Execution and Legacy
At 7:50 am on the sunny spring morning of April 3 two “chariots of shame” with the condemned prisoners rode out of the house of the detention to Shpalernaya Street. Zhelyabov was in the first chariot and by his side was Rysakov who had tossed the first bomb at the coach of Alexander II and then betrayed his comrades during the interrogation. Kybalchych, Perovskaya and Mikhailov were in the second. The hands and feet of the condemned were tied to the seats. Each had on his chest a black plaque with the white colored inscription: “A regicide”.
At 9:21 am the executor knocked off the foot stool from under the feet of Kybalchych, Mikhailov, Perovskaya, Zhelyabov and Rysakov were executed after him.
Thus Kybalchych and other Narodnaya Volya plotters including Sophia Perovskaya, Andrei Zhelyabov, Nikolai Rysakov and Timofei Mikhailov were hanged on April 3, 1881.
The fate of the invention, mentioned in Kybalchych's last letter, proved to be as tragic as that of its 27 year old creator. Kybalchych’s design was buried in the archives of Police Department, but the tsar authorities failed to consign the name of the inventor and his idea to oblivion. The trial and execution of the Narodniks had wide repercussions around the world. Much was said and written about Kybalchych’s design abroad and all kinds of conjectures were made about the essence of the invention and its subsequent fate. In 1917, Nikolai Rynin rediscovered the manuscript in the archives and published an account of it 1918 in the historic magazine «Былое» (Past).
In 1891, similar ideas were developed independently by the German engineer Hermann Ganswindt. After WWII, Stan Ulam proposed a nuclear pulse propolsion scheme which was studied in Project ORION.
The International Astronomical Union honoured the rocketry pioneer by naming a crater on the moon Kybalchych's crater.
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Kibalchich
Famous quotes containing the words execution and/or legacy:
“My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)