Blood and Rage: A Cultural history of Terrorism. Michael Burleigh
on the floor of a luxury hotel’. The nihilist who deliberately collided with a uniformed general in a park, rather than deferentially moving out of his way, probably took things too far as the general turned out to be the tsar.
The living inspiration for the nihilist ‘new man’ was the literary critic and social theorist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of an execrable utopian novel called What is to be Done?8 The book was written in prison, which does not redeem it unless one is sentimental. Its characters were like ideograms, the new moral personalities, for whom the personal was always the political, and who would inhabit the light-filled Crystal Palaces of glass and steel he envisaged as the human race’s future. Others, above all Dostoevsky, who had visited the real Crystal Palace on a short trip to London, thought that such futuristic visions suggested the creative finality of an ant-heap, his implication being that the human ants would not improve either through architectural innovation alone. As has been pointed out, Chernyshevsky’s ‘vision of a terrestrial paradise was a kind of oleograph of the kind of writings he must have read in his seminary days’. Although few of his admirers noticed, his crass scientific reductionism went hand in hand with airy ethical idealism. A great religious philosopher expressed the contradiction through a striking pseudo-syllogism: ‘Man is descended from the ape, and therefore we must sacrifice ourselves for one another.’9
Along with the exiled, and temporarily unfastidious, liberal Alexander Herzen, and the gross and slovenly fugitive anarchist Nikolai Bakunin, Chernyshevsky was one of the architects of a revolutionary conspiracy called Land and Freedom. This revolutionary organisation briefly flourished between 1861 and 1864, in which period it became prototypical for the many conspiracies that followed. It was a predominantly student response to the government’s partial rescinding of its university reforms, although the name suggested nobler outrage at the way in which the liberated serfs had had to put themselves in hock for land grudgingly relinquished by their erstwhile masters. There were unsuccessful attempts too to subvert the armed forces, on the part of officers already corrupted by a liberalism they had acquired in partitioned Poland. Mysterious fires in the poorer parts of St Petersburg conduced to a febrile atmosphere and suspicions of plots. Already under open surveillance by his janitor and cook, Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862 and held in custody for two years while the government manufactured evidence to frame him. This invidious treatment led to his going on one of the first hunger strikes in penal history. Evidence was forged to prove his authorship of inflammatory tracts, which he had in fact written, and he was given six years’ hard labour, with exile to Siberia upon his release. The experience killed him. A revolutionary martyr had been born; forty years later an admirer called Lenin would pay explicit homage to Chernyshevsky with a new tract called What is to be Done?
Even the most radical members of Land and Freedom, not to speak of Chernyshevsky himself, doubted whether killing the tsar would have any long-term effect, for another Romanov would simply succeed and the masses, whether in town or country, by way of vengeance would probably wipe out the long-haired intelligentsia, with their blue-tinted spectacles. Such thoughts did not deter the dispersed remnants of Land and Freedom, largely consisting of social misfits drawn from demi-educated plebeians and impoverished clerical or gentry families. Contemptuous of the older generation of liberals like Herzen, these men and women were mightily taken with Chernyshevsky’s literary embodiment of revolutionary implacability – the character of Rakhmetov -upon whom they modelled themselves.
The first nihilist terrorist group, the Organisation, was founded with the prime intention of liberating Chernyshevsky himself. Its leading lights were Ivan Khudyakov and Nikolai Ishutin, the latter a fantasist who used political causes to dominate other people, the former an unhappy young man plagued by a sexually voracious wife. An air of fanatical intent was propagated through claims that one recruit had offered to poison his rich father so as to donate his inheritance to the Organisation’s cause. Early in 1866, Ishutin formed a tighter group within the Organisation with the appropriate title Hell. While the members of the wider Organisation would continue with their mixture of agitprop and social work, members of Hell would devote themselves to assassination, blackmail and robbery. At night the youthful members of Hell discussed the minutiae of such subjects as using planted servants to blackmail their employers, or carrying out assassinations after using acids to disfigure one’s face. Phials of strychnine would prevent capture after the event.
These psychopathic fantasies might have remained the stuff of the time between midnight and dawn, but for Ishutin’s depressed first cousin Dmitry Karakozov. On 4 April 1866 tsar Alexander II entered a St Petersburg public park for his afternoon stroll with his setter Milord. He left his carriage and escorts at the gate. The forty-seven-year-old ruler of Russia had a brief talk with some aristocratic relatives, and then made his way back to the gate, hardly noticing the gathering crowd of admirers, some of whom were already bowing as a gesture of respect. As Alexander reached his carriage a shot rang out, the bullet narrowly missing his head. This good fortune was due to an alcoholic hatter’s apprentice, who inadvertently jogged the assassin Karakozov’s arm. Karakozov was quickly apprehended, with phials of acid and strychnine unused about his person. The tsar strode up to him for the following cryptic exchange:
‘Who are you?’
‘A Russian.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
The hatter’s apprentice was ennobled and given the wherewithal to drink himself to death. A terrified regime handed the investigation of this minuscule conspiracy of juvenile fantasists to count Michael Muraviev, known dramatically as the hangman, but whose wider investigations were clumsily repressive rather than brutal. Some radical journals were closed down and apartments raided. Instead of publishing the investigation’s findings to expose the psychopathic fantasies of the conspirators, or using a local jury which would have executed the lot, the government opted for a special trial by elderly members of the Supreme Criminal Court, with capable lawyers for the defence, in itself testimony to Alexander’s reforms. Karakozov and Ishutin were sentenced to death and hanged, while Khudyakov was sent to Siberia, turning down the offer to accompany him from his loyally importunate spouse. Other members of Hell received lesser sentences.10
In the years that followed, Alexander turned to more conservative advisers, without effectively clamping down on subversive ideas and those who expressed them. He forfeited much of his dignity when, in late middle age, he became besotted with a teenage girl. It was in this atmosphere of indecision that nihilist terrorism was born. In 1865, a peasant boy who had hauled himself up to become a rather louche schoolmaster had arrived in Moscow. His name was Serge Nechaev. He was introduced to radical intelligentsia circles by the Jacobin lawyer Peter Tkachev, whose odder ideas included the view that Russia could be reformed by killing everyone over the age of twenty-five. The two men collaborated in producing revolutionary tracts. Nechaev, meanwhile, was tantalising radical-chic upper-class ladies with claims that, despite being illiterate until sixteen, he had nevertheless mastered the philosophy of Kant. Such liberal ladies were almost impossible to parody, although Dostoevsky managed it, as they recalled Nechaev fondly: ‘He loved to joke and had such a good-natured laugh.’ One can meet such people any night of the week in London, New York or Sydney. Nechaev looked like the US outlaw Jesse James, which was appropriate since he admired the ferocious bandits of Russian history, but the inexplicability of his malicious deeds, and the fine plots he wove, are more suggestive of the evil of Shakespeare’s Iago.11 His practical jokes included sending subversive materials to his enemies, knowing that it would be intercepted by the police. Resentment would be a great recruiting agent. In early 1869, Nechaev decided to embroider his revolutionary mystique by faking his own arrest. He sent a cryptic note to eighteen-year-old Vera Zasulich, towards whom he had clumsily professed his love, which sensationally claimed that he had been taken to the government’s most intimidating penal fortress. In fact, he was en route to Moscow, where sympathisers procured him a passport to go abroad. He left Odessa bound for Switzerland. There he quickly insinuated himself into illustrious exiled circles. The shambolic Bakunin, who, compensating for lifelong impotence with rhetorical violence, was an early fan: ‘They are magnificent these young fanatics. Believers without God, and heroes without phrases.’ Nechaev painted a colourful tale of flight from the Peter and Paul fortress, and of the