Assassination of Alexander II (1881): The Tsar Liberator Killed

The assassination of Alexander II took place on 13 March 1881 in St Petersburg, when members of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) threw bombs at the tsar’s carriage on the Catherine Canal embankment. The emperor who had freed Russia’s serfs died within hours. Instead of opening the way to reform or revolution, his death ushered in a period of repression under his son Alexander III.

Background: the reforming tsar

Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, during Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War. Convinced that the empire needed modernisation, he carried out the Great Reforms. The most important was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, which ended personal bondage for millions of peasants and earned him the title Tsar Liberator.

Further reforms followed: independent courts and jury trials in 1864, elected local councils called zemstvos, a relaxation of censorship and, in 1874, universal military service. But Alexander remained an autocrat. He refused to share legislative power with an elected parliament, and after a Polish uprising in 1863 and a first attempt on his life in 1866 his government became more cautious and repressive.

The revolutionaries of Narodnaya Volya

Many educated young Russians felt the reforms had not gone far enough. In the 1870s thousands of populists (narodniki) “went to the people” to spread socialist ideas among peasants, but they met suspicion and arrests. In 1879 the secret society Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) split. One faction rejected terror; the other formed Narodnaya Volya, which concluded that only the killing of the tsar could break the autocracy.

The tsar had already survived several attempts on his life. In June 1867 a Polish emigrant, Antoni Berezowski, fired at him during a visit to Paris, and in April 1879 a former student, Alexander Solovyov, fired several shots at him near the Winter Palace without hitting him. Each attempt was followed by tighter police controls.

In August 1879 Narodnaya Volya’s Executive Committee formally condemned Alexander II to death. Several attempts followed. In November 1879 the group blew up a train near Moscow, but not the one carrying the tsar. On 17 February 1880 the carpenter Stepan Khalturin set off a large charge of dynamite beneath the dining room of the Winter Palace; Alexander was not in the room, but around ten soldiers of the guard were killed and dozens wounded.

The government responded by giving extensive powers to Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, who combined police measures with conciliatory gestures. By early 1881 he had drafted proposals to bring elected representatives into consultative commissions on legislation, sometimes loosely called the “Loris-Melikov constitution”. Alexander approved the plan on the morning of the day he was killed.

The attack on the Catherine Canal

Narodnaya Volya had studied the tsar’s movements and prepared both a mine under a street and a team of bomb throwers. On 11 March (27 February Old Style) police arrested Andrei Zhelyabov, the group’s leading organiser. His partner Sophia Perovskaya, daughter of a former governor of St Petersburg, took over direction of the attack.

On Sunday 13 March, after attending a military parade at the Mikhailovsky Manège, Alexander returned along the Catherine Canal embankment instead of the mined street. Perovskaya signalled the change of route by waving a handkerchief. At about 2.15 pm Nikolai Rysakov threw the first bomb. It damaged the armoured carriage and killed or fatally wounded a Cossack escort and a passing boy, but the tsar was unhurt.

Against the advice of his escort, Alexander got out to look at the wounded and the arrested bomber. A second conspirator, the Polish student Ignacy Hryniewiecki (Grinevitsky), then threw another bomb at his feet. The explosion shattered the tsar’s legs and also mortally wounded Hryniewiecki. Alexander was taken by sleigh to the Winter Palace, where he died at about 3.30 pm in the presence of his family. Around 20 other people were wounded by the two explosions.

Trial and executions

Rysakov, who was 19, gave the police information that helped identify his comrades. Within weeks the main surviving organisers were arrested, including Perovskaya, the explosives expert Nikolai Kibalchich, Timofei Mikhailov and Gesya Gelfman, in whose flat the bombs had been stored.

Six defendants were tried before a special session of the Senate in early April 1881 and sentenced to death. On 15 April Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Mikhailov and Rysakov were hanged on the Semyonovsky parade ground before a large crowd. Perovskaya was the first woman in Russia executed for a political crime. Gelfman’s sentence was commuted because she was pregnant; she died in prison in 1882 shortly after giving birth.

Kibalchich spent his last days in his cell sketching a design for a rocket-propelled flying machine, which was found in police files after the 1917 revolution. The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote to the new tsar urging him to pardon the assassins, but his appeal was not granted.

Reaction under Alexander III

The new emperor, Alexander III, was strongly influenced by his former tutor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who believed that reforms had weakened the state. Loris-Melikov’s proposals were dropped. On 11 May 1881 (29 April Old Style) a manifesto proclaimed the tsar’s faith in “the power and truth of autocracy”, and Loris-Melikov and other liberal ministers resigned.

In August 1881 the government issued the Statute on Measures for the Protection of State Order, which allowed officials to declare states of emergency, exile suspects without trial and close newspapers. It was meant to be temporary but stayed in force until 1917. The secret police were reorganised, and the security branches later known as the Okhrana expanded. Censorship was tightened, university autonomy was reduced in 1884 and the zemstvos were brought under closer control.

A wave of anti-Jewish pogroms broke out in southern Russia from April 1881. One of the conspirators, Gelfman, was Jewish, and rumours spread blaming Jews for the tsar’s death; much of the violence was driven by economic resentment and local agitation. The government did not organise the pogroms, but it responded with the restrictive “Temporary Regulations” of May 1882, often called the May Laws, which limited where Jews could live and trade. Emigration of Russian Jews, especially to the United States, rose sharply in the following decades.

Narodnaya Volya itself was largely destroyed by arrests. In 1887 a small group linked to its tradition plotted to kill Alexander III; among those hanged was Alexander Ulyanov, the elder brother of Vladimir Lenin.

Timeline

• 1861, 3 March (19 February Old Style): Alexander II signs the Emancipation Edict.
• 1866, 16 April: Dmitry Karakozov fires at the tsar in St Petersburg and misses.
• 1879, August: Narodnaya Volya’s Executive Committee sentences Alexander II to death.
• 1880, 17 February: Bomb explodes beneath the dining room of the Winter Palace.
• 1881, 13 March: Alexander II is mortally wounded on the Catherine Canal and dies at the Winter Palace.
• 1881, 15 April: Five conspirators are hanged in St Petersburg.
• 1881, 11 May: Alexander III’s manifesto reaffirms unlimited autocracy.
• 1907: The Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood is consecrated on the site of the attack.

Why it matters

The killing of Alexander II showed both the reach of a small, determined revolutionary group and the limits of terror as a political tool. Rather than winning freedom, it strengthened the forces of reaction, delayed constitutional change in Russia for a generation and helped set the stage for the confrontations of the Revolution of 1905 and 1917.