3-071-014 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in St. Petersburg: cheesemonger's shop in Little Garden-street where the mine was discovered, 1881. Aftermath of the assassination of Emperor Alexander II. '...the case of the pretended cheese-shop, where the mine was dug which was to blow up the quarter of the Anitchkoff Palace, affords another fair illustration of the peculiar imbecility of the police authorities...General Moroinsky, a member of the Local Board of Health,...did not think it worth his while to see what the contents [of the cheese barrels were] or he would have found that [they] were full of dynamite...Michael Trigoni, student, and Sheliaboff...[were] arrested a few days before the assassination of the Emperor...Several witnesses identify Sheliaboff as a visitor to the shop in Little Garden-street, or the Sadovaya, and in his lodgings was found cheese, which, from the stamp on the wrappers, was bought there...Keebalchich, who figures in the Act of Accusation as the maker of the bombs, confesses the part he took in the attempts to blow up the Imperial train on its way from the Crimea in 1879...The dynamite and electrical apparatus used in former attempts, as well as the fatal bombs and the subterranean torpedo of Sadovaya-street, were the work of his hands'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.