The White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting on April 25 was only the latest in a series of politically motivated attacks in recent years, a story we have covered extensively because we believe it is among the most important in America today. For a sense of where this could lead, we turn to Gary Saul Morson, one of the foremost scholars of Fyodor Dostoevsky—the 19th-century Russian novelist who watched a society normalize political violence and then wrote the definitive account of where it leads. Morson identifies in America today what Dostoevsky saw in 1870s Russia: a culture in which political violence has become not just tolerated but fashionable. —The Editors
The Russian terrorist movement, which began in the 1870s, had reached prodigious dimensions by the beginning of the 20th century. Between October 1905 and the end of 1907, some 4,500 government officials, and about the same number of private individuals, were killed or injured in terrorist attacks. Newspapers included supplements entirely devoted to assassinations and “expropriations.” People wearing a uniform risked having sulfuric acid thrown in their faces. In the town of Belostok (now Bialystok), one terrorist group consisted entirely of schoolchildren. The most evocative story about the routinely violent climate of the time concerns a newspaper reporter, who asked his editor whether to run the new governor’s biography and was told to save it for the obituary.
Who were these terrorists? Except in rare circumstances, they came not from the oppressed working class or peasantry, but from the ranks of the highly educated or prominent. Resorting to terror, in this time and place, had become almost mundane and unexceptional. Many were the offspring of the very people who supplied targets.
