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Overlooked No More: The Russian Icon Who Was Hanged for Killing a Czar
Sophia Perovskaya, an aristocrat, was executed for a political crime after leading the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II.
Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported by the newspaper.
By Eva Sohlman
The assassins hurled their first round of explosives as Czar Alexander IItraveled in his carriage through the streets of St. Petersburg. The czar survived, thanks to the carriage’s armor. But Alexander made the fatal mistake of descending to the street, and that is when the next bomb was thrown. He bled to death in hours.
It was Sophia L. Perovskaya, 27, an aristocrat herself and a descendant of Peter the Great, who had plotted and orchestrated the assault on March 13, 1881, signaling the czar’s route with a white handkerchief. She and her co-conspirators from the radical organization the People’s Will were soon arrested, and Perovskaya and four male accomplices were condemned to death by hanging.
Perovskaya, the first woman to be executed for a political crime in Russia, is credited with helping to push the empire down the road to revolution and was later given the mantle of martyrdom. Tolstoy called her an “ideological Joan of Arc.”
Indeed, the execution of “Russia’s first female terrorist” matched the drama of the assassination. On April 15, she and her fellow militants were driven through the streets of St. Petersburg in tumbrels, dressed in black robes, with their hands tied behind them and black placards reading “Czaricide” hung around their necks. The cortege, under military escort, rolled through the streets to the beat of drums as a throng watched.
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More soldiers held back a mob gathered on a central St. Petersburg parade ground, where five coffins waited behind a black scaffold. Just before her hanging, Perovskaya kissed her accomplices, including her lover, Andrei Zhelyabov. She had led the assassination plot after he was arrested.
Perovskaya maintained her composure, according to accounts. A last letter to her mother indicated that she had accepted her fate: “Believe me, dearest Mommy, it is not at all such a dark one. I have lived as my convictions have prompted me; I could not do otherwise; therefore I await what is in store for me with a clear conscience.”
Perovskaya, who had been swept up in revolutionary fervor as a girl, and her confederates viewed the czar as the main obstacle to constitutional reform. Once he was dead, they believed, the public would realize that the emperor was not the demigod depicted in the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church and would rise up against the autocracy.
Alexander II was a liberal who had abolished serfdom and created a judicial system, although he acceded to reactionary forces in his latter years. His death brought his conservative son Alexander III to the throne. The new czar rolled back many of his father’s reforms and imposed even more repressive measures.
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But ultimately, scholars say, Perovskaya and her band of assassins helped move Russia closer to revolution, which would erupt in 1917, ending more than 300 years of czarist rule.
“In some way — not immediately, but in some decades — her deeds and thoughts resulted in social revolution,” said Andrei B. Zubov, a historian and editor of the three-volume “History of Russia: The 20th Century” (2009).
Perovskaya came to be revered for her self-sacrifice.
“In the 19th century, she was regarded a martyr to the struggle for social justice and constitutional reform among the liberal and radical intelligentsia,” said Barbara Evans Clements, emeritus professor at the University of Akron in Ohio and author of “A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present” (2012).
In the 1920s the Bolsheviks, who had seized power, made Perovskaya a national heroine. Soviet biographies, novels and films — one with a popular score by Dmitri Shostakovich — further burnished her legacy. Monuments, squares, streets and even a minor planet discovered in 1968 were named after her.
Sophia Perovskaya was born on Sept. 13, 1853. Her father, Lev Nikolaevich Perovsky, had served as governor-general of St. Petersburg and was a descendant of the czarist line. He looked down on her pious mother, Varvara Stepanovna Perovskaya, as being a mere provincial aristocrat.
Perovskaya clashed with her despotic father early on. Tensions only increased after Varvara encouraged her daughters to pursue higher education, an unconventional path for young women at the time. Perovskaya attended the Alarchin Courses, a woman’s college, and organized a study circle.
Inspired by radical literature and repulsed by the brutal social injustices in Russian society — not to mention her father — Perovskaya left home while still a teenager.
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She is said to have charmed many with her lively intelligence, silvery laugh and attractive looks, with blond hair, blue eyes and a childlike face. Lauding her selflessness and sense of honor and duty, her biographer Nikolai A. Troitsky called her “probably the most likable personality among thousands and thousands of fighters against czarist autocracy.”
As the revolutionary movement gained momentum, Perovskaya, seeking to be of service to the people, passed a public teacher’s exam and completed studies as a doctor’s assistant. She joined the Populist movement, one of the first attempts by educated Russians to form a bridge to the peasantry in hopes of inciting a socialist uprising.
That prompted her arrest in 1874, after which she became a member of another revolutionary organization and eventually went underground. She joined the People’s Will, the most infamous militant group of the era, in 1879.
Perovskaya had participated in two failed attempts to kill Alexander II — one near Moscow and one in Odessa — before the third one succeeded. The site of the assassination was immortalized with the construction of a colorful city landmark, the Church of the Savior of the Spilled Blood.
In recent times, the memory of Perovskaya has fared less well, particularly amid a waxing reverence for the czarist past. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, streets bearing her name were renamed and monuments removed.
Nevertheless, her family home on their former vineyard in Crimea remains a museum. Perovskaya’s portrait holds pride of place in the main drawing room, a legacy of her Soviet heroic status, and her family name has been given to a local sparkling wine, said Larissa P. Biryukova, a tour guide who led a recent swing through the museum.
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However, with the Kremlin worried about the young flocking to antigovernment, pro-democracy protests, there has been less emphasis on her exploits. “We don’t tell the teenage groups so much about Sophia — more about making wine,” Biryukova said.
Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting from Moscow.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D12 of the New York edition with the headline: Sophia Perovskaya. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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