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Soon after dawn on a very cold winter morning in 1849, fifteen Russian criminals were led, in groups of three, before a firing squad. They were all insurgents against the despotism of Czar Nicholas I. They were mostly educated men, idealists in pursuit of a just society. They felt no remorse. Several were professed atheists; all were radicals. A priest carrying a cross and a Bible accompanied them. The first three were handed white gowns and shapeless caps and ordered to put them on; then they were tied to posts. The rest waited their turn. Each man in his own way prepared to die. The sun was beginning to brighten; the firing squad took aim. At just that moment, there was a signal—a roll of drums—and the rifles were lowered. A galloping horseman announced a reprieve. Although the condemned were unaware of it, the execution was staged, and the reprieve was designed to demonstrate the merciful heart of the Czar. Instead of being shot, the criminals were to be transported in shackles to a Siberian penal colony. One of the men went permanently mad. Another, fifteen years afterward, wrote “Crime and Punishment,” an impassioned assault on exactly the kind of radical faith that had brought its author to face the Czar’s riflemen that day. It was a work almost in the nature of double jeopardy: as if Fyodor Dostoyevsky in middle age—defender of the czar, enemy of revolutionary socialism—were convicting and punishing his younger self yet again for the theories that the mature novelist had come to abhor.

A new type of crime is on the American mind—foreign, remote, metaphysical, even literary, and radically different from what we are used to. Street crime, drunken crime, drug-inspired crime, crimes of passion and greed and revenge, crimes against children, gangster crime, white-collar crime, break-ins, car thefts, holdups—these are familiar, and to a degree nearly expected. They shake us up without disorienting us. They belong to our civilization; they are the darker signals of home. “Our” crime has usually been local—the stalker, the burglar, the mugger lurking in a doorway. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal sadist who kept boys’ body parts in his kitchen refrigerator, is not so very anomalous in the context of what can happen in ordinary neighborhoods: a little girl imprisoned in an underground cage; children tormented, starved, beaten to death; newborns bludgeoned; battered women, slain wives, mutilated husbands. Domesticity gone awry.

All this is recognizable and homespun. What feels alien to America is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose, who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism. Such a type has always seemed a literary construct of a particular European political coloration (“The Secret Agent,” “The Princess Casamassima”), or else has hinted at ideologies so far removed from tame Republicans and Democrats as to be literally outlandish. Then came the mysterious depredations of the Unabomber. Until the melodramatic publication of his manifesto, the Unabomber remained a riddle—unpredictable, unfathomable, sans name or habitation. In garrulous print, his credo revealed him to be a visionary. His dream was of a green and pleasant land liberated from the curse of technological proliferation. The technical élites were his targets—computer wizards like Professor David Gelernter, of Yale, a thinker in pursuit of artificial intelligence. Maimed by a package bomb, Gelernter escaped death; others did not. In the storm of interpretation that followed the Unabomber’s public declaration of principles, he was often mistaken for a kind of contemporary Luddite. This was a serious misnomer.

The nineteenth-century Luddites were hand weavers who rioted against the introduction of mechanical looms into England’s textile industry; they smashed the machines to protect their livelihoods. They were not out to kill, nor did they promulgate romantic theories about the wholesome superiority of hand looms. They were selfish, ruthlessly pragmatic, and societally unreasonable. The Unabomber, by contrast, is, above all, a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian. He hopes to restore to us cities and landscapes clear of digital complexities; he means to clean the American slate of its accumulated technostructural smudges. And if Theodore Kaczynski turns out to be guilty as charged, then we can also acknowledge him to be selfless and pure, loyal and empathic, the sort of man who befriends, without condescension, an uneducated and impoverished Mexican laborer. It is easy to think of the Unabomber, living out his principles in his pollution-free mountain cabin, as a Thoreauvian philosopher of advanced environmentalism. The philosopher is one with the murderer. The Napoleonic world-improver is one with the humble hermit of the wilderness.

In the Unabomber, America has at last brought forth its own Raskolnikov—the appealing, appalling, and disturbingly visionary murderer of “Crime and Punishment,” Dostoyevsky’s masterwork of 1866. But the Unabomber is not the only ideological criminal (though he may be the most intellectual) to have burst out of remoteness and fantasy onto unsuspecting native grounds. He is joined by the Oklahoma City bombers, the World Trade Center bombers, the abortion-clinic bombers. The Weathermen of the sixties, who bombed banks and shot police in order to release “Amerika” from the tyranny of a democratic polity, are close ideological cousins of the Russian nihilists who agitated against Alexander II, the liberalizing czar of a century before. That celebrated nineteen-sixties mantra—to make an omelette you need to break eggs—had its origin not in an affinity for violence but in the mouthwatering lure of the humanitarian omelette. Only the gastronomic image was novel. In the Russian sixties, a hundred years earlier—in 1861, the very year Alexander II freed the serfs—a radical young critic named Dimitry Pisarev called for striking “right and left” and announced, “What resists the blow is worth keeping; what flies to pieces is rubbish.” Here was the altruistic bomber’s dogma, proclaimed in the pages of an intellectual journal—and long before The New York Review of Books published on its front cover a diagram of how to construct a Molotov cocktail.

Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is a theorist who publishes a notorious essay expounding his ideas about men and society. Both are obscure loners. Both are alienated from a concerned and affectionate family. Both are tender toward outcasts and the needy. Both are élitists. Both are idealists. Both are murderers. Contemporary America, it seems, has finally caught up with czarist Russia’s most argumentative novelist.

And in “Crime and Punishment” Dostoyevsky was feverishly pursuing an argument. It was an argument against the radicals who were dominant among Russian intellectuals in the eighteen-sixties, many of them espousing nihilist views. In the universities, especially, revolutionary commotion was on the rise. Yet there was an incongruity in the timing of all these calls for violent subversion. Petersburg was no longer the seat of the czar of the repressive eighteen-forties, the tyrannical Nicholas I, against whose cruelties convulsive outrage might be justly presumed. Paradoxically, under that grim reign even the most fiery radicals were at heart gradualists who modelled their hopes on Western reformist ideas. By the rebellious sixties, the throne was held by Nicholas’s moderate son and successor, whose numerous democratic initiatives looked to be nudging Russia toward something that might eventually resemble a constitutional monarchy. The younger revolutionary theorists would have none of it. It was incomplete; it was too slow. Liberalism, they roared, was the enemy of revolution, and would impede a more definitive razing of evil.