Claudia Verhoeven : Time of Terror, Terror of Time. On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism

A principal discursive tic in the history and historiography of the Russian revolutionary movement identifies terrorism as „impatient“: terrorists are those who constitutionally cannot abide the natural unfolding of the historical process and therefore try to force history forward faster through artificial crises. On this reading, terrorists stand twice condemned: they are politically immature and historically ignorant. On the basis of evidence culled from revolutionary proclamations, newspapers, and memoirs from the early 1860s to the early 1880s, this article argues that temporality is indeed the essential category through which to grasp terrorism, but that the process of radicalization that leads towards the emergence of this type of political violence can only be understood by taking into account the terrorists’ own visions and experiences of historical time, and that these, ultimately, undermine the simplistic and totalizing causal explanations of terrorism that are implied by the “impatience” narrative.

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