Article by Micah Mattix in The American Conservative

Pre-Revolutionary Russia

What was pre-revolutionary Russia like? A place where robbery, extortion, and murder “became more common than traffic accidents.” Gary Saul Morson explains:

Anyone wearing a uniform was a candidate for a bullet to the head or sulfuric acid to the face. Country estates were burnt down (‘rural illuminations’) and businesses were extorted or blown up. Bombs were tossed at random into railroad carriages, restaurants, and theaters. Far from regretting the death and maiming of innocent bystanders, terrorists boasted of killing as many as possible, either because the victims were likely bourgeois or because any murder helped bring down the old order. A group of anarcho-­communists threw bombs laced with nails into a café bustling with two hundred customers in order ‘to see how the foul bourgeois will squirm in death agony.’

Instead of the pendulum’s swinging back—a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand—the killing grew and grew, both in numbers and in cruelty. Sadism replaced simple killing. As Geifman explains, ‘The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal irrational compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries.’ One group threw ‘traitors’ into vats of boiling water. Others were still more inventive. Women torturers were especially admired.

How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that ‘all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.’ When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: ‘Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!’

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin—’When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope’—would have been more accurately rendered as: ‘They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.’ True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, ‘liquidated’ members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/pre-revolutionary-russia/ 

 

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