History

Curriculum Vitae

“Revolutionary adventurism” was a term of derision Lenin reserved for political activists who had “neither theoretical principles nor social roots,” and whose worst flaw was their non-contemporaneity with the unfolding of the historical process. Lenin made copious use of the expression, but stuck it most scathingly to revolutionary terrorists, who with their individualistic assassinations consistently placed themselves ahead of the working classes, and thereby put the momentum of the entire revolutionary movement at risk. I’ve borrowed “revolutionary adventurism” for my research on terrorism’s temporality because, while the expression retains an element of critique, it also captures something about terrorism that is otherwise almost always forgotten: its romance with a life of risk and a life on the run.

Revolutionary Adventurism inquires into the theory and practice of Russian revolutionary terrorism in the period from 1868 to 1918. The project thus covers the entire history of non-state revolutionary terrorism in Russia, starting with the “Nechaev Affair” (the infamous intra-party murder orchestrated by Bakunin’s comrade-in-arms, Sergei Nechaev, that was fictionalized in Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons) and ending with the repression of the pro-terrorist Party of Socialist Revolutionaries by the Bolsheviks. The basic framework for this inquiry is temporality: Revolutionary Adventurism wants to uncover how revolutionary terrorists conceptualized and experienced a life lived self-consciously in historical time, and the role that violence played in living such a life. 

Claudia Verhoeven is assistant professor in the History Department at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. in 2004 from UCLA and was assistant professor of modern European history at George Mason University from 2006-2009. Her first book, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009), is a micro/cultural history of the 1866 attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II by the student radical, D. V. Karakozov. More recently, she has published a series of chapters and articles examining terrorism’s temporality, e.g. “Time of Terror, Terror of Time: On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism” in Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas and “Oh, Times, There is No Time (But the Time that Remains): The Terrorist in Russian Literature, 1863-1913” in Terrorism and Narrative Practice. She is also the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (forthcoming from Oxford UP in 2013-14) and “Cultures of Radicalization: Discourses and Practices of Political Violence and Terrorism,” a special issue of the Social Science History Journal (forthcoming Fall 2012). Besides terrorism and related forms of irregular violence, her research interests include the revolutionary tradition; the history of modernism and the avant-garde; literature; historiography and historical method; and Russian, German, and European cultural-intellectual history.

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