Through Violence to Eternal Kingdom: Revolutionary Avengers, Suburban Violence, and the Crisis of Imperial Governance in Post-1905 Russian Poland

Abstract

Abstract This article studies the case of a notorious criminal group, the Revolutionary Avengers (Rewolucjoniści Mściciele), to explore the “theatre of violence” in fin-de-siècle Russian Poland. First, it considers the reactions to the group’s activities and how they exposed the absence of state monopoly on violence, as well as the imperial bureaucracy’s slipping control over the means of communication following the October Manifesto and the abolition of censorship. Second, the group’s story is analyzed as representative of the post-revolutionary emergence of large numbers of men accustomed to, fluent in, and profoundly changed by violence, yet excluded from party structures. The article argues that the small-scale, anti-elite and anti-governmental violence perpetrated by the Avengers was a form of self-assertion, an attempt to live with dignity after the revolutionary promise had failed. Third, the article spatializes the Avengers’ activities within the industrial suburbs of Russian Poland. Although the urban outskirts were not the only places where the group operated, they were fundamental to their actions: it is where many Avengers came from, where they hid and recruited, as well as where their communities were based. Using Walter Benjamin’s theory of violence, the article suggests that many of the Avengers’ acts were “lawmaking” in nature, effectively delineating suburban “spaces of the poor.”