December 1 — a failed assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander II.
Due to irreconcilable disagreements, a split occurred within the populist party "Land and Liberty", whose members had set themselves the task of preparing a peasant revolution in Russia.
As a result, two new organizations emerged: "Black Repartition", which remained faithful to purely populist tendencies (going to the people, belief in the significance of the Russian peasant commune, which they saw as the starting point of socialist development), and "People's Will", which included the most radical populists: A. Zhelyabov, S. Perovskaya, V. Figner, N. Morozov, S. Khalturin, N. Kibalchich, G. Lopatin. One of the main methods of political struggle of the "People's Will" became terror.
On December 1, 1879, around 11 p.m., at the third verst of the Moscow–Kursk railway line, a People's Will combat group led by Sofia Perovskaya detonated a dynamite mine that had been planted in advance in a tunnel. The train was hit in which, as the revolutionaries assumed, Emperor Alexander II was traveling to St. Petersburg: two locomotives and one baggage car were torn off, the second baggage car overturned, and the other eight cars derailed with damage of varying severity.
Fortunately, none of the passengers was injured. The terrorists miscalculated. They attempted to destroy the second of the official imperial trains, which were traveling one after another at a half-hour interval. The tsar was riding in the first, while the one that was blown up contained only servants. After the failure of this attempt, the People's Will began developing a plan for a new attack...