The events that were not known to the tsar and that were to contribute to his death occurred before his trip to Livadia, in the summer of 1879. Everything connected to those events, at the time absolutely secret, is still debated by historians. This account relies as much as possible on original sources—the accounts of the fathers of Russian terrorism. They described the events after they were arrested, and the few who lived until the revolution in Russia wrote about them in their memoirs.
After Solovyov’s shooting, the divided Land and Freedom party saw that the proponents and foes of terror could not coexist anymore. Neither side could forget the hysterical scene between Popov, who was against terrorism, and Kvyatkovsky, who supported it, and the unexpected knock at the door that kept the argument from turning into a shoot-out. The hardliners formed a secret society inside Land and Freedom with the expressive name Liberty or Death.
But the partisans, the terrorists and their supporters, did not stop at that. They demanded a congress to ratify terrorism officially as the party’s central activity or to disband. The site for the congress was the city of Voronezh. But the secret society wanted to have its own secret congress in Lipetsk to prepare.
In June 1879, ten young men and a very beautiful young woman began arriving in the sleepy provincial town of Lipetsk, known for its medicinal mud. The spa was founded in the days of Alexander I, and its people were used to visitors, but the athletic young men bore little resemblance to invalids. Nevertheless they declared themselves patients when they checked into the hotel.
They came from all corners of Russia, the eleven people who wanted to turn around Russian history. Several came from the south. Unlike the aristocratic Land and Freedom chapter in St. Petersburg, the southern branches had children of poverty among the nobles. They would all become famous Russian terrorists.
From the southern port of Odessa, the Russian Marseille, came the peasant son Andrei Zhelyabov, a strong man with a dark beard. His father had been a serf, and Andrei was ten when Alexander II emancipated them. After high school he went to the law school at the university in Odessa. He was expelled and exiled from the city two years later for taking part in student riots. He went through many underground circles and student groups, prison and political trials. Eventually, he concluded that the only way to achieve his goals was terrorism.
From Kiev came the ideologue of terrorism, the nobleman Kolotkevich; from Kharkov came the always agitated son of a Jewish merchant, Grigory Goldenberg, who had killed the governor general of Kharkov.
Also from the south was Mikhail Frolenko, the son of a poor retired corporal. He had been accepted at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but he found it boring. Frolenko moved to Moscow to study at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy, where Nechaev murdered the student Ivanov. It was much more interesting in Moscow, where Frolenko joined the revolutionary bohemians, began publishing proclamations, and participated in all the student meetings. In the end, he dropped out of the academy and lived illegally. During the back to the people movement, he went to the Urals to seek out bearers of the Russian revolutionary spirit. He expected to find them among fugitives from Siberian prisons and members of sects persecuted by the Russian Orthodox Church. Frolenko believed that the Urals would be crawling with rebels. Dressed in peasant clothes, Frolenko traveled through the area, mostly on foot. After three months, he returned, never having run across a single sectarian or fugitive from a chain gang, and joined Land and Freedom. He made daring attacks on prisons to free revolutionary prisoners. He was highly valued in the organization. Among his comrades with refined aristocratic, or intellectual, or typically Jewish faces, Frolenko looked like the average working-class Russian. He was their man on the street.
Another arrival was the aristocrat Stepan Shiryaev, a specialist in dynamite. He was a dandy in fashionable clothes. He had worked in Paris in the laboratory of Yablochkov, one of the inventors of the electric light bulb, and returned to Russia with expert knowledge in electricity. Shiryaev created an underground laboratory; with him worked a true genius, the future father of rocket engines Nikolai Kibalchich.
When Kibalchich joined the organization, he swore: “I promise that all my time and all my efforts will serve the revolution through terrorism. I will study a science that will help me and the comrades apply their efforts in a manner that is the most profitable for the revolution.” With Shiryaev, they created the most advanced technology in Russia for making dynamite bombs. Prepared ahead of time for use in attacks, their bombs would spend long periods on the bottom of the Neva River and still work.
A good-looking married couple came to Lipetsk, Alexander Barannikov and his wife, Maria Oshanina. He was the Avenging Angel, with olive skin and raven hair, a worthy successor to the Jacobin aristocrats who killed their emperors. She, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, had ash-colored hair, dark eyes, and “a thirst for the blood of the oppressors.” After his killing of chief of gendarmes Mezentsov, Barannikov returned to the countryside to inspire revolutionary fervor in the peasants. After the daring, danger-filled life he led in St. Petersburg, enlightening the peasantry seemed unbearably dull. As Mikhail Frolenko said, laughing at their life in the country, “Their boredom was immense, and they accepted the invitation to Lipetsk like liberation from the Tatar yoke.” Thus, a beautiful young woman joined the ten men.
Nikolai Morozov, tall, thin, in spectacles, looked like a typical member of the intelligentsia. Orphaned young, he was the son of a landowner and a serf. His father’s butler, whose wife was taken by the master, blew up both of his parents with a powder keg. Nikolai Morozov learned about explosions in his infancy, and now he planned to devote his life to them.
Another interesting character was Lev Tikhomirov, the main intellectual and brains behind Land and Freedom. He was twenty-seven, but because of his mind and erudition and also his middle-aged appearance (by contrast with the majority of the arrivals, who were strong, healthy, and handsome), he was called The Old Man. It became his party pseudonym. “L. A. Tikhomirov is the best exponent of our ideas and goals,” Nikolai Morozov said. With time, this “best exponent” would become the staunchest foe of those same ideas and goals. But at first, as the terrorist Vera Figner put it, “Lev Tikhomirov was our acknowledged ideological representative, theoretician, and best writer.”
The main organizers of the congress came before the rest. They were the founders of Liberty or Death and the dismantlers of the former Land and Freedom—Alexander “Robespierre” Mikhailov and Alexander Kvyatkovsky. They were an odd couple: fat, round-faced and amiable-looking Mikhailov, and sleek, tall Kvyatkovsky who had a refined face framed by a well-tended beard.
The son of a Siberian gold prospector, Kvyatkovsky had studied (like Frolenko) at the Technological Institute, took part in student riots, quit, and went to the people. He worked as a sharecropper, smith, laborer, and peddler in villages. He came back convinced of the primacy of terror. Like many of the other arrivals, he was exceptionally strong and courageous. He had taken part in attacks on prison convoys and had twice rescued prisoners.
The young people spent their time peacefully in the hotel, went to take mud baths, and spent a lot of time boating on the unpleasantly named Antichrist Pond. “In Lipetsk…behind the spa’s gardens was a large pond or small lake with very clear water,” recalled Frolenko, “but surprisingly, there were no fish. We often took a boat and rowed there…. We asked the peasants and learned that the cause for the absence of fish was the weir built by the Antichrist. By Antichrist, they meant Peter I!”
During the reforms of Peter the Great, the people believed that Peter, who destroyed the Patriarchy in Russia and many ancient habits and customs, was the Antichrist, whose coming had been prophesied by church books. Many works appeared proving it through numerical calculations. Russia’s Great Transformer dealt with these authors handily, sending them to the stake or to dungeons.
The boat rides were not recreational. On Antichrist Pond, far from prying ears, “many preliminary questions were raised and discussed.” By mid-June, all eleven had arrived. On June 15 they went for their first historic meeting, in a very romantic spot.
Mikhail Frolenko wrote: “We found out from the bellmen that there was a forest outside town where people had picnics. We hired coaches, bought food, some wine, purified vodka, and set off.” The summer weather was perfect. The eleven (almost all of whom would end up hanged or dying in isolation cells) were merry.
“The road outside town was an unending series of meadows…. Far ahead lay the forest, where we were headed. Andrei Zhelyabov showed us his strength. Along the way, he bet someone that he could lift a droshky with its driver by the rear axle.” They saw a new carriage on the road. “Zhelyabov jumped down from our droshky, rushed over to the one approaching, grabbed its rear axle, and lifting it with the driver, stopped the trotting horse in its tracks.” That’s the kind of people they were.
They reached the spot, released the drivers, and “started looking for a place where we would not be readily seen from afar but from which we could see anyone approaching us. We found a place quickly. It was a group of trees and shrubs in a meadow, almost in the very center. Settling in that green island, we could see everything around us on the meadow, while we remained invisible and unheard…. We placed the bottles of wine, the food, and glasses on the grass, to make it look as if we had come to have a party, and immediately began our discussion.”
At this first meeting Kvyatkovsky and Mikhailov read the program and bylaws of the new party. They were accepted unanimously. This was the first time political terror was part of a party program.
Two more meetings were held in the cheerful green glade. At the last one, they defined the main goal of the coming terror. “At the third meeting…Alexander Mikhailov read a long list of charges against Emperor Alexander II…. ‘The emperor has destroyed in the second half of his reign,’ said Mikhailov, ‘almost all the good he permitted to be done by the progressive figures of the sixties.’”
“A vivid outline of the political persecutions of recent years ended that marvelous speech…. The listeners pictured long lines of young people sent to Siberian tundras for love of their homeland, the emaciated faces of prisoners, and the unknown graves of freedom fighters,” wrote Vera Figner.
After the obligatory revolutionary bathos, concrete questions were raised. Should the good works at the beginning of his reign pardon Alexander II for “all the evil that he has already done and will do in the future?” The answer was a resounding “No!”
In that cheerful glade eleven people condemned the emperor of an enormous empire to death. After that, they had a long discussion about how the eleven of them would overturn that great empire with its huge punitive apparatus. Outwardly, it seemed like a meeting of madmen, but there already existed new technology that made the murder of rulers quite possible despite all safeguards. Moreover, it allowed them to kill the guards along with the guarded, and to get away unscathed. The pistol and dagger, the main weapons of nineteenth-century conspirators, were becoming obsolete.
Now there was dynamite, an advanced technology invented by the Swede Alfred Nobel in 1867, the year after the first attempt on the Russian tsar’s life. Old Man Tikhomirov, the smartest of the lot, put it this way: “Terrorism is a very toxic idea, very terrible, which can create strength from impotence.” Dynamite was the terrible power of the powerless.
As Goldberg later testified, it was at Lipetsk that “we first spoke of using dynamite in the work of the revolution.” The idea of dynamite as a powerful weapon was already discussed by students in 1874. Europe was beleaguered by mysterious naval catastrophes that took many lives. They happened to old ships that exploded in the open sea once they left Dutch harbors. It turned out that shipowners were insuring old, useless ships and then blowing them up with newly invented dynamite and timing mechanisms.
Actually, besides the use of dynamite, another innovation arose in the Lipetsk meadow: a party of a new type. Robespierre Mikhailov was its creator. At the head was the Executive Committee. All the members gave their entire fortunes and lives to the committee. You could join it, but you couldn’t leave. The decisions of the Executive Committee (EC) were not subject to discussion but had to be executed unquestioningly by the rest of the party. The all-powerful EC had agents of various categories working for it. They were the “revolutionaries of the second rank” that Nechaev had written about in his Catechism for the Revolutionary.
“Agents of the Executive Committee,” recalled Maria Oshanina, “were appointed by the committee and had no rights, only obligations.” They were the revolutionary capital to be spent by the EC. The eleven people in the meadow named themselves members of the EC: A. I. Barannikov, A. I. Zhelyabov, A. A. Kvyatkovsky, N. N. Kolotkevich, A. D. Mikhailov, N. A. Morozov, M. N. Oshanina, L. A. Tikhomirov, M. F. Frolenko, S. G. Shiryaev, and G. Goldenberg.
At the head of the EC stood the Administrative Commission. The members of the EC met and passed resolutions, and the commission supervised their execution. Between meetings, the commission had dictatorial powers and demanded absolute execution of its own decisions. It met almost daily. The Administrative Commission consisted of three people elected by the members of the EC from its members. At that time the three were Alexander Mikhailov, Lev Tikhomirov, and Alexander Kvyatkovsky.
An iron dictatorial discipline was maintained in the new party, from top to bottom. That is exactly how Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin would build his party.
The bylaws described terror as the main means and the main goal of the party. There were several departments subordinate to the EC. The Military Department was headed by Andrei Zhelyabov, who formulated the first rule of future terrorism: its relentlessness. “The meaning of terror and all the chances of its success lie in consistency and relentlessness of action…. Under the blows of systematic terror autocracy will start to crack. The Government is not able to withstand such pressure for long and it will make actual, instead of virtual, concessions. Any deceleration is disastrous for us; we must go by forced march, straining our abilities.” Ruthless, uninterrupted terror would blow up the existing order, as Nechaev had once dreamed. Nikolai Morozov and the chief ideologue Lev Tikhomirov were elected editors of their planned underground newspaper.
They moved on to a discussion of the first steps of the new party. It was decided to start with a bang—blowing up the tsar in a railroad car. It had to be done that very fall, when he was returning from his usual stay in Livadia. The Lipetsk congress was declared closed. The next day the participants left for Voronezh, two or three at a time, as they had arrived for this meeting.
The congress of Land and Freedom met in Voronezh and concluded with a schism. The former Land and Freedom was buried. Two months later, the terrorists of the Lipetsk congress announced the creation of their own organization. They called it the People’s Will, as it is usually translated, even though the Russian word volya means both freedom and will.
The Voronezh congress added new members to the EC, including Vera Figner and Sofia Perovskaya. Now there were twenty-five members of the EC. The most famous new member would be Sofia Perovskaya, who changed the course of Russian history.
Sofia, known as Sonechka, always wore the favorite outfit of the “progressive college girls,” a modest brown dress with snowy white starched collar. Her round face, shining blue eyes, and light brown hair made her look like a little girl. Only the too-large, sloping forehead spoiled the delicate girl’s face. With every year her forehead grew larger; it seemed to take over her face. Lenin had that kind of forehead.
The People’s Will members believed in Nechaev’s definition: “The revolutionary is a doomed person.” They forswore a personal life until the victory of revolution. But that vow was often broken, because youth was stronger than promises.
The rock-hard revolutionary Sonechka Perovskaya became Andrei Zhelyabov’s mistress. They were a strange match: the handsome heroic man and the little girl with the large forehead. He was the son of a serf and she was the great-great-granddaughter of the hetman of Ukraine, the great-granddaughter of a minister, the granddaughter of the governor of the Crimea, and the daughter of the governor of St. Petersburg. The scion of serfs joined with the scion of the most outstanding aristocrats.
Sonechka Perovskaya came from the line of the Razumovsky counts. Their distant ancestor was a simple Cossack and alcoholic. His son, Alexei Rozum, had a beautiful voice and was brought to St. Petersburg to sing. At the court church, the choirboy was seen by the future empress Elizabeth, and she fell in love with him. When she ascended the throne, Elizabeth gave her lover the title of count of the Roman Empire. The former choirboy became Count Alexei Razumovsky, whom the court jokingly called the Night Emperor.
Sober, he was good-natured and treated his title with self-deprecating humor. But drunken (his father’s blood!), he was combative and beat Elizabeth’s officials. The wives of these courtiers had services said in church when their husbands went to dine with the hospitable Count Razumovsky, praying that they would return without broken noses. Even Elizabeth felt his wrath, for he sometimes beat “his treasure,” the empress of Russia. When he sobered up he crawled abjectly on his knees before the locked door of his mistress. But the empress could not go long without his nocturnal services. The count stayed out of court intrigues, had no great opinion of his own intelligence, and read only one book, the Bible. Instead of intrigues, he took care of his family. He brought his mother and brother from the village.
They dressed his mother in a court dress and brought her to the palace to meet the empress. There were no mirrors in the village. When the Cossack woman saw herself in a mirror, she dropped to her knees to bow—she thought it was the empress she was seeing.
He also brought his brother, Kirill, who was herding cows when they came to take him to St. Petersburg. He climbed a tree to hide from what he thought were recruiters for the army. At fifteen, Kirill was illiterate. But not much later he graduated from Goetingen University and eventually came to head the Academy of Sciences. Unlike his brother, Kirill Razumovsky was involved in court intrigues and conspiracies. Under Catherine the Great, he was the last hetman of Ukraine. He was Sonechka’s great-great-grandfather.
His son, Count Alexei Razumovsky, minister of education under Alexander I, was married to one of the wealthiest brides in Russia, but did not live with her. He lived with his mistress and had ten children by her. They were all given the surname Perovsky, after the count’s estate, Perovo. They were all granted noble status and some had brilliant careers under Alexander II. One was a minister, another a general, a third an influential tutor of the heir to the throne. They helped Sonechka’s father, Lev Perovsky, become governor of St. Petersburg.
Following family tradition, Sonechka’s father lived openly with a mistress while his own family was in financial need. All the other Perovskys lived in luxury, and the little girl saw it when she was taken to visit her famous and influential relatives. After the first attempt on Alexander II, Lev Perovsky was forced to retire, reducing the family circumstances even more.
This might have been when the very proud girl developed her hatred of inequality and her thirst for justice. In high school, she befriended girls who became revolutionaries. At sixteen, Sonechka Perovskaya left her parents’ house; she participated in workers’ circles, was arrested, and spent time in the fortress. Her father went to see Peter Shuvalov, chief of gendarmes, and she was released. Sonechka was sent to the Crimea, where her grandfather was governor. There she studied medicine to become a paramedic and work for the people. Then she was one of the defendants in the Trial of 193 narodniki. She was exiled to the Olonetsk Province. While she was being transported there, she slipped a sleeping draught into the gendarmes’ tea and escaped. She began living without legal status. She took part in the armed attempt to free I. Myshkin, who gave the celebrated speech at their trial. They ambushed the wagon taking him to hard labor. They wounded the gendarme accompanying him, but Myshkin was in leg irons and could not jump down from the wagon.
She was iron-willed. Once she made up her mind to do something, she was implacable. Her comrades feared her. She did not forgive weakness. As Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, who assassinated Mezentsov, said about her, “That woman is capable of driving a party comrade to suicide over the slightest failure.”
Upon their return from Voronezh, the EC went into action. An agent was sent to Switzerland to buy dynamite, which was smuggled into Russia. Shiryaev and Kibalchich started making bombs.
In late August at a secret apartment in Lesnoi near St. Petersburg, the EC had a meeting. The main point on the agenda was whether they should roll out numerous terrorist acts against top government officials or concentrate solely on killing the tsar.
The unanimous answer was to focus on killing the tsar. They formulated a pacifying theory of “the final killing” that would end the era of terror. They believed that the people would rise up in response, putting an end to the autocracy. Alexander Mikhailov, the de facto leader of People’s Will, kept a written history of its work. “26 August 1879, the Executive Committee passed a death sentence on the Emperor of All of Russia, Alexander II.”
At the time the forces of People’s Will in the capital consisted of only a few dozen people, but with the new technology, that was enough. The power of the powerless worked.
In the fall, when Alexander II left for Livadia, the EC had enough dynamite to destroy his imperial train. There were only two ways by which he could return to St. Petersburg, by sea through Odessa and then by train to Moscow and St. Petersburg, or by coach to Simferopol, and then by train. In either case he had to pass through the small town of Alexandrovsk. Thus the Odessa-Alexandrovsk-Moscow triangle covered all possibilities. Whichever way he traveled, he had to go through one of those places. The dynamite would be stored in all three, and his train would be blown up wherever he went.
The members of People’s Will went off to deliver their fatal presents for the tsar.
In September 1879, Vera Figner came to Odessa with the first portion of dynamite. Nikolai Kibalchich himself followed with explosives. Pretending to be a married couple, they rented an apartment on prestigious Ekaterininskaya Street.
Mikhail Frolenko arrived soon after. The trio started its dangerous work—they made fuses, dried pyroxylin, and tested the explosive mechanism. Dynamite was extremely sensitive and often blew up on its own, killing the dynamiters. That is what they were called, dynamiters, a new word for a new time.
The bombs were made. Now they had to place them on the tracks of the tsar’s train. Vera Figner went to see Baron Ungern-Shternberg, son-in-law of Count Totleben, the governor general of Odessa. Her refined society manners and good looks enchanted the baron. Figner asked him to find a job as a railroad guard for her servant, because “the doctors prescribe outdoor work because of his lung disease.” The baron was delighted to be able to help the aristocratic beauty, and he wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of the Odessa railroad. A new guard began work in the little village of Gnilyakovo, outside Odessa. He was Mikhail Frolenko, with his working-class looks.
But all the work in Odessa was in vain.
They had an agent in Simferopol, A. Presnyakov. At his youthful twenty-three, he had already been arrested, escaped, and lived abroad. But terror in Russia seemed much more attractive for the revolutionary than gay Paris or wealthy London. Presnyakov sent a coded telegram to Odessa to report that the tsar was not going there, he was traveling to Simferopol. Next his train would go through Alexandrovsk and Moscow.
In Alexandrovsk the terrorist group was headed by Andrei Zhelyabov, who assumed the role of a merchant come to the town to set up a leather factory. He bought land right next to the railroad tracks. This was at a point where the train traveled on a high embankment. They hoped it would be a bloody run.
Zhelyabov testified, “The place where the mine was laid was a huge ravine. The bomb was placed there with the intention of taking the entire train…. We knew how many cars there would be in the tsar’s train.” The chosen spot guaranteed the greatest damage. The cars would fall into the ravine. The victims would be not only the tsar and his family, but ordinary people, servants and guards. Of course, the former peasant Zhelyabov no longer worried about them. Revolutionary expediency meant that the end justified the means.
Every night Zhelyabov and his assistants, dressed in black, worked on the embankment. The ground was frozen, the cold had come early, and a cold autumn rain fell. But he dug tirelessly until the tunnel was ready. Then Zhelyabov did the most perilous part—he moved the armed mine into the tunnel, under the tracks. He had to carry it 200 meters, because the horse could not get any closer. He carried it, expecting it to blow up at any moment.
Everything was ready. Zhelyabov demanded the honor of connecting the wires for the explosion. His peasant hands would blow up the emperor’s train.
It was November 18, the day the tsar’s train was to travel through Alexandrovsk. A coded telegram informed Zhelyabov that the train with the tsar’s retinue would come first, followed by the imperial train, and that the tsar would be in the fourth car. At nine that morning Zhelyabov and his comrades went to the embankment and down into the ravine. He dug out the buried ends of the wires and waited.
The first train roared above them. The imperial train came soon after. Three cars passed over the spot with the mine. Then came the fourth, with the tsar. One of his comrades shouted to Zhelyabov, “Go!”
Triumphantly, Zhelyabov made the connection. Nothing happened. The train rolled down the track and out of view. They stood there in furious frustration. So much effort for nothing. The EC created a special commission to investigate the reason for the failure. The peasant son Zhelyabov had connected the wires incorrectly.
The tsar’s train rushed toward Moscow.
They followed the same scheme in Moscow. A pleasant married couple, the Sukhorukovs, came to the suburbs of the old capital. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky described it this way: “In one of the suburbs of the first Russian capital, where that half-Asian city, no less majestic than ancient Babylon or Nineveh…meets the gardens, orchards, and meadows that surround Moscow on all sides, in that almost rural part of the city stood a dilapidated one-story house with an attic, blackened by age and half in ruins.”
The Sukhorukovs rented that house, just 150 meters from the Moscow-Kursk Railroad. They were Sofia Perovskaya and Lev Gartman. From their house they started to dig toward the tracks, to lay the mine. They told the owner of the house that they were going to do major repairs and boarded up the windows. Others came to dig: Mikhailov, Barannikov, Morozov, Shiryaev, and their comrades.
They did not know how to make a tunnel. “Manuals on sappers and mines did not give us anything useful,” recalled Mikhailov. They learned as they went along. They had to dig a shallow tunnel because of the groundwater that quickly rose to the surface. But even at that depth, the floor was constantly damp. Week after week, on all fours, up to their necks in cold wet mud, they worked from early morning until late at night; they covered no more than two meters a day. They reinforced the tunnel with boards. In case the reinforcement didn’t hold and there was a cave-in, they carried poison so that they would not suffer long.
The police posed a much greater threat. “All the participants knew what awaited them in case of arrest. A bottle of nitroglycerine was kept in the house, to be blown up if the police were breaking down the door,” wrote Stepnyak-Kravchinsky.
Once, a fire broke out near their house. The neighbors knocked and offered to help carrying things out. They could not let them in, and quick-witted Sonechka Perovskaya saved the day. She grabbed an icon and ran outside, shouting, “Leave everything as it is, it’s God’s will. You can protect yourself from God’s punishment only through prayer!” The neighbors treated that declaration with great respect and left them alone. The girlish figure stood outside holding the icon and blocking the way until the fire was put out.
“However, despite all the danger, the most sincere merriment reigned in the little house…. At meals, when everyone gathered, we chatted and joked as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Sofia Perovskaya’s silvery laugh pealed most frequently, even though she kept a loaded revolver in her pocket, with which if necessary, she would blow up all and sundry,” the members recalled.
And so they labored and sincerely made merry, listening to Sonechka’s silvery laughter, before attempting to blow up a trainload of people. The tunnel went through the railroad embankment, right under the bed, and they could listen to the distant rumble of approaching trains. It would increase until the train roared right overhead, the tunnel roof shaking. “The wheels jumped from rail to rail…. Everythings hook around you…earth rained down through the cracks onto your head, into your ears and eyes, and the candles guttered, and yet it was pleasant to greet that mighty force flying past you,” recalled Nikolai Morozov.
At last, the time came to lay the mine. And here some of them worried that there wasn’t enough dynamite, even though Kibalchich assured them it was more than adequate. They received a telegram from their tireless agent A. Presnyakov: “The price of wheat is two rubles, our price is four.” They knew that the imperial train was traveling second, behind the retinue’s train. And the tsar was in the fourth car. They had plenty of dynamite for one car.
Goldenberg, impatient for action, went to Odessa to take the unused dynamite from Vera Figner. He put it in a big suitcase and headed back to Moscow.
He blew his cover at the Odessa train station. Dressed like a dandy, Goldenberg dragged the big and clearly heavy suitcase along the platform himself. He did not use a porter, as an obviously wealthy man would do. This made one of the porters suspicious and he reported him to the police.
The police sent a wire to the next station, Elisavetgrad, and the police there were waiting for Goldenberg. He tried to run but was immediately surrounded. He pulled out a gun. From the report to the Third Department: “It was not possible to approach him and take him: he cocked his revolver and aimed at whoever came near…thereby outraging the crowd against him.”
Finally, they got the gun away from him, and the crowd attacked poor Goldenberg. The gendarmes put an end to the beating. “However, even after that it took six men to tie his hands: he was so strong…and also angry, and he even bit.”
Grigory Goldenberg’s fate was horrible. At the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Goldenberg was given an experienced investigator, who quickly understood his main trait—monstrous conceit (a reaction to the endless humiliations he suffered as a Jewish child). Listening to Goldenberg’s proud speech about the great and noble goals of the People’s Will, the investigator proposed that he could save Russia. It would take very little—revealing to the government the true lofty aims of their party and describing the noble activists of the revolutionary party, after which, naturally, the government could not persecute such people. “The fault lies in our general confusion. But now he would lead the lost youth of Russia from the darkness of terror and the lost government toward the light of general reconciliation.”
Goldenberg believed it and wrote one hundred fifty pages, giving names, addresses, events, facts, and brief biographies of one hundred forty-three “noble members of the People’s Will.” However, at one of the interviews he warned, “Bear in mind that if even one hair falls from the heads of my comrades, I will not forgive myself.”
“I don’t know about hair…but I can promise you that heads will fall for sure,” the investigator said, laughing.
Goldenberg hanged himself in his cell.
In Moscow, the revolutionaries learned about Goldenberg’s arrest, but they were sure that he would not inform on them. A new blow awaited them on November 18, when they heard that the train got through Alexandrovsk without problem. They attributed that to an arrest, as well. They thought that Zhelyabov and his comrades had been caught, which might mean that the police were on their trail. They expected them to show up at any moment. Sonechka’s pistol was ready, and their nerves were strained to the limit.
Things were still quiet on November 19, when the train was to pass by. The arrival of the trains of the retinue and the tsar was expected at 10:00 and 11:00 P.M. All the diggers left the house. Nikolai Morozov took a rock from the deadly tunnel as a memento. “We discussed who should stay in the apartment to await the train and set up the explosion. We decided that Gartman and Perovskaya would stay to the end. The role of the person who would do the explosion was merely to make the connection,” said Shiryaev.
Thus, Sonechka would keep watch outside, and as the tsar’s fourth car came by, she would signal Gartman in the house, who would connect the wires. The mine would explode and the imperial train would fly into the air.
The historic moment arrived—the first train was barreling down the track. As the telegram had informed them, it was the entourage, and Sonechka let it go by. About half an hour later, the imperial train came into view. The cars rattled by, one at a time. There it was, the fourth car. She gave Gartman the sign. He connected the wires and a powerful blast shook the sleepy town of Rogozhskaya Zastava. The car was tossed into the air and it fell, wheels up. The other cars were derailed.
Perovskaya and Gartman quickly fled the scene. The tsar surely was dead.
War Minister Milyutin, who was in the imperial train, wrote, “The imperial train usually travels a half hour behind the other one, usually called the retinue train. This time it went ahead of the retinue train. It was due to mechanical problems with the retinue train. The tsar did not want to wait while they changed the locomotive, and the imperial train went first.”
Perovskaya had let the tsar’s train go by, and they blew up the retinue train. “The baggage car with fruit from the Crimea was blown up. There were no human casualties,” Milyutin wrote.
It was dark when Alexander reached Moscow. Troops were lined up at the station, and music played. When he left the station, the echo of a distant explosion could be heard.
He stayed at the Nikolayevsky Palace in the Kremlin, where he had been born sixty-one years earlier.
Milyutin wrote: “Around ten that evening, we moved into the Kremlin palace and had not yet settled into our rooms when we learned that the second train, traveling a half hour behind the first, with part of the retinue, servants, and baggage, just as it reached the outskirts of Moscow crashed because of a secret mine. Obviously, this villainous attack had been intended for the tsar’s train; a completely random circumstance (change of trains) led the villains into confusion…. The locomotive got past, but the two baggage cars behind it fell on their side; the other cars were also derailed, but fortunately were undamaged and not a single person was hurt.”
The tsar was unpacking when minister of the court Alexander Adlerberg came in. He told the tsar that the retinue train had been blown up. “The fourth car of the retinue train has been turned into marmalade,” Adlerberg said. “There was nothing in it but fruit from the Crimea.”
The emperor must have turned white with the realization that his was the fourth car in the imperial train. He now knew that they knew everything, the order of the trains and even the secret number of his car. Someone who was very well informed was feeding them information. His helpless response was reported: “What do those scoundrels want with me? Why are they badgering me like a wild animal?”
From Moscow he sent a telegram to the empress: “Arrived safely in Moscow, where it is 14 below zero. I am saddened that you are in the same condition. I feel good and not tired. Tender kisses.”
The next day the rumor spread through Moscow that the explosion was the work of students. A crowd rushed the university, but the police were already in place. At the Cathedral of the Assumption, a thanksgiving service was held for the health and miraculous rescue of the tsar. “God saved me again,” Alexander said. He did not know that God had saved him twice on that terrible voyage.
“The event of November 19 brought a grim color to our entire stay in Moscow,” wrote Milyutin. “We were still under that horrible impression during the trip to St. Petersburg. All measures were taken to protect the imperial train from new dangers. We did not let them know in St. Petersburg when the tsar would arrive. The troops of the imperial garrison, all the officers, officials, and even imperial family waited for several hours in the streets and at the station, in extremely and unusually cold weather. All telegraph service was suspended. To make matters worse, there was a blizzard in the night. The emperor got to St. Petersburg only around three in the afternoon. He was sad and serious.”
His heir was waiting for him in the palace. He was grim. His eyes conveyed his desire, “Destroy sedition.” He wrote in his diary: “22 November. Father back from Livadia, after two days in Moscow, where there was another attempt on his life…. It’s horrible, what a sweet time we live in!”
Now not only the tsar’s coach was guarded when he moved within his own capital, but also the entire railroad when the imperial train was traveling. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, who came to St. Petersburg with his father, the viceroy of the Caucasus, described his surprise: “The Moscow–St. Petersburg line, all 605 kilometers, was lined by troops. Throughout the entire journey we saw the glimmer of bayonets and soldiers’ greatcoats. At night thousands of campfires lit our way. At first we thought this was part of the ceremony of greeting the Viceroy, but then we learned that the Tsar was planning to visit Moscow in the near future, and therefore the government was taking extreme measures to protect his train from attack by villains. This saddened us greatly. Apparently, the political situation was taking on an extremely tense character, if even the train of the Emperor of All Russia needed every inch of road between the two capitals guarded. This was very unlike the days when Emperor Nicholas I traveled almost without guards through the most remote areas of his vast empire. Our father was very troubled and could not hide his agitation.”
In the meantime there was a police report. They had found the tunnel under the tracks. It led to the house of a certain Sukhorukov, which was only 150 meters from the railroad bed. The house was empty, but when the police arrived, the stove was filled with glowing embers, the samovar was still warm, and a candle was burning. The man who called himself Sukhorukov was not only a terrorist, he was also a con man. Just before the explosion, he borrowed a large sum of money from a widow, using the house he had rented as collateral.
The terrorists’ proclamation was brought to the tsar. “On November 19 of this year, near Moscow on the Moscow-Kursk railroad line, on the orders of the Executive Committee, an attempt was made on the life of Alexander II by blowing up the tsar’s train. The attempt failed. The reasons for the mistake and failure we do not find necessary to publish at the present time.
“We are certain that our agents and our entire party will not be discouraged by the failure, but will draw from this incident confidence in their strength and the possibility of successful struggle. Appealing to all honest Russian citizens for whom the road is free, for whom the people’s will and the people’s interests are sacred, we once again proclaim that Alexander II is the main representative of the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty, the main pillar of reaction, the main perpetrator of court murders…. In order to break despotism and return to the people their rights and power, we need general support. We demand it and expect it from Russia.”
The most inexplicable aspect of this story is the behavior of the tsarist police. On November 14, right after Goldenberg was arrested in Elisavetgrad, a telegram was sent to the Third Department: “Today at the Elisavetgrad Station the gendarmes arrested an unknown man arriving on the Odessa train. He resisted arrest. His baggage held more than thirty-six pounds of explosives. Under interrogation he declared himself to be a socialist. I am reporting this.”
“Was he preparing for the imperial train?” wrote Drenteln, chief of the Third Department, on this information. But what a strange question. It’s unlikely he was carrying dynamite for his own amusement. It was obvious that terrorists were preparing to blow up the imperial train. They should have telegraphed the train, perhaps stopped it, checked the railroad bed. They should have done something. But nothing was done. Only fate saved the tsar.
Stepnyak-Kravchinsky wrote: “The enormous dynamite conspiracy organized by the Executive Committee in 1879 in expectation of the tsar’s return from the Crimea was perhaps the grandest affair ever undertaken and brought to a conclusion by conspiracy. The organization did not have the personnel to execute it and therefore we had to use the services of many outsiders selected from the populous world of sympathizers that always surrounds a popular organization like the one that the EC was running then. It is not surprising then that with so many participants the rumors of the coming attempts spread very quickly literally throughout Russia. Of course, people did not know where the explosion was to take place. But all students, lawyers, and writers with the exception of those on the police payroll, knew that the tsar’s train would be blown into the air during the trip from the Crimea to St. Petersburg. People talked about it, as they say, everywhere. In Odessa one rather well-known writer (I. I. Svedentsov) ran a subscription for the explosion almost openly, and the fifteen hundred rubles he raised were delivered to the EC. The police knew nothing.”
Knew nothing? With its numerous agents and gigantic staff of informers? Why not? We will never know.
The penultimate new year in Alexander’s life, 1880, arrived with no greater sense of security. He had to admit that the executions and martial law had not pacified the country. Everyone expected reprisals, yet the emperor called Kostya. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich later related joyfully, “The tsar told me that he would like to show Russia a sign of trust for the 25th anniversary of his reign [February 19, 1881] by taking a new and important step toward completing the transformations he had undertaken. He would like to give society more participation than presently in the discussion of the most important affairs.”
Instantly rumors of a constitution began. Alexander had a conference, but when he announced his intention to continue reforms, the tsarevich’s eyes filled with horror. He saw the same horror in the eyes of the courtiers and the members of the extended Romanov family. They wanted a continuation of reprisals, not concessions.
That evening he noted in his memo book: “29 January, conference with Kostya and others, we decided to do nothing.” And once again he would spend hours plunged in deep thought in his study.
He suffered another humiliation. From the head of Russian foreign intelligence service came word that Lev Gartman had recently arrived by train in Paris, and he was the terrorist–con man Mr. Sukhorukov who was behind the bomb on the railroad. The Russian government demanded extradition.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Gorchakov appealed to the president of France: “The question is not about a Russian nihilist, but the principle of punishment. We must ask ourselves: is it possible to struggle with these new barbarians under these conditions?” He went on to say that they must not be given the opportunity to make “conspiracies freely, without any personal risk. It is enough for them to create a plan, dig a tunnel, set the mechanism for a certain time or send an electric spark from a distance” and then “vanish to another country to wait the results of their destructive work…under cover of the right to refuge that guarantees them security and freedom.”
The Russian government demanded the return of the “new barbarian.” But the French president’s chancellery was engulfed by letters from the public outraged by the “Russian monarchist frenzy.” The public campaign was headed by Victor Hugo, who sent an appeal to President Grévy. The French demanded Gartman be protected from “tsarist terror,” and French newspapers printed articles by famous Russian radical émigrés—Georgi Plekhanov, Petr Lavrov, and Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. The Russian ambassador, Prince Orlov, was informed by mail that a death sentence had been passed on him by the “Russian Socialist Committee in Paris.”
The president of France refused to extradite Gartman, and the tsar could do nothing but recall his ambassador from France.
Alexander decided to bring back the ailing empress, since the climate in Nice was not helping her. He thought she was afraid of dying alone in a strange land. It was winter. He sent Count Alexander Adlerberg to bring her back.
The empress had read in the newspapers about the new attempt on the Moscow railroad. This was another blow for her. It turned out she did not want to return at all, especially now after the attempt on his life. She did not want to go to a country where the monarch was humiliated and where he in turn humiliated his empress.
“No one asked my opinion. This is a cruel decision. I think they would treat a sick housemaid better,” she complained to her lady-in-waiting.
In preparation for departure, she wept and said that in her condition she would not be able to take a long winter journey. In fact, she was so ill on the trip that her ladies-in-waiting thought several times that they would not get her home alive.
Dr. Botkin explained to the tsar that it was important to keep her from being upset. So no one except a few family members was allowed to greet her at the station. She was brought to the Winter Palace, where she went to bed and did not get up again.
Unbeknownst to almost everyone, there was an assassin in the Winter Palace. Even the members of the “Great EC” (as Russian revolutionaries would subsequently call the committee) did not know about him. It was kept top secret. Only the Administrative Commission—Alexander Mikhailov, Lev Tikhomirov, and Alexander Kvyatkovsky—knew about the agent of the People’s Will now in the home of the Alexander II.
The core belief of the People’s Will, that once the tsar died, tsarism would fall, was becoming more popular in workers’ circles. The laborer Stepan Khalturin decided that the tsar must fall at the hand of a worker. “Let all tsars know that we workers are not so stupid and we can evaluate the ‘services’ tsars afford workers.” The thought that the tsar had betrayed the people and therefore must be killed by a worker became an idée fixe.
Having committed to regicide, Khalturin started on his path to the Winter Palace. He was an excellent carpenter with a wide network in the St. Petersburg labor market. He soon got a job working on repairs of the tsar’s yacht. It was a good step, and he acquitted himself well enough to come to the attention of the palace administration. Stepan Khalturin got the position he wanted at the palace.
Then he got in touch with the People’s Will. He offered to blow up the palace, with the entire royal family. He asked for cooperation from the EC, which would give him information, but most important, supply the dynamite.
The proposal was discussed by the Administrative Commission and accepted, naturally, but only as a backup. The commission was planning the attacks on the railroad, and they had neither the time nor the dynamite for a palace job. They told Khalturin to take the job at the palace and bide his time. In October 1879, under the name of Batyshkov, he began to work at the Winter Palace and to wait.
Khalturin was tall, with rosy cheeks, and the very sight of his always-happy young face was cheering. He became popular with the servants, especially the many females. The household services were on the first floor and in the vast cellars—kitchens, storerooms, workshops. Khalturin lived in the cellar with the other carpenters and his workshop was there, too. The royal family lived on the second floor. In the marvelous formal rooms, in the “reserve half,” the luxurious private apartments of the many Romanovs, and in the rooms of the lord chamberlains and ladies-in-waiting, something was always in need of repair or replacement. The calls on the very good handyman “Batyshkov” were frequent.
Khalturin even made repairs in the Diamond Storeroom, which held the imperial regalia and treasures accumulated over the centuries of the Romanov dynasty. Famous diamonds were there, for only the monarchs of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary bought large precious stones in those days. Later when the Bolsheviks confiscated the tsar’s diamonds they found themselves in the position, as Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote, of robbers “who got the commodity and destroyed the only possible purchasers.”
Khalturin learned the layout of the Winter Palace.
The tsar was expected back from Livadia and the palace was getting a general sprucing up. Khalturin worked from morning till night, primarily in the tsar’s rooms, renovating the valuable furniture. Portraying the peasant Batyshkov, Khalturin turned out to be a talented actor. He came up with a useful mask—the dull-witted, simple peasant. All the footmen laughed at his awkward manners and habit of scratching behind his ear while thinking. They tried to impress the unpolished country rube. Their boasting stories gave Khalturin a good picture of the palace schedule and the daily life. The fear that pervaded the reign of Nicholas I was long gone from the palace, as it was from Russian life. Only the oldest servants remembered the “reverent atmosphere, like church.”
General Delsal, commandant of the palace, was in charge of security. The old general, wounded in Sevastopol, kept up the patriarchal, preterrorism mores. The lack of discipline and the lax habits of the innumerable staff amazed Khalturin. His coworkers had parties in the staff rooms, attended by dozens of their friends, who came and went at will.
“At a time when even the most high-ranking people could not pass through the main entrances of the palace, the back doors were open at all hours of the day and night for any tavern acquaintance of the lowliest palace servant. Sometimes the visitors stayed the night in the palace,” Khalturin said.
The debauchery in the servants’ quarters and the disorder in household management shocked Khalturin. There was widespread thievery, and Khalturin had to steal food in order not to seem suspicious.
The revolutionary was not making this up. The same petty thievery was rampant even during the magnificent balls at the Winter Palace. The situation was so typical that Leo Tolstoy described it in his novel Anna Karenina. At a ball, a grand duchess asks one of the officers to show his new helmet to the Italian ambassador, who is interested in Russian army equipment. The cavalry guardsman begs off with some excuse. The grand duchess insists, and he takes it off. The grand duchess “turned over the helmet and—bam, a pear fell out, followed by two pounds of chocolates,” wrote Tolstoy. The officer had stolen it from the dinner tables.
As soon as the Moscow bombing failed, Khalturin became the main player in the tsar’s murder. His connection with the EC was Kvyatkovsky. Now he met with Khalturin daily, to pass along some dynamite, which he brought into the palace in small portions.
Kvyatkovsky’s apartment was turned into a dynamite laboratory. He kept detonators and other parts there. But the apartment had to appear to be an ordinary family home. Thus, Kvyatkovsky was given a “wife,” played by Vera Figner’s younger sister. The elegant Kvyatkovsky and his wife, a typical aristocrat with flawless manners, looked good together.
At one point, Khalturin had an opportunity to get the deed done with one blow. He was called into the tsar’s study to polish the furniture. The tsar was there, with his back to him, by his desk. A blow to the head with his hammer, and the tsar would be dead. But he was not prepared to kill an unarmed old man from behind. When Kvyatkovsky learned of the lost chance, he cursed Khalturin roundly.
But time was on the side of the EC. Khalturin figured out that the cellar where he and the other carpenters lived was right under the tsar’s dining room. He would kill them all there.
Between the cellar and the second-floor dining room was the guards corps, where the sentries lived. A good fifty men, they were peasants beloved by the revolutionaries. They would be doomed by an explosion in the cellar. Khalturin said coolly to Kvyatkovsky: “It’ll kill fifty without doubt…so it’s better to put in more dynamite, so that they don’t die in vain, so that it definitely gets him.”
In order to blast through the mighty granite vaults of the Winter Palace, Shiryaev and Kibalchich calculated that over 300 pounds of dynamite would be needed.
Khalturin continued bringing it in to the palace. “Every morning,” Khalturin recounted, “after work, I went out [to meet Kvyatkovsky] and came back with a small portion of dynamite, which I hid under my pillow. I was afraid to bring in more, which would attract attention. There were frequent searches, but they were so superficial that no one ever thought to lift my pillow (my luck!), which would have destroyed me. Of course, I had instilled absolute confidence in me with my good behavior.”
Sleeping on dynamite takes its toll. Nitroglycerine is highly volatile and highly toxic. Inhaling the vapors poisons the blood. It made Khalturin’s eyes strain out of their orbits, and his rosy complexion turned to clay. He had terrible headaches.
He came up with a clever idea—he purchased a large trunk, which was delivered to the cellar. He told his roommates that he was getting married and was buying his bride’s dowry. He had gotten a bonus for good work, and he intended to keep the dowry in the trunk.
Beneath the dresses and lingerie, he kept a large amount of dynamite. The explosives-filled trunk was to play the role of an infernal machine. Until November 24, that is, when Kvyatkovsky did not bring the next portion of dynamite and did not appear at their meeting place. He also failed to show up for the daily meeting on November 25.
Unbeknownst to Khalturin, Kvyatkovsky was in a detention cell, arrested, and his apartment was being searched. The trusting sister of Vera Figner had given illegal literature to a friend, who showed it to her lover, who immediately reported it. The police came to the apartment.
A strange turn of events ensued. The police found a green glass jar filled with nitroglycerine and magnesium, necessary components of dynamite. They found vessels with fulminate of mercury, used for detonators. These were all parts of destructive explosives.
It became clear what they were to be used for. The police confiscated a paper that Kvyatkovsky vainly tried to burn. It was a building plan, with an X marking one of the rooms. The police determined that it was a plan of the Winter Palace and that the X marked the royal dining room.
The palace should have been searched thoroughly, and all the staff should have been checked, particularly the new people. Someone from inside had given the terrorists the building plan.
None of it was done. They settled for searching the rooms adjacent to the dining room. They also did perfunctory searches of workers returning from leave. They did not bother Khalturin, who had already brought 250 pounds of dynamite into the palace.
He even continued adding to his stores, because now Andrei Zhelyabov brought it to him.
Both of the great actions of the Great EC—the bomb on the railroad track and the bombing in the Winter Palace—could have, rather, should have, been averted. But the police were strangely inactive. The question arises again: why?
The trunk now held close to 280 pounds of dynamite. Khalturin suggested blowing up the dining room. The Administrative Commission held a special meeting, asking their chief dynamiter to speak.
“What would be the effect of exploding that charge?” they asked.
“The tsar will be scared, but unharmed,” Nikolai Kibalchich replied firmly. “My calculations remain in effect—you need 320 pounds. Even better would be 360 pounds.” (Serpokryl, a member of People’s Will, later recounted this.)
Khalturin was nervous. Free access had been limited, and residents of the palace had to wear a brass badge identifying them. Nonetheless, he continued to bring in the dynamite in small pieces, “Inventing various subterfuges to avoid being searched or to trick the vigilance of the searchers.”
In other words, even after Kvyatkovsky’s arrest, there still was no mandatory search of everyone. The security check was clearly easy to foil, but Khalturin was tired and pushed for a quick move. Zhelyabov also wanted to use the dynamite as soon as possible. So the Administrative Commission, despite Kibalchich’s opinion, gave the order to set off the bomb.
Now, Zhelyabov waited for Khalturin every evening on Palace Square. As he walked past, Khalturin would say, without stopping, “No.” The explosion was postponed.
Khalturin wanted the whole family to be there, and he learned that on February 5, Alexander of Hesse, the empress’s beloved brother, would be visiting the Winter Palace. In honor of the occasion, a six o’clock family dinner would be held. The tsar would attend with his sons, the heir Alexander and Vladimir. The empress, it was said, would not be able to join them, for she did not leave her bed.
On February 3, agents of the EC lured a typesetter in their underground printing house, Zharkov, an informer, onto the ice of the Malaya Neva River. Stunned by a bludgeon, Zharkov fell. Young Presnyakov finished him off by stabbing him with a dagger.
On February 5, Khalturin had to get the carpenters who lived with him out of the cellar by six o’clock. It was not difficult. He invited them to a restaurant to celebrate his engagement. The restaurant was not far from the palace, and just before six, he told them that he wanted them to meet his fiancée and would go get her. He left them in the restaurant and hurried back to the palace.
The clock struck six. He could tell by the bustle among the staff that the prince had arrived. Khalturin went down to the cellar and connected the wires. He had fifteen minutes to get out of the palace.
St. Petersburg was in a blizzard. For three days heavy snowflakes fell on the city. The bridges and buildings drowned in snow and the street lights could barely be seen. It was disquieting and lovely. The Egyptian sphinxes on the Neva lay under a blanket of snow. The lights of the Winter Palace merely flickered in the distance.
Zhelyabov, covered in snow, waited for Khalturin on Palace Square. Khalturin appeared out of the swirling snow. “With amazing calm he greeted Zhelyabov and said, as if it were an ordinary conversation, ‘It’s ready,’” recalled Lev Tikhomirov. A few second later a thunderous explosion rang out in the square. The palace seemed to shudder, and the lights went out in the windows.
The dark palace vanished in the white blizzard.
The emperor had been waiting for Prince Alexander of Hesse. The blizzard had blocked the roads; even the horse-drawn trolley wasn’t working. He sent his sons, Sasha and Vladimir, to meet the train. It was delayed by snowdrifts, and the prince arrived just in time for dinner.
It was just after six when the emperor, his sons, and their guest approached the Yellow Dining Room (named for the color of the walls). Suddenly, the floor began to rise beneath their feet, and there was a heavy, monstrous thud below. “The floor rose as if in an earthquake, the gas lights in the gallery went out, there was total darkness, and the air was filled with the disgusting odor of gunpowder or dynamite,” recalled the prince of Hesse.
“We all ran to the Yellow Dining Room, from where the noise came, and found all the windows burst open, the walls showing cracks in several places, almost all the chandeliers out, and everything covered with a thick layer of dust and plaster,” the heir wrote in his diary.
There was smoke in the dining room. The windows were blown open by the shock wave, but even the freezing wind could not dissipate the thick, sulfurous smoke. Only one chandelier was still lit, and at the table two barely visible footmen, covered in plaster, stood at attention. The table service was covered with plaster, the candelabras rising above it. The palms decorating the table were also white with plaster. This suddenly white space, with the immobile, ghostlike footmen and the devilish smell of sulfur, was like a vision from the Apocalypse.
The heir’s diary records: “There was total darkness in the big courtyard, and terrible screams and noise came from there. Vladimir and I immediately ran to the main guard house, which was not easy, since all the lights were out and the smoke was so thick that it was hard to breathe.”
Terrified servants ran around with candles in the dark. The palace was in a state of panic. They could not find the commandant. He was stuck between floors. Because of his leg injury, Delsal usually used the lift. He had entered it and was on his way up when the blast occurred. The lights went out and the lift stopped.
“The poor general, not understanding the reason for the halt, hung in the air for twenty minutes, which must have seemed an eternity to him. He was surrounded by complete darkness on all sides,” recalled lady-in-waiting Tolstaya.
The fire bell rang in the square and fire engines hurried to the palace.
The firemen ran up the marble stairs to the corps de guards. As a newspaper described it, “It was hell in there. Ashes, smoke…impossible to breathe…flares barely showed through the smoke…the firemen’s helmets shone…. They brought more flares. Now the site of the catastrophe was illuminated. The granite floor, made of very heavy slabs, had been tossed up like a toy ball by the horrifying force of the explosion. A mound of broken slabs, rocks, plaster…. Beneath the ruins we heard moans…. Among the mounds in the smoke lay figures. It was impossible to walk—there were arms, legs, and other body parts strewn everywhere…. And in the light of the flares, we could see dark spots on the walls…. The wretched guards were literally blown apart. Wounded and dying men, groans and pleas for help that the firemen, crazed with horror and darkness, could not give. The only medic on duty that evening in the palace, and the nurse, rushed among the wounded.”
Sasha and Vladimir entered the sentries’ space. “When we ran in, we found a terrible scene: the entire large guards room where people lived was blown up and everything had collapsed more than six feet deep, and in that pile of brick, plaster, slabs and huge mounds of vaults and walls lay more than fifty soldiers covered with a layer of dust and blood. It was a heartbreaking picture, and I will never forget that horror in my life!” wrote the heir.
If not for the granite slabs, there would have been nothing left of the dining room or of the royal family. They were saved by the room full of murdered sentries.
While his sons ran down to the sentry room and a footman came out of the darkness to lead the frightened prince of Hesse away, the emperor ran upstairs. All the gas lights in the corridors had gone out and the halls were plunged into darkness. What if they were in the palace? He ran through the black, smoke-filled space. An illuminated face floated out of the dark—a lackey with a candelabra. He grabbed it and ran to the third floor. Beyond the chamberlain’s rooms he saw a weak strip of light. She was in the doorway with a candle. She was waiting for him.
The empress was the only person in all of St. Petersburg who knew nothing about it. She had slept through it. She slept almost all the time. The tsar would not permit her to be told.
In the evening the church bells rang dutifully about yet another miraculous escape. This was the fifth attempt on his life. If there really had been a gypsy who told his fortune, he should have been counting.
First they kept him from walking around his city, then from riding the train in his country, and now he could not live peacefully in his own house.
The next day, as usual, he received the war minister Dmitri Milyutin.
He tried to be calm, as usual.
Milyutin wrote in his diary: “The tsar called me to his study. As in the previous similar incidents, he maintained total presence of mind, seeing in this case a new manifestation of God’s Finger saving him for the fifth time from villainous attack.”
That was a lovely explanation. However, the minister, like the rest of Russia, could not get rid of this thought: “This incident was particularly amazing. Everyone has to think—where can one seek peace and safety, if villains can lay mines in the royal palace itself?!”
The minister was right, where could one seek peace and safety? St. Petersburg was in even greater panic than before. As the newspaper Golos put it: “Dynamite in the Winter Palace! An attempt on the life of the Russian tsar in his own dwelling! This is like a nightmare. Where is the limit and when will there be an end to this barbarity?”
Or, as Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich wrote in his diary, “Nerves are so taut that you expect to be blown up into the air at any moment. We are living through the Terror [of the French Revolution] with the difference that the Parisians could see their enemies face to face, while we not only do not see them or know them, we do not even have the slightest idea of their numbers.”
Later, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich repeated the same sentiment: “It would be too weak a comparison for me to say that we lived in a besieged fortress. At war you know your friends and enemies. Here we did not know. The chamber footman serving morning coffee could be working for the nihilists…every chimney sweep who came in to work now looked like the bearer of an infernal machine.”
Apparently, this was the consensus in the Romanov family and in St. Petersburg. A letter to the Third Department warned, “Beware your chimney sweeps, they’ve been ordered to put gunpowder into your chimneys. Avoid theaters, masquerade balls, because there will be an explosion soon in the theaters, in the Winter Palace, in the barracks.”
Rumors were rife, as Alexandra Bogdanovich wrote in her diary: “They said that under the Small Church of the Winter Palace they found a hundred pounds of dynamite.”…“Now they check the cellars daily in St. Isaac’s Cathedral—you never know, they might put some dynamite there, too, since they do it so easily.”…“They threaten to blow up all of St. Petersburg on February 19.”…“Some say that they will ruin the water pipes in St. Petersburg and we will be left without water, others that printed leaflets were sent the barracks of the Preobrazhensky, Horse Guards, and 8th Fleet that they will be blown up; they say that there was another incident at the palace, that they are still finding dynamite.”
Another writer feared death from the air. “At the time wild rumors spread in the city that the entire center was mined…. Balloons with dynamite would be sent at the city. Panic and fear spread like the plague through St. Petersburg.”
The People’s Will discussed the incident in an illegal apartment. Khalturin was terribly depressed, not because he had killed and maimed fifty people, but because the tsar was not killed.
“The news that the tsar was safe had an oppressive effect on Khalturin. He collapsed, and only tales of the enormous impression made by February 5 on Russia could console him a bit, although he never could accept his failure,” wrote Tikhomirov.
The Great EC did express its regrets over the death of the sentries. Here is the Proclamation of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will dated February 7, 1880.
“With deep sympathy we regard the death of the wretched soldiers of the tsar’s guard, those forced guardians of the divine villain. But as long as the army is a bastion of tsarist absolutism, until it realizes that in the interests of the homeland its sacred duty is to be with the people against the tsar, such tragic conflicts are inevitable.”
So it was their own fault and a lesson for others.
They concluded with a new threat. “We declare once more to Alexander II that we will continue this fight until he abdicates his power to the people, until he offers societal restructuring to a national Constituent Assembly.”
The sentries were buried on February 7. The tsar was in the church for the funeral service. There were ten coffins on the catafalque and Alexander said, “It feels as if we are still at war, back in the trenches near Plevna.”
After he returned to Russia and published The Devils, which was panned by the avant-garde critics, Dostoevsky turned to newspaper column writing. He started publishing Diary of a Writer, in which he told the reader, with frenzied frankness, everything that worried him about Russia right then. He wanted to be extremely sincere and he recognized no political correctness. His “biting thoughts” were often against everyone. His timely and topical diary was read eagerly even by those who disagreed with him. Only work on his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, interrupted the diary.
In those years, the usually solitary writer had a few close friends—Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the journalist Alexei Suvorin, and other leaders of the retrograde party were his circle. But they should have been wary of him, too. No matter how conservative he was, he could never become officially affiliated. While he was against the nihilists, he was simultaneously against reprisals against them and executions. “I cannot consider moral the man who burns heretics. I have only one moral model and ideal—Christ. I ask: would he have burned heretics—no. That means that burning heretics is an immoral act,” he wrote in a letter to Professor K. Kavelin.
It is why he had wanted an acquittal for Vera Zasulich. Fidelity to Christ was more important to him than fidelity to his convictions. If one day he was more retrograde than all the retrogrades, the next day he was suddenly more liberal than all the liberals. He wrote in his notebook, “Our conservative part of society is no less full of shit than any other. So many scoundrels have joined it.” In conversation he would call himself a Russian socialist.
He was in constant debate with himself. This was a struggle between “Yes” and “No” that often sounded simultaneously in his soul.
The Brothers Karamazov is a gigantic fresco depicting the battle between God and the Devil in the human heart. It is a testament imbued with forebodings of an apocalyptic catastrophe moving toward Russia. The Brothers Karamazov was printed in 1879–80 to the accompaniment of terrorist shots and bombs. The novel was enormously successful with readers.
Naturally the most topical of Russian writers was stunned by February 5. Soon after the explosion in the Winter Palace, Dostoevsky had a curious conversation. He was visited on February 20 by Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, a man known to reading Russia. He was owner and editor of Novoye Vremya (New Times), the most influential (and a semiofficial) newspaper.
Suvorin came in from the cold, tall and thin in his always unbuttoned beaver coat and ever-present walking stick. There was something vulpine and demonic about his face. Suvorin could easily have been a character in a Dostoevsky novel. He had made his way from grueling poverty to fame as a journalist whose feuilletons were read throughout Russia. He lived through a tragedy that almost cost him his mind: His wife was shot by her lover in a hotel room. Suvorin was brought there and she died in his arms. All this was newspaper fodder. But he rose from the ashes and concentrated on work. He bought Novoye Vremya, a failing newspaper, and soon made it famous.
The paper’s basic line was patriotism for the nationalist party, hatred of liberalism, and anti-Semitism. “The motto of Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya,” wrote Russia’s greatest satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, “is to go inexorably forward, but through the anus.” Nevertheless, this brilliant and terrible man was the friend of two great writers, Dostoevsky and, later, Chekhov.
Suvorin wrote a detailed account in his diary of his conversation with Dostoevsky. It is essential reading for an understanding of what was going on in Russia at the time. “Dostoevsky lived in a poor little flat. I found him at a round table in the living room, filling papirosy with tobacco.” He had just had an epileptic fit, and “his red face looked like the face of man fresh out of a steam bath.”
They started to talk about what the whole country was discussing, February 5, the bomb in the Winter Palace. Dostoevsky offered Suvorin a scenario. “Just imagine that we are standing in front of the windows of the Datsiaro [a store on Nevsky Prospect that sold artworks] and looking at the paintings. Next to us is a man who is pretending to be looking. He is waiting for something and keeps looking around. Suddenly another man hurries up to him and says, ‘The Winter Palace will be blown up now. I set the mechanism.’ We hear it. What would we do? Would we go to the Winter Palace to warn them of the bomb or go to the police, to the constable on the beat, to have them arrest these people? Would you go?”
In other words, Dostoevsky asked Suvorin: If you and I knew what would happen on February 5, would we have reported it? The editor of the semigovernmental newspaper replied, “No, I wouldn’t go.” And Dostoevsky, the author of The Devils, says, “Neither would I. But why? It’s horrible, it’s a crime. We might have been able to prevent it.” He explains why: “I was filling my papirosy and thinking, going over the reasons why it should be done: serious, important reasons of state significance and Christian duty. The reasons for not doing it were totally insignificant. Simply—the fear of being known as an informer. I pictured how I would arrive, how they would look at me, start questioning me, making me look at suspects, probably offering me a reward, or even suspecting me of being part of the conspiracy. They would publish: Dostoevsky fingered the criminals. Is that my business? It’s the business of the police. That’s what they’re for, that’s what they get paid to do. The liberals would not forgive me. They would torment me and bring me to despair. Is that normal? Everything is abnormal in our country.”
Suvorin continued, “Dostoevsky talked on the theme for a long time, and he spoke animatedly.”
The worst had happened: The liberal part of Russian society sympathized with the terrorists. They had become heroes, sacred cows that could not be touched. In the eyes of the progressive Russian intelligentsia, the killers had become fighters against the regime, which had once seduced the country with reforms and had now rejected reforms for ruthless repression. It was no accident that famous writers, journalists, and lawyers were friends of the terrorists. For example, the writer Gleb Uspensky was a close friend of Vera Figner; another EC member, the terrorist Nikolai Morozov, hid in 1879 in the apartment of the writer Vladimir Zotov. Vera Figner wrote then, “We are surrounded by the sympathy of the greater part of society.”
As if to confirm this, Dostoevsky concluded his conversation with Suvorin by telling him that “he would write a novel in which Alyosha Karamazov would be the hero. He wanted to take him through a monastery. And make him a revolutionary. He would commit a political crime. He would be executed. He sought truth and the search would, naturally, make him a revolutionary,” noted Suvorin in his diary.
The “political crime” punishable by execution was terrorism.
Thus, Dostoevsky, who had censured “Russian nihilism” in The Devils, now declared that he would make his beloved character, the holy Alyosha Karamazov, a revolutionary terrorist (that is, a devil).
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich would later write in his memoirs that allegedly Dostoevsky told Suvorin that day a terrible prophetic thing: “Wait for the sequel. Alyosha will leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the tsar.”
It may seem incredible, but the existence of that apparently impossible plot line was published three months later in the Odessa newspaper Novorossiiskii Telegraf. On May 26, 1880, it reported rumors “in St. Petersburg literary circles on the further content of The Brothers Karamazov. In the continuation of the novel, Alexei Karamazov, under the influence of some special psychological processes in his soul, is brought to the idea of regicide.”
This was the truth of life that Dostoevsky could not avoid: The Alyosha Karamazovs, the best young people, were becoming terrorists and regicides. That was the tragic result of the last decade of Alexander II’s reign. It was the revenge of the society seduced by his reforms. This suggests the frightening paradox that the tsar of all Russia was in some way the father of Russian terrorism.
The writer’s fantasy and prophecies soon became the reality of his own life. Just a few months later, in November 1880, an amazing young man moved into the apartment on the same landing as Dostoevsky’s. He would walk up the same narrow staircase and go up to the same floor. Dostoevsky lived in apartment 10, his apartment was 11. He was on the other side of the wall. It would have been impossible for Dostoevsky not to notice him. He was tall and handsome, with the demeanor of a guardsman, olive skin and raven hair. It was Alexander Barannikov, participant in the murder of chief of gendarmes Mezentsov, member of the EC of the People’s Will, part of the plot to blow up the imperial train, the Avenging Angel.
Next door to Dostoevsky, the truth-loving Alyosha-Karamazovs-turned-terrorist would meet. The people sought all over Russia, the leaders and members of the Great EC, met to plan regicide, the final attempt on Alexander II. They would all face what Dostoevsky planned for his unwritten sequel—regicide and death by execution or in a prison cell.
But that would happen later. Let us return to Dostoevsky’s apartment and his interesting conversation with Suvorin. Dostoevsky would not go to report a bombing at the palace because “the liberals would torment” him. But why wouldn’t the retrograde Suvorin go to save the tsar? He was not afraid of liberal torment, he tormented the liberals himself.
He was afraid of the conservatives. In 1880 certain letters came to Moscow from St. Petersburg. Their recipient was former lady-in-waiting Ekaterina Fedorovna Tyutcheva (sister of now also retired lady-in-waiting Anna Tyutcheva). This is what was in the letters:
“God’s fates sent him to the misfortune of Russia. Even the healthy instinct for self-preservation has dried up in him: the only instincts left are of dull love of power and sensuality..”…“Pathetic and miserable man!.”…“I am pained and ashamed, it sickens me to look at him..”…“It is clear that he has lost his will: he does not want to hear, does not want to see, does not want to act. He only wants to live by the mindless will of the belly.”
The man reviled in those letters was Alexander II, emperor of Russia. The writer was neither a revolutionary nor a liberal, but a key antiliberal and antirevolutionary. Those antitsarist remarks came from one of the most influential Russian officials, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor of the heir to the throne and soon to become head of the Holy Synod of the Church. He was the true head of the retrograde party.
His office had an oversized desk with bronze lions. The desk was always piled with papers and was surrounded by bookshelves. His ascetic face, so like the Grand Inquisitor’s, rose above the desk. The high forehead ended in a bare skull, his ears stuck out, and his nose was beaklike. His constant scornful gaze rattled his interlocutors.
From this office came the ideas that fed all the retrogrades in Russia, then and now. Many statements were attributed to Pobedonostsev: “In Russia all things must be done without hurry. I always tell the coachman, ‘I pay extra to drive slowly.’ That way I know the coach won’t overturn on our terrible roads…. We have a great legend about the spirit of the robber Stepan Razin, trapped in a cliff. Only autocracy and strict laws keep the rebel spirit of the Russian people in that wall. You want reforms? A constitution? Then the cliff will split open and the wild man will come out with a bludgeon into the boundless Russian field. At liberty, our wild man who has not known liberty, is frightening…he will destroy the world around him…and then himself…. Things are simple with a European, it is all in his face. He hates you, you can see it, he loves you, you see that, too. Our muzhik will greet you and then, with the same kind face, grab you by the throat and choke you to death, after which he’ll cross himself.”
Pobedonostsev dreamed of freezing Russia in order to save it. But for that, he needed a leader. When the tsar appointed him tutor of the new heir, Alexander, after the death of Niks, Pobedonostsev said, “I will bring him to the other pole.” And he did.
At the Anichkov Palace, where the heir resided, nothing had changed since the days of Catherine the Great. It was winter, and the conservatory was lit by the cold low sun. Inside the conservatory were marble statues, an Italian fountain with gurgling water, and evergreen trees. Outside there was snow. Anichkov Palace had been the residence for Sasha’s grandfather and father when they were crown princes. His brother Niks should have lived here. But Niks was in the grave, in the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, and the waters of the Neva had probably seeped into the coffin by now. Instead of handsome Niks, he lived here: His Imperial Highness Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich. He was thirty-six, almost the age when his father became tsar.
After February 5, Pobedonostsev came to see him at Anichkov Palace almost daily. Dmitri Milyutin laughingly called Pobedonostsev “the nymph Egeria of Anichkov Palace.” The nymph had counseled a Roman king in law. Of course, there was nothing nymphlike about the skeletal and tall Pobedonostsev. The gigantic heir was so fat he could not see his own boots because of his belly.
Count Witte, the most famous minister of the future tsar’s government, left an intellectual portrait of him: “Of a totally ordinary mind, perhaps even a below average mind, with below average abilities, and a below average education.” The piercingly brilliant Pobedonostsev had no difficulty in “bringing him to another pole,” turning the tsarevich into an embodiment of the National Idea, a colossus of unwavering autocracy.
The heir was best suited for this role. That direct descendant of a Holstein prince (Emperor Peter III) and an Anhalt-Zerb Princess (Catherine II), who thanks to the efforts of so many German princesses had 99 percent German blood, had a very Russian appearance. “He looked like a big Russian muzhik…a sheepskin jacket, long coat, and bast shoes would have suited him; in manner, he was more or less bear-like,” Witte continued.
The tsarevich knew this and he adored everything Russian. His habits were those of a middle-class landowner. He liked to drink and could hold his liquor. He was as anti-Semitic as many Russian landowners. He acknowledged his own limitations and respected intelligent people, so he obeyed Pobedonostsev. But his real comrade was Adjutant General Petr Cherevin, who was the deputy of the chief of the Third Department. Of medium height, neckless, and with the face of a bloodhound, the general was at heart a servant, a batman. He adored Alexander, the next tsar, the real tsar. And even though he owed his career to Alexander II, he considered him a false tsar, a Western tsar. In general, the world was divided into two categories for Cherevin: On one side were the heir and Cherevin who served him, and on the other “various scum.”
He loved sharing the heir’s simple pleasures, fishing, hunting, and drinking. The tsarevna did not approve of the last amusement and tirelessly fought against it. But Cherevin came up with a solution: He had boots made with very wide tops and a pocket for a flat flask that could hold a bottle of cognac. He later recalled, “Maria Alexandrovna was near us and we sat quietly, such nice boys. The minute she moved away, we’d give each other a look—one, two, three!—we’d pull out the flasks, suck on them, and then look innocent again. We used to call it mother of invention.”
They kept up the game even when the heir became tsar.
At home, the tsarevich was nice, simple, kind, and cozy, very moralistic and religious. He had a “wonderful heart, good humor, and fairness,” according to Witte. An excellent family man and monogamous, he hated infidelity and struck out against it, often in a childish way. He never missed an opportunity to tug on the skirts of the mannish suit worn by his aunt Masha, princess of Leichtenberg, who was secretly married to Stroganov. And then he would apologize innocently.
He could not bear his father’s affair with Princess Dolgorukaya.
The heir’s most dangerous trait was his habit of developing crushes. First he adored his brother Niks and was under his influence, then it was his wife. Now it was Pobedonostsev who influenced him. The tsarevna supported this attachment. The presence of the tsar’s favorite in the Winter Palace, her illegitimate children, as well as the dying empress, and the threat of a marriage between the tsar and Dolgorukaya after the empress’s death, hung over the tsarevich and tsarevna. She was happy when Pobedonostsev began gathering the party that Grand Duke Konstantin called retrograde around the heir. It should have been called the nationalist opposition.
Here are a few of the postulates Pobedonostsev instilled in the heir and that the nationalist opposition espoused. They are not forgotten in Russia even now.
“A constitution and parliament are the great lie of our times.”
“The great truth is the autocracy of tsars.”
“Old institutions, old proverbs, old customs are great and the people must value them as the Ark of their ancestors’ covenant.”
“Elections are merely an art with its own strategy and tactics, like the art of war. The crowd listens to whoever shouts loudest and who is best at pretending through banality and flattery to suit the concepts and inclinations popular in the masses. In theory, the voter gives his vote to the candidate because he knows him and trusts him, whereas in practice…he does not know him at all, but the voter is told about him in speeches and shouts from the interested party.”
“The winner of an election is, as a rule, the favorite of the well-organized minority, while the majority remains impotent.”
The nationalist party was supposed to protect the rights of the future real Russian tsar, Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich. All the opponents of reform were part of it. In the late 1870s, General P. A. Fadeyev and Adjutant General I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov wrote a manifesto of the counter-reformers. It was a book called Letters on the Contemporary State of Russia. It juxtaposed “living popular autocracy” to Western constitutions: “The tsar must be an autocratic tsar and not the head of the executive branch.” It criticized the “unproportionately large bureaucratic mechanism, infected with nihilism” and called for the “restitution of pre-Petrine government forms.”
The heir brought the manuscript to his father, and the emperor permitted it to be published, but only abroad.
Opposition was growing. People of passionate conviction took part in the constant meetings at Anichkov Palace, including such ideologues of nationalism as Prince Meshchersky and the columnist Katkov, who promoted the idea of the Great Slavic Empire. At the head of this union of the most conservative elements stood the heir to the throne. But the power behind him was Konstantin Pobedonostsev.
They declared themselves to be the party that protected the foundations of society, the party of order. More and more people with power joined their ranks. Thus began the battle between Anichkov Palace and the Winter Palace. All the officials of St. Petersburg knew about it. That is why Suvorin would not have rushed off to report his suspicions about a bomb at the Winter Palace. His newspaper was the voice of the retrogrades. He would not try to save the tsar, about whom Pobedonostsev had said, “God’s fates have sent him to the misfortune of Russia.”
The liberals were against the emperor because the reforms had stopped and the retrogrades were against him because there had been reforms. But these were politicians, leaders of public opinion. What about the ordinary people, what did they think? They were unhappy, too. “The basic underpinning of that dissatisfaction was obvious: the general economic downturn with individual artificial exceptions,” wrote the contemporary historian Klyuchevsky.
The half-measures of the reforms, and particularly the unfinished agrarian reform, coupled with robber-baron capitalism, had done their work. There appeared “the impoverishment of the masses and general dissatisfaction” that always accompanied Russian reforms. Against the background of this impoverishment, Klyuchevsky continued, “the persistent work of the old guard continued.” The retrograde party tried to persuade the public that all the ills were due to the reforms and that the only way out was back to Muscovite Russia, the reign of Nicholas, and autocracy. They successfully insisted on the favorite Russian contradiction: Forward means going back.
“As a result, the apathy of the days of Nicholas I ceded to general grumbling” and “wan docility to fate was replaced by malicious rejection of the existing order,” wrote Klyuchevsky. War Minister Milyutin wrote in his dairy: “No one supports the government now.”
Fedor Dostoevsky described the situation in Russia as “vacillating on the brink.”
Right after the bomb, the emperor called in the leaders of the military and security ministries. He wanted proposals, but they sat in total confusion and said nothing.
“Saw generals Drenteln and Gurko. Both behave as if they are observers of what is going on. Yet one is chief of gendarmes and the other governor general and commander of the troops! Halfwits!” recorded Valuyev in his diary on February 6.
Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, Kostya, became a frequent visitor at the Winter Palace. The camarilla knew how dangerous his influence could be. An instant rumor spread through the court that he was behind the terrorism. No wonder he was out of St. Petersburg when the bomb went off in the palace. Mme Bogdanovich recorded, “There is always something to take Konstantin Nikolayevich from St. Petersburg whenever something happens.”
From a denunciation to the Third Department: “Protect the tsar from Konstantin’s intrigues, the rebels are in his hands, a screen and weapon for his aims.” All this talk was passed on to the tsar.
In the meantime, the carriage bearing the desiccated Pobedonostsev pulled up at Anichkov Palace every day. He spent time with the heir in his study, after which the tsarevich would go to the Winter Palace. “I see Father every evening,” he wrote in his diary. Anichkov Palace had begun its campaign.
On February 8, the tsar convened a big meeting. The halfwit ministers were still stunned, but the heir spoke loudly. He spoke as one who had the right and power, and Alexander could hear Pobedonostsev in his speech.
He mocked the idea of a constitution, “which someone might propose now. Even in Western states constitutions bring disaster. I asked their ministers in Denmark, and they all complained that because of parliamentary blowhards they cannot accomplish a single beneficial measure. In my opinion, we need to be thinking not about constitutional ideas but something completely different.”
The heir continued: “My idea is very simple. I find that we are in an almost impossible position now. There is no unity in the administration; everyone is going in different direction, not thinking about a common connection.” He said there was a war going on. A war with the barbarians. A la guerre, comme à la guerre. They needed a supreme commander who could unite all power in his hands. They needed a dictator who could deal with the homeland’s enemies.
The tsarevich recalled how after the first attempt on the emperor’s life in 1866, General Muravyev (the Hangman) was given extraordinary powers, and he dealt with the nihilists.
The ministers were silent. But the tsar spoke. He did not agree. They must continue thinking. Everyone left in their original confusion. “This morning there was a lengthy but almost resultless conference with the tsar…. The tsarevich, ministers—military, court, internal affairs, chief of gendarmes, and me,” recorded Interior Minister Valuyev in his diary on February 8.
But that evening a letter from the heir was delivered to the Winter Palace. Full of filial gratitude for being allowed to speak, Sasha stubbornly proposed forming a punitive commission. It was not hard to guess who had dictated the letter to him.
The decisive night fell. It’s unlikely that the emperor got any sleep. It was a miserable night in the life of rulers—when you have to tell yourself what you least want to hear. The reprisals did not work. The fourteen executions, the trials, the exile—nothing came of it. It had not worked. Freedom below and autocracy above was not feasible. It was the path to perdition. There was only one way out, and that was to create harmony. Freedom below and above. They needed reform above, reform of the regime. But that would be a turn toward a constitution. Otherwise nothing would work. Kostya was right when he repeated the words of Count Geiden. That liberal bureaucrat wrote: “Autocracy today is the path to revolution. The only possibility of preserving the monarchy is to limit it.”
Alexander had to make a decision. It is hard to betray your father’s testament, but he had to reject the tight fist holding Russia. That meant overcoming the opposition of the halfwits that included the court, the ministers, his son—all of whom expected more reprisals, his father’s fist. But that was the usual fate of a great tsar in Russia. The writer Pososhkov put it brilliantly in the sixteenth century: “When it’s uphill, the tsar has to drag ten himself. Downhill, there are millions.”
Alexander came up with a way, a devious, eastern path. He needed someone to execute it. A devious, clever man, not tied to the court. He was surrounded by confused halfwits. Yet sometimes, the right man appears in a key historical moment, and there was such a man available. His name came to Alexander that night.
The next morning all the ministers were recalled to the Winter Palace. Once again they discussed what to do, and once again, there were more vague speeches, to which the tsar listened attentively. And then to the astonishment of the rest, the emperor announced that he was going to do what he had rejected the day before: He was establishing a Supreme Administrative Commission for the War on Sedition. It would have extraordinary powers, and the chairman would have power that only sovereigns had in Russia. All the highest institutions in the state, including the Third Department and the Gendarme Corps, would be responsible to him.
Thus, a dictator was being appointed. They all believed that Alexander had given up and was accepting the heir’s proposal. They froze in anticipation of the dictator’s name. They were stunned when they heard it: General Count Loris-Melikov.
He was Armenian, one of the most brilliant generals of the Balkan war. But he had fought in the periphery, in the Caucasus, so that he was basically unknown in St. Petersburg.
From Valuyev’s diary: “February 9: In the morning another command to be at the palace. A change in the tsar’s views (as Count Adlerberg surmises, as a result of yesterday’s letter from the tsarevich); a Supreme Commission is being established here. To be headed by Count Loris-Melikov. The tsar’s will was announced unexpectedly for everyone. The unexpected impression was expressed on every face.”
The members of the Supreme Administrative Commission were senators, generals, and officials of all rank responsible for preserving order. Among them were two people very close to the heir—member of the State Council Senator Pobedonostsev and Deputy Chief of the Third Department Major General Cherevin. Everyone at the first meeting decided that the unknown General Loris-Melikov was merely a pseudonym and that the heir would be in charge.
Even the simple heir thought so. On February he wrote in his diary, “Today Count Loris-Melikov took on his new position; may God grant him success, strengthen and guide him!” The tsarevich was triumphant.
Now everyone in St. Petersburg was interested in the Armenian who did not even keep a house in the capital. He had to rent an apartment on aristocratic Bolshaya Morskaya Street.
Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov, age fifty-six, came from the Armenian aristocracy; that is, he did not belong in any way to the St. Petersburg elite. He was an outsider. He had served thirty years in the Caucasus, fighting in 180 battles with the mountain tribes and Turks. He was courageous and cunning. He handled his soldiers gently and cruelly, as needed, earning the nickname “the Fox Tail and the Wolf Jaw.” But Loris-Melikov’s outstanding trait, which distinguished him from other generals, was a gift for administration. He managed not only his army but the civilian population.
The tsar remembered how during the war Loris-Melikov not only took the impregnable forts of Ardagan and Kars but also managed the impossible. During military action he persuaded the local populace to accept Russian chits instead of gold rubles. He used them for the war, saving a lot of gold. Once peace was established, he was made a count and continued his dangerous exploits. He dealt successfully with an outbreak of plague in Astrakhan Province, and even more amazingly, returned unspent funds to the treasury—a totally unexpected gesture in Russia.
During the war on terror, Loris-Melikov had been appointed governor general of Kharkov. He ruled the province harshly but without excess. He used repression, but he also made concessions to public opinion. As a result, he was the only military governor general to have ended terrorism in his province.