Blood and Rage: A Cultural history of Terrorism. Michael Burleigh
on how his day had started, when he and Loris-Melikov had agreed that elected representatives should be appointed to the State Council to advise on reforms.
Six members of the conspiracy to kill the tsar were put on trial in late March. All six were sentenced to death, although when it was discovered that Gesia Helfman was pregnant, she was reprieved. The remaining five were publicly hanged, with placards reading ‘Regicide’ around their necks. Kibalchich, the bomb maker, tried to interest the authorities in a propellant rocket as a way of securing a reprieve, but they were not to be diverted. The fact that Helfman was from an Orthodox Jewish background was one of the reasons for violent anti-Semitic pogroms that erupted in the rural Ukraine. While the new tsar Alexander III endeavoured to suppress the pogroms, the remnants of People’s Will actively welcomed them as evidence of forces that might one day be directed against the state. They issued pamphlets in Ukrainian, which Vera Figner distributed in Odessa, claiming: ‘It is from the Jews that the Ukrainian folk suffer most of all. Who has gobbled up all the lands and forests? Who runs every tavern? Jews! … Whatever you do, wherever you turn, you run into the Jew. It is he who bosses and cheats you, he who drinks the peasant’s blood.’ It is common knowledge that the tsarist secret police would exploit anti-Semitism to canalise popular anger; it should be equally well known that, some time before, the revolutionaries had rather welcomed anti-Semitism too. The authorities had much success in rounding up many of those involved in earlier conspiracies to assassinate Alexander II, including the pair who ran the phoney cheese shop on Little Garden Street. Soon Vera Figner was the sole surviving member of the Executive Committee, although its associated Military Organisation – consisting of dissident army officers – was in better shape, having been kept aloof from terrorism.
A fatal new development, the Degaev affair, unfolded in a bizarre period during which the People’s Will offered the new tsar Alexander III a truce, provided he permit an elected assembly and release political prisoners. Although this offer was rejected, some members of the government, and a rather ineffective clandestine counter-terror grouping called the Sacred Band, thought that negotiations with People’s Will might at least defer the latter’s assassination attempts until after the new tsar’s coronation. Nothing came of these talks – which took place in Geneva – because the regime had discovered that People’s Will was a shambles. The coronation went ahead in May 1883 without incident.
The reason why the authorities were so accurately apprised of the state of the revolutionary underground can be traced back to Vera Figner’s decision to appoint a capable former artillery officer, Serge Degaev, to run the military wing of People’s Will on behalf of the decimated Executive Committee. Degaev had impeccable revolutionary credentials, having helped dig the tunnel from the cheese shop in Little Garden Street. His mother and siblings were all involved in the wider movement. This proved Figner’s undoing because, when Degaev’s young brother Vladimir was arrested for sedition, he began to receive visits in his cell from major Sudeykin, the most capable of the tsar’s policemen. Appearing to be sympathetic to the cause, Sudeykin offered Vladimir his freedom if he would merely keep him abreast of general trends within the underground. He required no names. Vladimir agreed to these arrangements, confidently boasting to his associates that he was the one really in charge. In December 1882, Serge Degaev himself was arrested in Odessa with the apparatus of the clandestine press of the People’s Will. He recalled his brother Vladimir’s dealings with Sudeykin as he grimly contemplated fifteen years’ hard labour. Upon receiving a letter from Degaev, Sudeykin hastened south to see him. Some sort of murky deal developed in which, in return for ratting on the remnants of People’s Will, Sudeykin would recommend to the tsar that Degaev be allowed to lead a radical party committed to non-violent reform. Sudeykin offered Degaev a chance to meet the tsar in person, although that was impossible since Sudeykin himself was too lowly in rank to have such access himself. What Sudeykin actually wanted was to control the revolutionary movement through Degaev.
A few weeks later, Degaev miraculously escaped from a carriage escorting him to the railway station, kicking one guard out of the door, and throwing snuff into the eyes of his colleague, before vanishing into the snow. He re-established his contacts with People’s Will. Meeting him, Vera Figner forgot that Degaev was no snuff-user and that prisoners were usually manacled in transit. He appeared more concerned with her safety, inquiring whether her apartment had a rear exit. Two days later she left the front door of the apartment and was arrested. The tsar rejoiced, writing in his diary: ‘Thank God they finally got that horrid woman.’ He asked for a photograph of her, just to remind himself how horrid she was. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The genteel conditions within the Peter and Paul fortress where she was held for two years, dining on partridge and pears and wearing a splendid blue gown, gave way to the isolation and soiled grey garb of the Schlüsselburg where she spent the following twenty years.
Meanwhile, Sudeykin was on a slippery slope, steeper even than that being descended by the traitor Degaev. To cover his agent, with whom he had become close, Sudeykin offered up a rather ineffectual informer for Degaev to identify to People’s Will, who duly murdered him. As the number of those betrayed by Degaev mounted, the traitor worried that he would run out of victims. He suggested to Sudeykin a trip to Switzerland where he could extend his treachery to Russian exiles. In Geneva, Degaev reflected on the squalid nature of his relationship with the major with whom he had shared drinks and dishes of pirogi. He had thought he could control how Sudeykin used the information he supplied; in fact, Sudeykin made indiscriminate arrests. Degaev was the major’s slave, and, he realised, not an especially indispensable one either since Sudeykin had allowed him to repair to Switzerland. In this state of self-disgust, Degaev confessed his role to the leading revolutionary Tikhomirov. Although the latter dearly wanted Sudeykin dead, the swathe the latter had cut through the revolutionaries meant that assassins were in short supply. But then there was the major’s friend himself. Degaev was given the unenviable choice of either killing Sudeykin or being murdered himself. Although a more steely revolutionary had to be posted to stiffen the double-agent’s resolve, after a series of false starts Degaev did indeed murder the major. On the afternoon of 16 December, he lured Sudeykin to his apartment on the pretext of meeting an Italian revolutionary. The major brought his nephew, which complicated things. Degaev knew Sudeykin was always armed and wore a bullet-proof vest. Inviting him into his study, he shot him low in the back (the bullet went through his liver), while an accomplice pummelled the terrified nephew to the floor with a crowbar in the hallway. Mortally wounded, Sudeykin tried to lock himself in the water closet. Degaev’s accomplice forced his way in and used the crowbar to finish the major off with four blows to the back of his head. The scene was like an abattoir, with the major sprawled half in and half out of the closet. Sudeykin received a lavish funeral, with the tsarina sending a wreath of white lilies and a note, ‘To him who has fulfilled his sacred duty’. After fleeing to western Europe, Degaev resurfaced in the 1890s as one Professor Alexander Pell of the University of South Dakota where he taught mathematics.13
People’s Will never recovered from the Degaev affair. Fear of police informers hidden in their ranks was almost as acute as the government’s paranoia that nihilists were behind every untoward event. Disillusionment with the response of the peasants during the 1870s, and relentless repression throughout the 1880s, led many in the Russian revolutionary movement to rethink their goals and the means of attaining them. Terrorism was not the crucial issue, since all were more or less agreed that it was a legitimate tactic, although there were disagreements over how central it should be and against whom it should be directed. Rather, the disputes were about the processes and social groups that would drive revolutionary change.
For an important minority, the idyll of communal peasant socialism seemed outmoded in a rapidly industrialising country. Plekhanov was the leading exponent of social democracy and a Russian Marxism (his sect was called the Emancipation of Labour Group) in which capitalism, rather than the rural commune, would give birth to socialism, as described in the laws of history. The fact that the authorities were relatively indulgent towards working-class Social Democrats – the police tended to sympathise more with striking workers than with grasping factory owners – further inclined many revolutionaries to favour allowing the iron laws of history to do their work rather than jump-starting a revolution with bombs and guns. In their view, and one should note the uncontroversial acceptance of mass murder, terror was something that should succeed, rather