In 1909 Tsar Nicholas II was on an official visit to Sweden. During this period the revolutionary communist/anarchist factions had started to get going in earnest in Sweden, and their activities would later culminate during the 1917-1918 time period. But then and there in 1909 there was one particular radical by the name of Hjalmar Wång.
Aged 22 this Wång had just served a prison sentence for refusing to do National Service, and had let his refusal to participate in the ”exercises in murder” be known in a letter to the authorities where he also assured them that if he wanted to murder someone he could do so without their training, and also exclaimed ”long live the revolutionary socialism!”
When it became publicly known that the Tsar was going to visit Stockholm he had told several friends and family members that he should be shot, in the recollections of one of them Wång had said that ”he ought to be whacked.”
Later evening on the 26th of June of that year, right at midnight, Wång seems to have intended to act on this. At Kungsträdgården park in central Stockholm he opens fire on two men wearing military uniforms. The commander of the coastal artillery Major General Otto Ludvig Beckman, and navy Captain Per Dahlgren, who had just finished a late dinner together at the Grand Hôtel.
Beckman was hit in the back and died on the spot, Dahlgren managed to dodge two shots and was unharmed. A stray shot also hit field surgeon K.P. Levander who was happening to pass by, but he escaped with minor injuries to his hip. Wång apparently perceived Beckman as the primary target because once he saw that Beckman appeared to have died, Wång then turned the gun on himself and died from a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Given his previous comments on killing the Tsar, the dark night, and the fact that Beckman wore a pretty fancy uniform it is believed that this was a case of mistaken identity, that Wång thought he had managed to locate the Tsar leaving a dinner at the fanciest hotel in the city, and didn’t realize in the somewhat dark night that it was in fact someone else entirely. Beckman himself had no direct connection to Wång.
As such it becomes interesting to speculate on what could have happened to world history if Wång had managed to correctly locate the Tsar, who also moved around the city with seemingly limited security arrangements, and killed him in 1909. Would the mechanisms of the Great War have played out the same? Might the Russian Revolution have gotten going earlier than it did? Could it, like in the case of Franz Ferdinand, have triggered the start of the war, only five years earlier?
An interesting event, yet one that few seems to have heard about.