the social revolutionaries, by no less a person that Věra Zasulič, one of the co-founders of the Social Democratic Party.
She endeavoured to prove that individual outrages could not destroy absolutism, nor even weaken it, but that, on the contrary, they actually favoured absolutism by natural selection among its tools. Individual terrorist acts were mere demonstrations, not a means of combat. They might perhaps gratify the sentiment of personal vengefulness, but it was not the mission of the Russian revolutionist either to take vengeance for the masses or to defend the masses; it was his task to act among, not for, the masses. He must inspire them with enthusiasm, must carry them along with him. Věra Zasulič considered that the terrorist social revolutionary organisation was merely a bureaucratic regulation of spontaneous personal outbreaks of sentiment, and she condemned systematic terrorism no less emphatically than she condemned spontaneous acts of vengeance on the part of individuals.
The situation was certainly a strange one. The terrorist of 1878 penned in 1902 an ardent philippic against terrorism, whilst her party, in the dispute with the bolševiki, recognised terrorism as a temporary method of revolution![1]
Men with a political intelligence can hardly doubt which method is likely to be more effective politically, the terrorist slaughter of a despot, or the parliamentary decision of a majority, a competent majority, to reduce the civil list to the maintenance of the president of a republic. But it is true that such a parliament presupposes the political education, not of the deputies merely, but likewise of the electorate, to a degree still unknown in Europe. It is therefore all the easier for us
- ↑ The social revolutionaries quoted Marx as an authority in support of terrorism. In April 1331, writing to his daughter, Marx referred to the specifically Russian tactics of the terrorists, saying that these were "true heroes, without any melodramatic pose," and referring to their methods as "historically unavoidable." But Marx said nothing in this letter as to the political efficacy of terrorism, and still less is it possible to extract from it an argument for terrorism now that the duma exists. In 1900, Kautsky declared that terrorism, which had opened with the shooting of Trepov by Věra Zasulič, was a glorious struggle on the part of a handful of heroes. But he went on to say: "Although the individual terrorists were heroes, and although their unselfish hazarding of their lives in an unequal struggle for the great cause makes a profound and elevating impression upon our minds, nevertheless the system of terrorism was a product of the weakness of the social forces opposed to tsarism. As long as the adversaries of tsarism had no other means of attack than terrorism, though they might be able to kill individual ministers and even tsars, they were unable to overthrow tsarist absolutism."
