A Russian Tsar Was Killed by a Bomb Just After Thanking God for Escaping a Bomb Blast
In the 19th century, Russian revolutionaries formed a secret organization, Narodnaya Volya, or “People’s Will”. It was an underground network that aimed to overthrow the oppressive Russian tsarist government by acts of violent propaganda calculated to spark a mass revolt. A terrorist organization, in short. People’s Will were the forerunners of bigger and more effective anarchist and socialist organizations in the following decades. What they are best known for, however, was their assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
The organization emerged from radical student study circles in the 1870s, which tried to spread socialist ideas to peasants and industrial workers. However, they were easily repressed by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, who swiftly arrested and jailed the agitators. That led the radical students to rethink their strategy and tactics. Eventually, a consensus emerged that the only way to overthrow Tsardom was via revolutionary violence. More clandestine and aggressive tactics were called for – specifically, “propaganda of the deed”, or terrorism.
The result was Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty), a radical organization that preached political assassinations as self defense, and justified revenge against oppressive officials. However, it stopped short of viewing terror as a means of political struggle against the government. In 1879, People’s Will splintered off from Zemlya i Volya after the latter was almost wiped out by the secret police following a failed assassination attempt on the Tsar. People’s Will was far more radical, and saw terrorism as a proactive tool for overthrowing the regime, not simply as a reactive means of retaliation.
People’s Will called for violence, announced an ambitious program of terrorism and assassination to break the government, and issued a proclamation declaring a death sentence against the Tsar, who was to be executed as an enemy of the people. They established clandestine cells in major cities and within the Russian military, and began publishing underground revolutionary newspapers and leaflets targeted at industrial workers.
They tried to kill the Tsar in December of 1879 with explosives on a railway, but missed his train. People’s Will tried again two months later, by planting a bomb in his palace. However, he was not in the room when the explosives went off. A frightened Tsar declared a state of emergency, and set up a commission to repress the terrorists. Within a week, a People’s Will assassin attempted to kill the commission’s head. The repression mounted, and People’s Will activists caught distributing illegal leaflets were hanged. Undaunted, the group doggedly persisted with its relentless efforts to kill the Tsar.
They finally got their chance on March 1st, 1881. A People’s Will assassin waited in ambush along a route taken by the Tsar every week, and threw a bomb under his carriage when it passed by. The explosion killed a guard and wounded others, but the carriage was armored, the Tsar was unhurt, and the bomb thrower was captured. A shaken Tsar emerged from the carriage, and crossed himself as he surveyed the damage. Unbeknownst to him, there was a second assassin concealed in the gathering crowd. Shouting at the Tsar “it is too early to thank God!“, the second assassin threw another bomb, which landed and went off directly beneath the Tsar’s feet. There was a third assassin in the crowd, ready with yet another bomb if the first two failed. However, his explosives proved unnecessary.
The Tsar died of is wounds, and the assassins were arrested and hanged. In the aftermath, intensified repression effectively wrecked People’s Will, as nearly all its members were rounded up and executed or jailed. Terrorism in Russia was kept in check for years afterwards, but the repression created even more enemies for the regime. Lacking legal means for expressing dissent, many opponents were driven into underground clandestine resistance, as the Russian Empire was transformed into a pressure cooker. It finally erupted into revolution in 1905, and into an even greater revolution that finally did away with Tsardom in 1917. Surviving veterans of People’s Will, who began emerging from prisons at the turn of the century as their sentences expired, played important roles in both revolutions.