Рейтинг
Порталус

Relation of Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia to Present-Day Terrorism

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) ARMED FORCES →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190294172


Did the Russian terrorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide the model for present-day terrorist groups?

Viewpoint: Yes. Beginning with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin in the late 1860s and The People's Will group, formed in 1879, Russians developed the system of centralized underground organizations composed of disaffected zealots bent on disruption of governments by public acts of random violence that has been imitated widely throughout the world since.

Viewpoint: No. Terrorism is too amorphous to be traced to a single source. The Russian model, developed from French Jacobins of the early 1790s, is only one of several types of terrorist activity employed by those seeking political-, social-, or religious-based revolution.

_____________________________

Since 11 September 2001 the specter of terrorism has pushed study of the phenomenon into the forefront of modern life. This chapter assesses its Russian roots. For many scholars the methods, strategies, and objectives of twenty-first-century terrorists descend in a direct line from the violent revolutionary movements that plagued Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The expectation that the unpredictable use of lethal force would create major political change; organization into clandestine cells and other underground formations; and reliance on simple technologies all had Russian precedents and more or less direct linkages.
At the same time, however, terrorism and its uses can be said to be as old as modernity itself. The word terrorism dated to the era of the French Revolution. That event's profound and self-conscious influence on the Russian revolutionary tradition should not, in some scholars' opinion, escape proper studies of terrorism and its evolution.



Viewpoint: Yes. Beginning with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin in the late 1860s and The People's Will group, formed in 1879, Russians developed the system of centralized underground organizations composed of disaffected zealots bent on disruption of governments by public acts of random violence that has been imitated widely throughout the world since.

Terrorism has been among the most widely discussed yet least understood subjects of the past thirty years. Countless books, articles, plays, novels, and films have described the manifestations of terrorism in regions as varied as North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Since the late 1970s, terrorism has become increasingly identified with religious extremists, Muslims, or Middle Eastern societies. The public perception in the United States and Western Europe that Muslims and Arabs are terrorists crystallized following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

Far less well known are the modern origins of terrorist groups and the people who most influenced the strategy and tactics employed by modern terrorists and terrorist organizations: the Russian revolutionary terrorists of the mid to late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. These revolutionaries pioneered the systematization of revolutionary conspiracy and the forms of organization, methodologies of violence, and mass dissemination of information that have been utilized by countless modern terrorist organizations as dissimilar in their goals as the Irish Republican Army, the Amur River Society, Al-Qaeda, and the Tamil Tigers. Russian revolutionary terrorists developed the preeminent model by which a modern revolutionary organization kills in the name of a cause, and they are central to any discussion of the strategy and tactics of modern terrorist groups.

As Walter Laqueur observes in A History of Terrorism (2001), although terrorism has appeared in a variety of guises throughout human history, terrorism in most cases was one of many strategies employed by combatants, and it was often a secondary strategy. The terms terrorism and terrorist are relatively recent additions to the English lexicon and were derived from the term that Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobins used to describe themselves during the French Revolution. Among the earliest examples of the word in English was Edmund Burke's 1795 remarks on the "thousands of hell hounds called terrorists who [are] let loose on the people" of France. Yet, the terrorists that Burke describes openly worked for an authoritarian state en masse and were different in several ways from modern terrorists, who operate in small, clandestine groups and often shun public association with state or government leaders.

The "model" for modern terrorists arose among a group of people who lived far from France geographically but who shared the revolutionary fervor of Paris in the 1790s and Robespierre's attachment to Enlightenment ideals: the revolutionary anarchists of late-tsarist Russia. Among the most important of these figures was Mikhail Bakunin, who was regarded as the leading figure in the history of terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century. A scion of the Russian nobility, Bakunin renounced his heritage and publicly advocated revolution throughout Europe. While committed to secular and Enlightenment ideals, Bakunin infused a profound sense of messianic spirit into modern revolutionary ideas. Even more importantly, Bakunin, with Sergei Nechaev, authored Catechism of a Revolutionist, a guidebook for revolutionary activists using violence, in Switzerland in 1869.

Composed of twenty-six commands, Catechism of a Revolutionist specifies that members of a conspiracy must be organized into cells and must carry out all orders unquestioningly. It also specifies that adherents sacrifice their morality, family ties, and, if necessary, their lives for revolutionary goals. Adherents are to lead as normal lives as possible in order to conceal their identity and their goal of destroying a corrupt society. (This command is reminiscent of the participants in the March 2004 Madrid attack, all of whom were fully assimilated into Spanish society and had no previous criminal records, and of the 11 September terrorists, some of whom lived relatively average lives in southern Florida.) Catechism of a Revolutionist was the first attempt to organize revolutionary conspiracies and to develop a universally applicable model for organizing a select group of individuals to kill in the name of a cause. The influence of Catechism of a Revolutionist on the modern world cannot be overstated since it has been imitated and adopted by groups of all political persuasions in all corners of the globe. Indeed, the term cell appears almost as frequently in contemporary discussions of terrorism as the terms fundamentalist or Islam.

If Bakunin and Nechaev provided the guiding principles and modes of organization for modern terrorists, then Nikolai Chernyshevsky provided the model of personal behavior. Two of the characters of his novel What is to be Done?, Vera Pavlova and Rakhmetev, became the role models for a modern revolutionary: disciplined, fanatical, thoroughly ascetic, and uncorrupted personalities devoted to a higher revolutionary cause--no matter the personal or social consequences. First published in 1863, the book was a best-seller in Russia and was translated into most European languages and rapidly disseminated throughout Europe and North America by radical activists. One hundred and fifty years after Chernyshevsky wrote his novel, many leading terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, consciously cultivate a public persona that is strikingly reminiscent of the characters described by Chernyshevsky. In all of his videos, bin Laden appears in unpretentious clothes and settings devoid of all luxuries, both of which are meant to accentuate his ascetic and pious nature and devotion to his cause. (These images are especially powerful in light of his elite upbringing in Saudi Arabia.)

The first organization in Russia to systematically employ the ideas of Bakunin, Nechaev, and Chernyshevsky was the People's Will (Narodnaia Volia), started in 1879. The People's Will was a militant, centralized, and secret underground organization divided into cells. Composed of at most several hundred members, the organization adhered to a strict hierarchy of command. Although the organization failed to achieve its principal goals of overthrowing the Russian imperial government, it did succeed in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and inspiring future revolutionaries. Most importantly, it pioneered methods of political assassinations and violence using the new and relatively simple bomb technology of the late nineteenth century. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is striking that bombing techniques little different from those of the People's Will remain the killing method of choice for most modern terrorists, even after the advent of many other methods of killing such as the airplane or weapons of mass destruction.

The earliest inheritors of the organizational and methodological approaches of the People's Will were Russian: the Socialist Revolutionary Party, founded by People's Will survivors. Yet, the ideas of the People's Will, what became known as the "Russian model" of terrorism, spread rapidly throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas by way of popular books, novels, and newspaper articles. Leading novelists, such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, wrote stories in which Russian terrorists were central figures. Both Italians and Spaniards, whose societies in many ways resembled that of Russia, eagerly adopted Bakunin's ideas and those of his Russian successors. They employed these ideas in the burgeoning trade-union movements of Europe and brought them to Italian expatriate communities in the Middle East and North Africa, Central Europe, North America, and Latin America. Ironically, the Russian government, which the Russian terrorist model had originally been meant to overthrow, permitted Balkan and Armenian terrorist groups opposed to Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian rule to operate on Russian soil. One of those groups, Serbia's Union or Death (commonly known as the Black Hand), committed the most significant terrorist attack of the twentieth century: the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, an act that led directly to World War I.

Terrorism in Europe, however, did not end with the assassination of Francis Ferdinand. Germany's leftist Bewegung 2. Juni ( June 2nd Movement) committed many acts of violence in postwar West Germany, treated Catechism of a Revolutionist as scripture, and published Bakunin's writings. The Red Brigades in Italy, which perpetrated thousands of attacks against targets in Italy between 1969 and 1980, utilized techniques pioneered by Bakunin and Nechaev. Similarly, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque terrorist groups in Spain and France saw military strategies based on the Russian model as the most effective way to expel a perceived occupying power from their home regions. These organizations were infamous for their expertise in planning political assassinations: the Irish Republican Army killed dozens of British officials, Queen Elizabeth II's cousin Lord Mountbatten in 1979, and nearly Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet in 1984. Here one can see similarities to the tactics and objectives of the People's Will in tsarist Russia.

Groups utilizing the "Russian model" had an even larger impact on societies outside of Europe in Asia and Latin America. In Japan the ultranationalist Amur River Society assassinated moderate Japanese politicians and anyone else who resisted Japanese control of Manchuria and East Asia. The society's founder, Uchida Ryohei, studied in St. Petersburg, knew Russian, and had contacts in the Russian revolutionary community in the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Indian nationalists dedicated to ending British rule in South Asia formed secret societies modeled on the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and, like Ryohei, sought the guidance of Russian terrorists in bomb making and robbing banks. Indian terrorists also encouraged women to participate in assassinations in order to create an Indian record of female heroism equal to that of Russian terrorist women such as Vera Figner and Sofiia Perovskaya, who participated in the plot against Alexander II, and Vera Zasulich, who attempted to murder the governor-general of St. Petersburg. (Women terrorists would later be used with deadly effectiveness by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers.) Twentieth-century Latin American insurgents, such as the followers of Peru's Shining Path, blended the ideas of Bakunin and Nechaev with those of leading twentieth-century revolutionaries: Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro. The influence of the Russian model on Latin America's leftist revolutionaries was so extensive that their leading figure, Che Guevara, was often referred to by Soviet intellectuals as a "new Bakunin."

The Russian model had perhaps its most enduring impact among the peoples of the Middle East and Muslim world. As Donald M. Reid acutely observes, though politically motivated killings had occurred throughout Islamic history (the term assassin comes from Arabic), terrorist attacks and murders were reasonably rare in Muslim societies in the centuries preceding 1900. Political murders were generally related to palace coups or plots in which the murderer knew his victim personally. That all changed in 1910 when Ibrahim Nasif al-Wardani, who belonged to the secret Society of Fraternal Solidarity, shot and killed Egyptian prime minister Butrus Ghali. Over the next forty years, secular nationalists and Muslim activists targeted dozens of British and Egyptian officials, including the Egyptian sultan and President Gamel Abdel Nasser.

Throughout the same time period, Algerian nationalists employed the Russian model with devastating effectiveness to pressure the French to evacuate Algeria and the rest of North Africa. The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film documenting Algeria's nationalist rebels, remains the premier movie on modern terrorism and the best methods to combat it. Similarly, Jewish groups in 1930s and 1940s Palestine (many of whom had roots in Russia and Eastern Europe) and, later, Palestinians, used the Russian model to promote their community's national aspirations. Even Egyptian nationalists, who opposed Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, privately admired a Palestinian-based Jewish terrorist group's 1944 assassination in Egypt of Lord Moyne, Britain's resident minister for the Middle East.

While many of the groups that initially used the Russian model in the Middle East were secular nationalists, groups promoting an agenda of religious reform and stricter adherence to Islam increasingly turned to modern terrorism as a way to reach their aims from the mid twentieth century forward. Among the first organizations to employ the model was the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, founded by Hasan al-Bana in 1929. By the late 1930s, the Brotherhood had developed a secret military wing meant to promote its agenda of Islamic revival and eliminate opponents. Al-Bana and his fellow adherent to the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, also synthesized new interpretations of Jihad, Jahaliyyah, and other aspects of Islamic thought into an ideology of liberation from the domination of Western power and the authoritarian governments of Muslim states. This ideology spread rapidly in the Muslim world following Qutb's death, and it inspired the Jihadi movements of the last three decades. In this framework, the Russian model, originally designed to combat a totalitarian regime, was the natural choice of Al-Qaeda and other like-minded organizations to advance their goals and interests.

A century and a half after Bakunin, Nechaev, Chernyshevsky, and adherents of the People's Will developed the Russian model of terrorism it is still much a part of the modern world. In every part of the globe, select groups of individuals have seen fit to use the model as a way to forward their political agendas through violence--even if that meant murdering thousands of innocent people. In 1914 an organization using the Russian model sparked World War I by assassinating Francis Ferdinand. Nearly a century later Al-Qaeda used the model to produce the largest mass murder in U.S. history and one of the defining moments of the twenty-first century. Still, the influence of revolutionary Russian terrorists on the strategy and tactics of modern terrorism was perhaps best described by a Russian. As Steven G. Marks notes in How Russia Shaped the Modern World (2003), a former colonel in the division of the Soviet Red Army responsible for training terrorists in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War stated in 1996 that "the methods of and ideology of training terrorists . . . have remained substantially unchanged."

-- Sean Foley, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. Terrorism is too amorphous to be traced to a single source. The Russian model, developed from French Jacobins of the early 1790s, is only one of several types of terrorist activity employed by those seeking political-, social-, or religious-based revolution.

Ever since the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, the world continues to shudder, confronted with the tragic Madrid train bombing in March 2004 and the atrocious hostage situation at the school in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004, among other attacks. Terrorism may be the order of the day, but the world has witnessed this morbidly horrific drama before. Though frequently plagiarized by many, from anarchists to Bolsheviks, the original authors of what we identify today as modern terrorism were of eighteenth-century France.

The word terror is derived from the Latin terrere meaning to tremble, but the word as we know it was not in ordinary Western use until its French equivalents, terrorisme, terroriste, terroriser, developed in the 1790s. The first written evidence of terrorism appeared in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française as "système régime de la terreur." The Jacobins utilized these terms as positive references to themselves. After the collapse of their regime in July 1794, this word acquired a negative connotation, and terrorism was defined as attempts to further ideas using coercion. The terms were coined to describe a new phenomenon--the Great Terror or Reign of Terror (1792-1794) of the French Revolution. Perhaps initially lacking in complexity, the idea of the Terror became ideologically and politically advanced and evolved, creating exemplary slogans and practices for future generations to quote and ape. The French Revolution gave birth to the foremost model for Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin and future generations of terrorists to imitate. Modern international terrorism owes its greatest influence to the likes of Maximilien Robespierre and Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just, not to their ideological descendants Mikhail Bakunin, Sergei Nechaev, Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. The Terror was the first time mass murder for purposes of state was organized and codified. It was also the first time such atrocities were committed in the name of a political philosophy.

Harvard historian Crane Brinton defines the French Great Terror as the "interaction between a social environment and men consciously attempting to alter the environment." This political approach to ideology is the philosophical bedrock from which most terrorists, ranging from the anarchists to various Marxist organizations, would launch their "movements."

The systematized violence of the Terror created an unprecedented fear on a scale never known before; this effect is the quintessential concept of modern terrorism. Violence was advocated, human life held no value, and determined men could make a revolution. The Revolution made regicide all the rage. The tyrant as well as the whole establishment supporting the tyrant had to be eliminated. For his pamphlet's motto, Nikolai Morozov, one of the first theoreticians of Russian terrorism, cited Saint-Just and Robespierre's notion that it was perfectly justifiable to execute a tyrant without any legal complications. Saint-Just was the archetypal terrorist believing that terror alone would achieve his ends and not the virtue of the Republic. This sentiment would later be echoed by Bakunin, who wrote in his Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869) that change for the better was impossible without violence. Marx espoused that since capitalism was inherently cruel the only salvation was the establishment of communism by the rising proletariat and a "smashing" of the bourgeoisie. Adolf Hitler used the same Manichaean arguments to justify his state terrorism. The Jacobin Bertrand Barrère said, "let's make terror the order of the day." Another Jacobin declared, "let us be brigands for the good of our people." Everyone from Lenin and Trotsky to Yasser Arafat and Che Guevara, to name a few, repeated this idea of terror for the benefit of the masses.

Although the Terror was politically fueled and attacked religion and the church, it was laced with pseudotheological flavor. This so-called religious faith, according to Robespierre, justified terrorism. This religious zeal was used to rationalize any act in terrorists' favor. The Jacobins employed devotional language, references to righteousness and martyrdom, compared their opponents to sinners and agents of the devil, and insisted on pseudoreligious symbols and rituals. Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and the Shining Path, among others, all adopted the rhetoric of pseudotheological fanaticism while hailing atheism and condemning religion, as did terrorists afterward.

Even the organization of the Jacobins, who were a small, elite group, was mimicked by future generations of terrorists. A cult of personality was developed around Robespierre until he almost assumed a deity-like status, even referred to as "The Incorruptible." Most terrorist organizations are centrifugal and small in number. In the United States, sixteen groups advocate revolutionary change through violence. Numbers do not exceed fifty. The Italian Red Brigade numbered from four hundred to ten thousand. In Germany the Baader-Meinhof Gang consisted of approximately one hundred. The Japanese Red Army had no more than forty people. El Ansar has fewer than two hundred. Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine is less than three hundred.

The virus of violent purges in the name of utopia generated by the French Terror infected Russia, Europe, and the United States. The doctrine of systematic terrorism implemented by Russian populists, anarchists, Irish nationalists, Armenians, and others was adopted from Robespierre. Engels told Lopatin, the Russian émigré, "Russia is the France of this century." Nechaev was a Jacobin in the style of Robespierre. Many terrorist organizations that claim to be inspired by Marx or Lenin would be disappointed to know that their true muse was La Terreur. In addition to violence, popular insurrection was a slogan born of the French Revolution, influencing not only terrorists in Russia, but also in the Balkans, which lacked any tradition of urban revolutionary insurrection against absolutism. And even if Marx and Lenin made an impact on such organizations as the German Red Army Faction, the original source of inspiration is known. Without the men of the Terror, Marx and Engels would not have been possible. Lenin praised the Jacobins, and in 1918 the young Soviet fleet named its largest battleships Marat and Danton.

Bakunin, often cited as the man who wrote "the handbook" of terrorism, spread the idea of using violence to overthrow established order. He met with political thinkers and philosophers to formulate radical anarchism, stating that "the passion for destruction is also a creative passion." This statement reflected a standard many terrorists would attempt to match. In March 1881 the Russian "populist" terrorist organization People's Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. In 1901 an anarchist killed U.S. president William McKinley. Other anarchist victims around the turn of the century included King Umberto I of Italy, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and President Sadi Carnot of France.

Although international terrorism evolved, its development can still be connected to the Terror. Many embraced its choice of victims in addition to its methods. Soviet state terrorism was created by Lenin and continued and expanded by Stalin. They created a network of secret police, informants, executioners, and prisons just like Robespierre. No one was safe. Stalin adopted Georges-Jacques Danton's tactic of random, arbitrary violence to create a constant state of fear. High officials were purged and tortured just as they were guillotined during the Revolution.

French revolutionaries shaped the development of modern terrorism, but recent "apocalyptic" or "catastrophic" terrorism is a drastic departure from the traditional concept. Motives, character, and aims have changed. There is almost no ideological blueprint for the future, such as the ambiguous concept espoused by Russian anarchists of empowering "the people." Most terrorists are ignorant of the original source of their ideals and methods.

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the main thrust of the French Terror brand of terrorism was reversed, and religion, not politics, has become the driving force behind terror. Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Muslim organization, and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious cult that used chemical weapons on a Tokyo subway in 1995, all employ a combination of fear and religion. Terrorists motivated by religion rather than politics are not concerned about alienating people from supporting their cause. Destruction and chaos are the goals rather than political development, such as the creation of a republic or communism

Not only is religious fanaticism new on the international scene, it is the predominant form of terrorism today. According to Amir Taheri in his Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism (1987), Islam "cannot conceive of either coexistence or political compromise. To the exponents of Holy Terror, Islam must either dominate or be dominated." Bin Laden's fatwa reports "the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." Again, based on religion, killing is viewed as both purifying and saving.

Globalization has provided motive and ability for terrorism. The deterioration of the power of the state resulting from globalization renders state sponsorship no longer necessary; terrorists can "shop around." For example, Albanians in New York funded the KLA in Kosovo. Iran funded training camps in Sudan, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad received support from Iran and Syria.

Terrorist organizations have also undergone a metamorphosis from hierarchical, vertical structures to more horizontal, less command-driven groups. This development allows for agility. Like a constantly mutating virus, such a structure is more attractive to new recruits and difficult to discover and eliminate. This feature has been Al-Qaeda's main strength.

Technology has also provided for an even greater departure from traditional terrorism. The availability of powerful weapons, such as biological and chemical weapons, as well as communications and information technology has altered the manner in which terrorists operate, ranging from propaganda to logistics.

So today's terrorism resembles neither the French nor the Russian model. The increase in religious fanaticism, the use of terrorism to achieve death and destruction as opposed to some sort of political goal, the statelessness and independence of terrorists, their nonhierarchical structure, and the availability of technology are all novel characteristics of international terrorism.

-- Jelena Budjevac, Washington, D.C.


CATECHISM OF A REVOLUTIONIST

The following guidelines for revolutionaries were written in 1869 by Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev:

The Duties of the Revolutionary toward Himself

1. The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

2. The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.

3. The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only one science: the science of destruction. For this reason, but only for this reason, he will study mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. But all day and all night he studies the vital science of human beings, their characteristics and circumstances, and all the phenomena of the present social order. The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order.

4. The revolutionary despises public opinion. He despises and hates the existing social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way.

5. The revolutionary is a dedicated man, merciless toward the State and toward the educated classes; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.

6. Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude, and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and singleminded passion for revolution. For him, there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction--the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim--merciless destruction. Striving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.

7. The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all sentimentality, romanticism, infatuation, and exaltation. All private hatred and revenge must also be excluded. Revolutionary passion, practiced at every moment of the day until it becomes a habit, is to be employed with cold calculation. At all times, and in all places, the revolutionary must obey not his personal impulses, but only those which serve the cause of the revolution.

The Relations of the Revolutionary toward his Comrades

8. The revolutionary can have no friendship or attachment, except for those who have proved by their actions that they, like him, are dedicated to revolution. The degree of friendship, devotion and obligation toward such a comrade is determined solely by the degree of his usefulness to the cause of total revolutionary destruction.

9. It is superfluous to speak of solidarity among revolutionaries. The whole strength of revolutionary work lies in this. Comrades who possess the same revolutionary passion and understanding should, as much as possible, deliberate all important matters together and come to unanimous conclusions. When the plan is finally decided upon, then the revolutionary must rely solely on himself. In carrying out acts of destruction, each one should act alone, never running to another for advice and assistance, except when these are necessary for the furtherance of the plan.

10. All revolutionaries should have under them second- or third-degree revolutionaries--i.e., comrades who are not completely initiated. These should be regarded as part of the common revolutionary capital placed at his disposal. This capital should, of course, be spent as economically as possible in order to derive from it the greatest possible profit. The real revolutionary should regard himself as capital consecrated to the triumph of the revolution; however, he may not personally and alone dispose of that capital without the unanimous consent of the fully initiated comrades.

11. When a comrade is in danger and the question arises whether he should be saved or not saved, the decision must not be arrived at on the basis of sentiment, but solely in the interests of the revolutionary cause. Therefore, it is necessary to weigh carefully the usefulness of the comrade against the expenditure of revolutionary forces necessary to save him, and the decision must be made accordingly.

The Relations of the Revolutionary toward Society

12. The new member, having given proof of his loyalty not by words but by deeds, can be received into the society only by the unanimous agreement of all the members.

13. The revolutionary enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world. He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.

14. Aiming at implacable revolution, the revolutionary may and frequently must live within society while pretending to be completely different from what he really is, for he must penetrate everywhere, into all the higher and middle-classes, into the houses of commerce, the churches, and the palaces of the aristocracy, and into the worlds of the bureaucracy and literature and the military, and also into the Third Division and the Winter Palace of the Czar.

15. This filthy social order can be split up into several categories. The first category comprises those who must be condemned to death without delay. Comrades should compile a list of those to be condemned according to the relative gravity of their crimes; and the executions should be carried out according to the prepared order.

16. When a list of those who are condemned is made, and the order of execution is prepared, no private sense of outrage should be considered, nor is it necessary to pay attention to the hatred provoked by these people among the comrades or the people. Hatred and the sense of outrage may even be useful insofar as they incite the masses to revolt. It is necessary to be guided only by the relative usefulness of these executions for the sake of revolution. Above all, those who are especially inimical to the revolutionary organization must be destroyed; their violent and sudden deaths will produce the utmost panic in the government, depriving it of its will to action by removing the cleverest and most energetic supporters.

17. The second group comprises those who will be spared for the time being in order that, by a series of monstrous acts, they may drive the people into inevitable revolt.

18. The third category consists of a great many brutes in high positions, distinguished neither by their cleverness nor their energy, while enjoying riches, influence, power, and high positions by virtue of their rank. These must be exploited in every possible way; they must be implicated and embroiled in our affairs, their dirty secrets must be ferreted out, and they must be transformed into slaves. Their power, influence, and connections, their wealth and their energy, will form an inexhaustible treasure and a precious help in all our undertakings.

19. The fourth category comprises ambitious office-holders and liberals of various shades of opinion. The revolutionary must pretend to collaborate with them, blindly following them, while at the same time, prying out their secrets until they are completely in his power. They must be so compromised that there is no way out for them, and then they can be used to create disorder in the State.

20. The fifth category consists of those doctrinaires, conspirators, and revolutionists who cut a great figure on paper or in their cliques. They must be constantly driven on to make compromising declarations: as a result, the majority of them will be destroyed, while a minority will become genuine revolutionaries.

21. The sixth category is especially important: women. They can be divided into three main groups. First, those frivolous, thoughtless, and vapid women, whom we shall use as we use the third and fourth category of men. Second, women who are ardent, capable, and devoted, but who do not belong to us because they have not yet achieved a passionless and austere revolutionary understanding; these must be used like the men of the fifth category. Finally, there are the women who are completely on our side--i.e., those who are wholly dedicated and who have accepted our program in its entirety. We should regard these women as the most valuable or our treasures; without their help, we would never succeed.

The Attitude of the Society toward the People

22. The Society has no aim other than the complete liberation and happiness of the masses--i.e., of the people who live by manual labor. Convinced that their emancipation and the achievement of this happiness can only come about as a result of an all-destroying popular revolt, the Society will use all its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the evils and miseries of the people until at last their patience is exhausted and they are driven to a general uprising.

23. By a revolution, the Society does not mean an orderly revolt according to the classic western model--a revolt which always stops short of attacking the rights of property and the traditional social systems of so-called civilization and morality. Until now, such a revolution has always limited itself to the overthrow of one political form in order to replace it by another, thereby attempting to bring about a so-called revolutionary state. The only form of revolution beneficial to the people is one which destroys the entire State to the roots and exterminates all the state traditions, institutions, and classes in Russia.

24. With this end in view, the Society therefore refuses to impose any new organization from above. Any future organization will doubtless work its way through the movement and life of the people; but this is a matter for future generations to decide. Our task is terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction.

25. Therefore, in drawing closer to the people, we must above all make common cause with those elements of the masses which, since the foundation of the state of Muscovy, have never ceased to protest, not only in words but in deeds, against everything directly or indirectly connected with the state: against the nobility, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the traders, and the parasitic kulaks. We must unite with the adventurous tribes of brigands, who are the only genuine revolutionaries in Russia.

26. To weld the people into one single unconquerable and all-destructive force--this is our aim, our conspiracy, and our task.

Source: Michael Confino, ed., Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechayev Circle, translated by Hilary Sternberg and Lydia Bott (London: Alcove, 1974), pp. 224-230.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, revised edition (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952).

Barry Davies, Terrorism: Inside A World Phenomenon (London: Virgin, 2003).

Lawrence Zelic Freedman and Yonah Alexander, Perspectives on Terrorism (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1983).

Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001).

Laqueur and Yonah Alexander, eds., The Terrorism Reader: A Historical Anthology, revised edition (New York: NAL Penguin, 1987).

Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Matthew J. Morgan, "The Origins of the New Terrorism," Parameters: U.S. Army War College, 34 (Spring 2004): 29-42.

Albert Parry, Terrorism: From Robespierre to Arafat (New York: Vanguard, 1976).

Donald M. Reid, "Political Assassination in Egypt, 1910-1954," International Journal of African Historical Studies, 15, no. 4 (1982): 625-651.

Leon Steinmetz, "Bolsheviks of the Bastille," National Review, 41 (14 July 1989): 39.

Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth- Century Russia, translated by Francis Haskell (New York: Knopf, 1960).

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "Reflections on Terror," National Review, 41 (14 July 1989): 38-40.

"Wave Upon Wave," Canada and the World Backgrounder, 67 (January 2002): 4-7.

Michel Wieviorka, The Making of Terrorism, translated by David Gordon White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London & New York: Macmillan, 1974).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

Новинки на Порталусе:

Сегодня в трендах top-5


Ваше мнение?



Искали что-то другое? Поиск по Порталусу:


О Порталусе Рейтинг Каталог Авторам Реклама