Timeline of Insurrectionary Anarchism

A timeline of insurrectionary anarchism. Insurrectionary anarchism is a philosophy aiming for a refusal to organise and negotiate with authorities, instead opting to violently destroy them and their institutions to liberate humanity.

1800s

• 1866: Dmitry Karakozov made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II at the gates of the Summer Garden in St Petersburg. As the Tsar was leaving, Dmitry rushed forward to fire. The attempt was thwarted by Osip Komissarov, a peasant-born hatter's apprentice, who jostled Karakozov's elbow just before the shot was fired.
• 1878: Max Hödel attempts to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. His two attempts to shoot the monarch both fail, and he is apprehended and executed later that year.
• 1878: Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky stabs to death General Nikolai Mezentsov, head of the Tsar's secret police, in response to the execution of Ivan Kovalsky.
• 1878: Giovanni Passannante attempts to assassinate with a dagger King Umberto I of Italy. He is sentenced to death, but is commuted to life in prison, where he goes insane and is taken to the asylum.
• 1879: Grigori Goldenberg shoots Prince Dmitri Kropotkin (no, not our favourite Prince Kropotkin), the Governor of Kharkov in the Russian Empire, to death.
• 1879: Alexander Soloviev attempts to assassinate Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The monarch spots the weapon in his hands and flees, but Soloviev still fires five shots, all of which miss. Soloviev is captured and hanged.
• 1880: Stepan Khalturin successfully blows up part of the Winter Palace in an attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander. Although the Tsar escapes unharmed, eight soldiers are killed and 45 wounded. The invention of dynamite had now arrived politically.
• 1881: Tsar Alexander II of Russia is killed by a bombing coordinated by Narodnaya Volya.
• 1892: Alexander Berkman tries to kill capitalist Henry Clay Frick in New York City, USA in retaliation for Frick's hiring of Pinkerton detectives to break up the Homestead Strike, resulting in the deaths of seven steelworkers. Although badly wounded, Frick survives, and Berkman is arrested and eventually imprisoned for 22 years.
• 1893: Santiago Salvador throws two bombs into a theatre in Barcelona, Spain, killing 20 people.
• 1893: Auguste Vaillant throws a bomb in the French National Assembly, killing nobody and injuring one. He is then sentenced to death and executed by the guillotine, shouting "Death to bourgeois society and long live anarchy!" before his death. He had not intended to kill anyone, but only to injure them in retaliation for the execution of Ravachol, who was executed for four bombings.
• 1894: Émile Henry, intending to avenge Auguste Vaillant, sets off a bomb in Café Terminus in Paris, France killing one and injuring twenty.
• 1894: Sante Geronimo Caserio, seeking revenge for Auguste Vaillant and Émile Henry, stabs the President of France, to death. He is executed by guilltone later that year.
• 1896: Dimitris Matsalis, an anarchist shoemaker, stabs a banker and merchant, killing one in Greece.
• 1897: Pietro Acciarito tries to stab King Umberto of Italy. He is jailed for life.
• 1897: Michele Angiolillo shoots dead Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo at a thermal bath resort, seeking vengeance for the imprisonment and torture of alleged revolutionaries at the Montjuïc fortress. He is later executed.
• 1898: Luigi Lucheni stabs to death Empress Elisabeth, the consort of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, with a needle file in Geneva, Switzerland. Lucheni is sentenced to life in prison and eventually commits suicide in his cell.

1900s

• 1900: Gaetano Bresci shoots dead King Umberto, in revenge for the Bava-Beccaris massacre in Milan, Italy. Bresci is sentenced to prison for life on Santo Stefano Island, where he is found dead less than a year later.
• 1901: Leon Czolgosz shoots U.S. President William McKinley at point-blank range at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He is later executed by electric chair.
• 1902: Gennaro Rubino attempts to murder King Leopold II of Belgium. All three of Rubino's shots miss the monarch's carriage, and he is quickly subdued by the crowd and taken into police custody.
• 1921: Three anarchists on a motorcycle shoot dead Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Dato Iradier in Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid.
• 1926: 15-year old Anteo Zamboni tries to shoot Mussolini during a parade in Bologna, Italy. He misses, and is publicly lynched in a few minutes by nearby fascists.
• 1932: A dynamite-filled package bomb left by Galleanists destroys Judge Webster Thayer's home in Worcester, Massachusetts, injuring his wife and a housekeeper. Judge Thayer had presided over the trials of Galleanists Sacco and Vanzetti.
• 1969: Several parked police cars in Chicago, USA are blown up by the Weatherman Underground in response for the COINTELPRO based assassinations of black revolutionaries Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
• 1982: The Squamish Five blow up an electrical substation on Vancouver Island, Canada in protest of the construction a dam.
• 1982: The Squamish Five attempt to blow up a factory producing cruise missiles in Toronto, Canada.
• 1982: The Wimmin's Fire Brigade burns down three pornography stores accused of selling snuff films (pornographic films that depict real death and mutilation).
• 1997: Conscientious Arsonists in Greece begin burning 62 cars over a year-long timespan that belong to various politicians, corporate executives, journalists and army officers.

2000s

• 2000: 17N is alleged to have assassinated British military attache Stephen Saunders in Greece, although some journalists allege it is a part of Operation Gladio.