Despite the threatening mustache, his gaze betrayed his kindness and gentleness. His eyes bulged a bit, which caused his late uncle, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, to call him “Lambkin.” His eyes rolled helplessly from their orbit when he tried to imitate his father’s intimidating gaze. But they were divinely radiant when he was being charming. He was a typical charmer of the gallant era of French kings. Like many others at court who had studied French too assiduously as children, Alexander rolled his Rs in Russian.
With his mistresses, he naturally spoke French. But his wife, Masha, was not fluent in French (alas). So with his German wife he spoke Russian. His brother Kostya, on the contrary, spoke only Russian to everyone and liked to show off folk expressions, for instance, calling his wife zhinka, instead of zhena.
The servant brought coffee. Alexander stood at the window. His apartment on the second floor of the Winter Palace opened on the Admiralty and Palace Square. When Alexander married, these rooms were allotted to him by his father. One of them had been his classroom, where he studied with Zhukovsky. When he became emperor, he decided to remain in them. The apartment opened to a large reception room, which was the former classroom where his stern father liked to come to inquire after his progress. He had shivered there often, trying to gauge his father’s mood.
Then came the library, then the room for the orderlies. And then, the main room, the study that served as both study and bedroom. From here he ruled Russia, from behind a big desk with family photographs, the dear faces watching him while he worked. They looked down from the walls as well, but they were unrecognizable in formal family portraits. By the window stood a secretary desk, always covered with paperwork. He decided it all, the autocrat. Today there were mountains of documents, part of the agrarian reforms. On top lay the manifesto and the historic pen with which he would sign.
Marble columns with a cherry curtain set apart an alcove with the simple iron bed on which he slept. His father had slept and died on a similar bed. On that bed, in this room, he would die.
Like his father, he liked to take a walk before breakfast around the palace, before starting work. He breakfasted with the empress in the lettuce-green room, after which he returned to the study and started work. Every morning the tsar saw the war minister (Count Dmitri Milyutin, Nikolai Milyutin’s brother) and the chief of the Third Department (Prince Dolgorukov), and every other day, Kostya and the minister of foreign affairs (Prince Gorchakov).
After lunch he took a second walk, a long one, just like his father. He walked with his setter in the Summer Garden. Past the gilded fence and the marble statues of goddesses of antiquity, bashfully covered by thick foliage. He returned to the palace in an open carriage.
This was his routine year after year, a continuation of his father’s daily schedule. He would eventually have to face the incredible: He, the Autocrat of Russia, would be forced to stop his walks in his own capital.
But that morning, his schedule was violated by history. Instead of his morning walk, he went to the Small Church in the palace, so beloved by his father. The huge man had a touching preference for everything tiny and informal. He preferred the chapel to the magnificent cathedral.
Alexander asked everyone to leave, including the priest, and he prayed alone.
In the meantime Kostya arrived at the palace with his wife and son, the handsome Nicholas. Kostya called him Nikola. The heir, also Nicholas, was called Niks, like the late emperor. Their sister Masha also came to the palace. Their mother had died at the end of the previous year. The three siblings, now orphaned, were even more tender toward one another.
The Grand Procession to the Cathedral was opened by masters of ceremony wearing gold-shot camisoles and holding staves. High marshals and the senior high-marshal walked with gilt warders. Behind them came Alexander with the empress and children and other members of the imperial family. Then came a very long human train—members of the State Council, senators, ministers, his retinue, her ladies-in-waiting. This procession, sparkling with gold, medals, and jewels, slowly and solemnly crawled through the enfilade of formal rooms. Its participants did not yet understand that they, like serfdom, belonged to the medieval life that the emperor was about to destroy.
The procession stopped in the antechamber at the doors of the cathedral. The doors were flung open, but only the imperial family and the most important state officials could enter. The rest of the dressed-up masses would wait outside the cathedral doors for the very long service to end. He knew that they would not be silent for long. Many young men were slipping out the back stairs to have a smoke. No one would have dared such a thing in his father’s time! He was sure that one of them would be Nikola, a young ne’er-do-well, whose pranks amused the whole family.
Alexander prayed fervently and at length. Next to him prayed the heir, Niks, and the second-eldest son, Sasha. Niks was magnificent, handsome, athletic, and smart. Sasha was a failure—hugely fat and therefore shy and awkward.
A festive breakfast was held in the green salon. Afterward, Alexander, Kostya, and their sister Masha went to his study. Niks was brought in. The moment that changed Russia took place. With the stroke of a pen, he freed 23 million slaves.
From the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich:
19 February 1861. We gathered for the mass at the Winter Palace, followed by a special service with marvelous prayers…. After breakfast, I remained to watch Sasha sign the Manifesto…. First he read it aloud and, after crossing himself, he signed. I poured sand on the ink. He gave the pen with which he signed the manifesto to Niks. From this day forth a new history, a new era has begun. They had predicted revolution and other nonsense for today, but the people were as quiet and calm as ever. We had a family lunch at Sasha’s.
During the family lunch everyone shuddered at a loud noise outside the window, but it was only snow falling from the palace roof in the thaw.
Alexander did not wish to make the great event public yet. In the best traditions of his father, it was decided to keep it secret. The manifesto was promulgated only on March 5, “Forgiveness Sunday,” the day when Orthodox Christians forgive one another. Lent began on the following day, a period of humility, quiet, and peace—not for agitation but for repentance.
In the meantime, Janus Alexander prepared for the promulgation of the manifesto, still in his father’s tradition. Troops were put on alert all over Russia. The press wrote that the rumors about decisions made on the agrarian issue were false and nothing in that area was foreseen in the near future. At the same time, printing houses were publishing the manifesto, and messengers on troikas sped to the provinces with copies. They were followed by adjutants who would explicate the manifesto in the provinces.
The stirring Sunday of March 5 arrived, the day to proclaim the manifesto. The retrogrades kept up their warning of rebellion.
“I don’t know why P. N. Ignatyev [governor-general of St. Petersburg] and many other high-placed persons feared that disruptions would occur at the announcement of the Manifesto. Only Sasha [Alexander Patkul, who had studied alongside the emperor with Zhukovsky and was now police chief of St. Petersburg] was completely certain that the people would sooner go to church than riot in the streets,” recalled his wife, the former lady-in-waiting Alexandra Patkul.
The phlegmatic Patkul was right. The manifesto was read out in churches in both capitals, and everything remained calm.
As usual on Sundays, the tsar was present at the changing of the guards at the Mikhailovsky Manege. He spoke to the officers afterward.
Kostya recorded in his diary: “Sasha gathered officers around him in the Manege and told them that he had declared freedom that day. The response was such a loud ‘Hurrah!’ that my heart leaped and tears came to my eyes. That ‘Hurrah!’ accompanied Sasha out onto the street, where it was picked up by the people. It was a miracle!”
That “hurrah!” followed him farther. From the Mikhailovsky Manege, the tsar returned to the Winter Palace. “At Tsaritsynsky Meadow he was ha
iled with a ‘hurrah!’ that shook the earth,” wrote a contemporary.
Exactly twenty years later in March he would be returning from the Mikhailovsky Manege, from the changing of the guards, when he was assassinated.
So age-old slavery was repealed, repealed a bit earlier than in the United States of America, and without a civil war. But both emancipators would be killed.
The honeymoon between tsar and nation would last only a very brief month. At the Saltykov Entrance of the palace, which he usually used for his walk, an elated crowd awaited him every day. To avoid them, he took to using a different door. “I prayed to portraits of the tsar then,” wrote the literary critic Alexander Nikitenko in his diary.
Alexander’s foreign foe, Herzen, praised the tsar exultantly. “Neither the Russian people nor history will forget him for this. From the distance of our exile we hail him with a name rarely encountered in autocracy without eliciting a bitter smile—we hail him with the name ‘Liberator.’”
Another famous Russian radical, Prince Kropotkin, was a youth then, studying at the most prestigious Page Corps. The future leader of Russian anarchism recalled, “My feeling then was that if in my presence someone had made an attempt on the tsar’s life, I would have shielded Alexander II with my chest.”
The honeymoon ended when Alexander took a shocking step. The manifesto was a gift to the liberals, so Januslike, he quickly looked the other way, in the direction of the retrogrades. He decided to unite society as his great-grandmother Catherine had taught him: “Work must be started by people of genius and implemented by people who are efficient.”
Thanking the main reformers who had beaten the party of retrogrades, he awarded them medals and sent them into retirement. Nikolai Milyutin, the main executive of the reform, who had been called “Jacobin” and “red,” Minister of Internal Affairs Lanskoy, who was seriously accused by the retrogrades of leading Russia toward civil war, and other “liberal bureaucrats hateful to conservatives” were removed from their posts.
The only one left was Minister of War Dmitri Milyutin, because military reform was next.
The removals caused a shock. From the diary of Dmitri Milyutin:
As soon as the goal was achieved and the resolution went into effect, the Sovereign, as befits his character, decided it was necessary to reduce dissatisfaction which the Great Reform had caused in the landowning estate. For that the implementation of the new law was torn out of the hands of those who had attracted the hatred of the landowning estate and entrusted to such people who could not in any case be suspected of hostility toward the nobility.
Having gotten rid of the liberal bureaucrats, Alexander appointed a “conciliatory person” to head the government, who would suit everyone. Fifty-year-old Peter Alexandrovich Valuyev, a typical bureaucrat of the new era, became the minister of internal affairs.
Valuyev mastered the concept of Griboyedov’s comedy at an early age. He managed to hide his intelligence. He allowed himself to shine only in his diary, where the members of the government and its work are described ruthlessly. In his work, Valuyev resorted to “Russian wisdom,” that is, knowing which way the wind is blowing. The walking weather vane embarked on his career early.
During Nicholas I’s visit to Moscow, he so appealed to him with his retrograde views that the tsar called him “a model young man.” After Nicholas’s death, he immediately turned liberal and sent a note to Grand Duke Konstantin that boldly declared: “We have glitter on top, rot on the bottom…. Everywhere there is scorn and hatred of thought and supervision, as if we were minors.”
His boss now was the famous retrograde Muravyev, but he managed to please him, too, without losing his good relations with the liberals.
Valuyev was impressive looking, tall with good features, and he could be eloquent. In the spirit of the times, he made sure to demonstrate true European manners, which the sovereign particularly liked. Alexander believed that Valuyev could reconcile the victorious liberals and the vanquished retrogrades.
It was then that Alexander, who had grown accustomed to the adoration of society, began to realize that no one liked his reform. The landowners were unhappy—some mourned the age-old patriarchal lifestyle destroyed by the emancipation of the serfs, others feared a peasant revolt, when “a million soldiers will not be able to hold back the peasants in their fury.”
The peasants were unhappy with their minuscule land allotment. A very Russian rumor arose in the villages: The tsar had given the peasants “true freedom” but the masters hid it from the people. “Wise men” in the remote, illiterate villages began to explain the manifesto in their own way. In the village of Bezdna (Kazan Province), Anton Petrov read in the manifesto that all land, except for inconvenient places, must belong to the peasants. Men from other villages came to Bezdna “for true freedom.” Thousands of peasants gathered in the small village. Troops were sent to arrest Petrov, but the peasants would not give up their literate neighbor. They formed a ring around his hut. The army acted as it was taught in Nicholas’s time, that is, ruthlessly. On the command of Count Apraksin (son of an adjutant general at the court), the soldiers shot into the peasant crowd, and found and killed the poor literate peasant. Almost four hundred bodies lay on the ground when they were done.
The local landowners, who had braced themselves for another Pugachev Rebellion, a bloody peasant revolt, hailed the count for ably mowing down unarmed peasants. Peasant unrest continued, and it continued to be answered with bullets. Only the advent of spring, sowing time, dampened the explosion.
Young people were not happy, either. Alexander was stunned. They hadn’t dared utter a sound under his father. He had eased censorship, allowed people to talk, enlarged the rights of universities, permitted young people to go abroad! Now he learned that students were meeting to discuss the reprisals against the peasants in Bezdna. They dared to criticize his manifesto, quoting a line from the poet Nikolai Nekrasov.
“Enough rejoicing!” the Muse whispered to me. “It’s time to move forward. The people are free, but are they happy?”
The Third Department reported worrisome information on the sentiments of youth. By April 13, 1861, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich would write in his diary: “I am always terribly afraid when they touch on such questions, because this opens a wide field for the retrograde party.” Wise Kostya was first to understand that the youth would be the main trump card in the retrograde party’s game.
The insulted emperor decided to teach the students a lesson with a reminder of his father’s methods. He appointed an admiral (Count Putyatin) as minister of education, a general (G. Filipson) as warden of the St. Petersburg University, and a retired colonel (A. Fittsum von Eksted) as the university’s rector. These sixtyish military men were given a task: to use strong measures to kill off any desire the students might have “to stick their noses where they don’t belong.”
The military men decided that the problem lay in a lack of discipline and an influx of the poor to the universities. Poverty was the hothouse of free-thinking. They decided to do away with scholarships for poor students and to force everyone to pay for their education (65 percent of the students had subsidies).
The remaining students were put under military control. Special booklets called matriculas, for registration lists, were instituted. They served as both a pass to get into the university and a record of all information on the student (grades, behavior, and so on). To avoid discussion of these measures, Putyatin banned all student meetings.
The students left for summer vacation electrified by the rumors of new rules. When they returned in September, the poor students (that is, the majority) discovered that they were locked out. But these were new young people: The new tsar had reigned for six years, more than a quarter of a lifetime for these young men. They had grown up without Nicholas’s oppression, so they were completely free of the fear that the emperor’s generation knew. They were the children of “perestroika” and they did not want to submit.
In the meantime, the tsar went to the Crimea in the autumn, as usual. After his hectic Days of Creation, he rested at the glorious Livadia Palace. While he rested, students formed a huge crowd in the courtyard of the university in the capital.
“Let’s talk to the warden!” shouted the orators. “We’ll force them to give back our subsidies!” cried others. The gendarmes made their way to the university. The stunned governor general Ignatyev and the chief of police of St. Petersburg, Alexander Patkul, galloped there, too.
“Bear in mind that they don’t dare shoot at us!” shouted the orators. And so the city witnessed a sight a never before seen in St. Petersburg. A long column of students moved down Nevsky Prospect toward the apartment of Warden Filipson. They wanted to complain to the warden, a general, about the minister, an admiral. Police on foot and on horseback moved on both sides of the students, in rhythm with their march. A platoon of gendarmes was behind them, and the rear was brought up by Governor General Ignatyev and Chief of Police Patkul on horseback.
Frightened, Filipson refused to speak with the students at home and agreed to hear them out only at the university. So the procession of students, with the completely confused Filipson at the head, moved back through the center of the city to the university. There were several hair salons along the way. Seeing the procession, the French hairdressers and barbers recognized a familiar picture. They ran out of their establishments, shook their fists, and shouted joyfully: “La révolution! La révolution!”
Minister of Education Admiral Putyatin sent panicked telegrams to Livadia—What was he to do? The tsar, enjoying sea and sun, replied kindly, “Deal with them like a father.” The old admiral remembered that in Nicholas’s day, being fatherly meant giving a whipping. Fortunately, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich managed to stop the punishment and saved them all from great shame.
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