Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia

Introduction: Just Assassins?

 Introduction: Just Assassins? Anthony Anemone Even in the best, most peaceful and secure of circumstances, the subject of terrorism is remarkably resistant to rational discourse. In the aftermath of major terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and in the midst of an ongoing “global war on terrorism” with no end in sight, devising a generally acceptable definition of terrorism would seem to be a hopeless task. As Charles Townshend has recently written,“When societies feel under threat, attempts at rational analysis are often openly resisted as giving aid and comfort to, or even sympathizing with, the enemy.”1 And yet it is precisely at such times that the effort to understand terrorism takes on an importance that transcends the merely historical or academic.For if terrorism represents the central threat facing early twenty-first-century America,2 the challenges it presents cannot be met without thoroughly understanding its history, including how other societies have responded to the calamity of political violence. For these reasons, understanding Russia’s historical experience of terror and terrorism is crucial for a contemporary American audience. Indeed, Russia’s tragic destiny has been to experience all the varieties of violence used to terrorize individuals or groups for political purposes:3 palace coups and revolutionary conspiracies, targeted attacks on government officials and random attacks on civilians, “propaganda of the deed,” state terror directed against entire classes and ethnic nationalities, double agents and agents provocateurs, “enhanced interrogation,” public surveillance, and extrajudicial measures, including preventive detention, “extraordinary rendition ,” and assassination. While many specialized studies of political vio-  anthony anemone lence, revolutionary movements, and especially state terror in tsarist and Soviet history exist,4 only very recently have scholars started looking at the many and complex ways in which terrorism has been represented in Russian culture.5 The present collection of essays by leading American and British specialists in Russian history, literature, and media intends, at least in part, to fill this gap. By analyzing a wide range of responses to almost two hundred years of political violence in Russia by poets, novelists, filmmakers , dramatists, and journalists, as well as political thinkers, revolutionaries, soldiers, and terrorists, the contributors to Just Assassins hope to add to our understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which modern terrorism evolved. While the genealogies of complex phenomena like terrorism will always be contested and open to revision, the notion of terror as a political system was coined in late eighteenth-century France, where it referred to the revolutionary government’s policy of “preemptive self-defense” against enemies,real,potential,or imagined: what was then called a “reign of terror” and today simply “state terror.”6 Of course, states have always claimed the right to use violence against internal enemies as a corollary to their power to make war against external enemies and by analogy with the right of an individual to self-defense. Indeed, Weber’s notion of the state possessing “a legitimate monopoly of the use of physical force (i.e., violence) within a given territory” is one of the pillars of Western political theory.7 And yet, when state violence goes unchecked or is used to deny a significant part of the population their human or civil rights, and when peaceful forms of protest and opposition are outlawed,the question inevitably arises: Do individuals or groups have the right to use violence to oppose or even overthrow the tyrannical government? And what kinds of violence are justifiable in the struggle for political rights and social justice? Traditionally, the main restraint on tyranny was the ancient tradition that justified armed opposition against, and even assassination of, a ruler who,in behaving like a tyrant,lost all claim to legitimacy.8 Palace coups and acts of regicide carried out and justified, or at least rationalized, in terms of the right to oppose a tyrannical and hence illegitimate tsar were a staple of the Russian monarchy between the reigns of Peter the Great and Alexander I.9 But palace revolts, coups d’état, and assassinations were mostly about dynastic competition,succession struggles,the privileges of elite groups,and pure lust for political power and,despite the rhetoric of public welfare,were decidedly not ideological in nature.10 Terrorism,on the other hand,was born in very different soil in the 1860s in Russia. Frustrated by the slow pace of reform, government incompetence , police brutality, and the impossibility of legal political opposition, [18.117.182.179] Project...