On February 17, at 6:30 p.m., in the basement of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Stepan Khalturin, a carpenter on the palace repair crew, detonated a 32-kilogram dynamite bomb.
This was the fifth assassination attempt on Alexander II. The explosion in the Winter Palace did not bring the results the terrorists wanted: Alexander II was unharmed; instead, 11 soldiers were killed—veterans of the recently ended Russo-Turkish War, assigned for distinguished service to the Imperial Palace and serving on duty there—and 56 people were wounded.
The floors of the palace guardhouse collapsed downward, and only the double brick vaults between the first and second floors of the palace withstood the удар of the blast wave. No one on the bel etage was injured, but the explosion heaved up the floors, shattered window glass, and put out the lights. In the Tsar’s dining room, a wall cracked, a chandelier crashed onto the table set for dinner, and everything around was covered with lime and plaster...
“The dining room, when we entered it after the explosion, looked like this: all the lighting was out, frost poured in through the broken windows, a large hole yawned in the floor... From below came the groans of the wounded,” eyewitnesses testified. Khalturin managed to escape. First he made his way to Moscow, and then to Odessa.
The behavior of the guard soldiers was exemplary. The surviving sentries, despite their wounds, every last one of them, crawled out from under the debris and took up their posts again. Scraped and bloodied, barely able to stand, they did not yield their positions even after the relief arrived from the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment, until, as required by the regulations, they were formally relieved by their own corporal of the guard detail, who had also been wounded. Upon learning of what had happened in St. Petersburg, the German Emperor Wilhelm I issued an order to the army demanding that guard duty be performed the way the Russian Guardsmen had performed it.
After the explosion, the Winter Palace was тщательно searched, and several unexpected discoveries were made: for example, a cow was living in the palace attic. It turned out she had been there for quite a while; one of the servants had been keeping her there...