When I took the throne, Russia still had 30 million serfs or peasants who could be bought or sold and were little more than slaves. I gave them their freedom, and still the revolutionaries weren’t content. They wanted me dead.
They shot at me in the royal palace, in the royal train and in the royal carriage, and missed though they did kill a horse that got in the way. They even tried to bomb me in my dining room but only succeeded in killing soldiers and servants.
Finally the revolutionaries came up with a double-bomb plot that reached the parts other bombers failed to reach.
I had just signed the document that would let my people vote for the Council of the Empire when the commander of the guards sidled over to me and whispered in my ear 'Don’t go to the army parade tomorrow. It’s too dangerous'.
I ignored the advice and set off in my carriage and inspected the troops and drove off to lunch with my cousin. I remember thinking it was all very pleasant as we drove along the street, nobody had tried to kill me for a change and the crowds had come out to cheer me, one woman waved a handkerchief so enthusiastically, i cheerfully waved back at her.
As i found out later she wasn't waving at me but waving a signal to her Revolutionary friends and a man ran from the crowd and threw a bundle, wrapped in a newspaper, under the horses’ feet where it exploded in a cloud of smoke and snow.
When the snow settled it was stained with the blood of two horses, two guards and an innocent butcher’s boy who’d been watching the procession but most importantly I wasn’t hurt.
I wanted to speak to the injured and as i stepped down from my broken carriage and that’s when the second bomber stepped from the crowd and flung a second bomb and this one did hurt and i died a few hours later.
The irony is that I was a reformer and when my son took over all my reformist pans were scrapped so the revolutionaries got themselves a worse life which was still more than i had as I no longer had any life at all.
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