Chapter 18: “Our Girls Are Fiercer Than Our Men”

For Sofia Perovskaya, news of the executions behind prison walls bolstered her determination to sacrifice all else to carry out a dramatic killing of the Tsar. At a meeting of the full Narodnaya Volya Executive Committee, Sonia took the lead in stifling a renewed push by her lover Zhelyabov, and others, for “postponement.” Maria Olovennikova, who was in attendance, left the following account.457

There was a good deal of argument over the renewal of terrorist activity. It was clear that it would mean that our other activities would suffer: we would have to devote all our resources to terrorism. Mikhailov took pains to emphasize the importance of the other sides of our work. So did Zhelyabov. He realized the difficulties we were up against better than anyone else. Tikhomirov as usual agreed with the majority. Perovskaya was all out for terrorism, whatever the cost.

Nikolai Kibalchich, who was also in attendance in this meeting, later summed up the role of Perovskaya and Yakimova in a phrase. “Our girls are fiercer than our men.”458 He added some more comments which shed light on Perovskaya’s character. “Perovskaya has the same kind of hatred as Mikhailov, only with a different nuance, more befitting a woman. But she does not show it as clearly as he does. This feeling is noticeable in her movements, in the attention with which she follows the Tsar’s movements. In Mikhailov it is strong and steady, in Perovskaya it is sharper, deeper and more vehement.”⁴⁵⁹

A former Sixties radical writing in 1906 amplified the terms in which Perovskaya, during this period, had explained her thought process relative to what would be by terrorism.

I asked her about the seizure of power. She clapped her hands in comic amazement, since this question was raised only by those who did not belong to the organization. Her own personal view was that no program could dictate what would happen. Not to seize control would be to concede to the enemy. But the seizure of power, though desirable, was not a fundamental point in their program. Their opponents would claim that they were ‘Jacobins,’ but ‘our motto, “The People’s Will,” is not a mere phrase, it actually expresses the essence of our ideas, since in everything we are prepared to submit to the will of the people, expressed freely and clearly. But in the name of this, another problem arises for a revolutionary party, quite apart from the present direct battle with the contemporary political structure; that is to create, after the downfall of this structure, the social conditions in which the people would have the opportunity of expressing freely their will and realizing it . . . .

The conversation then touched on political terror, and the causes that had forced it to play such an important part in Narodnaya Volya. ‘Revenge is a personal issue here,’ she said. ‘One can justify it, and with some difficulty, as a terrorist act committed on the individual initiative of separate people, but not by an organized party. Our revolutionary history does not recognize these acts, apart from situations of self-defense. It would be impossible to organize a party around the banner of revenge – or to attract any public sympathy, something that we must make use of. That first shot fired by Vera Zasulitch was not revenge, but an act of retaliation against an insult to human dignity. That is how it was understood by everybody, and that is also how it was understood at her trial by the representatives of the public conscience.’

‘The political history of nations presents eloquent evidence that everywhere where the agents of the government are not answerable to the law for their actions, people will take the law into their own hands to counteract this, and at certain periods a revolutionary administration of justice will arise. But we cannot use this formula of retaliation to justify the aims and methods of Russian revolutionary terror. By elevating it into a systematic method of struggle, the Party uses it as a powerful means of agitation, and as the most effective way of throwing the government into confusion, holding it under the sword of Damocles, and forcing it to make important concessions. All other paths are prohibited to us – prohibited by the government itself.’460

Even Olovennikova, a stalwart Sixties radical, was stunned at the degree to which it appeared Perovskaya and those who shared her views within Narodnaya Volya had lost touch with any semblance of political reality. “All they can talk about now is dynamite.” She saw the party as bent on a suicidal course.461

Upon the Tsar’s return to the capital from Livadia five days after Kviatkovski’s hanging, Sonia personally assumed command of scouting Alexander to see exactly how, and when, he might be vulnerable to attack. She assembled a squad of six volunteers, acting under her supervision. Each day they went out in pairs to watch for the Emperor’s appearances in town, to follow his routes, and to understand his tendencies.⁴⁶²

The “Janitor,” Mikhailov, determined to carry on with the revolutionaries’ practice of publicizing their dead fellow terrorists as martyred heroes. He took snapshot photos of Kviatkovski and Presnyakov to a photo store to get them printed. Mikhailov was unable to enlist a “legal,” so he decided to handle the photo reproductions himself. This was a blunder, one especially unusual for the shrewd “Janitor.” Understanding the terrorists’ propensities, the police had notified all of the photo shops in St. Petersburg to be on the alert. When Mikhailov returned to pick up the photo prints, he fell into a police trap and was captured. This was the strongest blow yet that the Government had registered in its fight against Narodnaya Volya.⁴⁶³ The cool, calculating Mikhailov, who controlled Kletochnikov, and who coordinated the overall “security,” financing and planning of the terrorist operations, could not easily be replaced.

Sonia tried to bolster the ranks by asking Morozov, who had left St. Petersburg right before the Winter Palace bombing to join the radical community in Switzerland after losing what amounted to a power struggle with Tikhomirov, to return to Russia to rejoin Narodnaya Volya. Morozov felt close to Sonia. The two had sat together when they were co-defendants during the Trial of the 193. Sonia’s political beliefs also leaned more toward Morozov’s anarchist political philosophy than toward Tikhomirov’s more “centralist” theories. Morozov responded to her appeal. In January 1881, Morozov left behind Olga Lyubatovich and their newborn daughter in order to make the journey back to Russia. A few days after his departure, Lyubatovich received word that her lover had been been arrested at the border. She was stunned and anguished. Her nursing baby cried all night. The next morning Serge Kravchinsky volunteered to go to Russia and figure out how to free Morozov. Olga refused this. Instead, she vowed to go personally, leaving the baby behind. It was arranged to leave the girl with Serge Podolinsky, a radical doctor who already had three children under his care. When Lyubatovich walked out on her daughter asleep in a crib, her heart was “petrified with sadness.” She later wrote, “It is a sin for a revolutionary to start a family.”

Olga’s return to Russia to follow Morozov was a pitiful and abject failure. While Olga was aboard the train headed to Russia, her milk kept emerging in her breasts and she had no way to release it. The liquid buildup caused her pain, inflammation and fever. The little girl she had left behind quickly contracted meningitis. She died within two weeks after her mother’s departure.464

The loss of Mikhailov left Perovskaya and Zhelyabov in an even more central role within the ranks of Narodnaya Volya. The group badly needed new blood for their next project. They sought new recruits from the ranks of the “Workers Section.” However, Zhelyabov was far less astute than Mikhailov. Many of the new people he brought in turned out to be less dependable and reliable than their incarcerated or deceased predecessors. For instance, Zhelyabov recruited an Odessa carpenter named Vasily Merkulov, who assisted with the tunneling plot there, led by Perovskaya and Figner, in the spring of 1880. Merkulov turned out to be difficult. He was prone to complaining and finding fault, making him irritating for others to work with. He resented the role of intellectuals, as opposed to workers, in controlling the “movement.”⁴⁶⁵

In December of 1880, Merkulov was sent on a mission to Kishinev, 200 kilometers northwest of Odessa in territory that is now part of Moldavia. There he was assigned to assist Frolenko and Lebedeva. Using the fake name “Mironenko,” the Narodnaya Volya couple had rented a house together that was adjacent to the state treasury. The intent was to tunnel from their cellar into the treasury cellar in order to steal cash stored there. However, for reasons we do not know, the plan did not succeed and had to be abandoned. In January 1881 the “Mironenkos” cleared out and, with Merkulov, made their way back to St. Petersburg. Upon their return, Lebedeva blamed Merkulov for the plan’s failure, while Merkulov blamed Frolenko.466

Kishinev marked Narodnaya Volya’s latest attempt to address an increasingly urgent problem, the need to raise money to finance its many and varied nefarious activities. As is typical for terrorists, their plots had became far too intricate, and their identities had become far too clandestine, to permit them to hold down paying jobs. For several years, Zemlya i Volya derived a large proportion of its funding from the personal fortune of Dmitri Lizogub. Lizogub was a scion of a wealthy landowning family in Cernigov, located in northern Ukraine near the border with Belarus. His father, in addition to being a multi-millionaire, had been a liberal who worked for the abolition of serfdom. Lizogub became a member of Chaikovsky circle in 1873-74. He was not handsome. He was tall, pale and somewhat slim. He had long eyebrows, from underneath which there peered large blue eyes. His smile had something infantile about it. His voice was somewhat slow in utterance and always pitched in the same key. Kravchinsky describes him as “very poorly clad,” wearing a linen jacket with large wooden buttons, which “from much wear and tear seemed a mere rag.” A “worn-out black cloth waistcoat covered his chest to the throat.” From his appearance one would never have guessed that he was a millionaire.⁴⁶⁷

Lizogub was intimately associated with Valerian Osinski, and became a principal financier for the Osinski’s “disorganizing” exploits. Although he did not personally engage in any terrorist acts, his connection to the “Southern” terrorists became known to the authorities, and he was placed under tight surveillance. Lizogub came up with a plan to liquidate his assets and dispense the proceeds through an attorney friend named Vladimir Drigo.

On July 30, 1878, Lizogub was arrested in an Odessa brewery while in the company of two other revolutionaries. After Lizogub’s arrest, Drigo stopped further disbursements of Lizogub’s fortune. The “Janitor,” in response, pursued bringing Drigo to heel. Drigo schemed with the police to set a trap for the “Janitor,” but Mikhailov smelled it out. Drigo himself wound up being arrested and incarcerated. Eventually, he was, rather ironically, put on trial as one of the November 1880 “Kviatkovski” group of 16 defendants. Meanwhile, as a result of information from Drigo and from Feodor Kuritsyn, who had been placed as Lizogub’s cell mate similar to the way he was later placed with Goldenberg, the authorities confirmed everything they needed to know about the enormity of Lizogub’s financial support for the terrorist movement. Lizogub was surprised to learn that a noose awaited his neck. He was hanged publicly in Odessa on August 10, 1879.468

After Mikhailov’s arrest at the end of November 1880, Narodnaya Volya’s finances became extremely tight. The group enjoyed a great deal of prestige among elements of society, such as students and workers, who were not in a position to provide any significant degree of financial support. Additionally, Zhelyabov lacked the deftness of Alexander Mikhailov. His methods of fund raising were focused on a small scale, and they were heavy handed. Zhelyabov recruited a 19-year old apprentice named Nikolai Rysakov into the movement. Young Rysakov was “completely dazzled” by the charismatic Zhelyabov, who now went by a new nickname among his admirers – they called him “Taras,” after a mythical hero. “Taras” insistently exacted from Rysakov the meager funds that Rysakov’s rather poor and hard-working family had scraped together to send him to support his apprenticeship in the capital. Zhelyabov required Rysakov to take out an advance of 90 rubles – three months’ allowance – from his father’s employer, and to hand 50 rubles of that sum over to Narodnaya Volya.469

Using her scouts, Sonia observed that the government had become very security oriented in the wake of the three known assassination attempts against the Tsar during the last two years. The Tsar’s daily schedule was constantly changed. Everywhere he went, he traveled at top speed in a carriage drawn by a team of horses. The carriage was also escorted by five to seven mounted Cossack guards. He was, in short, a protected and difficult target. However, on Sunday, Alexander almost always visited the Mikhailovsky Manège, a St. Petersburg cavalry parade ground, for the changing of the guard which occurred at noon. His normal route for traveling the ten or so city blocks to get to the Manège from the Winter Palace took him along a street called Malaya Sadovaya.

Narodnaya Volya’s “Executive Committee,” led by Perovskaya, decided on a new plan for attacking the Tsar. Sonia’s fingerprints are all over the plan from its inception. In its essentials, it was a replay of the same mine attack she had already spearheaded twice before, at Moscow and at Odessa. The terrorists would open a phony “cheese shop” in Malaya Sadovaya; they would then tunnel from its basement beneath the street to place a bomb where it could be exploded under Alexander as he passed overhead on a Sunday.

Yuri Nikolaevitch Bogdanovich, a friend of Figner, was selected for the part of the cheese merchant. Bogdanovich, typical of the Narodnaya Volya extremist, was from a noble landowning family in Pskov. But he relished playing the role of the peasant shopkeeper, and he made sure to look and talk the part. Perovskaya nominated herself to serve as his fictitious shopkeeper wife, the same role she had played previously in Moscow and Odessa. But she was overruled by the group. Instead, this time “Baska” Yakimova was selected to play the role of the shopkeeper’s wife. She and Bogdanovich assumed the family name of “Kobozev,” and got in touch with the landlord’s agent. After some negotiation they agreed to take the partially subterranean space at an annual rent of 1,200 rubles. They were unable to move in at once, as two of the rooms had been damaged by recent floods and were being repaired, but they signed the lease and paid a deposit of fifty rubles. The landlord’s agent reported the curious nature and behavior of the “Kobozevs” to the police. The police checked with Voronezh, the place of their passport’s issue. But the terrorists had become very sophisticated in their handling of falsified identity documents. The confirmation came back that Yovdokim Yermolayev Kobozev, a lower middle class citizen, had indeed received this document. The plasterers finished the repairs, and the couple moved into their new premises shortly after January 1, 1881.470 Tunneling underneath the street swiftly got under way. All of the available Narodnaya Volya men who were in St. Petersburg, except Tikhomirov, participated. They worked around the clock in shifts. The dirt extracted from the mine was hidden inside empty cheese barrels. When Frolenko, Lebedeva and Merkulov returned to St. Petersburg from the Kishinev expedition, they too were pressed into service as diggers. However, Merkulov proved so difficult and resistant to taking orders that Bogdanovich ultimately had to get rid of him as a worker.⁴⁷¹

Yuri and “Baska” were convincing in their subterfuge of pretending to be a country couple. “But,” according to Figner, “from a commercial point of view they were both incompetent, and the neighboring tradesmen at once decided that the newcomers could not be dangerous rivals.” In addition to this, Narodnaya Volya’s supply of money remained so low during January and February, the terrorists could buy few cheeses with which to stock the “store.” So meager were their funds for this purpose, when Vera Figner secured from wealthy sympathizers 300 rubles with which to purchase stock, it was regarded by the conspirators as a stroke of great fortune.472

Narodnaya Volya was now experienced with digging tunnels. The work progressed fairly swiftly, but ran against two obstacles underneath the Malaya Sadovaya. The first was a cast iron water pipe, which the terrorists successfully manuevered around, but the second was a larger wooden boxlike structure. They could not go over it, because it was too close to the surface, and they could not go under it, because the St. Petersburg water table was too high. They reluctantly decided to cut through it. They were rapidly overcome by the stench that emerged, for the wooden box was in fact a sewer. Undeterred, the digging crew managed to seal off the bottom half of the box, in which the sewage was flowing, covering it with a fabric cover, and proceeded with digging the hole through the top half. The entire cheese shop was permeated with the smell. The diggers began wearing improvised respirators fashioned out of cotton soaked with a chemical.⁴⁷³

In the midst of work on the Malaya Sadovaya mine, Narodnaya Volya received an unexpected message from a ghost. On a frigid January night Isaev, who was then posing as Vera Figner’s fictitious husband, walked into the apartment where she and two other Executive Committee members were sitting and placed before them a 2.5 centimeter wide scroll of paper. He said to them unemotionally, as if there was nothing extraordinary in it: “From Nechaev, from the Ravelin.”

Sergei Nechaev had not been heard of by anyone on the outside for eight long years. For Perovskaya, Figner and the others, who had been in their teens at the time, Nechaev’s name evoked mainly the grisly memory of his infamous murder of Ivanov. In the intervening years, however, these former Chaikovsky participants had come full circle. The Narodnaya Volya “Executive Committee” now embraced an outlook and ruthless methodology very reminiscent of that advocated in Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary. For instance, the third edition of the underground bulletin of Narodnaya Volya had published a set of “program guidelines” that was taken directly from Nechaev’s Catechism.474 The new terrorists jumped to attention with respect the moment they received the old terrorist’s message.

This whole time, Nechaev had been held principally in secret solitary confinement in the Alexei Ravelin, a maximum security wing of the Peter and Paul Fortress. There he was bound with chains. But even though locked down within Russia’s most impenetrable dungeon, he proved able to use his strange snake charming personality to perfection. Even in chains, he retained a sinister capacity to bend weaker minds to his will. For the prison staff it was strictly forbidden to say even one word to the unmentionable Nechaev. But with stubborn will, persistence and determination, Nechaev slowly induced many of the officers in his unit, one by one, to bend this rule. Once started on the road to hell, they moved on to speaking with him in full-fledged conversation. Sergei probed and catalogued each guard’s personality and weaknesses. He also capitalized on awe for Narodnaya Volya’s high profile terror strikes, and the resulting public notoriety. Even high government officials, including Loris-Melikov, paid him occasional visits in an attempt to win him over to assist in fighting the terrorist contagion. Nechaev used the buzz surrounding these visits to impress the officers with his aura of importance. To those he sensed to be wavering in his favor, he whispered that he was a martyr suffering for them, for their fathers and brothers, for truth and justice. Very slowly, always dealing with them separately, always keeping them ignorant of the progress he might be making in turning others, Nechaev cultivated his own “staff” of followers among the prison guards. The “staff” called him by a nickname -- “the Eagle.” This was the same title Chernyshevsky in What Is to Be Done? gave to his mysterious strong man, Rakhmetov.

Even as he was cultivating his “staff,” the Eagle also engaged the prison wardens. Loudly and constantly he protested his degree of isolation. He went on hunger strikes. He threatened suicide. Eventually the prison commanders, too, relented, and began providing Nechaev with access to some of his requested reading materials.475

Stepan Shiraev was a member of Narodnaya Volya’s Executive Committee who had served as one of Perovskaya’s workers in digging the Moscow tunnel and in arming the mine for the resultant train explosion. Following his conviction and sentence of imprisonment in the Trial of the 16 in October 1880, Shiraev was transferred to solitary confinement in the Alexei Ravelin. “The Eagle” soon learned of Shiraev’s presence in the unit. Using Nechaev’s “staff,” the two men were able to communicate. Through contact information gleaned from Shiraev, Nechaev for the first time figured out a way to arrange to smuggle messages to the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya in the person of Grigory Isaev.⁴⁷⁶

Nechaev’s first message to the Executive Committee was very straightforward. Basically, it was a simple “help me get out of here.” When it was received, the Executive Committee was deeply moved and impressed. With “unusual emotion” all of its members unanimously resolved at once that “he must be freed.” Detailed messages were exchanged in which Nechaev set forth several scenarios for helping him escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress. At least one plan, involving Nechaev’s escape through a sewer pipe, was investigated to the point that Zhelyabov actually went to observe the outlet of the pipe in question. But Zhelyabov concluded the plan would not work because the pipe was too long and anyone trying to get through it would suffocate. Other possibilities were considered. But the ultimate response Narodnaya Volya gave to “the Eagle” was that it was busy devoting all of its energy and resources to its terror attack on Tsar Alexander II. Freeing Nechaev would have to be the next order of business, as soon as the assassination was carried out.

Once the line of communication was open, many more intricately coded messages were received from “the Eagle.” Nechaev described in hieroglyphics the methods he had used to acquire his influence. He transmitted detailed information about the fortress in which he was held. He told lurid stories of brutality within its walls. Above all, Nechaev sent detailed directives on matters such as how to handle his “staff,” and how to bring about and conduct the revolutionary dictatorship after Alexander’s death. Some of the advice for his protégés can only be described as classic Nechaev. For instance, he urged Narodnaya Volya to publicly exaggerate its numbers by a factor of at least two orders of magnitude – i.e., to represent itself at not less than one hundred times its true strength. He advocated a variety of plots for sowing deception. One was to distribute fake news – reporting an imperial ukase decreeing that all serfs should be returned to their former masters. For Zhelyabov, he professed his utmost admiration. He suggested that Zhelyabov should become the revolutionary dictator.477 This cleverly appealed to Zhelyabov’s own fantasies.⁴⁷⁸

On January 28, 1881, Loris-Melikov presented Alexander with an official memorandum detailing his accomplishments to date, as well as his planned reforms. In this memorandum he covered his abolition of the Third Section and his abolition of the highly regressive salt tax. ⁴⁷⁹ The number of peasant disturbances during the period of his stewardship, in 1880, had declined substantially, he noted. The time was right, he went on, to proceed with a new set of reforms. He proposed to involve representatives of local society in formulating the details of new laws. The reforms would be carried out under the authority of “His Majesty’s will,” and certainly would not amount to a full-fledged Western style democracy, but the initiative would nevertheless be a diligent effort to secure participation and input from concerned citizens. From the citizens, there would be drawn one committee on administrative reforms, and a second commission on financial reforms. The memorandum was discussed in Alexander’s high council of state, the equivalent of his cabinet, on February 5. Despite the private reservations of conservatives, the meeting ended with general approval of Loris-Melikov’s proposals.480

Loris-Melikov could also point with pride to the progress that had been made by his administration in catching terrorists. The authorities had wisely refrained from engaging in a mass execution of the defendants in the Trial of the 16. Instead, they commuted three of the five death sentences to life imprisonment with hard labor. One of the convicts thus spared was Ivan Fedorovich Okladsky. Okladsky was not a quintessential terrorist. Rather, he was more in the profile of what, in the post 9-11 world, we can recognize under the rubric of a “muscle hijacker.” He was basically a workingman who was recruited into the ranks of terrorist schemes by Andrei Zhelyabov and then remained under the influence of Zhelyabov’s magnetic personality. Okladsky enthusiastically participated in numerous Narodnaya Volya exploits, in which he made himself very useful. But he differed from the typical terrorist profile in that he was not frought with class guilt, he was not an ascetic, and he was not suicidal. Throughout the Trial of the 16, he remained just as defiant as the other defendants. But in the trial’s aftermath, in December 1880, he agreed to cooperate with the authorities. At first he declined to give any names (and, it is possible that he did not know any of the real names), but he did agree to assist in identifying the safe houses of the remaining outlaws.⁴⁸¹ He also helped immensely by acting as an eyewitness to verify the identities of suspected terrorists, including Mikhailov, once they were captured.

As a result of information provided by Okladsky, on January 25, 1881, the St. Petersburg police captured Mikhailov’s longtime friend, Alexander Barannikov. Other important terrorists fell like dominoes. Barannikov was found to have a false passport that revealed his underground residence address. This turned out to be a seven room flat on Kuznechny Lane. It happened to be in the same building where Fyodor Dostoyevsky lived. The flat was placed under surveillance, which promptly bore fruit when the “Purring Cat,” Nikolai Kolodkevitch, was spotted and captured there the following day. After Mikhailov’s arrest, Kolodkevitch had been assigned the role of Kletochnikov’s “handler,” meeting with him for debriefings in Kolodkevitch’s residence. Now, Kolodkevitch’s residence was also discovered and placed under surveillance. Kletochnikov, hurrying to warn Kolodkevitch of Barannikov’s capture, walked into an ambush there and was captured on January 28, 1881. This was on the same day when Loris-Melikov was giving his report to Alexander. Narodnaya Volya’s “Guardian Angel” was now in custody.482

Central St. Petersburg