St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  The attack had been even more impressive than the assault on the train. To strike at the emperor in the very heart of imperial power suggested that the group would stop at nothing and that they were, indeed, everywhere. As one government minister observed, ‘the ground is shaking, the house threatens to crash down’. The celebrations in 1880 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alexander’s accession were muted, with festivities largely centred on the palace.52 Frightened people left the capital, and there were many empty boxes at the inevitable performance of Glinka’s beguiling paean to loyalty, A Life for the Tsar. Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia – a celebration of eastward expansion under Alexander II was not even performed. Mikhail Loris-Melikov, who had experience of fighting terrorists in the south, was appointed head of the Supreme Administrative Commission. He was welcomed to the position by the bullet of yet another terrorist, who failed to hit his target and was hanged a few days later, before a huge crowd in Semyonovsky Square. Among the spectators was Fyodor Dostoevsky, who watched the execution and commented on the strange sympathy of people for the perpetrators of terrorist crimes.53 As for Loris-Melikov, he recommended a shake-up of law enforcement and replaced the Third Section with the Department of State Police. While his reforms could not beat the terrorists, some of his methods would be used by those whom they eventually brought to power.

  Despite the perpetual threat of terrorism, St Petersburg became a destination for Americans visiting Europe during the post-civil-war tourist boom.54 European musicians and composers also came. Berlioz returned during the 1867–8 season to conduct six concerts. The Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov recalled that, despite bad health and signs of age, Berlioz was alert in rehearsal but, on this occasion, appeared indifferent to the wider musical life of the capital. Richard Wagner visited in 1863 and his opera, Lohengrin, was performed at the beginning of the 1868 season.55 Tchaikovsky’s 1st Symphony was finished the same year. The chemist Borodin had completed his Ist Symphony a year earlier and was worrying away at a second work delayed by his generosity to students and by the hospitality he offered to sick friends and poor relations. There was also a great clutter of cats roaming about his apartment, so Borodin’s piano was often inaccessible. One tabby – known as ‘the fisherman’ – was adept at trapping small fish during the freeze by dunking its paw through tiny holes in the ice.56 Academic commitments and kindness postponed the successful completion of the symphony by a decade, and Borodin drew on melodic material from Prince Igor, the opera that he doubted he would ever have time to finish.57 As Russian music came of age, it looked back to reclaim Russia’s legendary past. The composer of Prince Igor was ‘a pre-muscovite warrior prince’. Sweet-voiced, drunken Modest Mussorgsky wrote Boris Godunov, set at the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the Time of Troubles. Rimsky-Korsakov was ‘a magician’ from a medieval Russian epic. Tchaikovsky alone, was ‘a Russian gentleman from the mental and spiritual world’ inhabited by Turgenev.58

  After the death, in 1873, of music’s patroness, the Grand Duchess Vera Pavlovna, the Conservatoire and the Russian Musical Society were taken under the wing of the imperial treasury and placed on a more professional footing.59 Rimsky-Korsakov began to play a vital part in the musical life of the capital. He taught, advised, orchestrated, composed and rescued unfinished scores from the lodgings of dead composers. He even conducted in eternally dilapidated Kronstadt, where concerts were performed by the United Bands of the Navy Department to an audience that never realised – much to Rimsky-Korsakov’s consternation – that music ‘has such a thing as a composer! . . . “He played that fine” – that is as far as they got in Kronstadt!’60

  Mily Balakirev, who had once contemplated making an opera out of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, became a staunchly tsarist Slavophil and something of a religious recluse. He influenced Tchaikovsky’s 2nd Symphony, ‘The Little Russian’ – composed in 1872 and revised at the end of the decade – as well as the peasant song in Tchaikovsky’s masterly 1879 opera of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The poet’s tales had also inspired Glinka and, with Mussorgsky’s 1874 Boris Godunov, Pushkin’s influence continued. Revelling in the costumes and rituals of old Russia, the opera delighted Slavophils and carried a warning for more progressive members of the audience: Boris is a usurper, and his end is defeat and death.

  Looking backwards provided a comforting aesthetic for a society facing an uncertain future. This was reflected in the historical eclecticism of Petersburg fashion during the second half of the nineteenth century. Designers plundered past epochs, using historical fabrics, cuts, patterns, textures and embellishments. The interiors of the capital’s palaces decorated during this period were subject to a similar historical mix, as the aristocracy sought to take refuge in the safety of a fantasy past. A Renaissance revival began to dominate exteriors from the 1860s, visible in palaces such as Maximilian Messmacher’s Admiralty Embankment structure built for the Grand Duke Mikhail, or his State Council Archive, which went up facing the New Hermitage. There was, nevertheless, modern utilitarian construction. A second permanent bridge across the Neva was built between 1875 and 1879, linking the increasingly industrialised Vyborg Side with Liteiny Prospekt. But the overwhelming nostalgia in palace building and interior decoration revealed that the aristocracy had lost touch with the quickening pulse of the age.

  Misjudging the Zeitgeist was not the Romanovs’ only mistake. In 1867, Alexander rashly sold Alaska to America for just over $7 million.61 Despite the nexus of family ties, the Romanovs were also staring into the barrel of German militarism. The defeat of the French at Sedan in September 1870 had unified Germany. The political fallout in France was the Paris Commune’s revolt against the monarchist National Assembly. Disdaining the signs of the times, Russia’s rulers exhibited a self-absorbed decadence which was eroding respect. They kept the population in thrall and squandered money on the luxuries of a lavish court. The story broke of how Alexander’s nephew, the Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich, was caught red-handed stealing the jewels from his mother’s icon frame in order to pay his gambling debts. After details began to circulate of his affair with a shameless American adventuress, Henrietta Blackford – who all too gladly dished the dirt, in memoirs published in Belgium in 1875 – there was outrage. When the grand duke brushed off his guilt, claiming that such behaviour was in his genes, the attitude of the aristocracy appeared to have sunk to a cynical low. As for the tsar himself, his foxy eyes kept him in trouble. His unrelenting susceptibility to impressionable women, his habit of strolling with young ladies when he took the air in the Summer Garden and his all-too-visible infidelities were damaging to the image of the ‘father’ of the Russian people, a monarch anointed by God.62

  An 1870 revolutionary manifesto addressing women suggested that only in work would they find freedom and cited ‘the débaucher, Alexander II, himself’ as the worst offender in the conspiracy to keep women down.63 Matters came to a head in 1880 when the tsar —after an indecently short forty-day mourning period for his deceased empress, Maria Alexandrovna – married his long-term mistress, the unpopular Ekaterina Dolgoruka. She had been with Alexander in the Summer Garden on that afternoon in 1866 when the unstable Karakozov had taken a potshot at autocracy. They were in Paris when another assassination attempt on Alexander II miscarried and, in St Petersburg, the tsar rented a convenient townhouse on the English Quay for Ekaterina. On top of this trail of flagrant self-indulgence, their marriage violated the taboo – in place since the time of Peter the Great – on tsars taking Russian wives and marrying outside the exclusive club of reigning European dynasties. It also rekindled a 200-year-old peasant superstition that predicted death to any Romanov who dared to marry a Dolgoruky: a superstition given credence by the fact that Peter II died on the very day he was to have married one.64 But Alexander and Ekaterina were wedded by an inexhaustible lust. She vividly documented their passionate romps, noting that they climaxed only hours before the tsar was blown to pieces.65

  W
hile a sophisticated plot to kill Alexander II was coming to fruition in January 1881, Fyodor Dostoevsky died. Radical in his youth, the novelist had come to detest socialism and political extremism. In his late novel, A Raw Youth, he explored the tensions between the 1840 generation and the nihilists. He also revisited one of his early impressions of St Petersburg. He imagined the capital in the twilight hour, from ‘the refuges of the poor’ to ‘the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world’, to be a ‘fantastic vision of fairyland, like a dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away’.66 Through the newly industrialised vapours of the tsarist capital, that disintegration was on the horizon. Decades of unrepentant arrogance provoked the ultimate act of anti-tsarist terrorism. Had there ever been so many failed attempts to assassinate a head of state? Five times assassins had failed. It would take two goes to make the sixth attempt succeed.

  Vera Figner looked back on late 1880 and early 1881 as a ‘brilliant period’ when the Military Organisation of Narodnaya Volya was at its height. As unrest spread among an increasingly urbanised proletariat, some members of the military were becoming concerned about the state of their country and the immodesty and barbarism of its rulers. Naval officers and midshipmen began to spread revolutionary propaganda among the ranks at Kronstadt. Soldiers in an artillery division stationed in the capital were responding to the complaints of the revolutionaries. On the civilian front, funds were collected through robbery and donation – revolt was expensive. An estimate for three of the attempts on the life of the tsar put the cost at 30,000-40,000 roubles.67 Having failed so often, the assassins realised the necessity of financing a watertight plan with a backup strategy.

  In January 1881, a couple opened a cheese shop in the front room of premises on Sadovaya Street.68 In the back room, excavations began to undermine the road along which the emperor’s carriage drove on his Sunday outing to review the troops at the Mikhailovsky Manège. The police budget in St Petersburg during these dangerous times was a fraction of what it was in contemporary Paris,69 and when the underfunded force – acting on a tip-off – conducted a cursory inspection of the premises, the odour of the cheese on sale blotted out the stench rising from a wooden sewer that had accidentally been pierced by the tunnellers. The police shot out a question about the damp clay around the cheese barrels in the shop – barrels filled with excavated earth – and were satisfied to be told that sour cream had been spilt. They left it at that.

  The plan was to bomb Alexander as he passed above the tunnel that extended from the shop. Should that miscarry, four bomb-throwers – Nikolai Rysakov, Ignaty Grinevitsky, Timofei Mikhailov and Ivan Emelyanov – were to be actioned. If they failed, Andrei Zhelyabov – armed with a dagger – was to stab the tsar. The bomb-throwers would carry six-pound devices comprising nitroglycerine and proxilin packed in empty paraffin cans. Defying detection, they had tested two such bombs in a wood outside the capital, but only one had detonated. The conspirator who acted the part of Vera Figner’s husband had three fingers blown off conducting a test.70

  On 28 February, the bomb-making went on throughout the night. Figner helped, while Sofia Perovskaya – the director of the operation – slept. Mikhailov lost his nerve and went home, leaving three bombers. Grinevitsky prepared a statement: ‘It is my lot to die young . . . but I believe that with my death I shall do all it is my duty to do.’

  The tsar took one of two possible routes to review the troops. On I March 1881 – driving in a bullet-proof carriage presented by Napoleon III – he took the route that did not go via Sadovaya Street. When he returned from the inspection, taking the same route, Sofia Perovskaya signalled as much to the bomb-throwers, who hurried to the Catherine Canal. Just after 2.15 p.m., the tsar’s carriage turned right out of Inzhenernaya Street onto the quay. As the tsar approached Konyushenny Bridge, Rysakov hurled a bomb, which rolled underneath the horses’ legs and exploded beneath the carriage. It killed a Cossack who was riding in the tsar’s guard; it also killed a passer-by. As Rysakov was taken, the tsar emerged from his battered carriage. Security pressed to speed him away, but Alexander wished to confront his would-be assassin. Asked by a member of his staff if he was all right, the tsar answered, ‘Thank God.’ At this, Grinevitsky yelled out, ‘It’s too early to thank God,’ and threw a second bomb, which mortally wounded the terrorist and smashed the legs of the emperor. Alexander was sledged to his study in the palace, where his doctor saw immediately that the terrorists had – at last – achieved their goal. At a little after 3.30, the flag above the palace was lowered. Armed Preobrazhensky Guards patrolled the corridors. Cossacks encircled the exterior.71

  Tsar Alexander II is assassinated, illustration from The Illustrated London News, 1881.

  With the bad timing of an awards ceremony on a day of national tragedy, Vasily Surikov’s Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy went on exhibition in St Petersburg on Sunday I March.72 A painting that depicted the savage treatment of Russian subjects at the hands of a Romanov was – depending on your politics – a timely or an unfortunate subject to present at the moment the tsar’s blood and body parts stained the white velvet snow of the imperial capital. Peter the Great had built his city on the bones of dead muzhiks. Now the oppressed were constructing the road to revolution on the shattered bones of a tsar.

  Vera Figner rushed home, weeping for joy, through streets abuzz with gossip. The bomb made ‘all Russia tremble’ and Figner’s prominent role in the success of the endeavour, along with that of her comrade Sofia Perovskaya, set an example to the numerous women who joined the revolution in the succeeding decades.73 Only days after the assassination, Perovskaya was arrested in the street. The backlash – ‘the white terror’, as Figner called it – had begun. After being taken into custody, Rysakov had been turned and he squealed. Not that it did him much good. Within a month, under a sunlit spring sky, he was among the six terrorists carted into Semyonovsky Square to be hanged. As priests prepared them for the next world, Perovskaya snubbed the turncoat, but only a short while later they were dumped together in a common grave.74

  Figner wanted to use the cheese shop and its tunnel for an attempt on Alexander III, but the seven other members of the Executive Council who remained at large disagreed. Despite the palpable support for Narodnaya Volya in the capital, it was considered prudent to relocate. Two years later, Figner was arrested in Kharkov and incarcerated for twenty years in the tomb-like void of the fortress at Shliisselburg. She later observed that a period of reaction had set in and that Narodnaya Volya had been ahead of its time, anticipating the political development of the people by a quarter of a century. However, the group gave an impressive and impassioned curtain call. Audaciously, it petitioned Alexander III, explaining the assassination of his father as the upshot of repression. It promised that the revolutionary ‘movement will continue to grow . . . A terrible explosion, a bloody hurly-burly, a revolutionary earthquake throughout Russia will complete the destruction of the old order of things.’75 As if to underline the purity of its motives, when US President Garfield was assassinated at the end of 1881, the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya declared itself to be ‘against such acts of violence’. Violence could be ‘justified only when it is directed against violence’.76

  In May 1881, Alexander III proclaimed his ‘faith in the power and truth of absolutism’ and enlisted the help of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod, to buttress autocracy with orthodoxy. Pobedonostsev – tutor to Alexander’s son, the future and final tsar, Nicholas II – hated progress and any form of parliamentary government.77 His reactionary vision was to be of little benefit to the challenged dynasty.

  Surly and shy, Alexander III enjoyed fishing, drinking and hunting big game. After the hunt, all the dead animals were laid out by torchlight outside the palace – those bagged by the emperor being placed in the front row. As the imperial family arrived for the hunt dinner, music was played, with different melodies evoking the various species that had been shot.78 />
  The empress – Princess Sophie Frederikke Dagmar, daughter of Christian IX of Denmark, who took the name of Maria Fyodorovna when she married – adored festivities and, at balls, would dance for hours. New Year 1886 saw the first ceremonial ball with the palace lit by electricity. The rooms were filled with exotic plants transported from the Crimea and adorned with thousands of flowers cut from the greenhouses at Tsarskoe Selo. For the New Year ball in 1891, there were 3,700 hyacinths, 1,700 sprays of lily-of-the-valley, 1,600 red and white tulips, 180 yellow tulips, 150 cyclamens and sixteen orchids gracing the public rooms. But apart from such splendid occasions,79 Alexander preferred to live in the relative simplicity of the Anichkov Palace, away from dining rooms marked with Xs. He had a passion for Fabergé. If Easter eggs were symbolic of Christ’s resurrection, then intricate and ostentatious Fabergé eggs – fabricated to the tsar’s specifications – suggested the revivification of the imperial family. But that was not about to happen.80 If Alexander’s reign corresponded to a period of peace abroad, it was a time of mounting trouble at home. A scapegoat was sought, and Alexander – a pernicious anti-Semite – blamed the Jews.