Alexander Barannikov

Alexander Ivanovich Barannikov (Russian: Александр Иванович Баранников; 1858 – 18 August 1883) was a Russian revolutionary and terrorist who was one of the leaders of the military wing of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), the organisation that assassinated the Tsar Alexander II.

In 1876, he faked suicide, leaving a note for the principal, to join the revolutionary movement, as a propagandist in the Rostov-on-Don area.

He was one of the organisers of the assassination of the chief of the gendarmes, General Nikolay Mezentsov, who was stabbed to death by Sergey Kravchinsky.

In 1880, he took part in attempts to kill the Tsar by placing a mine under the Moscow-Kursk railway, and by dynamiting the Kamenny Bridge in St Petersburg.

[2] According to Praskovya Ivanovskaya, who ran Narodnaya Volya's secret printing press: "In radical circles, he was justifiably known as a 'knight without fear or reproach', the most devoted soldier of the revolution ...(with) enviable tact in all matters, and, particularly, an unfailingly gentlemanly attitude to women.