12. The Temporary Blunder That Got a Tsar Killed
On March 1st, 1881, People’s Will finally achieved their hearts’ desire. That day, one of the group’s assassins waited in ambush along a route taken by Alexander II every week and threw a bomb under his carriage. The explosion killed a guard and wounded others, but the carriage was armored, the Tsar was unhurt, and the bomb thrower was captured. Alexander was safe in his carriage, but in what turned out to be a blunder, he thought that the danger was over, and stepped out to survey the damage. As the shaken Tsar crossed himself at his deliverance from harm, a second assassin concealed in the gathering crowd spotted him. He shouted: “it is too early to thank God!” and threw another bomb. This one exploded at Alexander’s feet.
A third assassin in the crowd was ready with yet another bomb if the first two failed, but his explosives were unnecessary. The assassins were arrested and hanged, and in the aftermath intensified repression effectively crippled People’s Will as its members were rounded up and executed or jailed. Terrorism was kept in check for years, but the repression created even more enemies for the regime and drove more opponents into underground clandestine resistance. The Russian Empire was transformed into a pressure cooker that finally erupted into revolution in 1905, and into an even greater revolution that finally did away with Tsardom in 1917. Veterans of People’s Will, who began to emerge from prisons at the turn of the century as their sentences expired, played important roles in both revolutions.
