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By Root 884 0

the boiling point of revolution, terrorism - understood as disorganising and annihilating the existing regime - gradually acquired its own momentum as an end in itself. In 1876, Land and Freedom tried to convert a mass being celebrated in the church of Our Lady of Kazan into ‘the first workers’ demonstration in Russian history’ by mingling fifty factory workers with the congregation exiting the cathedral. In fact, many of the workers who did participate had been bribed by Land and Freedom to attend, for most factory workers were more interested in Western-style trades unionism than in being pawns for middle-class revolutionaries. The government’s inept insistence on arresting and trying anyone remotely connected with this sort of agitation led to a series of political trials, in which the accused declined defence lawyers so as to make ringing declarations of revolutionary intent from the witness box.

Meanwhile, the more venturesome Kievan group hit upon the idea of forging tsarist rescripts so as to stimulate defiance on the part of peasants who were unhappy with the land they had received after 1861. One rescript ordered the peasants to form ‘secret bands’ to fall upon the necks of noblemen and officialdom. While this absurd plot was unfurling, the leading members of the Kievan group decided to murder the twenty-year-old Nikolai Gorinovich, who, recently released from jail, they imagined was a police informer. In echoes of Nechaev’s murder of Ivanov, they beat him senseless with an iron ball attached to a chain, and then poured acid over his face to frustrate identification. Unfortunately for them, the blind and scarred Gorinovich survived this murderous attack - photographs of his injuries are almost unbearable to look at - and went to the police. They may have apprehended the culprits, but they did little to publicise the psychopathic nature of the attack, the paranoia that triggered it, and the way in which the group had set up a kangaroo court to convict someone on the basis of entirely circumstantial evidence.

The authorities’ oscillation between indulgent slackness and repression culminated in an incident in St Petersburg’s preliminary-arrest jail, where a few hundred political prisoners freely consorted with one another in a sort of university behind bars. On 13 July 1877, general Fydor Trepov, the governor of the capital, visited the jail and encountered scenes of fraternisation that appalled him. Out in the yard, Arkhip Bogoliubov, a founder member of Land and Freedom, enraged him by arguing the rights of political prisoners as if he were addressing an equal. Trepov knocked the man’s cap off, and ordered that he should be flogged twenty-five times. In addition to being technically illegal, this treatment also violated the unspoken assumption that the government would not treat political criminals drawn from the intelligentsia with the customary brutality meted out to ordinary felons. These were gentlemen whom the prison guards called ‘sir’. They could tell the guards to make tea.

On 24 January 1877, Vera Zasulich called at general Trepov’s offices to obtain a licence to teach. After two years’ imprisonment and four years of exile because of her association with Nechaev, Zasulich had become a gaunt, chain-smoking, professional revolutionary. While Trepov scribbled something down, Zasulich produced a gun from her muff and shot him in the side. She claimed to have been motivated by moral outrage at the treatment of Bogoliubov. Her trial for attempted murder was a great setpiece occasion, with both the foreign minister and Dostoevsky present. The government did its best to remind the judge of his ‘duty’, but it was a credit to Alexander’s reforms that the judge remained scrupulously impartial. It quickly became Trepov’s rather than Zasulich’s trial. Dressed in her customary grey linen smock, and instructed by her lawyer not to bite her nails - a sign of evil thoughts in Russian folklore - Zasulich turned in a tear-jerking performance, with no one questioning why, if her response to the brutality of Trepov had been