March 13, 1881: Czar Alexander II of Russia is assassinated in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. He was 62 years old.
Note: Like the German word "Kaiser," the Russian word "Czar," meaning "Emperor," comes from the Latin term "Caesar." "Czar" has also been written as "Tsar," but "Czar" is how I first saw it spelled, and that's how I'm spelling it here.
There is an old joke that the Russian Revolution finally happened once the people realized that the Czar, whom they revered, and the Tsar, whom they hated, were one and the same. And there's another old joke, included in the musical Fiddler On the Roof, where a Rabbi says, "May the Lord bless and keep the Czar... far away from us!"
Additional Note: I had wanted to do one of these entries for the publication of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but it was published in 1866. I had also wanted to do one for the publication of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, but that was published in 1867. Both came before my cutoff year of 1869, the year of the 1st openly professional baseball team. If I had records for the games played by the top amateur baseball teams prior to 1869, I would have gone back further than that. So far, I have not found such records, so I can't include events from those years. If I could, I might be particularly overloaded for the years of the American Civil War, 1861 to 1865.
So I haven't included a single Russian novel from the 19th Century. While both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky continued to publish novels after 1869, the aforementioned were their defining works. I looked for a list of top Russian novels, and these were the others usually included: Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin, published in 1832; Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev, 1862; and 2 from the 20th Century, for both of which I will have entries: Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, 1957; and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962.
Alexander II had taken the Imperial throne in 1855, upon the death of his father, Czar Nicholas I. Being "Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias" meant that he was also "King of Congress Poland" and "Duke of Finland."
And, as Russian rulers go, he was fairly liberal. On March 3, 1861, he issued the Edict of Emancipation, ending serfdom, which bound millions of poor people to the land they were working on. It was one step up from slavery, and it's been estimated that it was the lot in life of 38 percent of the people in the Empire -- more than 1 out of every 3.
And, since both of my grandfathers could trace their ancestry to places ruled by the Russian Empire -- Poland on my father's side, Lithuania on my mother's -- that meant that, like millions of African-Americans, "my people" were not free when Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.
Alexander also reformed the Empire's judicial system, promoted universities, and sold Alaska to America in 1867. But he wasn't all peaches and cream -- or cheese babka and vodka: He instituted universal military service for young men, and stripped Poland of its separate constitution after an 1863 uprising.
He survived an assassination attempt in 1866, and became more reactionary. He abandoned his ally, Emperor Napoleon III of France, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, fearing the anger of the Prussians, including his uncle, who thus became Wilhelm I, the first Kaiser of a united Germany; and sealing France's defeat. He approved the Circassian Genocide, killing over 1 million people. He fought a war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78, leading to the independence of Romania, Bulgarian, Serbia and Montenegro. There would be another failed assassination attempt in 1880.
His 1st wife, formerly Princess Marie, the daughter of a Grand Duke of Hesse, gave him 8 children, but the eldest son, Tsarevich Nicholas, died of meningitis at age 21 in 1865. That left his brother, Grand Duke Alexander, as heir.
All the while, he had a series of mistresses. In 1866, Catherine Dolgorukova , a Princess and a distant cousin, became one of them. They had 4 children together before Marie died in 1880. Alexander married Catherine just 40 days later, and officially legitimized their children.
That really made the Russian nobility mad: They knew they could keep the affair secret from the Russian people, but marrying another woman so soon after the Czarina's death couldn't be hidden. They had no more children.
So now, the people plotting against the Czar included the nobility. At this point, it was not if he would be removed from power, but when, and how.
March 13, 1881 was a Sunday. As he usually did on Sundays, the Czar rode out of his residence in St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace, heading for the Mikhailovsky Manège, the academy for training cavalry officers, for the military roll call. He was seen by Nikolai Rysakov, a member of a group calling itself Narodnaya Volya, or "People's Will."
It was 2:15 PM. Rysakov told his story: "After a moment's hesitation, I threw the bomb. I sent it under the horses' hooves, in the supposition that it would blow up under the carriage. The explosion knocked me into the fence."
It also killed one of the Czar's mounted Cossack escorts. But the carriage itself, a gift from Napoleon III, was bulletproof. It wasn't quite bombproof, but it only sustained minor damage. The Czar was not hurt. Rysakov was immediately captured, but yelled out to an accomplice, Ignacy Hryniewiecki.
Seeing the damage, the Czar told his escorts, "Thank God, I escaped injury." Hryniewiecki yelled back, "It is too early to thank God yet!" He also had a bomb, and was less than 5 feet away. He threw the bomb at the Czar's feet, and it exploded.
Over 20 people were injured, including the Czar. His legs had been severed. His stomach was ripped open. His face was mutilated. What was left of him was carried back to the Winter Palace on a sleigh, but nothing could be done. He died at 3:30.
Hryniewiecki was captured, but was also badly hurt, and only outlived the Czar by 7 hours. He was 25, but had left a suicide note:
Alexander II must die. He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...
It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.
Within a month, Rysakov was executed. Grand Duke Alexander became Czar Alexander III, and he became more reactionary than his father ever had, brutally suppressing even the slightest of opposition until his own death. In other words, the assassination of Alexander II did more harm than good.
Alexander III died in 1894, from kidney disease. He was only 49, leaving his son, just 26 and not nearly as intelligent as his father or his grandfather, but every bit as reactionary, as Czar Nicholas II. And he would be the last Czar.
As I said, both of my grandfathers can trace their ancestry to Russian-controlled lands. I tell people that this is why I have a healthy distrust of Russian dictators, including Vladimir Putin. Sometimes, I tell people that the reason my ancestors left the Russian Empire is that they were involved in the conspiracy to assassinate the Czar, or were thought to be, and had to flee. I have absolutely no evidence that either is true. But, knowing how stubborn my family can be, on both sides, it is plausible. And it makes for a great story.
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March 13, 1881, as I said, was a Sunday. Baseball and football were out of season. Basketball hadn't yet been invented, and hockey barely had. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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