DEATH ORDERS: STEPHEN BROWN REVIEWS “THE VANGUARD OF MODERN TERRORISM”
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/10/death-orders/
The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger Security International, 2010.by Anna Geifman
A 21-year-old woman walks into a police headquarters, a normal occurrence most days, except for this one. Thirteen pounds of explosives and a detonating device are attached to her body underneath her clothes. But before she has the chance to blow herself up along with the building and everyone in it, she is, fortunately, apprehended.
Almost weekly, an act of suicide terrorism is announced somewhere in the world. But this barley averted attack did not occur in Gaza, Pakistan or Chechnya, or any other well-known terrorist hot spot. The lady in question was not even Muslim or a “black widow”, seeking to avenge a dead relative or to expunge her shame for her unmarried status or for alleged sexual misconduct before marriage.
The year of this failed suicide mission was 1907. The name of the young woman determined to end her existence and the innocent lives of others in such horrific fashion was Evstiliia Rogozinnikova, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in pre-revolutionary tsarist Russia. Along with numerous other socialists and anarchists, Rogozinnikova was part of one of the most sanguinary, and unknown, terrorist campaigns in modern times that, between 1901 and 1917, killed and wounded 17,000 people in 23,000 terrorist attacks.
The Rogozinnikova case is only one of the highly original comparisons that Anna Geifman, a Professor of History at Boston College, makes between the terrorist groups in tsarist Russia, primarily from 1905 to 1910, and modern-day Islamic terrorism in her remarkable and fascinating book, Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia. In her well-detailed work, Geifman maintains modern-day terrorism has its roots in the pre-revolutionary tsarist state and traces its development to the present day. Her approach to this century-old scourge is a psychohistorical one, which has led her to conclude there is no difference in mindsets between the followers of Lenin and those of Osama bin Laden, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Geifman is well qualified to write a work of this kind. As a professional historian of Russian revolutionary violence and modern terrorism, she has written the well-received books Thou Shalt Kill: Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917; Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution; La mort sera votre Dieu: du nihilisme russe au terrorisme islamiste (Death Will Be Your God: From Russian Nihilism to Islamiste Terrorism) and was the editor of Russia Under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion. Author of several journal articles, Professor Geifman, who is originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, also teaches history of contemporary terrorism at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
Geifman argues early twentieth century Russian terrorists and modern-day Islamists possess the same psychological motivations because they are thanatophiles, or people who worship death (Geifman also includes the Nazis in this group). Moving between the two time periods, Death Orders contains numerous examples of thanatophilia as the basis for modern terrorism. Although the two eras are decades apart and very different in culture and traditions, Geifman shows the terrorists’ indiscriminate and deadly violence has the same psychological underpinnings.
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