BOMB PLOT REVEALED.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

BOMB PLOT REVEALED.

RED VERA TELLS HER STORY.

20 YEARS IN DUNGEON

Cultivating flowers in a quiet suburb of Moscow is a slim, fragile woman who was. once known as "The Terror of Russia," and who was the driving force behind a series of celebrated crimes which filled the world with horror. She is "Vera Figner, one-time leader of the Nihilists, who planned and directed scores of political murders and was the master mind of the conspiracy which brought about the assassination of Czar Alexander 11. Seen by a pressman recently, the former revolutionary, who is 75, talked in her oldworld garden. She disclosed that she is spending her declining days writing her memoirs. Vera Figner was sentenced to life imprisonment for her participation in the Nihilist movement. She actually spent 20 years ia the dungeons of the fortress of Schlusselburg, and ten more in a penal colony iu Siberia. Till now she has always kept silent about her amazing exploits. She waß 25 years old, she said, when she became a member of the Executive Committee of the Revolutionist party. It was in- the year 1880 that she conceived the idea of assassinating the Czar Alexander 11., and suggested it as the best method of calling the attention of the world to the tragic situation of the masses in Russia. Dynamite Dairymaid. The executive committee promptly accepted Vera Figner's suggestion, charging her with the duty "of laying before the committee a practical plan. Two unsuccessful attempts were made on the Czar's life, but they only served to make Vera Figner more eager to bring about his doom. She seemed obsessed by the idea that the Tsar must be killed and she evolved a third plan, which was immediately accepted by her fellow conspirators. Once or twice every week, she argued, the Czar left the palace and rode in his carriage through certain streets. One of these streets must be undermined and blown up beneath him. The conspirators rented a small store and opened a dairy ,one of them acting as storekeeper, two others as clerks, and others as friends and customers. During the day they sold cheese and milk, but in the evening they went to the cellar, and dug a long underground passage leading to the street where the Czar was expected to pass. They laid a mine so that it could be blown up from the store. It took four weeks to dig the tunnel and lay the mine.

At the last minute it was learned that the Tsar had changed his plans and was to proceed by a different route. The preparations were useless. But a revolutionary was waiting in the crowd with a bomb in his pocket. As the Czar carriage came abreast he calmly took aim. In an instant, carriage, Czar, driver and horses lay on the pavement in a bloody heap.