Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported by the newspaper.

By

May 30, 2018

The assassins hurled their first round of explosives as Czar Alexander II traveled in his carriage through the streets of St. Petersburg. The czar survived, thanks to the carriage’s armor. But Alexander made the fatal mistake of descending to the street, and that is when the next bomb was thrown. He bled to death in hours.

It was Sophia L. Perovskaya, 27, an aristocrat herself and a descendant of Peter the Great, who had plotted and orchestrated the assault on March 13, 1881, signaling the czar’s route with a white handkerchief. She and her co-conspirators from the radical organization the People’s Will were soon arrested, and Perovskaya and four male accomplices were condemned to death by hanging.

Perovskaya, the first woman to be executed for a political crime in Russia, is credited with helping to push the empire down the road to revolution and was later given the mantle of martyrdom. Tolstoy called her an “ideological Joan of Arc.”