The psychiatrist and the would-be regicide: the story of professor Ivan Merzheevskiy and his daughter Yuliya

The article examines the role played by Yuliya Merzheevskaya (1881 - ?) in the Russian revolutionary movement in its most dramatic period, the twentyyear period before the collapse of the monarchy. Being the daughter of Russian psychiatrist celebrity Ivan P. Merzheevskiy, Polish by origin, she caused a lot of trouble both to the Department of Police and to her unfortunate father. Numerous files of the political police of the Russian Empire preserve detailed records of revolutionary activities and family incidents from the life of Yuliya Merzheevskaya and her father. On the one hand, according to psychiatrists, she was altogether mentally unstable needing to be put to mental hospital rather than to prison. On the other hand, she moved in circles of well-known revolutionaries, which, due to her high social position and financial resources made her quite a dangerous figure, despite her mental illness. The political police were definite that this exalted person, full of hatred to the monarchy and Russia alike, is capable of accomplishing her terrorist plans. Being obsessed by the idea of assassinating the Russian Emperor, at first, Alexander III, then Nicholas II, she set up her own terrorist group. However, the group was too small, Yuliya Merzheevskaya’s operations were inept and incompetent and, what is more important, the neglect of the revolutionary émigré circles and Dmirtiy Bogrov’s interference - all these circumstances accounted for her and her group’s prompt arrest by the police. Yuliya Merzheevskaya’s radical views and mental illness might have caused her father’s sudden death and the ensuing bankruptcy of her family. That might have destroyed her own life but for the unanimous advocacy of the scholarly psychiatric community.