Let us try to form for ourselves a vivid picture of the Russia terrorist's life. In the majority of cases his existence, full of vexations and hardships, had to be passed in bitter poverty and deprivation. For the refugee, Europe was but a civilised Siberia. Whilst the Siberian prisoner or exile succumbed to misfortune, the refugee was prematurely worn out by his activities. In many cases, the revolutionist was driven to suicide to escape the informers, who even in Europe would not leave him in peace. In Russia itself, the struggle between the police and the nihilist was of a most exciting character. The secret police waged a life and death warfare against the conspirators, using all possible means to gain the upper hand. The conspirator had to be ever on his guard, even against his most intimate friends, as is evidenced by the frequent assassination of spies and traitors. Finally we have to remember that for the revolutionists all family ties were dissolved that they had been torn from their customary environment, from their familiar social sphere; that they had been isolated, had been plunged into a sea of tears and blood, had become indwellers of a realm of death.[1]
The revolutionist frequently became a proletarian, a déclassé, losing all interest in culture, and judging society and social organisation from this narrow outlook.[2]
The Russian terrorist, like Russian liberal and progressive society in general, had, notwithstanding his realism and realistic nihilism, a nervous and restless element in his composition. I have numbered among my personal acquaintances several Russians who, burning with curiosity and eagerness, came to Europe as to the promised land, and yet hardly had they become settled there when they began to feel that European life was too uniform, too bourgeois, too orderly and philistine too monotonously grey. The European intelligentsia, Europe political and socialist parties, appear to the Russian utterly unrevolutionary; parliament is insipid; Russia, with all its horrors, seems to him more attractive, and he is seized with violent home-sickness.
"We need something different; we need storm and life,
- ↑ The average duration of life of the Russian terrorist was estimated two years. The number of victims of the terrorist revolution during the 1866 to 1892 is stated to have been 30,000.
- ↑ Lieutenant-Colonel N. V. Sokolov, an administrative exile, wrote The Renegades (1866) in which he ascribed all human progress to the activity of the déclassés.
