“To a Dog, a Dog's Death!”: Naïve Monarchism and Regicide in Imperial Russia, 1878–1884

The article examines arrest protocols drawn up from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s by local policemen investigating thousands of individuals denounced to the authorities for having voiced criticisms of the monarchy and approval of the campaign of terror in the reign of Alexander II. The discussion proceeds in two stages. It first argues that the arrest protocols constitute grounds for a revisionist challenge to the existing historiography which charts enduring, if gradually declining, popular support for the monarchy in the final decades of tsarism. It then argues for a reappraisal of the efforts by revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II to destroy the sanctity of the autocracy through the use of “propaganda by the deed.” The campaign to assassinate the tsar emerges in the arrest protocols as an effective form of political messaging that gained real purchase in the popular imagination. It prompted lower-class Russians to articulate their own local grievances in terms of popular sovereignty, natural justice and political accountability.

‘Propaganda by the Deed’ in Theory and Practice

Many analysts of the ‘terrorism’ phenomena locate the desire to cause terror as a key definitional concept: terrorists seek to cause terror. Such a conception risks obscuring the motivations for the act of terrorism, it is committed purely to terrorise. The idea that this type of political violence is an act of ‘propaganda by the deed’, however, is one commonly applied by the perpetrators themselves. The anarchist ‘terrorists’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and contemporary ‘jihadists’ both understood their acts, at least in part, as propaganda by the deed. Beyond just the creation of terror propaganda by the deed can be used as an alternative conceptual vantage point to examine and understand the motivations that lie behind acts of terrorism and the material conditions that give rise to these acts.

Anarchist Terrorism in Fin-de-Siècle France and its Borderlands

In contrast to traditional historiography, which insists on the absence of organization within the anarchist movement and on the individual character of propaganda by the deed, this chapter situates anarchist attacks in the context of a more structured movement that operated on a local, regional, national, and international scale. This movement was not, however, identical to the “Black International,” the fantasy of a small group giving orders to disciplined operatives that was dreamt up at the time by, among others, police informants and journalists. The chapter shows how, although some attacks were indeed individual and spontaneous, others were carefully prepared by local, regional, national, and cross-border networks whose members benefited from active solidarity within the movement and together managed to terrorize the Third Republic.