Assassination of Alexander II of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  At 2:15 in the afternoon on the 13th of March 1881, the Assassination of Alexander II of Russia began with a single bomb thrown by Nikolai Rysakov onto the cobblestones of Saint Petersburg's Catherine Canal embankment. The Tsar emerged from his damaged carriage shaken but unhurt, spoke to the wounded, and said to the anxious crowd around him: "Thank God, I'm untouched." Sixty seconds later, a second bomber named Ignacy Hryniewiecki stepped forward, and everything changed. What drove a secret revolutionary committee to spend a year and a half hunting their own emperor? How did a plot involving cheese shops, tunnels, and handkerchief signals nearly fail at every turn before finally succeeding? And what happened to the empire, and to its Jewish population, in the weeks and months that followed?

• 2. The People's Will

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  On the 25th and the 26th of August 1879, the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, which translates as "People's Will," voted to kill Alexander II. The timing was deliberate: the vote fell on the anniversary of his coronation. The committee had 22 members, and their hope was not merely to kill a tsar but to spark a revolution. Andrei Zhelyabov was the chief architect of the operation, spending months studying Alexander's habits. The conspirators learned that on Sunday afternoons the emperor traveled to Mikhailovsky Manège to watch military manoeuvres, then returned to the Winter Palace by one of two routes: either along Malaya Sadovaya Street or along the Catherine Canal. For the first route, the group rented a stall in the Eliseyev Emporium and dug a tunnel under the street to lay a large mine. For the second, they trained four bomb-throwers to take up positions at the canal. Zhelyabov also planned to attack with a dagger or pistol himself if both the mine and the bombs failed. Two days before the attack, police arrested Zhelyabov. His wife, Sophia Perovskaya, stepped in to lead the operation in his place.

• 3. The Bombs and the Bombers

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  Nikolai Kibalchich designed and built the hand-held bombs the conspirators would carry on the day of the attack. The night before the assassination, Perovskaya and Vera Figner, who was also among seven women on the Executive Committee, helped assemble them. Four men volunteered to throw the bombs: Hryniewiecki, Rysakov, Timofey Mikhailov, and Ivan Yemelyanov. On the afternoon of the 13th of March, the Tsar's closed two-seater carriage turned into Bolshaya Italyanskaya Street, bypassing the mine entirely. Perovskaya watched from the street, and when she saw the carriage change course, she blew her nose into a handkerchief as a prearranged signal. The bomb-throwers, minus Mikhailov who failed to reach his position, moved to the canal. The Tsar paused during the return journey to visit his cousin, the Grand Duchess Catherine, giving the bombers extra time to walk to the canal and take their positions.

• 4. Two Minutes at the Canal

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  Rysakov was carrying his bomb wrapped in a handkerchief when the imperial carriage passed him at around 2:15 in the afternoon. He threw it under the horses. The blast killed a Cossack guard named Alexander Maleichev and mortally wounded a fourteen-year-old butcher's delivery boy named Nikolai Zakharov; several others were injured. The carriage was damaged, but Alexander II stepped out of it alive. Rysakov was seized almost immediately. Police Chief Dvorzhitzky offered the Tsar his sleigh and urged him to leave. Alexander agreed, but first stopped to look at the wounded and survey the wreckage. He was about to depart when Hryniewiecki moved through the gathered crowd and threw his bomb directly at the Tsar's feet. The second explosion threw both men to the ground. Alexander's legs were shattered below the knee, his abdomen was torn open, and his face was mutilated. Hryniewiecki lay mortally wounded beside him. A third bomb-thrower, Yemelyanov, stood in the crowd clutching a briefcase with a third bomb, ready to act if needed. He instead rushed forward with others to answer the Tsar's barely audible whisper: "Take me to the palace... there... I will die." Alexander was carried by sleigh to his study in the Winter Palace. The attending physician, Sergey Botkin, when asked how long the Tsar had, replied: "Up to fifteen minutes." At 3:30 PM that same afternoon, the personal flag of Alexander II was lowered for the last time.

• 5. Arrests and Trials

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  Hryniewiecki never gave his name to the authorities who tended him at the military hospital. He died that same evening. Rysakov, by contrast, cooperated with investigators in a vain attempt to save his own life. His testimony enabled police to raid the conspirators' headquarters on the 15th of March. In that raid, a woman named Helfman was arrested, while a man named Sablin fired on police and then shot himself. Mikhailov was captured in the same building the following day after a gunfight. Perovskaya was arrested on the 22nd of March, Kibalchich on the 29th of March, and Yemelyanov on the 14th of April. Six conspirators, including Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Helfman, Mikhailov, and Rysakov, were tried as state criminals by the Special Tribunal of the Ruling Senate between the 26th and the 29th of March. All six were sentenced to death by hanging. The executions were carried out on the 15th of April 1881. Helfman's sentence was deferred because she was pregnant. Alexander III later commuted her sentence to indefinite forced labor. She died of a post-natal complication in January 1882, and her infant daughter did not survive much longer. Yemelyanov was tried the following year and received a life sentence at hard labor, though he was later pardoned after serving 20 years. Vera Figner, who had helped assemble the bombs the night before the attack, remained free until the 10th of February 1883. During that time she organized the assassination of General Mayor Strelnikov, the military prosecutor of Odessa. Sentenced to death in 1884, her execution was commuted to indefinite penal servitude. After 20 years, a plea from her dying mother persuaded the last tsar, Nicholas II, to release her.

• 6. The Church on Blood

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  A temporary shrine stood on the canal embankment while planners and fundraisers worked on something more lasting. Construction on the Church of the Savior on Blood began in 1883 under Alexander III and was not completed until 1907 under Nicholas II. Inside, at the end of the church opposite the altar, workers built an elaborate shrine in the form of a ciborium on the exact spot where Alexander fell. The shrine is decorated with topaz, lazurite, and other semi-precious stones. The original cobblestones from the old road were left exposed in the floor beneath it, visible to anyone who visits today.

• 7. Jews and the Aftermath

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  Alexander II had been regarded as relatively tolerant of Jewish subjects. During his reign, special taxes on Jews were removed, those who completed secondary school could live outside the Pale of Settlement, and Jews became eligible for state employment. Large numbers of educated Jews moved to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other major cities as a result. His son Alexander III reversed these policies after coming to power. One of the conspirators with links to the assassination was Jewish, and that connection was seized upon, exaggerated, and distorted in the aftermath. Hryniewiecki, the man who threw the fatal bomb, was rumoured to be Jewish; he was in fact an ethnic Pole. About a third of the female members of Narodnaya Volya were Jewish, though Helfman's actual role in the plot was secondary: she had provided the conspirators with a flat. In the wake of the assassination, the government passed the May Laws, and retaliatory violence swept through Jewish communities. Pogroms destroyed thousands of homes across 166 towns in the south-western provinces of the empire, killing and injuring men, women, and children, and driving many families into poverty.