Economic History

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian authorities were facing serious problems because of systematic political terrorism, which was mostly connected to the activities of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (the PSR). The most striking feature of that terrorism was that many of the terrorists were women -a feature that makes it justified to maintain that by taking part in political terrorism women entered the domains that in patriarchal societies were considered to be exclusively male: the domain of violence and the domain of politics. Such intrusion to the male territory was especially shocking for the traditional patriarchal society of pre-revolutionary Russia. Despite this striking feature however, systematic historical research on gendered representations of the Russian female terrorists at the beginning of the 20 th century is still in short supply whereas in other academic disciplines portrayals of women as agents of political violence are a frequent topic in the research on contemporary terrorism. To help fill up this void, the purpose of the article is by using the case of Maria Spiridonova, the most famous female terrorist in pre-revolutionary Russia, to see whether the conclusions made by non-historians about gendered representations of contemporary female terrorists can be used for historical research in order to identify eventual distortions in the representations of violent female agency in the past and, thus, obtain deeper knowledge about gender order in historical perspective.

Many contemporary researchers of female violence claim that gender stereotypes dominate works about militant women. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the historical works about the Russian female terrorists in order to find out whether those stereotypes influence its contents and the scholars' conclusions. Typology of the gender stereotypes that exist in the works about women terrorists is constructed in the article and used for the analysis of the historical literature. The article is concluded with the discussion about what is to be done in order to avoid the gender stereotypes and write a new balanced research on the topic.

Representing revolutionary terrorists as heroes and martyrs was a typical feature of the mythology of the Russian revolutionary underground at the beginning of the 20th century. This mythology described Underground Russia, the world of the revolutionaries, as an ideal country inhabited by ideal people. The purpose of that epos was to represent the revolutionary struggle, and individual revolutionaries in such a way that they would gain sympathy from the wider public and become role models for other revolutionary fighters. Sympathetic representations of women who committed political violence seem to be especially shocking in the context of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, since female violent behavior contradicted the existing gender order.
Employing theoretical perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis, gender history and intersectionality, the dissertation analyzes the way narratives about the individual life paths of female terrorists of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (the PSR), the biggest socialist party in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, were constructed in their revolutionary auto/biographies.  It analyzes how the lives of women from different social and ethnic origins, of different ages, with different life paths, who happened to be united only by their participation in the political terrorism of the PSR, were recounted with the help of narratives used in the Russian revolutionary underground.
The research findings demonstrate that the accounts of the lives of female PSR terrorists were constructed with the help of the dominant narrative that was formed as a conversion story. Within the framework of that narrative, the lives of individual women were adapted to the dominant discourse of heroism and martyrdom, and at the same time were contextualized within the dominant discourse on “good” femininity that existed in the Russian society, and even within the discourse on Jews as perpetual “Others” in the Russian empire in case of Jewish women.  Social and ethnic backgrounds as well as individual circumstances of the terrorist women, however, transformed the dominant narrative, and thus created diversity of representations. The discursive practice of writing a revolutionary life accepted by Bolsheviks influenced the discursive practice employed in revolutionary auto/biographies of female terrorists written during the early Soviet period.

Most historians writing about revolutionary terrorism in Russia in the
second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century have
long treated it as the history of a righteous fight against the autocratic
regime, which is the way the terrorists themselves represented their
activities. However, conservative contemporaries of the terrorists,
with a progovernmental perspective on revolutionary terrorism have
until recently not been taken into account. This article discusses the
main narratives employed by conservatives at the beginning of the
20th century to explain the political violence committed by women,
and it shows how these narratives have been employed in the scholarly
analysis of the topic. The article provides an answer to the question
why progovernmental conservative views on the female terrorists
and terrorism in prerevolutionary Russia have never been influential in
the historiography.