Anarchism in Russia developed out of the populist and nihilist movements' dissatisfaction with the government reforms of the time.

The first Russian to identify himself as an anarchist was the revolutionary socialist Mikhail Bakunin, who became a founding figure of the modern anarchist movement within the International Workingmen's Association (IWA). In the context of the split within the IWA between the Marxists and the anarchists, the Russian Land and Liberty organization also split between a Marxist faction that supported political struggle and an anarchist faction that supported "propaganda of the deed", the latter of which went on to orchestrate the assassination of Alexander II.

Specifically anarchist groups such as the Black Banner began to emerge at the turn of the 20th century, culminating with the anarchist participation in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Though initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, many anarchists turned against them in the wake of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, launching a "Third Revolution" against the government with the intention of restoring soviet democracy. But this attempted revolution was crushed by 1921, definitively ending with the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion and the defeat of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.

The anarchist movement lived on during the time of the Soviet Union in small pockets, largely within the Gulag where anarchist political prisoners were sent, but by the late 1930s its old guard had either fled into exile, died or disappeared during the Great Purge. Following a number of uprisings in the wake of the death of Stalin, libertarian communism began to reconstitute itself within the dissident human rights movement, and by the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the anarchist movement had re-emerged onto the public sphere. In the modern day, anarchists make up a part of the opposition movement to the government of Vladimir Putin.

In 1848, on his return to Paris, Mikhail Bakunin published a fiery tirade against Russia, which caused his expulsion from France. The revolutionary movement of 1848 gave him the opportunity to join a radical campaign of democratic agitation, and for his participation in the May Uprising in Dresden of 1849 he was arrested and condemned to death. The death sentence, however, was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was eventually handed over to the Russian authorities, by whom he was imprisoned and finally sent to Eastern Siberia in 1857.

Bakunin received permission to move to the Amur region, where he started collaborating with his relative General Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who had been Governor of Eastern Siberia for ten years. When Muravyov was removed from his position, Bakunin lost his stipend. He succeeded in escaping, probably with the collusion of the authorities and made his way through Japan and the United States to England in 1861. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Western Europe, principally in Switzerland.

In January 1869, Sergey Nechayev spread false rumors of his arrest in Saint Petersburg, then left for Moscow before heading abroad. In Geneva, he pretended to be a representative of a revolutionary committee who had fled from the Peter and Paul Fortress, and he won the confidence of revolutionary-in-exile Mikhail Bakunin and his friend Nikolay Ogarev.

Bakunin played a prominent part in developing and elaborating the theory of anarchism and in leading the anarchist movement. He left a deep imprint on the movement of the Russian "revolutionary commoners" of the 1870s.