The Life of the Tsar

In 1879, Stepan Khalturin got a job as a Hermitage carpenter. He worked on the ground floor, in the carpenters’ workshops that were near the present Saltykovsky entrance to the museum. Above, on the second floor were the tsar’s private apartments, specifically, the Yellow Living Room, which Alexander II often used as a dining room.

Stepan Khalturin settled into his job in the workshop and started taking small portions of dynamite with him to the Winter Palace. He kept the sticks of dynamite inside a pillow and complained to Andrei Zhelyabov, another member of the revolutionary People’s Will, that he was having headaches from sleeping on dynamite. Meanwhile, Khalturin was haunted by a question: How many bags of dynamite would it take to blow up the Yellow Living Room?

Khalturin never got an answer. On the day of the planned explosion, Alexander had used the Hermitazhny, not the Saltykovsky entrance, which meant he had not had enough time to get to the dining room before the explosion occurred. Besides, Khalturin had not used enough dynamite: just three parquets broke, some dishes fell off the table and some sweets scattered to the floor.

This is how the Hermitage learned about terrorism.