Manarchists In History: The Niglistki of Russia
The Niglistki were women involved in the Russian nihilist movement which existed in the nineteenth century. The nihilist women rejected all aesthetic presentations of femininity and the traditional social life of Russian women. Many entered into “new marriages” with their male comrades, which were marriages in name only and allowed the women freedom from the traditional marital norms in Russian society. Many women, such as famed nihilist Olga Liubatovitch, went on to join the various cells which comprised the armed wing of the nihilist project. Liubatovitch co-authored a tract entitled The Terrorist Struggle, which advocated vast networks of small groups of insurgents as a way of attacking the Tsarist government, becoming as intraceable as possible, and disallowing any vanguardism or hierarchy to form within nihilist struggle. These cells ended up assassinating a number of prominent officials in Russia and sabotaging the Tsarist regime.
These nihilist manarchists didn’t understand that if we don’t have a positive worker’s utopia to fight for then we’re just going to give into our patriarchal destructive rage. And who wants that?
