Raskolnikov into Pnin

Tony Wood

• The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia by Richard Pipes
  Yale, 153 pp, £16.95, April 2003, ISBN 0 300 09848 0

The first ‘wanted’ poster to be issued in Russia appeared in late February 1884, and featured six likenesses of the suspect: three frontal shots, showing a man in his late twenties, with a moustache, with a beard and clean-shaven; and, beneath them, a trio of three-quarter views of the same man, repeating the permutations of facial hair, but with a fur hat added to each image. The surly face depicted with these minor variations belonged to Sergei Degaev, a member of the revolutionary terrorist group Narodnaia Volia, the organisation responsible for the assassination of Alexander II three years earlier. He was wanted for the murder of Lieutenant Colonel Grigory Sudeikin, the head of the St Petersburg secret police and a key figure in the tsarist authorities’ clampdown in the wake of Alexander’s death. The 10,000 rouble reward available to anyone who could provide Degaev’s address was more than a hundred times what a factory worker could earn in a year.