St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  The authorities did attempt to further regulate prostitution and make it safer for the workers. Numbers rose. Although many women remained unregistered, the official figures – 1,800 in the early 1860s, rising to nearly 4,500 in 1870 – are undoubtedly underestimated. By the middle of the decade there were about 150 brothels operating. Owners were supposed to keep no more than three-quarters of the earnings and – in return for their hefty cut – provide adequate lodgings and good food for their workers. Brothels were not tolerated within 320 metres of churches or schools, and no image of the imperial family was permitted to grace the interior. Swelling numbers of prostitutes meant that the small charitable shelter caring for them since 1833 was replaced by a larger establishment run by the Sisters of Mercy, which, in turn, was superseded by yet another shelter established in the grounds of the Kalinkin Hospital. From 1857, a dacha in the woods to the north of the capital cared for child prostitutes.26 All these establishments were overcrowded and – at best – inefficient. For most of the girls and women forced into selling their bodies, life was ugly. In Crime and Punishment, prostitutes are seen ‘covered with bruises’, their upper lips ‘swollen’, their future promising more of the same – or the madhouse and suicide.27 Meanwhile, confirmed cases of syphilis – identified with considerable difficulty by the medical authorities – rose staggeringly from just over 6,000 in 1861 to nearly 15,000 in 1868.28

  During the mid-i86os drunkenness – once again – became an issue. The capital boasted 1,840 taverns, 562 inns, 399 shops selling alcohol and 229 wine cellars. Workers, drinking heavily before they started their day, were often disorderly and there were countless arrests. Before he began Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky planned a novel called The Drunkards to explore the epidemic. When Alexander II remarked on the rise of ‘debauchery, depravity and especially drunkenness’, it resulted in the 1867 restrictions on the sale of alcohol on public holidays. Before the tsar’s intervention, ‘people’s promenades’ – not unlike modern outdoor raves – saw thousands of workers moving in a mass around the city getting steadily plastered. After the restrictions were imposed, 100,000 people gathered peacefully in Mars Field during August without a single arrest for drunkenness.29

  The tsar’s anxiety about the rowdiness of his people reflected his own sense of insecurity. In April 1866, there was the first of six unsuccessful attempts on his life. The would-be assassin was a depressed and deranged character, right out of the pages of Dostoevsky. Dmitri Karakozov – expelled from the University of Kazan for student agitation and from the University of Moscow for not paying his fees – journeyed to the capital with the express intention of assassinating the tsar. So demented was the ex-student that he put this plan into print and distributed copies to all and sundry. The police obtained one, but in a city pestered by rowdy workers and radical students, they chose to ignore Karakozov’s declaration, imagining – quite rightly, but nearly fatally – that it was penned by a nut. Karakozov had, in fact, joined a radical group with the sensational name of ‘Hell’. It was led by a Manson-like fanatic called Nikolai Ishutin, who attracted the wayward and unbalanced. One member of the group contemplated poisoning his own father, in order to contribute his inheritance to the coffers of Hell.30

  On 4 April 1866, after strolling in the Summer Garden with his mistress, Ekaterina Dolgoruka, the tsar was climbing into his carriage when Karakozov took aim. Whether through vigilance or by chance, a bystander jogged the assassin’s arm and the shot missed its target. While this brazen attempt failed, defiance had moved to a new pitch, and the American Congress touchingly sent their regrets that an ‘enemy of emancipation’ should attempt to take the life of the tsar.31 Count Muraviev – the scourge of the 1863 Polish Rebellion – was appointed to investigate. Of the thirty-five people brought to trial, Ishutin and Karakozov were sentenced to death, although only the would-be regicide was executed. The sentence of Hell’s leader was commuted to the purgatory of hard labour for life.32

  While the students, writers and revolutionaries of the 1860s were attempting to find ways to ameliorate their situation and change the regime, the social and industrial conditions went from bad to worse. Petersburg’s population increased and its industry – by fits and starts – expanded. The authorities began to worry about the adverse effects of the capital’s peculiar atmosphere. A good number of the stories set in Petersburg were clouded by depression and melancholia and saturated with images of its choking fog. But blaming sickness and unrest on the climate was dismissed by the doctors working for the city’s Archive of Legal Medicine and Social Hygiene. Landlords were to blame. The authorities were to blame. An inspection in 1870 revealed that cellar dwellings were congested, cold and damp – some were even flooded with polluted water. Outside, courtyards were piled with refuse and excrement. The situation had deteriorated since the 1840s, when Nekrasov offered the first eyewitness account of Petersburg slums. Five-floor tenements – constructed by entrepreneurs for profit – added to the crowding, and thus to the pollution and contamination. Typhus struck the capital in 1865, followed by cholera and smallpox in 1870.33 Thirteen two-storey buildings had risen on land owned by the Viazemsky family between the Fontanka and the Haymarket. Home to about 10,000 lodgers, they provided the depraved backdrop for Vsevolod Krestovsky’s popular and sensational novel of 1864, The Slums of St Petersburg.34

  The 1870s saw a marked increase in industrial production, stimulated by the threat of Prussian military might and the rapid expansion of Russia’s railways. Factories were built around the capital – in the Petersburg and Vyborg sectors and on parts of Vasilevsky Island to the north, but with the highest concentration in Narvskaya, along the Obvodnogo Canal in the south. The Putilov Iron Works became Petersburg’s largest industrial employer with several factories, sixty engineers and more than 12,000 workers. The Arsenal was modernised in 1870, and Ludwig Nobel – cousin to the man who invented dynamite and instituted a Peace Prize – became a major arms manufacturer for the Russian military, working from a small factory on the Vyborg Side. Nobel was only one of the many foreign bosses who complained about the lack of skill among Russian workers and their large number of holidays. Nonetheless, growing confidence resulted in the 1870 ‘All-Russia Industrial Exhibition’, showcasing the country’s manufacturing prowess, and the first All-Russian Congress of Manufacturers, which exaggerated the harmonious relationship between workers and owners. Nikolai Putilov’s closing speech pushed the image of the factory as one big happy family even though, as the Congress opened, 800 spinners at the Nevsky textile factory had walked out and mounted the first sustained strike in Russian history. Its leaders were tried and punished, but the intransigence of the authorities triggered a decade of intensifying industrial unrest.35

  The Catechism of the Revolutionary, written in Geneva in 1869 by Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev, stimulated protest and revolt. Head of a group known as The People’s Vengeance, Nechaev was a young extremist who believed that anything which served the revolution – however ruthless or amoral – was acceptable. When a member of his group decided to withdraw, Nechaev had him eliminated. The Catechism proposed that revolution could only succeed if it was prepared to destroy ‘the entire state apparatus and eliminate all state traditions, orders and social classes in Russia’.36 Arrested and returned to Petersburg for trial, Nechaev was sentenced to solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he died of scurvy in 1882. Although his attempt to set up a network of revolutionary cells controlled by an all-powerful centre ended in failure, he had encouraged revolutionaries to spurn the egalitarian communal model. They could learn how to gain control from the methods of their enemies.

  Switzerland was a source of printed propaganda and a hotbed of revolutionary thinking. Russian women obliged to obtain an education in Zurich were exposed to the radical ideas of Russian exiles. This potentially dangerous breeding ground for dissent prompted the authorities to create the St Petersburg Medical Institute for Women in 1872. One of the forces behind thi
s was the great and part-time Russian composer Alexander Borodin. In Fathers and Sons, Bazarov suggests that a ‘decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet’ – a sentiment obviously shared by Borodin, who never allowed music to displace his work as a Professor of Chemistry at the Medical Academy.37

  Although female revolutionaries would prove themselves to be every bit as ruthless as their male counterparts, their presence in higher education had an effect on the gentle and defining movement of the early 1870s – the narodniki or populists. Rejecting the savagery of men like Ishutin and Nechaev, and taking their inspiration from the ideas of sacrifice and humility expressed by Bakunin’s Zurich rival, Peter Lavrov, the populists set out to make contact with rural Russia. They wished to reach out beyond the centres of power and search for a future as Herzen wanted – derived from the mir, or village commune. Even Karl Marx, whose political scheme depended on an urban proletariat seething to revolt, realised that in the agrarian Russian context, the obshchina provided a useful starting point for communist development.38 The narodniki went out into the countryside to raise the political consciousness of rural communities and learn their ways, so that the procedures of the peasant commune could be applied to society at large. In the spring of 1874, about 4,000 students – one-fifth of them women – left the cities wearing rough peasant clothes.39 They travelled in small groups, or sometimes as man and wife. Others went singly, claiming to be travelling craftsmen or itinerant field workers. While they shared broad ideals, there was no coherent approach in their various attempts to educate and instruct. What is more, they encountered a great deal of suspicion and indifference. Although the narodniki had come to do good, village priests informed against them and about 1,600 were arrested and brought to trial between 1875 and 1878.40

  The meeting of the village commune – one model for socialist revolution.

  The desire to go out to the people was reflected in a new movement in Russian painting. Inspired by ideas Chernyshevsky had put forward in his Master’s dissertation for St Petersburg University in 1855, these painters maintained that art should serve social progress by its choice of relevant subject matter-a concept which re-emerged during the ascendancy of Soviet Realism in the twentieth century.41 Chernyshevsky had an obvious appeal for the students who had rejected their Academy examination in 1863 and organised themselves into a society to present travelling exhibitions. Innovative in terms of subject matter rather than technique, the Wanderers, or peredvizhniki, presented scenes of rural life which neither idealised nor sentimentalised. When, in Fathers and Sons, the two young protagonists drive through a landscape described as ‘not in the least picturesque’, they are in peredvizhniki country. The political dimension of the work was clear from canvases such as Barge-Haulers on the Volga by Ilya Repin or his two versions of They Did Not Expect Him – variously interpreted as a political exile returning home or Christ’s second coming.42

  On 6 December 1876, against the stately curving colonnades of Kazan Cathedral, a vibrant red banner with the slogan ‘Land and Freedom’ was courageously unfurled before a crowd of angry revolutionaries. Georgy Plekhanov – one of the country’s first self-declared Marxists, and later founder of the Social Democrat Movement – gave a rousing speech, which sent the radicals yelling anti-tsarist chants as they marched down the Nevsky, right into a rough mob of feisty, frightened shopkeepers and workmen. Policemen stood aside to watch the demonstrators drubbed and then arrested them. Detentions were unaccountably long. It was March 1877 before fifty of the narodniki arrested in 1874 were given a hearing. Later in the year, another 193 agitators – thirty-eight of whom were women – were brought to trial. By that time, ninety-seven others had died, gone mad or committed suicide in prison. One of the defendants, Ippolit Myshkin – later executed for attacking a prison guard – made a stirring speech against the senators trying the case, and roused the crowd in the courtroom to fever pitch. Many defendants were acquitted, only to be rearrested on orders from the tsar. During their trials, the goodness of the students who had gone to the country made a profound impression on the Petersburg public, while the overreactive attitude of the authorities inflamed the challenge to the regime.43

  The governor of St Petersburg, General Fyodor Trepov – the man who supervised the beating of radicals detained in prison – ordered the public flogging of a political prisoner who, when brought before him, had refused to remove his cap. Outraged by this unnecessary brutality, Vera Zasulich decided to settle the score. An introverted, unhappy orphan whose devotion to Christ had led her to the fanaticism of Nechaev, Zasulich gained admittance to Trepov’s office and shot him. An unpractised assassin, she only wounded the governor and was brought to trial. Acquitted by the jury, Zasulich was carried out of the courtroom by a triumphant crowd who fired shots in exultation. Someone was killed and policemen were despatched to rearrest Zasulich, who was swiftly smuggled out of Russia to work in Switzerland with Plekhanov.44

  After such an exasperating verdict in the Zasulich case, the government suspended trial by jury, and revolutionaries responded with new levels of violence. The head of the Third Section, General Nikolai Mezentsov, was stabbed to death at high noon on a Petersburg street by Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, a narodnik escaped from prison. Mezentsov’s successor, General Alexander Drenteln, narrowly escaped death when Leon Mirsky – a handsome young aristocrat and member of the Land and Freedom movement – galloped past his carriage and took several shots at him.45 Provincial officials and governors were assassinated in Odessa, Kharkov and Kiev and, in April 1879, there was another lone-wolf assassination attempt on the tsar in Palace Square. The would-be assassin, Alexander Solovyev, pursued Alexander II with a revolver and fired five times, without – incredibly – hitting his target. The ex-student, obviously untrained in marksmanship, was apprehended and hanged the following month.46

  Meanwhile, Land and Freedom members were developing the skills and acquiring the necessary equipment for successful subversion. One of nearly 600 women revolutionaries identified during the 1870s was Vera Figner, who had been among those who went off to Zurich to study medicine.47 After returning to St Petersburg in 1876, she passed her examinations to become a midwife, and was about to move on to higher studies when she gave up everything and plunged into the revolutionary movement. She was outraged that the narodniki who ‘turned to the people with peaceful propaganda’ were met by a government ‘with wholesale arrests, exile’ and ‘penal servitude’. At first Figner performed simple tasks, such as writing coded letters to comrades in prison and working as a typesetter for the group’s printing press. She saw clearly that ‘the entire life of the nation was at every point subjected to the arbitrary and unrestrained caprice of the administration’. Against such callous indifference, she suggested that terror could only be considered ‘a weapon of protection, of self-defence’.48

  Land and Freedom split in two in late 1879. One group, which was led by Plekhanov and included Zasulich, worked from Switzerland. The other, the deadly Narodnaya Volya – the aptly named People’s Will – issued a death-threat against Alexander II. Scientists within the group started to experiment with dynamite. It set up safe houses across St Petersburg. Plans were laid, and another formidable woman – the daughter of a governor of St Petersburg, granddaughter of the governor of the Crimea and great-granddaughter of Kyril Razumovsky, the precocious President of the Academy of Sciences under Elizabeth – played a major role in leading operations. Sofia Perovskaya directed a cell detailed to blow up the tsar’s trains as they trundled through a Moscow suburb in November 1879. One bomb failed to detonate and the first train passed. The revolutionaries rapidly resolved the problem and wrecked the second train. Unfortunately for Perovskaya and her colleagues, the tsar was in the first.49 Although the attempt sent shockwaves across the globe, Narodnaya Volya felt it necessary to publish a face-saving statement: Alexander deserved to die in payment for all the ‘blood he has shed’ and ‘the pain he has caused’. The seemingly blessed tsar surro
unded himself with police and Cossacks when he walked out from the Winter Palace. He drove about his capital in a closed carriage with the blinds drawn down. Increasingly on edge, he was at war with an invisible and ubiquitous adversary. As the Grand Duke Konstantin noted, we ‘not only do not see them or know them, but have not the faintest idea of their number’.50

  Meanwhile, a personable young carpenter named Stephan Khalturin obtained a position in the maintenance team at the Winter Palace and started to smuggle dangerous quantities of nitroglycerine past the lax security at the service entrance. Shortly afterwards, Vera Figner’s sister, Evgenia, was arrested with another revolutionary. During a search of their premises, gendarmes found not only dynamite and detonating agents, but also a screwed-up piece of paper on which a floor plan had been sketched and marked with an X. The plan was identified as the Winter Palace, and the X was placed on an area occupied by the Yellow Dining Room. Beneath the dining room were the quarters of the palace guards; beneath them, the rooms where the maintenance team was lodged. A security search of these floors revealed nothing, and Khalturin continued to accumulate explosives.

  Narodnaya Volya was ready for its next attempt against the tsar. On 5 February 1880, Alexander was hosting a dinner for the empress’s brother-in-law, Prince Alexander of Battenberg. Khalturin was given the go-ahead at 6 p.m. He connected a Rumford fuse to the fulminate detonator, lit it and left the palace. At 6.22, just as the imperial party was about to enter the dining room, a blast sent the nauseating smell of nitroglycerine spiralling through the palace. The floor of the dining room sagged. Cracks, like lightning bolts, zigzagged across the walls. The floor held, but windows were blown out and a bitter wind agitated the thick dust of shattered bric-a-brac. None of the imperial party had been hurt, but the floor below, where the guards of the Finland Regiment were quartered, had been blasted to kingdom come. Ten guards were dead and more than fifty lay wounded. Two days later, Narodnaya Volya claimed responsibility and expressed their deepest regret for the death of the soldiers.51