From My Recent Past

From My Recent Past is a memoir written by Russian revolutionary Grigory Gershuni (1870-1908), the infamous mastermind behind the Combat Organization (CO) of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR). The book depicts his revolutionary activities, arrest, tribunal, and years of imprisonment in Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses. It is presented here in English translation by Katya Vladimirov, with an introduction by Katya Vladimirov and an afterword by John P. Moran. Grigory Gershuni, Russian revolutionary and the infamous mastermind of the Combat Organization (CO) of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) had an epic life that deserves to be a great action movie filled with underground activities, smuggling, false identities, moral and spiritual struggles, danger, assassinations, betrayals, arrests, imprisonment, solitary confinement in dungeons, escapes from Siberian labor camps, a long road to freedom from Japan to US, and sudden death at an early age. His memoir, Iz nedavnego proshlogo (My Recent Past) not only offers insights into his amazing life and worldviews but provides an understanding of such adamant adversaries of the tsarist autocratic regime, full of convictions yet in desperate desire to be heard and understood by an impersonal society ruled by indifferent despots. Grigory Gershuni was a true warrior fighting a dragon of injustices of the autocratic tsarist regime; a true believer in Russian revolution that akin a purifying tsunami would swipe away "the regime that made killers out of its own children!" In his view, the road to revolution was by cutting the head of a dragon, i.e slayings of cruel and lawless people in power. The movement's success was due to uniquely creative individuals, Gershuni among them. As founder of the Combat Organization, he was responsible for many assassinations of high-ranking Russian officials. Over the course of nine years (from 1902 to 1911), there were seventy-eight members of the CO. In total, they committed 263 terrorist acts, including the assassination of two government ministers, thirty-three governors-general, and a vice-governor, as well as several admirals and generals. The revolutionary wave followed soon enough.