Re-Imagining Terrorism: The Case of Late-Imperial Russia

This paper aims to draw attention to the role of the scholar's imagination in problematizing terrorism through narrative and representation by way of re-imagining traditional accounts of terrorism in late-imperial Russia. I focus on the political historiography of Lev Tikhomirov, one of the leading figures of the revolutionary organization Narodnaia Volia, and argue that the revolutionaries conceive of Russian history as a history of struggle between a Russian people of peasants and a foreign race constituting the nobility. In this war between the ruling and ruled races, or classes, terrorism emerges as a tactic of revolutionary struggle. Based on a re-reading of the debate between Leon Trotsky and Karl Kautsky on the role of terrorism for communism, I further examine the transformation of this discourse of class struggle into a discourse of State racism against the class enemy, which occurs at the moment when the revolutionaries seize state power in the Bolshevik revolution.