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 The Terrorist as Novelist: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky Peter Scotto Murder is a terrible thing. Only in a moment of the most intense passion, reaching even to a loss of self-consciousness, can a man who is not a monster and a degenerate deprive another like himself of life. —DEATH FOR DEATH! At around 9:00 a.m. on August 4, 1878,1 Adjutant General Nikolai Mezentsev , chief of Russia’s gendarmes and head of its secret police, was assassinated in Mikhailovsky Square in St. Petersburg. Coming a little more than six months after Vera Zasulich’s sensational attempt on the life of Petersburg governor-general Fedor Trepov, Mezentsev’s murder was a signal event in the wave of revolutionary terror that convulsed Russia at the end of the 1870s, reaching its zenith in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of Narodnaia volia (the People’s Will) on March 1, 1881.2 After driving a dagger into his victim, Mezentsev’s assassin managed a daring escape, galloping away from the scene of the crime in what one source later described as an “elegant carriage.”3 Within days of the event, a pamphlet with the bloodcurdling title Death for Death! rolled off a secret printing press in St. Petersburg.4 The title offers a key to its reasoning : Mezentsev was executed by “revolutionary-socialists” in retaliation for the arbitrary imprisonment, abuse, torture, and death of comrades at the hands of the secret police. If the government wanted an end to the terror , it had to give up its own deadly campaign against the revolutionaries. As it was, the revolutionaries had been pushed beyond human endurance. They had no choice but to act. From here on in, death would be answered by death.  peter scotto *** Sometime on the afternoon of December 29, 1893, Olivia Garnett of Bloomsbury made an agitated entry in her diary: “I must say that the article ‘Anarchists’II was a blow to me. . . . Selfishly I feared that I might lose ‘my Stepniak’—the artist—in the nihilist, terrorist and _____________.”5 (The long dash belongs to the diarist.) Twenty-two years old when she made this entry,“Olive”was the daughter of Richard Garnett—poet,writer, scholar, and Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum. She was also the sister-in-law of Constance Garnett.Constance Garnett (née Black) had married Olive’s brother Edward in 1889 and, at the end of 1893, had only just begun her life’s work as a translator of Russian literature. Through Constance, Olive had become acquainted with the community of Russian political exiles in London. Like Constance, she had developed a deep emotional attachment to one of its most charismatic figures, Sergei Stepniak.6 Stepniak was well known in the city’s literary and political circles. His Underground Russia, first published in Britain in 1883,had met with instant success, and was in its fourth edition by 1892.7 His accounts of life under the tsar had become familiar to readers of the Times, the Contemporary, and the Fortnightly, and, drawing on this journalistic work, he had put together and published in rapid succession three substantial volumes on the origins, practices, and consequences of tsarist despotism: Russia Under the Tzars (1885),The Russian Storm-Cloud (1886),and The Russian Peasantry (1888).8 He had been instrumental in founding the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in 1890, editing its newspaper, Free Russia, from 1890 to 1893,9 and, together with fellow émigrés, had organized the Russian Free Press Fund to publish Russian-language books, pamphlets, and tracts for the revolutionary movement inside Russia and abroad.10 Buoyed by the success of lectures throughout Britain, he undertook a five-month tour of the United States in 1890–91, speaking and raising money for the revolutionary cause in New York, Boston, and Chicago.11 In Britain, he could number among his friends and acquaintances William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, and Herbert Burrows. On the other side of the Atlantic, he could count George Kennan a close friend, William Dean Howells an admirer, and Samuel Clemens an acquaintance . All but forgotten today, Stepniak was, throughout the 1880s and up until his death in 1895, one of the two most important interpreters of the Russia revolutionary movement for the English-speaking world. His only rival was George Kennan, whose famous series of articles on the Russian exile and prison system began to appear in The Century Magazine...

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