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use with his suspecting terrorist friends. During the opera’s second interval, Stolypin stood chatting in front of the orchestra pit, while Nicholas II and his daughters remained in their nearby box. Stolypin was hit by two shots fired from close range, one of which went through his hand, injuring one of the musicians on its further trajectory, while the second ricocheted off one of his medals and burrowed its way into his liver. The prime minister placed his hat and gloves on the edge of the balcony and unbuttoned his tunic, revealing a spreading red patch on his white shirt. The tsar came to the box, where his dying prime minister blessed his monarch with a final move of his hand. Bogrov was sentenced to death four days later and hanged the following week.

Although the tsarist regime succeeded in temporarily containing the epidemic of terrorism, it had fatally weakened the capacity and willingness of the government’s bureaucratic servants to resist further assaults in future, especially when these occurred in the context of Russia’s catastrophic conduct of the First World War. The repression represented by the field courts martial was a temporary success, but the tactic itself did nothing to foster a liberal camp that might have combined an insistence on legality with an unambiguous condemnation of terrorism. Instead, ‘liberalism’ was represented by the revolutionary Kadets with their soft tolerance of appalling terrorist violence. As for the terrorists, many of them slipped effortlessly into the apparatus of state terror that Lenin and his comrades established, beginning with the Cheka and from 1922 onwards the dread GPU. Kamo the Caucasian bandit re-emerged as a Chekist state terrorist, whose method of ascertaining the political loyalty of his Bolshevik subordinates was to torture them, to sort out the weaklings whom he then summarily executed. But even he was dispensable. In 1922, as the black joke went, the only bicycle in Tiflis, the one he was riding, was hit by the city’s sole truck. The Bolsheviks’ leading terrorist Leonid Krasin became their first ambassador to the Court of St James; Maxim Litvinov, their chief arms procurer, was a Soviet foreign minister under Stalin, the former terrorist who erected a tactic into a system of government.

CHAPTER 3

Black: Anarchists and Terrorism

I ‘SHOOT, STAB, BURN, POISON AND BOMB’:

THEORISTS OF TERROR

Anarchists, including some who never touched a stick of dynamite, theorised a violence that Fenians and nihilists practised, although there were more obscure precursors. In organisation and spirit nineteenth-century terrorist groups owed something to organised banditry and the conspiratorial societies of late-eighteenth - and early-nineteenth-century Europe, notably ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ against the bourgeois Directory that ruled France after 9th Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre. This failed attempt to restore the dictatorship of the purest of the pure had some of the salient characteristics of modern terrorism, not least the infatuation with the most sanguinary phase of the French Revolution. The conspirators had faith in the redemptive powers of chaos: ‘May everything return to chaos, and out of chaos may there emerge a new and regenerated world.’ Babeuf and his co-conspirator and biographer Buonarroti pioneered the view that ‘no means are criminal which are employed to obtain a sacred end’. This became a founding commandment of future terrorists, even when they practised something resembling an operational morality.

The Italian anarchists Carlo Pisacane, Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta, and more especially the French doctor Paul Brousse, would convert this into the slogan ‘propaganda by the deed’, meaning the mobilising and symbolic power of acts of revolutionary violence. After an abortive rising in Bologna, Malatesta claimed that ‘the revolution consists more in deeds than words … each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts … it is the duty of every revolutionary socialist to declare his solidarity with the movement