Propaganda of the deed
Based on Wikipedia: Propaganda of the deed
In February 1880, a carpenter named Stepan Khalturin walked into the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with a plan that would change the vocabulary of revolution. He had spent months working as a palace employee, smuggling dynamite past the guards piece by piece, hiding it beneath his pillow at night. When he finally detonated his cache, eight soldiers died and forty-five more were wounded. The Tsar escaped unharmed—he was running late for dinner—but something else had been accomplished. As historian Benedict Anderson would later observe, "Nobel's invention had now arrived politically."
Khalturin had demonstrated a principle that would haunt governments for the next half-century: that a single person, armed with the right technology and sufficient conviction, could strike at the heart of power itself. This was propaganda of the deed.
The Idea Behind the Violence
The concept sounds almost paradoxical at first. Propaganda, we tend to think, means words—pamphlets, speeches, newspapers, arguments designed to change minds. But propaganda of the deed flips this relationship on its head. Actions speak. Actions educate. Actions inspire.
The theory rested on a simple observation: most people are not moved by abstract ideas. You can distribute a thousand pamphlets explaining the injustice of the capitalist system, and they will line birdcages. But blow up a government building, assassinate a king, rob a bank in the name of the revolution—and suddenly everyone is talking. The newspapers cover it. The authorities overreact. The mask of omnipotence slips.
That was the point. The state wanted to appear invincible, its power absolute and unchallengeable. Every successful attack proved otherwise. Every assassination demonstrated that the mighty were mortal after all.
But there was a second, more sinister logic at work. Proponents of propaganda by the deed actually wanted the state to crack down. They wanted repression. The theory held that when governments responded to attacks with mass arrests, censorship, and police violence, ordinary people would see the system for what it truly was. Repression would radicalize the moderates. The spiral of action and reaction would accelerate until the whole rotten structure collapsed.
Origins in Italian Soil
The phrase itself—propaganda dei fatti—first appeared in the writings of Carlo Pisacane, an Italian revolutionary who died in 1857 during a failed uprising against the Kingdom of Naples. Pisacane had grown frustrated with what he called "propaganda of the idea," the endless theorizing and pamphleteering that seemed to lead nowhere.
"Ideas result from deeds," he wrote, inverting the common assumption that people must first be educated before they can act. "People will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free."
This was a profoundly impatient philosophy. It rejected the slow work of building movements, organizing workers, changing minds one at a time. Why wait for the masses to develop revolutionary consciousness when a bold action could crystallize that consciousness in an instant?
The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin formalized the theory in 1869, working alongside the shadowy Sergey Nechayev, a man so devoted to revolution that he would later murder a fellow conspirator merely for questioning his authority. Bakunin called for revolutionaries to abandon "pointless propaganda" and put their ideas into practice through acts of destruction. Destruction, he believed, was a creative force—the necessary prelude to any new world.
The Spark That Wouldn't Catch
In 1877, two Italian anarchists named Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero put the theory to the test. They led a small band of armed revolutionaries into the remote province of Benevento in southern Italy, marching into two villages, burning the tax registers, and proclaiming the overthrow of the Kingdom of Italy.
The peasants welcomed them. They cheered as the hated tax records went up in flames. But when Malatesta and Cafiero asked them to take up arms and join the revolution, the peasants demurred. They had crops to tend. They had families. They wished the revolutionaries well, but this was not their fight.
Within days, the Carabinieri arrived. The insurrection was suppressed. Malatesta and Cafiero fled into exile.
The pattern would repeat itself across Europe. The spark was struck, but the fire wouldn't catch. The masses refused to rise. The revolution remained stubbornly theoretical.
Yet the failure didn't discredit the tactic. If anything, it radicalized its proponents. If demonstrations and insurrections couldn't inspire the masses, perhaps something more dramatic was required. Something that would shock the world out of its complacency.
The Age of Assassinations
The 1880s and 1890s became an era of spectacular political violence. Anarchists assassinated heads of state with a regularity that seems almost impossible today, in an age of metal detectors and security details.
Tsar Alexander II of Russia was killed by a bomb in 1881, a year after surviving Khalturin's attack on the Winter Palace. President Sadi Carnot of France was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in 1894. Prime Minister Cánovas del Castillo of Spain was shot in 1897. Empress Elisabeth of Austria—the famous "Sisi"—was stabbed with a sharpened file in 1898. King Umberto I of Italy, the same man who had survived a stabbing as a young king in 1878, was finally killed by bullets in 1900. President William McKinley of the United States was shot in 1901.
The list goes on. Bombs exploded in theaters, cafés, and legislatures. Banks were robbed in "expropriations"—the anarchist term for revolutionary theft. The world had never seen anything quite like it.
The Bomber's Logic
What motivated these attacks? The perpetrators left behind manifestos, trial statements, and letters that reveal a peculiar mixture of idealism and rage.
Auguste Vaillant, who threw a nail bomb into the French National Assembly in 1893, insisted at his trial that he hadn't intended to kill anyone. He only wanted to wound a few deputies in retaliation for the execution of another anarchist. When he was sentenced to death anyway—the sole injury had been minor—he went to the guillotine shouting, "Death to bourgeois society and long live anarchy!"
Émile Henry, who set off a bomb in a Paris café three months later to avenge Vaillant, was more coldly calculated. The café attack killed one person and injured twenty. When asked why he had targeted ordinary people rather than politicians or industrialists, Henry gave a chilling reply: there were no innocent bourgeois. Everyone who benefited from the system was complicit in its crimes.
This logic—collective guilt justifying indiscriminate violence—would echo through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from the Baader-Meinhof Group to Al-Qaeda.
The Theorist and the Terrorist
Not all anarchists embraced the bomb. Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince turned revolutionary scientist, preferred education and patient organizing. He believed small groups of revolutionaries should enter workers' organizations—especially trade unions—and agitate from within. Violence, if it came, should arise from a genuine mass movement, not from isolated individuals acting on their own authority.
Yet Kropotkin refused to condemn the bombers. He understood their rage. He emphasized that state terrorism—police brutality, judicial murder, colonial exploitation—was the root cause of all individual terrorism. The bomb-throwers were symptoms, not causes.
This ambivalence was common among anarchist intellectuals. They might personally prefer peaceful methods, but they couldn't bring themselves to denounce comrades who had sacrificed their freedom and often their lives in the name of the common struggle.
Élisée Reclus, the French geographer and ecologist who was one of the leading anarchist thinkers of his era, expressed this tension clearly. He preferred propaganda by the word. But he declared that any revolt against oppression was "inherently good" and that "all revolutionary acts are, by their very nature, essentially anarchical."
The Most Dangerous Man in America
Across the Atlantic, a German anarchist named Johann Most became the most notorious advocate of propaganda by the deed in the United States. Most had a genius for provocation. He toured the country giving speeches that called for revolutionary violence against Wall Street and the capitalist class. He delighted in his reputation as "the most dangerous man in America."
Most went further than mere rhetoric. While working at an explosives factory, he learned how to make bombs. He published a pamphlet—essentially a do-it-yourself terrorism manual—detailing how to manufacture various kinds of explosives. He celebrated assassinations and called for more of them.
The irony was that Most himself never acted on his own teachings. He was a propagandist of propaganda by the deed, a theorist of action, a man who inspired others to do what he never did himself. His follower Alexander Berkman actually attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892, during the violent Homestead steel strike. Berkman shot and stabbed Frick, but failed to kill him, and spent the next twenty-two years in prison.
After the Haymarket affair of 1886—when a bomb killed police officers at a labor rally in Chicago and led to the execution of four anarchists—Most quietly distanced himself from his earlier advocacy of violence. The consequences had become too real.
The Galleanisti
But the tradition of American anarchist violence was far from over. In the early twentieth century, an Italian immigrant named Luigi Galleani became perhaps the most vocal proponent of propaganda by the deed since Most.
Galleani took undisguised pride in calling himself a subversive. He advocated the violent overthrow of government and capitalism through direct action—bombings and assassinations. He published a monthly magazine called Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) and used it to distribute instructions for making explosives, including formulas for nitroglycerin.
By all accounts, Galleani was an extraordinarily effective speaker. His followers, known as Galleanisti, were devoted to him with an almost religious fervor. Carlo Buda, brother of the Galleanist bombmaker Mario Buda, described the effect of hearing Galleani speak: "You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw."
The Galleanisti were responsible for dozens of bombings across the United States between 1914 and 1920, including mail bombs sent to politicians and industrialists, and a massive explosion on Wall Street in 1920 that killed thirty-eight people. Their most famous members—Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—were executed in 1927 for murders committed during a robbery, becoming martyrs to the left and symbols of American injustice.
The Revolutionary Critique
Not everyone on the radical left supported propaganda by the deed. Some of the sharpest criticism came from Marxists who shared many of the anarchists' goals but rejected their methods.
Leon Trotsky, writing in 1911, dismissed individual acts of violence as counterproductive. They provided excuses for state repression without advancing the revolutionary cause. "The anarchist prophets of the 'propaganda by the deed' can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses," he wrote. "Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise."
Vladimir Lenin largely agreed. He saw individual terrorism as an ineffective substitute for the coordinated action of disciplined revolutionary cadres. The problem wasn't violence itself—Lenin was quite prepared to use violence—but the ad hoc, uncoordinated, individualistic nature of anarchist terrorism. A real revolution required organization, discipline, and strategic thinking, not romantic gestures by isolated individuals.
Both Lenin and Trotsky drew a distinction between the spontaneous bombings of propaganda by the deed and organized violence coordinated by a professional revolutionary vanguard. The first was mere adventurism. The second was serious politics.
The Spiral of Repression
In one sense, propaganda by the deed succeeded brilliantly. It certainly got the state's attention.
The French government responded to the anarchist bombings of the 1890s with the infamous lois scélérates—the "villainous laws"—which criminalized anarchist propaganda, restricted press freedom, and enabled the prosecution of anyone who expressed sympathy with anarchist ideas. Similar crackdowns occurred across Europe.
But this was precisely what the anarchists had predicted and, in a perverse way, wanted. The mask of liberal tolerance had slipped. The state had revealed its repressive nature.
The problem was that ordinary people didn't interpret the crackdowns as the anarchists expected. Most people didn't conclude that the state was the enemy. They concluded that the anarchists were dangerous criminals who needed to be stopped. The spiral of violence and repression didn't radicalize the masses. It isolated the radicals.
The Long Shadow
Propaganda of the deed, as a coherent revolutionary strategy, was largely exhausted by the 1920s. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism created new political landscapes that made the old anarchist tactics seem quaint.
But the idea never entirely disappeared. It mutated and migrated.
The concept that spectacular violence could communicate political messages, inspire imitators, and provoke state overreaction would reappear in the tactics of twentieth-century guerrilla movements, from the Irish Republican Army to the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the Red Brigades in Italy. The notion that governments could be destabilized through targeted assassinations and bombings persisted into the era of Islamic terrorism.
Even non-violent movements borrowed the language. When Mahatma Gandhi organized mass civil disobedience in India, he was practicing a kind of propaganda by the deed—using dramatic actions to demonstrate principles, inspire followers, and provoke the British into revealing the violence underlying colonial rule. The lunch counter sit-ins of the American civil rights movement worked on similar logic: Black students sitting peacefully at segregated counters, waiting to be attacked by white mobs, the violence captured on camera for the world to see.
The difference, of course, was that Gandhi and the civil rights activists invited violence against themselves rather than inflicting it on others. They turned propaganda of the deed inside out, making victimhood itself the message.
The Paradox of Political Violence
The history of propaganda by the deed suggests a troubling paradox. Political violence works, in the sense that it forces the world to pay attention. The assassinations and bombings of the anarchist era made headlines, inspired imitators, and terrified governments into action.
But it rarely achieves what its perpetrators intend. The masses don't rise. The revolution doesn't come. The state doesn't collapse. Instead, the violence provides justification for repression, alienates potential allies, and transforms complex political movements into simple questions of criminality.
Khalturin's bomb in the Winter Palace didn't bring down the Tsar—at least not immediately. The Tsar was killed a year later, but his death only led to a more repressive successor. The Russian autocracy didn't fall until 1917, and then to an entirely different kind of revolutionary movement than the anarchists had envisioned.
Perhaps the most honest assessment came from an unexpected source. Gustav Landauer, a German anarchist writing in the early twentieth century, redefined propaganda of the deed in a way that stripped it of violence altogether. For Landauer, the phrase meant the creation of libertarian social forms and communities that would inspire others to transform society. The deed was not the bomb but the example—the demonstration that a different way of living was possible.
It was a quieter vision, less likely to make headlines. But it may have been closer to what Pisacane originally meant when he said that ideas result from deeds. The most powerful propaganda is not destruction but creation—the living proof that another world is within reach.