Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Our experienced Don Juan obeyed the trite rule: If you want to leave a dangerous woman without consequences, allow her to think that she left you.

  In 1865, the empress grew concerned, sensing that something unusual was happening. He had the look of a new love, but no one knew who she was. There were strange rumors of some schoolgirl from the Smolny Institute for Girls of the Nobility with whom he took walks in the Summer Garden. But that was ridiculous, for platonic love was not for the Romanovs. Moreover, she could see from the windows of her Golden Parlor that an unknown lady was often brought to the palace by carriage, and that lights would go on in the memorial study of Nicholas I, where he had died. Apparently that was where they carried on, shaming his father’s memory. She would not learn the identity of her rival for some time.

  By 1866, eleven years into Alexander’s reign, the new leaders of the young generation were young themselves, high school and university students who had not completed their degrees. They were caught up in the intoxicating scent of liberty and they thirsted for political activity. “Whatever the last book read told him is what will be on his mind,” wrote Nikolai Nekrasov, idol of Russia’s youth, about the youth of Russia.

  Banned books and mad ideas circulated. The hardest young people despised the previous generation of liberals and even the former hero of radical Russia, Alexander Herzen. With the hatred of youth for the old, they called them “conciliators, important gentlemen, who for all their erudition and revolutionary phrases, were impotent to break with the old order.” They believed revolution would inevitably come to Russia, and soon. All it needed was a strong external push. That push was to be the assassination of the tsar.

  This belief would persist through all the revolutionary movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. The meager intellect of these Russian Jacobins was a product of the country’s history. As Dostoevsky would sorrowfully write, “The French Revolution happened after Corneille and Voltaire, on the shoulders of Mirabeau, Bonaparte, Danton, and the Encyclopedists. All we have is the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia. Our expropriators, killers, and bomb throwers are mediocre writers, students who did not finish their degree, lawyers without trials, actors without talent, scholars without science. People with enormous ambition and tiny talent. A lot of ambition, not enough ammunition.”

  N. A. Ishutin, who failed to graduate from high school in Penza, came to Moscow and became an auditor at Moscow University. The son of a poor merchant (with only one blue shirt and worn trousers tucked into swamp boots to his name), he was morbidly ambitious. He wanted to lead his peers. He may have had a miserable wardrobe, but he had a wealth of new ideas, which he brought from the provinces. The main one was about imminent revolution. Ishutin had read about it in banned books, and the wretch wanted to lead it.

  “He tried to look grim and angry, as a brutal revolutionary should,” wrote a female contemporary. “But in fact he was an envious mediocre man…who passionately dreamed of popularity.”

  In 1863, after the fires in St. Petersburg, most of the Moscow rebel students, led by Zaichnevsky, were sent to hard labor, and Ishutin picked up the baton. There was a large apartment building in Sytinsky Cul de Sac in Moscow. It consisted of tiny cell-like apartments that were rented to students. It turned into a huge dormitory for poor students. Here Ishutin easily found candidates for future Robespierres, and his circle grew.

  First the Ishutinites decided to implement the socialist ideas of Fourier, to create a working commune together with workers. They would start a book bindery, without blood-sucking middlemen so that they could divide up the earnings equally. But the bindery unfortunately required them to do actual work. And as Dostoevsky once put it, “Who in Russia wants to work?” So they moved on to more attractive plans.

  Inside his circle, Ishutin created a narrower circle called “The Organization,” made up primarily of provincials. The goal of this underground circle was no more and no less than building socialism in Russia. Ishutin told the members that their little Organization was part of a “European Revolutionary Committee” preparing revolution throughout the world. Just as he had thought, the myth made the participants quiver with delight—and with fear and obedience to him. Ishutin was the first to make falsehood an integral part of revolutionary work.

  Then, within The Organization, Ishutin created a top-secret nucleus called Hell, of his most trusted students. Their purpose was to kill the tsar, which was to be the signal for the great social uprising. The peasants would rise up instantly, followed by a general rebellion that would destroy the regime. It was discussed over endless cups of tea with chunks of sugar and cheap sausage sandwiches.

  Each member of Hell had to see himself as a doomed man, cut off from ordinary society and totally dedicated to the revolution. They were from Hell because they could not fear the most terrible and dirty methods, so long as they served the revolution. To impress new members, Ishutin would tell them how one of the circle poisoned his own father for the inheritance that he gave to the revolutionary work.

  These methods would later be used by the uncompromising Russian revolutionary, the precursor of the Bolsheviks, Sergei Nechaev.

  The same conundrum comes up again and again. The journalist Elena Kozlinina wrote in her memoirs, Over a Half Century, that at the time “many knew of the existence of Hell, but treated it as no more than empty chatter of young people.” But if many knew of it, why didn’t the omniscient Third Department know about Hell? After the student riots, which were particularly violent in St. Petersburg and Moscow, they watched students closely. They must have had agents in that dangerous student anthill. And of course, they should have been extremely alert to “chatter” about regicide. But no action against them was taken.

  A highly mysterious young man, Ishutin’s cousin Dmitri Karakozov, was accepted in Hell. The son of an impoverished aristocrat, the always silent Karakozov was a dangerous and very Russian type. He said nothing while others argued. But he listened attentively. And while his comrades made noise and amused themselves with dangerous fantasies, the religious young man came up with the idea of self-sacrifice. If the tsar was in the way of socialism, which would bring happiness to his country, then the tsar did in fact need to be killed. He understood that his comrades were all talk. He saw that he would have to do it himself.

  Saying nothing to his comrades, Karakozov left for St. Petersburg.

  It happened on April 4, 1866. That day the tsar took a walk as usual in the Summer Garden. This time he was with his sister’s children, Nikolai (Kolya) and Masha Leichtenberg. His sister, Masha, beloved daughter of their late father, Nicholas I, found herself in a piquant situation. She was widowed very young. Her husband had been the cheerful drinker and gambler duke of Leichtenberg, son of Napoleon’s stepson, and grandson of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine.

  Masha embarked on a stormy affair with Count Grigory Stroganov, and they married secretly. As Anna Tyutcheva put it, “The former tsar would have sent Masha to a convent and exiled the count to the Caucasus.” But the gentle Alexander, who was now head of the dynasty and was supposed to keep order in the family, preferred not to let on that he knew about the secret marriage. Count Stroganov grumbled that he was too old (at forty-two) to sneak into his own wife’s bed at night. Once they had children, they were forced to live in Italy.

  Masha begged the tsar to recognize her new marriage and permit them to live in Russia, in the marvelous palace their father had built for her. It had a glass conservatory like none other in Europe, with peacocks and parrots among the palms, orchids, fountains, and waterfalls. It was a mirage of the South in the midst of the St. Petersburg winter.

  He did not dare permit it. He suggested that his sister continue living abroad and he continued to pretend not to know about it. He was very sorry for Masha, especially when he himself, at almost fifty, had fallen in love, as if for the first time. (You have to live long to become young.)

  Since the emperor could not permit his sister’s misalliance, h
e paid special attention to her children by her first marriage, who lived in St. Petersburg without their mother.

  The tsar came out of the Summer Garden after three; the Leichtenbergs stayed to walk some more. On the Neva embankment by the garden’s marvelous wrought-iron fence, the usual crowd had gathered to see the tsar. This happened every day. The policeman pacing by the crowd stood at attention. The gendarme junior officer waiting by the carriage came to attention when he finally noticed the tsar. Alexander lifted the long tails of his military coat and prepared to get in.

  At that moment came the deafening bang of a shot. Someone tall and young ran out of the crowd, racing down the embankment toward the bridge. The policeman and the gendarme ran after him. The policeman knocked him down and disarmed him; the gendarme punched him in the face. The man tried to block the blows and kept shouting, “Fellows, I shot for you!” He was brought to the tsar.

  Minister Valuyev wrote an account in his diary. “The tsar asked him whether he was Russian [hoping he was Polish] and why he shot at him. The killer replied that he was Russian and that the tsar had allegedly been deceiving us too long. Others say that he said that the tsar had cheated the peasants of land. Still others, that he turned to the crowd and said, ‘Fellows, I was shooting for you.’”

  After the assassination attempt the tsar went to the Kazan Cathedral and held a thanksgiving service. When he returned to the Winter Palace, Prince Dolgorukov, chief of the Third Department, recounted the amazing circumstances that would be written up in all the newspapers the next day.

  It turned out that “the man standing next to the villain pushed his hand at the moment of the shot. God Himself used his hand to push the villain’s hand. This ordinary Russian man named Komissarov was from Kostroma.

  “Long ago in the Time of Troubles, Ivan Susanin was from Kostroma, and he saved our tsar’s august ancestor, founder of the dynasty Mikhail Romanov, from a troop of Poles and paid for it with his life.”

  The emperor commanded that Komissarov be brought to him.

  The guards lined up in the great White Hall. They greeted him with a thunderous “Hurrah!” They brought in the savior—a short, pale, and shabby-looking man. Alexander embraced him, kissed him, and elevated him to the nobility. Now he was the aristocrat Komissarov-Kostromsky. Another shout of “Hurrah!”

  In his notebook, Alexander wrote a very brief account, as usual. “Was walking with Marusya and Kolya in the Summer Garden. Shot from a pistol, missed. Killer caught. General sympathy. I went home and to Kazan Cathedral. Hurrah! The entire guards in the White Hall. Name is Osip Komissarov.”

  The heir, Sasha, wrote much more: “You can say without mistake that all of St. Petersburg came spilling out onto the street. Traffic, agitation was unimaginable. Running in all directions, primarily toward the Winter Palace, shouts, most of them with the words ‘Karakozov!’ ‘Komissarov!’ threats and curses for the former, delighted exclamations for the latter. Groups of people, singing ‘God Save the Tsar.’ General delight and thunderous ‘Hurrahs.’ Then they brought in the man who saved him. Papa kissed him and made him a nobleman. Another terrific ‘Hurrah.’”

  The Third Department had acted with great efficiency, which it had lacked before. Everyone involved in the attempt was quickly discovered and arrested. The tsar was told all the circumstances: The assassin was the nobleman Dmitri Karakozov, age twenty-six. He had been a student at Moscow University, but was expelled for not paying his tuition. He came from the provinces. In Moscow he met his relative, Ishutin, an auditor at Moscow University. That young man with criminal aims had created an underground group, and so on.

  “The capital is mad with joy,” wrote a contemporary. “They’ve remembered their love for the tsar, remembered everything he has done for Russia! You hear ‘God Save the Tsar’ everywhere.” Naturally, there was a special performance of Glinka’s Life for the Tsar, about Ivan Susanin’s heroism (dying to protect the tsar from Poles). The two bassos in the company who alternately sang the role of Kostroma native Ivan Susanin fought to sing that night. Susanin’s aria was accompanied by constant applause. The other Kostroma native, the savior (as Komissarov was called by the press), sat in the box next to the royal box.

  Dispatches and telegrams came from all over Russia. Cities, ethnic groups, and social estates competed in expressions of patriotic feelings. Workers in the provinces rallied in honor of the tsar. In Moscow (from where Karakozov had come) students, in expiation of their mutinous recent past, organized a procession to the Icon of the Iversk Mother of God, singing “God Save the Tsar,” and then prayed in Red Square by the Church of Vassily the Blessed.

  The exultation began developing a tinge of pogrom. Drunken “patriots” roamed the streets, knocking off the hats of passersby who did not seem sufficiently thrilled and dragging all “long-haired bespectacled types” (students) to police precincts.

  While the populace rejoiced that the tsar was saved, a completely different version of the assassination attempt was told in whispers in the capital. In this version, Komissarov was just one of the crowd of gawkers waiting to see the tsar come out of the park. After the shot, he was rounded up along with the others and first sent to the governor general’s house and then to the Third Department. He thought he was doomed. But when the authorities learned that he was originally from Kostroma, they decided to turn him into a new Ivan Susanin.

  That was the start of the “savior’s” path to glory. Russians rushed to heap him with gratitude. Priests called him a guardian angel in their sermons, poets called him “the humble weapon of God’s providence.” He was given a multistory house and his wife wandered through the stores in the Gostiny Dvor complex, buying up silks and diamonds and presenting herself curtly as “the wife of the savior,” embarrassing the merchants.

  Komissarov-Kostromsky eventually ended up forgotten in the provinces and died of delirium tremens.

  The day of the assassination attempt, Dostoevsky burst into the apartment of the poet Appolon Maikov, shouting, “They shot at the tsar!”

  Maikov responded “in an unnatural voice: ‘Did they kill him?’ ‘No…saved him…he’s fine…But they shot, they shot, they shot!’ Dostoevsky kept repeating in despair and shock.”

  The writer understood that, despite the miss, the shot had in fact been a hit. Before, the tsars had been killed in the palace, secretly, and they were said to have died peacefully of hemorrhoidal colic or stroke or something. Now, someone had taken a shot at the tsar in public, shattering the inviolable aura of the sacred person that is the tsar.

  Alexander understood this, too.

  While the country rejoiced, the tsar was in a fury. Kostya rushed from the Pavlovsky Palace to St. Petersburg to be with Alexander. He remembered from childhood how dangerous and uncontrollable Alexander’s wrath could be. He begged him not to be hasty and to keep their slogan in mind: “No weakness, no reaction,” but in vain. Alexander demanded revenge. He gave the ingrates freedom and what did he get? Bloody proclamations, arson, and now a bullet. The tsar must have recalled his father’s tight fist, his testament on his deathbed.

  Disappointing Kostya, Alexander signed a decree creating an Investigation Commission headed by General Muravyev the Hangman, who had suppressed the Polish uprising. The nihilists had to see that the authorities were not going to mollycoddle them.

  This was the end of the chain of strange events: the incomprehensible conditions of incarceration for the rebellious students that led to their mad proclamations, the terrible fires and their unknown arsonists, the underground organization about which so many people knew except for the police, and the shooting. The result was the tsar’s readiness to fulfill the dream of the retrograde party—to start serious reprisals.

  The tsar commanded that Mikhail Muravyev be brought to the palace. The stunned and pleased general appeared and asked for the heads of his former enemies, the liberal bureaucrats. “They are all cosmopolites, adherents of European ideas. Now real Russians must come to power!”
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  In just a few days, Muravyev shattered the liberal party. His sworn enemy, Prince Suvorov, lost the governor generalship of the St. Petersburg region, and Prince Dolgorukov, a friend of the tsar, lost his position as chief of the Third Department. Ministry of Education Golovnin, Kostya’s man, was fired for “letting young people get out of hand.” The famous retrograde Count Dmitri Tolstoy was appointed minister of education. He was soon to be called “the damnation of the Russian school.”

  Among the liberals forced out was Lev Perovsky, governor of St. Petersburg. His daughter, Sofia, was twelve. Fifteen years later the terrorist Sofia Perovskaya would be standing on the Catherine Canal, where we left the tsar. The bombers would be following her plan.

  The news of Muravyev’s appointment brought a chill to the capital. Everyone remembered how he burned villages in Poland, hanged Catholic priests, and exiled entire families to Siberia. They knew he would show no mercy. Interrogations of suspects began. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote, “St. Petersburg was dying. What horrible people had risen from their graves. Everything was remembered and avenged. A herd of ‘well-meaning’ people hurried to let loose the grudges they had been nursing.”

  The Muravyev Commission brought in everyone for questioning—writers, officials, officers, teachers and pupils, students, peasants, princes, merchants. The investigators were allowed to insult female “nihilists.” They asked the college girls how many men they had slept with and threatened to give them a yellow identification (which meant they were prostitutes) unless they answered the question.

  Panic and fear ruled the capital. People remembered the reprisals of Nicholas I after the Decembrist uprising. The most unstable (just as they had been then) were some of the liberals. Nekrasov was frightened, too. The great poet worried for himself and for his journal, Sovremennik. He first turned for help to his card partner Count Adlerberg, who could do nothing. The zealot Muravyev had everything in his power. So Nekrasov decided on an action he thought would help.