Tag Archives: february 7

1852: Martin Merino, Jesuit assassin

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On this date in 1852, a 63-year-old Jesuit priest was garroted outside Madrid’s Toledo Gate for attempting to assassinate Queen Isabella II.

Only five days before, Martin Merino y Gomez (Spanish Wikipedia link) had slipped into the palace wearing his clerical robes, and planted a dagger in the Queen’s side. (Non-fatally; her corset partly shielded the blow.)

Despite some speculation that he might have been connected to some more elaborate plot, investigation found him to be a lone nut, “crazed with Liberal doctrines, disordered vanity, and bilious disease.”

Neither a clear motive nor a real link to any other actor was ever established. Merino died as a lone nut, and then his parricidal remains were burned to ashes and scattered to the winds.

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1920: The White Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak

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On this date in 1920, White commander Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak was shot in Irkutsk.

Absent the Russian Revolution, Kolchak‘s epitaph would read “naval officer and arctic explorer.”*

After the Russian Revolution touched off civil war, Kolchak became Supreme Ruler — and ruthless dictator — of an anti-Bolshevik government stretching from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean.

It didn’t last.

Fleeing east, Kolchak was arrested by a Bolshevik-allied government in Irkutsk on Lake Baikal. The White army mounted an offensive to retrieve him — leading the Soviet government to order his immediate execution, along with one of his government ministers, Viktor Pepelyayev. Unable to bury them in the frozen soil, their captors unceremoniously dumped the corpses in the Ushakovka River.


A monument to Admiral Kolchak in Irkutsk, Russia. Image courtesy of Jack Sheremetoff of Baikaler.com.

* An inhospitable Arctic island he helped explore was named (and is now again named, following a Soviet change of moniker) for Kolchak.

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