Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia

The Spiridonova Case, 1906: Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom

 The Spiridonova Case, 1906:Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom Sally A. Boniece Reflecting in the early 1950s on the “legitimization of murder” that had “culminate[d] in . . . the Hitlerian apocalypse,” Albert Camus upheld the Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) terrorists of the early twentieth century as “fastidious assassins” whose “voluntary assumption of guilt and death” and “respect for human life in general and contempt for their own lives” he contrasted to the “nihilism” practiced by “the totalitarian theocrats of . . . state terrorism.”1 In the 1970s, Michael Walzer echoed this theme in discussing “the revolutionary ‘code of honor’” by which the SRs and other earlier terrorists had operated prior to “the systematic terrorizing of whole populations” that developed in the course of World War II.2 Well before World War II, however, the Left SR leader Isaak Zakharovich Steinberg, commissar of justice in the short-lived Bolshevik–Left SR government of 1917–18, emphasized the difference between the principled “individual”or oppositional terrorism of the SRs and the unprincipled state terrorism of the subsequent all-Bolshevik regime.3 One century ago, terrorism as conceptualized by the Russian SRs was limited in scope and moral in purpose. To the SRs and their supporters, “terrorist”was a heroic label, because “terrorism”meant a righteous violence in the cause of political change, employed against a corrupt autocracy on behalf of an oppressed and helpless people. Occurring in what Luigi Bonanate has characterized as a “blocked society,”4 with no national forum for  sally a. boniece political participation let alone toleration of political opposition, the SR Party’s assassinations of tyrannical government officials met with acclaim rather than fear from the greater part of the Russian population. Although SR terrorism did not lead to a radical overturn of the tsarist system as intended , its power to attract popular sympathy was especially noteworthy in the case of Maria Spiridonova. The public legend or myth that developed around the Spiridonova case is illustrative of the interactive aspects of political terrorism in the modern era. Mark Juergensmeyer, building on earlier definitions by Martha Crenshaw, has described terrorism as “performance violence” insofar as it communicates with multiple audiences, both sympathetic and antagonistic, through actions, images, and symbols.5 The technological achievements of the modernizing state—railroads, telegraph, photography, mass-circulation newspapers—brought the theatrical events of terrorism, as Russian revolutionaries of 1905–6 were well aware, to national and even international attention. In the argument of Claudia Verhoeven, Russian terrorists staged acts of violence to speed up progression toward modernity’s ultimate goal of “universal redemption and autonomy”; for terrorism,she writes,“is violence perpetrated by those who think they can deliver the future from the past by intervening in the present.”6 Furthermore, the multiple audiences that reacted to the Spiridonova case within the Russian Empire—ranging from the peasants to the propertied , from the revolutionary underground to the tsarist bureaucracy—can be viewed in correspondence to the subcultures, or semiotic systems, that constitute the cultural space or semiosphere of Russian society, in Yuri M. Lotman’s model.7 Spiridonova herself, as a participant in Russian revolutionary subculture,was conforming to an existing behavioral text or myth of that subculture in committing her terrorist act.8 This particular behavioral text, which might be titled the myth of the revolutionary martyr-heroine,9 had resonance beyond the revolutionary subculture in the chaotic period of 1905–7. Hence Spiridonova became perhaps the supreme incarnation of the Russian myth of female revolutionary martyrdom. On the morning of January 16, 1906, at the Borisoglebsk railroad station in Tambov province, twenty-one-year-old Maria Aleksandrovna Spiridonova , daughter of a nonhereditary noble and member of the SR Party, shot and fatally wounded provincial councilor Gavril Nikolaevich Luzhenovsky, notorious for his suppression of peasant unrest in the Tambov countryside . One of close to two hundred acts of SR “individual terror” occurring throughout the Russian Empire of Nicholas II during the revolution of 1905–7, the Luzhenovsky assassination received little more than local at- the spiridonova case, 1906  tention until the following month. On February 12 a liberal newspaper in St. Petersburg published a letter from the imprisoned Spiridonova that not only detailed her beating and torture by Cossacks and police during her arrest and initial detention but also hinted at sexual abuse. Spiridonova, beloved by Tambov peasants as their deliverer from Luzhenovsky ,now gained national recognition for her heroism,from...