Fascinating and impressive article. I never knew any of it.
It’s maybe an interesting coincidence that Lincoln and the Tsar both faced assassination attempts in 1865-6, and then Garfield and the Tsar both really were assassinated in 1881. Any thoughts about that? And, speculatively, what might have happened had the Tsar been killed in 1866?
Also a coincidence that you published this today, as Tom Stoppard passed away. I (and maybe a lot of people) had only heard of Herzen from his trilogy of plays, where he and Bakunin are main characters.
I had not thought about the parallel with the US running so deep, the Garfield dimension specifically (as I'm sure you know, a lot of contemporaries did compare Lincoln and Alexander II, and a statue of the two shaking hands was unveiled in Moscow in 2011). It's easier, I think, to explain that in terms of the terrorist phenomenon of the era developing as a genuinely international phenomenon and by the 1880s it has thickened into a pretty effective apparatus. Some historians call the period from c. 1880 to the First World War "the golden age of assassination".
If Alexander II had fallen in 1866 ... there's a question. Thinking on my feet here, but it could well have rebounded seriously against the terrorists. The one certainty we have is that Alexander III would have taken the throne (he was in his early 20s) and if we assume he died at the same point, in the mid-1890s, for Russia to have had 30 years of his conservative and consolidating rule, as opposed to 15, that could have been quite different. It probably reduces the likelihood of revolution in 1917.
The terrorist movement was somewhat put on ice under Alexander III as it was; it seems likely the damage would have been longer lasting if he had taken power in 1866. One aspect that comes to mind is the Bulgarian crisis in the mid-1870s: Alexander III is much less likely to have been pressured into getting involved, and Russian involvement - which you'd think would bring prestige to the Monarchy (and it did) - also had a significant role in electrifying the terrorist movement, ironically.
The second big thing is that the wave of shocking pogroms in 1881-82 is less likely in 1866. Among other things, the Okhranka was in the middle of a reorganisation in 1881, which hampered its response. And if those pogroms do not happen, it's less likely the 1905-06 wave happen - especially if the terrorists are weakened (the big problem in 1905-06 is that the Imperial Government just does not have the resources to keep order because it is combatting a massive terrorist uprising). Without the pogroms, and the restrictive laws that follow, internally fewer Jews would be drawn into the revolutionary movement, and abroad the image of the Tsardom is probably less negative, which might have had impacts on how motivated the European terrorist milieu was to feed the chaos in Russia, and conversely European governments might have been more willing to engage more deeply with the Russian government economically and so on.
The funny thing with the "going to the people" experiment is that it reminds me of similar activities by the modern Marxist left. I remember hearing tales about how, in the late 70's, the US Socialist Workers Party (different ideologically from the UK SWP in certain key areas) believed that there was going to be huge upsurge of trade union activity and so instructed members to try going into the unions. For some reason, there are US SWP members in London (they have an office around Brick Lane), and so you had this odd and amusing situation where American university graduates went to work in a meat packing factory in the UK.
It is interesting how often in the memoirs of anti-Communists - the leading lights there being nearly all being ex-Communists - one of the things they mention as an early flicker of doubt is the experience of selling the Party newspaper at the factory gates or otherwise integrating themselves with the workers, and finding both how little interest the workers had in them, and how poorly they understood the workers.
I didn't know about that about the US SWP lol. The great socialist tide from 1917 led in some very strange directions.
Fascinating and impressive article. I never knew any of it.
It’s maybe an interesting coincidence that Lincoln and the Tsar both faced assassination attempts in 1865-6, and then Garfield and the Tsar both really were assassinated in 1881. Any thoughts about that? And, speculatively, what might have happened had the Tsar been killed in 1866?
Also a coincidence that you published this today, as Tom Stoppard passed away. I (and maybe a lot of people) had only heard of Herzen from his trilogy of plays, where he and Bakunin are main characters.
First, thank you.
I had not thought about the parallel with the US running so deep, the Garfield dimension specifically (as I'm sure you know, a lot of contemporaries did compare Lincoln and Alexander II, and a statue of the two shaking hands was unveiled in Moscow in 2011). It's easier, I think, to explain that in terms of the terrorist phenomenon of the era developing as a genuinely international phenomenon and by the 1880s it has thickened into a pretty effective apparatus. Some historians call the period from c. 1880 to the First World War "the golden age of assassination".
If Alexander II had fallen in 1866 ... there's a question. Thinking on my feet here, but it could well have rebounded seriously against the terrorists. The one certainty we have is that Alexander III would have taken the throne (he was in his early 20s) and if we assume he died at the same point, in the mid-1890s, for Russia to have had 30 years of his conservative and consolidating rule, as opposed to 15, that could have been quite different. It probably reduces the likelihood of revolution in 1917.
The terrorist movement was somewhat put on ice under Alexander III as it was; it seems likely the damage would have been longer lasting if he had taken power in 1866. One aspect that comes to mind is the Bulgarian crisis in the mid-1870s: Alexander III is much less likely to have been pressured into getting involved, and Russian involvement - which you'd think would bring prestige to the Monarchy (and it did) - also had a significant role in electrifying the terrorist movement, ironically.
The second big thing is that the wave of shocking pogroms in 1881-82 is less likely in 1866. Among other things, the Okhranka was in the middle of a reorganisation in 1881, which hampered its response. And if those pogroms do not happen, it's less likely the 1905-06 wave happen - especially if the terrorists are weakened (the big problem in 1905-06 is that the Imperial Government just does not have the resources to keep order because it is combatting a massive terrorist uprising). Without the pogroms, and the restrictive laws that follow, internally fewer Jews would be drawn into the revolutionary movement, and abroad the image of the Tsardom is probably less negative, which might have had impacts on how motivated the European terrorist milieu was to feed the chaos in Russia, and conversely European governments might have been more willing to engage more deeply with the Russian government economically and so on.
I had missed that about Stoppard! RIP.
The funny thing with the "going to the people" experiment is that it reminds me of similar activities by the modern Marxist left. I remember hearing tales about how, in the late 70's, the US Socialist Workers Party (different ideologically from the UK SWP in certain key areas) believed that there was going to be huge upsurge of trade union activity and so instructed members to try going into the unions. For some reason, there are US SWP members in London (they have an office around Brick Lane), and so you had this odd and amusing situation where American university graduates went to work in a meat packing factory in the UK.
It is interesting how often in the memoirs of anti-Communists - the leading lights there being nearly all being ex-Communists - one of the things they mention as an early flicker of doubt is the experience of selling the Party newspaper at the factory gates or otherwise integrating themselves with the workers, and finding both how little interest the workers had in them, and how poorly they understood the workers.
I didn't know about that about the US SWP lol. The great socialist tide from 1917 led in some very strange directions.