Ignacy Hryniewiecki and the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II

Ignacy Hryniewiecki was a child of privilege, born as he was in 1856 in the town of Kalinovka, Belarus, to aristocratic parents of Polish Descent. His was by no means a troubled childhood yet he was an embittered young man. He was bitter about the oppression of the Polish people, barred as they were from holding public office in their own country and banned from using their own language in official documents. But most of all he was bitter about the gradual impoverishment of his own family and their consequently reduced status. This anger never left him, it went everywhere with him, including to University in St Petersburg where he soon became active in radical politics and joined the Russian revolutionary movement Narodnya i Volya (The Peoples’ Will) proponents of propaganda by deed – and determined to kill the Tsar.

Ignacy Hryniewiecki 

Not being a Russian national he was not at first entirely trusted and so was assigned low level tasks and employed in the distribution of propaganda (quite literally the handing out of leaflets) and provided with the rather lame soubriquet of Kotik (Kitten). But he stuck to his task assiduously and in time his zeal and commitment was recognised when in February, 1881, he was assigned to a bomb-throwing unit. Here he joined such experienced  revolutionaries as Timofei Mihailov, Ivan Elmanyov and Nikolai Rysakov. He was very much the junior member but his enthusiasm for the cause soon won over any doubters. Their task, he was soon to discover, was to assassinate the Tsar. The assassination would be planned, as had previous attempts, by Sofia Perovskaya. But why the grim determination to kill this particular Tsar? He was, after all, even in his own time known as the great reformer.

Tsar Alexander II, the Tyrant 

Tsar Alexander II, unlike his conservative predecessor was determined to liberalise Russia and open it up to the West. He had ascended to the throne in 1855 at the tail end of the Crimean War. This shambolic, disastrous affair had convinced him that Russia must change if it was to remain a great power. So he embarked upon a massive and wide-ranging programme of reform: the taxation system was simplified and made fairer, local authorities, the Zemstvo, were formed with elected assemblies, the railway system was massively expanded, foreign investment encouraged and the process of industrialisation started in earnest. In 1861, his reform programme culminated with the abolition of serfdom, the effective ending of slavery in Russia. He even, temporarily at least, removed the death penalty from the statute book. But these reforms benefited few in the short term. The serfs were actually worse off as a result of emancipation many now finding themselves evicted from the land they had farmed for centuries. The workers were demanding better pay and conditions of employment not more railways they could not afford to use; and despite the many reforms Russia’s minorities were no better off. They merely wanted to be free of Russia’s suffocating embrace but the Tsar would have none of it and came down hard on any dissent. Following the Polish uprising 1863, in which thousands were killed in the fighting and many thousands more executed after it was over, the regions of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine were governed like police states. It was an unforeseen consequence of the Tsar’s reform programme that it had actually impinged upon his authority and weakened his control hence the believe of the Russian Empire’s minorities that they could break away in the first place.

This latest attempt to assassinate the Tsar would not be the first. In December 1879, the Narodniks, as they were known, had tried to blow up the Royal Train. The line had been mined but the explosives hed failed to go off and bombs thrown at the train missed. On 5 February, 1880, however, they did manage to blow up the Tsar’s dining room killing 67 and wounding many more. Unfortunately, the Tsar had been delayed by State business and was late for dinner. Still, his would be assassins were not deterred.