Prop D

On March 13, 1881, Emperor Alexander II left the Winter Palace to inspect a St. Petersburg military parade. He had been warned of plans to assassinate him—but someone was always trying to assassinate him. By now he was used to it. His reign had been marked by a strange duality. Celebrated as “The Emancipator” responsible for freeing Russia’s serfs in 1861, he was also prey to reactionary spasms, including the violent repression of the Polish independence movement. He had recently resolved to introduce a modicum of popular representation to the Russian government, the latest in a string of half-hearted reforms meant to pacify the country’s burgeoning revolutionary movement.

On a street at the edge of a canal, a fair-haired young woman named Sofia Perovskaia pretended to blow her nose. This was the signal to begin. Nikolai Rysakov tossed a bomb under the imperial bulletproof carriage, the sound of the explosion muffled by the snow. A coachman entreated Alexander to remain in the vehicle, but the tsar alighted to question Rysakov and inspect the damage. A young Polish revolutionary, Ignati Grinevitsky, threw the second bomb, fatally injuring both himself and the tsar. Alexander the Emancipator lay bleeding in the snow, his side whiskers graying, his legs shattered and his belly mangled. A third terrorist, still carrying an undetonated bomb, ran toward the dying monarch to assist him.

The first attempt on Alexander’s life had been made in 1866. A half-mad ex-student named Dmitry Karakozov wrote a manifesto declaring his intent to kill the tsar, persecutor of the poor, and die for the people, but the letter got lost in the mail. As the tsar left the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg, Karakozov took aim with a double-barreled gun; a peasant next to him bumped his elbow, and Karakozov missed. He was hanged, and the government increased its surveillance and repression in universities, which it saw as the breeding ground of revolutionary sentiment. In 1867, during the World’s Fair in Paris, a Polish immigrant shot at the tsar’s carriage, hoping to free Poland from the Russian yoke. His pistol broke as it fired. When in 1879, the revolutionary Alexander Solovyev shot at the tsar, the monarch showed remarkable presence of mind; he ran away in zigzags, evading several bullets. Only his coat was a little torn.

Like many Russian terrorists of this period, Solovyev saw his act of violence as a sanctified feat of self-sacrifice for his country. Vera Figner, a noblewoman who would become one of the most beloved terrorists in history, later described Solovyev as possessing “the courage of a hero,” “the self-renunciation of an ascetic” and “the kindness of a child.” Such a description—the last part, in particular—might seem a surprising way to characterize a political assassin. But for some Russian idealists of the later nineteenth century, “propaganda of the deed” was a last resort in the struggle against autocracy, which denied the Russian people any kind of freedom while also failing to provide for its most elemental needs. The birth of Russian political terror shows a broader truth: aiming to extinguish dissent, political repression can foster violence rather than prevent it. As the cycle escalates, even saintly maidens can become murderers, and in the eyes of an angry and thwarted public, murderers can start to look like saints