Russian jingoists insist that Russia was brought into this world to teach it a lesson. They have a point, though not the one they mean. It’s a lesson in how not to do things.
Now that the initial excitement following the murder of Charlie Kirk has subsided, commentators begin to ponder the roots of political assassination. No such analysis is possible without historical references, and these aren’t in short supply.
Just in this morning’s papers, I’ve seen the US, Ireland, Austria-Hungary, France and a few other countries mentioned in that context. However, one country, Russia, is a notable omission, which offends my sense of fairness.
For, during the 50 years before the 1917 revolution, Russia boasted more assassinations than the rest of the world combined. She also showed that yes, the tendency to kill politicians may be traceable back to human nature, as one of today’s pundits correctly claimed.
Yet justice is there precisely to prevent flaws in human nature from doing too much harm. We wouldn’t need cops and courts if we were all little angels.
It’s ineffectual justice that turns a propensity for assassination into isolated outbreaks and then into a pandemic, and this point is often ignored. Ignored with it is a valuable lesson for today’s West.
One teacher worth heeding was Sergei Nechayev, a seminal figure in Russian, and therefore the world’s, history. It wasn’t so much Marx as Nechayev who was the role model for Lenin. In particular, Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) provided the blueprint for Lenin’s What Is to Be Done (1902).
Nechayev was a Left-wing extremist and, like his Western counterparts today, he enjoyed the support of liberal intellectuals. His most prominent sponsor was the London resident Alexander Herzen, whose family money took Nechayev from his Swiss exile back to Russia.
Once on his native soil, Nechayev organised the terrorist gang called the People’s Reprisal (Narodnaya rasprava). When the student Ivanov tried to leave the gang, he was brutally murdered, and the Nechayevites had their collars felt. (The incident was the inspiration behind Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed).
This was the inaugural test case for the newly instituted trial by jury which failed the test miserably. Though the defendants were found guilty of murder, only four were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
A message was thus sent to society that honestly felt political hatred went a long way towards exonerating even murderers. The message was taken, and an open season on tsarist officials began.
One case, that of the terrorist Vera Zasulich, became a European cause célèbre. A French magazine even named Zasulich “the most famous woman in Europe”, a great accolade indeed. (Later, Time Magazine awarded its Man of the Year distinction to Hitler and to Stalin, twice.)
That pan-European celebrity was tried in 1878 for an attempt to murder Fyodor Trepov, St Petersburg’s governor. Zasulich, incidentally, had some previous: she had been imprisoned for a while on suspicion of complicity in the Ivanov murder. However, she had been soon released for lack of evidence. This time she was caught red-handed.
Though this is neither here nor there, Trepov wasn’t entirely blameless. He had ordered that the student Bogolyubov, serving time in prison, be flogged for insubordination. The law, however, banned corporal punishment for noblemen, which Bogolyubov was, and the legally minded Zasulich was incensed enough to pull the trigger. On second thoughts, perhaps she wasn’t as legally minded as all that.
Alas, neither was the court. The defence successfully turned the proceedings into a trial not of the terrorist but of Trepov, and the jury of Zasulich’s peers found her innocent on the grounds of her political, rather than simply criminal, motive. (In 1883 she co-founded the first Marxist group in Russia, the Liberation of Labour.)
That miscarriage of justice showed that jury trial was useless in Russia, and from then on political crimes were mostly tried by military tribunals. Those proved only marginally less lenient, at least until nihilist terror reached pandemic proportions in the early twentieth century.
Russian judges came to their senses then and, in return for the murders of 1,600 officials, including some members of the royal family, passed about 5,000 death sentences in 1905-1907. But by then it was too late. The country’s madness had flared up and in a few years she’d go on a murderous rampage the likes of which the world had never seen.
The failure of Russian courts to save the country from nihilist outrages could have taught a useful lesson to posterity even in the West: institutions are only as good as the people who man them.
Trial by jury, for example, can’t survive as an instrument of justice in the absence of a broadly based group of people who understand what justice really means. Such understanding is impossible without an ability to draw a line between good and evil, which alone can make legal justice morally just. Yet we’ve been house-trained not to think in such categories any longer.
Today’s British criminals, expertly guided by their barristers, recite in chorus the mantra “it’s all society’s fault”, knowing that the twelve good men would nod their assent.
As a personal example, the man who robbed my mother-in-law while she lay on her deathbed got off with a derisory punishment having declared, “I did this on account of my childhood.” No country can have real justice if such statements can be made, never mind accepted.
That condition wasn’t met in Russia in Zasulich’s time, and it’s not being met in the West today. Thus an argument that a criminal had an impoverished childhood has been known to draw mild sentences or even acquittals in Western courts, race has been seen as an extenuating circumstance, and political motives have been accepted as being more noble than simple common-or-garden savagery.
As a result, courts are beginning to act as rubber stamps of egalitarianism, rather than agents of justice. Society predictably responds with a climbing crime rate that only statistical larceny can pass for anything other than a social catastrophe. One example: in 1954 there were 400 muggings in all of Britain; one month of 2001 produced the same number in Lambeth, a South London borough (p. 318,000).
The craven weakness of the judiciary system creates an atmosphere of general lawlessness irrespective of the law acting tough in isolated cases. I have no doubt, for example, that the murderer of Charlie Kirk will be punished severely, possibly terminally. Yet even in America, to say nothing of Britain, the liberal mindset prevails.
Judges throughout the West are passing light sentences or none at all for acts that ought to have brought the whole weight of the law on the criminals’ heads. Capital punishment has been abolished throughout Europe, and any punishment is increasingly seen as too cruel and superfluous.
Regardless of the odd tough sentence, such wishy-washy liberalism diminishes collective respect for the law. And when people don’t respect the law collectively, they are more likely to break it individually.
In due course, the rule of law may become an empty phrase full of deadly ramifications. Granted, today’s Western democracies are a far cry from 19th century Russia, where independent judiciary was still in the experimental stage that it has never progressed from.
One hopes that, say, Britain will be spared the kind of diabolical collapse that befell Russia and, with her as the agent, may yet destroy life on earth. But let’s not confuse hope with certainty. “It can’t happen here” is right up there on the list of famous last words.
More or less everything conceivable has been tried during the 5,000 years of recorded history. That makes the past a compendium of invaluable teaching aids, and Russian history may claim pride of place among them.
It teaches how desperately wrong things can turn out when justice fails and mindless liberalism reigns.