Most Russian terrorists sought to limit terrorism to killing suspected informers and the most egregiously harsh officials like Trepov. In the south, however, a more Machiavellian strategy was adopted, of killing the most liberal members of the regime so as to foster repression as a recruiting mechanism, a tactic employed by many later terrorists the world over, especially if their sect was manifestly bereft of a wider following. In February 1878, Verian Osinsky unsuccessfully shot the chief prosecutor in Kiev, whose life was saved by a thick fur coat, and then in May stabbed to death the rather ineffectual chief of the city’s police. A few days later he successfully sprang the assailants of Gorinovich from jail. Since, ironically, the liberal elite objected to his killing of ineffectual policemen, Osinsky concentrated on trying to co-opt them into joint advocacy of constitutional and legal reforms that he anticipated would fail, the covert aim being to radicalise these hapless confederates to the point of supporting his tactic of terror.
A rather different sort of policeman was on Osinsky’s trail. This was Georgy Sudeykin. Born in 1850 into an impoverished and landless gentry family, Sudeykin graduated top of his class from the Infantry Cadet School. He was a tall, well-built man, with piercing eyes and a persuasive manner. A lack of money, and a fascination with crime and its detection, led him to join the Corps of Gendarmes rather than the elite and flashy Guards. Sudeykin adopted the chameleon life of his terrorist prey, never sleeping in one apartment too long and carrying multiple identity papers. Lacking the mentality of the stereotypical tsarist martinet, he used his ostensibly flexible political opinions to insinuate himself into revolutionary circles and to win over those he captured by treating them as potential collaborators in the cause of reform. Being inordinately ambitious himself, he knew how to play on the ambitions of terrorists, who after all were part of career structures themselves.
In January 1879 Osinsky and his older lover, Sophia Leshern von Hertzfeldt, were detained despite their attempts to shoot Sudeykin and the other arresting officers – the revolutionaries earlier having resorted to revolvers against policemen armed only with sabres. Osinsky’s death and Sophia’s exile to Siberia left a legacy of revolutionary romanticism that proved contagious. Meanwhile, the organisers of Land and Freedom issued a revised programme that effectively downgraded traditional Populist belief in the revolutionary potentialities of the people in favour of full-blown terrorism. Other innovations were the creation of discrete cells with no cognisance of one another, and the licensing of freelance acts of terrorism under Land and Freedom’s ideological franchise, a tactic that in our time would serve Al Qaeda rather well. Throughout late 1878-9 the terrorist nucleus within Land and Freedom under Alexander Mikhailov carried out a series of high-profile assassinations. Victims included Mezentsov, chief of the ineffectual Third Department, and prince Dmitry Kropotkin, governor of Kharkov and cousin of the anarchist aristocrat – as well as comrades suspected of being agents or informers. Early that year, a disillusioned Populist named Alexander Soloviev contacted Land and Freedom offering to assassinate the tsar. He explained: ‘The death of the emperor will effect a change in public life. The dissatisfaction that is expressed in quiet mumbling will explode in regions where it is most deeply felt. And then it will spread everywhere. It just needs an impetus for everything to rise up.’ Mikhailov purchased for Soloviev a large-calibre American pistol known as a Bear Hunter. Soloviev had competition, because a young Jew called Goldenberg was also volunteering as suicide-assassin. Since Goldenberg’s ethnicity would have prompted a pogrom had he been successful, Mikhailov stuck with Soloviev.
Given the enormity of the undertaking, the scheme had to be vetted by the full membership of Land and Freedom, rather than that hidden part of it that had few qualms about terrorism. This meeting degenerated into angry exchanges between Mikhailov and the leading Populist theorist Georgy Plekhanov. The outcome was that, although Land and Freedom would not formally endorse the assassination, it would not prevent individual members from aiding and abetting Soloviev. At 8 a.m. on 2 April 1879, Soloviev approached the tsar on his morning walk as he returned to the square in front of his palace. Something about Soloviev -in his long black coat and official’s cockaded hat – caught Alexander’s attention. He turned and saw a gun pointed at his head. When the first shot missed, the tsar took flight and ran zigzagging into the palace as four more shots passed by. His bodyguard felled Soloviev, and managed to stop the would-be assassin from swallowing a nugget impregnated with cyanide. ‘God saved me,’ wrote the tsar in his diary. Although the church bells rang and the Guards shouted ‘Hurrah!’, others joked on hearing the bells, ‘Missed again?’ Meanwhile, Soloviev reclined on a sofa, with a basin of his stomach contents beside him. He told his ineffably polite interrogators, men with epaulettes betokening high rank who hung on this rascal’s every word, that he had seen the ‘ghosts’ of political martyrs. He had been impelled by a sense of social justice to bring ‘closer the radiant future’, although he was rather vague about what this might be save that no one would harm anyone else. Soloviev was tried by a Special Court and executed in Semenovsky Square.
The advocates of ‘terrorism first’ within Land and Freedom met at a seaside resort in June 1879 to conspire not only against the regime, but also against those comrades who favoured the mainstream Populist agenda of patient agitation among the peasantry, as they all gathered for a further plenary meeting in Voronezh. There, sentiments flowed this way and that, as the terrorists argued that their campaign would force the government to grant a constitution, while the older Populists around Plekhanov, who rejected constitutionalism as an obstacle to socialism, argued for radical land redistribution instead. The tensions became unsustainable. Plekhanov stormed out and founded a movement called Black Repartition. Interestingly, Vera Zasulich had tried to slip back into Russia for this meeting but she arrived too late. Prone to bouts of depression and morbid self-reflection, she had become convinced that she had started the spiral of terrorist violence in Russia. She had developed major reservations about the tactic, except when, as in her own case, terrorists acted for purely selfless reasons. Terrorism was divisive and exhausting, and it provided the government with too easy a pretext for massive repression. More importantly it led to pathological behaviour: ‘in order to carry out terrorist acts all one’s energies must be expended, and a particular frame of mind almost always results: either one of great vanity or one in which life has lost all its attractiveness’. The advocates of terrorism dissolved Land and Freedom – whose name both factions agreed to renounce – for a new conspiracy called People’s Will in conscious rejection of rule by the will of a single man.
On being invited to join People’s Will, Vera Figner initially exclaimed, ‘But this is pure Nechaev!’ In fact, the terrorist nucleus of Land and Freedom had already adopted many of Nechaev’s dubious practices, including bank robberies and murdering informers. People’s Will also borrowed his tactic of suggesting to the credulous that it was the tip of a much larger revolutionary organisation – the Russian Social Revolutionary Party – which in reality was non-existent. There was an imposing-sounding Executive Committee all right, but this was coterminous with the entire membership of People’s Will . Further deceptions included claims that members of this Executive were themselves merely ‘third-degree agents’, the insinuation being that there were limitless levels of revolutionary talent above them. In fact, People’s Will never had more than thirty or forty members, who would then recruit ‘agents’ for specific tasks or to establish affiliate cells within sections of society deemed to have revolutionary potential. Efforts were made to co-opt the leading lights of the arts and intelligentsia with a liberal-sounding public platform. After all, which reasonable person could quibble with the Party’s explicit goals? Its programme espoused liberal and democratic-socialist aims: a parliament, universal male suffrage, the classic liberal freedoms of speech and the press, together with peasant and worker control