Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [31]
On being invited to join People’s Will, Vera Figner initially exclaimed, ‘But this is pure Nechaev!’ In fact, the terrorist nucleus of Land and Freedom had already adopted many of Nechaev’s dubious practices, including bank robberies and murdering informers. People’s Will also borrowed his tactic of suggesting to the credulous that it was the tip of a much larger revolutionary organisation - the Russian Social Revolutionary Party - which in reality was non-existent. There was an imposing-sounding Executive Committee all right, but this was coterminous with the entire membership of People’s Will. Further deceptions included claims that members of this Executive were themselves merely ‘third-degree agents’, the insinuation being that there were limitless levels of revolutionary talent above them. In fact, People’s Will never had more than thirty or forty members, who would then recruit ‘agents’ for specific tasks or to establish affiliate cells within sections of society deemed to have revolutionary potential. Efforts were made to co-opt the leading lights of the arts and intelligentsia with a liberal-sounding public platform. After all, which reasonable person could quibble with the Party’s explicit goals? Its programme espoused liberal and democratic-socialist aims: a parliament, universal male suffrage, the classic liberal freedoms of speech and the press, together with peasant and worker control of land and the factories. Much was unsaid about how these aims were related to the tactical goal of a revolutionary coup by an elite Jacobin minority. No wonder Lenin would recommend that his associates study the structure and modus operandi of this precursor organisation to the Bolsheviks.
Like the contemporary Irish Fenians, People’s Will discovered the unique killing properties of dynamite. Having sentenced Alexander II to death, in one of its pseudo-popular conclaves of three individuals who were judge, jury and executioner, People’s Will made seven attempts to kill him before they succeeded on 1 March 1881. Their first efforts focused on Odessa, near which the tsar would pass on his return to the north from his annual vacation in the southerly Crimea. After being rebuffed as an assassin, Vera Figner was allowed to move dynamite there. She rented an apartment with a man posing as her husband, where the explosives expert Kibalchich set about his work with dynamite, guncotton and fulminates. Since the plan was to put a mine under the railway track some distance from Odessa, Figner - temporarily reverting to her old posh self - boldly secured a post as a railway section master for one of her fellow conspirators by interceding on his behalf with baron Ungern-Shternberg, an acquaintance of the governor-general. In the event, the plan was aborted since Goldenberg requested most of their dynamite for a northerly plot that had much greater chance of success, while they learned anyway that the tsar was taking another route home. Goldenberg was arrested at a railway station after an alert policeman became suspicious about his trunk, which he discovered contained fifty pounds of dynamite. Of a weak disposition, Goldenberg became progressively deranged in the loneliness of his cell. His concerned jailers offered him a deal that calmed his distress: he would betray People’s Will in order to end senseless violence and to speed the reforms the jailers admitted were necessary.
Meanwhile, People’s Will had set two further railway attacks in motion just in case the tsar changed his route. At Alexandrovsk, a second group of conspirators, whose cover was a tannery business, had crawled through a gully so as to dig holes under the railway line into which they placed two canisters of explosives, linked with wires which in turn