The Russian Terrorist-Revolutionary Movement, 1866 – 1876

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

The Russian intelligentsia had emerged in the 1840s dedicated to the overthrow of the entire structure of Tsarism. The logic of cumulative radicalisation implanted by literary critic and novelist Nikolay Chernyshevsky had dictated a turn from literary agitation to active revolutionary methods, specifically terrorism, the objections of leading intelligént Alexander Herzen notwithstanding. The result was the first attempt to assassinate a Tsar in April 1866 by Dmitry Karakozov. This was the onset of a new phase of the Russian revolutionary movement.

Karakozov had not acted alone: he had been part of a secret revolutionary group, run by his cousin, Nikolai Ishutin, whose death sentence in 1866 was commuted by the Tsar (a detail those who present the Imperial Government as a proto-fascist regime might take note of). By some accounts, the group was founded in 1863, with an inner core called “Hell” and an outer circle called simply “The Organisation”. In truth, thanks partly to Ishutin’s wilful mystification, nobody really knows the structure of the Ishutin Society, even all this time later. It seems very unlikely, for instance, that the Society was one faction of a “European Revolutionary Committee” with branches in every State in Europe awaiting the order to murder their monarchs, as Ishutin told his cadres,1 but the Russian terrorist-revolutionaries would become highly integrated into a transnational infrastructure that extended as far west as Britain,2 and it is not impossible international links of some kind were forged in this period.

What is clear is what the group stood for. In ideology: socialism, violence as a virtue, and revolution to thwart industrialisation and constitutionalism in Russia, an idea that would gain increasing salience for the intelligentsia. And the conduct of its members accorded to the principles of Chernyshevsky’s “New Man”: self-sacrifice, ascetism to the point of renouncing family ties and not marrying, and the rejection of all conventional morals, expressed most clearly in its unscrupulous fund-raising methods (namely robbery; one member even planned to murder his father for the inheritance) and its use of deception (not least against its own members).3 The group, a component of the Russian Jacobin stream, was devoted to conspiracy in bringing off revolution and the rule of a despotic minority afterwards, with “Hell” at the centre of the new regime and the (largely non-existent) “Organisation” staffing the State. The economy would be nationalised, counter-revolutionaries exterminated to ensure equality, and officials in the new government who fell short would be removed by assassination.4 (Read more.)