The history of revolutionary terrorism in Russia should perhaps begin with reference to the so-called Decembrists*. Several of the officers who were attracted by republicanism in the years after the Napoleonic Wars and who mutinied in December 1825 on the death of Alexander I (1801–25) were convinced of the necessity of regicide. Pavel Pestel, for example, contemplated the creation of a suicide squad, which would kill the tsar and other members of the royal family, as a necessary first step toward establishing a republic. The example of Brutus was often cited in this period in defense of tyrannicide. The Decembrist Revolt was quickly crushed, five of its ringleaders were executed, many other Decembrists were exiled to Siberia, and political dissent was effectively suppressed throughout the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55). However, in the reign of Alexander II (1855–81), a vigorous revolutionary movement did unfold and it soon began to be punctuated by acts of violence, to such an extent that imperial Russia, during the last fifty years of its existence, may be seen as the place where modern terrorism was born. This essay will characterize the intellectual and cultural background to the development of the revolutionary movement, trace the movement's early history, especially its terrorist strand, and consider Dostoevsky's response to these phenomena during the last two decades of his life.

Intellectual rebellion

In the freer intellectual climate that prevailed during the early years of the reign of Alexander II, after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1853–6), the Russian intelligentsia* became sharply polarized. A young generation of radical thinkers, led by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, and, in the mid-1860s, Dmitry Pisarev, expressed impatience with the older generation that had begun to flourish in the 1840s but whose idealism and eloquence had yet to yield any tangible social benefits for non-noble classes in the political conditions of autocratic Russia. Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and other thinkers of their generation set about challenging what they saw as the now useless clutter of established religious, moral, and aesthetic beliefs, or “superstitions” and “prejudices,” as they called them. They denied that human beings had a spiritual dimension or altruistic impulses. On the contrary, the world consisted only of matter, they insisted, and there was no God. Humans invariably behaved according to self-interest.