While they argued in the capital, the decision was taken in the provinces. In the spring of 1879, Alexander Solovyov came to St. Petersburg. He was the son of the poor assistant to the paramedic on the estates of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. She gave generous aid to their family. She paid for the education of all the children. Solovyov had attended high school and then law school at the university thanks to her money. But he dropped out, went to the people, and then joined Land and Freedom.
He was thirty-three, and as Christ did at that age, he understood his destiny. He headed for St. Petersburg. There he found Alexander Mikhailov, one of the leaders of the party. His comembers considered Mikhailov their Robespierre.
Alexander Mikhailov was from the aristocracy and also from the provinces, from Pskov, like Alexander Barannikov. They were friends in high school. Mikhailov was one of the numerous Russian boys who appeared at that time—“great critics” born in an era of freedom. Dostoevsky said of them, “If you give a Russian schoolboy a chart of the heavenly bodies, he will make corrections.” In high school, he became obsessed with the idea of restructuring the imperfect world. He instantly felt “much higher than my peers” as a result. His peers acknowledged his leadership. Fat, clumsy, and nearsighted, Mikhailov was the leader in his friendship with the handsome and strong Barannikov, whom he brought to revolutionary ideas. Mikhailov naturally went to the people, but he grew disenchanted quickly. He came back to the capital as a proponent of ruthless terror. Alexander Mikhailov, who resembled Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, whose round fat face radiated kindness, became the leader of the politicals.
Alexander Solovyov came to his illegal apartment. Mikhailov recalled, “Knowing that I was close to the Land and Freedom party, he opened up his heart to me.” It turned out that Solovyov wanted to kill the tsar and that was his reason for coming to the capital. Solovyov explained to Mikhailov: “The death of the emperor will make a turn in public life. The dissatisfaction that is expressed in quiet mumbling will explode in regions where it is most deeply felt. And then it will spread everywhere. It just needs an impetus for everything to rise up.”
So twelve years later, he gave the same reasons to Mikhailov that had brought Karakozov to the gates of the Summer Garden. Kill the tsar and the rest will follow. He asked for the help of Land and Freedom.
Robespierre Mikhailov liked Solovyov’s focus and he went out to buy a revolver for him. “We chose an American one with big barrels, they use them for hunting bear.” The revolver was called Bear-hunter. The revolutionaries called the Russian tsar “The Bear.” So they chose the appropriate weapon for the hunt.
But no sooner had Mikhailov gotten a gun for one regicide than another one came to him. Another provincial came to St. Petersburg, this time from Kharkov. Grigory Goldenberg was also a member of Land and Freedom, notorious for his assassination of the governor general of Kharkov, Prince Kropotkin. Buoyed by his success, Goldenberg now wanted to kill the tsar. He also asked for help from the capital’s branch of Land and Freedom. It was hard to refuse such an experienced man, but Solovyov had come first. So Mikhailov reported on the situation to another of the politicals’ leaders, Alexander Kvyatkovsky. They decided to arrange a meeting of the two candidates.
They met in a tavern, and over a shot of vodka Mikhailov and Kvyatkovsky discovered that they were meeting terrorists of a new type. Both men were willing to shoot, knowing that they were unlikely to escape from the tsar’s bodyguards and therefore did not intend to try. They had both decided on their own to take poison as soon as they had killed the tsar. They would leave the world without revealing their identities.
This was a new type of terrorist—a suicide killer. Kvyatkovsky and Mikhailov were stunned. “We were not prepared at that time for self-sacrifice. The awareness of our situation between two men who had doomed themselves to death took away our moral right to help decide which of the two should do it,” recalled Mikhailov.
But they had to take part in the decision. Goldenberg was Jewish and Mikhailov delicately explained to him that “we must avoid giving the government any excuse to oppress any particular estate or nationality…so that millions are spared new hardship.” He then told Goldenberg that a Jew who kills the tsar would unleash a wave of pogroms across Russia. Solovyov picked up on the theme and added, “I’m the only one who meets all the criteria. I must go. It is my affair, Alexander II is mine, and I won’t relinquish him to anyone.” Goldenberg agreed without argument.
Solovyov’s arrival was the detonator that blew up Land and Freedom. A secret meeting took lace in an underground apartment. Alexander Mikhailov reported on Solovyov’s mission. Nikolai Morozov recalled, “Alexander Mikhailov then asked for a horse for Solovyov to escape after the assassination and a member of the organization to act as coachman.” Apparently Mikhailov decided to help the dead man remain alive.
The country bumpkins shouted that “no help should be given to the man who came to kill the tsar and Solovyov should be captured, tied up, and taken out of St. Petersburg as a madman.”
The politicals rebutted angrily. The bumpkins screamed that in that case they would stop Solovyov themselves. A man named Popov yelled: “He is ruining the work of the narodniki, I’ll kill him, if there’s nothing else to be done with him.” They understood the repression that would follow the murder of the tsar and that they would have to stop their work with the peasants.
The leader of the country bumpkins, the theoretician of the narodnik movement, Georgi Plekhanov, made a speech: “Because of your whims, our organization is going to be forced to give up old regions of activity one after the other, like Rome gave up one province after the other under the pressure of the barbarians…. The only change from that killing will be that after the name of Alexander there will be three lines instead of two. Alexander II will be replaced by Alexander III. And nothing more!”
But the majority believed otherwise. They declared that while they would not help Solovyov themselves in view of the differences of opinion, they would not forbid individual members from giving him help.
The meeting degenerated into shouts again. One of the country bumpkins declared that if a new Karakozov appeared, he was prepared to be the Komissarov. The political Kvyatkovsky shouted, “Are you planning to be an informer? Then we will deal with you the way we do with informers!”
Popov said to Kvyatkovsky, “Are you planning to kill us? If so, do not forget that we shoot no worse then you.”
At that moment, when they were going to reach for their pistols, the doorbell rang.
“Gentlemen, it’s the police!” cried Mikhailov. “We will defend ourselves, of course?”
“Naturally!” the rest said softly.
Each of the men took out his revolver and cocked it. Mikhailov slowly and calmly went to the entryway to open the door. It was a false alarm. Mikhailov returned with the news that it had been the janitor about some domestic problem.
“But that false alarm put an end to the stormy scenes. Soon afterward the meeting broke up quietly. Everyone left with the feeling that the good old unity of Land and Freedom was destroyed and now each direction would go its own way,” wrote Plekhanov.
On April 2, 1879, after eight in the morning, Alexander set out as usual on his morning walk. The emperor’s day followed an inviolable schedule. But on that day, a radical change was made in his plans. His traditional walk was canceled forever.
From the newspaper Russkii Invalid, April 5, 1879.
On April 2, after 8:00 A.M., when the Sovereign Emperor deigned to take his usual walk in the area around the Winter Palace, on the sidewalk near the building of the headquarters of the troops for the St. Petersburg military region, a man, dressed quite properly, in a civil uniform with a cockaded cap, came toward His Imperial Majesty from the opposite side of the building. Coming closer to the Emperor, this man took out a revolver from his coat pocket and shot at His Majesty and took several other shots after that. People walking nearby as well as the police instantly threw them
selves on the villain and detained him. God’s Providence preserved our August Tsar’s days, precious for Russia. The villain is arrested. The investigation is under way.
In fact, it was much more shameful. He was returning from his walk. He had passed Pevchesky Bridge and came out onto the square in front of the palace. Captain Kokh, the head of his bodyguards, followed at a distance so as not to disrupt his thinking. Not far from the arch of the General Staff building, a crowd of curiosity seekers had gathered, as usual. Here, the emperor saw a very tall young man in a long black coat and a uniform cap with a cockade (as worn by officials).
From the diary of Alexandra Bogdanovich, wife of a general: “Makov, who saw the tsar a half hour after the attempt on his life, told us that the tsar said that when the young man came even with the tsar, he stopped and saluted him. The man’s face caught the tsar’s attention. And when he turned back involuntarily, he saw a pistol pointed at him.”
That turn of the head save his life. The bullet whistled past. “The bullet penetrated the wall of the palace and stuck there. The villain aimed again, the tsar bent to the left, the criminal aimed a third time, and the tsar bent again.”
That was how Makov euphemistically described the tsar of all Russia running around the square. When Solovyov shot the first time, two steps away from him, he missed. Alexander ran from him like a boy. In front of the crowd, the tsar ran toward his palace. For the first time since his father’s death, he had to obey another’s will.
Solovyov ran behind him, shooting. Another shot. The emperor ran to the right. He ran in zigzags, as his army training had taught him. The sixty-year-old tsar had not lost his presence of mind. Another shot, he ran to the left. He could hear the assassin’s breathing. Another two shots, but he swerved aside, and a bullet grazed his greatcoat. Finally, the last shot was near his legs. Solovyov shot as he fell, when Kokh caught up with him.
At first Kokh and the police had been stunned. Then they chased after Solovyov. He managed to get in five shots before Kokh caught him and knocked him down with his saber.
The huge pistol lay next to him. Solovyov was surrounded, kicked and beaten. But Solovyov was chewing on something. Kokh figured it out first. In his haste to force Solovyov to open his mouth, he scratched up his face. He had a nut with cyanide in his mouth, a powerful poison. But it must have been old and had deteriorated. Solovyov did not die.
Peter Shuvalov ran out of the palace. The retired chief of the Third Department continued to live in the palace. He persuaded Alexander to get into a passing carriage (one of “them” could still be on the square!) and brought him the remaining few yards to the palace.
The failed regicide was taken to the city governor’s office.
Alexander returned triumphantly to the palace. He announced: “God saved me again!” The empress knew the whole story, and he ordered her not to talk about it. She did say, weeping, to her lady-in waiting, “There’s no reason to live…. I can feel this killing me. Today the murderer hunted him like a hare. It’s a miracle he survived.”
The White Hall was filled with courtiers and officers of the guards’ regiments. Mikhail, learning of the attempt, ran to the palace without his cap. Outside, a crowd gathered just as it had twelve years earlier. They shouted, “Hurrah!” when the tsar appeared to them. Someone helpfully calculated, “They shouted for an entire ten minutes.” A church service was held. But Alexander sensed that something had changed drastically. Back then they had wept with joy. Now they tried to appear happy. They had grown used to assassination attempts.
He wrote dryly in his diary: “Out walking. An unknown assailant shot at me five times from a revolver outside the General Staff building. God saved me. The whole family gathered, one after the other. Spoke with Drenteln: the killer is arrested. Thanksgiving service. Many ladies and gentlemen. All the officers: hurrah!”
Then the bells rang and he went out on the balcony over the Saltykov Entrance. The crowd hailed him. Vassily Bilbasov, well-known journalist and historian (author of the History of Catherine II) was in the crowd and he later recounted to Mme Bogdanovich how someone in the crowd said loudly: “If you’re a patriot, shout hurrah, if you’re a socialist, keep quiet.” “The words were spoken by someone dressed as a craftsman. The people around him heard him calmly and didn’t do anything with the man.”
A joke made the rounds: A janitor hearing the bells pealing, says: “Missed again?”
Many people came to the Guard’s Staff Square (the name for that part of Palace Square near Pevchesky Bridge) to see the bullet marks on the southern facade of the Staff Building.
In the meantime, in the city governor’s office the man everyone in Russia was talking about lay on a couch. He was thirty-three, he hadn’t done a thing in his life, and he was a failure here, too. He couldn’t shoot the tsar at three feet, he couldn’t even poison himself with cyanide. Yet everyone in the country knew him now, after thirty-three years of no recognition at all. Suddenly everyone was bustling around him. He had made the giant leap from nobody to a major figure.
Fame was one of the motivations for terrorism. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky was famous. And now so was Solovyov. An eyewitness described the scene: “Next to the couch on the floor stood a washbasin with a lot of vomit (they had pumped his stomach). His first question when he came to was, Did I really not kill the tsar? After openly regretting it, he relaxed. He lay calm and important. Then, he causally asked for a cigarette. And someone with extraordinary courtesy jumped up and assiduously scratched matches. At the criminal’s head, gracefully leaning on the arm of the couch and bending over him, stood a gentleman with court insignia on his uniform, who asked questions with an ingratiating voice: ‘You are aware that in your position total frankness will lead to the good result where no innocent person will suffer, while otherwise…’ But Solovyov kept silent regally.”
Nonetheless, the investigators quickly learned everything about him.
Solovyov became chatty and happily told them that he had spent the night before the shooting “with a prostitute.” (He liked shocking them.) Having enjoyed life’s pleasures for the last time, he headed off to kill the emperor, not forgetting to put on a “clean shirt I had saved and threw the dirty one on the floor.” He was going to his death.
Why did he do it? He was avenging his comrades. “Like ghosts, the martyrs for the people, who figured in many major political trials and who perished prematurely, pass through my imagination.” He also explained the goals for which he was killing: “I belong to a Russian social-revolutionary party that recognizes the extreme injustice of the majority of the people laboring while the minority exploits their labor. We socialists declare war on the government. For the tsar, as an enemy of the people, I can feel only hostility.”
He believed that his shot “brought closer the radiant future.” He did not, however, have a very clear idea of that future: “I cannot clearly picture the new order, but I think that humanity must reach a perfection in which everyone will satisfy his own needs without harming anyone else.”
The highest officials of the empire, dressed in epaulets and wearing orders, men who would not have permitted him to enter their waiting rooms, now hung on his every word and wrote down his thoughts. Even more important, Solovyov forced the tsar of all Russia and the entire royal family to change its life. The tsar would no longer take morning walks in the city. He now went out only with bodyguards. The grand dukes had to have bodyguards, as well.
The next day, the heir wrote in his diary: “Today I had to travel for the first time in a carriage with a convoy. Father, thank God, is also going to travel with a convoy, and now has, as I do, a Cossack sergeant next to the coachman and two Cossacks on horseback.”
This was new for the populace, seeing the tsar protected by bodyguards in his own capital. Neither Alexander I nor Nicholas I had needed them. Alexandra Bogdanovich wrote in her diary what everyone was saying: “It’s painful to see that.”
The Special Senate Court condemned Solovyov
to death. He heard the verdict calmly. He was offered a chance to write a plea for pardon. He left the paper blank.
On May 28, 1879, he was brought to Semenovsky Square, where Dostoevsky and the Petrashevsky circle members had awaited execution. A crowd of four thousand people had gathered. The tall wooden scaffolding was surrounded by an iron fence on all sides. Two wooden pillars were connected by a bar, from which two nooses hung, swinging in the wind. Next to the scaffold stood a coffin covered by cloth but still obviously a coffin. There was something chilling about the sight of a coffin prepared for a still-living man. The cart pulled up. Solovyov sat facing away from the horses, his hands tied behind his back with rope. He wore a black coat of heavy army cloth and a big black sign hung on his chest: State Criminal. Soldiers formed several rings around the scaffold. The minister of justice and the prosecutor of the court entered the cordoned-off area.
The executioner Frolov went up on the scaffold. He was a criminal who took the job in exchange for a pardon. He was picturesque: tall, in a red shirt and black vest with a long golden watch chain. Frolov had many executions ahead of him.
Solovyov sneered as he stood by the pillory and listened to the sentence being read. Then a priest came up to Solovyov, but he shook his head. He had told them in the investigation that he did not believe in God. Frolov took over, helping him put on the white hooded garment that would hide his face and the sight of his suffering. Holding him by the shoulders, he led him to the gibbet. He threw on the noose, checked it, and then gave the sign. An assistant kicked away the support, and Solovyov fell through the trapdoor. The white hood jerked and remained swinging in the wind.
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