Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Only people close to the royal family were permitted to enter past the cavalry guards into the private family rooms. Empress Elizabeth had installed them there. There had been cavalry guards on post for the last half century.

  Alexander’s grandmother continued to care about Europe’s opinion, but Nicholas calmed her. He wrote his own account for Europe: “At the time when the residents of the capital learned to their great joy that Tsar Nikolai Pavlovich had accepted the ancestral crown, on this long-awaited day there was a sad event, which for just a few hours upset the tranquility of the capital. At the time that the new Tsar was met everywhere by expressions of sincere love and loyalty, a handful of vile-looking scoundrels in frock coats…” And that was it. There was no rebellion, no shooting, no cannons. There was an unpleasant event, nothing more. It was not the guards who had mutinied, but a few civilian scoundrels.

  The situation remained grim, however. In the first round of interrogations, Nicholas learned that the most notable families of Russia were involved in the conspiracy, descendants of the pre-Romanov rulers Rurik and Gedemin—Volkonsky, Trubetskoy, Obolensky and other families that were part of Russian history. They were brought for questioning from flood-damp cells of the Fortress of Peter and Paul to the Winter Palace, where they had so recently attended balls and duty tours, covered in military orders for their exploits in the war with Napoleon.

  Nicholas was not yet thirty. He knew that he was unpopular in the capital. Next to him was his terrified, unhappy wife, who spoke Russian poorly. Outside the palace, the short winter days with long, dangerous nights helped St. Petersburg to seethe with hostility. It was filled with the powerful relatives of the men now incarcerated in the fortress. Nicholas expected a strike in response from the arrogant St. Petersburg elite, whose ancestors had killed his grandfather and father. He expected a continuation of the uprising.

  But the unexpected occurred. The cannons and rifles had an instant sobering effect on society. “From all sides came cries of delight: ‘Victory! Victory!’ As if a foreign army had been vanquished instead of a handful of fellow countrymen. There were church services held for the salvation of the Homeland! Former friends, brothers, and lovers were now called ‘state criminals,’ and fathers readily led their children to their punishment. There was a flood of volunteers to play executioner,” wrote a contemporary.

  Most zealous of all were the people known as “liberals.” It was then that Nicholas learned an important law of Russian life: If the ruler is firm and the retribution is ruthless, those who had been the boldest become the most cowardly. That is why Nicholas decided to bring the main liberals into the uprising inquiry.

  As it turned out during the investigation, the conspirators had wanted to make the famous Count Mikhail Speransky the future leader of republican Russia. The late Alexander I had dreamed of great reforms at the start of his reign—he wanted to emancipate the serfs. Count Speransky had been his chief advisor. He had a great mind. Napoleon had jokingly suggested that Tsar Alexander exchange Speransky for a kingdom of his choice. But when Alexander came to hate his youthful infatuations, he sent the count into exile, where he remained for six years, a symbol of liberal ideas.

  Nicholas put Speransky in charge of the Supreme Criminal Court to determine the punishment for the Decembrists. Speransky, the great liberal, created such a long list of candidates for the gallows that Nicholas could appear merciful. He shortened the list significantly. But five were still condemned to death. Once again the emperor could show mercy—he replaced the medieval punishment of drawing and quartering, recommended by Speransky, with ordinary hanging.

  There had been no executions in Russia since the reign of Elizabeth. The empress had vowed to God to repeal the death sentence if her uprising was successful. Now the strict tsar revived the practice. But something intolerable had occurred in the interim—they had forgotten how to hang people. The gibbet was made too high, so that school benches had to be brought from the Merchant Marine School, located nearby. The five condemned Decembrists walked up the steps to the gallows and then stood on the benches under the ropes. The nooses were wrapped around their necks, but the second the executioner left the gallows, the bridge collapsed. Two were hanged, but the other three fell down into the gaping hole, hitting the steps and benches.

  Despite custom, it was decided to hang them once again. The bridge was repaired and the wretched three were brought up again.

  Colonel Muravyev-Apostol, hero of the war against Napoleon, said as he went up the gallows again, “Damned country, where they don’t know how to form a conspiracy, hold a trial, or hang people!” To a drum roll, the nooses were placed once more, this time successfully.

  The rest of the participants were sentenced to hard labor, reduced in rank, and stripped of nobility. The once-dashing guards officers found themselves in the mines of Siberia in horrible conditions.

  Throughout Nicholas’s reign, he was begged to pardon the Decembrists. But he was implacable. And when eleven women, the wives and fiancées of the sentenced men, decided to follow them to Siberia, Nicholas did his utmost to punish them, too. They lost not only the privileges of nobility, but also the most ordinary civil rights.

  Society zealously distanced itself from the rebels. It even resorted to the saving grace of sarcasm: “In Paris the cobbler revolts to become a landowner—that’s understandable. In Russia, when the nobility makes a revolution, is it because they want to be cobblers?” wrote Countess Rostopchina, once an acquaintance of the sufferers.

  Having suppressed the uprising, Nicholas learned the lesson of how to rule Russia. He tried to pass the wisdom to his son: “In Europe the ruler must have the art of being sometimes fox, sometimes lion. That is what General Bonaparte taught politicians. In Russia, he must be only the lion.”

  The rout of the Decembrists proved to be the end of the guards’ political role. There were no more attacks on the palace. Now the obedient troops worked assiduously on their training. Nicholas made the guards look like a corps de ballet. And as funny as it may sound, he made the ballet resemble the guards. During a production of Abduction from the Seraglio, the corps de ballet had to portray janissaries. Nicholas ordered that the ballerinas be taught to handle sabers. Junior officers were sent to the ballet to give instruction. The ballerinas treated it as a joke, but Nicholas would not put up with insubordination, even from ballerinas. It was a matter of principle. It was in the middle of winter, and the tsar passed word that noncompliant dancers would be sent outdoors to practice in the cold in their ballet slippers. Everyone complied.

  During Nicholas’s reign, not even a fly dared take to the air without his approval.

  In the Summer Garden, a sentry stood in the middle of a meadow. Nicholas once asked why there was an armed guard there and what was he guarding? No one could tell him. They finally found an old adjutant general, who recalled what his father had told him: One day Catherine the Great was strolling in the Summer Garden and saw the first snowdrop poking through the snow. She asked that the flower be protected while she continued her walk. Since the empress did not rescind the order, a sentry stood on the spot for the next half century.

  Nicholas enjoyed the story very much. He told it to Bismarck, who was then ambassador to Russia. He added that, during the great floods in St. Petersburg, sentries who had not been ordered to leave their posts had stayed and died as the waters rose.

  An order from the Russian sovereign was an order forever. Nicholas wanted this to be understood not only by soldiers but by the entire country.

  This was the man who ruled Russia for thirty years. And for those thirty years Alexander was to live as heir to the throne.

  CHAPTER 3

  His Father’s Empire

  The new emperor became one of the most awesome tsars in Russian history. Having dealt with the guards, Nicholas came to a sad conclusion: None of the Romanov governments before him had known what was happening in their own capital.

  The conspiracy and murder of his gr
andfather, Peter III, and the conspiracy and murder of his father, Paul I, were the most glaring examples. Numerous people took part, but the poor sovereigns learned about them in their final hour. The Decembrist plot had gone on for several years. Yet the uprising had not been prevented, and it could have been disastrous for the dynasty. The previous secret police force in Russia had “proven its paltriness,” in Nicholas’s words.

  Nicholas decided to create a new, efficient secret police force. All subsequent Russian special agencies came out from beneath Nicholas’s greatcoat, to paraphrase Pushkin on Gogol’s seminal short story.

  The tsar envisioned an agency that would be able to not only discover a developed conspiracy, but signal its conception; that would not only learn the sentiments of the public, but know how to manage them. It would be an institution that could nip sedition in the bud and punish not only actions but thoughts.

  And in the bowels of the Imperial Chancellery, the mysterious Third Department was born. Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benkendorf was the guards general who wrote to Alexander I to denounce the Decembrists, some of whom were acquaintances of his. His report, which had been ignored, was found among the papers of the late tsar. The new emperor read it, and was much more attentive. Nicholas invited Benkendorf to work on the creation of the Third Department and then to be its chief. He was quickly becoming the tsar’s new favorite.

  Chief Director Count Benkendorf reported to and was subordinate only to the tsar. Moreover, all the ministries were controlled by the Third Department. St. Petersburg did not at first grasp the all-encompassing nature of the new agency. When the tsar explained the aims of the Third Department, he handed Benkendorf a handkerchief and said, “Use this handkerchief to dry the tears of the unjustly injured.”

  The public applauded. But it soon became apparent that before drying the tears of the innocent, Count Benkendorf would inspire copious tears in the eyes of the guilty. And not only the guilty, but those who might be guilty.

  The staff of the Third Department was misleadingly small, just a few dozen people. But it was given an entire army, which came to be called by the French word gendarme. The Third Department had its Separate Gendarme Corps, and the chief director was also the chief of this political police force.

  It was only the tip of the iceberg. The main force of the Third Department was its invisible secret agents. They enveloped the country; they were everywhere—in the guards, the army, the ministries, in brilliant St. Petersburg salons, in theaters, at masquerade balls, and even in society bordellos. The invisible ears were listening. “They’re in my soup,” complained a contemporary.

  Members of the elite became informers, some as a career move, others, because they found themselves in difficult straits: men who lost at cards and women involved in dangerous adultery.

  The kind-looking blue eyes of the chief of the secret police now watched everything. The unheard-of occurred: The tsar permitted Benkendorf to reprimand Grand Duke Mikhail himself, for his dangerous puns. The tsar’s youngest brother raged impotently.

  Serving in the secret police was considered quite reprehensible, but Nicholas forced men from the best families to work in the Third Department. To make the light blue uniform of the gendarmerie acceptable in society, he kept Count Benkendorf at his side in his carriage when he went out for rides in the city. With every year, “with Germanic tenacity and precision, Nicholas tightened the noose of the Third Department around the neck of Russia,” wrote the great Russian essayist Herzen. Literature came under the purview of the secret police, because the tsar knew that sharp words had started rebellions in Europe.

  Nicholas banned writers from criticizing the government and even from praising it. As he put it, “I’ve cut them off once and for all from interfering in my work.” Stringent censorship was put in place. Anything with a shade of double meaning or that could weaken the sense of “loyalty and voluntary submission to higher authority and the law” was ruthlessly excised from print. Words crossed out by the censors could not be replaced with ellipses, either, lest the reader “fall into the temptation of thinking about the possible contents of the banned part.”

  A certain sense of responsibility for the printed word was introduced permanently into the consciousness of Russian writers, yet their responsibility was not before God or conscience, but before Emperor and State. An author’s right to a personal opinion that differed from the state’s was declared “bizarre and criminal.”

  Gradually Russian writers stopped imagining a true literature. The great victim of censorship, the liberty-loving Pushkin, wrote in all sincerity:

  I would not wish, by a false idea seduced,

  To disparage censors with offhand abuse

  What’s opportune for London is for Moscow oversoon.

  (Translated by Anya Kucharev.)

  The last line took on life as a proverb.

  Many writers worked as censors, including the great poet Tyutchev and the novelists Aksakov and Senkovsky. Benkendorf, not known for his love of literature, was now forced to read a lot. The elderly Baltic German’s sad, crumpled, and weary face was bent over manuscripts he hated. The tsar read manuscripts, too. The tsar and the chief of the Third Department became Russia’s supreme censors.

  Scary stories started spreading about the Third Department. It was said that in the building on Fontanka Canal, “Sheshkovsky’s room,” with its special floor, was still in use.

  In the reign of Catherine the Great, Sheshkovsky was the unofficial chief of the secret police. The empress, who corresponded with Voltaire, had done away with torture, but the whip survived. Sheshkovsky found a handy use for it. A free-thinking nobleman would be called in for a talk. Sheshkovsky would be extremely amiable, offer a comfortable chair, and then give a mild lecture. The person being rebuked would think that he was getting off lightly, when Sheshkovsky would turn to the abundance of icons in his office and pray fervently and loudly. The floor beneath the erring gentleman would suddenly sink down and the chair seat fall away, exposing his nether regions to people armed with switches. Stealthy hands would pull away his trousers and the nobleman would be whipped long and hard, like a slave, until his buttocks bled. The miserable victim would scream in pain and damn Sheshkovsky, who continued at his prayers.

  Then the same hands would pull up the victim’s trousers, smooth his shirt, and send the chair back up. Sheshkovsky would turn and gently resume the conversation as if nothing had happened.

  This would not be the end of the affair. Soon the regiment (thanks to Sheshkovsky) would learn of the incident. A nobleman whipped was a nobleman dishonored, and he would be forced to retire from the army.

  Benkendorf played at being Sheshkovsky, gazing kindly at the men he interrogated tenderly yet ruthlessly.

  As usual in Russia, when you can’t blame the tsar you blame the lackey. Everyone believed that Benkendorf himself had created the unprecedented might of the secret police. Periodically a happy rumor would circulate that the “executioner of thought” Benkendorf had lost the tsar’s favor. For instance, after the dueling death of the great poet Pushkin, it was thought that the tsar was wrathful and that because Benkendorf had not been able to prevent the duel that destroyed the genius of Russian literature, he would be forced to retire.

  Funnily enough, the chief of the Third Department believed the rumor, too. He did what every official in Russia resorts to in a moment of the tsar’s anger—he became “direly ill.” People gloated. But the tsar came to visit the patient, which prompted a traffic jam at Benkendorf’s house. Everyone who had gleefully awaited his downfall the day before now hastened to show sympathy for his illness. Hundreds of visiting cards were left in the reception room.

  It had been yet another test of the public’s docility. Benkendorf, like all ministers, was a puppet in Nicholas’s hands. Yet when Benkendorf died, the tsar had his bust sculpted and placed in his office as a reminder of how much the tsar valued his police.

  Nicholas treated Russia like a teacher with
eternally mischievous children. He was very strict and took care that the children not grow up too much. They were easier to handle that way. As his minister of education Uvarov used to say, “If I can extend Russia’s childhood another fifty years, I will consider my mission accomplished.”

  Soon afterward, the tsar summed up in satisfaction, “In Russia everything is silent because it is flourishing.”

  “At first we feverishly wanted to be heard. But when we saw that they were not fooling with us; that they demanded silence and inaction from us; that our talent and intelligence were doomed to grow torpid and rot at the bottom of our souls,…that any bright thought was a crime against the social order, when, in a word, we were told that educated people were pariahs in our society; and that…a soldier’s discipline was considered the only principle—then our entire young generation became morally depleted.” So wrote Alexander Nikitenko in his famous diary. He was a very wise critic who had to work as a censor. Nikitenko was sent to the guardhouse more than once for his attempts, in his words, “to give secret aid to literature,” that is, for being insufficiently vigilant. His diary is an eloquent account of how the reign of Nicholas killed talent and energy and made people believe that the “only wisdom was silence and patience.”

  The emperor’s physical appearance embodied the majesty of power. “Nicholas was handsome, but his beauty radiated cold; there is no face that reveals as ruthlessly a man’s character as his face…. The features expressed implacable will and weak thought, more cruelty than sensitivity. But most important are his eyes,” wrote Alexander Herzen.