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By Root 911 0

Figner persuaded her young lawyer husband to abandon his career so that she could study medicine in Zurich. There, she became rapidly alienated from her more conservative husband - notwithstanding his having given up his career for her - and so sceptical about her new-found vocation that she failed to qualify. Under the impact of radical student groups, she ‘came to see in the practice of medicine only a palliative for an evil which could be cured only by social and political means’. Vera had fallen for the myth of deep causes. She wrote to her husband renouncing any further relations with him and his future financial support. She consciously disavowed her own narrow ambitions, and the ‘egotism’ of the family that had encouraged them, in favour of the life of denial and sacrifice practised by revolutionaries in Russia. She returned to the - disillusioning - chaos of the revolutionary underground in Moscow. This seemed squalid, for nothing in Figner’s genteel background had prepared her for bribing policemen or consorting with gnarled criminals. Deeply depressed, she left to continue the work of propaganda in the countryside, after qualifying as a midwife. She would return to the city as a terrorist.3

Figner was an example of the many young upper-class women who engaged in terrorism. Why did they get involved? Apart from the keen sense of altruism many of them felt, terrorism was one of the few areas where women could play an active role, with their views being accorded equal respect to those of men and their lives exposed to the same hazards. Vera Zasulich, who became a revolutionary at the age of seventeen when her elder sister inducted her into radical student circles, regarded this as a way to escape the dismal fate of being a governess in a gentry household, the only future open to poor relations of rich people such as herself: ‘Of course it would have been much easier if I had been a boy; then I could have done what I wanted… And then, the distant specter of revolution appeared, making me the equal of any boy; I too could dream of “action”, of “exploits”, and of “the great struggle”… I too could join those “who perished for the great cause”.’4

Much of the inspiration behind Populism was a form of guilt on the part of the leisured educated and upper classes - for, instead of ruthlessly espousing their own selfish interests as Marxism avers, many members of Russia’s elites were only too eager to repudiate themselves. As Figner discovered in the villages, ‘only there could one have a clean soul and a quiet conscience’. Despite its outward espousal of atheism, Populism was an essentially Christian vision, in which redemptive virtue was ascribed to the lowest of the low, and paradise would dawn after their consciousness had been raised to revolutionary levels. Towards the end of her twenty-two years in prison, Figner told her family of a dream she had had:

I dreamed we four sisters were riding in a sleigh, over a perfectly black road, bare of snow, and that we were driving through a village, now uphill, now downhill. We passed rows of fine peasants’ houses, with sloping stone steps for pedestrians built everywhere, squares with leafless trees, and arbors with golden-yellow roofs. In the centre, on a hillock, rose a white church, a mass of stone, with many graceful, golden cupolas. And when I looked up, suspended from the sky, I saw over the church and the whole hill a crystal canopy which amazed me by its beauty, and for some reason reminded me of the Northern Lights. When we had left the village there spread before us a limitless field, covered with tender green, and above it shone a hot sun in a blue sky. For some reason it reminded me of a picture I saw some time ago: tired pilgrims are walking; and ahead of them in the distance, as though hanging in the clouds a fine outline of a city is visible, with an inscription: ‘hail, ye who seek the city of the Lord!’5

Where did the bit about the glass canopy come from? And were all terrorists as benign as Vera Figner? It is necessary to review briefly some of the ideas which