Terijoen laukausten pitkä kaiku: Mihail Herzensteinin murha toisen sortokauden taustalla by Marina Vituhnovskaja-Kauppala (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 774 movement and radical politics. It should interest not only those with an interest in the history of late imperial Russia, but those researching urban history and the history of terrorism. Department of History George Gilbert University of Southampton Vituhnovskaja-Kauppala, Marina. Terijoen laukausten pitkä kaiku: Mihail Herzensteinin murha toisen sortokauden taustalla. Historiallinen Arkisto, 144. Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki, 2016. 357 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €40.00 (paperback). Marina Vituhnovskaja-Kauppala, who teaches at the University of Helsinki, presents in this book a case study of the 1906 murder of the Russian Constitutional Democratic Party (or Kadet) leader Mikhail Herzenstein and the subsequent three-year trial of his murderers. She uses the trial and the attendant polemics to provide a new perspective on the processes that led to the following, effectual abolition of Finnish autonomy by the Russian Imperial state. The result is the most detailed account we have of the investigation into the Herzenstein assassination and one that succeeds well in showing the resultant trial’s centrality as a catalyst for the rise and state co-optation of Far Right Russian nationalism in the 1910s. Mikhail Herzenstein was a member from Moscow in the first Russian State Duma and a key leader in the Kadet Party. Born a Jew but converted into the Russian Orthodox Church, an accomplished economist active also as a liberal reformist polemicist, after the Revolution of 1905 he emerged as the principal author of the Kadets’ land reform programme and as one of their most visible public representatives. Consequently targeted by the antisemitic Black Hundreds (Chornaia sotnia) as one of their principal enemies, he was assassinated by their agents in the Finnish town of Terijoki in July 1906. Vituhnovskaja-Kauppala tracks the 1907–09 murder trial in exhausting, indeed excruciating detail, and she contextualizes the attendant polemics with the rise of the Black Hundreds’ influence. She shows how Tsar Nicholas II and his inner cadre grew steadily more frustrated as the trial proceeded, appalled by the Finnish judge’s and prosecutor’s presumption to sit in judgement of Russian nationals, and steadily more determined to end Finnish autonomy. From an impressive range of Russian and Finnish sources, VituhnovskajaKauppala shows also how the alliance of the Black Hundreds with the Russian Imperial state (and with Nicholas II himself) progressively deepened during the trial and how it was that the trial convinced them (and the tsar) that REVIEWS 775 Finland had become a principal seedbed for subversion and had to be repressed. More modernized and economically advanced than Russia itself, ethnically and culturally different, and governed by a more liberal constitutional order, Finland was deeply suspect to the Black Hundreds to begin, seen by them as a dangerous inspiration and example to Russia’s liberals, Socialists and ethnic minorities. The way in which the Finnish legal system, separate from the Russian Imperial one, exposed the Black Hundreds’ campaigns of terror and assassination — and their linkages to the Russian secret services — then turned the Black Hundreds ineluctably against it. The trial occasioned a steadily more extreme stream of Black Hundreds press polemics about a claimed Finnish-Jewish-Russian liberal conspiracy against the Imperial Russian state. Vituhnovskaja-Kauppala reconstructs and expertly contextualizes these polemics. She also tracks the constant obstruction of the trial by Imperial authorities. These authorities protected those charged and implicated, and they tried repeatedly to have the entire legal process ended. The Russian Imperial state’s collusion with the Black Hundreds becomes very clear as the book proceeds, trial session by trial session. Akeyfigurethroughoutwastheone-timepaediatricianAleksandrDubrovin, head of the Union of the Russian People, a key Black Hundreds organization. Vituhnovskaja-Kauppala establishes that he was behind the Herzenstein assassination but that he escaped arrest because of the tsar’s personal protection. Later he emerged from hiding as a key figure behind the notorious Beilis Trial of 1913. All but one of those actually convicted of the Herzenstein assassination were promptly pardoned by the tsar, and some of them continued their Far Right activities afterwards. As is well known, other Black Hundreds activists later moved to Nazi Germany and continued their murderous work there. Dubrovin’s Union of the Russian People was...