underground contacts.

Marxist writer Vera Zasulich (whose sister Alexandra sheltered him in Moscow) recalls that when she first met Nechayev, he immediately tried to recruit her, telling her about his plans: Many were impressed by the young proletarian and joined the group.

However, the already fanatical Nechayev appeared to be becoming more distrustful of the people around him, even denouncing Bakunin as doctrinaire, "idly running off at the mouth and on paper".

On 21 November 1869, Nechayev and several comrades beat, strangled and shot Ivanov, hiding the body in a lake through a hole in the ice.

[18] The body was soon found and some of his colleagues arrested, but Nechayev eluded capture and in late November left for Saint Petersburg, where he tried to continue his activities to create a clandestine society.

This incident was fictionalised by writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in his anti-nihilistic novel Demons (published three years later) in which the character Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is based on Nechayev.

[22] In his article "The Fundamentals of the Future Social System" (Glavnyye osnovy budushchego obshchestvennogo stroya), published in the People's Reprisal (1870, no.

2), Nechayev shared his vision of a socialist system which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would later term barracks communism.

[23] Nechayev's suspicion of his comrades had grown even greater, and he began stealing letters and private papers with which to blackmail Bakunin and his fellow exiles should the need arise.

In September 1872, Karl Marx produced the threatening letter (which Nechayev had written to the publisher) at the Hague Congress of the International at which Bakunin was also expelled from the organisation.

[30] While locked up in a ravelin of the fortress, Nechayev managed to win over his guards with the strength of his convictions and by the late 1870s was using them to pass on correspondence with revolutionaries on the outside.

[31] In December 1880, Nechayev established contact with the executive committee of the People's Will (Narodnaya Volya) and proposed a plan for his own escape.

However, Narodnaya Volya abandoned the plan due to its unwillingness to distract the efforts of its members from attempting to assassinate Tsar Alexander II, which they achieved only in March 1881.

[32] Vera Zasulich, who ten years earlier had been among those investigated for Ivanov's murder, heard in 1877 that the head of the Saint Petersburg police, General Trepov, had ordered the flogging of Arkhip Bogolyubov, a young political prisoner.

Historian Edvard Radzinsky suggests that many revolutionaries have successfully implemented Nechayev's methods and ideas, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.