Afterword by Mitsuyoshi Numano

 

“Savinkov Reborn: The Fight for Freedom Continues”

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Fighting against both the Tsar and the Bolsheviks and leading a life full of twists and turns, the prominent Russian revolutionary Boris Savinkov (1879–1925). His major work The Pale Horse dug deeply into the torments and conflicts of terrorists based on his own experience, creating a worldwide sensation. He has many readers in Japan as well; it is well known that Itsuki Hiroyuki, inspired by this work, wrote Behold the Pale Horse.

Savinkov’s life has now been recounted in To Break Russia’s Chains, a biographical work by Vladimir Alexandrov, one of North America’s outstanding scholars of Russian literature. Published in the centenary year of his death, this is a monumental work.

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Who is Savinkov = “Ropshin”?

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This book is a complete Japanese translation of Vladimir Alexandrov, To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks (New York: Pegasus Books, 2021). The original is a hefty hardcover of 562 pages; first of all, we should be glad that this groundbreaking book can now be read in Japanese so swiftly. I say “groundbreaking” because there is no comparable work in the world that, based on solid documentary research and yet written as a superb biography that grips a broad readership, portrays the entirety of Savinkov’s extraordinary life—his loves and death, his political thought, and his literature all included. Until now, Savinkov’s life has been shrouded in many mysteries and colored by various legends and praise-and-blame, but at last this book has revealed his complete figure as a living human being. In contemporary Russia, around the same time as this book’s publication—or following in its wake—academic studies by historians began to appear. In the former Soviet Union prior to that, research on anti-Bolshevik revolutionaries like Savinkov had long remained discouraged.

The author, Vladimir Alexandrov—one of North America’s preeminent scholars of Russian literature (now Professor Emeritus at Yale University)—has written specialist studies on Andrei Bely, Nabokov, Tolstoy, and others; in recent years, however, he has turned from academic literary criticism to nonfiction biographies aimed at general readers, and has been writing prolifically. His first biography was The Black Russian, the adventurous life of Frederick Thomas—an African American who, fleeing discrimination, went to imperial Russia and achieved great success as an impresario in Moscow’s nightlife world (original 2013; Japanese translation by Takeda Madoka, Hakusuisha, 2019, under the title Thus Moscow’s Nights Were Made, and Jazz Was Brought to Turkey—The Life of Frederick, a Black Impresario Who Ranged Across Two Empires).

This “Black Russian,” Frederick Thomas, had been completely forgotten; Alexandrov diligently unearthed unpublished archival materials from around the world and splendidly rescued Thomas from the brink of historical oblivion. In the present book he shines a light on yet another figure who has come to be half-forgotten: Savinkov (whose surname, accented on the first syllable in Russian, is sometimes rendered in Japanese as “Sāvin’kov”).

Or perhaps it’s a bit too strong to say that Savinkov is now “half-forgotten.” There are surely still those who remember two things about him: first, that in imperial Russia before the revolution he led the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s “Combat Organization” and assassinated high government officials, making him a famous (or infamous?) terrorist-revolutionary; and second, that based on that experience he wrote, under the pen name Ropshin, the highly autobiographical novel The Pale Horse, which depicted the inner life of a terrorist and caused a sensation, and was at one time feverishly read in Japanese translation. Yet beyond those two points, few people likely know much about this contradictory, enigmatic figure.

As becomes clear when you read this book without any unnecessary preconceptions, Savinkov’s life was a succession of adventures and ordeals stranger than fiction: clandestine activity as a terrorist; nerve-wracking struggle with the authorities; arrest and escape; and doubles agents operating around him. After the February Revolution he turned from an underground activist against the regime to enter the center of power, only to step down quickly, and then—displaying astonishing tenacity and persistence—continued to fight to overthrow the Bolshevik regime, flying all over Europe—France, Britain, Poland, Italy—to seek meetings with political leaders and solicit their cooperation. In the end he fell prey to a plot by the Russian secret police: when he infiltrated Bolshevik Russia he was arrested and sentenced to death… Needless to say, with such a way of life, the calm of ordinary family life was out of the question; even so, moments of tender affection toward several women and children are woven into his story.

This book depicts the whole of Savinkov’s extraordinary life, which until now had been little known—not only in Japan but also in the West and even in Russia itself. Its greatest feature, as with the earlier The Black Russian, is that while it is founded on rigorous academic research and analysis ranging as far as unpublished archives worldwide, it is free of the dry scholarly tone and instead becomes a breathless biography-as-story for general readers (and—perhaps with American readers in mind—it takes pains to make things clear, such as converting sums into modern US dollars, which is also welcome for Japanese readers).

What makes the book fascinating, above all, are Savinkov himself and the colorful cast around him: the notorious double agent Azev; Sidney Reilly, the globe-trotting spy said to have inspired James Bond; and even, appearing as a British intelligence operative, the future famous writer Somerset Maugham. Among European politicians of the time: Churchill, Piłsudski (Poland’s first head of state), and even the young Mussolini. What an extravagant cast.

But beyond the sheer extraordinariness of the “material,” we must single out Alexandrov’s literary power in rendering it. This is surely possible because the author, originally a literary scholar who made the whole of modern Russian literature his own, writes with a touch born of long familiarity: faces and expressions, subtle psychological tremors, cityscapes—all are carefully drawn (and yet not as invented fiction, but firmly based on sources). Indeed, references to Russian writers—from nineteenth-century titans like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to twentieth-century modernists such as Bely and Nabokov—are scattered throughout the book; but rather than showy “ornaments” to display erudition, they are natural points of contact whereby the essence of Russian literature, which the author knows inside out, leads into Savinkov’s life. To draw readers’ attention to one “inside joke”: although not spelled out, an anecdote embedded in the epilogue about a kind of urban legend that Savinkov’s ghost appeared in Moscow is remarkably similar to Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Life imitates art.

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Russian Terrorism — The Prehistory Leading to Savinkov

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Savinkov led the SR Combat Organization that assassinated Interior Minister Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei, Governor-General of Moscow, in 1904 and 1905, respectively; but there was a long prehistory of terrorism in Russia leading up to that. As Wada Haruki succinctly put it, “The systematic practice of terror targeting individual persons as a means of political struggle was a feature of Russia’s revolutionary movement.” In fact, Russian history from the late 19th to the early 20th century was saturated with bloody terror.

The first example was the Karakozov incident in April 1866. Dmitrii Karakozov, only 25 at the time, an activist in the secret society “Hell,” which advocated political terror, attempted to shoot Alexander II, failed, and was hanged. Though the assassination failed, as the first attempt on the Tsar’s life it shocked society and blazed the trail for later terrorism.

Next to shake the world was the 28-year-old woman Vera Zasulich, a member of the Narodnik organization “Land and Liberty.” In January 1878, moved by moral indignation, she shot and grievously wounded Trepov, the St. Petersburg chief of police, was arrested on the spot, and put on trial. Sympathy for her lofty motives swelled; she was acquitted, delighting not only revolutionaries but much of Russia’s intelligentsia. Zasulich came from a nobles’ family. As an aside, in Russia’s revolutionary movement there were, even more than among male revolutionaries, many female revolutionaries of noble origin. According to calculations by the American historian of Russia Richard Stites, 67% of the women deeply involved in the movement between 1873 and 1877 were of noble birth, and at least four were daughters of generals. In other words, from the outset many of the women bearing Russia’s revolutionary movement were well-born daughters of the aristocracy.

After Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov, in 1879 “Land and Liberty” split into two factions: “People’s Will,” which accepted terrorism, and “Black Repartition” (here “black” meaning “complete” or “general”), which focused on rural agitation and denied terror. Terrorism reached its peak in March 1881, when members of “People’s Will” succeeded in assassinating Alexander II. This time dynamite bombs—the newest technology of the age—were used. Six perpetrators were arrested and hanged. Vera Figner, the legendary woman revolutionary whom Savinkov would later meet and befriend in the South of France, was also involved in the plot.

Dostoevsky’s life was deeply affected by these terror incidents. He was shaken by the first report of the Karakozov incident, listened intently to the Zasulich trial, and died just before the assassination of Alexander II. It is conjectured that in The Brothers Karamazov, published the previous year, he had planned a continuation in which Alyosha Karamazov would be involved in an assassination of the Tsar (see Kameyama Ikuo, Imagining a Sequel to “The Brothers Karamazov”, Kobunsha Shinsho, 2007).

Who, then, were the people who created this unprecedented current of terrorism? As a premise for understanding Savinkov’s activity, let us briefly review the flow of revolutionary thought to that point. In 1864 Russia established self-governing bodies called “zemstvos.” From the zemstvos arose a liberal trend seeking constitutional and parliamentary reform beyond local self-government, forming a progressive force opposing imperial power; at the same time, however, more radical revolutionary currents also arose, sharply at odds with zemstvo-based liberalism.

In the 1860s, Russia saw the appearance of radical youth called “nihilists” (pronounced “naiarists” in English; in Russian “nigilist”), who placed at the core of their thought the wholesale negation of established order, an anti-aesthetic stance and utilitarianism, faith in science, sharp religious criticism, and materialism. Turgenev’s Bazarov in Fathers and Sons is considered the archetypal nihilist.

The word “nihilism” in this sense fell out of use within Russia by the early 1870s, but in Western Europe “nihilist” long served as a synonym for Russian revolutionaries. The OED, for example, lists as one sense of “nihilist” the specifically Russian historical phenomenon and adds that they were people who “reject all systems of government, aim at the complete overthrow of the established order, and are ready, for this purpose, to resort to terrorism.”

Of course Russian society did not readily accept such nihilists. Turgenev’s Smoke and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Demons are critiques of nihilism. Yet even critics of nihilism intuited that nihilism tapped something deep in the Russian psyche. The later émigré philosopher Nikolai Lossky (1870–1965), who advocated intuitionism and personalism, wrote: “Nihilism is not inconsistent with the basic characteristics of the Russian people. Even after losing religion and becoming materialists, most nihilists still became obsessed with eradicating evil in social life. They replaced the ideal of absolute good in the Kingdom of God with the idea of material happiness on earth—imagining it realizable precisely in the form of socialism—and thought revolution indispensable for that end” (The Character of the Russian People, 1957). Likewise the émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) argued that Russian nihilism, while denying God, should be recognized as a “religious phenomenon” founded on the soil of Orthodoxy, an “inverted Orthodox asceticism,” an “asceticism without grace” (The Origin of Russian Communism, 1937).

Russia’s revolutionary thought, with forerunners such as Herzen and Chernyshevsky and with anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin, developed in its own way distinct from Marxism. Within this stream, what stood out as a particularly Russian phenomenon was the “Narodniki” (Populists), who replaced the 1860s nihilists in the 1870s as revolutionaries with a more clearly defined political program. Under the slogan “To the People,” they entered the countryside to conduct propaganda among peasants, but were not accepted and suffered harsh repression; they then turned to a policy of fighting power through terrorism. That is, whereas liberals centered on the zemstvos aimed at legal social reform within the system, the Narodnik-line revolutionaries who accepted terror thought that if only they could overthrow the regime by assassinating the Tsar and other dignitaries, a peasant-based socialism would be realized. Marxist revolutionary forces joined somewhat later: the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, founded in 1898, soon saw Lenin emerge as leader of the “majority” (Bolsheviks) and take on an important role in the revolutionary movement. Meanwhile those in the Narodnik tradition calling themselves Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) appeared in the late 1890s, formed a party in 1901, and organized a Combat Organization, bringing a new wave of terrorism to Russia. It was in this phase of Russian history that Savinkov operated as a terrorist.

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The Introduction of Nihilists and Narodniks in Japan

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The activities of non-Marxist, pioneering socialists/revolutionaries called nihilists and Narodniks were introduced in Japan quite early, and their terror incidents were reported in detail. The assassination of the Tsar in Russia must have stimulated the imagination of Meiji-era Japanese socialists. This is clear enough if we recall Ishikawa Takuboku’s famous poem “After Endless Debate,” written in 1911 in shock at the executions of Kōtoku Shūsui and others in the “High Treason Incident”:

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We read and we debate,
And how our eyes shine—
No less than Russian youths of fifty years ago.
We debate what is to be done.
Yet not a single one pounds the table with a clenched fist
And cries “V NAROD!”

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This is not the place to recount, nor do I have the knowledge to do so, the reception of Russian revolutionary thought in Meiji and Taishō Japan; but to cite one early emblematic publication: Miyazaki Yumeryū’s True Record of the Nihilist Party: Demon’s Wail (1885), a kind of political novel, is thought to be based on works such as the Narodnik revolutionary Stepniak’s (Kravchinskii) Underground Russia (1883). As the title suggests, the term “nihilist” was usually translated in Japan at the time as “kyomu-shugisha” (advocate of nothingness) or “kyomu-tōin” (member of the Nihilist Party).

Stepniak himself was a terrorist who stabbed to death the head of the gendarmes, Mezentsov, in 1878. Though now forgotten, Stepniak’s books were translated one after another; in Meiji-Taishō Japan he could be counted among Russia’s well-known “authors,” alongside Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It is well known how Russian literature was translated and avidly read in Meiji Japan, and there are many excellent studies (e.g., Hajishima Wataru, A Biographical Dictionary of Translators of Russian Literature, Tōyō Shoten, 2012; Katō Yuri, Studies on the Translation of Russian Literature in the Meiji Period, Tōyō Shoten, 2012). But parallel to the introduction of “pure literature,” translations of what should be called “revolutionary literature” were also active; the two readerships overlapped to some extent and together formed the overall interest in Russia in Japan—this deserves more re-examination.

A book widely read when I was a student in the 1970s was Arahata Kanson’s The Dawn of the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Iwanami Shinsho, 1960). Prodded by Professor Kikuchi Masanori—“You aren’t even in the conversation if you haven’t read at least this!”—I hurried to read it. Focusing on the Narodniks as the prehistory of the Russian revolutionary movement, it was written by Kanson (born 1887), a pioneer of Japan’s socialist movement. Though not a specialist in Russian history, it could only have been written on the basis of his youthful immersion in Narodnik literature translated since the Meiji era. I also clearly remember that in the 1970s, even for a naïve literary youth like me who wasn’t specializing in history, Narodniks were still a hot topic in Japanese Russian-history circles: when the world authority Franco Venturi (author of the monumental Roots of Revolution, 1960; untranslated into Japanese) came to Japan to lecture, my heart raced; and the imposing two volumes of Wada Haruki’s early masterpiece Nikolai Russel—A Narodnik Across Borders (Chūōkōronsha, 1973) shone on bookstore shelves.

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When The Pale Horse Was Hot — The Rise of Proletarian Literature

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Let us return to Savinkov. What made his name—or rather his pen name “Ropshin”—known worldwide was the novel The Pale Horse (1909), in diary form and with strong autobiographical elements, depicting a terrorist’s inner life. It is not treated as a classic in the mainstream of later Russian literary history; indeed it was something of a “faddish piece” that soon faded. Nonetheless, it was translated early in Japan, had a strong impact, and became so popular as to create a fad. Forgive the seeming pedantry, but let me confirm the basic bibliography.

The first Japanese translation, from English, was Aozameru Uma (Winter-Summer-sha, 1919), translated by Aono Sukekichi, a critic in the then-emerging proletarian-literature camp. I have not seen this translation, but it reportedly contained many redactions and was fairly inaccurate; later Uchimura Gōsuke, with his characteristically cutting style, even called it “shallow.” Even so, it powerfully moved left-wing readers from the time of publication through the early Shōwa period, as recollections by Eguchi Kan and Hirano Ken make clear. The same year saw a partial translation from English by Mikami Oto’kichi of Savinkov’s memoirs as Russia’s Secret Society (Genbun-sha). In 1924, I Saw the Black Horse, a sister work to The Pale Horse, appeared in translation from Russian by Kuroda Oto’kichi (Zuihitsu-sha). For reference: Stepniak’s English-language novel The Career of a Nihilist (London, 1889) was translated in 1926 as To the Scaffold (Mizukami Ichie, Shōbundō), depicting a Russian terrorist up to his execution; in subject it anticipates Ropshin’s The Pale Horse. (Perhaps because it sold well, or for reasons unknown, it was reissued the following year under the sensational title A Revolutionary in Love! by Seikōkan; though titles and publishers differ, the two books are in fact identical, from the same typesetting.) This publishing situation shows that, in the rise of proletarian literature, a work not strictly “proletarian” like The Pale Horse was avidly read—mainly among left-wing readers—as a broad “revolutionary literature.” We might call it the age of “revolutionary romanticism.” On these matters, see the excellent recent article by the young scholar Tamura Futoshi, “The Shadow of Ropshin—An Aspect of the Reception of The Pale Horse in Japan,” Slavica iotoensia vol. 1, 2021.

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When The Pale Horse Was Hot — The Era of Campus Struggles

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In Japan, The Pale Horse saw another boom from 1967 into the 1970s. Entering university in 1973, I witnessed the aftermath in real time. Comparing publication dates, it seems the harbinger of the boom was a short story by Itsuki Hiroyuki, “Behold the Pale Horse,” in Bessatsu Bungakukai no. 98 (December 1966). The following January it won the Naoki Prize, sending the newcomer—who had debuted just the previous year with “Farewell, Moscow Hooligans”—into instant fame. As befits Itsuki, who studied Russian literature at Waseda, the story is set in the Soviet Union of the day; its content has no direct connection to Ropshin’s The Pale Horse, drawing rather on anti-Soviet writers like Solzhenitsyn. In Itsuki’s story, “Behold the Pale Horse” is the title of a novel secretly written by an elderly Soviet writer which, once translated, sets off an international sensation. Perhaps Itsuki, with his keen feel for the times, was foreshadowing the return of a Ropshin boom? Soon after came Kawasaki Nami’s translation of Savinkov’s Memoirs of a Terrorist (full translation; Gendai Shichō-sha, March 1967), followed by a rush of publications:

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• The Pale Horse, with Selected Poems by Ropshin, trans. Kawasaki Nami, afterword by Uchimura Gōsuke, Gendai Shichō-sha, Nov. 1967.

• The Pale Horse, trans. Kudō Masahiro, afterword by Hirano Ken, Shōbunsha, Nov. 1967.

• The Black Horse, trans. Kudō Masahiro, afterword by Takahashi Kazumi, Shōbunsha, May 1968.

• I Saw the Black Horse, with Savinkov’s Confession, trans. Kawasaki Nami, Gendai Shichō-sha, June 1968.

• Aldamatskii, Reprisal: Savinkov—His Betrayal and Death, trans. Kawasaki Nami, afterword by Uchimura Gōsuke, Gendai Shichō-sha, Jan. 1969.

  • A Soviet biographical novel (1967), strongly shaped by Soviet ideological constraints and evidencing limits of documentation; unusually, both translator and afterword writer are fairly critical of it, but as the first Soviet Savinkov biography it was translated swiftly.

• Prison: Ropshin Short Stories, with a Study of Savinkov = Ropshin, translated and authored by Kawasaki Nami, Hakuba Shobō, Oct. 1969.

• Posthumous Poems of Ropshin, trans. Kawasaki Nami, Hakuba Shobō, 1972 (reissued by Michitani, 2010).

• Savinkov (Ropshin), Phantoms / O My Friends the Terrorists, trans. Nakata Hajime, afterword by Uchimura Gōsuke, Hakuba Shobō, Feb. 1977.​

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Even a glance at this list shows several things. First, the revival of Savinkov = Ropshin was driven by the passionate translation efforts of two then-young Russian-literature scholars: Kawasaki Nami (b. 1930) and Kudō Masahiro (b. 1943; later rendered Masahiro → Masahiro with different character). The Ropshin translations weren’t by establishment authorities but by up-and-coming scholars unafraid of the theme of terror. Kawasaki’s nearly 100-page study “Savinkov = Ropshin,” included in Prison, remains the most outstanding Japanese study by a Russian-literature scholar, detailing Savinkov’s life and works as comprehensively as possible based on the literature then known; it was later reprinted in Iwanami’s modern-library edition of The Pale Horse (2006). Kudō—who would later make major contributions in Pasternak studies and translation—was still an undergraduate at Hokkaido University when approached by the poet Osada Hiroshi (then editing at Shōbunsha) to translate The Pale Horse.

Second, publication was handled mainly by two new, distinctive publishers: Gendai Shichō-sha (founded 1957) and Shōbunsha (founded 1960). Gendai Shichō-sha, under founder Ishii Kyōji, put out one unorthodox book after another that sharply drew a line against conventional good taste and tepid progressivism; it is well known for Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s translation of Sade (confiscated as obscene and brought to trial) and the 11-volume Trotsky Selected Works (1961–65). Shōbunsha focused on humanities and literature, emphasizing new world literature beyond old-fashioned authority, and was especially supported by young readers of foreign literature. It is interesting that both publishers, seeking a stimulus lacking in the reading world, simultaneously set their sights on The Pale Horse.

Third, three commentators of different generations—Hirano Ken, a towering literary critic; Uchimura Gōsuke, a Russian-literature scholar; and Takahashi Kazumi, a young, socially minded writer lionized by the Zenkyōtō generation—all lent powerful support to the reevaluation of Ropshin. From the Russian-lit side, it is striking that the reevaluation was led not by establishment figures but by the maverick Uchimura Gōsuke, who, after long Siberian internment, wrote forthright criticism.

This publishing program to reevaluate Ropshin = Savinkov achieved unusual success. Particularly impactful, of course, was The Pale Horse, with the Kawasaki and Kudō translations released virtually simultaneously (colophons show the Gendai Shichō-sha edition five days earlier). The tale of this “race,” as recalled by editor Suyama Ikurō of Gendai Shichō-sha, is too delightful to omit. On learning that Shōbunsha was also preparing a translation, Ishii rushed the proofreading and printing and brought the book to Hashimoto Bindery—only to find that Shōbunsha had just brought the Kudō translation there as well. Ishii pleaded for priority, but the old-school, fair-minded president refused: both were valued clients. Finally he roared, “Fine! Then I’ll make sure both books go out the front door at the same time!” (Suyama Ikurō, The Flash Called “Gendai Shichō-sha”, 2014).

Ordinarily, two translations of the same book released at the same time might cancel each other out; surprisingly, the opposite occurred—mutual reinforcement—and both sold extraordinarily well. I couldn’t confirm total sales or reprint counts, but the copies I own show the Gendai Shichō-sha (Kawasaki) edition at its 21st printing by Jan. 10, 1975, and the Shōbunsha (Kudō) at its 15th by Oct. 20, 1973; the Kawasaki version also entered Kadokawa Bunko in 1975 and ran through many printings there too.

Behind this boom from the late 1960s to 1970s lay a season of politics and violence. The wave of university struggles (especially the Zenkyōtō movement) that swept Japan peaked in 1969, but intraleft violence continued, as did unrest such as the 1970 security-treaty protests and the 1972 United Red Army Asama-Sansō incident.

In a review, Honda Shūgo noted that “in air charged with flammable gas, a single match can start a conflagration”; that was indeed the mood.

According to Kawasaki Nami, the initial Memoirs of a Terrorist project at Gendai Shichō-sha was handled by Matsuda Masao, who later became a noted film critic (and at the time was active in the Tokyo Action Front formed by Ishii Kyōji). “Far-left radicals aimed to start a revolution and overthrow the government. … Tracing the background of Memoirs of a Terrorist’s appearance in Japan, I now think there was a latent ideology of overthrowing the state. It was also Matsuda who proposed changing the original title Memoirs of a Terrorist to Portraits of Terrorists.” “Many students mistook me for an agitator for terror … When I presented Portraits of Terrorists to a senior professor, he said, ‘If that had come out last year, you might not have been hired full-time,’ and I felt fortunate.” (Kawasaki had just become a full-time lecturer at Waseda’s School of Education in 1967.) “Incidentally, after the 1970 Yodogō hijacking by extremists, Portraits of Terrorists and a book by Che Guevara were reportedly left on the plane. I even wondered whether I might be tailed by police.” These precious recollections are from an email to Numano dated June 5, 2025, quoted here in part with the author’s permission. I thank Professor Kawasaki, now 95, for his swift and generous response.

In Soviet-related matters, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1974 expulsion of Solzhenitsyn shook the world and spread disillusionment with the USSR among Japan’s left-leaning intellectuals—likely accelerating a turn toward Savinkov as an alternative to the Soviet reality.

Among outstanding critical essays of the time on Russian terrorists, I would cite Takahashi Kazumi’s “The Philosophy of Assassination” (first in Bungei, Sept. 1967; then in A New Great Wall, Oct. 1967). Ranging from Sima Qian to Dostoevsky, Azev, Merleau-Ponty (Humanism and Terror), and Haniya Yutaka, he focuses on Savinkov’s memoirs and Camus’s play The Just, discussing Kalyayev (rather than Savinkov) and, in Ropshin’s novel, Vanya—their contradictions and anguish: “Their actions, while certainly acts of killing in themselves, had to be an ethics that would not stain the future to come. There is no stranger, more terrifying contradiction.”

Camus may be another behind-the-scenes figure who prepared the way for renewed attention to Russian terrorists. The Plague (1950) and The Stranger (1951) were translated early in Japan; after his 1957 Nobel Prize his fame was secure. His play The Just (1949; Japanese 1953) and long essay The Rebel (1951; Japanese 1956), which sparked his quarrel with Sartre, also appeared in Japanese, prompting readers to rethink the modern significance of Russian terrorists. The Just centers on Kalyayev—Savinkov’s close friend since gymnasium days who, under Savinkov’s direction, became the executioner of Grand Duke Sergei’s assassination; in the first attempt he refrained from throwing the bomb because he saw, contrary to expectation, the Grand Duchess and two small children in the carriage—a famous anecdote showing the terrorists’ high ethical standard (as Savinkov himself describes in detail). In Japan, Ozaki Shirō had already written a nonfiction piece, “The Poet,” on this anecdote in 1933; later, after seeing The Just staged by the Mingei Theatre, he boasted that “I, who set out earlier, wrote Kalyayev better.” In The Rebel, Camus devotes a chapter to “The Tender Murderers,” concluding that Kalyayev is “the purest image of revolt”: “He who pays for a single life with his own life, who consents to die, however negative the act he performs, affirms at one stroke a value that transcends himself as a historical individual. … Kalyayev and his comrades overcame nihilism.”

Rereading The Pale Horse, one cannot help noticing the many biblical quotations. For a tale of revolutionaries, the religious atmosphere is striking; Vanya—modeled on Kalyayev—tries to reconcile Christian faith with his deeds to the end. From prison he writes to George: “I could not help but kill. Had I possessed the apostles’ pure and spotless faith, of course I would not have joined in terror. I believe … that what saves the world is not the sword but love. Yet though I cannot recognize in myself the strength to live for love, I can die for love—and must.” (Kawasaki trans.)

The title itself quotes Scripture, referring—as the epigraph shows—to the horse ridden by Death in the Book of Revelation. Strictly speaking, Isaiah Ben-Dasan (Yamamoto Shichihei) pointed out in The Japanese and the Jews that this title is a mistranslation vis-à-vis the Greek original; but it may be that the very phrase “The Pale Horse,” somewhat absurd and mysterious (for “pale” usually describes a human face, not a horse), contributed to the novel’s popularity. Tagawa Kenzō, in his New Testament: Translation and Notes, Vol. 7, Revelation (Sakuhinsha, 2017), notes that chlōros literally means “pale green,” but suggests that “pale” in Japanese suits the symbol of death here. In Russian translations chlōros is rendered blednyi (English pale), and Ropshin’s original title is Kon’ blednyi. Russian has the idiom “pale as death,” and thus the Japanese Aozameru Uma as a translation from Russian is not wrong. The important point in Ben-Dasan’s observation is rather that The Pale Horse is studded with biblical quotations Japanese readers have passed over. From the title’s apocalyptic aura of death onward, why did Savinkov, who justified terror as a political means, envelop his novel in biblical imagery? We should think anew.

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The Fight for Freedom Continues

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As we have seen, Savinkov = Ropshin’s works were passionately received in Japan in the late 1960s and 70s, forcing upon politically sharpened readers—and also upon young people disillusioned by political activism—questions of politics and literature; ends and means (are any means permitted for a just end?); violence and ethics. Shōbunsha’s 15-volume collected writings of Walter Benjamin (1969–81) belongs in this context too; it is no accident that the first volume published in 1969 was Critique of Violence. To me, Murakami Haruki’s 1979 debut, Hear the Wind Sing, symbolizes the shift in the zeitgeist.

Alexandrov’s book once again brings to light questions previously posed and debated, then weathered without answers (Takahashi’s “The Philosophy of Assassination” famously ends with the strange sentence, “This piece has no conclusion”). Many long-standing mysteries are clarified to a considerable degree. Preeminent among them is how the revolutionary (Savinkov) and the writer (Ropshin) could coexist; Alexandrov draws one person’s story without separating politics and literature, but rather seamlessly. He renders Savinkov’s many adventures as objectively as possible; explains seemingly contradictory words and deeds based on sources; and, regarding his private life—from his fastidiousness about dress to relationships with women and gambling—refuses to join in rumor based on speculation, avoiding beautification and heroization. Thus, though the author is a superb literary specialist, he does not offer facile praise of Savinkov’s literature. And yet what emerges clearly is Savinkov’s steadfast struggle throughout his life—even with mistakes born of bluntness, and actions that at times look like compromise or apostasy: a figure who, no matter the enemy—Tsarist Russia or Lenin’s Bolsheviks—and even when victory was unlikely, risked his life to fight for democracy and freedom. Was he truly such a thorough champion of democracy and freedom? I still hesitate somewhat. But it is moving—and deserving of heartfelt applause—that Alexandrov’s magnum opus portrays such a figure. Because the world today needs such a spirit.

In a post-9/11 world rife with murky terrorism, statements that could be read as praising terror must be avoided. Alexandrov is fully aware of this. Still, when we compare the high ethical standards and nobility of Russian terrorists like Savinkov and Kalyayev with the indiscriminate terror that plagues the modern world—aimed at killing as many random people as possible—and with state terror, such as wars that blithely kill small children, the baseness of the latter is plain to see.

Another thought the book calls up is this: though there are no “ifs” in history, still—“What if Savinkov had prevailed?” This question is posed to the reader at the end by Alexandrov himself. We moderns, left or right, tend to accept the October Revolution as given—as the ultimate endpoint of imperial Russia, or as the starting point of the 20th-century Soviet experiment. We find it hard to escape a mental framework that treats the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power as a historical necessity and point of departure. Yet tracing Savinkov’s life shows that with different contingencies the Bolsheviks might have failed in their coup and never taken power; or, after taking power, they might have been toppled during the “Civil War” (which in reality was a “condensed world war”) by other forces or foreign intervention. What then for Russia, and the world? As Alexandrov suggests in closing: what if Savinkov had succeeded in assassinating Stalin? (Incidentally, Stalin had a pathological fear of terrorism and even banned research on People’s Will.)

Fittingly, this book appears in the centenary year of Savinkov’s death. Yet the protagonist’s indomitable struggle has not become entirely a thing of the past. For isn’t it so? The fight for freedom continues in Russia even now. Indeed, in America too. Around the world.

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Numano Mitsuyoshi — Professor Emeritus of Russian and Polish, University of Tokyo

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