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

Political Violence
Terrorism
Race
Political theory

Abstract

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.