Nikolay Speshnev

Nikolay Alexandrovich Speshnev (Russian: Николай Александрович Спе́шнев; 1821, Kursk - 1882, St. Petersburg) was a 19th-century Russian aristocrat and political activist, best known for his involvement with the pro-socialist literary discussion group the Petrashevsky Circle. He formed a secret revolutionary society from among the members of the circle, which included the young Fyodor Dostoevsky. After the government of Tsar Nicholas I arrested the members of the Petrashevsky Circle in 1849, Speshnev was interrogated, threatened with torture, and eventually sentenced, along with Dostoevsky, Petrashevsky and others, to execution by firing squad. The sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia, but the prisoners were only informed of this after enduring a mock execution.

Dostoevsky drew on his experiences with Speshnev's secret society and the Petrashevsky Circle when writing his socio-political satire Demons. The novel's central character—Nikolay Stavrogin—is thought by many commentators to be partly based on Speshnev.

Speshnev was born in the Kursk province in 1821 into a very wealthy noble family. He attended the elite Alexander Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, where he first met Petrashevsky.

From 1842 to 1847 he lived and travelled in Europe. While abroad he studied a number of political philosophers including Feuerbach, Marx and Proudhon, and was influenced by the amoralist egoism of Max Stirner. In Dresden and Paris he associated with Polish émigrés opposed to Russian rule, which piqued his interest in the techniques of underground conspiracy. He studied Buonarroti's History of Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of Equals' , a handbook on conspiratorial tactics, and Abbé Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, which described the Masons and Jacobins' alleged secret orchestration of the French Revolution. Speshnev is thought to have participated in the Sonderbund war in Switzerland in 1843, fighting on the side of the liberal Cantons.

...
Wikipedia