Bakunin and the United States

Abstract

MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH BAKUNIN is in San announced front page of Herzen's Kolokol in November 1861. HE IS FREE! Bakunin left Siberia via Japan and is on his way to England. We joyfully bring this news to all Bakunin's friends. Arrested in Chemnitz in May 1849, Bakunin had been extradited to Russia in 1851 and, after six years in Peter-Paul and Schlusselburg fortresses, condemned to perpetual banishment in Siberia. On June 17, 1861, however, he began his dramatic escape. Setting out from Irkutsk, he sailed down Amur to Nikolaevsk, where he boarded a government vessel plying Siberian coast. Once at sea, he transferred to an American sailing ship, Vickery, which was trading in Japanese ports, and reached Japan on August 16th. A month later, on September 17th, he sailed from Yokohama on another American vessel, Carrington, bound for San Francisco. He arrived four weeks later, completing, in Herzen's description, the very longest escape in a geographical sense. Bakunin was forty-seven years old. He had spent past twelve years in prison and exile, and only fourteen years of life — extremely active life, to be sure — lay before him. He had returned like a ghost from past, risen from dead as he wrote to Herzen and Ogarev from San Francisco. His sojourn in America, one of least well-known episodes of his career, lasted two months, from October 15th, when he landed in San Francisco, to