The Russian organization in Russia having been destroyed, he is forced
to create a new one in a foreign country. All that was perfectly
natural, legitimate, very useful--but the means by which he undertakes
it are detestable.... He will spy on you and will try to get possession
of all your secrets, and to do that, in your absence, left alone in your
room, he will open all your drawers, will read all your correspondence,
and whenever a letter appears interesting to him, that is to say,
compromising you or one of your friends from one point of view or
another, he will steal it, and will guard it carefully as a document
against you or your friend.... If you have presented him to a friend,
his first care will be to sow between you seeds of discord, scandal,
intrigue--in a word, to set you two at variance. If your friend has a
wife or a daughter, he will try to seduce her, to lead her astray, and
to force her away from the conventional morality and throw her into a
revolutionary protest against society.... Do not cry out that this is
exaggeration. It has all been fully developed and proved. Seeing himself
unmasked, this poor Nechayeff is indeed so childlike, so simple, in
spite of his systematic perversity, that he believed it possible to
convert me. He has even gone so far as to beg me to consent to develop
this theory in a Russian journal which he proposed to me to establish.
He has betrayed the confidence of us all, he has stolen our letters, he
has horribly compromised us--in a word, he has acted like a villain. His
only excuse is his fanaticism. He is a terribly ambitious man without
knowing it, because he has at last completely identified the
revolutionary cause with his own person. But he is not an egoist in the
worst sense of that word, because he risks his own person terribly and
leads the life of a martyr, of privations, and of unheard-of work. He is
a fanatic, and fanaticism draws him on, even to the point of becoming an
accomplished Jesuit. At moments he becomes simply stupid. Most of his
lies are sewn with white thread.... In spite of this relative naivete,
he is very dangerous, because he daily commits acts, abuses of
confidence, and treachery, against which it is all the more difficult to
safeguard oneself because one hardly suspects the possibility. With all
that, Nechayeff is a force, because he is an immense energy. It is with
great pain that I have separated from him, because the service of our
cause demands