He graduated with honors from the Classical Gymnasium of Simbirsk in 1883 and later attended Saint Petersburg Imperial University, where he majored in Natural Sciences and earned a degree in zoology.

Acknowledging the working class as the "nucleus of the Socialist Party", the program affirmed the revolutionary's initiative of fighting autocracy through terrorism.

On 1 March 1887 (Julian calendar), the day of the sixth anniversary of Alexander II's murder, three party members were arrested in the Nevsky Prospekt carrying handmade bombs filled with dynamite and lead pellets poisoned with strychnine.

Police suspected that when Alexander III visited church on the anniversary of his father's assassination, the plotters would throw bombs into the Emperor's carriage.

Before Aleksandr's arrest, Lenin and the family had not known of Aleksander's activism and were comfortably middle class and essentially apolitical, holding no strong feelings for or against the Russian monarchy.

[5] Historian James D. White reported that Lenin's introduction to radical politics came only after Aleksandr's death in an attempt to understand the events: "The actions of Lenin and Olga in the period following Sasha’s [Aleksandr's nickname] execution suggest that they had resolved that their brother’s death would not be in vain and that they would serve the cause for which he had sacrificed himself – just as soon as they could discover what that cause had been.