Alexander II, Alexander III and Alexander of Battenberg and more killed in 1880 explosion?

The Bulgarian Tsar is not late, or the clock mechanism is delayed longer.

The explosion goes off when the full royal assortment is in the dining room, killing almost all of the people there.

On 26 August 1879, the 22 members of the organization’s executive committee sentenced Alexander II to death. Prior to his murder, the most serious of their attempts to kill the tsar came in February 1880. At 6:20 pm, an explosion rocked the Winter Palace, destroying the room where members of the Imperial family were due to dine with Prince Alexander of Battenberg (1857–93), the newly proclaimed chief of autonomous Bulgaria. The prince was late; hence, the room was still empty when the dynamite went off. The explosion still killed 11 and wounded another 56 people. The dynamite used in the attack had been smuggled into the palace in small batches by Stepan Khalturin (1857–82), a member of the People’s Will who posed as a carpenter and was hired as part of a construction crew working on the palace.


What is the result? Does the revolution succeed?

Who becomes regent for Nicholas and how does his reign proceed? What does the absence of Alexander III's pacifist rule do, does Russia get involved in more wars? Perhaps the Panjdeh incident escalates? Does Nicholas get assassinated?

In Bulgaria how does the death of their ruler impact the reunification process?

 
Regency depends upon which of the survivors is closer by a succession line. AFAIK, all of them more or less fit in a category “nincompoop” with the variations along the lines “liberal nincompoop”, “life-enjoying nincompoop”, “nincompoop with the irrelevant expertise (for example “cattle, purebred dogs, horse breeding, fishing and hunting”). There is no reason to expect that any of them would change disastrous economic course of AII and no way to figure out international stupidities they can commit. I doubt that Panjdeh incident would escalate into a war: in a reality both Russia and Britain wanted to finalize the Afghan border and neither really cared about the tiny details of the arrangement: it was almost literally “line on the sand”.

“Revolution” is irrelevant: the terrorists had been a small group of the hoodlums with no popular support, no real plan of taking power and a lot of other “no”.
 
The best scenario here is a liberal regent with good advisors for economics. Hopefully he can kill two birds with a stone, resolve Russia economic problems and steer its politics towards a constitutional monarchy.
 
Some depends on who was left, but I presume that the explosives weren't large enough to destroy the whole palace? That would really create some interesting things with those not in the dining room also potentially killed, but it does seem like with that small group of terrorists they wouldn't be able to get enough to do that.

Still, it does raise some interesting questions. I was just reading another thread on what if Alexander II hadn't been assassinated at all, and it said that Alexander III at least kept the economy from being a total mess, so the fact is improved a little helped. Here, a Regency might or might not alleviate some of the economic woes.

Alexander II had been target of numerous assassination attempts, but this would be such a huge thing - with several members of the line of succession passing – that perhaps people's minds, at least for a little while, would come out in support of the czar. Nicholas II would be 12 years old, though, so it's not like he is still a small child; he would be in the public eye. So he would have a chance to either cement that support or turn people off of him.

Of course, the wrong regent could wind up making Nicholas II his puppet even into adulthood. And, again, if he was 12 years old I wonder if he might have been in that room and someone else would be the czar, meaning that the regent would serve for possibly well over a decade and not just six years.

It would be interesting to see what the results are psychologically for him also. Even if he and his siblings would not have been in that main dining room, the explosion would doubtlessly have been heard by the young Nicholas II and it's possible he could have been injured by it.
 
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