Saturn's Daughters

The Birth of Terrorism

Sometimes terrorism works..... In the 1880s terrorism, as we understand it today, became a reality when a group of Russian idealists, the People’s Will, decided to sacrifice everything for a single goal: a fair and free society. Their plan, driven by Sonya Perovskaya, was to assassinate the Tsar. Once he was gone, they believed, some form of democracy must follow. And the plan succeeded – despite legions of secret police protecting the Tsar’s every movement, Sonya and her little band hounded him to death. But in every other respect they failed. Repression – not freedom – followed the assassination. In destroying the Tsar they destroyed themselves, their lives, their integrity, their very ideals. Saturn’s Daughters is the story of this failure. The birth of a movement, the death of dictator and the self-destruction of the women and men who were first to call themselves terrorists. They began as idealists, they ended as psychopaths. Sometimes terrorism works. Mostly it leads to disaster.