1879: Joseph Davidenko, Sergei Chubarov, and Dmitri Lizogoub

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On this date in 1879, three Russian nihilists were hanged for an attempted regicide.

Revolutionary nihilism flowered in 1870s Russia; in the words of the movement’s expatriate crier Stepniak,

In 1870 the whole of advanced Russia was anarchist … The socialists of this epoch based all their hopes upon the peasants. Thousands of young people of both sexes went upon a crusade among the peasants; the more exalted with the object of calling them to open rebellion, the more moderate with the intention of preparing the ground for future revolution by peaceful socialist propaganda. This was one of the most touching and characteristic episodes of the younger movement, when the motto “All for the people and nothing for ourselves” was the order of the day.

…

This socialist crusade was a complete failure. … In the course of 1873 and 1874 fifteen hundred propagandists and agitators, or their friends and supposed accomplices, were arrested in the thirty-seven provinces of the empire, and thrown into prison. Half of them were released after a few months’ detention; the rest were kept in preliminary confinement from two to four years, during which seventy-three either died or lost their reason. In 1877 one hundred ninety-three were tried and condemned to various punishments, from simple exile to ten years of hard labor in the mines of Siberia …

But theories, once adopted, do not disappear so easily. The passions spoke first; and men began to act in the right direction before they had reasoned out their action. The wanton cruelty with which political prisoners were treated, the horrors of preliminary detention, the barbarous punishment inflicted for trifling offences — all this proved unendurable even to the mild, patient Russians. The spirit of revenge was kindled, giving birth to the first attacks upon the Government, known by the name of terrorism.

We have met these passionate Russians time and again in these pages, of course. And like this group, the movement’s ne plus ultra objective was taking out the tsar himself.

The reader will have noticed that Stepniak’s leading players are elites gone to rouse the masses to rebellion rather than creatures of the masses themselves. One of the leading figures in this date’s group, Dmitri Lizogoub — many transliterations are possible: Lissogub, Lizogoob, etc. — was a wealthy nobleman; indeed, he was one of his comrades’ chief financiers. The “Saint of Nihilism” was turned in by his own steward for the opportunity to collect as his bounty the small remainder of Lizogoub’s estate. Sergei Chubarov, another nobleman, instigated the assassination plan for which they die: to greet a state visit by the much-targeted Alexander II to Nikolaev explosively.

It was after a dragnet of putative subversives in the wake of Soloviev‘s April 1879 assassination attempt that our batch for today was rounded up and put before a military proceeding among a group of 28 terrorists. Others received terms of prison or Siberian exile; Lizogoub, Chubarov, and a Black Sea fleet deserter named Joseph Davidenko publicly hanged together at the Odessa race-course. Two others of their circle, Wittenberg and Lobovenko, were executed in the subsequent days at Nikolaev.

This particular conspiracy was detected in time, but conspiracies in general did not abate in the wake of harsh punishment: if anything, dreams of tyrannicide redoubled. Given the sheer volume of plots against the Autocrat of All the Russias, one, inevitably, finally got through.

On this day..

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