The assassination attempt on Alexander 2. Russia 1881, March 1.
1879, August - a secret organization "Narodnaya Volya" appeared in Russia. Its leadership - the Executive Committee - included professional revolutionaries. The founders of Narodnaya Volya demanded that the authorities call a Constituent Assembly and carry out broad democratic reforms. They set the task of "curbing government arbitrariness." Terror was seen as one of the means of political struggle on August 26, the Executive Committee passed the death sentence to Emperor Alexander II.
In Russian history, Alexander II remained a controversial figure. On the one hand, he is known as Alexander the Liberator, who gave freedom to the peasants. Savior of the Balkan Slavs from the Turkish yoke. The initiator of the Great Reforms - zemstvo, judicial, military … On the other hand, he was a persecutor of not only socialist students, participants in the “going to the people”, but also very moderate liberals.
Groups of Narodnaya Volya militants began to disperse to the designated cities. The emperor was preparing to attack in Odessa, Aleksandrovsk (a city between Kursk and Belgorod) and Moscow.
The Moscow group was the closest to success. People's will - Mikhailov, Perovskaya, Gartman, Isaev, Barannikov, Shiryaev and others - built a 40-meter underground passage from a house they bought near the railway. In the late evening of November 19, a mine went off under a passing train. The explosion overturned a baggage car, another 8 derailed. No harm done. Moreover, it was a train with a retinue, and the imperial staff followed.
The attempted murder of Alexander II, November 19, stirred up the public. Even the official press noted the skillful and thorough engineering preparation of the tunnel. In the leaflets of "Narodnaya Volya" circulated after the terrorist attack, Alexander 2 is declared "the personification of a hypocritical, cowardly bloodthirsty and all-pervading despotism." The Executive Committee demanded the transfer of power to the national Constituent Assembly. “Until then - struggle! The fight is irreconcilable!"
In the winter of 1879/1880, when preparations were underway for the 25th anniversary of the reign of Alexander II, the situation in the state was turbulent. The great dukes asked the sovereign to move to Gatchina, but the tsar refused.
1879, September 20 - the carpenter Batyshkov got a job at the Winter Palace. In fact, under this name was hidden Stepan Khalturin, the son of a Vyatka peasant, one of the founders of the Northern Union of Russian Workers, who later joined Narodnaya Volya. He believed that the emperor should die at the hands of the worker - the representative of the people.
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His room with his partner was located in the basement of the palace. Directly above her there was a guardhouse, even higher, on the second floor - the royal chambers. The personal property of Khalturin-Batyshkov was a huge chest in the corner of the basement - to this day it is unclear why the tsarist police never bothered to look into it.
The terrorist carried the explosive into the palace in small bundles. When dynamite accumulated about 3 pounds, Khalturin attempted to assassinate Alexander 2. On February 5, he blew up a mine under the dining room, where the royal family was supposed to be. In the Winter Palace the lights went out, the frightened guards came running. Alas, Alexander 2 did not go out to the dining room as usual, as he was meeting a guest - the Prince of Hesse. As a result of the terrorist attack, 19 soldiers were killed and another 48 were wounded. Khalturin was able to escape.
The attempted assassination of Alexander II, on February 5th, made Narodnaya Volya world famous. The explosion in the royal palace seemed absolutely incredible. At the suggestion of the heir, the Supreme Administrative Commission for the maintenance of state order and public peace was established. The emperor appointed the governor-general of Kharkiv Loris-Melikov as the head of the commission, who subjugated not only the police, but also the civil authorities.
Merciless repression was used against the participants in the revolutionary movement. Non-commissioned officer Lozinsky and student Rozovsky were executed only for distributing leaflets in March. Earlier, the same sad fate befell Mlodetsky, who attempted to assassinate Loris-Melikov.
In the spring and summer of 1880, the Executive Committee tried to organize two more attempts on Alexander II (in Odessa and St. Petersburg), but both did not take place. It should be noted that Zhelyabov and Mikhailov advocated the continuation of organizational and propaganda work. They saw the assassination of Alexander II as a means of waking up society, setting the people in motion, forcing the government to make concessions.
By the fall of 1880, the authority of Narodnaya Volya had become extremely high. She had many voluntary and selfless assistants, the youth was ready to take part in her most dangerous activities, and money was collected from all strata of society for the needs of the party. Even the liberals took part in this action: they believed that the activities of the People's Will would force the tsar to agree to some indulgences, and began to seriously talk about the draft of the much-desired constitution.
1880, October - the trial of 16 Narodnaya Volya members who were betrayed by the traitor Goldenberg ended. The execution of one of the founders of the organization A. Kvyatkovsky and the revolutionary worker A. Presnyakov shocked the People's Will. In a proclamation issued on November 6, the Executive Committee called on the Russian intelligentsia to lead the people to victory under the slogan "Death to tyrants." Now the Narodnaya Volya considered revenge to the emperor not only as a duty. “The honor of the party demands that he be killed,” Zhelyabov said about the upcoming assassination attempt.
This time they decided to liquidate the sovereign at all costs, using, if necessary, several methods of attack at once. An observation detachment of youth followed the emperor's departures. Technicians Kibalchich, Isaev, Grachevsky and others prepared dynamite, explosive jelly, shells for throwing bombs.
At the end of 1880, a shop was rented in the basement floor of a house at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Malaya Sadovaya. The tsar drove along these streets on the way to the arena. Under the guise of cheese merchants, Bogdanovich and Yakimova from Narodnaya Volya settled there using forged passports. The new owners aroused the suspicion of neighboring shopkeepers, and then the police, nevertheless, the revolutionaries began to dig under Malaya Sadovaya.
It seemed to have foreseen everything. If the sovereign had not been injured in the explosion of a mine, then bomb blast would begin to operate. If the latter failed, Zhelyabov was going to rush at Alexander II with a dagger. However, by the end of February, the threat of defeat hung over the Executive Committee. The betrayal of Okladskiy, who was pardoned after the trial of 16, led to the failure of two safe houses and to a whole chain of arrests.
The accidental arrest of Alexander Mikhailov in November 1880 had grave consequences. Demanding and implacable in the implementation of organizational principles and conspiracy, he was a kind of security chief for Narodnaya Volya. Mikhailov knew almost all spies and police officials. It was he who was able to introduce agent Kletochnikov into the III department.
After Mikhailov was arrested, the rules of conspiracy were observed with unforgivable negligence, which led to new failures. Following the arrests of Klodkevich and Barannikov, it was Kletochnikov's turn. There was no limit to the surprise of the police when they discovered that the executive and quiet official was a secret agent of the revolutionaries.
The government, which was aware of the preparation of a new assassination attempt on Alexander II, took countermeasures. On February 27, the police received an unexpected gift. Together with the head of Odessa circles, Trigoni, who had arrived in St. Petersburg, Zhelyabov was seized with a weapon in his hotel room, who had been searched for more than a year by gendarmes all over Russia to no avail.
Andrei Zhelyabov, the son of a courtyard peasant in the Tauride province, expelled from the third year of Novorossiysk University for participating in the riots, in 1880 became the de facto head of the Executive Committee and, as a member of the administrative commission, directed all terrorist actions. Without a doubt, if the People's Will succeeded in a political coup, then the revolutionary government would be headed by Zhelyabov.
Loris-Melikov, two weeks earlier, had warned the sovereign about the impending danger, on the morning of February 28, triumphantly reported to the tsar about the arrest of the main conspirator. Alexander 2 cheered up and decided to go to the Mikhailovsky Manege the next day.
On February 28, a "sanitary commission" headed by the engineering general Mravinsky came to the cheese shop on Malaya Sadovaya. On a superficial examination of the traces of the undermining, the commission could not find, and the general did not dare to search without special permission (for which he was later put on trial).
In the evening, members of the Executive Committee hastily gathered at Vera Figner's apartment. The arrest of Zhelyabov was a heavy blow for the People's Will. Nevertheless, they decided to go to the end, even if the emperor did not go along Malaya Sadovaya.
The bombs were loaded all night, a mine was set in the cheese shop, which Mikhail Frolenko was supposed to detonate. Sophia Perovskaya supervised the throwers. The daughter of the St. Petersburg governor, she ran away from home at the age of 16, enrolled in women's courses, and then became carried away by revolutionary ideas.
On the day of the assassination attempt, March 1, she displayed composure and resourcefulness. When they found out that the sovereign did not go along Malaya Sadovaya, Sophia bypassed the throwers and assigned them new places on the embankment of the Catherine Canal, along which the tsar was supposed to return.
In the end, what the Narodnaya Volya members had been striving for for so long came to pass. At three o'clock in the afternoon in the city center, two explosions were heard one after another. The first bomb, thrown by Nikolai Rysakov at the horses' feet, only managed to damage the tsar's carriage. Two Cossacks from the royal convoy and a boy passing by were killed.
When the tsar got out of the carriage, the second bomb was thrown by Ignatius Grinevitsky. The emperor and the thrower were mortally wounded in this explosion. Alexander II, bloodied, with his legs crushed by an explosion, was taken to the palace. The urgently called doctors could not save the monarch on March 1, 1881, at 4 pm, a black flag was raised over the Winter Palace.
Grinevitsky died in terrible agony, retaining his composure to the end. A few minutes before his death, he came to his senses. "What's your name?" the investigator asked him. “I don’t know,” was the answer. The name of the revolutionary was found out only during the trial on the March 1 case.
On the morning of March 1, Grinevitsky, at the direction of Perovskaya, took the most important place on Manezhnaya Square, but when the emperor changed the route, he was the second on the Catherine Canal …
For several weeks St. Petersburg was under martial law. Policemen, soldiers, and spies were everywhere. Popular unrest was expected, and many revolutionaries believed that Narodnaya Volya "was beginning to acquire a reputation as a force capable of withstanding the forces of the government." In particular, they feared the actions of the workers - Rysakov treacherously reported on the whole organization in their midst. Cossack outposts cut off the workers' outskirts from the center.
The Narodnaya Volya members had the strength to draw up an appeal of the Executive Committee to the Russian people and to European society, to publish and distribute the “Letter of the Executive Committee to Alexander III”. The letter contained demands for amnesty for all political prisoners, for convening representatives from the entire Russian people, and for ensuring their elections - freedom of the press, speech, and electoral programs.
In factories and factories, the Narodnaya Volya workers waited for a call for strikes and demonstrations, or even for an open struggle, for an uprising. However, none of the leaders showed up. The Narodnaya Volya's proclamation, received on the third day, did not contain specific calls to action. In essence, the Executive Committee in its terrorist struggle remained a narrow, strictly closed conspiratorial circle. Immediately after March 1, Gelfman, Timofey Mikhailov, Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Isaev, Sukhanov, and then Yakimova, Lebedeva, Langans were arrested. After March 1, friends advised Perovskaya to flee abroad, but she chose to stay in St. Petersburg.
Zhelyabov decided that it was in the interests of the party to personally participate in the trial, promoting the ideas of Narodnaya Volya. He wrote a statement to the prosecutor of the court chamber, in which he demanded “to be included in the March 1 case” and expressed his readiness to give incriminating testimony. This unusual request was granted.
The trial of the First March took place on March 26-29 under the chairmanship of Senator Fuchs and under the supervision of the Minister of Justice Nabokov and the entourage of the new Tsar Alexander III.
At the beginning of the session, the Senate's resolution was read out to reject Zhelyabov's application filed on the eve of the non-jurisdiction of the case to the special presence of the Senate and to transfer the case to the jury. Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Gelfman, Mikhailov and Rysakov were accused of belonging to a secret community with the goal of violent overthrow of the existing state and social system and participation in the regicide on March 1.
On March 29, the court sentenced the defendants to death. The pregnant Gelfman was replaced by a link to hard labor, but she died shortly after giving birth.
On the morning of April 3, two high black platforms drove out of the gates of the pre-trial detention center on Shpalernaya. Zhelyabov and the repentant Rysakov on the first, Mikhailov, Perovskaya and Kibalchich on the second. On each chest there was a plaque with the inscription: "The regicide." They were all hanged …
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