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Оглавление“PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED”: ANARCHIST BOMBERS
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“PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED”:
ANARCHIST BOMBERS
SOME MAJOR
ANARCHIST OUTRAGES
1866 First of several
attempts on life of
Tsar Alexander II
1878 Kaiser Wilhelm I of
Germany survives an
assassination attempt
1881 Tsar Alexander II
killed in bomb blast
1892 US industrialist Henry
Clay Frick badly wounded
in shooting attack
1893 Bomb thrown into a
Barcelona opera house,
killing eleven people
1894 President Sadi
Carnot of France
stabbed to death
1897 Spanish prime
minister Antonio Cánovas
gunned down
1898 Empress Elizabeth of
Austria stabbed to death
1900 King Umberto of Italy shot and killed
1901 US President McKinley fatally shot
1909 Argentinian police chief blown up by a bomb
1911 Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin killed
1920 Wall Street bombing kills 38 people
SPREAD TO THE
UNITED STATES
Anarchist actions spread through
Europe and then across the
Atlantic to North America.
In 1886, a bomb was thrown
at police during a Chicago
demonstration that had
been protesting against
the shooting of striking
workers. The authorities
clamped down hard, with four
anarchist supporters rounded up and hanged in a rigged
trial. The Chicago repression was typical of the authorities’
responses around the world, although brutal repression
only tended to produce further violent reaction from the
radical anarchists.
Police spies and informers unmasked several anarchist
gangs, but the outrages continued well into the 1920s,
with a final flurry of action taking place in the United
States as a result of the execution of the Italian anarchist
immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. But in the end
violent anarchy died out because radical interest had
turned elsewhere, towards socialism and the possibilities
offered by the communist Soviet Union.
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
The insurrectionary anarchists would never
have made such an impact without two
technological developments: the revolver and
dynamite. The revolver was a reliable handgun
that could easily be concealed in a coat pocket
and was capable of firing multiple shots in
quick succession—invaluable when a single
shot might not kill the target outright.
Dynamite was an explosive developed by the
Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel
in the late 1860s. It was more powerful
than gunpowder and more stable than
the notoriously unreliable
nitroglycerin—and it could
be detonated with a simple
blasting cap. The revolver and
the dynamite bomb became
the weapons of choice
for the violent anarchist.
Above: Artist’s rendition of the
bomb thrown in the French
National Assembly by the
anarchist Auguste Vaillant
on December 9, 1893.
Left: Assassination
of P
resident
McKinley
