Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin grew up on a Tver estate, studied in Moscow and Berlin with academic ambitions, then met Marx and Proudhon in Paris and turned irreversibly radical. He was expelled from France, fought in the 1848 Prague and 1849 Dresden uprisings, was sentenced to death, extradited multiple times, and exiled to Siberia in 1857 before escaping via Japan to London. In 1868 he joined the International Workingmen's Association and led its anarchist wing to rapid growth, but the 1872 Hague Congress became a showdown with Marx over whether socialism required state power or its abolition — Bakunin couldn't r…