In July 1906, I was in Bialystok. A pogrom had just been started. I saw women who were repeatedly raped before the eyes of their husbands and their fathers. I saw a child, four years old, deliberately shot in the arm by a soldier. I saw a girl of twelve shot in the stomach. I saw a hospital that was purposely fired upon by soldiers merely to create a panic among the patients. The local schoolmaster was killed by three gendarmes driving nails into his skull. The whole reason for the massacre was to terrify the population into submitting meekly to various governmental impositions. The massacre is a recognized weapon of the Russian Government, often used to shape political ends. By what standards of the eternal verities is it wrong to combat this kind of slaughter by removing the official or officials responsible? To assassinate an Alikhanov, a Pavlov, a Min, a Dubossov, a Sergius, a Plehve, is, to my mind, precisely like killing a rattlesnake that has crawled into a nursery, or stamping out a pest, or blowing up a building to stop the further spread of the flames.

Kellogg Durland: The Necessity for Terrorism in Russia.

It is not often remembered—tho it should be—that at this time these Nihilists were not politicals, and did not fight czarism. Their object was to teach the alphabet, not to overthrow the dynasty. It was only when the government condemned to a slow death in Siberia every one who printed a leaflet, or distributed a pamphlet, or attended a meeting, or listened to a speaker, or joined a co-operative association, or started an experimental farm, or went to a technical school, or taught a peasant—that they commenced to oppose the Romanoff regime. It was only when the ultimatum, "No schools allowed!"[16] was for several years rammed down their throats at the point of the bayonet that the Nihilists became Terrorists. It was only when the prisons overflowed with their young warm blood that Sophia Perovskaya waved her handkerchief.

The shaft of truth is naked, and so armored with bias is the mind of man, that the missle cannot pierce the mail. In spite of the unanswerable array of historical data, many will still exclaim, "We do not believe in using force in Russia. We believe in education."

O huge Sviatogor, giant-hero of the primitive Russians, endow us with your mighty nerves, lest we burst!

There was a girl—Miss Gukovskaya. A young girl—fourteen years old.[17] She addressed a crowd—about Kovalsky. She was transported to a remote part of Siberia for life. The child could not endure the wilderness and drowned herself in the Yenisei.

There was another girl who gave a single pamphlet to a worker. Her punishment was nine years of hard labor and then life-long exile among Siberian snows.

A young man was found reading a book not admired by the censor. He was put in prison and kept there until he committed suicide.

When the gay and gentle Starinyevitch was a student, a manifesto was found in his possession. Unwilling to incriminate another, he refused to say from whom he received it. For this omission he spent twenty years in filthy prisons.

While searching the room of Rosovsky who was not yet twenty, the police discovered a proclamation of the Executive Committee.

"Who gave it to you?"

"That I cannot say. I am not a spy."

He was sentenced to death and died on the scaffold.[18]

Kropotkin mentions another youth of nineteen who posted a circular in a railway station. He was caught and killed—hanged I think. "He was a boy," says Kropotkin, "He was a boy but he died like a man."

Ask a Revolutionist if he knows Sophia Bardina and his glowing eyes will answer yes. Because she read a couple of articles in public, she was condemned to several years' penal servitude, which by special favor of the czar was commuted to life-long exile.

Leo Deutsch in his mild and modest Sixteen Tears in Siberia, tells of a few girls of Romny who hit upon the plan of loaning one another books and making notes on them. Soon a few young men joined, and thus was formed a small reading society, such as might help to pass away the long winter evenings in the dull provincial town. For this—and for absolutely nothing but this—"the conspirators of Romny" were deported across the Urals.

Only a couple of years ago, several schoolteachers met at Tiflis to discuss the best method of improving their educational curricula. A commander entered and cried, "Disperse!" Turning to his cossacks he said, "These women are yours"—and all were raped with impunity.

As long as the Romanoffs rule Russia, only idiots opaque and impervious to reason, can speak of education without action.

If education were permitted, revolutionary violence would not be, because terrorism is the last straw to which the drowning nation clutches. They cling to this because under existing circumstances nothing else is possible, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Russia has produced no greater Terrorist than Gregory Gershuni, and when this glorious Jew stood before his "judges" he told them: "History will forgive you everything; the centuries of oppression, the millions you have starved to death, the other millions you have sent to be butchered on the battlefield; everything but this—that you have driven us who mean well with our fatherland to seek recourse in murder."[19]

Men cannot meet for purposes of discussion, because if they do, they will be beaten and bayoneted. Children cannot, for they will be hacked to pieces. Women cannot, for their bodies will be utilized to warm the beds of cossacks.

Such liberticide must be answered by tyrannicide! And the hand that holds a dagger, red with the blood of a despot, is the noblest hand of all!