Two years have passed since Ivanov’s murder. Nechaev’s followers languish in jail while the investigation drags on. Even after amassing piles of documents and evidence, the Third Department was perplexed about how the over 150 suspects in their custody had been doing so little. Propaganda was printed and distributed, plans were made, secret messages transmitted, but the group seeking to overthrow the state had killed nobody but one of their own. For almost two years, Vera Zasulich waited in solitary confinement until she was released for lack of evidence. Ten days later, she was arrested again on the Czar's orders. Alexander II was convinced to exile some of the suspects. Evidence was thin, but their intentions were clear.
Vera Zasulich found herself shivering in Krettsy, a tiny village in the far north, until she was summoned back to St. Petersburg to give testimony in the trial against Nechaev’s followers. The sensational trial was about to unfold, complete with a packed courtroom, media frenzy, and hundreds of testifiers and suspects, but Nechaev was nowhere to be seen. He slipped past the authorities, and despite his name and likeness spread on train stations, police offices, magistrates, and newspapers from Barcelona to Budapest, Russia’s most wanted man was back in Europe.
In his absence, Nachaev's reputation continued to grow. The new Prussian Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, ordered his arrest, and the Third Department spread their meager resources across as much of the continent as they could muster. As the trial grew nearer, rumors of a master conspiracist with tentacles burrowed throughout the Russian Empire and even European capitals, with an army of fanatical agents prepared to enact his orders. Some were convinced he was dead or perhaps never existed in the first place; a character invented by the Czarist government as a pretext to clamp down on the student movements.
Between Ivanov's murder and the trial of the Nechaevites, Alexander Herzen, a giant of Russian dissent, died. This worked to Nechaev’s advantage, as Herzen distrusted him immediately and without reservation, protesting any attempts to give him money. With Herzen gone, his friend Ogarev, who had fallen under Nechaev’s charisma, held control over a substantial amount of the Russian political exiles' funds. Nechaev now had the money to build a new identity to navigate Europe with and print periodicals from his Committee. Named the People's Retribution, his new paper was meant to build a movement abroad. In an attempt to woo a small sect dedicated to the theories of Karl Marx, Nechaev was the first person to publish The Communist Manifesto in Russian. He outlined the society that would emerge from the wreckage of Czarist Russia. Private property would be abolished, and a central organ would command the economy based on data collected from workers' unions, which would command all labor. All previous laws and customs would be rewritten towards the goal of flattening social and economic distinctions and the whole of society would be managed by an all-powerful committee and “all the people would gladly obey the Committee because they would have seen in practice its foresight, its vigilance, its energy and the usefulness of its orders and be convinced of the necessity of that discipline.” Those who did not conform to this new society “will remain without means of existence and be left with one of two alternatives - to work or to die” Leaving no room for misunderstanding, Nechaev elaborated, “The knowledge and the certainty that we are right is the guiding principle in our relations with the whole world, with all who are not like us and cannot be like us. Our motto is: he who is not with us is against us.”
This was too much for Bakunin. Though he kept his faith that the Committee had existed, that the Czar’s forces had not by now dismantled it was too implausible. He recognized that Nechaev was “one of the most active and energetic men I have ever met,” but couldn't fail to see his tyrannical fantasies. Bakunin wrote a warning to others.
“As soon as he penetrates into your circle, what will he do? At first he will come with a packet of lies in order to win your sympathy and trust. But that will not satisfy him. The divided sympathy of men, who give revolution only part of their activity and still maintain other human interests such as love, friendship, family or social obligations, is not sufficient for him. In the name of “the cause” he will, without your realizing it, try to gain power over your whole personality. When you are out, he will open your drawers and boxes and read your letters against you and your friends. That is precisely what he did with us and our friends, and when we all together unmasked him, he was bold enough to reply: “Yes, that is our system. We consider all people who are not completely at one with us as our enemies and are obliged to deceive and decry them…if you introduce him to a friend, his first effort will be to sow dissension between you with gossip and intrigues in order to break up your friendship. If your friend has a wife or a daughter, he will try to seduce her and get her with child, in order to place her “outside the traditional moral code” as a protest against social conventions… All personal connections, all feelings of friendship, all ties of a private nature are for him an evil that must be destroyed…Do not say: this is an exaggeration! He has explained and proved it to me in every detail. He has misused the trust of all of us…he has behaved like a scoundrel. His sole excuse is his fanaticism…In spite of his comparative naivety he is terribly dangerous, because he daily abuses your trust and betrays you, and it is the more difficult to protect oneself as one cannot imagine such actions to be possible…I parted company from him with regret, because…one only rarely meets a man who possesses [such energy]. His last idea was to organize a band of thieves and robbers in Switzerland in order to get money for revolutionary purposes. I saved him by forcing him to leave the country. He would only have brought ruin upon himself and us.”
Bakunin continued to send letters to anyone he heard had met Nechaev, advising them to avoid him at all costs. In his final letter to Nechaev, Bakunin condemned his “system of deceit, which is increasingly becoming your sole system, your main weapon and means, [and] is fatal to the cause itself.” Reflecting on how he became so enamored, “Did I believe out of weakness?”, he asks, “Out of blindness, or because of stupidity? You know yourself that this is not so.” Either trying to convince Nechaev through flattery or merely to protect his own ego, Bakunin continues to heap praise on Nechaev; his energy and selflessness, his unwavering commitment, and his determination to act within Russia and not from abroad like so much of the intelligentsia. Yet his patience is exhausted and gives Nechaev a final offer: to adopt his tactics and organize a new revolutionary group named The People’s Fraternity, never consisting of more than fifty to seventy members and glued together by solidarity instead of dictatorship. To relinquish deceit within the movement and violence and “drop the absurd idea that revolution can be made outside the people and without its participation”, to make amends with those Bakunin thought Nechaev had wronged. If you refuse these conditions, he tells Nechaev, “I shall have to break all ties with you.” Nechaev’s decision was not surprising.
Despite Bakunin's efforts, Nechaev continued to grow his support throughout Europe, scraping enough money together to create a second periodical with the uncharacteristically soft title The Community. After breaking with his former patron, Nechaev writes against Herzen and Bakunin, smearing them as the fading generation of “windbags”. Nachaev started his next act, and seventy-nine defendants prepared to stand trial for his crimes.