The vague and puzzling character of the Nechaev conspiracy issues in part from the nature of conspiracy itself. Nechaev aimed to sow confusion, to deceive. But was he himself confused, ideologically infirm, and capricious? Reading through his proclamations and short-lived revolutionary journals one encounters a swarm of mutually contradictory ideologies and revolutionary strategies. It would appear that he was conducting several conspiracies simultaneously, some of them based upon the seventeenth and eighteenth century Russian experience of palace coups, pretenders, and cossackled peasant insurrections, others modelled upon the European revolutionary tradition, or contemporary anarchist and communist movements. Perhaps he was confused about the political implications of the several doctrines which he evidently studied only superficially. Certainly, the fine points of systematic doctrines were lost upon him. In typical fashion, he called such developed systems products of mental onanism.' Hence, any attempt to label Nechaev precisely is an even more futile exercise than is usually the case when one deals with thirdor fourth-rate ideologues. Nonetheless, amid the confusion of revolutionary programs, strategies, and tactics expressed by Nechaev during his strange career, it is possible to pick out two unifying themes running like red threads, to borrow a particularly appropriate cliche, all the way through that career. These themes