Lectures were postponed until the matriculas were handed out. The university was closed and it was announced that only students with booklets would be allowed to take classes. The unrest continued.
October began with clashes between students and police. Crowds of onlookers gawked at the unusual spectacle. In the tsar’s absence, the Senate held a session. On October 12 a crowd of students gathered in the university courtyard. More fiery speeches were heard. The students who had agreed to the matriculas got caught up in the enthusiasm, and to the applause of their comrades, tore the booklets up and threw them on the ground. A carpet of paper stretched out in front of the university’s main entrance.
Then came the turn of the retrogrades. The Senate and the Holy Synod made a decision. Guardsmen—a half platoon of the Preobrazhensky Regiment and a platoon of the Finland regiment—were sent to the university. They surrounded and arrested the students in the courtyard. The soldiers formed a corridor through which the prisoners were brought out. Students out on the street attacked the soldiers with sticks. Then came the command the soldiers wanted to hear: “Butt stocks!”
As Minister of War Milyutin wrote, “The enraged soldiers went at it seriously.”
Soon, 270 beaten students were led to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. They cursed the regime as they went. “The fortress was overcrowded,” wrote Milyutin. Six of the wounded were sent to the hospital. Student unrest traveled to Moscow and the provinces. Everywhere, it was put down by gendarmes and policemen.
That was the tsar’s first step toward the Catherine Canal. During the student riots in Moscow a certain Peter Zaichnevsky was arrested. A student of Moscow University, he was soon to play a fateful role in Alexander’s life.
When the tsar returned to St. Petersburg, Kostya persuaded him to correct the situation. Janus agreed and once again looked forward: Putyatin was removed, and he appointed a young liberal from Kostya’s circle as the new education minister. Forty-year-old Alexander Golovnin reopened the closed departments in St. Petersburg and allowed expelled students to sit for exams. The universities were given the autonomy they wanted.
But it was too late. The students had tasted the intoxication of rebellion.
It did not end here. The next spring, in 1862, the “fantastically bloody” proclamation of a group named Young Russia was found by the secret police. The tsar read in astonishment: “We need not a divinely anointed tsar, not an ermine mantle that hides hereditary inability, but an elected elder who receives a salary for his service. If Alexander II does not understand this and is not willing to voluntarily cede to the people, the worse for him.”
Then came the bloody call: “There is only one way out of the oppressive situation—revolution, revolution bloody and inexorable, revolution that must radically change everything, everything without exception, all the foundations of contemporary society, and destroy the adherents of today’s order. We are not afraid of it, even though we know that rivers of blood will flow, that there might be innocent victims. We will have just one cry: ‘To the hatchets!’ and then attack the imperial party, without pity, the way it does not pity us now. We will attack in the squares, if the vile blackguards dare to come out, attack them in their houses, attack in crowded city alleys, attack on the broad avenues of the capitals, attack in the villages and towns! Remember that those who are not with us are against us, and those who are against us are our enemy, and enemies must be obliterated by every means.”
It was signed: “Central Revolutionary Committee.”
Another bloody proclamation was laid on his desk. “A Bow to the Masters’ Peasants from Their Well-Wishers.” It was aimed at the peasants, calling on peasant Russia to take to their axes, to more bloodshed.
Now Alexander could see what the retrogrades had warned him about, the consequences of the “thaw” on young minds.
Kostya had been right to worry. Alexander was furious. His entourage sensed the imminent wind of change. Count Peter Shuvalov, close to the tsar, left the circle of liberal bureaucrats. He spoke to the tsar about the inability of another friend of the tsar, Prince Dolgorukov, to lead the Third Department effectively.
Within the Third Department, they began to talk of “the need for a harsh course.” Denunciations began appearing on the tsar’s desk about how the rebellious International, formed by the German professor Marx, had penetrated into Russia. A secret international alliance of revolutionaries was behind those proclamations. They were in Russia!
It would become clear later who was behind those mad proclamations.
In a Moscow cell, Peter Zaichnevsky and some other students arrested during the student riots awaited trial. They were given surprisingly comfortable accommodations. Actually, suspiciously comfortable ones, considering the habits of Russian policemen trained in Nicholas’s harsh times.
On Sundays the prisoners were taken to an ordinary city bath house. Their friends awaited them along the way. A small group would gather and the police guard would wait patiently and tactfully to one side while the gentlemen chatted. It would end with an invitation for the friends to come talk in the cell.
“The small, low-ceilinged solitary cell was full; people sat on the bed, the window ledge, the floor, and the table. Most were young people, including several friends of Zaichnevsky from university. There were heated arguments,” wrote one of the participants. It was bizarre, to say the least, for the police to permit a political meeting for students who had been arrested for attending such meetings.
Peter Zaichnevsky with a few incarcerated others had written the proclamation that so disturbed Alexander. Naturally, they made it harsh—it included a call for killing the entire royal family and landowners and other quotations from the Parisian Jacobins of 1793. The title “Young Russia” was a paraphrase of Young Italy, an organization of the Italian Carbonari revolutionaries.
For a small reward, a guard had agreed to take the proclamation in an envelope to the prisoners’ friends. The text was published by an underground press and distributed in many copies, and thereby reached the Third Department. When it was brought to the tsar, the department branded it the fruit of international revolutionaries.
Immediately, as if to continue the momentum, mysterious fires broke out in St. Petersburg. Beginning on May 16, the capital burned every day. The nauseating odor of smoldering filled the air. The white nights had a red glow. The worst catastrophe occurred on May 28, 1862, when a monstrous fire broke out in Apraksin Yard. The fire leaped along the rotting wooden sheds filled with rubbish. The flames covered an enormous territory, jumping across the Fontanka River to the woodpiles in the backyards of magnificent palaces. Fire bells rang in vain, as all the efforts of the fire brigades were useless. The army was called in. Minister of War Milyutin came on horseback.
He recalled, “When I got to the fire, around 7:00 P.M., I saw a sea of flames the entire length of Gostiny Dvor (which fortunately was unharmed) to Sagorodny Prospect and from the Page Corps to Apraksin Yard. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was engulfed in flames; they were throwing packets of files out the windows.”
Alexander immediately came from Tsarskoye Selo to the inferno. He headed the fire fighting, for this was a real battle. By 2:00 A.M., the fire was stopped. Gostiny Dvor and the Page Corps were saved. But the center of the city had been turned into black, smoking ruins. The victims of the fire were settled on Semenovsky Square, where once Dostoevsky and the Petrashevsky group awaited execution.
Milyutin recalled, “Fires are a habitual catastrophe for us in Russia in the summer…and the people bear their bad luck docilely. But in 1862 the ‘red rooster’ took on such scope and character that there could be no doubt of intentional arson.”
This was just what the secret police reported to Alexander. They fingered young people, students, as the arsonists. Rumors about student activity were constantly circulated during the huge fire.
Milyutin wrote, “The people who had gathered made a strong impression on me, I was astonished by their rage. It b
ecame dangerous for students to appear in the streets in uniform. (‘Rebel student’ is a common phrase among the simple people now.)”
Minister of Internal Affairs Valuyev made a strange notation in his diary, that the fires and proclamations had “the desired effect.”
On May 21 an Investigation Commission was formed. In consisted of St. Petersburg’s chief of police Alexander Patkul and delegates from the ministries of Internal Affairs, Justice, and War, and of course, the Third Department. They started an investigation of the fires, but they could not find the arsonists. There was one poor Jew in Odessa who was hanged for arson, but he was the only one. The question remains—did they fail as detectives? Or was there no one to be found, because the fires were a police provocation to frighten the tsar?
“The retrogrades” had been the pillars of Nicholas’s reign, his military figures and officials. Tellingly, the court camarilla, a Spanish word for “intriguers at court,” was used in Russia to refer to the court elite.
They all sensed that society had awakened dangerously after the hibernation under Nicholas. They wondered whether a major earthquake was coming. Would autocracy survive? Their banner was Great Russian chauvinism—the old triad of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism—with a hatred of the new reforms that might lead Russia down the Western path toward an end to autocracy.
At the beginning of the tsar’s reign, they preferred to be anonymous, while he was wrapped up in his transformations. But with time, they became well known and they had a dangerous leader. The summer of fires marked their first victory. In expectation of the commission’s conclusions, the tsar agreed to numerous arrests of “suspicious persons.”
On June 8, he ordered the Department of Engineering “to prepare with all possible haste rooms for 26 political prisoners in the prison of the Fortress of Peter and Paul.” He approved a resolution on the supervision of printing presses. By his decree the publication of the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) was suspended for eight months.
The journal was a symbol of glasnost. Its editor, the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, had become the idol of liberals in the early years of the new reign. Sovremennik “printed all the famous living writers. At its traditional lunches, the cream of literature gathered. As a contemporary joked, ‘If the ceiling were to fall during one of those lunches, the great Russian literature would vanish.’”
The main authors of the essays in the journal were the very young Nikolai Dobrolubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The former’s satirical essays and articles and the latter’s articles were quoted by young people everywhere. “If Chernyshevsky is a viper, then Dobrolubov is a cobra,” wrote an author offended by their criticism. Dobrolubov died very young, leaving the criticism and punditry to Chernyshevsky, who became the intellectual trendsetter for youth. The ban on the journal affected him most of all.
Chernyshevsky was everything: philosopher, economist, pundit, literary critic, and writer. Paradoxically, the level of his philosophical and economic works is pathetic and he was a mediocre writer, yet he wielded enormous influence on all of Russian life. In an age of the titans Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he would write the novel that was most popular among progressive young people in Russia, What Is To Be Done?
His father was a Russian Orthodox priest, who was a true pastor of his flock. In Nicholas’s time, when “people were to be treated severely for their own good,” people heard only words of kindness and welcome from him. The father’s kindness, spiritual purity, and renunciation of the petty and vulgar were passed on to him. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a luminous man; even his greatest foes admitted that. They called him a fallen angel.
He was a follower of the humanist Mill, and he called for enlightened self-interest. “In acting nobly, we act for the exclusive benefit of ourselves.” But this kindhearted man would be the ideological teacher of future terrorists and young Lenin.
When Alexander began work on peasant reform, Chernyshevsky had been thrilled. But the final result of the reforms elicited his determined protest. Overt political activity was out of the question, so with other disillusioned radicals he created the secret organization called Land and Freedom. It was secretly and closely bound to Herzen. It wanted true freedom for the peasants with a just allotment of land. It felt that the miserable allotment given by Alexander would lead to shock waves and a bloody rebellion, meaningless and ruthless.
In his “Letters Without an Address,” Chernyshevsky wrote of the coming threat: “Our people are ignorant, filled with crude superstition, and blind hatred for those who have rejected their wild habits. Therefore we are equally against the anticipated attempt by the people to rid themselves of all supervision and care and to take on ordering their own affairs. In order to avert this horrifying denouement, we are prepared to forget everything—our love of freedom and our love of the people.”
After the fires, Chernyshevsky was arrested and charged with inciting the very peasant revolt that he so feared. The proclamation “A Bow to the Masters’ Peasants from Their Well-Wishers” was attributed to him. On June 12, 1862, he was brought to one of the prepared cells at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where he would spend close to two years, admitting nothing.
The investigation, prison, and the unfairness of the regime changed him. He became an implacable opponent of the regime. Sitting in the damp solitary cell, where he would occasionally go on a hunger strike to protest his conditions, he started writing What Is To Be Done? His hatred for the regime illuminated his work with a secret fire.
From his prison cell, Chernyshevsky would dictate to an entire generation what it was to do. The novel’s hero would have an unprecedented, fantastic influence on Russia’s youth.
Alexander, by now, was caught between retrogrades in his regime and radicals in the universities. Once he filled up the cells of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, he surprised the retrogrades by looking in the opposite direction. Very far.
In that hot summer filled with smoke in the capital, turbulent peasant unrest, and student riots, Alexander called in his chief of cabinet Valuyev. He commanded the minister to prepare in total secrecy a new draft project. The State Council, appointed by the tsar, was to be reorganized into a bicameral legislative advisory institution with elected deputies.
Valuyev was stunned. It would be the first higher elected institution in Russia. Was the autocrat heading toward a parliament and constitution? The ever-helpful Valuyev did not discuss the tsar’s orders and asked questions only in his diary. The human weather vane instantly started work with great enthusiasm.
While his assiduous minister wrote a draft of the decree, Alexander decided to test the constitutional idea on the empire’s borders. His brother, Kostya, and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna were by his side again.
He selected the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Finland as his constitutional testing grounds. Before they were annexed by Russia, both states had had a much more progressive form of government than the empire. They had constitutions. The tsar began with Poland. He decided to expand Polish self-government significantly, which his father had always been against, hating the continually rebellious Poles.
In late June 1862, the family’s chief liberal, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, went off to Poland as viceroy to implement the reform of self-government. But the Poles rejected “miserable hand-outs.” They felt the winds of change and wanted everything right away. They demanded independence and did not want a Russian viceroy.
They shot at brother Kostya at the theater. Fortunately, it was a slight shoulder wound that did more damage to his gold epaulet than to his arm. The grand duke remembered his father’s tradition: The would-be assassin was hanged as an example to others.
But the shot was only a prelude.
Alexander was at a ball when he learned that an uprising had begun throughout Poland. The rebels had formed a national government and declared their independence. Kostya, not very good in the role of gendarme pacifier, was having trouble putting down the rebellion.
Alexander was furious. He decided to give the “ingrate rebels” a taste of his father’s medicine. He sent General Mikhail Muravyev to Poland. Muravyev was a huge man, short of breath, with the face of a bulldog and the eyes of a tiger. He was a leader of the retrograde party. When he had served as governor in western provinces, he was ruthless in implementing the policy of Russification. He was one of the few to openly criticize the reforms of the new emperor. After serfdom was abolished, Muravyev retired demonstratively.
A distant relative had been hanged with the Decembrists. But as he used to say, “I’m not one of the Muravyevs who get hanged, I’m one of those who do the hanging.”
Muravyev set conditions: Grand Duke Konstantin was to be recalled and he was to have dictatorial rights in Poland. Alexander did not argue. When Muravyev set out for Poland, he joked, “The only good Pole is a hanged Pole.” He came to be known by the name of Muravyev the Hangman.
A hundred-thousand-strong Russian army shattered the poorly armed Polish rebels. Then Muravyev began a vicious “purge” of Poland. Estates were taken away, entire families were sent to Siberia, monasteries were closed, and monks and nuns who had helped the rebels were driven out of their cells. Twenty-two thousand Poles were sent to hard labor, shot, or hanged. Several thousand rebels escaped to Europe.
It was the end of Polish self-government, not the beginning. Poland was now ruled from St. Petersburg and Russian was the mandatory language for all officials.
After these atrocities, Alexander once again felt the approval of society. “What a man that Muravyev! What a fist! He executes and hangs. Hangs and executes! God grant him health,” wrote the Slavophile Alexander Koshelev.
This was an expression of Orthodox Russia’s age-old dislike and distrust of Catholic Poland. In the Time of Troubles, the Poles almost conquered Russia and put pretenders on the throne, and quite recently they had fought with Napoleon against Russia. Russians never forgot nor forgave that.
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