January 4, 1886
Pyotr Tkachev, a Russian revolutionary, died in Paris at the age of 42. He believed that terrorist attacks against government officials would help the people overcome their fear of the tsarist regime.
A swift and just reprisal against the bearers of autocratic power and their henchmen weakens this power, incites panic in it, and forces it—in the literal sense of the word—to lose its head.
He was born on July 11, 1844, in the Pskov province, to an architect who designed palaces for the royal family. His happy and carefree life ended at the age of four, when his father died suddenly.
The family moved to St. Petersburg, and his mother began working as a nanny. He became fascinated with socialism in high school, where he encountered endless spankings, senseless "drills," and the arbitrary behavior of older students.
At 17, he enrolled in the law department at St. Petersburg University and immediately became involved in student protests against the ban on public gatherings and the establishment of libraries. He spent two months in the Kronstadt Fortress.
When he was released under his mother’s guarantee, he declared that in order to renew Russia, he considered it morally justified to “destroy all inhabitants of the empire over the age of 25, without exception.”
A year later, he was imprisoned again for possessing revolutionary proclamations. He was released three years later, publishing articles on literature, philosophy, and law. He earned a law degree as an external student and defended his dissertation.
He fled the country at the end of 1873, after serving another four-year prison term due to suspicions of ties to the Nechayevites and being sent into exile. He lived in England and Switzerland, publishing the journal "Nabat." He believed that the peasants, who were still held back by fear of the regime, would be the driving force of the revolution.
This fear is one of the most powerful and unshakable pillars of the autocratic power of the police-bourgeois state. If fear were to disappear from the hearts of loyal subjects, the autocratic state could not exist for a single day.
Due to conflicts with other ideologists and editorial boards, he found himself thrown to the sidelines of revolutionary life and ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where he died three years later.
