- Anna Geifman
Anna Geifman is an American historian. She is a student of political extremism, terrorism and the history of the Russian revolutionary movements.
Biography
Geifman was born in the U.S.S.R. and moved to Boston with her parents in 1976. She received her BA from
Boston University in 1984 and he PhD fromHarvard in 1990. She is a professor of history at Boston University.Intellectual positions
Geifman has introduced the comparison between the pre-Revolutionary Bolshevik movement and the contemporary Islamist movement into the conversation on terrorism. [TERRORISM; Finding Who Is Responsible When No Group Takes Credit, Anna Geifman, Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1996] [ Does Hamas vs Fatah = Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks? By , Jerusalem Post, Aug. 3, 2008 [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1215331181989] ] She maintains that al-Qaida's decentralized, informal network of cells and spinoffs is very like the network of pre-Revolutionary Russian terror cells that operated without any connection with one another beyond the fact that all were inspired by the same ideology. [ The Bolsheviks of Gaza, by Sam Ser, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 18, 2008 [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710396756&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull] ]
In Geifman’s opinion, the idea that taking on the responsibilities of government will moderate groups like
Hamas andHezbollah is a fallacy. A better understanding of how ideologically-driven groups that use terrorism as a tactic operate can be gained by looking at the Bolshevik Revolution. “You want to know what happens when terrorists come to power? As soon as terrorists come to power, they begin building on what they did to get there. Look at the Bolsheviks, who were terrorists before they came to power in 1917. They used this terror-based revolution to build a terror-based state." [ The Bolsheviks of Gaza, by Sam Ser, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 18, 2008 [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710396756&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull] ]As evidence of this, she points to the parallel between Hamas’ commitment to building up its “security forces,” and the Bolshevik establishment and funding of the KGB as its first priority upon gaining power. [ The Bolsheviks of Gaza, by Sam Ser, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 18, 2008 [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710396756&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull] ] She predicts that Hamas’s chief victims will be moderate Palestinians, just as the victims of the Bolsheviks were Russian and Ukranian. [ The Bolsheviks of Gaza, by Sam Ser, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 18, 2008 [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710396756&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull] ]
Books
* Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
* Russia under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894-1917. Edited volume, with introduction and one article contributed. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
* Entangled in Terror. The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution. Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books, 2000.
References
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