Alexander not only had no interest in literature, he had no time for it. In 1865, he suffered a personal tragedy that became a tragedy for the country. He and his wife adored their son Niks, the heir to the throne. The handsome and incredibly gifted young man was a true European in his convictions and was to continue his father’s reforms. His teachers called him “Russia’s hope,” “a brilliant young man,” “a flexible and subtle intelligence fervently responding to everything new.” Everyone loved him. “The crown of perfection” was what Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich called him. His huge and clumsy brother, Sasha, loved him with touching fidelity.
Sasha was next in line. Aware of the rivalry between Alexander and Konstantin, the empress (who never could overcome her dislike of her younger son) did not give Sasha the education that Niks received. Sasha was intentionally not groomed to be Niks’s understudy.
This did not bother sweet Sasha, who was not interested in scholarship. Like all the Romanovs, he loved military affairs. He called himself “the parfait regimental commander,” although unlike the real guardsmen in his family, Sasha wasn’t very good at it.
He never danced at the balls, because he was ashamed of his clumsiness. He sat with the old men in a corner, a good vantage point for watching his beloved brother dance. Sasha was immensely strong; he could bend a horseshoe as a child, after which he would look to his brother for approval.
His constantly kind gaze, fat face, and canine loyalty prompted Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich (Uncle Misha) to call him Pug. The court called him Little Bulldog.
It was an accident. Alexander’s nephew, young Duke Nicholas of Leichtenberg, was a guest in the palace. Niks enjoyed gymnastics and wrestling, and so did his cousin. Niks suggested a wrestling match. The two Nicholases met, with Sasha looking on. During the match Niks hurt himself, right on the spine. “He hit himself so hard on the corner of the marble table, that if he had not been helped, he would have fallen,” recalled Alexandra Patkul. “My husband, the officer on duty at the Winter Palace under the tsar just then entered the room where Their Highnesses were playing in order to greet them. Seeing the heir pale and unable even to rise, my husband ran to fetch a glass of water, as no one had thought to do so. Then he inquired as to what had occurred and learned the details from Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich [Sasha]. He told Count Stroganov [Count Sergei Stroganov was Niks’s governor] to send for a doctor immediately, that a serious blow to the spine needed attention…but no energetic measures were taken.”
Princess Dagmar, Niks’s Danish fiancée, arrived soon afterward. The petite and charming Dagmar was madly in love with him. She rode very well, so a fox hunt was organized in Peterhof. When Niks leaped up into the saddle, his face contorted in pain. His father asked what was wrong, but instead of an answer Niks spurred the horse and, with a cry of pain, almost fell from the saddle. No one treated this incident seriously, but in a short time the tsarevich began to change. He lost a lot of weight and he began to hunch over when he walked. His father did not understand and angrily chided him for “walking like an old man.” Niks tried to overlook the pain, thereby doing greater damage to himself.
Eventually, he was given a thorough physical. The court physician, Dr. Botkin, went into the tsar’s study with his report. The emperor came out, pale with shock. The blow to the spine had led to the development of a horrible disease, tuberculosis of the bone.
Niks was sent to Nice for treatment. He grew worse, and Sasha was granted permission to join him. In April 1865 the tsar received a telegram with more bad news: The illness had spread to the brain. The heir’s days were numbered. They sent word to Copenhagen, and Dagmar and her mother headed for Nice.
The tsar and his entire family set out to see Niks for the last time. They held a service at the Kazan Cathedral before departing. The family prayed. “We traveled with one thought—would God allow us to find him still alive…. The train flew at terrifying speeds,” wrote the heir’s governor.
In Berlin they were met by King Wilhelm, the heir’s uncle Willy. The monarchs embraced in silence. In the Prussian station, a car with Dagmar and her mother was added to the imperial train. The women wept. In Paris, the train was met by Napoleon III. The tsar “was grateful for the look of grief on his face.”
With unprecedented speed for those days—three days and nights—they reached Nice. No one had ever traveled that fast from St. Petersburg. The train platform in Nice was filled with weeping Russians. Everyone loved Niks.
He was dying in the Villa Bermont, which Alexander later bought. The whole family came in. Niks lay in bed with a cheerful face, or rather, a cheerful smile on his waxy, emaciated face. Dagmar and mother stood at the bed, with the giant Sasha behind the petite Danish women.
The empress rushed to Niks. He kissed them all; he was alert and awake. But that night he had a wonderful delirium, addressing deputations with speeches, commanding regiments, explaining his father’s achievements, quoting Latin, and speaking of the needs of the Slavs oppressed by the Turks. “We all blamed ourselves for not having it written down,” Lieutenant General Litvinov, his governor, later recalled.
In his confession, Niks said he felt guilty for being impatient and sinfully wanting to die soon. The family and Dagmar came back into the room. Niks joked, “Isn’t she wonderfully sweet, Father?”
April 12 was his last day. The tsar’s family was staying across the street in the Villa Verdie, purchased for their arrival. At six, the governor rushed in to awaken them. He was dying. His medication was making him vomit. Dagmar kneeled at his bed and wiped his chin. He held her hand and then said, “Papa, take care of Sasha, he is such an honest, good man.”
“After two, he raised his hand and caught Sasha’s head in his right, and he seemed to be reaching for Princess Dagmar’s head with his left…his tongue weakened and he said his last words. Holding the empress by the hand and indicating her to Dr. Harman, he said in French, ‘Take good care of her,’” recalled Litvinov.
The family legend tells the story a little differently: On his deathbed Niks allegedly embraced his brother’s head with one hand and with the other took his fiancée’s hand. He placed her hand in his brother’s hand. This justified what happened later.
Dagmar wrote to her father in Copenhagen: “I thank God that I reached him in time, my darling treasure, and that he recognized me in his final minute. I will never ever forget the look he gave me when I approached him. No, never! The poor Emperor and Empress! They were so attentive to me in my, and their, sorrow; his poor brothers, especially the oldest, Sasha, who loved him so nobly—not only as a brother but as his only and best friend. It is very difficult for him, poor thing, because now he must take his beloved brother’s place.”
Now Sasha was the heir. His teachers were saddened, for they knew his limited capabilities. Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna begged the tsar to make the next son in line, Vladimir, the heir. He was no great star, either, but he was not as stubborn and dim as Sasha, or rather, as it was put more gently, he was not burdened by such “static thought.”
Alexander was too depressed by his loss to think about making changes.
The heir was given many new teachers. Famous historians, jurists, and economists who had been teaching Niks now tried to fill in the gaps in Sasha’s education. As one of them, the legal historian Boris Checherin, said, “We took on a hopeless task.”
Everything the older brother had, the younger brother liked enormously. The new heir liked Dagmar, too. Sasha was very monogamous in his love. As a youth he had fallen in love with Princess Meshcherskaya and touchingly kept her slipper, which a servant stole for him. The princess had to be given away in marriage, and his father sternly lectured him.
He never had another infatuation until now. As Sasha dreamed of Dagmar, he wrote in his diary, “I keep thinking of Dagmar and pray every day that He arrange what will be my happiness for all my life.”
He spoke to his father, told him that he loved Dagmar and wanted to marry her. It had seemed to him in Nice that she would not mind. His somewhat stupefied father wrote to Copenhagen, inviting Dagmar to St. Petersburg. The emperor soon learned that Sasha’s perception had been correct.
From Sasha’s diary: “Her mother wrote that she would not like to send Dagmar to us now, because she needed peace and she must bathe in the sea.” That meant that they agreed to the marriage, but it had to be postponed, otherwise Europe would think that she was in a hurry to marry Dagmar off to the new heir. “As for me, that’s all I think about. I pray to God for Him to arrange this and bless it,” the heir wrote simply.
The proprieties were observed, several months were allowed to pass. Autumn came and Dagmar was ready to travel. The engagement was announced.
She arrived in September, to glorious weather, clear and sunny. The obligatory festivities began—balls, illuminations, fireworks. This was torture for the clumsy heir, who hated to dance. He declared his refusal to dance, and kept his word, to the consternation of court and family.
Count Sergei Sheremetyev, who played with Sasha when they were children and was later appointed his adjutant, recalled in his memoirs, “In general, the tsarevich was impossible in the role of fiancé. He showed himself in public only because it was his duty, he felt a revulsion for illuminations and fireworks. Everyone pitied the bride, deprived of the graceful and gifted bridegroom and forced to join another without love, a crude, unpolished man with bad French. That was the reigning assessment in court circles.”
But she was not the one to be pitied. Russia was.
The bride conquered everyone. Dagmar regarded life with radiant eyes, and her simplicity and charm boded well for family life, although Sheremetyev wrote the truth: Not everyone in court accepted this hasty switch from the dead brother to the live one.
They did not understand that her small and graceful body belonged not to Niks or Sasha but had been intended from birth for the heir to the throne. That is why her mother bore her. Her mother married off her daughters and sons with great cleverness. Dagmar’s sisters and brothers were related to all the royal houses from England to Greece. Dagmar’s mother was called “the mother-in-law of Europe.” Through her numerous offspring, the Danish queen amusingly created a united Europe.
From the day their engagement was announced, petite Dagmar was in charge of enormous Sasha. Once they were married, he never left her side. When she went to visit Denmark, he sat lost in her rooms, like a big hound that had lost his master.
Sasha always had to be a sidekick, always in love. First it was Niks, now it was Dagmar, yet he was the new heir to the throne of the Russian Empire. Dagmar, whose new Orthodox name was Tsarevna Maria Fedorovna, “Minny” in the family, was very happy in her new country.
If only she had known then what awaited her in Russia. She would see the death of her husband, Alexander III, and of her four sons. The first two of her children died early: Alexander in infancy, followed by Georgy, who died of tuberculosis. In 1917, she survived the revolution and the abdication from the throne by her sons Nicholas and Mikhail, and their deaths. Mikhail was executed in Perm. The last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was executed in Ekaterinburg and, with him, her grandson, the tsarevich, and her four granddaughters. She would also outlive her favorite brother, King George of Greece, killed by a shot in Thessalonica. She would see the end of the great empire and the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty and live out her days in a foreign land.
But during the engagement festivities she was so happy that it made people glad just to look at her. The poet Tyutchev called it “Dagmar’s happy week.”
Her mother-in-law, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, was more restrained in her attitude toward her. Everyone noticed. “She cooled the outbursts of her kindness, as if to stress the betrayal of her favorite son,” wrote Count Sergei Sheremetyev. It was painful to look at her young daughter-in-law, who reminded her of her youth and young love. Now her relations with her husband were very different. She had given birth to their last child five years earlier. Tuberculosis—the result of the damp climate of St. Petersburg—and frequent childbirth had shattered her.
The empress retained her sense of humor. Every morning, her husband, Alexander, whom she called Sasha, maintained their ritual: He came to her rooms for their coffee, to give her a kiss, ask about the children, and remark that she “looked wonderful today.” One day, she responded angrily. “The only thing I’m wonderful for is the anatomical theater—a teaching skeleton, covered with a thick layer of rouge and powder.” She laughed bitterly. But that was just for a moment.
The group around the empress grew smaller. Her salon, once the top attraction, emptied. The death of the heir seemed to draw a line summing up her life. Dr. Botkin explained to the tsar that her lung disease made it impossible for her to fulfill her matrimonial duties. She and Alexander sighed in relief. Those “duties” had not been fulfilled for many years, anyway, but now the falseness of the situation disappeared. That part of life was closed to them and therefore, he was not really cheating on her any more.
They had a different relationship now. She became fervently devoted to religion and good works. Her office was filled with icons and she constantly spoke to him of newfound undecayed saints’ relics.
The court began calling the empress a saint. The court, which had not liked her, now did not like the young beauties who went through the revolving door of the emperor’s bedroom.
The emperor’s amusements were becoming more exotic. He invited a French troupe of actors, who performed dialogues from the banned works of the Marquis de Sade for a select audience. Court rumors had them showing more than dialogues.
He also had a chief mistress. From the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich: “22 November 1861. For lunch with wife to Tsarskoye Selo. At the Orlov Gates met Sasha on horseback and behind him Alexandra Sergeyevna Dolgorukova, also on horseback and completely alone. The conclusion is not difficult. Painful.”
Kostya wrote “painful” not because he was so moralistic, but because lady-in-waiting Princess Alexandra Dolgorukaya was an extremely predatory lady.
She was considered a true beauty. “However, if no one is looking at her, you will see to your astonishment that she is not beautiful!” Anna Tyutcheva wrote. “Long-limbed, flat chest, bony shoulders, zinc-white face.” But no sooner did the princess notice “an interesting man’s gaze” than her lithe body straightened, a blush appeared on her cheeks, and all her movements took on a dangerous grace. She acquired a feline friendliness.
The pussycat should have been called a tigress. Her body and sly and ingratiating smile ensnared her quarry. She was incomparable and yet a typical court beauty. Her interests were limited to the court, intrigue, and gossip. She had mastered the school for scandal, she knew how to give left-handed compliments that would please the devil himself.
As befits a master of court intrigue, she was a brilliant actress. Once she had slept with the tsar, she found a clever way to announce her relationship. The empress was reading the Dictionary of History and Geography in her sitting room, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting. The tsar came in and Alexandra Dolgorukaya prompted fainted. The tsar hurried to her side. She was pale, her pulse was weak. The tsar, flustered, held her in his arms too long. The empress remained calm and dignified, continuing to leaf through her book.
The empress tolerated the liaison stoically. As had happened before, Alexander’s passion faded, and the lady-in-waiting was retired. He arranged a marriage to his adjutant general and wrote her a gallant letter. “My spiritual wound will not soon heal, and my poor heart, which you read like a children’s book, will suffer for a long time. Farewell forever.”
Our experienced Don Juan obeyed the trite rule: If you want to leave a dangerous woman without consequences, allow her to think that she left you.
In 1865, the empress grew concerned, sensing that something unusual was happening. He had the look of a new love, but no one knew who she was. There were strange rumors of some schoolgirl from the Smolny Institute for Girls of the Nobility with whom he took walks in the Summer Garden. But that was ridiculous, for platonic love was not for the Romanovs. Moreover, she could see from the windows of her Golden Parlor that an unknown lady was often brought to the palace by carriage, and that lights would go on in the memorial study of Nicholas I, where he had died. Apparently that was where they carried on, shaming his father’s memory. She would not learn the identity of her rival for some time.
By 1866, eleven years into Alexander’s reign, the new leaders of the young generation were young themselves, high school and university students who had not completed their degrees. They were caught up in the intoxicating scent of liberty and they thirsted for political activity. “Whatever the last book read told him is what will be on his mind,” wrote Nikolai Nekrasov, idol of Russia’s youth, about the youth of Russia.
Banned books and mad ideas circulated. The hardest young people despised the previous generation of liberals and even the former hero of radical Russia, Alexander Herzen. With the hatred of youth for the old, they called them “conciliators, important gentlemen, who for all their erudition and revolutionary phrases, were impotent to break with the old order.” They believed revolution would inevitably come to Russia, and soon. All it needed was a strong external push. That push was to be the assassination of the tsar.
This belief would persist through all the revolutionary movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. The meager intellect of these Russian Jacobins was a product of the country’s history. As Dostoevsky would sorrowfully write, “The French Revolution happened after Corneille and Voltaire, on the shoulders of Mirabeau, Bonaparte, Danton, and the Encyclopedists. All we have is the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia. Our expropriators, killers, and bomb throwers are mediocre writers, students who did not finish their degree, lawyers without trials, actors without talent, scholars without science. People with enormous ambition and tiny talent. A lot of ambition, not enough ammunition.”
N. A. Ishutin, who failed to graduate from high school in Penza, came to Moscow and became an auditor at Moscow University. The son of a poor merchant (with only one blue shirt and worn trousers tucked into swamp boots to his name), he was morbidly ambitious. He wanted to lead his peers. He may have had a miserable wardrobe, but he had a wealth of new ideas, which he brought from the provinces. The main one was about imminent revolution. Ishutin had read about it in banned books, and the wretch wanted to lead it.
“He tried to look grim and angry, as a brutal revolutionary should,” wrote a female contemporary. “But in fact he was an envious mediocre man…who passionately dreamed of popularity.”
In 1863, after the fires in St. Petersburg, most of the Moscow rebel students, led by Zaichnevsky, were sent to hard labor, and Ishutin picked up the baton. There was a large apartment building in Sytinsky Cul de Sac in Moscow. It consisted of tiny cell-like apartments that were rented to students. It turned into a huge dormitory for poor students. Here Ishutin easily found candidates for future Robespierres, and his circle grew.
First the Ishutinites decided to implement the socialist ideas of Fourier, to create a working commune together with workers. They would start a book bindery, without blood-sucking middlemen so that they could divide up the earnings equally. But the bindery unfortunately required them to do actual work. And as Dostoevsky once put it, “Who in Russia wants to work?” So they moved on to more attractive plans.
Inside his circle, Ishutin created a narrower circle called “The Organization,” made up primarily of provincials. The goal of this underground circle was no more and no less than building socialism in Russia. Ishutin told the members that their little Organization was part of a “European Revolutionary Committee” preparing revolution throughout the world. Just as he had thought, the myth made the participants quiver with delight—and with fear and obedience to him. Ishutin was the first to make falsehood an integral part of revolutionary work.
Then, within The Organization, Ishutin created a top-secret nucleus called Hell, of his most trusted students. Their purpose was to kill the tsar, which was to be the signal for the great social uprising. The peasants would rise up instantly, followed by a general rebellion that would destroy the regime. It was discussed over endless cups of tea with chunks of sugar and cheap sausage sandwiches.
Each member of Hell had to see himself as a doomed man, cut off from ordinary society and totally dedicated to the revolution. They were from Hell because they could not fear the most terrible and dirty methods, so long as they served the revolution. To impress new members, Ishutin would tell them how one of the circle poisoned his own father for the inheritance that he gave to the revolutionary work.
These methods would later be used by the uncompromising Russian revolutionary, the precursor of the Bolsheviks, Sergei Nechaev.
The same conundrum comes up again and again. The journalist Elena Kozlinina wrote in her memoirs, Over a Half Century, that at the time “many knew of the existence of Hell, but treated it as no more than empty chatter of young people.” But if many knew of it, why didn’t the omniscient Third Department know about Hell? After the student riots, which were particularly violent in St. Petersburg and Moscow, they watched students closely. They must have had agents in that dangerous student anthill. And of course, they should have been extremely alert to “chatter” about regicide. But no action against them was taken.
A highly mysterious young man, Ishutin’s cousin Dmitri Karakozov, was accepted in Hell. The son of an impoverished aristocrat, the always silent Karakozov was a dangerous and very Russian type. He said nothing while others argued. But he listened attentively. And while his comrades made noise and amused themselves with dangerous fantasies, the religious young man came up with the idea of self-sacrifice. If the tsar was in the way of socialism, which would bring happiness to his country, then the tsar did in fact need to be killed. He understood that his comrades were all talk. He saw that he would have to do it himself.
Saying nothing to his comrades, Karakozov left for St. Petersburg.
It happened on April 4, 1866. That day the tsar took a walk as usual in the Summer Garden. This time he was with his sister’s children, Nikolai (Kolya) and Masha Leichtenberg. His sister, Masha, beloved daughter of their late father, Nicholas I, found herself in a piquant situation. She was widowed very young. Her husband had been the cheerful drinker and gambler duke of Leichtenberg, son of Napoleon’s stepson, and grandson of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine.
Masha embarked on a stormy affair with Count Grigory Stroganov, and they married secretly. As Anna Tyutcheva put it, “The former tsar would have sent Masha to a convent and exiled the count to the Caucasus.” But the gentle Alexander, who was now head of the dynasty and was supposed to keep order in the family, preferred not to let on that he knew about the secret marriage. Count Stroganov grumbled that he was too old (at forty-two) to sneak into his own wife’s bed at night. Once they had children, they were forced to live in Italy.
Masha begged the tsar to recognize her new marriage and permit them to live in Russia, in the marvelous palace their father had built for her. It had a glass conservatory like none other in Europe, with peacocks and parrots among the palms, orchids, fountains, and waterfalls. It was a mirage of the South in the midst of the St. Petersburg winter.
He did not dare permit it. He suggested that his sister continue living abroad and he continued to pretend not to know about it. He was very sorry for Masha, especially when he himself, at almost fifty, had fallen in love, as if for the first time. (You have to live long to become young.)
Since the emperor could not permit his sister’s misalliance, he paid special attention to her children by her first marriage, who lived in St. Petersburg without their mother.
The tsar came out of the Summer Garden after three; the Leichtenbergs stayed to walk some more. On the Neva embankment by the garden’s marvelous wrought-iron fence, the usual crowd had gathered to see the tsar. This happened every day. The policeman pacing by the crowd stood at attention. The gendarme junior officer waiting by the carriage came to attention when he finally noticed the tsar. Alexander lifted the long tails of his military coat and prepared to get in.
At that moment came the deafening bang of a shot. Someone tall and young ran out of the crowd, racing down the embankment toward the bridge. The policeman and the gendarme ran after him. The policeman knocked him down and disarmed him; the gendarme punched him in the face. The man tried to block the blows and kept shouting, “Fellows, I shot for you!” He was brought to the tsar.
Minister Valuyev wrote an account in his diary. “The tsar asked him whether he was Russian [hoping he was Polish] and why he shot at him. The killer replied that he was Russian and that the tsar had allegedly been deceiving us too long. Others say that he said that the tsar had cheated the peasants of land. Still others, that he turned to the crowd and said, ‘Fellows, I was shooting for you.’”
After the assassination attempt the tsar went to the Kazan Cathedral and held a thanksgiving service. When he returned to the Winter Palace, Prince Dolgorukov, chief of the Third Department, recounted the amazing circumstances that would be written up in all the newspapers the next day.
It turned out that “the man standing next to the villain pushed his hand at the moment of the shot. God Himself used his hand to push the villain’s hand. This ordinary Russian man named Komissarov was from Kostroma.
“Long ago in the Time of Troubles, Ivan Susanin was from Kostroma, and he saved our tsar’s august ancestor, founder of the dynasty Mikhail Romanov, from a troop of Poles and paid for it with his life.”
The emperor commanded that Komissarov be brought to him.
The guards lined up in the great White Hall. They greeted him with a thunderous “Hurrah!” They brought in the savior—a short, pale, and shabby-looking man. Alexander embraced him, kissed him, and elevated him to the nobility. Now he was the aristocrat Komissarov-Kostromsky. Another shout of “Hurrah!”
In his notebook, Alexander wrote a very brief account, as usual. “Was walking with Marusya and Kolya in the Summer Garden. Shot from a pistol, missed. Killer caught. General sympathy. I went home and to Kazan Cathedral. Hurrah! The entire guards in the White Hall. Name is Osip Komissarov.”
The heir, Sasha, wrote much more: “You can say without mistake that all of St. Petersburg came spilling out onto the street. Traffic, agitation was unimaginable. Running in all directions, primarily toward the Winter Palace, shouts, most of them with the words ‘Karakozov!’ ‘Komissarov!’ threats and curses for the former, delighted exclamations for the latter. Groups of people, singing ‘God Save the Tsar.’ General delight and thunderous ‘Hurrahs.’ Then they brought in the man who saved him. Papa kissed him and made him a nobleman. Another terrific ‘Hurrah.’”
The Third Department had acted with great efficiency, which it had lacked before. Everyone involved in the attempt was quickly discovered and arrested. The tsar was told all the circumstances: The assassin was the nobleman Dmitri Karakozov, age twenty-six. He had been a student at Moscow University, but was expelled for not paying his tuition. He came from the provinces. In Moscow he met his relative, Ishutin, an auditor at Moscow University. That young man with criminal aims had created an underground group, and so on.
“The capital is mad with joy,” wrote a contemporary. “They’ve remembered their love for the tsar, remembered everything he has done for Russia! You hear ‘God Save the Tsar’ everywhere.” Naturally, there was a special performance of Glinka’s Life for the Tsar, about Ivan Susanin’s heroism (dying to protect the tsar from Poles). The two bassos in the company who alternately sang the role of Kostroma native Ivan Susanin fought to sing that night. Susanin’s aria was accompanied by constant applause. The other Kostroma native, the savior (as Komissarov was called by the press), sat in the box next to the royal box.
Dispatches and telegrams came from all over Russia. Cities, ethnic groups, and social estates competed in expressions of patriotic feelings. Workers in the provinces rallied in honor of the tsar. In Moscow (from where Karakozov had come) students, in expiation of their mutinous recent past, organized a procession to the Icon of the Iversk Mother of God, singing “God Save the Tsar,” and then prayed in Red Square by the Church of Vassily the Blessed.
The exultation began developing a tinge of pogrom. Drunken “patriots” roamed the streets, knocking off the hats of passersby who did not seem sufficiently thrilled and dragging all “long-haired bespectacled types” (students) to police precincts.
While the populace rejoiced that the tsar was saved, a completely different version of the assassination attempt was told in whispers in the capital. In this version, Komissarov was just one of the crowd of gawkers waiting to see the tsar come out of the park. After the shot, he was rounded up along with the others and first sent to the governor general’s house and then to the Third Department. He thought he was doomed. But when the authorities learned that he was originally from Kostroma, they decided to turn him into a new Ivan Susanin.
That was the start of the “savior’s” path to glory. Russians rushed to heap him with gratitude. Priests called him a guardian angel in their sermons, poets called him “the humble weapon of God’s providence.” He was given a multistory house and his wife wandered through the stores in the Gostiny Dvor complex, buying up silks and diamonds and presenting herself curtly as “the wife of the savior,” embarrassing the merchants.
Komissarov-Kostromsky eventually ended up forgotten in the provinces and died of delirium tremens.
The day of the assassination attempt, Dostoevsky burst into the apartment of the poet Appolon Maikov, shouting, “They shot at the tsar!”
Maikov responded “in an unnatural voice: ‘Did they kill him?’ ‘No…saved him…he’s fine…But they shot, they shot, they shot!’ Dostoevsky kept repeating in despair and shock.”
The writer understood that, despite the miss, the shot had in fact been a hit. Before, the tsars had been killed in the palace, secretly, and they were said to have died peacefully of hemorrhoidal colic or stroke or something. Now, someone had taken a shot at the tsar in public, shattering the inviolable aura of the sacred person that is the tsar.
Alexander understood this, too.
While the country rejoiced, the tsar was in a fury. Kostya rushed from the Pavlovsky Palace to St. Petersburg to be with Alexander. He remembered from childhood how dangerous and uncontrollable Alexander’s wrath could be. He begged him not to be hasty and to keep their slogan in mind: “No weakness, no reaction,” but in vain. Alexander demanded revenge. He gave the ingrates freedom and what did he get? Bloody proclamations, arson, and now a bullet. The tsar must have recalled his father’s tight fist, his testament on his deathbed.
Disappointing Kostya, Alexander signed a decree creating an Investigation Commission headed by General Muravyev the Hangman, who had suppressed the Polish uprising. The nihilists had to see that the authorities were not going to mollycoddle them.
This was the end of the chain of strange events: the incomprehensible conditions of incarceration for the rebellious students that led to their mad proclamations, the terrible fires and their unknown arsonists, the underground organization about which so many people knew except for the police, and the shooting. The result was the tsar’s readiness to fulfill the dream of the retrograde party—to start serious reprisals.
The tsar commanded that Mikhail Muravyev be brought to the palace. The stunned and pleased general appeared and asked for the heads of his former enemies, the liberal bureaucrats. “They are all cosmopolites, adherents of European ideas. Now real Russians must come to power!”
In just a few days, Muravyev shattered the liberal party. His sworn enemy, Prince Suvorov, lost the governor generalship of the St. Petersburg region, and Prince Dolgorukov, a friend of the tsar, lost his position as chief of the Third Department. Ministry of Education Golovnin, Kostya’s man, was fired for “letting young people get out of hand.” The famous retrograde Count Dmitri Tolstoy was appointed minister of education. He was soon to be called “the damnation of the Russian school.”
Among the liberals forced out was Lev Perovsky, governor of St. Petersburg. His daughter, Sofia, was twelve. Fifteen years later the terrorist Sofia Perovskaya would be standing on the Catherine Canal, where we left the tsar. The bombers would be following her plan.
The news of Muravyev’s appointment brought a chill to the capital. Everyone remembered how he burned villages in Poland, hanged Catholic priests, and exiled entire families to Siberia. They knew he would show no mercy. Interrogations of suspects began. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote, “St. Petersburg was dying. What horrible people had risen from their graves. Everything was remembered and avenged. A herd of ‘well-meaning’ people hurried to let loose the grudges they had been nursing.”
The Muravyev Commission brought in everyone for questioning—writers, officials, officers, teachers and pupils, students, peasants, princes, merchants. The investigators were allowed to insult female “nihilists.” They asked the college girls how many men they had slept with and threatened to give them a yellow identification (which meant they were prostitutes) unless they answered the question.
Panic and fear ruled the capital. People remembered the reprisals of Nicholas I after the Decembrist uprising. The most unstable (just as they had been then) were some of the liberals. Nekrasov was frightened, too. The great poet worried for himself and for his journal, Sovremennik. He first turned for help to his card partner Count Adlerberg, who could do nothing. The zealot Muravyev had everything in his power. So Nekrasov decided on an action he thought would help.
The English Club gave Muravyev an honorary membership, which was cause for a celebratory dinner. Nekrasov attended. After the lavish dinner, Muravyev, a ton of wheezing blubber, rested in an armchair. The civic poet Nekrasov asked for permission to read his new poem dedicated to the man all decent people had just recently called the Hangman. But Muravyev did not bother with a response, continuing to smoke his pipe. He seemed not to have noticed Nekrasov. The poet, not waiting for gracious agreement, started reading his panegyric to the Hangman.
But that didn’t seem like enough to Nekrasov. When he finished, he said beseechingly, “Your Excellency, will you permit me to publish this poem?”
Muravyev replied dryly, “It’s your property and you can do what you wish with it.” He turned his back on the poet. One of the people in the room said very loudly, “He thinks he can bribe justice by reading verse! You just wait, you won’t get away!”
The poet left, mortified.
His Sovremennik was shut down. Neither Russian youth and nor high society could forgive Nekrasov. Students took his picture down from their walls and threw it away, or, scribbling “scoundrel” across it, mailed it to him. He suffered terribly.
Nine years later, Nekrasov grew severely ill, his life turning into protracted death throes. “You asked for an easy life from God, when you should have asked for an easy death,” he wrote. Lying in bed, tormented, he continued trying to explain that act and repenting: “Beloved Homeland, bless your downed son, instead of beating him.”
News of his mortal illness spread across Russia and it reconciled people to him. Letters, telegrams, greetings, and notes came from all over the empire. On the eve of his death, he was the idol of youth once more.
He died on December 27, 1877. It was extremely cold, but for the first time in the history of Russian literature, several thousand people came to a writer’s funeral. They followed his body to its final resting place at the Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow.
The first plan proposed to Alexander was to declare Karakozov insane, the way Nicholas I had handled Chaadayev. This would make it clear that no sane person would ever attempt to kill the tsar. But Alexander did not want that: He wanted to teach villains a lesson, or else others might try to shoot at the tsar if they thought it could be done with impunity, which would be the end of the state. Karakozov and Ishutin were sentenced to die by hanging.
Karakozov spent the entire time in prison praying. He wrote a letter to Alexander begging for forgiveness. “I beg your pardon as a Christian of a Christian and man of a man.” The tsar “spread his hands in regret.” Karakozov was told, “His Majesty forgives you as a Christian, but as the Sovereign he cannot forgive you. You must prepare yourself for death.”
He did forgive Ishutin and commuted his sentence to hard labor for life. The gift of life was not to be announced until the last second, when he was on the gallows. He punished him with the anticipation of death, remembering how his father had treated the Petrashevsky circle members.
The first execution on Semenovsky Square took place. Karakozov was hanged. He had passed out and had to be dragged up to the gibbet. Ishutin was dressed and then told about the change in his sentence.
Alexander had needed to bring in Muravyev to scare the country, but the tsar could not stand the monster for long. The Hangman was soon retired. He died in sadness in 1866. However, the tsar did not return the liberal bureaucrats to power nor did he wish to hear anything else about liberal reform. Let the public digest what was given to them first.
Thus, while the country was moving forward in the late 1860s, Alexander decided to stop the reforms and the country’s dangerous motion. Only military reform, because of the immensity of the problems, continued into the 1870s. He needed the army to get his revenge for the Crimean War.
Alexander did not know the rule: Starting reforms is dangerous, but it is much more dangerous to stop them.
Alexander realized that he had to think about fighting sedition, which meant a new chief for the Third Department who would be able to control society’s new friskiness. He appointed Peter Shuvalov, son of his late mother’s high marshal.
The Shuvalovs rose to power in the reign of Empress Elizabeth, in the mid-eighteenth century. One Shuvalov had been her lover. His uncle was a major financier and also the requisite embezzler and devious statesman. When Elizabeth became infatuated with a new young cadet named Beketov, dropping the older Shuvalov’s nephew, he took measures to return his relative to favor. He became the best friend of the young and simple lover and gave Beketov a cream “to whiten the face.” The poor fellow broke out in a pus-filled rash. Someone whispered into the empress’s ear the words “venereal disease,” which the cadet allegedly picked up from someone else, and the infuriated Elizabeth cast him aside and returned Shuvalov to her favors.
The son of this enterprising bastard had a subtle mind, nobility, and good education. His French was so good that he published poems in Paris. Catherine the Great, who wrote fluently in French, sent her famous letters to Grimm and Voltaire to this Shuvalov first for editing, which he did with determination. Catherine called him “my wise washerwoman.”
This was the line from which Peter Shuvalov came. He was ten years younger than the tsar and a companion in some of his merry adventures. Using his friendship with the tsar, he dared to court the daughter of Maria Leichtenberg, the tsar’s sister. The tsar was forced to reprimand him severely. Count Peter wised up immediately, becoming what was needed—“loyal but smart” (as Alexander described him) and “a dog on a chain” (as Kostya did). Count Peter combined many qualities of his ancestors. He was lively, witty, absolutely comme il faut and at the same time ruthless and a cruel superior.
He was liberal when necessary but a retrograde at heart. The retrogrades rejoiced at his appointment. They quoted Shuvalov as saying that he would soon “wring the necks” of the liberals and “the tsar himself would toe the line.”
Shuvalov ruled Russia for eight years, a period of counter-reform, when the regime undercut its own good deeds. Alexander was happy: The reforms were in place, and he hoped the country would quiet down. He intended to relax, because he was in love. But a leader can never rest, for his time off is always severely punished.
While he was away from active ruling, an extremely dangerous change took place. The new head of the Third Department reinstated the broad powers of the secret police. Using them, Shuvalov began to take over the Committee of Ministers. Minister of War Dmitri Milyutin was astonished to find that he had been “completely removed from military affairs.”
“It is all being done under the exceptional influence of Shuvalov, who has frightened the Sovereign with daily reports on terrible dangers,” he wrote in his diary. “Under the guise of protecting the person of the tsar, the count interferes in affairs. He has surrounded the Sovereign with his own people…. In the Committee of Ministers, the majority acts as one with the count, like an orchestra directed by the conductor.”
For eight years, Count Peter Shuvalov, chief of the secret police, was the de facto prime minister. This brought about a most dangerous situation for Alexander: the unification of the retrograde party with the secret police.
The court referred to Shuvalov as Peter IV. In order to become him truly, Shuvalov had to get rid of the chief liberal, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich. The camarilla relished the anticipation.