Revolutionary terrorism in Russia in the early 20th century: the murder of the Siberian warder I.S. Mogilev

The aim of the article is to study the political murder of I.S. Mogilev, a Tobolsk central prison warder. Using a microhistorical approach, the author considers the terrorist act in the context of Russian revolutionary extremism, which had been widely spread in the first decade of the 20th century. The historical sources involved in the research (periodicals, sources of personal origin, documents of governmental agencies, archive materials and works of historians and publicists) allow to provide an overall pattern of revolutionary terrorism sprouting in pre-revolutionary Russia thanks to the apologists of the doctrine of the People's Will. Founders of political terror viewed it as a temporary and transitional stage in struggle against Tsarism, after which a turn followed to a more humane form of liberation movement activities in case of a change in governmental policy. But, according to the author, socialist-revolutionaries, who were confident in the necessity to give terror a permanent character, had a completely different view on the way of transforming Russian reality. Thanks to the active propaganda of the Socialist Revolutionary Party members, the beginning of the 20th century was marked for the empire with the growth of anti-government unrest, directed against officials of every government body, including the penitentiary agency. The author believes that during the events of 1905-1907, Russian prisons became a hotbed of revolutionary sentiments, and officials of the penitentiary system became one of the main symbols of hostile monarchy that required struggling in a violent way. Siberian outskirts did not avoid the tendency of "prison terror", which characterized violence against jailers in historiography. Mogilev, a warder of Tobolsk central prison, who followed the letter of the law steadily and at the same time maneuvered between a loyal policy and a tightening of discipline, was not accepted by the convicts, half of whom served to the Socialist Revolutionary Party ideas. The reason for it was the character of the penal system, part of the arsenal of punitive forces of Tsarism, with whom the anti-government movement struggled. The author concludes that the unwillingness of the prisoners to tolerate the suppression of their revolutionary enthusiasm and their fighting spirit expressed in obstructions, riots and different stratagems, which stigmatized the warder as a cynical bigot, was the reason for the official's tragic death. Becoming victim of "prison terror", Mogilev swelled the numerous ranks of the adherents of the monarchy regime who were killed by revolutionary terrorism.

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