Mikhail was born in the Russian Empire to a family of Russian nobles. As a young man he was a junior officer in the Russian army, but he quit his commission in 1835. He went to school in Moscow to study philosophy and began to attend radical groups where he was greatly influenced by Alexander Herzen. Bakunin left Russia in 1842 for Dresden, and eventually Paris where he met George Sand, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx