The doctrinal origins of the philosophy of the bomb emerged in the nineteenth century but its antecedents predate the invention of modern explosives. Terrorism has always been justified as a means of resisting despotism and as such its origins are of course to be found in antiquity. Plato and Aristotle regarded tyranny as a deviation, a perversion, the worst form of government. Tyrannicides in ancient Greece were elevated to the rank of national heroes. Cicero noted in his De Officiis that tyrants had always found a violent end and that the Romans had usually acclaimed those who killed them. The saying was attributed to Seneca that no victim was more agreeable to god than the blood of a tyrant. The civic virtues of a Brutus were praised by his fellow Romans.
The early Church fathers did not see eye to eye about regicide but there was an influential school of thought which maintained that tyranny might be resisted as it violated divine and natural law alike. As St. Isidore put it, it was the task of the ruler to maintain justice and the tyrant consequently had no claim to obedience. Thomas Aquinas drew a distinction between the tyrannus ex defectu tituli, the usurper, who could be killed by any individual, and the tyrannus ex parte exercitii, who could be punished only by publica auctoritas. John of Salisbury in the twelfth century was the first medieval author to provide an explicit defense of tyrannicide. Referring to the legends of Jael and Sisara, of Judith and Holofernes and a great many other examples, he argued that there was a basic difference between a good king, who, in observing the law, was the guardian of the well-being of his people, and the oppressor whose rule was merely based on force: he who usurps the sword was worthy to die of the sword.1
Dante had banished the murderers of Caesar to the depths of his Inferno but the Renaissance rectified their place in history. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) had banned tyrannicide but the concept was widely accepted in the sixteenth century by Catholic and Protestant thinkers alike: the people had an inherent right to resist the command of the prince if it was contrary to the law of God. According to Mariana (1536-1623), the power of the king was based on a contract with the people; if the king violated his part of the contract he could and should be removed, and any private citizen was entitled to kill him, if necessary by poison. Even earlier George Buchanan (1506-1582) in his Dejure Regnis apud Scotos had argued that it was “most just” to wage a war against a tyrant who was an enemy of all mankind; all good men should engage in perpetual warfare with such a public enemy. The author of De droit des magis trals (1574) noted with disdain that among the Jews, killers of tyrants had to be specially commissioned by God (implying that the Jews should have been less fainthearted and taken the initiative without divine prodding).2 The Monarchomachs of the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries discussed at great length the circumstances in which a king might become a tyrant. They developed a theory of popular sovereignty and this, in turn, led them into accepting the right of resistance.
The writings of these ancient and medieval authors are of more than academic interest in the context of modern terrorism for the ancient concept of justified tyrannicide provided inspiration for nineteenth-century terrorist thought. The program of the Narodnaya Volya as drafted at their first convention (Lipetsk, June 1879) stated explicitly that “we will fight with the means employed by Wilhelm Tell.” Very few of these young Russians knew of Buchanan, but all of them had read Schiller, so dear to successive generations of Russian progressives, and they knew the “In Tyrannos” literature, often by heart. Nikolai Morozov, one of the first theoreticians of Russian terrorism, chose as a motto to his pamphlet quotations from Saint-Just and Robespierre to the effect that it was perfectly justifia- ble to execute a tyrant without any legal niceties.3 But tyrants were usually not alone, they could not function without assistants, and the death of a tyrant was not necessarily the end of tyranny. Hence the necessity to attack the system on a broader front, first discussed in the secret societies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Secret societies, with their magical and religious preoccupations (but often also with very tangible social functions) and their rites de passage, have existed since time immemorial in many civilizations; as a very result of their secrecy, the scope and importance of their activi ties has frequently been overrated. The eighteenth-century secret societies might debate the inequities of the world but they did not, as a rule, engage in conspiracies aimed at the violent overthrow of the existing political and social order. Alfieri, the poet of Italian liberty, discussed in the 1770s the most effective ways of doing away with tyranny in un instante e con tutta certezza. * But it was only after the Thermidor that the idea took firm root. When asked at his trial about the means he counted upon employing, Baboeuf proudly de clared: “All means are legitimate against tyrants.” And later on, Buonarroti echoed him: “No means are criminal which are employed to obtain a sacred end.” Baboeuvisme was a movement without the people, and aimed at a dictatorship; the absence of anything specifically popular was precisely what made it into terrorism.5 Buonar roti’s History of Baboeuf’s Conspiracy remained the bible of two generations of young revolutionaries all over Europe. Seen in histori cal perspective, it was the precursor of Blanquism, of armed insurrec tion rather than of individual terror. But it also influenced latter-day terrorist thought through its advocacy of violence, its scant regard for human life, and its belief that a few determined people could make a revolution; what did the fate of a few individuals matter if the future of twenty-five millions was at stake? In the French Revolution the practice of intimidating the enemy by means of terror had gained ground, instinctive and spontaneous at first, later on bureaucratic and doctrinaire. Until in the end the sans culottes lost faith in terror and its leading advocates were swept from the scene by the reaction triggered off by their excesses. But terreur was not quite synonymous with terrorism, and its proponents did not yet have a clear concept as to how it should be utilized in the long term. A Jacobin tradition whose aims were vague and ill-defined failed to make any notable inroads against a government which had both public support and a fairly effective police force.6
Elsewhere, in Spain, Piedmont and Sicily the Carbonari, their successors, and similar such groups succeeded in overturning governments, much to the consternation of the Holy Alliance, but this was the result of insurrections rather than systematic campaigns of terror. The critics of the Carbonari attributed to them the most terrible and sanguinary plans for revolt; the “good cousins” through their venditi (branches, literally shops) were said to have fomented terror, setting fire to their enemies’ houses, and helping prisoners to escape; “several individuals, who were adverse to their maxims were destined to the poignard,” and when this was too risky, poison was used as a fitter method of liquidation.7 The Carbonari were said to be pitiless professional revolutionaries, ready to kill anyone. Once having joined the conspiracy, their members lost all individuality, without family or fatherland, and belonged totally to their masters. At a signal they had to obey them blindly, knife in hand.8 It is true that the language used by the Carbonari was bloodthirsty. The following passage conveys something of its flavor:
The cross should serve to crucify the tyrant who persecutes us and troubles our sacred operations. The crown of thorns should serve to pierce his head. The thread denotes the cord to lead him to the gibbet; the ladder will aid him to mount. The leaves are nails to pierce his hands and feet. The pick-axe will penetrate his breast, and shed the impure blood that flows in his veins. The axe will separate his head from his body, as the wolf who disturbs our pacific labors. The salt will prevent the corruption of his head, that it may last as a monument of the eternal infamy of despots [etc., etc.].9
Little is known to this day about the origins of the Carboneria other than the mere fact that the movement appeared first in Naples in 1807. Whether it drew its inspiration from earlier anti-Austrian secret societies in northern Italy or whether French republicans and freemasons had a hand in founding the movement is still a matter of contention.10 It is certain however that the terrorist-element in Carbonari activities was grossly exaggerated. Occasional terrorist acts were perpetrated but they did not amount to a systematic campaign. Elsewhere, I have discussed the ideas of Carlo Bianco, Conte di Saint Jorioz, who was first in Europe to outline a strategy of a national war of liberation by means of guerrilla tactics; he also wrote about the necessity of imposing a revolutionary dictatorship and of applying terrorist means against the enemies of the revolution.11 But such suggestions remained unanswered. Three decades later Orsini tried to kill Napoleon III and Cavour denounced the “villainous doctrine of political assassination practised by the execrable sectarians.” Maz-zini in an open letter wrote a withering reply: you exhumed the theory of the dagger, a theory unknown in Italy. Do you take us for villains and madmen? For whom and to what end could the death of Victor Emmanuel serve?12 In fact, Mazzini’s attitude to assassina tion was not that unambiguous for in letters to friends he had written that holy was the sword in the hand of Judith, the dagger of Harmo-dios and Brutus, the poignard of the Sicilian who had initiated the Vespers and the arrow of Wilhelm Tell — was not the finger of God to be discerned in the individual who rose against the tyrant’s despotism?
In some of the secret societies of Central Europe, such as the “League of the Just” (which later became the Communist League), the doctrine of terror was first discussed — only to be rejected. Wil helm Weitling, a tailor and the first German Communist, suggested in letters to his friends in Paris various ways of “founding the king dom of heaven by unleashing the furies of hell.” They were shocked by his suggestions which also included community of women; they were positively horrified when he proposed to turn loose the “thieving proletariat” on society. Weitling thought he could mobilize some 20,000 “smart and courageous” murderers and thieves. His corre spondents thought that a desirable end could not possibly be attained by “Jesuit tactics.”13 It would do the cause irreparable harm if mur derers and thieves were proudly to style themselves Communists. Their moral standards would not be improved by the example set by Weitling: they would not surrender their ill-gotten gains for a politi cal movement to use; any such suggestion would be vastly amusing to them, and very likely they would kill Weitling. This exchange of letters took place in 1843, unknown to Marx and Engels who, in any event, had misgivings about Weitling’s capacity as a systematic thinker. They argued that it was fraudulent to arouse the people without a sound and considered basis for action. But Weitling was not deterred by the arguments of his friends in Paris and the idea of the noble robber continued to figure in his writings in later years. In a new edition of his main opus, Garantien der Harmonic und Freiheit, published after the failure of the revolution of 1848, he wrote that public opinion ought to be persuaded that a robber who found his death in the fight was a martyr in a holy cause. Anyone who informed on such a man should not rest secure for a single moment from the people’s vengeance, and those who sought to take revenge upon him should be given protection and cover.14 The year of the revolution, 1848, also gave fresh impetus to the concept of terrorism, expressed most succinctly perhaps in an essay entitled “Murder” (Der Mord) written by the German radical democrat Karl Heinzen (1809-1880). He argued that while murder was forbidden in principle this prohibi tion did not apply to politics. The physical liquidation of hundreds or thousands of people could still be in the higher interests of humanity. Heinzen took tyrannicide as his starting point; he pointed out that such acts of liberation had been undertaken at all times and in all places. But it soon emerged that he was willing to justify terrorist tactics on a much more massive scale: “If you have to blow up half a continent and pour out a sea of blood in order to destroy the party of the barbarians, have no scruples of conscience. He is no true republican who would not gladly pay with his life for the satisfaction of exterminating a million barbarians.” There could be no social and political progress unless kings and generals, the foes of liberty, were removed.
Seen in retrospect, Karl Heinzen was the first to provide a full-fledged doctrine of modern terrorism; most elements of latter-day terrorist thought can be found in the writings of this forgotten German radical democrat. It was a confused doctrine, to be sure; on one hand he argued that killing was always a crime, but on the other hand he claimed that murder might well be a “physical necessity,” that the atmosphere or the soil of the earth needed a certain quantity of blood. (Die Evolution, January 26,1849). He maintained that it was absolutely certain that the forces of progress would prevail over the reactionaries in any case but doubted whether the spirit of freedom and the “good cause” would win without using dagger, poison and explosives: “We have to become more energetic, more desperate.” This led him into speculations about the use of arms of mass destruction. For the greater strength, training and discipline of the forces of repression could be counterbalanced only by weapons that could be employed by a few people and that would cause great havoc. These weapons, Heinzen thought, could not be used by armies against a few individual fighters. Hence the great hopes attached to the potential of poison gas, to ballistic missiles (known at the time as Congreve rockets) and mines which one day “could destroy whole cities with 100,000 inhabitants” (Die Evolution, February 16, 1849). Heinzen blamed the revolutionaries of 1848 for not having shown sufficient ruthlessness; the party of freedom would be defeated unless it gave the highest priority to the development of the art of murder. Heinzen, like Most after him, came to see the key to revolution in modern technology: new explosives would have to be invented, bombs planted under pavements, new means of poisoning food ex plored. To expedite progress he advocated prizes for research in these fields.15 Heinzen’s subsequent career was not, however, in the field of professional terrorism; he did not blow up half a continent but migrated to the United States and became an editor of various short lived German-language newspapers, first in Louisville, Kentucky, and eventually in Boston — “the most civilized city in America.”
The idea of the alliance between the revolutionary avant-garde and the criminal underworld was to reappear from time to time in the history of nineteenth-century terrorist movements (pace the Narodnaya Volya) and again among the American and West German New Left militants of the 1960s. Pavel Akselrod, one of the fathers of Russian socialism, relates in his autobiography how in 1874 he and Breshkovskaya, the future “grandmother of the Russian revolution,” went searching the forests of southern Russia, without evident suc cess, for a famous robber who had the reputation of plundering rich landowners and Jews and distributing his booty among poor peas ants.16 Weitling’s theory had been forgotten by that time but like all revolutionaries of his generation Akselrod had read Bakunin; Baku-nin, in turn, had met Weitling in Zurich and had been deeply in fluenced by him. This meeting was one of the formative events of Bakunin’s life, “completing his transformation from a speculative philosopher into a practical revolutionary.”17
In his never-ending search for the main catalysts of the forthcoming Russian revolution, Bakunin placed high hopes on the religious sectarians. But he was even more sanguine about the rebel-robbers in the tradition of Stenka Rasin and Pugachov and had nothing but contempt for the Marxists and “Liberals” who preferred not to ap peal to the so-called evil passions of the people. The robber (Bakunin wrote) was the only sincere revolutionary in Russia, a revolutionary without phraseology, without bookish rhetoric, irreconcilable and indefatigable, a revolutionary of the deed. The robber was tradition ally a hero, a savior of the people, the enemy par excellence of the state and its entire social order. Without an understanding of the robber one could not understand the history of the Russian people; whosoever wanted a real, popular revolution had to go to this world. It was a cruel, merciless world, but this was only the outcome of government oppression. An end to this underworld would spell ei ther the death of the people or their final liberation. Hence Bakunin’s conclusion that a truly popular revolution would emerge only if a peasants’ revolt merged with a rebellion of the robbers. And the season was at hand to accomplish this task.18 Bakunin, however, placed no emphasis on individual terror or even on guerrilla warfare. In 1848, he envisaged the emergence of a regular revolutionary army, trained with the help of former Polish officers and, perhaps, by some junior Austrian officers.19 It was only after Bakunin’s death that his Anarchist followers committed themselves to “propaganda of the deed.”
Though Bakunin was second to none in his revolutionary enthusi asm ever since he first appeared on the European scene in the 1840s, it was only two decades later, once he had met Nechaev (that “mag nificent young fanatic, that believer without God, hero without rhet oric”), that Bakunin developed a theory of destruction. In the Princi ples of Revolution, published in 1869, he wrote that “we recognize no other action save destruction though we admit that the forms in which such action will show itself will be exceedingly varied — poison, the knife, the rope etc.” Those intended for liquidation had already been singled out. Weeping and wailing would follow: “soci ety” would experience fear and remorse. The revolutionaries, however, should show indifference toward the lamentations of the doomed, and were not to enter into any compromise. Their approach might be called terroristic but this ought not to deter them. The final aim was to achieve revolution, the cause of eradicating evil was holy, Russian soil would be cleansed by sword and fire.
The demand that the revolutionary should have but one thought day and night, that is, merciless destruction, recurs in the most fa mous document of the period, the “Revolutionary Catechism.”20 The Catechism has frequently been quoted and a short summary will suffice for our purposes. It opens with a general list of rules for organization and then characterizes the attitude of the revolutionary toward himself and others. He is a lost man, without interests, be longings, personal ties of his own — not even a name. (The idea of the nameless soldier of the revolution was later to recur in many terrorist organizations as far afield as Ireland and Serbia where members were known by number rather than by name.) He must be absorbed by a single interest, thought and passion — the revolution. He has broken with society and its laws and conventions; he must eschew doctrinairism and despise public opinion, be prepared for torture and death at any time. Hard toward himself, he must be hard toward others, leaving no place for love, friendship, gratitude or even honor — room was to be spared only for the cold passion of the revolution ary cause whose success was to give him his pleasure, gratification and reward.
Tactical advice follows: in order to effect merciless destruction, the revolutionary has to pretend to be what he is not, to infiltrate the Church, the world of business, the bureaucracy and army, the secret police and even the royal palace. Bakunin divided “society” into six categories: intelligent and energetic individuals, particularly danger ous to the revolutionary organization, were to be killed first, for their sudden and violent death would inspire fear among the government; secondly there were those, albeit no less guilty, whose lives should be temporarily spared, for their monstrous crimes objectively fo mented revolution. The third category consisted of the high-ranking, the rich and powerful; they were mere “animals,” neither particu larly intelligent nor dynamic, who should be duped and blackmailed. Use should be made of ambitious politicians, including the liberals among them. The revolutionaries should conspire with them, pre tending to follow them blindly, but at the same time ferreting out their secrets, thereby compromising them to such a degree as would cut off their retreat from the struggle against the authorities. The fifth category, the loudmouths, those platonic advocates of revolu tion, should be engineered into making dangerous declarations; most would perish in the struggle but a few might become authentic revolutionaries. Finally, the women: some were useless and stupid and were to be treated like categories three and four; others were capable, passionate and devoted even though they might not yet have acquired full revolutionary consciousness. The sixth category comprised those who had completely thrown in their lot with the revolutionaries; they were the most precious possession of the revo lutionary party, and their aid was absolutely essential. In its final section, the Catechism emphasizes the need for total revolution: institutions, social structures, civilization and morality were to be destroyed, root and branch. A closing reference is made to the world of brigands, the only real revolutionaries who, once united, would bring into being a terrible and invincible power.
Bakunin’s Catechism was written for the benefit of a nonexistent terrorist group — Nechaev’s Narodnaya Rasprava; like Bakunin’s “World Revolutionary Union,” it was a mere figment of imagination. The only victim of Nechaev’s terrorism was a fellow conspirator, a student, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, who was killed in 1869 by his com rades for reasons which have remained obscure. With all his extrem ist rhetoric Bakunin would have lacked the ruthlessness (even if he had had the following) to practice his philosophy of pan-destruction-ism.
Young revolutionaries had pronounced similar ideas even before Bakunin, no doubt also without the capacity to put them into prac tice. Zaichnevski, the son of a landowner in the Orel district, was twenty-one years of age when he published a leaflet on behalf of “Young Russia.” His group felt that the revolutionaries ought to be prepared for any operation, however dangerous. They ought to storm the Winter Palace, the residence of the tsar, and destroy all those who lived there. Perhaps it might be sufficient to kill only the tsar and his family? Should, however, the whole “Tsarist party” — the landowners, rich merchants, etc. — rise like one man in defense of the emperor, no pardon ought to be given them, just as they had given no pardon to the revolutionaries. Those who were not with the revolutionaries were against them and were enemies to be destroyed by every possible means.21 Zaichnevski was openly contemptuous of the liberal critics of the regime, including those who lived abroad, and his critics reciprocated by dismissing his appeals as immature and un-Russian, a mixture of undigested Schiller (Karl Moor), Baboeuf, Blanqui and Feuerbach. At the time even Bakunin attacked him for his unabashed elitism and doctrinaire scorn of the people. Zaichnevski and his few comrades were arrested soon after his ap peal was published. It had had no political significance but did reflect a certain mood among the students and, as such, was a precursor of the terrorism of the 1870s.
Ishutin’s “organization” came into being two years later. It was called “Hell” and purported to be the Russian branch of a (needless to say, nonexistent) international organization of terrorists, the “European Revolutionary Committee.” Some of its members spoke of assassinating the tsar, and their basic ideas bore a striking resem blance to concepts developed a few years later by Bakunin and Nechaev. Their aim was to kill members of the government and big landowners. Lots were to be cast among the revolutionaries to estab lish who was to carry out the assassinations. The terrorist should live under an assumed name, break all ties with his family, give up his friends, and forgo marriage. He should cut himself off from his own comrades and find his friends in the underworld. On the day ap pointed for the assassination, he was to disfigure his face with chemi cals to avoid being recognized. In his pocket he would carry a mani festo explaining his motives, and once he had carried out his attempt, he was to poison himself.22 Not all the members of Ishutin’s circle agreed with his prescriptions for revolutionary action; they pre ferred propaganda and the establishment of schools and coopera tives. They even thought of locking up the extremists in their ranks in lunatic asylums, and when Karakozov, a member of the group (and Ishutin’s cousin) prepared for his attempt on the life of the tsar, Ishutin himself seems to have had second thoughts and tried to dissuade his cousin. Karakozov made his attempt, was apprehended, and hanged. Ishutin died in prison and a period of repression fol lowed in which organized opposition within Russia was virtually stamped out.
Only in 1878, after Vera Zasulich’s shooting of General Trepov, the governor of the Russian capital, did terrorism as a doctrine, the Russian version of Propaganda by Deed, finally emerge. The Tsarist authorities explained this sudden upsurge of terrorism as a result of the Narodniks’ failure to “go to the people”; the peasants had been unresponsive, the workers had informed on the “apostles of future happiness.” After their lack of success in mobilizing the masses, the authorities maintained, the revolutionaries had come to regard ter ror as the only effective means of discrediting the government and proving to society at large that a revolutionary party not only existed but was growing stronger.23 This interpretation was not far from the truth. Plekhanov took virtually the same view when he wrote that terror was the product of the revolutionary party’s weakness and followed on its realization that it could not stage a peasant uprising.24
Russian terrorism developed in several stages. It began with sporadic acts of armed defense in resisting arrest and as a reaction against individual police officers who had maltreated arrested revolu tionaries. On a few occasions, spies who had infiltrated the revolu tionary cells were executed. The very first manifesto announcing that a new era in revolutionary action had dawned was Serge Krav-chinski’s “A death for a death” in which he explained his reasons for having taken part in the assassination of General Mezentsev, the head of the “third section” (the Tsarist political police).25 His mani festo was full of contradictions: on the one hand, he argued that “you, the representatives of power are our enemies and there can be no peace between us. You should and will be destroyed.” Mezentsev, he claimed, had been sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal, in revenge for those who had been cruelly treated in prison. As long as the cruelty of the system continued, the revolutionary tribunal would hang over the rulers of the state like the sword of Damocles. At the moment, the movement was only of limited strength but it was growing hourly. Kravchinski, however, seemed to have had some doubts about the identity of his enemy, for in the same mani festo he contended that his real foes were the bourgeoisie and capitalists. He even suggested that the government should stay neutral in this struggle. But how was a line to be drawn between capitalism and the state? The program of the Narodnaya Volya specifically stated that the Russian government was a monster, that unlike West ern European states, it was also the greatest capitalist exploiter, owning half of Russia’s land. Revolutionaries were permitted to confis cate state property; private property was to be inviolate as long as it was not used in the fight against the revolutionary movement.26
Kravchinski’s manifesto appeared in August 1878. In November that year the first issue of the journal Zemlya i Volya was circulated and Kravchinski wrote its editorial in which he announced that the working masses could not be liberated as a result of terrorist opera tions. Only the popular masses could bring about a revolution and destroy the system — against a class, only a class could rebel. The terrorists were no more than the military vanguard of the revolution ary movement. If all their forces were channeled into terrorist activi ties this would be tantamount to abandonment of their chief goal. Even if they succeeded in destroying the system, it would be a Pyrrhic victory because power would then pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie.
These reservations about the use of terror reassured some mem bers of the revolutionary movement (such as Plekhanov) who all along had argued against the concentration on terrorist acts at the expense of all other activities. Dissension on the subject of terror could not be contained for long; in 1879, when terrorist attacks multi plied, debate became more and more heated, and ultimately led to a split. Morozov, amongst others, was in favor of “pure terror”; Zhelyabov and others aimed at a Jacobin-style coup and felt that terror should be used only as punishment meted out to the tsar and his hirelings for their policy of repression.27 Aptekman, who aligned himself with Plekhanov, wrote that political terror was recognized at the time to be an extreme and exclusive instrument only to be em ployed in special circumstances.28
But the general mood gradually swung toward “armed struggle.” An overwhelming desire to act took over and when the Central Committee voted in March 1879 on whether or not to assassinate Drenteln, the new head of the third section, Plekhanov found him self in a minority of one. To some extent this swing toward terrorism was engendered by the mass arrests, the savage sentences and the executions which continued all the time. But perhaps even more important a factor was the belief that terrorist operations were far more effective in promoting the revolution, if only because of the tremendous publicity they received — very much in contrast to il legal propaganda and organizational work which had no visible effect. By autumn 1879 the split was an accomplished fact. Earlier (in March 1879) the ideological justification for terrorism had already been outlined in some detail in the Listok Narodnoi Voli, the organ of the radical, activist trend edited by Morozov and Tikhomirov. Political assassination was above all an act of revenge, but at the same time it was one of the best weapons of agitation. One had to strike at the center to shake the whole system. The future belonged to mass movements but terrorism had to show the masses the way. The program of the Narodnaya Volya Central Committee listed the liqui dation of the most dangerous members of the government, the de fense of the party against spies, and the punishment of those who had committed the most glaring oppression as the main tasks of the terrorist struggle. If ten to fifteen pillars of the establishment were killed at one and the same time, the government would panic and would lose its freedom of action. At the same time the masses would wake up.29 But it was never made quite clear in what way such terror would lead to the actual conquest of power. Was the government simply to disintegrate or would there be a popular rising? If so, the party needed an organizational network to lead the masses and a few terrorist fighting groups would not suffice. Such an organization, however, did not exist. Tikhomirov thought that two or three years of systematic terror would bring about the collapse of the government; others, Sofia Perovskaya among them, were equally optimistic. At the very least, the government would have to make far reaching concessions and grant the basic freedoms of organization and speech. In that event the revolutionaries would cease their terrorist activities. It has been argued that not all Narodovoltsy were terrorists (and that not all terrorists were Narodovoltsy), that out of the 500-odd members who belonged to the party only a tenth actively took part in attacks and assassinations.30
As already noted, the mood was overwhelmingly pro-terrorist, reaching far beyond the ranks of the organization to students, the intelligentsia, and other sections of society. Even the Liberals were willing to give money for bombs (though not for socialist propaganda); grand old men of the Russian emigration, such as Lavrov and Mikhailovski, gave terrorism their blessing; even Marx and Engels believed that Russia was on the eve of a revolution as a result of the actions of the Narodnaya Volya. Plekhanov, who had warned time and again against terrorism, felt he could no longer speak out against it; it would have been futile, he later wrote, the intelligentsia believed in terror “like in God.”31
The most outspoken protagonists of the terrorist approach, Morozov and Romanenko, outlined their views in two pamphlets pub lished in England and Switzerland respectively.32 These were not official “party documents” but they are of interest because they ex pressed a widespread mood and, after some initial hesitation, the party more or less accepted the reasoning on which they were based. True, the authors were as yet a little reluctant to call a spade by its real name just as Narodnaya Volya frequently referred to “disorgani zation” where terror would have been the more appropriate term. Tikhomirov wrote about “partisan warfare,” and Morozov later con fessed that he did not like the term “terror” either. Initially he had wanted to call his pamphlet “Neo-Partisan Warfare.”33
Morozov described how the revolutionaries had advanced from self-defense to attack. The government with its guns, prisons, spies and millions of soldiers could easily defeat any frontal assault, but it was powerless against terrorist attacks. The only thing that the ter rorists had to fear was lack of caution on the part of their own members.34 Terrorism, according to Morozov, was an altogether new fighting method, far more “cost-effective” than an old-fashioned rev olutionary mass struggle. Despite insignificant forces, it would still be possible to concentrate every effort upon the overthrow of tyranny. Since there was no limit to human inventiveness, it was virtually impossible for the tyrants to provide safeguards against attacks. Never before were conditions so auspicious from the point of view of the revolutionary party, and once a whole series of terrorist groups came into being, they would spell the final days of the monarchy. Terrorist attempts in the past had been acts of despair and frequently of suicide. This tragic element no longer existed: the terrorists simply carried out a death sentence which had been imposed by their tribu nals and there was every reason to assume that the executioners would not be apprehended and would disappear without trace. Vic tory was inevitable sooner or later. In order to blunt the terrorist struggle and win over the bourgeoisie, the government was quite likely to grant a constitution. But the terrorist struggle could be conducted not only against tyranny but also against a constitutional oppression such as in Germany. Dictators like Napoleon or Bismarck should be liquidated at the very beginning of their rise to power “pour decourager les autres” and it was immaterial whether they were backed by an army or a plebiscite. In this way terror would remain a guarantee of freedom, a constant deterrent against would-be despots. In Morozov’s view the principal assignments currently facing the revolutionaries were first to provide a theoretical founda tion for terrorism “which so far every one understood in his own way”; second, to apply terrorism systematically so as to achieve the demoralization, weakening and final disorganization of the government.
Romanenko’s views were on similar lines: terrorism was not only effective, it was humanitarian. It cost infinitely fewer victims than a mass struggle; in a popular revolution the best were killed while the real villains looked on from the sidelines. The blows of terrorism were directed against the main culprits; a few innocent people might suffer, but this was inevitable in warfare. Terrorism, then, was the application of modern science to the revolutionary struggle. He in terpreted Russian history since the days of the Decembrists as a duel between the intelligentsia and the regime. It was pointless asking the people to rise against their oppressors for the masses were insufficiently strong. It was wrong to regard systematic terror as immoral, since everything that contributed to the liberating revolution was a priori moral.35
The same idea of cost-effectiveness and, in particu lar, the humanitarian character of terrorism was also voiced by Zhelyabov, the central figure of the Narodnaya Volya and, most outspokenly, in a pamphlet by Lev Sternberg (1861-1927), Politi-cheski Terror v Rossii.36 Terrorism, in Sternberg’s view, was a safety valve; if there was no terror there would be a terrible explosion from below. It was the historical mission of the intelligentsia to prevent — or, to be precise, to preempt — this uncontrolled explosion.
Romanenko’s pamphlet was written in answer to the critique of M. P. Dragomanov (1841-1895), the leading Ukrainian writer who, on the whole, was in sympathy with the Russian revolutionary movement. But Dragomanov denounced the “Machiavellianism” of the terrorists as well as attacks against banks and post offices in which mere guards had been killed. It was one thing, Dragomanov wrote, to accept terrorism in Russia as a natural response to the terror exerted by the government. It was another to make terrorism into a system, the cardinal principle of the revolutionary struggle. For terrorism, in the final analysis, was a pathological phenomenon, and if the aim of the revolutionaries was to be unsullied it could be achieved only by purity of method. Attacks in the open, attempts to liberate revolutionaries from prison and even attacks against the secret police were all justifiable, but individual terror as a system could not be morally justified.37
The subsequent fate of the main protagonists of the doctrine of terrorism is of some interest: Morozov spent more than twenty years in Tsarist prisons but was released in 1905; he published poems as well as papers on chemistry, cosmogony, history and Christianity. His chemistry, according to all accounts, was sounder than his history. He became a sympathizer of the Kadets (the liberal constitutionalists) but decided to remain in Russia after 1917 and was made an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences. He died in 1946. Gerasim Romanenko (1858-1927), on the other hand, gravitated toward the extreme right, the “Black Hundred”; some of his critics had argued from the beginning that he was a terrorist without being a socialist. Tikhomirov also solemnly renounced terrorism in later years, and became a conservative publicist. Sternberg made good use of his years in Siberian exile and became an ethnographer of world re nown.
There was a striking discrepancy between the extreme means used by the Narodovoltsy and their relatively moderate political demands. In this respect they certainly did not agree with Bakunin’s pan-destructionism. A letter which the Narodnaya Volya Executive Com mittee wrote to Alexander III, published in March 1881, ten days after the assassination of his predecessor, stated that terror was a sad ne cessity, that the terrorists only wanted a general amnesty and a constitution which provided elementary civil freedoms. If these de mands were met, terrorist activity would cease, and a peaceful strug gle of ideas would replace violence.38 It has been said, and not with out cause, that at least some of the Narodovoltsy were simply “liberals with a bomb.” Kibalchich, the scientific genius, who pro duced dynamite for the Narodovoltsy, was the mildest of men in his private life as well as in his political views. If a peace-loving man like him agreed to cooperate with the terrorists, Lev Deitch later wrote, it only proved that people with a conscience saw no other way out in the given circumstances.39 It is equally true that Nechaev (unlike Bakunin) was not a socialist but a Jacobin in the style of Robespierre, and that some of the main advocates and practitioners of Russian terrorism in the first decade of the twentieth century, such as Burt-sev, Savinkov and Schweitzer, were also radical liberals rather than socialists.
The terrorist campaign conducted by Narodnaya Volya was essen tially different from anarchist activities elsewhere in Europe, which were carried out (as F. Venturi has noted) by isolated individuals inspired by obscure ideals. Russian terrorism was both one aspect of the formation of a revolutionary socialist party and a symptom of a general crisis in Russian society.40 Vera Zasulich, who had opened the terrorist campaign, was later to write that terror had been like a major storm in an enclosed space: the waves rose high but the unrest did not spread. It exhausted the moral force of the intelli gentsia.41 Kravchinski, who wrote a most moving account of the heroism of the revolutionaries, concluded that terrorism as a system had outlived its era and that it could no longer be revived. The one side no longer had its previous faith and the other side no longer feared -it.42 Kravchinski’s prophecy proved premature; terror was revived, but only two decades later by a new generation of revolutionaries.
The tradition of the Narodnaya Volya lingered on and attempts were made to reestablish the party. From time to time its program (in slightly modified form) and other literature was published.43 In Russian emigre circles it had its strong defenders who disputed the strategy of the orthodox Marxists. Alexander Ulianov, Lenin’s older brother, was the head of a small terrorist group of students, whose leading members were arrested and hanged in 1887. He, too, ad vocated “systematic terrorism” and believed that the initiative had to come from the intelligentsia since the common people had no rights and were altogether unprepared to act.44 The first to reempha-size the importance of terrorist action after a long period of silence was Burtsev, a radical-democratic opponent of the regime, in a new journal, Narodovolets (1897), published in London.45 In the very first number he stated unequivocally that terrorism in the tradition of the Narodnaya Volya was the only policy that held out any promise. Burtsev was arrested after intervention by the Russian government, but subsequently was released. He issued a new pamphlet in which he stressed that support for terrorism was growing fast, that all those who approved of terrorism were of one family and that they should bury, at least for the time being, all differences of opinion between them.46 Support for terrorism came from unexpected quarters such as from the moderate socialist Krichevski, who regarded the new terrorist wave after the turn of the century as a turning point of historical significance. Others who came out in its support were Grigorovich (i.e., Zhitlovski), as well as writers in various Russian and Polish language periodicals which began to appear at the time, such as Nakanune, Przedswit, Revoliutsionnaya Rossiia and Vestnik Rus-skoi Revoliutsii.
In 1900 the Social Revolutionary party was eventually founded in Kharkov and it was this movement that became the main agent of the second wave of terror, beginning with the assassination of Sipyagin the Minister of the Interior in 1902. The leaders of the new party, which included some survivors of the old Narodnaya Volya such as Gots and Rusanov, maintained that terrorism was necessary and unavoidable. It was not intended to replace the mass struggle; on the contrary it would strengthen and supplement the revolutionization of the masses. Systematic terrorism, the party stated, in conjunction with other forms of open mass struggle such as industrial riots, agrar ian risings and demonstrations, would lead to the disorganization of the enemy. “Terrorist activity will cease only with victory over autocracy and the complete attainment of political liberty.”47 A ter rorist “Fighting Organization” (Boevaya Organisatsia — BO) was set up and given autonomy within the party. The political purpose of terror was defined by the party leadership in a polemic against the Social Democrats.48 The old quarrel as to the use of terrorist tactics had been resolved in the light of historical experience. There were always ideological reasons against terrorism, but revolutionaries were driven to it, unable to choose the means they were forced to employ. Self-defense was necessary against the attacks of Tsarist autocracy which engaged the Cossacks and their whips (nagaikas) to destroy the human dignity of their victims. Imprisoned revolution aries were driven to suicide and despair. Iskra, the organ of the Social Democrats, had argued that the only effects of terrorism were to isolate the revolutionary vanguard from the masses and to hamper organizational work.49 Yet at the same time Iskra demanded that the government should be made to behave with humanity toward striking workers and political prisoners. How could it be compelled to do so? Perhaps by speeches and articles! The whistle of bullets was the only sound that the rulers heeded. More and more people on the left were learning the propagandistic effect of the terrorist act. (It should be noted in passing that many, perhaps most, leading members of the “Fighting Organization” such as Kalyayev, Balmashev, Savinkov and Karpovich had initially belonged to Social Democratic, anti-terrorist organizations.) Terror, claimed the Social Revolutionaries, caused chaos within the establishment. Again, the statement was not exag gerated as subsequent events were to show: Gerassimov, head of the political police at the time, later wrote that the terrorist operations had indeed disoriented the regime: “All ministers are human and they want to live. . . .”50 Durnovo, minister of the interior, used almost identical words when, in later years, Tikhomirov spoke to him of the folly of terror — “stupid it may be, but it is a very poisonous idea, a very terrible one, creating power out of impotence.”51
The Social Revolutionaries argued that even the actions of the Narodnaya Volya twenty-five years earlier, despite comparatively little public support, had had a tremendous effect, and for a while the authorities had contemplated constitutional reforms. How much greater was the impact likely to be now that the revolutionary move ment had reached more sections of the population? Although the Social Revolutionaries regarded terror as a psychological necessity, it was only one weapon among several; it should not be self-per petuating. No illusions, no exaggerated optimism as to its conse quences should be entertained, and it was clear that terror was a temporary phenomenon — the result of specific Russian conditions. It simply strengthened other forms of the struggle. Again the Social Revolutionaries criticized the Social Democrat Iskra which had ob jected to planned, organized, systematic terror, but accepted acci dental (“stychic”) terror. Unplanned terror would by necessity be indiscriminate and was bound to entail unnecessary victims. The party, the organization, would have to decide whom to attack and when. These views about the strictly rational character of terror endorsed by party ideologists abroad were not necessarily shared by the terrorists within Russia. The very language the terrorists used pointed to their irrationality: the revolutionary was a hero driven by hate, inspired by honor and willingness to sacrifice himself — bomb-throwing was “holy.”52
The impact of terrorist operations on Russian public opinion during the early years of the century was startling. During 1878-1881, there had been some support among the intelligentsia, whereas two decades later “society” in its majority was sympathetic. After the assassination of Plehwe, the minister of the interior, in 1903, even Plekhanov, a lifelong opponent of terrorism, was prepared to justify such operations under certain circumstances and suggested cooper ating with the Social Revolutionaries. It was only after leading Social Democrats such as Akselrod and Martov threatened to leave the party that he withdrew his suggestion of cooperation.
In October 1905, when the tsar published his famous manifesto announcing the creation of a legislative assembly, the Socialist Revolutionaries suspended terrorist activities. They were resumed in Jan uary 1906, suspended again when the First Duma opened, and renewed when the Duma was dissolved in July 1906.53 Meanwhile a more radical faction, the “Maximalists” had split away and estab lished its own fighting organization. By that time the debate about terrorism had virtually ended for during the revolution political vio lence had become a daily occurrence. The Bolsheviks engaged in it on occasion, the Black Hundred organized pogroms and assassinated political opponents. The only discussions concerned terrorist tactics. The Maximalists criticized the Fighting Organization of the Social Revolutionaries for its strictly centralist, hierarchical structure: its leadership was appointed from above, and its members had no right to criticize operational plans. Such centralism had its advantages, argued the Maximalists, provided a man of genius like Gershuni was at its head, but it was bound to create dissatisfaction and frustration in the ranks, who would lose their capacity for inventiveness and improvisation. When the supreme commander was a police agent (as had been the case) it naturally led to total disaster.54 The Maximalists were aware that far-reaching decentralization also had its disadvan tages: it was likely to cost more victims, and result in operations that were badly timed from a political point of view. Decentralized terror groups could not be guaranteed against penetration by police agents either. Thus, the ideal solution was to combine the advantages of centralized and decentralized terror, granting a greater measure of autonomy to local groups while retaining a strong central leader ship. It was easier, however, to discuss ideal tactics in the abstract than to carry them out in practice, and these debates, in any case, be longed to a period when terrorism had virtually petered out. There was no Maximalist fighting organization after 1907 and a similar fate had befallen the Social Revolutionaries even before Azev had been unmasked as a spy in 1909. At the Socialist Revolutionary party con ference of May 1909 Rubanovich had sharply denounced terrorism, which, he claimed, had become a “business enterprise.” Everyone agreed that terrorism ought to be temporarily suspended, but what was its role in the more distant future? Chernov argued that the Azev affair had compromised the terrorists but not the system as such, whereas the critics insisted on the dissolution of the “Fighting Orga nization.” Recent events had shown that the revolutionary party in Russia no longer faced just the Tsarist regime; social classes had emerged in the revolution and individual terror was of no avail in the class struggle. This in turn was rejected as a quasi-Marxist argument and the debate continued for some three more years; but while there were some more sporadic terrorist actions there was no longer any “systematic terrorism.”55
During and after the revolution of 1905 there was much free wheeling terrorism in the Caucasus. Anarchist groups preached “ruthless and total people’s vengeance.” One of their sections, the Bezmotivniki (the motiveless ones), declaring “death to the bour geois,” contemplated and occasionally committed acts of indis criminate terror, such as throwing bombs in cafes, restaurants and theaters. Attacks took place at the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw and Cafe Libman in Odessa, which, it was subsequently pointed out, was not at all a cafe of the rich.56 But anarchism in Russia itself was ineffectual and its operations were on a much lesser scale than the far-reaching campaign of the Social Revolutionaries. It made no theoretical contribution to the cause of the armed struggle, except for some appeals in the style of the Futurist manifesto of 1909 which complained of the “poisonous breath of civilization: Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundations of venerable towns! Everything is ours, outside us is only death. . . . All to the street! Forward! Destroy! Kill!”57 The proper place of appeals of this kind is in the annals of expressionist literature, not in the his tory of terrorism.
The example set by the Russians had a considerable influence on terrorist movements, contemporaneous and subsequent, throughout the world. Its impact was felt all over Europe, and its methods were studied even in Ireland and America. Polish socialists came under its particular sway and also engaged in attacks on government offices, in individual assassinations, and, in particular, in “expropriations,” i.e., armed robbery of banks and trains. Strong repercussions were felt in the Balkans where terrorism in various forms had been en demic for a long time. The attraction was not one-sided: Kravchinski had gone to fight in Herzegovina in the 1870s and Kalyayev once told a comrade that while there were only a few Russian terrorists as yet, he hoped he would live to see the existence of a really popular terrorist movement as existed in Macedonia.58 But the Balkan terror ists were first and foremost (and usually exclusively) nationalists; if some of the southern Slavs were familiar with the writings of Baku-nin and Kropotkin, the ideological inspiration of the Young Bosnians, for instance, owed much more to Mazzini than to the Narodnaya Volya. They did resemble the Narodniki in their asceticism, the chas tity they observed and in their belief that only persons of nobility of character were capable of political assassination.59
There is evidence to the effect that the methods of the Armenian revolutionaries of the late 1880s and 1890s were largely borrowed from the Narodnaya Volya. Their first leader in Turkey was Avetis Nazarbeck, who was converted to socialism by his fiancee. She re portedly spoke only Russian and had taken part in the Russian revo lutionary movement.60 The program of the Dashnak party (1892) stated that the revolutionary bands intended “to terrorize government officials, informers, traitors, usurers and every kind of ex ploiter.” Organizational links with Armenians living in Russia were close: weapons were produced in a plant by workers who had gained experience in the Tula arms factory or were bought (albeit not through official channels) from the Russian government armory in Tiflis.61
The political problems facing the Armenian terrorist movement were, of course, sui generis: they were a minority, facing both a tyrannical government and a hostile population. Some of them advocated an immediate struggle, others warned against frittering away their forces and suggested waiting until the Ottoman government was embroiled in Arabia, Crete or with some European powers in order to strike.62
The proponents of immediate action prevailed, and since they could not possibly hope to overthrow the government, their strategy had to be based on provocation. They assumed, in all proba bility, that their attacks on the Turks would provoke savage retalia tion, and that as a result the Armenian population would be radical ized; more decisive yet, the Western powers, appalled by the massacres, would intervene on their behalf as they did for the Bul garians two decades earlier. Lastly, they seem to have hoped that their example would lead to risings among other nationalities in the Ottoman empire, as well as perhaps inspiring disaffected Turks.63 Their most spectacular action was the seizure of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople in August 1896. But the results were disastrous: a three-day massacre followed in which thousands of Armenians were killed. Europe showed “murderous indifference” and a friend of the Armenian cause, criticizing the revolutionaries, wrote that “if our Henchakists and Drojakists continue their crazy enterprises, very few Armenians will be left in Turkey to profit one day from the application of reforms.”64
The Armenian example clearly showed the difficulties facing a national minority that resorted to terrorist methods. When Karako-zov fired at the tsar in 1866 he was apprehended by passersby and his shouts, “Fools, I have done this for you,” were to no avail, for the “masses,” far from assisting him, were loyal to the tsar. (The tsar asked: Are you a Pole?) In the eyes of the Turkish population the Armenian terrorists were just foreign agents, traitors, and not much encouragement by the authorities was needed to instigate massacres against the enemies of Islam and the Turkish nation.
The Russian example gave some impetus to the revolutionary movement in India. “Protests are of no avail,” Tilak wrote in 1906, “days of prayer have gone.... Look to the examples of Ireland, Japan and Russia and follow their methods.”65 There was advice of a more practical nature, too. A Russian chemical engineer gave Senapati Bapat a Russian manual for the manufacture of bombs in 1908, and a Russian student translated it for the benefit of the revolutionaries of the “Free India Society” in North London.86 The manual was cyclostyled and sent to India.
But the doctrine of the Narodniki contained elements quite indi gestible to India; the burning idealist patriotism of Mazzini appealed much more than the polemics between various socialist factions. Savarkar, the most fiery apostle of early Indian terrorism, wrote a life of Mazzini in Marathi, a book which became the first victim of the Indian Press Act.
Indian terrorism was relatively infrequent and on the whole quite ineffective: more often than not the Indian terrorists managed to kill some innocent bystanders rather than their intended victims. Yet the ideology of Indian terrorism is of some interest for it contained a strange mixture of Indian traditions and Western influences. In 1897 Tilak wrote that the Hindu rebel leader Shivaji had been entitled two centuries earlier to kill Afzal Khan, a Muslim general, at a peace parley: Shivaji had now become a national hero with his own festi vals.67 Gandhi, it should be added in parenthesis, regarded Shivaji as a misguided patriot. Marathi newspapers quite openly justified mur der when inspired by a higher purpose. The young patriots, fired by these teachings, were orthodox Hindus and they despised the re formist politicians of the Congress parties who, they claimed, vi olated religious principle by partaking of biscuits, loaves, meat and spirits. In their manifestoes they announced that “we shall assuredly shed upon the earth the lifeblood of the enemies who destroy reli gion.”68 When ten years later the most successful of the vernacular dailies, Yugantar, began to appear, the same message was preached with even greater emphasis and detail. Theft and dacoity were nor mally regarded as crimes, but destruction for the highest good was justified; it was work of religious merit. The murder of foreigners was no sin but jagna, a ceremonial sacrifice.69 Bombs should be manufac tured in secret and guns imported from abroad, for “the people of the West will sell their own motherland for money.” Tilak, who invoked the goddess Kali in his patriotic speeches (“We are all Hin dus and idolaters and I am not ashamed of it”), likened the bomb to a sacred formula, to “magic” and an “amulet.” Savarkar and his pupils not surprisingly turned against pacifism and the universalist element (the “mumbo jumbo”) of Hindu religion; nonviolence would crush “the faculty of resisting sin” and destroy the power of national resistance. In his book on the Indian War of Independence of 1857, which became something of a classic among the extremists, Savarkar wrote that the sword of Brutus was holy and the arrow of Wilhelm Tell divine, and he cited some incidents in Indian history too — every Hiranyakashipu had his Narasimha, every Dushshasana had his Bheema, every evildoer his avenger.70 The Indian Sociologist pub lished by Krishna Varma in London also justified political assassina tion. The British authorities took a dim view. Like other periodicals such as Bande Mataram and Talvar it had to transfer its activities from Highgate, N.6, to the continent.
There was an upsurge of terrorist activities in 1909 when Sir Wil liam Curzon Wyllie, Lord Morley’s political secretary, was killed in London by one of Krishna Varma’s students. But this spurt was short lived and it was only in the 1920s that a new wave of terrorist actions took place. Indian terrorism, as preached by Savarkar and others, was directed not only against the British but also against Muslims, and, by implication, against political enemies within their own ranks. In later years Savarkar became the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and its military-terrorist arm the RSSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh). They preached that India was one and indivisible, and everyone who did not accept this precept was a traitor. The leadership of the RSSS consisted of Brahmins, mainly from Poona, Savarkar’s home town and political base. One of them, Nathuram Godse, shot Gandhi in 1948. He had been Savarkar’s chief aide for several years, but Savar-kar’s complicity could not be proven in court. He was released and died at the ripe old age of eighty-three in 1966.71
The inspiration of the next generation of Indian terrorists at first sight seemed altogether different. Most of them had been members of Gandhi’s nonviolent noncooperation movement during its early phase, and it was only after the hopes accompanying it had ebbed away that they began to turn to revolutionary ideas. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) was founded in 1928. Some of its leaders, such as Bhagat Singh, had allegedly read Das Kapital and they were great admirers of the Soviet Union.72 Their doctrine, as summarized in a work entitled The Philosophy of the Bomb, stated that they did not ask for mercy and gave no quarter: “Ours is a war to the end — to Victory or Death.” Yet at the same time they disclaimed that their revolution was to be identified with violence, or, more specifically, with the cult of the pistol and the bomb. In their writings they emphasized the leading role of the working class. Unfortunately, workers and peasants were as yet “passive, dumb and voiceless” and the radical nationalist youth, idealist and restless, would have to act as the vanguard of the revolution.73 This then was their historical mission: the youth of India, being the salt of the earth, was to conduct not just “propaganda by deed” but propaganda by death. These glaring contradictions between doctrine and practice are not too difficult to explain. The young revolutionaries were both impatient and isolated. A Russian-style “going to the people” was ruled out; in India — as in Latin America and Africa — manual labor has never been held in high esteem among members of the upper classes, including the revolutionaries among them. A sympathetic historian notes that the HSRA failed to do any political work among the common people, and hardly had any link or contact with them. In theory they had become totally committed to revolutionary social ism, yet the “revolutionary consciousness” which they invoked so frequently was purely nationalist, and the young militants could be used therefore almost exclusively for nationalist action.74
The origins of The Philosophy of the Bomb, the HSRA manifesto, should be mentioned at least in passing.75 Following the attempt of Indian terrorists to blow up the vice-regal special train in 1929, Gandhi made a speech to an Indian Congress meeting (later pub lished as an article in Young India under the title “The Cult of Violence”) and drafted a resolution rejecting terrorism. The terror ists were denounced as “cowards,” their actions described as “das tardly.” Gandhi wrote that he would despair of nonviolence if he was not certain that bomb-throwing was nothing but “froth coming to the surface in an agitated liquid.” Gandhi also warned against terrorism in view of the likely internal consequences: from violence done to the foreign ruler there was only an “easy, natural step to violence to our own people whom we may consider to be obstructing the country’s progress.”76 Prophetic words in the light of the tragic death of the Mahatma.
Gandhi had denounced terrorism, of course, on many previous occasions. History had proved, he told Calcutta students in 1915, that assassinations (“a Western institution”) had done no good: “What have they done to the Western World? We would not hesitate to rise against those who wanted to terrorize the country.”77 The philoso phers of the bomb argued on the other hand that while terrorism was not a complete revolution, revolution was not complete without terrorism. Nor was terrorism a European product; it was home grown. “Terrorism instills fear in the hearts of the oppressors, it brings hope of revenge and redemption to the oppressed masses. It gives courage and self confidence to the wavering, it shatters the spell of the subject race in the eyes of the world, because it is the most convincing proof of a nation’s hunger for freedom.”78 The average Indian, the terrorists claimed, understood little about fine theological necessities of love for one’s enemy. Gandhi’s gospel of love would not sway the British viceroys and generals. Violence did not impede the march toward social progress and political freedom: “Take the case of Russia and Turkey for example.”79 Gandhi, they claimed, did not understand revolutionary psychology. A terrorist did not sacrifice his life because the crowd might shout “bravo” in appreciation; he en gaged in terrorism because reason forced him into that course and because conscience dictated it. “It is to reason and reason alone that he bows.” There was no crime that Britain had not committed in India: “As a race and as a people we stand dishonoured and outraged. Do people still expect us to forget and to forgive? We shall have our revenge, a people’s righteous revenge on the tyrant.”80
The terrorists distributed The Philosophy of the Bomb and some other manifestoes but their impact on the masses was insignificant compared with Gandhism. There were a few demonstrations of “propaganda by deed.” A police officer was shot in Lahore in Novem ber 1928. In April 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeswar Datta threw two small bombs from the public gallery into the Delhi Legislative Assembly. They made no attempt to escape. Both were executed: in their statement in court they said that their sole purpose had been “to make the deaf hear,” to register a protest on behalf of those who had no other means left to give expression to their heartrending agony. They said they had been inspired by the ideals which guided Guru Govnd Singh and Shivaji, Kemal Pasha and Reza Khan, Washington and Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin.81
There were some other examples of “propaganda by deed” such as the Chittagong raid in 1930. The same year the Yugantar party in Calcutta drew up a terrorist manifesto calling for the assassination of Europeans in hotels, clubs and cinemas, the burning of the aerodrome in Dum-Dum, the destruction of gas and electricity works.82 But these few manifestoes and actions apart, a marked decline in terrorist activities took place after 1932, coinciding with the collapse of the Civil Disobedience movement. The emergency regulations adopted by the government were quite effective, and the constitu tional reforms of 1935 (in the words of one historian) blunted the edge of both the violent and nonviolent methods of Indian politics.83 Ter rorism had a short-lived revival only during the Second World War. With Partition, revolutionary violence became transformed from in dividual to mass terror and civil war.
The concept of “propaganda by deed” has been traced back by a historian of anarchism to Carlo Pisacane, the hero of the Risor-gimento who lost his life in a tragically futile expedition to Calabria in 1857. Pisacane had written that the propaganda of the idea was a chimera and that ideas result from deeds.84 Similar thoughts, in fact, were expressed well before, but the era of “propaganda by deed” was heralded in a statement by the Italian Anarchists Malatesta and Cafiero, in 1876. They made it known that their Federation believed that “the insurrectional fact destined to affirm socialist principles by deeds is the most effective means of propaganda and the only one which, without tricking and corrupting the masses, can penetrate the deepest social layers and draw the living forces of humanity into the struggle sustained by the International.”85 Soon after, writing in the same journal, Paul Brousse, a young French physician, coined the phrase “propaganda by deed.”86 Theoretical propaganda — whether mass meetings, newspapers, or pamphlets — was of limited efficacy; moreover, the venal bourgeois press could always calumniate and disguise (“manipulate” in latter-day jargon) the true message and bourgeois orators could wheedle popular assemblies. Furthermore, workers who returned home, after an exhausting working day of eleven or twelve hours, had little desire to read socialist literature. Proudhon had written brilliant studies, but who had read them except a handful of people? Practical demonstrations, such as the Paris Commune, had presented the issues at stake in so dramatic a way that they could no longer be shirked. Propaganda by deed, in short, was a powerful weapon to awaken the consciousness of the people.87 Yet Brousse did not preach political assassination in so many words; on the contrary, he expressed doubt whether political assassination could possibly change a political system. It was only two years later that Kropotkin provided the classic formulation, defining Anarchist action as permanent incitement through the spoken and written word, the knife, the rifle, dynamite — everything, provided it was not legal. One single deed created more propaganda in a few days than a thousand leaflets. The government would endeavor to defend itself by intensifying its oppression, but further deeds would then be committed by one or more persons, thus driving the revolutionaries to ever more heroic acts. One deed would bring forth another, more and more people would join in the struggle and the government would lose its unity and self-confidence. Any concessions it might make would come too late, and eventually a general revolution would take place.88
Prince Kropotkin, the son of a high-ranking Russian officer, had served in the Corps of Pages; he joined a group of revolutionaries, was arrested in 1874, but succeeded in escaping two years later. His political career belongs to the history of the Anarchist movement of which he became a leading ideologist; all that need be noted in this context is that, very much in contrast to the Nechaevs of this world, he was an almost saintly figure who, in later years, came out strongly against “mindless terror.” But it cannot be denied that when he took over the leadership of the Anarchist movement in the late 1870s he was one of the main protagonists of individual terror as a means to arouse the spirit of revolt among the masses.89 Even in later years he was able to justify the assassination of Alexander II and attempts on the lives of leading political figures in the West in the 1880s and 1890s as acts committed by desperate men in response to unbearable con ditions. The individuals responsible were not to be blamed. Society was answerable for it had taught them contempt for human life. He fully endorsed Kravchinski’s view that while terror was profoundly distasteful, to submit to violence was even worse.90
The concept of “propaganda by deed” figured prominently in the deliberations of the International Anarchist Congress which took place in London in July 1881. One of the delegates, Ganz, suggested that greater attention be given to the study of chemistry and technology in order to supply dreadful weapons for the struggle against the oppressors. Kropotkin thought that these were praiseworthy senti ments but noted that it was an illusion to assume that one could become a chemist or electrician in a few hours; a handful of experts could deal with these problems more competently.91 Nor were chemistry and pyrotechnics a panacea: it was more important to understand how to mobilize the masses. The Congress nevertheless passed a resolution that as technical and chemical sciences had al ready rendered service to the revolutionary cause and were bound to render still greater services in the future, affiliated organizations and individuals should devote themselves to the study of these sciences.92 These suggestions were based on the assumption — again to quote the resolution — that a general conflagration was not far distant; “propaganda by deed” had to reinforce oral and written propaganda and arouse the spirit of the masses insofar as illusions still existed about the effectiveness of legal methods. But the conflagra tion did not take place, and more than a decade was to pass before certain French, Italian and Spanish Anarchists engaged in “propaganda by deed.” There were only a few bombings and assassinations throughout Western Europe during the 1880s, and most of these, such as the attempt to kill the German Emperor Wilhelm I, were not undertaken by Anarchists. The original impulse for the new doc trine, of course, had been provided by the example of the Russian revolutionaries, but by the time the London resolutions were adopted the terrorist wave had abated even in Russia.
Thus the Anarchist appeals had no serious consequence other than alarming the general public. There is evidence that in their endeavor to penetrate the ranks of the Anarchists the police actually provided money for Anarchist publications and, in some cases, apparently also for terrorist operations. One of the most bloodcurdling appeals was published in a police-sponsored French-language periodical in London: it called for blows against the left, right and center, against religion and patriotism. Theft, murder and arson were legitimate means in the struggle and so, of course, was the great friend, the “thunder of dynamite.”93 In 1880 the French Anarchist journal La Revolution Sociale began publishing instructions for the fabrication of bombs. At the time this paper was edited by Serreaux, a police spy, with money provided by Louis Andrieux, the prefect of the Paris police, who thoughtfully left us with detailed memoirs. On the other hand, the bomb, “the last weapon of revolt,” was also praised in bona fide Anarchist publications such as Most’s Freiheit, La Lutte Sociale, and Swiss publications. Advice was given to place bombs or inflam mable materials near storehouses where cotton or alcohol were kept. Chemical formulae for making produits anti-bourgeoises were published. Of course, one could not be too specific: “L’action ne se conseille, ni ne se parle, ni ne s’ecrit— elle se fait.”94 Marie Constant, a revolutionary Paris shoemaker, composed a popular song ending
Maintenant la danse tragique
vent une plus forte musique:
Dynamitons, dynamitons.
After the execution of Ravachol, a new verb came into being, ravacholiser; the Ravachole was sung to the tune of the Carmagnole, Vive le son d’l’explosion. A Ravachol cult caused considerable acces sion of strength to Anarchism.95 Among the more far-fetched sugges tions was advice to domestic servants to poison their employers, to churchgoers to poison clerics, to soak rats in petrol, set them on fire and then let them loose in buildings marked for destruction.96 Anar chist journals called on their followers to arm themselves with every weapon provided by science, to destroy the criminal institutions of a society based on the most extreme egoism: “Pillons, brulons, detru-sions.” The new revolutionary strategy, it was announced, was no longer based on open, frontal battles, “mats une guerre des partisans menes de facon occulte.”97
When the London Congress adopted its militant resolutions, the Italian Anarchists, who had wielded considerable influence in the 1870s, were already in rapid decline. After a few ineffectual insurrections the momentum petered out altogether. The murder of a Viennese shoemaker in 1882, the assassination of a police inspector the year after, of a police agent and of a money changer in 1884, also in Vienna, did nothing to bring the revolution any nearer. The fact that the small children of the money changer had also been killed in order to dispose of witnesses did not endear the terrorists to the masses either. A pharmacist was murdered in Strassburg and a banker in Mannheim. In both these cases robbery seems to have been the motive and not political principles. A few minor incidents took place in Switzerland. This was about the sum total of “propaganda by deed” in Central Europe. The change came only with a series of terrorist actions that took place in France between March 1892 and June 1894. After 1894 there were still a few spectacular political assassinations usually carried out by Italians. But these actions were undertaken by individuals, and as far as can be established no organi zation supported them. (The only possible exception was in the case of Bresci, the murderer of King Umberto of Italy in 1900, who had apparently been chosen and assisted by a group of Italian Anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey.)98 The “great international Anarchist con spiracy” existed only in the imagination of police chiefs and the press; its main importance in retrospect was to have inspired novels by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Emile Zola, and some others, just as the Russian Anarchists had inspired Dostoevsky. But there was no “Anar chist party.” When Emile Henry, who had thrown the bomb at the Cafe Terminus, declared at his trial that “we ask no pity in this pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie,” he was speaking for no one but himself.” Anarchist periodicals had virtually ceased to recommend “propaganda by deed” several years before, noting that it was Utopian to believe that individual terror could possibly be the basis of rational, active and sustained propaganda.100 Kropotkin, once one of the most outspoken advocates of terrorism, admitted in 1891 that a mistake had been made: the revolution would not come as the result of some heroic actions. Inspired by the Russian revolutionaries in 1881, European Anarchists had erroneously be lieved that a handful of dedicated revolutionaries armed with a few bombs could bring about a social revolution, as though a building rooted in centuries could be destroyed by a few kilograms of explo sives.101 But if the appeal of 1881 for “propaganda by deed” had been ignored for ten years, so was the call for retreat in 1891. There was no global conspiracy, no high command, no “party discipline”; each individual Anarchist, each group, felt free to register his protest in the form and at the time he saw fit.
In Spain terrorist operations were to continue for longer than elsewhere. It began with the mysterious Mono Negra movement, a peas ant revolt in Andalusia in the 1880s, continued mainly in Catalonia in the 1890s, and reaching a climax in Barcelona, in 1904-1909 and again between 1917 and 1922. Two pronounced features of Spanish terrorism were the atentados sociales, i.e., violence accompanying labor disputes (and conflicts between unions) and the subsequent widespread participation of criminal elements (pistoleros), “thieves and gunmen who certainly would not have been accepted by any other working-class party together with idealists of the purest and most selfless kind.”102 Behind the “strategic terrorism” of 1905, cul minating in the attempted assassination of King Alfonso, there might have been a design to trigger off a revolutionary movement. But the terror during and after the First World War, rooted according to Angel Pestana in a “mystical and apocalyptic idealism,” soon became commercialized with the pistoleros acting as dues collectors for the unions, terrorizing workers as well as overseers and employers.103 Terrorism in Spain ought to be viewed in the light of Spain’s long tradition of political violence, and the country’s particular social con ditions. The role of ideology was insignificant, nor indeed was any such doctrine needed.
Terrorist acts in the United States resembled those in Spain insofar as there was a tradition of violence and a long history of stormy, often bloody, labor disputes. This was particularly true among the miners, and continued from the days of the Molly Maguires to the Western Federation of Miners under Bill Haywood and the IWW. Following the arrival of German and later of East European proponents of “propaganda by deed,” an ideological element was infused which did not exist in southern Europe. The antiparliamentarian International Working People’s Association, founded in Pittsburgh in 1883, was syndicalist in character and advocated violence in the form of mass strikes and sabotage rather than acts of terror. Chicago was the cen ter of these activities.
But as the industrial conflicts worsened and tempers rose, the Alarm and the Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung became advocates of individual as well as mass terror. Dynamite was the great social solvent, the emancipator, and instruction was freely offered to workers on how to handle arms: “The Weapons of the Social Revolutionist Placed within the Reach of All.” Dynamite, a reader wrote, “of all good stuff, this is the stuff. ... It is something not very ornamental but exceedingly useful. It can be used against persons and things, it is better to use it against the former than against bricks and ma sonry.”104 C. S. Griffin argued that no government can exist without a head, and “by assassinating the head just as fast as a government head appeared, the government could be destroyed, and, generally speaking all governments be kept out of existence. Those least offen sive to the people should be destroyed last.”105 Albert Parsons, one of the accused in the Haymarket affair, editor of Alarm and former chief deputy collector of Internal Revenue in Austin, Texas, de fended the use of dynamite even in court: it was democratic, it made everybody equal. It was a peacemaker, man’s best friend. As force was the law of the universe, dynamite made all men equal and therefore free. But Parsons denied that he had anything to do with throwing the bomb.106 Those allegedly involved in the Haymarket affair were the contemporaries and pupils of Johann Most, for many years the high priest of terrorism in America.
In the 1890s, younger and even more radical activists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman came to the fore. In July 1892, Berkman tried to shoot Henry C. Frick of the Carnegie Com pany, whom he regarded responsible for the outrages committed during the Homestead strike earlier that year. Aged twenty-one at the time, Berkman had arrived in the United States five years previ ously. He was an enthusiast; Bazarov, Hegel, “Liberty” and Cherni-shevski (apparently in this order) were his idols.107 As he saw it, only the toilers, the producers, counted; the rest were parasites who had no right to exist. All means were justifiable, nay advisable in the fight against them: the more radical the treatment, the quicker the cure. Society was a patient, sick constitutionally and functionally; in the circumstances surgical treatment was imperative. The removal of a tyrant was an act of liberation, the highest duty of any revolutionary. As an enemy of the people, his assassination was in no way to be considered as the taking of human life.108 Berkman’s action was not only rejected by most Americans, it also caused a deep split in Anarchist ranks: Most, in Freiheit, denounced him, while Emma Goldman in the Anarchist came to his defense. The fact that Most, the “incar nation of defiance and revolt,” repudiated Berkman had come to her and her circle as a bombshell.109 It was almost as if Marx in his old age had been converted to capitalism.
Johann Most, born in Germany in 1846, had had an unhappy childhood in his native country. After an apprenticeship as a bookbinder and some Wanderjahre, as was customary among artisans at the time, he was arrested as a radical agitator in Austria. Later he became one of the leading figures of the German Social Democrats. He was an indefatigable organizer, an effective speaker and a fluent, if er ratic, strident writer. Although a member of the Reichstag, he had to flee Germany when Bismarck enacted his antisocialist emergency laws. Most founded and edited Freiheit, a Social Democratic weekly, in London. In 1879 he was still a Marxist: “As old Socialists we preach revolution not a putsch,” he wrote. But by temperament he was always more radical than the party leadership. At first he still covered himself by invoking the authority of others when preaching more extreme doctrines; for example, he approvingly quoted Wilhelm Liebknecht who had said that in certain circumstances, such as in a barbaric country like Russia, it might be possible to destroy the sys tem by means of the dagger and the revolver.110
But why only in Russia? Most was dissatisfied with Marxist explanations, and by September 1880 he reached the conclusion that Anarchist principles should be discussed in his paper. After all, they were being received with much more enthusiasm (as events in Russia showed) than social democratic gradualism. He published Bakunin’s Revolutionary Catechism for the benefit of revolutionaries who (he predicted) were about to copy the Russian Anarchists’ tactics in Germany.111 He hailed the Irish dynamiters: no honest social revolutionary could blame them, even if their acts of vengeance proved cruel: “Once we shall be stronger, we shall act like them; a party waging war cannot tolerate traitors in its ranks. The devil take the false, weak-hearted humanitarian approach. Long live hate! Long live vengeance!” Or on another occasion: “Let us all do our duty. Let us all work for the day when attacks will multiply against all those who bear responsibility for the servitude, exploitation and misery of the people.” After an enthusiastic editorial (“Victory, Victory”), hailing the assassination of Alexander II, Most was sent to prison by a London court.112 In the meantime he had also been expelled from the ranks of the German Social Democrats.
Freiheit was transferred to the United States and during the next few years it became the world’s most uninhibited Anarchist mouth piece, preaching propaganda by deed. It was also the most influen tial; some issues had a circulation of 25,000, and Most’s pamphlets such as The Beast of Property and The Revolutionary Science of War were widely read.
Most rejected the European socialist parties’ approach. He did not believe, as they did, in patient organizational and propagandistic work; he rejected their assumption that sooner or later strong left-wing parties would emerge and that the system would collapse as a result of its own contradictions. He was convinced that the people, at all times and in every country, were mature for revolution (and the state of freedom that would follow it) but that they lacked the courage to undertake a determined effort. Thus a small minority was called upon to show the way: the mass of people had always borne a certain resemblance to something monkey- and parrot-like, and it was quite ludicrous to wait for an initiative from the unenlightened, volatile and hesitant masses.113 Few of those born into servitude could get rid of their chains by their own efforts, but nonetheless they should not be required to bow to the majority. Even in a future, free society there should be no tyranny by the majority. A revolutionary who really meant business had to engage in conspiracy. Once he sought his goal he could not possibly reject the means that were to lead to a realization of his aim.114 The means were bound to be barbaric — not because the revolutionaries chose them but because the present system was essentially barbaric and could be overthrown only by its own weapons. The murderers themselves had to be killed. The road to Humanitaet led through barbarism.115 The law of the jungle had forever prevailed in history; the victor had always been right. No Russian revolutionary of the 1880s would have accepted any such doctrine but, unlike them, Most and some of his Anarchist comrades were influenced by various contemporary Social Darwinist philosophers who glorified the elite and even the superman. One of the forgotten prophets of this subculture was Ragnar Redbeard, whose writings appealed both to the extreme left and the far right, and thus should be mentioned — at least in passing.
Blessed are the strong, Redbeard wrote, for they shall possess the earth; cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke. Blessed are the unmerciful, their posterity shall own the world. Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice but by Might. The naked sword is still kingmaker and kingbreaker as of yore — all other theo ries are lies and lures. Each molecule, each animal fights for its life, the workers have to fight for theirs or surrender. The survival of the strongest is the iron law of history; personal cowardice is the greatest vice of a demoralized age. Courage that delights in danger is needed, and must not know despair.116 Parts of Redbeard’s books read in sections like a precursor of Mein Kampf or Alfred Rosenberg, with tirades against the non-Aryans and appeals that “we must either abandon our reason or abandon Christ.” Jesus, Peter, Paul and James were crude socialist reformers with misshapen souls, demagogues, politicians-of-the-slum. Nothing that is noble can ever emerge from the slums. Socialism, Christianity, Democracy, Equality are all the whining yelpings of base-bred mongrel-multitudes.117
Such reasoning was not uncommon toward the end of the nine teenth century. One of Redbeard’s idols was Cecil Rhodes (“there is no cant and hypocrisy about him”). Teddy Roosevelt apparently liked the book. It was an all-purpose philosophy: the left could draw encouragement from Redbeard’s thesis that not once in the whole course of human history had a subjugated people ever regained their liberty without first butchering their oppressors and then confiscating the property of their former masters. Redbeard was certainly sure of his case: he offered 50,000 ounces of pure gold to anyone who could show him one authentic example to the contrary.118
Traces of Redbeard’s message can be detected in Most’s writings. In order for the masses to be free, the rulers must be killed. Powder and lead, poison, dynamite, fire and knives were more telling than a thousand revolutionary speeches. Most did not rule out propaganda, but only propaganda by deed could be regarded as effective in sowing confusion among the rulers and mobilizing the masses. He was one of the first to recognize the importance of the media: with modern means of communication, terrorist actions would immedi ately be known all over the globe; wherever people met they would discuss its causes. Most apprehended what became known much later as the “echo effect”: the deed would be imitated every day, even every hour.119 He had no patience with those who argued that revolutionaries fought against a system not against individuals. There were no social systems which were not represented and, indeed, made to work, by persons. The system was defended by the forces of “law and order”; to kill them was not murder, for policemen and spies were not human.120 The enemies were pigs, dogs, bestial mon sters, devils in human shape, reptiles, parasites, scum, the dregs of society, canaille, hellhounds. How could one exterminate them all in the most effective way? Freiheit, like some of the French Anarchist periodicals, freely offered advice, and like them and the Russian journals saw in dynamite the tool for the destruction of society. The “New Messiah” was hailed in editorials and even poems:
Zuletzt ein Hoch der Wissenschaft.
Dem Dynamit, das heisst der Kraft
Der Kraft in uns’ren Haenden
Die Welt wird besser Tag fuer Tag.121
[At last a toast to Science
To dynamite that is the force
The force in our own hands;
The world gets better day by day.]
At one time Most took a job in an explosives factory in Jersey City Heights receiving on-the-job training in the production of explosives. He stole a little dynamite and found that it was more reliable than the homemade variety.122 He pioneered various innovations such as the letter (incendiary) bomb and in a remarkable flight of fantasy even envisaged bombing the enemy from the air. With the help of dirigible airships it would be possible one day to drop dynamite on military parades attended by tsars and emperors; neither infantry, cavalry nor artillery would be able to prevent such attacks.123 Dynamite, in short, was an invincible weapon. Some “innocents” (Most’s quotation marks) were bound to get hurt but this did not bother him unduly: it was not their business to be in places where a bomb was likely to explode. British women and children had been injured by Irish bombs, but the British in their “wars of extermination” had committed worse outrages in many parts of the world. (Most was not, however, an uncritical admirer of the Irish and frequently dis sociated himself from the “sectarian” character of their struggle.) The revolutionary should not be guided by considerations of chiv alry; bombs should be placed quite indiscriminately wherever the upper ten thousand were likely to meet — for example, in churches and dance halls. Furthermore, a revolutionary about to commit a terrorist act was duty-bound to kill any witness likely to betray him.124
The question whether assassination of individual monarchs, ministers, and generals would have any decisive political impact (and the arguments of his socialist opponents to the contrary) preoccupied Most throughout his life. In later years he admitted that it was illusory to believe that the removal of individual generals would lead to the defeat of an enemy army as long as the proletariat itself was not up in arms. At the same time, however, he stressed that the repressive system was highly centralized, and that a blow at the heart of tyranny would remove a not easily replaceable dangerous foe125 (akin to the reasoning of the Russian revolutionaries about “hitting at the cen ter”). Again, defending himself against charges about the inhuman character of the kind of war he preached, Most argued that governments were using the very same weapons he advocated — only theirs were a hundred times stronger and more destructive. He made it known that a pamphlet of his about the revolutionary science of war had largely been copied from a book issued under the auspices of the Austrian general staff. The revolutionary party was not a state and could not play such games as breaking off diplomatic relations. In reply to a charge that he had been ill advised to discuss the use of poison, Most replied that arsenic and strychnine had first been recommended by American newspapers to eliminate useless ele ments in society.126
Most maintained that in money — even more than in dynamite — was the key to success to be found. Money could buy more reliable and effective explosives than those made at home. A revolutionary who could somehow put his hands on a hundred million dollars would do mankind a greater service than by killing ten monarchs; this kind of money could turn the world upside down. The few cents collected among workers were quite insufficient for any meaningful conspiratorial work. Gold would open a great many doors normally closed to the terrorist, corrupting and disarming enemy agents, and enabling the revolutionary to infiltrate “society.” In short, funds were needed to carry out the “deed” and these had to be “confis cated.”127
It has been said that by mid-1885 Most had mellowed, and had begun to doubt the efficacy of “propaganda by deed.”128 In 1890, however, he still argued that it was necessary to engage in deeds, even of a bestial kind, and he continued to justify political assassina tions wherever they occurred.129 But it is quite true that there was a gradual shift in emphasis, and that in later years he put greater stress on propaganda. Most praised the Russian revolutionaries not only for throwing bombs but also for risking their lives by establishing secret printing presses. He argued that terrorist acts per se had little, if any, impact unless they took place at the right time and place, and that “propaganda by deed” was no children’s game.130 Most was in favor of a dual strategy: legal or semilegal organizations with meetings and publications, on one hand, and on the other operations of small conspiratorial groups. The fewer people who knew about terrorist actions, the more assured would be their success. Militants usually had families and it was irresponsible to jeopardize their liveli hood; intellectuals would immediately lose their jobs if it became known that they belonged to the Anarchist movement.131 There was yet another consideration which made a division of labor imperative: some revolutionaries were capable speakers and writers and might also prove good fighters in the heat of battle, but they were tempera mentally incapable of planning cold-blooded assassination. This was not cowardice — such men and women were simply too good-hearted, too idealistic. Though it was desirable that every “theoretical revolutionary” ought also to be a man of action, it was clearly unrealistic to expect this from every one of them. Out of a false sense of shame many a theoretician could not admit even to himself that he was not born to commit murder. The revolutionary movement had to accept this fact of political life which regrettably meant fewer assassinations, thereby prolonging the “transition period,” but nothing could be done about it. These then were Most’s views in his later years, and it was not surprising therefore that he condemned Berk-man’s attack — a condemnation which made Emma Goldman so angry that she horsewhipped her former guru.
The American atmosphere was corrosive. Most’s New York group with its beer evenings, excursions and amateur theatrical performances gradually came to resemble a German Verein rather than a Russian terrorist organization. Much of his activity was absorbed by internal dissension. His influence, by and large, was restricted to German-speaking workers; some Italians and East European Jews also came to his meetings and, on occasion, a few native Americans, but they were the exceptions. Despite all his inexhaustible energy, Most came to realize toward the end of his life that America was not to be the center of a world revolu tion and that his was a voice calling in the desert. At long last he also understood that the wall dividing Anarchists and the trade union movement had to be pulled down and even though he con tinued to oppose the American unions, he favored the principle of worker organization.
At a distance of almost a century Most’s hyper-radicalism seems both absurd and self-defeating. But in fairness his views have to be examined against the general background of time and place. It was a violent age, when public opinion freely held that workers who went on strike for higher wages and shorter working hours should be shot. A great deal of brutality accompanied labor disputes and Anarchists were submitted to constant harassment by the police. On the other hand it was only in America that a newspaper such as Freiheit could appear for any length of time. Though the employers had the right to exploit their employees, the workers, too, could freely organize themselves and take counteraction. America, after all, was neither Tsarist Russia nor Ireland. There were effective forms of political struggle other than violence. Most failed to make a convincing case as to why terrorism was necessary or likely to succeed in the United States and for this reason his influence remained restricted to a small group of newly arrived immigrants.
Marx and Engels regarded Most and his supporters as semieducated, muddleheaded men — or, alternatively, as dangerous charlatans. Nonetheless the issue of individual terror was to occupy orthodox Marxism for a long time. Engels’s common-law wife, Lizzy Burns, was a Fenian, and their house in Manchester provided a shelter for Irish militants. In a letter to Kugelmann, Engels welcomed the Fenian raid in Manchester (September 1867) in which a prison van transporting Fenians was attacked. Three months later the three main accused were hanged. Engels wrote that the only thing the Fenians had lacked were a few martyrs; he admired the violent anti-English character of their movement and thought that agrarian terror was the only effective means of protecting the Irish against extermination by the landlords. Despite their approval in principle of the Fenian approach, Marx and Engels condemned the “foolish ness which is to be found in every conspiracy.” They denounced the purposeless “propaganda by deed” for which their party ought not to be made responsible and dissociated themselves from individual actions such as the Fenian bombing of Clerkenwell Prison. It was one thing to call for an overthrow of Irish landlordism and to denounce Britain’s truly “Prussian behaviour” in Ireland; it was another to give unconditional support to the strictly nationalist, religious-sectarian approach of the Irish radicals who had no sympathies for Marxism and the policies of the First International.132
The issue of individual terror also played a certain role in the campaign of Marx and Engels against Bakunin, their main rival in the First International. In these attacks they made use of the revelations of the Nechaev trial and the brochures which Bakunin had written in 1869, in part inspired by Nechaev. Engels wrote that only a police agent could have glorified the bandit as the authentic revolutionary and identified revolution with individual and collective murder.133 They might have taken a more tolerant view had it not been for Bakunin’s Panslavism and, above all, his influence in certain sections of the International. For the Marxist attitude toward the terror of the Narodnaya Volya was by no means consistent and unambiguous. Plekhanov had correctly predicted in 1879 that a terrorist campaign would end in catastrophe and setback for socialism in Russia. But Plekhanov was not yet a full-fledged Marxist at the time and his conversion certainly did not become easier when he realized that Marx and Engels who had so bitterly denounced Bakunin had en couraging words for the neo-Bakuninists in Russia and refrained from criticizing their clearly nonsensical theoretical program. When Plekhanov published his Nashe Raznoglasiya (Our Differences) in 1884 Engels dryly noted that the Narodniki were after all the only people in Russia who were doing something. And Marx’s comment on the assassins of Alexander II is worth recalling: in his eyes they were sterling people through and through, simple, businesslike and heroic; they endeavored to show Europe that their modi operandi were specifically Russian and historically inevitable. One could no more moralize about their action (for or against) Marx wrote, than about the earthquake of Chios.134
Marx and Engels exaggerated the strength of the Narodnaya Volya and overestimated the weakness of Tsarist despotism. “Russia is France of this century,” Engels told Lopatin, a Russian emigrant. And, in a letter to Vera Zasulich he wrote that the revolution might break out any day in Russia, just a push was needed. Perhaps Blanqui and his fantasies had been right after all — with regard to Russia only, of course. Perhaps a small conspiracy could overthrow a whole society? Perhaps this was one of the few cases in which a handful of people could “make” a revolution? Such comments were anathema to Plekhanov and he must have welcomed the fact that Engels later revised his views. In retrospect (in 1894) Engels noted that there had been an acute revolutionary situation in Russia and for this reason Marx had told the Russian revolutionaries in the late 18705 not to be in too much of a hurry to “jump” into capitalism. There had been, in fact, two governments: on the one hand the tsar, and on the other, the Executive Committee of the conspirators and the terrorists, whose power grew by the day. The overthrow of Tsarism seemed at hand.135 Fifteen years later these illusions had faded away and the Marxist attitude to terrorism changed. With regard to Western Europe, Marx and Engels had not been willing to make allowances for terrorism in any event: revolutions were made by classes not by a few conspirators. Hence Marx’s scathing comment on Most’s theo retical attempts to ascribe to the assassination of the tsar a panacea—this was just “childish” (Marx in a letter dated April 1881 to his daughter Jenny). In January 1885 Engels took an even dimmer view of the activities of the Irish dynamiters and others in Western Europe who wanted to copy the terrorist struggle. This, he said, was revolu tion a la Schinderhannes (a famous German eighteenth-century rob ber), for it directed one’s weapons not against one’s real enemies but against the public at large. Such terrorists were not the friends of Russian revolutionaries but their worst enemies. Only the Russian government was interested in actions of this kind. One could possibly understand the motives of the Irish who had been driven to despair, but their effect was to stir up blind rage among British public opin ion. Marx and Engels, as already noted, were highly critical of the Fenian leaders who were “mostly asses and partly exploiters.” The Clerkenwell explosion, Marx wrote to Engels, was a very stupid act; one could not really expect the London proletarians to be blown up in honor of the Fenian emissaries: “There is always a kind of fatality about such a secret, melodramatic conspiracy.”136 Engels reacted even more strongly; “cannibals,” “cowards,” “stupid fanatics” were some of the epithets used. After the Phoenix Park murders Engels wrote that such bragging purposeless propaganda par lefait should be left to the Bakuninists, Mostians, and those who threatened an Irish revolution which never materialized. True, on another occasion Marx wrote to his daughter that his whole family supported the Fenians. But he offered an interesting explanation: his motives were not simply humanitarian — “To accelerate social development in Europe, you must push on the catastrophe of official England. To do so you must attack it in Ireland.”137
Yet with all these reservations the influence of Blanquism (which always implied an element of terrorism) on Marx and Engels, and a fortiori on Lenin, was stronger than they were generally prepared to admit. They rejected, of course, primitive Blanquism, the conspiracy of a handful of people who aimed at insurrection. Such attempts were invariably doomed to failure because they lacked mass support. But Marx and Engels knew, or instinctively felt, that the masses could not seize power unaided, that they needed a leadership and that in the final analysis “Blanquism on a higher level” was essential. A conspiracy was needed that could mobilize the masses. Whether a conspiracy such as this aimed at insurrection, civil war, sabotage, a terrorist campaign, or a combination of these and other elements were secondary questions. While the Marxists rejected terrorism as unsuitable for advanced Western countries, they could not possibly reject it tout court.
The German Social Democratic leaders were certainly more em phatic about terrorism than their teachers in London. Wilhelm Liebknecht thought Most clinically mad, Bebel took a somewhat more charitable view: Most was a gifted man but was in need of someone to discipline and guide him. The terrorist organizations, Bebel said, were deeply penetrated by police spies and agents provocateurs. Furthermore, the Anarchists assisted the police in creating a public climate in which all left-wing opposition could be branded as “terrorist.” In fact, the police considered the Anarchists harmless; it was the Social Democrats they feared, and they were grateful for any pretext given to suppress them.
The debate on terrorism was resumed among the Russian Marxists when the Social Revolutionaries took up terrorist operations around the turn of the century. Lenin’s attitude to individual terror was ambivalent: while paying tribute to their heroism, he rejected terrorism as practiced by the Narodovoltsy. Then, it had been restricted to a group of intellectuals who were cut off from the working class and the peasants; quoting his late brother who had believed in terrorism and, at the same time, dissociating himself from him, Lenin wrote that Russian terror “was and remains a specific kind of struggle practised by the intelligentsia.”138 He was all the more opposed to the Social Revolutionaries practicing “old-style terror” at a time when a revolutionary mass movement had emerged. At best, it made organizational and political work among the people more compli cated. According to Lenin, experience had shown Anarchist terror, in the form of individual assassination, as harmful and counterpro ductive. He juxtaposed assassinations carried out in the name of the people (by the Socialist Revolutionaries) to revolutionary activities undertaken by the Bolsheviks “together with the people” (whatever that may have meant in practice).139 The long and arduous work of organization and political propaganda was preferable to a repetition of “easy” tactics which had never proved their worth. In the final analysis Lenin’s rejection of terror was tactical, not, as in Plekhanov’s case, a matter of principle. He thought Plekhanov’s total rejection of terror philistine and wrote in Iskra that he had never rejected terror in principle for the simple reason that it was a form of military operation that might be usefully applied or even be essential in certain moments of battle.140 When Friedrich Adler shot Stuergkh, the Austrian prime minister, in October 1916, Lenin wrote that he was not opposed to political murder per se. In 1901, fifteen years previously, different conditions had prevailed and he thought that at that time terror was inadvisable as likely to disrupt the revolutionary forces and not the government. By contrast, in October 1905, at the height of the first Russian revolution, he expressed real anguish that his party had merely been talking about bombs but that not a single one had been made. Terrorism was to be recommended provided that the mood of the masses and the working-class movement on the spot was taken into account.
Rosa Luxemburg and Martov thought it harmful (not only aestheti cally) that ordinary bandits should collaborate with revolutionary workers. Lenin had no such scruples. In fact, several prominent Bolsheviks cooperated in terrorist enterprises: Krassin, who was an engineer, supervised the manufacture of bombs for the Maximalists; “Kamo” (Ter Petrosian) organized some daring and successful armed robberies in the Caucasus; Litvinov and Semashko (the future minis ter of health) were arrested in Germany when they tried to change the money that they had “expropriated.” The Mensheviks de nounced the Bolshevik tactics, but Lenin did not even bother to reply.141 After the suppression of the first revolution, Lenin (and also Trotsky) again argued that terror was ineffectual: the assassination of a minister would not bring the overthrow of capitalism nearer. Trotsky in 1911 wrote in the Austrian Social Democratic organ Der Kampf that he had grave doubts as to the efficacy of terror. Even successful terrorist operations only temporarily introduced confusion into the ranks of the establishment; the capitalist state did not rest upon ministers alone and could not be destroyed with them:
The classes whom the state serves will always find new men — the mechanism remains intact and continues to function. Far deeper is the confusion that terrorist attempts introduce into the ranks of the working masses. If it suffices to arm oneself with a revolver in order to reach our goal, then to what end are the goals of the class struggle? If a pinch of powder and a slug of lead are enough to destroy the enemy, what need is there of a class organization? If there is rhyme or reason in scaring titled personages with the noise of an explosion, what need is there for a party?142
These observations of Trotsky have frequently been quoted by subsequent generations of Trotskyites in their disputations with comrades who advocate a more militant line. But it is also true that Trotsky’s attitude, like Lenin’s, was in fact more ambiguous than would ap pear. He derided the “eunuchs and pharisees” who opposed terrorism as a matter of principle. However, the account with capitalism was too great to be settled by the assassination of individual ministers — only collective action would repay the debt. On another occasion he noted that while terrorism in Russia was a thing of the past, it might have a future in what would now be called the “Third World”; there were auspicious conditions in Bengal and Punjab; it was part of the political awakening in these countries.143 In 1934, after the murder of Kirov, Trotsky defined individual terrorism as “bureaucra tism turned inside out” — not one of his most brilliant formulations and not even relevant to the Kirov case — indicative of his views on individual as distinct from collective terrorism, which he de fended in a famous polemic with Kautsky when he was still in power.
Communist attitudes toward individual terror have shown the same ambiguity ever since. Terrorism might be rejected in principle; nonetheless on certain occasions terrorism in practice has not been ruled out (Spain after the First World War, Bulgaria in 1923, Germany in 1929-1931, or Venezuela in the early 1960s). In November 1931 when the Central Committee of the German Communist party came out against individual terror, many militants opposed this turn in the party line.144 The official textbooks condemned individual terror in the sharpest possible terms but this did not deter the GPU, its predecessors and successors, from “liquidating” political enemies such as Trotsky, who were considered particularly dangerous. More recently, individual terror has been practiced on a fairly wide scale by Communist-led movements of national liberation such as in Vietnam — less so in China. Terror is regarded, however, to quote Lenin again, as merely one form of military operation — usually not a decisive one. Communist parties have bitterly attacked rival left-wing movements for concentrating on terrorism to the detriment of other forms of political and military struggle: the history of Communism in Latin America during the last two decades offers many such exam ples.
The belief has gained ground in recent years that terrorism has been, and is, the monopoly of the extreme left wing. But this is true only to the extent that theoretical problems of terrorism are always much more widely discussed by the left. At least as frequently, terrorism has been employed by right-wing groups and nationalist movements. Terrorism in India in the 1890s had a distinct religious infusion (the worship of Kali and Durga and the anti-cow killing campaign) and was frequently practiced by high-caste Brahmins. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish terrorism is a good example of empiri cal terrorism. While the American Clan na-Gael stood for “bloodless terrorism” directed against buildings and similar targets, O’Donovan Rossa favored indiscriminate attacks. The Invincibles of the 1880s practiced individual terror such as the Phoenix Park murders. The Irish proponents of terrorism were very much interested in gim micks, whereas doctrinal issues hardly bothered them. They spent sixty thousand dollars on building three submarines in the United States which were never used; Rossa wanted to spray the House of Commons with osmic gas; and money was collected for the purchase of poison stilettoes, lucifer matches and other unlikely weapons.145 They saw no need for elaborate theoretical justification: had Britain not behaved much worse all over the world, killing women and children in Africa, shooting into unarmed crowds, blowing Indian sepoys from cannon? The purpose of the dynamite campaign in the 1880s was to cause maximum dislocation and annoyance, to harm the tourist industry, to make travel in underground railways risky, to cause widespread “moral panic” and the paralysis of business.146 The Invincibles predicted that the new “mysterious and overshadowing war of destruction” would eventually result in Britain having to adopt fiercer coercion laws at home than Ireland had known. But if the Irish leaders were not ideologists they were not ignorant men and, given the occasion, they could be quite eloquent on the subject of terrorism: “Despotism violates the moral frontier as invasion vio lates the geographical frontier,” one of them wrote. “To drive out the tyrant or to drive out the English is in either case to retake your territory. There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices. After philosophy there must be action. The strong hand finishes what the idea has planned. Prometheus Bound begins, Aristogeiton com pletes; the Encyclopaedics enlighten souls, the 6th of May electrifies them.”
Or on mass psychology: “The multitude has a tendency to accept a master. Their mass deposits apathy. A mob easily totalizes itself into obedience. Men must be aroused, pushed, shocked by the very ben efits of their deliverance, their eyes wounded with the truth, light thrown in terrible handfuls.”147
Heated debates took place among the Irish leaders, but these were on tactics rather than issues of principle. John Devoy thought Rossa’s dynamiters “fools, imbeciles, insane designers,” the whole show was a burlesque “which makes us appear fools and ignoramuses.”148 But this did not prevent Devoy from threat ening in 1881 to take a British minister’s life in reprisal for every Irishman killed. Thus, he repeated Rossa’s threat, five years ear lier, that if a skirmisher was hanged, the minister who ordered the execution would be killed and the city in which the patriot was hanged would be burned down.149 And even Parnell, who never expressed sympathy for terrorism in public, frequently con veyed in private the impression that he sympathized with the militants. His, too, was a dual strategy: constitutional means rein forced by the actions of secret organizations. No one knows to what extent he was involved in the terrorist campaign.150 The reasons for the opposition of Devoy and most other Irish leaders to individual assassination up to the First World War was that Britain was too powerful, that Irish resources were insufficient, and that there were other, more effective means of struggle for the time being.
Assassinations of political opponents carried out by the Black Hun dred in prewar Russia are examples of terrorism as carried out by the extreme right. There were many more cases of assassination after the end of the First World War in other parts of Europe. Hitler had said more than once that “heads would roll, ours, or the others” — and the Nazis would ensure that it would be those of the others. Giving evidence in the trial of four National Socialists in Berlin in 1931, he argued that this had just been a parable, a synonym for ideological confrontation, and that he had always demanded strict observance of legality. If his veto on illegality was violated, those responsible were brought to account. Acts of violence had never been contemplated by his party.151 But if Hitler had to stick to cer tain legal niceties, his aides were under no such constraints. Thus Joseph Goebbels: whoever defended his own Weltanschauung with terror and brutality would one day gain power. The “street,” as Goebbels saw it, was the decisive place in which policy was made. Conquest of the street meant the gain of the masses: he who had the masses would conquer the state.152 The basic Nazi strategy was to mobilize the masses in order to conquer the street, disrupt meetings of other parties, and attack their opponents’ demonstrations. Occa sionally they would engage in terrorism, and in defense they quoted the authority of Mussolini. “Terror? Never. It simply is social hy giene, taking those individuals out of circulation like a doctor would take out a bacillus.”153 Mussolini, a radical socialist in his younger years, had welcomed terrorist actions in various parts of the world: “il proletario deve essere psicologicamente preparato all’uso della violenza liberatice,” he once wrote.154 His orientation toward the proletariat changed, but Mussolini’s belief in “liberating violence” remained. There was progressive, liberating violence, he said on one occasion, and stupid, reactionary violence — that used by his political enemies. The Socialists ask what is our program? he once wrote in Popolo d’ltalia. Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists. This, too, was terror, but of a different kind — mass violence in tended to intimidate opponents rather than eliminate individual enemy leaders. The Nazis always stressed that they were never the first to engage in terror. True, they were not “bourgeois aesthetes” but only engaged in “terror against terror” in self-defense.155 On the other hand, no German political party appreciated better than the Nazis the tremendous uses to which political violence could be put so as to maximize publicity in the mass media. Any clash was bound to be reported on the front page of the newspapers, and a small and uninfluential group soon became nationally known. This was Goeb-bels’ strategy in the “conquest of Berlin” and his example was copied elsewhere.156
Neither the Nazis nor the Italian Fascists needed ideological justification for political violence. Theirs was the generation that had fought in the First World War, and to them it was perfectly obvious that in the struggle for power, all forms of violence were permissible. The friend-foe dichotomy was at the bottom of their politics, taking it for granted that the enemy would not be defeated by persuasion alone. The enemy was the democratic-liberal system, and radical, pseudo-socialist undertones were by no means absent in the on slaught on the “system.” This emerged from Mussolini’s early pro gram, also appearing in Nazi slogans during the Kampfzeit. The Nazis quite frankly admitted that they would cause maximum dis ruption, for as long as “business was good” they would not be feared.157 At a Berlin trial against Nazi storm troopers, Count Hell-dorf, their leader, argued that it was quite absurd to accuse them of having attacked Jews, for they were fighting against the capitalist system, which was represented, after all, not only by Jews. . .,158
On the whole, however, individual terror was comparatively rare in Germany and Italy; it was more frequently used by the smaller Fascist and proto-Fascist groups — precisely because they were small. These groups are usually labeled “right-wing extremist,” but such labels are only of limited help in understanding their motives and strategy. Certain German Free Corps such as the Organization Consul, engaged in systematic terror in 1921-1922.159 But they were radicals, not conservatives, and the last thing they wanted was to prop up a “doomed bourgeois society.” Some of them were pure Nihilists; Ernst von Salomon later wrote about himself and his com rades that they “killed whoever fell into our hands, we burned what ever could be burned. . . . The march into an uncertain future was for us sufficiently meaningful and suited the demands of our blood.”160 This was gibberish, of course, but it described fairly accu rately the mood prevailing in these circles. When the terrorists de cided to kill Rathenau, the German foreign minister, it was not be cause they hated him or thought him particularly wicked; on the contrary they admired him. He had to be removed because he was more significant than mere mediocrities. They saw the struggle as a “duel between giants” (an image that had frequently been invoked by the terrorist faction of the Narodnaya Volya). At one stage the Freikorps terrorists planned to kill von Seeckt, head of the Reich-swehr, and the Hungarian Fascists planned the assassination of the right-wing minister of the interior. The Rumanian Iron Guard assas sinated two prime ministers — Duca in 1933 and Calinescu in 1939. None of these victims, or intended victims, was a man of the left, or a liberal.
The composition of “right-wing” terrorist groups varied greatly from country to country. Many criminal elements were found among the members of the Hungarian “Arrow Cross”; the Macedonian IMRO, once a patriotic movement, developed into a Mafia-type orga nization, accepting “contracts” from the highest bidders and engaging, inter alia, in the traffic of narcotics.161 The Rumanian Iron Guard on the other hand consisted largely of young idealists of sorts (the “legionnaires”) who stood for a religious revival, spiritual regen eration, sacrifice and martyrdom: “You want programs?” the “Man ual of the Legionnaires” asked. “They are on everybody’s lips. Better look for men. Anyone can turn out a programme in one night: that is not what the country needs.”162 The legionnaires were in a moral quandary: as good Christians they believed in forgiveness, but as patriots they felt that the nation could be saved only by un-Christian acts. Murder had to be committed but had also to be expiated, either by surrender after the deed or at least by suffering for their sins in their hearts. Similar to certain Anarchist groups that preceded them, the legionnaires came to believe that there was only one ideology, the Deed (Vasile Marin). Like Sorel before, and a great many minor thinkers after, they believed in “the ethical value of force.”163 Their terrorism comprised a mystique of death. “Legionnaires are born to die,” it was said in their songs, and “Death is a gladsome wedding for us.” Lombroso had first noted a suicidal impulse among Anarchist groups in Western Europe and this impulse could be found among them, too. Although the Rumanian authorities claimed that the le gionnaires had plans to seize power it is not certain if they ever seriously intended to do so.
A common denominator marked terrorist movements of the “left” and the “right” in Europe, indicating a protest against modern soci ety, against corrupt political parties and “plutocracy.” Patriotic and religious motivations were called in as reinforcements. This reaction was not limited to Europe. Japanese terrorism drew its inspiration from the knightly spirit of the Samurai; more surprising is the fact that some of its prominent practitioners had once been Anarchists or belonged to the Tolstoyan “School of Love for the Native Soil.”164 Capitalism and Western civilization had to be destroyed; the mem bers of the “Terrorist League of Blood” were called upon to sacrifice themselves for the principle of the love for the soil, to abandon their families (shades of Ishutin and Nechaev) and renounce their personal existences forever. The Japanese terrorists of the 1920s were manipu lated by military leaders and right-wing adventurers, who wanted to frighten the emperor, the court and the government into accepting a more aggressive policy: peace at home, expansion abroad.165 But the threat of assassination alone would not have sufficed in a country with traditions like those of Japan. Terrorism was also a moral force, inducing an uneasy conscience among those it threatened and in timidating the politicians who did not wish to appear disloyal to the terrorists’ concept of the historical mission of the Japanese people.
Right-wing terror in Europe between the two world wars took many different forms. In France the activists of the extreme right limited their activities to the universities and the theaters, intimidating unpopular professors and playwrights. This was terror of incitement — of speech, of the written word which drove Roger Salengro to suicide. There was also more tangible terrorism such as that of the CSAR, a small Fascist group, on which more below, leading to assassination. If the French right used journalism for its purposes, the early Austrian Nazis (and the Japanese extremists) regarded the press as one of its main enemies. “One kills these dogs by shooting or poisoning them, every means is right,” one of the early advocates of Austrian terrorism wrote. His comrades planned to send letter bombs to leading journalists and to destroy the printing presses.166 The Finnish Lapua movement did not kill their opponents but kidnaped them, beat them up, and dropped them over the Russian border. The Italian Fascists forcibly fed castor oil to their opponents adding insult (and ridicule) to injury.
But individual terror, to repeat once again, was relatively infre quent among the Fascist mass parties; Rathenau and Erzberger were killed by small groups who had no clear political program. Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor, was assassinated in the course of an armed insurrection and Matteoti was murdered when the Fascists were already in power. Terrorism in Fascist, as in Communist, strategy was accredited only a minor place for reasons of effectiveness; there was nothing in Fascist doctrine which would have ruled out terrorism in principle. The thoughts of right-wing activism on the subject were expressed most succinctly by Carl Schmitt in his writings on the “political soldier”: the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount applied to the private enemy, the inimicus, not to the hostis, the public foe. Political conflicts were settled not by discussion, persuasion or barter, as the liberals mistakenly believed, but by struggle, both in foreign as well as domestic policy.167 In the final analysis, Nazis, Fascists and other extreme right-wing groups did not need a philosopher to teach them that “love your enemies” did not apply to politics. They knew this instinctively.
The similarities between the inspiration underlying terrorism of “Right” and “Left” have been noted: the assumption that the deed was more important than words; the belief that any change would be for the better; a contempt for liberalism and bourgeois democracy; a sense of the historical mission of the chosen few. It was no mere coincidence that Carl Schmitt, who provided the most sophisticated justification for political violence as practiced by the right, should develop a “theory of the partisan” after the Second World War in which he expressed admiration for Mao and left-wing revolutionaries — his philosophy of violence is truly value-free. On both extremes of the political spectrum terrorism was regarded as a useful weapon to discredit the “system.” The SS too held to a perverse idealism, a belief that only they took values seriously, that they were chosen for the same quasi-religious moment of sacrifice. The Narodovoltsy killed with a bad conscience, whereas the Fascists had no such qualms of conscience. The Anarchists of “propaganda by deed” did not weep for their victims either. When Emile Henry, who had thrown a bomb at the Cafe Terminus appeared in court, he declared “there are no innocent bourgeois”; some of his comrades went fur ther, expressing the view that there were no innocent human beings in general. There were, of course, differences between the terror of the left and the right in other respects: the Narodovoltsy practiced terror because they saw no other way to make their demands heard in a regime which had outlawed all opposition. They denounced acts of terror committed in countries in which normal political activity was possible (as in their message after the assassination of President Garfield). They genuinely believed in a free and nonviolent society. The terrorists of the right did not share this belief in the essential goodness of human nature. Their ideal society was of a very different kind.
Terrorist doctrine is of considerable importance for the under standing of the terrorist phenomenon but it is only one of the moti vating forces, and not always the decisive one. The Macedonian IMRO and the Croatian Ustacha began as genuine patriotic move ments. By the 1930s they had become play-balls of foreign interests: the Macedonians must have known that they could not possibly at tain national independence, and the Croatian separatists were aware that they would have to pay a heavy price, such as the surrender of Dalmatia to their Italian protectors. The Croatians launched indis criminate attacks inside Yugoslavia; the Macedonian terrorists killed each other and were also used by the Bulgarian government for the liquidation of political opponents. Croats and Macedonians probably still believed that operations directed against their oppressors cou pled with foreign help might one day result in a favorable interna tional constellation in which they could attain their aims. But it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty whether they (and other groups) still predominantly comprised a political movement, or whether the key to their activities must be found in other levels of social behavior. There was, furthermore, “instinctive terrorism” among movements with national or social grievances that fitted into no known ideological category. It can be taken for granted that the Ukrainians in eastern Poland and the peasants of Schleswig-Holstein at the time of the Great Depression had never read terrorist tracts.168 But they knew, even if they had not read it in books, that publicity was needed to make their protest known; it was far more likely that they would be listened to if political pressure was reinforced by terrorist action. Sometimes there was a simple division of labor: the more militant wing of a movement, dissatisfied with the lack of prog ress, would opt for “direct action,” whereas the more moderate would continue their nonviolent activities. In short, if it has been possible since time immemorial to make love or to cook without the help of textbooks, the same applies to terrorism. In some cases the decision to adopt a terrorist strategy was taken on the basis of a detailed political analysis. But usually the mood came first, and ideo logical rationalization only after. On occasion this led to the emer gence of a systematic strategy of terrorism and to bitter debates between proponents and opponents. But terrorism also took place without precise doctrine and systematic strategy, with only hazy notions about the direction of the struggle and its aim. Like Faust, the terrorists could truly claim Im Anfang war die Tat — in the beginning there was the deed.