The 20th century tamed the plague, anthrax, cholera and a whole range of other terrible diseases, but terrorism as a social pathology was too tough for it. By now, the bacilli of terrorism have penetrated almost every corner of the planet and the outbreak has grown to the scale of a global pandemic. To treat a disease, and not the symptoms, you need to know its roots, understand the secret of its birth. Pavel Krusanov does not offer recipes, but makes an attempt to understand the origins of the phenomenon, to find the mental and social prominences that give rise to it. Icons of terrorism from Charlotte Corday and Sergei Nechaev to Che Guevara and Carlos the Jackal will appear before the reader in all their sinister splendor in the pages of this book.