This week’s episode is brought to you by Casper. Casper is a sleep brand that makes expertly designed products to help you get your best rest. One night at a time you spend one third of your life sleeping. So you should be comfortable. The experts at Casper work tirelessly to make a quality sleep surface that cradles your natural geometry in all the right places.

The original Casper mattress combines multiple supportive memory foams for a quality sleep surface with the right amounts of both sink and bounce. Casper also now offers for other mattresses the way the essential, the hybrid Casper and the hybrid wave all at affordable prices because Casper cuts out the middleman and sells directly to you.

There’s free shipping and returns in the United States and Canada. And you can be sure of your purchase with Casper’s a hundred night risk-free sleep on it trial and the Duncan family still hardly endorses the Casper mattress and pillows, many great naps and great night’s sleeps were taken on the Casper.

They were just comfortable mattresses that helped us all sleep better. So the deal is you get $50 towards a select mattress by visiting casper.com/revolutions and using revolutions at checkout. That again, get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com/revolutions and using revolutions at checkout terms and conditions apply.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Episode 10.15: The Tsar Must Die

Before we get going this week, I want to remind everybody that I will be at the Sound Education Conference from September the ninth to the 12th. I’ll be giving my own talk and then also doing a panel with the History of Byzantium. I also have interviews lined up with great podcasts like the Eastern Border and Pax Britannica, so you’ll also get to hear me coming out of multiple other podcasts in the near future and I’ll bump any and all interviews that come out of this. I hope to see you there.

So where we left it last time was in the midst of this era of great reform. When the emancipation of the serfs was followed by political and judicial reforms, all under the auspices of the Tsar Liberator. But where we really left things was that the expectations created by this era of great reform would soon be going unmet.

Now Alexander the Second had loosened censorship a little bit in the leadup to emancipation and public discussion of ideas and events were now moderately tolerated, as long as they stayed within certain bounds. This discussion was most gratifyingly embraced by a small but growing segment of the population that was just now being dubbed the intelligentsia, a term I’m sure you’re all familiar with, that was being coined right now here in Russia, in the mid 19th century. The intelligentsia described a group of non-elite, non-noble, or at least lower noble educated men of society. The lawyers and doctors and businessmen who were beginning to assert their own tastes and preoccupations ideas and desires into Russian culture. They were now both the creators and audience for books, art, literature, philosophy, poetry, and music, and this was in contrast to the old noble patronage model, where the tastes preoccupations ideas and desires of the aristocracy reign supreme. The intelligentsia tended to be pretty liberal in its outlook, especially those joining the conversation in this age of great reform. They were keen to improve Russian society, and they lauded the tsar’s good work, but they also didn’t want to rock the boat too much after all, their own property and position might be at stake.

There was, however, a more radical faction inside this intelligentsia who wanted more than just liberal reform, who would not cheerlead the great reforms the government was unrolling, but rather criticize them for not going far enough, or for not being implemented fully. These radicals, as you can imagine, tended to be younger and more plebeian. They were too young to have really been stamped by the military autocracy of Nicholas the First, and they now are arrived as energetic teenagers and 20-somethings in the late 1850s and early 1860s, in an environment that encouraged reform and rejuvenation and reappraisal, and some of them hoped, revolution.

These young radicals were a long way from the liberal noble Decemberists. They were also well removed from the now middle-aged and middle-class intellectuals who had gone through the 1830s and 1840s in various semi-secret literary societies who dared to read prescribed books and articles. This new younger set was a irrevent, iconoclastic, and ready for action.

Their hero was a guy named Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky was the lowborn son of a priest, who graduated from seminary and then took a master’s degree in literature from St. Petersburg university. He was in his late twenties when the tsar announced the goal of emancipating the serfs, and was by then already coming into his own as a journalist. He was a student of western ideas and new socialist writers like Fourier; he had read and absorbed his exile countrymen like Herzen and Bakunin. But he also moved away from strict philosophy and economics, and also absorbed the rapid advances being made in the natural sciences. We are now in the age of Darwin, so he was less interested in abstract German philosophy and more interested in concrete, evolutionary biology, Chernyshevsky wanted to elevate and center the narod, which we would translate as the people, and serves as a kind of idealized abstraction, not unlike the German volk. Chernyshevsky synthesized a set of political principles that define the next generation of social and political battles: narodnichestvo, or to westernize it, so I don’t have to keep trying to pronounce it: narodism. Chernyshevsky envisioned a kind of agrarian socialism that could spring naturally from the already existent village communes. He was personally and temperamentally a revolutionary, but kept his prose mostly clear of those kinds of suggestions, though he did warn against trusting too much in the tsar’s emancipation scheme. True liberty could never be handed down from above, it would have to be seized from below. Despite being very careful about his published utterances though, Chernyshevsky was ultimately arrested by the Third Section in 1862, and they convicted him on some trumped up charges and sentenced him to exile in Siberia.

The crazy thing though, is that while locked up in the St. Peter St. Paul fortress waiting to be tried, the authorities let Chernyshevsky keep writing, and he produced a novel called What is to Be Done. Then even more incredibly, they allowed this novel to be published in 1863, presumably the censors were like hung over that morning, and didn’t feel like reading it. What is to Be Done tells the story of a young woman who escapes from an arranged marriage, but it is mostly a vehicle for expressing a semi-utopian vision for the future that was built around communal factories. This new utopian order would help end poverty and break down the old and clearly outmoded political, social, and family structures of the present day. What is to Be Done was a landmark event for our budding young social and political revolutionaries of the post-emancipation world. If the title, What is to Be Done, rings a bell, that’s because Lenin said he read the book five times over a single summer and titled his own famous 1902 pamphlet What is to Be Done as an homage that would have been well-known to all his readers. Everyone read Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done, and everyone had something to say about it: Dostoevsky ridiculed it, Tolstoy wrote his own nonfiction track that is often translated into English as What is to Be Done, which outlined his own Christian pacifist anarchism.

But that is the novel’s later legacy. Back here in the 1860s, Chernyshevsky himself was exiled to Siberia, and the young radicals gained a martyr and a legend that gave the novel he left behind an even more urgent, emotional heft. Young radicals treated it as a kind of Bible, and they copied their own dress and styles and attitudes around various characters in the book. And these kids were now creating a little counterculture youth movement for themselves. They deliberately dressed sloppily and were rude in posture and appearance. Men grew their hair long, women cut their’s short. And women were active and enthusiastic participants in this radical counterculture. As of 1859, women were allowed to go to university, and so one of the defining traits of this generation is their equalitarian and feminist flair. They started living together in communal groups, both for ideological and economic reasons. And most scandalously, for polite society, the men and women were living together as equals outside the bonds of marriage. Freeing themselves, at least psychologically from a society they were highly critical of, they indulged in hedonistic and leisurely pursuits. They were a bunch of hippie punks, basically.

Because of this, they came to be called nihilists, which came from the 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. But these young nihilists didn’t believe in nothing, as the name seems to imply, they just didn’t believe in the same things their parents did. And since time immemorial, flummoxed older generations have always accused younger generations of believing in nothing when they found themselves unable to comprehend what they were looking at, which was simply an alternative set of values. So, this is just standard issue is nothing sacred hand-wringing from the oldsters, to which the youngsters would reply it’s not that nothing is sacred, it’s that different things are sacred.

So, what they did believe in was narodism, this new style of revolutionary populism, agrarian socialism run by truly free people. And in this era, a little proto-party called Land in Liberty showed up to espouse those principles. Pamphlets and declarations floated around the underground advocating radical social change: they should reject existing social conventions, educate the peasants about their glorious place at the center of a coming socialist utopia, and topple the parasitic and unnecessary tsarist regime. This younger and more radical faction of the intelligentsia believed that their role was to be the intellectual leaders of a social revolution. They would use the tools found in the first Russia, modern enlightened education, to elevate the other Russia. The second Russia, the mass of Russia, which currently labored in ignorant superstition, they wanted to take that other Russia and make it the center of a real Russia, a post-imperial socialist Russia. I mean, the peasants were already doing collective ownership and managing their own affairs perfectly well, all we need to do is get rid of the tsar.

There was a debate though, about how best to achieve this. Some said, we must go out and educate the peasants, then the revolution will grow inexorably from below. Others said, we must directly attack the imperial state because the state strEngels the minds and sometimes the bodies of the people and prevents them from realizing their natural freedom. In 1866, a minor noble from the Volga region named Dmitry Karakozov decided to cut to the chase. Karakozov had personally concluded that for the revolution to live, the tsar must die. It was nothing personal against Alexander the Second specifically, nor did he think that killing Alexander would in and of itself do anything? Karakozov believed the peasantry was inhibited by superstitious beliefs about the mystical power of the tsar as a quasi-deity, and what he hoped to do was break that spell to prove the emperor was a mortal like everyone else. And once that spell was broken, the people would rise up.

So the tsar was leaving the summer garden on April the Fourth, 1866, when Karakozov approached, pulled out a revolver, and started firing. But he missed. The tsar was not even wounded. Quickly arrested, Alexander came and spoke directly to Karakozov and asked if Karakozov was a Polish nationalist. Karakozov said, no, I am a proud Russian. Which spooked the hell out of the Tsar Liberator, who was pretty sure he had been doing a good job, and hardly in need of being assassinated.

This assassination attempt could not have backfired harder. Rather than triggering a popular uprising, it triggered a reactionary backlash. A heavier hand was put in charge of the Third Section. Liberals were purged from the government. A harsh white terror descended against radicals who were not really given the benefit of the tsar’s new judicial system. Most of them had to run for it, which is the partial origin story of a whole new generation of Russian revolutionaries in exile who we will talk about next week.

The era of great reform that Alexander had kicked off with his speech in Moscow in 1856 ended with those gunshots in 1866. But though this assassination attempt, triggered not revolution but reaction, it was not the end of radical nihilist revolutionaries in Russia. Indeed, this is right when the most infamous of them all shows up: Sergei Nechaev.

Nechaev got into radical politics as a teenager, reading smuggled Bakunin and Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done. Joining in the going fad, he modeled himself after a strict and uncompromising revolutionary character from the book. An extremist from the jump, Nechaev hosted meetings that featured historical idols like Robespierre and Saint-Just, men who had seen what needed to be done and had done it. But in addition to being a hardcore revolutionary, each Nechaev was also part con artist and habitual fabulist. He went abroad in 1869, amidst a flurry of purposefully self-manufactured rumors that he had been arrested. Arriving in Switzerland, he sought out the great old man Bakunin and came bearing another pack of lies: namely that he represented the central committee of a revolutionary network in Russia.

No such committee or network existed.

But Bakunin was excited by Nechaev’s evident, dedicated enthusiasm, and took them on as a protege, much to the delight of Karl Marx, who merrily criticized Bakunin’s association with this unsavory kid who was already dogged by rumors of fanatical craziness, dishonesty, and self-serving recklessness.

While in Switzerland in the spring of 1869, the Nechaev penned the famous, or infamous, Catechism of a Revolutionary. Which is as blunt and uncompromising a statement of revolutionary principle as you are ever likely to read. Those who wanted to join the revolution must dedicate themselves to it with every fiber of their being. The revolution must be put before friends, family love, even the truth. There was no greater exemplar of the ends justify the means than Nechaev, who frankly makes Auguste Blanqui look like Louis Blanc. This was not about embracing immorality, but definitely about embracing amorality. The only compass point was how can this advance the revolution. And it opens, the revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought, and the single passion, for revolution.

But after sneaking back into Russia, Nechaev engaged in some means, that even the greatest of ends, would have a hard time justifying. One of his followers started questioning Nechaev’s story about this secret revolutionary committee no one else had ever heard of, and openly questioning Nechaev’s tactics. So Nechaev decided this guy had to go. Telling their other comrades the guy was an informer, Nechaev and a few accomplices lured him into a trap, killed him, and dumped his body.

A subsequent murder investigation uncovered Nechaev’s little revolutionary ring. Nechaev himself managed to skip town while his duped accomplices were all arrested. Returning to Switzerland, Nechaev was initially welcomed back with open arms by Bakunin, but then his bullshit and his lies and his duplicity caught up with him. Because, as it turns out, revolutionaries do owe each other trust and comradeship, they can’t just use each other. Bakunin distanced himself from Nechaev who was then rebuked by the International. And remember, the International is supposed to be this umbrella organization where everyone is welcome. Well, yeah, everyone, except that guy, we’ve got nothing to do with him.

Mostly friendless, Nechaev was arrested in Switzerland in August of 1872, and then extradited back to Russia to stand trial. He spent the next 10 years in prison, believing he was still working towards the revolution, but he would die in prison in 1882. And though he was an extreme case and something of a black sheep personally, elements of the Catechism of a Revolutionary are going to be picked up by those who came after him. So Nechaev was an infamous, but still influential, figure in revolutionary circles.

Meanwhile, Nechaev’s contemporaries had moved away from his kind of violent fanaticism. Most had taken the white terror as proof that violent direct action was counterproductive. We should plant ideas, not bombs. If we’re going to have a social revolution in favor of decentralized agrarian socialism, we probably need to get the peasants to understand what we’re trying to do.

So in the summer of 1874, we get this famous event called the Going to the People. Thousands of young narodst radicals spontaneously left their homes and jobs and universities in the major cities, and they fanned out to go live among the people. The plan, if there was a plan, was to teach their new neighbors advanced ideas of revolutionary self-consciousness and self-determination. Initially driven by a kind of missionary zeal, the whole thing turned out to be a fiasco. Those who went to the people had never actually met the people, and they found the peasants unreceptive to their ministrations. Disillusionment set in very quickly. The villagers turned out to be dull, conservative, and very suspicious of these strange men and women showing up one day spouting all kinds of heretical nonsense. These kids spoke against the tsar, and the church, bedrocks of traditional life. And the gender equality that was taken for granted amongst these radicals was bizarre and out of place in the traditional villages. Many peasants just arrested the interlopers and handed them over to the authorities. Over about two years, something like 1600 people were arrested and held on the charge of being, you know, vaguely suspicious. By 1876, the Going to the People was going down as an embarrassing debacle. As the Marxist historian Alan Woods puts it: they went to the people, and the people sent them back.

The failure of the Going to the People swung the strategic pendulum away from cultivating revolution from the people below, and back toward direct political action against the powers above. So in 1876, a new revolutionary party called Land and Liberty was founded. They took their name from the earlier 1860s group, but otherwise were completely new. This would not be some loose knit literary society, but a disciplined revolutionary party. This new party was a gifted a huge PR coup by the tsar himself when it came time to punish some of those detained during the Going to the People. Hoping to use the new open trial court system to discredit all of these lunatic kids, the authorities convened a mass trial that became known as the trial of the 193. The press was invited in to cover this trial extensively.

But rather than discrediting the radicals, they each stood up and gave passionate speeches, accurately denouncing the reality of conditions in Russia, and generally ginning up sympathy among anybody who was reading about the trial and the newspaper. The kicker came when the verdict was handed down and there wasn’t even enough evidence to convict like 150 of them, because they hadn’t really done anything provably wrong. The net effect of all this was to further radicalize the radicals. Not only had many of them now been held for years without really having done anything wrong, but it also seemed like maybe the regime was not nearly as powerful as it thought it was, that maybe it could be toppled.

While the trial of the 193 was ongoing in the summer of 1877, there was another little incident where one of the political prisoners was publicly flogged for not removing his cap in the presence of St. Petersburg Governor Fyodor Trepov. The flogging outraged public opinion it also outraged a young woman and her friend, who were already talking themselves into assassinating the prosecutor in the trial of the 193. Now Trepov was also targeted. In January of 1878, our young woman managed to get into Trepov’s office when he made himself available to the public. She walked in, pulled out a gun and shot him. But though she hit Trepov he lived, and the young woman was arrested. Incredibly though, when she stood trial, her case was presided over by a liberal judge, and heard by a sympathetic jury. Then her lawyer successfully made the trial about the victim Trepov, not the would-be assassin, who he said had acted from the noblest of motives. And she was, shockingly, acquitted.

But well aware that the authorities would no doubt rearrest her at the first opportunity, she skipped town, beginning a sojourn that would carry her into prolonged political exile. And many of you out there already know that I have just introduced Vera Zasulich, who we will meet back up with next time, to discuss her foundational role in creating the first Russian Marxist Society in 1883.

After these events, Land and Liberty started fracturing over the question of the utility of political terrorism. There had been other bombings and assassination attempts, some successful, some not, and a majority of Land and Liberty thought this now necessary, a form of self-defense or a righteous verdict they were handing down against guilty tyrants. And the violence was not indiscriminate attacks on civilians. They targeted specific ministers, police officers, provisional governors, and, naturally, the tsar himself. But a smaller minority wanted to focus on propagandizing, organizing, educating, and winning the war of ideas. That all of this violence was a counterproductive distraction, and worse, it was leading to severe reprisals that were crippling their ability to organize further, and alienating them from respectable opinion.

The final split came with the third near-miss assassination attempt of the tsar in 1879, the second attempt, I should mention, was by Polish nationalist whose gun misfired in Paris when the tsar was with Emperor Napoleon the Third for the 1867 Universal Exposition. The third attempt though was here in 1879, and committed by a member of Land and Liberty, who came with the tsar with a revolver, but the emperor saw the weapon in time and dodged five bullets while running away. This latest assassination attempt had two effects: first, certain security powers were taken away from the ones feared and vaunted Third Section. They had been unable to detect or prevent far too many things of late. The other was a permanent split inside Land and Liberty.

A minority faction redubbed itself Black Repartition, and concluded violence was bad and counterproductive. They would focus on their ideological writing and thinking and propagandizing, and they disassociated themselves from the violent majority, and many of them wound up emigrating either to Switzerland or England. Those who remained, now committed to terrorism, restyled themselves Narodnaya Volya, which has always translated in English as, the People’s Will. Now shed of moderates, People’s Will was an overtly political terrorist organization, run by a central committee, and composed of somewhere north of 500 dependable members, of whom about 15% were women. They had cells in every major city, as well as key army garrisons and naval yards. In August 1879, People’s Will passed a death sentence on the tsar, and for the next two years, Russia was a running low-grade warzone. The revolutionaries would kill a governor or a police officer, the state would retaliate. Guns were being pulled out of overcoats, bombs were going off. There were shootouts in the streets, jailbreaks from the prisons, raids on homes and offices. But the goal of People’s Will was not just, kill ’em all. Ideologically the rationale for all this was an aggressive kind of anarchism, that the repressive state apparatus needed to be disorganized, it needed to be attacked until it collapsed. Once this was done, the peasants would be free to self-organize into agrarian socialism that didn’t require them to pay things like redemption payments. So People’s Will believed that political freedom was the key to social change, and political freedom was to be had by destroying the state, and most especially, by killing the tsar.

Emperor Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator, was slow to accept that this threat was really real. For personal, logistical, and political reasons, he didn’t want to alter his habits or routine, even as he avoided near miss assassination attempt number four, a bomb planted to derail his train in December of 1879 that failed only because they missed the train. Then just a few months later in February of 1880, a People’s Will operative went undercover into the Winter Palace disguised as a carpenter, and he managed to plant a bomb in the dining room that was set to host the tsar and his court. The bomb exploded on time, killing 11 and wounding 30, and missed the tsar this time only because Alexander was by chance late to dinner. That was near miss number five. And it would be the last near miss.

After the Winter Palace bombing, the emperor finally realized that this was a major crisis and he needed to respond. First he closed down the Third Section entirely. This was the end of the line for the department that had been created by his father in the wake of the Decemberist revolt back in 1826. The Third Section had been okay tracking high level bureaucrats and grumbling nobles, but were clearly incompetent when it came to tracking down these lower-class terrorists. Dealing with them would require the creation of a whole new secret political police.

The other thing the tsar did was elevate Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, who counseled the tsar to take a two-pronged approach to all this: first, ruthlessly eradicate the People’s Will and any other revolutionary group. But pair that by announcing the resumption of great reform efforts. Ultimately Loris-Melikov wanted to create a national consultative legislature modeled on and built out of the zemstvos that we talked about last week. So with one hand, choke the enemies we have. With the other, draft reforms that will stop young potential revolutionaries from thinking they need to become revolutionaries at all. The very last decree Tsar Alexander the Second signed was approval for a slate of reforms that he himself acknowledged were the first step towards a political constitution.

But he wasn’t going to live to see any of those possible reforms enacted, nor would they ever be enacted. With this new reform plan possibly having its intended effect of reducing the urgency of revolutionary action, People’s Will put everything they had into killing the tsar. On March the first 1881, the sixth time would be the charm. The tsar’s entourage was traveling along the Catherine Canal in St. Petersburg when a man pushed through the crowd and hurdled a package at the emperor’s coach. The package turned out to be a bomb. It exploded and killed some soldiers and bystanders, but only damaged the tsar’s bulletproof coach, a gift from Emperor Napoleon the Third, dontcha know. When the dazed tsar got out to survey the damage, a second man pushed through the crowd with a second bomb. He tossed it at the tsar’s feet. The explosion was point blank enough that the bomber himself was killed in the explosion. The emperor, meanwhile, was merely torn to pieces: leg blown off, guts hanging out, all that good stuff. His dying body was dragged back to the Winter Palace and the Tsar Liberator died in the very study where he had once signed the Emancipation Decree.

When he breathed his last bloody breath, he was attended by his family, including his own son Alexander, now set to rule as Tsar Alexander the Third, and his 12 year old grandson, little Nicky, who was now heir to the throne. And it would be hard not to draw a lesson from the fate of his dead grandfather, who had done all of these great reforms, and for his benevolent efforts had been blown to bits by a terrorist bomb.

But we will come back to little Nicky later, because next week, we are going to follow our now threading threads of 19th century revolutionary philosophy and the course of Russian history as they combine into a single narrative. The age of great reform died with the Tsar Liberator in 1881. Now would be a time of a ruthless reaction. But in secret corners of the empire and most especially abroad in the salons of exiled Russian radicals, the candle of revolution would be kept flickering, and it would be maintained long enough to pass it along to the next generation. A generation of boys and girls who were currently a bunch of kids running around in short pants.

But who would, in just a few years, bring the Russian Empire to its knees.