Chapter 10 - ‘Infernal Machines’: Improvised Explosive Devices

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Shortly after 6 p.m. on 17 February 1880, Stepan Khalturin lit a fuse in the cellar of the Russian tsar's Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Around 15 minutes later, the fuse initiated 145 kg of explosives that the carpenter had smuggled into the palace on behalf of the revolutionary group, The People's Will. The resulting explosion killed and injured around 50 people, many of them servants.

The People's Will was well aware that the bombing would endanger ordinary workers—the very people the group professed to be trying to liberate—but deemed the casualties acceptable if Tsar Alexander II was killed. ‘It will kill 50 without a doubt’, said one of the plotters. ‘It is better to put in more dynamite so they don't die in vain, so it definitely gets him.’ The sacrifice was futile, though, as the Russian monarch was not in the dining hall when the bomb exploded because his guest was late for dinner (Radzinskiĭ, 2005).

This was the first mass-casualty attack carried out using high explosives and detonators, technology that had only been invented around a decade earlier by Alfred Nobel. The Swedish industrialist had devised a way to stabilize nitro-glycerine in the form of dynamite and to detonate it using small charges of less stable explosives. These technological breakthroughs had incalculable benefits for the mining and construction industries, but also put hitherto unimaginable destructive power in the hands of small groups and individuals.