3-052-495 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Attempt on the life of Count Loris Melikoff, 1880. Engraving from a sketch by H. Cederström, St. Petersburg, of '...the attempt of a young Polish Jew, or converted Jew, named Wladetsky [Ippolit Mlodetsky], to shoot General Count Loris Melikoff, the newly appointed Chief of the Supreme Commission, who has been invested by the Emperor with unlimited powers...Melikoff, at the door of his own house, in the street called the Grand Morskaia, had just stepped out of his carriage. There was but one shot fired from the revolver, and it passed through the overcoat...but did not inflict any wound...Melikoff struck the man twice in the face to prevent his firing a second shot, and he was quickly overpowered by the servants and guards. A brief examination by court-martial resulted in sentence of death, which was executed next morning, by the gallows erected on the Place Simonoffsky, in the presence of a great crowd of spectators. It is not certain that Wladetsky acted with the express concurrence, or by the order or arrangement, of the Nihilist conspirators, who would probably have made greater and more elaborate preparations for the crime; and he seems to have been a silly, perverse young man, inflamed with false notions of the time'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.