The “Apparel of Innocence”: Toward a Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
Author(s): Susan K. Morrissey
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 84, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 607-642
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The “Apparel of Innocence”: Toward a Moral Economy
of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia*
Susan K. Morrissey
University College London
On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through
a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called
on to justify itself. (ALBERT CAMUS, The Rebel1)
On February 2, 1905, Ivan Kaliaev did not throw a bomb. He and his fellow
members of the Combat Organization of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary
共SR兲 Party had been tracking their target, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, for months, but Kaliaev aborted the mission at the last moment
because he had glimpsed a woman and two children sitting with him in the
carriage. Two days later, however, he did throw it, killing the Grand Duke and
his driver. Hanged in May 1905, Kaliaev became a mythic figure for the Left,
a selfless hero who murdered and sacrificed his life for the revolution and yet
who had also refused to kill innocent children. On August 12, 1906, in
contrast, three members of an SR splinter group, the Maximalists, drove up to
the summer residence of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin intending to detonate
their bombs during his reception hours, a time when members of the public
would be present in addition to Stolypin’s family. When the Maximalists were
challenged, they blew themselves up, killing two dozen people outright and
seriously wounding many others, including two of Stolypin’s children; a
further six people would die of their injuries. Had the Maximalists made it
inside the building, the number of casualties would have been still higher.
Stolypin himself was unharmed.
These two acts, which marked pivotal moments in the wave of violence that
engulfed Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, represent different models
of terrorism: the first belongs to a tradition of political assassination in which
lines were drawn between combatants and noncombatants—the guilty and the
* I would like to thank the British Academy for its generous funding of my research
project on political violence in late imperial Russia. I also thank the people who
commented on or otherwise contributed to this article: Daniel Beer, Polly Jones,
Martin Miller, Alexandra Oberländer, Alesya Obodova, and the journal’s anonymous
readers.
1 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower
共1951; London, 2000兲, 12.
The Journal of Modern History 84 (September 2012): 607– 642
© 2012 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2012/8403-0003$10.00
All rights reserved.
608
Morrissey
innocent; the second blurs, perhaps even erases, such distinctions, accepting,
perhaps even desiring, large numbers of casualties.2 Analogous events were
occurring in Western Europe and the United States,3 as well as in Russia,4 for
terrorism had become a tactic employed against politically oppressive regimes
and the capitalist economic system.5 Decades later, in 1950, Albert Camus
would rediscover Ivan Kaliaev’s two-act performance of February 1905,
placing it at the center of his own project to assess the origins and ethics of
modern political violence more generally. “We shall be capable of nothing,”
2 In the history of modern terrorism, the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries are typically termed the “age of assassinations.” The literature is large.
See Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism 共Boston, 1987兲; Wolfgang J. Mommsen
and Gerhard Hirschfeld, eds., Social Protest, Violence, and Terror in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Europe 共London and Basingstoke, 1982兲; and Gérard Chaliand
and Arnaud Blin, eds., The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to Al Qaeda 共Berkeley,
2007兲.
3 Scholars have recently devoted attention to the second model. John Merriman
argues that the bombing of a Parisian café by Emile Henry in 1894 was the first modern
terrorist act due its targeting of the anonymous crowd, the “bourgeoisie”; as Henry
later stated, “There are no innocents.” See John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How
a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror 共London, 2009兲;
and James Joll, The Anarchists 共1964; repr., London, 1979兲, 118. In addition, Beverly
Gage analyzes the bombing in 1920 of the J. P. Morgan Bank in New York, which
killed thirty-eight people, mostly bystanders and low-level employees, and which was
the largest terrorist attack in the United States before the Oklahoma City bombing of
1995. See Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First
Age of Terror 共New York, 2009兲.
4 Russia’s initial encounter with terrorism 共spanning the late 1860s to the 1880s but
primarily 1877– 81兲 was dominated by the model of targeted assassination. One of the
first examples of the second model was the bombing by anarchists in December 1905
of the Café Libman in Odessa, a spot supposedly frequented by the “bourgeoisie.” See
Anke Hilbrenner, “Der Bombenanschlag auf das Café Libman in Odessa am 17.
Dezember 1905: Terrorismus als Gewaltgeschichte,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 共2010兲: 210 –31. The literature on the earlier period is large. The
most recent contributions include Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov:
Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism 共Ithaca, NY, 2009兲; Philip
Pomper, Lenin’s Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution 共New York, 2010兲;
and Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St.
Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World 共New York, 2008兲. For a discussion of
recent historiography, see Susan K. Morrissey, “Terrorism, Modernity, and the Question of Origins,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 1
共Winter 2011兲: 213–26.
5 Russian proponents of terrorism typically blamed the autocratic political system
for making the tactic necessary, and the People’s Will criticized the assassination of
US President Garfield, asserting that democracy made such methods illegitimate. See
http://www.hrono.info/dokum/1800dok/18810910.html. Although this remained SR
policy in the twentieth century, some party members disagreed, expressing sympathy
for French and Spanish anarchists and their attacks on the representatives of capital.
See Boris Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista 共1917; repr., Leningrad, 1990兲, 75–77.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
609
Camus wrote in his introduction, “until we know whether we have the right to
kill our fellow-men, or the right to let them be killed.” Indeed, in his view, the
specter of innocence hovered over the ruins of modernity: “It is a question of
finding out whether innocence, the moment it begins to act, can avoid committing murder.”6 In his influential contribution to just-war theory, the political theorist Michael Walzer cited Camus’s reading of the Kaliaev case in his
own exploration of these questions, arguing that modern terrorism, “in a strict
sense,” emerged only after World War II, when it made “the random murder
of innocent people” into its object.7 Distinguishing between “aiming at particular people because of things they have done or are doing, and aiming at
whole groups of people, indiscriminately, because of who they are,” he
emphasized the importance of “the moral distinction, drawn by [some] ‘terrorists’, between people who can and people who cannot be killed.”8 As
Walzer would readily grant, however, this “political code” has a long and
thorny history.
Drawing its inspiration from Camus and Walzer, this article explores the
shifting meanings and functions of “innocence” within Russian revolutionary
terrorism of the early twentieth century, a pivotal moment when the terrorists’
“aim” became a fraught political issue. Concepts of innocence underpinned the
political conventions, ethical norms, and legitimizing strategies with which terrorists conceived the permissibility, goals, and limits of their violence—what I
call its “moral economy.”9 Assessments of innocence and guilt had been integral
to the justification of revolutionary assassination in Russia since the 1870s: the
targeting of prominent officials who were judged guilty, in contemporary
6
Camus, The Rebel, 12, and, on Kaliaev, 133– 43. For Camus’s theatrical representation of Kaliaev’s feat, in which he likewise articulates the perspective of those
who denied the need for moral limits, see Albert Camus, The Just, trans. Henry Jones,
in “Caligula” and Other Plays 共London, 2006兲.
7 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. 共1977; New York, 2006兲, 198.
8 Ibid., 200, 199. Walzer analyzes historical cases in which a moral distinction was
drawn between those who “can be killed,” especially the officials who devise and
implement the policies of an allegedly oppressive political regime, and those who
“cannot be killed,” namely, people uninvolved in “political harming.” Walzer likens
this violence to vigilante justice and discerns the various layers of its moral relativism,
but he rightly notes that our response to an assassin often depends on the victim: we
might even praise the assassination of a “Hitler-like” figure. See ibid., 198 –200.
9 Walzer considers the “political code” 共the implicit rules governing terrorist actions兲 to be a less developed analogue to the military convention. See ibid., 199 –200.
I prefer “moral economy” due to its connotations of a moral system as well as its
historiographical prominence since it was first developed by E. P. Thompson. It
maintains that collective actions 共such as bread riots兲 are shaped by a common set of
attitudes, conventions, and norms, especially about justice. In applying the term “moral
economy” to Russian terrorism, I am arguing that there was a value system underpinning terrorists’ activity but not that this system was unified, hegemonic, or unchanging.
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Morrissey
rhetoric, of specific or general crimes against the people, their lives forfeit.10
This personalized vengeance-cum-justice combined moral and juridical rationales into a broader political statement in which these officials were often
understood as representatives and defenders of the sociopolitical order. Yet
the inherent dualism of innocence, which connotes its counterpart of guilt 共and
vice versa兲, requires ethical judgments: Who was “guilty,” and of what kinds
of “crimes”? Who had the right to pass this judgment? What “price” 共in
“innocent” life兲 was acceptable in hitting the target? These were questions that
Russia’s terrorists, as individuals and groups, had to answer, sometimes
confronting them directly and often eliding them, letting their deeds speak in
their place.
As the revolution unfolded over the course of 1905– 6, several discrete, if
connected, developments occurred that suggest important shifts in conceptions of guilt and innocence within the underground. As the number of
terrorist groups rose, especially on the local level, many were widening their
aim from top government officials 共ministers, governors兲 to low-profile employees 共such as police officers兲, economic figures 共factory owners, managers兲, and even anonymous people whose “guilt” adhered to their identity
rather than to specific actions 共the “bourgeoisie”兲. In addition, the extent of
what today is often called “collateral damage” was increasing. Terrorist
actions had long claimed the lives of some innocents, of course, especially
servants and drivers, and this was a price that terrorists had typically deemed
unavoidable in practice, if undesirable in principle. However, the early twentieth century witnessed an outright disregard among some activists, including
the Maximalists, for the loss of “innocent” life, which only encouraged more
audacious attacks. These developments suggest that the perceived right to kill
in the name of revolutionary transformation was expanding, both diminishing
the space for “innocence” or “neutrality” and blurring the boundaries between
combatants and noncombatants.11
Yet innocence also possessed an additional range of meanings in the moral
economy of terrorism, not as the inverse of guilt but as the embodiment of
10 My emphasis on the early twentieth century in no way denies the important
continuities with earlier periods: the theoretical underpinnings, rhetorical flourishes,
and “hagiographies” of the twentieth century built upon historical precedent and
revolutionary myths. My purpose, however, is to focus closely on one historical
moment, not to explore these broader continuities and differences. For an overview of
the entire period, see Norman M. Naimark, “Terrorism and the Fall of Imperial
Russia,” Terrorism and Political Violence 2, no. 2 共Summer 1990兲: 171–92. See also
Norman M. Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary
Movement under Alexander III 共Cambridge, MA, 1983兲.
11 Parallel developments occurred within colonial violence and modern warfare, as
Hannah Arendt first explicated; see her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed.
with added prefaces 共New York, 1973兲.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
611
purity and cleanliness. As Sally Boniece has shown in her analysis of the
celebrated case of Mariia Spiridonova from early 1906, this kind of innocence
adhered to many terrorists themselves, coalescing into a coherent mythology
about the purity of their motives and characters that was promoted not just by
underground parties but also the liberal press.12 Claiming to act in the name of
freedom, justice, and human rights, they justified violence in the name of
nonviolence, physical harm under the banner of the dignity and integrity of the
human being. Indeed, the supposed moral purity of the terrorists, which was
symbolically enacted in their willingness to die, lent their murders and
martyrdoms a sacral force. Even violence itself could thereby acquire an aura
of innocence, becoming the means to cleanse and purify the world for the
dawn of a new age. An “apparel of innocence” had also been integral to earlier
myths of the terrorist-martyr 共with models dating back to the late 1870s兲,13 but
the widening field of revolutionary struggle in and after 1905 threatened to
dirty it, a threat that was fully realized by 1908 –9 in the mass exposure of
personal and collective corruption—in the form of police spies—at the heart
of Russia’s oppositional movement.14 Just as the three discursive threads of
innocence— guiltlessness, purity, and purification—were closely entwined in
the moral economy of Russian revolutionary terrorism, so too were their
共presumed兲 opposites— guilt, corruption, and degradation.
12 Mariia Spiridonova, a twenty-one-year-old member of the Tambov SRs, shot and
killed an official who had led a brutal pacification campaign against local peasants; she
was arrested and—according to rumor—raped by her guards 共who were subsequently
assassinated兲. In the spring of 1906, Spiridonova became a national celebrity through
a campaign orchestrated by herself, the SRs, and liberal newspapers, in which she
came to symbolize the purity of Russia violated by the violence of the state. See Sally
A. Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case, 1906: Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom,” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3 共Summer, 2003兲: 571– 606. See
also Alexandra Oberländer, “‘Die Provokation ging auf dem Nevskij spazieren’: Die
Wahrnehmung sexueller Gewalt im ausgehenden Zarenreich, 1880 –1914” 共PhD diss.,
Humboldt University [Berlin], 2010).
13 The early prototypes, such as Vera Zasulich and Sofiia Perovskaia, were often
female, although models of male virtue were also common. The key text propagating terrorist mythologies was Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii’s Underground
Russia 共1881兲. See Lynn Ellen Patyk, “Remembering ‘The Terrorism’: Sergei
Stepniak-Kravchinskii’s Underground Russia,” Slavic Review 68, no. 4 共Winter
2009兲: 759 – 81, and “Dressed to Kill and Die: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,
Gender, and Dress,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 共2010兲: 192–209.
14 Numerous historians have analyzed police provocation, especially the most infamous case, involving Evno Azef, the leader of the Combat Organization. See Nurit
Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR
Party, 1902–1914 共Basingstoke, 1988兲; Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef
Affair and the Russian Revolution 共Wilmington, DE, 2000兲; and L. G. Praisman,
Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory 共Moscow, 2001兲.
612
Morrissey
In light of the dimensions and diversity of terrorist violence in late imperial
Russia, this article is selective rather than comprehensive, focusing primarily
on the words and deeds of terrorists and their supporters 共as found in leaflets,
speeches, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, court records, and memoirs兲,15 not
on government policy or broader public attitudes.16 It focuses further on two
particular events in order to analyze the moral economy of terrorism as it was
practiced and propagandized on the ground, not just abstractly theorized. The
heir to a handful of other recent SR terrorist-heroes 共and a forerunner of those
like Spiridonova兲, Kaliaev was the prototypical “fastidious assassin,” in Camus’s words—the iconic figure who stood at the threshold of a new, less
fastidious age, an age when a prime minister’s summer home, filled with
members of the public, could be bombed. Although they represent divergent
models of the revolutionary terrorism practiced during this period, these two
events possessed a common organizational and political-intellectual heritage
in the neopopulist movement, with the Maximalists splitting off from the SRs
in 1906, evolving their own distinctive approach to violence in the process.17
Indeed, the Maximalists’ attack was often judged and interpreted at the time
15
My focus is broadly on what Marina Mogil’ner terms “Underground Russia,” the
revolutionary “microcosm” dating back to the nineteenth century that opposed itself to
“legal Russia.” Employing a semiotic method, Mogil’ner explores the shared mentalities, values, and attitudes of this “semiosphere” but tends to homogenize it by
emphasizing its internal coherence 共at least until its self-destruction sometime after
1905兲. See Marina Mogil’ner, Mifologiia “podpol’nogo cheloveka”: Radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza 共Moscow,
1999兲. Boniece follows her lead, showing Spiridonova “conforming to an existing
behavioral text.” Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case,” 573.
16 Terrorism had strong public support in Russia during much of this period,
certainly well into 1906, and the public image of individuals such as Kaliaev 共and,
later, Spiridonova兲 often adhered to the positive terms of revolutionary hagiography,
all of which suggests that the moral economy I am analyzing resonated well beyond SR
circles. Support ultimately declined, leading to significant opposition, but the dynamics
of this process have not yet been well documented. Although public opinion is a
relevant issue, which I am considering in my monograph, I largely exclude it here due
to the limits of space and the need for analytic coherence. On public support, see
Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case.”
17 Camus uses the term “fastidious assassins” as the title of chapter 2 of The Rebel.
See The Rebel, 133– 42. Focusing on this neopopulist wing of the revolutionary
underground allows me to consider different approaches to violence among people
with many shared political beliefs; the programs of the SRs and Maximalists are
discussed in more detail below. Although there was significant overlap in goals,
rhetoric, and personnel between them and other groups employing terrorist methods,
including the anarchists and various leftist national parties, a comparison is less fruitful
due to differing political traditions and national contexts. See Manfred Hildermeier,
The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War 共New York,
2000兲; and Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists 共Princeton, NJ, 1967兲, esp. chap. 2,
and his Anarchist Portraits 共Princeton, NJ, 1988兲. On right-wing violence, including
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
613
with reference to Kaliaev’s, partly due to these shared traditions 共and overlapping memberships兲 and partly due to the symbolic significance of children,
the ultimate embodiment of innocence. At issue in this dialogue were fundamental questions about the morality of political violence. While numerous
factors—from tactical considerations to the broader political context—
contributed to a general escalation of violence in the eighteen-month interval
between these two events, this article considers how terrorists themselves
represented the political landscape and justified their actions.18 It asserts,
thereby, the importance of individual agency, political ethics, and collective
judgments, even as it locates them into the broader discursive fields of a moral
economy. To excavate such “moral systems” is not to claim that they were
actually moral, nor is it to make broader arguments about the moral permissibility of violence; it is, rather, to illuminate the norms themselves— how
they both enabled and constrained the practice of violence—and, in the end,
the inherent fragility of the limits they articulated.
CONTEXT
After a hiatus of some two decades, terrorism had reappeared in Russia in the
early twentieth century, taking, most prominently, the lives of two interior
ministers, Dmitrii Sipiagin in 1902 and Viacheslav von Plehve in 1904.19
Spearheaded nationally by the newly formed SR Party and its Combat Organization, joined by individuals and groups at the local level, this turn to
violence was relatively limited in scale until 1905, when it accelerated to
unprecedented levels. Following the massacre of hundreds of unarmed workers and members of their families by soldiers on Bloody Sunday 共January 9,
1905兲, protests spread across the country as revolutionary organizations expanded in size and ambition. At this time, the number of terrorist acts grew
some terrorism, see Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905
共Cambridge, 1995兲, 127– 41.
18 A spiral of state and nonstate violence promoted an escalation of overall violence,
as discussed below, but explanations relying on this abstract process or a “brutalization
effect” can obscure human agency: the actual choices that people made, including
attempts to set or to deny moral limits in violence, that were shaped by what I am
calling a “moral economy.” Furthermore, it is worth noting that violence can also
produce fear, pessimism, political passivity, and a rejection of violence 共including
pacifism兲, all of which were likewise evident in Russia during this period.
19 Stepan Balmashov and Egor Sazonov—the assassins of Sipiagin and von Plehve,
respectively—were important precursors to Kaliaev and were celebrated in parallel
terms, but Kaliaev’s case is interesting due to his initial refusal to throw the bomb, the
subsequent debates about this, and its overall timing.
614
Morrissey
markedly.20 The SRs claimed responsibility for six attacks from 1902 to 1904,
but then fifty-one in 1905 共forty-nine of which occurred after Kaliaev’s兲,
seventy-eight in 1906, and sixty-two in 1907, until the number fell again to
just three in 1908.21 As one archival source makes explicit, however, the
dimensions of the phenomenon were much greater: between January 1 and
August 20, 1906, for example, 1,782 terrorist acts—134 involving bombs—
killed or wounded 1,363 people, including 497 private individuals.22 Compare
these figures to some thirty-five assassinations, including that of the tsar, in
Russia’s previous and better-known terrorist moment of 1877– 81.23 Mass
terrorism—in the form of assassinations, public bombings and gunfights, and
expropriations 共armed robberies兲—would reach its height from the summer of
1906 into 1907, though the central terror of the SRs had been largely displaced
by local groups with often amorphous political affiliations, including regional
SR “fighting squads,” anarchists, and successive generations of the Maximalists. This was a period of “excess,” when violence broke through the constraints usually placed upon it and became pervasive.24 The subsequent decline had many causes, including state repression, a waning of public support,
and an internal crisis of the Left 共caused, inter alia, by the failure to topple the
regime, the extreme levels of violence, and the serial exposure of agents
provocateurs兲. The last prominent victim would be Stolypin himself, shot and
killed in September 1911 by a man with a shady past, both terrorist and police
agent.
20
The highest estimate is some 17,000 people killed or wounded in terrorist strikes
through 1916, although many acts that are included in that estimate could be categorized as criminal. See Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in
Russia, 1894 –1917 共Princeton, NJ, 1993兲, chap. 1. The lines between revolutionary
activity and criminal activity were blurred, with criminals often calling themselves
anarchists, and newspapers likewise using this term liberally. The field courts 共of
1906 –7兲 did not consider the political or criminal basis of its cases, and one official
contended that the vast majority were criminal, not political. See Gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv rossiisskoi federatsii, Moscow 共henceforth GARF; State Archive of the Russian
Federation兲, f, 102 共DP 7兲, op. 203 共1906兲, d. 8 t.4 lit.A, l. 168.
21 The number was likely higher, as local committees often operated with significant
autonomy. See M. Ivich, “Statistika terroristicheskikh aktov,” Pamiatnaia knizhka
sotsialista-revoliutsionera, no. 2 共n.p., 1914兲, 6.
22 The data, compiled from reports from provincial authorities, are broken down
according to whether victims were private individuals or in state service, and, for the
latter, by office held, including both high and low ranks. See GARF, f. 102 共DP OO兲,
op. 236 共1906兲, d. 808t.1, ll. 3– 4, 6.
23 Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats, 174.
24 In a perceptive discussion of political violence, Michael Geyer uses the term
“excess” with reference to the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, but
it likewise suits the early twentieth century. Michael Geyer, “Some Hesitant Observations concerning ‘Political Violence,’” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3 共Summer 2003兲: 695–708.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
615
Studies of Russian revolutionary terrorism in this period have charted its
numerical dimensions, theoretical justifications, organizational forms, and
wide geographical scope; they have further demonstrated the passive—and, at
times, active— endorsement of the tactic by political groups not formally
associated with it, including Social Democrats and liberals. In describing its
spread in and after 1905, they generally refer to a “degradation” or “degeneration,” suggesting a break between the organized acts of established parties
and the “mass terror” from the “lower depths.”25 Anna Geifman has taken this
approach the furthest, linking the extreme violence of the post-1905 period to
the emergence of a new kind of terrorist, unschooled in ideology 共and often
barely literate兲, socially marginal, and psychologically unstable; in the process, she effectively subsumes the “new” terrorism into a framework of
irrationality, criminality, and insanity.26 Yet politics and political agency
should not be so quickly dismissed. As the latest generation of scholars is now
demonstrating, a terrorist act is an assertion of political subjectivity as well as
a culturally constructed, often orchestrated public event 共in which “madness”
itself could become part of the performance兲.27
The main contextual factor for the escalation of terrorism in the early
twentieth century was the broader eruption of political violence.28 Since the
late 1880s, the socioeconomic transformations of rapid industrialization together with political repression and russification had heightened social, ethnic,
religious, and national tensions. This, in turn, fed the political organization of
Russian society, including the formation of underground parties as well as
armed self-defense units and terrorist groups on the left and the right. Ter25 The most comprehensive overviews are those in Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill; and
Oleg Budnitskii, Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii: Ideologiia, etika,
psikhologiia 共vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX v兲 共Moscow, 2000兲. See also Maureen
Perrie, “Political and Economic Terror in the Tactics of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before 1914,” in Mommsen and Hirschfeld, Social Protest, Violence,
and Terror; and Manfred Hildermeier, “The Terrorist Strategies of the SocialistRevolutionary Party in Russia, 1900 –1914,” in ibid.
26 The strengths of Geifman’s study lie elsewhere, especially in her analysis of the
regional and imperial dimensions of terrorism as well as the ambivalent views of it
among liberals and Marxists. See Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, esp. chaps. 3, 6, and 7.
Criticisms of her approach have been made by other scholars, including Budnitskii,
Terrorizm, 24 –27; and Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case,” 605.
27 See Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case”; and Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov;
see also the five articles in Anke Hilbrenner and Frithjof B. Schenk, eds., “Modern
Times? Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia,” special issue, Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas, no. 2 共2010兲; and Lynn Patyk, “The Double-Edged Sword of Word and
Deed: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture” 共PhD diss., Stanford
University, 2005兲.
28 The best overview of this period, including its violence, remains Abraham Ascher,
The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. 共Stanford, CA, 1988 –92兲.
616
Morrissey
rorism thus overlapped with national movements, urban and working-class
conflict, peasant revolts, and common criminality, reflecting the local cultures
and dynamics of these varied and particular circumstances.29 Of central
importance, moreover, was the role of state actors, not just their well-known
reluctance to institute genuine political reform but also their very readiness to
escalate the deployment of violence in military and civilian settings alike.
Since the enactment of “temporary” legislation on state security in 1881, large
territories had been de facto ruled under these measures, and they were
extended in reach and applied to an unprecedented degree during the revolutionary years, effectively placing most of the empire, center and periphery,
under emergency measures or martial law.30 Beginning in 1905, artillery
barrages, pacification campaigns, and “punitive expeditions” were deployed
on a large scale against civilian targets; soldiers and police repeatedly fired
into crowds; and thousands of people were arrested, imprisoned, exiled, and
executed, many with hardly a modicum of due process.31 Contemporary
estimates of the number of casualties of state violence are harrowing, reaching
the tens of thousands for 1905 and 1906 alone.32 The single most bloody event
was probably the military suppression of the Moscow Uprising in December
1905, which took the lives of 1,059 Muscovites, including 86 children.33 In the
29 I use the term “local” because it lacks the connotations of “archaic” or “traditional,” terms that can essentialize political violence into narratives of backwardness.
Violence was also shaped within local contexts. Working-class violence and peasant
violence, for example, built upon long-standing attitudes and practices but were
likewise influenced by contemporaneous conditions and ideas. For further discussion,
see Peter Holquist, “Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905–21,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3
共Summer 2003兲: 627–52.
30 Several levels of enhanced security measures 共“reinforced” and “extraordinary,”
culminating in outright martial law兲 allowed extremely wide powers for the detention
and exile of those suspected of involvement in state crimes, the use of military justice
in civilian 共political兲 contexts, and the prohibition of gatherings and residence. See
Jonathan Daly, “On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial
Russia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 共Autumn 1995兲: 602–29; and William C. Fuller,
Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 共Princeton, NJ, 1985兲. For
additional context, see Jonathan Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and
Opposition in Russia, 1866 –1905 共De Kalb, IL, 1998兲, and The Watchful State:
Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906 –1917 共De Kalb, IL, 2004兲.
31 According to one progressive statistician, who analyzed a range of officially
produced statistics as well as other sources, the average prison population rose from
77,255 in 1897 to 181,241 by April 1, 1909. See A. B. Ventin, “Piatiletnie itogi 共17
oktiabria 1905 g.–17 oktiabria 1910 g.兲,” Sovremennyi mir, no. 12 共1910兲, 81– 89.
32 One source listed 26,183 dead and 31,117 wounded, not including the thousands
of people who suffered in punitive expeditions. Cited in ibid., 81.
33 These figures do not include the summary shootings, arrests, and beatings that
occurred in the ensuing crackdown. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 1:322.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
617
five-year period beginning with the promulgation of the October Manifesto on
October 17, 1905, moreover, military courts sentenced 6,992 people to death,
of whom 3,741 were executed, the vast majority 共3,015兲 for political crimes.34
Levels of violence were often highest in the borderlands, especially the Baltic
region, Poland, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, where all of these factors came
together with particular potency during these years.35
With its spiral of state and nonstate violence and dramatic rises in the
number of casualties on all sides, this period constitutes a textbook example
of what Martin Miller calls “terrorist moments.” In a programmatic article, he
defines terrorism as
a historically contextualized phenomenon characterized by the violent combat between
governments and societies over unresolved political issues. The combat produces
situations in which the consequences of the violence, which is conducted either from
above in the form of a variety of authoritarian regimes 共vs. society兲 or from below
directed by insurgencies 共vs. the state兲, become a dominating factor in the daily
functioning of social and political life. The phenomenon is sustained by the dynamic
interaction of the combatants and their allies 共i.e., the media, elites, masses, and
foreign supporters, among others兲, who may be complicit, passively or actively
engaged by force or choice.36
While state violence is too large a topic to be systematically reviewed here, it
functioned as an essential reference point within the moral economy of
terrorism. Maintaining that the state was the main source of violence in
Russian society, whether literally 共as in the shootings on Bloody Sunday, the
suppression of the Moscow Uprising, and the mass executions兲 or more
figuratively 共as in the systemic humiliation and degradation of the human
being兲, revolutionaries legitimized their own turn to violence as a necessary
and intrinsically moral rejoinder: a means to punish the guilty and to assert
their own human dignity and political sovereignty. While rising levels of
conflict may have encouraged ever more extreme responses, they also pro34
These figures refer to people processed through the judicial system; summary
shootings are not included, and the data on field courts are incomplete. See Ventin,
“Piatiletnie itogi,” 81– 89.
35 Pogroms and right-wing street violence became an almost daily experience in
many towns and cities, and they too claimed thousands of victims. For further
discussion of this and the situation in the borderlands, see Rawson, Russian Rightists;
Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904 –1907 共Ithaca, NY, 1995兲; and
Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps 共Bloomington, IN, 1993兲. On pogroms more generally, see John Doyle Klier and Shlomo
Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History 共1992;
repr., Cambridge, 2004兲.
36 Martin A. Miller, “Ordinary Terrorism in Historical Perspective,” Journal for the
Study of Radicalism 2, no. 1 共2008兲: 125–54, quote on 125; emphasis in original.
618
Morrissey
voked doubts, at times even soul-searching, casting a critical spotlight back
upon the moral claims of revolutionary violence—its apparel of innocence.
REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE
AND
REVOLUTIONARY WAR
The popular mood was rebellious when Kaliaev did actually throw his bomb
into the carriage of the Grand Duke Sergei, the unpopular and dictatorial
former governor general of Moscow as well as confidante and adviser to his
nephew the tsar. It blew him into pieces spread over a wide area, a fact that
many Muscovites greeted with open expressions of delight. One eyewitness
described the scene in detail, not just the force of the blast, the scattered body
parts, and the fragments of clothing and coach but also the irreverent attitude
of passersby. Some made crude jokes: one man nudged bits of spattered brain
with his boot—no skull was ever found—and quipped, “Hey, brothers, they
said that [he had] no brains, but they’re lying here.” The crowd as a whole
refused to doff hats or disperse, watching indifferently as the widow, who had
run to the scene from nearby, kneeled before the remains before shouting in
anger at the onlookers. Throughout that day, the atmosphere in Moscow was
reportedly festive, with most people simply going about their business: theater
and nightlife began as usual before being shut down by decree.37 Sources
indicate that a small minority responded with violence of their own: retaliatory
attacks on students, whose radical politics were widely presumed at this point
and whose uniforms made them easy to spot.38 Nevertheless, the pattern of
response was similar to what had followed von Plehve’s assassination in July
1904, and it points to a key component of terrorism in the early days of the
revolution: its popularity among many segments of the urban population.39
Even when faced with such a horrific scene, in which the force of a bomb had
literally ripped a human body apart, much of the gathered public saw the guilt
of the victim more than the violence committed against him.40
37 GARF, f. 102 共DP OO兲, op. 233 共1905兲, d. 60, l. 137. For another account that
includes the incident with the Grand Duchess, see Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista,
103. Published newspaper reports placed her at the scene but fail to mention the
impolite 共at best, indifferent兲 reaction of the crowd or her outburst, instead focusing on
the size of the blast and its impact upon the body of the Grand Duke and his coach. See
the heavily censored coverage in Peterburgskii listok, Rus’, and Russkoe slovo starting
on February 6, 1905.
38 For further discussion, see Susan K. Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian
Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism 共New York, 1998兲.
39 For another source recording the joy that greeted news of Grand Duke Sergei’s
assassination as well as the refusal of secondary school pupils to attend memorial
services, see S. R. Mintslov, Peterburg v 1903–1910 godakh 共Riga, 1931兲, 146 – 48,
150; for the response to von Plehve’s death, see also 92–93, 98.
40 Kaliaev’s indictment also described the bodily remains in some detail, apparently
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
619
Although this response reflected the widespread loss of legitimacy experienced by the tsar and his government in the wake of Bloody Sunday, it also
echoed a more long-standing conventional perception of the state as the source
of illegitimate and arbitrary violence in society.41 This convention attained its
most explicit expression in revolutionary propaganda, but more subtle versions had long underpinned legally permitted publications, whether legal,
literary, or publicistic works about corporal punishment and Siberian exile or
even discussions of suicide.42 Since the turn of the century, moreover, criticism of the regime had grown more vocal and more organized, highlighting its
disregard for the rule of law and human dignity and calling for democratic
change.43 Kaliaev’s act itself took place in a highly volatile environment
characterized by swings between repression and halfhearted conciliation.
Several months of relative political relaxation had followed von Plehve’s
assassination, which included the decision not to execute the assassin, Egor
Sazonov, but the growing wave of protests in the autumn of 1904 —antiwar
demonstrations, the banquet movement, and workers on strike— had strengthened the position of hard-liners around the tsar.44 The events of Bloody
intending to demonstrate the barbarity of the crime. The indictment, along with an
extensive 共if not exhaustive兲 compilation of other materials 共newspaper articles, photographs, letters, poetry, proclamations, courtroom speeches兲, was reprinted in an
extended pamphlet as part of the SRs’ propaganda barrage. Where possible, for ease
of reference, I cite from this pamphlet: Ivan Platonovich Kaliaev 共henceforth IPK兲
共n.p., 1905兲, 16.
41 This convention would reach its apogee in the huge controversy about Mariia
Spiridonova: the point is that controversy focused not on her own act of violence but
on the violence committed against her. This event occurred in a period of relaxed press
freedom, which was not the case in 1905. See Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case”; and
Geyer, “Some Hesitant Observations,” 706.
42 Abby Schrader, The Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in
Imperial Russia 共De Kalb, IL, 2002兲; and Susan K. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body
Politic in Imperial Russia 共Cambridge, 2006兲.
43 This was a strong current in student protest and was integral to the Liberation
Movement. See Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution; and, in addition, see Shmuel Galai,
The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1901–1905 共Cambridge, 1973兲.
44 Prominent among them was the Grand Duke Sergei, who was a strong proponent
of a muscular autocracy on the model of Alexander III. His appointment in 1891 as
governor general of Moscow 共and, in 1896, as the head of its military district兲
effectively placed Russia’s second capital city under the direct rule of an influential
member of the royal family and was a key reason for the forced expulsion of large
segments of Moscow’s Jewish population in and after 1891. In late 1904, Sergei
submitted his resignation as governor general 共effective January 1, 1905兲, in part due
to his disagreements over the more conciliatory policies of the interior minister, Prince
Sviatopolk-Mirskii, who had replaced von Plehve. The Grand Duke remained head of
the military district and a highly influential proponent of repressive policies in St.
620
Morrissey
Sunday then set off a process of mass mobilization and belated gestures
toward reform that would ultimately culminate in the general strike and the
granting of some civil liberties and a parliament in the October Manifesto. Yet
this outcome was not clear in the spring of 1905, and the Kaliaev case marked
an important transitional moment.
By 1905, the SR Party was one of Russia’s most prominent socialist
movements, in part due to its sponsorship of high-profile terrorist attacks.
Founded in 1901, it positioned itself as the successor to the populist parties of
the 1870s and enjoyed significant support from both peasants and workers as
well as from educated society. Influenced by Marxism, though rejecting its
historical determinism and dismissal of the revolutionary potential of the
peasantry, the SRs set their immediate goal as a political revolution to
establish a democracy and social reforms. Toward this end, they developed a
coherent defense of terrorism as a method of political struggle, arguing that it
had both a disruptive effect upon the government and an agitational effect
upon society. Central to their policy was its subordination in theory to the
control of the party, which was not only to determine targets but also to ensure
a balance with other key activities such as revolutionary organization and
propaganda.45 Following the first successful action of the SR Combat Organization in 1902, party leaders had likewise accumulated valuable experience
in broadcasting their feats. This was the era of the “avengers” 共mstiteli兲: lone
heroes courageously assassinating evildoers in the tsarist administration, turning the courtroom into a site of political resistance, and sacrificing themselves
on the scaffold, ideally producing daring letters or poetry in the interim.
Kaliaev’s case conformed extremely well to this model, and a close reading of
the propaganda barrage illuminates the official script of SR revolutionary
terrorism. The timing of his actions, however, at the advent of an era of mass
revolutionary politics, engendered new ambiguities: even as Kaliaev’s selfrestraint seemingly embodied the principle of setting moral limits, his example also became a rallying cry promoting an ever-expanding field of combat.
At the core of SR propaganda was the rhetoric of revolutionary justice. Its
twofold purpose was to justify an assassination as a legitimate and necessary
response to state violence and to assert the sovereign right of “the people”
共represented by the party兲 to pass “legal” judgment. Proclamations, including
the official announcement entitled “The Court Is in Session,” thus served as
Petersburg. See Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in
Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. 共Princeton, NJ, 1995–2000兲, esp. 2:293–96.
45 Key programmatic texts are reprinted in Oleg Budnitskii, ed., Istoriia terrorizma
v Rossii v dokumentakh, biografiiakh, issledovanniiakh 共Rostov, 1996兲. See also
Hildermeier, Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party; and Ascher, The Revolution of
1905, 1:39 – 40.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
621
conjoined indictments and verdicts, detailing Grand Duke Sergei’s “crimes”
against the people. These ranged from his alleged complicity in the catastrophe at Khodynka Fields, a notorious incident during the coronation festivities
of Nikolai II in which 1,360 people had died 共according to official sources兲,
to his repressive policies as governor general and his influence on the tsar.46
Kaliaev later took the same approach at his trial, attempting to turn the tables
and indict the state, as represented in the Grand Duke, for its crimes: following
SR protocol, he admitted killing the Grand Duke but denied his guilt on this
basis.47 This rhetoric explicitly celebrated the rough justice of vengeance:
“The spilling of the people’s blood called forth repulsion, retribution. And
retribution has begun. . . . His own blood, his lifeless corpse, is the most
forceful and irrefutable argument. Blood for blood. Sergei, who built the tsar’s
coronation on the corpses of Khodynka Fields, ended how he began.”48
One of Kaliaev’s defense attorneys, the liberal M. L. Mandel’shtam,
articulated a more refined version of this narrative, arguing in his speech
before the court that the Russian state was directly responsible for the
violence against it.49
Political murder occurs in all times and places. There is no government structure, there
is no form of state power, that would be immune to it. The tragic death of Carnot, the
terrible fate of Cleveland [sic50]—representatives of two democratic republics—are the
most vivid evidence of that. But there, where such murders are not fed by general
discontent, . . . there where there are no “troubles,” political murder is [only]
sporadic. However strong the organization, however many members it has, it
cannot feed for long on its own juices. It needs the constant infusion of new
strength, the eternal metabolic exchange with all the living elements of the country.
Otherwise [it will end in] disintegration and death. Sedition that does not depend
“Sud idet,” Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, no. 59 共1905兲, 23.
As Kaliaev summarized: “To fall under revolutionary punishment, the Grand
Duke Sergei had to commit, of course, a countless quantity of crimes against the
people.” IPK, 20. His trial took place behind closed doors on April 5, but reports leaked
out, including transcripts of the speeches given by Kaliaev and his two defense
attorneys, M. L. Mandel’shtam and V. A. Zhdanov. For uncensored coverage by the
illegal liberal press, see “Delo Kaliaeva 共Ot nashego korrespondenta兲,” Osvobozhdenie, no. 69/70 共1905兲, 311–13.
48 “Sud idet,” 23.
49 Mandel’shtam was a well-known defense attorney, a future member of the
共left-liberal兲 Constitutional Democratic Party, and ultimately a victim of Stalin’s
purges. His argument here was not uncommon among liberals, who, if they did not
overtly support terrorism, understood it as a consequence of state policy. See N. A.
Troitskii, “Mikhail L’vovich 共Moisei Leibovich兲 Mandel’shtam,” in Sud’by rossiiskikh
advokatov 共Saratov, 2002–11兲, http://www.sgu.ru/files/nodes/9871/10.pdf.
50 The exact transliteration is Klevelend, and I suspect that he confused the US
president Grover Cleveland, whose term in office ended in early 1897, with his
successor, William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist, Leon
Czolgosz.
46
47
622
Morrissey
on unrest is [but] a conspiracy; sedition that finds its highest sanction in unrest is
a revolutionary party.51
Precisely because the Russian government had failed to work with the elemental forces of social change, seeking to restrain rather than to direct the
flood, it had created what it so feared: mass social unrest and organized
“sedition.” Mandel’shtam narrated Kaliaev’s life story as an exemplar of this
process: a young student, full of hopes and idealism, had been met with
violence. Banned from the university for participating in student protests, he
had been sentenced to internal exile, thereby driving him along the path
toward the bombing and the scaffold.52 He was, moreover, but one of many.
What made Russian terrorism so threatening, in Mandel’shtam’s account, was
that it fed upon the swells of broad-based social unrest—the “troubles” created
by government policies.53
The counterpart to state violence and depravity was the moral purity of the
terrorist, which was a standard trope in revolutionary propaganda. Much
evidence was marshaled to demonstrate Kaliaev’s character—an autobiographical fragment, letters to his mother and comrades, poetry, reminiscences of comrades— but the real proof was Kaliaev’s decision not to
throw the bomb on February 2.54 This act, it was averred, showed “more
vividly than any words the tenderness and innate nobility of him, who was
later judged as a murderer.” This anonymous account was written by Boris
Savinkov, one of the leaders of the Combat Organization and the mastermind of the assassination:
He ran to the coach, to this long-awaited coach, and lifted his hand but immediately
dropped it; in the coach, in addition to Sergei Aleksandrovich, sat a woman and
children, who were later established to be the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna and
51
IPK, 22–28.
Narratives of the individual’s journey toward the ultimate self-sacrifice of terrorism, which were common in revolutionary literature, emphasized the role of state
violence combined with the sensibility of the future terrorist to the tremendous
sufferings of the people.
53 Ironically, the prosecutor depicted the SRs as cruel and bloodthirsty fanatics
seeking to murder Russian “civil society” 共obshchestvennost’兲—a term typically
claimed by the educated public in opposition to the autocracy. Because the state had
to act in society’s defense, he demanded a guilty verdict with a death sentence. IPK,
21. For discussion of this term, see Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James
L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public
Identity in Late Imperial Russia 共Princeton, NJ, 1991兲.
54 Some of this other material was reproduced in IPK. See also “Kassatsionnaia
zhaloba I. P. Kaliaeva v Senat,” Byloe, no. 7 共1908兲.
52
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
623
the children of the Grand Duke Pavel, Dmitrii and Mariia Pavlovna.55 . . . He did not
throw the bomb on the 2nd, and he didn’t go to Tverskaia Street on the 4th, knowing
that [a bomb there would result in] unnecessary and innocent victims. Only those who
are acquainted with the tremendous difficulty in the techniques of combat acts can fully
value all the risk and self-denial of such a decision.56
Kaliaev’s refusal to take innocent lives— of children, even those of the royal
family—attested to both his nobility of character and the high moral purpose
of his mission, paradoxically reinforcing a supposedly moral basis for his
actual assassination of the Grand Duke two days later. Whereas state violence
was depicted as immorally indiscriminate—witness the massacre of workers’
families on Bloody Sunday—revolutionary violence set limits, targeting only
the truly guilty. Indeed, Kaliaev subsequently claimed that his restraint
marked a second victory for himself personally and the Combat Organization
more generally: they always tried to avoid “unnecessary accidents,” though
never swerving from their goal.57
A public controversy that erupted after the assassination provided another
chance to affirm the dichotomy between revolutionary virtue and autocratic
duplicity but also threatened to blur the boundaries between guilt and innocence. On February 7, the wife of the victim, the Grand Duchess Elizaveta,
had visited Kaliaev in prison. They conversed in private, and Kaliaev accepted
a gift of an icon upon her departure. Soon afterward, the press reported on the
meeting, asserting that Kaliaev had burst into grateful tears before the noble
beneficence of the Grand Duchess.58 Clearly devastated by this publicity,
which he considered a public defamation of his character, Kaliaev twice
requested a second meeting, produced his own account of the encounter, and
wrote an open letter to the Grand Duchess. According to his version, he had
been completely surprised by his visitor, initially not even realizing her
identity, and he admitted feeling pity for her sorrow and tears. But he also
claims to have acted honorably by audaciously proclaiming his revolutionary
principles and affirming the justice of his action as well as his own purity of
conscience. He accepted the icon, he stresses, not out of a sense of guilt or a
Christian sensibility but out of a desire to be magnanimous in victory: it was
55 Fatefully, perhaps, Dmitrii Pavlovich was one of the organizers, in 1916, of the
murder of Rasputin.
56 IPK, 4.
57 Ibid., 10. Little reference was made to the Grand Duke’s driver, who was in fact
killed despite his “innocence.” Assassinations of prominent figures were notoriously
difficult, requiring months of painstaking planning and surveillance, and drivers were
typically deemed acceptable “collateral damage.” This reflected a specific ethical
judgment: at issue, therefore, was whether this judgment should be expanded, rendering acceptable the murder of incidental companions or family members.
58 See the report on “reliable rumors” in Novoe vremia 共February 14, 1905兲, 2.
624
Morrissey
her admission of guilt, her supplication, not his. This was, as he put it, “the
first time a member of the royal family had bowed [her] head before a people’s
avenger.”59 Yet Kaliaev’s righteous indignation destabilized the limits he had
placed on the exercise of revolutionary terror because it undercut the Grand
Duchess’s status as a noncombatant. By slandering him in the media, she had
betrayed his trust and violated his human dignity, thereby demonstrating her
own complicity and rendering herself an integral part of the system he sought
to destroy.60
The final act in the revolutionary drama was the death sentence and
execution, which Kaliaev strived to play well. Upon hearing the sentence, he
stated: “I am pleased with your verdict. I hope that you will decide to carry it
out upon me as openly and publicly as I carried out the sentence of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party. Learn to look directly into the eyes of the
approaching revolution.”61 Kaliaev realized, of course, that his execution
could hardly be held in public; his goal was rather to evoke a rhetorical
contrast between the transparent, open, fearless, and thereby legitimate act of
revolutionary justice and the dark, hidden, fearful, and thereby illegitimate
violence of the state. Following well-established practices, he wrote letters of
farewell to his family and comrades, which circulated widely. Similarly, he
refused to petition the tsar for leniency, likewise forbidding his mother to do
so in his name. In the end, Kaliaev would reportedly meet his death with a
calm demeanor and “iron tranquillity.”62 While capital punishment usually
exemplifies the state’s sovereign power, revolutionaries transformed it into a
spectacle of illegitimate violence by highlighting the personal resistance,
dignity, and moral fortitude of the victim. Indeed, as an act of state violence,
it demanded justice, thereby starting the cycle of vengeance anew.
Despite its undeniable hyperbole, revolutionary propaganda should be
taken seriously, if less for its accuracy than for its rhetorical categories and,
in this instance, how they framed an argument on the permissibility of
59
Kaliaev writes: “We looked at each other, I don’t deny it, with a certain mystical
feeling, like two people on death row who had remained alive. I— by accident,
she— by the will of the organization, by my will, as the organization and I deliberately
strove to avoid superfluous bloodshed.” Less convincing was his interpretation of the
icon: “It was for me a symbol of her recognition of my victory, a symbol of her
gratefulness to fate for the preservation of her life and a confession of her conscience
for the crimes of the Grand Duke.” IPK, 7–13, quote on 9 –10.
60 He writes: “I trusted your nobility, assuming that your high official position, your
personal dignity, might serve as a guarantee, sufficient [to prevent] a slanderous
intrigue. . . . But you proved yourself unworthy of my generosity.” Ibid., 10, 12–13.
61 Ibid., 22 共cf. 47兲.
62 Indeed, one report claimed that the procurator [prosecutor] came to his cell nine
times in the hours before the execution, and each time Kaliaev sent him away with a
categorical refusal to plead for clemency. Ibid., 46. See also “Poslednyi den’ Kaliaeva,” Byloe, no. 5 共1906兲; and “Kazn’,” Osvobozhdenie, no. 71 共1905兲, 351.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
625
violence. The narrative of revolutionary justice, with its likening of the
terrorist act to juridical punishment, also constructed a binary politics of
enmity—the virtuous Kaliaev versus the degenerate Sergei, the people
versus the enemies of the people, us and them—though one with space for
innocence and neutrality. Yet these images often slipped into a rhetoric of
warfare, as Kaliaev made explicit in his trial statement: “I am not the
defendant, I am your prisoner. We are two warring sides. You are the hired
servants of capital and the imperial government; I am the people’s
avenger, a socialist-revolutionary.”63 During the spring and summer of
1905, which was a period of intense political activity and organization,
these categories came together to help spur an expansion of revolutionary
violence, especially on the local level. As mass action and individual terror
spread, the archetype of the avenger was appropriated ever more frequently into new contexts, and these acts of violence, in turn, were
heralded within the underground as signs of an incipient mass movement
of armed revolt, perhaps even the mass terror of total revolutionary war.
A drive to expand the field of action was palpable in many locally produced
SR leaflets, which were consumed by local activists and sympathizers but also
used in general propaganda efforts. Noteworthy for their vivid, vitriolic
language, they anticipated the approaching conflagration, reading the Kaliaev
case as a glorious narrative of heroism and victory, not one of conscience or
restraint. The Moscow Committee, which was a hotbed of radicalism that
would produce several leading Maximalists, issued a proclamation one day
after Sergei’s assassination that painted a dehumanizing portrait of him as the
personal embodiment of absolute evil: “He fell, blown up by a bomb, the chief
culprit of the Moscow massacre; [he] fell, the murderer of thousands of
Petersburg workers, the hero of Khodynka, the strangler of Russia, the
extinguisher of freedom and light. A filthy debaucher in his personal life, a
vile executioner, he thought he could commit outrages against the great people
without punishment, and he is no more.”64 Having mounted crime upon crime,
metaphor upon metaphor, in an outright frenzy of condemnation, the proclamation concluded with an apocalyptic vision: “Let the great terrorist blow that
struck Sergei be the first peal of the people’s thunder, the springtime storm of
renewal. Let the armed people in a concerted onslaught completely destroy the
brutish den of the Romanovs and on its ruins build the kingdom of light and
63
IPK, 18 –19.
Dated February 5, 1905, and signed “the Moscow Committee of the PSR [Party
of Socialist Revolutionaries],” International Institute of Social History 共henceforth
IISG兲, PSR, file 357; because the folios are not numbered, I provide information for
identification.
64
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Morrissey
freedom. Death to the people’s enemies. Glory to the heroes.”65 Some leaflets
from other regions were similarly militant, glorifying the cleansing functions
of violence and extending the category of “enemy” with extreme language and
imagery: “Eternal memory to this new victim of bloodthirsty tsarism
[Kaliaev]! Only a little more effort and a few more sacrifices . . . and not
only tyrants but also tyranny will perish. Death to the last degenerates of
the heavy legacy of despotism! Death to the soulless oprichniki shooting
the defenseless people! Death to the bloodsuckers and robbers who have
turned our unhappy, ruined country, drenched in blood, into a half corpse.
Glory to the perished hero!”66 Another example condenses the logic into a
single slogan, its metaphor evoking capitalism as much as autocracy:
“Merciless vengeance to all enemies, to all parasites of the laboring
masses.”67 These specific leaflets were all produced in the aftermath of
either Sergei’s assassination or Kaliaev’s death sentence, but such rhetorical excess was becoming increasingly common, occurring in a handful of
locally produced leaflets 共following local assassinations兲 before the spring
of 1905 and rapidly proliferating afterward.68
Party leaders lent their approval to this development, publishing in August
1905 a lead article in their flagship journal entitled “Memento!” 共in Latin,
“Remember!”兲.69 Kaliaev’s execution, it contended in the opening sentence,
marked the onset of a new era characterized by the government’s increasing
reliance on executions 共which it termed “legal terror”兲 and the growing daring
of regional “fighting squads” 共which were assassinating “enemies” on the
local level兲. With a warning, “À la guerre— comme à la guerre!” it outlined
new terms of engagement in what was now a civil war: “The government and
the country unavoidably aim against each other the terrible weapons of
extermination. Under such conditions we can and must respect the personal
safety only of those people who are really and completely neutral in the
struggle between the government and the revolution. Anyone, however, who
actively helps the government in its struggle, who violates his neutrality to its
benefit— cannot not be our direct political enemy who [thereby] calls our
strikes upon him. For him there can be no pardons or acquittals.” Enemies
65
Dated February 5, 1905, and signed “the Moscow Committee of the PSR,” IISG,
PSR, file 357.
66 Dated April 9, 1905, and signed “the Volynskii Committee,” IISG, PSR, file 441.
The word oprichniki refers to the brutal agents of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
67 Titled “In Memory of Ivan Kaliaev,” dated May 1905, and signed “the Riga
Committee,” IISG, PSR, file 321.
68 Bloodthirsty imagery was not new, of course, but the function here was historically specific: to promote the transition from acts of individual terror to mass violence
in part through the parallel glorification of the hero and dehumanization of the enemy.
The fact that these were locally produced indicates grassroots radicalism.
69 “Memento!” Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, no. 72 共August 1, 1905兲, 1–2.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
627
now included not just high-ranking ministers and governors but also mid- and
low-ranking government employees, all the way down to the police officer
who arrested a revolutionary.70 By the summer of 1905, therefore, SR combat
actions had widened their aim, contracting the space for innocence and
employing “weapons of extermination.” While party leaders attempted to pull
back from this rhetoric following the October Manifesto, when they called but
failed to enforce a cease-fire, vengeance attacks only spread.
In the context of intense and rising political conflict, therefore, the Kaliaev
case had become a reference point among SRs justifying an open-ended spiral
of violence rather than self-restraint. Indeed, its very articulation of moral
limits came to demonstrate the absence of absolute limits 共and, implicitly, the
moral ambiguities of revolutionary terrorism in general兲. In a portrait of
Kaliaev published anonymously in May 1906 to mark the first anniversary
of his execution, Savinkov explored this paradox through a series of
elliptical memory fragments— his encounters with Kaliaev beginning with
their student days together 共circa 1899兲 and culminating in the events of
February 1905.71 It begins with a conversation—presented as a monologue
with the author as silent observer—in which Kaliaev first confronts the
problem of the moral imperative to murder and to die:
“Listen,” he quietly said: “Is this not a question of morality? Is force forbidden?
Surely ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is not for always? Because they kill? Because blood
flows in a river. [It] is often invisible, always innocent. Is it blood for blood? A life
for a life?” . . . He looks at me with a long, suffering glance. . . . His cheeks burn
and torment shines in his eyes, the torment of doubt and hesitation. . . . “Who will
decide—tell me—who will decide? Is [it] permitted, is everything permitted?”72
From this initial torment emerges moral certainty. At their next meeting,
which is undated but from the context apparently took place in late 1903 or
early 1904, Kaliaev had found his answers, stating, “Now there are no
questions. . . . Blood calls forth blood.”73
The memoir culminates, however, in Kaliaev’s panic following the incident
70 The article explicitly praised recent assassinations of police officers, and many of
these did actually follow the model of the “avenger”: targets were often participants in
local right-wing politics or pogroms, and local proclamations justified the actions in
those terms, adhering to the moral economy of terror as revolutionary justice and
vengeance.
71 For a perceptive discussion of the Kaliaev case as part of a broader analysis of
Boris Savinkov’s place in Russian terrorism and culture, see Patyk, “The DoubleEdged Sword,” chap. 4.
72 Boris Savinkov, Iz vospominanii ob Ivane Kaliaeve 共n.p., 1906兲, 3. For a reprinted
and signed version, see [Boris Savinkov], “Iz vospominanii ob Ivane Kaliaeve,” Byloe,
no. 7 共1908兲.
73 “Iz vospominanii ob Ivane Kaliaeve,” 4.
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Morrissey
with the children on February 2, 1905, when certainty disappears in an
onslaught of new questions. He is desperate to know whether he was right not
to throw the bomb, whether he would be judged a coward, whether the
children were innocent or guilty. He addresses Savinkov directly:
“You decide. I will not take it onto myself alone. If it is necessary for us, for the party,
for everyone—then they won’t survive the return trip. Not him, not her, not the
children.” And he is again silent. “Not me. Think. Not about me. About the party and
about them. As we decide, so it will be. Do you understand? As we decide, so it will
be.” I see his eyes and am terrified. We leave together. The blizzard hits us. [It]
whistles and stabs with snowy needles. Chiming bells plaintively moan somewhere
above. I kiss him. . . . And suddenly, burning pain [zhguchaia bol’], happiness without
name, without word, and without limits.74
The silence, the kiss, and the burning pain all allude to the conclusion of Fedor
Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, itself a meditation on human
freedom, the capacity to make moral choices, and the potential to assume that
burden in the name of others. Yet the scene ends here, as the text jumps to
their final farewells two days later, when Kaliaev kisses Savinkov before
departing into the fog, bomb in hand. Refusing to affirm the absolute sanctity
of innocence, Savinkov instead allows an unsettling question to hover in the
air: Could it sometimes be necessary—in the interests of the party and for the
good of the people—to kill the children too?
THE POLITICS
OF
PURIFICATION
On August 12, 1906, members of the Union of SR-Maximalists gave a
positive answer to this question when they targeted Prime Minister Petr
Stolypin at his dacha during his public reception hours. The combined size of
the three bombs 共over forty-five pounds兲 as well as the time and place of the
attack all point to a general disregard for incidental victims, and such was the
result. Stolypin’s daughter almost lost both her legs, and his son had serious
head injuries.75 Other victims included prominent officials but also servants
and petitioners. The bombing occurred at a pivotal moment politically, just
over a month after the dissolution of the first State Duma.76 Even though a
much-anticipated outbreak of civil war had not occurred, passions had flared
and violence spread, reaching a crescendo of sorts in mid-August, when over
74
Ibid., 14 –15.
For the accounts of his daughters, Aleksandra Stolypina and M. P. Bok, see B. G.
Fedorov, ed., P. A. Stolypin v vospominaniiakh docherei 共Moscow, 2003兲, 41– 44,
220 –30.
76 Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2:198 –207.
75
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
629
a hundred state employees were killed or wounded in just one week.77 In the
aftermath of the bombing, the government added a new weapon to its arsenal
in what would become its single most controversial policy of repression: a
military field court, empowered to try, convict, and execute civilians accused
of political crimes within four days of arrest without right to appeal. The
subsequent months witnessed hundreds of executions, including, as the press
reported, those of many innocent people.78 August 12, 1906, thus marked a
defining moment politically, ushering in an intense period of conflict.
While Maximalist violence evolved out of its SR foundations, it also
developed a distinctive moral economy of its own.79 Most obvious, of course,
was the acceptance in practice of extensive “collateral damage” as necessary
and wholly justifiable. This acceptance reflected a more fundamental shift in
the conceptualization of combatant and noncombatant, guilt and innocence. Building on the existing rhetoric of enemies and warfare, the
Maximalists articulated a radically bipartite view of Russian society that
left little room for innocence or neutrality. At the same time, the prominence of martyrology—its stress on the personal moral purity of the
terrorist and the rituals of self-sacrifice—notably declined, though it did
not disappear. In its place emerged a language of purification that was
associated with the act of violence itself.
The background to these developments lay in the Maximalists’ split from
the left flank of the SR Party. Though the SRs had long sought to combine
central discipline with significant internal autonomy, the unprecedented
events of 1905 had accentuated simmering disagreements, especially over the
permissibility of “economic terror,”80 the autonomy of local party commit77
One liberal journal reported seventy-two state employees killed and forty-two
wounded as well as thirty-one expropriations of state-owned institutions 共during which
twenty-two people were killed or injured兲. It also lambasted the continuing government
repressions, including arrests, pacification campaigns, and executions. “Vnutrennee
obozrenie,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 9 共September 1906兲, 189 –214, 195.
78 See, esp., the weekly chronicle in the legal journal Pravo.
79 Significant overlap of membership continued between the Maximalists and the
left flank of the SRs; my discussion of their violence focuses primarily on the first
generation, almost all of whom would be arrested 共and many executed兲 by late autumn
1906. The only book-length treatment of the movement is by D. B. Pavlov, EseryMaksimalisty v pervoi rossiiskoi revoliutsii 共Moscow, 1989兲, which contains much
useful material. The Maximalists also bordered upon the anarchist movement, sharing
with it the more expansive revolutionary aims as well as both a preference for localism
and a readiness to employ violence in socioeconomic as well as political contexts. Key
differences lay in their attitude to authority, party structures, and a postrevolutionary
dictatorship. Many individuals evolved in these years from SRs into Maximalists
and/or anarchists. On anarchist terrorism, see Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, chap. 2;
Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, chap. 4; and Budnitskii, Terrorizm, chap. 4.
80 “Economic terror” referred to three discrete phenomena: agrarian terror 共the
630
Morrissey
tees, and the timing and nature of the developing revolution.81 In sanctioning targeted political assassinations, for example, it had generally opposed economic terror, fearing in particular the potential explosiveness of the “masses.”
Nevertheless, and at times despite explicit prohibitions, individuals and
groups within the party advocated “economic struggle” 共including violence
against persons兲, and many of them would become Maximalists.82 Furthermore, tensions between central party authorities and radical grassroots organizations heightened when the SR Party resolved to halt terror in response to
the October Manifesto, a decision that was reversed in early 1906 and briefly
reinstituted when the Duma came into session. Many activists, among them
future Maximalists, refused to follow these directives, continuing their campaigns of local terror. Finally, ideological visions wove these threads together,
propelling the movement’s violence. Rejecting the SRs’ interest in parliamentary politics 共and challenging the Marxist-influenced notion of revolutionary
stages兲, the Maximalists contended that the revolution should not be limited to
“bourgeois” political reform 共a “minimalist” platform兲 but must instead aim
for full-fledged socialist transformation, including the immediate socialization
of agriculture and industry. This expansive goal sanctioned sweeping tactics:
the complete rejection of all peaceful or evolutionary means, such as participation in electoral politics,83 and the advocacy of exclusively “revolutionary”
methods, that is, political and economic terrorism as well as outright “partisan
war.”84
Only at the end of October 1906 did the Maximalists issue any statements
about the August attack, a delay that stands in noteworthy contrast to the
seizure or destruction of property and the use of violence against gentry landowners兲,
factory terror 共violence against factory owners and managers兲, and expropriations
共armed robberies directed in theory against state institutions but in practice against
private ones as well兲.
81 See Budnitskii, Terrorizm, chap. 3; Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, chap. 2; and Pavlov,
Esery-Maksimalisty, chap. 1.
82 For further analysis, see Perrie, “Political and Economic Terror,” 69 –74.
83 According to the party program 共from late October 1906兲, representative bodies
“dissipate the atmosphere of revolutionary hate and enmity [and] cultivate in the
masses a petty bourgeois-conservative psychology”; furthermore, “the bourgeois order
attracts the people into the abyss of degeneration and thereby delays the moment of
socialist revolution.” Reprinted in D. B. Pavlov, ed., Soiuz eserov-maksimalistov:
Dokumenty, publitsistika, 1906 –1924 gg. 共Moscow, 2002兲, 34 –35. See also Sushchnost’ maksimalizma 共St. Petersburg, 1906兲.
84 The party program obliged a “revolutionary path,” emphasizing “all forms of
[active] struggle” against socioeconomic exploitation and the political order, including
“the most energetic terrorist and partisan struggle both in the countryside and the city,
crowning this struggle with a general armed uprising.” See Pavlov, Soiuz eserovmaksimalistov, 34, 37–38.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
631
public relations machine of the SRs. In addition to presenting their general
platform and goals, these two proclamations provide important indications
about the Maximalists’ approach to violence. Directly addressing questions of
guilt and innocence as well as the large number of casualties, they challenged
the very possibility of neutrality in the political struggle. One proclamation
opened with a statement about the intended and actual victims of the bombing:
To everyone’s great sorrow, Stolypin himself, against whom the strike was directed,
remained alive. The majority of those who perished in the explosion were figures
involved in the cause of the oppression of the people, whether directly or indirectly,
and they are not worthy or deserving of sympathy. Sorrow goes only to those of the
victims who were completely uninvolved in the enslavement of the people and as well
to the children, although they are his children. We think, however, that these sacrifices
and sufferings are nothing in comparison to the sacrifices and sufferings which the
Russian people have suffered and will suffer at the hands of Stolypin.85
The authors perceived no need to justify the deaths of the guilty “majority,”
some of whom were high-ranking officials, implying that anyone associated
with the government constituted fair game. The proclamation did not bother
to enumerate any actual “crimes” of these officials, though much space was
still spent elaborating those of Stolypin himself.
The text seems to allow a concept of neutrality, mentioning the children in
particular, but it immediately undercuts it, arguing that this cost was not only
justified but negligible. It thereby constructs a kind of “calculus of suffering,”
in which the quantity of “sacrifice and sufferings” of the bombing’s victims is
literally “nothing” in comparison to that of the Russian people at the hands of
Stolypin. In addition to minimizing the significance of incidental victims, the
proclamations advanced a radically binary vision of society. Evoking the
metaphor of two Russias diametrically opposed and in perpetual conflict, they
described an entire world divided into enemies and friends: “At every step we
meet masters and slaves, bosses and workers, authorities and subordinates. One
lives at the people’s expense, doing nothing; the others—the people themselves—
despair from hunger, overburden themselves from labor.” The Maximalists believed, of course, that they too had drunk from the cup of the people’s suffering
and were acting in defense of laboring Russia and “the human personality” until
such a time as the people rose in righteous fury. Yet among their new enemies
were the media, whose condemnation of the bombing provoked this selfrighteous response: “We predicted earlier that they would call us nothing other
than evildoers, insane, and even . . . enemies of the people. Who are we and
who are they? Who is right and who is guilty? Who is a friend of the people
and who is its enemy—let the people decide.” Yet in claiming to act for “the
85
GARF, f. 102 共DP OO兲, op. 235 共1906兲, d. 20 ch. 12, ll. 24ff.
632
Morrissey
people” in this apocalyptic struggle, the proclamations reveal an underlying
insecurity: “And the question torments us: has, does, and will the people
understand us without our words, without our explanations, which we were
unable to give because freedom of speech is banished from Russia?”86 They
feared, in other words, that the people had not understood, that deeds also
required words.
Those few sources that describe the specific responses of party members in
the aftermath of the attack do not indicate any regrets but invoke a calculus of
suffering. Co-organizer Natal’ia Klimova recalled during her interrogation an
initial moral anguish regarding the likelihood of accidental victims but still
considered the bombing necessary due to Stolypin’s criminal activity.87 A
memoir written by a fellow Maximalist, Gr. Nestroev, and published in 1910
both praises the “three heroes” who perished and makes light of the bloodshed. He even pictures the scene:
In the pillar of dust rising above the destroyed dacha one figure is visible—the figure
of the minister [Stolypin] running through the ruins of his home and searching for his
children. . . . He endured terrible minutes. . . . But how many fathers and mothers
endure still more terrible minutes through his fault? Did he think sometimes about
that? If he did, then he knows that “he gets what he deserves” [po delam ego vozdastsia
emu]. Let Stolypin survive. Let him. But this skirmish between the Maximalists and the
head of the government will long serve as an example of the heroic bravery and
disregard for death that runs like a red thread through all Maximalist action, an
example for those who come to take the place of the perished.88
This text is striking for its absolute lack of empathy for Stolypin as a father
共not just as a representative of the state兲 and of any recognition of the
wounded children themselves, their own autonomous existence and suffering.
Instead, Nestroev identified a red thread— heroic bravery and a disregard for
death, though whose death exactly is unclear.
The organizer of the attack and one of the leading figures of the Maximalists was Mikhail Sokolov, who would be arrested on December 1, 1906, and
GARF, f. 102 共DP OO兲, op. 235 共1906兲, d. 20 ch. 12, ll. 24ff.
Klimova was arrested at the end of November 1906 and put on trial together with
Nadezhda Terent’eva in February 1907. They followed a common script, refusing
defense attorneys, providing only general testimony, and admitting their actions while
denying their culpability. Her reference to a moral quandary should be understood in
this constrained context. Their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment
due to the influence of Klimova’s family. She later escaped and went into exile abroad,
where she joined the SR Combat Organization under Savinkov; by this time, however,
central terrorist activity had largely ceased. For the indictment and a summary of
testimony, see “Vzryv na Aptekarskom ostrove 共Delo Klimovoi i Terent’evoi o
pokushenii na Stolypina兲,” Byloe, no. 5/6 共27/28兲 共November–December 1917兲, esp.
223.
88 Gr. Nestroev [G. A. Tsypin], Iz dnevnika Maksimalista 共Paris, 1910兲, 55–56.
86
87
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
633
hanged the following day.89 His response to the bombing was described much
later in a memoir by the SR activist E. Iu. Grigorovich, who saw Sokolov
frequently in this period and maintained good relations despite political
disagreements. She recalled meeting him soon after the bombing, which had
left him animated, even transformed. “I am absolutely satisfied,” she reports
him saying, dismissing the significance of the many casualties in revealing
language: “These were ‘human lives’? A pack of Okhrana [police] agents—they
deserved to be shot each individually.” This inflected question casts the rhetoric
of “two Russias” into still more extreme form, and the answer—in its universal
will to judge and refusal even to acknowledge the innocents—is little less than a
rejection of moral limits themselves. Sokolov did express regret for the deaths of
his comrades, Grigorovich states.90 However, in its disregard for their selfsacrifice and the conventions of martyrology, this single expressed regret only
reinforces his emphasis on ends over means.
Although admitting the bombing had not been fully successful due to
Stolypin’s survival, Sokolov presented it as an advance on SR methods:
“Force only contends with force. The dimensions are important. All of this
filigree trimming of single-target attempts is outmoded—a boulder is exploded with dynamite; [you] don’t shoot it with a revolver.” Grigorovich
recalls that she did not argue with him, stating that the Bear, as he was called
in the underground, possessed his own truth, grounded in the tremendous
strength of his belief and his willpower, which she thought could move
mountains 共even if she also noted to herself that his dynamite had left but a
scratch on the boulder兲. The language is revealing, illustrating their shared
belief in the capacity of individuals to “turn the wheel of history.”91 On
another level, however, it points to Sokolov’s faith in violence itself— his
desire to explode the boulder at one go.92 Other Maximalists agreed that
large-scale attacks 共inevitably with many casualties兲 were both fully justifiable
89 Later in his memoir, Nestroev appended a brief reservation about Sokolov, whom
he otherwise praised, noting Sokolov’s “criminally light attitude to his own and others’
lives, which ran like a red thread through all Maximalist combat actions.” Nestroev, Iz
dnevnika, 64.
90 Grigorovich recalls this scene: “It’s a pity about the comrades, the Bear [Sokolov]
says, and frowns.” E. Iu. Grigorovich, Zarnitsy: Nabroski iz revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia 1905–1907 gg., ed. N. M. Druzhinin 共Leningrad, 1925兲, 61– 62.
91 Ibid., 61. Grigorovich used the expression “tolknet koleso istorii” 共turn the wheel
of history兲 to describe the power of Sokolov’s faith and will. Ibid. For a broader
discussion of this image in the Soviet era, esp. the problem of being crushed in the
wheels of history, see Irina Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,”
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 共Fall 2002兲: 577– 610,
588 –90.
92 Savinkov claims to have met Sokolov in November and found him more disheartened by then. Admitting that “partisan” strikes were not enough, he lamented
problems in organization and discipline. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 192–95.
634
Morrissey
and necessary to the revolutionary struggle. Dismissive of SR-style assassinations of targeted individuals, they enthusiastically endorsed “really big acts,
powerful enough to rock society.”93 This belief in the importance of size, of
large-scale strikes, highlights an apocalyptic strain: a belief that terrorism
would finally ignite the people in revolt—as long hoped and dreamed—if only
if it were big enough.94
Sokolov’s inflected question—“These were ‘human lives’?”— echoed
within Maximalist circles. The dehumanization of the enemy was nothing new
in itself, of course, as all revolutionary parties employed extreme, often
vitriolic rhetoric, whether about the representatives of tsarism or capitalism,
liberals, or one another 共as did, incidentally, the state and right-wing media兲.
Yet the Maximalists pushed this rhetoric further, articulating a radically
bipartite world with no space for neutrality, as a theoretical statement from
1907 illustrates:
In the current period, two powers struggle in the historical arena of Russia—we would
say two worlds—the old exploitative [world] and the new world of free labor and free
social development. This struggle divides the entire population into two camps: in the
one, the camp of the old world, the permanent sector is taken by the entire tsarist clan
[rod], all ministers, bureaucrats, priests, landlords, capitalists, and in general anyone
who lives on the account of the people’s labor; in the other, everyone comes together
who is deprived and oppressed, [everyone] who is chained to hard labor, [everyone] to
whom the current order [gives] not eternal life but eternal suffering.
The author did admit the existence of fringe elements, those who belonged but
uneasily or provisionally to one or the other side. These included both liberals,
whose dedication to the revolution was supposedly partial and temporary, as
well as right-wing street gangs and pogromists, who had, he contended in
revealing language 共not unlike Sokolov’s兲, literally lost their humanity: “In
the form of temporary affiliates to the world of the exploiters are the discards
of society, people with a dark conscience, driven by contemporary society to
the complete loss of the image of the human being [obraz cheloveka].”95
Having thus divided the entire population into two warring camps, the
author of this tract celebrated the energy and enthusiasm of violent resistance
in all its forms—terrorist acts, shootings and bombings, partisan strikes, agrarian
93
Quoted in a report about the Maximalists from a letter confiscated during an
arrest. GARF f. 102 DP OO, op. 237 共1907兲, d. 10 ch. 51. l. A, l. 59ob-60. See also
the party program, which endorsed “powerful strikes in the very heart of the decomposing regime,” in Pavlov, Soiuz eserov-maksimalistov, 33.
94 The sacral and apocalyptic nature of violence was a broader theme in this period,
and it likewise has roots in, for example, Bakunin’s belief in its destructive and
cleansing powers.
95 S. Svetlov, “Organizatsiia nashikh sil i sotsial’naia revoliutsiia,” in Pavlov, Soiuz
eserov-maksimalistov, 52.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
635
and factory terror, expropriations. Such fighting back, he believed, served both to
educate the will and to cultivate human dignity through resistance to day-to-day
maltreatment, degradation, and 共state兲 violence. While the cup of humiliation had
not yet spilled over, producing a mass uprising of purifying, cleansing violence,
“a day does not pass when, somewhere in Russia, the hand of retribution does not
fall upon an executioner— one or the other representative of the government, who
is washed from the face of the earth, like dust.” Only violence, he stressed, all
its methods without exception, can destroy the old world and achieve freedom.
In the face of public criticism, he emphasized, including criticism of the strike
against Stolypin, the only response is to affirm that “the revolution will bury
them.”96
Probably the most extreme expression of this approach to revolutionary
politics and identity occurred in an extended pamphlet entitled The Purification of Mankind, by Ivan Pavlov, published in 1907.97 Very much informed by
contemporary theories of race, heredity, and degeneration and citing such
prominent criminologists and psychiatrists as Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri,
and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Pavlov rejected the historical significance of
biological races 共though he was more approving of Lombroso’s notion of the
hereditary criminal兲 in favor of his own theory of hereditary ethical races.
Humanity, he argued, was divided into two primary moral groups:
Take, on the one hand, the worst, most evil egoists with an inborn inclination
toward predation, repression, the torture of people—for example, the Russian
administration, from the camarilla down to the lowest enforcers of its will. Their
children 共the overwhelming majority兲 will display the same malice, cruelty, baseness, predaceousness, and greed; their children the same, and so forth. This race
morally differs from our animal ancestors in the negative direction. . . . On the
other hand, take the best altruists, for example, activists of the Russian liberation
movement 共of the type of the [terrorists] Balmashovs and Spiridonovas, etc.兲. They
are likewise a race but with the diametrically opposed qualities of magnanimity,
96
Ibid., 60 – 61, 63, 66 – 67.
See also the discussion of this booklet in Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 80 – 83, where
Pavlov is described as one of the chief theoreticians of Maximalism. Geifman is
understandably horrified by The Purification of Mankind and speculates about the
origins of Nazi and Soviet totalitarian violence—in particular, whether original traits
can be found among both the Maximalists and, by association, the SRs. However, she
seems unaware of the extent to which discourses of degeneration—and extreme ideas
about the routes to potential regeneration— had permeated European society by this
time: the common thread linking this text to later forms of mass violence is degeneration theory. On degeneration theory in Russia, see Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia:
The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880 –1930 共Ithaca, NY,
2008兲; and Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia 共Ithaca, NY, 1992兲. On degeneration theory in Europe, see
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848 – c. 1918 共Cambridge, 1989兲.
97
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selflessness, humanity. In them the qualities of beasts have atrophied,
disappeared.98
These two “races” were so fundamentally at odds that Pavlov excluded the
former from the very category of “human,” dismissing them as morally
inferior to wild animals. “If Spiridonova is a human being,” he wrote, “then
[her jailer] Avramov is not a human being; if he is a human being, then she
is not.”99 Although the forces of natural selection favored the survival of the
egoists as the “fittest,” an outcome that had repeatedly led, Pavlov speculated,
to the decline and fall of civilizations throughout history, the achievement of
socialist transformation would at long last favor the altruists— but only if
humanity was physically purified of the egoists. In his view, therefore,
previous revolutions had failed precisely because they had not taken the
process of “purification” to its necessary and ultimate conclusion, instead
allowing the survival and ultimate resurgence of the egoists. While egoists had
no qualms about squashing others like cockroaches, he tellingly summarized,
the altruists were “unfortunately” too ready to extend the ideal of the “human
personality” to the Avramovs, falsely believing that a future society could be
grounded without their physical elimination. Pavlov’s peculiar application of
degeneration theory to modern politics thus presented mass violence as scientifically justified—an act of social hygiene without “sentimentality” or
“false humanity.”100 共Indeed, he even claimed to possess practical plans and
criteria for distinguishing “inborn” from “acquired” moral qualities.兲 While
his theories were idiosyncratic, they pushed the Maximalists’ rhetoric to a
logical extreme: the purifying force of violence would eliminate all the guilty,
like cockroaches, inaugurating a new world of magnanimous and selfless
innocence.101
KALIAEV’S FEAT, AGAIN
The Central Committee of the SR Party quickly condemned the bombing of
Stolypin’s dacha, issuing a formal statement denying any practical or personal
involvement and asserting the deviation of that action from their own, ethiIv. Pavlov, Ochistka chelovechestva [The Purification of Mankind] 共n.p., 1907兲, 9.
Ibid., 10. Other named examples of the non– human being included General
Rennenkampf, who had led one of the most brutal punitive expeditions. Ibid., 10, 31.
100 Ibid., 10, 30. It is perhaps deliberate that Pavlov does not mention Kaliaev as a
positive exemplar: following this logic, the decision not to kill the children would be
considered a harmful sentimentality.
101 On the imagery of insects and cockroaches in the “war on terrorism,” see
Matthew Candelaria, “Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic: From The Descent of Man
to ‘The Empire of the Ants,’” in Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War
on Terrorism, ed. Isaac Land 共New York, 2008兲.
98
99
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
637
cally rigorous, approach to violence: “The method of commission of this act
共an explosion in the apartment during reception hours兲 completely contradicts
those principles that the party considered and considers morally and politically
obligatory for itself and that may be most clearly illustrated by the well-known
act of I. P. Kaliaev, who refrained from throwing the bomb into the carriage
of the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich when two children and the Grand
Duke’s wife were in it.”102 In his memoirs published decades later, SR leader
Viktor Chernov made the same comparison, emphasizing the moral-military
distinctions between the SRs and the Maximalists. Describing an SR Party
conference that took place early in 1907, he recalled the speech of one of its
leaders, the founder of the Combat Organization, to express a broader point
about the nature of SR violence: “[Grigorii] Gershuni demanded of the
revolution just what humane people demand of commanders: to avoid unnecessary victims, to have mercy on the conquered, to respect the interests and life of
neutral [people]. He reacted with enthusiasm to Kaliaev’s act. . . . He, like [fellow
SR leader] Mikhail Gots, was set against the tactics of the Maximalists who blew
up the dacha of Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin when it was full of extraneous
people.”103 The point could not be more explicit: these SR leaders did not deny
that they were fighting a war, but they cited the Kaliaev case as evidence of their
adherence to the strict rules of combat of the military convention. Such condemnation of the Maximalists’ action may have been heartfelt; we can never know for
sure. Party leaders were also negotiating several political minefields, from the
immediate media storm to their keen interest in participating in the upcoming
elections for the second State Duma. Yet in asserting their own distinctive
identity, they chose Kaliaev— especially his act of restraint—as the supposed
embodiment of SR values: though not inventing a tradition, they were selectively refining and polishing one.
This context was an important reason why the SR assassination of General
G. A. Min by Zinaida Konopliannikova, which took place on August 13, 1906
共just one day after the Maximalists’ attack on Stolypin兲, quickly became such
a high-profile event. It offered the SRs an opportunity to affirm the favorite
narrative—indelibly bonded to icons such as Kaliaev— of terror as revolutionary justice and the terrorist as an incarnation of virtue. It helped that Min
was such a vilified figure: as commander of the Semenovskii Regiment 共he
IISG, PSR, d. 326, Listok Pet. Kom. P. S.-R., no. 1 共August 1906兲, 1.
V. M. Chernov, Pered burei: Vospominaniia 共New York, 1953兲, 277–78. Interestingly, the minutes of the conference 共which are incomplete兲 do not record these
words, and the extended debate about terrorism suggests significant diversity of
opinion. See C. J. Rice, ed., Protokoly Vtorogo 共Ekstrennago兲 S”ezda Partii
Sotsialistov-Revolyutsionerov [sic] 共White Plains, NY, 1986兲. See also the discussion
of the conference and the tensions between party leaders and activists in Budnitskii,
Terrorizm, 172–74.
102
103
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was a colonel at the time兲, he had led the bloody suppression of the Moscow
Uprising in December 1905, notoriously ordering his soldiers to act without
mercy and to make no arrests. The SR’s assassination of the general was also
“clean,” occurring without loss of “innocent” life: Konopliannikova shot Min
at close range at a train station and, in giving herself up, warned people to be
careful so as not to detonate accidentally the bomb she was carrying. Finally,
Konopliannikova herself possessed a model biography: she was a village
schoolteacher who, it was proclaimed, had sought to devote her life to the
people’s enlightenment before being driven to her act by state persecution.
This true daughter of the people had acted only in righteous vengeance against
an “executioner,” “wild beast,” and “enemy of the people.” She would be the
first woman executed since Sofiia Perovskaia in 1881.104
New memoirs of Kaliaev also affirmed his status as an exemplar of the
virtuous terrorist, reasserting the legitimization of terror by the personal virtue
of the terrorist that had its roots in the “heroic” generation of 1881. Boris
Savinkov produced another account of February 2, 1905, that excluded ambiguity, describing how he and other members of the Combat Organization
had emphatically agreed with Kaliaev that the murder of children was unacceptable.105 The most excessive example of the genre, however, was a 1907
hagiography of Kaliaev by Egor Sazonov, who described their time together
planning Plehve’s assassination in 1904. The text opens with his first impressions: “I looked at him whom they call the Poet. A young, intelligent,
surprisingly handsome face shined with a serene smile. Pure, penetrating eyes
attentively surveyed me and began to sparkle with such a caress that I felt
warm and good, as if the sun had bestowed on me its first ray of springtime.”106 Serenity, purity, warmth, strength, tenderness, beauty, even saintliness—the language is unrelenting, and Christian symbolism was explicit
throughout. Not only does Sazonov note Kaliaev’s resemblance to Mikhail
Nesterov’s painting of the medieval saint Sergius of Radonezh as a youth; he
104 Of course, Konopliannikova did shoot Min in the presence of his wife and
daughter, and the very fact that she carried a bomb in a crowded train station indicates
a readiness to accept additional casualties. GARF, f. 102 DP OO, op. 235 1906, d. 312,
esp. 23–26 共for an account of the assassination兲, and d. 211 共on Konopliannikova
herself兲. For the announcement from the Central Committee of the PSR, see IISG,
PSR, 326: “Listok Pet. Kom. P. S.-R.,” no. 1 共August 1906兲, 1. For a sample of local
proclamations, see IISG, PSR, 446, “Kazn’ Mina”; and IISG, PSR, 367, Krestianskii
listok, no. 4 共1906兲, 3– 4. For the hagiography, see “‘Sud’ nad Z. V. Konopliannikovoi,” in Vesti s rodiny 共n.p., 1906兲.
105 The writing of these much more famous memoirs, which Camus apparently read,
dates to 1907– 8 共although the earlier version was also reprinted in 1908兲. Savinkov
was himself a father of young children. Compare Savinkov, “Iz vospominanii,” with
Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 96 –97.
106 Egor Sazonov, “I. P. Kaliaev 共Iz vospominanii兲,” Znamia truda, no. 2 共1907兲, 11.
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
639
even depicts Kaliaev’s intense desire to die on the scaffold as a Christlike act,
a gift of his life to humanity that would bring forth new life. Kaliaev is no less
than the embodiment of the promise of socialism, its ethos of love and
renewal: “It seemed as if his wide, open eyes blazed with a reflection of the
new, beautiful dawn rising upon the old world.”107 In this martyrology, the
terrorist’s purity signifies the ethical essence of socialism, the ultimate victory
of innocence over violence and corruption. However, its almost ecstatic tone
masked a deep unease. Published at a time when state repression was continuing at full throttle, revolutionary hopes were dying, and terrorism was
morphing into outright criminality, the portrait concludes with metaphors of
relics and icons in a curious plea for Kaliaev’s resurrection: “An irrepressible
rush compels me to collect with care all the details, which, like valuable
pearls, are preserved in memory. Not to recall a sacred image [obraz]— oh
no! Just to prevent my treasures from being mislaid. Maybe somebody will
use them and reanimate [his] radiant, dear image [obraz]. May he live
eternally.”108
Such attempts to affirm a well-defined SR tradition and to demarcate clear
lines between legitimate and illegitimate violence were made in part because
lines and traditions had all become rather blurred. Indeed, not all SRs had
perceived a need to condemn the Maximalists’ action. A leaflet issued by the
Viatka Committee explicitly heralded it, for example, associating some of
those killed with particular “crimes” against the people and adopting the
calculus-of-suffering strategy with regard to the innocent.109 Furthermore,
tensions were palpable within the SR Combat Organization itself, which had
been enduring a string of inexplicable failures 共caused by the presence of the
informer Evno Azef in a leadership position兲. Already in the spring of 1906,
members had been contemplating much more extreme methods—though, it is
important to note, more out of tactical considerations than from apocalyptic
notions of violence.110 According to V. M. Zenzinov, Abram Gots 共the brother
107
Ibid., 12–16.
Ibid., 16.
109 “Private individuals also suffered in this, and, incidentally, among the wounded
were Stolypin’s daughter and son. But what do these few individuals signify in
comparison to the tens of thousands of victims who fell by the hand of this criminal
government?” It then cited official government figures for those killed or wounded in
the process of “pacification” 共32,706 individuals for the period between January 9,
1905, and March 1906兲, which was described as an entire “sea of innocent blood,” and
ended by highlighting the self-sacrifice of the three terrorists in a nod to SR-style
martyrology. Krest’ianskii listok, no. 4 共1906兲, 3, in IISG, PSR, d. 367.
110 According to Savinkov, Sokolov had joined the Combat Organization in this
period only to resign almost immediately, complaining about the protracted surveillance of targets and arguing for “partisan” tactics. See Savinkov, Vospominaniia
terrorista, 192–95.
108
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of SR leader Mikhail Gots兲 suggested at this time that three individuals with
explosives sewn into their waistcoats should attend the public reception hours
of interior minister P. N. Durnovo, shoot their way in if necessary, and then
trigger the explosion: “Each must have on himself not less than twenty
pounds. In this way the terrorists would turn themselves into living bombs
with tremendous explosive power. The nitroglycerine or dynamite must be
enough so that three human bombs would blow up the entire building. Of
course Gots wanted to be one of them.”111 While the proposal was not pursued,
its parallels with the attack on Stolypin’s dacha are obvious.112 In his memoirs,
Savinkov also describes increasing doubts about SR terrorist practices, which
he believed hindered initiative and pushed many revolutionaries—in their
desire for action—toward other terrorist parties. At one point during the
autumn of 1906, he claims to have suggested to Sokolov that they collaborate,
though he was speaking, he emphasizes in a revealing passage, as a private
individual and a terrorist, not formally for the SR Party.113
Nevertheless, the radicalism of the Maximalists—their celebration of violence, their willingness to countenance large numbers of deaths, their dehumanizing rhetoric of enmity that narrowed and sometimes eliminated the
space for innocence and neutrality— compelled others to look at violence
itself, to consider its moral claims and political impact, and, in some cases, to
attempt to set limits.114 In her memoirs, Grigorovich recalls how she feared the
implications of the Maximalists’ strategy: they were losing the “wholeness
and purity” of the original cause, she believed, because principled boundaries
were necessary to prevent the degeneration of terror into murder, expropriation into robbery.115 She was writing with the benefit of hindsight, for precisely these issues would come to plague all revolutionaries by 1908 –9, the
SRs most critically: the unmasking of Azef as a provocateur would contaminate the entire history of the Combat Organization, including its most heroic
moments, the assassinations of Plehve and the Grand Duke. Furthermore,
V. M. Zenzinov, Perezhitoe 共New York, 1953兲: http://www.hrono.ru/libris/lib_z/
zenzin09.html.
112 According to Zenzinov, Azef sabotaged the proposal by insisting that he would
have to be among the three human bombs, knowing that other members would reject
that proposal out of hand and see it as evidence of Azef’s own finely tuned morality.
See http://www.hrono.ru/libris/lib_z/zenzin09.html.
113 Explicit criticism of the Maximalists is noteworthy primarily for its absence from
his memoir. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 192–95, 273–74. One critic doubts
the veracity of Savinkov’s account of his meeting with Sokolov. See N. S. Tiutchev,
“Zametki o Vospominaniiakh B. V. Savinkova,” in Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 364 – 87, esp. 385.
114 It should also be stressed that some observers enthusiastically welcomed and
endorsed the Maximalists’ model. See, e.g., the purloined letters in GARF, 102, op.
265, d. 98, ll. 38, 41.
115 Grigorovich, Zarnitsy, 61– 62.
111
Moral Economy of Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia
641
Savinkov’s controversial novels, which seemingly exposed the moral nihilism
of terrorism, would explode the facade of the terrorist as positive hero.116
Ironically, however, even the loss of revolutionary purity was linked to state
violence and duplicity, for terrorists effectively became the moral and literal
equivalents of okhranniki (political police).117
Yet this theme of moral equivalence was already clearly visible in the
summer of 1906. Admitting that it was possible to understand why some
people had once approved political murder or celebrated its heroes, a searing
commentary in a prominent liberal journal emphasized the rupture that had
occurred on August 12, 1906. What is most striking in such “hecatombs of
innocent people,” it argued, is “the complete contempt for human life more
generally. After the December [1905] shootings on Moscow streets, the most
cruel reproach, addressing the victors, was that they did not distinguish the
innocent from the guilty, actual fighters for the revolution from uninvolved
bystanders. Is it not the same in the Stolypin catastrophe? Is not the attitude
toward human life close to what was expressed from the other side in the
slogans ‘Do not spare the bullets’ and ‘Chips fly when you cut wood’?”
Paradoxically, the text actually illustrated the authority of the SRs’ official
narrative: it implicitly likened them to a regular army that followed the
military convention, depicting the Maximalists, in contrast, as dangerous
irregulars, leaving death and destruction in their wake.118 But the implication
was also clear: the rising tide of violence was discrediting all violence as such,
revealing a moral chasm at its heart.
The importance of Kaliaev’s feat or the Maximalists’ attack is not so much
that they constituted watersheds in and of themselves; any such assertion
would probably overstate their immediate importance as events. They did,
however, become crucial symbols and reference points around which the
claims and limits of political violence were formulated, scrutinized, and
sometimes challenged. As a palimpsest of concepts, images, and narratives of
innocence, the moral economy of neopopulist terrorism in this period was rent
by fractures and ambiguities, providing no single script to be followed or
norm to be observed, despite some claims to the contrary. Even the act that
seemed most to embody an affirmation of moral principle—Kaliaev’s decision
116 See Patyk, “The Double-Edged Sword,” chap. 4; Daniel Beer, “The Morality of
Terror: Contemporary Responses to Political Violence in Boris Savinkov’s The Pale
Horse 共1909兲 and What Never Happened 共1912兲,” Slavonic and East European Review
85, no. 1 共2007兲: 25– 46; and Aileen Kelly, “The Intelligentsia and Self-Censorship,”
in Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance 共New
Haven, CT, 1998兲.
117 It is no accident that the SR Party—with Chernov at the head—attempted to
blame the Combat Organization, not the party itself, for allowing provocation: it was
a means to limit the contamination of the revolutionary project as a whole.
118 “Vnutrennee obozrenie,” 190.
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not to throw the bomb— had disparate motives, readings, and consequences,
for it was embedded into larger rhetorical, tactical, and political contexts. In
the spring and summer of 1905, the Kaliaev case became a call to arms, a
means to galvanize forces and expand the field of combat; in the aftermath of
August 1906, in contrast, it functioned more as an ethical touchstone, an
emblem of—and claim to—revolutionary virtue at a moment when distinctions between innocence and guilt, purity and corruption, were seeming to
vanish. As legitimizing strategies evolved in the heat of struggle, compelling
individuals and groups to make choices, they both enabled the spiraling
violence and produced new doubts, even a search for an innocence supposedly
lost. Yet innocence had always been a rhetorical fiction, if one with real moral,
personal, and political consequences. Limits were consequently relative and
contingent, not absolute. Kaliaev did not kill the children that February day,
but he had been willing to do so. His successor, Zinaida Konopliannikova,
shot General Min without other casualties, but she had also carried a bomb
into a crowded train station.
As Camus recognized, innocence always carries the shadow of guilt. For
him, what ultimately distinguished these fastidious assassins was their acceptance of contradiction and doubt—the inevitability of violence combined with
the impossibility of truly justifying it.119 This paradox never had, and probably
never will have, an absolute answer.
119 Camus argued that they resolved this contradiction in their own voluntary
self-sacrifice and deaths, thereby placing the value of human life above the abstract
idea. It is possible, of course, to critique the accuracy of Camus’s reading of Russian
terrorism, especially as his sources were incomplete and he did not have access to my,
rather more ambiguous, version of Kaliaev. Indeed, many liberals strongly disagreed
at the time, arguing that the revolutionary tradition privileged the abstract idea over
human life. See Camus, The Rebel, 133– 42; and Colin Davis, “Violence and Ethics in
Camus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, ed. Edward J. Hughes 共Cambridge,
2007兲, 106 –17. The most influential critique of the revolutionary tradition along these
lines was Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii 共Moscow, 1909兲.