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‘spontaneous’, she had waited six months before seeking revenge, returning to the capital from a revolutionary commune where she rode about with a gun in her belt. The defence lawyer went into rhetorical overdrive when he compared this political assassin with women ‘who had imbrued their hands in the blood of lovers who jilted them or that of their successful rivals’, crimes of passion for which they had been acquitted. This had the public gallery in tears, while Zasulich herself sobbed demurely. Few paid much attention to the prosecution’s cogent argument that ‘every public figure, whoever he may be, has the right to a legal trial and not trial by Zasulich’. After deliberating for seven minutes, the jury duly acquitted Zasulich to cries of ‘Bravo! Our little Vera!’ from the gallery. Smart society (and the jury) had effectively endorsed political violence. The government promptly undid any credit it was due for the fairness of its courts by seeking to rearrest Zasulich, who fled abroad, where already the London Times was celebrating her as a latterday Charlotte Corday, who, it failed to recall, had actually killed the Jacobin terrorist Marat. She did not return to Russia until 1905.12

Most Russian terrorists sought to limit terrorism to killing suspected informers and the most egregiously harsh officials like Trepov. In the south, however, a more Machiavellian strategy was adopted, of killing the most liberal members of the regime so as to foster repression as a recruiting mechanism, a tactic employed by many later terrorists the world over, especially if their sect was manifestly bereft of a wider following. In February 1878, Verian Osinsky unsuccessfully shot the chief prosecutor in Kiev, whose life was saved by a thick fur coat, and then in May stabbed to death the rather ineffectual chief of the city’s police. A few days later he successfully sprang the assailants of Gorinovich from jail. Since, ironically, the liberal elite objected to his killing of ineffectual policemen, Osinsky concentrated on trying to co-opt them into joint advocacy of constitutional and legal reforms that he anticipated would fail, the covert aim being to radicalise these hapless confederates to the point of supporting his tactic of terror.

A rather different sort of policeman was on Osinsky’s trail. This was Georgy Sudeykin. Born in 1850 into an impoverished and landless gentry family, Sudeykin graduated top of his class from the Infantry Cadet School. He was a tall, well-built man, with piercing eyes and a persuasive manner. A lack of money, and a fascination with crime and its detection, led him to join the Corps of Gendarmes rather than the elite and flashy Guards. Sudeykin adopted the chameleon life of his terrorist prey, never sleeping in one apartment too long and carrying multiple identity papers. Lacking the mentality of the stereotypical tsarist martinet, he used his ostensibly flexible political opinions to insinuate himself into revolutionary circles and to win over those he captured by treating them as potential collaborators in the cause of reform. Being inordinately ambitious himself, he knew how to play on the ambitions of terrorists, who after all were part of career structures themselves.

In January 1879 Osinsky and his older lover, Sophia Leshern von Hertzfeldt, were detained despite their attempts to shoot Sudeykin and the other arresting officers - the revolutionaries earlier having resorted to revolvers against policemen armed only with sabres. Osinsky’s death and Sophia’s exile to Siberia left a legacy of revolutionary romanticism that proved contagious. Meanwhile, the organisers of Land and Freedom issued a revised programme that effectively downgraded traditional Populist belief in the revolutionary potentialities of the people in favour of full-blown terrorism. Other innovations were the creation of discrete cells with no cognisance of one another, and the licensing of freelance acts of terrorism under Land and Freedom’s ideological franchise, a tactic that in our time would serve Al Qaeda rather well. Throughout late