January 13, 2022 57into vats of boiling water; others were
mutilated both before and after death.
Conscious mythmaking prevailed
from the movement’s beginning. In
his highly influential Historical Letters
(1868–1870), the social philosopher
Peter Lavrov, who wrote a preface to
Stepniak’s Underground Russia, called
for “critically thinking individuals” to
arouse the unenlightened masses by
fabricating heroic myths. “Martyrs are
needed, whose legend will far outgrow
their true worth and their actual ser-
vice,” Lavrov foresaw. “Energy they
never had will be attributed to them....
The words they never uttered will be
repeated.... The number of those
who perish is not important: legend
will always multiply it to the limits of
possibility” so as to “compile a long
martyrology.”For Alexandrov, the noblest, most
spotless of all these heroes is Savinkov.
To B re a k R u s sia’s Chains begins,
“This is the story of a remarkable man
who became a terrorist to fight the ty-
rannical Russian imperial regime, and
when a popular revolution overthrew
it in 1917 turned his wrath against the
Bolsheviks because they betrayed the
revolution and the freedoms it won.”
His motives, Alexandrov believes, were
entirely pure: “All his efforts were di-
rected at transforming his homeland
into a uniquely democratic, humane,
and enlightened country.”
Accusations that Savinkov loved ter-
ror itself, Alexandrov concludes, “are
profoundly unfair because they are the
result of ideological bias, not historical
or psychological understanding.” In
Alexandrov’s view, Savinkov “chose
terror out of altruism, although what he
did bears no resemblance to what ‘ter-
rorism’ means today.” For that matter,
Alexandrov repeats, although Savinkov
organized terror, “he never killed any-
one himself.” Is someone not a killer if
he planned, organized, and provided
weapons for murder but, rather than
throwing bombs himself, instead re-
cruited others to do so?
Alexandrov stresses an incident
figuring prominently in terrorist my-
thology. When Savinkov’s recruit and
childhood friend Ivan Kaliaev was
about to throw a bomb at the Grand
Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s carriage,
the presence of the duke’s wife and
children made him draw back, because
the Socialist Revolutionary Party had
issued no instructions about this (not
unforeseeable) possibility. Believe it or
not, Savinkov writes matter- of- factly,
the party “had never discussed or even
raised the question” of killing family
members. Savinkov recalls telling Ka-
liaev that killing innocents “was quite
out of the question,” evidence for Al-
exandrov that his hero was supremely
considerate of innocent human life.
Alexandrov is correct that Savinkov
did not deliberately target innocent
people, as other terrorists did, but if he
was so concerned about not harming
bystanders, why did the Combat Or-
ganization under his direction switch
from guns to bombs? And why did Sa-
vinkov’s bomb makers construct their
weapons not in remote buildings but in
hotels, where, on two occasions, they
accidentally exploded? After Pokoti-
lov, whose heavy drinking should have
been a warning sign, blew himself up in
the Northern Hotel in St. Petersburg,
Maximilian Shveytser died when an ac-cidental explosion destroyed his room,
several adjoining ones, and a French
restaurant. Lumber, plaster, and fur-
niture landed on the street below. Sav-
inkov even cooked up the scheme of
using an early (and hard-to-manage)
airplane carrying a giant bomb. “One
wonders what precautions Savinkov
believed he could take to spare the lives
of innocents,” Alexandrov asks. What
indeed.
Although he barely mentions the
indiscriminate carnage Geifman de-
scribes, Alexandrov does note the
attempt of the Maximalists—an off-
shoot of the PSR too violent even for
them—to kill the tsar’s chief minister,
Pyotr Stolypin, by bombing his house
when it was crowded with petitioners.
Twenty- seven people were killed, and
about thirty others—including Stoly-
pin’s daughter and son—were wounded,
some seriously. The minister escaped
with minor injuries. Is this an example
of the targeted killing that bears no re-
semblance to modern terrorism?
“Savinkov and [his mentor Mikhail
Gotz] rejected what the Maximalists
had done,” Alexandrov assures us,
“because of the horrifying number of
innocent victims”—which sounds as if
they were shocked by the deaths of by-
standers rather than the setback to pro-
paganda. Yet in his memoirs, Savinkov
reports his own reaction to the PSR’s
official “proclamation repudiating the
terror of the Maximalists”:I did not approve of it. Gotz ex-
pressed sympathy for the Maxi-
malists. He was sorry for them,
pointing out that the explosion...
had not been carefully prepared....
Gotz also pointed out that the kill-
ing of many innocents was bound
to have an adverse effect on public
opinion. He refrained, however,
from passing judgment on the
Maximalists. The explosion... was
the only possible answer to [the
tsar’s] dissolution of the Duma.Savinkov reports that he tried to join
forces with the Maximalists. Once
again, ideology made no difference to
him. “Look here, we’re talking man to
man,” he recalls telling the Maximalist
leader.Why cannot we work together? For
my part, I see no obstacles. It is all
the same to me whether you are a
Maximalist, an anarchist, or So-
cialist Revolutionist. We are both
terrorists. Let us combine our orga-
nizations in the interests of terror.Are statements like this why so many
have concluded that Savinkov was pri-
marily motivated by terror itself?Most studies of Savinkov focus on his
novels, especially Pale Horse. An early
English translation by Z. Vengerova
(known to Churchill) has been far sur-
passed by the sparkling new one by
Michael Katz, who has ably translated
several works of Russian radical fic-
tion—including Vasily Sleptsov’s Hard
Times and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s
utopian novel What Is to Be Done? In
his 562- page biography, Alexandrov
devotes only six pages to Pale Horse,
and there he mostly denies that the
work expresses Savinkov’s real views.
To present Savinkov as an altruistic
hero, Alexandrov could hardly do oth-erwise, since the novel has always been
taken, in the historian Aileen Kelly’s
words, as a “savage demystification” of
the terrorist hero.
Pale Horse includes conversations
about the morality of terrorism. Curi-
ously, they concern not whether terror-
ism is justified but which justification
is best. The Christian Vanya, evidently
based on Kaliaev, reasons that even
though Christians should not kill, he is
a bad Christian and so is bound to do
so. In one shocking passage, the hero
George describes how in the Belgian
Congo, Africans who lived on one side
of a river would kill those who wan-
dered over from the other shore, and
vice versa. He concludes that killing is
normal: “I want to do something and I
do it. Does this [need for justification]
perhaps hide some cowardice, fear of
someone’s opinion?” When Vanya asks
how George can live without love, he
answers, “You spit at the whole world.”
George at last murders his lover’s
husband. “There is no distinction, no
difference. Why is it all right to kill for
the terror,” he asks rhetorically, “but
for oneself—impossible? Who will
answer me?” Like the protagonist of
Lermontov’s Byronic novel A Hero of
Our Time, after the murder George
immediately loses interest in his lover.
A lexa nd rov a s ser t s t hat George’s “a i m-
less egoism has no relation to anything
that mattered most deeply to Savinkov
personally,” but even if this is true, the
book surely glorifies the Byronic self-
image Savinkov labored to construct.
One might suppose that Savinkov’s
willingness to join the Bolsheviks
would shake Alexandrov’s certainty
that his subject was not an adventurer
but a man of principle. Alexandrov
instead constructs a scenario rescu-
ing his hero’s reputation. He surmises
that Savinkov must have been deceiv-
ing the Bolsheviks so that they would
eventually free him and give him an-
other chance to kill their leaders. Even
if the Bolsheviks had eventually freed
Savinkov, is it remotely plausible that
the Cheka would allow him to roam
unmolested and build a new terrorist
organization? Given Savinkov’s “abso-
lute commitment to personal and polit-
ical freedom,” Alexandrov reasons, his
death must have been suicide prompted
by the realization that he would never
be released to carry out his scheme.
Having “lost his gamble,” his suicide
was “the only blow he could make
against” the regime.
In contrast to Savinkov and many
others, Lenin despised those who ro-
manticized terror. They suffered, he
wrote, from “petty- bourgeois revolution-
ism,” “dilletante- anarchist revolution-
ism,” and, most famously, an “infantile
disorder.” “The greatest danger... that
confronts a genuine revolution,” he
declared, “is exaggeration of revolu-
tionariness...when they begin...to el-
evate ‘revolution’ to something almost
divine.” It is no wonder that Lenin
triumphed, since his grasp of power
politics was never obscured by dreamy
idealizations.
One sympathizes with Alexandrov’s
wish that tsarism could have been re-
placed by something other than Bol-
shevism. Savinkov, he believes, came
a hairsbreadth from ensuring just that.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda
Mandelstam posed a different question:
Could it be that the romanticization of
terror and revolution is the main reason
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