I’m currently trudging my way through Stephen Kotkin’s recent book on Stalin. It is the first work I’ve read where the author repeatedly emphasises that everything would have turned out better if some of the key characters had been assassinated. Kotkin variously wishes that Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin had been strung up or shot at moments where that was a real possibility. I’d agree with him on Stalin and every writer brings their prejudices to their work, but most have the good sense to leave out the things they might say after a few beers. What makes his views on political assassination interesting is that he’s the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. So, for ultra-establishment academics and their institutions, political assassination is perfectly reasonable so long as the other side is getting bumped off.

Luigi Mangione has repopularised political terrorism to the extent that The Economist is reporting that “Public support in America for using violence to achieve political goals is rising… police officials … said that Mr Thompson’s killing should not be considered a one-off. They reported an escalation of threats since the shooting, what those in the counterterrorism field call contagion.” Meta spends $23m a year to keep Zuckerberg safe and I doubt this is because he’s cheesed me off by suspending my longstanding Facebook account without an explanation or any method of dealing with a human being to sort it out. Capitalists were frightened and Luigi has made them more jumpy.

Not an exact parallel

Kotkin’s main service to my education has been to encourage me to look a bit more deeply into what’s known of Maria Spiridonova and Fanny Kaplan, who was also known as Dora. In a way, they were the Luigi Mangiones of early 20^th century Russia. It isn’t an exact parallel because Kaplan is alleged to have put two bullets into Lenin rather than a notoriously brutal government official or a capitalist who oversaw the deaths of thousands to maximise profits.

Spiridonova was 22 when she assassinated Police Inspector Gavril Luzhenovsky. Like Mangione, she wasn’t stupid. She had been studying dentistry and went on to be the leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, her death sentence having been commuted. Let’s see if the American capitalists turn out to be as liberal as Tsarist Russia. Trotsky described her as “courageous” despite the fact the organisation she led plotted a coup against the Bolsheviks having instructed a couple of party members to kill the German ambassador in a crazy hope of restarting the war between Germany and Russia. She was murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1941.

Kaplan was not as significant a figure as Spiridonova in the Socialist Revolutionaries  and there is real doubt about her claim to have fired the shots, but again there is no doubt as to her courage. She felt that the Bolsheviks were betraying the revolution. She was summarily executed, and her body was incinerated in a barrel. Surely not even Trump would do that.

In some respects, Herschel Grynszpan was the Luigi Mangione of his day. Aged 17, he shot a Nazi diplomat in Paris in 1938. Trotsky said of him:

 “Our open moral solidarity with Grynszpan gives us an added right to say to all the other would-be Grynszpans, to all those capable of self-sacrifice in the struggle against despotism and bestiality: Seek another road!”

Hard to disagree with that. He goes on to make the point that killing random functionaries and capitalists might momentarily satisfy a need for revenge or justice, but that individuals acting alone cannot overthrow an entire system of oppression. That requires millions of people to be brought into activity. I would only add to this that any aspirant Luigis out there need to bear in mind that the entire weight of your jurisdiction’s legal system will be brought to bear on you personally and what didn’t work for Grynszpan and Spiridonova isn’t going to work for you, no matter how many memes you generate.