WRITINGS ON TYRANNY AND THE ORIGINS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BOMB
In ancient times, some religious leaders saw tyranny as a violation of divine law. Terrorism is not new. Even in antiquity, acts of terror were justified by their proponents as a necessary resistance to evil. Plato, in fact, regarded tyranny as a deviation. Aristotle in turn considered it the worst form of government. The ancient Greeks regarded the Tyrannicides as national heroes, and in his monumental work De Officiis, Cicero maintained that while Romans often acclaimed tyrants, the tyrants always met a violent end. Seneca often gets credit for the saying that, to the gods, nothing tastes sweeter than the blood of tyrants. The concept of violently resisting tyranny predates the invention of explosives. The philosophy of the bomb emerged long before the modern tools that would be incorporated into its practice.
Early discourse within the Catholic Church was contentious about the “merits” of regicide. Yet on tyranny, a unifying school of thought promoted the divine resistance against tyranny. According to Saint Isidore and others, the call of the ruler was the promotion of justice. Tyranny, Isidore noted, could have no claim on loyalty. Thomas Aquinas likewise distinguished the tyrannus ex parte exercitii or the tyrant punishable by the publica auctoritas alone, and the defecting usurper tyrannus ex defectu tituli a threat to any one individual and society combined.
In the twelfth century, John of Salisbury extolled the merits of tyrannicide. He makes note of the good king—one who observes the law and champions the well-being of those he leads. Salisbury also decries the oppressor. He observes the legends of Jael and Sisera, then of Judith and Holofernes. He concludes that those who rule by force, who maintain power solely through violence and oppression, are themselves worthy of a violent end.
Dante too lent his pen to the collection of writing on tyranny, casting Caesar’s murderers to the depths of the Inferno. Later attempts such as the 1418 Council of Constance attempted to outlaw tyrannicide, losing sight of the shibboleth that any opposition to tyrannical rule is a rejection of the institutions held by those in power. The council’s efforts were ignored as both Catholic and Protestant thinkers maintained their “inherent” right to resist commands contrary to the divine law of God. In fact, some went so far, such as Juan de Mariana of the late 1500s, to suggest that a ruler’s power should be based on a contract with the people. Mariana goes further still and argues that the ruler’s violation of the social contract with the people meant the entitlement of any citizen to remove the same ruler from power by any force necessary.
This brief survey on the evolution of Western thought regarding tyrannicide was not just an intellectual exercise for students of terrorism and political violence. These tracts and ideas influenced idealists for centuries. Indeed, the justification of tyrannicide laid the intellectual foundations from which nineteenth-century terrorists would later draw inspiration and, subsequently, all terrorist movements onward. Examples taken from Russian terrorism illustrate this point. In June 1879, the Narodnaya Volya held a convention at Lipetsk, where they explicitly stated in their drafted manifesto, “We will fight with the means employed by Wilhelm Tell.” Every one of them knew of Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm Tell, and often they knew all the stories compiled by Stephen Junius Brutus contained in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos by heart. Nikolai Morozov, for example, justified the executions of tyrants without legal notice based on a reading of Saint-Just and Robespierre. Still, a tyrant’s execution did not mean the summary end of tyranny. Tyranny involved a concerted bureaucratic effort to maintain its hold on power. The tyrant was but the figurehead of a system designed to exploit and abuse millions for the privilege of the very few. Many recognized that to truly defeat tyranny, it had to be attacked from multiple fronts. To this end, many of those drawing inspiration from the tyrannicide literature of the medieval era formed secret societies where they could multiply their strength with an organizational machine designed for revolutionary change. This set the stage for the terrorist groups that operated throughout Europe in the 1800s. To be sure, secret societies existed before their reemergence in the eighteenth century. Many groups certainly existed before that with religious preoccupations or magical rites. Yet the eighteenth-century secret societies that engaged in the political debates of their day did not violently conspire to topple the existing political order.
The idea of effecting the systematic removal of tyranny really began with Thermidor. True, the Italian poet Alfieri in his work “Un istante e con tutta certezza”1 reflected on the most effective means to end tyranny when writing on liberty in 1770. However, such popular slogans declaring “all means are legitimate against tyrants” by the likes of Babeuf, or even “no means are criminal which are employed to obtain a sacred end” by Buonarroti, were all in the vein of Thermidor. In fact, Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality would become the inspiration of revolutionaries for generations to follow. It both preceded Blanquism (with its embrace of insurrection rather than individual acts of terror) and influenced what has now come to be thought of as modern terrorism (due to its promotion of violence and disregard for life). Justification of the means by the ends entered into the calculus as well. If a few can mobilize a revolution of the many, some rationalized, then the fate of those few catalysts mattered less than the future of the many. Interestingly, this rationalization was a departure from its origins, where the foundational belief was that the many should have some say in their future rather than a few determining the fate of many.
The French Revolution was a defining moment in the evolution of political violence. Terror gained currency in fits and starts but later matured into a doctrine. Ultimately, terror as a doctrine lost prominence as proponents fell victim to their own excesses. Yet terror, or terreur, was quite different from the long-term terrorism that followed. Among the French revolutionaries, the Jacobins failed to identify clear long-term aims. Coincidentally, they also lacked public favor and policing. Nonetheless, this epoch gave early intellectual underpinnings to the critical belief among terrorists that fear could effectuate revolutionary change. Certainly, there were differences with what people consider terrorism. During the Reign of Terror, terrorism was associated with state violence and, as explained elsewhere, it lacked the pejorative meaning ascribed to it today. For those learning from these experiences, though, they saw how the very fear of death created sufficient panic among opponents of the revolution that it helped protect the republican values animating it.
Students of the French Revolution also forget that Spain, Piedmont, and Sicily managed to overthrow their governments. These campaigns were insurrections, more akin to what people today would call an insurgency than actual terrorist campaigns. Yet terror did occur. In Piedmont and Sicily, the Carbonari were said to have fomented terror, setting fire to their enemies’ houses and helping prisoners to escape. When this was too risky, poison was used. 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. When signaled, they had to obey them blindly, knife in hand. 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 pickaxe 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.].2
Little is known to this day about the origins of the Carbonari 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. 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.
This was a distant prelude to political violence on the peninsula. In later decades, Felice Orsini tried to kill Napoleon III, and Cavour denounced the “villainous doctrine of political assassination practiced by the execrable sectarians.” Giuseppe Mazzini, the great Italian advocate for unification, wrote, “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?” If Mazzini’s words here appear unclear, his personal letters to friends shed further light on his attitude toward assassination. “Holy was the sword in the hand of Judith,” he said, “the dagger of Harmodios and Brutus, the poniard 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?”
These acts of terror in France and Italy did not amount to a doctrine. The first underpinnings of a terror doctrine emerged within secret societies in central Europe, although they would eventually reject it. The League of the Just (later, the Communist League) was an example of this. Wilhelm Weitling, the first German Communist, advocated to his friends in Paris for the “founding of the kingdom of heaven by unleashing the furies of hell.” He did not discriminate in terms of who he thought should participate in this particularly violent project. For example, he believed a community of women would serve this purpose just as well. His friends were immediately horrified by his proposal of stirring up the “thieving proletariat” against society. Weitling continued. He ambitiously concluded that he could amass tens of thousands of “smart and courageous” murderers and thieves. Weitling’s correspondents balked at his ideas. They believed it was possible that a desirable end could be attained by what they termed “Jesuit tactics.” They added that they thought Weitling’s idea would do the revolutionary cause irreparable harm were murderers and thieves to style themselves as Communists. If they prevailed, their argument, they would not support the cause of Communism, and they would likely kill Weitling.
This exchange of letters took place in 1843, unknown to Marx and Engels, who had misgivings about Weitling’s capacity as a systematic thinker. They argued that it was fraudulent to rouse the people to action 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 Harmonie und Freiheit,3 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. 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 prohibition 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.
Karl Heinzen was the first to provide a full-fledged doctrine of modern terrorism. In fact, most elements of modern terrorist thought can be found in the writings of this long-forgotten German radical democrat. To be sure, it was confused. For instance, he argued against killing, saying that it was always a crime. Yet 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.4 He maintained 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 daggers, poison, and explosives: “We have to become more energetic, more desperate.” This led him to speculate about the use of arms for 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 against many. These weapons, Heinzen thought, could not be used by armies against a few individual fighters. Hence the great hope attached to the potential of poison gas, to ballistic missiles (known at the time as Congreve rockets), and mines that one day “could destroy whole cities with 100,000 inhabitants.”5 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 Johann 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 explored. To expedite progress, he advocated prizes for research in these fields. 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 alliance between the revolutionary avant-garde and the criminal underworld recurred throughout the nineteenth-century terrorist movements (as in the case of 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 Catherine Breshkovskaya, the future “grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” went searching the forests of southern Russia, without evident success, for a famous robber who had the reputation of plundering rich landowners and Jews and distributing his booty among poor peasants. Weitling’s theory had been forgotten by that time, but like all revolutionaries of his generation, Akselrod had read Bakunin; Bakunin, in turn, had met Weitling in Zurich and had been deeply influenced 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.”
Mikhail Bakunin, one of the key historical figures in anarchist thought, placed high hopes on the religious sectarians in his never-ending search for the main catalysts of the forthcoming Russian Revolution. He was even more sanguine about the rebel-robbers in the tradition of Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachov and had nothing but contempt for the Marxists and “Liberals,” who preferred not to appeal 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 traditionally 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 either 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. 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. It was only after Bakunin’s death that his anarchist followers committed themselves to “propaganda of the deed.”
Bakunin had been fervent in his devotion to the revolutionary cause since his emergence in the 1840s. Sergey Nechaev, however, inspired a drastic change in him. Meeting for the first time while Nechaev was a student at Saint Petersburg University in 1868, Bakunin came to call him that “magnificent young fanatic, that believer without God, hero without rhetoric.” This relationship in turn inspired Bakunin’s theory of destruction. His major book, Principles of Revolution, outlined his thoughts: “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.” This work, dating to 1869, noted that those meant for death had been chosen already. Sorrow was imminent. The revolution meant that no compromise or remorse could be expressed. He echoed future terrorists, by noting the condemnations that would be hurled at them but stating that this should not stop them. Their aims were holy and just, and therefore, they were above criticism. Russia would be purified.
Nechaev himself built on many of Bakunin’s ideas. As the great nihilist of Russia during the 1860s and 1870s, he absorbed fully the ideals of revolution. That violence should become a hallowed and divine thing came to the fore in Nechaev’s most important work. In The Revolutionary Catechism, Nechaev provides an anthropological assessment of what defines a revolutionary, including lacking a name, his or her attitude, and rules for organizing as such. The revolutionary is a person with no attachment to anything but the cause of revolution. The revolutionary is nameless and it is a nameless soldier fighting for a higher purpose—an idea absorbed, learned, and internalized by terrorists in Ireland and Serbia many years later. The revolutionary above all else is one who exists outside the laws of society, shrugs off public opinion, and is committed to withstand torture and death to realize the goals of the revolution. This is a lonely path, devoid of human needs and wants such as love, friendship, gratitude, and honor. Nechaev’s manifesto permits revolutionary passion and nothing more. The success of a revolution would be the revolutionary’s reward.
This assessment of the revolutionary’s anatomy serves as a prelude to the rest of Nechaev’s work. He provides tactical advice on how to proceed. He urges revolutionaries to infiltrate all of society’s institutions in secret: churches, the world of business, government, the military, and even the royal house. Nechaev catalogues “society” into six separate categories:
1. Above all, those who are especially inimical to the revolutionary organization must be destroyed; their violent and sudden deaths will produce the utmost panic in the government, depriving it of its will to action by removing the cleverest and most energetic supporters.
2. The second group comprises those who will be spared for the time being in order that, by a series of monstrous acts, they may drive the people into inevitable revolt.
3. The third category consists of a great many brutes in high positions, distinguished neither by their cleverness nor their energy, while enjoying riches, influence, power, and high positions by virtue of their rank. These must be exploited in every possible way; they must be implicated and embroiled in our affairs, their dirty secrets must be ferreted out, and they must be transformed into slaves.
4. The fourth category comprises ambitious office-holders and liberals of various shades of opinion … they must be so compromised that there is no way out for them, and then they can be used to create disorder in the State.
5. The fifth category consists of those doctrinaires, conspirators, and revolutionists who cut a great figure on paper or in their cliques. They must be constantly driven on to make compromising declarations: as a result, the majority of them will be destroyed, while a minority will become genuine revolutionaries.
6. The sixth category is especially important: women … [whom can be] divided into three main groups. First, those frivolous, thoughtless, and vapid women, whom we shall use as we use the third and fourth category of men. Second, women who are ardent, capable, and devoted, but whom do not belong to us because they have not yet achieved a passionless and austere revolutionary understanding; these must be used like the men of the fifth category. Finally, there are the women who are completely on our side—i.e., those who are wholly dedicated and who have accepted our program in its entirety. We should regard these women as the most valuable or our treasures.
For all the furor within his manifesto, no real group existed to make it a reality. Certainly, Nechaev wanted people to believe this, and he created the Narodnaya Rasprava, or People’s Reprisal. That being said, once Nechaev’s fanaticism and distrust overwhelmed him, his group did manage to kill a student named Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov. Nechaev was beginning to see conspiracies everywhere. This lack of a real organization held true for Bakunin as well. His “World Revolutionary Union” was nonexistent, but even if he did have comrades, Bakunin was not the type of man to manifest his philosophy.
Of course, what Bakunin and Nechaev advocated was neither new nor unique. Youths from all over history had articulated curious ideas about changing the world without the means of making them come to life. Peter Zaichnevski was one of them. Coming from a well-off family in Orel, Zaichnevski wrote and published Young Russia when he was twenty-one. He surrounded himself with young ideologues like himself who viewed themselves as true revolutionaries. He thought that, as was the case with his cohort, all people ought to be ready for any plot despite the obvious danger, such as storming the tsar’s Winter Palace and killing everyone there, whether it be the tsar and his family or the elite that made up the backbone of the Russian nobility. The pamphlet also included the usual diatribes against those who opposed the revolutionaries, enemies who merited destruction. Zaichnevski relished the criticism of Russia’s liberal opposition, which reciprocated by pointing out his immaturity and detailing the ways in which his ideas were derivative of Schiller, Babeuf, Louis Auguste Blanqui, and Ludwig Feuerbach. Bakunin joined in the attacks because he was not receptive to Zaichnevski’s elitist worldview. The outcry generated was reflective of Russia’s political climate in the 1860s, but the pamphlet led to no plots or attacks. It’s also worth noting that Zaichnevski and some of his conspirators were arrested after its release.
Another youth of the era was Nikolai Ishutin. He established a group named Hell, some two years after Zaichnevski’s arrest, which claimed ties across Europe. Hell was supposedly the Russian branch of a pan-European terrorist organization called the European Revolutionary Committee. Threads from Ishutin’s predecessors emerged again. They talked heavily of regicide, killing the elite and major landowners. Ishutin came before Nechaev but anticipated many of his ideas, such as the identity-less character of the revolutionaries. Members of his group now belonged to a different world. After having committed to this, the revolutionary was to take even more extreme measures. To really be faceless revolutionaries, they would literally have to be faceless. They had to disfigure their own faces before assassinating the intended target. Revolutionaries executing a plot would have manifestos explaining their cause and a poison capsule to commit suicide if captured, not entirely dissimilar to the martyrdom videos members of al-Qaeda or Islamic State film before executing plots. Not all that followed Ishutin were this extreme, however. Many preferred the traditional method of propaganda and seeking to educate others in the values of socialism. They even sought means of fettering and restraining the extremist that shared Ishutin’s vision. Eventually, they toned down Ishutin, who sought to dissuade his cousin Dmitry Karakozov from executing a plot to kill the tsar. Karakozov proceeded, failed, and was executed by the Russian state. They also arrested Ishutin, temporarily blocking all revolutionary activity in the country. Ishutin died in 1879 in Kara Katorga prison, driven insane by years of solitary confinement, never seeing the fruits of his labor.
RUSSIA’S TERRORISM AS A DOCTRINE
Carlo Pisacane is credited with having designed the notion of “propaganda of the deed,” but the Russians created their own version of the doctrine after Vera Zasulich attempted to kill Colonel Fyodor Trepov, the governor of Saint Petersburg, in 1878. Afterward, there was a spate of terrorist violence throughout Russia, which seemed to be a reaction to the revolutionaries’ failure to recruit or inspire the peasantry to buy into their utopian values. Terrorism was used to draw attention to their cause, demonstrate the revolutionaries’ capabilities and their growing strength, and to also delegitimize the Russian government. Everyone—the authorities and even the likes of Georgi Plekhanov—agreed on this point.
This did not occur overnight. The process of systematizing Russian terrorism was spurred by events occurring around them, but all of this was gradual. Authorities penetrated revolutionary groups with spies, whom the terrorists executed publicly upon discovery. The first to take action was Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. He had assassinated General Nikolai Mezentsov in 1878 with a dagger. Days later, he justified his actions in a pamphlet called A Death for a Death, a fascinating document riddled with inconsistencies. His main point was that Mezentsov had been the head of the tsarist political police and as such had to be killed in just reprisal for all the revolutionaries killed at the hands of the government. The revolutionary movement would continue to punish anyone who harmed the idealists associated with the movement as it progressed and continued to accrete in strength. Kravchinsky for some reason also decided that the middle class and the capitalists should be the main targets of any violence to come, asking the government to remain on the sideline in the conflict. A few lines later, Kravchinsky identified the state as the main capitalist force in the country, claiming that government lands now belonged to the revolutionaries but private lands should remain untouched. In November 1878, Kravchinsky wrote the editorial for the first issue of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty), where he contradicted his pamphlet. In it, he argues that the masses are the key to the revolution and that terrorism’s ultimate effect would be minimal. Only the people could destroy the system that oppressed them. If terrorism did collapse the state, it would only mean that the bourgeoisie would become the new rulers of Russia.
This period of moderation reduced the talk of terrorism. Plekhanov, a prominent Russian Marxist who maintained ambivalent ties with Lenin and Trotsky, thought it wise to restrict terrorist activities and focus on other more productive actions. By 1879, there was a threefold split between those that advocated mass terrorism, such as Nikolai Morozov, and others who thought it best to copy the approach used by the Jacobins in France. Terrorism should be reserved to preserve the values of the impending Russian Revolution, so only those who were anathema to its purpose would die—meaning the tsar and his supporters. Osip Aptekman and Plekhanov, for their part, thought that terrorism should be a measure of last resort.
Eventually, the first group won, and traditional terrorist groups began to emerge, adopting the “armed struggle” approach. This became evident when the conspirators in Russia decided in March 1879 to murder the new head of the political police, Alexander Drenteln. Plekhanov objected before the Central Committee, but he was overruled. The terrorist campaign came in full swing as terrorists soon realized how much more publicity could be generated by a brazen attack for the revolutionaries’ cause. Morozov and Lev Tikhomirov, another revolutionary who would renounce violence and later adopt a more conservative worldview, explained this in their newspaper, Listok Narodnoi Voli, in March 1879.
This increasing belief in the efficacy of terrorism led to the splintering of Zemlya i Volya and the formation of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). This group, perhaps the most famous terrorist organization of late-nineteenth-century Russia, included luminaries of Russia’s revolutionary movement such as Morozov, Andrei Zhelyabov, Vera Figner, and several others. For those in the Narodnaya Volya, terrorism assumed a pedagogical function. Assassinations served two purposes: revenge and agitation. The terrorist’s purpose was to show the masses the way to change the system—by destroying the heart of the system. According to the Narodnaya Volya, a terrorist had to kill key government officials, kill those that opposed the revolutionaries, and kill spies. They understood that these mass killings would trigger an overreaction, which would help the masses to perceive their conditions and find ways to fight back. Unlike modern terrorist groups, though, the Narodnaya Volya failed to provide a strategy. Their approach was purely tactical. They never designed an organizational framework for recruiting and mobilizing people after committing attacks or explained how terrorism itself was supposed to fracture the government and allow the revolutionaries to assume control of Russia. Tikhomirov was the most optimistic, arguing that a few years of violence would suffice. There was also a degree of naïveté among the radicals, as they believed that their protracted terrorist campaign would bring the government to the negotiating table and promulgate reforms, such as freedom of speech and the right to assembly. Of course, this extreme view represented a minority of the Narodnaya Volya; only 10 percent of the organization’s roughly five hundred members were terrorists. Certainly, not all terrorists were Narodovoltsy, as supporters of terrorism included people from many levels of society, including intellectuals, university radicals, and even garden-variety liberals. Others that blessed the Narodnaya Volya included Lavrov and Mikhailovski, and even Marx and Engels, who saw it as a means for achieving the revolution. Plekhanov even stopped arguing against it, noting that supporters of terrorism believed in it “as they did in God.”
Other Narodovoltsy who provided justification for terrorism included Morozov and Romanenko, both of whom published pamphlets abroad that eventually became doctrine. They are of interest because of the rationalization provided for terrorism, but also for the great lengths taken to avoid calling terrorism what it was. Morozov’s pamphlet sought to provide a common language for terrorism and to systematize it into a doctrine that all revolutionaries could share, rather than taking their own interpretative approach to the phenomenon. He thought that after achieving this, terrorism could be implemented in such a way that would destroy the Russian monarchy. He begins by tracking the evolution of the terrorists from a defensive movement to one engaged in a frontal assault against the overwhelming power of the government, which struggled in defeating them. Terrorism was an avant-garde, cost-effective fighting method. It had supplanted the mass struggle of the 1850s. From here, Morozov details its strength, ideas that would be revived by terrorist luminaries throughout history. The terrorists’ ability to disperse and hide among the people rendered the government’s ability to mass-murder useless. In contrast, terrorists could dedicate all their energies to tyrannicide and changing the system. Terrorists were human and inventive, not saddled by the constraints of bureaucracy or law. In addition, the terrorists had grown in strength, and unlike their predecessors, they were not being reactive but rather proactive. They were not tragic figures imposing death sentences on the government in secret; they now had the ability to attack it directly. This would doom the monarchy. Terrorism was an inexorable movement, and the only way to give it pause was by the government making reforms and granting them the constitution the revolutionaries wanted for Russia. It was an approach that could be replicated elsewhere too, like Germany. Morozov thought the destruction of tyrants and dictators was an obligation for all terrorists, and terrorists were capable of confronting them regardless if their power base was martial or pseudodemocratic (Bismarck). Interestingly, Morozov imputed much of the moral value onto terrorism that the French had during the Reign of Terror, arguing that it was a guarantor of freedom and liberty, as it would dissuade naked power grabs.
Romanenko’s pamphlet shared many of the same points, but he seemed to take a more nuanced and scientific approach to justifying the violence. For one, he noted that terrorism only eliminated the guiltiest, something that mass revolutions in the past had struggled to do, as they often ended up killing many innocent people along the way. This protection of human life made it much more humanitarian and cost-effective, and it was the culmination of the dialectical struggle between the monarchy and the intelligentsia, waged since 1825. Systemic terrorism was just because it brought freedom, a utilitarian argument. Romanenko’s ideas were echoed by Zhelyabov and in Lev Sternberg’s pamphlet Political Terror in Russia, the latter arguing that terrorism was necessary in order to prevent a mass revolution that would consume all of Russia. Not everybody agreed with these views. M. P. Dragomanov, a Ukrainian who supported the revolutionary cause, disliked the rationalization of death demonstrated by the Narodnaya Volya. He particularly disliked the systematization of terrorism into a method beyond self-defense and reprisals. By committing violence not meant for defense, the terrorists were on the same moral plane as the government they sought to dislodge.
These men all had different fates. Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov lived to see the revolution he dreamed of, dying in 1946. He was imprisoned between 1885 and 1905 and became a prolific writer on topics as far flung as Christianity and chemistry. Despite becoming a liberal on the eve of the revolution, he lived the rest of his life in Russia. Tikhomirov distanced himself from terrorism later in life, Sternberg became an ethnographer, and Romanenko became a fascist and joined the Black Hundred, to be discussed in a later chapter.
The Narodnaya Volya were interesting because of what they wanted. They were not followers of Bakunin—there was no talk of destroying everything—but they adopted an extreme approach for the simple request of a constitution and amnesty, something they argued to Alexander III in a letter written ten days after killing Alexander II. Their violent program would end if these demands were met, signaling that they were not intent on waging a forever war. They wanted to litigate their rights in the context of the free market of ideas; they were at worst liberals with bombs, forced to take such drastic measures because of the repressiveness of the Russian monarchy. This latter argument was advanced by Lev Deitch, who noted that the Narodonaya Volya was composed of many peace-loving individuals such as Nikolai Kibalchich, the main bomb producer for the group, who was compelled to violence out of necessity. At any rate, Bakunin’s ideas did not define this group. Neither did the ideas of Nechaev, who was more of a Jacobin. Interestingly enough, those that followed the latter’s example into the early twentieth century were liberals, not socialists.
The Narodonaya Volya represents a unique moment of terrorism in Europe. They were youthful idealists who were able to coalesce around key values to wage a protracted terrorism campaign with a unique operational tempo and a systematized doctrine. The anarchists in Europe throughout the nineteenth century resembled the lone-wolf terrorism of the twenty-first century more than the Narodovoltsy. This spasm of violence led to the formation of a revolutionary socialist party, cementing its originality in the European space. The terrorists themselves recognized this to an extent, with Vera Zasulich comparing it to the explosive potential produced by pressure built up in sealed objects. After this spasm, violence subsided. Kravchinsky detailed the exhaustion felt by Russia’s intelligentsia and argued that terrorism had become a thing of the past by the late 1880s. Nonetheless, there remained a potent fear about terrorism in the Russian state. Alexander III, in response to the death of his father, reversed many of his policies. He also promoted a strong counterterrorism program to neutralize the terrorist problem. It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that terrorism was revived with any fervor in Russia.
In the decades prior to the October Revolution, individuals of all stripes looked at the Narodonaya Volya for inspiration. Its materials circulated in clandestine circles, and people like Alexander Ulyanov attempted to create a student terrorist group based on its ideals. Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, was hanged in 1887. Ulyanov borrowed heavily from his predecessors, emphasizing the pedagogical, educative, and illustrative value that mass terror had in terms of drawing attention to a cause and serving as a catalyst for mobilization. After Ulyanov came Vladimir Burtsev, who praised the Narodovoltsy’s terrorism as the only method for fomenting regime change in Russia. Burtsev published his views in the Narodovolets, a journal he founded in London in 1897. The Russian monarchy, understanding the implications of Burtsev’s ideas, asked the British government to arrest him, which they did, though they released him shortly thereafter. This only served to motivate Burtsev to expand on his ideas further in a pamphlet, in which he noted that all opposition groups in Russia, regardless of their ideological bent, were beginning to believe that terrorism was the only way to force change. He was not wrong, as diverse individuals across the Russian Empire began advocating its use, including Krichevsky, Zhitlowski, and half a dozen Polish thinkers.
While at the time, it was easy to conclude that these efforts were largely in vain, they were setting the foundations for the terrorist platform in Russia leading to the Bolshevik Revolution. Conditions had degenerated enough that a group of individuals established the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1900 and turned this into a platform for terrorism. The group included veteran Narodovoltsy, who provided them with a modicum of wisdom. Unlike the Narodonaya Volya, they believed it was imperative to create a party apparatus that was commensurate with the scope of any terrorist plotting. This would be placed alongside other activist methods, not all of them legal, to buttress the mass struggle. Such concerted efforts to sow chaos would overwhelm the monarchy and help fracture it: “Terrorist activity will cease only with victory over autocracy and the complete attainment of political liberty.”
To help maintain a separation of the different efforts, they established the Boevaya Organisatsia (Fighting Organization), a subunit of the party that retained organizational independence from the political activities. Complementing this, the party published a pamphlet explaining the rationale for the use of terrorism. Written as an attack against the Social Democrats, the party said that terrorism was the option of last resort adopted when there were no alternative or legitimate ways to register opposition to the government, or when the revolutionaries had to defend themselves against the oppression of the state. The Social Democrats disliked terrorism. They viewed it as an egotistical approach that failed to unite the revolutionary intelligentsia with the masses they proclaimed to be supporting, and moreover, they believed peaceful dialogue with the government was possible. Of course, the Russian monarchy was loath to give up power and repressed the masses viciously, and the party mocked the Social Democrats’ desire to use speeches and pamphlets to change people’s minds. The party articulated once again the propaganda value of terrorism and discussed the chaos it was creating. The animosity of the Boevaya Organisatsia toward the Social Democrats probably came from the fact that many of its leading members, like Ivan Kalyayev, Stepan Balmashov, Boris Savinkov, and Mikhail Karpovich, had been part of it before switching over to the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The Boevaya Organisatsia made its presence known in Russia quickly with the assassination of Dmitry Sipyagin, the interior minister, in 1902. The power of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s terrorism was made manifest later by Pyotr Durnovo, another interior minister, when he said, “Stupid it may be, but it is a very poisonous idea, a very terrible one, creating power out of impotence.” Durnovo, unlike his six predecessors, died of natural causes and not a victim of terrorism.
Those that followed the Narodnaya Volya understood the political impact of the group. The Social Revolutionaries, emerging some twenty-five years later, saw what effect they had on Russia’s political class, despite lacking public support. The Social Revolutionaries thought they could magnify this effect with more public support. Terrorism was not their main tool; it was only used sparingly to help generate attention. They did not believe it to be a moral and self-replicating phenomenon that could serve as a panacea for all their problems. Terrorism only made sense in the Russian atmosphere where it was otherwise impossible to register political dissent. Once the situation normalized, they would return to normal political procedures. They opposed the Social Democrats’ newspaper Iskra, which came out in support of accidental terrorism but wholly rejected systematic terrorism. Accidental terrorism was defined as collateral fear generated from normal revolutionary activity. Systematic terror, in contrast, was a concerted plan of action, targeting specific individuals who carried some symbolic value or were key members of the ruling governing apparatus. The Social Revolutionaries disliked accidental terror because of their lack of control over it and the innocent victims it would claim. The Social Revolutionaries had a strategy for their murders that necessitated planning, debate, dialogue, and proper timing to effectuate the greatest impact without causing innocent deaths. There was a degree of rationalization not seen in contemporary terrorists. Unfortunately, while the party held these views, the terrorists in Russia differed. They let emotion carry them forward and painted themselves as revolutionary heroes driven by hatred, inspired by honor and the willingness to sacrifice themselves. Violence was divine, and bomb-throwing was holy.
Gradually, these terrorist activities shifted public opinion in Russia. In the early years, only the intelligentsia seemed receptive to their cause. By the end of the nineteenth century, the average Russian came to support terrorism as well. Even the likes of Georgi Plekhanov came to justify the assassination of Vyacheslav von Plehve, the interior minister, while noting the value of cooperating with the terrorists.
Sticking to their word, the Social Revolutionaries unilaterally ceased the use of terrorism in 1905 after the tsar established a legislative assembly. This was short-lived. They renewed violence in January 1906 and July 1906—when the Duma opened and was dissolved respectively. Internal bickering led to a splinter group called the Maximalists, which had a more violent outlook and strategy. In these years, terrorism became a daily occurrence throughout imperial Russia. Both the left and the right were active participants. The Black Hundred carried out pogroms and assassinated political opponents, while the Bolsheviks carried out their own plots. The Maximalists, for their part, broke from the Social Revolutionaries because they disliked how hierarchical the organization was in terms of plotting. They believed centralized control was only effective if the right people directed it—men like Grigory Gershuni—but there was not a man like that in charge. A more decentralized approach would allow spontaneity, creativity, and a broader sense of fear because the attack would be random. Besides, a centralized organization was susceptible to undercover police agents (something that did ultimately happen). The downside, of course, was that decentralization would most likely kill more innocents, and it would not stop infiltration from security services. They wanted to rebuild the organization with a strong leader who could provide a strategic vision and tactical guidance while maintaining autonomy at the local level.
By 1909, both the Maximalists and the Social Revolutionaries had ceased being terrorist organizations—the former in 1907, and the latter in 1909, after Yevno Azev was revealed to be a police spy. In May 1909, one of the leaders, Ilya Rubanovich, criticized terrorism in a party conference, and by the end of the year, the entire leadership echoed Rubanovich and decided to suspend terrorist activity. Viktor Chernov thought that the use of terrorism was greatly compromised after the outing of Azev, but it remained an effective tactic. His opponents just wanted to end the program writ large. The conditions in Russia had changed as well. The tsarist regime had lost much of its power. There was a major class struggle occurring with various groups holding disparate ideologies that were competing among themselves. At this point, the individualized terrorism of the late nineteenth century no longer held as much strategic value.
In the Caucasus, terrorism occurred following the 1905 revolution. Anarchist groups preached “ruthless and total people’s vengeance.” A group called Bezmotivniki (meaning “the ones lacking motives”) declared “death to the bourgeoisie” and employed bomb-throwers against soft targets like cafés and theaters. The Hotel Bristol and Café Libman were bombed in Warsaw and Odessa, respectively, but none of these plots compared to what was occurring in Russia. On the whole, they were ineffective. Perhaps their only real contributions were their belligerent appeals, such as the one from the 1909 futurist manifesto: “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!”