Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Alexander understood that Gorchakov was right. When it came to decisive moments, England fought with its own hands. The valor of its soldiers was seen by Napoleon at Waterloo and by Alexander’s father in the Crimea.

  Gorchakov’s most vociferous opponent was the heir, who had fought alongside his father. For the first time Sasha was truly independent, for the first time he dared to insist even against his father’s wishes. As is the case with busy parents, Alexander suddenly realized that his son was in his thirties and was approaching the age at which he himself had begun his reign.

  The emperor knew that the retrogrades had been grouping around his son. Muravyev, who had suppressed the Polish uprising (and whom Alexander called on when there was dirty work to be done), had a powerful influence on the heir. Sasha enjoyed his anti-West speeches. Fortunately, the Hangman died before long. Alexander also knew that the heir openly longed for the good old days of serfdom. He knew how easily his stubborn Sasha fell sway to outside influences. And he knew that his main advisor now was his own former tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, now inseparable from the heir.

  Pobedonostsev would have a major influence on Russian history. The son of a university professor and himself a professor of law, Pobedonostsev was an enthusiastic participant in judicial reform and one of the creators of the Law Regulations of 1864. But the events that followed—fires, proclamation, student riots, and the assassination attempt on the tsar—changed him completely. “The fear is gone and that is why Russia is perishing,” Nikitenko noted in his diary, and this was Pobedonostsev’s basic thought as well. The former reformer became an implacable foe of reform. The man’s energy and erudition were focused on suppressing everything new.

  Alexander was weary of war. The specter of more blood, on a European scale, frightened him. He did not have the strength for a new war, and the country did not have the funds. He told the heir that peace would be made because that was his decision. “This is what I command, this is what I want.” Sasha obeyed.

  To keep face, the emperor commanded: If the British land at Constantinople, take the city immediately, but if the Turks offer a beneficial treaty, immediately conclude it. He knew that the British would not land and that the Turks would offer peace, which they did. Now he could return to St. Petersburg.

  He could not be without Katya anymore. No wonder the wise old men of the East took young beauties to their beds. She was his life, and her youth gave him strength. He left, to the great relief of the entourage that had accompanied him.

  The small town of San Stefano, so near Constantinople/Istanbul, was the site of the treaty signing. The town’s quiet life was disrupted by the appearance of VIPs, military and civilian, soon followed by actors and singers with a multilingual repertoire. Fancy carriages drove through its streets. In a short period, San Stefano turned into a miniature Paris.

  The Treaty of San Stefano was signed on March 3, 1878. Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania became independent states. Prince Milan’s dynasty, the Obrenovic, took power in Serbia. Bosnia and Herzegovina received autonomy. Bulgaria, after five centuries of Turkish rule, became an autonomous state, though it had to pay a tribute to Turkey. The Russian Empire was paid an indemnity of 310 million rubles and received the southern part of Bessarabia, lost during the Crimean War, and the forts of Ardagan, Kars, Batum, and Bayazet in the Caucasus.

  The Treaty of San Stefano infuriated Britain and Austria. Devious Bismarck offered to reconcile everyone. A congress of the great European powers was convened in Berlin.

  Chancellor Gorchakov went to Berlin. The old hound wanted to show his master that he still had strong teeth. It ended catastrophically. Gorchakov was ill, and on the opening day, the eighty-year-old minister was carried in to the ceremonies in a chair. Fate played a mean trick on the weak prince. He had brought a secret map with him that showed the maximum concessions that were acceptable if the enemies united against Russia. Confused and ill, he inadvertently showed the secret map to British prime minister Disraeli, who instantly understood the situation. Britain and Austria-Hungary made no concessions. Then Bismarck, unhappily, demanded that his Russian friends accept that bad map. The Treaty of Berlin was signed.

  The result left only the north of Bulgaria autonomous. The Bulgarian principality was divided by a third. Of the acquisitions received in the San Stefano treaty, Russia returned Bayazet. Austria, which had not fought in the war, received Bosnia and Herzegovina to administer until order was restored. (In the early twentieth century Austria would establish order by annexing the territories.) Serbia’s territorial acquisitions were reduced.

  After the Congress of Berlin, Minister Gorchakov wrote to Alexander: “This is the blackest page in my biography.”

  “Mine, too,” replied Alexander to the old minister.

  Even though the war gave independence to Slavic states and to Greece, even though he had achieved (albeit not completely) his father’s dreams, even though he had gotten back the land lost in the Paris Peace (except for the mouth of the Danube), no one acknowledged it. Everyone seemed to forget what he had done and mentioned only what was lost. People in Moscow were particularly bitter about the results of the war. The ones who called themselves Slavophiles had pictured Russia at the head of the emancipated Slavic people with the Orthodox cross and Russian flag over Constantinople. Better there had been no victory march on Istanbul, better none of the achievements of San Stefano, no dashed hopes.

  Protests and speeches started again. Ivan Sergeyevich Aksakov, son and brother of equally famous Slavophiles, and leader of Moscow’s Slavophiles (who married Anna Tyutcheva, the lady-in-waiting), spoke at a meeting of the Slavic Committee.

  Is this you, Russia the Conqueror, who voluntarily demoted herself to vanquished? Barely containing their laughter, the Western powers are brazenly stripping you of your laurels of victory and offering you instead a fool’s cap with bells, while you obediently, almost with an expression of sincere gratitude, bow your long-suffering head under it. If just reading the papers makes your blood boil, what must the Tsar of Russia feel, bearing responsibility for the country before History? Did he not call our war ‘holy’?…Russia does not want war, but even less does it want a shameful peace. Ask any Russian in the street if he would not prefer to struggle to the end of his blood and strength! The duty of loyal subjects orders everyone to hope and believe—and the duty of loyal subjects orders us not to be silent in these days of illegality and lies that erect a barrier between tsar and country, between the tsar’s thoughts and the country, between the tsar’s thoughts and the people’s thinking.

  The tsar, irritated by the ingratitude, ordered the committee shut down and its Cicero exiled from Moscow to the countryside. When the governor general of Moscow reported that the “enfant terrible is being quiet,” the tsar permitted Aksakov to return.

  But it was not only the voice of the Slavophiles, it was the voice of the public. The war that was supposed to unite the country brought instead another disillusionment in the tsar. Simultaneously, there was an economic downturn, typical of wartime, and the ruble fell 40 percent on world markets.

  The war provoked the attack both of retrogrades unhappy with its result and with reformers and liberals unhappy with its result and the lack of reforms.

  One of the leaders of the retrograde party, Prince Meshchersky, wrote: “If not for this sad result of the war, the anarchist movements would have remained a chronic illness in Russia’s mental life and would not have found the soil to move into an acute condition and to a daring attack on state order.”

  The Berlin Treaty was a powder keg for Russia. Tragic events followed quickly.

  They began in circumstances that seemed ordinary for the times. Alexander preferred to have people in his service who resembled the yes-men of his father’s day. Adjutant General Fedor Fedorovich Trepov, the city governor of St. Petersburg, was such a man. The tsar knew that Trepov was not liked in society. But he also knew that whomever he appointed became disliked automatically. Alexand
er noted irritably that whatever he did was wrong now.

  Trepov, the same age as Alexander, sixty, was of the old school. On a summer day, July 13, 1877, Trepov arrived at 10:00 A.M. on business in the House of Preliminary Detention on Shpalernaya Street. He found three prisoners walking together in the courtyard.

  One of them was Bogolyubov, a member of Land and Freedom arrested for demonstrating at the Kazan Cathedral and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Bogolyubov was awaiting deportation to hard labor.

  The rest was banal. Trepov was in a bad mood, and he didn’t like the way Bogolyubov spoke to him and didn’t take off his hat. The city governor vented his anger in the usual way: “Into the isolation cell with him! Take off that hat!” and he flung out his arm to knock the prisoner’s hat off his head. Bogolyubov, thinking that the general wanted to hit him, jumped aside. The hat fell off, but Bogolyubov lost his balance and almost fell. The scene was observed by the inmates through the windows, almost all of them political prisoners. They thought that Trepov had struck Bogolyubov. The prisoners were young and free of the fear of Nicholas’s day. Moreover, they were thirsting to show their attitude toward the regime.

  They flung curses and everything that fit through the bars at Trepov: mugs, books, toothbrushes. Completely infuriated, Trepov ordered Bogolyubov to be whipped. Thinking the incident finished, Trepov left.

  But it was only the beginning. The guards hated the political prisoners. So, to tease them, they made a show of slowly dragging the rods across the courtyard to the isolation cell where Bogolyubov was taken. The political prisoners were a nervous lot, and some of the women went into hysterics. The inmates shouted curses at the regime and threatened to riot. Things were heating up. The incident had to be reported to Minister of Justice Count Palen.

  Palen was cut from the same cloth as Trepov, and he declared that the city governor had acted properly. “If disturbances begin, we’ll send firefighters to douse them with cold water, and if the disturbances continue, we’ll shoot at the whole lot of that trash.”

  There were no disturbances, and once again, the incident seemed to be over. But the government had not understood that these were different times: The new era of glasnost did not suit the actions of the yes-men. The newspapers learned all the details of the incident. The journalists were not distinguished by sympathy for the city governor, and their articles reflected that.

  On January 28, 1878, Trepov was receiving petitions in his office. One of the petitioners was a young woman of medium height, with a long, colorless, and somehow unhealthy face, and smooth, pulled-back hair. She was wearing a gray hooded cloak with incongruous festoons along the hem. She held her petition in one hand, and the other was under the cloak. She offered the petition to Trepov, only to fling open the cloak and shoot at him with a revolver.

  She was nervous. The shot was wild. “The prisoner wounded Adjutant-General Trepov in the nether pelvis with a large-caliber bullet,” as one report put it. In other words, she got him in the buttock.

  She did not flee and permitted herself to be detained. A witness said, “She sat on a chair, staring at the ceiling nearsightedly with her gray eyes and indifferently responded to the investigator’s questions.” She stated that she had never met Trepov before. She shot at him because she had read newspaper accounts of his brutal treatment of the helpless prisoner. “It was very difficult to raise your hand against a person, but my conscience forced me.”

  In the next room, they were having trouble removing the bullet from the city governor’s rear end. The tsar saw it all, for he had come to visit the wounded Trepov.

  Alexander was recently back from the front and had not yet recovered from the war. Going up the stairs, he “stopped on almost every step, breathing hard,” recalled the celebrated lawyer Anatoly Koni, chairman of the St. Petersburg District Court. Koni was a liberal. There were still a few liberals, reminders of past reforms, working with hardliner retrogrades.

  Vera Zasulich was the name of the twenty-eight-year-old woman who had shot at Trepov. Her story was typical. Born to an aristocratic family (as were most of the revolutionaries then), she graduated from a German-French boarding school in Moscow, where she came in contact with the ideas of the narodniki. At seventeen, she decided to devote her life to the revolution. She moved to St. Petersburg, where she worked in a bindery, to be with the laborers, and she taught in a factory school. During the student riots of 1869 she met Nechaev, who failed to get Zasulich into his organization. But she ended up in the Fortress of Peter and Paul for dealing with him. That was followed by exile and a transition to an unlawful situation. When she read the newspaper accounts of the treatment of narodnik Bogolyubov, she began planning her assassination of Trepov.

  As was later learned, Zasulich’s shot was supposed to have a continuation. There was to have been a public vengeance against another persecutor of the narodniki, prosecutor V. Zhelekhovsky (a comrade of the Senate’s high prosecutor).

  He had prosecuted the Trial of 193. While Zasulich headed off to shoot Trepov, her friend Maria Kolenkina, armed with the same kind of revolver, went off to execute Zhelekhovsky. It was a coordinated terrorist act. Both women flowed from the wellsprings of the future Great Terror.

  While Zasulich sat in Trepov’s waiting room, Kolenkina rang the doorbell to Zhelekhovsky’s apartment. A servant opened the door and she asked him to call the prosecutor. Zhelekhovsky’s wife and children appeared in the entry, and she realized that she would have to shoot him in their presence. Kolenkina silently turned and left. The terrorists had not yet learned to kill in the presence of children.

  Trepov was very lucky, too, that Zasulich’s hand had shaken. At the time, many young men who did know how to shoot were planning to kill him. “Trepov’s vicious act with Bogolyubov was the final drop that made the cup of bitterness overflow, in my heart and in the hearts of my comrades,” wrote narodnik Nikolai Morozov, subsequently a bold terrorist. He had been preparing to kill Trepov. So was narodnik Alexander Barannikov, who had studied in a military school. An entire group of narodniki led by Mikhail Frolenko was also preparing an attack.

  None of these people would have missed. They were soon to become heroes of Russian Terrorism. Zasulich’s shot saved the city governor’s life.

  The case was very clear to the tsar, especially since Zasulich denied nothing. It was clear what a jury would decide. There was no point in passing the case to the Special Chamber of the Senate. On the contrary, Alexander wanted the would-be assassin and nihilist to be condemned publicly.

  Zasulich’s trial was to start on March 31 in the St. Petersburg District Court, in an open hearing. Anatoly Koni, chairman of the court, was to hear the case. Justice Minister Count Palen invited Koni to see him before the trial. He warned him, “In this case, the government has the right to expect special favors from the court and from you.”

  The liberal lawyer replied with dignity, “Permit me to remind you of the words of the French jurist addressed to the king who had also asked him for a favor: ‘Your Majesty, the court does not perform favors, the court renders verdicts.’”

  Palen had his reasons for asking Koni to help. The case, which had seemed so clear-cut, was producing anxiety. All the celebrated prosecutors turned down the state’s offer to prosecute Vera Zasulich. In the end, K. I. Kessel, a mediocre lawyer and friend of the prosecutor general, agreed to do it. The legal stars all wanted to defend Zasulich, for it promised to be a case that would bring national fame (as had the Trial of 193). It was more fashionable than ever to be antiestablishment.

  Petr Alexandrov, the brilliant orator who had defended the narodniki in the Trial of 193, took Vera Zasulich’s case.

  The date was March 31, 1878. Anatoly Koni recalled that he had not slept the night before. Huge crowds gathered outside the courthouse on Liteiny and on Shpalernaya, including many students. Long lines of police and gendarmes formed around the entrance to the court and at the gates of the House of Preliminary Detention nearby.

&
nbsp; The courtroom was standing room only, filled with people from high society. In the VIP chairs behind the judges were the chancellor himself, Prince Gorchakov, State Comptroller Count D. M. Solsky, deputy head of artillery Count A. A. Barantsov, chairman of the Economics Department of the State Council A. A. Abaza, former governor general of St. Petersburg Prince A. A. Suvorov, and other members of the State Council. In the first row sat Minister of War Count D. A. Milyutin and generals and officers. In the press seats were Fedor Dostoevsky and the cream of Russian journalists.

  Alexandrov used his right to veto jurors wisely and ended up with a jury with a predominance of midlevel and minor officials, the liberal part of the bureaucracy. Addressing them, Alexandrov expressed ideas that were surprising in a court session. “The face and shape of state crimes is often quite mutable. What yesterday was considered a state crime, today or tomorrow becomes a highly regarded act of civil courage. A state crime is often a homily on what is not yet sufficiently matured and for which the time has not yet come. All this, despite the severe punishment of the law that comes to a state criminal, does not allow us to see in him a despicable and rejected member of society, does not allow us to stifle sympathy for everything noble, honest, dear, and rational that remains in him outside the sphere of his criminal act.”

  He did not leave out the sensitive: “Bogolyubov’s torturers needed the groan not of physical pain but the groan of a mocked human soul, a stifled, humiliated and destroyed man. The Russian apotheosis of the whip triumphant!”

  In conclusion, Alexandrov said, “There have been women here in the defendant’s bench who avenged themselves on their seducers with death. There were women who dirtied their hands in the blood of men they loved who had betrayed them or of their more fortunate rivals. For the first time there is a woman here who had no personal interests, personal revenge in her crime, a woman who with her crime connected the struggle for an idea to the name of someone who was only a fellow brother in misery throughout her young life.”