Russian Revolutionary Terrorism

The theory and practice of terrorism became a major fixture of the modern world in the last third of the nineteenth century in many places, but it achieved the most prominence in three distinct forms: Russian revolutionary terrorism, international anarcho-terrorism, and American white supremacist terrorism.

Tsarist Russia was a land with little experience of representative institu­tions, civil liberties or the rule of law. The leaders of the revolutionary movement that developed there in the third quarter of the nineteenth century were devoted to the emancipation of the serfs, an emphasis on local governance and a massive reapportionment of the land - in toto, a generic form of agrarian socialism known in Russia as ‘populism'. They vacillated between working towards the development of a popular revolu­tionary movement through education and agitation and, when tsarist police infiltration and repression blocked that possibility, the use of targeted assas­sination. The earliest attempt on the life of the tsar by a revolutionary was carried out by Dmitri Karakozov against Tsar Alexander II in 1866. The return of revolutionary terrorism was marked in 1878 by attacks on St Petersburg's governor general Fyodor Trepov by Vera Zasulich (unsuccessful) and on Nikolai Mezentsov, the head of the tsar's secret police, by Sergei Kravchinsky (successful). Both assassins were ideologically populists. While Zasulich's attempt was primarily an act of revenge meant to punish Trepov for his beating of a jailed revolutionary, Kravchinsky's attack had a much broader motive, about which he later wrote at great length.

In the late 1870s, Russians formed the first-ever large-scale conspiratorial organisation devoted to the use of revolutionary terrorism. The People's Will, as it was known, probably did not have more than a few score hardcore members, but its several thousand supporters across Russia were organised into cells, whose members were unaware of each other's names and loca­tions. These cells engaged in agitation, raised money, recruited members and supplied safe houses. Within the central organisation, members specialised in distinct fields, such as surveillance, counterespionage, forgery, smuggling and explosives. The group's leaders debated among themselves about how best to deploy their violence: Nikolai Morozov argued for a massive campaign of terrorism that would destabilise Russia and lead to peasant rebellions, while others proposed using targeted assassinations as a prelude to a coup. The organisation's nominal chief, Lev Tikhomirov, eventually prevailed: like Kravchinsky, he believed that the principal purpose of terrorism was sym­bolic in that it could keep the movement alive, undermine the legitimacy of the tsar and his regime, and eventually pave the way for some sort of revolution. More to the point, he later confessed that the commitment to violence came before the rather tortured efforts to validate its purpose.^[932] Although Morozov left when his dream of a widespread campaign was discarded, he captured the group's mood when he claimed that terrorism ‘should make the struggle popular, historical, and grandiose'.^[933] After six failed attempts on the life of the tsar, the People's Will finally succeeded in assassinating Alexander II on i March 1881, by blowing up his sled with hand­tossed explosives. No popular revolution erupted, and the tsar's son, Alexander III, rolled back reforms and launched a major crackdown on even mild subversion after he came to the throne.