[ Source: BBC News ]
It may be set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars series takes a key plot from a real robbery masterminded by Stalin in an Imperial Russian city. And Andor has as much to do with our world as it has with Stalin’s.
It has all the makings of the perfect heist.
The scheme takes place far from the imperial seat of power, on the wild fringes of an empire almost too vast to comprehend. Fuelled with revolutionary zeal, the plotters are a rag-tag outfit of men and women that includes thieves, murderers and turncoats. Their prize? A treasure chest of cash that can fund ever-more-ambitious missions against the hated ruling elite.
If you watched the first season of the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor, you’ll recognise this plot as one of the high points. Over three episodes, anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his band of accomplices hide out in mountain passes on the planet Aldhani, fine-tuning an audacious smash-and-grab from an Imperial garrison which is storing the wages of an entire sector.
The real-life theft that inspired it was also a long, long time ago, just not quite so far away.
It took place in Yerevan Square in what was then the imperial Russian city of Tiflis, now the Georgian capital Tblisi, on 26 June 1907. A shipment of cash for the city’s Russian state bank branch, amounting to some 300,000 roubles ($1m at the time), was stolen by a gang of robbers linked to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement. Using bombs and guns, the gang left a scene of utter devastation in their wake; some 40 people were killed and dozens more injured. The news of the brazen daylight attack made headlines across the world.
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