The two-faced Janus was now looking only forward. Tsar Alexander II was great once again, he was his former self, just as in the days when he emancipated the serfs. But this time there was much more maneuvering: He had to soothe his heir and deceive the opposition rallied around the tsarevich and the court.
The tsar would be behind all the actions of Loris-Melikov. At first Loris-Melikov wagged his fox tail. In those sweet days, the heir, who hated the liberal bureaucracy of St. Petersburg, was delighted by the provincial war general who seemed prepared to follow his (or rather Pobedonostsev’s) every instruction.
The general did not tire of assuring him: “From the first day of my appointment as head of the Supreme Administrative Commission,” he wrote flatteringly to the tsarevich, “I vowed to act only in the same direction with High Highness, finding that the success of the work entrusted to me and the calming of the homeland depend on it.”
The young nihilists also believed in Loris-Melikov’s total subordination. One of them decided to act, soon after his appointment. It was February 20, the very day that Dostoevsky had his conversation with Suvorin, after 2:00 P.M. Two gendarmes were at the entrance to the count’s house and a policeman was patrolling nearby. Nevertheless, and despite the recent acts of terrorism, none of the guards paid attention to the suspicious “bedraggled and dirty young man” (as Novoye Vremya described him) hanging around the building. Loris-Melikov’s carriage pulled up, with Cossacks on horseback. The count got out, and the young man rushed toward him. He pulled out a pistol from his coat and shot.
The bullet grazed the count’s overcoat, tearing the coat and his uniform. Expecting a second shot, the count fell to the ground and just as quickly jumped up. Before the eyes of the stunned guards, he attacked the shooter and knocked him down. The Cossacks helped, and the bold count handed over his attacker.
St. Petersburg applauded a representative of the regime for the first time in quite a while. The public liked his bravery. But the general did note the strange blindness of the guards who had not noticed the lurking terrorist. “They were saluting instead of grabbing the villain and noticing others in the vicinity,” wrote Novoye Vremya on February 22. The shooter was Ippolit Mlodetsky, a petty bourgeois Jew from the town of Slutsk in Minsk Province. It was later determined that Mlodetsky acted on his own, without sanction from the People’s Will. But at the time, naturally, everyone assumed the mighty EC was involved. The foreign newspapers wrote about the imminent fall of the dynasty.
Loris-Melikov ordered Mlodetsky hanged immediately, without a trial, the way it is done in war. But the emperor commanded him to follow the law. New military legislation required everything completed within twenty-four hours. The investigation was completed that evening, the trial was in the morning, and Mlodetsky was taken to the gibbet later that morning.
The writer Vsevolod Garshin, who had fought as a volunteer in the Balkan War, came to see Loris-Melikov right after the attempt. To the general’s surprise, Garshin begged him to forgive Mlodetsky, saying that his forgiveness would “save everything.” The general could not understand that reasoning.
Mlodetsky was executed on Semenovsky Square. It was a wet, sleety February. Fedor Dostoevsky came to watch the execution. The writer was planning a novel about a young terrorist who dies in the noose and he could not miss this. Looking at Mlodetsky as he awaited his death, he thought of another young man who faced death on that very square. He had loved life so much, and he had consoled another of the condemned men with the words, “We will be together with Christ.”
Kostya’s second son, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (who published poetry under the pseudonym K.R.) later spoke with Dostoevsky and recorded their conversation in his diary: “Dostoevsky went to Mlodetsky’s execution. Perhaps he wanted to relive his own impressions…Mlodetsky looked around and seemed indifferent. Dostoevsky explained that at such a moment a person tries to chase away thoughts of death and he recalls mostly happy pictures, and he is transported to a garden of life, filled with springtime and sunshine. But the closer it gets to the end, the more persistent and tormenting is the idea of inexorable death. The coming pain and suffering are not frightening: what is terrifying is the transition to another, unknown form.”
The young Dostoevsky had gotten a reprieve. This time, there was no pardon: The drumming began, Mlodetsky was dressed for the execution, and the executioner, with a friendly arm around his shoulders, led him to the noose dangling in the wind.
The emperor made this notation: “Mlodetsky was executed. Everything is in order.”
As the anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs, February 19, approached, crazy rumors spread like wildfire, and people fled the city. It passed peacefully. Yet, something strange did happen. Loris-Melikov appealed to the residents of the capital. The government had decided to trade polemics with the revolutionaries. “Preaching freedom, they are trying by threats and anonymous letters to oppress the freedom of those who are performing their duty. Fighting for the principles of their personal inviolability, they stoop to murder by ambush.” The government called “for help from all strata of the Russian people for a united front in the effort to uproot evil.”
The regime was turning for the first time to support from the public, which the autocrats had never considered. The count explained tirelessly: The Supreme Commission is a dictatorship, but it was a dictator ship of good, of reason and law. The skeptics referred to the count’s ideas ironically as the “dictatorship of the heart.”
During the first two months of the work of the Supreme Administrative Commission, Loris-Melikov met several times a week with the heir. They had very amiable relations and corresponded continually. On February 21, 1880, the heir wrote. “Gracious Count, if you are not too busy and if it is possible, I ask you to drop by to see me at 8:30 this evening—I would like to speak with you.”
Their meeting was very successful. That same night, on the 21st, the heir noted in his diary that he and Loris-Melikov “talked over an hour about the current situation and what to do.”
The Loris-Melikov archive has many notes from the heir with the same invitation, to drop by. Their number increased as Loris-Melikov started visiting less frequently, and the heir had to send more reminders. On February 27 the heir wrote, “I haven’t seen or talked with you in a long time. If you are busy and don’t have time, please, don’t be shy, I can set another day.” He wanted to see the count because Loris-Melikov was preparing a report to the tsar with a proposed program of action. In April 1880 the report—“the plan of government actions that should put an end to the turmoil and promote bringing order in the Russian state”—was ready.
To the heir’s joy, Loris-Melikov called “untimely” and “harmful” the “proposals to create national representation in forms borrowed from the West” (that is, a constitution). The heir wrote to Loris-Melikov on April 12, 1880: “Now we can go forward boldly and calmly…implement your program for the fortune of our beloved homeland and the misfortune of the Messrs. ministers, who will probably be very upset by the program…the hell with them!”
But the program upset not only the ministers. To the heir’s great surprise, Pobedonostsev did not like it, either. Pobedonostsev sadly noted numerous points that Loris-Melikov made in his report. For instance, the count proposed liquidating the Third Department, which was loyal to the heir and of which one of the main administrators, Cherevin, was fanatically loyal to the tsarevich. (The files of the Third Department were transferred to the Ministry of the Interior, to form a special Police Department.)
Pobedonostsev knew that the Third Department was more than an institution, it was a symbol of the era of Nicholas I, the era of true autocracy and national fear. The simple-minded heir, intoxicated by the count’s flattery, did not understand. The fox tail was doing its work.
There were many points in the program that made Pobedonostsev wary. For instance, it spoke of a “new management of the periodic press, which has an influence here that is not comparable to Western Europe, where the press is merely the expression of public opinion, whereas in Russia the press forms it.” Other proposals included giving rights to sects, a review of the passport system, an easing of peasant migration, and so on. Pobedonostsev felt this was a very dangerous beginning.
The policies implemented by Loris-Melikov bore fruit right away. February ended in peace; so did March. April came, and there were still no attacks from the People’s Will. Even more important, the liberal intelligentsia was changing its attitude toward both the terrorists and the regime. Success!
But the more successful Loris-Melikov was, the more he forgot his original intentions, which had pleased the tsarevich so much. Before shutting down the Third Department, Loris-Melikov did a review of the institution hated by liberals. As a result many victims of the secret police were freed from surveillance, returned from exile, and even from abroad.
The tsar was behind all of Loris-Melikov’s actions. The emperor did not forget about nods in the direction of the retrogrades. He commanded Loris-Melikov to appoint Pobedonostsev chief procurator of the Holy Synod.
The tsar had felt a tangible drop in the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. The recent trip of the Protestant Evangelical missionary Granville Waldegrave (Lord Radstock) was proof of that. The tall middle-aged Englishman, with large forehead, tufts of blond hair around his mostly bald head, and short red side-whiskers, dressed in a dull gray suit, had created a furor in the Orthodox capital. He inspired faith. After his sermons, rich men gave away their fortunes and donated thousands to charity. He was invited to every fashionable salon. Four dozen of the most aristocratic homes opened their doors to him. Count Alexei Bobrinsky, minister of transport, a man from the tsar’s inner circle, and Prince Vassily Pashkov, a well-known millionaire, became Protestant.
“I found the Lord!” Bobrinsky told the tsar. Alexander thought this a dangerous symptom. The tsar believed that Orthodoxy was the main bastion of Russia’s tsars, and he decided to strengthen the Church with Pobedonostsev, a wise and conservative man. He also hoped that the problems of the Church would distract Pobedonostsev from fighting reforms.
It was time to fight, because the tsar had landed a palpable blow. In late April, Loris-Melikov forced into retirement a living symbol of the retrograde movement, an active member of the Anichkov Palace party, Minister of Education Count Dmitri Tolstoy. He exemplified the official as slave. Hating the tsar’s reforms, he still kissed his hand, the only minister to do so. A fervent opponent of emancipating the serfs, who whipped his serfs personally and forced serf girls into marriage and sometimes into his bed, Dmitri Tolstoy espoused the most liberal ideals in the presence of the tsar. Appointed head of education after the first attempt on Alexander’s life, he invented a system that would lead young people away from dangerous modern ideas. It called for a predominantly classical education, with high school students focusing on dead languages (Latin and Ancient Greek) and memorizing long ancient works.
At long last, the round little man on stubby legs, greedy and cruel, fell. The liberals were thrilled. They called it the third emancipation: First the tsar freed the peasants from their masters, then the Bulgarians from the Turks, and now education from Tolstoy. Even an underground leaflet of the People’s Will spoke favorably of Tolstoy’s firing.
Loris-Melikov worked well with the press, and he set up a special commission to explore the repeal of censorship. But the press continued its favorite activity—berating the regime. Loris-Melikov was accused of breaking promises and making empty promises, of hypocrisy. When he could not stand the attacks anymore he acted in accordance with a discerning understanding of the Russian character. He did not shut down the papers, he did not fine them, the way his predecessors had. Instead, he called in the editors of the top newspapers, and waving his fox tail, he made a speech about the significance and might of the Russian press, the opinion-maker, and how he wanted to work in conjunction with it. After which he asked them not to rush the regime and not to rile the already aggravated public. He told them his long-range plans and listened to their opinions.
For once, the regime was taking advice from the press instead of persecuting it. The omnipotent minister of the autocrat asked for help and was extremely frank. He told them the most bitter truth: At present Russia could not have anything like a European parliament. Nevertheless, the editors liked him, because he did what Russians value most: He showed respect. The tone of the liberal press changed, the newspapers became moderate, and the opposition relaxed, because there would be no constitution.
The Anichkov Palace finally became upset when Loris-Melikov started flirting with the most volatile part of society, its youth. The students saw all their demands met: the right to organize mutual aid associations, to form literary and scholarly clubs, to have reading rooms and meetings. Of course, the students still wanted to rebel; they had gotten used to the thrill.
When the executor of these reforms, the new minister of education Andrei Saburov, showed up at the auditorium of St. Petersburg University, he heard a passionate antigovernment speech that called him “lying and vile.” Leaflets fell from the balcony onto his head. During the confusion, a student rushed up to the poor minister and slapped him.
The next day the students had come to their senses and repented. At a noisy meeting where they were selecting guests for their university ball, they chose Minister Saburov and Count Loris-Melikov to head the list. Other names on the list included the terrorist Vera Zasulich, and People’s Will member Gartman and the Pole Berezovski, who both had tried to kill the tsar.
No one persecuted them for that. The terrorist Rusakov wrote in a letter found by the police: “Count Loris-Melikov gives us all forms of freedom; this is not life, but heaven.”
Alexander and Loris-Melikov had tamed Russia. The murderous attacks ceased. It was quiet.
Expressing the sentiments of the opposition, Pobedonostsev wrote to Ekaterina Tyutcheva in Moscow. “Things have quieted down thanks to him, but we’ll see for how long…. He raises up and releases forces that will be difficult to handle. His recipe is simple…the students are rebelling, let’s give them freedom and self-regulation. The press is going mad—free it!” He predicted: “These tricks will cost Russia dearly. O, woe!” And he warned: “The time will come when the champions of the healthy forces of truth and national life find themselves in opposition to the government. I fear that soon I will find myself in that situation. I expect great ordeals for myself from that. I cannot be silent.”
Pobedonostsev could not be silent, and so he cursed. But would he stop at that? Had the time come for him to act?
The tsar’s second family life was still a secret. An open secret, naturally. But this secret de Polichinelle continued romantically. Wherever he was, Katya and children moved nearby.
For instance, when he moved to one of his residences outside the city, Peterhof or Tsarskoye Selo, he would go out for a drive in a carriage with his children, his daughter and sons. The carriage would stop in the park and he would get out for a walk. At an agreed-upon meeting place in the park, his adjutant waited with a horse. “And the emperor rides in the direction known well to the public…. The second half of the walk ends in the society of his secret friend. That maneuver was repeated daily,” wrote lady-in-waiting Tolstaya.
It was a very risky maneuver in view of the many attempts on his life, but love was stronger than fear. More often, a procession would appear on the palace grounds—a lady with children, accompanied by a male servant. They were brought through a hidden door into the palace. He could not exist without her and the children.
The prayer of one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting was understandable: “Lord, protect our empress, because as soon as her eyes are closed, the tsar will marry the odalisque!”
The prayer was refused. “Translucent, ethereal—there seemed nothing earthly left to her. No one could look at her without tears,” remembered lady-in-waiting Alexandra Tolstaya. It hurt him to see her “all-forgiving” (accusing) eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t mention the empress to me, it hurts,” he asked his brother Kostya.
She did not get out of bed or leave her apartment. In bed, the empress brought her affairs into order and dictated her last letters and her will to her ladies-in-waiting. Not long before her death, she thought of a poor Englishwoman she had been aiding for many years and “sent her money in an envelope, with difficulty addressing it herself with trembling hand: ‘For Miss Lundy from a patient,’” Tolstaya wrote.
In her will she asked to be buried in a simple white dress without the royal crown. “I also wish, if it is possible, to have no autopsy.” Most of the time, she slept. She also began having hallucinations, seeing beloved faces and talking to them. She would realize that it was her imagination and stop.
On the night of May 21, the tsar wanted to go to Tsarskoye Selo, where Katya and the children were living. He visited the empress and her condition worried him. He spoke with Dr. Botkin, wondering whether he should stay in town. “The revered Botkin declared with the confidence typical of doctors that he vouched for the tsaritsa’s life for that night…. However, it was during that night that the angel of death came for her very quietly, while the palace slept…. A solitary death was the final chord in a life so far from vanity and earthly fame,” wrote Tolstaya.
No one was with her when she died. Her chamber lady Makushina came in at eight and found the empress. The emperor was informed that she had died quietly, without pain, in her sleep.
In the morning War Minister Milyutin came for his daily report to Alexander in Tsarskoye Selo. He learned that the tsar had just been told of the empress’s death and had left for St. Petersburg by special train.
“I hurried back to town, where I was commanded to come to the Winter Palace. It was after eleven when I entered with my report. The tsar was sad and nervous, but he had the patience to listen to my usual report.”
During his conference, Makushina came in “with various rings and other pieces of jewelry that the empress usually wore. The tsar went through them himself and decided which to place on the corpse and which he wanted to keep as mementos.”
After her death, besides her will, they found just one letter, addressed to the tsar and written long ago. She had saved it. In it, she thanked Alexander for her happy life with him.
Mourning was declared in St. Petersburg. While the members of the Romanov family waited to see Alexander’s next steps, there was agitation in Moscow—but for another reason. The long-anticipated unveiling of a monument to Pushkin approached, and the organizers feared that the ceremonies and festivities would have to be postponed because of the mourning. In the end, the mourning period was not long or strict (for which there were good reasons), and the tsar permitted the festivities in Moscow.
Besides writers, professors, and representatives of the press, ambassadors from almost every public organization in the country, including choral societies, came to Moscow. There were numerous deputations with church banners and wreaths, and the halls were filled with crowds of admirers of the famous authors participating in the events.
The political spring that began with the appointment of Loris-Melikov had reinvigorated society, and the Pushkin festivities were a sign of that awakening. The occasion took three days. On the third, final day, Fedor Dostoevsky gave a speech about Pushkin. It remains one of the greatest and loveliest legends in the history of Russian literature.
Reading the speech today is not the same as experiencing what occurred in the auditorium. “When he finished his speech, there was a moment of silence, and then, like a dam bursting, came unprecedented elation. Applause, shouts, banging of chairs—it all blended into one sound. Many wept, turning to strangers with exclamations and greetings; many rushed to the stage, where lay a young man who had passed out from the overwhelming emotions he experienced. Almost everyone was in a state that if the orator had called on them, they would have followed him anywhere. This must have been the effect Savoranola had on crowds in the distant past.”
The reminiscences of all witnesses are the same: “When he concluded, something incredible began…there wasn’t a person who wasn’t clapping, banging, or shouting ‘bravo’ in a frenzy…women waved their hankies hysterically…people jumped up on chairs, the better to shout and wave their kerchiefs from there…hats and top hats flew into the air. People embraced universally. A young man in ecstasy rushed to Dostoevsky on the stage and fell in a nervous faint…. Then severalcharming college girls came out with a huge laurel wreath…God knows where they got it.”
“After Dostoevsky the head of the Moscow Slavophiles, Ivan Sergeyevich Aksakov, was supposed to speak. But he…announced that he was in no shape to speak after Fedor Mikhailovich.”
What created this triumph? First, it was Dostoevsky himself, “a hypnotic man.” He came out to speak, with rounded shoulders, not very tall, head bent, tired eyes, hesitant gestures, and quiet voice. His face was unattractive and sickly pale, with a sparse reddish beard. The light chestnut hair with a reddish cast was thin and soft, carefully slicked back with pomade.
He began dryly, as if wound tight, with no movements, not a single gesture; only his thin, bloodless lips moved nervously when he spoke. But gradually, he was completely transformed. His small light brown eyes expanded and glowed. His arm moved imperiously. The audience, entranced by the hypnotic power of his words, could not pull away from those eyes, from the gesturing hand of the prophet.
The magnificent moment of that speech is not all that has vanished. The other component of his outstanding success is also gone—the burning topicality of the speech. It was desperately needed by the society divided by enmity; it was a uniting speech, so rarely popular in Russia. Speaking about Pushkin, Dostoevsky naturally spoke of his own times. He addressed a crazed Russia vacillating at the brink. He spoke of the tragedy of Aleko, the protagonist of Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies, the proud murderer who dreamed of freedom and who (as Dostoevsky wrote in Diary of a Writer) “needed universal happiness…he would not accept anything less.” The audience knew that he was addressing other murderers who also believed that they were killing for the sake of freedom and who also dreamed of universal happiness.
He entreated them: “Humble yourself, proud man, and only then will you be free!” “Labor, idler!” He addressed those wretches who had forgotten what productive labor was, devoting their talents and youth to revenge and killing.
“These young wastrels who every day eat bread made with another’s labor, do they have the right to any pride? If you take any of those possessed people and ask them what, finally, are their contributions to society, what tangible efforts permit them to live this way, there will be none. The great majority of them are parasites or semiparasites,” wrote a contemporary meanly about the young terrorists.
But that was the point: In Dostoevsky’s speech there was no anger. No reproach. Only love for the lost, only one fervent prayer—to repent, to unite, and love one another.
With this love he appealed to the two ever-hostile camps, the Westernizers and Slavophiles, who called their war “holy.” He told them there was no point in fighting each other, since there were no contradictions in their views. “‘We must be Russian and be proud of it,’ the Slavophiles say. But to become a true Russian, you must be the brother of all men…for the destiny of the Russian is indubitably European, universal, as the Westernizers dream…. Oh, the nations of Europe, they do not even know how dear they are to us!”
Uniting all in love, forgiveness, and humility before God was what the writer begged Russia to do. This stunned the audience, used to endless arguments, debates, and malice. The Pushkin speech was Dostoevsky’s anointment as a prophet in the eyes of Russians.
At the end of the year, Pobedonostsev tried to bring Dostoevsky into the Anichkov Palace party. He arranged a meeting of the writer with the tsarevich and tsarevna.
On December 16, 1880, Dostoevsky came to the palace. While there, Dostoevsky consistently violated all the rules of court etiquette. He stood whenever he wanted, he spoke first, and in departure he turned his back on the tsarevich, instead of backing out of his presence. “This is probably the only instance in the life of the future Alexander III that he was treated like an ordinary mortal,” Dostoevsky’s daughter wrote.
It’s unlikely that this “inner freedom” would have pleased the heir. And it’s unlikely that Dostoevsky did not know that. The writer remembered the words of his beloved Pushkin: “Spare us more than all sorrows the master’s wrath and the master’s love.” A wild steed cannot live in a political enclosure. It was impossible for free thought. It was impossible for the writer who wrote, “I have only one moral model—Christ.”
The denouement of Alexander’s private intrigues came sooner than expected in St. Petersburg. The tsar waited until after the memorial services on the fortieth day after the empress’s death and then he summoned Adlerberg. The minister of the court heard what he had feared. The tsar announced that he had decided to marry Katya. The games between the tsar and the minister, the secret of Polichinelle, were over.
Adlerberg tried to persuade him against it: The official year of mourning had only begun, this was a challenge to the Romanov family, to religion, to custom. The response was, “I am the sovereign and the only judge of my actions.” The tsar ordered him to organize the wedding and to take part in the ceremony.
He was in a hurry to wed. He valued every day he lived without an assassination attempt. What if they killed him or he died on his own? Katya and the children would be left with nothing.
One romantic element remained: They married in secret.
The wedding took place on July 6, 1880, at 3:00 P.M. in Tsarskoye Selo. He led the bride into the room where a field altar had been set up. The senior priest of the Winter Palace, Father Ksenofont Yakovlevich Nikolsky, officiated. There were only a few people present, the tsar’s closest associates, Adlerberg and two adjutant generals, Eduard Baranov and Alexander Ryleev. They held the wedding crowns over the heads of the bride and groom during the ceremony.
The guests were uncomfortable, but the tsar was in excellent spirits, joking and clearly happy. He wore the pale blue Hussars uniform and she a formal wedding gown.
The witnesses signed the marriage certificate: “On the sixth of July eighteen hundred eighty, at three o’clock in the afternoon, in the field church of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace, His Imperial Majesty of All Russia Alexander Nikolayevich deigned to enter a second time into a legal marriage with lady-in-waiting Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya. We, the undersigned, were witnesses to the marriage and have written this certificate and confirm it with our signatures, July 6, 1880.”
It was signed: “Adjutant General Count Alexander Vladimirovich Adlerberg. Adjutant General Eduard Trofimovich Baranov. Adjutant General Alexander Mikhailovich Ryleev.”
After the ceremony, the tsar invited his wife for a carriage ride. The weather was perfect and he felt at peace. Now he did not have to worry about the future.
By the next morning, of course, the court knew. The ladies-in-waiting of the late empress were stunned and angered. The witnesses had to justify their behavior by explaining they were commanded to do so. The news traveled instantly from Tsarskoye Selo to St. Petersburg. Mme Bogdanovich recorded her “profound indignation” in her diary. The general reaction was “the old emperor has immediately forgotten his poor wife and married a young debauched woman.”
The two-faced Janus didn’t get it, yet again. The despot Peter the Great could marry a cook and make her an empress—precisely because he was a despot. Alexander, who wanted to rule European-style, had to think about public perception all the time. But he had been brought up by his father, and he could not get used to the idea of public accountability.
That night she slept in the palace, in his bed, and he sat at his desk and finalized formalities. He signed the necessary decree: “To the Government Senate: Having entered a second time into a legal marriage, with Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya, we command her to be named Princess Yuryevskaya with the title Serene Princess. We command that the same name with the same title be given to our children: our son, Georgii, our daughters Olga and Ekaterina, and also to any others that might be born subsequently, and we confer upon them all the rights of legitimate children in accordance with art. 14 of the empire’s basic laws and art. 147 of the Statutes on the Imperial Family.
“Alexander.
“Tsarskoye Selo 6 July 1880.”
Their children, Georgii, Olga, and two-year-old Ekaterina, born in 1878, became serene princes. But according to the Statutes on the Imperial Family, “Children of a marriage between a person of the imperial family with a person without the appropriate qualifications, that is, not of royal or ruling family, do not have the right to the throne.” The rules for morganatic marriage were clear. That should have appeased the court and the heir.
But they all knew that this was an autocratic state and the laws were changed by the sovereigns. “There is no will but the tsar’s,” as General Cherevin, friend of the heir, liked to say.
The next morning Loris-Melikov was summoned to Tsarskoye Selo. Alexander informed the count of his new marriage and told him it had to be kept secret for now. He added, “I know how loyal you are to me. From now on you must be just as loyal to my wife and my children.” Then Alexander switched to current affairs. But after that, Katya, now the serene princess Yuryevskaya, was often present during their meetings. The count understood that the tsar was showing him that this was the future empress. The title of serene princess was only the first step. Wise Loris-Melikov sometimes consulted with her before his meetings with the tsar—he knew how much it pleased him.
The heir, who had been at a spa in Gapsal, Estonia, returned to St. Petersburg, where he was immediately told the “secret.” He was stunned. Deeply religious and monogamous, he never did understand his father’s sinful life, but now, for Alexander to marry before the mourning period was over was too much.
Three days later the emperor summoned his son to Tsarskoye Selo. He told him about his marriage and explained his reasoning. The heir found the reasons shameful. The autocrat of Russia was afraid of being killed by a band of villains he was unable to control. They had forced the divinely anointed ruler to violate church laws. They were controlling his actions.
The heir was told that the marriage would be kept secret until the year’s mourning was over. And that Princess Yuryevskaya and her children naturally had no rights to the throne and that she would never overstep her modest role.
At their first meeting, the wife of the emperor, Serene Princess Yuryevskaya, kissed the hand of the tsarevna, as was required by the etiquette for morganatic spouses.
The summer of I88O passed tranquilly. August began, and there were still no attempts on his life. But there was trouble brewing at court and in the Romanov family. The grand duchesses, the wives of his brothers, were old women and they remained outraged by his marriage. Clearly they feared it would set a bad example. Their ladies-in-waiting and those of the late empress kept inventing terrible stories about “the odalisque.” They even managed to find that the great beauty wasn’t beautiful at all—and poorly brought up, at that.
Things got worse. Adlerberg told them that she dared to discuss state affairs with Loris-Melikov, and this gave rise to the rumor that would find its way into their memoirs and move into the works of many historians: The emperor had turned into a useless old man who was bossed by his young and stupid wife and the sly Armenian general.
The rumor grew stronger as it became more evident to the camarilla which way the emperor was leading the country. Princess Yuryevskaya was turned into a forerunner of Rasputin. Like Rasputin, she divided the Romanov family, and the opposition used her image to undermine the tsar’s prestige.
Alexander ignored the family rebellion because his main goal had been achieved. He stopped the country from going over the brink into the abyss. His decision to bank on reform had been justified. Loris-Melikov reported the joyous tidings: It was time to disband the Supreme Administrative Commission.
The news was announced on August 6. Russia was returning to normal life and Count Loris-Melikov was giving up his dictatorial powers. At the same time the main symbol of oppression of public life, the Third Department of His Majesty’s Chancellery, was being destroyed.
To replace it, the powerful Ministry of Internal Affairs was created, with a Police Department within it. The functions and personnel of the Third Department were moved there. Count Loris-Melikov was appointed as the new minister of internal affairs, of course, and he also became chief of the Gendarme Corps.
It was mid-August. The tsar was preparing to leave the city for his traditional vacation in the Crimea, in the Livadia Palace. Before leaving, he accomplished an extremely important separation of his son from the opposition. Loris-Melikov and the emperor met with the heir. Alexander knew that for all his stubbornness, the heir was a weakling, easily broken.
Loris-Melikov had the floor, and he explained to the tsarevich that reprisals only led to an increase in the influence of the revolutionaries, while the new policy had made the public turn toward the regime. The Fox Tail knew how to put things extremely simply, unlike the complex perorations of Pobedonostsev. The emperor was menacingly and significantly silent. That evening Loris-Melikov wrote to Mme Shebeko, Dolgorukaya’s dearest friend, “As far as I can judge, the report I made today to the heir did not make a poor impression on him. Thank the Lord!”
Loris-Melikov was too modest. The tsarevich had once again become the obedient heir, as had been his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. He was the executor of his father’s will.
Now Alexander could leave St. Petersburg to the tsarevich’s care. The emperor took Loris-Melikov with him. In Livadia they would work on the greatest transformation, the final goal. In blessedly gorgeous surroundings, far from the capital fraught with strife, he wanted to think through his most risky project. He wanted to make reality out of Count Geiden’s phrase: “To preserve autocracy you must limit it.” It was the lifelong dream of Kostya and the liberal bureaucrats.
On the morning of August 17, the emperor returned to St. Petersburg from Tsarskoye Selo, planning to leave for Livadia that evening. A carriage awaited him at the train station, and surrounded by an escort of Cossacks, the tsar set off for the Winter Palace. The usual journey took the imperial cavalcade over the Kamenny Bridge.
Certain young people had started boating frequently under that bridge. They included fat, round-faced Alexander Mikhailov (who after Kvyatkovsky’s arrest had become the sole leader of People’s Will), the tall and bearded Zhelyabov, who was head of the fighters, and the pleasant intellectual in pince-nez, the chief dynamiter Kibalchich. Mikhailov had come up with this plan. He felt pressured to act fast, because it was clear that Loris-Melikov was moving public opinion in favor of the regime. Terrorism was losing its popularity.
Kibalchich himself made the calculations: 250 pounds of dynamite were placed under the supports of the bridge. This would lift the tsar’s carriage into the air, along with the bridge itself. In waterproof rubber cushions, the dynamite had been lowered to the bottom of the river. The wires were brought out to the plank dock by the shore where women did laundry. There, the terrorists would join the wires of their latest gift for the tsar.
On August 17, the royal carriage approached the bridge, completely surrounded by the Cossack escort. The horses galloped, and the carriage and men on horseback seemed to fly over the bridge. There was no explosion.
This time the explanation was quite prosaic: One of the main team members had overslept. The terrorist Teterka had no watch, and he reached the bridge after the carriage had passed over it.
God had saved the tsar once again. If the gypsy’s prediction were to be believed, two attempts on his life stood between the tsar and his death.
Late in the evening of August 17, the imperial train left for the Crimea. Princess Yuryevskaya and the children were brought to the station. Since their marriage, she went everywhere with him, to Tsarskoye Selo and Peterhof. She told him that after the explosion on the train, she would not let him go alone. If he were to die, they would all die with him. Previously, she had traveled in a separate railroad car, and the officials accompanying the tsar pretended not to know who the lady was.
But now a tiny revolution occurred—the princess and children were escorted to the tsar’s car. She took the compartment that had been the empress’s. The retinue was flabbergasted. The marriage was supposed to be kept secret for a year. An even greater surprise occurred in Livadia. The princess did not depart, as usual, for the small villa in Byuk-Sarai. Instead, she moved into the Livadia Palace with the tsar. He had her move into the apartments of the late empress. Now, the retinue realized what Loris-Melikov had seen earlier. There would be a new empress.
They were together all the time in Livadia. They went for rides in his carriage, they rode horseback, they played with the children on the grounds, and in the evening they sat together on the upper veranda, cuddling and gazing at the sea.
They were together when Loris-Melikov came to discuss the coming constitution and the end of autocracy. On August 30, the main executor of the reform, its public face, cavalry general, adjutant general, and minister of internal affairs, Count Loris-Melikov was given the empire’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew.
The emperor strengthened his loyal associate before the outrage of the court and the powerful retrogrades descended upon him.
They worked on the project every day. Ministers were summoned to Livadia. It was a plan for elected representatives from the zemstvos and towns to participate in the legislative work of the State Council. This was what he had long ago asked Minister Valuyev to elaborate, what he had discussed with Kostya before the Winter Palace bombing, and had not done. But now, he was ready.
This reform, modest by European standards, was revolutionary for Russia. For the first time a European principle was being introduced into the highest state institution—the principle of popular representation. A principle hated by his father. For the first time, elected representatives would be able to participate in the discussion of new laws.
Elections would undermine the very concept of autocracy, the holy of holies. The transformed State Council could not be considered a parliament, but it could be the embryo and forerunner of one. In Russian history, this reform came to be known as the Constitution of Loris-Melikov.
It was not yet a constitution, but as the emperor would tell the heir, “We are moving toward a constitution.” This is how they prepared for the next blow against their Asiatic past. It was the path toward Europe.
But once he had decided on this project, the tsar began his old game, vacillating, hesitating, tormenting himself and everyone around him. But Loris-Melikov had figured out his psychology. The tsar wanted everyone to insist and force him. Loris-Melikov and Katya kept after Alexander.
The tsarevich came with his family to visit the tsar in Livadia, and saw that Katya had been moved into his late mother’s rooms. The tsarevich was offended, and the wise tsarevna understood that something serious was afoot. These were the hateful princess’s first steps to the throne. The tsarevna made the heir even more upset, so that he told his father that the situation was intolerable. He was going to Denmark to stay with the tsarevna’s family. Alexander replied like a true autocrat: “Then you will no longer be the heir to the throne.”
The son’s rebellion was quelled. The tsarevich, gritting his teeth, had to be polite to the princess. His father took pity on him and spared his feelings. Every Sunday the emperor had the ministers brought to Livadia to dine with him. That Sunday his son and the tsarevna sat next to the tsar. But the following Sunday the tsarevich and tsarevna were sent for a long walk to visit the grand dukes, whose palaces were nearby, while Princess Yuryevskaya sat next to the tsar at the dinner table. The tsar introduced her to the ministers. She was becoming more of an empress every day.
The heir took his family back to St. Petersburg.
Everything was going well, but premonitions disturbed him. Despite all of Loris-Melikov’s success, there was something ominous in the quiet. The closer they were to returning to St. Petersburg, the more he thought of death.
On September 11, the emperor sent instructions from Livadia to have 3,302,900 rubles transferred to the State Bank for the account of Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya. He wrote: “I give the right to her alone to use this capital in my lifetime and after my death.”
In early November he wrote from Livadia to his son, who had left. “Dear Sasha, In the event of my death I entrust my wife and children to your care. Your friendly disposition toward them, which you displayed from the very first and which was a true joy for us, makes me believe that you will not abandon them and will be their patron and kind advisor…. In my wife’s lifetime, our children must be only under her guardianship. But if Almighty God calls her before they reach their majority, I wish General Ryleev, or another person of his choice and with your approval, to be appointed as their guardian. My wife did not inherit anything from her family. Thus, all property that she now owns, including real estate, has been acquired by her personally, and her family has no rights to this property…. Until our marriage is announced, the capital I put in the State Bank for her, belongs to my wife by force of the document I gave her.
“This is my last will, and I am certain that you will execute it diligently. God’s blessings upon you! Don’t forget me and pray for your Pa, who loves you tenderly.”
He knew that his son was kind, and that after receiving that letter, would take care of her and the children.
On November 12, the emperor decided to return to St. Petersburg. Loris-Melikov’s department was on the alert and the police found an infernal machine under the railroad bed near the Lozovaya station. The People’s Will were still active, but Russia’s police were finally improving.
The tsar was leaving Livadia for the last time. As usual, he stopped over in Moscow. Princess Yuryevskaya lived with him in the Nikolayevsky Palace, where he was born.
On November 21 at noon the imperial train arrived from Moscow in St. Petersburg. Usually, he was greeted by the whole Romanov family upon his return from the Crimea. But the ceremony prescribed for such an official welcome required his morganatic wife to follow in the procession behind all the grand duchesses. He did not permit her to be humiliated this way. The formal welcome was canceled. He commanded the train to be stopped at a small station near St. Petersburg, and he had his meeting with the Romanovs in his car.
When they reached the capital, the emperor, the princess, and their children left the train, got in a carriage surrounded by Cossacks, and headed for the Winter Palace. A new present awaited her there. Instead of the pathetic three rooms in which she had lived, now a magnificent apartment was made ready for her—a habitat fit for an empress.
Work on the project proceeded quickly. In January 1881 the tsar received a report from Loris-Melikov with a draft. He read it and expressed no objections. That meant it was almost done. The tsar decided to convene a secret commission for a special session to polish the text.
“My dear Ekaterina Fedorovna,” wrote Pobedonostsev hopelessly to Tyutcheva. “Another year has passed, a difficult and terrible one, leaving lots of broken pieces. Loris is a master at manipulating and charming…. He created two bases for himself with amazing speed—both in the Winter Palace and in Anichkov Palace. He became indispensable to the tsar, a security screen. He eased access to the tsar for the heir and gave him ready answers to all his questions, Ariadne’s thread to follow out of any labyrinth. Upon the death of the empress, he grew even stronger, because he untangled an even more difficult knot in the tangled family and found a third base of support in that woman…. This fateful reign is pulling toward a fatal fall into an abyss. Forgive this man, O Lord, he knows not what he does, and now he knows even less. Now you can’t see anything in him except [debauched Assyrian King] Sardanapal…I am pained and ashamed, it sickens me to look at him, and I sense that he does not like or trust me. I hurry to conclude this letter so to give to someone for you…. May God preserve you.”
Such letters could not be trusted to the post. Loris-Melikov had instituted total surveillance. The police read all mail, even spoiling a chess game played by mail between Moscow and St. Petersburg, because they thought the chess moves were code. Letters like this had to go with trusted travelers, and there were many trusted people around Pobedonostsev.
The tsar continued introducing his wife to the high officials. Madly in love, he could not imagine that everyone else did not share his delight in her. He invited Pobedonostsev. Naturally, a description of the meeting was sent to Ekaterina Tyutcheva in Moscow. “She wore a black silk dress, only slightly open, with a diamond star on a velvet ribbon around her neck. The tsar looked pleased and happy and was voluble. She sat on the tsar’s right and I on his left. Next to her was Loris-Melikov, with whom she kept talking in a low voice…. I found her unpleasant and very vulgar. I see no beauty in her. However, her complexion is very fine. The eyes, by themselves, would be attractive, I suppose, only her gaze has no depth—the kind in which transparency and naïveté meet with lifelessness and stupidity…. How it irks me to see her in the place of the dear, wise, and graceful empress!”
He managed to find the beautiful woman vulgar and ugly, as did all the elderly ladies-in-waiting of the late empress. “How it irks me to see her in the place of the dear, wise, and graceful empress!” That was the refrain of the aging court of Alexander II. But the besotted emperor continued bringing the Romanov family together with the princess.
The tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, viceroy in the Caucasus, was invited to one of the family receptions. Later his son, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, recalled: “On Sunday evening the members of the imperial family met at the Winter Palace around the dinner table to meet Princess Yuryevskaya. The voice of the master of ceremonies after he banged three times with the ivory-handled staff was uncertain: ‘His Majesty and Serene Princess Yuryevskaya.’
The grand duchesses were not warmly welcoming. “My mother looked to one side, the tsarevna Maria Fedorovna looked at the floor. The emperor walked in quickly, leading a pretty young woman by the hand. He nodded cheerfully at my father and looked searchingly at the mighty figure of the heir.
“Counting on the complete loyalty of his brother (our father), he had no illusions regarding the views of the heir on his second marriage.
“Princess Yuryevskaya graciously responded to the polite bows from the Grand Duchesses and Dukes and sat next to the Emperor in the chair of the late empress.
“The many years of living together had not decreased their mutual adoration. At sixty-four, Emperor Alexander II behaved with her like an eighteen-year-old boy. He whispered words of encouragement in her small ear. He asked whether she liked the wines. He agreed with everything she said. He watched us all with a friendly smile, as if inviting us to rejoice in his happiness, he joked with me and my brothers….
“Full of curiosity, I did not take my eyes off Princess Yuryevskaya. I liked the expression of her sad face and the radiant glow from her light hair. It was obvious that she was nervous. She turned to the emperor frequently, and he patted her arm soothingly. She certainly would have conquered the hearts of all the men, but the women were watching them, and all her attempts to take part in the general conversation were met with polite, cold silence. I pitied her and could not understand why they treated her scornfully for falling in love with a handsome, jolly, and kind man who to her misfortune was the Emperor of All Russia.
“At the end of the meal the governess brought in their three children.
“‘And here’s my Goga!’ the emperor exclaimed proudly, picking up a merry little boy and putting him on his shoulder. ‘Tell us, Goga, what is your name?’
“‘My name is Prince Georgy Alexandrovich Yuryevsky,’ Goga replied and started playing the emperor’s side-whiskers, tugging at them with his little fingers.
“‘I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Prince Yuryevsky!’ joked the tsar. ‘And wouldn’t you like to become a grand duke, young man?’
“‘Sasha, for God’s sake, drop it!’ the princess said anxiously.
“With that joke, Alexander II rather clumsily tested his relatives on the question of adopting his morganatic children. Princess Yuryevskaya was extremely embarrassed, and for the first time forgot court etiquette and called the tsar, her spouse, by a diminutive in the hearing of others.
“On the trip back from the Winter Palace, we witnessed a new argument between our parents: ‘Whatever you may say,’ my mother declared, ‘I will never recognize that adventuress. I hate her! She is despicable. How dare she in the presence of the entire imperial family call your brother Sasha.’
“My father sighed and shook his head in despair. ‘You still do not wish to understand, my dear,’ he replied meekly, ‘good or bad, she is married to the sovereign. Since when have women been forbidden to use a diminutive for their legal husbands in the presence of others? Do you call me Your Imperial Highness?’
“‘How can you make such stupid comparison!’ said my mother with tears in her eyes. ‘I haven’t broken anyone’s family. I married you with the consent of my parents and yours. I am not planning the destruction of the empire!’”
They would later accuse Rasputin of the same evil intentions.
The Romanov family understood his question, “And wouldn’t you like to become a grand duke, young man?” They knew Alexander’s character; he would not put up with the current situation, when the emperor’s wife had to give way to grand dukes and duchesses and sit at the end of the table between the prince of Oldenburg and Duke Nicolas of Leichtenberg. He would have to crown her empress. And that would make his son a grand duke. And if that happened, would the next step follow? Would he want to give Russia a new heir instead of the son he did not love?
Their fears were not groundless. The daughter of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, whose name was also Ekaterina Mikhailovna, like Katya, soon related that the tsar, playing with little Goga, said, “This is a real Russian. He, at least, has only Russian blood flowing in him.”
Then came more troubling information. Allegedly the tsar said, “At least there will be a tsar with Russian blood on the Russian throne.” They also repeated Loris-Melikov’s servile words: “When the Russian people meet Your Majesty’s son, they will say as one, ‘This is our man.’”
Aware of the danger, the tsarevich became even more obedient. During a discussion of the Loris-Melikov project, the tsarevich expressed his total agreement with the will of his father. On January 17, Loris-Melikov returned from a conversation with the heir at Anichkov Palace and told Princess Yuryevskaya triumphantly: “Now the heir is completely with us.”
The tsar appointed the heir head of the secret special session that would complete the elaboration of the project. As he had in the days of the emancipation, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich took a very active part in this project, becoming chairman of the State Council, where the reform was to take place.
But the tsar was frightened by the combination of Kostya’s enthusiasm and Loris-Melikov’s energy. He was wary of their dangerous impatience. Alexander planned to watch carefully the elections of the representatives of the zemstvos and cities to the State Council. He said, “All of Louis XVI’s problems began when he convened the notables. The notables were rebels.”
Despite all his doubts, on February 17, Alexander II approved the report of the special session and wrote: “Execute.” The new reform would live.
On February 19, they celebrated the anniversary of his first major reform. A quarter century had passed since he had emancipated the serfs. There were more rumors of terrorist actions, and many wealthy people left St. Petersburg. The festivities were unmarred. The tsar appeared with his children on the balcony, the band played “God Save the Tsar.” Then came the artillery salute, followed by the tsar’s Grand Entrance. The five hundred people of his retinue awaited Alexander.
He saw how his court had aged over the quarter century. The sagging powdered flesh of the ladies-in-waiting, draped in diamonds and pearls, the quivering fat jowls of the officials drooping onto their golden epaulets. The women were dry and comically tall, the gentlemen had slumped under the weight of their years. And all those old people could not forgive Katya’s youth or his youthful happiness.
Preparations for a dynastic revolt continued apace. It was not a simple matter. Empresses were crowned when their husbands were crowned, with only one exception. The second wife of Peter the Great, Catherine (the cook of Pastor Gluck), was crowned separately. After the coronation, her children born before their marriage were legitimized and took on the rights of Peter’s legitimate children. Her daughter Elizabeth later became empress. This precedent and the ceremony were studied closely on Alexander’s command.
Tertii Filippov, an acknowledged expert on Church history, was sent to Moscow to search in the archives for material on the coronation of Catherine I. He had to hurry, because court rumor put the coronation of Princess Yuryevskaya in August 1881.
Alexandra Tolstaya, a lady-in-waiting, wrote: “Alexander II spent the last fourteen years of his life outside the laws of God and morality…. It was definitely known that the tsar was thinking of the coronation of Princess Yuryevskaya, the model and precedent for the coming event was the coronation of Catherine! The archives were rummaged in the search of promising documents…. Everyone kept silent, but in their hearts they all thought approximately the same way: what would happen to the tsarevich and his wife, whose position was already intolerable? Could they accept the humiliating role intended for them when even we, myself included, tried to avoid her, not knowing where to apply but determined not to put up with the offensive new order. The situation was more than tragic. It seemed hopeless—no way out or salvation ahead.”
Pobedonostsev and the retrograde party, abandoned by the heir, watched events unfold in desperation. The heir may have been broken now, but he might return to them—in his heart he was with them. But now they saw that he might no longer be the heir. If these members of the great Byzantine autocracy wanted to continue to exist, they had to act fast.
The sentiment that the princess was destroying the empire was repeated more and more frequently in society and especially in the St. Petersburg salons. The Armenian count Loris-Melikov, they said, was using her to push his destructive projects on the tsar in exchange for supporting the terrible idea of crowning her empress. The retrogrades saw nothing but the tsar’s weakness, his old man’s whining, his trembling hands, his continual sadness, and how his aides were managing him.
But it was just the opposite. He had become powerful again. If the war had aged him, love had returned his youth. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich had commented that he behaved like an eighteen-year-old and that she had fallen in love with a handsome, cheerful, kind man. Pobedonostsev himself had said, “The tsar looked pleased and happy and was voluble.”
To the retrogrades, their fears meant that it was time to change the ruler. Quickly.
The old ladies-in-waiting were quitting en masse, rather than serve the “odalisque.” The poet Tyutchev had a third daughter, Daria, who also was a lady-in-waiting. She left “so as not to spit in the face of Princess Yuryevskaya,” who dared to settle into the rooms of the “sainted” late empress. When she was leaving the palace, she had a conversation with Alexandra Tolstaya, who also “suffered from hopelessness.” Daria Tyutcheva, sister of Pobedonostsev’s correspondent Ekaterina Tyutcheva, said something amazing to Tolstaya: “Remember what I tell you: I have an accurate premonition that everything will change. I don’t know what will happen, but you will see that in three or four months all the dirt will be swept out of the Winter Palace.”
Since her enormous prophecy did take place, we can only wonder whether she had inside information. The information could have come from her sister, who had confidential letters from Pobedonostsev.
The sudden death of Dostoevsky marked the rapidly advancing end of a great era. He had welcomed 1881 happily, and his health was markedly good in the first weeks of January. He had had no epileptic fits, and his wife, Anna Grigoryevna, was sure that the winter would pass well.
Anna Grigoryevna was “the nicest and most rare of writers’ wives,” as a contemporary called her. The young woman had borne everything—the death of her first two children and their terrible financial situation. She was his secretary and stenographer, and she dealt with their creditors. “She followed him like a nanny, like the most caring mother. Their adoration was mutual,” a woman who knew them recorded. The dawn finally broke for them. The publication of The Brothers Karamazov brought him national fame, which reached its apogee with the Pushkin speech. Now his every appearance on stage for fundraisers or readings drew endless ovations. There was hope for material well-being. And then…
On the night of January 25, as Anna Grigoryevna later related, Dostoevsky’s pen holder fell to the floor and rolled behind the bookcase. “He loved that pen holder not only because he wrote with that pen, but he also used the holder to fill his papirosy with tobacco…. To get it, he had to move the bookcase, which was very heavy. He had to strain, which caused the pulmonary artery to burst and blood poured out of his mouth.”
It was over in three days. On January 26, they called the doctor, and the writer seemed to improve. But at 4:00 P.M., he hemorrhaged again severely and lost consciousness for the first time. When he came to, he said, “Anya, please get a priest immediately, I want to say Confession and take Communion.”
His state improved again after Communion and the night passed quietly. On January 27, there was no bleeding. But on January 28, he woke his wife at dawn and said, “You know, Anya, I’ve been awake for three hours, thinking, and it’s become clear to me that I will die today.” Poor Anna Grigoryevna tried to calm him down, but he interrupted, “No, I know that I am to die today. Light a candle, Anya, and give me the New Testament.”
This was the New Testament given to him by the wives of exiled Decembrists. He often used it for predictions. In the dark winter morning, she lit a candle and he let the book fall open. It was book three of Matthew: “But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.”
Dostoevsky said very calmly to his wife: “Do you hear—‘suffer it to be so.’ That means I will die.”
At eleven, the hemorrhage resumed, and he began to die. According to his daughter, he called her and his son Fedya at six. He handed them the New Testament and asked her to read the parable of the prodigal son. Afterward, he said, “Children, never forget what you just heard here. Keep your free faith in God and never despair of His forgiveness. I love you very much, but my love is nothing compared to the endless love of God for all people created by Him…. And remember, if you should ever commit a crime in your life, still do not lose hope in God. You are His children, be as humble before him as before your father, pray to Him for forgiveness, and He will rejoice in your repentance as He rejoiced in the return of the prodigal son.”
At eight, the death agony began. He lay on the couch in his study, a dark, unattractive room. The church of St. Vladimir, where he was a parishioner, was visible through the window. The writer Boleslav Markevich, who was there for the last minutes of his life, wrote: “He lay fully dressed, with his head back on a pillow. The light from the lamp on a table near the divan fell directly on his forehead and cheeks, white as paper, and the dark-red spot of blood on his chin…. His breath came from his throat in a weak whistle through his feverishly open lips. His eyes were half-shut. He was totally unconscious. The doctor…suddenly bent over him, listened, then unbuttoned his shirt, slipped his hand beneath it and shook his head at me…. It was over…I looked at my watch: it was 8:36.”
The news of his death traveled through St. Petersburg, and a pilgrimage began to his apartment. Russia’s most famous jurist, Koni, who had been chairman at the trial of Vera Zasulich, came to pay his respects. “In the dark, uninviting stairs of the house on the corner of Yamskaya and Kuznechny, where the deceased had lived on the third floor, there were quite a few people headed toward the door with an insulating covering of worn oilcloth. Fedor Mikhailovich lay on a low catafalque, so that his face was visible to all. What a face! It was unforgettable…. It was not the seal of death upon it, but the dawn of a new, better life…I could not tear myself away from contemplating that face, the expression of which seemed to say: ‘Well, yes! It is so—I had always said that it must be, and now I know that it is.’”
His funeral was an unprecedented event in Russian history. A human sea, thirty thousand people, followed the coffin, seventy deputations carried wreaths, and fifteen choirs took part in the procession. His wife and other witnesses of his death recounted it in detail. But they did not recount the most mysterious aspects of his death.
If we had followed Koni up the dark uninviting staircase of Dostoevsky’s house to the third floor and went not into the writer’s apartment but the one opposite, number 11, we would have learned about the amazing events that took place there the very same days that Dostoevsky was dying.
Back in early November 1880, when Dostoevsky was thinking about a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov in which Alyosha Karamazov would become a terrorist, a new tenant had moved into apartment 11, a raven-haired, olive-skinned young man. In the large, seven-room flat, he chose the room that shared a wall with Dostoevsky’s apartment. He was one of the most dangerous Russian terrorists, Alexander Barannikov, the Avenging Angel.
The EC had selected the apartment for a reason. Dostoevsky had many visitors—galleys were delivered, manuscripts were picked up for printing houses. The revolutionaries coming to see Barannikov were lost in the flow of people headed for the writer’s apartment.
The author of The Devils now served as a smoke screen for the new “devils,” who were, in fact, the heroes of his next novel. The visitors to Barannikov’s apartment would have been of great interest for this book. The most frequent visitor was Alexander Mikhailov, the head of the People’s Will. He kept track of all the terrorist acts they committed. Another visitor was one of the great beauties of the organization, a tall brunette often dressed in an expensive fox-lined silk pelisse and white goose down and wool scarf, Alexandra Korba, the one who wrote a letter to Dostoevsky before heading to the Balkan war. Despite the general ban on romantic entanglements among members until the revolution, Korba started an affair with chubby Mikhailov, following the example of the passionate relationship between Perovskaya and Zhelyabov.
And finally, the narrow staircase led the most mysterious member of the People’s Will, whom they called the Guardian Angel, to the apartment of the Avenging Angel. His name was Nikolai Kletochnikov. He was gaunt, with sunken cheeks, not tall, with a duckbill nose, thinning hair, and a muffled voice. To use an image of the times, he was a typical “chancellery rat,” or to use a contemporary one, a cubicle drone.
“Kletochnikov came to St. Petersburg in late 1878 from Simferopol, where he held a second-rate position in the district court. Before leaving, Kletochnikov had suffered some personal drama. He never told anyone what it was. But his suffering was so bad that he wanted to commit suicide. However, the political events in St. Petersburg in 1878, Vera Zasulich’s shot and her acquittal by a jury, the assassination of the gendarme general Mezentsov—all this so agitated Kletochnikov that instead of suicide he decided to offer his services in a terrorist act to the revolutionaries,” recalled Alexandra Korba.
Like the failure Mirsky, Kletochnikov was seduced by the fame of the terrorists. The office worker decided to change his life radically. Instead of “the sticks of the provinces and life among clerks who quarreled and drank,” he wanted the danger of an “interesting life.” What could be more interesting than hunting down people, especially in the name of the lofty ideal of the people’s happiness?
He came to St. Petersburg where he knew two women from home who were enrolled at the higher courses for women at the liberal educational institution created for women when the universities admitted only men. Through them he met Alexander Mikhailov and Alexander Barannikov. “In his eyes they stood on an unattainable peak, and he worshipped them, hoping that they would be models of life and behavior for the rest of humanity…. He regarded Mikhailov and Barannikov as giants who could only be worshipped and whose influence had to be obeyed,” Korba continued.
Chance sealed Kletochnikov’s fate. His landlady had a close relative who worked in the Third Department. The “giant” Mikhailov came up with a plan. But instead of asking him to fight dangerous battles, Mikhailov asked (rather, ordered) Kletochnikov to try to get a despised office job at the Third Department.
This was the first mole, an agent of the revolutionaries, in the secret police. For two years (1879 and 1880), Kletochnikov worked in the chancellery of the Third Department—in the very important Third Expedition, which was in charge of political detection.
When those functions were moved to the Police Department, Kletochnikov became a junior file clerk of that department in December 1880.
He had a fine calligraphic hand and he was entrusted with the copying of secret papers, and he was put in charge of file cabinets with top secret documents. His coworkers teased him for his assiduousness, his readiness to stay after hours and to do work for his colleagues. Deep into the night, alone in the empty building, Kletochnikov familiarized himself with the files on the desks of his coworkers and in the file cabinets. Thus, the quiet office rat “knew all the political cases in St. Petersburg and all of Russia.”
His hard work was noted. On April 20, 1880, he was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav. As a chevalier of the order, he told the People’s Will about the plan to send agents provocateurs into their ranks. Thanks to Kletochnikov, Presnyakov stabbed to death Alexander Zharkov, who had been recruited by the Third Department. Kletochnikov also warned them of the betrayal by the miserable terrorist Grigory Goldenberg. They took measures that kept the police from using “Goldenberg’s list.”
Kletochnikov never took notes at the department. He did not need to. He carried home in his phenomenal memory dozens of names, numbers, and addresses every day, and he reported it all during his meetings with the revolutionaries. At those meetings, Kletochnikov wrote down his information, which Alexander Mikhailov immediately copied, destroying the originals. Kletochnikov visited the apartment of Barannikov, on the other side of Dostoevsky’s wall. There he relaxed after his office work.
Such interesting people lived next door to Dostoevsky. In December, the heroes of his unwritten novel began preparing for the final act of the Russian drama of the nineteenth century—the murder of Tsar Alexander II.
Every morning in December, Barannikov left his apartment. Like a dandy flaneur, he wandered around the center of St. Petersburg, looking for something. He found it on Malaya Sadovaya Street—the basement apartment in a building owned by Countess Megden was for rent. Every Sunday the tsar turned down this street—Malaya Sadovaya—toward the Winter Palace from the Mikhailovsky Manege, where he watched the guards parade.
That fall rumors circulated about the constitution being prepared. Later, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, the killer of Mezentsov, wrote that the People’s Will had not known of the reform. This was his attempt to justify their action before European public opinion. Only he, who was living abroad, might not have known about it. The members of People’s Will living in St. Petersburg knew all about it. In fact, they feared it. This was the great paradox—two opposing forces were equally afraid of reform. The retrograde-nationalists feared the reform that would put an end to autocracy. The revolutionaries feared that Loris-Melikov’s reform would lead the country away from revolution.
The interests of two hostile parties coincided. They both had to hurry.
The Trial of the 16, all members of the People’s Will, took place in October 1880. Five were sentenced to death. The explosions had stopped and the public seemed reconciled. The tsar should have pardoned all five, but Alexander pardoned only three. Two were condemned to the noose. They were Kvyatkovsky, who was involved in the deadly explosion at the Winter Palace, and Presnyakov, who killed the agent Zharkov. Presnyakov, in a shoot-out during his arrest, also killed a doorman, who was an innocent bystander.
This was the first execution since Mlodetsky had been hanged. Mlodetsky, a terrorist who shot publicly, had been executed right after the monstrous explosion at the palace. But now with the attacks stopped, even those who had demanded blood were no longer furious. People got used to quieter times and forgot attacks and executions. This was a reminder. Kvyatkovsky and Presnyakov were executed publicly on Semenovsky Square.
Several years earlier, Kvyatkovsky helped Presnyakov escape from prison, and then did not see him again. Now they met on the scaffold. “Both took Communion, both embraced, first with the priest, then, their hands tied, they kissed each other and bowed to the troops…. When Kvyatkovsky was hanged, Presnyakov had tears in his eyes. The same fate awaited him a minute later…. A horrible impression! I’m not very sympathetic to the nihilists, but such a punishment is terrible,” wrote Alexandra Bogdanovich, the general’s wife, in her diary.
She was seconded by the mistress of another St. Petersburg salon. Elena Shtakenshneider, whose literary coterie included Dostoevsky, wrote, “A sad and bad impression comes from that execution, even for nonliberals.”
The public execution was the signal the People’s Will was waiting for. The tsar would not play by the new rules, and that gave them the moral right to act. An eye for an eye! “I think we’ll finish him off now,” Alexander Mikhailov declared. The Great EC went into action.
After their failure on Kamenny Bridge, Mikhailov decided to continue the general scheme: blow up the tsar on one of his habitual routes. The new team included Sofia Perovskaya and two very young men, both students, Ignati Grinevitsky and Nikola Rysakov. “Our team had to determine the time and the streets…the tsar used for his travels in the city,” according to Perovskaya.
They learned that he traveled by carriage, surrounded by six riders from His Majesty’s Cossack Convoy. They traveled at great speed. The routes during the week changed frequently. But the Sunday route was inflexible. At noon, the tsar went to the Mikhailovsky Manege for the changing of the guard and parade. The time of his departure was fixed and he was always punctual. Then he returned to the Winter Palace, and there were only two ways: via Malaya Sadovaya Street and via the Catherine Canal.
At a meeting in late November, the observers summed up the situation. The emperor could be killed easily on a Sunday during his regular return from the Manege. Sofia Perovskaya noted that when he used the Catherine Canal, the driver had to slow the racing horses down to a walk when they reached the turn. “That’s the best place. A bomb can be thrown accurately at that moment…. As for his return through Malaya Sadovaya Street [which was more frequent], that is in the center of town and there are many police agents about. It is better to mine the basement of one of the buildings on that street, and blow up the tsar’s carriage from there.”
That was why Barannikov looked for a basement on this street. They decided to turn the rented basement into a cheese store, and to start digging under the street. The parts of the married owners of the store were played by a nobleman and former landowner in Pskov named Semyon Bogdanovich and another member of People’s Will, Anna Yakimova.
Bogdanovich looked like a Russian merchant, with a reddish beard and broad red face. He called himself Evdokim Kobozev, a merchant from Voronezh, and he and his wife moved in to the flat on Malaya Sadovaya, where they started selling cheese.
Settled in their store, the revolutionaries decided to start digging in January. That same month an event occurred that would have been of great interest to Dostoevsky. The heroes of his unwritten novel got a letter from the protagonist of a published novel: “The devil” Nechaev wrote a letter to the People’s Will. The letter was momentous and they debated it hotly.
He had been resurrected from oblivion, buried in a solitary cell several years earlier. This amazing person had managed to influence the guards—the guards of the main prison citadel of Russia, the secret Alexeyevsky ravelin in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Through the tiny window of the cell door, Nechaev talked to the bored guards. The former teacher of religion knew how to speak to simple soldiers. He explained that he was a holy martyr, suffering for the people and obeying Christ’s commandment to serve the poor. He did not fail to instill belief in his mysterious power, either. He demonstrated it, when he slapped the chief of gendarmes, the adjutant general Alexander Potapov, who then kneeled before him. After that, Nechaev could tell the soldiers stories about his high protectors, that the heir himself was behind him, and that Nechaev belonged to the heir’s party and that was why he was being persecuted. He told them this was just a temporary setback and the party of the true, Orthodox tsarevich would soon vanquish the Antichrist Alexander II.
The guards began referring to their prisoner as “our eagle.”
Nechaev sent the soldiers to deliver his letter to the People’s Will. They believed that they were bringing it to associates of the crown prince’s party. It arrived in January, the last month of Dostoevsky’s life. “One crackling frosty night,” Vera Figner recalled, they read the letter in a secret apartment. Nechaev addressed it “as a revolutionary fallen from the ranks to comrades still at liberty.” Figner said, “Nechaev’s letter was very businesslike—simply and directly Nechaev raised the question of his liberation.”
“Let’s free him!” everyone there cried with “extraordinary spiritual enthusiasm.” They discussed fantastic scenarios for his escape: through the sewers during outdoor recreation for prisoners or after the guards loyal to Nechaev kidnapped members of the royal family during services at the Cathedral of Peter and Paul near the graves of the Romanov dynasty. They wrote back to him with their plans. The “Alyosha Karamazovs” began corresponding with “The Devil.”
When Nechaev learned that they were planning to kill the tsar, he wrote: “Forget about [my escape] for the time being and get on with your work, which I will watch from afar with the greatest interest.” Like the members of the People’s Will, he believed that the people would rise up after the death of the tsar.
Vera Figner recalled, “That letter had an amazing impact: everything that had lain on Nechaev’s character like a dark spot…all the lies that enfolded Nechaev’s revolutionary image had vanished. [The lies were the death of the student Ivanov, his provocations with proclamations that sent many young people to prison, his use of compromising materials for blackmail, and so on.] What remained was his intelligence, undimmed by many years of isolation; his will remained, unbent by the weight of the punishment; his energy, unbroken by the misfortunes of his life.”
They now saw him as a hero. Once they had been impossibly far from Nechaev, but now they had grown closer. They had been executing the program of his Catechism for some time. As he had dreamed, they created a terrorist organization, based on total subordination. As he had called for, they learned to kill the innocent along with the guilty, persuading the enemies of the revolution with dynamite, and as he had taught, they had penetrated “all institutions and even the Winter Palace.”
Nechaev’s reasoning, “The worse life is for people, the better it is for the revolution,” had become their morality. That was why Loris-Melikov’s transformations frightened them, and why they were in a hurry to kill the tsar.
On the eve of the death of the author of The Devils, the novel’s protagonist mocked its creator. The novel’s epigraph about demons that were cast out from people and into pigs now seemed like a joke. The devils had possessed Russia’s youth, and the Bolshevik revolution was not far off.
On the morning of January 25, an icon of St. George and a votive light were displayed in the window of the cheese shop. The next window, of the shop owner’s apartment, was tightly shuttered.
This was a significant morning—they were starting to tunnel under the street. Taking off the wooden cover, they exposed the brick and mortar wall. The revolutionaries picked up sledgehammers and went at it: Andrei Zhelyabov, Semyon Bogdanovich, and Alexander Barannikov, who came to do the honors. After breaking through the wall, Barannikov went to visit Fridenson, another member of the group. But Fridenson had been arrested the night before, and the police had set up a trap in his rooms.
Barannikov was caught when he entered. Once they got his identification, the police searched his room, next door to Dostoevsky. They set up a trap there, as well.
Dostoevsky, a man of nocturnal habit, was usually awake after midnight. The walls were not very thick in the cheap building, so he had to have heard the noise of the search. It was during the search on the other side of the wall that Dostoevsky’s pulmonary artery burst, causing the hemorrhage.
The next day, January 26, as Dostoevsky suffered, the first victim was caught in the police trap next door—a People’s Will member named Nikolai Kolotkevich. There is a police report on his noisy arrest: “In house 5/2 on the corner of Yamskaya Street and Kuznechny Alley, apartment No. 11, on this date at 4 o’clock an unknown man arrived…. He was asked by officer Yakovlev to go to the police precinct…. After which the unknown man asked to be let go, offering money. At the precinct the unknown man refused to identify himself or his residence.”
Kolotkevich’s being taken away in the police coach could be seen from Dostoevsky’s study. Dostoevsky’s severe hemorrhaging began just at that time.
Thus, the first signs of Dostoevsky’s fatal illness appeared during the search of Barannikov’s apartment, and the main symptoms occurred right after Kolotkevich was arrested. Are these things coincidental? Many theories are possible.
One is that the search and arrest of the young revolutionaries were a vivid reminder of his own arrest in his youth. The impressionable and ailing Dostoevsky began to hemorrhage.
There is another theory, very dark and even fantastic.
Dostoevsky, who was planning a novel about a terrorist, knew about his neighbor. He met the People’s Will group even before Barannikov had moved in. The archives of the People’s Will have a residency permit issued by the police to another member of the Great EC, Alexandra Pavlovna Korba. It stipulates that she was issued a permit to live in building 5/2 in November 1879. The People’s Will beauty lived in Dostoevsky’s building a year before Barannikov moved in.
It might be that Dostoevsky met the revolutionaries in 1879, through Korba, who had written to him years ago. There would not have been anything particularly unusual in this. The People’s Will members maintained amicable relations with some liberal writers. But could young radicals be friends with the author of The Devils?
Even though they hated the novel, revolutionary young people always treated Dostoevsky with great trust. The writer E. P. Letkova-Sultanova, part of revolutionary and narodnik circles, explained that despite The Devils, radical youth perceived Dostoevsky as “a former revolutionary and convict, a humanist artist of genius, the defender of the humiliated and injured…. They acknowledged his right to be a teacher and to address society as its judge.” That was why the narodnik and future terrorist Korba wrote to him. Young radicals attempted to carry leg irons in Dostoevsky’s funeral procession, but the police confiscated them.
But would the author of The Devils have dealt with the young madmen?
Dostoevsky, who had almost paid with his life for his convictions, understood the tragedy of these noble young people. “Sacrificing yourself and everything for the truth is the national trait of this generation. May God bless it and send it an understanding of the TRUTH. For the question is exactly that: what is to be considered the truth.”
He fought with them for their own sake, “for a correct understanding of the truth.” That was why he wrote The Devils, for which they came to hate him. That was why he wanted to write a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov, in which the story of Alyosha, whom they loved, would open their eyes. That was why he needed to know the heroes of his new book personally. And that was why the young radicals and the writer who planned to write about them were quite likely to meet. That may even be why Barannikov rented an apartment in Dostoevsky’s building.
The handsome idealist turned terrorist who had fought in Montenegro’s war against the Turks (a war Dostoevsky considered holy)—how interesting Barannikov must have been for the writer. But once Dostoevsky got to know them, he might have accidentally learned their plans to blow up the Winter Palace. If that were the case, then his odd conversation with Suvorin becomes explicable. He had said, “Just imagine that we are standing in front of the windows of the Datsiaro [a store on Nevsky Prospect that sold art] 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?” He had answered his own question: “I would not.” And explained it this way: “The liberals would not forgive me. They would torment me and bring me to despair.”
This is a very weak and unimaginative explanation for the mutinous Dostoevsky. He had gone against the current all his life and he never tired of fighting the liberals. He served “only Christ.” There may have been another reason that he did not dare give in: He could not send the young people who trusted him to their death. It would explain why he was tormented during his conversation with Suvorin and why he told him that he was going to write a novel about Alyosha Karamazov as a terrorist.
If Dostoevsky had had some of the People’s Will literature in his study, for his research, the nighttime search in Barannikov’s apartment would have made him destroy it hastily. He would have moved heavy furniture, which might have brought on the hemorrhage. The arrest of Kolotkevich, too, would have shaken the former prisoner completely. The possibility of exposure of his ties to the terrorists would mean a new and final collapse of his life. It might have caused the fatal hemorrhage. Of course, all this is pure speculation, that the “devils” on the other side of the wall directed the death of their creator. What is indisputable is that Dostoevsky’s death was a prologue to a fateful turn in Russian history.
During the frighteningly successful work of the Executive Committee, people kept wondering how they were getting away with it and why the police could not capture them. As Vera Figner recalled, the EC in fact had twenty-four members plus five hundred active party members. They were up against the famous Third Department with its huge staff, plus the army and the prison system.
The most popular answer was that this was the first time that the tsarist police had to deal with professionals, instead of mere students. The professional revolutionaries proved the might and invulnerability of terrorism.
But General Loris-Melikov apparently attributed the success of the terrorists to other causes. After studying the two sensational actions of the EC—the explosion on the railroad and the explosion in the Winter Palace—he correctly assessed the suspicious carelessness of the Third Department. He did not trust the Third Department and wanted to reform it. That is why he created a structure that duplicated the work of the Third Department.
In the spring of 1880, the city governor was given the right to search and arrest people for political crimes in St. Petersburg on the same terms as the Third Department. Now the Third Department (and after its transformation. the Police Department) learned about searches and arrests post-factum.
Suddenly, the “great conspirators” stopped succeeding. On July 24, 1880, officials captured the elusive Alexander Presnyakov, who participated in blowing up the royal train and had murdered an agent of the Third Department. Later the “poet of conspiracy,” the head of the party Alexander Mikhailov, was arrested. Mikhailov was the party’s historian. Here is how his lover, Alexandra Korba, described his failure. “He sought out pictures of everyone who died for the liberty and happiness of the people. He gathered material on them, he did not want them to remain unknown in the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia…. He was arrested when he went into a photographer’s shop to pick up the photos he had ordered of the arrested members of People’s Will Kvyatkovsky and Presnyakov. The shop was on Nevsky Prospect. Its owner was an agent of the secret police. When Alexander Mikhailov had come the day before to find out about the photos, the wife of the photographer and spy stood behind her husband’s chair, gave Mikhailov an anxious look and moved her hand across her neck, to let him know that he was in danger of being hanged…. That same day the Administrative Commission met and the members of the Commission were indignant and made him promise that he would not return to the dubious photography shop. He gave his word.” Yet he went. “He probably thought that not picking up the photos would be cowardly,” wrote Korba, who knew him well.
He was arrested at the shop. The childish fecklessness of the Genius of Conspiracy is astonishing. But that strange fecklessness was typical of other “professionals” as well. Here is how Kibalchich, the chief dynamiter of the People’s Will, behaved: “During the organization of the explosion of the royal train, he was carrying the explosive in a worn suitcase. He was sleepy. While waiting for the train, he fell asleep on a bench in the waiting room…. Martial law was in effect, and in anticipation of the tsar’s return from Yalta, there were all kinds of officials at the train station; spies were everywhere, peering into people’s faces. Kibalchich was illegal then, and it was easy to recognize him from photographs, since he had already served time in prison. He lay there, face upward, noticeable because of his pose and his suitcase under his head…. That time, fortunately, nothing happened,” recounted a People’s Will member named Deich.
They seemed strikingly unprofessional, those outstanding professionals from a secret organization. No sooner had Loris-Melikov created another institution doing the work of the Third Department than their “luck” went away. They were caught one after another, quite unprofessionally.
The police set a trap in Fridenson’s apartment. The conspirators, it turned out, had no sign to warn of danger, a commonsense precaution. So the previously elusive EC member Barannikov showed up there and was arrested. They immediately set up a trap at Barannikov’s. There were no secret signals there, either. The next terrorist fell into the trap—also a member of the Great EC, Kolotkevich. This professional carelessly carried around secret documents. They confiscated the top secret bylaws of the People’s Will, the program of the Executive Committee, and his address book with notations on how to make explosives.
Now there was a trap at Kolotkevich’s apartment, which also lacked danger signals.
As Alexandra Korba wrote, “Our comrades had become lax about using warning signs. Neither Barannikov nor Kolotkevich had their signals in order, and that led to the loss of Kletochnikov.”
The legendary Kletochnikov, the Guardian Angel of the People’s Will, was in danger. Kolotkevich, who had been arrested, was his contact. Kletochnikov gave him information from the Police Department. Kolotkevich had been arrested by the city governor’s agency, and the news of the arrest reached the Police Department only after the fact. The EC knew that Kletochnikov would not be aware of the arrest and would come to Kolotkevich’s apartment, only to be arrested.
He had to be warned. Someone would have to go to the Police Department and wait for him to come out. Someone would have to hurry to his apartment, someone would have to wait for him along the way to the Kolotkevich’s place. Their invaluable Guardian Angel had to be protected. They had Alexandra Korba go to his house.
“His maid told me that he had not come home yet.” Korba dropped by again later, and since he was still out, left him a note. Nothing more was done. (She may have been too concerned with the arrest of her lover, Mikhailov, to worry about Kletochnikov.) Kletochnikov went to Kolotkevich’s apartment, where he was arrested.
On February 27, the head of the fighters, Andrei Zhelyabov, was captured at the apartment of Mikhail Trigoni. They fell, one by one. Which raises the question, how had they survived so long? In countries with a long tradition of autocracy, as soon as there is a threat to the autocratic regime, the most conservative forces form a union with the secret police. Could some conservatives have been using the terrorists as a cat’s paw? The idea of making the People’s Will concentrate on killing the tsar would have suited them. Was that why the police were so useless and why the terrorists lived so freely? Was Russia the first place where terrorists were used by others to destroy an unsuitable monarch?
Once Loris-Melikov created a parallel police structure, the helplessness of the police instantly stopped. Only the terrorists were helpless. Is my theory correct? I don’t know. But I do know that the strange behavior of the police continued.
By March, Loris-Melikov had arrested the leadership of the People’s Will. The count had found out about the apartment on Malaya Sadovaya Street. A delegation came to the cheese store: It was headed by a gentleman in a fur coat with a red lining and a general’s cap. He was General Mrovinsky, the inspector of the Police Department and a specialist on explosives. Behind him came a police inspector and the janitor. Their appearance suggested that someone had informed on the plot.
Bogdanovich, pretending to be a cheese merchant, thought it was the end. There was a barrel in the store filled with earth from the tunnel they were digging and covered with a layer of cheeses. Mrovinsky headed straight for the barrel and asked what it contained. Told it held cheese, he did not even look inside.
Then the inspector went into the living quarters, where the tunnel began. When the revolutionaries went into the tunnel, they removed the wooden panel of the wall from floor to window, and then replaced it. Mrovinsky went to the wall. Just knocking on it would show that it was a hollow wall. The experienced inspector knocked, so inexpertly (or so expertly?) that there was no telltale hollow sound. He also looked in the back rooms of the store, where there were mounds of dirt, covered with sacking. Here, too, the inspector general found nothing unusual.
The explosion of the train and the bomb in the Winter Palace were to be repeated. The Third Department was still doing its job. The tsar was doomed.
Daria Tyutcheva apparently did have basis for her prediction that in three or four months the Winter Palace would be swept clean. The tsarevich’s closest friend, formerly deputy director of the Third Department and now deputy minister of internal affairs, Adjutant General P. A. Cherevin, would later say, “I owe my entire career to Alexander II, but I still say: it’s a good thing they got rid of him, otherwise where would he have led Russia with all his liberalism!”
Getting rid of unsuitable tsars was a tradition that went back to the palace coups of the guards. Usually the people closest to the sovereign were involved in the conspiracies.
There was an Iago in the Winter Palace. Minister of the Court Alexander Adlerberg held a hereditary position. His father had been minister of the court under Nicholas I and remained in the position when Alexander II ascended to the throne. His son, the tsar’s childhood friend, succeeded him when he retired. Both Alexanders enjoyed recalling their childhood and their tutor Zhukovsky. Adlerberg was the only one at court to enjoy the privilege of calling the tsar by his diminutive name, Sasha, and to see him without being announced.
But politics and the tsar’s love came between them. Adlerberg and Peter Shuvalov had taken a passionate part in the counter-reforms, and Alexander’s inability to suppress sedition irritated Adlerberg. The appearance of Loris-Melikov, the coming reform, and Princess Dolgorukaya ended the friendship. Adlerberg joined the camarilla and had been against the tsar’s marriage. The tsar did not forgive him.
Adlerberg’s career was coming to an end. As War Minister Milyutin subsequently recorded in his diary: “Count Adlerberg told me, ‘Even if the catastrophe of March 1 had not occurred, I still would not be minister of the court now…. The late tsar was completely in the hands of Princess Yuryevskaya, who would have led the tsar to the most extreme irrationality, to shame.”
The count’s behavior had become quite strange. After the attack by Solovyov, Alexandra Bogdanovich recorded the words of the historian Vassily Bilbasov in her diary: “Five days before the attempt, a German agency sent coded telegrams…. They ended up on Adlerberg’s desk and he never bothered to unseal anything.” The shots took place.
Before the explosion in the Winter Palace, Governor General Gurko, who knew about the lax discipline at the palace, wanted to take the supervision of the palace out of Adlerberg’s hands. But Adlerberg told the tsar that Gurko wanted to enforce military order at the palace, knowing that the tsar would immediately think of the “delicate circumstances” (i.e., the presence of Princess Dolgorukaya, then his mistress) and would not permit the general in the palace.
On the eve of March 1, the minister’s actions were very surprising. A. I. Dmitriev-Mamonov (later governor general of Omsk) was head of the bodyguards of the tsar and his family, subordinate not to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but personally to Minister of the Court Count Adlerberg. Only he and Dmitriev-Mamonov knew the routes the tsar took on his travels.
Dmitriev-Mamonov later told the story to a relative of his, A. Spassky-Odinets, who recorded it. “There was no lack of reports on preparations for an attack, but they were all anonymous. However, on the morning of fateful March 1 there was a signed warning that gave the place and circumstances, which turned out to be completely accurate. Dmitriev-Mamonov, in his words, took the letter to Adlerberg and reported on the need to change the usual route that day. Adlerberg replied: ‘No later than yesterday after dinner and in the presence of the heir, the tsar said in a stern voice, almost shouting, “Listen, Adlerberg! I’ve told you before and I command you now: do not dare tell me anything about attempts being planned on my life. Leave me in peace. Take whatever measures you and Dvorzhitsky think necessary, but I want to live whatever life God has left me in peace!” How could I, after that command, given in such harsh tones, report to His Majesty and insist on changing his trip?’”
Apparently not everyone in the camarilla was convinced of the need to get rid of the tsar, and there was a struggle in its ranks. The State Archive of the Russian Federation has letters that were received by Princess Yuryevskaya starting in May 1880. The first letter tells the princess that a secret organization of defenders of the monarchy had been created in St. Petersburg that intended to fight with secret organizations of revolutionaries. The organization called itself The Secret Anti-Socialist League, with the Russian acronym TASL. The author of the letter, the Great Leaguer, was its head. He would not tell her his name or the names of the league members. “We swore that no one would ever know our names.”
Instead, the Great Leaguer gives detailed descriptions of TASL’s ceremonies, which resembled Masonic ones. After a brief service, the members gathered in a hall, dressed in black with silver medallions of the order on their chests and their faces behind black hoods. This would seem no more than game playing if not for the author’s knowledge of the work of the People’s Will.
The Great Leaguer told her about the structure of the People’s Will, and gave an accurate number of members of its top secret Executive Committee and the number of fighters. This was information only at the disposal of the Administrative Commission of the People’s Will. In May 1880, the Great Leaguer begged Princess Yuryevskaya to persuade the tsar not to attend the changing of the guard and parade in the Mikhailovsky Manege on Sundays. He told her that “probably, a bomb will be thrown at the tsar or the road will be mined.” But it was only in May that the Executive Committee, according to Vera Figner, “came up with the project to rent a store in the part of St. Petersburg where the tsar travels most frequently and to lay a mine to blow him up.”
Princess Yuryevskaya got the last letter in December 1880. Who wrote those letters? And what was this secret organization that surfaced so mysteriously and vanished as mysteriously?
Probably there was no TASL; it was just an invention of the writer. And the writer was most likely someone from the Third Department. He was one of the people who intended to use the People’s Will as a cat’s paw to remove the tsar, hence his knowledge of underground Russia. For some reason, he betrayed his fellow conspirators and tried to save the tsar. We can only imagine his reasons.
The notebook of Captain K. F. Kokh, the chief of the tsar’s convoy, records all the routes taken by Alexander II. They did not change after the May warning from the Great Leaguer. Apparently Alexander II did not take the letters seriously.