On March 13, 1881, Emperor Alexander II left the Winter Palace to inspect a St. Petersburg military parade. He had been warned of plans to assassinate him—but someone was always trying to assassinate him. By now he was used to it. His reign had been marked by a strange duality. Celebrated as “The Emancipator” responsible for freeing Russia’s serfs in 1861, he was also prey to reactionary spasms, including the violent repression of the Polish independence movement. He had recently resolved to introduce a modicum of popular representation to the Russian government, the latest in a string of half-hearted reforms meant to pacify the country’s burgeoning revolutionary movement.
On a street at the edge of a canal, a fair-haired young woman named Sofia Perovskaia pretended to blow her nose. This was the signal to begin. Nikolai Rysakov tossed a bomb under the imperial bulletproof carriage, the sound of the explosion muffled by the snow. A coachman entreated Alexander to remain in the vehicle, but the tsar alighted to question Rysakov and inspect the damage. A young Polish revolutionary, Ignati Grinevitsky, threw the second bomb, fatally injuring both himself and the tsar. Alexander the Emancipator lay bleeding in the snow, his side whiskers graying, his legs shattered and his belly mangled. A third terrorist, still carrying an undetonated bomb, ran toward the dying monarch to assist him.
The first attempt on Alexander’s life had been made in 1866. A half-mad ex-student named Dmitry Karakozov wrote a manifesto declaring his intent to kill the tsar, persecutor of the poor, and die for the people, but the letter got lost in the mail. As the tsar left the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg, Karakozov took aim with a double-barreled gun; a peasant next to him bumped his elbow, and Karakozov missed. He was hanged, and the government increased its surveillance and repression in universities, which it saw as the breeding ground of revolutionary sentiment. In 1867, during the World’s Fair in Paris, a Polish immigrant shot at the tsar’s carriage, hoping to free Poland from the Russian yoke. His pistol broke as it fired. When in 1879, the revolutionary Alexander Solovyev shot at the tsar, the monarch showed remarkable presence of mind; he ran away in zigzags, evading several bullets. Only his coat was a little torn.
Like many Russian terrorists of this period, Solovyev saw his act of violence as a sanctified feat of self-sacrifice for his country. Vera Figner, a noblewoman who would become one of the most beloved terrorists in history, later described Solovyev as possessing “the courage of a hero,” “the self-renunciation of an ascetic” and “the kindness of a child.” Such a description—the last part, in particular—might seem a surprising way to characterize a political assassin. But for some Russian idealists of the later nineteenth century, “propaganda of the deed” was a last resort in the struggle against autocracy, which denied the Russian people any kind of freedom while also failing to provide for its most elemental needs. The birth of Russian political terror shows a broader truth: aiming to extinguish dissent, political repression can foster violence rather than prevent it. As the cycle escalates, even saintly maidens can become murderers, and in the eyes of an angry and thwarted public, murderers can start to look like saints.
Most Americans have never heard of Figner, Perovskaia, Solovyev or Karakozov—but they have heard of Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on a Manhattan sidewalk early one morning last December. Like Perovskaia or Figner, Mangione has become a romantic idol to some admirers. On a political level, of course, he bears little resemblance to the Russian socialists and anarchists: as far as we know, he was part of no larger movement, and the closest he came to political theory was the Unabomber manifesto. But like the Russians, Mangione saw himself as a righteous avenging angel, not a cold-blooded murderer. His act tapped into American fury and frustration at levels of economic inequality, exploitation and structural violence that have not been seen since the Gilded Age—when the Russian-American anarchist Alexander Berkman shot the industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick. The Mangione affair has made it clear that some Americans, especially younger ones, are primed to see a halo around the handsome head of a sympathetic assassin. Suddenly, the stories of these Russian revolutionaries appear newly urgent—not least in their lessons about the corrupting nature of political violence, with its ineluctable momentum.
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The humanitarian bona fides of Figner and other members of the People’s Will, the secret terrorist organization that splintered from the populist group Land and Freedom, were indisputable. Despite her involvement in multiple assassinations, Figner was remembered as an almost angelic figure. Some revolutionaries had vocations stimulated by despotic fathers, grinding poverty or suicidal tendencies. But Figner, who was born in 1852, described her childhood as an exceptionally happy one. She found her vocation in her good fortune: “It was this superabundance of joy in my attitude towards life,” she wrote in her memoirs, “as I first entered it, that formed the real source of my altruistic aspirations.” She wanted everyone in Russia to be able to share in her happiness. As a young woman, she decided to sacrifice all earthly comforts and devote her life to the people.
Figner was partaking of a much larger movement. In the 1860s, with hopes for meaningful reform sparked by the emancipation, and with socialism on the rise throughout Europe, Russian populists had begun to “go to the people,” hoping to educate the masses and thereby facilitate their political awakening. Karakozov, the first would-be tsaricide, was an outlier during this period. In the 1860s and into the 1870s, most Russians with revolutionary inclinations rejected political terror, focusing instead on developing a mass socialist movement among the workers and peasants and attempting to provoke a popular uprising. In 1874 and ’75, thousands of idealistic young people went to the countryside to educate peasants on political issues. The government reacted with sweeping arrests. More than two hundred people were imprisoned for years as they awaited trial, often without any evidence of a crime. Many went insane, committed suicide or died in prison.
In the early 1870s, the young Vera Figner had joined the growing number of Russian progressive women studying medicine in Zurich, intending to return home to tend to the masses. But in 1873, the tsarist government, convinced that women were only studying medicine so that they could perform abortions on each other, ordered all Russian women studying in Zurich to abandon their studies and leave the city. Though she had nearly completed her doctorate, Figner returned to Russia to become a full-time agitator. She went to the countryside to work as a feldsher, the rough equivalent of a nurse-practitioner. There she saw firsthand the misery of Russia’s peasant masses. Her patients were malnourished and filthy, suffering all manner of chronic pain, illness and disability, covered in sores, wounds and skin diseases. In ten months she treated five thousand people. She was adored by her patients—perhaps the only outsider ever to offer them help—but she soon had to flee after she was denounced, falsely, for spreading atheism and revolutionary ideas. Political circumstances had effectively made illegal the provision of humanitarian medical care.
The 1877 Trial of the 193, when the young people arrested for “going to the people” were at last put before a judge, marked an inflection point in the revolutionary approach to violence, and in the public’s attitude to it. In one of his reformist moods, Alexander II had established an independent judiciary. This made trials a precious venue for the expression of forbidden political ideas. The young defendants in the Trial of the 193 made the best of this opportunity, with many delivering eloquent speeches. A third of the prisoners were given onerous sentences; to the dismay of the government, the rest were acquitted. Almost all of those acquitted were promptly rearrested and exiled on administrative charges. Their number included Sofia Perovskaia and her husband, Andrei Zhelyabov.
With Perovskaia, Zhelyabov and others in the secret society that became known as the People’s Will, Vera Figner came to believe that since political persecution had made peaceful means impossible, “justice must be protected by physical force.” The peasants were too engulfed in poverty to defend themselves; the revolutionary youth would have to do it for them. Without any kind of political freedom or social aid, there was no choice but violence. The members of the People’s Will took vows of secrecy, promised to “forget for its sake all ties of kinship” and have no private property, and pledged to renounce individual desire and subordinate themselves to the will of the majority. “If these demands had been less exigent,” Figner wrote, “if they had not stirred one’s spirit so profoundly, they would not have satisfied us; but now, by their severe and lofty nature they exalted us and freed us from every petty or personal consideration.” Renunciation made more vivid the sense of being inhabited by an ideal.
At first, the assassinations were direct retaliations. They started with the general who had persuaded the tsar to double the sentences of the 193. Next came a notoriously cruel prosecutor in Kiev, then the governor-general of Kharkov. The culmination was a more abstract kind of terrorism, targeting the ultimate embodiment of imperial injustice: the People’s Will issued a death sentence against the tsar. The conspirators made plans for an attempt that would take place simultaneously at four sites, to maximize the chances of success. Figner’s principles demanded that she be directly involved, and she was soon on her way to Odessa with a load of dynamite.
The events that followed had an element of morbid slapstick comedy. Like Wile E. Coyote trying to kill the Road Runner, the revolutionaries kept missing, sometimes blowing off their own limbs in the process. The first mines laid to explode the imperial train traveling from Crimea to St. Petersburg failed to ignite due to incorrectly linked electrodes. The second bomb exploded slightly too late, missing the tsar and blowing up a train full of courtiers instead. The conspirators managed to place a large bomb in the basement of the Winter Palace, planning to explode the imperial dining room and with it the tsar’s family and a visiting prince. But the explosion was not strong enough, and it only made the imperial dishes fall to the floor. Beneath the dining room, fifty soldiers in the tsar’s guard were mutilated or killed. This kind of collateral damage would later cause revolutionary thinkers like Emma Goldman to renounce political violence; but the terrorists of the People’s Will hardly seemed to register it.
The dogged conspirators now rented a cheese shop, struggling to come up with the funds for enough cheese to create a convincing display. From the back room of the shop, they drilled a passage stretching under a street on which Alexander’s carriage would pass in spring. They stored the excavated soil in Figner’s apartment, which was soon crowded with parcels of earth. Their efforts were at constant risk due to their bad business skills; it was obvious to fellow merchants that they were not turning a profit. Yet thanks to its aura of mystery and invincibility, the People’s Will was winning new recruits, including military officers, and attracting support in western Europe through its propaganda efforts. As Figner put it, “Boldness is as infectious as panic; the energy and audacity of the organisation attracted to it vital elements, and death itself lost its terror.” Across Europe, people were attacking their monarchs.
In February 1881, the People’s Will made plans for the next sequence of attempts. They would explode a mine under the tsar’s carriage, and four bomb throwers would lie in wait to toss their bombs at the tsar from either side of the street. A fifth man would be ready with a dagger to finish the tsar off if the mines and the bombs failed. On March 13th, the tsar did not take his expected route, rendering the mines useless. But Perovskaia revised the plan on the spot, waving the handkerchief that doomed the tsar.
Figner wept with joy when she heard the news of the tsar’s death. She believed that the “nightmare, which for ten years had strangled young Russia before our very eyes, had been brought to an end; the horrors of prison and exile, the violence, executions, and atrocities inflicted on hundreds and thousands of our adherents, the blood of our martyrs, all were atoned for by this blood of the Tsar, shed by our hands. A heavy burden was lifted from our shoulders; reaction must come to an end and give place to a new Russia.” She had been worried, before Solovyev’s attempt two years earlier, that a failed shot at the tsar might “bring about still more serious reaction.” She and her fellow assassins seem never to have considered that success could have the same effect.
The authorities dragged the city and the country for the conspirators, though they failed to capture Figner. Perovskaia, Zhelyabov, Rysakov and two others were hanged on April 15th. Perovskaia was the first woman in Russia to be executed for a political crime, having been caught while making frantic plans to assassinate the new tsar—who was so afraid of the People’s Will that he did not hold a coronation. Some Russians viewed Perovskaia as a bloodthirsty freak, others as a secular saint. In the days before her death, she was said to spend visiting hours lying quietly with her head in her beloved mother’s lap. Like Figner, she had started by going to the people, drawn to an ascetic life of self-sacrifice as a village doctor. And like Figner, she concluded that such efforts were futile.
The People’s Will had expected the assassination to trigger an uprising among the peasants. They were disappointed. Neither did the murder force a monumental change in the political or economic system. Instead, Alexander III hid in a Vauban fortress in Gatchina, outside St. Petersburg. For several years, the People’s Will managed to maintain the illusion that they were ready to strike at any time, despite the arrest of most of their leaders. The government came close to making concessions. But when the police managed to plant an informer in the organization, the jig was up. Figner spent twenty years in prison.
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In a passage midway through her memoir, written in the early 1920s, Figner is clear-eyed about the dangers of resorting to terror:
Violence, whether committed against a thought, an action, or a human life, never contributed to the refinement of morals. It arouses ferocity, develops brutal instincts, awakens evil impulses, and prompts acts of disloyalty. Humanity and magnanimity are incompatible with it. And from this point of view, the government and the revolutionary party, when they entered into what may be termed a hand-to-hand battle, vied with one another in corrupting everything and every one around them. On the one hand, the party declared that all methods were fair in the war with its antagonist, that here the end justified the means. At the same time, it created a cult of dynamite and the revolver, and crowned the terrorist with a halo; murder and the scaffold acquired a magnetic charm and attraction for the youth of the land, and the weaker their nervous system, and the more oppressive the life around them, the greater was their exaltation at the thought of revolutionary terror.
Figner ascribed the turn to terror to the desire of the revolutionist to see results in his or her own short lifetime—in other words, to impatience. She observed that revolutionary and governmental violence joined in an escalating cycle, inuring society to bloodshed, degradation and vengeance.
Yet Figner also argued that the terrorism of the People’s Will was redeemed by the purity of its members’ motives and their way of life. Through asceticism, selfless camaraderie and uncomplaining acceptance of their punishment, they vindicated themselves. And the murders they committed were much outweighed by the systemic violence of the government: What were the deaths of a few guilty officials compared to the suffering of millions? After musing on the corrupting effects of violence, she concluded that the People’s Will “had accomplished its mission … the recognition of the necessity of political freedom, and of active warfare in order to attain it, remained in the minds of the following generations, and became a part of all ensuing revolutionary programmes.”
Figner’s observations about cycles of violence help explain why terrorism retained its central place in revolutionary circles even when new avenues opened, after the 1905 revolution, for nonviolent efforts at reform. Assassinations continued to proliferate, though by now there were many other options; a certain type of young revolutionary still believed that terrorists were saints. After decades of revolutionary conspiracies, meanwhile, society was pullulating with spies. Sometimes the tsar’s secret agents were the ones planning the murders of government officials. In other cases, revolutionaries committed suicide after being falsely accused of informing on their comrades. The sanctity of revolutionary fellowship had been sullied.
In her description of the dangers of the turn to political violence, Figner could also have been writing between the lines about the victorious Bolsheviks, who did not hesitate to use force to suppress all forms of “counterrevolutionary” dissent. The assassins of the People’s Will became Soviet heroes, with streets named for them across the country, but their successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries, were snuffed out. After 1917, Figner became a living relic, trotted out as an icon of the revolutionary past. Though she did not denounce the Bolsheviks, she did not join them either. Instead, she went back to where she’d started, devoting herself to humanitarian work. The imperial government she had fought against was gone, but violence and suffering remained. By the time she died in 1942, political freedom was a distant memory.
Russia’s revolutionaries helped invent modern terrorism, in which acts of largely symbolic political violence are amplified and sensationalized via the mass media. Much more than historical curiosities, these Russian stories are a reminder that when there is glaring injustice with no freedom to vote, to speak out, to organize, or even to offer humanitarian aid, those dissatisfied with the status quo may turn to murderous spectacle. The narrower the channel of dissent, the fiercer the stream. Repression can alchemize resistance into violence; medical students become bomb throwers, destroying their lives and those of others. And as Figner observed, when the cycle of violence begins, it is terribly difficult to stop it from escalating. Alexander II sometimes wept inconsolably as he reflected on how reactionary his reign had become. But no sooner had he initiated a reform than he had forgotten it, and Russia remained the most politically repressive regime in Europe. Timely, decisive liberalization—a widening of the channel of dissent—might have saved Alexander’s life, and perhaps the lives of the millions who died in the course of the revolutionary struggle and its aftermath.
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A recent Mangione-inspired episode of Law and Order—that reliable barometer of American centrist anxieties—bears an eerie similarity to another of the most famous acts of Russian revolutionary terrorism. In 1877, a young woman named Vera Zasulich went to the St. Petersburg police station and shot the widely hated chief of police, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. (The gunshot wound was not fatal.) The public sympathized with Zasulich, an ascetic idealist who had lived her whole adult life in poverty and political exile. The intelligentsia competed for tickets to the trial, which was described as a “Milky Way” of celebrities. Dostoevsky was among those present, deeply moved by Zasulich’s declaration, “It is a terrible thing to raise one’s hand against a human being but I felt I had to do it.” Zasulich was a character straight out of one of his novels.
When the jury acquitted Zasulich in just eight hours, the courtroom filled with “shouts of unconcealed joy, hysterical sobs, impassioned applause, the stomping of feet.” The presiding judge wrote that “the jury’s verdict was, perhaps, not correct from the juridical point of view but it was true to moral feeling; it dissented from the dead letter of the law but in it resounded the voice of living law.”
Like that Russian judge, the writers of Law and Order showed significant sympathy for the assassin. “Folk Hero,” as the episode is titled, opens with two police officers discussing the absurdities and injustices of the health-insurance system; over the course of the episode, characters repeat a litany of well-founded reasons for anger at insurers, many of them direct echoes of the discussions that followed Mangione’s attentat. The fictionalized assassin in “Folk Hero” is even more beloved by the public than Mangione; his mother died after being denied cancer treatment by her insurance company. His attorney characterizes his murder as a defense of human life, intended to protect the people the health-care CEO would otherwise have killed through denials of coverage. As in the Zasulich trial, it is the victim, not the shooter, who is cast as the villain.
A prosecutor who declined to serve in the Zasulich trial explained himself in a letter: “Juries energetically prosecute only such injury which can threaten each and all without distinction. For this reason they naturally pay particular attention to the personality of the victim of a crime in order to ascertain to what extent he departs from the common standard and places himself in unfavorable conditions—following which they consider to what extent the defendant is dangerous in general to each and every member of society and to what extent his crime was inspired by the victim of the present case.” Rewritten in punchy American TV sentences, this explanation would have fit seamlessly into “Folk Hero.”
Like Vera Zasulich’s jurors, the Law and Order writers couldn’t bring themselves to condemn the appealing young assassin. (Mangione fans did complain, however, that the actor cast in the lead role wasn’t handsome enough.) “Folk Hero” ends just before the forewoman pronounces the verdict, leaving open the possibility of his acquittal. Luigi is an American Vera, though Mangione’s attentat seems even more futile than Zasulich’s. Long after she left Russia, Zasulich wrote that it was the “poetry of revolution,” the sense of belonging to the “camp of the doomed,” that attracted her to the struggle. But she had little certainty that such acts would “produce a ‘future order’ and general happiness.” Since Mangione’s “propaganda of the deed,” meanwhile, the channel of dissent has only narrowed.
Image credit: Illustrated London News, The assassination of Alexander II, 1881. Wellcome Collection.
On March 13, 1881, Emperor Alexander II left the Winter Palace to inspect a St. Petersburg military parade. He had been warned of plans to assassinate him—but someone was always trying to assassinate him. By now he was used to it. His reign had been marked by a strange duality. Celebrated as “The Emancipator” responsible for freeing Russia’s serfs in 1861, he was also prey to reactionary spasms, including the violent repression of the Polish independence movement. He had recently resolved to introduce a modicum of popular representation to the Russian government, the latest in a string of half-hearted reforms meant to pacify the country’s burgeoning revolutionary movement.
On a street at the edge of a canal, a fair-haired young woman named Sofia Perovskaia pretended to blow her nose. This was the signal to begin. Nikolai Rysakov tossed a bomb under the imperial bulletproof carriage, the sound of the explosion muffled by the snow. A coachman entreated Alexander to remain in the vehicle, but the tsar alighted to question Rysakov and inspect the damage. A young Polish revolutionary, Ignati Grinevitsky, threw the second bomb, fatally injuring both himself and the tsar. Alexander the Emancipator lay bleeding in the snow, his side whiskers graying, his legs shattered and his belly mangled. A third terrorist, still carrying an undetonated bomb, ran toward the dying monarch to assist him.
The first attempt on Alexander’s life had been made in 1866. A half-mad ex-student named Dmitry Karakozov wrote a manifesto declaring his intent to kill the tsar, persecutor of the poor, and die for the people, but the letter got lost in the mail. As the tsar left the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg, Karakozov took aim with a double-barreled gun; a peasant next to him bumped his elbow, and Karakozov missed. He was hanged, and the government increased its surveillance and repression in universities, which it saw as the breeding ground of revolutionary sentiment. In 1867, during the World’s Fair in Paris, a Polish immigrant shot at the tsar’s carriage, hoping to free Poland from the Russian yoke. His pistol broke as it fired. When in 1879, the revolutionary Alexander Solovyev shot at the tsar, the monarch showed remarkable presence of mind; he ran away in zigzags, evading several bullets. Only his coat was a little torn.
Like many Russian terrorists of this period, Solovyev saw his act of violence as a sanctified feat of self-sacrifice for his country. Vera Figner, a noblewoman who would become one of the most beloved terrorists in history, later described Solovyev as possessing “the courage of a hero,” “the self-renunciation of an ascetic” and “the kindness of a child.” Such a description—the last part, in particular—might seem a surprising way to characterize a political assassin. But for some Russian idealists of the later nineteenth century, “propaganda of the deed” was a last resort in the struggle against autocracy, which denied the Russian people any kind of freedom while also failing to provide for its most elemental needs. The birth of Russian political terror shows a broader truth: aiming to extinguish dissent, political repression can foster violence rather than prevent it. As the cycle escalates, even saintly maidens can become murderers, and in the eyes of an angry and thwarted public, murderers can start to look like saints.
Most Americans have never heard of Figner, Perovskaia, Solovyev or Karakozov—but they have heard of Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on a Manhattan sidewalk early one morning last December. Like Perovskaia or Figner, Mangione has become a romantic idol to some admirers. On a political level, of course, he bears little resemblance to the Russian socialists and anarchists: as far as we know, he was part of no larger movement, and the closest he came to political theory was the Unabomber manifesto. But like the Russians, Mangione saw himself as a righteous avenging angel, not a cold-blooded murderer. His act tapped into American fury and frustration at levels of economic inequality, exploitation and structural violence that have not been seen since the Gilded Age—when the Russian-American anarchist Alexander Berkman shot the industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick. The Mangione affair has made it clear that some Americans, especially younger ones, are primed to see a halo around the handsome head of a sympathetic assassin. Suddenly, the stories of these Russian revolutionaries appear newly urgent—not least in their lessons about the corrupting nature of political violence, with its ineluctable momentum.
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The humanitarian bona fides of Figner and other members of the People’s Will, the secret terrorist organization that splintered from the populist group Land and Freedom, were indisputable. Despite her involvement in multiple assassinations, Figner was remembered as an almost angelic figure. Some revolutionaries had vocations stimulated by despotic fathers, grinding poverty or suicidal tendencies. But Figner, who was born in 1852, described her childhood as an exceptionally happy one. She found her vocation in her good fortune: “It was this superabundance of joy in my attitude towards life,” she wrote in her memoirs, “as I first entered it, that formed the real source of my altruistic aspirations.” She wanted everyone in Russia to be able to share in her happiness. As a young woman, she decided to sacrifice all earthly comforts and devote her life to the people.
Figner was partaking of a much larger movement. In the 1860s, with hopes for meaningful reform sparked by the emancipation, and with socialism on the rise throughout Europe, Russian populists had begun to “go to the people,” hoping to educate the masses and thereby facilitate their political awakening. Karakozov, the first would-be tsaricide, was an outlier during this period. In the 1860s and into the 1870s, most Russians with revolutionary inclinations rejected political terror, focusing instead on developing a mass socialist movement among the workers and peasants and attempting to provoke a popular uprising. In 1874 and ’75, thousands of idealistic young people went to the countryside to educate peasants on political issues. The government reacted with sweeping arrests. More than two hundred people were imprisoned for years as they awaited trial, often without any evidence of a crime. Many went insane, committed suicide or died in prison.
In the early 1870s, the young Vera Figner had joined the growing number of Russian progressive women studying medicine in Zurich, intending to return home to tend to the masses. But in 1873, the tsarist government, convinced that women were only studying medicine so that they could perform abortions on each other, ordered all Russian women studying in Zurich to abandon their studies and leave the city. Though she had nearly completed her doctorate, Figner returned to Russia to become a full-time agitator. She went to the countryside to work as a feldsher, the rough equivalent of a nurse-practitioner. There she saw firsthand the misery of Russia’s peasant masses. Her patients were malnourished and filthy, suffering all manner of chronic pain, illness and disability, covered in sores, wounds and skin diseases. In ten months she treated five thousand people. She was adored by her patients—perhaps the only outsider ever to offer them help—but she soon had to flee after she was denounced, falsely, for spreading atheism and revolutionary ideas. Political circumstances had effectively made illegal the provision of humanitarian medical care.
The 1877 Trial of the 193, when the young people arrested for “going to the people” were at last put before a judge, marked an inflection point in the revolutionary approach to violence, and in the public’s attitude to it. In one of his reformist moods, Alexander II had established an independent judiciary. This made trials a precious venue for the expression of forbidden political ideas. The young defendants in the Trial of the 193 made the best of this opportunity, with many delivering eloquent speeches. A third of the prisoners were given onerous sentences; to the dismay of the government, the rest were acquitted. Almost all of those acquitted were promptly rearrested and exiled on administrative charges. Their number included Sofia Perovskaia and her husband, Andrei Zhelyabov.
With Perovskaia, Zhelyabov and others in the secret society that became known as the People’s Will, Vera Figner came to believe that since political persecution had made peaceful means impossible, “justice must be protected by physical force.” The peasants were too engulfed in poverty to defend themselves; the revolutionary youth would have to do it for them. Without any kind of political freedom or social aid, there was no choice but violence. The members of the People’s Will took vows of secrecy, promised to “forget for its sake all ties of kinship” and have no private property, and pledged to renounce individual desire and subordinate themselves to the will of the majority. “If these demands had been less exigent,” Figner wrote, “if they had not stirred one’s spirit so profoundly, they would not have satisfied us; but now, by their severe and lofty nature they exalted us and freed us from every petty or personal consideration.” Renunciation made more vivid the sense of being inhabited by an ideal.
At first, the assassinations were direct retaliations. They started with the general who had persuaded the tsar to double the sentences of the 193. Next came a notoriously cruel prosecutor in Kiev, then the governor-general of Kharkov. The culmination was a more abstract kind of terrorism, targeting the ultimate embodiment of imperial injustice: the People’s Will issued a death sentence against the tsar. The conspirators made plans for an attempt that would take place simultaneously at four sites, to maximize the chances of success. Figner’s principles demanded that she be directly involved, and she was soon on her way to Odessa with a load of dynamite.
The events that followed had an element of morbid slapstick comedy. Like Wile E. Coyote trying to kill the Road Runner, the revolutionaries kept missing, sometimes blowing off their own limbs in the process. The first mines laid to explode the imperial train traveling from Crimea to St. Petersburg failed to ignite due to incorrectly linked electrodes. The second bomb exploded slightly too late, missing the tsar and blowing up a train full of courtiers instead. The conspirators managed to place a large bomb in the basement of the Winter Palace, planning to explode the imperial dining room and with it the tsar’s family and a visiting prince. But the explosion was not strong enough, and it only made the imperial dishes fall to the floor. Beneath the dining room, fifty soldiers in the tsar’s guard were mutilated or killed. This kind of collateral damage would later cause revolutionary thinkers like Emma Goldman to renounce political violence; but the terrorists of the People’s Will hardly seemed to register it.
The dogged conspirators now rented a cheese shop, struggling to come up with the funds for enough cheese to create a convincing display. From the back room of the shop, they drilled a passage stretching under a street on which Alexander’s carriage would pass in spring. They stored the excavated soil in Figner’s apartment, which was soon crowded with parcels of earth. Their efforts were at constant risk due to their bad business skills; it was obvious to fellow merchants that they were not turning a profit. Yet thanks to its aura of mystery and invincibility, the People’s Will was winning new recruits, including military officers, and attracting support in western Europe through its propaganda efforts. As Figner put it, “Boldness is as infectious as panic; the energy and audacity of the organisation attracted to it vital elements, and death itself lost its terror.” Across Europe, people were attacking their monarchs.
In February 1881, the People’s Will made plans for the next sequence of attempts. They would explode a mine under the tsar’s carriage, and four bomb throwers would lie in wait to toss their bombs at the tsar from either side of the street. A fifth man would be ready with a dagger to finish the tsar off if the mines and the bombs failed. On March 13th, the tsar did not take his expected route, rendering the mines useless. But Perovskaia revised the plan on the spot, waving the handkerchief that doomed the tsar.
Figner wept with joy when she heard the news of the tsar’s death. She believed that the “nightmare, which for ten years had strangled young Russia before our very eyes, had been brought to an end; the horrors of prison and exile, the violence, executions, and atrocities inflicted on hundreds and thousands of our adherents, the blood of our martyrs, all were atoned for by this blood of the Tsar, shed by our hands. A heavy burden was lifted from our shoulders; reaction must come to an end and give place to a new Russia.” She had been worried, before Solovyev’s attempt two years earlier, that a failed shot at the tsar might “bring about still more serious reaction.” She and her fellow assassins seem never to have considered that success could have the same effect.
The authorities dragged the city and the country for the conspirators, though they failed to capture Figner. Perovskaia, Zhelyabov, Rysakov and two others were hanged on April 15th. Perovskaia was the first woman in Russia to be executed for a political crime, having been caught while making frantic plans to assassinate the new tsar—who was so afraid of the People’s Will that he did not hold a coronation. Some Russians viewed Perovskaia as a bloodthirsty freak, others as a secular saint. In the days before her death, she was said to spend visiting hours lying quietly with her head in her beloved mother’s lap. Like Figner, she had started by going to the people, drawn to an ascetic life of self-sacrifice as a village doctor. And like Figner, she concluded that such efforts were futile.
The People’s Will had expected the assassination to trigger an uprising among the peasants. They were disappointed. Neither did the murder force a monumental change in the political or economic system. Instead, Alexander III hid in a Vauban fortress in Gatchina, outside St. Petersburg. For several years, the People’s Will managed to maintain the illusion that they were ready to strike at any time, despite the arrest of most of their leaders. The government came close to making concessions. But when the police managed to plant an informer in the organization, the jig was up. Figner spent twenty years in prison.
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In a passage midway through her memoir, written in the early 1920s, Figner is clear-eyed about the dangers of resorting to terror:
Figner ascribed the turn to terror to the desire of the revolutionist to see results in his or her own short lifetime—in other words, to impatience. She observed that revolutionary and governmental violence joined in an escalating cycle, inuring society to bloodshed, degradation and vengeance.
Yet Figner also argued that the terrorism of the People’s Will was redeemed by the purity of its members’ motives and their way of life. Through asceticism, selfless camaraderie and uncomplaining acceptance of their punishment, they vindicated themselves. And the murders they committed were much outweighed by the systemic violence of the government: What were the deaths of a few guilty officials compared to the suffering of millions? After musing on the corrupting effects of violence, she concluded that the People’s Will “had accomplished its mission … the recognition of the necessity of political freedom, and of active warfare in order to attain it, remained in the minds of the following generations, and became a part of all ensuing revolutionary programmes.”
Figner’s observations about cycles of violence help explain why terrorism retained its central place in revolutionary circles even when new avenues opened, after the 1905 revolution, for nonviolent efforts at reform. Assassinations continued to proliferate, though by now there were many other options; a certain type of young revolutionary still believed that terrorists were saints. After decades of revolutionary conspiracies, meanwhile, society was pullulating with spies. Sometimes the tsar’s secret agents were the ones planning the murders of government officials. In other cases, revolutionaries committed suicide after being falsely accused of informing on their comrades. The sanctity of revolutionary fellowship had been sullied.
In her description of the dangers of the turn to political violence, Figner could also have been writing between the lines about the victorious Bolsheviks, who did not hesitate to use force to suppress all forms of “counterrevolutionary” dissent. The assassins of the People’s Will became Soviet heroes, with streets named for them across the country, but their successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries, were snuffed out. After 1917, Figner became a living relic, trotted out as an icon of the revolutionary past. Though she did not denounce the Bolsheviks, she did not join them either. Instead, she went back to where she’d started, devoting herself to humanitarian work. The imperial government she had fought against was gone, but violence and suffering remained. By the time she died in 1942, political freedom was a distant memory.
Russia’s revolutionaries helped invent modern terrorism, in which acts of largely symbolic political violence are amplified and sensationalized via the mass media. Much more than historical curiosities, these Russian stories are a reminder that when there is glaring injustice with no freedom to vote, to speak out, to organize, or even to offer humanitarian aid, those dissatisfied with the status quo may turn to murderous spectacle. The narrower the channel of dissent, the fiercer the stream. Repression can alchemize resistance into violence; medical students become bomb throwers, destroying their lives and those of others. And as Figner observed, when the cycle of violence begins, it is terribly difficult to stop it from escalating. Alexander II sometimes wept inconsolably as he reflected on how reactionary his reign had become. But no sooner had he initiated a reform than he had forgotten it, and Russia remained the most politically repressive regime in Europe. Timely, decisive liberalization—a widening of the channel of dissent—might have saved Alexander’s life, and perhaps the lives of the millions who died in the course of the revolutionary struggle and its aftermath.
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A recent Mangione-inspired episode of Law and Order—that reliable barometer of American centrist anxieties—bears an eerie similarity to another of the most famous acts of Russian revolutionary terrorism. In 1877, a young woman named Vera Zasulich went to the St. Petersburg police station and shot the widely hated chief of police, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. (The gunshot wound was not fatal.) The public sympathized with Zasulich, an ascetic idealist who had lived her whole adult life in poverty and political exile. The intelligentsia competed for tickets to the trial, which was described as a “Milky Way” of celebrities. Dostoevsky was among those present, deeply moved by Zasulich’s declaration, “It is a terrible thing to raise one’s hand against a human being but I felt I had to do it.” Zasulich was a character straight out of one of his novels.
When the jury acquitted Zasulich in just eight hours, the courtroom filled with “shouts of unconcealed joy, hysterical sobs, impassioned applause, the stomping of feet.” The presiding judge wrote that “the jury’s verdict was, perhaps, not correct from the juridical point of view but it was true to moral feeling; it dissented from the dead letter of the law but in it resounded the voice of living law.”
Like that Russian judge, the writers of Law and Order showed significant sympathy for the assassin. “Folk Hero,” as the episode is titled, opens with two police officers discussing the absurdities and injustices of the health-insurance system; over the course of the episode, characters repeat a litany of well-founded reasons for anger at insurers, many of them direct echoes of the discussions that followed Mangione’s attentat. The fictionalized assassin in “Folk Hero” is even more beloved by the public than Mangione; his mother died after being denied cancer treatment by her insurance company. His attorney characterizes his murder as a defense of human life, intended to protect the people the health-care CEO would otherwise have killed through denials of coverage. As in the Zasulich trial, it is the victim, not the shooter, who is cast as the villain.
A prosecutor who declined to serve in the Zasulich trial explained himself in a letter: “Juries energetically prosecute only such injury which can threaten each and all without distinction. For this reason they naturally pay particular attention to the personality of the victim of a crime in order to ascertain to what extent he departs from the common standard and places himself in unfavorable conditions—following which they consider to what extent the defendant is dangerous in general to each and every member of society and to what extent his crime was inspired by the victim of the present case.” Rewritten in punchy American TV sentences, this explanation would have fit seamlessly into “Folk Hero.”
Like Vera Zasulich’s jurors, the Law and Order writers couldn’t bring themselves to condemn the appealing young assassin. (Mangione fans did complain, however, that the actor cast in the lead role wasn’t handsome enough.) “Folk Hero” ends just before the forewoman pronounces the verdict, leaving open the possibility of his acquittal. Luigi is an American Vera, though Mangione’s attentat seems even more futile than Zasulich’s. Long after she left Russia, Zasulich wrote that it was the “poetry of revolution,” the sense of belonging to the “camp of the doomed,” that attracted her to the struggle. But she had little certainty that such acts would “produce a ‘future order’ and general happiness.” Since Mangione’s “propaganda of the deed,” meanwhile, the channel of dissent has only narrowed.
Image credit: Illustrated London News, The assassination of Alexander II, 1881. Wellcome Collection.
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