Some revolutionaries, however, were not prepared to abandon the idea of the ‘big bang’ approach to revolution, believing in the enormous propaganda value of terrorism directed against the state’s principal actors as the essential precondition to seizing power.14 One such group was formed at St Petersburg University, where students chafed against the regime’s introduction of higher fees designed to reduce the number of lower-class radical students, as well as against the reimposition of other petty restrictions in the 1884 university Charter. Students began talking about regicide and about the killing of the tsar’s key conservative supporters.
Peter Shevyrev created the Terrorist Fraction of the People’s Will in early 1886, one of its recruits being a brilliant zoology student hitherto expert in the biology of annular worms. He had two things in his favour. He was a literate scientist, who could give the group’s tracts a spurious air of ‘inevitability’, and he knew chemistry, essential to the manufacture of explosives. His name was Alexander Ulyanov; his younger sibling was Vladimir Ulyanov, better know to posterity as Lenin. Alexander argued that the Terrorist Fraction had been driven to act because of the regime’s frustration of non-violent reform. A campaign of constant terror would also serve to raise the people’s revolutionary spirit. The Fraction incorporated further revolutionaries into the conspiracy, including Józef Pifsudski, the future head of state in independent Poland, and a number of radicalised Jews, an ever growing presence in revolutionary and terrorist circles. By 1900 they constituted 50 per cent of the membership of revolutionary parties, even though there were only 7 million Jews in a population of 136 million.
Alexander Ulyanov was responsible for the group’s bomb factory. One bomb was concealed within a large tome called Digest of the Laws, while others were within cylindrical tubes. On 26 and 28 February and 1 March, the bombers stalked the Nevsky Prospect, hoping to waylay the tsar as he crossed it towards St Isaac’s Cathedral. Acting suspiciously, the bombers were snatched by the police, who probably had information about them already since the ramification of the conspiracy had been too casual. Sloppiness led to the arrest of the other principal conspirators including Ulyanov. Although he was not the main architect of the conspiracy, Ulyanov bravely became its spokesman during the trial. They were all sentenced to hang. Despite the urging of his mother, Ulyanov refused to make a plea for pardon. He and five others were hanged on 8 May 1887; fifty students were exiled to Siberia including Pifsudski.
At the time this may have seemed like the death rattle of terrorist groups that between the 1860s and 1900 had ‘only’ caused about one hundred casualties, even if one of them happened to be the tsar of Russia. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century there was a massive escalation of terrorist atrocities in imperial Russia, with perhaps as many as seventeen thousand people succumbing to terrorist activities between 1901 and 1916, before even these shocking statistics were dwarfed by the onset of Bolshevik state violence, much of it the handiwork of the terrorists turned Chekist secret policemen described in the following pages.
There were various reasons for this recrudescence of terrorism on a huge scale. A major famine in 1891, followed by cholera and typhus epidemics in European Russia a year later, saw renewed attempts by radicals to mobilise the starving peasantry, efforts which were as doomed as trying to ignite sodden sticks. Minds turned to an alternative means of combustion: acts of exemplary violence that would jolt the rural masses out of their somnolence. The disaster of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and Bloody Sunday in January 1905 when protests in St Petersburg were brutally suppressed, contributed to the climate of crisis, as did the darker side of Silver Age literary culture with its emphasis on the pathologically morbid. Less luridly, and more culpably, many people with liberal views – including many members of the legal profession – irresponsibly sympathised with the terrorists up to the point of aiding and abetting them, rather than supporting the regime’s efforts to reform itself. This especially applied to the liberal Kadet Party, which adopted the dubious doctrine that there were no enemies to the left, and whose members became the leading apologists for terror within respectable opinion. A ghastly moral relativism infected smart circles as when a leading Kadet politician made the following analogy: ‘Remember that Christ, too, was declared to be a criminal and was subjected to a shameful execution on the cross. The years passed, and this criminal – Christ – has conquered the whole world and become a model of virtue. The attitude towards political criminals is a similar act of violence on the part of the authorities.’ Liberals deliberately eschewed the term terrorist, preferring to view the aggressors as ‘minors’ who were really the victims of repressive authority. While no Kadet newspaper ever condemned a single act of leftist terrorism, pages were devoted to the almost insignificant instances of extreme right-wing violence, which assumed mythic proportions in the left-liberal imagination. This poison affected many liberals and leftists in foreign countries, with the British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats acting as ignorant cheerleaders for terrorist murderers in Russia. Indeed, fear of foreign liberal opinion inhibited a tsarist regime sensitive to the charge of being Asiatic from adopting effective measures to repress terrorism.
The tentative attempts at reform of the new tsar Nicholas II, specifically the Imperial Manifesto of 17 October 1905 guaranteeing basic rights and granting legislative powers to the State Duma, incentivised violent revolutionaries who took such concessions as signs of weakness. Some also thought that acts of terrorism would provoke the regime to lash out, with its lack of discrimination serving to radicalise greater numbers of people. Terrorist attacks on government officials, both high and humble, as well as what were called expropriations (actually robberies) and murders of private individuals, reached epidemic proportions. This did not apply just to Russia itself but to the Baltic provinces, the Caucasus, Finland and Poland, where the Russians (and German landowners in the Baltic) were regarded as alien occupiers by nationalist terrorists for whom any atrocity was legitimate. An improved technology, enabling the miniaturisation of explosives, meant that people feared there were bombs planted everywhere:
People have started getting wary,
They consider fruit quite scary.
A friend of mine as tough as granite
Is frightened of the pomegranate.
Policemen, ready to bark and grumble,
At the sight of an orange now tremble.15
Like the Fenians, the new generation of Russian terrorists preferred to manufacture their own explosives rather than risk capture by importing them ready-made from abroad. It was risky work, in which a trembling alcoholic hand or less than perfect concentration could cost a man his life. In 1904–5 two terrorists inadvertently blew themselves up in hotel rooms; one was identified only by his tiny hands, while bits of another were found in a neighbouring park. As with the Fenians, there was an eagerness to explore new technologies with which to kill – in the Russian case, involving aircraft designed to bomb the tsar at his residences at Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof.
In these years, terrorism became both indiscriminate and inextricably entwined with banditry and other forms of criminality, such as kidnapping, armed robbery and extortion. These exploits were lauded in the left-liberal press, as if they were the actions of a Robin Hood or William Tell. In fact, these robberies were used to boost the profile of particular political factions – notably the Bolsheviks – or, more usually, simply to enable the terrorists to enjoy the good things of life on the run. There was a perceptible moral slippage, as human life lost any kind of value in the eyes of terrorists who were often from rougher social milieux than their genteel predecessors in the 1870s and early 1880s. These were truly Nechaev’s children, in a literal sense, for many terrorists were minors, some as young as fourteen or fifteen. A deadly game could be camouflaged with idealistic rhetoric. Some 30 per cent of those arrested for political crimes were Jewish, as were 50 per cent of those involved in revolutionary organisations, even though Jews were a mere 5 per cent of the overall population. Pogroms and discrimination when combined with a moralising and secularised messianic streak led many of these young people on to the path of terrorism, regardless of the impact this would have on the rest of the Jewish