Modern Terrorism Roots in Car Russia

Terrorism is one of the worst scourges of the 20th century, especially with the religious fall that characterizes radical Islam. What are the historical roots of terrorism? Scholar Vittorio Strada, Russian culture and literature scholar, speaks on this subject in his book “Domundsidence to kill”. Strada shows that modern terrorism found in the Czar Russia and later in the Bolshevik revolution an incubator of fertility. This terrorism, born under the shadow of the Caris regime and which flourished during the October Revolution, marked the history of the entire West and not alone. As Strada went, Western terrorism has developed in Russia by the second half of the century XIX and at the beginning of the 20th century, promoted by a sui generis legislation coming from a socialist and communist utopia.

Professor Strada, why exactly in Russia?

Terrorism in Russia resulted, not from a local rebellion, but from a particular historical situation. Overall, the insistence on an absolute autism resisting any reform of the institutional type, the pressure of broad rural measures, all of this prepared the ground for the revolt. When socialist ideas from the West were added, the situation erupted.

Has the model for terrorism played any role in the birth of this contemporary terrorism?

The flux of French revolution's ideas and actions, in particular during terror, was crucial and brought about a new kind of revolution aimed at a Ottoman renewal of society. As for the manifestations in Russia, they were more ruthless than French and theoretical, but this may be part of Russian nature...

A terrorist theory, Sergey Necaev, a secretist popular by Lenin, is perhaps the one who brought to high levels the cult of violent action...

Necaev was the black spirit of movement, and today is still a puzzle. It doesn't make sense to demonize him. Dostoyevsky told the Demons about him, and the Russian author himself considered him a mystery. In a way, Dostoyevski sounded the alarm that something new was happening in Russia, that he was hiding a different and dangerous nihilist violence, but he was ignored...

What was happening in Russia, about Necaev, was so turbulent that both moderates and progressives remained unable to react. One sense was that they were victims of what we today will call politically correct. They were paralyzed in the face of those revolutionary ideals of horror and genocide.

Necaev was a theory, but in 1905 he completely changed...

In the early 1900 ' s, terrorism in Russia gained an increasingly rigorous organisational character, and even more became a phenomenon of measures related to the revolutionary war in general. Now we move from basic terrorism to what will be the terrorism of the communist state.

How did the sponsors of terrorism in Russia reach the west?

It was a natural passage dictated by ideological communication. What is different in terrorism from the 1970s to the west is the ratio to various state structures. The states were more organised and more involved in a global geopolitical game.

In terrorism, more and more religious archacipes are taking up even when it comes to formal Communist terrorism. An example can be the myth of the martyr.

It's a broader problem than it seems, and it's in the process of modern society's secularism, where atheism itself has religious conotations. Totalitarianism is the most fulfilled form of this phenomenon. Between terrorism and totalitarianism that took place in Russia, there has been a connection that has been especially fatal.

What are the similarities and the differences between this terrorism and Islamic terrorism?

Once again, Russian experience has shown this kind of connection between secular and secular terrorism. It's a complicated subject that I examine in the introduction of my book.

Strada writes: Russian “Terrorism constitutes the pre-historic of current and future terrorism. Those who voted for death by dropping bombs on Cari have preceded suicide terrorists using more sophisticated devices against Western crowds today.” /Il Gyornale World.al