Visions of Terror

On 15 July 1904, the notoriously oppressive and unpopular Minister of the Interior, Viacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve stepped into his armored carriage, complete with an entourage of bicycle detectives, and set off from his dacha to the Baltic Station on his way to regular meeting with tsar Nicholas II, now residing at his summer palace in Peterhof. Plehve, who had already survived several attacks on his life, probably took this trip in stride, and so it must have been quite a surprise when, as he approached his destination, a young man, Igor Sazonov darted towards his carriage and threw a bomb underneath its speeding wheels. Sazonov was just one of several assassins that day who were poised and ready to trade their own lives for the Minister’s. They were all members of the Battle Organization, the terrorist branch of the Socialist revolutionaries who had been responsible for a number of prominent assassinations of political figures, most notably of Tsar Alexander II.

In his classic modernist novel, Petersburg (1913), Andrei Belyi created a fictional assassination plot modeled on this one in order to depict the atmosphere of crisis that pervaded the city at the turn-of-the-century. In the novel, the assassination and the city more generally-then undergoing the painful transition into modernization, wracked by war, and threatened by revolution-stand as an emblem of the uncertainty of this age.

Follow along here with one of the head conspirators, Boris Savinkov as he guides you through the intricacies of the assassination plot and the precise movements of the assassins on the day of the murder. Savinkov will introduce to some very memorable revolutionary personalities as well as explain to you how it was possible that such a central figure-constantly protected by police and paranoid about attacks on his life-could have been killed in a crowded public place in a city crawling with agents secret police, the okhrana. Stroll with Savinkov to the exact spot of the explosion and hear about how he made such a miraculous escape. See Petersburg from a new perspective, through the eyes of socialist revolutionary terrorists, like Boris Savinkov.