THE REVOLUTIONARY STUDENTS of St. Petersburg took stock of their chances after the arrests in the military schools in December 1886 and January 1887. The regime appeared to be ready for anything, and only the most reckless vowed to go through with an attempt on the life of the tsar. Rumors of assassination plots continued to make the rounds and appeared in the foreign press, but pessimism was the order of the day. In late January and early February, Sasha had doubts about the timing of the assassination attempt and asked Shevyrev and the others to put it off until the fall of 1887. It seemed to be an impossible task. Despite all of the preliminary work in the zemlyachestva and other student organizations, the hastily planned assassination plot of less than four months’ duration enrolled only a handful of fully committed terrorists. Shevyrev, with the help of Orest Govorukhin, Josef Lukashevich, and Sasha, recruited Vasilii Osipanov, Pakhomii Andreyushkin, and Vasilii Generalov as throwers and, as signalers, Michael Kancher, Peter Gorkun, and Stepan Volokhov. When the need arose, the main organizers reached out to a larger network of helpers and suppliers: some did little more than fetch and carry bomb-making materials, others lithographed or set type for the group’s program; still others provided contraband chemicals, poisons, weapons, safe houses, and funds.
The authorities could connect only fifteen people directly to the conspiracy (not counting those already arrested in earlier roundups, like Sergei Nikonov, or in emigration, like Govorukhin and Nicholas Rudevich). All of those arrested and brought to trial played significant roles. Michael Novorussky and his mother-in-law, Maria Ananina, helped Sasha set up a laboratory in a suburb of St. Petersburg. Raisa Shmidova stored explosives and, like Anna Serdyukova in Yekaterinodar, connected the St. Petersburg group with other outposts of the terrorist network. Lukashevich’s contacts in Vilnius—Bronislaw and Josef Pilsudski, Anton Gnatowski, and Titus Pashkovsky—provided chemicals, poisons, and pistols. Sasha worked feverishly in Bronislaw Pilsudski’s apartment typesetting the program on February 27 and 28. They did everything at breakneck speed and, in the end, botched everything.
The conspirators of the Second March First seem pathetically inadequate compared with the Executive Committee of the People’s Will. The organizers of the successful attempt on the life of Alexander II had swept up hundreds of collaborators into their project. With all of their resources, they failed repeatedly in several ambitious attempts spread out over a period of two years. Even the failures of the Executive Committee, however, were impressive. Each attempt cost enormous effort and personal sacrifice. In February 1880 Stepan Khalturin, who had been hired as a carpenter on the royal yacht, got himself transferred to the Winter Palace. Beginning in November 1879 he smuggled small amounts of dynamite and hid them where he bunked in the cellar of the Winter Palace. Khalturin stored more than one hundred pounds of dynamite in a box, placed to explode beneath Alexander II’s dining room. The tsar failed to reach his table at the usual time because of a meeting with a visiting dignitary. Instead, the huge explosion killed eleven people and wounded fifty-six more. This was the most spectacular of the several failed efforts. The years 1879–81 in retrospect became the heroic period of Russian terrorism, when the terrorists achieved maximum effect. Thereafter the regime managed to stay one step ahead of the revolutionaries. In December 1886 and January 1887 arrests among St. Petersburg army and naval cadets brought pessimism and apathy. Mark Braginsky, who had marched with Sasha on November 17, and Sergei Nikonov were both arrested.
Sasha believed that the participation of military elements was crucial for the execution of systematic terror, and held no brief for gathering all of their meager resources for a solo attack on the tsar. His commitment to the group kept him working on the bombs, but according to Govorukhin, Sasha thought he could best serve the cause with theoretical work abroad. “I’ll help prepare the assassination and then I’ll hide and, if the government searches for me, I’ll flee abroad.”1 Govorukhin in January 1887 accused Ulyanov of vacillating, but once he himself emigrated, he confessed that delay made more sense than holding the assassination attempt to the original calendar. It seems likely that not only Ulyanov but Lukashevich, Govorukhin, and Shevyrev as well had no real intention of staying with the bomb throwers until the bitter end. Lukashevich’s and Shevyrev’s behavior at the trial strengthens this impression. Govorukhin knew that he might have to go into hiding well before the assassination attempt. In January, however, not rational calculation but emotions determined the outcome, and all of the central actors except Ulyanov thought that the group should hold to the March 1 target date.
Although Shevyrev’s compulsiveness played a central role, the suicidal impatience and machismo of the bomb throwers had great weight in the final decision. Osipanov, the lead assassin, and his companion Cossack bomb throwers cared little for theory and simply wanted to get on with it. Andreyushkin and Generalov vied to prove their Cossack masculinity. Their machismo expressed as revolutionary commitment impressed Sasha during his visits to the Don and Kuban Cossack zemlyachestvo, and he let them and Osipanov dictate the timetable. Each decision that Sasha made reinforced his sense of responsibility to the group. When others fell by the wayside, he stepped up. During January he was only one of several bomb makers; after mid-February, when Govorukhin and N. A. Rudevich fled abroad and Shevyrev left for the Crimea, Ulyanov and Lukashevich became co-equal in bomb-making and organizational work. Sasha’s writing skill and ability with complex ideas made him the main communicator and theoretician of the Second March First.
During January and February 1887 Ulyanov and Lukashevich had full responsibility for the bomb making and organizational work connected to it: they needed to procure chemicals and laboratory equipment, to establish secure laboratories and storage sites; to distribute the tasks, to test the explosive materials and fuses, and to instruct the throwers about the way the bombs worked. Much of this was done in surprisingly slipshod fashion, but they were able to build the bombs without police detection of their laboratories.
The bomb making proceeded in January and February at a hectic pace, sometimes recklessly. Lukashevich, Ulyanov, Govorukhin, Generalov, and Andreyushkin worked in far-from-secure settings—their own apartments—and took great risks. The manufacture of nitric acid produced penetrating odors, but the complaints and questions of landladies and landlords were adroitly parried with the usual explanation: they were performing chemistry experiments for their studies. Once while Sasha and Govorukhin were producing lead cubes for bullets in Sasha’s apartment on Alexandrovsky Prospect, a friend walked in on them. Showing more than a little sangfroid, Sasha asked him to help them, without explaining what they were doing. No questions were asked and no consequences ensued.2
Nicholas Rudevich, another Kuban Cossack, had been recruited into bomb making by his former gymnasium mate Andreyushkin. When Andreyushkin indiscreetly revealed his central role in a project to assassinate the tsar, Rudevich realized that anyone associated with Andreyushkin was in a ticklish position. He decided to stop working on the project. Andreyushkin told Shevyrev, who threatened that Rudevich would have to be eliminated because he knew too much. At that point Andreyushkin balked and asked Sasha to intervene. Sasha called Shevyrev’s method “Nechaevist,” and persuaded him to back down. They agreed that it was prudent to send Rudevich abroad at the beginning of February 1887 and supplied him with funds and a false passport. It was one of several incidents in which Ulyanov braked Shevyrev’s ruthlessness. Although Sasha willingly helped others emigrate, he became more deeply involved. Like the bomb throwers, he chose fidelity to the cause over self-preservation.
Ulyanov’s self-subordination to the will of the group did not occur thoughtlessly or recklessly, but “scientifically.” Sasha believed in the Russian Darwinian notion that historical evolutionary processes of selection worked at the group level rather than the individual level. Lavrov, whose writings circulated widely in lithographed copies in the student body, had made such thinking paramount in narodnik doctrine. Lavrov legitimated terrorist action only if it signified subordination to the tactic of a disciplined wing of a revolutionary party guided by scientific theory—an approach that the Bolsheviks later translated into “democratic centralism.” The individual will and intellect had to be sacrificed to the group’s authority—to the party line. It mattered little to Sasha that the party line in this small group had been set by reckless and suicidal youths, whose behavior violated conspiratorial rules and played into the hands of the police.
BY THE LATE 1880s relations between police and institutions of higher education had become virtually routine—not necessarily a good thing for the authorities. Students expected police agents to show up at private apartments when five or more students gathered, presumably for parties. The revelers ordinarily served their visitors enough strong drink to soften their vigilance. Student festivities were often Potemkin villages of a sort, fake name-day celebrations or engagement parties with dancing, music, and a prominent display of bottles—façades for serious backroom political discussion. Despite this slackness in some areas, the authorities had infiltrated all of the subversive groups and illegal zemlyachestva. Threatened with expulsion or worse, some students became police collaborators. Others who had been arrested for illegal activity bargained with the police and served as double agents or stool pigeons. In prisons the police planted them where they could tease out information for use in court, or turn the prisoners against each other by spreading disinformation.
Under Dmitry Tolstoy, minister of the interior from 1882 to 1889, and Vyacheslav Von Plehve, the head of the Police Department between 1881 and 1884, spying reached a new level. They gave Gregory Sudeikin, already head of the St. Petersburg Security Bureau and bane of the People’s Will, even greater authority in January 1883. A secret directive of June 5, 1882, issued at the beginning of Tolstoy’s tenure, created the “black offices” for systematic invasion of the empire’s mail. Until this time the practice of opening and replacing private letters had been performed relatively infrequently. Things changed quickly. In 1882 alone twenty employees in seven such clandestine operations located in post offices in the Russian Empire’s major cities opened 380,000 letters.3 The practice, called “perlustration,” gave the St. Petersburg police the crucial information they needed to round up the Second March First conspiracy. The black office had been reading some of Andreyushkin’s correspondence, which yielded an indiscreet letter of January 20, 1887, to a student in Kharkiv University, Ivan Platon-ovich Nikitin. This inexplicably careless letter gave the police every reason to believe that Andreyushkin was serious about terrorism:
“…Might we have a social-democratic movement, like Germany’s? I think that’s impossible. What’s possible is the most merciless terror, and I firmly believe that it will actually happen in the near future; I believe that the present calm is the calm before the storm. I’ll not rehearse the virtues and advantages of red terror…because that’s my hobbyhorse and it’s no doubt why I hate social-democrats.”4
The letter was quite enough to set the political police into motion, but the signature on the letter was indecipherable, and the police in St. Petersburg did not receive verification from the police in Kharkiv that Andreyushkin had written it until February 27,1887. The black office then sent the information to St. Petersburg chief of police, Gresser, with a request to begin “continuous and extremely close surveillance” of Andreyushkin and to establish who his close contacts were. The close surveillance of Andreyushkin, though much delayed, started on February 28. Undercover agents of the political police as well as regular police found him and the other throwers and signalers rehearsing for the main event on Nevsky Prospect. However, Generalov had been under close surveillance, and, even earlier than that, on February 22 and 26, his tail had followed him from his apartment to his rendezvous with Andreyushkin and Osipanov.5 Andreyushkin’s letter to Nikitin thus alerted the police to the possibility that they were all part of a terrorist organization and that imminent action was possible. The police would have had even more explicit information about Andreyushkin and the conspiracy if they had intercepted his messages to Anna Serdyukova.
A promising student from a poor family, Serdyukova had attended a normal school and had qualified to teach at the elementary level. She had three younger siblings and lived with one of her two sisters. At some point Serdyukova joined radical circles. Her mentor Kikifor Kochevsky, who taught in a village school in Yekaterinodar District, had been accused of spreading revolutionary materials in 1875. Information gathered by police agents in 1887—too late for the trial in April 1887—connected the Kharkiv circle of terrorists to Kochevsky, and thus tied Serdyukova to Shmidova. Both of the women knew Vasilii Brazhnikov, a veteran terrorist from the Kuban who had studied in Yekaterinodar, then in St. Petersburg and Kharkiv, where he became a major organizer of the groups there. The central Kharkiv terrorist group had been decimated in 1886, and the survivors sent emissaries far and wide for help. Brazhnikov went in February 1887 to St. Petersburg, where he contacted Shmidova. Rudevich, like Andreyushkin, was part of the Yekaterinodar and Kharkiv networks. He had graduated from the Kuban military gymnasium in 1885, a year earlier than Andreyushkin.
Andreyushkin met Serdyukova in Yekaterinodar, a town of roughly 45,000 on the Kuban River, in the summer of 1884. He was nineteen and a gymnasium student in the seventh class, and she, roughly six years his senior, was giving private lessons and earning forty-six rubles a month in a nearby village. They met again in February 1885. One year later, in February 1886, she took up residence in Yekaterinodar. As a favor to her, Andreyushkin tutored Serdyukova’s younger sister, who was fourteen and preparing to enter a gymnasium. This went on until August 1886, before he left for St. Petersburg. During these months Serdyukova and he became very close friends—“as close as people of the opposite sex can be and respect one another”—and they continued their relationship via mail.6
At the trial in April 1887, in his agonized attempt to explain his correspondence with her and deny a political connection, Andreyushkin called Serdyukova “more than a friend.” She, however, knew that he was a doomed man and tried to save herself by describing the contents of the smuggled letters that she had burned according to his instructions. One such letter recounted the events of November 17, 1886, and in it he vented his anger at the authorities. She knew that it would be imprudent to respond, but when Andreyushkin wrote again, explicitly asking whether she agreed with his views, she replied that she disagreed with them. In December 1886 he wrote that he would sometimes be using invisible ink, and if she could not read parts of his letters she should heat them over a lamp to reveal the text. Then in January 1887 Andreyushkin wrote that he had joined the People’s Will.7 The police did not know the contents of these messages until after Serdyukova’s arrest and interrogation in March 1887. Rather, it was the letter to Nikitin in Kharkiv that tipped off the police to his intentions at the end of February.
In February, Serdyukova heard rumors that Andreyushkin had been arrested. His mother, with whom she was acquainted, lived not far from Yekaterinodar in a Cossack village. She came to town and told Serdyukova that the rumors were false, that she had received a letter from her son, but was illiterate and needed Serdyukova’s help. Andreyushkin’s letter, though sent to his mother’s address, was actually written for Serdyukova. Evidently sent on February 14, the letter contained the misinformation that he had typhus, and would be hospitalized on February 15, and requested that Serdyukova should keep this from his mother. In the same letter, to her shock, she found a marriage proposal. How could she marry someone seven years her junior? She decided to put an end to his fantasy and sent a reply telling him that she could not marry him—that he was like a brother to her. But after she had sent her letter she realized that his letter containing the proposal might also have a hidden message. It did, and what she saw terrified her: “There is going to be an attempt on the life of the tsar. I’m one of the bomb throwers; be careful, don’t make a misstep; don’t even write if you agree to my proposal.”8 What could she do now? She had been put in a double bind. Perhaps a yes would stop him from going through with the plot, but he had made it virtually impossible for her to say yes. Not knowing that he had been arrested on March 1, she decided to go back on her refusal, and telegraphed acceptance of his proposal of marriage on March 6: “You asked me not to write. Since I received your letter I’ve lived through an eternity. Yes. Please reply. Komikhina.”9 Serdyukova thought she could evade detection by using a nickname known only to her friends. The police, of course, collected all of Andreyushkin’s letters after his arrest, among them an unsent letter to her. They intercepted Serdyukova’s telegram on March 7, easily traced it, and arrested her. Later she was charged with concealing knowledge of the conspiracy.
Serdyukova’s situation now resembled Shmidova’s, although the latter was more deeply involved with the conspiracy and with both Ulyanov and Govorukhin. The two women had become revolutionaries in Yekaterinodar and Kharkiv, and then were drawn into the world of reckless and suicidal young men who wanted to be heroes, to impress the women they loved, perhaps to receive a soldier’s goodbye, but perhaps, at some unconscious level, to sacrifice their loved ones as well. Govorukhin sent Shmidova a strange message dated February 25 (that is, after his departure) beginning, “If they find my corpse, then I beg that no one be accused of causing my death.” In the apparent suicide note he claimed that he intended to drown himself in an ice hole, but what begins tragically ends clownishly: “O. M. G. Guess who?”10 The initials are obviously those of Orest Makarevich Govorukhin. Although Govorukhin claimed in his memoirs that this was just a ruse to confuse the police, it was not clear that Shmidova took it that way. At the trial in April she testified that she believed that he intended to commit suicide because she thought he was “somewhat psychologically abnormal.”11 Then there was Sasha’s use of a telegram unnecessarily implicating Anna in the conspiracy. All three men were at least wounding the women closest to them—and possibly destroying them.
THE POLICE HAD PICKED UP Sasha’s trail during the fall semester of his senior year. His name appeared in several reports from agents planted in the student body. In the fall of 1886 Sasha’s frequent visits to the zemlyachestvo of Don and Kuban Cossacks made him especially suspect. The police were fully aware of the rumors about assassinations circulating after November 17, 1886. They did arrest suspects, but the Second March First was only one of many incipient terrorist groups, and in matters of security, timing was important for achieving maximum effect. The police had made numerous arrests in December and January and were closing in on Govorukhin in February, but in order to make a clean sweep they would have had to arrest quite a few of Russia’s future elite academicians. The university reforms of 1884 and the events of November 17, 1886, had alienated so many students that the police could hardly detect the serious plotters against the background noise. Even so, they held the balance of power in 1887.
In the first half of January 1887 Sasha decided that, for his own good, Chebotarev should move from Alexandrovsky 25 to another apartment, and his friend did leave on January 20.12 Chebotarev’s name had begun to appear with Sasha’s on police reports, but he had not made the same kind of commitment to terror that Ulyanov had. Sasha did not want his friend to go down with them. Now a full-time terrorist, Sasha made bombs and laid plans for systematic terror—flexible, decentralized terror whose operatives would seize opportunities and lie low when necessary. Sasha felt confident that he might make a contribution as a theoretician as well as a technician—hence his dream of becoming an émigré in one of the European centers that produced the strategic literature for the revolutionary movement—perhaps in Paris with Lavrov or in Geneva with Plekhanov.
In January he began to make nitric acid and lead cubes, and then in February nitroglycerine, dynamite, and the bomb casing. Toward the end he packed the dynamite and strychnine-treated lead into the bomb’s shell. Only Lukashevich stood above him in the technical chain of command. Govorukhin and Sasha had recommended Generalov and Andreyushkin to Shevyrev as possible recruits. Sasha became their instructor in the manufacture of nitric acid. Ordinarily taciturn and gloomy, overcome by what Russians call toska—a mood barely suggested by ennui because it is so much deeper—the young Cossacks seemed to come to life only when involved intensely with bomb making and preparing for the event.
Vasilii Generalov, the son of a Don Cossack landowner and miller, only nineteen at the time of the attempted assassination, had enrolled, like Andreyushkin, in St. Petersburg University in 1886, but chose the law faculty. Generalov’s academic record and attitude in his stagnant gymnasium in Novocherkass evoked the assessment “indifferent to the point of dullness.”13 In fact, Generalov had ample intelligence but lacked stimulation. The rich intellectual and political life of the university and the circle of Don and Kuban Cossacks saved him from a state of perpetual funk. Revolution became his métier. In St. Petersburg, Generalov began to organize gymnasium students into self-education circles. After the demonstration of November 17 he returned to his habitual gloom and apathy, but brightened again when, with Govorukhin and Ulyanov’s help, he found his way to Shevyrev. He was perfect for Shevyrev and Lukashevich’s designs. Before he could throw bombs, however, he would have to make them. At the end of December, Ulyanov commissioned him to make roughly two hundred cubes of lead for the bombs. On January 3, 1887, Generalov moved into a two-room apartment on Bolshaya Belozerskaya Street, one room of which became a laboratory and storage place for the explosives.14 He and Andreyushkin then were assigned the difficult and time-consuming task of making nitric acid.
Pakhomii Andreyushkin had the humblest origins of all the conspirators. Born out of wedlock to a Kuban Cossack mother and a Greek father, he came to St. Petersburg in 1886 after a permissive gymnasium education supplemented by self-education circles dedicated to learning the latest radical theories. The gymnasium students in Yekaterinodar created a virtual reign of terror, breaking the windows of out-of-favor teachers and meditating—though not too seriously—on simultaneously blowing up the residences of several gymnasium directors in the region.15 The police were watching Andreyushkin from the very beginning of his university career in the fall semester 1886. He, too, entered the physical-mathematical department in St. Petersburg University, planning to study the natural sciences and then move on to medicine. The reactionary atmosphere hastened his way to terrorism. In January 1887 Andreyushkin’s apartment became the workshop for nitric acid and bullets.
Andreyushkin arrived during the radical upsurge of 1886 and, as one might expect, joined the radical clique in the Don and Kuban Cossack zemlyachestvo. He immediately focused his energy on terrorism and became its stubborn advocate. Like Nechaev and Shevyrev, Andreyushkin did not rule out “violence against brothers” when he thought it necessary for the cause. Like Bakuninist insurrectionists, he admired the old Cossack rebels Razin and Pugachev. When the police put an illegal student circle’s library under official seal, Andreyushkin worked out a plan to liberate the books, but discovered that another student group had similar designs. He threatened to rat them out to the police, and they backed off. Andreyushkin’s recklessness and blindness to danger reached the edge of pathology—and perhaps beyond.16
Shevyrev found in Adreyushkin another ready recruit for the assassination squad. Although the failure of the Second March First seemed very likely, Andreyushkin’s inability to contain his enthusiasm and boastfulness attracted a level of police surveillance that guaranteed the discovery of, at least, the personnel involved. When Shevyrev proposed that he be one of the throwers, Andreyushkin accepted with alacrity and demanded that they give him the biggest bomb and also the first crack at the imperial equipage. Another tragicomic note sounds in Andreyushkin’s refusal to carry potassium cyanide—although in this he was seconded by Osipanov. Sheyvrev offered it for use in the unlikely event that the throwers survived the blast. Andreyushkin taunted Generalov for accepting the poison: “I’m not a Don, but a Kuban, Cossack and have the courage to endure any suffering.”17
Lukashevich’s method for producing nitric acid of the requisite strength proved to be tedious and time-consuming. The conspirators brought in another Cossack, Rudevich, to help them, but his defection from the project made things even more difficult, and they appealed to Shevyrev to look for another way—hence the decision at the end of January to purchase the acid in Vilnius. Lukashevich used his connections. He and Shevyrev decided that Michael Kancher would be the best person to act as liaison. Born in Ukraina in Poltava Province, the son of a postmaster in the imperial service, Kancher had graduated from a classical gymnasium and, like several other members of the plot, had joined the faculty of mathematical and physical sciences at St. Petersburg University. He quickly fell in with Shevyrev in October 1886. The apartment at Tuchkovy Lane on Vasilevsky Island that he shared with Peter Gorkun, his friend from Poltava and a law student at St. Petersburg University, became a central site of the conspiracy. Kancher’s reliable work for Shevyrev’s dining room, his role in the work on the proclamation connected with the November 17 demonstration, and his businesslike behavior and boundless energy made him the perfect candidate for a complicated and dangerous commission. At the end of January 1887 Lukashevich and Shevyrev gave Kancher fifty rubles and the addresses of Lukashevich’s contacts in Vilnius.18
Ulyanov agreed to be the link with Kancher, to confer with him on the day of his departure, to monitor by a conspiratorial telegram his successful procurement of the goods and his arrival time in St. Petersburg, and then to meet him at the Warsaw Station and pick up the contraband. Sasha had Kancher send the telegram under the name “Petrov” to Anna’s address rather than his, thereby making her an unwitting accomplice. After a little reflection he realized that giving Shevyrev Anna’s address had been a mistake, but when he tried to intercept Kancher before his departure it was too late.
In Vilnius during January 31 to February 2 Kancher met Bronislaw Pilsudski, Isaac Dembo, Titus Pashkovsky, and Anton Gnatowski, all committed to terrorism. At Dembo’s request, Pilsudski, who enrolled in law at St. Petersburg University in 1886 and went home to Vilnius during December and January, procured strychnine and atropine from a pharmacist. In another of history’s ironies, Bronislaw Pilsudski’s older brother, Josef, after years in tsarist prisons for his socialist and nationalist plotting, became commander of the Polish army. President and de facto dictator of Poland, he stopped the Red Army in 1920, thereby halting the spread of the Russian Revolution not only into Poland but possibly into Germany by way of Poland. Bronislaw Pilsudski and Pashkovsky stood trial in April 1887 and were sentenced respectively to fifteen and ten years hard labor in Siberian exile. Dembo and Gnatowski fled to Switzerland and, with others, tried to complete the unfinished business of the Second March First. In 1889 Dembo tested a new and presumably better kind of bomb, but it exploded prematurely and fatally injured him.19
On the night of February 2, 1887, Anna received Kancher’s telegram from Vilnius signaling his success at procuring the materials: “Sister is dangerously ill.” Sasha met Kancher on February 3 at the Warsaw Station when he returned carrying a suitcase with forty pounds of nitric acid. Kancher also carried funds contributed by the Vilnius circle, pistols, and poison. However, the nitric acid he brought back from Vilnius was too dilute and thus useless for dynamite. They dumped it into the Neva and once again began to make acid of the requisite strength from scratch. Lukashevich also had to acquire more poison.
In February they began collecting all of the necessary materials to build the bombs, once again with Kancher’s help. Kancher recruited a friend, a gymnasium dropout, Stepan Volokhov, who became the third signaler. They purchased in St. Petersburg shops sulfuric acid, tubes, retorts, and other laboratory equipment and vessels necessary for making and storing the explosives. Andreyushkin, Generalov, Kancher, and Volokhov kept up the output of lead bullets, transported the products to Govorukhin and Shmidova, who stored some of it, and brought the rest to Michael Novorussky’s apartment, for transshipment to a makeshift laboratory in the northern suburb of Pargolovo. A theology student working toward a master’s degree, Novorussky gave Ulyanov cover as tutor in scriptures for his mother-in-law’s son. Her suburban dwelling became a safe house for the production and storage of dynamite and nitroglycerine.20
At the beginning of February, Ulyanov began to assume more responsibility for the manufacture of the bombs themselves, although he contributed very little to the infamous book bomb. He had doubts about its design and wished that he could modify it. Lukashevich in his memoirs took credit for designing and building the book bomb. He bought Greenberg’s Dictionary of Medical Terminology, a sizable tome with a stout cover, glued the edges of the pages, put the book in a press, and let it dry. Then he cut out most of the inside, leaving only the pages’ now solid edge to make the book into a sturdy box. Lukashevich described how he made the bomb’s innards down to the smallest detail. He apparently did this mainly out of pride, to defend his reputation against the expert testimony of Major General N. P. Fyodorov, a professor at the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy. Fyodorov testified that the book bomb failed to explode because it was badly designed and that the two cylindrical bombs suffered from similar defects.21
It is difficult to know exactly how much work Sasha actually did on the bombs, because during the trial he did everything possible to save Lukashevich from hanging. Under interrogation at the trial Ulyanov claimed that he packed the book bomb with dynamite between February 8 and 10, but it still remained to fill the space between the tin casing and the cardboard book cover with strychnine-treated lead cubes, a job that he gave to Generalov. Sasha then started to prepare the cylindrical bombs and estimated that they needed a few additional pounds of dynamite. Ulyanov didn’t think that he could safely prepare the explosives in his own apartment. His friend Novorussky, a theology student of revolutionary bent, donated his mother-in-law’s suburban cottage. Novorussky, a candidate for a higher degree in the Theological Academy, had a typically nihilist common-law marriage to Lydia Ananina, the daughter of a midwife of peasant background, Maria Alexandrovna Ananina. Novorussky recommended that Ulyanov pretend to be a tutor for his mother-in-law’s fourteen-year-old son, Nicholas.
Maria Ananina and Nicholas lived in a rented dacha in the third, most northerly section of Pargolovo, roughly ten kilometers north of St. Petersburg and near the Shuvalov Station on the Finland railway. On February 10, 1887, Novorussky dispatched there a carriage loaded with baskets filled with Ulyanov’s laboratory equipment and chemicals. Sasha arrived on February 11 by the rail line that passed nearby; the next day Novorussky sent another shipment from St. Petersburg. Working systematically in the dacha, in three days Sasha made three and a half pounds of white dynamite and more nitroglycerine than they needed for the bombs. He intended that the surplus nitroglycerine and the laboratory serve future bomb making for an extended terrorist campaign. Ulyanov carefully instructed Ananina about the dangers of letting the nitroglycerine warm up. She hid the bottle in the water closet and then put it in a pot that she packed with snow every two days.22
On February 14, the day of Sasha’s departure from Pargolovo, Ananina convinced him that it would be easier and cheaper to ride with her in the horse-drawn cart she had hired than to take the train to St. Petersburg. They started out together, but the suburban road got rough, and it became too dangerous to continue the ride in Ananina’s cart. When they reached the beginning of the horse-tram line to St. Petersburg, Ulyanov left her and got on the tram with his sack of dynamite. In St. Petersburg he returned to his apartment to work on the tin casing and thick cardboard shells of the two cylindrical bombs.
Lukashevich had to make last-minute adjustments to the bombs’ fuses and put the new design through repeated trials, with Ulyanov and Shevyrev participating. The throwers would be walking with the bombs along St. Petersburg’s busiest thoroughfares, and an unexpected jolt might lead to premature ignition, so Lukashevich decided to make it impossible to ignite the fuses accidentally. He evidently used the wrong kind of string to arm the fuses. At the trial Fyodorov mentioned the string as one of the problems with the bomb mechanism. Although he did not admit this outright, Lukashevich wrote, “It would have been more practical to use cord instead of string.”23 Lukashevich, however, defended the design of his fuses and placed the blame on the brute force used by the police, who prevented Osipanov from yanking the string properly and opening the valve. One of Osipanov’s depositions suggests otherwise.
Meanwhile, Shevyrev shifted Kancher, Gorkun, and Volokhov to new roles. Heretofore procurers and transporters of the materials for the bombs and also bomb makers, they now entered the inner circle and learned the precise goal of all their work. They accepted the role of signaler proposed by Shevyrev. Having gotten the bombs well on the way to completion and his combat team enlisted, Shevyrev on February 17 left for Yalta. Before his departure he brought Ulyanov into the central group and gave Lukashevich the mantle of leader, although in practice Sasha and Lukashevich became co-leaders of the group. On February 17 Sasha met Osipanov for the first time. In the following days, under the watchful eyes of Ulyanov and Lukashevich, the throwers practiced with simulated bombs of the same weight as the real ones and duplicate fuses. In order to test the dynamite itself Lukashevich sent a quantity to Vilnius, where his friends carried out his instructions and successfully exploded a large cartridge. They sent a coded telegram to inform him.24
The main actors spent February 20–21 in feverish activity. Sasha and Lukashevich completed the job of constructing the cylindrical bombs’ tin inner casings and cardboard outer shells. They cut the tin in Ulyanov’s apartment and then took the pieces to Lukashevich’s for soldering. Andreyushkin, Generalov, Kancher, and Volokhov finished the work on the more than five hundred bullets and filled them with strychnine. This involved cutting cross-shaped pieces out of thick sheets of lead, creating a small hollow space inside when the arms of the cross were bent into a cube. After filling the space with strychnine and atropine sulfate they pierced the sides of the cube with an awl. Finally, they slathered the outside surface of the cubes with strychnine and alcohol.25 Only the packing of the bombs with dynamite and bullets remained.
On February 20 Sasha took a break from his other tasks to accompany Govorukhin to the Warsaw Station. He gave Govorukhin one hundred rubles, for which he had pawned the gold medal he had received for his junior thesis. Govorukhin had stayed as long as he safely could, and the bombs were virtually finished. That same day Andreyushkin took surplus bomb-making materials designated for future combat squads to Govorukhin’s now empty apartment for storage. Shmidova, whose apartment adjoined Govorukhin’s, had Andreyushkin hide the materials in a basket under Govorukhin’s bed. When Shmidova went out later that day, the landlady searched both apartments and found bottles filled with liquid and other mysterious parcels in Govorukhin’s. She told the doorman to alert the police, but her suspicions seemed to him to be much ado about nothing. He characterized the situation in those terms to the police, who were not going to put themselves out for a foolish old woman. They searched the apartments only on the afternoon of the next day and found nothing, because Sasha had retrieved the bomb-making materials before they arrived. After leaving Govorukhin at the Warsaw Station on February 20, he took a cab to Shmidova’s apartment. Unnoticed by the landlady, they moved the materials into Shmidova’s apartment. Sasha stayed with her until morning and then left before dawn with the contraband.26
Kancher and Volokhov were supposed to take the finished bombs from Ulyanov’s apartment on February 21 for distribution to the throwers. They arrived earlier than expected; Lukashevich and Sasha were still at work packing the bombs with dynamite. This had important consequences. After the arrests on March 1 Kancher and Volokhov quickly broke down during interrogation and testified to seeing Sasha and Lukashevich working on the bombs. The larger bombs were delivered to Andreyushkin; Osipanov already had the book bomb.
The three throwers met as a team for the first time on the evening of February 22 in the Café Polonais on Mikhailovskaya Street and discussed possible assassination sites. Osipanov, the tactician for the combat group, suggested the area near the Mikhailovsky Manège, where Alexander II had reviewed his guards regiments shortly before his assassination, but after discussion the three throwers thought that it would be better to intercept the tsar’s equipage either on Nevsky Prospect, at the Catherine Canal, or on Bolshaya Sedovaya. They decided to hold off on a detailed plan until they could have a joint meeting with the signalers on February 25. Now that the members of the entire combat squad had assembled and were supplied with their bombs, Sasha took the lead in suggesting that they have a farewell party.27 They had all passed the point of no return.
On Monday afternoon, February 23, an exhausted Sasha showed up at Anna’s apartment. While she went for tea he fell asleep on the sofa. After rousing him she showed him a recent letter from home. One of Ilya Nikolaevich’s former colleagues wrote that Maria Alexandrovna had suffered a breakdown on the first anniversary of Ilya’s death, but had then recovered her equilibrium. Sasha sat silently, his head in his hands and a doleful look on his face. Anna, a genius at denial, still did not know precisely what was going on, although she had felt uneasy about Sasha’s behavior throughout his senior year. For a moment she thought that the letter would be helpful—reminding him of his responsibility to Maria Alexandrovna and his younger siblings. It obviously affected him, but reminding Sasha of his father’s death and mother’s suffering may have been a mistake. Rather than calming him down, it probably reinforced his rage and desire for revenge. What, after all, had caused all of this suffering if not the regime that had forced Ilya Nikolaevich into retirement and undermined his life’s work?
On February 25 the combat group and Sasha met in Kancher and Gorkun’s apartment. Osipanov told them how to deploy along the tsar’s anticipated route. Ulyanov lectured them on the construction of the bombs. After the others departed, Sasha read Osipanov a programmatic statement justifying their terrorist action. This was a precaution. If Osipanov survived, then he would have to represent their ideals and aims to a tribunal. Sasha thought that “the Cat,” a somewhat uncouth man of few words, would be a poor mouthpiece for the program of scientific socialism. When the plot went awry, Sasha decided to take responsibility for making their case not only to the Senate tribunal but to the larger court of posterity. This seems odd in view of Ulyanov’s own taciturn ways. He had cultivated the persona of the gloomy and tight-lipped nihilist hero of the literature of the 1860s. Now he had to adapt to the moment—and the moment required a different kind of heroic role—that of a socialist tribune modeled on the earlier martyrs of the People’s Will. Who was better equipped to play that role than Sasha, who had expended agonies arriving at the notion of scientific socialism and then embodying it succinctly in a program?
The anguish and sorrow that Anna saw in Sasha during the last days of February she later ascribed to the pain of knowing that he was going to sacrifice his own mother to his socialist ideals. Her perception of his agitated state may have been correct but her diagnosis wrong. He may have been unhappy with the way things were going—with the hasty and sloppy work of the conspirators, with their immaturity and recklessness, and even perhaps with his own. Sasha was still trying to be a perfect nihilist hero—a person whose ideas and actions were perfectly rational and in precise harmony with his feelings. He identified himself with the socialist vanguard of humanity—what Lavrov called the “critically thinking minority”—and, like other terrorists of the late 1880s, Sasha played the role presumably assigned by the historical moment with the merciless consequentiality required of a developed person.
SASHA AND HIS CO-CONSPIRATORS had barely launched their project during the second half of December 1886 than they began to explore the idea of a program for the terrorist group. Everyone agreed that none of the existing programs clarified the meaning of revolutionary terrorism at this moment in history. They needed to present an “objective-scientific explanation” for the inevitability of the clash of the government and the intelligentsia. They had to show that it was a natural expression of contemporary Russian life. Sasha patiently explained it all to one of the gendarmes who interrogated him on March 20–21,1887:
The former program of the People’s Will lacked a scientific foundation…. In addition, we thought that it was our duty in undertaking such a serious project to inform the public not only about our most immediate motives for our deed, but our entire political “credo.” This inspired the composition of the general part of our program forming together with the special part the “Program of the terrorist faction of the party ‘The People’s Will’” that I set forth in this deposition…. I personally was deeply involved in its composition and completely agreed with everything proposed in it, its positions and the explanation of terror….28
Somehow Sasha managed during the last days of February to compose and plan (though without success) the printing and distribution of the program of the Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will. The designation “faction” signified a departure from the main line of the now shattered Executive Committee. Ulyanov tried to update both theory and practice and unify all of the terrorist and social-democratic groups, but by and large he faithfully reproduced the ideas of the narodovoltsy of that time. Like the People’s Will in 1881, the terrorists of 1887 were trying to extort a liberal constitution by means of dynamite.
Sasha represented the relatively irenic socialism of the late 1880s, when narodnik terrorists and social democrats worked together in the same organization simply because they all believed in the necessity of terror. The Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will contained people like Shevyrev and Andreyushkin, who did very little “scientific” thinking at all, and Sasha, who spent enormous effort on a scientific analysis of the Russian Empire’s unique situation. Although he admired Marxism, he did not think that an ethical revolutionary could idly sit by while capitalism did its work. Ulyanov looked to Lavrov for his ethics. To the science-oriented narodniki guided by Lavrov, terrorism was ethical to the extent that it could remove Russian autocracy, the greatest obstacle to the dissemination of scientific socialism to the narod. Lavrov taught that Russian socialism needed fanatic, heroic people during the phase of socialist struggle that preceded the formation of a disciplined party and the mass education of the people.
The People’s Will had some of the characteristics of a disciplined party, but even during its heyday it was a vulnerable underground organization. In the late 1880s there was no real party, only small groups of young fanatics trying against all odds to shape one. Sasha joined them after he overcame his initial contempt for the state of social science and made a fatal commitment, as it turned out, to a narodnik-Marxian hybrid, in which the narodnik side of the hyphen dictated tactics. Lavrov’s ethics and appreciation of Russia’s uniqueness trumped Marx’s more catholic vision. His articles for The Messenger of the People’s Will gave the new generation a social and political analysis emphasizing Russia’s special features and both the obstacles and the opportunities associated with them.
Sasha’s social analysis of historical progress closely shadowed Lavrov’s ideas in Socialism and the Aims of Morality. With Darwin himself their authority, Russian Darwinists found in human beings an inherited tendency to sacrifice themselves for their group. Lavrov had taken things further and written that the most “developed” people, the socialist vanguard, had a duty to sacrifice not only themselves but, if necessary, those closest to them to serve an ideal that embraced the love of humanity as a whole. Such thinking transmuted suicidal and murderous acts of terrorism into the naturally ordained self-sacrifice of a scientific vanguard for the sake of the human species. Lavrov, however, believed that critically thinking individuals still made a choice. What was natural was not inevitable for the “developed” minority.
The Marxian side of Sasha’s hybrid program showed in several ways. At the very outset of the program he modified the People’s Will’s formula of 1879: “In our basic convictions we are socialists and narodniki” by dropping the word narodniki.29 Second, Sasha embraced the notion that economic forces inevitably shaped social change and would produce a happy socialist ending—not merely adequate material resources and social justice for all, but full human development for all. To be sure, states would not all arrive at socialism in the same way. Although he began with economics, the emerging proletariat, and their growing consciousness of their position, Sasha did not make economic forces the only drivers of historical change. Rather, he gave significant roles to factors that dogmatic Marxists assigned to the “superstructure.” Like other narodniki, Sasha assumed that governments and intelligentsias played no small role in determining how any given people would arrive at socialism. In Russia historical change now depended on the struggle between an outdated and defensive political system—a stubbornly autocratic police state—and the progressive forces in a changing society.
For Sasha the Russian peasants remained the most significant social force, though not the most progressive one. Their value lay not just in their numbers but in their communal traditions: their belief in the right of the people to land, their collective ownership and cultivation of the land, and their communal, local self-government—all features that might allow them to move quickly toward a higher form of socialism. Narodnik theorists also believed in the power of ideas: once made conscious of scientific socialism by the vanguard intelligentsia, Russia’s peasants might not have to go through a long period of misery under capitalism. Although Marx and Engels usually attacked anything that smacked of “idealism,” their preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party allowed that a socialist revolution could succeed in a relatively backward Russia if it triggered revolutions in the more industrially developed states. All of this turned out to be wishful thinking. For the moment, Russian peasants lacked the requisite consciousness and could only vaguely support the struggle of the revolutionary elements in Russian society. Europe was in the early stage of a new surge of imperialism. For pure Marxists 1887 showed little promise.
For Sasha, Russia’s urban factory workers—themselves recent arrivals with strong connections to the villages—would serve as a crucial link with the countryside. Like Marxists, Sasha saw the workers as the “natural bearers of socialist ideas.”30 Despite their relatively small numbers, they were the nucleus of a socialist party, its most active element, a decisive force for change, and the group most receptive to political indoctrination and struggle. The Second March First had thus made plans to spread propaganda among the workers of St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, in Sasha’s theory Russian workers, like the intelligentsia, would act mainly to bring to a higher level of socialist consciousness the larger mass of peasants already inclined toward socialism.
The Russian theorists of revolution always had difficulty assigning the revolutionary intelligentsia a precise practical role. Sasha, like other narodniki, recognized the socialist intelligentsia as a social force in its own right and even as the vanguard of political struggle for freedom of thought and speech, but he did not believe that it could play a fully independent role in a revolutionary struggle. He found convincing the Marxian notion that revolutionary struggle had to be class struggle. The intelligentsia vanguard might be midwives of revolution, but no more than that. Unlike Bakunin, Sasha did not imagine historical circumstances in which the vanguard could impose “from above” a “scientific” program that did not really coincide with the hopes of tens of millions of peasants. The narodnik scenario that Russia might take a shortcut to socialism played out after 1917—but this time under the leadership of a Marxist party led by Sasha’s reckless younger brother. The tragic results are well known.
VLADMIR ILYICH ULYANOV, as Lenin, would head the scientific Marxian “priesthood” prophesied by Michael Bakunin, who understood that those who invoked the authority of science could be every bit as tyrannical as religious fanatics, and that they would use science to justify a new kind of state despotism, even more oppressive than the old one. During his struggle with Marx over control of the First International in 1872, Bakunin had written a letter to the socialist journal La Liberté (Brussels) in which Bakunin both outlined the likely consequences of the kind of revolution Marx wished for, and predicted with great prescience the soviet-style regimes of the twentieth century.
That revolution will consist in the expropriation of the land…from the current owners and capitalists and in the appropriation of all the land and capital by the State, which, in order to fulfill its great economic mission as well as its political one, will have to be very powerful and very strongly centralized. The State will administer and direct cultivation of the land by means of its appointed managers commanding armies of rural workers, organized and disciplined for that kind of work. Simultaneously, on the ruins of the entire existing banking system it will establish a single bank controlling all labor and the entire national commerce…. One can see immediately how an organizational plan so apparently simple might seduce the imagination of workers, who seek justice and equality more avidly than liberty, and who foolishly imagine that the other two can exist without liberty…. In reality, this will be a barracks regime for the proletariat, most of whom will be reduced to a uniform mass, and will wake up, go to sleep, work, and live by the drum…. Internally there will be slavery and in external affairs war without respite…31
Sasha believed that the socialist party’s central task was to educate and organize the emerging social class most susceptible to socialist ideas. But the oppressive regime lay between the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia and the workers. Without a liberal constitution granting freedom of speech, they would not be able to spread the word. Here Ulyanov remained squarely within the Lavrovian doctrine that gave the intelligentsia a tutelary role, both as carriers of enlightened thought and as organizers. Like Lavrov, Sasha saw the intelligentsia not as mere instruments of larger forces but as ethical actors, paying back their debt to the suffering millions whose serf labor for their ancestors had permitted the privileged few to reach the highest level of human development. Sasha never spoke about it, but he probably saw his own father as a victim who had worked himself to death serving the cause of enlightenment under a regime opposed to his goals. In his own way, Sasha continued his father’s project, but now as a destroyer of the state that had rejected Ilya Nikolaevich’s work.
Members of the revolutionary intelligentsia had two radically different images of the Russian imperial state. In their pessimistic moods, they pictured it as a brute force against which they had little chance; in more optimistic frames of mind, they saw it as a flimsy structure vulnerable to a variety of internal and external shocks and threats. Historical experience had taught them that the conjunction of military and diplomatic defeat by foreign powers and internal rebellion presented the greatest opportunities for changing the system. For now, Sasha wrote, the socialists had to concentrate their efforts on producing a shock to the Russian state system by means of terrorism, but only as a means to an end: enlightening and organizing the victims of the system for class struggle. In this terrorist campaign to win a modicum of freedom, they might join with liberals—nonsocialists who also wanted Western-style constitutions.
Eventually, a people’s state would be won, a new kind of state that would bestow the full panoply of civil liberties: a universal franchise and freedom of conscience, speech, the press, and association. The people’s socialist regime would nationalize the land, the factories, and all the means of production; give peasant communes the power to organize a socialist economy in the countryside; dissolve the standing army in favor of local militias; and guarantee free elementary education. Ulyanov, following Lavrov, believed that such measures would be a good foundation not only for social justice and the fulfillment of material needs but for full individual moral development. Every person would be able to rise to the scientific ethics of the socialist vanguard. The human species would realize its evolutionary potential. Sasha could not present a full picture of the stages of development that would follow the winning of initial civil liberties after a successful terrorist campaign; nor could he imagine, as Bakunin had, what might follow from nationalization. “The Program of the Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will” was just a rough sketch, an attempt to inspire and unite the pitiful forces available in 1887. For now, the intelligentsia saw no other way than the use of revolutionary terror against state terror.
An implicit critique of the People’s Will emerged at the very end of Sasha’s program in which he made the case for systematic terror—a term that seemed incongruous with the decentralized and spontaneous program of terror he described. The program did repeat the Executive Committee’s claims for the efficacy of terror. Ulyanov averred that terror would not only disorganize the regime but inspire the people to revolution by giving them abundant evidence that struggle was possible, that the government was not all powerful. However, Sasha added to this the important claim that centralized terror was no longer possible or desirable. Now terrorists had to adapt themselves to local conditions and to use terror as a protest against oppression where they found it in its most obnoxious forms. This more spontaneous form of terrorism would feed on and in turn unleash the elemental forces of the people—and in this Sasha made a gesture toward Bakuninism. He quite wittingly hoped to have something for all Russian revolutionaries in this ecumenical document. Ulyanov worked around the clock from February 27 to March 1 with two helpers in Bronislaw Pilsudski’s apartment setting the type for the program and correcting it. They never managed to print a clean copy.
The program Ulyanov created might have been a critique of the conspiracy that he served—a tiny group whose flimsy network and pitifully inadequate remaining resources in the apartments of the bomb makers and in Pargolovo could not possibly follow up a successful assassination with more acts of terror. The means for systematic terror simply did not exist. Yet the bombs were ready; the combat group went into the streets with them twice on days when the tsar might have given them a target; and even the heroic work of the black office did not make up for police laxity and obtuseness. Alexander III’s work habits and a lapse of his palace staff perhaps did more to prevent the attempt on his life than good police work; and the police themselves might have suffered serious casualties but for flaws in the book bomb’s design.
THE ENTIRE COMBAT GROUP, signalers and throwers, went into action on short notice on February 26 because of inside information that the tsar would attend a service in his honor on “Tsar Day” at St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Osipanov had been designated the leader of the throwers, and on his initiative they spread out along the route to St. Isaac’s on that day.32 Osipanov cared more about getting the job done than about strictly following the symbolism of killing the tsar on March 1. The large body of police at the golden-domed cathedral seemed to support the rumor about the tsar’s appearance. After a long wait, Osipanov asked one of them whether they expected the tsar to attend the service. The policeman replied affirmatively, but couldn’t explain why the tsar hadn’t come. The reason he hadn’t, at least the one given in the diary of A. P. Arapova, one of the members of the court, was that Alexander III simply was overwhelmed with work and spent Tsar Day clearing his desk. He told the empress to go ahead without him.
On February 28 the combat squad followed up with a second promenade on Nevsky Prospect, with Generalov and Andre yushkin carrying the cylindrical bombs and Osipanov carrying the book bomb. This time, thanks to the heightened surveillance after Andreyushkin had been positively identified as the writer of the letter to Nikitin, the police tracked their every move.33 Generalov left his apartment at about 10:00 a.m. and went to Andreyushkin’s. Kancher arrived by cab half an hour later, and after twenty minutes emerged from the apartment alone, followed five minutes later by Generalov and Andreyushkin. They carried their bombs in slings concealed under their coats. Keeping a prescribed distance between them, at the Police Bridge, which crossed the Moika Canal at Nevsky Prospect, they walked past Osipanov and then Kancher and Gorkun, the latter in student’s uniform. After walking for quite a while along the planned route, Generalov, Andreyushkin, and Osipanov assembled in a tavern at the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Nevsky Prospect, not far from the Police Bridge. Kancher joined them there. According to M. N. Svergunov, one of the police officers on the surveillance team, when they got up to leave he rushed on foot to his waiting supervisor to warn him. Although police headquarters was only minutes away on Gorokhovaya Street, by the time Svergunov returned with a detail of three additional officers, the throwers and signalers were gone.34
A second agent, Shevelev, added a significant detail. At approximately 3:30 p.m. the imperial equipage occupied by Maria Fyodorovna passed Generalov and Kancher on Nevsky Prospect at the Police Bridge. They kept on walking along Nevsky past the Kazan Cathedral. Eventually, the three throwers assembled near Admiralty Square, where they hired a cab.35 The police had obviously taken Andreyushkin’s letter seriously, but they lacked the planning and coordination to take advantage of the opportunity to round up the group on February 28. Evidently the police still did not know that the people they were following carried bombs. Generalov had been in a position to throw a bomb at the tsar’s consort, if not at Alexander III himself.
On March 1 the police did not wait as long as they had on February 28, but one wonders what would have happened had the tsar left the Anichkov Palace at precisely 10:45 a.m. If the imperial equipage had appeared as planned on the designated route at roughly 11:00 a.m., a great deal would have depended upon the ability of the police to physically restrain three determined young men. In addition to the bomb, Andreyushkin carried in the pocket of his overcoat a bulldog revolver with six bullets in it.36 At about 10:00 a.m. he went to Generalov’s apartment. Half an hour later they left and walked to Nevsky Prospect, with an undercover agent following them in a cab. At the corner of Nevsky and Admiralty Square they were invited by other agents to go to the office of the chief of police. Gorkun’s tail spotted him near the Anichkov Palace and picked him up at the corner of Sadovaya and Nevsky. The police apprehended Kancher on Nevsky at the Nikolaevsky Station and the third signaler, Volokhov, nearby. They were all taken to Gorokhovaya 2, the office of the Security Bureau of the secret police—where Sudeikin had run the operation that had infiltrated and all but crushed the People’s Will. The St. Petersburg police, detectives, and gendarmes finally assembled the team that rounded up the combat squad at the eleventh hour on March 1.
After the arrest of two of the throwers and the three signalers, a three-man police detail pursued Osipanov. They found him near the Kazan Bridge at roughly noon walking in the direction of Admiralty Square. When they “invited” him to accompany them to the chief of police, he asked whether they had documents and they replied affirmatively. Two of them held his arms, standard police practice in such cases. On the way to Gorokhovaya 2 he vainly begged to have his arms freed. According to Osipanov’s later testimony, after arriving there:
We soundlessly went up a narrow, spiral staircase and while on it I pulled the string that was supposed to tear…the partition, but I pulled it so hard that the string broke off and made a faint sound…Timofeyev and Varlamov [the police agents] holding my arms…heard the sound and strengthened their grip and prevented me from throwing the bomb…but when they led me…into the room with a police officer sitting behind a desk, they let go of my arms and I tossed the bomb to the floor…from a point above my head and to a distance of about three steps away from me…but no explosion followed.37
When one of the police agents retrieved the “book,” he was surprised to discover that it was an explosive device. Despite all of the bomb-making activity of students whose apartments were being watched; despite all of the purchases of chemicals and materials that obviously could have been used in explosive devices; despite the discovery of suspicious bottles full of liquid and of mysterious packages by Shmidova’s landlady; and despite the establishment of close surveillance on Generalov and Andreyushkin, when they arrested the bomb throwers on March 1, the police still did not know that their suspects were carrying bombs! Terrorist acts are designed to surprise, and the near-misses are no less surprising than the successes. If the book bomb had worked, the explosion would probably have killed anyone within a radius of 3.2 meters and thrown eighty-six strychnine bullets over 11 meters in every direction. Several lives quite literally were hanging by the string that was supposed to open the valve in the book bomb’s fuse.
Had Osipanov lied to save face and failed to pull the string before throwing it? Or had he pulled a defective string that broke off before it opened the valve? One of the police officers denied that Osipanov had been able to arm the bomb on the way to the station. The officer’s testimony was obviously self-serving, but Major General Fyodorov, the explosives expert, could not find the string when he examined the book bomb. He believed, in any case, that the bomb’s construction was faulty, and testified that the fuses of the cylindrical bombs had the same flawed design. Was the fuse mechanism designed by Lukashevich faulty? The police never tested that hypothesis with the captured bombs, and neither did Fyodorov.
LUKASHEVICH AND ULYANOV experienced hours of anguished waiting on March 1. Sasha walked to Kancher and Gorkun’s apartment, where he was arrested. Of the three leaders of the conspiracy, Ulyanov was the first to fall. Lukashevich went to the student cafeteria, where he heard rumors that terrorists had shot at the tsar and that Kancher had been arrested. Lukashevich did not give up hope. Even if part of the organization fell, they might still send a second combat group into the field, but he had to lie low. On the evening of March 2 he returned to his own apartment. He had already cleaned it, and now looked through his papers for any incriminating evidence. The police knocked on his door at 2:00 a.m. and showed him a search warrant. To his eye, they searched only superficially, even though he had a small laboratory in the apartment. They seized his books and made a brief stop at the local police station before taking him to Gorokhovaya 2. Several more suspects were taken to the well-known building of the security police in the predawn hours of March 3 as Lukashevich watched the sky lighten. Detectives chattered freely about the events of March 1. Lukashevich learned, to his dismay, that Osipanov had thrown the bomb and that it had failed to explode. He also learned that the early signs that he himself was not a serious suspect were misleading. P. N. Durnovo, director of the Police Department, spoke with Lukashevich and said that they’d connected him with Ulyanov. Finally, on the night of March 3, they took him to the Peter and Paul Fortress.38
Lukashevich’s is the only available detailed account of the prisoners’ initial treatment, and we can imagine, in the absence of Ulyanov’s own version, that Sasha experienced something similar: a strip search that Lukashevich described as disgusting. They gave him his prison clothes and pan and put him in a cell in one of the casemates of the fortress—a spacious, vaulted cell with a dirty asphalt floor; a small, double-barred window near the ceiling; and a chamber pot in the corner. The table, with a small kerosene lamp, and bedstead were made of steel and secured to the floor. The police routinely woke their prisoner at 2:00 a.m. and brought him back to Gorovokhavaya Street for interrogation, this time by officers of the gendarmerie, the military branch of the security agencies.
The gendarmes were far less polite than the security police. One, literally frothing at the mouth, tried to intimidate Lukashevich: wasn’t the plot Polish revenge for those hanged in Warsaw after the uprising of 1863? Alternatively, hadn’t a bunch of dirty kikes pulled this off? The assistant prosecutor of the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber, Michael Kotlyarovsky, continued the interrogation, but now showed Lukashevich a copy of Kancher’s testimony of March 2 implicating Lukashevich in the bomb making. The detailed account of the bomb making on February 21 in Ulyanov’s apartment removed any doubt—Kancher had indeed given them up. Lukashevich suggested that Kancher had lied in order to lighten his sentence. Kotlyarovsky assured him they didn’t need to promise anybody anything—and without further ado the assistant prosecutor sketched out some well-known techniques of torture.39 The weaker members of the conspiracy had obviously caved in immediately to threat of torture.
Andreyushkin, Osipanov, and Generalov needed no such threat. They had already chosen to die and proudly admitted to their roles. Lukashevich, like the others, had vowed to die for the cause, but the actual experience of captivity evidently changed his mind. The fact that Kancher and Gorkun had already talked absolved him of the duty to keep silent. Later Kotlyarovsky showed him other confessions inspired by Kancher’s revelations. Ulyanov had confessed to building the bombs, although he had not named Lukashevich. Lukashevich then confessed to what Kancher and Gorkun had seen on February 21, but tried to prevent the Russian authorities from turning the trial into a witch hunt against Polish revolutionaries, and did everything in his power to obscure his true role.
On March 3 the police began an intensive hunt for Shevyrev in the Crimea. By the time they arrested him in Yalta on March 7, the authorities had in hand much of the information they needed to send him and the entire central group to the gallows. Only Lukashevich, who had carefully read all of the testimony they gave him for details about his participation, took full advantage of the fact that he had been accused only of tactical help: packing the bomb cylinders with dynamite on February 21, helping set up the transport network run mainly by Kancher, and linking Kancher and Gorkun to his friends in Vilnius. The court placed Lukashevich in the third level of the organization, the “facilitators,” rather than the second-level “accessories” or the top-level “instigators.” He and Novorussky fell for different reasons into the same category as Ananina, Shmidova, Bronislaw Pilsudski, and Pashkovsky. Lukashevich’s fears that the Vilnius Poles and Shmidova, a Jew, would receive especially severe treatment proved false.
The court’s handling of Lukashevich suggests that Ulyanov, too, might have escaped hanging, had he played the game properly. In fact, Sasha tried to defend himself during his first interrogation on March 3 by Cavalry Captain Lyutov, but at each step of the way the stories told by others placed him at the center of things. In his testimony of March 2–3 Gorkun reinforced the impression given by Kancher that Ulyanov played a central executive role. Still, no one knew that he and Govorukhin had approached Shevyrev in December and suggested terrorism. Ulyanov did not have to be tried in the first category, as an instigator.
In his depositions of March 4–5 to Lyutov, after he had been shown Kancher’s and Gorkun’s testimony, Sasha quite scrupulously described his own role in the preparation of the dynamite, the cylindrical bombs, and the lead bullets, but he denied having made the book bomb or fuses. Lukashevich’s role in their manufacture remained unknown. It would appear that Lukashevich and Ulyanov had roughly the same chance to beat the gallows at the time of their depositions in March, but they played different games after that. Anna Ilinichna later showed considerable insight into the way Lukashevich had escaped the gallows, and she understood that he had done it at her brother’s and Shevyrev’s expense. As the interrogations continued, Sasha became more and more forthcoming. On March 20–21, for his last deposition, he reproduced from memory “The Program of the Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will.” It still remained, however, to speak for the group and present the rationale for terror before the tribunal. The drama of the trial lay ahead.