12 - Terrorism in the Russian Empire

Summary

Russia was an integral part of the modern world’s first historical wave of terrorism, which lasted from the final third of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Some historians and terrorism experts even consider the Russian Empire to be the ‘birthplace’ of terrorism. Indeed, in Russia, terrorism as a systematic tactic of revolutionary strategy, with its own ideological justification and organisational framework, took shape in 1869–81, is usually dated back to Sergei Nechayev’s ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’ and was developed and applied in practice by the Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’) organisation. By the start of the twentieth century, terrorist bombings in British India, the Balkans and elsewhere were often referred to as ‘the Russian way’, or ‘the Russian method’. Along with anarchist terrorism in Europe, which started to spread roughly at the same time, and the early resort to terrorist means by some national liberation and anti-colonial movements, Russian revolutionary terrorism of the late nineteenth century was certainly one of the first identifiable forms and clear manifestations of modern terrorism. Placing the Russian case in a global historical context allows us to assess the extent to which its national experience forms, conforms to or deviates from global trends in terrorism.