The imperial coach stopped at the Michaelovsky Palace, where the tsar called on his cousin Catherine.
He did not stay long. He only wanted to tell her personally about the Manifesto he planned to sign the next day.
It was half past two in the afternoon when the tsar’s covered carriage and entourage began its return journey to the Winter Palace. Not many people were out along the street as they went. No one, not even the vigilant Cossack Lieutenant Grigorov, noticed the woman on the street corner near the Ekaterinski, otherwise known as the Catherine Canal. Neither did they notice as she raised the handkerchief in her hand, and instead of applying it to her eyes or nose, waved it up and down with two or three quick motions, then stopped.
Sophia Perovskaya herself had come to oversee this vital final leg of the tsar’s journey, following the carriage as best she could from the cheese shop, and then waiting. She tucked the handkerchief into her pocket as she watched her volunteer assassins take up their positions. The street was uncommonly quiet and deserted. That concerned Sophia, for one of her colleagues, a long-haired student of geology, stood out dangerously. She hoped no one noticed the small parcel he clutched in his hand.
Without warning the imperial carriage sped up and hastened past the critical juncture. The geology scholar had just been ready to make his move, but the unexpected lurch of the carriage threw off his timing the second it took for him to miss his mark.
He hurled the bomb in his hand an instant too late for it to strike the imperial coach. It exploded instead in the midst of the trailing Cossack guards. Horses reared in the deafening explosion amid panicked whinnying. Several of the guards were flung broken and bleeding to the ground.
The force of the blast caught the royal carriage from behind. In the mayhem of the rocking earth and the wildly spooked horses, the carriage’s back wheels splintered and it toppled over sideways, screams coming from within. The driver was thrown clear, uninjured. Misha, likewise, was thrown off his perch, but his head struck the icy street below and he lay unconscious.
Miraculously, with the help of the driver’s assistant, the tsar climbed from the wreck unscathed. That he had once more defied the assassin’s hand seemed unbelievable, yet clearly apparent. The grand duke likewise bore only a few bruises.
Only a moment later police sledges skidded to a stop at the scene and the hapless student was immediately seized.
“Come with me, Your Highness!” cried one of the gendarmes, running to the tsar and urging him to board his undamaged sled in order to rush him safely back to the palace.
“No, I will not leave until I have ascertained the condition of my poor wounded Cossacks.”
He began making his way on with uneasy step back toward the site of the blast.
“Are you unhurt, Your Highness?” called out someone in the gathering crowd of bystanders that was pressing closer and closer.
“Thank God, yes I am,” replied the tsar.
“Thank God?” repeated a sharp voice. It was a voice full of malice and derision. The tsar turned to see the man who had spoken as he broke free of the crowd and was now running toward him.
Alexander never saw the face of his assassin. The bitter words were no sooner out of the killer’s mouth than he sprinted forward, pitching something toward the object of his hatred. It could have been a child’s snowball, but it carried enough lethal power to shake the world.
The violent blast blew the martyr to bits. But his life was not given in vain. Even before the echo died away, the tsar of Russia lay shattered beside him, stretched out in a pool of his own blood on the snowy St. Petersburg avenue.
The grand duke rushed forward and knelt down in the blood-stained snow. The tsar had just enough breath left to whisper a handful of words to his brother.
“Home to the palace, Michael . . . must die there . . .”
His final Imperial command was hastily followed. His broken body was carefully transferred to one of the waiting police sledges and rushed to the Winter Palace.
Less than an hour later, the last sacrament was administered. And in the bastion of the Romanovs, Tsar Alexander II of Russia went to join the tsars that had gone before him.