In 1907 one of the leading Maximalist theoreticians, Ivan Pavlov, published a pamphlet entitled The Purification of Mankind. Anyone still harbouring the illusion that the class killings of the left were somehow morally superior to the race-based killings of the far right might wish to reconsider in the light of this tract. Pavlov argued that mankind was divided into ethical as well as ethnic races. Those in any kind of economic or state authority were so heinous that they literally constituted another race, ‘morally inferior to our animal predecessors: the vile characteristics of the gorilla and the orangutan progressed and developed in it to proportions unprecedented in the animal kingdom. There is no beast in comparison with which these types do not appear to be monsters.’ Since this group villainy was heritable, it followed, by this weird logic, that the children of these beasts in human form had to be exterminated. Other Maximalists sought to put a number on the exploiters who had to be killed, with one coming up with a round twelve million. Oddly enough, these pathological zoomorphic fantasies – which would be turned into Soviet reality by the rival Bolsheviks – have received far less scholarly attention than every minor Austrian or German völkisch racist who passed the days and nights wondering how to castrate or kill Jews.
While the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not conceal their campaign of terror, the rival factions of the Social Democratic Labour Party ostentatiously disavowed terrorism as incompatible with Marxism’s emphasis on forming revolutionary consciousness through agitation, while practising it on a massive scale. This distinctive theoretical stance enabled them to identify a separate niche from the SRs; acts of individual terrorism, Lenin averred, were a minor distraction from the serious business of mobilising and organising the revolutionary masses. Both the impact of terrorist campaigns in the early 1900s and the social provenance of many new-wave terrorists meant that the exiled Lenin had to revise his opinions to keep step with events on the ground in Russia. By 1905 he had come to realise the complementary value of terrorism, openly exhorting his followers to form armed units and to attack Cossacks, gendarmes, policemen and informers, with bombs, guns, acid or boiling water. Local Bolshevik terrorist groups extended this campaign from servants of the state to the captains of industry. Moreover, they also used violence to disrupt the elections to the first State Duma, attacking polling stations and destroying the records of the results, since elections might undermine the prospects for revolution in Russia.
Lenin had few scruples about political finance. On one occasion he ordered his subordinates to seduce the unremarkable daughters of a rich industrialist so as to grab their inheritance. He also helped establish a clandestine Bolshevik Centre specifically tasked to carry out armed robberies. The Bolshevik robbers were especially active in the wildly exotic Caucasus, where Lenin’s Georgian associate Josef Stalin had graduated from leading street gangs to political violence on an epic scale. His right-hand man was the Armenian psychopath Semen Ter-Petrosian, or ‘Kamo the Caucasus brigand’ as Lenin affectionately knew him. Stalin’s Outfit was responsible for extortion against businessmen and armed robberies, the most spectacular being a June 1907 bomb and gun raid on carriages taking money to the State Bank in Tiflis which netted at least a quarter of a million rubles.16 Many leading Bolsheviks who benefited from the proceeds of this crime were arrested abroad as they tried to exchange high-value 500-ruble notes for smaller denominations in Western banks.17 Kamo was betrayed in Berlin, but managed to feign insanity sufficiently well to be confined in a mental institution when he was extradited to Russia. He was released after the Revolution; a statue of him replaced that of Pushkin in Tiflis’s Yerevan Square, scene of his most notorious exploit.
Although the Bolsheviks’ rivals, the Mensheviks, included among their leaders men like Iuly Martov and Pavel Aksel’rod who opposed terrorism, things were not so straightforward either in theory or in practice. Again, many Menshevik activists simply ignored the leadership’s strictures against terrorism, which were rarely accompanied in any case by condemnations of terrorist attacks committed by rival groupings. In entire regions, such as the Caucasus, revolutionaries were unaware of any rift between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the first place, and hence continued to commit acts of terrorist violence under a common Social Democrat banner. The vast majority of terrorist killings, however, should be ascribed to anarchists, drawn from craftsmen, students and the underworld, all conjoined by belief that theoretical niceties were irrelevant and that reformism merely served to perpetuate an evil system. They practised what they called ‘motiveless terror’, in other words violence that was utterly disconnected from any alleged wrongdoing on the part of the victim. So instead of killing a member of the regime known for persecuting revolutionaries, anarchist terrorists regarded all the regime’s servants as legitimate targets. Moreover, since the anarchists regarded private property as an evil on a par with the evil of the state, all estate and factory owners and their managers became targets too. The ideological enemy was included, whether clerics or reactionary writers and intellectuals. These generous guidelines meant that anarchist groups were responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks in Russia, although the anarchists’ disavowal of central organisation and emphasis on the spontaneous violence of dispersed local groups meant that their responsibility was not reflected in any sort of accounting of atrocities.
The new wave of terrorism decelerated for various reasons. Following the assassination attempt at his villa in August 1906, prime minister Stolypin resorted to emergency decrees which bypassed the Duma, a step he took with regret since he respected the rule of law. In areas where disturbances were endemic, governors were licensed to use field court martials, where military judges passed summary justice on anyone indicted for terrorist attacks, assassinations, possession of explosives or robberies. Death sentences were frequent and, in a new departure, they were invariably carried out – a thousand within the first eight months of these new courts being established. The noose was known at ‘Stolypin’s necktie’. The regular civil and military courts were also encouraged to be less indulgent towards political criminals. Measures were introduced to improve the calibre and training of the police who investigated terrorist offences, while efforts were made to render imprisonment more stringent, by denying political offenders the privileged status that distinguished them from common criminals. In a few cases, government forces exceeded their authority, as when the commandant of Yalta in 1907 shocked civilised Europe by burning down the house from which a terrorist had tried to shoot him before killing himself. These measures were successful for they demonstrated the regime’s resolve, while the costs to the terrorists became real. Parallel agrarian and economic reforms diminished the wider grievances upon which terrorism fed. Then there was the demoralising effect of what came to be known as the Azef affair, after the spy hidden within the SR Combat Organisation. Azef was so dedicated and senior a revolutionary that those comrades who suspected that he was a police spy were ignored. One man, Vladimir Burtsev, the editor of an SR journal, persisted with these accusations, supporting them with evidence that the Party leadership could not dismiss. A Judicial Commission confirmed Burtsev’s allegations in a way that cast a poor light on the entire SR leadership group.
The exposure of further highly placed police agents led many revolutionaries to question the value of terrorism as a tactic, a feeling that spread to other leftist parties which otherwise enjoyed the SRs’ discomfort. Terrorism directed from the centre went into abeyance, although it continued to be practised by locally based groups of diehard radicals. Dmitry Bogrov, the Okhrana agent and terrorist, belonged to such a group in Kiev. In August 1911 he received a visit from a fellow revolutionary who presented him with the unenviable choice of being killed as a traitor or assassinating the head of the Kievan Okhrana for whom Bogrov acted as an agent. Deciding that he had bigger fish to fry, Bogrov managed to persuade the same Okhrana chief that there was a plot abroad to kill Stolypin on a visit to the Ukrainian capital; in return for this information, which he failed to pass on since the only threat that concerned him would have been against the tsar, the police chief presented Bogrov with a ticket for that night’s performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, allegedly to provide Bogrov with an alibi to use with his suspecting terrorist friends. During the opera’s second interval, Stolypin stood chatting in front of the orchestra pit, while Nicholas II and his daughters remained