Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  At 1 p.m. on a “dark, dreary” Sunday afternoon the sixty-three-year-old tsar set off for the troop inspection, resplendent in “a red cap, a red-lined overcoat with beaver’s collar, and gold epaulets.” Six Cossacks rode on horseback alongside his carriage and two sleighs full of policemen traveled behind him over the snow-covered cobblestone streets. By 2:15 p.m., after visiting a cousin, he was ready to return to the Winter Palace. The route he took did not carry him past the cheese shop, so it was now up to the bomb throwers. When Perovskaya gave the signal—blowing her nose into a silk handkerchief—three assassins deployed along the Catherine Canal Embankment. (One had lost his nerve at the last minute.)

  As the tsar’s carriage raced along, it was approached by a young blond man holding a small package. He swung his arm and there was a “deafening blast.” Several people were killed or wounded but the tsar was unharmed. He got out of the carriage to inspect the damage, ignoring the coachman’s pleas to keep going. As the tsar walked around, surrounded by his Cossacks, another young man approached and threw something at his feet. Alexander and all those around him toppled over like bowling pins. Twenty people had been hit, including the assassin, Ignat Hryniewicki, who died a few hours later. “Through the snow, debris, and blood,” recalled an officer, “you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabers, and bloody chunks of human flesh.”

  The tsar, his legs shattered, died at the Winter Palace shortly thereafter. The seventh assassination attempt was the last.61

  34.

  “AN UNCONTROLLABLE EXPLOSION”

  Socialist Revolutionaries in Russia, 1902–1917

  UPON HEARING THE news, Vera Figner wept tears of joy and relief that the tyrant was dead. Soon she would be weeping tears of a different kind. For the death of the tsar did not lead to the death of tsarism. It simply led to the coronation of his reactionary son, Alexander III. On April 3, 1881, five of the terrorists, including Sofia Perovskaya, were hanged. Three others were condemned to life terms in prison. Figner wound up spending twenty years in solitary confinement. The People’s Will was decimated. By 1883 its remnants were led by Sergei Degaev, a double agent working for the secret police who eventually killed his police handler and fled to America.62

  Even after its collapse, the People’s Will would serve as an inspiration to future revolutionaries. Lenin, for one, urged his acolytes to emulate its “party discipline and conspiratorial practices,” and his older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, would join a successor organization—the Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will. He was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Alexander III, an event that helped radicalize the young Lenin.63 Thereafter terrorism briefly disappeared from the Russian scene until reappearing bigger than ever at the turn of the century.

  Its reemergence should be no surprise given that the essential conditions that created opposition to the tsarist regime remained unchanged. The economy was in the throes of industrialization, creating an urban proletariat that lived in execrable conditions and a fledgling middle class that did not have power commensurate with its growing wealth. Education was also spreading: the number of university students increased thirteenfold between 1860 and 1914, the number of periodicals more than tripled between 1860 and 1900, and the literacy rate rose from 21 percent to 40 percent between 1897 and 1914.64 But while society was modernizing and becoming politically aware, the regime remained frozen in an autocratic past where there was no way to affect peaceful change. That was a recipe for trouble. As the liberal former prime minister Count Sergei Witte wrote in 1911, “At the beginning of the 20th century it is impossible to pursue with impunity a medieval course of policy. . . . At the first weakening of the Government’s power and prestige, [revolution] bursts out with the violence of an uncontrollable explosion.”65

  At the forefront of the explosion was the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party and its Combat Organization, which was dedicated to terror. It announced its existence in 1902 when one of its members walked into the office of the interior minister and killed him with two shots at point-blank range. His successor was murdered by another SR terrorist in 1904 who tossed a bomb into his carriage. The following year, 1905, it was the turn of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the tsar’s uncle and governor-general of Moscow. He was obliterated by another hand-thrown bomb—a fate narrowly avoided by his successor, who in 1906 received only minor injuries in a blast that killed an aide.

  The SRs, who called bomb throwing a “holy act,” anticipated many of the practices of twenty-first-century terrorism. They were imaginative enough to talk about using a newly invented airplane to bomb the Winter Palace and ruthless enough to employ suicide bombers. In 1906, three members of an ultra-radical SR offshoot, the Maximalists, tried to kill the newly appointed prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, a conservative reformer who was so notorious for hanging revolutionaries that the noose became known as “Stolypin’s necktie.” When the terrorists were denied entry to Stolypin’s summer house, they shouted “Long live freedom!” and blew themselves up in his anteroom with suitcase bombs. Stolypin escaped, but twenty-seven others were killed and seventy injured, including two of his children.

  Stolypin would be killed in another SR attack, in 1911 (the eighteenth attempt on his life), while attending the opera in Kiev with Tsar Nicholas II. The assassin, Dmitri Bogrov, was a police informer who had been uncovered by his comrades and forced to kill the prime minister as an act of atonement. Audaciously enough, he duped the secret police into providing him a ticket to the opera (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan) by promising to point out two other SR terrorists who were supposedly planning to assassinate Stolypin.66

  The SRs’ major competitors on the left, the Social Democrats, ostensibly eschewed terrorism in favor of fomenting a revolt of the proletariat. Leon Trotsky summed up their creed: “A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses.”67 But in practice both Social Democrat factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, sometimes practiced terror too, albeit to a lesser extent than the SRs. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader in exile, endorsed terrorism amid the turmoil of 1905 when the tsarist regime teetered on the brink of collapse. With workers’ strikes spreading and workers’ councils (or soviets) springing up, he urged his followers to “take every opportunity for active work, without delaying their attacks until the time of the general uprising.”68

  That invitation was eagerly welcomed by one of Lenin’s most devoted disciples. Josef Djugashvili, later known as Stalin, was a pockmarked former seminarian from Georgia who commanded Bolshevik Battle Squads that waged a campaign of terror across the Caucasus. Throughout 1905 his “cut-throats” fought pitched battles against the Cossacks and the Black Hundreds vigilantes. By 1906 the tsar had regained control with a harsh campaign of repression, and Stalin had to go underground again. From hiding he cooperated with the Mensheviks to assassinate General Fyodor Griyazanov, the leader of the counterrevolution in the Caucasus.

  Thereafter Stalin turned his attention to “expropriations,” as political bank robberies were known. There was an epidemic of bank stickups in Russia, with almost two thousand recorded between 1905 and 1906—so many that confidence in the entire banking system was shaken. Stalin became a veritable Jesse James, leading his Technical Group, or “Outfit,” to take down stagecoaches, trains, even steamships. Their most spectacular heist occurred on June 12, 1907, in one of the main squares of Tiflis, as the capital of Georgia was then known. Sixty brigands hijacked a heavily guarded shipment of cash. Throwing bombs and firing pistols, they mowed down Cossacks and police along with many innocent bystanders, and got away with at least 250,000 rubles ($3.4 million) that would go to fund Lenin’s operations. Stalin also engaged in a protection racket, extorting industrialists in return for a pledge not to kill them or blow up their facilities. As with other acts of “social banditry,” it was not always clear where political motives left off and pure avarice picked up. Although Stalin apparently did not pocket the proceeds, other revolutionaries certainly did.69

 
In addition to the socialists, Russian anarchists such as the Black Banner group were also active in carrying out assassinations and expropriations. Like Émile Henry, they sometimes tossed bombs into cafés simply to kill “bourgeois” patrons as part of a policy of “motiveless terror.”70 Also getting into the act were revolutionary parties that claimed to represent disaffected minorities within the Russian Empire; the Armenian Dashnak and the Polish Socialist Party were particularly active.

  The sheer number of attacks was staggering. It has been estimated that during the last two decades of the old regime (1897–1917) seventeen thousand people throughout the Russian Empire were killed or wounded by terrorists, with the bulk of the attacks occurring between 1905 and 1910.71 “So many governors were killed by the revolutionaries,” wrote the tsar’s brother-in-law, “that an appointment to the post of governor acquired the meaning of a death sentence.”72

  HOW WAS THIS much violence possible in what was supposedly Europe’s strictest police state? The tsar deployed not only the secret police, the Okhrana, but also a uniformed Corps of Gendarmes devoted to political repression. They were given virtually unlimited powers to censor publications, open mail, and detain individuals. One catchall law made it a crime punishable by a minimum of sixteen months’ imprisonment to compose “written documents containing unpermitted judgments with regard to the ordinances and actions of the Government.”

  Draconian as these rules sounded, their application was tempered by what Count Witte described as the “lethargy, incompetence, and timidity prevalent among executive and administrative officers.” In 1895 the Okhrana had only 161 full-time employees and the Gendarmes fewer than 10,000, most of whom did apolitical policing, to watch over 136 million people spread over eleven time zones. Russia had over “one hundred times fewer policemen” per capita than France, leaving the Romanov empire “significantly underpoliced” in one historian’s judgment. Between 1867 and 1894, only 158 books were banned; Marx’s Das Kapital was not one of them. During those same years 44 people were executed for political crimes, all of them assassins or would-be assassins. There was a big jump in executions during the 1905 Revolution: 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in 1905–06. But that was still less than one-fourth the number slain in the Paris Commune. A greater number of revolutionaries was confined in prisons, yet most of them were better treated than common criminals because they were, after all, “gentlemen.” For many radicals, prisons became schools of socialism where they could gain a “solid revolutionary education.”

  Another common punishment was exile in Siberia, but in 1880 there were only 1,200 political exiles, a figure that had increased to 4,113 by 1901. More were exiled following the 1905 Revolution (nearly 8,000 in 1906), but being sent to Siberia in the tsarist era had nothing in common with the hellish gulags that the Bolsheviks would later operate. Exiles lived in reasonable comfort in Siberian villages; they even received a stipend from the government, which could be supplemented by contributions from home. While in Siberian exile, Lenin brought out his mother and mother-in-law to take care of him and finished writing a weighty economic treatise. Escape was easy because police surveillance was so lax. The American traveler George Kennan (not to be confused with his distant relative and namesake, the future architect of “containment”) reported in 1891 that Siberia “literally swarms with . . . escaped exiles” and that “thousands” leave “the very next day after their arrival.” Stalin, for one, arrived in the Siberian village of Novaya Uda at the end of November 1903 and left at the beginning of January 1904, having served just one month of a three-year sentence.73

  The most effective, if also most morally fraught, Okhrana tactic was the infiltration of terrorist groups. This backfired in the Degaev and Bogrov cases when informers committed shocking assassinations. But it was more effective in the case of the SR Combat Organization, which was taken over in 1907 by Evno Azef, who had been a well-paid Okhrana agent for the past fifteen years. The disclosure of his double life in 1908 discredited and demoralized the SRs. It would take them years to recover.74

  In general police measures were strong enough to alienate a substantial portion of the population—but not strong enough to suppress the revolutionaries. As important as any coercive measure in restoring a measure of calm was Tsar Nicholas II’s willingness to concede some liberal demands in October 1905 by granting a constitution and creating a parliament, the Duma. A Bolshevik organizer bemoaned “the corroding influence of the seeming freedom, of which we had a few breaths after the revolution of 1905.”75 This limited liberalization, combined with mass arrests and executions, ended terrorism as a serious threat by the eve of World War I. But the damage had been done.

  Anna Geifman, the foremost student of the Russian terrorists, concludes that they “hastened the downfall of the tsarist regime.” “To a large extent,” she finds, “the revolutionaries succeeded in breaking the spine of Russian bureaucracy, wounding it both physically and in spirit, and in this way contributed to its general paralysis during the final crisis of the imperial regime in March of 1917.”76 But it is doubtful that the wounds would have been fateful without the trauma of defeat in World War I. Terrorism was at most one contributing factor among many to the collapse of the tsarist government.

  When the tsar finally fell he was replaced, after a brief liberal interregnum, by a Bolshevik dictatorship whose leaders were steeped in the culture and tactics of the revolutionary underground. Stalin applied the methods he had learned as a young brigand in the Caucasus on a much greater scale to terrorize the entire Soviet Union. And, knowing from personal experience “the toothless way the tsarist regime [had] struggled with its ‘gravediggers,’ ”77 he made sure to create a more pervasive police state that could not be undermined by a few bomb throwers. Thus the antitsarist terrorists left a deep imprint on the history of Russia—and the world—even if they did not immediately succeed in their goal of overthrowing the state.

  In few other countries were terrorists as effective. Ireland was one of the exceptions.

  35.

  SHINNERS AND PEELERS

  The Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921

  THEY SPENT FIVE days, five endless days, at the ambush site amid the shamrock-green fields. An informant had told them that a load of gelignite (an explosive more powerful than dynamite) was going to be conveyed to the Soloheadbeg Quarry in southern Ireland on January 16, 1919. They wanted the gelignite for themselves, but even more they wanted to make a statement—“not merely to capture the gelignite but also to shoot down the escort.” So wrote Dan Breen, one of the nine masked marauders lying in wait in county Tipperary. A twenty-four-year-old railway lineman with, to quote a “wanted” poster, a “sulky bulldog appearance,” he had been raised “only a stone’s throw from the quarry” and “knew every inch of the ground.”

  Like most of his countrymen, he came from a poor farming family that “barely existed above the hair-line of poverty.” “Potatoes and milk were our staple diet,” he recalled. “On special occasion we had a meal of salted pork but the luxury of fresh meat was altogether beyond our reach.” He had been forced to leave school at fourteen and had taken a job on the railroad. He also took on a covert role as one of two thousand members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society better known as the Fenians, which had been fighting British rule since 1858. With the aid of Irish-American sympathizers, the Fenians had assassinated the chief secretary of Ireland and his undersecretary in Dublin’s Phoenix Park (1882) and inadvertently killed twelve Londoners while trying to blast one of their members out of prison (1867). Those isolated acts of terrorism had been as ineffectual as the anarchist attacks of the same period. The British occupation of Ireland, already more than seven hundred years old, remained unshaken.78

  In the early twentieth century, new republican groups sprang up: in 1902 a political party called Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”), followed in 1913 by a military force called the Irish Volunteers that would become the Irish Republican Army. To th
e British, all of the republicans were dubbed “Shinners” (Sinn Féin is pronounced shin fane).

  On Monday, April 24, 1916, during Easter week, fifteen hundred Shinners tried to seize power in Dublin by brute force. A similar effort by the Bolsheviks in Russia in November 1917 would face little opposition and lead to the overthrow of an already shaky provisional government during the “ten days that shook the world.” British rule was not so easily shaken. Within five days the Shinners had been routed out of their stronghold in the ornate General Post Office by British troops (many of them Irishmen) backed by artillery. More than four hundred people were killed. Subsequently sixteen leaders of the Easter Rising were executed, creating fresh martyrs for the independence movement. There was no shortage of other grievances for the republicans to exploit going back to the Middle Ages.

  “Sickened to death by British duplicity, cant and humbug . . . I decided to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood,” Dan Breen later wrote. Subsequently he also joined the Irish Volunteers and became quartermaster of the South Tipperary Brigade. His neighborhood pal Sean Treacy, who by 1918 had served two terms in British jails, was its vice commandant. From 1913 to 1919, they drilled as best they could, trying to learn how to become soldiers from British military manuals, including C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars. Their armaments were negligible—“a .45 revolver here and there, a few old, broken-down rifles,” recalled one republican. “ ’Twasn’t worth a farthing.” All the while they were frustrated by “the local Sinn Feiners, many of whom were not in favor of any stronger weapons than resolutions.” So in January 1919, Breen, Treacy, and a few other Volunteers decided to take matters into their own hands. Without any authorization from above, they set out to fire the shots that would “begin another phase in the long fight for the freedom of our country.”