Barely literate, the new wave of terrorists possessed no sophisticated theoretical reasons for their actions, which were more likely to be the product of frustration, anger and resentment, or because the perpetrators were amoral, hysterical or mad. A surprising number acted out of existential boredom with the quotidian frustrations of their lives: ‘I cannot live peacefully. I like danger, so as to feel the thrill.’ The young terrorist who eventually succeeded in killing prime minister Stolypin in 1911 claimed to be in despair at the future prospect of ‘nothing but an endless number of cutlets’. This accidie easily translated into a megalomaniac and sadistic desire to dominate and humiliate others, not least those terrorists suspected of being informers or merely weak, who were routinely tortured by colleagues whose view of an interrogation was to hold a gun to the victim’s temple. Killing people became addictive. A Polish terrorist with the alias ‘Gypsy’ murdered nineteen policemen. He explained why he experienced an uncontrollable urge to go to the funerals of his victims where he could check to see the accuracy of his marksmanship on the person displayed in an open coffin: ‘In the beginning it was difficult for him to kill, but by the third or fourth time the act of taking a life was already making an unusually pleasant impression on him. Seeing the blood of his victim gave him a special feeling, and therefore he felt an increasing urge to experience this sweet sensation again. This is why he has committed so many murders of which he does not repent in the least.’ Still others were acting in accordance with a death-wish, undertaking attacks from which they knew there was no prospect of escaping either being shot or executed if captured. Many lost what small moral compass they originally possessed: ‘Tell me, why can one not lie? Why can one not steal? What does “dishonest” mean? Why is it dishonest to lie? What is morality? What is moral filth? These are but conventions.’ Dmitry Bogrov, the young lawyer’s clerk from an assimilated Jewish background who in 1911 assassinated Stolypin in a Kievan opera house, ‘always laughed at “good” and “bad”. Despising conventional morals, he developed his own, whimsical and not always comprehensible.’ A bad gambling habit meant that he was always short of money, which probably explained why he became a police informer.
II BOLSHEVIKS AND BANDITS
Whereas in the 1870s and 1880s the People’s Will had endeavoured to confine its murderous activities to specific highly placed individuals, its successors indiscriminately attacked anyone connected with the state, or indeed private citizens and their families. Humble constables patrolling the streets were either gunned down or had sulphuric acid thrown in their faces. Innocent civilians who got in the way were killed, regardless of age or gender. As government officials took increased security measures, from installing triple locks and peepholes on doors to hiring thuggish bodyguards or wearing undergarments of chain mail, so terrorists sought them out in such public places as church services or while in transit. Anarchist terrorists, who were especially vicious, targeted entire classes of people, hurling bombs into churches, restaurants, synagogues and theatres, or simply shot anyone whose white gloves signified the bourgeoisie’s mark of Cain. The Bolsheviks similarly used the generic libel that any alleged opponent belonged to the Black Hundreds – that is, what the left claimed was Russia’s proto-fascist movement – as when they threw three bombs into a shipyard workers’ tavern, on the grounds that some of the workers supported the monarchist Union of the Russian People. Those who survived these explosions were shot as they sought to flee outside.
In a further shocking development, the new-wave terrorists resorted to suicide bombings, in addition to attacks that were already a subliminal form of killing oneself. In 1904 terrorists connected to anarchist groups walked into gendarme or secret police buildings and blew themselves up. On 12 August 1906, three terrorists dressed as gendarmes tried to enter prime minister Stolypin’s villa on an island near St Petersburg. The minister’s guards held them in an antechamber, where, shouting ‘Long live freedom, long live anarchy!’, they blew themselves up with sixteen-pound bombs. The explosion was so powerful that it tore the façade off the villa, burying the minister’s horse and carriage. There were human body parts and blood everywhere. Twenty-seven people were killed and thirty-three injured, including many elderly people, women and Stolypin’s four-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter. The minister himself suffered no greater indignity than having the inkwell fly from his desk, splashing ink all over his face and shirt front. In 1908 nine members of a terrorist group were arrested for plotting a suicide attack on the justice minister. One of their number was kitted out as a human bomb, the idea being that he would hurl himself beneath the minister’s carriage, simultaneously detonating the bomb. When the police tried to arrest this Conradian figure, he warned: ‘Be careful. I am wrapped around with dynamite. If I blow up, the entire street will be destroyed.’ Seven of this group were sentenced to death and hanged.
In addition to acts of murder, the new terrorists of the 1900s carried out acts of extortion, hostage-seizures and armed robbery, the latter leading to gunfights on city streets that resembled scenes from a Western set amid snow. A man of means would receive a note scrawled: ‘The Worker’s Organisation of the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in Belostok requires you to contribute immediately … seventy-five rubles … The Organisation warns you that if you fail to give the above-stated sum, it will resort to severe measures against you, transferring your case to the Combat Detachment.’ In the Caucasus where Armenian and Georgian terrorists were notoriously violent (one group was called Horror, another Terror of the City of Tiflis) and hardly distinguishable from criminal gangs, they intimidated people into not paying the state’s taxes while imposing regular levies of their own. This was sometimes done under the self-delusion that the gangs were like latterday Robin Hoods.
Who were the groups responsible for this new wave of terror? The group most identified with the tactic was the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) which had coalesced out of various neo-Populist groups shortly after 1900. It established a special Combat Organisation solely dedicated to acts of terrorism under a former pharmacist Grigory Gershuni, a cunning figure who recruited many of the Organisation’s assassins. He led the Combat Organisation until his capture in 1903, when Boris Savinkov, the son of a Warsaw judge, replaced him. The person who acted as the link between the SR’s Central Committee and the Combat Organisation was Evno Filipovich Azef, the son of a Jewish tailor who had studied electrical engineering at Darmstadt university in Germany. For fifteen years Azef was at the heart of SR terrorist activities — a remarkable run of luck, for since the early 1890s he had been working for the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, in return for a monthly salary.
The SRs acknowledged the People’s Will as their immediate inspiration, but tried to reconcile acts of terror with Marxist concerns with history’s larger motions in which neither the individual pulling the trigger nor the individual on the receiving end of a bullet was of much import. Marxified terror had several purposes. It could be a defensive response to repressive acts by the state. It would serve to disorganise the regime. Above all, in the SRs’ view, terrorism had propaganda value, ‘inciting a revolutionary mood among the masses’. In practice, things were never so clear cut as this theoretical exposition implies. There was a strong esprit de corps among the terrorists themselves, independent of the ideological niceties that served to differentiate each group. Besides, many of the terrorists had such limited education that they could scarcely articulate the ideological justifications for their actions at all. Many of the lower-level cadres who committed acts of terror were motivated by hatred and revenge, or simply became habituated to violence. Such people tended to be contemptuous of the Party’s deskbound theoreticians, who did not practise the violence their theories licensed. In addition to the centrally controlled Combat Organisation, the SR leadership also encouraged local terrorist groups, whose attacks were less discriminating than those of the central terrorist organisation. When the SRs decided in October 1905 to halt their terrorist attacks in the wake of the tsar’s reforming platform, locally