Black-shrouded carriages, in red and gold royal equipage, wound their way along the river embankment from the Winter Palace. The procession would creep for hours through the streets of Russia’s capital before at length crossing the Troitsky Bridge. There it would reach its destination at the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Alexander’s predecessors, all the tsars of the Romanovs, were buried.
The crowds of mourners along the street were silent, lulled, by the forlorn tattoo of drumbeats and the dolorous tolling of church bells.
Russia’s “Little Father” was dead, felled by the assassin’s hand. It was perhaps shock more than grief that darkened the faces watching the cortege. Alexander had never been immensely popular, and even what approbation he had enjoyed had waned considerably in later years. Perhaps it was true after all, what so many conservatives were now saying in guarded whispers, that what Russia needed, and really wanted, was a strong, firm leader.
The people of this huge land were children who required the security of firm discipline. They simply did not know how to follow a man like Alexander II, whose benevolence had appeared as weakness and whose attempts at despotism bordered on the laughable.
But this late ill-starred monarch, notwithstanding his deficiencies, was still the “Tsar-Liberator.” Thus he would be remembered, though even that singularly supreme act of his reign was also marred by strife and imperfection. One French diplomat lamented at the funeral, “Oh, a liberator’s task is a dangerous job!” Perhaps Alexander’s major fault was that unlike his contempory and fellow liberator, Abraham Lincoln, he had outlived the glory of his grand deed.
Viktor stood on the fringes of the crowd with his friend Alexander Baklanov. Baklanov had commented that the general grief of the people was not perhaps as profound as it should have been for a dead monarch, and one of the half dozen or so most powerful men in all Europe.
“At least you have good reason, Viktor,” said Baklanov sympathetically, “not to be pained by his passing. He could have interceded on behalf of your son. He could have granted him clemency. After all, you and he were friends for years. But instead, he turned his back not only on Sergei but on you, the most loyal friend a man could have.”
“You are right, Alex,” said Viktor pensively. “And perhaps that is why I am unable to conjure up enough outward show of anguish. But it has little to do with my son. You see, I have already grieved for Alexander long before this. It began, I suppose, with his destructive relationship with that woman. And after the war when he fell so low in public esteem.”
Viktor paused and sighed. “It all changed him, Alex,” he went on slowly. “He could have been a great man, a great tsar. But he sacrificed it all to personal whim. It seems to me that God might have in this way spared him from losing still more of his dignity and self-respect. His death can only be regarded as a blessing, Alex, if only the circumstances had not been so horrible.”
Viktor Fedorcenko felt no bitterness for Alexander Nicolaivich, though he knew that his death sealed forever any hope of reprieve for Sergei. The new tsar was a stiff reactionary with whom Viktor himself had been at odds on many occasions. Alexander Alexandrovich, no matter how much he had himself argued with the former tsar, would not be favorably disposed toward the idea of leniency toward one who had wronged his murdered father.
Even worse, the entire royal family, the new Alexander III included, had been shown in a negative light in the scuttled writings of would-be author Sergei Viktorovich Fedorcenko. The new tsar had his own reasons for despising the author of A Soldier’s Glory.