1. Ideas discussed in this chapter are developed in Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Towards a Novel History of Revolutionary Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). “Nihilism” was popularized through Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons (Otsy i Deta), but the term had seen earlier usage, for a survey of which, see M. P. Alekseev, “K istorii slova ‘nigilizm’,” Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti AN SSSR 101, no. 3 (March 1928). When the term “settled,” it signified the Weltanschauung of the new men and women of the 1860s, who, having abandoned the Romantic literature and German idealism of their parents’ generation, turned toward the natural sciences, English utilitarianism, and French socialism, and adopted a whole new modus vivendi. Critics, however, staged nihilism as pure negation, as a philosophy that believes in nothing, and seeks to destroy everything.
2. S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, Underground Russia; Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches fiom Life, with a preface by Peter Lavrov (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1973), vi–vii. Originally published as La Russia Sotterranea in 1882 in Milan.
3. Ibid., 28–29; S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, Grozovaia Tucha Rossii (Moscow: Novyi Kliuch, 2001), 42. The Russian reprint does not capitalize “terrorist” as does the English.
4. V. I. Lenin, “Partizanskaia voina,” Polnoe Sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958–65), 14:3. Originally published in Proletary no. 5, September 30, 1906.
5. Alexander Herzen, “Zhurnalisty i Terroristy,” Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1954–65), 16; Alexander Herzen, “Our ‘Opponents’,” My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 289; MV, no. 78, April 14, 1866.