Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The ovation was quelled with difficulty by the presiding chairman.

  Addressing the jury, Alexandrov concluded in the spirit of Dostoevsky’s novels: “Without rebuke, without bitter complaint, without hurt she will accept your decision and will find comfort in that perhaps her suffering, her sacrifice will prevent the possibility of a repetition of the event that caused her action. No matter how darkly we regard the act, we can see only honesty and nobility in the motives for it. Yes, she can come out of here condemned, but she will not come of here shamed.”

  Another ovation.

  On her lawyer’s advice, Zasulich refused to have a final word. It would have been stupid to ruin the effect of the brilliant speech that quickly made the rounds of Russia.

  The time came for the sentencing. Koni described it in his memoirs.

  With pale faces, the jurors crowded around the corner of the judges’ table. There was total silence in the court, everyone had bated breath. The foreman of the jurors, an official in the Ministry of Finances, hurried rattled off the question: “Is Zasulich guilty of wounding…” and then loudly, so that the whole room could hear: “No! Not guilty!

  Anyone who did not witness it cannot imagine the explosion of sounds obliterating the foreman’s voice, the movement that ran through the room like an electric shock. There were shouts of uncontrolled joy, hysterical weeping, rapturous applauses, foot stomping, cries of “Bravo! Hurrah! Well done! Vera! Verochka! Verochka!” all blurring into a single groan and howl. Many people in the downstairs seats blessed themselves; upstairs in the more democratic gallery, the public embraced; even in the seats behind the judges [the VIP seats] they applauded strongly. One was clapping right near my ear. I looked around. It was the deputy of the artillery general Count A. A. Barantsov, a gray-haired fat man, his face red, clapping wildly. Meeting my eyes, he stopped and smiled in embarrassment, but as soon as I turned around, he went back to clapping.

  Vera Zasulich “had expected to be hanged after a staged trial.” Instead, Koni declared, “You are acquitted! Go to the detention house and get your things. The order for your release will be sent immediately. The court is adjourned!”

  Dostoevsky, moved, told the journalist G. K. Gradovsom, seated next to him, “Punishing that young woman is inappropriate, excessive. It should be put this way: go, you are free, but don’t do it again. I don’t think we have the judicial formula for that, and now they’ll make a heroine out of her.”

  The crowd outside in the street was already making a heroine out of her. “A deafening ‘Hurrah!’ greeted Vera Zasulich, and shouts of ‘Lift her onto your shoulders!’ Another ‘Hurrah!’ and shouts of ‘Long live Zasulich! Hail Zasulich!’”

  Koni was about to leave the courtroom, but he was detained by A. I. Despot-Zenovich, a member of the Council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The old man with the St. Alexander Nevsky star pinned to his chest said, “This is the happiest day of my life, the happiest day!” And he shook Koni’s hand.

  But the elated admirers of that happiest day could see its results immediately. As the carriage carrying Zasulich approached Voskresensky Prospect, gendarmes rushed toward it. Shots rang out. It was the revolutionary narodnik and student Grigory Sidoratsky, who thought that the gendarmes might arrest Zasulich again.

  Koni was lunching with friends when a late guest announced, “Do you know what’s going on in the street? They’re shooting. A dead man is lying on Voskresensky Prospect.” The shots and the dead gendarme were the bloody epigraph to what followed.

  Thus Russia demonstrated that it was still in its juridical infancy. The trial by justice (by liberal lights) won a crushing victory over trial by law. It created a legal precedent for the right to shoot out of your convictions. From this moment of the great humiliation of the law, the clock of the revolution started ticking.

  Just as the court had mocked the law, the tsar mocked the court. Alexander was incensed by the verdict. The director of the House of Preliminary Detention, Colonel M. Fedorov, was called in by Major General Kozlov (acting city governor in Trepov’s place). He announced: “On the command of the tsar, for the premature release of Zasulich, you are to spend seven days in the brig.” Kozlov was very embarrassed, since Fedorov had acted in accordance with the law, that is, he implemented the court decision and the written orders of the chairman of the court. But the tsar wanted justice, too.

  The day after the trial, Kozlov issued another order: “I suggest the gentlemen of the district precincts take the most energetic measures to find and hold Vera Zasulich, who attempted to kill Adjutant General Trepov.” But Zasulich had gone without a trace.

  Western newspapers hailed her and the court’s heroic decision, acting against autocracy. Zasulich’s fame must have been contagious. Right after the trial came two attempts on the German emperor’s life, an attempt on the Italian king, and one on the Spanish king.

  Vera’s shot was ricocheting all over Europe.

  It ricocheted most loudly in Russia. Members of Land and Freedom began taking revenge. They shot at the prosecutor of the Kiev District Court, Kotlyarevsky, whose thick fur coat acted as a bulletproof vest.

  Police agent Nikonov was killed. Gendarme officer Baron Geiking was shot in the street. In Kharkov, the governor general Prince Kropotkin was killed.

  The government responded with arrests. During an arrest in Odessa, I. Kovalsky, another member of Land and Freedom, shot a policeman. He was captured and executed. The revolutionaries considered his sentence unjust and took commensurate action.

  Terror came to St. Petersburg.

  On the morning of August 8, N. Mezentsov, chief of the Third Department and the gendarmes, was returning home from church. His house was in the center of St. Petersburg on Mikhailovsky Square, near the Mikhailovsky Palace.

  A young man was lying in wait for him there. He was athletic, with a dusky complexion, curly hair, and a fashionable curly beard à la Napoleon III. It was Sergei Kravchinsky, the aristocrat who was one of the first to resign from the army and go to the people. Kravchinsky had seen a lot in that time. He fled Russia, fought in the war against the Turks, fought with the rebel poor in Italy, and then returned to Russia to become one of the leaders of Land and Freedom.

  He wrote a lot for their underground press, becoming a well-known author under the pseudonym Stepnyak. All Europe read his book Underground Russia. He entered Russian history under the name Stepnyak-Kravchinsky.

  Stepnyak-Kravchinsky paced in front of Mezentsov’s house with a mysterious package. Farther along on Mikhailovsky Square a second participant stood ready, a tall young man in an elegant navy blue coat. This was another failed officer, also athletic and also handsome.

  He deserves a more detailed account as one of the main protagonists of terrorism. His name was Alexander Barannikov, and he came to St.Petersburg from the provinces to study at the prestigious Pavlovsk military school. His family hoped that he would be an officer like his late father. As he left for the school, he promised to become a general.

  Tall, with perfect military bearing, he was distinguished by great physical strength and glowing health. “If terror needed physical embodiment, there could be no better choice than the image of Barannikov,” wrote the terrorist Vera Figner. “His dusky face without any trace of blush, hair like a raven’s wing, and black eyes made him unlike a Russian: he could easily be taken for an Eastern man, most likely a man from the Caucasus.” (His mother was Persian.)

  But he also looked threatening. “When we needed to put a scare into someone, we sent Barannikov,” she added.

  Slow to change his mind, Barannikov did not accept revolutionary ideas quickly. But once he did, he became a fanatic. The lofty goal, freeing the people, elevated him above his classmates. What could be more important than that for a young man? He loved danger, it made him feel most alive.

  In order to leave the Pavlovsk school and keep his mother from looking for him, Barannikov faked his suicide, leaving his uniform and a note to his mother on
a riverbank. He went underground, living without documentation.

  Naturally, Barannikov went to the people. With him went Maria Oshanina, one of the great beauties of the movement. She came from a family of wealthy merchants and had a brilliant education. “She was beautiful,” recalled narodnik V. Chernov. “Delicate features, huge dark languid eyes.” She became Barannikov’s common-law wife, but not for long. The underground life required pretense of marriage in order to deceive the police, but with constantly shifting partners.

  The many qualities Barannikov enjoyed made him intolerant of weakness. Such people do not value their own lives or the lives of others. Only the noose could stop him and the many like him. Barannikov would take part in all the attempts on Alexander’s life. The terrorists called him the Avenging Angel.

  At the house of gendarme chief Mezentsov, his carriage pulled up. With him was his old friend, a retired lieutenant colonel. Mezentsov got out, and Stepnyak-Kravchinsky rushed up to him. In front of stunned witnesses, he pulled a dagger from his package and jabbed it to the hilt into Mezentsov’s belly. Calmly, to make sure, he twisted the dagger. Mezentsov’s unarmed friend attacked Kravchinsky with his only weapon, an umbrella. Shots rang out in response. Alexander Barannikov was covering Kravchinsky’s escape, and both leaped into a carriage. It was harnessed to a famous black horse called Barbarian, used three other times to help terrorists flee from prison.

  The “sleepy tiger” Mezentsov had not been known for cruelty or bloodthirstiness. He was killed as a symbol, for being the head of the Third Department. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky wrote a proclamation entitled “Death for Death.” It was dedicated “to the memory of Martyr Ivan Martynovich Kovalsky, shot by the secret police for defending his freedom, August 2, 1878, in Odessa.”

  “The chief of gendarmes, the leader of a gang that has all of Russia under its heel, has been killed,” wrote Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. “Few have not guessed whose hands dealt the fatal blow. But in order to avoid any confusion, we announce for general information that gendarme chief Adjutant General Mezentsov was in fact killed by us, revolutionary socialists…. We tried the perpetrators and inciters of the brutalities done to us. The trial was as just as the ideas we are defending. This trial found Adjutant General Mezentsov deserving of death for his villainous deeds against us, and the sentence was carried out on Mikhailovsky Square on the morning of August 4, 1878.”

  This was the first instance of a new rule in Russian terror—claiming responsibility publicly for murder. At first, the athletic Kravchinsky had planned a much more horrible death for Mezentsov. He wanted to behead him on the street. But he decided against that piece of street theater because it would have been difficult to keep the sword hidden in advance.

  Mezentsov’s death, next to the Mikhailovsky Palace, which Alexander visited every Sunday to have tea with his cousin, was a shock for St. Petersburg. Land and Freedom had achieved its goal. Now people talked about the power of the terrorists. Kravchinsky’s name was on everyone’s lips. Most amazingly, Kravchinsky, who had attacked an unarmed, elderly man, became a kind of Robin Hood.

  The tsar appointed a military general, sixty-year-old Alexander Drenteln, who had fought gloriously in the Balkan campaign, as the new chief of gendarmes. But soon General Drenteln discovered that the terrorists had eyes in his own office.

  At the time, one of the most influential political salons in St. Petersburg was that of Alexandra Bogdanovich, wife of General Bogdanovich, who was a member of the Council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a respected elder of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the greatest in St. Petersburg. The hospitable hostess gathered the cream of St. Petersburg’s officials in her salon. She made precise notes in her diary of the conversations of the most famous guests.

  She recounts how soon after Drenteln was appointed (in the middle of March), two of his friends had lunch at his house. “After lunch they went to the study where they saw the socialist journal Land and Freedom on his desk. The issue was not carefully printed…Drenteln commented on that but added that it was rather well written [even the chief of the gendarmes wanted to show his freethinking—it was the fashion]. The next day he received a letter from the socialists, thanking him for his review and promising to correct the deficiencies soon! That’s the kind of people they are!”

  Her exclamation is filled with the horror of impotence.

  The chief of the Third Department only laughed then. He did not see what the wise Bogdanovich saw—the shameful impotence of the once almighty Third Department. A few days later he was taught a lesson.

  On March 13 around one o’clock in the afternoon, Drenteln’s carriage was driving past the Summer Garden headed for Palace Square and the Winter Palace. His carriage was passed by a young dandy, who had ridden on the general’s path before. It was hard not to notice the young man. “A tall handsome fellow with exquisite manners on a magnificent English horse, and all the society ladies who rode by in open carriages stared at him through their lorgnettes,” is how the revolutionary Nikolai Morozov described him.

  This time the young man came back at full gallop. Passing Drenteln’s carriage, he pulled out a revolver and shot at the chief of the gendarmes. He missed. Galloping on, he turned his horse around at full speed and came at the carriage. He shot at Drenteln again, and missed again. Then he galloped away.

  The shooter was quickly found, through his rented horse. He was Leon Mirsky, an aristocrat, and also a member of Land and Freedom. Mirsky had studied at the mutinous Medical-Surgical Academy and even spent time in the fortress for distributing illegal literature.

  The bizarre reason for his attempt was that his fiancée found Stepnyak-Kravchinsky’s daring assassination very attractive. The image of the fearless revolutionary killing the chief of gendarmes in broad daylight obsessed the woman. The jealous Mirsky decided to recapture her affections by killing the new chief of gendarmes.

  He got in touch with Nikolai Morozov, and the Land and Freedom group approved his idea. Mirsky did everything by the rules—he studied the general’s usual route and found the place where the carriage usually slowed down. But he was a bad shot.

  In prison Mirsky remained steadfast at first. He asked permission to have a frock coat made by an expensive tailor for the trial, which his fiancée was to attend. He was wearing it when he was sentenced to endless hard labor.

  The tsar, just back from Crimea, wrote sarcastically about Mirsky. “He acted under the influence of women and writers.” He was very angry because he had “not doubted that Mirsky would be hanged,” he wrote to the minister of justice.

  But the justice system knew what it was doing. The flirtatious young man could not stand incarceration and became an agent provocateur in prison. He started working for the secret police.

  The security situation demanded extraordinary measures from the tsar, instantly. Governor N. D. Seliverstov wrote to Alexander II: “All the measures taken up to this time against antigovernment agitation have had no success and no good consequences. Evil is growing by the minute…. We need extraordinary measures.”

  The columnist M. N. Katkov suggested making all trials of terrorists closed. Open trials were too helpful to the terrorists. “Thanks to glasnost, the nihilists of the whole world could learn that using a long-range revolver if you want to hit someone in the head at close range, you must aim at the feet, and that you should not buy revolvers without testing them first.”

  The tsar knew that harsh punitive measures were already being taken, and that the openness of trials was already limited. But it wasn’t enough, and the two-faced Janus was not prepared to curb any more of the freedoms he had himself granted. All he managed was to ask for help from owners of apartment buildings.

  In his letter to the St. Petersburg Duma, he wrote: “I appeal to you, gentlemen. Building owners must keep an eye on their janitors and residents. You must help the police and not keep suspicious persons…. Look at what is happening in our country. Soon an honest man won’t be able to show his face on the
street. Look at the number of killings. All right, God spared me. But they sent poor Mezentsov to the other world. They shot at Drenteln…. I am counting on you. Your help is needed. It is your duty.”

  CHAPTER 13

  War on Terror

  A major schism occurred in Land and Freedom. Some still believed that the peasants had to be enlightened, to be prepared for an insurrection, and that they had to work in the countryside. They were still called narodniki or, disparagingly, country bumpkins. They were despised by the other camp, which was now called the politicals. The politicals considered work in the country useless: “You need centuries to make fighters against the regime out of illiterate, cowed peasants who can’t read proclamations, are afraid to rebel, and often turn their enlighteners in to the police.” A small group of heroes could put an end to tsarism much faster with the new weapon of the century—terrorism.

  Terrorism against the regime’s violence created respect in the public. That was shown by the shooting of Trepov and the murder of Mezentsov. They woke up Russia. Only terrorism could make the mighty regime tremble and make concessions. The heroism of the terrorists, they hoped, would force the regime to respect their ideas, and fear would force the average man to put pressure on the pathetic government. Power to the revolver and the bomb. Political terrorism must be the basic tool in the life of Land and Terror.

  As Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, who had escaped abroad, declared: “Terror is a terrible thing. There is only thing worse than terror, and that is putting up with oppression docilely.” This became the motto of the politicals. They began to put their ideas into practice.

  By this time murder at all the steps of the social ladder had been achieved—the governor general was killed, the chief of gendarmes was killed. Only the very top of the Olympus remained untouched, the palace, the autocrat. Twelve years had passed since Karakozov shot at the tsar. It was time to try again. The country bumpkins disagreed, they felt it would lead to new, ruthless repressions.