The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

In 1887 a twenty-year old student-terrorist took part in a plot organized by the Will of the People to kill the Czar on the anniversary of Alexander II’s assassination, was arrested and condemned to death. His mother applied for permission to visit him in prison. “I think it would be advisable to allow her to visit her son,” the Czar scribbled on the margin of the letter that the despairing woman had sent him, “so that she might see for herself what kind of person this precious son of hers is.” Explaining his act — or rather his intended act — at his trial, the student said: “Under a system which permits no freedom of expression and crushes every attempt to work for their [the people’s] welfare and enlightenment by legal means, the only instrument that remains is terror.” The young man was hanged, with four of his fellow conspirators in the courtyard of the Schlusselberg fortress on the morning of May 20, 1887. His name was Alexander Ulyanov and he had a seventeen-year old brother, Vladimir, who later became a conspirator himself and took the pen name Nikolai Lenin.