Following a tradition established by his murdered great-grandfather, Paul I, the emperor observed the changing of the guard and parade every Sunday, in the enormous Mikhailovsky Manege, which could hold several cavalry squadrons. Often it was attended by the grand dukes, adjutant generals of the retinue, and ambassadors (if they had military titles). As February came to an end, the whole route traveled by the emperor’s carriage was lined by police guarding him and by observers from the People’s Will.
Almost all the participants of the assassination would later be arrested and give detailed testimony. Their words shed light on the event, which is still not clear in many respects.
The tunnel from the cheese shop on Malaya Sadovaya was completed by late February, and required only the mine to be laid. Four volunteers were found to throw bombs if the tsar took the route via the Catherine Canal. They were Nikolai Rysakov, a student at the Mining Institute (he was only nineteen, a minor under tsarist law), the aristocrat Ignati Grinevitsky, a student at the Technological Institute, twenty-four, and two young workers, Timofei Mikhailov and Ivan Emelyanov.
The four met at an illegal apartment, where the chief dynamiter Kibalchich explained how the bombs worked. Rysakov stated, “As he left, Kibalchich asked us not to frequent places where we might be arrested…. Usually, at such moments, arrests are more likely somehow, he explained.”
Mikhailov, Barannikov, and Kolotkevich were already behind bars. Andrei Zhelyabov was now in charge of the People’s Will. He sensed approaching danger. Rysakov continued, “I noticed a feverishness in the actions of my comrades, which was explained by the frequency of arrests. Zhelyabov told us, ‘We must hurry.’”
In late February Zhelyabov told them, “You must come to the conspiracy apartment on Sunday March 1, to get the mines and necessary instructions.” They understood that the assassination was set for that day, and that it would probably be the last day of freedom for them, and perhaps of their lives.
They never saw Zhelyabov again. The next day, February 27, the police came to the room of Mikhail Trigoni, who rented a room on Nevsky Prospect, and arrested him and Andrei Zhelyabov, who was visiting him. The giant did not even have time to reach for his revolver. In prison, Zhelyabov repeated his line, “If you kill us, there will be others…lots of people are being born these days.”
The next morning at the Winter Palace, the tsar received Loris-Melikov and Milyutin (he saw them daily) and Nikolai Girs, head of the Asian Department (who was expected to replace elderly Gorchakov as minister of foreign affairs). Loris-Melikov proudly reported the arrest of Zhelyabov and Trigoni. Later the tsar told Milyutin, “Congratulate me twice: Loris told me that the last conspirator has been captured and that they will persecute me no more!”
That evening, the tsar made notes as usual: “28 February. 11:00 A.M. reports of Milyutin, Girs, Loris. Three important arrests: including Zhelyabov.”
Those were the happy results of the penultimate day of his life.
On that same day, the remaining members of the Executive Committee met in an illegal apartment near Voznesensky Bridge. None of the original leaders was left. They were all in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. The organization was in disarray. “And on top of it, we learned to our horror that not one of the four bombs was ready. The next day was March 1, Sunday, and the tsar might drive along Sadovaya, where the mine was still not placed in the tunnel,” wrote Vera Figner.
Sofia Perovskaya led the meeting. The petite young woman took charge of the bewildered men. She believed that a popular rebellion would follow the death of the tsar, and then Zhelyabov, who was in prison, would be saved. It would be a complete misunderstanding, however, to think that his release was her primary motivation. She wanted to achieve the party’s main goal, their maniacal dream, to kill the tsar, so that the revolution would begin.
With her rampant faith and fierce energy, Perovskaya fired up the men’s spirits. The women turned out to be the ones with the greatest courage at this meeting—Alexandra Korba, Alexandra Mikhailova, and Vera Figner, who all wanted to free Russia.
After Perovskaya’s inspiring speech, the men perked up. “Agitated, we were imbued with one feeling, one sentiment…. Everyone present declared unanimously: ‘Act. Tomorrow no matter what, we act!’ The mine had to be placed. The bombs had to be ready by morning,” Figner wrote.
It was around three in the afternoon on Saturday. They had under twenty-four hours.
Only the ones with work to do remained in the apartment by five. Three dynamiters led by Kibalchich and Vera Figner labored until morning, making the bombs. It was very dangerous work, especially done in haste. These sensitive bombs often went off by themselves. Figner wrote, “I persuaded Sofia Perovskaya to lie down, to gather strength for the next day, and I helped the workers, wherever they needed a hand, even though I was inexperienced; I cut up kerosene tins I had bought to serve as wrappers for the bombs. Our lamps and the fireplace were lit all night. At two in the morning I left the comrades, because my services were no longer needed.”
That same night, the student Ignati Grinevitsky (nicknamed “Kotik”) wrote his last will and testament. “Alexander II must die. His days are numbered. He will die and we, his enemies, his killers, will die with him…. History will show that the luxuriant tree of freedom demands human sacrifices…. Fate has doomed me to an early death, and I will not see victory, I will not live a single day, a single hour in the radiant time of triumph…. But I believe that with my death I will have done everything I had to do, and no one in the entire world can demand more of me.”
Perovskaya and Figner slept. “When Perovskaya and I awoke at eight, the men were still working, but two bombs were ready, and Perovskaya took them [to the other apartment where the bomb throwers were supposed to get them].” Figner helped fill the other two bombs, and Kibalchich took them to the apartment. That is how they greeted the morning of March 1.
Rysakov’s apartment, early on the morning of March 1. His landlady testified, “That morning he got up after 7:00: hearing noise in his room, I got up, too. He came to the kitchen and said, ‘See how early I got up today; I should get up this early on weekdays.’…He was so touching, he started talking to me, before he almost never spoke.”
He was small and round-shouldered, with a pale fuzz on his upper lip. He looked like a high school student. Rysakov testified: “Around 9:00, I came to the conspiracy apartment to get the bombs and for the explanation of the assassination plan. At about the same time Kotik, Ivan Emelyanov, and Timofei Mikhailov showed up. Then came a blonde, who had carried a rather big parcel…. Those were the bombs. She first handed them out and then explained the action plan, sketching on an envelope the approximate location. And who should be where.”
The final plan had two versions. The first was if the tsar returned from the Manege along Malaya Sadovaya Street. Then the mine in the tunnel near the cheese shop would go off. This part of the operation was called Central Blow.
At the same time all four bomb throwers were to be at both ends of Malaya Sadovaya Street. If the explosion was unsuccessful (that is, if it went off too soon or too late), they had to throw their bombs at the carriage. The plan had also called for Zhelyabov to attack the tsar bodily, and stab him to death with his dagger, if the bombs all failed. But now Zhelyabov was in prison, Sofia Perovskaya was in charge, and they had to give up on the stabbing.
The second version was if the tsar went back to the palace via the Catherine Canal. Then it was up to the bomb throwers alone. All four had to leave Malaya Sadovaya Street and hurry to the canal, on the signal that would come from Perovskaya.
“The signal was a light flutter of a ladies’ lace hankie,” Vera Figner wrote poetically, many years later. That fluttering lace hankie became part of many works of history and poetry. But in fact, as Rysakov testified during the investigation, the historic signal was much more prosaic. “The blonde [Perovskaya] would take out a handkerchief and blow her nose, and that would show us we had to go to the canal.”
Usually, when Alexander took the Catherine Canal, he stopped along the way to visit his cousin at the Mikhailovsky Palace. That would give them time to take their places on the canal.
March 1, early morning in the Chancellery of the city governor. A. I. Dvorzhitsky, the chief of police who accompanied the tsar to the Mikhailovsky Manage, explained what happened: “At nine in the morning of the horrible day of March 1, 1881, the city governor General Fedorov gathered all the police chiefs of the district precincts and told us that everything was going well, that the main activists of the anarchists, Trigoni and Zhelyabov, were arrested, and only two or three people remained to be captured to end the war on sedition, and that the emperor and the minister of internal affairs were totally satisfied with the work of the police. Despite this faith on the part of the city governor on the success of suppressing anarchy, many of us remained in great perplexity. I personally did not share the city governor’s conviction, based on the information that was continually reported to him, and I felt it my duty right after General Fedorov’s speech to go to see my acquaintance chamberlain Count Perovsky, a man who was close to the Imperial Highnesses Grand Dukes Vladimir Alexandrovich and Alexander Alexandrovich.”
Dvorzhitsky, like many other police chiefs, knew of troubling information that was continually reported to the city governor, who ignored it. Did that mean that the governor was also working with the people opposed to the coming reforms?
The information was so terrifying that the police chief was willing to risk his career and go over the heads of his superiors to see Count Perovsky. “Having told the count of the worrying situation in the capital, I asked Count Perovsky to inform Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich [note, not the heir] that in what I perceived the present situation to be, we could not guarantee the safety of the tsar. The count gave me his word to do so that very day.”
So Count Perovsky promised to speak with the tsar’s son Vladimir, even as his niece, Sofia Perovskaya, had turned over the bombs to the throwers. In the meantime, Dvorzhitsky went to the Winter Palace to accompany the tsar to the Mikhailovsky Manege.
At the Winter Palace, the tsar no longer took walks in the morning—the assassination attempts had curtailed them. On March 1, after the service in the Small Church, the tsar had coffee in the lettuce-green dining room with Princess Yuryevskaya and went to his study.
He received Loris-Melikov, who brought a government announcement on the new reform. The tsar commanded a meeting of the ministers to be convened on March 4, because the draft had to be promulgated in the name of the government. He was irritated by the thought that the “opposition would speak in the name of Pobedonostsev” again. But it was done, Alexander had approved the draft. They had started down the road to a constitution. The day would be remembered in history, he hoped.
The tsar was wearing the uniform of the Sapper Battalion, the one that saved his father and the palace during the Decembrist uprising. His father had brought him out to greet them in his child-size uniform.
Now he was wearing their uniform and taking his last trip. He went to say good-bye to his wife. She pleaded with him not to go, she wept, she had a foreboding, not because of the prediction of the gypsy or the letters from TASL, but because she loved him.
He overcame her nervous objections. As the all-knowing Suvorin would record in his diary, repeating what the tsar’s doctor Botkin told him, “Before leaving for the guards parade on March 1…the tsar toppled the princess onto the table and took her. She told this to Botkin herself.”
That was the way a passionate and powerful man of the Romanov dynasty was supposed to calm a woman. Neither of them knew it would be their farewell.
The Winter Palace was not the only place where wives pleaded with their husbands—a similar scene took place at the palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, Alexander’s brother, at 12:30. He was seen off to the Manege as if he were going to war. “The fact that my father always had to accompany the tsar during these Sunday parades drove my mother terribly crazy. ‘I’m not afraid of the officers or the soldiers,’ mother would say, ‘but I don’t trust the police…. The road to Mars Field is long, and all the local nihilists can see you travel down the streets,’” recalled Alexander Mikhailovich in his memoirs.
But the grand duke went to the Manege.
At the Winter Palace, at 12:45, police chief Dvorzhitsky drove up in a sleigh, in order to accompany the tsar to the Manege. Dvorzhitsky testified: “At a quarter to one I was at the Winter Palace, when Count Loris-Melikov was leaving the palace. When I came into the entry, I met Minister Count Adlerberg, who in conversation with me sadly spoke of the difficult times as a result of the activity of the anarchists. During this conversation we heard a joyous “Health to you, Sire!” from the guards in response to His Majesty’s greeting. After that, the tsar came into the covered entry, greeted everyone there, as was his custom, got in the carriage and told the coachman Frol Sergeyev, ‘To the Manege over Pevchesky Bridge.’”
The tsar was traveling via the Catherine Canal.
Alexander II traveled in a closed carriage. He was accompanied by six Cossacks and a seventh sat on the coachman’s left. The carriage was followed by two sleighs with police chief colonel Adrian Ivanovich Dovrzhitsky and the chief of the tsar’s guards Captain Kokh with policemen.
They reached the Manege, and the tsar was greeted with the guards’ “Hurrah!” The tsar entered the Manege. The battalion of the Life Guards of the reserve infantry regiment and the Life Guards of the Sapper Battalion were in formation. The tsarevich and the tsar’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich joined the tsar.
At the cheese store on Malaya Sadovaya Street, at 1:00 P.M., according to the plan developed by the Executive Committee, Bogdanovich and his “wife,” Yakimova, prepared to leave the cheese store. They would be replaced by an experienced dynamiter, Frolenko. He had volunteered to join the wires. Frolenko would most likely die under the ruins of the building from the blast he would create. “When he came to the store,” Yakimova recounted, “I was surprised to see him take out a sausage and a bottle of red wine from the package he had with him, put it on the table, and get ready to eat. ‘What is this?’ I asked, almost in horror, seeing the materialistic intentions of a man doomed to certain death under the collapsed building. ‘I have to be strong,’ [he replied] and Frolenko calmly set about eating.”
He and the bomb throwers had already said good-bye to life.
Frolenko could see through the window that gendarmes on horseback had appeared at both ends of Malaya Sadovaya in preparation for the tsar’s carriage. At both ends of the street, mixing with passersby, were the four bombers. It was time for the tsar to leave the Manege.
Yakimova left the cheese store with only Frolenko in it. The last thing she saw was Frolenko at the table by the window. Before him on the table was a vessel with the solution that would conduct electricity, and one wire. All he had to do was lower the other wire into it.
The guards parade ended at the Manege. “The guards parade went very well. The tsar was pleased by everything and was, apparently, in a good mood, joking…. When it was over, he spoke a bit with the persons around him and then left the Manege,” Milyutin recalled.
Alexander got into the carriage with its convoy and commanded, “To the Winter Palace, by the same route.”
At the cheese store, Frolenko saw the gendarmes leave, which meant that the tsar was taking the other route. He realized that he would live. Frolenko quickly left the store. The four bomb throwers also left their posts at Malaya Sadovaya. They went down Mikhailovskaya Street in the direction of the Catherine Canal.
Sofia Perovskaya was waiting for them on Mikhailovskaya Street and gave them the signal that meant they should head to the Catherine Canal.
On the way home to the Winter Palace, the tsar stopped at Mikhailovsky Palace. His cousin Grand Duchess Ekaterina Mikhailovna (with the same name as his wife) lived here. She was the daughter of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, who was the tsar’s associate in his reforms, and of the martinet Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich. She took after her father and did not approve of either his reforms or his wife.
The tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, pulled up in his carriage right after the tsar. The two brothers tried yet again, unsuccessfully, to bring peace between the two Ekaterina Mikhailovnas. Tea was served in the formal reception room of the palace. It was the last tea of the tsar’s life.
The bomb throwers took their places on the canal. Perovskaya later related that at 2:00 P.M. the student Grinevitsky, “passing her, headed for the fatal place, smiled quietly at her, barely noticeably…. He did not exhibit a shadow of fear or agitation and went to his death with a completely calm mind.”
“Don’t consider sacrifice a sacrifice, and live only for the sacrifice,” wrote the Decembrist Alexander Yakubovich, who had planned to kill Alexander II’s father, Nicholas I.
Most of them sought a joyous death. But only three bomb throwers took their places at the canal. The one who was to meet the carriage first, the worker Timofei Mikhailov, had vanished. He “felt that he could not throw the bomb and he went home without even reaching the place.” Now, Rysakov was first.
Rysakov testified, “Around two o’clock I was on the corner of Nevsky and the canal, and before that time I walked around Nevsky or connecting streets, so as not to call attention to myself from the police on the canal.”
While the men took their places, Perovskaya had crossed the Kazansky Bridge to the opposite side of the Catherine Canal. She waited for the denouement, a grateful spectator of bloodshed.
At 2:10 P.M., the tsar said good-bye to Grand Duchess Ekaterina Mikhailovna, after spending his customary half hour with her. Apparently, he had not persuaded her, so Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich stayed on.
At 2:15 P.M., Alexander went to the carriage. It turned onto the canal, followed by two sleighs carrying Dvorzhitsky, Captain Kokh, and the policemen.
The coachman whipped the horses and the carriage speeded up along the street—a fence and narrow sidewalk on the left and on the right, the wall of the grounds of the Mikhailovsky Palace and the sidewalk. There were not many people on the street: a boy with a big basket with meat, two young apprentices carrying a couch, and a young woman.
Walking toward the carriage from Konyushenny Bridge came a very young man, blond, short, and wearing a black overcoat, holding a white package the size of a box of chocolates. It was a bomb wrapped in a white handkerchief. He swung his arm.
Rysakov went on: “After a moment’s hesitation, I threw the bomb. I sent it under the horses’ hooves in the supposition that it would blow up under the carriage…. The explosion knocked me into the fence.”
There was a deafening blast, and a cloud of white smoke enveloped the carriage. When it cleared, the carriage was past the bomb, which had blown up behind it. Only the back of the coach had been damaged. The imperial cavalcade stopped. One of the Cossacks lay dead behind the carriage. The man who had sat on the coachbox with the driver had a concussion and was convulsively clutching at the empty air. On the sidewalk, the dying boy groaned, his basket of meat next to him. A few steps away, a wounded pedestrian leaned against the fence and a wounded policeman struggled to his feet.
It was a street scene previously unknown in St. Petersburg.
Rysakov started to run, shouting, “There he goes! Get him!” pretending to be chasing the criminal. But they were after him already. A workman who was doing some repairs nearby threw his crowbar at his feet, tripping him. The police and Cossacks forced his head down, holding him tight in a crouching position. Rysakov must have seen a familiar face in the crowd and shouted, “Tell my father they got me!”
They disarmed him: He had a pistol and a dagger under his coat.
As soon as the carriage had stopped, the emperor opened the door and climbed out, with the help of one of the Cossacks. Colonel Dvorzhitsky was already out of his sleigh and he ran up to the tsar.
Dvorzhitsky recalled, “The tsar crossed himself; he was a bit unsteady and understandably upset. When I asked him about his health, he replied, ‘Thank God, I am not wounded.’ Seeing that the tsar’s carriage was damaged, I decided to offer His Majesty a ride in my sleigh to the palace.”
Dvorzhitsky heard Rysakov shout at someone in the crowd and realized that there was someone else nearby, also with a bomb. He asked the tsar to leave without delay. The coachman understood, also, and made the same request. “The coachman Frol also asked the tsar to get back in the carriage and go on.” Only the back wall was damaged.
The tsar understood, too, but…“But His Majesty, without a word in response to the driver’s request, turned and headed for the sidewalk on the Catherine Canal side. He walked along the sidewalk; I was to his left, behind him was the Cossack who had been on the coachbox and four convoy Cossacks who had dismounted and led their horses. They surrounded the tsar. After a few steps, the tsar slipped on a cobblestone, but I helped to steady him.”
The tsar was headed toward Rysakov. The would-be assassin was about twenty paces from the site of the explosion; he was held by four soldiers, and Captain Kokh, chief of the bodyguards, was there. A junior lieutenant, who did not recognize the tsar at first, asked, “How is the tsar?” and the tsar, approaching Rysakov, replied, “Thank God, I’m fine, but look…” and he pointed to the dead Cossack and the dying boy. Rysakov replied immediately, “Is it thanks to God?”
The tsar approached Rysakov. Relieved to learn that he was from the bourgeoisie and not a nobleman, the tsar berated him: “A fine one!” He shook his finger at Rysakov and walked back toward the carriage.
Colonel Dvorzhitsky once again pleaded with the tsar. “Here I permitted myself a second time to speak to the tsar with a request to get in the sleigh and leave, but he stopped, thought for a bit, and then replied, ‘All right, but first show me the site of the explosion.’”
A platoon of the Eighth Naval Equipage, returning from the guards parade, approached. Completely surrounded by the guards and the Cossacks, the tsar headed on the diagonal toward the hole in the street. He was pacing the canal, apparently waiting for something. “Obeying the tsar’s will, I turned at an angle toward the explosion site, but I had not taken three steps when…” A young man who had stood sideways by the canal fence had waited for the tsar to draw near. He suddenly turned, lifted both arms, and threw something at the tsar’s feet.
That was Ignati Grinevitsky. The tsar and the officers and Cossacks surrounding him, the young man who threw the bomb, and the people nearby all fell at once, as if mowed down. Above their heads a big white cloud of whitish smoke formed and, swirling, dissipated and settled.
“I saw how the tsar fell forward, leaning on his right side, and behind and to the right of him fell an officer with white epaulets. That officer tried to stand up, but rising slightly, he pulled the tsar over on his back and looked into his face,” an eyewitness reported.
The officer with white epaulets was Dvorzhitsky, who said, “I was deafened by the new explosion, burned, wounded, and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s weak voice: ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the tsar. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking that he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him, but the tsar’s legs were shattered, and the blood poured out of them.
“Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay by the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others crawled, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them. Through the snow, debris, and blood you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabers, and bloody chunks of human flesh.” The cap had fallen from the tsar’s head; his tattered coat slipped from his shoulders; his pale face was bloodied and bruised. In a weak voice, he repeated: “Cold, I’m cold.” His head was covered in wounds. One eye was shut and the other stared ahead without expression. Not far from the tsar, Grinevitsky lay dying in a puddle of blood. “The explosion was so strong that all the glass was blown out of the gas light and the post itself was bent,” an eyewitness said.
A crowd had gathered around the tsar, dying on the bloody street, in dirty snow and tatters of clothing. They were Junkers from the Pavlovsk school, passersby, police, and the surviving Cossacks. Colonel Dvorzhitsky stood, swaying, above him. Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich came racing up in his carriage. He had heard the explosion in the Mikhailovsky Palace and hurried to the scene. The grand duke kneeled on the street. He heard his brother say, “Take me home quickly!”
The tsar lost consciousness as the blood pulsed out of his body.
If they had taken him to the military hospital nearby, they might have stopped the bleeding and saved his life. But in a panic, without binding his wounds, they took him to the palace.
It was impossible to carry the bleeding body into the carriage, so a dozen hands carried the emperor to Dvorzhitsky’s open sleigh. Among the helpers was the third bomb thrower, Ivan Emelyanov. He had a briefcase under his arm, with the bomb he would have used to kill the tsar if the first two had failed.
The sleigh moved toward the palace. The horse pulling it was the famous Barbarian that had long served the People’s Will. The police had confiscated him and now he worked for the police. Once upon a time Barbarian had helped Stepnyak-Kravchinsky and Barannikov escape after killing Mezentsov. Now he was bringing the dying tsar to the palace. The Cossacks stood in the sleigh and supported the unconscious body. Their coats were drenched in his blood.
They brought him to the Saltykov Entrance. The doors were too narrow for the crowd to carry him in. There was no stretcher in the palace. They broke down the doors and all carried Alexander II up the steps of the marble staircase to his study, where twenty-five years earlier he had signed the emancipation proclamation and where that day he had laid the path to the Russian constitution. The marble steps and the hallway were covered in his blood.
This was how the seventh attempt on his life ended.
Doctor F. F. Markus said, “When I ran into the study, I found the tsar in a semirecumbent position on the bed, which had been brought out from the alcove and placed almost next to the desk, so that the emperor’s face was turned to the window. He was wearing a shirt without a tie, he had a Prussian order around his neck…his right hand was in a suede glove, splattered in blood. Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, in tears, stood at the head of the bed in full parade uniform. When I ran up to the bed the first thing I noticed was the terrible disfigurement of the lower limbs, especially the left leg, which from the knee down was a shattered bloody mass; the right leg was also damaged, but less than the left. Both shattered limbs were cold to the touch…. I started pressing as hard as possible on both femoral arteries, where the pulse was almost imperceptible, thinking this way to preserve at least some of the blood. The tsar was completely unconscious. All the efforts of the doctors who came after me were in vain—the tsar’s life had been extinguished.”
The tsar died leaving us this last puzzle—why did he not leave immediately, knowing full well the danger in staying? Why did he walk for such a long time along the deadly canal? Was it weariness of fighting with the camarilla, and his son, and with the madmen who hunted him like a wild animal, which made him lose the will to live? Or was it absolute faith that God would always protect him and that he was invulnerable? Did he decide to prove that to himself and those around him one more time?
The sound of the first bomb on the canal had traveled far, and it resembled the noon cannon shot at the Fortress of Peter and Paul. But it was past two. An extraordinary agitation enveloped the city after the second blast. Crowds of excited people filled Palace Square and Catherine Canal. Held back by armed guardsmen, the crowd blocked the narrow space of the canal embankment, creating a bottleneck. The sidewalk was a mess of dirtied snow mixed with debris and blood.
An officer sent by Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich rushed along Nevsky Prospect to Anichkov Palace, to inform the heir. He had been present at the guards parade at the Manege and then had gone back to his palace. The tsarevich and tsarevna had just finished lunch: He was at his desk and she was looking out the window onto Nevsky, when two distant booms reached them. They were trying to guess what it could have been when she saw the sleigh racing down Nevsky, with the officer standing up in it. The tsarevich ran down the stairs, Maria Fedorovna running after him.
The messenger could only manage: “The tsar is terribly wounded!”
The gigantic tsarevich in a general’s topcoat and his petite wife next to him rushed to the Winter Palace in a two-seat sleigh. They were slowed by the human bottleneck by the Palace Square.
In the meantime, at the palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich, who had gone to the Manege, his youngest sons planned to go ice skating with thirteen-year-old Nicky, son of the tsarevich. (Nicky was what the future Nicholas II was called in the Romanov family.)
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled, “We were supposed to pick him up, when we heard a loud explosion and then a second one. Soon a panting servant ran into the room. ‘The tsar has been killed!’ he shouted. ‘And so is Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich! Their bodies have been taken to the Winter Palace.’
“Mother ran out of her room upon hearing his screams. We rushed to the carriage at the entrance and hurried to the Winter Palace. We were passed on the road by a battalion of the Life Guards of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, who were running, rifles over their shoulders, in the same direction.
“The big spots of black blood on the marble steps and then along the corridor showed us the way to the tsar’s study. Father stood in the doorway, giving orders to the servants…. Mother, shocked to see him unharmed, fainted…. Emperor Alexander II lay on a couch by the desk. He was unconscious…. He looked horrible…. One eye was shut, the other stared ahead without expression…. Members of the Imperial Family came in one after the other. The room was overflowing…. The heir came in and wept, saying, ‘This is what we have come to,’ and embraced the grand dukes, his brother, Vladimir Alexandrovich, and his uncle, Mikhail Nikolayevich.
“…Princess Yuryevskaya, half-dressed, ran in. They said that some overzealous guard tried to stop her from entering. She fell on top on the tsar’s body, covering his hands with kisses and shouting, ‘Sasha! Sasha!’ It was unbearable. The grand duchesses began weeping. Dr. S. P. Botkin examined the dying man…. In answer to the tsarevich’s question of how long the tsar would live, he replied, ‘Up to fifteen minutes.’”
A boy in a sailor suit was being led up the marble steps. It was the new heir, thirteen-year-old Nicky. He tried to avoid stepping into his grandfather’s blood, but it was hard. The blood of Alexander II was everywhere. Nicky became the heir in blood. And in blood, he would cease being tsar.
The spiritual advisor of Their Majesties, Father Bazhenov, gave the tsar Communion and Extreme Unction. The death agony began. The doctor, who was taking the tsar’s pulse, nodded and released the bloody wrist. “The emperor has passed away!”
“Princess Yuryevskaya cried out and fell to the floor. Her pink and white peignoir was soaked in blood,” recalled Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. At around 3.30, the standard of Alexander II was lowered at the Winter Palace.
The entire Romanov family kneeled around the late emperor. “To my left,” wrote Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, “stood the new emperor. A strange change came over him in that instant. This was not the same tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich, who liked to amuse the small friends of his son, Nicky, by tearing a deck of cards in half or bending an iron rod into a knot. In the course of five minutes he was completely transformed. Something incomparably greater than the simple consciousness of the duties of the monarch illuminated his heavy figure. A fire burned in his tranquil eyes.”
It was the regal gaze, the heavy, pitiless gaze of Nicholas I. They had all waited for that ruthless gaze, they had all believed that it would return peace and great power to the country. “He made a sign with his hand to Maria Fedorovna, and they left together. Her miniature figure highlighted the mighty build of the new emperor.”
The grand dukes looked down from the windows of the late emperor’s study with such hope, as they watched the giant tsar Alexander III make his way through the crowds below to his sleigh. He strode and his little wife barely kept up.
The crowd shouted “Hurrah!” But the new tsar responded angrily to the crowd’s greeting. He was awesome. Surrounded by a hundred Don Cossacks, his sleigh moved. The spears glinted red in the setting March sun.
The unconscious body of Princess Yuryevskaya was taken from the study to her rooms. After everyone left, they brought in Konstantin Makovsky, Alexander’s favorite painter. He started to work in the fading light. He looked closely at the emperor’s face, covered in tiny wounds. “I worked on his final portrait through my tears,” he wrote.
The court grieved loudly, while many remembered quietly. They remembered numerous ill omens of the reign. The orb that fell from Gorchakov’s hands during the coronation, and the crown that fell from the empress’s head. About two weeks before his death Alexander kept finding mutilated pigeons on his bedroom window every morning. A falcon had settled on the palace roof. It was so unusually large that they had it stuffed for the museum after it was killed.
People talked about the mystical coincidence of his last day. After the guards parade at the Mikhailovsky Manege, the tsar had tea with Grand Duchess Ekaterina (Catherine) Mikhailovna; he died on the Catherine Canal; and he was married to another Ekaterina Mikhailovna. His affair with her began in 1866, as did the era of assassinations. “The criminal affair seemed to open an era of attacks on his life. This gives a large field for considerations of a mystical bent, but they creep into your heart whether you want them or not,” said lady-in-waiting Alexander Tolstaya.
The tsar had married Princess Dolgorukaya at 3:30 in the afternoon, and he took his last breath at 3:33 P.M. To the court it was evident that his death was a reprisal for his sin and preposterous reforms. “And everything was saved by God’s hand, which cut the Gordian knot in time,” Tolstaya concluded.