Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 26, 2012



The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery occurred on the morning of 26 June in the Georgian city of Tiflis (now Georgia's capital, Tbilisi). Wanting money to fund their revolutionary activities, Bolsheviks attacked a cash-filled bank stagecoach in the crowded Yerevan Square. The attack killed forty people and injured fifty others. The robbers escaped with 341,000 rubles (equivalent to around US $3.4 million today). The robbery was organized by a number of high-level Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin, and Alexander Bogdanov, and executed by a gang led by Kamo. The Bolsheviks could not use most of the large bank notes obtained from the robbery because their serial numbers were known to the police. Kamo was the only major participant or organizer to ever be caught and tried for the robbery, and he was released from prison after the 1917 Revolution. Using robberies to fund revolutionary activities was explicitly prohibited by the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and the robbery and the killings caused outrage within the party against its Bolshevik faction contributing to a split in the Bolshevik leadership. (more...)

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