Kill the Tsar

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With great talent for story-telling, historian Tessendorf traces the roots of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. This comparatively liberal tsar used compromise to avoid civil war but inadvertently contributed to his own demise, having freed 25,000,000 serfs and offered education to the masses. His intention was to train the professional force needed to bring Russia into the industrial revolution. This plan, which took form in the 1860s, also created a group of nihilist radicals who rejected reform, hoping to dismantle the social structure and replace it with something new. The assassins, Andrei and Sonia, were the son of a serf and a daughter of the aristocracy; he was educated as a lawyer, she as a physician's assistant. The book's unusual subject matter becomes highly relevant in its parallels with the 1960s generation, and its timely examination of terrorism. (12-up)

School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up In April of 1881 five young people were hanged in St. Petersburg for ``Tsaricide''the killing of the Russian monarch. They were among the last survivors of a small band of terrorists, a rag-tag band of students, idealists, opportunists, and drifters who, for 20 years, had sought effective means of protest against the government. Tessendorf tells a fascinating story of shifting purposes, changing personnel, burning idealism, and the chance turns of fate that brought these four men and one woman to the gallows. Parallels with the 1960s counterculture and with terrorist groups of the present are made clear, but the main value of this book is in the detailed account it gives of the secret societies that promoted revolution in Russia between 1861 and 1881. The story is told in terms of the individualsyoung, brave, foolish, desperate, idealistic, and unrealisticwho called themselves ``The People's Will'' and sought only their own violent purposes. When, after six failed attempts, they finally killed the Tsar, the result was not the liberation of the people but even worse oppression. Those interested in Russia, in political science, and in sociology will find this a fascinating story and a thought-provoking book. Shirley Wilton, Ocean County College, Toms River, N.J.