Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917

(Paperback)

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Anna Geifman examines the explosion of terrorist activity that took place in the Russian empire from the years just prior to the turn of the century through 1917, a period when over 17,000 people were killed or wounded by revolutionary extremists. On the basis of new research, she argues that a multitude of assassination attempts, bombings, ideologically motivated robberies, and incidents of armed assault, kidnapping, extortion, and blackmail for party purposes played a primary role in the revolution of 1905 and early twentieth-century Russian political history in general.

Reviews

"Professor Geifman ... dissects with surgical precision the couple of decades that preceded the Bolshevik seizure of power, a time when a beleaguered tsarist regime groped desperately, and failed to find, some means of defending itself."--Virginia Quarterly Review "This book makes gripping reading... Geifman's detailed account makes it clear that in fact the wave of terrorism broke out more or less spontaneously, and amounted more to a universal breakdown of law and order than to a 'movement.'"--Edward Ross Dickinson, New England Slavonic Journal

Author Bio

Anna Geifman is Assistant Professor of History at Boston University.