Living by the Sword: Religiosity and the Terrorist Subculture of Russian Revolutionaries, 1904-1910

Author

Gregory I. McEvoy, CUNY City CollegeFollow

Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Department

History

First Advisor

Lale Can

Second Advisor

Barbara Syrrakos

Keywords

Russia, Revolution, Socialism, Terrorism, Religion, Propaganda

Abstract

The Marxist dictum of “religion is the opiate of the masses” has led to a prevailing assumption in scholarship that the socialist movements of the early twentieth century have been inherently atheistic. Religion is often associated as a remnant of old, antiquated society and incompatible with the claimed modernity of socialist progress. This assumption has led to overlooking the religiosity within certain radical movements and revolutionary culture at large. Scholarship on the political underground in Tsarist Russia has, thus far, perpetuated this impression. While it is the true that the Bolsheviks and Leninist Social Democrats rejected religion as obscurantist and contrary to principles of scientific atheism and progress, they did not represent the sentiments of the revolutionary underground. Among the Bolsheviks were other revolutionary parties and movements, some of which not only tolerated religiosity, but incorporated it into their ideological system, the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) being one of them. With over one million official members in 1917, the SRs were the most influential party in Russian politics. Despite adhering to general secularist principles and ruthlessly attacking the Russian Orthodox Church, SR activists frequently employed religious rhetoric, both propagandistically and in private correspondence. I argue that this rhetoric did not just exist as a mere propagandistic tool, but served to communicate and envision a modern socialist system of belief.

This study seeks to examine religious rhetoric within the SR’s autonomous Combat Organization, the terrorist wing of the party. Unlike other forms of struggle, principally labor organizing, the function of terror was sensationalized spectacle. The act of murder not only removed an undesirable minister or governor, but was a triumph of popular will against an unjust and repressive system. As such, violence became canonized and mythologized for propagandistic intent, but also in turn forming and molding a political identity. The party’s endorsement of terrorism as a legitimate form of revolutionary struggle demanded intense discipline and impassionate devotion to a higher cause. The intensities and burdens of political violence required a principled system of morality and ethics. Revolutionary struggle, whether it be socialist or nonsocialist, became a political religion of the SR Combat Organization. I argue that religious rhetoric existed more than just a propagandistic tool but served to communicate and conceptualize an imagined system of socialist modernity. I support this by using three different case studies of the party’s most celebrated and renown combatants: Boris Savinkov, Ivan Kalyayev, and Egor Sozonov.

Recommended Citation

McEvoy, Gregory I., "Living by the Sword: Religiosity and the Terrorist Subculture of Russian Revolutionaries, 1904-1910" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/1212