Abstract

On February 17, 1905, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich Romanov, uncle of the reigning Tsar Nicholas II and the former Governor General of Moscow, was assassinated on the grounds of the Kremlin. His murder occurred at a time when revolutionary violence, which was sporadic in the years preceding 1905, quickly began to intensify in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 22, 1905. What often gets overlooked in analyses of the turbulent 1905 Revolution is Sergei, and this thesis seeks to return the spotlight to him and uncover how the American press reported on his death in the context of the burgeoning revolution. As such, my thesis fits into a new wave of scholarship that considers the 1905 Revolution as a transnational phenomenon. American newspapers, which fortunately had access to foreign correspondents stationed in Russia who were no longer impeded by Russian censorship laws by this time, broke the news of the assassination the day following the bombing – but what did they write about it? Better yet, to what extent did they grasp that the assassination of the Grand Duke was part of a larger revolutionary phenomenon, if at all? This thesis examines news reports printed by five American newspapers about the assassination and its aftermath over a period of three months – from the day after the bomb exploded to the day after the assassin was executed – and finds that the press recognized from the outset that the bombing was not an isolated incident, but part of a planned revolutionary campaign against the autocracy. Moreover, an analysis of news reports about Sergei’s assassination demonstrates how quickly his story was supplanted by other news stories about revolutionary violence.