While Alexander II and his family were fortunate enough to escape the explosion unscathed, at least physically, there were others who suffered hideously. The amount of dynamite smuggled gradually into the palace by the resident assassin turned out to be insufficient to blow the royals to pieces but more than enough to decimate a large group of guards gathered in their quarters directly beneath the dining room. Hearing agonized screams, the emperor’s sons rushed to the source.
“When we ran in, we found a terrible scene,” recalled the future Alexander III: “the entire large guards room where people lived was blown up and everything had collapsed more than six feet deep, and in that pile of brick, plaster, slabs and huge mounds of vaults and walls lay more than fifty soldiers covered with a layer of dust and blood. It was a heartbreaking picture, and I will never forget that horror in my life!”
Meanwhile, the emperor had an urgent concern of his own: his mistress Katya, who for obvious reasons had not been invited to the dinner honoring her rival’s brother. After stumbling through the dark and smoky palace to her apartments on the third floor, he was relieved to find his beloved waiting for him in the doorway with a candle. As for the ailing Empress Maria, she appeared to be less of a worry. Heavily sedated in her sickroom, she slept right through the explosion. Four months later she was dead.
As St. Petersburg reeled from this most audacious terrorist strike, the emperor managed to remain stoic in the face of yet another attempt on his life. “The tsar called me to his study [the day after the palace explosion],” the war minister, Milyutin, recorded in his journal. “As in the previous similar incidents, he maintained total presence of mind, seeing in this case a new manifestation of God’s finger saving him for the fifth time from villainous attack.”
Yet while Alexander II firmly believed that his life had been preserved through divine intervention, he nevertheless recognized that the extremists were gaining strength from their constant assaults. And in order to maintain something of the autocratic order in Russia, he concluded that he would have to cede a measure of his God-given power to the people who demanded it. Death intervened, however, before he could execute his plan.
Perhaps it was the emperor’s sense of his own mortality that prompted his hasty marriage to Katya just over a month after the death of his wife. It was an unseemly breach of mourning etiquette, but Alexander seemed not to care. He was determined to lap up whatever happiness he could in the time he had left. Much to the disgust of his family, who revered the late empress and considered Katya to be nothing but a scheming gold digger, he installed his new bride in his dead wife’s apartments, gave her the title of princess, and legitimized their three children with imperial titles as well. It was all too galling for the rest of the Romanovs.
“This marriage of the Tsar’s six weeks after the death of our dear Tsarina, is hard enough to bear in itself,” Grand Duchess Marie, Miechen, vented in a letter to the late empress’s brother. “But that this woman, who for fourteen years has occupied such a very invidious position, should be introduced to us as a member of the family surrounded by her three children is more painful than I can find words to express.”
As his family continued to grumble, the emperor demanded that they put an end to their snubs and honor Katya properly. Some even believed he eventually planned to make her empress. Certainly he was smitten enough. Miechen, who longed for the day when “the Tsar’s eyes must at length be opened to the worthlessness of the creature who seems to have him bound as in a spell,” nevertheless noted ruefully, “Up to the present he is utterly and blissfully happy, looks very well, and years younger.”
Alas, the newlyweds had very little time left together before the assassins struck again.
Rather than placating the terrorists, word of the tsar’s planned concessions to the people only intensified their zeal. They were convinced that such limited measures would only diminish whatever revolutionary momentum existed in Russia. Thus, before he could ruin their movement with his reforms, a new way was quickly devised to kill Alexander II. The date for the deed was set for March 13, 1881, a Sunday, when the emperor made his usual weekly visit to the Mikhailovsky Manege to review the troops.
Alexander was known to take one of two routes on the way back from the review to the Winter Palace: either through Malaya Sadovaya Street or along the Catherine Canal. The assassins were prepared either way. They had rented a shop on Malaya Sadovaya, from the basement of which they burrowed a tunnel and deposited a bomb directly below the street. If the tsar came that way, they would detonate the explosive just as his carriage passed over it. To ensure success in the event that the bomb failed or the explosion was ill-timed, three conspirators, each armed with dynamite, were positioned along the street to complete the job. If, alternatively, Alexander traveled along the Catherine Canal, the same men would have time to scurry over to that route and hurl their explosives there.
“Alexander II must die,” one of the assassins wrote in his last will and testament on the eve of the murder. “His days are numbered. He will die and we, his enemies, his killers, will die with him.… History will show that the luxuriant tree of freedom demands human sacrifices.… [F]ate has doomed me to an early death, and I will not see victory, I will not live a single day, a single hour in the radiant time of triumph.… But I believe that with my death I will have done everything I had to do, and no one in the entire world can demand more of me.”
Katya was filled with foreboding on Sunday morning as her husband of six months prepared to leave for the troop review. She tearfully begged Alexander not to go, but he didn’t heed her warning. Instead, he gave Katya what turned out to be quite the farewell. “Before leaving for the guards parade on March 1[3], the tsar toppled the princess onto the table and took her,” the journalist Alexis Suvorin recorded in his diary after a conversation with the imperial physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin. “She told this to Botkin herself.”
Meanwhile, the terrorists were making their final preparations, and by the time Alexander embarked on his return journey from the military review they were ready. The sudden withdrawal of the sentries posted along Malaya Sadovaya Street indicated that the emperor had opted for the Catherine Canal route instead. Along the way, he popped into the Mikhailovsky Palace to visit his cousin, Catherine, reportedly in a vain attempt to persuade her to accept his new wife. This gave the bomb throwers more than enough time to take their places along the alternative route.
After about half an hour, the tsar left the palace and reentered his carriage, which immediately sped away. That’s when the first assassin approached with his weapon wrapped in a handkerchief. “After a moment’s hesitation, I threw the bomb,” the killer later testified. “I sent it under the horses’ hooves in the supposition that it would blow up under the carriage.… The explosion knocked me into the fence.”
It also killed or maimed a number of bystanders, but the emperor survived—dazed, but unharmed. The bomb had exploded just as the carriage passed over it, and as a result, only the back of the vehicle was damaged. Alexander emerged, shaking. “The tsar crossed himself,” recalled Colonel Adrian Dvorzhitsky; “he was a bit unsteady and understandably upset. When I asked him about his health, he replied, ‘Thank God, I am not wounded.’ ”
The would-be assassin was quickly apprehended and disarmed of a pistol and dagger. But Dvorzhitsky heard him shout to one of his accomplices and realized the tsar was still in grave danger. He urged Alexander to leave the scene at once, but the emperor disregarded him as he walked toward the man who had just tried to murder him. Someone asked how he fared, to which Alexander responded, “Thank God, I’m fine.” Then, pointing to the mass of dead and wounded, he said, “but look …” At this the assassin sneered, “Is it thanks to God?”
After confronting the bomb thrower, the emperor started back to his ruined carriage. Again Dvorzhitsky pleaded with him to leave. Alexander stopped for a moment, then replied, “All right, but first show me the site of the explosion.” It was then that
the second killer emerged and hurled his bomb at the emperor.
“I was deafened by the new explosion,” Dvorzhitsky recounted, “burned, wounded, and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s weak voice: ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the tsar. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking that he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him, but the tsar’s legs were shattered, and the blood poured out of them.
“Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay by the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others crawled, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them. Through the snow, debris, and blood you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabers, and bloody chunks of human flesh.”
In the midst of this nightmarish scene, Alexander was heard to mutter several times, “Cold, I’m cold.” Then, when his brother Michael arrived, the tsar said, “Take me home quickly!” With his life slowly draining away as the blood continued to pulse out of his ruined legs, he was placed on a sled and rushed to the Winter Palace. One of the men who helped move him was the third assassin, his unexploded bomb still on hand.
The emperor’s nephew, Grand Duke Alexander (“Sandro” to the family), hurried to the palace when he heard what had happened. “The big spots of black blood on the marble steps and then along the corridor showed us the way to the tsar’s study,” he recalled. “Father [Grand Duke Michael, the emperor’s brother at the scene of his assassination] stood in the doorway, giving orders to the servants.… Emperor Alexander II lay on a couch by the desk. He was unconscious.… He looked horrible.… One eye was shut, the other stared ahead without expression.… Members of the Imperial Family came in one after the other. The room was overflowing.… The heir [soon to be Alexander III] came in and wept, saying, ‘This is what we have come to,’ and embraced the grand dukes, his brother, Vladimir Alexandrovich, and his uncle, Mikhail Nikolayevich.
“Princess Yuryevskaya [Katya], half-dressed, ran in. They said that some overzealous guard tried to stop her from entering. She fell on top of the tsar’s body, covering his hands with kisses and shouting, ‘Sasha! Sasha!’ It was unbearable.”
One witness to the bloody horror at the palace that Sunday was a young boy of thirteen, the future Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar—destined to die less than three decades later under similarly gruesome circumstances. Before that would happen, though, it was the boy’s father who emerged as the new emperor after Alexander II—hounded to the end—finally found peace.
* * *
*1 The much-lauded Komissarov later died in obscurity of delirium tremens.
*2 It should be recalled that a shot also had been fired at Alexander’s father, Nicholas I, during the Decembrist Revolt of 1825.
Alexander III (1881–1894): A Colossus of Unwavering Autocracy
The Guardian of Russia
—ALEXANDER III ON HIS WIFE, EMPRESS MARIE FEODOROVNA
His father called him “the bullock,” an apt description for the lumbering, hardheaded behemoth who succeeded Alexander II in 1881 and immediately set about dismantling the liberalizing policies he believed contributed directly to his father’s murder. “Constitution?” Alexander III snorted. “They want the emperor of all of Russia to swear to cattle?” A profoundly biased nationalist, religious fanatic, and ferocious anti-Semite, the uncouth autocrat hardly presented the picture of an enlightened modern monarch. “I have such a dislike to the fat Czar,” Britain’s Queen Victoria sniffed. “I think him a violent … Asiatic full of hate, passion & tyranny.” But Alexander III had one redemptive quality that softened him and brought out the best in his humanity: his wife, Empress Marie. Theirs was an unlikely love story—born out of tragedy and altered destinies—but it was genuine, enduring, and, most unusual in a Russian royal marriage, faithful until death.
The Romanovs were gathered in grief in the spring of 1865 as twenty-one-year-old Grand Duke Nicholas—their beloved “Nixa”—lay dying of tuberculosis before them. It was simply incomprehensible that Alexander II’s bright, handsome, and vibrant heir—“the crown of perfection,” as his uncle Constantine called him—would soon be gone. And with him, all the best hopes for the glorious future of the imperial dynasty.
Among the distraught family members surrounding the tsarevitch in those final hours was his petite, seventeen-year-old fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, known to the family as “Minnie.” Her dark eyes, Nixa had once rhapsodized, “speak for her: they are so kind, intelligent, animated.” Also present was Nixa’s adoring brother, Alexander, or “Sasha,” as he was called (like his father). To the distress of all, this hulking, somewhat dim-witted ox of a man—whose only demonstrable skill seemed to be bending metal to his will with his bare hands—was about to replace his far more promising sibling in the line of succession.
Nixa commended both his fiancée and his brother to his father. “She is so sweet, isn’t she?” he said of Minnie, after which he implored the grief-stricken emperor, “Papa, take care of Sasha; he is such an honest and good person.” Then, before taking his final breaths, the young man silently took the hands of Dagmar and Alexander and joined them together. As one witness noted, “It seemed like the Tsarevitch was handing his fiancée over to his beloved brother, to whom he was also leaving his place on earth.”
The sad circumstances that resulted in Minnie and Sasha’s eventual engagement did not bode well for a happy future together. Nor did the fact that each of their hearts lay elsewhere: Minnie’s with the memory of her dead fiancée; Sasha’s with his mistress, Princess Maria Mescherskaya, one of his mother’s maids of honor. Although the new heir recognized that the velvety-eyed Maria could never be his consort, he was still most reluctant to abandon her in favor of Minnie.
“I want to refuse to marry Dagmar, whom I cannot love and don’t want,” Alexander lamented in his diary. “Perhaps it would be better if I relinquished my right to the throne. I feel incapable of ruling. I have too little respect for people and get fed up with everything that concerns my position.”
Disgusted by his son’s pining intransigence, Alexander II sent Maria away and sharply reminded the new heir of his duty. With that imperial command, Sasha had little choice but to travel to Copenhagen and ask for Minnie’s hand—an odious task that became surprisingly pleasant when Alexander arrived and found himself attracted to the young princess who should have been his sister-in-law. When at last he mustered the courage to propose, Sasha found Minnie more than receptive. She kissed him passionately and assured him that she could love no other. “We both burst into tears,” Alexander recalled, “then I told her that my dear Nixa helped us much in this situation and that now of course he prays about our happiness.”
On September I, 1866, Princess Dagmar left her relatively humble life in Denmark—where she and her sister Alexandra (the future queen of England) once shared a bedroom and sewed their own clothes—for the staggering opulence of the Russian court. The famed author Hans Christian Andersen, who had known Minnie since she was a little girl, was there to see her off. “Yesterday, at the quay, while passing me by, she stopped and took me by the hand,” he wrote. “My eyes were full of tears. What a poor child! Oh Lord, be kind and merciful to her! They say that there is a brilliant court in Saint Petersburg and the tsar’s family is nice; still, she heads for an unfamiliar country, where people are different and religion is different and where she will have none of her former acquaintances by her side.”
Minnie arrived in St. Petersburg to a rapturous welcome and instantly enchanted her future subjects with her effortless grace and vivacity. “Dagmar’s popularity was growing,” observed Alexander’s friend S. D. Sheremetyev. “She was seen as a key to prosperity, all the hopes were laid on her and she would light the hearts with her eyes, her simplicity and charm promised happiness and peace.”
The only one who seemed less than enthralled with Dagmar’s arrival was Alexander, who, socia
lly awkward as he was, thoroughly hated all the public ceremonies associated with the event. “In general, the tsarevitch was impossible in the role of fiancé,” wrote Sheremetyev. “He showed himself in public only because it was his duty, he felt revulsion for illuminations and fireworks. Everyone pitied the bride, deprived of the graceful and gifted bridegroom [Nixa] and forced to join another without love, a crude, unpolished man with bad French. That was the reigning assessment in court circles.”
Yet despite the vast differences in temperament between the extroverted Minnie and the sullen Sasha, this odd couple managed to endear themselves to each other. They were married on November 9, 1866, in a lavish ceremony at the Winter Palace chapel, followed by a honeymoon neither would ever forget. While Minnie giggled uncontrollably when Sasha appeared before her in the traditional wedding night attire—a heavy silver gown, with matching slippers curled at the toes, and a silver turban topped by cupid figures—her new husband recorded his own impressions of the evening:
“I locked the door behind me. All the lights were turned off in her room.… I walked into the dressing room, locked the door and reached for the handle on the bedroom door. It felt as if my heart was trying to escape from my body. Afterwards I closed both doors to the dressing room and walked over to Minny [sic]. She was already lying on the bed. It is impossible to describe the feelings that overwhelmed me as I pulled her towards me and embraced her. We embraced and kissed each other for a very long time. I then said my prayers, locked the door to the study, blew out the candles and lay down on the bed. I took off my slippers and my silver dressing gown and felt my darling’s body against my own.…
“How I felt thereafter I don’t wish to describe here.…
Secret Lives of the Tsars Page 20