Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The young people back from abroad were in the front ranks of the powerful movement, the unprecedented collective exodus of young urbanites into the dark corners of the Russian countryside. “Nothing comparable existed before or after. It seemed as if some kind of revelation was at work. As if a mighty call coming out of nowhere had passed over the land. And everyone with a living soul responded and followed that call, imbued with longing and anger at their former lives. They left their home, wealth, honors, family, gave themselves up to the movement with the thrilled enthusiasm, with the fiery faith that knows no obstacles, measures no sacrifices, and for which suffering and doom are the most burning, insurmountable stimulus to action,” wrote the young nobleman Sergei Kravchinsky. He graduated from the Mikhailov Artillery School (as had Bakunin), served a year as an officer in the provinces, retired, and went to serve the cause.

  “Listen—from all parts of our enormous homeland, from the Don and the Urals, from the Volga and Dnepr, rises the call: ‘To the people! To the people!,’” wrote Herzen elatedly.

  The Third Department had information on the strange burgeoning movement. The new chief at the time was Adjutant General Alexander Potapov, formerly chief of staff of the Gendarmes Corps. He was totally devoted to his fired predecessor Shuvalov. He had no other qualities to speak of and was a totally useless leader. (Shuvalov had no need of power-loving men.) Potapov floundered as he read his agents’ reports. There didn’t seem to be an organization, yet something organized and massive was ripening. There seemed to be the need to arrest people, but it wasn’t very clear whom to arrest and for what. There were no obvious ringleaders and the goals, which the agents of the Third Department had so much trouble formulating, were not clear.

  And in fact, the narodniki (as the members of the crusade to the people, the narod, were called) had very different goals. Some wanted to open the people’s eyes to the tsar and to the oppression in which they lived, dreaming of creating an uprising. Others simply wanted to teach people to read, to move up out the darkness and poverty; still others wanted to learn from the people, to learn their ideal of a better life.

  Young girls from the best families took courses to be rural teachers, paramedics, and midwives. “Our ‘plans’ and ‘dreams’ were extremely vague,” wrote the narodnik M. Tikhomirov. “We went ‘to see,’ ‘to look around,’ ‘to test the waters’…and then? Maybe to cause a mutiny, many to propagandize…. But most importantly, in going to the people there was something so new, tempting, and interesting, it demanded so many minor duties that did not overburden the mind (like studying the costumes and manners of peasants, forging passports, and so on), demanded so much physical deprivation (which was satisfying morally, making everyone feel that he was performing an act of self-sacrifice). And that fulfilled a person’s entire being.”

  But as has happened so often in Russian history, heroism immediately combined with farce and ended in blood.

  To be as closely entwined with the people, some of the narodniki decided to wear peasant clothing and pretend to be the people. They falsified documents and bought used clothing, worn boots, and other items of “people’s clothing.” “Let’s throw off our pathetic suits and change into the holy homespun coats of the people,” mocked the major historian Vassily Klyuchevsky, writing at the time.

  Preparations began. Sergei Kravchinsky and a friend changed into dirty coats bought from a used-clothes dealer, and headed to study the people’s habits in one of the poorest inns on the edge of the capital. They reached the impoverished inn by carriage.

  The customers were mostly coachmen in neat coats, and the nihilists in filthy rags looked out of place. The owner demanded that they pay in advance. “We were served boiling hot soup in a common wooden bowl with two big wooden spoons. Bits of pickled beef cheeks floated in it.”

  Starting on the soup, not without some revulsion, the young men tried to get the coachmen to talk about the difficult lot of the people. But the coachmen wanted to finish their meal and get back to work, so they responded curtly. The future narodniki hurried home to get rid of the stinking clothes and head to a decent inn for a good meal.

  But they were undeterred and they continued preparations. They decided to learn an itinerant trade that would give them an excuse for moving around the villages, enlightening the people. At a general meeting, they voted to become cobblers. “The people don’t demand fancy boot sewing—as long as it’s sturdy, so we can learn it quickly.”

  A grim, taciturn Finn agreed to teach them the trade. He believed that if there was a revolution in Russia, his homeland would be freed as well.

  The hour came and the first narodniki set out. They had copies of local maps. Dressed in rough sheepskin jackets, with knapsacks on their backs, they went out two at a time, carefully looking around for agents of the omnipotent Third Department. They reached the Nikolayevsky Station. Their friends shouted, “Bon voyage!” to the avant-garde of the great movement. The next day the friends who had seen them off would head out to the people, followed by more and more ranks of young intelligentsia. This “going to the people” began in March 1874.

  The road to the people was not easy. The maps they used were inaccurate. It was only along the way that the young idealists realized that instead of using maps they needed to talk to people who knew. They recalled the proverb, “Your tongue can get you to Kiev.” But once they reached their first village, the kindly peasants refused them lodgings for the night. It turned out that there were plenty of cobblers in the villages, so that they had to come up with another occupation. It was proving very difficult pretending to be of the people, that is, lying at every step. They spent most of the summer of 1874 doing casual labor. As a rule, the narodniki lost their jobs because they weren’t any good at them. They hired on to plow without knowing how to harness a horse, and they were fired. They worked as fishermen, but didn’t know how to set the nets, and they were fired. “But still, this was a happy time for me…I breathed so easily,” wrote one of them. “Though we were always being caught out. I remember I found some white fleas in my shirt…and I mentioned to the men working with us. They almost died laughing—what fleas? Are you a fool, boy, those are lice!”

  Thus the children of aristocrats met the people’s most important insect. But they continued in their work, doing propaganda and agitation among the peasants. Banned literature awaited them in agreed-upon places, brought by comrades in hay wagons. It had been published by émigrés in the West and smuggled into Russia with great difficulty. Alas, their audiences were unreceptive. The peasants were illiterate. The narodniki tried to read aloud to them, but the peasants did not like that either. At best, they slept through it, at worst they denounced to the police the strange “peasants” who couldn’t plow but could read. Only once did the narodnik N. Morozov see unfeigned interest on the face of a peasant as he read some antigovernment verses. The man looked quite concerned, so Morozov interrupted his reading.

  “I think you want to ask me something?” he asked hopefully.

  “You have good boots,” the peasant said. “Where did you buy them, how much did they cost?”

  Conversations among the radicals often went like this: “What are we doing here? Wasting time. You see the people…they’ve been turned into animals, even worse. Animals at least dream of freedom, but they’re like seaweed. Maybe they’ll wake up in a hundred years.”

  “Oh, no! I’m not willing to wait more than three or four years for the revolution.”

  Many of them decided to go back to the city and work on their dream: revolution. But some, who worked as teachers and paramedics, held on longer. Vera Figner, a gray-eyed noblewoman, had studied medicine in Lausanne. She took paramedic courses upon her return to Russia and went off to a remote village with her sister. The district authorities were stunned by her beauty and aristocratic mien.

  “I soon ended up in Studentsy, a huge village…. Before that I knew of peasant poverty from books, magazine articles, and statistical materials. Now, I
spent eighteen days a month traveling to villages…. I usually stayed in a hut for ‘visitors,’ where patients immediately appeared, 30–40 people filling the hut; they were old and young, mostly women, and even more children of all ages, who filled the air with shouts and squeals. Dirty, emaciated…the diseases were all chronic, all the adults had rheumatism, almost everyone had skin diseases, incurable catarrh of the stomach and intestines, chest coughs you could hear many steps away, syphilis that did not spare any age, scabs and ulcers, and all this with such unimaginable filth of housing and clothing, with food that was so unhealthful and meager, that you stop stunned at the question: is this the life of an animal or a human? Often tears rolled down my cheeks into the mixtures and drops I prepared for these wretches; and when work was over, I fell on a pile of straw on the floor for my bed; and I would give in to despair: where was the end of this poverty, truly horrifying; how hypocritical was it to give these medicines in these conditions; wasn’t it ironic to speak to people completely oppressed by their physical deprivations about resistance and struggle? Were not the people in a period of their total degeneration?”

  She gave up and left.

  The city beckoned, and the narodniki returned. “I can’t live in the country anymore, you know, I’m going crazy. Sometimes I’m so lonely I could weep. I want to talk with my kind, I want to read a book—I’ve become a savage. Once—can you believe this?—I wanted to speak ‘our’ language, and I turned to the stove and talked to it, pretending that I was having a conversation with one of us!” one narodnik wrote.

  The impatient revolutionaries wanted a clash between the people they were enlightening and the government as soon as possible. They wanted a fight.

  As the celebrated radical Georgi Plekhanov wrote, “The revolutionary narodnik movement was dying not from blows of the police…but because of the mood of those revolutionaries, who wanted at any cost to ‘pay back’ the government for its persecution and generally enter into ‘direct combat’ with it.”

  The government helped. The new chief of the Third Department Potapov decided to teach those young people a tough lesson. The police began putting them away, implementing Nechaev’s dream. Four thousand narodniki were arrested in thirty-seven provinces. For the entire three years of the investigation, they were kept in solitary confinement. Thirty-eight went mad, forty-four died in prison, twelve by suicide.

  The so-called Trial of the 193 began in October 1877. One hundred ninety-three narodniki were on trial, charged with organizing to overthrow the existing order. It was the largest political trial in the history of the Russian courts. The defense team was the best the country had to offer: V. D. Spasovich, P. A. Alexandrov, N. P. Karabchevsky, among others. Thirty-five lawyers known to all educated Russians defended the narodniki—the regime was growing less popular all the time. The defendants and their advocates seemed to vie with each other in exposing the regime.

  Alexandrov said this about the prosecutors: “The history of Russian thought and liberty will recall them and as a lesson to our descendants will consign them to immortality, pilloried in shame.”

  More than half the defendants boycotted the trial. In their name, Ippolit Myshkin, a narodnik, spoke to the court. It made him famous. He praised the narodniki and mocked the government (read, the tsar). The chairman of the court had to interrupt him, but Myshkin would not listen. The gendarmes were instructed to bring order and they tried to lead Myshkin from the courtroom. The other defendants began rattling the bars and cursing, the public rushed around the room, several women fainted. The chairman closed the session and the other judges followed him out. Gendarmes with drawn sabers escorted the defendants and the public out of the courtroom. The defense lawyers tried to bring round the fainted ladies with smelling salts. Prosecuting attorney V. Zhalekhovsky cried, “It’s revolution!”

  One hundred three defendants were sentenced to various forms of punishment, twenty-eight of them to hard labor. Ninety were acquitted. But the tsar wanted them taught a lesson, too. On his command, eighty of the acquitted were exiled.

  During this persecution, the idea of “going to the people” died away. A dangerous transformation took place in the well-meaning narodniki, just as the “devil” Sergei Nechaev, serving time in the fortress, had wanted.

  “The propagandist of 1872–1875 had too much idealism. A new type of revolutionary was developing, ready to take his place. On the horizon appeared a dark figure, illuminated by a hellish flame, who with proudly raised head and gaze blazing challenge and revenge made his way through the cowed crowd, in order to step with firm tread onto the arena of history. That was the terrorist!” wrote narodnik and future terrorist Sergei Kravchinsky.

  In 1876, the narodniki met in St. Petersburg to discuss the results and lessons of the experience. They formed a party that later came to be called Land and Freedom, as it’s usually translated, although the Russian word volya felicitously for this context means both liberty and will. It was named for Chernyshevsky’s underground society. Rakhmetov’s followers did not forget their idol.

  The bylaws of Land and Freedom contained the favorite ideas of the Russian radicals: All land must be given to the peasants, tsarism must be destroyed, Russia must move toward socialism in its own way, bypassing capitalism, through the native commune, the obshchina. But there was something totally new in the bylaws as well: the right to political assassination. It was limited at that point to political murder in “special circumstances,” as an act of vengeance for injustice or as a response in self-defense.

  All the key narodniki became members of the organization, Kravchinsky, Figner, Morozov, and Tikhomirov among them—all future major terrorists.

  They held a demonstration on December 6, 1876, in front of the Kazan Cathedral where the tsar had prayed ten years earlier after the assassination attempt on him. At the tsar’s favorite church, the demonstrators flew the red flag for the first time. The police broke up the demonstration and arrested two dozen members, none of them ringleaders.

  The central figure arrested was a rank-and-file Land and Freedom member, A. Emelyanov, who was tried under his revolutionary alias Bogolyubov. He would soon enter Russian history.

  Thus the tsar took another big step toward the Catherine Canal. He had to have sensed that the times were troubled. He began reacting in unfocused ways. He replaced Potapov with Adjutant General Mezentsov. The new chief of the Third Department lacked initiative and was on the lazy side, just like Potapov. Mezentsov was dubbed “Sleepy Tiger.”

  So Alexander resorted to the time-honored way out of social conflict: a popular war.

  Alexander’s military reforms had transformed the army. The navy now had steam-powered ships. Russia was ready for conflict—and Turkey generously provided an excuse for war. In 1875, Bosnia and Herzegovina revolted, exhausted by Turkish oppression. The response was ruthless slaughter. The Slavs were killed brutally, the women raped, infants impaled on stakes, villages burned, heads chopped off. Outrage over Turkish atrocities spread through the Russian public.

  In 1876 the Serbian prince Milan Obrenovic started an uprising and Serbia declared war on Turkey. It was a unique event in the history of the Ottoman Empire for a vassal principality to declare war on its sovereign state. The Montenegrins joined Prince Milan, and the Slavs in Bulgaria rose up as well.

  In both Russian capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, demonstrators called for aid to their brother Slavs. The public demanded war, and even the nihilists in their underground proclamations called for war and accused the government of betraying their brothers.

  Alexander saw that he could become one with the public once again. A victorious war would unite the country. The great idealism that led young people to the countryside could find an outlet in this war.

  “The great eastern eagle has soared above the world. Not to conquer or expand its borders, but to free and restore the oppressed and downtrodden, to give them a life for the good of mankind…and this Europe does not want to believe,” wrote Dos
toevsky at the time.

  Alexander’s ministers were against the war. The minister of finance told the tsar that Russia’s economy, shaken by the reforms, could not afford it. The war minister was against it because his military reforms were not completed. The minister of foreign affairs, the hypercautious Gorchakov, spoke of the inevitable conflict with the West if Russia won and of the possibility of Britain aiding the Turks.

  The tsar allowed Gorchakov the opportunity to seek a compromise. There were conferences of European ambassadors in London and in Istanbul. The ambassadors demanded that the sultan put an end to the atrocities and immediately implement reforms in the Slavic provinces. But as the tsar had expected, England played a double game. Prime Minister Disraeli secretly supported Porte and advised the Turks to be intransigent. Porte proudly rejected the ambassadors’ demands. Thus, Disraeli advanced the war the tsar wanted.

  Still, Britain had to be appeased. Through his daughter, the duchess of Edinburgh, Alexander informed Queen Victoria: “We cannot and do not wish to quarrel with England. On our part it would be madness to think of Constantinople and of India.” All they wanted was to defend their fellow Slavs.

  He was truthful about India, less so Constantinople. It was the age-old dream of the Russian tsars, not only to free Slavic nations from the Turks but to create a great Slavic empire. The many Romanovs named Konstantin were a reminder of that dream. The cross with the mosaics from the city’s great cathedral lay in his father’s coffin.

  Alexander decided to fight. But for the time being he pretended to join his ministers in opposing the war. As usual, he wanted to pretend to be persuaded to make the predetermined decision. Milyutin, the war minister, recorded the tsar’s antiwar speeches. “I have no less sympathy for the wretched Christians of Turkey than anyone else, but I hold higher the interests of our country. We cannot be drawn into a European war.” The tsar added a phrase that the war minister set down in his diary, showing that he understood the secret message: “But if we are forced to fight, we will fight.”