This is a law book, and it should be read as one. Igor Blishchenko and Nikolai Zhdanov were Soviet international lawyers, and Terrorism and International Law — translated by Lev Bobrov, designed by Timur Samigulin, issued by Progress in Moscow — does what a monograph in that field is supposed to do. It works through the 1937 League of Nations Convention, the Tokyo, Hague and Montreal air conventions, the 1971 OAS Convention, the 1973 Convention on Internationally Protected Persons, the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, the 1979 Hostages Convention and the law of mercenarism. It reproduces the drafting record of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on International Terrorism by document symbol. It cites Georg Schwarzenberger, Paul Wilkinson, Pierre Mertens, Brian Jenkins, Jean Salmon and the American Journal of International Law, mostly accurately and sometimes generously. It ends by arguing for a permanent international criminal court. A reader who came to it expecting a pamphlet will find something closer to a seminar.
Start with the date. The spine says 1984; the Russian imprint codes carry 84; but nothing in the text happens after the middle of 1982. The last events discussed are the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of June 1982 and a Middle East report of the same year; the most recent book cited is The Words of Friends, Progress, 1982. The strings "1983" and "1984" do not occur anywhere in seventy-five thousand words. This is a manuscript closed in the second half of 1982 and published two years later, and it matters, because it places the book beside a companion volume rather than after it. A. S. Grachev's In the Grip of Terror, Progress, 1982, was Moscow's political answer to the Reagan administration's "international terrorism" campaign — the Haig announcement of January 1981, Claire Sterling's The Terror Network, the El Salvador White Paper. This is the same commission in a different register. Grachev, who worked in the International Department of the Central Committee, wrote for the Western communist parties. Blishchenko and Zhdanov wrote for the international lawyers, and for the delegations that had spent a decade deadlocked in the Sixth Committee. Between them the two books divide the brief: Grachev supplies the facts, this one supplies the doctrine.
The doctrinal problem is genuine, and the book states it correctly. In 1982 international law had no agreed definition of terrorism and had never had one. The 1937 Convention, drafted after the murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Louis Barthou at Marseilles in October 1934, was signed by twenty-four states, ratified by one — India — and never entered into force. The General Assembly took the subject up in 1972 under an agenda item so long and so hedged that the book reproduces its full title twice, and the Ad Hoc Committee established by Resolution 3034 (XXVII) produced, through three subcommittees and several sessions, nothing. The book's account of why is the most useful thing in it, and it is documentary rather than assertive: it prints the submissions of Syria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the USSR from A/AC.160/1 and its addenda, and it names the fourteen non-aligned states — Algeria, Congo, Guinea, India, Mauritania, Nigeria, People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, Syria, Tanzania, Tunisia, Yemen Arab Republic, Yugoslavia, Zaire and Zambia — who pressed for state terrorism to be examined first. That is not a Soviet invention. It was the position of a large part of the General Assembly, and anyone who wants to understand why the UN could not define terrorism for thirty years needs to know it. It was also being said in 1981 by people with no interest in Moscow's convenience. Maurice Bishop, prime minister of Grenada, put it to a rally that March in terms the book never improves on: Washington was "trying to lump together the socialist countries, the Non-aligned countries, the national liberation movements, the progressive countries in the third world . . . to try to attack the freedom fighters against apartheid in Namibia and South Africa as being internationalist terrorists." Intercontinental Press, reporting him, added the flat sentence that is the whole of the argument: "Grenada rejects this imperialist definition of terrorism."
The Soviet formula is stated plainly and should be stated fairly. The USSR, the book records, "declared it to be inadmissible to extend the interpretation of the concept 'international terrorism' to cover the national liberation struggle, resistance to the aggressor in the territories occupied by him, and action by working people in defence of their rights and against the oppression by exploiters." The Conclusion repeats it almost word for word: legal measures against terrorism must "under all circumstances, preclude the possibility of such interpretation of international terrorism as could be applied to the national liberation movements or resistance to the aggressor in occupied territories, or the activities of the working people against their exploiters." One can disagree with that and still see that it is a position with a case behind it. A law that made armed resistance to the South African army in Namibia a crime, while leaving the South African army's raids into Angola outside the definition, would not have been a neutral law. The book quotes Wilkinson's chapter arguing that in recognising the PLO the UN had "granted legal status to terrorists and legalised their terrorist activities", and the reply — that this condemns the liberation movement and whitewashes the reaction — is not a bad one. Nor was the fear hypothetical. When Senator Jeremiah Denton opened the hearings of the new Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism in Washington in April 1981, he began by reading out a fresh CIA definition of terrorism that encompassed actions with "insurrectionary goals", and Charles Mohr of the New York Times observed that "This would seem to include some wars of national liberation." Intercontinental Press reported it in its issue of 4 May 1981, while these authors were still writing. The drafting fight the book describes was being conducted in the open, and the side the book was arguing against had just said the quiet part aloud.
The Western double standard was real, and the book's sharpest instance of it has never been answered: the United States co-sponsored resolutions condemning air piracy while sheltering the Brazinskases, who hijacked a Soviet airliner to Turkey in 1970 and shot dead the stewardess Nadezhda Kurchenko. That happened.
The book also develops the concept of state terrorism seriously, which almost no Western monograph of 1982 did. Its route is technical and rather elegant: since the Special Committee on the Question of Defining Aggression had, in April 1974, brought acts of state terrorism and support for them within the draft definition of aggression, and since the General Assembly adopted that definition in December 1974, state terrorism can be prosecuted through the law of aggression, and belongs among international crimes proper — alongside crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and apartheid. It is applied to Israel's operations against the PLO in Europe and in Lebanon, to South Africa in Angola, to Chile — Letelier in Sheridan Circle in September 1976, which it attributes correctly to the Chilean secret police, DINA, together with the car bomb that killed General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974 and the shooting of Bernardo Leighton and his wife in 1975 — and to the United States, with the Church Committee material quoted from the published report. Isabel Letelier is quoted from New Times: "This is a case of state terror directed against a great many people in both Chile and other countries." The book's own definition, which it puts in a footnote, is this: "State terrorism should likewise be interpreted to imply a policy of terrorism pursued by the authorities in respect of individuals, groups of individuals or population for political, racial and" — the sentence runs on — and, by the doer, "acts of terrorism committed by persons in civil service and by those expressly trained for the purpose".
Write that definition out and read it slowly. It is a good definition. It is also, word for word, a description of what the Soviet state did to its own population between 1936 and 1938.
The same perception was arriving, that same season, from the opposite direction. On 4 December 1981 Reagan signed an executive order replacing Carter's of 1978, and where the Carter order had at least attempted a definition of "international terrorist activities", the new one dropped the definition and kept the powers. Jim Mack, writing in the Militant of 18 December and reprinted in Intercontinental Press of 21 December 1981, drew the conclusion:
The term "terrorist activities" has merely become the 1980s replacement for "subversive activities," which was used by an earlier generation of thought-control police. It is a term whose very value to the cops comes from the fact that it is never defined, and never can be defined.
Set that beside Blishchenko and Zhdanov and you have the two halves of one insight. Mack's point is that power finds an undefined term useful. Theirs is the harder case, and they get most of the way to it: that the cure is a definition precise enough to bind whoever invokes it. What they will not do is take the last step, which is to stand inside it.
The test this book invites, then, is not Grachev's. Grachev simply asserted that "throughout their entire history, the activities of the CPSU and the Soviet state have not had any relation with terrorism and political violence", in a book where the word Stalin never appeared. These are lawyers, and they do something more interesting and more damaging: they state a test, and then decline to run it.
Here is the test, in the first chapter:
Never in the history of the Marxist working-class movement in Russia, not even in the context of ruthless terror of the tsarist secret police (particularly after the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1905) has any act of terrorism been planned or committed against any member of the tsarist government or the tsarist household, or against any official of the Russian Empire for that matter on the territory of a foreign state.
And immediately after it:
The entire history of the world communist movement demonstrates its consistent and emphatic rejection of terror as a method of struggle, and all the more so the terror that has international implications, which is directly connected with the concept of condemning the export of revolution and the export of counter-revolution.
The first sentence is, as drafted, probably true, and it is carefully confined to the tsarist period. The second is not confined at all. And the criterion both sentences turn on — political killing carried out on the territory of a foreign state — is the criterion the book itself adopts as the mark of international terrorism. In the chapter on the 1937 Convention it quotes Maxim Litvinov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, addressing the Council of the League of Nations, with evident approval: "one particular feature of this kind of terrorism is that it is almost always prepared and carried out in foreign territory, financed from foreign sources and ... becomes an instrument of a foreign policy". A footnote on the same page lists the paradigm cases: Vorovsky, the Soviet plenipotentiary killed in Switzerland in May 1923; the couriers Nette and Machmastal attacked in Latvia in 1926; Voikov, the Soviet plenipotentiary shot in Warsaw in June 1927.
Litvinov's definition is exact, and it convicts his own service. Ignace Reiss, who had run Soviet intelligence networks in Europe and broke with Stalin in the summer of 1937, was shot dead near Lausanne that September — in the same country as Vorovsky, in the same year the Geneva conference adopted Litvinov's convention. Rudolf Klement was abducted in Paris in July 1938; a forged letter of resignation from the Fourth International appeared days later, and in September, in the words of Fourth International six years afterwards, "his mutilated body was dragged up from the River Seine". Leon Sedov died in a Paris clinic in February 1938. And on 20 August 1940, in Coyoacán in Mexico, an agent of the NKVD put an ice-axe through the skull of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky had described the pattern himself, in a letter to the Mexican authorities written on 1 June 1940 after the machine-gun raid on his house — twenty-five men, four in the morning, 24 May — and published in Fourth International that October:
It is first of all necessary to affirm that the attempted assassination could only be instigated by the Kremlin; by Stalin through the agency of the GPU abroad. During the last few years, Stalin has shot hundreds of real or supposed friends of mine. He actually exterminated my entire family, except me, my wife and one of my grandchildren. Through his agents abroad he assassinated one of the old leaders of the GPU, Ignace Reiss, who had publicly declared himself a partisan of mine. This fact has been established by the French police and the Swiss judiciary.
Prepared and carried out in foreign territory; financed from foreign sources; an instrument of a foreign policy. Joseph Hansen, who was in the house, recorded what Trotsky said when he came out of his study with the blood running down his face — "See what they have done to me!" — and what he dictated in the ambulance: "He was a political assassin. Jacson was a member of the GPU or a fascist. Most likely the GPU." The killer's true name, Ramón Mercader, was not established for years; the Fourth International's own accounts of 1940 call him Jacson and Mornard throughout. He served twenty years in a Mexican prison and was made a Hero of the Soviet Union.
None of this is denied in these pages, because none of it is raised. The word Stalin does not appear in the book. Neither does Cheka, GPU, NKVD, KGB, Yezhov, Kirov, Katyn, collectivisation, famine, purge or Moscow trial. In a monograph on the international law of political killing, the Soviet security service is not named once, in any of its acronyms, across seventy-five thousand words. Trotsky is named exactly once, and not as a victim: "The theoretical base of leftist terrorism is an eclectic mixture of anarchism, Trotskyism and fascism." The sentence carries no footnote, which is conspicuous in a book that footnotes Lenin scrupulously by volume and page a dozen times over, and Plekhanov by volume in a five-volume Progress edition. It is also, as an account of Trotsky's position, precisely backwards. His "Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism", published in Der Kampf in November 1911, is one of the sharpest Marxist attacks on individual terror ever written, and it makes the same argument this book makes at length in chapter one — that terrorism belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness — and attributes it to Plekhanov and Lenin instead.
The Red Terror of 1918 is not among the silences, and here the book is more honest than Grachev, if only just. It appears three times, and it is defended: "Red terror was declared in reply to White terror during the Civil War, following the 1917 October Socialist Revolution", with Lenin's Letter to the British Workers quoted — "Our Red terror is a defence of the working class against the exploiters, the crushing of resistance from the exploiters." One may argue about that; it is at least an argument, made about a civil war with foreign armies on Soviet soil, and it is stated openly. But it is where the Soviet record stops. The book has a long and rather good discussion of the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94, complete with the Committee of Public Safety, the revolutionary tribunals and Marx's line about "a plebeian way of dealing with the enemies of the bourgeoisie". On Soviet internal history it has nothing at all between the end of the Civil War and the UN debates of the 1970s. The terror the authors were old enough to remember is the one period the book does not enter.
Afghanistan is handled by inversion rather than silence, and the inversion is legal. The mujahideen appear as "bands of mercenaries" committing aggression from the territory of Pakistan and Iran with American support; the Soviet army appears once, in a single sentence, as collective self-defence: "the Soviet Union, replying to a request from the legitimate government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, and in accordance with Art. 51 of the UN Charter regarding the right of individual or collective self-defence and Art. 4 of the 1978 Soviet-Afghan Treaty, has lent armed assistance to the people of Afghanistan". The book's own protected category — "resistance to the aggressor in the territories occupied by him" — is applied to Palestine, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola, and cannot be applied to the one country where, at the moment of writing, the Soviet army was the largest armed force in the field. And a few pages earlier the authors have printed, without comment, the list of parties to the Convention on the Definition of Aggression of 3 July 1933: "the USSR and Afghanistan, Estonia, Latvia, Iran, Poland, Romania and Turkey". Of the seven other signatories to the treaty by which the USSR proposed to define aggression, six were subsequently invaded, occupied or partly annexed by it — Poland in 1939, Estonia, Latvia and Romanian Bessarabia in 1940, northern Iran in 1941, Afghanistan in 1979. Only Turkey escaped. The list is on the page. Nobody counts.
Two things the book gets right deserve saying, because a reader told everything is worthless learns nothing.
The first is the shooting of Pope John Paul II on 13 May 1981, which was being loudly attributed to Bulgarian and Soviet services at the time and is not mentioned in this connection here at all. What the book does say is that Mehmet Ali Agca was a Turkish national connected to the neo-fascist Grey Wolves, that he had murdered Abdi İpekçi, the editor of the liberal Milliyet, in 1979, that he was sentenced to death and escaped from an Istanbul prison shortly before the sentence was to be carried out, and that an accomplice arrested in Italy had obtained a pistol for him from Italian neo-fascists. Every element of that is correct, and it was correct when Western newspapers were printing something else. The absence of any answer to the Bulgarian allegation is a consequence of the manuscript's closing date rather than of evasion — Sergei Antonov was arrested in November 1982, after the text was finished. The case against him rested, as Will Reissner wrote in Intercontinental Press in June 1985, on the "unsubstantiated statements" of a man who was by then telling an Italian court he was Jesus Christ reincarnated; four years of investigation, a 1,200-page indictment and a ten-month trial produced nothing else. The trial ended in Rome on 29 March 1986 with the three Bulgarians acquitted — and Reissner noted the sting in it, that they were acquitted only for "lack of proof", one step short of full acquittal under Italian law.
The second is the chapter on the 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, which is the best sustained legal argument in the volume and has aged into something close to prophecy. The Convention's method was to strip the political-offence exception out of extradition law for a defined class of violent offences, and the authors object that it "does not draw any line of distinction between a terrorist act of international significance and a terrorist act of a domestic character", so that the machinery built for one is available for the other. They do not make this case alone or from Moscow: they cite the Belgian jurist Jean Salmon, writing in the Journal des tribunaux of 24 September 1977 under the title "Un vrai pas en arrière", who held that the text could be applied to "a spy, a hangman, or an entirely innocent civilian", that it aimed less at international terrorism than at internal political violence, and that "any political opponent of an existing regime, who has committed no act of violence whatsoever, can be declared an accessory and prosecuted for terrorist activity." They note that French lawyers drew up a counter-convention protecting the right of asylum in protest. Every European state that has since watched terrorism legislation migrate into ordinary criminal procedure will recognise the shape of the complaint. So will anyone who has followed the last twenty years of extradition politics. It should be said that on this one point the anti-Stalinist left has no rival text to offer: a search of Intercontinental Press and International Viewpoint across 1981–86 turns up no discussion of the 1977 European Convention by name at all. The tradition was fighting the campaign, not the treaty. Blishchenko and Zhdanov saw the treaty, and they were right about it.
And there the book closes its own circle without noticing. Its final substantive argument is a defence of the right of political asylum against a treaty that erodes it. Trotsky spent the last eleven years of his life on a planet, as he put it, without a visa: expelled from the USSR in 1929, moved on from Turkey, France and Norway, and given asylum at last by the Cárdenas government in Mexico in January 1937 — asylum of exactly the kind these authors defend. He was killed there by a man his own government had trained and sent. That is a policy of terrorism pursued by the authorities in respect of an individual for political reasons, committed by a person expressly trained for the purpose, prepared and carried out in foreign territory, financed from foreign sources, and an instrument of a foreign policy. Every clause of that sentence is taken from this book.
The reply to it was written in Coyoacán in the first week of June 1940, by the man who knew what was coming. The Fourth International's account of the assassination — Hansen's "With Trotsky to the End", Fourth International, vol. 1 no. 5, October 1940 — is still the fullest eyewitness record, and Trotsky's own "The Comintern and the GPU", finished on 19 August 1940 and printed in the November issue, was written for a Mexican court to prove that a state had organised murder abroad. He completed it the day before Mercader came back. That is the case these two lawyers had to answer, and they had the tools to answer it: they built the category, they drafted the definition, they quoted Litvinov's test. They simply never turned any of it around.
What became of the fight is worth recording, because it vindicates the book's diagnosis and not its politics. In December 1985 the General Assembly finally passed a resolution on terrorism, and it passed because the phrase "state terrorism" had been taken out of it — deleted, Intercontinental Press reported in January 1986, "in deference to the delegations from the principal imperialist countries, including the United States". Cuba cast the only dissenting vote in the legal committee on 6 December. From the other side, Israel's ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu complained that the resolution attempted to "legitimize terrorism" because of the way it referred to self-determination. Both objections on one page, three years after this manuscript closed: the concept the book had built was traded away to get a text, and the text was still too generous for the people who had wanted one.
The tradition's own position, when it was finally set out at length, belonged to neither camp. Gerry Foley's "'Terrorism' out of control?", in International Viewpoint no. 97 of April 1986, was written after the American strikes on Libya and it refuses both the available loyalties — indicting Washington for having "built up a really massive terrorist apparatus" while saying flatly, in the same piece, that "Qadhafi's Libya is not a revolutionary regime". The analytical core is a sentence Blishchenko and Zhdanov could have used and could not have written, since their whole chapter on "leftist terrorism" depends on assigning bombs an ideology: "bombs and bullets have no political convictions. They can be used equally by rightists, leftists, criminals, uncontrolled individuals and lunatics". That is why a definition has to attach to the act and the actor's office rather than to the actor's politics — which is, in its better moments, exactly what this book argues.
Read the book for the drafting history, which is documentary and hard to find elsewhere; for the argument on asylum and extradition, which was right; for the proposal of an international criminal court, made sixteen years before the Rome Statute and by no means as a formality; and for the concept of state terrorism itself, which the West would not take seriously for another generation and which remains the correct name for what was done in Chile and Central America in those years. Then read the first chapter again and notice what a definition is for. A definition in international law is a promise to apply the same rule to yourself. This one is a very good definition, and the promise was never made.