Saint Petersburg and Moscow, December 1871-March 1874
PRINCE KROPOTKIN adopted the nom de guerre Borodin, and went about in peasants’ boots and sheepskins. (Beneath this costume he wore a silk undergarment.) He lived ascetically, dining on rye bread, cucumbers, and weak tea. What remained of his income, after he had thus meagerly provided for himself, he devoted to the cause of the people. He printed pamphlets, helped friends to evade the police, and attempted to relieve the suffering of the masses.
His efforts were soon ended. Kropotkin was arrested by agents of the Third Section, and after a long interrogation was taken to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. He passed through a series of iron gates, and was taken down a passageway that led to a cell. A heavy oak door shut behind him, a key turned in the lock, and he was alone.
Epilogue
THE ORDEAL OF LIBERTY
SIX YEARS AFTER the culmination of the revolutionary events of 1861-1871, Ulysses S. Grant, having completed two lackluster terms as President of the United States, went on a tour round the world. Among the capitals in which he stopped was Berlin, where he called on Chancellor Bismarck in the Wilhelmstrasse.
“What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war,” Bismarck told Grant during their interview, “was that you were fighting your own people. That is always so terrible in wars, so very hard.”
“But it had to be done,” Grant replied.
“Yes,” said Bismarck, “you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.”
“Not only save the Union,” Grant said, “but destroy slavery.”
“I suppose, however,” Bismarck rejoined, “the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment.”
“In the beginning, yes,” said Grant, “but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold, like cattle.”
Bismarck changed the subject. Lincoln had made one sort of revolution, he another. The awkward break in the dialogue between the Chancellor and the President was a hint of the chasms the world crisis of 1861-1871 opened up. The struggles that began during those years would continue for a dozen decades and engage the passions of the whole world. Germany’s challenge to the free state would lead, in the twentieth century, to two world wars; the fires lit by Russia’s red brigades would not be extinguished until the 1990s, when the Cold War ended.
AFTER THE FAILURE of Alexander’s liberal revolution, Russia hurtled with ever greater rapidity towards catastrophe. The Tsar acquiesced in a policy of romantic nationalism, and in 1877 he went to war with the Ottoman Empire. Russians rallied to their sovereign’s throne, eager to subdue the “turbaned Turk.” The Russian army, after many disappointments, reached the suburbs of Constantinople. But Great Britain, the traditional protectress of the Ottoman régime, was determined to defend her interests in the Near East, which since the opening of the Suez Canal was the principal highway to her Indian Empire. Disraeli turned the screws, and Alexander pulled back. Although the final settlement left the Empire with gains in Asia Minor and Bessarabia, Russia was dissatisfied. The Tsar had revived the ancient dream of a redemption of Byzantium, but to the consternation of his subjects, he had failed to make the vision come true.
The red brigades contributed to the domestic unhappiness of the Empire. A series of attacks on Tsarist officials took place. The director of the Third Section was assassinated in a Saint Petersburg street. Trepov, the Governor of the city, was shot and seriously wounded by the Marxist terrorist Vera Zasulich. In April 1879 a revolutionist fired five shots at Alexander himself outside the Winter Palace. The Tsar dodged the bullets. In September the terrorist group People’s Will conducted what was called a trial and condemned Alexander to death in absentia. Afterwards terrorists mined the tracks on which the imperial train traveled, and in December 1879 the Tsar narrowly escaped with his life when a bomb exploded and wrecked the imperial baggage train. Two months later, in February 1880, a powerful explosive was detonated in the Winter Palace itself, in a cellar beneath the Tsar’s dining room. Dozens perished, but Alexander, who had not yet gone in to dine when the explosion occurred, survived.
He was now a prisoner of his office. He went about surrounded by Cossacks, and traveled in steel-plated carriages specially built by French craftsmen. Thousands of soldiers with bayonets fixed lined the railway tracks when he traveled by train. He trusted no one. The valet who brought him his robe in the morning, the butler who poured out his coffee, the maid who cleaned his room, the sentinel who guarded his door—any one of them might be in the employ of the nihilists. His heart grew harder, his attitude more cynical. The more good he tried to do, he believed, the more he would be hated. When he was told that a man had spoken uncharitably of him, he said, “Strange, I don’t remember ever having done him a favour; why then should he hate me?”
In 1880, the Empress Mary died, alone and neglected. In the days that followed the Tsar was strangely giddy. One day, at Tsarskoe Selo, he donned the blue uniform of a Hussar of the Life Guards and went to fetch Katya, or the Princess Yurievskaya as she was now styled, in her room in the Catherine Palace. They were married that day in a drawing room of the palace.
The Tsar insisted that his morganatic consort be accorded by members of the imperial family the same deference which the deceased Empress had been shown. When Alexander and his young wife entered a room together, the master of ceremonies tapped thrice with his stave and cried out, “His Majesty, the Emperor, and Princess Yurievskaya.” The beaming Tsar watched as the Princess seated herself in a chair formerly reserved for Mary. “At sixty-four Alexander II acted as a boy of eighteen,” the Tsar’s nephew, Grand Duke Alexander, said. “He whispered words of encouragement into her small ear; he wanted to know whether she liked the wine; he agreed with everything she said; he looked at his relatives with a friendly smile inviting them to enjoy his idyllic happiness.” “I am so happy at present,” the Tsar said one evening as he took Katya into dinner, it “frightens me.”
There was a last suggestion of promise. While Alexander dawdled in his daydream, General Loris-Melikov directed the government. In contrast to Count Shuvalov, the new vizier was a reformer, and he proposed the creation of a number of advisory commissions, the gossamer threads of what might eventually become the more substantial fabric of a parliament and a constitution. Such a reform, Loris-Melikov told Alexander, would perhaps reconcile the country to a step the Tsar longed to take— the crowning of Katya as Empress. Alexander tentatively approved the idea. He then went off to preside at the changing of the guard in the Riding School, just as he had two decades before, on the day the emancipation law was promulgated. After the ceremony, he climbed into his carriage. “To the Winter Palace,” he instructed the coachman, “by the same route.” As the cavalcade went down Catherine Street, a student threw a bomb. The device exploded, killing a Cossack of the Escort and mortally wounding a young boy. The Tsar, who was unhurt, alighted from the carriage and, after making the sign of the Cross, went towards the victims. A crowd gathered, and someone asked the Tsar whether he was hurt.
“Thank God, no,” Alexander said.
“Thank God?” cried a voice. A second terrorist tossed a bomb at the Tsar’s feet.
The shattered body was taken to the Winter Palace. Drops of black blood spattered on the marble staircase as the Tsar was carried to his bedroom-study on the second story. Doctors and grand dukes crowded round the couch on which the mangled body was laid. Alexander was by this time unconscious; one of his eyes was shut, the other fixed in a glassy stare.
Katya burst in. She had not had time to dress, and wore only a pink-and-white negligée. She threw herself on her husband. “Sasha, Sasha!” she screamed as she kissed him. The court surgeon took one of the Tsar’s hands and felt the pulse. At length he let the hand drop.
“The Emperor is dead.”
Alexander’s nephew, Grand
Duke Alexander, looked at Katya. She “gave one shriek and dropped on the floor like a felled tree. Her pink-and-white negligée was soaked in blood.”
In the years after Alexander’s death, his successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, pursued a reactionary course. Their efforts to quench the flame of rebellion with a policy of severity brought the country ever closer to civil upheaval, and in March 1917 the dynasty quivered, then fell. Nicholas and his family were taken prisoner, and in July 1918, in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg, they were shot dead by order of Lenin, né Ulyanov. The red brigades had triumphed.
As for Katya, she survived the fall of the Romanovs. She died at Nice in 1922, at the age of seventy-four. The youngest of her three surviving children by the Tsar, who was also called Katya, lived into the era of Chairman Khrushchev and President Eisenhower. She for a time earned a meager living as a dance-hall performer; later she pawned her last piece of jewelry for forty pounds and a bottle of gin. Born in a Romanov palace, the youngest child of Alexander spent her last years in a bungalow in England. She died, alone and impoverished, just before Christmas 1959.
PRINCE KROPOTKIN was transferred from his cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul to one of the Tsarist prison hospitals. He escaped from the hospital and fled to England. He was for many years active in anarchist circles, though after 1900 he grew markedly less radical. He expressed sympathy for Russia’s free-state liberals: Russia, he said, must have a constitution and a legislature. When revolution broke out in 1917, the former page de chambre of the Tsar returned to his native land after more than forty years in exile. He supported the provisional government formed after the abdication of Nicholas; Alexander Kerensky, the leading figure in the new government, offered him a place in the Cabinet. (Kropotkin declined to accept the portfolio.) He was dismayed when, in the autumn of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power. “This buries the revolution,” he said. The Prince died in the town of Dmitrov outside Moscow in February 1921.
Count Tolstoy, who spent his final years advocating Christian anarchism, was recognized throughout the world as Russia’s greatest living prophet. In August 1910 his family celebrated his birthday; he was eighty-two. In spite of the mythic proportions of his reputation, he was still very much a man, crawling between heaven and earth. At times, his wife wrote in her diary, he lived a “spiritually exalted” life, denying himself all luxuries, and striving to be “good, honest, open and spiritually pure.” At other times, “he enjoys himself quite openly, loves good food, a good horse, cards, music, chess, cheerful company. . . .” On his birthday, Countess Tolstoy said that she hoped he “would soon be completely at peace with himself” now that he was “reaching the end of his life.” “At this,” she said, “he pulled an angry face.” Their life together in 1910 resembled nothing so much as their life together in 1862—quarrels, tears, tantrums, and reconciliations.
One day in October 1910 the Countess rejoiced when “my dear husband, the old Lyovochka, noticed my existence twice. . . . Later on he ate a delicious pear and brought one for me to share with him.” At the end of the month, at five in the morning, Tolstoy slipped out of the house, accusing his wife of having rummaged through his papers. In a letter he said that he wanted to give up the world and live alone, in silence. “I thank you for the forty-eight years of honorable life you spent with me,” he wrote, “and I ask you to forgive all the wrongs I have done to you.” He and a friend, Dr. Makovitsky, went to the railway station and boarded a train. “What you need, Father,” a peasant told Tolstoy in the car, “is to get away from the affairs of this world, to go into the monastery and labor to save your soul.” Tolstoy smiled. At Kozelsk he wired his daughter Alexandra, and asked her to send him copies of Montaigne’s Essays, the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, and Maupassant’s Une Vie. He and Makovitsky engaged a carriage and drove to a hostelry near the monastery of Optina Pustyn. The next day they visited Tolstoy’s sister, Mary, who was a nun in the Shamardino Convent. Here Alexandra joined them. Tolstoy spoke of settling at Optina, or of remaining in the shadow of Shamardino; at other times he talked of going to the Caucasus, or to Bulgaria and Turkey. In fact his journey had a single object, that of avoiding the path that leads to the grave.
Accompanied by Alexandra and Makovitsky, the restless man went back to Kozelsk and boarded a train. The flight of the prophet was frontpage news. “The old boy’s played her a pretty trick!” a young dandy on the train said. “It must not have made Sofya Andreyevna very happy to see him skip out like that. . . .” But when he learned that Tolstoy himself was aboard, he closed his mouth.
The Count had, by this time, developed a fever. The party detrained at Astapovo, and Tolstoy was put to bed in the stationmaster’s cottage. “God is that infinite whole of which man is conscious of being a finite part,” he said. In his delirium he talked of the peasants. “What about the muzhiks?” he asked. “How do the muzhiks die?” Pneumonia set in, and after a vigil of several days he breathed his last. He was buried at Yasnaya Polyana.
Countess Tolstoy survived her husband. After the Revolution of 1917, her pension from the Tsar ceased to be paid, and Yasnaya Polyana became a state farm. The aged Countess was, however, permitted to stay on, and a few rooms were set aside for her use. Bolshevik soldiers later commandeered the house and raised the red flag over it. Countess Tolstoy died in November 1919.
ALEXANDER’S REVOLUTION never reached those places in the Russian spirit where Tolstoy delighted to linger. Bismarck, by contrast, touched Germany’s spiritual nerve all too skillfully. After 1871, the Chancellor’s principal task was to prevent his countrymen from destroying their Empire in a euphoria of violence.
The General Staff was not merely ready, it was eager for battle. No sooner had Moltke returned to Germany than he began to draw up mobilization plans for the next campaign. He foresaw a war on two fronts, with Russia coming in on the side of France. In 1877 he refined these plans: his new strategy called for a “great decisive battle” against the French in the earliest phases of the war, after which Germany would be free to throw her might against the Russians. It was a premonition of 1914.
Bismarck by no means ignored the external dangers to the Empire which preoccupied the Staff. The French, he saw, were full of bitterness. Louis-Napoleon escaped the vengeance of his former subjects; he perished at Chislehurst, in January 1873, after surgeons opened his bladder.45 Bazaine, too, cheated the executioner; Marshal MacMahon, who succeeded M. Thiers as President of the French Republic, commuted his sentence to twenty years’ penal servitude.46 Germany’s Staff officers sought to frustrate the French yearning for la revanche (revenge) with mobilization plans; Bismarck preferred to meet the challenge through an intricate diplomacy designed to prevent the emergence of a Franco-Russian military alliance. In this he was successful, and it was only after his ejection from office that the French and the Russians negotiated their entente.
Moltke acquiesced in the diplomatic design which Bismarck communicated to him. The Field Marshal (for such he now was) dropped his “decisive battle in the West” plan, and in time he ceased to advocate a pre-emptive strike against Russia, in which Austria was to be the stalking horse. Bismarck persuaded him that a break between Vienna and Saint Petersburg, with their antagonistic interests in the Balkans, would spell doom for Germany. But others on the Staff were unreconciled to the Chancellor’s pacific policy. Moltke’s deputy, Count Alfred von Waldersee, who succeeded him as Chief of the General Staff in 1888, was a warmonger, and so, too, was Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who succeeded Waldersee. Schlieffen favored a mobilization plan that drew on Moltke’s discarded strategy of a massive initial thrust against France. While Bismarck remained in power his immense prestige enabled him to stare down the generals, but after he fell the Staff came into its own.
At home, Bismarck’s policy combined elements of authoritarian nationalism and paternalistic socialism. His own authority was great, for although his constitution granted universal manhood suffrage, he himself, the principal Minist
er of the Empire, was not responsible to the elected lawmakers. The Reich, though it was in appearance a constitutional monarchy, was in fact a coercive superstate, tempered only by the prudence and moderation of the Chancellor. Such opposition as Bismarck encountered he crushed, or attempted to crush. He suppressed the socialist parties—and, ingeniously, appropriated their paternal theory of government. “Give the workingman the right to employment as long as he has health,” he said, “assure him of care when he is sick and maintenance when he is old, and the socialists will sound their birdcall in vain.”
Such reforms might have been salutary had they been implemented in a different spirit; but they were intended less to help people than to liquidate their will. Bismarck’s object, the historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote, was not to improve the condition of the workers, but to make them subservient to the state. “Whoever has a pension for his old age,” Bismarck said in 1881, “is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect.”
The Reich was at once the consummation and the tomb of Bismarck’s genius. Through his policy, the historian Theodor Mommsen said, the Black Prince broke his nation’s back. He liberated a people without freeing them, and became yet another manifestation of a problem that drove Machiavelli to despair. The leader who is strong enough to make a nation is rarely good enough to give it freedom. In certain moods Bismarck was himself inclined to lament the repercussions of his statecraft. “Had it not been for me,” he said, “there would not have been three great wars; 80,000 men would not have perished; and parents, brothers, sisters would not be in mourning. But that is something I have to settle with God.” Presumably, however, the Chancellor was confident that these negotiations with the Deity would have an outcome favorable to himself.
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