The Assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881

ISIS and The History of Russian Terrorism

Lessons from the Pioneers of Blowing Stuff Up in Public

Too much is written about ISIS. To an outsider, it would seem that the extent of Western media coverage is, in its way, a form of self-flagellation — atonement for having missed the swift rise of our scariest nightmare. Perhaps. More likely, in ISIS our media has found click-bait par excellence.

What makes us click on articles with ISIS-related titles (like this one) so eagerly is the construction of the radical group in our collective imagination as evil beyond historical comparison, harboring a blood thirst that is so total and anachronistic, we compare the perpetrators not to other humans but to animals. This monolithic evil fascinates us.

Of course, ISIS villainy is plain and undeniable. It is a scourge that rips the fabric of society just as it destroys the bodies of the men and women who wove it. Behind its peculiar approach to worshipping God by separating body parts that work better together (head; body) is a religious zeal that blinds, that blocks the capacity for human empathy. There is no denying that. But whereas early, measured coverage of it could have effectively informed policy decisions, construing ISIS today as worse than anything we have ever seen before plays into the hands of ISIS strategists, seeking as they do to spread the State’s message and recruit ever more fighters. It also fosters a culture of paranoia that can be conducive to massive policy blunders.

Our collective memory is too damn short is the cry of the historian, and it is one we must heed more often. Instead of construing the Islamist group’s brand of evil as unprecedented, let us turn back to the pages of the past. There we will find that, while ISIS presents a threat that must be taken very seriously, it is far from unique and that, by studying its predecessors, we can learn to better understand it.

That ISIS is a variation on an existing theme within the modern Middle Eastern terrorist tradition is hardly surprising. Less expected, perhaps, is that the group has much in common with a peculiar and very disparate group of zealots: the original Russian radicals.

— —

Modern terrorism was not born in the Middle East. It was delivered on the vast Russian steppe, its midwives in frock coats and Homburg hats. The deliverers belie the archetype of the modern-day terrorist. Well educated, multi-lingual and pale as aristocrats: thus looked the original mujahedeen. And yet, these men and women came to be as feared by their enemies as they were revered by the generations of radicals that followed them.

In the middle of the nineteenth-century, armed with homemade bombs, misfiring guns and ominous-sounding names like the Men of the Sixties, a handful of activists ignited the spirit of radical revolution in Russia. If one man must be granted the title of the first modern jihadist, it would certainly be Dmitry Karakozov, the son of a minor nobleman educated at — and expelled from — both Kazan University and the prestigious Moscow State University. This is not to say he was successful. His act of defiance was the first in a long tradition of spectacular, Chaplin-esque failures in the history of terrorism, disciples of which include such master strategists as the Underwear Bomber and the guys whose planned attack on Fort Dix was foiled when they submitted their terrorist training videos to Circuit City to be copied onto a DVD.

Karakazov’s attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II in 1866, complete with a suicide note-cum-manifesto that was lost in the mail, failed thanks to a nearby peasant whose unsuspecting elbow happened to deflect the shooter’s gun. Instead of firing another round, Karakazov attempted to bolt but, not having made an escape plan, was caught by police forces following a very short chase. However, where it failed in execution, the plan succeeded in legacy. The first attempted public regicide in Russian history was a watershed moment, etching violent political opposition into the nation’s lexicon of civil struggle. The defensive paranoia into which the regime was thrown revealed deep insecurities lurking beneath the surface.

Paradoxically, the Tsarist counter-offensive galvanized the opposition. Having realized the unsettling effect of propaganda by deed, many radical cells came into existence over the following decade. Of these, the most influential by far was the Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), founded in 1878 by a group of middle and upper class intellectuals with the express purpose of fighting for peasant and worker rights. Although some of its early exploits were hilariously misguided, it is generally considered the first large-scale, organized terrorist group in modern times. They gained notoriety for their use of dynamite and other weapons with a large area of effect to maximize both damage and public spectacle. In 1881, its operatives orchestrated an exceedingly bloody public attack on the tsar’s entourage, successfully assassinating Alexander II and killing many bystanders in the process.

Between the turn of the century and 1917, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) usurped the terrorist mantle from Narodnaya Volya. Formed in late 1901, the SRs carried out their attacks so extensively, and had such an orthodox following, that they came to be known as the party of terror. They precipitated the second wave of terrorism in 1902 with the murder of Dimitry Sipyagin, the Minister of the Interior. Aside from very public assassinations of ministers, the socialist radicals also murdered anyone they deemed complicit in the regime’s mechanism of oppression. Cossacks, local officials, policemen, “capitalists”: few were safe. Following the 1905 revolution, bombings and assassinations instigated by socialist radicals escalated further. By the time of the Great War, terrorist acts involving bombings or public assassinations came to be known internationally as the Russian Method.

The force driving the Russian radicalist enterprise was Marxism. Its visions of utopia begat fanaticism couched in Marxist terms. Terror, one SR manifesto declared, aims to “awaken even the sleepiest philistines and force them to think politically” — with the goal of ultimately usurping power from their imperialist-capitalist overlords. In other words, Russian radical leaders found in Marxism an ideology that vindicates violent resistance, and in violent resistance they saw a powerful weapon for forging mass movements.

— —

In the previous sentence, one need only substitute ISIS for Russian radical and Islam for Marxism, to find that two socio-political movements, geographically remote and more than a century apart, are remarkably similar. There is little doubt that ISIS fighters, much like the original Russian extremists, are religiously devoted to their ideologies and do not conceive of them merely as justifications for violence. And yet, through their words and actions, both have made it clear that they see violence as an effective tool of revolution, and that selective reading of their respective sacred texts provides the framework for popularizing that attitude. Violence today, utopia tomorrow, the riff goes.

Here the similarities don’t end. The Russian radicals taught ISIS about the important role of office politics in the terrorizing enterprise. The SR’s original hierarchical division of labor between theoreticians (upper management), organizers (middle management), and practitioners (the cogs) is the administrative blueprint that underpins ISIS operations today. At the top reside radical intellectuals: just as ISIS is led by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi who holds a PhD in Islamic Studies, so too were the Russian extremist groups founded and steered by lawyers, doctors and professors of natural science, some of whom were laureates of international awards and many of whom became, after the revolution, the intellectual vanguard of the new state. The opposite end of the organizational pyramids have much in common too, populated as they tend to be by disillusioned members of the working class seduced by the radicals’ smooth language of promise.

The two are similar, too, in their self-conception. In the history of violent political movements, few were self-consciously extremist. Neither Thomas Cromwell nor Robespierre expected to become images of terror incarnate. In contrast, Al-Baghdadi and Russian radical heresiarchs from Nikolai Morozov to Lenin and Trotsky embraced this role, proudly distinguishing themselves by their conviction that committing atrocities on a massive scale is not only a permissible but also a necessary step towards the utopian mirages they project. With this dogma as a central tenet, power and status become commensurate with willingness to commit acts of violence. Terror, therefore, comes to be worshipped as an end in itself.

Everything else aside, this is a brilliant marketing strategy. ISIS and socialist radical theoreticians recognized that the elements of the mainstream/margins binary define themselves by their counterpart — or what they are not. In explicitly worshipping terror, an exercise that supposedly stands in direct opposition to mainstream values, the two groups create for the mainstream a clear and self-delimiting enemy. In doing so, they also establish clearly marked hubs that attract all those who feel themselves marginalized from the mainstream. We ought not be so surprised, then, that countless Western citizens have smuggled themselves into Syria: they are moving, ultimately, in search of a home.

Yes, savvy marketing may bring them to ISIS. But the topic of ISIS’ prodigious use of social media for recruitment is a horse that, if not dead, has been beaten dangerously close to it, and I will beat it no further. The jury is back and the verdict is clear: ISIS is unique among its peers today and throughout history for its ability to capitalize on contemporary modes of communication. Its 140-character fluency, sleek jihadi magazines and websites, and high-definition videos constitute a veritable marketing empire.

They have certainly made powerful use of the tools available to them. But their primacy here is illusory. Sure, compared to the grainy Taliban footage of high-pitched threats echoing against the rocky mountains of Kandahar, ISIS is superior. But the Russian radicals understood the importance of viral marketing long before the Islamic State sent out its first tweet. Every radical group in nineteenth century Russia had its own publication circulated clandestinely throughout cities and villages. The publications were not simply manifestos. They used poems, pictures and parables (and never shunned gore) because they recognized in the popular marketing tools of the day the potential to reach a wide audience by entertaining, not just preaching. And when printers refused to take magazine orders for fear of official retribution, the revolutionaries would often write them out by hand, copy after copy — reflecting a keen sense for the importance of spreading the revolutionary message in whatever form available.

In the absence of televised news and the internet, Russian radicals pioneered the genre to which ISIS’ viral beheading videos belong. They were among the first to recognize the potential inherent in exposing large audiences to gruesome displays of violence. The perpetrators of violent attacks were directing spectacles that promised an extremely realistic experience for its audience. Unlike early Irish terrorists, the Russians always chose the highest risk methods: those that would cause the biggest audiovisual impact.

A weapon favored by Russian radicals was a grenade made of kerosene camps filled with nitroglycerine. These exploded on impact, tearing apart flesh and bone in a large radius and leaving in their wake a fiery post-bellum. What is more HD, what is more jarring, than blood-splattered limbs laid bare in front of you? What eyewitness would not write home about it? This is the tradition that ISIS continues today.

And neither are ISIS fighters uniquely cruel. The Russian radicals’ early disregard for ‘collateral’ damage and torture of kidnapped officials set the stage for later revolutionary viciousness. In the midst of the civil war that marked the establishment of the first socialist state, revolutionaries committed atrocities that were so far from civil, they would make even the most battle-hardened jihadist ask if you know any good therapists. This period in Soviet history came to be known, appropriately, as the Red Terror.

Curiously, revolutionary fighters are conceived of in both mythologies in rather similar terms. Islamic State training videos make clear that they do not view themselves as guerilla warriors, but rather as an army of dedicated soldiers classed by military rank. They have adopted a Spartan lifestyle (which, in any case, is in line with Salafist dogma) and dedicated themselves to a cause greater than themselves: the construction of an Islamic caliphate. The fanaticism with which ISIS fighters have embraced this cause, the language of dedication that echoes through every megaphone in the State, is reminiscent of the provocative catechism of Russian radical leader Sergey Nechayev:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests…his entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion — the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose — to destroy it.

Does this not sound like something directly out of an Islamic State pamphlet?

— —

In the summer of 1918, the United States, the British Empire and their allies began sending troops and supplies in response to the nascent threat of communism embodied by the Bolsheviks. However, facing continued fighting on the Western Front and pressure at home, the Western powers cut their involvement soon after. For the Bolsheviks this was a peach of an opportunity and they gobbled it whole: through a campaign of organized violence, they consolidated their power and established the Soviet Union.

History shows that ruthlessness and brutality, when successful, are emboldened. Where violence plays an instrumental role in the destruction of the ancien regime, it gets woven into the political fabric of the group that comes to replace it. The Russian revolutionaries lived by the sword (and the nitroglycerine bomb), built the Soviet State by the sword and ruled it, also by the sword.

The survival of the Russian revolutionaries also hinged on the persistence of a common, overwhelming enemy. Even when the Tsarist regime has been plowed under and salt strewn in its furrows, new ‘enemies’ kept popping up. After the Whites had been vanquished in the civil war, it was capitalists — very broadly defined — in the late ‘20s, non-impoverished peasants in the early ‘30s, Communist party members and military commanders in the late ‘30s, Jews in the late ‘40s and so on.

The two governing characteristics of a state founded on radical terrorism — the recourse to violence as state policy and the search for enemies, real or imaginary, who would bear its brunt — were as much characteristics of the Soviet Union as it is, perhaps to a lesser extent, of the Russian state today. A precedent was established a century ago and has been reinforced decade after decade. It worked well in 1956 and 1968. Problems arose for the leadership when force wasn’t applied, like 1989. And so, is it surprising that Russian leaders, having grown up in an environment where violence is a legitimate and effective tool of power consolidation, resort to it when people protest in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg today?

The same two characteristics are true of ISIS today. And again, Western powers are involved in a conflict with an ideologically radical movement that thrives on terror and that is on the cusp of becoming a de facto state. The Soviet experience clues us into what a state like that might look like — and what role it might play in the region.

The legacy of ISIS violence far surpasses the immediate victims: it teaches an entire generation of future leaders that mass brutality makes things happen. That it is rewarded with land and autonomy. For those living in Iraq and Syria today, ISIS violence piles on top of years of fighting and bloodshed. My fear is that the West will allow this conflict to simmer and draw out like countless others. The longer the conflict lasts, the harder it will be to unlearn the lessons of ISIS’ success, and the more difficult it will be to convince those that bear witness to the quotidian horrors it presents that this is not the new normal — that political change can come about even if you leave your guns at home.