The Narodnaya Volya leader who organized the assassination of Alexander II and declared his party's creed to the court that condemned him
"I have served the cause of the people's liberation. This is my sole occupation, to which I have devoted my entire being for many years" — at the preliminary investigation, 1881.
Born a serf, Zhelyabov became the de facto leader of the Narodnaya Volya Executive Committee. He masterminded the assassination of Alexander II. Arrested two days before, the attack succeeded without him. At trial he declared his sole occupation was the people's liberation, and he was hanged in April 1881.
Career Timeline
- 1869–1871Entered Novorossiysk University law faculty, Odessa; expelled for leading student unrest
- 1873–1877Joined the Chaikovtsy circle; 'Going to the People' propaganda; acquitted at the Trial of the 193
- 1879.6Attended the Lipetsk Congress; founding member of the Narodnaya Volya Executive Committee
- 1879.11Attempted to blow up the imperial train at Alexandrovsk
- 1880.2Directed Stepan Khalturin's Winter Palace bombing
- 1880–1881De facto head of the Executive Committee; built workers', student, and military networks; planned the tsaricide
- 1881.2.27Arrested two days before the assassination; demanded to be joined to the case
- 1881.4.3Hanged at the Semyonovsky parade ground with the other 'First Marchers'
Political Program and Organizational Strategy
After witnessing the failure of the 'Going to the People' campaign, Zhelyabov emerged as the chief theorist of a political-terror strategy aimed at the autocracy itself. At the Lipetsk Congress in June 1879, he championed the dual principles of armed struggle and a centralized, conspiratorial party, and at the Voronezh Congress he became the leading spokesman for the terrorist wing within Land and Liberty. After the split, he drafted or co-authored many of the key programmatic documents of Narodnaya Volya and designed the ideological framework for its 'Workers' Gazette' in autumn 1880. His most notable contribution was the 'Program of the Workers' Members of Narodnaya Volya,' which laid out a three-stage revolutionary blueprint: overthrow of the autocracy, convocation of a constituent assembly, and transfer of land and factories to the people. This was far more than a justification for terror. It was a coherent vision of political revolution. Zhelyabov argued for building separate organizational networks among workers, students, and military personnel, and he designed a nationwide command structure that linked assassination planning with the underground press and local cells. Contemporaries regarded this as the most sophisticated organizational doctrine the Russian revolutionary movement had yet produced.
Trial and Execution — The Revolutionary in the Dock
Zhelyabov was arrested on 27 February 1881 at a lodging house on Nevsky Prospect, just two days before the assassination he had orchestrated. He immediately demanded to be joined to the tsaricide case. At the preliminary investigation he declared: "I have served the cause of the people's liberation. This is my sole occupation, to which I have devoted my entire being for many years." When the Special Tribunal of the Governing Senate opened on 26 March, Zhelyabov refused a defense lawyer and used the courtroom to argue that the government itself, by savagely repressing peaceful propagandists of socialist ideas, had forced the revolutionaries onto the path of terror. Prosecutor Nikolai Muravyov denounced him as a "revolutionary careerist," but Zhelyabov's composure and political arguments left a deep impression on Russian society. On 3 April 1881 he was hanged at the Semyonovsky parade ground alongside Perovskaya, Kibalchich, Rysakov, and Mikhailov. The silent farewell glance he exchanged with Perovskaya just before the execution became legendary in the memory of later revolutionaries. Lenin later ranked Zhelyabov alongside Robespierre and Garibaldi, and he became the protagonist of Yuri Trifonov's novel The Impatient Ones (1973).