Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia

Exile’s Vengeance: Trotsky and the Morality of Terrorism

 Exile’s Vengeance:Trotsky and the Morality of Terrorism Martin A. Miller Moral arguments justifying and condemning the use of tactical violence to achieve desired political ends have been advanced and discussed for more than two centuries. In the modern era of European history, Maximilien Robespierre and his ideological theoretician Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just were among the first to formulate the notion of justifiable state violence in 1793 during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Karl Heinzen’s 1849 essay “Murder,” published in the German radical paper Die Evolution, and Sergei Nechaev’s 1869 essay “Catechism of a Revolutionary”are among the earliest attempts at a moral justification of terrorism from below. Very few individuals,however,have presented arguments both for and against terrorism on ethical grounds. One reason is that so few have had the opportunity to have experienced both the radical,illegal underground in a high-intensity period of political violence and, later, the heights of state power. One of these rare figures was Lev Davidovich Trotsky, whose life encompassed the roles of both outlaw and Leviathan and who composed both a comprehensive critique of terrorism and an influential justification of it at different moments in his career. His work therefore represents an important pathway to understanding the links between state and antistate political violence,which are usually considered entirely separate subjects.1 This essay seeks to analyze his opposing and contradictory conceptualizations of political violence and to explain their moral basis in historical context.  martin a. miller *** In 1909, Lev Trotsky (né Bronstein) was a committed Marxist revolutionary living a peripatetic existence in political exile from tsarist Russia and deeply engaged in the bitter ideological divisions that defined and divided the European social democratic movement. One of the most charged issues facing Russian revolutionaries at the time, regardless of party affiliation, was the question of whether or not to accept terrorist tactics as a means of sabotaging the autocratic system. The battle lines on the radical left over supporting or criticizing terrorist actions had already been drawn in earlier ideological wars between the followers of Karl Marx and anarchists loyal to Mikhail Bakunin. Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels had earlier corresponded with each other frequently about the futility of political violence carried out by elite squads or individuals representing larger movements . Of the effort by the Irish Fenians to bomb the Clerkenwell prison in London to free political prisoners, Marx called it “a secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy.”2 Engels wrote back to him that this “stupid affair in Clerkenwell was obviously the work of a few specialized fanatics” in “the arson business” who think they “can liberate Ireland by setting fire to a tailor ’s shop in London.”3 Later, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of the People’s Will (Narodnaia volia) in St.Petersburg and the killing of Lord Cavendish, the chief British official responsible for control of Ireland, in the Phoenix Park bombing, Engels referred to these events as characterized by “infantile behavior” and “sheer folly, [and] a piece of pure Bakuninist histrionic,senseless ‘propagande par le fait.’”4 In another letter he noted that “the anarchists commit suicide every year, and this will continue until anarchism is subjected to serious persecution” in France, Switzerland, and Spain, where they were numerous.5 A decade later he continued to attack the anarchists’ tactics of political violence, believing they “were on the verge of extinction” as a result of their unproductive attentats. “The chasm between us and the anarchists,” he concluded, “is gaping.”6 Lenin carried this discourse further, arguing as early as the summer of 1902 that “the noisy preaching of terrorism” by the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party “as a means of political struggle was doing the most serious harm to the [revolutionary] movement of the masses,” and “serve[d] only to sow harmful illusions.”7 Despite further criticism of SR violence, his attitude toward terrorism was nevertheless far less consistent than the positions Marx and Engels had taken. For example, in the spring of 1906, amid the dying flames of the 1905 revolution, Lenin wrote that the Bolsheviks recognized “that [their] party must regard the fighting guerrilla operations of the groups affiliated with it as being in principle permissible and even exile’s vengeance  advisable in the present situation.”8 In a weak attempt...