| Abstrakt: |
Abstract:On the night of 27 November (10 December) 1910, the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Egor Sozonov, renowned as the assassin of Minister of the Interior Viacheslav von Pleve in July 1904, committed suicide in his Siberian prison cell in protest at the use of corporal punishment against his fellow political prisoners. News of Sozonov’s death provoked an outcry across Russia: it was accompanied by questions in the Duma, widespread and hagiographical coverage in the liberal and revolutionary press, and student protests in the major university towns (and, conversely, by barely concealed joy from the Black- Hundredist right). This article serves two purposes. First, it reconstructs, in as much detail as the evidence allows, the events surrounding Sozonov’s death, which (despite their infamy at the time) have up to now received little scholarly attention and remain, to some extent, shrouded in mystery. Secondly, it explores how these events came to serve as the basis of a revolutionary martyrology — originally promoted by the SRs, and later appropriated by the Bolsheviks after 1917 — that glorified Sozonov as a ‘just assassin’, persecuted by a despotic government, who had ultimately sacrificed his own life in order that others might live. The article situates Sozonov’s death in the wider political, social and cultural context of the time, considering it in relation to contemporary discourses on suicide (as a transcendentalist political act), corporal punishment (long regarded as the gravest imaginable insult to the dignity of educated Russians), the ‘moral economy’ of revolutionary terrorism and the quasi-religious mythologies of the revolutionary underground. |
