Why was ALEXANDER ii of russia assasinated?
In 1866 there was an attempt on his life in Petersburg by Dmitry Karakozov. To commemorate his narrow escape from death (that he referred to only as “the event of April 4, 1866”), a number of churches and chapels were built in many Russian cities. On the morning of April 20, 1879, Alexander II was walking towards the Square of the Guards Staff and faced Alexander Soloviev, a 33 year-old former student. Having seen a revolver in his hands, the Tsar ran away; Soloviev fired five times but missed. He was sentenced to death and hanged on May 28. The student acted on his own, but other revolutionaries were keen to kill Alexander. In December 1879, the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), a radical revolutionary group which hoped to ignite a social revolution, organised an explosion on the railway from Livadia to Moscow, but they missed the Tsar’s train. Subsequently, on the evening of February 5, 1880 the same revolutionaries set off a charge under the dining room of the Winter Palace, right in
