Part 1. On the “First Russian Revolution” and Terrorism
Part 2. Long traditions of Anti-Russian lies
Part 5:10: Rampage of Terrorism
Photo: wikipedia.org
11. Capital Punishment as an Object of Information Manipulation
In connection with the statistics, it is important to pay attention to the history of capital punishments in Russia, since the logical reaction of the tsarist authorities in the fight against terrorism was used by Western and internal liberal propaganda as proof of the “beastly nature” of autocracy. The issue of capital punishment in Russia became an argument in demagogic reasoning by opponents of the Russian state system.
Perhaps this is the most studied aspect of the history of the beginning of the twentieth century, as it is based on more or less accurate arithmetic calculations (even taking into account the understatement of police data and the exaggeration of figures by opposition-minded liberal politicians, in which discrepancies in numbers occurred due to the mixing of criminals with terrorists)—the difference, however cynical it may sound, is not so significant. At least, there is no talk of tens of thousands hanged, as European and Soviet propaganda had it.
The Russian government executed 3,174 (according to other data—3,263) people by court during this decade. In the USA for the same period, fewer than 1,800 were executed, but many thousands of terrorist detachments of “forest brothers,” Dashnaks, SRs, Maximalists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, and Bundists did not operate in the USA from 1905 to 1909. And one more not unimportant fact—in 1904, Japan attacked Russia, supported by England and the USA, and then also by Austria and Prussia. The war was bloody—we lost during one and a half years of war, according to different counts, 50,000–90,000 killed, and about 100,000–15,000 wounded soldiers.
From 1901 to mid-1906, the number of executions in the USA was greater than in Russia. From the second half of 1906 to mid-1910 in the Russian Empire, the number of executions, compared to the USA, increased several times. In the subsequent years from 1910 to 1913 in Russia, the number of executions decreased many times, and the USA overtook us again in this matter.
From 1901 to mid-1906, the number of executions in the USA was greater than in Russia
Now let us turn to the statistics by years. These are the archival data of courts—and the publisher writes that some of the figures given are exaggerated, since cases of unrealized executions were not taken into account: 1901—nine, 1902—twenty-eight, 1903—eleven, 1904—nineteen, 1905—thirty-one, 1906—two hundred fifty-seven, 1907—one thousand three hundred seventy-six, 1908—six hundred forty-seven, 1909—six hundred twenty-nine, 1910—one hundred sixty-seven.
And here are the curious figures of a Soviet historian (Tsarist Courts in the Struggle Against the Revolution, 1958), which speak of the difference between those sentenced to execution and those executed in 1905 to 1910: Sentenced to execution were 6,290 people, and executed were 2,719 people; that is, almost two and a half times fewer.
Regarding capital punishments, we are interested not only in including the number of executed in the total number of victims of the civil confrontation, but also the reaction of the judicial system to the terrorist war that was waged at the hands of extremist political parties inside Russia, and was inspired by external forces.
As we see, the decision to use the courts, the police and the army against terrorists was not made immediately—the process of establishing decisive measures on the part of the government was gaining momentum for a year and a half. According to the statistics showing the dynamics of capital punishments—by rises and falls—one can objectively observe the course of this terrorist war.
At the same time, the methods of the political police were always within the law. It was impossible to liquidate an obvious terrorist without trial if he did not resist during arrest at the scene of the crime, or to kidnap one who had fled, or even arrest him somewhere abroad, for example in Europe or even in Finland, where local authorities did not extradite “political” persons. But for the terrorists there was no law; they considered it a great victory to kill a minister, an official, or any person in uniform, and did not grieve over the civilian victims of their actions.
This struggle against capital punishment was one of the forms of support for extremism and terrorism
Naturally, liberally minded politicians intended to decisively battle the very idea of capital punishment. Discussions about capital punishment filled the pages of the liberal press and the minutes of sessions of the State Duma of various convocations from 1905 to 1910. This struggle against capital punishment was one of the forms of support for extremism and terrorism.
According to attorney I. A. Malinovsky, by applying capital punishment, the authorities lose their legal foundation, enlightened by reason, and descend to “animal instinct… savagery,” and regress “into the depths of the gloomy past.” Another professor of Moscow University expressed the opinion that from 1905 to 1907, people were being replaced by ideas and principles “not subject to execution,” so “in place of one executed [terrorist], dozens of others rise.” By applying executions the authorities will not calm and mollify the country. On the contrary, the author argued, the mission of the state should consist in the initiative of pacification and the duty to govern the country and educate the population with moral, fair measures. Duma deputies called capital punishment “official butchery.” The same lawyers, professors, journalists, and deputies never once cited the developed system of capital punishment in, for example, Europe and the USA.
On August 24, 1906, the text of the government message on the introduction of military field courts was published in the newspapers. These courts were declared a response to revolutionary terror and became a forced, defensive measure of the state:
“Crimes must be stopped without hesitation, <…> if the state does not give them real opposition, the very meaning of statehood is lost…”
The Chairman of the Council of Ministers P. A. Stolypin stopped hesitating. In his note to the Tsar he wrote:
“A heavy, stern duty has been laid upon me by you yourself, Sire. This duty, this responsibility before Your Majesty, before Russia and history dictates my answer: To our grief and shame, only the execution of a few can prevent seas of blood…”
The number of those executed by court was significantly less than those liquidated by terrorists without trial or investigation.
During the debates in the Second Duma , P. A. Stolypin noted that when in danger, the state must “adopt the strictest laws to protect itself from disintegration,” and sometimes make necessity stand above rights in general. He proposed that the Duma condemn revolutionary terror, say a “word of pacification” that would stop the “bloody madness,” and help recreate the historical edifice of Russia. From that moment, liberals began to call capital executions “Stolypin neckties.”
Leo Tolstoy. Photo: wikipedia.org The apogee of the struggle against capital punishments was Leo Tolstoy’s manifesto “I Cannot Be Silent” (1908). As the liberal press stated, the writer’s article was published “throughout the civilized world.” At the same time, capital punishment at the beginning of the twentieth century existed in almost all these “civilized countries.” On the other hand, some Russian journalists posed a reasonable question to Tolstoy: Where was the writer when the lists of hundreds of Russian state figures killed from around the corner by terrorists were published?
And indeed, the count of those executed by court was significantly less than those liquidated by terrorists without trial or investigation.
12. Terrorism: Signs and Methods
Now, in the twenty-first century, all signs of terrorism are studied thoroughly. If all elements of modern terrorist attack schemes were compared with what happened in Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century, we would see no difference other than the technical means, which have improved significantly over the century. It is impossible not to mention one of the authoritative researchers of terrorism, who began to develop this topic, Professor of Boston University Anna Geifman, who published in Russian the books, Revolutionary Terror in Russia. 1894 to 1917 (1997), and, Destroyers. Totalitarian Cults of the Twentieth to Twenty-first Centuries (2017).
The word “terror” comes from the Latin concept—fear, horror. Synonyms are the words “violence,” “intimidation,” “aggression,” “blackmail,” “banditry,” “extremism,” “diversion.” All these concepts are shades of the ideology of premeditated, politically motivated violence and the practice of its application.
The performers of terrorist acts are secret agents, combat cells, extremist groups, radical parties, or conspiratorial organizations acting covertly for the effective implementation of their goals, bypassing legal forms of political struggle, open ideological and economic competition.
These goals vary greatly in scale—from the elimination of state leaders and political enemies to attempts to change the state system or economic order; from arsons of estates and manors to inciting national intolerance, nationalist separatism, and violation of the country’s territorial integrity. As intermediate tasks, terrorists attempt to disrupt public safety and influence the adoption of decisions by authorities beneficial to them. All these goals were openly and doctrinally set before the revolutionaries of the early twentieth century and met the interests of Russia’s geopolitical enemies.
The main trends in the development of terrorism in the early twentieth century are clearly traced:
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expansion of geography and its internationalization;
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increase in the level of organization of terrorist activities, creation of large terrorist formations with developed infrastructure;
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strengthening of the connection between terrorism and organized crime: unification of efforts with criminal communities, bandit groups, thieves’ gangs, criminals;
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growth of financial and material-technical support of terrorist structures;
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the desire of terrorists to master means of mass destruction of people;
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use of terrorism as an instrument of interference in the internal affairs of the state;
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development and improvement of new forms and methods of terrorism aimed at expanding the scale of consequences of terrorist actions and increasing the number of victims.
Each of these points can be illustrated with eloquent examples.
M. M. Litvinov It is enough to read the memoirs of Bolshevik M. M. Litvinov, the future People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, about how he purchased unique for that time and expensive weapons—machine guns—for armed actions. In the Russo-Japanese War, they were used by the Russian army for the first time, to the amount of 352 pieces. From these memoirs, one can learn how, with money from the RSDLP, he bought dynamite, Mauser rifles, bullets and machine guns in Europe, as well as a yacht for thirty thousand francs to transport weapons to the Caucasus. It describes how he met sealed wagons with weapons that were sent from Belgium and Germany through Austria to Bulgaria. The only thing Litvinov hid in those memoirs was that the RSDLP money came from Japan. Just like Georgiy Gapon, Litninov was supplied with money from the same source to buy and deliver weapons from London via the Baltic Sea. Both actions, by the way, failed.
Or the question of the relationship between terrorists and gangs, bands, criminals. In historical literature, this aspect is illustrated by many examples, especially in the Caucasus.
We were interested in a story full of inexplicable coincidences—the theft and possible destruction of the wonderworking Kazan Icon, which saved Russia in times of turmoil. The theft of the icon by the gang of Bartholomew Stoyan (according to documents he was Fyodor Chaikin) occurred just on the eve of the new Time of Trouble in the summer of 1904. An ominous sign! Coincidence? Most likely. At the trial, it was established from witnesses’ testimonies, that the bandits were only interested in the jewels, and Stoyan-Chaikin chopped up the icon and burned it in the stove.
“I wanted to find out, sir chief, whether the icon is really wonderworking,” Stoyan said during interrogation. “If God exists, He will not let it be destroyed, and I will be torn to pieces. And if He allows, then there is no God. See how I managed to prove the non-existence of God!”
However, he more than once during the investigation hinted that the icon was preserved. Moreover, after the trial, the testimony of a nine-year-old girl about the burning of the icon was questioned.
Later, in the fall of 1905, Stoyan unexpectedly directed the investigation to a new participant in the theft who lived in Mariupol. The prisoner was sent there for investigative measures, and this coincides with the time of turbulent rebellious events in October. Shortly before this, a large terrorist organization operated in the city: At the Nikopol plant (now Azovstal), owned by Americans, Bundist terrorists secretly produced bombs, but were captured by the police and imprisoned in the place where Stoyan had been brought. Fellow party members of the terrorists, having attacked the prison, attempted to free them—and were successful. Thanks to this, the blasphemer managed to escape. It is not excluded that he was connected with them and did not go to Mariupol by chance. In any case, when he was arrested in Yaroslavl a month later, he categorically denied this connection, insisting that on October 22 he dug a tunnel under the prison walls and thus escaped to freedom, which was impossible and incredible and only strengthened the suspicion of contacts of the destroyer of the icon of the Mother of God with the Mariupol Bundist terrorists.
His Holiness Patriarch Kirill has said a number of times that although “the wonderworking Kazan image of the Mother of God has disappeared, we believe that it was not destroyed. Only, the time for its appearance has not yet come.”
The most common methods of terrorist activity of revolutionaries:
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attacks carried out both openly and by ambush;
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mining of industrial, transport, communications, military facilities, residential and administrative buildings;
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use of explosives and poisonous substances, armed seizure of hostages;
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use of chemical, biological and other hazardous substances and their components.
There were almost no mass seizures of hostages from the civilian population by terrorists, as did happen in the Civil War (1917 to 1922), except for cases in the Baltic region in 1905 to 1906. However, the following was proposed by V. L. Burtsev as a method of struggle against tsarism in 1903: To take government officials and representatives of the bourgeoisie hostage for use in future negotiations with the government. This was also called for by the famous Bolshevik V. D. Bonch-Bruevich during the December uprising in Moscow in 1905: To capture “a couple of grand dukes as hostages and keep them in constant fear of inevitable and immediate execution if even one drop of proletarian blood is shed on the streets of Moscow.”
As for poisonous, chemical and biological substances—this was an obsessive idea for revolutionary terrorists.
Relatively recently (Historical Journal, 2009), a very remarkable archival document was published—a letter from a rank-and-file terrorist to the Central Committee of the SR party. In this letter is a demand for militants to tip bullets and bladed weapons with poisons so that even a slight wound to the enemy would lead to inevitable death. In case of a lack of poison for poisoning bullets, he proposed to infect weapons with infectious bacteria “of anthrax, tetanus, diphtheria, typhoid fever, etc.” “More ‘holy hatred’ towards the enemy!”—writes the absolutely dehumanized fighter for a bright future. Otherwise, “you will sow panic among enemies, but for now… for now you… are pitiful in your impotence and ridiculous.” The publisher of the letter believes that it dates to 1907.
However, ideas related to the use of poisons and chemicals in the practice of terrorist acts appeared much earlier. For example, the creator of the Combat Detachment of the SRs, Grigory Gershuni, a doctor-bacteriologist by profession, led the murder of the Kharkov Governor Prince I. M. Obolensky in 1902 and supplied the militant F. Kachura with bullets tipped with strychnine.
In the fall of 1905, V. I. Lenin urged his party members to pour sulfuric acid on policemen.
Even earlier, in 1876, the revolutionary-Narodnik and future Menshevik leader Lev Deich used sulfuric acid in an attempt to execute his fellow revolutionary N. E. Gorinovich, suspected of betrayal. Surprisingly, Gorinovich survived, despite his head being pierced by brass knuckles and his face disfigured by acid. Subsequently, he testified at the trial against Deich as a victim “with his nose and ears fallen off and eyes popped out.”
Among these cases could be included the poisoning in the railway workers’s dining room in Tiflis on July 3, 1906, of a man who refused to participate in the strike.
