“Guards were placed in the first and in last cars. As soon as the train would stop, the guards would encircle the cars of “Their Majesties.” Two twin trains (for the czar and his entourage) would constantly change places when traveling. Thus, in November 1879, terrorists blew up the entourage train thinking that it was the czarist one.”
“When the czar was traveling by railway, guards would stand along the entire route, in every ten meters. They would open fire without warning on anyone who would approach the tracks. They would open fire even at boats or rafts passing underneath railway bridges. Nearly every trip of the czar would end up with innocent victims.”
But you’ve got to consider the source of this information, and that makes some of it suspect. Pravda was the official propaganda newspaper of the Soviet communist regime.
Even the Russians had a saying about Pravda. The word Pravda means ‘truth’ in Russian. The saying was, “There’s no truth in Pravda.”
I belive it was Lord Mountbattan who said Stalin’s security put anything the Czar had to shame. Mountbattan would have known, he was a frequent visitor as a boy to Czar Nicholas’ court.
"Some dissidents preferred a policy of terrorism to obtain reform and on 14th April, 1879, Alexander Soloviev, a former schoolteacher, tried to kill Alexander. His attempt failed and he was executed the following month. The government responded to the assassination attempt by appointing six military governor-generals that imposed a rigorous system of censorship and repression in Russia.
The following month terrorists used nitroglycerine to attempt to destroy the Tsar’s train. However, the terrorist miscalculated and it destroyed another train instead. An attempt the blow up the Kamenny Bridge in St. Petersburg as the Tsar was passing over it was also unsuccessful."
"On 1st March, 1881, Alexander was traveling in a closed carriage, from Mikhailovsky Palace to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. An armed Cossack sat with the coach-driver and another six Cossacks followed on horseback. Behind them came a group of police officers in sledges.
On a street corner near the Catherine Canal Sophia Perovskaya gave the signal to Nikolai Rysakov and Timofei Mikhailov to throw their bombs at the Tsar’s carriage. The bombs missed the carriage and instead landed amongst the Cossacks. The Tsar was unhurt but insisted on getting out of the carriage to check the condition of the injured men. While he was standing with the wounded Cossacks another terrorist, Ignatei Grinevitski, threw his bomb. Alexander was killed instantly and the explosion was so great that Grinevitski also died from the bomb blast."
Yes, but in this case it’s perfectly easy to consult comparative historical sources. I note that in the original quotation, there is no indication that the ‘terrorists’ are being praised for a ‘sic semper tyrannis’ attitude, which would be one hallmark of the ‘typical’ sort of Soviet propaganda.
Russian words can be interesting. “Pravda” for example doesn’t mean just ‘truth’, it means something that has been PROVEN (which is literally what ‘pravda’ means) to be true. Now, this is not necessarily any better ‘truth’ than Marxist-Leninist theology was ‘scientific socialism’ – but note what semantics can do to the brain when you hear the word.
A similar little nuance that was lost on most people in the West in the '80s was the word ‘mir’ for peace. Just as the Greeks had different words for different kinds of ‘knowledge’ and ‘love’, there are different senses of peace in Russian: “Mir” in particular means the peace that comes after an enemy has been completely vanquished and there will be no more fighting. That is not, of course, the sense that was communicated to the general English-speaking Western world…