Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [36]
Some revolutionaries, however, were not prepared to abandon the idea of the ‘big bang’ approach to revolution, believing in the enormous propaganda value of terrorism directed against the state’s principal actors as the essential precondition to seizing power.14 One such group was formed at St Petersburg University, where students chafed against the regime’s introduction of higher fees designed to reduce the number of lower-class radical students, as well as against the reimposition of other petty restrictions in the 1884 university Charter. Students began talking about regicide and about the killing of the tsar’s key conservative supporters.
Peter Shevyrev created the Terrorist Fraction of the People’s Will in early 1886, one of its recruits being a brilliant zoology student hitherto expert in the biology of annular worms. He had two things in his favour. He was a literate scientist, who could give the group’s tracts a spurious air of ‘inevitability’, and he knew chemistry, essential to the manufacture of explosives. His name was Alexander Ulyanov; his younger sibling was Vladimir Ulyanov, better know to posterity as Lenin. Alexander argued that the Terrorist Fraction had been driven to act because of the regime’s frustration of non-violent reform. A campaign of constant terror would also serve to raise the people’s revolutionary spirit. The Fraction incorporated further revolutionaries into the conspiracy, including Józef Piłsudski, the future head of state in independent Poland, and a number of radicalised Jews, an ever growing presence in revolutionary and terrorist circles. By 1900 they constituted 50 per cent of the membership of revolutionary parties, even though there were only 7 million Jews in a population of 136 million.
Alexander Ulyanov was responsible for the group’s bomb factory. One bomb was concealed within a large tome called Digest of the Laws, while others were within cylindrical tubes. On 26 and 28 February and 1 March, the bombers stalked the Nevsky Prospect, hoping to waylay the tsar as he crossed it towards St Isaac’s Cathedral. Acting suspiciously, the bombers were snatched by the police, who probably had information about them already since the ramification of the conspiracy had been too casual. Sloppiness led to the arrest of the other principal conspirators including Ulyanov. Although he was not the main architect of the conspiracy, Ulyanov bravely became its spokesman during the trial. They were all sentenced to hang. Despite the urging of his mother, Ulyanov refused to make a plea for pardon. He and five others were hanged on 8 May 1887; fifty students were exiled to Siberia including Piłsudski.
At the time this may have seemed like the death rattle of terrorist groups that between the 1860s and 1900 had ‘only’ caused about one hundred casualties, even if one of them happened to be the tsar of Russia. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century there was a massive escalation of terrorist atrocities in imperial Russia, with perhaps as many as seventeen thousand people succumbing to terrorist activities between 1901 and 1916, before even these shocking statistics were dwarfed by the onset of Bolshevik state violence, much of it the handiwork of the terrorists turned Chekist secret policemen described in the following pages.
There were various