illustration by MGLima-Hipergrafia Studio Sept. 25, 2025, reproduction rights free to noncommercial sites.

The trial of the Russian terrorists [Grigori Andreyevich] Gershuni and his comrades has only now reached its end, after attracting so much attention in Germany and elsewhere. Various rumors about the trial did the rounds through the press. First, we heard that the leader of the sentenced group, Gershuni, had begged on his knees for mercy. We then heard that the man responsible for the assassination attempt on Count [Ivan Mikhailovich] Obolensky, [Thomas] Kachura, had made strongly incriminating statements about his comrades.^[1] These were refuted, and finally the execution of three of the accused was reported as having already taken place. It now turns out that those who were supposedly put to death, as the Berliner Tageblatt felt its business to report, actually had their sentences commuted to “life imprisonment.”  Before the Russian government is able to patch its lies together for its official report, we can draw closer conclusions for ourselves by using the unabridged official text of the court indictment, which [Peter] Struve’s own journal Osvobozhdenie [Liberation] journal has published….

It is of course a commonplace that traitors like Lieutenant Grigoryev and cowards like poor little Kachura have always existed and will continue to exist in all revolutionary struggles. But this is particularly so when it comes to the terrorist struggle in Russia, which places the greatest demands on the strength of souls and the capacity for self-sacrifice of its participants.

Yet this court case, based as it is on mindless betrayals, leaves us with the indubitable impression that terrorist activities in Russia are imbued with a major internal weakness. When you attempt to form an overall and detailed picture of the activities of the terrorist organizations, you are forced to conclude that really only one man, gifted with extraordinary charisma, really mattered—and that was Gershuni. He surrounded himself with what was essentially a revolutionary illusion, as opposed to a serious movement and organization. In the indictment all five of the accused were charged with belonging to the much talked about “Boyevaya Organisazia” or “Combat Organization.” But by the prosecution’s very own documents, it is clear that the fact that Grigoryev, Kachura and Weizenfeld “belonged’ to this “Combat Organization” only means that they communicated regularly with Gershuni—and with him alone—who sometimes turned up in Petersburg, sometimes in Kiev, and sometimes in Kharkov. Yet aside from that, they didn’t have the faintest clue as to the composition, function, or methods of this mysterious “organization.” Perhaps this whole “organization” did not consist of much more than Gershuni himself…

Overall, the trial of Gershuni and his comrades leaves us with a distinct impression of the extent to which the terrorist movement in Russia has lost the ground beneath its feet, and is hanging, disconnected, in the air. It can hardly be doubted that the first assassinations by [Michael] Karpovich and Balmashkov in 1901 and 1902 were anything more than spontaneous and isolated acts of bitterness and of self-defense. The first eruptions that harnessed oppositional and revolutionary energy in Russian society occurred by themselves, like the shot fired by Vera Zasulich at Trepov in 1878;^[2] simple reactions, necessitated by nature, against the inhumane and unbearable bestial acts that various servants of absolutism were committing. Society was not expecting them, yet they worked immediately like a liberating act of standing on our own two feet and of salvation from the coarse atmosphere of slavishly holding our tongues and tolerating all the impertinences of an animalistic and animalizing regime.

We also believe that such spontaneous actions of self-defense will be entirely understood by all civilized humans who have as much as half a clue about Russian absolutism’s atrocities—that is, all people who don’t see the world from the perspective of a member of the Prussian government, for whom only ruling-class persons are sacred and only their dignity is inviolable. Our Privy Councilors know only too well how to hound the African Hereros[3] and the “pigtailed Chinese,” calling for “revenge campaigns” for the death of every German colonial adventurer to be “atoned” by not one but by thousands of foreign lives. They understand their screams for revenge as being for “German honor,” as soon as someone in Honolulu or Patagonia dares as much as look at the Germans disapprovingly. They simply do not understand that the Russian people—whose well-being and human dignity is trampled upon daily by their government in the most horrific way—will vent their spleen from time to time, in isolated, violent acts.

We, on the other hand, entirely grasp these incidents. It is however quite a different matter how such terrorist acts should be judged in terms of a method of political struggle. And we must say that the rise of terrorism in Russia is always a sign of the revolutionary movement’s weakness, even if this sounds paradoxical. The need to vent stored-up bitterness and torment against individual supporters of absolutism only occurs during those moments when no serious mass movement is expressing itself in a normal manner. It acts as a safety valve for revolutionary energy and oppositional spirit. The use of terrorist tactics actually arose from the disappointments caused by the failed attempts to bring a peasant mass movement to life in the 1870s.

Viewed from still another perspective, the terrorist struggle conveys the proof of its internal weakness as a political undertaking. To reiterate—Russian terrorism’s plan is to intimidate absolutism through fear of an invisible and secretive revolutionary power to force it to grant concessions, or even to abdicate. Yet it is highly naive to believe that any government would capitulate to an invisible enemy that does no more than lead a half-mystical existence. It will only capitulate to a visible, tangible and real power that can justifiably strike awe and respect into it. And such a power can only be a fully class-conscious people’s movement, which enters the stage as an expression of historical necessities ripened over time. In contrast, as so strikingly demonstrated by the Gershuni trial, a tiny circle of people suffices for a terrorist movement. We have here individuals who operate totally disengaged from the country’s social development and its social movements. Absolutism can divine its weakness only too easily….

The working classes’ daily political struggle will only be severely damaged and endangered by terrorists, as terror would nonetheless succeed in sucking power away from the workers’ movement and stoking false illusions. Even from its own point of view, terror cannot draw fresh energy from the workers’ movement in Russia today. Quite the contrary. When influenced by the atmosphere of the workers’ movements, terror naturally loses its inner bearings, its inner sense of self-belief, and its appeal to new recruits.

Individual terrorist acts will continue to occur in Russia, and will probably continue to occur for as long as tsarist absolutism exists, because—and we allow ourselves to say this to Messieurs [Bernhard von] Bülow, [Karl Heinrich von] Schönstedt and [Oswald von] Richthofen, as they hunt down scroungers, conspirators and anarchists—absolutism in Russia produces spontaneous terror, in a manner identical to how the bourgeoisie’s class hegemony in Western Europe produces anarchy. Yet just as Social Democracy is here the only real bulwark against the mad joke of anarchy, so has the Russian workers’ movement—that has grown in the spirit of Marxism—shown itself to be the safest method against the illusions of terrorism. The period of systematic terror in Russia is over, and it is precisely this that is made evident by the profoundly tragic trial of Gershuni and his comrades.

[1] After helping to form the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1901, Gershuni founded the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization in 1902 with the aim of assassinating tsarist officials. In that year he planned the assassination of Sipyagin, Minister of the Interior, and Bogdanowich, Governor of Ufa. His effort to assassinate Obolensky was a failure. In 1908 (following Gershuni’s death) the Combat Organization was disbanded. For more on Gershuni, see Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov, Grigori Gershuni: Zayn lebn un tetikayt (His Life and Activities) (New York: Institute of Jewish Education, 1934) and Gershuni’s memoir, Iz nedavni’ag’ proshlago (From the Recent Past) (St. Petersburg, 1907).

[2] On January 24, 1878 Zasulich, then a member of the People’s Will organization, attempted to assassinate Colonel Fyodor Trepov, Governor of St. Petersburg. He was widely hated for helping to suppress the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 and for his extreme brutality. Trepov survived the attempt, but Zasulich was later found not guilty at her trial. It marked a turning point in the development of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire.

[3] The Hereros are an African people living in what was then known by Europeans as South West Africa; today it is Namibia. German colonists began entering their territory in 1892 and a genocidal conflict began almost at once. German reprisals against Herero resistance were brutal, resulting in the near genocidal destruction of their society. It is estimated that of the 100,000 Herero people living at the time of contact, the German army may have killed 85,000.