As Tsar Alexander II's iron-clad carriage came around the corner of a snowy St Petersburg street, the first bomber hurled his device under the horses' hooves. The bomb weighed only 5lbs and had a blast range of one metre but it nevertheless shattered the carriage, killing a young boy in the crowd and one of the Tsar's Cossack escorts, the force of the explosion hurling the bomber backwards into a fence. The Tsar emerged from his stricken carriage unscathed, to the entreaties of his surviving entourage, who urged him to leave the area at once, fearful that a second assassin may be at hand.
Yet Tsar Alexander II – the Emperor of Russia, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland, a man who had now survived eight assassination attempts – chose instead to remain at the scene. It was a fatal mistake. Jostling forward through the melee to where the Tsar stood, the second bomber, Ignaty Grinevitsky, hurled his bomb from as close as he could. Knowing the limited range of the device, he was aware that the explosion would likely kill him too.
“Alexander II must die,” he had written less than 24 hours earlier. “He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too… I shall not see out victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph.”
As the smoke cleared, the Tsar could be seen lying on the ground, his shattered legs pouring blood, his stomach ripped open and face cut apart. He was dead within minutes of receiving the last rites. His killer, also terribly wounded, died later that day too. It was 1 March 1881. The age of the suicide bomber – whose kin killed more than 250 people in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday – had begun.
In his outstanding study of the phenomenon, The Price of Paradise, the investigative journalist and author Iain Overton explores the evolution of suicide bombing from the day Grinevitsky, the 25-year-old member of the revolutionary political organisation Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), blew away his own life together with that of the most powerful man in Russia. Thousands of bombings and 138 years later the suicide bomber has become central to our contemporary era of terror, described by Overton as a figure that not only dominates the fears of Western societies but also influences the way we fight our wars, protect our nations, pass security legislation and even define ourselves.
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