January 13, 2022 55
Falling in Love with Terror
Gary Saul MorsonTo Break Russia’s Chains :
Boris Savinkov and His Wars
Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks
by Vladimir Alexandrov.
Pegasus, 562 pp., $29.95
Pale Horse:
A Novel of Revolutionary Russia
by Boris Savinkov, translated
from the Russian by Michael R. Katz
and with an introduction by Otto Boele.
University of Pittsburgh Press,
119 pp., $23.95
In the late 1870s, a new type of hero
arose in Russia. “Upon the horizon
there appeared a gloomy form, illumi-
nated by a light as of hell... with lofty
bearing, and a look breathing forth
hatred and defiance,” explained Sergei
Stepniak in Underground Russia: Rev-
olutionary Profiles and Sketches from
Life (1882). This hero, who “made
his way through the terrified crowd to
enter with a firm step upon the scene
of history,” was the terrorist: “Noble,
terrible, irresistibly fascinating... he
combines in himself the two sublimities
of human grandeur: the martyr and the
hero.”
Stepniak was himself a terrorist who
in 1878 had assassinated the head of
Russia’s secret police by stabbing him
and twisting the knife in the wound.
He escaped abroad. His “revolution-
ary portraits” of assassins (he calls
them “saints”) celebrated the People’s
Will movement, which culminated in
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II
in 1881. Infiltrated by a tsarist double
agent, the People’s Will had collapsed
by 1883, with the arrest of its legendary
leader Vera Figner. Terrorism abated,
only to reach unprecedented heights
two decades later.
Terrorism practically defined the
early twentieth century in Russia, the
first country where “terrorist” became
an honorable, if dangerous, profes-
sion, one that could be passed down in
families for generations. Its extent was
breathtaking. As Anna Geifman ob-
serves in her authoritative 1993 study
Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terror-
ism in Russia, 1894–1917:
During a one- year period begin-
ning in October 1905, a total of
3,611 government officials of all
ranks were killed and wounded
throughout the empire.... By the
end of 1907 the total number of
state officials who had been killed
or injured came to nearly 4,500.
The picture becomes a particularly
terrifying one in consideration of
the fact that an additional 2,180
private individuals were killed and
2,350 wounded in terrorist attacks
between 1905 and 1907.... From
the beginning of January 1908
through mid- May of 1910, the au-
thorities recorded 19,957 terrorist
attacks and revolutionary robber-
ies, as a result of which 732 gov-
ernment officials and 3,051 private
persons were killed.Polite society celebrated terrorists,
who included the first suicide bomb-
ers. Killing and maiming (throwing
sulfuric acid into the face) evolved
into a sport in which victims, Geifman
explains, were just “moving targets.”
In 1906–1907 a group of terrorists, or
“‘woodchoppers’... as one revolution-
ary labeled them...competed...to
see who had committed the greatest
number of robberies and murders, and
often exhibited jealousy over others’
successes.” One anecdote told of an
editor who was asked if his newspaper
would run the biography of the new
governor-general. “No, don’t bother,”
he replied. “We’ll send it directly to the
obituary department.”
After 1905 terror became so com-
monplace that newspapers “introduced
special new sections dedicated exclu-
sively to chronicling violent acts...
[with] daily lists of political assassi-
nations and expropriations [robberies]
throughout the empire.” In Warsaw, rev-
olutionaries threw explosives, laced with
bullets and nails, into a café with two
hundred people present, in order “to
see how the foul bourgeois will squirm
in death agony.” “Robbery, extortion,
and murder,” Geifman notes, “became
more common than traffic accidents.”Stepniak’s mythic portraits of terror-
ists found many imitators. Like Step-
niak, Boris Savinkov practiced the
epoch’s two most prestigious Russian
occupations, terrorism and novel writ-
ing. Citing Winston Churchill’s over-
stated observation about Savinkov that
“few men tried more, gave more, dared
more, and suffered more for the Rus-
sian people,” and applying W. Somerset
Maugham’s comment that “there is no
more sometimes than the trembling of
a leaf between success and failure” to
Sa vinkov’s attempts to drive the Bolshe-
viks from power, V ladimir A lexandrov’s
new biography of Savinkov, To B re a kRussia’s Chains, presents him as a secu-
lar saint who “chose terror out of altru-
ism.” Alexandrov, a prominent scholar
of Russian literature who grew up in a
Russian émigré family, is best known
for his writings on Nabokov and for The
Black Russian (2013), a biography of
an African American named Frederick
Bruce Thomas, who became a wealthy
entrepreneur in tsarist Russia and, after
the Bolshevik takeover, in Turkey.
There is no doubt that Savinkov was
the best known of early twentieth-
century Russian terrorists. The son of
a Russian imperial justice of the peace,
he impressed others with his worldly
polish, charming conversation, good
looks, and elegant dress. A lifelong
dandy, he had a taste for role- playing
and was a master of disguises. In the
1904 campaign in St. Petersburg that
resulted in the death of Interior Min-
ister Vyacheslav von Plehve, Savinkov,
without knowing any English, proudly
pretended to be an English business-
man named George McCullough.
Joining the Combat Organization of
the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries
(PSR), he became its second leader.
Strangely enough, ideology didn’t in-
terest him. Perhaps the most interesting
feature of his Memoirs of a Terrorist is
the almost total absence of concern for
alleviating people’s suffering. He was
not alone. In the memoirs of other ter-
rorists, and in Savinkov’s descriptions
of them, concern for the people is often
a decidedly secondary matter. Vera
Zasulich, whom Stepniak celebrated
as the “angel of vengeance,” recalled
how, as a girl, she wanted to die as a
Christian martyr. Losing her faith, she
sought a different martyrdom. “Sym-
pathy for the suffering of the people
did not move me to join those who per-ished,” she explained. Growing up at
Bialkovo, an estate in Smolensk prov-
ince, “I had never heard of the horrors
of serfdom... and I don’t think there
were any.” Savinkov ascribed a similar
morbid psychology to terrorist Dora
Brilliant, who demanded to be an ac-
tual bomb thrower. “No, don’t talk... I
want it,” he quotes her. “I must die.”
Savinkov cites the letter the terrorist
Boris Vnorovsky wrote to his parents
before he d ied th row i ng a bomb : “Ma ny
times, in my youth, I had the desire to
end my life.” In terrorism he found a
way to do it. He was resolved on death,
and all that “remained to be done was
to find a definite program.” The terror-
ist Fyodor Nazarov was equally “far
removed from acceptance of any party
program,” Savinkov notes. Instead of
loving the common people, “he devel-
oped a contempt for the masses.”
Savinkov irritated PSR leader Vic-
tor Chernov when—“with a chuckle,”
in Alexandrov’s words—he expressed
indifference to the party’s defining
commitment to the peasantry. At times
he pronounced himself an anarchist,
Chernov noted, and at other times a
devotee of “spiritual- religious revolu-
tionism.” According to Alexandrov,
a woman Savinkov tried to recruit for
terror “concluded that terrorism for its
own sake had eclipsed all other consid-
erations for Savinkov.”
Chernov and others reached the
same conclusion about Savinkov’s mo-
tives. What attracted him to terror was
its risk, adventure, and the sheer thrill
of dramatic murder. The hero of Sav-
inkov’s novel Pale Horse, George—the
English name Savinkov himself had
adopted—finds this thrill addictive.
“What would I be doing if I were not
involved in terror?” he asks himself.
“What’s my life without struggle, with-
out the joyful awareness that worldly
laws are not for me?” The hero of an-
other novel by Savinkov, What Never
Happened, explains, “I live for murder,
only for murder.” He realizes that “he
had fallen in love, yes, yes, fallen in love
with terror.” Savinkov quotes his real-
life bomb maker Alexey Pokotilov: “I
believe in terror. For me the whole rev-
olution is terror.”
Savinkov changed the Combat Or-
ganization’s preferred weapon from
guns to bombs, which, of course, were
much more likely to kill bystanders. In
one successful assassination, a coach-
man died, in another the target’s fellow
passenger. Having successfully blown
up von Plehve in 1904 and the tsar’s
brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexan-
drovich the following year, Savinkov
acquired an aura of mysterious power.Savinkov began his two careers, writer
and terrorist, at about the same time,
and, according to the scholar Lynn Ellen
Patyk, he kept clippings about both. Did
Savinkov write novels to glorify his ca-
reer as a terrorist or did he turn to ter-
rorism to provide compelling material
for fiction? In either case, he engaged
assiduously in a process that Russians
call “life creation,” a form of self-
mythologization in which one lives as if
one were a literary exemplar. “As a mem-
ber of the gentry, a cosmopolitan aes-
thete, and a dandy,” Patyk persuasivelyBoris Savinkov, 1910s; photograph from the records of the Okhrana,
the Russian imperial secret policeState Museum of the Politi cal History of Russia, St. Petersburg/F
ine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images