Bullets and the Ballot Box: Rethinking Russian Revolutionary Terrorism after 1905

Writing in 1911, Petr Struve argued that Dmitrii Bogrov, the assassin of Stolypin, represented a 'new type of revolutionary', motivated less by revolutionary idealism than moral nihilism. More recent studies of Russian revolutionary terrorism have taken a similar view: after 1905, Russian terrorist groups underwent a 'moral degeneration', characterised by 'largely indiscriminate behaviour and increasing callousness toward bloodshed' (Anna Geifman), their activity at times 'barely distinguishable from blackmail, murder and extortion' (Norman Naimark). In this paper, I subject the evidence for this view to a critical re-examination and, in the process, attempt to refocus attention on the political aspects of Russian - specifically, Socialist-Revolutionary - terrorism after 1905. Firstly, I suggest that the dramatic upsurge of of terrorist violence in the years 1905-1907, far from being a case of unintended consequences, largely aligned with the SR theory of terrorism. Secondly, I seek to show that the SRs' move towards the use of smaller combat groups after 1905, often cited in the literature as evidence for the 'degeneration' thesis, was in part a pragmatic response to the greater political and financial constraints the party confronted at the time. Thirdly and finally, I examine intra-party debates over the relationship between terrorism and electoral politics, debates that acquired an existential character in late 1906 when the SRs lifted their boycott of the Duma elections. By 1907, the SR leadership had settled on a strategy of simultaneously persisting with terrorist assassinations while denying responsibility for them, a strategy that failed at the time, but which, half a century later, would become standard practice for revolutionary and national liberation movements operating in democratic or semi-democratic systems.  

Ben Phillips is Lecturer in Modern Russian History at the University of Exeter (UK), and co-editor of the journal Revolutionary Russia. His first monograph, Siberian Exile and the Invention of Revolutionary Russia, 1825-1917, was published by Routledge in 2022. His current research focuses on the history of terrorism and political violence in late imperial Russia, particularly around 1905 and in relation to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.