Blood and Rage: A Cultural history of Terrorism. Michael Burleigh
his killing by executing four republican prisoners, thereby putting a stop to this particular cycle of publicly acknowledged violence. However, it did not stop murderous warfare between the IRA and Free State troops. Some of the latter seem to have killed IRA prisoners by tying them up and exploding mines beneath them. Perhaps as many as four to five thousand people were killed in the civil war, the majority of them IRA personnel, as recorded Free State military losses were about eight hundred. In May 1923 the IRA declared a ceasefire and hid its arms, prompting president William T. Cosgrave to remark that the organisation’s members might need them ‘any time they took it into their heads to interview a bank manager’. Be that as it may, in republican circles the Rising became a foundational myth that one criticised at one’s peril. In 1926 the working-class Protestant playwright Sean O’Casey did just that, in The Plough and the Stars, performed in the national Abbey Theatre a decade after the Rising. The wives and widows of republican martyrs, including the mother of Pearse, created pandemonium on stage as the Irish tricolour was paraded in a pub to the ghostly tones of Pearse proclaiming his republic. O’Casey left Ireland and never returned.21
One inadvertent consequence of the civil war that convulsed the South was that it enabled Ulster Unionists – the secession within the secession – to consolidate partition by forming the state of Northern Ireland. This was accelerated by the quiet decampment of a third of southern Protestants after an IRA campaign of sectarian murder less well known than ugly Unionist riots against Catholics in Belfast. The ambiguities and unsuppressed hopes emitted by the southern Treatyites had unfortunate repercussions in the North. Catholic nationalists abstained from political involvement in the crucial formative years of Northern Ireland, a stance that enabled the Unionist majority to abolish proportional representation and to gerrymander its local government arrangements. This fed a sense of Catholic nationalist grievance that the victims themselves were partly responsible for because of their wish to maintain the provisional character of the new northern polity. This still exists as part of the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first century, with Belfast, but not Dublin, on British television weather maps.22
I DOING GOOD
Alexis de Tocqueville thought that the most critical time for the pre-revolutionary French monarchy had been when it conceded limited reforms. That assertion held good for late-nineteenth-century tsarist Russia too. Tsar Alexander II, who succeeded to the throne in 1855, embarked on liberalisation measures after the Crimean War had brutally exposed Russian backwardness. His principal reforming measures were the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and the modernisation of provincial government, the law courts and the army. Even the universities, which under his forbidding predecessor Nicholas I resembled socially exclusive reformatories, were opened to students from modest backgrounds who enjoyed a heady period of self-government. A gentler hand was initially evident too in the Russian regime in partitioned Poland, while disabilities imposed on religious sectarians and Jews were relaxed. The latter were allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement, and Jewish converts to Orthodox Christianity could be, and were, appointed to high office.
Discontent developed because Alexander was torn between the liberal spirit of these reforms and the dying exhortation of his father Nicholas: ‘Hold on to everything.’ The tsar would not consider any constitutional concessions, thereby antagonising many Western-orientated liberals who sought some form of parliamentary government. Expanding higher education was all very well, but there was no corresponding increase in the positions open to graduates; many humanities graduates faced a life in penurious limbo that failed to match their ambitions. Similarly, there were no official steps taken to satisfy the desire of many educated young women to do something socially useful, or to attain parity of esteem with their male contemporaries. Most crucially, once the excitement was over, the emancipation of the serfs fell far below their heightened expectations, since they had to compensate their former masters for relinquishing a valuable commodity. Having forfeited their feudal authority through governmental edict, the landowners faced an ugly mood from peasants who felt they had been defrauded. In a village called Bezdna, a holy fool cum village idiot enjoined the peasants to resist soldiers who had come to enforce the rights of the landlords. He claimed to have the ‘real’ edict ‘written in golden letters’. Forty-one villagers were shot dead and seventy injured by the army. Despite evidence that the soldiers’ captain was insane, he was court-martialled and shot. Hopes rose in radical circles that such incidents of peasant unrest would lead to a general explosion of rural violence. Although Alexander had wanted to increase Polish self-government, this seemed only to fuel nationalist demonstrations -which were violently suppressed by Russian soldiers – and the romantic insurrectionism rife in Polish circles. As with the British and Ireland, so Russia’s troubles in Poland – and in the Baltic, Caucasus and Finland -were always regarded as an opportunity by Russia’s own domestic radicals.
Russian policy in Poland oscillated between concessions and repression: these equivocations resulted in the bizarre spectacle of the viceroy and the general commanding Warsaw fighting a so-called American duel, in which, after drawing the short straw, the general duly shot himself in the head and the viceroy resigned. In early 1863 the Russian authorities, sensing that an insurrection was imminent, decided to round up Warsaw’s radical young, sending them as conscripts to the depths of the Russian interior, a measure that duly triggered the insurrection. Polish partisans were easily crushed by Russian regulars. Twenty thousand insurgents were killed, and in the subsequent crackdown four hundred rebels went to the gallows and a further eighteen thousand to Siberia. The real beneficiaries of the Rising were Prussia and the USA. Alexander II looked on benevolently as Bismarck defeated Austria and France in the name of a united Germany, while to spite the British and French who supported both the Confederacy and the Polish rebels Alexander sold to the Union the wastes of Alaska for US$7 million. The final area in which Alexander took fright and pulled back from his earlier concessions was in the febrile universities. Confronted by evidence that the students were running an informal dictatorship over the professors, student assemblies were banned and limits were placed on the numbers receiving subsidised tuition. Two elderly generals were placed in charge of higher education. This led to student demonstrations which were suppressed with erratic brutality, for it was Alexander’s tragedy that, having failed to institute thoroughgoing liberal reforms, he proved incapable of re-establishing his father’s austere police regime too.1
Severally, these events led to the multiplication of revolutionary conspiracies among people whose general emotional and philosophical outlook needs to be briefly elaborated, for this was the milieu from which more select numbers of terrorists emerged. Although the ranks of terrorists included a few notorious psychopaths, the more typical pathology was a misdirected or frustrated altruism, experienced by people – from a variety of family and socioeconomic backgrounds -whose political goals ranged from the impeccably liberal to the most sanguinary Jacobin totalitarianism.2
The common idealistic fantasy was called Populism – that is, the belief that, once the crushing weight of the autocracy and aristocracy had been lifted off by revolution, the structures and habits of socialism allegedly inherent in the traditional peasant commune would be revealed. This was nonsense, albeit inspired by a moralising concern with social equality and justice, on the part of predominantly decent-minded people who wished to overcome the boredom and purposelessness of their own lives by doing good to others.
One can see this impulse at work in the young Vera Figner, the pretty daughter of a well-to-do justice of the peace of noble lineage, who attended one of Russia’s elite boarding schools. There she received a very limited education, chiefly in the art of deportment, essential training for society balls and ensnaring an acceptable husband. In her memoirs, Figner gave a presentiment of the lady she was not destined to be: dressed in a cloud-like gauzy white dress with white slippers and her dark hair in ringlets, about to make her lonely debut in a brilliantly lit ballroom filled with elegantly smart people. Nothing in her childhood explains her subsequent career – which she embarked on aged twenty-four – of lifelong revolutionary. There were no signs of psychological disorder; indeed, although rather frail, she was happy and not given to excessive introspection. As a teenager she was virtually unaware of