20 May — for an attempted assassination of Alexander III, Alexander Ulyanov and his associates were hanged.
Alexander Ulyanov was one of the organizers and leaders of the “Terrorist Faction” of the “People’s Will” party, and the elder brother of V. I. Lenin. The “Terrorist Faction” was composed mainly of university students (P. Andreyushkin, V. Generalov, O. Govorukhin, Yu. Lukashevich, V. Osipanov, N. Rudevich, and others) and was independent of other People’s Will groups; it maintained ties with circles in Vilnius and Kharkov, with revolution-minded students of the capital’s military educational institutions, and carried out propaganda among workers. The faction’s members acted under the influence of the ideas of K. Marx, F. Engels, and G. Plekhanov, as well as the program documents of the “People’s Will.”
The program of the “Terrorist Faction” recognized the need to organize a socialist party whose core should be the working class, to nationalize land, factories, and plants, and, as the ultimate goal, to establish a socialist system. Following the People’s Will tradition, the authors of the program considered the immediate task of the organization to be the struggle for political freedoms through the “disorganization” of the government; terror was recognized as the method of struggle. They prepared an attempt on Emperor Alexander III, scheduling it for 13 March 1887, in honor of the day when, six years earlier, Emperor Alexander II had been killed, also at the hands of the People’s Will.
But the attempt failed: the police had been watching the terrorists for a long time, and they were all arrested. During searches, three bombs, a revolver, and the program of the Executive Committee of the “People’s Will” were found. The attempted assassination of the tsar ended with the destruction of the organization. The participants and organizers of the attempt (15 people) were tried on 15–19 April before a Special Session of the Government Senate. At first the court sentenced all of them to death, but Alexander III approved the supreme penalty only for five. On 20 May 1887, in the Shlisselburg Fortress, Ulyanov, Andreyushkin, Generalov, Osipanov, and Shevyrev were hanged; the rest were sentenced to various terms of penal servitude and exile to Siberia.