1801 Assassination of a Russian Emperor
Russia under the tsarist rule was an autocracy: the sole source of power, law, authority, and honour was the Emperor (or, occasionally, the Empress). There were no representative institutions or any other form of civil society that might mediate between the tsar and the people, and therefore, political change in Russia most often took the form of conspiracy or assassination. By murdering her lack-witted husband, Peter III, Catherine the Great took the throne in 1762. Her son Paul was dispatched to his own estate where he could indulge his obsession with military maneuvers and training soldiers in the Prussian style.
In 1796 Paul I succeeded his mother and began tinkering with reform. Life for the serfs became a little bit easier, the aristocracy lost some of their local power to royal bureaucrats, and the country was isolated from infection by the French Revolution by a ban on foreign travel and the import of foreign books. He thought that Russia was best served by a defensive, rather than an expansionist, foreign policy and pulled back his troops inside national borders.
An aristocratic conspiracy sought to replace him with his oldest son. On the evening of March 23, 1801, a gang of drunken nobles invaded the royal bedchamber waving a notice of abdication; when Paul refused to sign it, the tsar was beaten, strangled and kicked to death. The heir to the throne, Alexander I, was then told by one of the murderers, “Time to grow up! Go and rule!”
The Russians never lost their taste for assassination. Tsars Alexander II (1881) and Nicholas II (1918) would be murdered in their turn. Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, would die of wounds inflicted by a female terrorist (1924) but, alas, no one could be found to rid the world of Joseph Stalin.
Sadly, Stalin is still all-to-with-us, in spirit at least.