Claudia Verhoeven
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Scan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you’ll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote. After all, Karakozov was no great theorist. He led no political organization. He hardly fit the image of the iron willed, revolutionary aesthetic who preached the maxim ‘The ends justifies the means.’ No, to his contemporaries, Karakozov was a nobody, an odd and sickly school dropout who, like so many of his ilk, dabbled in student radicalism. That is until he tried to assassinate the tsar. And with that act he unleashed the unthinkable.
Pinpointing the exact moment a historical phenomenon is born is no easy endeavor. But after reading Claudia Verhoeven‘s The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009), we can now locate the birth of terrorism in its more or less modern form. Terrorism was born on April 4, 1866 at around 3:45 pm. It’s father was the aforementioned odd student, who pulled out a double-barreled flintlock pistol and shot at Alexander II as he stepped out of St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden on to the boulevard. Karakozov missed, and perhaps his act would have remained a historical abortion if it weren’t for terrorism’s mother: modernity. For, according to Verhoeven, it was the modern conditions of Imperial Russia that allowed Karakozov’s shot to reverberate throughout the Russian body politic. It was modernity that gave us a new form of political violence, and perhaps more important a new political subject, the terrorist, who through his or her political will could alter the course of history. The Odd Man Karakozov is, in Verhoeven’s words, truly a work of nanohistory. Through a singular moment she shows how the consummation between an odd man like Karakozov and modernity influenced the idea of revolutionary conspiracy, literature, celebrity, revolutionary fashion, art, and our present understanding of terrorism and the terrorist.
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Sean, your interviews are a great service. Thanks for doing it. As a non-scholar outside of academia, I especially enjoy such opportunities.
I heard your talk with Claudia Verhoeven. I have not read her book, but now I will keep an eye out for it. Thanks to your questions the podcast wasn’t simply a verbal summary of the book. As Verhoeven answers your questions, listeners are able to hear her think out loud and consider new angles on the issues she wrote about. Good job, both of you.
Three quick remarks:
(1) 19th Century Russia is one thing, but 21st Century US is another, so it’s depressing that in dealing with terrorists the US has so easily (and expansively) resorted to the state of exception rationale. Although it was a disappointing move, I assume that back in 1866 few were too surprised that the Russian state was so quick in implementing exceptions when they perceived a new kind of threat. It is a different for present-day America. In the US, after all, due process is not supposed to be a novelty, and nowadays nobody can claim that terrorism is a new phenomenon.
(2) Few people (even Russians) are aware that when compared to other powerful states the Russian Empire, from the times of Elizabeth, rarely used the death penalty for crimes not targeted against the state. During the 19th Century both Great Britain and the United States executed several times more people than Russia. Somehow, though, this does not mesh with the common stereotype of Imperial Russia. Dostoyevky’s Raskolnikov and Dmitri Karamazov were never in danger of being sentenced to death. In 1866 England a Raskolnikov would have been sent to the gallows, not so in Russia (I’m referring to private murders, not political assassinations.)
(3) Probably much too obvious, but here it goes anyway: we should not assume that Karamazov’s Alyosha was destined to become a Tsar murderer had Dostoyevsky lived a few years longer. Plans change, drafts are discarded. Dostoyevsky’s own works provide many such examples. Even if he already had a story in mind, nobody knows how that story would have changed at the end.