Russian Terrorists and Their ‘Progressive’ Allies

The birthplace of modern political terrorism was prerevolutionary Russia. There, in the first decade of the 20th century, terrorists of various left-wing leanings—from anarchist to Marxist—executed an unprecedented 23,000 attacks, of which 17,000 yielded injuries and deaths. Political assassinations were not a Russian invention, of course; they may be traced to the late 11th century, when the infamous Assassins (Hashashin), an offshoot of the Ismaili Shi’a sect, were arguably the first regularly to employ murder as a weapon against their enemies among Muslim and Christian elites. These targeted killings—like those across the world in the eras to come—counted in single-digit numbers. In contrast, by the early 1900s the tactics of the Russian terrorists degenerated from persecution of designated influential adversaries to systematic, indiscriminate political violence carried out en masse.

Modern terrorism entails intentional, unselective brutality against civilian targets to attain political objectives. The key word here is “intentional,” as opposed to collateral, unintended damage inflicted upon noncombatants, emphasizes the Israeli scholar Boaz Ganor. For the first time in history, the Russian extremists sought to destabilize the sociopolitical environment via random violence. The subversives swapped traditional ethical norms for ideological purposes; they recognized any principles only insofar as they served revolutionary goals. In their disregard for human life, the terrorists of the early 1900s were the forebears of the communists, the Nazis, and other dogma-driven oppressors. The Russian radicals heralded the propinquity of totalitarianism, a gruesome trademark of the 20th century.

The circumstances under which a revolutionary was justified in killing a tyrant or avenging oppression by his senior associates was a customary discussion topic in the Russian antigovernment milieu. Yet, although most 19th-century radicals did take ethical considerations seriously, incidents of extreme brutality revealed the budding totalitarian thinking and behavior. Sergei Nechaev stopped at no lie, fraud, manipulation, and intimidation to secure leadership in a small antigovernment student circle; in 1869, he provoked a brutal beating and murder of a comrade, who had challenged his authority. The “black sheep of the revolutionary family,” Nechaev was not alone; in a shocking 1876 episode of terrorist vengeance, several enraged radicals poured sulfuric acid over the face of a suspected informer, N.E. Gorinovich, leaving him blind and permanently disfigured.

The sporadic brutality of the late 19th century was but a prelude to routine violence of the 1900s, which was “carried out without weighing the moral questions posed by earlier generations,” noted the historian Norman M. Naimark. Countless terrorist acts plunged Russia into a bloodbath: “Everything that could be blown up exploded,” recalled a former police official—from liquor stores to gendarme offices; from coffee houses to houses of worship. Manufacturing of homemade bombs became an open secret, with school children assembling explosive devices from empty sardine cans, nails, bolts, and drugstore supplies.

Leaders in the antigovernment camp recognized that mass-scale terrorism had exposed the “seamy side” of the liberation movement, having attracted and become a breeding ground for numerous radicals qualified as “a merger of revolutionary and bandit.” Many of them dismissed the goals of social justice and equality with utter cynicism; their partaking in political violence revealed a befuddled mindset—a brew of primitive radicalism and sheer criminality.

Terrorist Ivan Lidzhus killed about 30 “enemies of the revolution”; among them was at least one personal rival. Lidzhus also took part in “revolutionary robberies,” the so-called expropriations, or “exes,” to procure funds for his organization but also for his own needs. The new-type radicals did not see such behavior as contradictory. One expropriator outlined a private ethical compromise: He would use half of the loot from an armed assault to help the poor and the other half to treat himself to an estate on Lake Geneva. He fully sympathized with the socialists, he confirmed, but their hope for a just social order seemed to him entirely unattainable. He hated the bourgeoisie, but he “could not help but envy it.”

By the early 1900s, a new type of terrorists had come to dominate the revolutionary camp, both numerically and spiritually. They might have called themselves Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, or anarchists, but often they acted like gangsters, preoccupied primarily with robberies and extortion for personal profit. Some revolutionary leaders acknowledged that nine-tenths of all “exes” were sheer banditry. Adhering to no clear ideological trend, many perpetrators, while referring to themselves as bandits, employed exalted rhetoric to vindicate their lucrative, if risky, trade.

Numerous self-proclaimed “freedom fighters” had criminal records prior to their involvement in terrorism and were recruited into radical organizations while serving terms for nonpolitical crimes. Grigorii Frolov, the assassin of the Samara governor, initially met “true revolutionaries” in prison and soon partook in Socialist Revolutionary terrorist enterprises “to find out what kind of party it was.” Murder or robbery was a product of oppression and exploitation, not a crime, the radical inmates comforted potential recruits among the incarcerated thugs. Moreover, acts of banditry undercut the despicable regime and were therefore “socially progressive.” Welcomed as comrades in the antigovernment camp, convicted felons embraced the opportunity to return to the path of crime as heroes under the revolutionary banner. Zealous to validate his new identity as a born-again fighter against injustice, Frolov said he was ready to kill even the best governor.

An archetypal radical of the new type might have been initially imprisoned for thievery, several years later be convicted as a terrorist, and eventually end up behind bars again for a common crime. Thus, members of one anarchist gang active in the Moscow area contrasted sharply with a romanticized image of the revolutionary idealist. The band’s chief was a navy deserter, who claimed responsibility for 11 murders yet did not understand and had no interest in the anarchist agenda. He admitted that he yearned only for action and the resulting material profits. Among his crew were his girlfriend, a registered prostitute, another fugitive sailor sentenced to hard labor for taking part in killing a priest and robbing a church, and that convict’s mistress—a thief with a police record.

Public humor promptly reflected that it was nearly impossible to separate extremist politics from criminal behavior: “How does a murderer become a revolutionary?” ran a popular riddle. “When Browning in hand, he robs a bank. How does a revolutionary become a murderer? In the same way!”

Cruelty, bordering on sadism, permeated the revolutionary camp. Amid routine bloodshed, human life quickly lost all value, as the perpetrators of violent acts, allegedly for the sake of ideological goals, frequently stopped at nothing to achieve their less lofty aims, such as personal vendetta. To extort a few rubles, the extremists did not shun from brutal beatings of “greedy bourgeois.” They tortured suspected spies to death, slashing throats, cutting off ears and noses, decapitating them as punishment, and excising their tongues as a “symbolic gesture.”

Not infrequently, mental instability seemed to be a catalyst for the terrorists’ viciousness; amid raging political crisis, aberrancy and perversions, including sadism, assumed revolutionary forms. Emotionally damaged individuals gravitated toward extremism, confirming an established connection between psychological imbalance and aggressive impulses. Psychosis was almost as exceptional among the radicals as it was in a nonrevolutionary milieu, but terrorists did suffer from a variety of other mental conditions, such as acute paranoia, depression, hysteria, and recurrent manic episodes. Some experienced emotional breakdowns and were patients in psychiatric hospitals; others would not miss a chance for a random act of aggression, which, of course, received ideological interpretation.

“Unbalanced,” “turbulent,” “completely abnormal,” “mentally deranged,” and “crazy” the revolutionaries called their psychologically deviant comrades—“cannibals,” in one reference, due to their proclivity for uninhibited brutality. Precisely because of their aberrant aggressiveness, recruiters often sought to enlist them for terrorist enterprises. A famous case in point is the “Caucasian bandit” Semen Ter-Petrosian, nom de guerre Kamo, who required clinical treatment for mental illness, and whose wild temper the Bolsheviks exploited to ensure constant inflow of stolen cash for their party. The “idealistic robber” worshipped Lenin but knew literally nothing about the Bolshevik program. Once present at a dispute on a theoretical issue, he quickly lost his temper: “What are you arguing with him for?” he asked his Bolshevik comrade and offered, pointing at his staggered opponent: Just “let me cut his throat.” In 1911 Kamo proposed a creative solution for cleansing the Bolshevik ranks of police informers—to stage a bogus detention of leading party activists: Dressed in police uniforms, he and his associates would “arrest you, torture you, run a stake through you. If you start talking, it would be clear what you’re worth.” The Bolshevik leaders tabled the plan discreetly, so as not to aggravate the passionate fighter or, as the celebrated writer Maxim Gorky titled him, “artist of the revolution.”

Gorky’s sympathy for the liberation cause was entirely conventional: By the early 20th century, perpetrators of political violence invariably found understanding and support among the Russian intelligentsia and the educated strata at large. The trend may be traced to January 1878, when revolutionary Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the governor-general of St. Petersburg to avenge mistreatment of an imprisoned comrade. In a sensational verdict, the liberal court jury found her not guilty of attempted murder. Carried out of the courtroom by jubilant admirers, she instantly became a symbol of selfless sacrifice. In a poem-in-prose, “Threshhold,” renowned writer Ivan Turgenev extolled the revolutionary vigilante as “a saint.” The “Zasulich affair” endorsed the idea of political violence as virtue.

In the following era, Russian intellectuals cultivated the romanticized image of the revolutionary idealist. In a country where literature often shaped public opinion, fiction was a medium to construct the image of a selfless hero who sacrificed himself for the general good. Leonid Andreev’s widely read stories glorified “the martyrs” and inaugurated a new fad—public sympathy and admiration for the terrorists. Backing words with action, Andreev turned his summer house into a refuge for combatants, while Gorky converted his Moscow apartment into a bomb laboratory and financed extremist enterprises.

Following the writers’ example, scores of progressive citizens—university professors, teachers, doctors, journalists, and other educated professionals—also acknowledged and took upon themselves an ethical obligation to help the radicals. They provided money and shelter, procured for them proper documents, and offered their family homes for concealment of guns and explosives. Defense lawyers built high-profile careers upon winning lighter sentences for gangsters, whom they portrayed in fiery court speeches as Robin Hood-like champions of the poor.

Under the influence of the fabricated reverence for the extremists, support for them became exceedingly widespread among average Russians, who venerated portraits of terrorists as if they were icons. Shaken by vivid newspaper depictions of beautiful young women-martyrs, 16-year-old boys fell “madly, endlessly in love” with them. A teenager committed suicide, having found out that his idol, terrorist Maria Spiridonova had been sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia for life. Schoolgirls modeled themselves on famous female terrorists and dreamed of “revolutionary princes” worthy of their love. All girls “adored the bombists,” remembered a former student from the Crimea. In 1907, together with her girlfriends, she had smuggled packages to jailed extremists; the heroes were ready to give their lives for their ideals—“how romantic this was!”

An unequivocal condemnation of terrorism from the reputable Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party could have, its leaders later admitted, sobered many revolutionary enthusiasts who mindlessly followed the trend. Instead, while advocating more restrained tactics against the autocracy in public, self-designated liberals in Kadet circles privately welcomed terrorism. The party counted among its members “the flower of the Russian intelligentsia”; personally, they showed no proclivity for violence and affirmed their stand as peaceful opposition. At the same time, the undeclared Kadet policy was to march with the radicals because of a shared immediate goal—to overthrow the autocratic regime, demoralized by escalating terror. “ As long as the stronghold of autocracy has not been destroyed,” declared party leader Pavel Miliukov, “anyone who is fighting against it represents ... a great blessing.”

While not partaking in blood-spilling themselves, the Kadets invested a great deal in the common “urgency to uproot” the regime. They sponsored fundraisers to benefit terrorist enterprises. From the parliamentary floor of the Russian Duma, party delegates berated measures against “the poor terrorists and expropriators ... led to the gallows like cattle to the slaughterhouse.”

In their speeches and publications, the Kadets invariably depicted terrorists as altruists who were deeply “troubled by the injustice reigning in society” and could not stand aside. The rulers, not the terrorists, were the guilty party, the Kadets insisted, and bombs were a logical response from the victims of tyranny and lawlessness. The pure souls have been provoked to commit violent acts because they saw no peaceful way to influence the official “murderers ... these monsters.” All in all, therefore terrorism entailed “a certain social advisability.”

No demagoguery was excessive in the Kadet public effort to vindicate their radical allies: “Remember that Christ, too, was declared to be a lawbreaker and subjected to a shameful execution on the cross … The attitude towards political criminals is a similar act of violence on the part of the authorities.”

The illiberal progressives in prerevolutionary Russia patented a blueprint attitude toward terrorism: Throughout the 20th century, devotees of sweeping societal reconstruction would justify and sanctify political manslaughter time and again. Participants in terrorist solidarity rallies across the globe, extolling terrorists as “martyrs, not murderers,” have adhered to a spectrum of perspectives—from left-wing camaraderie of the 1960s, to political correctness of the 1980s and 1990s, to postmodern ethical relativism. The Russian paradigm warrants another glance across the temporal distance: The sociocultural milieu which came to validate terrorism disintegrated almost visibly, particularly since the early 1900s. After the collapse of 1917, Russia’s intelligentsia found itself victim of the totalitarian regime it had helped erect.