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As his Sunday custom, the Czar traveled in his bulletproof carriage (a gift from Emperor Napoleon III of France) to the Mikhailovsky Manège to review the military roll call. He was escorted by the police as well as his own guard, including his Cossack personal bodyguard. In the crowd that gathered on the narrow pavement to watch Alexander pass were agents from the Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will") bent on assassinating the Czar to instill a new order of communistic anarchy. Nikolai Rysakov was the first to strike, throwing a bomb wrapped in a handkerchief. The explosion would kill one of the Cossack guards and injure onlookers and more guards, but Alexander would prove unhurt as he stepped from his carriage. The police hurriedly apprehended Rysakov, who shouted to someone else in the crowd. The surrounding guards and the Cossacks urged the emperor to leave the area at once rather than being shown the site of the explosion.

But the Tsar insisted on seeing the wounded first. The 6 remaining Cossacks assigned to protect the Czar were distracted by the crowd who were excitedly gathering at the scene. Colonel Dvorzhitsky, district chief of police, rushed up and urged the Tsar to get into his carriage. Alexander agreed, but began to wander over to look at the site of the explosion. Feeling the Czar was still in danger, Dvorzhitsky threw himself into Alexander and violently pushed him into the carriage, violating the royal space but proving to save his life as a second bomb exploded. A surviving guard was later to write :

"I was deafened by the new explosion, burned, wounded and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty's voice cry, 'Help!' Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the emperor. Colonel Dvorzhitsky was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him but his legs were shattered, and the blood poured out of them. Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay on the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others to crawl, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them. Through the snow, debris, and blood you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabres, and bloody chunks of human flesh. Thanks to God, the Czar was still alive".

The carriage was immediately ordered to flee away. Just in time a third bomb was thrown, but it fortunatelly it didn't explode. Alexander was urgently carried to the Winter Palace to his study where, twenty years before almost to the day, he had signed the Emancipation Edict freeing the serfs. Alexander II planned to release a plan for the duma to the Russian people. He was now hesitating. His grandson, Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, was able to convince to sign this decree. In a matter of 48 hours, Russia was set to follow a path to constitutional monarchy instead of the long road of oppression that defined the reigns of his predecessors.

With construction starting in 1883, the Church of the Savior on Blood was built on the site of Dvorzhitsky's sacrifice and dedicated in his memory.


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