Death Orders: Interview with Russian historian Anna Geifman

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Anna Geifman, aProfessor of History at Boston University, where she teachesclasses on imperial Russia and the USSR, psychohistory, and modern terrorism. She is also Senior Researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Her most recent book is Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia.

FP: Anna Geifman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Geifman: Thank you!  I am very grateful for the opportunity to share my work.

FP: Let’s start with what inspired you to write this book.

Geifman: I have written this book after having researched and published on the topic of modern terrorism for exactly 25 years.  So, Death Orders is a précis, or summation, of my position with regards to political extremism.

The turning point for me was the September 1, 2004 massacre in School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia.  It is shocking how few people remember:  32 terrorists detained 1,200 pupils, their relatives, and their teachers.  There was not a chance that Russia’s president Putin would have fulfilled the terrorists’ demands; they knew this, and the purpose of their acts was to spill blood for the sake of blood spilling.  So, by no way am I exaggerating when I say that they turned theschool into a mini-replica of Auschwitz.  They shot first-graders in the back as they were trying to run away.  Eventually, at least 334 hostages were killed, among them 186 children; over 700 were wounded. Death Orders shows that not 9/11, but the collective murder in Beslan, specifically directed against children and affecting the entire town, marks a new stage in global terrorist practices.

I have written Death Orders in Israel, one of the epicenters of terrorism.  I have had direct personal experience with what had previously been a matter of scholarly research during my work a small Israeli town of Sderot.  There, Hamas-manufactured Qassam rockets exploded in residential areas as people tried to go about their daily routines… I have written this book as an expert in my field, taking full responsibility for the validity of my sources, arguments, and conclusions.  At the same time, for me terrorism was no longer an issue that I could tackle solely as an intellectual enterprise: the Sderot experience had a major emotional impact on my life....