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OCR for page 69
From the Experience of the Intelligence
Services of the Russian Empire in
Combating Terrorists
Dmitry M. Aleksenko *
Commonwealth of Independent States Antiterrorist Center
The Latin word terror, meaning fear or horror, was known to residents of
the Russian Empire as far back as the first half of the nineteenth century. But
words arising from this root, such as terrorism and terrorists, have been applied
differently in Russia in different historical eras.
In encyclopedias, dictionaries, and criminal codes, definitions of terrorism
have appeared and continue to appear, varying in accordance with the demands
of the time and in relation to which infringements of societal values evoke "fear"
or "horror" in the majority of citizens. At first, these concepts included only the
"sacred person of the sovereign emperor" and members of the imperial family.
Later, they encompassed the concept of power (imperial, Soviet, state), and fi-
nally man, his rights and freedoms, which is recorded in the majority of the
constitutions of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Despite the fact the modern scholarship has not yet developed a universal
internationally accepted definition of terrorism, the essence of such occurrences
remains practically unchanged even after such a long period.
In the Commonwealth of Independent States, law enforcement agencies
make almost no use of the experience that the intelligence services of the Rus-
sian Empire amassed in their struggle against terrorism up to 1917.
The scale of terrorism in those times was enormous. It bears recalling that
during the prorevolutionary period in Russia, terrorists killed or wounded about
4500 government employees of various ranks. As for private citizens, terrorists
killed 2180 and wounded 2530.
* Translated from the Russian by Kelly Robbins.
69
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HIGH-IMPACT TERRORISM
Today, there may be a certain value in the almost forgotten experience of the
intelligence services of the Russian Empire in the struggle against the so-called
bombers from among the ranks of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists.
The Socialist-Revolutionary Party began in late 1901, when various
"neopopulist" groups both within Russia and outside its borders joined together
in a unified organization. It was the only party that officially included terrorist
tactics in its program and itself became the embodiment of terror.) The member-
ship of the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party varied at different times, but dur-
ing the revolutionary uprising of 1917, it counted up to 700,000 members.2
Adhering to the opinion common at that time in radical circles regarding the
need for professionalism in revolutionary and military activities, the Central
Committee of the SR Party in late 1901 organized a special detachment for
carrying out terrorist acts. It was known as the Combat Organization. This was a
conspiratorial organization created on the basis of strong convictions, in which
its members' loyalty to each other was valued more highly than their devotion to
the party.
In the first terrorist acts carried out by members of the Combat Organization
(the murder of Internal Affairs Minister Sipyagin on April 22, 1902, by Kiev
University student S.V. Balmashev; the attempt on the life of Chief Procurator of
the Holy Synod K.P. Pobedonostsev at Sipyagin's funeral; the attempt on the life
of Kharkov Governor-General I.M. Obolensky on July 29, 1902; and others), the
militants used firearms and targeted those specific Russian imperial officials whom
the party's Central Committee felt were guilty of crimes against the people. This
raised the authority of the SRs in revolutionary circles and created in the eyes of
the common people an image of the "SR hero-terrorist, sacrificing his life in the
struggle for the people's happiness." The word "terrorist" took on a positive
aspect. Hundreds of young revolutionaries in Russia dreamed of becoming terror-
ists and joining the Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
In their newspapers, brochures, and proclamations, SR theoreticians argued
that the "crowd" was powerless against the autocracy. Against the "crowd," the
autocracy could use the police and gendarmes, but against individual "uncatch-
able" terrorists, there was no force that could help.3
Terrorism in those years was for many simple and understandable, a most
rational and even humane method, and terrorist revolution was more democratic
and even humane. Indeed, if the choice were between thousands of victims of
mass revolution, or a precisely inflicted strike on those individuals specifically
responsible for the people's sufferings ....
At that time, the tsarist authorities focused serious attention on matters re-
garding the protection of gunpowder and other explosives produced in Russia,
which practically ruled out the possibility of their theft from military facilities,
plants, and laboratories. Therefore, foreign countries were the primary source
from which terrorists could obtain explosives. But getting explosives across the
border was extremely difficult, so terrorists began manufacturing the substances
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TERRORISM AND THE LAW
71
themselves. The membership of the Combat Organization began to include spe-
cialists in manufacturing dynamite bombs, such as Dora Brilliant, Aleksei Poko-
tilov, Maksimilian Shveitser, and others. However, their poor knowledge of
chemistry and particularly of the fine points of the processes of nitration and
chemical stabilization of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, the basic components
of dynamite, made it impossible for the terrorists to make high-quality explosive
devices. Sometimes, this even led to the deaths of the terrorists themselves.
Thus, on March 31, 1904, Aleksei Pokotilov was killed while making a
bomb in the Northern Hotel in St. Petersburg. The same fate befell Maksimilian
Shveitser on February 26, 1905, at the Bristol Hotel. In both cases, the destruc-
tive force of the explosions was enormous: the rooms in which the bomb makers
were located were destroyed, along with the adjoining rooms, and the bodies of
the terrorists were blown to pieces.4
However, this did not stop the terrorists. In July 1904, they used a dynamite
bomb in the assassination of Minister of Internal Affairs V. Plehve.
This terrorist act was planned under the direct leadership of Azef who
headed the Combat Organization after the arrest of Gershuni.
Because of his policies, Plehve was universally hated by the revolutionar-
ies, who scornfully called him "Cain" in their circles. He was accused of harsh-
ly suppressing peasant uprisings in Poltava and Kharkov provinces, imposing
strict programs of Russification, and organizing pogroms against the Jews. On
June 15, 1904, when Plehve was heading off for his latest audience with the
Tsar, the militant Yegor Sazonov (known by the nickname "Avel"J threw a
bomb into the minister's carriage. Plehve and his driver were literally blown to
pieces. Seven other people were injured in the blast, including guards, random
passersby, and the terrorist himself 5
In order to justify this barbaric act, the SR Central Committee issued
several appeals in connection with Plehve's murder: "To All Workers, " "July
15, " "To the Entire Russian People, " and "Eulogy for a Court Favorite. " In
these documents, the SRs attempted to justify the terror and viewed the acts as
capable of inspiring revolutionary activity even among the less active elements
of society.
The next "big" terrorist act of the Combat Organization was the murder
of the Governor-General of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the
uncle of Nicholas II.
The SRs decided to carry out this act as revenge against the governor for
the so-called Khodyn disaster, at which 1389 people were killed and 1300
injured during the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896, and for the mass arrests,
antisemitism, and persecution of the progressive press. The leaders of the SR
Party's Central Committee understood that random casualties resulting from a
terrorist act involving the use of explosive devices would reduce its political
effect. However, the great destructive power of dynamite bombs guaranteed
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HIGH-IMPACT TERRORISM
success and practically ruled out the possibility that the victims marked by the
terrorists would receive only minor injuries. This therefore determined the se-
lection of dynamite as the main weapon in the struggle for "democracy. "
On February 2, 1905, the SR militant Ivan Kalyuev was standing in front
of the Bolshoi Theater and already had his bomb in hand and his arm raised,
ready to make the fatal throw into the Grand Duke's carriage. However, seeing
that the Grand Duke was accompanied by his wife Elizabeth and children Mar-
ia and Dmitry, he decided to postpone the terrorist act. Two days later, at the
Spassky Gates, he threw the bomb into the window of the Grand Duke's car-
riage, blowing up Sergei and seriously wounding the driver and Kalyuev him-
self The terrorist was arrested, condemned, and on April 5, 1905, hung at the
Schlusselberg Fortress. At his trial, Kalyuev spoke out with accusations against
the government and declared that acts of terrorism "are history's judgment
against you .... " Kalyuev's speech at the trial was widely distributed by the
SRs for propaganda purposes.6
These two powerful explosions were in fact the last major successful acts by
the Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. They spurred the
creation and activization of combat units in the Bialystok, Volyn, Dvinsk
(Daugavpils), Vitebsk, Odessa, Gomel, Krasnoyarsk, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod,
Moscow, and Tbilisi committees of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. These
brigades became actively involved in the revolutionary uprisings that swept Rus-
sia in 1905, and they used dynamite bombs fairly frequently. According to police
data, they carried out more than 30 terrorist acts during this period.7
Besides the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the widespread practice of using ex-
plosive devices was also observed among the anarchists, who advanced and put
into practice the slogan "Death to the Bourgeoisie." The most famous instance
in which this slogan was carried out occurred on December 17, 1905, in the city
of Odessa, when anarchists threw bombs into the Libman Cafe, a place where, in
their opinion, the bourgeoisie gathered. As a result, about a dozen people were
killed, many were wounded, and the building itself suffered enormous damage.
In 1905-1906, in the defense of workers' rights, anarchists made a practice of
throwing bombs into streetcars and trains that were operating during strikes.
They also blew up several merchant steamers and killed two captains whom the
workers disliked.8
The use of explosive devices objectively led to the killings not only of those
whom the revolutionaries had "condemned to death, " but also of guards, adju-
tants, drivers, and random passersby, which was considered a grave sin even
among the revolutionaries who believed in God. This gave the police both a
moral and a religious basis for the recruitment and re-recruitment of God-
fearing revolutionaries as secret agents.
In the struggle against the terrorist bombers, the police and gendarmes used
all the resources of the state and its fundamental institutions. Their most impor-
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TERRORISM AND THE LAW
73
tent basic method was infiltration and the recruitment of agents within revolu-
tionary organizations. According to incomplete calculations, there were about
6500 agents, provocateurs, and other political investigations specialists operat-
ing in various political parties and organizations in the Russian Empire at the
start of the twentieth century. The difficult situation in which the intelligence
services of the time found themselves was occasioned by the fact that the imperi-
al ruling circles were not always able to define their political goals or the means
of achieving them, even under the intensifying crisis conditions. Therefore, the
police and gendarmes often set priorities themselves, at times even at the risk of
the lives of high-ranking government officials and members of the imperial fam-
ily. Matters concerning the security of the secret agents were of top priority, and
maintaining the strong positions of agents within the terrorist organizations of
the Socialist-Revolutionaries was considered more important than preventing
assassinations, even against officials of the government.9
One example of this was the case of the agent Evno Azef who operated in
revolutionary circles for about 15 years. From 1893 on, he was an agent of the
police department. As a student in a German polytechnic school, he took the
initiative of offering his services to the police department at the rate of 50
rubles per month, after which he attached himself to a foreign group calling
itself the Union of Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries. He knew about the major-
ity of terrorist acts being planned by the Sits, but he did not always report to his
bosses about them. Nevertheless, the police paid him well for his services. In
1905, Azef's base salary from the police department totaled 600 rubles per
month, and with "travel per diem" and "bonuses" the total exceeded 1000
rubles, which at that time was even higher than the salary of the governor. As a
"professional" revolutionary, Azef received 120 rubles per month from the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party. In this sense he could in all honesty be called a
"professional agent" for the police, as he received almost ten times more per
month from his job as an agent than from his "official source of income .... "
After he was exposed as an agent in 1908, Azev J?ed to Germany, where he
married a German woman and lived comfortably on the money he "earned"
from the police and stole from the Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revo-
lutionaries. He died there in Germany in 1918.1°
Another method used in fighting the terrorists was the monitoring of the
basic flow of information in the Russian Empire. The police department man-
aged an efficiently operating system for inspecting the correspondence of for-
eigners and Russian subjects suspected of harboring antigovernment sentiments.
Inspection of correspondence was one component in the fight against terrorism.
So-called black offices, in which police personnel inspected letters, operated in
the post offices of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov,
Vilnius, Tbilisi, Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk. On average, the police opened up
to 380,000 envelopes per year in their search for operational information on the
activities of revolutionary terrorists. ~ ~
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HIGH-IMPACT TERRORISM
Terrorist acts involving the use of explosive devices also spurred the tsarist
authorities to apply radical legislative measures, which may be categorized as a
third method in the fight against the terrorist bombers.
On August 12, 1906, an attempt was made on the life of Council of Ministers
Chairman and Minister of Internal Affairs P. Stolypin, in which 25 people were
killed (including even the terrorists) and 32 injured (including Stolypin's 3-year-
old son and 14-year-old daughter) by the explosion of dynamite bombs thrown by
terrorists into the drawing room of the minister's dacha. In the wake of this inci-
dent, the government took advantage of Article 87 in the Fundamental Laws,
which permitted the issuance of urgent decrees in the absence of ratification by
legislative organs (since the Second Duma had not yet been elected). Thus, on
August 19, 1906, the government, with the tsar's approval, passed on an emergen-
cy basis a law making civilians subject to trial by military field courts.
According to this law, governors and military district commanders in areas
under martial law or a state of emergency had the right to hold for military trial
those individuals whose participation in such crimes as production, storage, or
use of explosive devices, terrorist attacks and murders, armed attacks on govern-
ment officials, or other acts of resistance was so obvious that it did not require
detailed investigation.
Each such militaryfield court consisted of five officer judges appointed by
the local commander. Defendants had the right to call witnesses, but they did
not have a right to legal assistance. Court sessions were held behind closed
doors. Cases in such courts were heard within 24 hours from the time of arrest,
sentences were handed down within 48 hours, there were no appeals, and sen-
tences were carried out within 24 hours after verdicts were rendered. In the
majority of cases, these courts issued sentences of either death or a long period
of hard labor. In the eight months from the time this law was enacted until its
validity was terminated in April 1907, over a thousand terrorists were shot or
hung.
Along with the military field courts, the regular military and civilian courts
continued to function. Although their sentences were lighter, especially in cases
involving women and minors, they too, at Stolypin's order, instituted harsher
trial procedures.
The intensity of the struggle against revolutionary terrorism may be judged
from the following data: in 1908 and 1909 in Russia, 16,440 civilians and
military personnel were convictedfor political crimes, including armed attacks,
of whom 3682 were condemned to death and 4517 to hard labor.12 The scale of
the revolutionary terror that gripped the Russian Empire in the early twentieth
century may be judged by the following data from the Police Department. From
1902 to 1911, revolutionaries carried out 263 terrorist acts. The victims of
these acts were 2 ministers, 33 governors, governors-general, or vice-gover-
nors, 16 town governors, district division heads, police chiefs, public prosecu-
tors, assistant prosecutors, or heads of police investigations divisions, 7 gener-
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TERRORISM AND THE LAW
als or admirals, 15 colonels, 8 barristers, and 26 spies or provocateurs. Among
the direct perpetrators of terrorist acts were 62 workers, 14 representatives of
the intelligentsia, 9 peasants, and 18 high school or university students.
75
Placed in opposition to the terrorists by the police and gendarmes, this sys-
tem of measures included both means of obtaining operational information and
strengthening agents' positions in revolutionary circles (to break them down
from the inside) as well as means for implementing legislative and judicial poli-
cies and practices merciless to terronsts. By 1910, it allowed the tsanst govern-
ment to seriously break the wave of revolutionary terror and explosions that had
gripped Russia at the start of the twentieth century.
The political results of the terror earned out by the Socialist-Revolutionanes
turned out to be zero. The exposure of the agent Azev was an especially strong
blow to the SR Party, after which it in fact broke apart into separate uncoordinat-
ed groups. After this, some of the SRs took up mysticism, engaging in "God-
seeking" or "God-building."
In particular, this category included Azef's deputy in the Combat Organiza-
tion of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, B. Savinkov, who under the pseudonym
V. Ropshin published a novel in Paris entitled Pale Horse. In the book, he heaps
scorn on the revolution and depicts the terrorists themselves in an unfavorable
light. B. Savinkov took the name of the book from the Apocalypse, in which the
description of the Last Judgment mentions the appearance of a "pale horse"
whose rider will be death . . 13
. .
NOTES
1. Geifman, op. cit., p. 75.
2. Razakov, F. 1997. Century of Terror. Moscow, p. 10.
3. Gusev, K.V. 1992. Knights of Terror. Moscow, p. 19.
4. Gusev, K.V. 1995. The SR Party from Petit Bourgeois Revolutionarism to Counterrevolu-
tion. Moscow, p. 59.
5. Geifman, op. cit., p. 192.
6. Kuras, L. 1998. Stories from the History of the State Security Agencies of the Republic of
Buryatia. Ulan-Ude-Irkutsk, p. 19.
7. Aldanov, M.A. 1991. Collected Works. Moscow, Vol. 6, pp. 449-486.
8. Bolsheviks. Documents from the History of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1916 from the Former
Moscow Police Department. 1990. Moscow, p. 8.
9. Geifman, op. cit., p. 317.
10. Gusev, K. V. 1995. The SR Party from Petit Bourgeois Revolutionarism to Counterrevolu-
tion. Moscow, p. 75.
11. Bolsheviks. Documents from the History of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1916 from the Former
Moscow Police Department. 1990. Moscow, p. 8.
12. Geifman, op. cit., p. 317.
13. Gusev, K.V. 1995. The SR Party from Petit Bourgeois Revolutionarism to Counterrevolu-
tion. Moscow, p. 75.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
terrorist acts
