The Russians Collection

by Michael Phillips

  The carriage rumbled on through another long block, then veered sharply left along the new route. Misha Grigorov, Cossack guard to the emperor, immediately found himself breathing much easier.

  His roving eye, however, continued scanning the street ahead.

  33

  Paul uttered a frustrated curse and leaped up.

  He had slammed down the detonator the moment the lookout had signaled him of the approach of the royal entourage. Only silence had met his ears.

  He spun around and flew down the stairs to the basement and toward the tunnel, heedless of the wires strung out along the floor.

  Everything had been perfect. He had checked it only moments before!

  There could not have been sabotage in such a short time! Only he and one or two others who were completely trustworthy had come near the bomb.

  Just as he reached the tunnel entrance, suddenly a cat flew out of the dark, between his legs, and past him into the store basement. Paul groaned but hurried on. A moment or two’s quick investigation revealed that a wire had been pulled loose from the bomb lodging above him in the shaft, whose bare end now lay exposed and useless on the tunnel floor.

  Of all the idiotic luck! He had never given a thought to the cat that had wandered into the store one day and adopted the place as his home. Paul had been sympathetic toward the ragged, homeless creature and began feeding it from the meager scraps available. The miserable beast!

  He spun around again. Was there still time to make a hasty repair? He bounded back up the stairs after the cat and ran to the window.

  Mounted Cossacks rode even with the storefront, following the carriage that had already rumbled past. The prime opportunity had been missed! It was too late now to recapture it!

  Angrily Paul kicked at the animal, then grabbed it roughly by the scruff of the neck, opened the door, and tossed it rudely into the street.

  He closed the door, sat down for a moment, his face in his hands, dejectedly contemplating his failure. But he did not have long to wallow in his despair.

  Shortly, the door opened, then slammed shut after a moment. There stood Sophia Perovskaya glowering at him.

  “What happened!” she demanded.

  Glumly Paul told her that their itinerant houseguest had tangled itself in the tunnel wires.

  “Perhaps they will return by this way later, since it has proved safe,” he said hopefully.

  “Forget it, Pavlikov. They will not be back by here this day. Just clean up and lock the basement—it may be of use another day.”

  “Next Sunday?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But why wait?” said Paul excitedly. “Sophia, let me take one of the nitro bombs! There is still time for me to take up a position.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Pavlikov. With Zhelyabov gone, I need you for more important assignments than getting your brains blown out. If today’s attempt fails, the mines will need to be manned by someone who knows what he is doing.”

  “After such a miserable failure, how can you still say such a thing about me?” exclaimed Paul mournfully. “I let a stupid cat—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, her angry tone softening slightly. “It’s passed. What’s done is done. If we fail today, then we all share the failure.”

  Paul nodded in gloomy appreciation.

  “And,” she added, “if we succeed . . . then we all share that as well.”

  34

  The imperial coach stopped at the Michaelovsky Palace, where the tsar called on his cousin Catherine.

  He did not stay long. He only wanted to tell her personally about the Manifesto he planned to sign the next day.

  It was half past two in the afternoon when the tsar’s covered carriage and entourage began its return journey to the Winter Palace. Not many people were out along the street as they went. No one, not even the vigilant Cossack Lieutenant Grigorov, noticed the woman on the street corner near the Ekaterinski, otherwise known as the Catherine Canal. Neither did they notice as she raised the handkerchief in her hand, and instead of applying it to her eyes or nose, waved it up and down with two or three quick motions, then stopped.

  Sophia Perovskaya herself had come to oversee this vital final leg of the tsar’s journey, following the carriage as best she could from the cheese shop, and then waiting. She tucked the handkerchief into her pocket as she watched her volunteer assassins take up their positions. The street was uncommonly quiet and deserted. That concerned Sophia, for one of her colleagues, a long-haired student of geology, stood out dangerously. She hoped no one noticed the small parcel he clutched in his hand.

  Without warning the imperial carriage sped up and hastened past the critical juncture. The geology scholar had just been ready to make his move, but the unexpected lurch of the carriage threw off his timing the second it took for him to miss his mark.

  He hurled the bomb in his hand an instant too late for it to strike the imperial coach. It exploded instead in the midst of the trailing Cossack guards. Horses reared in the deafening explosion amid panicked whinnying. Several of the guards were flung broken and bleeding to the ground.

  The force of the blast caught the royal carriage from behind. In the mayhem of the rocking earth and the wildly spooked horses, the carriage’s back wheels splintered and it toppled over sideways, screams coming from within. The driver was thrown clear, uninjured. Misha, likewise, was thrown off his perch, but his head struck the icy street below and he lay unconscious.

  Miraculously, with the help of the driver’s assistant, the tsar climbed from the wreck unscathed. That he had once more defied the assassin’s hand seemed unbelievable, yet clearly apparent. The grand duke likewise bore only a few bruises.

  Only a moment later police sledges skidded to a stop at the scene and the hapless student was immediately seized.

  “Come with me, Your Highness!” cried one of the gendarmes, running to the tsar and urging him to board his undamaged sled in order to rush him safely back to the palace.

  “No, I will not leave until I have ascertained the condition of my poor wounded Cossacks.”

  He began making his way on with uneasy step back toward the site of the blast.

  “Are you unhurt, Your Highness?” called out someone in the gathering crowd of bystanders that was pressing closer and closer.

  “Thank God, yes I am,” replied the tsar.

  “Thank God?” repeated a sharp voice. It was a voice full of malice and derision. The tsar turned to see the man who had spoken as he broke free of the crowd and was now running toward him.

  Alexander never saw the face of his assassin. The bitter words were no sooner out of the killer’s mouth than he sprinted forward, pitching something toward the object of his hatred. It could have been a child’s snowball, but it carried enough lethal power to shake the world.

  The violent blast blew the martyr to bits. But his life was not given in vain. Even before the echo died away, the tsar of Russia lay shattered beside him, stretched out in a pool of his own blood on the snowy St. Petersburg avenue.

  The grand duke rushed forward and knelt down in the blood-stained snow. The tsar had just enough breath left to whisper a handful of words to his brother.

  “Home to the palace, Michael . . . must die there . . .”

  His final Imperial command was hastily followed. His broken body was carefully transferred to one of the waiting police sledges and rushed to the Winter Palace.

  Less than an hour later, the last sacrament was administered. And in the bastion of the Romanovs, Tsar Alexander II of Russia went to join the tsars that had gone before him.

  35

  Black-shrouded carriages, in red and gold royal equipage, wound their way along the river embankment from the Winter Palace. The procession would creep for hours through the streets of Russia’s capital before at length crossing the Troitsky Bridge. There it would reach its destination at the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Alexander’s predecessors, all the tsars of the R
omanovs, were buried.

  The crowds of mourners along the street were silent, lulled, by the forlorn tattoo of drumbeats and the dolorous tolling of church bells.

  Russia’s “Little Father” was dead, felled by the assassin’s hand. It was perhaps shock more than grief that darkened the faces watching the cortege. Alexander had never been immensely popular, and even what approbation he had enjoyed had waned considerably in later years. Perhaps it was true after all, what so many conservatives were now saying in guarded whispers, that what Russia needed, and really wanted, was a strong, firm leader.

  The people of this huge land were children who required the security of firm discipline. They simply did not know how to follow a man like Alexander II, whose benevolence had appeared as weakness and whose attempts at despotism bordered on the laughable.

  But this late ill-starred monarch, notwithstanding his deficiencies, was still the “Tsar-Liberator.” Thus he would be remembered, though even that singularly supreme act of his reign was also marred by strife and imperfection. One French diplomat lamented at the funeral, “Oh, a liberator’s task is a dangerous job!” Perhaps Alexander’s major fault was that unlike his contempory and fellow liberator, Abraham Lincoln, he had outlived the glory of his grand deed.

  Viktor stood on the fringes of the crowd with his friend Alexander Baklanov. Baklanov had commented that the general grief of the people was not perhaps as profound as it should have been for a dead monarch, and one of the half dozen or so most powerful men in all Europe.

  “At least you have good reason, Viktor,” said Baklanov sympathetically, “not to be pained by his passing. He could have interceded on behalf of your son. He could have granted him clemency. After all, you and he were friends for years. But instead, he turned his back not only on Sergei but on you, the most loyal friend a man could have.”

  “You are right, Alex,” said Viktor pensively. “And perhaps that is why I am unable to conjure up enough outward show of anguish. But it has little to do with my son. You see, I have already grieved for Alexander long before this. It began, I suppose, with his destructive relationship with that woman. And after the war when he fell so low in public esteem.”

  Viktor paused and sighed. “It all changed him, Alex,” he went on slowly. “He could have been a great man, a great tsar. But he sacrificed it all to personal whim. It seems to me that God might have in this way spared him from losing still more of his dignity and self-respect. His death can only be regarded as a blessing, Alex, if only the circumstances had not been so horrible.”

  Viktor Fedorcenko felt no bitterness for Alexander Nicolaivich, though he knew that his death sealed forever any hope of reprieve for Sergei. The new tsar was a stiff reactionary with whom Viktor himself had been at odds on many occasions. Alexander Alexandrovich, no matter how much he had himself argued with the former tsar, would not be favorably disposed toward the idea of leniency toward one who had wronged his murdered father.

  Even worse, the entire royal family, the new Alexander III included, had been shown in a negative light in the scuttled writings of would-be author Sergei Viktorovich Fedorcenko. The new tsar had his own reasons for despising the author of A Soldier’s Glory.

  36

  If Viktor Fedorcenko was in no position to make appeals to the new Tsar Alexander III, there were others who made attempts on behalf of their own causes.

  The dead tsar’s body was still fresh in its grave, and mourning still draped the Winter Palace, when Michael Loris-Melikov approached the tsar about the status of the constitution that had been so close to becoming reality. Melikov was no favorite of Alexander Alexandrovich, for the governor-general had gone too far in trying to curry the favor of Catherine Dolgoruky in order to wheedle his way further into the good graces of Alexander II.

  Another obstacle faced Melikov in the person of Pobedonostev, who had long been tutor and close advisor to the tsarevich. Now, with his protege’s ascension to the throne, he himself rose to great power. Melikov had tried in the past to win over Pobedonostev with cunning and manipulation, but never with much success. Now the past was about to blow up in his face. For it was Pobedonostev who answered Melikov’s inquiry.

  The tutor listened patiently to the governor-general’s question, then rose in indignation, declaring that a constitution would signify the very collapse of Russia. His belief in the holy imperative of the monarchy was well known throughout St. Petersburg. But his angry passion this day far exceeded political orientation.

  As Melikov stood by silently, the tutor pointed an aged finger out the window toward the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the dead tsar’s body lay, and fervently cried, “It would be nothing less than desecration to reward the murderers of the late emperor in such a way. The action would shame all who would stand as men in this council!”

  Even Melikov realized that Pobedonostev’s words spelled the kiss of death for the governor-general’s reforms. The new tsar was as conservative as he was dull and unimaginative. He was, if nothing else, a loyal pupil of his longtime tutor.

  Pobedonostev spun around from the window, then snatched up a sheet of paper from a nearby desk.

  “Listen to this, Melikov!” he cried. “These are the people you would give in to. Those cursed maniacs who call themselves by the absurd name The People’s Will—this is what they have written to Alexander when his father’s body is scarcely cold in its tomb. We received this yesterday.”

  He looked down for a moment, and then began reading.

  The tragedy enacted on the Ekaterinski Canal was not a mere casualty, nor was it unexpected. After all that had happened in the course of the previous decade, it was absolutely inevitable, and in that fact consists its deep significance for a man who has been placed by fate at the head of governmental authority.

  You are aware, Your Majesty, that the government of the late emperor could not be accused of a lack of energy. It hanged the innocent and the guilty, and filled prisons and remote provinces with exiles. But the revolutionary movement did not cease—on the contrary, it grew and strengthened.

  Whence proceeds this lamentable necessity for bloody conflict? It arises, Your Majesty, from the lack in Russia of a real government in the true sense of the word. The Imperial Government subjected the people to serfdom, put the masses into the power of the nobility, and is now openly creating the most injurious class of spectators. All of its reforms result merely in a more perfect enslavement and a more complete exploitation of the people.

  From such a state of affairs there can be only two exits: either a revolution, absolutely inevitable and not to be averted by any punishments, or a voluntary turning of the Supreme Power over to the people.

  And now, Your Majesty, decide! Before you are two courses, and you are to make your choice between them.

  Pobedonostev paused, then added, “It is signed The Executive Committee of The People’s Will.”

  He laid the paper back on the desk and glared at Melikov. “And you would have us bow to their ultimatum? No . . . no, my friend. That will not be my recommendation to Alexander!”

  “Will you at least give me an audience with the new tsar,” asked Melikov humbly, trying to hide his annoyance at the tutor’s narrow viewpoint, “so that I might lay out my proposals in greater detail for His Majesty?”

  “I will tell him of your request,” Pobedonostev replied. “I can promise you nothing.”

  Indeed, nothing was promised, and nothing came of the interview. Less than two months after Alexander II’s death, the new emperor published his own Manifesto, declaring a new course for his reign.

  Pobedonostev’s mark was clearly stamped throughout the document that amounted to a wholesale regression to Russia’s commitment to Slavophilism, a determined refusal to accept any European form of constitutional government. It affirmed renewed dedication to all of what it termed the “old traditions,” and carried a distinct undertone of Orthodox fervor.

  The autocracy, with the supreme sanction of Almighty God, woul
d continue to flourish in the Motherland of Russia.

  As for Melikov, he had no delusions about his own continued longevity in the Imperial Court. Liberal thinkers would follow the same path as their liberal ideas—into the waste bins and onto the dust-laden shelves of obscurity and ignominy. Michael Loris-Melikov was slowly being forced into a position where he would have no choice ultimately but to resign.

  His thoughts were consumed with irony. If he had been given but a few days he would have been a hero. If Alexander II had lived but one day longer, the Constitutional Manifesto would have been made public, and the whole history of Russia might have been changed.

  There was another in the empire who also had a hope of altering history, but his way was perhaps even more impossible for the new tsar to fathom than Melikov’s. Even while the young Prince Fedorcenko found himself in exile for his writings, the man whom he looked to as his mentor was attempting to wield his pen to speak for moderation and reason.

  Count Leo Tolstoy wrote to the new tsar imploring him, for the good of the nation, to forgive the murderers of his father.

  Monarch! If you were to do this: were to call these people and give them money, and send them away somewhere to America, and write a manifesto headed with the words, “But I say, Love your enemies,” I do not know how others would feel, but I, poor subject, would be your dog and your slave! I should weep with emotion every time I heard your name, as I am now weeping. . . . At those words, kindliness and love would pour forth like a flood over Russia. All revolutionary struggles will melt away before the man-tsar who fulfills the law of Christ.

  The imperial response to this heartfelt, if euphemistic, plea was to lower the heavy fist of repression even harder than before upon the Russian people, especially those the dreamy author would have him forgive.

  As for the murderers of the tsar’s father, he would deal with them swiftly and certainly with no manifesto of goodwill. The woman with the handkerchief was noticed after the explosion, and as her eyes glowed in triumph from across the street, she had been taken into custody by two watchful gendarmes. Andrei Zhelyabov was taken from prison to join his lover Sophia Perovskaya and two surviving would-be bombers.