«Tiger of the Revolution» – G.A. Gershuni

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Abstract

The author in the article explores the life path and social activities of the founder and leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Combat Organization, the organizer of the assassination attempts on the Minister of Internal Affairs D.S. Sipyagin, Governor N.M. Bogdanovich, Governor-General Prince I.M. Obolensky. The relevance of the declared topic is explained by interest in revolutionary events and personalities in Russia, rethinking and re-reading them thanks to modern realities and facts, recreated thanks to comparative historical and historical-biographical methods. The author concludes that, first of all, thanks to the efforts of G.A. Gershuni was founded the party of socialists-revolutionaries, its Central Committee was formed. Until his arrest in May 1903, he was the undisputed leader of the party, its prominent publicist, ideologist and most active functionary: he created and inspected local organizations, founded all-party printing houses and organized transport of literature, reformatted the Central Committee, and held in his hands all the threads of the party guides. In 1902, Gershuni created and led the organization of intense terror: the militant organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; recruited terrorists, developed plans and directly led the assassination attempts, painfully perceived by the authorities and constituting the glory of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He is the only one among the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who possessed the clearly expressed abilities of an ideologist, publicist, speaker and organizer. The author believes that the life path of the «tiger of revolution», an outstanding personality in general terms, reflected the tendency for revolutionary organizations to emerge in Russia in the late XIX and early XX century with their explicitly expressed aspirations for extreme violent methods up to terrorism.

 

About the authors

M. I. Leonov

Samara National Research University

Author for correspondence.
Email: morenov@ssau.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-8513-8871

Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor of the Department of Russian History

References

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