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associated with revolutionary activism, most nihilists were in fact not political and instead discarded politics as an outdated stage of humanity.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]

The term nihilism has been widely misused in the West when discussing the Russian movement, especially in relation to revolutionary activity. Criticizing this misterming by Western commentators, Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky stated that revolutionaries themselves simply identified as socialist revolutionaries, or informally as radicals. However, from outside Russia, the term nihilist was misapplied to the entirety of the country's revolutionary milieu.^[15] The Encyclopædia Britannica attributes the probable first use of the term in Russian publication to Nikolai Nadezhdin who, like Vasily Bervi-Flerovsky and Vissarion Belinsky after him, used it synonymously with skepticism. Nadezhdin himself had applied the term to Aleksandr Pushkin. From there, nihilism was interpreted as a revolutionary social menace by the well-known conservative journalist Mikhail Katkov, for its negation of moral principles.^[16] The term came into favour when accusations of materialism proved no longer sufficiently derogatory.^[17]

The intellectual origins of the nihilist movement can be traced back to 1855 and perhaps earlier,^[18] where it was principally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism.^[19] However, it was not until 1862 that the term was first popularized when Ivan Turgenev's celebrated novel Fathers and Sons used nihilism to describe the disillusionment of the younger generation, the šestidesjatniki, towards both the traditionalists and the progressive reformists that came before them, the sorokovniki.^{[20][nb 2]} This at a time when the terms faced by serfs under the emancipation reform of 1861 were seen as bitterly failing.^[21] The nihilist characters of Turgenev's novel take up the name of their own volition, stating that negation is the most necessary thing in the present age and as such they deny everything.^[22] Likewise, the movement very soon adopted the name, despite the novel's initial harsh reception among both the conservatives and younger generation,^[23] and wherever the term was not embraced it was at least accepted.^[24]

The term realist was used by Dmitry Pisarev to describe the nihilist position and was also the name of a literary movement, literary realism, which had flourished in Russia in the wake of Pushkin.^[25] Although Pisarev was among those who celebrated the embrace of nihilism, the term realism may have done away with the connotations of subjectivism and nothingness that burdened nihilism while retaining the rejection of metaphysics, sophistry, sentimentality, and aestheticism.^[26] In a notably later political climate, Alexander Herzen instead presented nihilism as a product of the sorokovniki that the sestidesjatniki had adopted.^[27] Contemporary scholarship has challenged the equating of Russian nihilism with mere skepticism, instead identifying it with the fundamentally Promethean character of the nihilist movement.^[28] In fact, the nihilists sought to liberate the Promethean might of the Russian people which they saw embodied in a class of prototypal individuals, or new types in their own words.^[29] These individuals were seen by Nikolay Chernyshevsky as rational egoists, by Pisarev and Nikolai Shelgunov as the thinking proletariat, by Pyotr Lavrov as critically thinking personalities, by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky as the intelligentsia, and by others as cultural pioneers.^[30] Nihilism has also been attributed to a perennial temperament of the Russian people, long pre-existing the movement itself.^[31]

Overlapping with forms of Narodism,^[12] the movement has also been defined in political terms. Soviet scholarship, for example, often interchanges the designation revolutionary democrats.^[32] However, the role of politics was seen as outdated and irrelevant by most nihilists.^[33] Rather, they discarded politics,^[34] and those who did hold political views or socialist sympathies remained vague.^[35] Russian nihilism has also been defined in subcultural terms,^[36] in philosophical terms, and incorrectly as a form of political terrorism.^[10]

Russian nihilism, as stated in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–1866 out of which later radical movements emerged".^[37] During this foundational period, the countercultural aspects of the movement scandalized the country and even minor indiscretions left nihilists imprisoned for lengthy periods or in exile to Siberia, where grittier revolutionary attitudes fermented.^[38]

At its core, Russian nihilism inhabited an ever-evolving discourse between the sorokovniki and the šestidesjatniki.^{[39][nb 2]} While nihilism was not exclusive from them, the sorokovniki were on principle a generation given to idealism.^[40] "Their attraction to the airy heights of idealism was partly a result of the stultifying political atmosphere of the autocracy, but was also an unintended consequence of Tsar Nicholas I's attempt to Prussianize Russian society", writes historian M. A. Gillespie. "Their flight from the harsh reality of everyday life into the ideal was prepared on an intellectual level by the theosophy of Freemasonry, which exercised great intellectual force in Russian at the time, especially among those whose intellectual education had been shaped by Böhemian mysticism of the radical orthodox sects, the so-called Old Believers."^[41] Despite this, the sorokovniki provided the fertile soil for the šestidesjatniki's ideological advancements, even in their confrontations.^[42]

Russian materialism, which quickly became synonymous with Russian nihilism, developed under the influence of Left Hegelian materialism from Germany and the delayed influence of the French Enlightenment.^[51] The origins of this followed from Ludwig Feuerbach as a direct reaction to the German idealism which had found such popularity under the sorokovniki—namely the works of Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel and Johann Fichte.^[52] However, it was in fact those among the older generation who were first characterized as nihilists,^[53] and it was Left Hegelianism that the Schellingians began to define as nihilism.^[54]

After severely struggling in the face of censorship — from which much of its core content is left unclear and obscured — the open academic development of Russian materialism would later be suppressed by the state after an attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866,^[55] and would not see a significant intellectual revival until the late nineteenth century.^[56] The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

The only strictly philosophical legacy of the materialists came in the form of their influence on Russian Marxism. Georgii Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin, the two thinkers most responsible for the development of Marxism in Russia, credited Chernyshevskii with having, respectively, 'massive' and 'overwhelming' influence on them. During the communist period of Russian history, the principal 'nihilist' theoreticians were officially lionized under the designation 'Russian revolutionary democrats' and were called the most important materialist thinkers in the history of philosophy before Marx.^[57]

Bazarovism, as popularized by Dmitry Pisarev, was the marked embrace of the style and cynicism of the nihilist character Yevgeny Bazarov from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, in which the term nihilism was first popularized. Pisarev graduated university in 1861, the same year as serfdom was abolished and the first major student demonstration was held in St. Petersburg.^[74] Turgenev himself notes that as early as 1862, the year of the novel's publishing, violent protestors had begun calling themselves nihilists.^[75] The surge of student activism became the backdrop for Alexander II's education reforms, under the supervision of education minister Aleksandr Vasilevich Golovnin. These reforms however, while conceding an expansion of the raznochinnaya intelligentsia, refused to grant more rights to students and university admittance remained exclusively male.^[76] Historian Kristian Petrov writes:

Young nihilist men dressed in ill-fitting dark coats, aspiring to look like unpolished workers, let their hair grow bushy and often wore blue-tinted glasses. Correspondingly, the young women cut their hair shorter, wore large plain dresses and could be seen with a shawl or a big hat, together with the characteristic glasses. Such a nihilist could, however, above all be identified by a reversal of official etiquette; the men demonstratively refusing to act chivalrously in the presence of women, and the women behaving contrary to expectations. Both sexes hence sought to incarnate Bazarov’s roughness, his "cynicism of manner and expression."^[77]

Literary works and journals quickly became enrapt with polemical debate over nihilism.^[78] Nikolay Chernyshevsky for his part saw Turgenev's novel as a personal attack on Nikolay Dobrolyubov, and Maxim Antonovich attacked the book with such vitriol that others in the movement took issue with him.^[79] Pisarev famously published his own review at the time of the novel's release, where he championed Bazarov as the role model for the new generation and celebrated the embrace of nihilism. To him, Bazarovism was the societal struggle that must be toiled through rather than resisted—he attributed it to the exclusive and distinct spiritual strength of the young and their courage to face social disorder. The popularity of Pisarev's review rivaled that of even the novel itself.^[80]

The atmosphere of the 1860s had led to a period of great social and economic upheaval across the country and the driving force of revolutionary activism was taken up by university students in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mass arson broke out in St. Petersburg in the spring and summer of 1862 and, coinciding with insurrections in Poland, in 1863. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw Nikolay Chernyshevsky as responsible for inciting the revolutionaries to action and supposedly pleaded with him to bring a stop to it. Historian James Buel writes that while St. Petersburg faced threat of destruction, arson became rampant all throughout Russia.^[81]

Turgenev's own opinion of Bazarov is highly ambiguous, stating: "Did I want to abuse Bazarov or extol him? I do not know myself, since I don't know whether I love him or hate him!"^[82] Nevertheless, Bazarov represented the triumph of the raznochinnaya intelligentsia over those like Turgenev from the aristocracy.^[83] Comparing to Ivan Goncharov's The Precipice, which he describes as a caricature of nihilism, Peter Kropotkin states in his memoirs that Bazarov was a more admirable portrayal yet was still found dissatisfying to nihilists for his harsh attitude, his coldness towards his old parents, and his neglect of duties as a citizen.^[84]

Chernyshevsky published his landmark 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? while being held at Peter and Paul Fortress as a political prisoner.^[85] By an extraordinary failure of bureaucracy, government censors allowed the book to be published without any trouble despite it being the most openly revolutionary work of its era and a direct product of the suppression Chernyshevsky had faced.^[86] The novel marked a significant departure for Chernyshevsky into utopian socialism.

In the meantime, extensive castigation of nihilism had found its place in Russian publication, official government documents, and a burgeoning trend of antinihilistic literature. Notable earlier works of this literary current include Aleksey Pisemsky's Troubled Seas (1863), Nikolai Leskov's No Way Out (1864), and Viktor Klyushnikov's The Mirage (1864).^[87] Also in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky published his novel Notes from Underground as a direct satire upon Chernyshevsky's novel. Interestingly, the protagonist both criticizes and is a parody of Chernyshevsky's views on egoism. Dostoevsky posited this dislikable glorifier of self-will as a more realistic portrayal of an egoist than the benign depictions of rational self-interest.^[88] "[Chenyshevsky's] virtuous fictional creations were not the genuine, flesh-and-blood egoists whose growing presence in Russia Dostoevsky feared", writes scholar James P. Scanlan. "Yet the doctrine these pseudo-egoists advanced – rational egoism – was a genuine danger, because by glorifying the self it could turn the minds of impressionable young people away from sound values and push them in the direction of a true, immoral, destructive egoism."^[89]

Chernyshevsky continued to write essays and literature while incarcerated. In 1864, he was sentenced and given a mock execution before being exiled to Siberia, where he served seven years in forced labour camps followed by further imprisonment.^[90] Chernyshevsky gained a legendary reputation as a martyr of the radical movement and,^[91] unlike Mikhail Bakunin, not once did he plead for mercy or pardon during his treatment at the hands of the state.^[92]

Leading up to 1864, the movement underwent what Dostoevsky termed the 'schism of the nihilists'. The Sovremennik began taking a more moderate or even regressive position while Russkoye Slovo continued to push further into radical nihilism. Maxim Antonovich, now head of the Sovremennik's literary criticism department entered into bitter disputes with other publications ever since his disagreements with Pisarev over Bazarovism.^[93] Under Pisarev, Russkoye Slovo took over as the leading journal of radical thought.

• Anti-nihilistic novel
• Cynicism
• Narodniks
• Narodnaya Volya
• Nihilist Faction