On a cool autumn morning in 1866, hours before Monday’s work started, the streets of St. Petersburg were unusually busy with throngs of people all headed to a single destination: the execution grounds of Smolenskoe Field. The only thing holding back the veritable sea of onlookers was the imperial military, whose soldiers formed a loose square around the gallows. Public officials-- including the Minister of Justice and the Secretary of the Supreme Criminal Court, Ya. G. Esipovich-- began to filter into the square by carriage, which encouraged those pedestrians behind them to run, lest they miss the execution. Finally, one more carriage entered the field. The accused, Dmitri Karakozov, was bound to his high seat on the carriage. As Esipovich recalls:
His face was blue and ghastly. Filled with horror and mute desperation, he looked upon the scaffold, then his eyes began to search for something else; for a moment his gaze rested on the gallows and suddenly his head convulsively, as if involuntarily, turned away from that strange subject… The Minister of Justice turned to me: ‘Secretary of the Supreme Criminal Court, publicly declare the court’s verdict.’ I ascended the steps to the scaffold, stopped at the edge of the railing and, addressing the troops and the people, began to read: ‘By the decree of His Imperial Majesty.’ After these words began the drums; the army performing guard duty removed their hats. When the drums fell silent, I read each word with care and then again returned to the square, where the Minister of Justice stood with his retinue.[1]
A priest delivered Karakozov’s final rites, and the executioners spent minutes struggling to put a shroud over him, but finally he was delivered to the gallows. For “twenty or twenty-two minutes,”[2] Secretary Esipovich stood with the other state officials until Karakozov was finally dead. From the thousands of onlookers not a word of outcry was heard; indeed, “most of the people present made the sign of the Cross, saying, ‘Lord, forgive his sins and save his soul.’ During the following days the police arrested anyone coming to visit Karakozov’s burial place.”[3]
Six months prior, just across the river from Karakozov’s execution grounds, another crowd was gathering at the Summer Palace. This crowd was mundane: it was typical for the people of St. Petersburg to gather and view their tsar, Alexander II, as he strolled through his gardens. But the peace of the morning was shattered as a single man, dressed in peasant garb, stepped forth and let loose a shot from his concealed pistol. The shot missed-- allegedly due to the intercession of a man named Osip Ivanovich Komissarov-- but Dmitri Karakozov’s attack on the Tsar would prove to change the face of Russian radical politics for the remainder of the century.
And indeed, this is now considered one of the earliest acts of terror, but it remains a footnote compared to the more “canonical” attacks of Felice Orsini and John Brown, or later, the Russian terrorist group Narodnaia volia. It does not help that the event itself resists easy historical comprehension-- despite the sources which allow us to approach an understanding of Karakozov’s motives, it is hard to argue with the fact that, when asked by Alexander II himself “What do you want?” Karakozov simply replied, “Nothing, nothing.”[4] One historian could approach Karakozov as a revolutionary hero, the other as a mentally ill criminal enacting violence for its own sake, and it would be difficult to prove either interpretation wrong. But one interpretation reigns: that Karakozov was “too early,” and this is why he is oft-forgotten. It is this idea which led Claudia Verhoeven to write The Odd Man Karakozov, the only authoritative manuscript dedicated to Karakozov’s story.
As Verhoeven notes, terrorism is “not simply a strategy, not a means towards this or that particular political end, but rather a paradigmatic way of becoming a modern political subject, and that its genesis can be understood only when analyzed in the material contexts of modernity.”[5] I adopt this view that Karakozov’s attempt must be understood not as a means and an end, but as a new beginning; the birth of a new political paradigm: terrorism. Yet in analyzing the material contexts surrounding this novel type of political violence, we must be clear that the outcomes of this attack are not direct political change, but cultural change. One can note how certain technologies of modernity-- telecommunications and the bridging of vast distances via ship and train, to name a few-- enabled terror, and one can write an intellectual history of terror, but neither of these approaches explain how and why these early moments of terror led to the self-identification of revolutionaries as “terrorists” and the proliferation of terrorist violence in the latter half of the 19th century. To approach these questions, I propose a new framing in the study of Karakozov’s attack and its aftermath: terrorism as a form of performance.
Indeed, this aspect of performance is the factor which makes both Karakozov’s attempt and his later execution stand out from the historical background noise of other proto-terror and wider political violence. One defining trait of Karakozov’s attempt, and its proto-terrorist contemporaries more broadly, is the presence of an audience in the form of primarily peasant onlookers. Neither Karakozov’s attempt nor his execution promised to materially alter the political landscape: even if Alexander II had been killed it likely would have done little to curb the power of the Russian Empire, and at the time of Karakozov’s execution, he and his comrades posed little material threat to the existing order. But both played to an audience and utilized the nascent tools of capitalist production to spread their message as far and wide as possible. To elucidate my approach, allow me first to elaborate on exactly what performance does in the construction of identity.
To this end, while gender does not heavily factor into my approach, performance’s function in identity creation is best explained by the famous quote from Simone de Beauvoir (and Judith Butler’s subsequent analysis): “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” Butler identifies in this quote an “agent” which defines gender; and defines this agent as the cultural hegemony of what is deemed “acceptable” for a particular gender identity. As Butler puts it, “gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self and desire,” and this self-definition is “produced by the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence.”[6] Following this line of thinking, they conclude that “the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence… In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.” Following Nietzsche’s claim that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed,” Butler argues that “there is no gender identity beyond the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” In short: one becomes a woman by seeing the behaviors which constitute “woman” performed, and in that, learning how to perform the identity of woman.
Performance studies owes Butler a great debt for their formulation of how performance begets identity, and this example from the field of gender studies will assist in understanding exactly how performance functions in the creation of a terrorist identity. Identity is created not by some higher power or outside force, but is rather formed by a doing and a reenacting. “The doer” performs a culturally agreed upon aspect of an identity, and onlookers learn to adopt that behavior in their performance of that same identity. In this core lays my interest in the Karakozov case: before his attempt on the tsar’s life, there was no agreed-upon definition of the behaviors which constituted “terrorism.” While many might argue that he was not the first terrorist, his actions became the template by which we define terrorism today. This leaves us with a number of questions: how novel was Karakozov’s attack, and of the parts which he did not wholly invent, where did he learn that behavior? How did this attack and its aftermath lead to the creation of a terrorist political identity, and what does it mean to be a terrorist in this context? Finally, how did the proliferation of the terrorist identity through the remainder of the 19th century define political identity both for self-defined terrorists and those whose identities were based on loyalty to the state?
To answer these questions, I intend on returning to the Karakozov case with this performative lens and branching out along the various reactions to, and iterations upon, his attack. First, I intend to investigate the idea of terror which was “in the air” prior to April 4 and determine the exact genealogy of this idea. While this is a difficult task, and scholars such as Verhoeven have noted flaws in this approach, the tools provided by Performance Studies allow for a reconsideration of how Karakozov might have understood his historical antecedents and situated himself among them. The following section will focus in on April 4, 1866 itself, utilizing Karakozov’s manifesto and early Soviet historical work to understand how the attempt formulated an almost coherent terrorist identity through Karakozov’s use of an existing martyr tradition and its marriage to a nascent violent revolutionary subjectivity.
The story of any terrorist attack is not complete without understanding how it echoes through history, and the third section of this paper will present a number of vignettes from the years following Karakozov’s attempt in order to demonstrate how the performative identity construction of terrorism and anti-terrorism functions in relation to other already-existing subjectivities, giving further shape to “the terrorist.” There are three stories here. First is the story of Komissarov, whose later ascension to the nobility would create an “other” for the terrorist: much as the category of “woman” loses its meaning without a category of “man,” the Russian terrorist cannot exist as an identity without a counter-identity of tsarist loyalty, and Komissarov represents this co-production of terror by revolutionary and state. Second, we will then turn to the little-known Polish terrorist Anton Berezowski, whose recreation of Karakozov’s attempt only a year later demonstrates not only how terrorists performatively learn from one another, but also shows another example of terrorism’s co-production between revolutionary and state through the attachment of a terrorist identity to Berezowski’s pre-existing national identity. Finally, we will end on the story of Sergei Nechaev, the famous Russian terrorist and author of Revolutionary Catechism, to show another strategy which was utilized to build the terrorist identity: association with performative writing.
This performance-centric analysis of political identity creation in mid-19th century Russia will not only assist us in situating Karakozov within a history from which he seems to stand apart, but will help us understand what powered the transition of the Russian radical movement towards violence in the latter half of the century. In this, it will become apparent how Karakozov created the identity of “terrorist” through a self-conscious use of performativity, with his echoes existing through the Russian revolutionary tradition for decades to come. This historiographical approach to Karakozov will not only provide new insight into what makes him arguably “the first terrorist,” but will also broaden our understanding of the behaviors which constitute a terrorist self-identity and demonstrate how a performance-centered approach might help us contend with terror as a historical and contemporary phenomenon.
One of the main problems in understanding Karakozov, as pointed out by Verhoeven, is identifying how he situated himself among his antecedents without relying on the cheap use of a “zeitgeist” trope. However, by using the tools of performance studies, I argue that understanding the unfinished idea of terror which was “in the air” at this time is exactly how we might approach an understanding of Karakozov’s novelty. While critiques of “zeitgeist theory” in analyzing this case ring true, court documents from the Karakozov case do reveal some degree of inspiration drawn from prior international assassination attempts and literary fiction which promoted an idea of political violence among contemporary Russian radicals. By tracing these real and imagined antecedents to Karakozov’s attempt, we might draw clearer boundaries between what was in the air prior to April 4, and which aspects of the attack were truly novel innovations on Karakozov’s part. The conceptual framework of performance enables this investigation: by understanding how those real predecessors conceived of themselves, and how the fictitious/imaginary predecessors influenced the self-identity of Russian radicals at the time, we can recreate the culturally prescribed ideas of a politically violent individual in the 19th century. It stands to reason, through this performance lens, that by understanding the array of behaviors and self-conceptions that made up any identity of political violence, we can ascertain what new possibilities were born after Karakozov’s attempt. What follows is my attempt to chart this history. From the Jacobin terreur, through theorists of proto-terror through the mid-1800s, and finally, to the first enactment of modern terror by Felice Orsini, we see an outline of the history of terrorism’s development. Through this approach, terror is shown not as the simple sum of “the elements making up the situation whence it emerged”[7] per traditional “zeitgeist” theory, but rather, as what performance theorist Della Pollock describes as performance’s ability to turn identity creation into “repetition with a difference.”[8] This will ultimately demonstrate how Karakozov did not invent terror wholesale, but how he did provide it novelty through his conscious use of performativity. But before continuing, it is necessary to explain one of the analytical tools afforded by performance studies: the idea of performative writing.
Following our understanding of “performance” as shorthand for “the culturally agreed-upon set of behaviors which make up a particular identity,” we can surmise that performative writing is a style of writing which assists in the process of identity formation. But this is vague and only tells part of the story. To assist in understanding the exact function of performative writing, this brief section will outline the contents of Pollock’s very aptly titled essay, “Performative Writing.” To her, the problematic is the idea of “textuality:” simply, the idea of writing as meaning. The focus on textuality creates an ouroboros of meaning-making, where writing is made “its own object/subject,” where writing is defined by “the sense that all discourse is encompassed within a multilayered, reflexive/reproductive ‘text;’” in short, writing as a way of uncovering meaning. In contrast is performative writing, which is able to answer “discourses of textuality not by recovering reference to a given or ‘old’ world but by writing into a new one. For [Pollock], performative writing is not a genre or fixed form (as a textual model might suggest) but a way of describing what some good writing does.”[9] And what it does is speak: it brings “the reader into contact with ‘other-worlds’” through “the interplay of reader and writer in a joint production of meaning” rather than present objective truths in a journalistic style.[10] It:
shift[s] from positioning the self… to articulating the motive, shaping relations among selves in an ongoing process of (self-) production, and second, [it] shift[s] from documenting ‘me’ to reconstituting an operative, possible ‘we.’ The self that emerges from these shifting perspectives is, then, a possibility rather than a fact… the performative self ‘is not simply put forward,’ it moves forward… and between selves/structures, projecting in turn alternative figures of social relation. […] Identity cannot escape its discursive construction in/as iteration but, through performance, it may exert a counterpressure. It may repeat with a vengeance, making repetition stumble, stutter… thus at least promising repetition with a difference. […] Performative rhetoric names a new public… it projects new modes of being and relating through its forms, constituting the very norms by which it will be read.[11]
In short: performative writing constitutes a co-production of author and reader, where the subject of production is not “meaning,” but rather, a mode of being. Performative writing, far from being a coherent genre or set of intelligible techniques, is rather any writing which abandons the meaning of textuality in favor of proposing a new subjectivity-- one which the reader meets with their own, and in that meeting, synthesizes a new identity.
While the word “terror” at this time did not refer to the form of political violence we know today, the idea which would become terrorism was already well in the making by the mid-1850s. Often, conversations of early terrorism will focus around Felice Orsini and his bomb attack on Napoleon III, which left Napoleon unscathed but killed or wounded over a hundred people in the vicinity.[12] And in the history of the embodiment of terror, this is one of the first acts which would enter the terrorist repertoire.[13] However, before terror could be embodied, it had to be conceptualized. Here, we turn to Karl Heinzen[14] and Felice Orsini to investigate some of the intellectual and practical predecessors to Karakozov, allowing us to examine Karakozov’s attempt in the context of the political violence which came before.
Five years before Orsini’s percussion-capped bombs would seismically alter Europe’s understanding of political violence, Heinzen wrote his 1853 treatise entitled Mord und Freiheit (“Murder and Liberty”) which would put forth one of the earliest material and ideological defenses of the violent strategies-- such as targeted assassinations of kings and vital administrators, or the mass killing of civilians-- which would coalesce into “terrorism” within the next thirty years. Despite some of Heinzen’s tactical prescriptions being utilized by both Karakozov and Orsini, as will be elaborated later, further research is necessary to determine whether Karakozov ever directly worked with Heinzen’s ideas. Nevertheless, regardless of the exact provenance of Karakozov’s thought, the similarity in means between his attack, Orsini’s attempt on Napoleon III, and Heinzen’s theorized form of political violence all suggest that terror arose as a response to a particular set of political/ideological convictions and material realities for the horizons of revolution. In this section, early terrorists and terrorist ideologues will be situated within their post-1848 context to explain not only the transnational development of violent ideas, but also of the shared conditions which encouraged separate early terrorists to conceptualize their violence independently. This history of ideas will foreground Karakozov’s attempt, allowing the following section to demonstrate what novelty Karakozov introduced to terrorism.
The European experience of 1848 was one of violent terror: not the terror of concealed daggers and bombs, but of firing squads and mass graves. The “Springtime of Nations” saw democratic revolutions all across Europe, but most failed, seeing immediate violent repression from the ruling classes and a swift return of monarchical leadership. And the violence was unimaginable. As Alexander Herzen describes the events of 1848 in a short piece entitled Pereat!:
Our ears are still ringing with the sound of shot, the clatter of galloping cavalry, and the heavy muffled sound of the gun carriages rattling through the dead streets; isolated moments still flicker in the mind’s eye, a wounded man on a stretcher pressing his hand to his side and a few drops of blood running down it, omnibuses filled with corpses […] after the victory of the National over Paris, we heard the sound of gunfire at short regular intervals… we glanced at one another, our faces looked green. ‘The firing squads’ we all said with one voice, and turned away from each other. I pressed my forehead to the windowpane. Moments like these make one hate for a whole decade, seek revenge all one’s life.[15]
It is this drive for revenge after such a shattering loss which would fuel the development of terror in the years following 1848. The weaponry of the 1848 revolutions was not enough to stave off the forces of reaction, and to certain spectators, it seemed clear that a change in strategy was necessary. To Heinzen, one of the most vital lessons of 1848 is “That a revolution in which only the blood of revolutionaries flowed is a folly, a crime, the punishment of which necessitates a regiment of the same bloody insolence and unscrupulous decisiveness… Each revolution is a suicide if it shies away from becoming the murderer of reaction.”[16] And it seemed as if the tactics of revolution required a change to avoid this suicide. The increasing capacity of industrial militaries for rapid mass deployment and widespread destruction was impossible to counter with the small arms and barricades of the revolutionaries, and this exact asymmetry was one of the features of 1848 which allowed for such successful violent repression by European states. But many of these revolutionaries still called to stain the halls of power with noble blood in response to the indiscriminate slaughter of their comrades, and they needed tactics which would allow this violence.
[1] A. A. Shilov, Karakozov i Pokushenie 4 Apreliya 1866 Goda,, Istoriko-Revolyutsionaya Biblioteka (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo Peterburg, 1920), 48. ↩
[2] Shilov, 49. ↩
[3] Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 349. ↩
[4] Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 79. ↩
[5] Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 4. ↩
[6] Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Feminisms, ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 278. ↩
[7] Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 93. ↩
[8] Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, The Ends of Performance (New York London: New York university press, 1998), 92. ↩
[9] Ibid, 75. ↩
[10] Ibid, 80. ↩
[11] Ibid, 92. ↩
[12] James Crossland, “Radical Warfare’s First ‘Superweapon’: The Fears, Perceptions and Realities of the Orsini Bomb, 1858-1896,” Terrorism and Political Violence 35, no. 2 (February 17, 2023): 355, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2021.1924692.↩
[13] Here, “repertoire” refers to the broadly culturally understood set of behaviors which constitute a given identity.↩
[14] For further history of the development of terrorism between 1790 and 1850, see Klaus Ries’ “Making Terrorism Thinkable” in The Oxford Handbook of The History of Terrorism.↩
[15] Aleksandr I. Herzen, From the Other Shore and The Russian People and Socialism: An Open Letter to Jules Michelet., trans. Moura Budburg, Reprint [d. Ausg.] London 1956 (Westport, Conn: Hyperion Pr, 1981), 45–47.↩
[16] Daniel Bessner and Michael Stauch, “Karl Heinzen and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Terror,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 2 (March 11, 2010): 160, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550903445209.↩