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An important precursor of Lenin's theories of revolution
 
Анархія мысли. Собраніе критическихъ очерковъ.[Anarchy of Thought. A Collection of Critical Essays.]
Pyotr Tkachev
London, 1879
 
First edition of this rare collection of anarchist-revolutionary essays.
 
15 x 10.8 cm., 78 pages. Original wrappers bound in mid-20th century full leather by the famed Alain Lobstein. A scratch to the label, textblock moderately browned, else Fine. An exceptionally rare survival with just two copies in WorldCat.
 
“Tkachev was the first to advance the program of a direct assault upon the government by an organized revolutionary minority, in preference to attempts at socialist propaganda among the masses or reliance on a general peasant uprising to be provoked by agitation…some of his fundamental concepts in the field of revolutionary strategy and tactics anticipate, in a striking fashion, Lenin’s design for a revolution in Russia.”(Karpovich)
 
During the student riots in St. Petersburg in the 1860s, Tkachev led a small radical group and was repeatedly arrested and sentenced to imprisonment, but escaped abroad in 1873. Ideological disagreements with Marx and Engels, and with Russian revolutionary émigré circles, would leave him isolated. In the mid-1870s, he published the radical magazine Nabat (Alarm Bell), which advocated the creation of secret revolutionary cells in Russia and sympathized with acts of terrorism. His ideas began to gain more traction – People’s Will, a group influenced by him, assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Tkachev spent the last few years of his life in a Parisian sanitarium, succumbing to cerebral palsy in 1886 at just 41 years old.
 
Ref:
 
A Forerunner of Lenin: P.N. Tkachev, Karpovich
A History of Russian Philosophy, Kuvakin