It was twenty or thirty years ago. I was at a gallery opening. I was pouring the wine. There was some legal theory about why I wouldn’t be liable for the college students who were sucking it down. A young fellow started talking to me, telling me he was really into the Unabomer manifesto which had just been published. I hadn’t read it but I told him that the Unabomer was bourgeois. He correctly accepted the Marxist critique of industrial society but couldn’t imagine the Marxist solution of working class political action. Real revolutions are rare, but the Unabomer never explained how mailing bombs to people, killing three, was going to change anything.
The guy looked at me strangely and walked away. It could be that he didn't really take the manifesto seriously and was surprised anyone did.
It’s basically what you had in this movie. Based on an autobiographical novel by Boris Savinkov who was head of the “paramilitary wing”, a cell of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party, around 1905. They shot and threw bombs at aristocratic government ministers.
They discuss what made individuals in the group adopt violence. They were anti-Marxist and against proletarian revolution. It was set around the time of the failed 1905 revolution, but that didn’t interest them. One guy was a devout Christian who said he was doing it out of love.
Except for one guy, they were all upper class---elite murdering elite, which had some appeal as a movie. They were killing people I didn't sympathize with but doing it for reasons that weren't very well thought out and killing themselves in the process.
As it happened, the Social Revolutionary Party under Kerensky took power in 1917. They turned out to be fairly normal reformist politicians, so that didn’t last long.
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