Ambivalent Reflections—Obshchestvo in the Time of Terrorism

The Russian and Western historiography on Russian revolutionary terrorism has taken a largely unified approach to its subject. Terrorism is a political problem, a challenge posed by the revolutionaries to autocracy and by nonstate actors to state sovereignty; for this reason, the relationship between the state and the revolutionaries has taken center stage in the literature. Iuliia Safronova’s new study Russskoe obshchestvo v zerkale revoliutsionnogo terrora, 1879–1881 gody takes a refreshingly different approach: revolutionary terrorism was a “serious ordeal” (ser’eznoe ispytanie) that impelled Russian society to come to know (poznavat’) itself (351).¹ As her title suggests, Safronova turns the looking glass so that the object reflected in the mirror is not—or not primarily—revolutionary terrorism, but Russian society (obshchestvo) in the turbulent years of 1879–81. This is unquestionably a clever conceit, and Safronova is well aware that the object of inquiry is twofold: Russian society and revolutionary terrorism, each in fact reflecting the other.

In her introduction, Safronova wrangles with these two central and almost equally problematic terms, drawing deftly on Russian and Western scholarship. Obshchestvo has a particular valuation in Russian that it does not in English, perhaps because its very existence, as Safronova observes, has been cast so often in doubt. Can “society” as it developed and exists in the West be said to exist in Russia, or does the term obshchestvo denote something qualitatively different or even simply a mirage? From her musings on Russian obshchestvo and the related term obshchestvennost’ Safronova concludes “that it is possible to come to one conclusion: one can not say anything definite, neither from the social nor the political point of view, except for the fact that society all the same existed and manifested itself through some kind of action” (19). Considering the thoroughness of her literature review, this is something of an evasion, and it would have been helpful for Safronova to simply state what the reader ultimately infers from her exposition. Obshchestvo refers to those actively engaged citizens with varying degrees of education who identified themselves as part of a larger entity called obshchestvo. This includes anyone who articulated their opinion about public affairs, from government ministers to journalists to tradespeople to writers such as Fedor Dostoevskii, but largely excludes those without access to education and a self-conception of citizen, such as women and peasants.

In spite or because of society’s elusiveness, Safronova reaffirms that “the hero of this book is obshchestvo” (9, 19), borrowing from her sources the trope of obshchestvo as a unitary subject and personified agent. The adoption of this trope and the conceit of “society as the hero” introduce some conceptual static into Safronova’s project. As in Russian, so in English, the word geroi (hero) has two meanings: that of “protagonist” as a morally neutral term for the central figure of a narrative, and “hero” in the classical sense of an individual who performs deeds worthy of admiration and emulation. In the context of Russian revolutionary terrorism, the word geroi automatically invokes the heroic narrative, or mythology, in which the terrorist is the hero or hero-martyr (podvizhnik). From its inception, terrorism generated this heroic narrative, not only among its supporters in the revolutionary underground but among international observers and subsequently even among historians of the revolutionary movement.² Uninitiated readers may simply assume that Safronova means “protagonist,” but other readers (like this one) will wonder if Safronova is intentionally invoking this narrative with the object of advancing her candidate and with it a different model of heroism, in the venerable Russian tradition of backing an unlikely hero against a more conventional contender (e.g. the Underground Man vs. the “man of action”) or if she is simply writing in the ironic mode. This in turn raises questions about the specific nature of obshchestvo’s action and its moral valuation, as well as obshchestvo’s relationship to...