Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev () ( – ) was a Russian communist revolutionary and prominent figure of the Russian nihilist movement, known for his single-minded pursuit of revolution by any means necessary, including revolutionary terror. He was the author of the radical Catechism of a Revolutionary. Nechayev fled Russia in 1869 after having been involved in the murder of a former comrade. Complicated relationships with fellow revolutionaries caused him to be expelled from the International Workingmen's Association. Arrested in Switzerland in 1872, he was extradited back to Russia where he received a twenty-year sentence and died in prison. Early life in Russia Nechayev was born in Ivanovo, then a small textile town, to poor parents—his father was a waiter and sign painter. His mother died when he was eight. His father remarried and had two more sons. They lived in a three-room house with his two sisters and grandparents. They were ex-serfs who had moved to Ivanovo. He had already developed an awareness of social inequality and a resentment of the local nobility in his youth. At the age of 10, he had learned his father's trades—waiting at banquets and painting signs. His father got him a job as an errand boy in a factory, but he refused the servant's job. His family paid for good tutors who taught him Latin, German, French, history, maths and rhetoric. Aged 18, Nechayev moved to Moscow, where he worked for the historian Mikhael Pogodin. A year later, he moved to Saint Petersburg, passed a teacher's exam and began teaching at a parish school. From September 1868, Nechayev attended lectures at the Saint Petersburg University as an auditor (he was never enrolled) and became acquainted with the subversive Russian literature of the Decembrists, the Petrashevsky Circle and Mikhail Bakunin among others as well as the growing student unrest at the university. Nechaev was even said to have slept on bare wood and lived on black bread in imitation of Rakhmetov, the ascetic revolutionary in Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?. Inspired by the failed attempt on the Tsar's life by Dmitry Karakozov, Nechayev participated in student activism in 1868–1869, leading a radical minority with Pyotr Tkachev and others. Nechayev took part in devising this student movement's "Program of revolutionary activities" which stated later a social revolution as its ultimate goal. The program also suggested ways for creating a revolutionary organization and conducting subversive