methods of recruitment. When a police crackdown occurred in March 1869, he fled to Switzerland to make contact with Russian emigr?s, who published the journal The Bell in Geneva. Nechayev falsified the extent of the movement and his role in it in order to gain the collaboration of Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Ogarev, who, with Alexander Herzen, published the journal. The romantic Bakunin especially admired ruthless men of action, and his connection with Nechayev foreshadowed future relationships between the theorists of revolution and unsavory figures. Before Nechayev’s return to Russia in September 1869, he and Bakunin wrote the Catechism of a Revolutionary and several other proclamations heralding the birth of a revolutionary conspiracy, the People’s Revenge. Bakunin’s tie with Nechayev figured in the former’s expulsion from the First International in 1872.
With vast energy and unscrupulous methods, Nechayev involved more than one hundred people in his conspiracy. Its only notable achievement, however, was the murder of Ivan Ivanov, who had tried to opt out. Nechayev and four others lured Ivanov to a grotto on the grounds of the Petrov Agricultural Academy in Moscow, where they murdered him on November 21, 1869. Nechayev escaped to Switzerland and remained at large until arrested by Swiss authorities in August 1872. They extradited him to Russia, where he was tried for Ivanov’s murder and imprisoned in 1873. Nechayev died in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1882.
Some historians have presented Nechayev as an extremist who harmed his cause, while others have studied him as a clinical case. Early Soviet histori1032
NEMCHINOV, VASILY SERGEYEVICH
ans admired him as a Bolshevik type. In the period of glasnost and after, Russian writers saw in Nechayev a forerunner of Stalin and other pathologically destructive dictators. See also: BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH; DOS-TOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; TERRORISM
Avrich, Paul. (1974). Bakunin and Nechaev. London: Freedom Press. Pomper, Philip. (1979). Sergei Nechaev. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Prawdin, Michael [Charol, M.]. (1961). The Unmentionable Nechaev. New York: Roy Publishers. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution. New York: Knopf.
(1821-1878), one of Russia’s most famous poets.
Painfully aware of the injustice of serfdom, Nikolai Nekrasov (the “master poet of the peasant masses”) was the first poet to make the “People” (narod) the focal point of his poetry-especially the downtrodden, who became the symbol of national suffering and exploitation. In one of his masterpieces, the satiric folk epic Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? (written between 1873 and 1877), seven peasants try endlessly to guess the answer to the question in the title. Nekrasov also served for thirty years as editor of Sovremenik (The Contemporary), a journal he bought in 1847. Ivan Tur-genev, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, and Fyodor Dostoevsky gladly sent their writings to him, and soon Nekrasov became a leading intellectual figure of the time. Censorship was at its height at the beginning of his career, intensified by the French Revolution of 1848 and later the Crimean War (1854-1856), and Nekrasov was only able to write freely after the death of Nicholas I and the accession of the liberal Alexander II.
The decade from 1855 to 1865 was one of the bright periods in Russian literature. Serfdom was abolished (1861), Sovremenik’s readership steadily increased, and Nekrasov published some of his finest poems, including “The Peasant Children,” “Orina, the Mother of a Soldier,” “The Gossips,” “The Peddlers,” and “The Railway.” Some contemporaries criticized Nekrasov for his didacticism and prosiness. The enthusiastic response of radical revolutionaries to his poetry confirmed their suspicion that he was primarily a propagandist. But Nekrasov, as he wrote to Leo Tolstoy, believed that the role of a writer was to be a “teacher” and a “representative for the humble and voiceless.”
Nekrasov’s empathy for the poor and oppressed stemmed from his life experiences. He was the son of a noble family that had lost its wealth and land. His father, an officer in the army, had eloped with the daughter of a Polish aristocrat, inducing her to give up her wealth. The couple settled in Yaroslav Province on the Volga River, where the young Nekrasov could hear and see convicts pass on their way to Siberia. His father, who had become the local police chief, often took Nekrasov with him on his rounds, during which the boy heard the condescending way he spoke to peasants and witnessed the cruel corporal punishments he inflicted on them. When Nekrasov was seventeen, his father sent him to St. Petersburg to join the army, cutting off his funds when he disobeyed and tried to enter the university instead. It took the poet three years of near-starvation before he could make enough money from his writing to survive. See also: GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; POPULISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Birkenmayer, Sigmund S. (1968). Nikolaj Nekrasov: His Life and Poetic Art. Paris: Mouton. Kates, J. (1999). In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press. Peppard, Murray B. (1967). Nikolai Nekrasov. New York: Twayne. Smith, Vassar W. (1996). Lermontov’s Legacy: Selected Poems of Eight Great Russian Poets, with Parallel Texts in English Verse Translation. Palo Alto, CA: Zapad Press.
(1894-1964), Soviet statistician, mathematical economist, and reformer.
Though originally trained as a statistician, Nemchinov became one of the most versatile and productive members of the Soviet economics es1033
tablishment. During the early period of his career, his specialty was agricultural economics and statistics, on which he published a number of important theoretical works. He developed methods for measuring livestock herds and grain harvests from aerial observations, which were intended to remove human error but led ironically to the scandalous exaggeration of Soviet grain harvests. In 1940 he became director of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in Moscow. He was elected academician of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences in 1940, and of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1946.
Nemchinov was often in political trouble. In 1948, in the struggle with Trofim Lysenko over genetics, he harbored a number of modern geneticists in the Timiryazev Academy and defended them against the Lysenko forces. As a result, he was forced out as Academy director and was even removed from his position in the statistics department. He went home to await arrest, but the Soviet Academy of Sciences stood by him, and he was appointed chairman of a new Council on Productive Forces. He remained an important figure in the Academy, holding, for example, the position of academician-secretary of the department of economic, philosophical, and legal sciences from 1954 to 1958.
The final phase of his career centered on the introduction of mathematical methods into Soviet economics. In 1958, he organized in the Academy of Sciences the first laboratory devoted to the application of mathematical methods in economics, which later became the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute. He was the driving force in setting up the first conference on mathematical methods in economic research and planning in 1960. He headed the scientific council on the use of mathematical methods and computer technology in economic research and planning in the Academy and organized the faculty of mathematical methods of analysis of the economy at Moscow State University. His role in developing linear programming methods and economic models was rewarded posthumously in 1965 by the conferral of the Lenin Prize. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nemchinov, Vasilii. (1964). Use of Mathematics in Economics. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.
(b. 1959), prominent liberal politician and leader of the Union of Right Forces.
Born in Sochi, Boris Ivanovich Nemtsov received a doctorate in physics in 1990. From 1990 to 1993 he was a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, serving on the Council for Legislative Affairs. In 1991 President Boris Yeltsin made him the governor of Nizhny Novgorod.
Nemtsov quickly moved to transform the province into a cutting-edge experiment in free-market economics. Obtaining a license to open a business in post-communist Russia plunged would-be entrepreneurs into a nightmare
