Considering that the police and the revolutionaries in Russia were locked together in a violent dispute over political authority, it should not be surprising to find a similar trend in Western Europe during the same time period. Tsarist Russia was in many ways a part of Europe throughout the nineteenth century, yet also, in more significant aspects, apart from it. Thus, though the structural conflicts over state legitimacy and citizen participation in the political process bore strong resemblances, the specific situations in Western Europe require a separate discussion of these separate campaigns of terrorism. Russia’s governance remained committed to medieval justifications of authority via divine right and the exclusion of any wider political involvement of the general population in decision-making. These circumstances explain the emergence of social groups there, such as an influential literary intelligentsia willing to engage in political challenges to the regime’s authority, and powerful insurgent groups, forced underground to play a more extreme role in confronting the Romanov administrations and their enforcers, particularly during the second half of the century. Western European countries, by contrast, permitted far more dissonance within the boundaries of legality for the conflicts over state legitimacy to be contested, as witnessed by the gradual introduction of representational institutions, however limited they were, in response to demands from below. Nonetheless, the governing officialdom and their opponents were unable to avoid a continuing resort to violence in order to resolve the issues that divided them.