Don't know who that is?
Well, you are not alone.
Remembering Tatiana Bakunin
And All the Other Invisible Figures in History
To observe the 204th anniversary of her birth, we remember Tatiana Bakunin, sister of the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
On the basis of all the available information, Tatiana and her sisters were as courageous and creative as Mikhail.
Tatiana repeatedly played a pivotal role behind the scenes in her brother’s life and in the intellectual development of several other important thinkers.
The fact that her name and ideas are not widely known today attests to the barriers she faced and the deficiencies of the “great man” model of history.
Nearly all of what we know about Tatiana appears in the margins of stories written about men.
She is one of the countless people who remain invisible through the lens of patriarchal memory, which conceals both her contributions and the things she could have accomplished if the institutions and conventions of her time had not denied her personhood.
Her correspondence and writings have yet to be translated.
Tatiana and her sisters grew up in the Russian countryside studying literature, music, and history.
Their father raised them to speak several languages, bringing in tutors from Western Europe; he had picked up liberal ideas during his youth working in Italy as a diplomat, though his politics shifted to the reactionary end of the spectrum as he aged.
In this environment, Tatiana Bakunin distinguished herself for her love of reading and writing and her reflective spirit.
While her brother Mikhail left home at the age of fourteen to attend military academy, Tatiana and her sisters continued their studies into adulthood.
They developed a private mysticism based in poetry, powerful feeling, and asceticism, which they referred to among themselves as la religion.
The sisters were the first ones in the family to rebel, revolting against the role prescribed for women in 19th-century Russia as wives and mothers.
When their parents pressured the eldest daughter, Lyubov, to marry a military officer, the sisters opposed this choice and eventually forced their parents to let her break off the engagement.
Tatiana herself never married.
Get the full story.
In case you missed it, here is her brother:
The ideas that we are being led to today originated when the problems that prompted them began.
The will to be free and independent is a strong one within all of us.
Inevitably, no matter how advanced the techniques of mind control become, Logan will run, and Equality 7-2521 will find his candle killer.
It's just the nature of the beast of this species we make up.
When the first two men ganged up to farm the neighbors rather than the land is where this originates.
Since that time the very nature of our humanity has been influenced by those that conform.
Conform to get good grades.
Conform to get accolades from your peers.
Conform or live less life.
Conform to dominating your neighbors or be dominated.
It really is insidious what the crapitalusts have done to us while you have willingly remained ignorant of the very concepts that control you.
Unless you seek knowledge in places your slave masters don't want you looking, you will only know the bars that contain your mind.
You will not know the thrill of finding an original thought.
Do you know how hard it is to think something that nobody has thought before you?
Here is how Mikhail Bakunin recorded these ideas for the modern era.
They are not original to him.
Many of the ideas come from PJ.