1. Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that it is forgetfulness that is indispensable: “Thus even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows: but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis, 1957), 6-7.

2. http://www.unodc.org/unodc/terrorism_definitions.html (accessed 18 July 2007; no longer available). The United Nations had provisionally adopted the definition provided by the political scientist Alex Schmid. Schmid's definition, which originated in his monograph study with Janny de Graaf, Violence as Communication: Insurgent Terrorism and the Western Neius Media (London, 1982) must also be historicized since it most closely describes practices of terrorism post-World War II (post-1960s). U.N. member nations have been unable to arrive at a definition of terrorism due to disagreement regarding who may be considered a terrorist, best expressed in the by now old saw: “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”

3. The scholarly literature on terrorism is understandably voluminous, and the attempts to define it are as legion as glaring omissions of definition. Authors Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: TheFollies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York, 1996) are most careful when they admonish that terrorism must be defined in its historical and cultural specificity (99). Feliks Gross offers a discerning and extremely useful typology of terrorisms in his Violence in Politics: Terror and Political Assassination in Eastern Europe and Russia (The Hague, 1972), 13, 14. The most comprehensive history of revolutionary terrorism in twentieth-century Russia, Anna Geifman's Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton, 1993), does not offer a definition of terrorism, although she distinguishes between the theories and practices of different revolutionary groupings, from the targeted individual terrorism of the People's Will to the random terrorism of the anarcho-syndicalists.

4. The obvious counterargument, of course, is “What about 9/11?” whose memory has clearly not been superseded by a subsequent mimetic series. But 9/11 is memorable in completely different terms (as the founding event of a new age and world order, among other things), and is, in fact, a singular event, since it has not been followed by repetitions on U.S. territory. This is arguably the (only) success of the Bush administration's War on Terror.

5. According to Walter Laqueur, one of the earliest known instances of terrorism “from below” was that of the sicarii, who participated in the Zealot struggle in Palestine (A.D. 66-73). Like modern and contemporary terrorists, they availed themselves of the anonymity of the crowd to murder their targets (with short swords) undetected. In the eleventh century, another group of religious/political fanatics, the Assassins, specifically targeted government officials. “They always used a dagger because [ … ] murder was considered a sacramental act.” See Laqueur, Walter, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, 2001), 7–8.Google Scholar

6. “Terrorist” and “terrorism” emerged with the French Revolution and were occasionally used by the Jacobins in a positive sense; after the 9th of Thermidor the terms quickly became pejoratives. Laqueur, A History of Terrorism, 6. In current media usage, “terror” and “terrorism” are used interchangeably. Russian revolutionaries most commonly used the Russian word terror when referring to the tactical use of systematic violence to eliminate and intimidate counterrevolutionaries, but they also used euphemisms such as “disorganization” and “partisan warfare.”

7. I was fortunate to participate in both the German Historical Institute's conference entitled “Terrorism and Modernity” in New Orleans, 23-27 October 2008, devoted to this topic, and a roundtable, “Terrorism and Modernity: Modes, Methods and Mythologies,” at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November 2008, where I presented an excerpt from this article. In particular, Claudia Verhoeven, Carola Dietze, Anke Hillbrenner, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, and Sally Boniece have been engaging interlocutors on this topic.

8. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26, Special issue on Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7.

9. Nora's thought opposes memory to history—an opposition that at times verges on the Manichean. Whereas memory “is life” pulsating through the gestures and immemorial ways of a community, constantly evolving and perpetually relevant, history is essentially dead matter or “paper memory“—in other words, the way a society organizes and represents its past in the absence of memory. An explicit goal of revolution, of course, is the “conquest and eradication of memory by history,” and so it is no coincidence that the French Revolution pioneered and excelled in orchestrating some types of lieux de mémoire, such as the revolutionary festival. See Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8, 9, 13.

10. Laqueur, A History of Terrorism, 11. Studies of systematic terrorism by groupings with political goals typically begin with the terrorist campaign conducted from 1878 to 1881 by Narodnaia volia (The People's Will), proceed to study national liberation movements (Serb, Irish, Macedonian, Armenian) that used terrorism as a tactic, and conclude with anarchist terrorism in western Europe and the United States in the 1890s. The second and more devastating wave of Russian revolutionary terrorism lasting from 1902 to 1911 is also included in their purview.

11. Figner, Vera, Zapechatlennyi trud; Vospominaniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1964), 1:68.Google Scholar

12. In their study of social memory among the peasantry, James Fentress and Chris Wickham observe that peasant communities retain for generations in oral form the memory of local events in which families or individuals from their immediate communities were direcdy affected but may be impervious to events of national significance. See Fentress, James and Wickham, Chris, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), 92, 93.Google Scholar

13. Nora identifies and gives examples of topographic, portable, and monumental lieux: for him, minority groups within a national community have recourse to portable lieux, and his quintessential minority group is in fact the quientessential “people of memory“—the Jews. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 16, 20.

14. See, for example, Buel, James W., Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia (St. Louis, 1883)Google Scholar; Thun, Alphons, Geschichte der Revolutiondren Beivegungen in Russland (Leipzig, 1883)Google Scholar; Scherr, Johannes, Die Nihilisten (Leipzig, 1885)Google Scholar; Frédé, Pierre, La Russie et le nihilisme (Paris, 1880)Google Scholar; Panin, Ivan, The Revolutionary Movement in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1881)Google Scholar; and Giovanni Battista Arnaudo and Henri Bellenger, Le nihilisme et les nihilistes (Paris, 1880), among others.

15. Stepniak [Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii], Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. With a Preface by Peter Lavroff. Translated from Italian (New York, 1883), 46.

16. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 9.

17. Evgeniia Taratuta was Kravchinskii's indefatigable Soviet biographer, and her works are the backbone of scholarship on Kravchinskii. See Taratuta, Evgeniia, Podpol'naia Rossiia: Sud'ba knigi S. M. Kravchinskogo (Moscow, 1967)Google Scholar; Taratuta, , S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii—revoliutsioner i pisatel’ (Moscow, 1973)Google Scholar; and Taratuta, , Russkii drug Engel'sa: Rasskaz ob intern, sviaziakh rus. revoliutsionera-narodnika S. M. Stepniaka-Kravchinskogo (Moscow, 1970)Google Scholar. For Anglo-American scholarship, see Hulse, James W., Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, and Senese, Donald, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, the London Years (Newtonville, Mass., 1987).Google Scholar On Kravchinskii's elusiveness as a biographical subject, see Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 11-17. According to Taratuta, Kravchinskii was born on 1 July 1852 in Novy Starodub, Ukraine, to an army doctor and was one of four children. He was on track for an estimable military career until he left the Mikhailovskii Artillery Institute in St. Petersburg to join the radical Chaikovskii Circle.

18. Peter Lavrov, preface in Stepniak, Underground Russia, ix.

19. The classic works on the revolutionary movement in nineteenth-century Russia are Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movement in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (New York, 1960); Ulam, Adam B., In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Wortman, Richard, The Crisis of Russian Populism (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Hardy, Deborah, Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876-1879 (Westport, Conn., 1987)Google Scholar; and Naimark, Norman M., Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. James Frank McDaniel, “Political Assassination and Mass Execution: Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia, 1878-1938” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1976), 32.

21. Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 246.

22. Ibid., 8.

23. McDaniel, “Political Assassination and Mass Execution,” 40.

24. That he meet his victim face to face and kill him with a knife rather than a gun was a point of honor for Kravchinskii. Ibid., 39.

25. Ford, Franklin L., Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 44.Google Scholar See also Dan Edelstein, “War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution” French Historical Studies 31, no. 2 , Special Issue on War, Culture and Society (2008): 229-62.

26. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 39.

27. Notably, Kravchinskii's aristocratism elides Dmitrii Karakozov's failed attempt on the life of Alexander II on 4 April 1866. The impoverished and most likely psychologically unstable student, camouflaged as “one of the people” in a peasant overcoat, ineptly fired a pistol from the midst of a crowd. Karakozov's attempt does not even feature in Kravchinskii's history of “the Terrorism” but is briefly mentioned in his history of “the Propaganda” and accordingly downgraded as a “terrible warning.” For an excellent elaboration of why Karakozov did not fit the mold that Kravchinskii, in essence, was establishing, see Verhoeven, Claudia, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, 2009).Google Scholar

28. Shishko, Leonid, S. M. Kravchinskii i kruzhok Chaikovtsev (Geneva, 1903), 3–4.Google Scholar

29. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 42.

30. Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1986), 102-3.Google Scholar Hercules had appeared as the mythological representation of the power of individual French kings, whereas David chose to emphasize and invert certain elements of the image so that the revolutionary Hercules represented “collective, popular power.” Kravchinskii performs his own inversion by making his “Hercules” represent a heroic elite, “the Terrorism.”

31. “This strategy was intimately bound up with the power of the Russian state and therefore carried with it much of the traditional sacredness of the Russian king-martyrs. As a result of this ostensible secular transposition, the venerable signifying complex of Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationality spawned its double in the ideology of the intelligentsia.” See Freidin, Gregory, “By the Walls of Church and State: Literature's Authority in Russia's Modern Tradition,” Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993): 156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. This is Freud's argument in Totem and Taboo: the murder of the father by the band of brothers (“the Terrorism“?) is repressed, even as the son, appropriating his symbols, takes his place and institutes his own religion premised upon the commemoration of murder in the form of sacrifice.

33. Ol'ga Liubatovich, who saw him at a secret meeting of the party shortly after the assassination and in the white heat of a police manhunt for him, left this account: “He seemed to draw into himself and saw nothing around him. In general, if you observed carefully, you could note in this man who was to all appearances a healthy, powerful, and almost boisterously happy person the symptoms of one who has lived through a deeply unnerving shock, the external signs of which were almost but not quite concealed by the force of his own restraint.” See Ol'ga Liubatovich, “Dalekoe i nedavnee,” Byloe, 1906, no. 5:213.

34. For a general description of the British press's coverage of Russia in these years, see Sakowicz, Iwona, “Russia and the Russians: Opinions of the British Press during the Reign of Alexander II (dailies and weeklies), “Journal of European Studies 35, no. 3 (September 2005): 271-82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The dispatches of foreign reporters required the signature of the public prosecutor before they could be telegraphed abroad. See Cynthia Marsh, “The Times (1881) and the Russian Women Terrorists,” Scottish Slavonic Review, no. 21 (Autumn 1993): 54.

35. Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 235. In the autumn of 1878, Kravchinskii left Russia to avoid arrest for Mezentsev's murder: he went first to Italy but was spooked by the Italian police and left hastily for Geneva after the publication of his series in il Pungolo. Kravchinskii finally settled in England in 1882, where he firmly established himself in socialist and literary circles and worked tirelessly for the Russian Free Press.

36. Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 233-34. On the success of the series, see 235.

37. Taratuta, , Istoriia dvukh knig: “Podpol'naia Rossiia“ S. M. Kravchinskogo i “Ovod“Etel’ Lilian Voinich (Moscow, 1987), 44.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 48-49.

39. This latter usage proliferated beginning in the late 1860s, and the usage sampled in the Oxford English Dictionary testifies to the mixture of fascination, condescension, opprobrium, and simplification with which they (and Russia) were regarded:

1868 G. Duff Glance over Europe, 42: “The Russian Tories … have been assisted … by the spread among the half educated of absurd and anti-social notions, to which the name Nihilism has been given.”

1880 19th Century. VII I: “It is because ‘nothing’ as it exists at present finds favor in their eyes that they have been called ‘Nihilists.'”

1882 Macm. Mag. XLV, 407: “Nihilism in Russia is an explosive compound generated by the contact of the Sclav [sic] character with Western ideas.”

41. Ibid., 10.

42. Kravchinskii of course, does not intend to defame the hero-martyrs of the generation, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov.

43. A mutual friend of Kravchinskii's and Ivan Turgenev's in Paris relayed Turgenev's favorable impression (and constructive criticism) of Underground Russia to Kravchinskii by letter. See Taratuta, Istoriia, 76.

44. From a letter to Zasulich quoted in Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 249.

45. White, Haydn, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1975), 156 Google Scholar; Kravchenskii quoted in Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 247.

46. Kravchinskii's quotation of Hugo shows that he acutely perceived the revolutionary community's need for commemoration as a bulwark against historical oblivion. Nora puts it this way: “The defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that has retreated to jealously protected enclaves in this sense intensely illuminates the truth of lieux de mémoire—that without commemorative vigilance, history would sweep them away.” Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12.

47. Vladimir Burtsev edited the first revolutionary history of the revolutionary movement with Kravchinskii, Za sto let: 1800-1896. Sbornih po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii. Sostavil VI. Burtsev pri redaklsionnom uchastii S. M. Kravchinskogo (Stepniaka). It was published by the Russian Free Press Fund in 1897, two years after Kiavchinskii was tragically struck and killed by a train. Both Underground Russia and Za sto let have served subsequent historians of the Russian revolutionary movement as important primary sources.

48. See Taratuta, Istoriia, 72-76, on Podpol'naia Rossiia's reception by Russians after 1905. Lev Tolstoi was also deeply impressed and based his own story “Bozheskoe i chelovecheskoe” on the profile of the revolutionary “saint” (but not terrorist) Dmitrii Lisogub.

49. Her attempted assassination of General Trepov and subsequent acquittal was widely publicized in the European press and the subject of much discussion. Writers and artists with revolutionary sympathies were also inspired to compose dramas based on the incident, the most famous (but alas mediocre) of which is Oscar Wilde's play Vera.

50. “Pis'ma S. M. Kravchinskogo (Stepniaka) k V. I. Zasulich (ot 1881-1894 g.),” in Gruppa ‘Osvobozhdenie truda' sbornik (Moscow, 1923), 215.

51. David Marshall, P., Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis, 1997), 5.Google Scholar

52. For a summary of Hazlitt's writing on celebrity, see ibid., 7.

53. For a Weberian analysis of the celebrity as a type of charismatic authority, see ibid., 20.

54. This is an abbreviated synthesis of Marshall's argument concerning the nature of celebrity and its cultural power. By “intertextual sign,” Marshall means that the production of celebrity is predicated upon “the domain of interpretive writing on cultural artifacts“: on magazine stories, interviews, pinup posters, studio releases, reviews, candid photos … Kravchinskii is self-consciously participating in this intertextuality.

55. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 13.

56. See Charles L. Ponce De Leon, Self Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, 2002), 56-60.

57. Ibid., 60.

58. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 45.

59. Ibid., 106.

60. Ibid., 106-7.

61. Ibid., 109. After reading her own profile, Zasulich sought to convey to Kravchinskii her profound feeling of violation with this hypothetical scenario: “Imagine, or even better, ask Fanichka [Kravchinskii's wife] to imagine that in some large company some one of her friends begins to tell different things, in no way shameful, about her, but things that she would never tell about herself. Well, what would she do? At first she would pull her friend by the sleeve, saying, ‘He's making it all up’ and if he continued, she would sulk, leave, and at home I don't guarantee that she wouldn't cry and throw a glass or a saucer at her friend's head.” Quoted in Taratuta, Istoriia, 58. Taratuta has included the entire correspondence between Kravchinskii and Zasulich concerning her profile.

62. Kravchinskii consciously assimilates all of his revolutionary subjects to type. At the end of Demetrius Lisogub's profile, he writes: “Stefanovic was the Organiser; Clemens the Thinker; Ossinsky the Warrior; Krapotkine the Agitator. Demetrius Lisogub was the Saint.” Stepniak, Underground Russia, 100. Type, as an epistemological and narrative device, was central to Russian realism, and realist writers on both sides of the political spectrum used type to describe and situate (often in ideological terms) the individual within social reality. See Safran, Gabriella, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, 2000), 15.Google Scholar

63. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 75.

64. Ibid., 81.

65. See Marsh, “The Times (1881) and the Russian Women Terrorists,” 57-58.

66. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 116. Michelet is likewise entranced by Charlotte Corday's beauty and simplicity and describes her voice as “silvery.” Jules Michelet, The History of the French Revolution, vol. 6, trans. Keith Botsford with text and notes by Gérard Walter (Wynnewood, Penn., 1973), 130. It is clear that Kravchinskii is writing his Perovskaia on the palimpsest of Corday.

67. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 114.

68. Ibid., 118.

69. Kravchinskii as profiler is more rigorous than Chernyshevskii as novelist and expunges from Perovskaia's portrait the sensual and emotional foibles with which Chernyshevskii seeks to make Rakhmetov humanly plausible (namely, his weakness for expensive cigars and his love for the unnamed lady) and novelistically palatable. In Perovskaia's case, the elaboration of such foibles would only reinforce the wanton image purveyed by the press.

70. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 130.

71. As Marina Warner has explained, the belief in the intense communion between mother and son in the course of the Passion, and the ritual, images, and stories generated by this interaction, performed a vital role in the Christian faidi. “The Virgin was the instrument mediating bafflement at die mystery of the Redemption into emotional understanding. She made the sacrifice on Golgotha seem real, for she focused human feeling in a comprehensible and accessible way.” Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976), 211.Google Scholar

72. This interpretation is influenced by Nikolai Berdiaev's view that Russia remained fundamentally tied to its pre-Christian tradition in which the soil was identified with the Great Mother Goddess, who in die Christian era was worshipped and adored as the Mother of God. Berdiaev perceived an opposition between the Mother of God, who belonged to the people, and God the Father and God the Son, who came to be associated in Russian religious culture widi the autocratic state. Berdiaev, Nikolai, The Russian Idea, trans. French, R. M. (London, 1992), 24–25.Google Scholar

73. Marshall applies Gilles Lipovetsky's idea of “hyperindividualism” to the celebrity, arguing that celebrity is the quintessential instantiation of the intensification of the personal and psychological in media representation. To the extent that “hyperindividualism” is the product of the capitalist, bourgeois order, a Leninist critique of revolutionary terrorism would see it, too, as emblematic of “hyperindividualism,” and Kravchinskii's profiles would serve as fuel for such a critique. See Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 59, and Lipovetsky, Gilles, L'Éredu vide: Essais sur [l'individualism contemporain (Paris, 1983), 82.Google Scholar

74. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 38.

75. Ibid., 54.

76. “We must take as an established fact that this metamorphosis of the city is due to a transposition of the setting—namely, from the savannah and forest of Fenimore Cooper, where every broken branch signifies a worry or a hope, where every tree trunk hides an enemy rifle or the bow of an invisible and silent avenger. Beginning with Balzac, all writers have clearly recorded this debt and faithfully rendered to Cooper what they owed him. Works like Les Mohicans de Paris, by Alexander Dumas—works where the title says it all—are extremely common.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 439.

77. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 72.

78. Ibid., 75.

79. See the discussion of the spectator-novelist and the woman of the streets as his central trope in Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, 1995), 1-11.

80. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 170.

81. Benjamin here quotes Hippolyte Babou, “When Balzac lifts the roofs or penetrates the walls in order to clear a space for your observation … you listen at the doors…. In the interest of sparking your imaginadon, that is, … you are playing the role of what our neighbors the English, in their prudishness, call the ‘police detective'!” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 443.

82. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, 9.

83. Stepniak, Underground Russia, 137.

84. Ibid., 138.

85. Ibid., 147.

86. These two neatly illustrate Nora's distinction between lieux de historie and lieux de mémoire, the former—“spectacular and triumphant, imposing and generally imposed by a national authority [ … ] one attends them rather than visits them.” Whereas the latter are “places of refuge, sanctuaries of spontaneous devotion and silent pilgrimage, where one finds the living heart of memory.” Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 23. His idealization rests on the antinomies of public versus private, ceremonial formalism versus authentic emotion, the sublime (the aesthetically overwhelming action of an external presence) versus the spiritual (a profoundly felt inner connection). Both, however, aspire to the sacred.

87. Zasulich, Vera, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1931), 87.Google Scholar

88. Jean-François Lyotard writes trenchantly of the memory of the memorial as forgetting: “As far as forgetting is concerned this memory of the memorial is intensely selective; it requires the forgetting of that which may question the community and its legitimacy.” Lyotard, Heidegger and “The Jews, “trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis, 1990), 7.