An explosion thundered here, at the Stolypin’s official two-storeys dacha on August 12, 1906. Shortly before that day Stolypin, who at that time was both Interior minister and the chairman of the council of ministers, had worked on the fast-track investigation of the terrorist cases. The explosion sped up the process of introducing the law and implementing court martials.
That terror attack was organised by St. Petersburg group “Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists”, led by Mikhail Ivanovich Sokolov.
In the middle of the day a coach drove up to the dacha, where the visitors were waiting for a reception. Two men wearing gendarme uniform with briefcases in their hands appeared from the coach. They were stopped in the reception room by Major-General Alexander Nikolayevich Zamyatnin, who suspected something wrong, because the “gendarmes” were wearing the old-style hats. The terrorists dropped their briefcases and tried to run. The bomb exploded. 27 people were killed, many badly wounded, including Stolypin’s children: 12-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son.
The terrorists were torn to pieces, Zamyatnin, who had stopped them, died too. The number of victims was extremely high for the fact that a lot of applicants had been waiting their turn in the reception room. Stolypin, who at the moment of explosion, was in his cabinet, was not hurt. Sokolov, who organised the explosion, was arrested three months later. By the court martial he was sentenced to death and was hanged. However, the killers got Stolypin in 1911. He was murdered by the terrorist Dmitry Bogrov in the theatre in Kiev.
An obelisk was unveiled in memory of the dead on the site of the dacha explosion in 1908. The obelisk can be seen today on Aptekarskaya embankment.
