1. Sophia Perovskaya helped orchestrate the assassination of Alexander II of Russia, for which she was executed by hanging.
16 Facts About Sophia Perovskaya
1. 2.
Sophia Perovskaya's grandfather, Nikolay Perovsky, was a governor of Taurida.
3.
Sophia Perovskaya spent her early years in the Crimea, where her education was largely neglected, but where she began reading serious books on her own.
4.
Sophia Perovskaya left home at the age of sixteen over her father's objections to her new friends.
5.
Sophia Perovskaya was a "populist" to the very bottom of her heart and at the same time a revolutionist, a fighter of the truest steel.
6.
In 1873, Sophia Perovskaya maintained several conspiracy apartments in Saint Petersburg for secret anti-tsarist propaganda meetings that had not been sanctioned by the authorities.
7.
Sophia Perovskaya took part in an unsuccessful attempt to free Ippolit Myshkin, a revolutionary and a member of Narodnaya Volya.
8.
Sophia Perovskaya managed to escape on her way to exile and went underground.
9.
Sophia Perovskaya propagandized among students, soldiers, and workers, took part in organizing the Worker's Gazette, and maintained ties with political prisoners in Saint Petersburg.
10.
Sophia Perovskaya participated in preparing assassination attempts on Alexander II of Russia near Moscow, in Odessa, and Saint Petersburg.
11.
Sophia Perovskaya was the closest friend and later the wife of Andrei Zhelyabov, a member of the executive committee of Narodnaya Volya.
12.
However, when Zhelyabov was arrested two days prior to the attack, Sophia Perovskaya took the role.
13.
The night before the attack, Sophia Perovskaya helped assemble the bombs.
14.
Sophia Perovskaya, by taking out a handkerchief and blowing her nose as a predetermined signal, dispatched the assassins to the canal.
15.
Sophia Perovskaya was the first woman in Russia executed for a political crime.
16.
Three decades after her death, Sophia Perovskaya would become the inspiration for the Japanese feminist Kanno Sugako, who was involved in a 1910 plan to assassinate the Emperor Meiji.