Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The next day a proclamation was distributed all over the city. “We have picked up the glove thrown at us, we are not afraid of struggle and death, and in the end we will blow up the government, no matter how many die on our side.”

  Real panic spread through the capital. A. A. Kireev, retired general, newspaper columnist, and acquaintance of Fedor Dostoevsky, noted in his diary: “The most fantastic rumors are spreading in the city that the nihilists will foment a revolution and that all of us will be killed. Some units of the army are on standby!!! The heir cannot live in Tsarskoye Selo and is moving to Peterhof…because it is too difficult in Tsarskoye Selo to protect against killers. That won’t be a life, but hard labor! This is what things have come to!”

  The lady-in-waiting Maria Frederiks (her mother, Cecilia, had been lady-in-waiting and best friend of Alexander II’s mother), wrote in her Reminiscences, “Tsar Nicholas I knew that one could fight long and hard against innate [Russian] ungovernability and instability, but they can be conquered only by force and firmness…. He knew that for a Russian, strictness is more beneficial than laxness, which leads to no good. We can see that Emperor Nicholas I was right by what came after him. When, after the death of our wise tsar, there was weakness and laxness in the air, everyone breathed it in and rejoiced…. They gave us freedom of thought and freedom of action and freedom of the press; everyone rushed for everything at once, hoping to speed up Russia’s development. The wild flow that was suddenly unblocked…poured over its banks quickly and wildly; it broke and burned everything in its path. And what was the end result? A handful of morally deformed degenerates who made their goal, under guise of loyalty to the Homeland, to change the entire order in Russia.”

  That was the manifesto of the court. It was an article of faith for a growing opposition of retrogrades, and the tsar could see it in the eyes of his son, the heir. The retrograde party rallied round his Sasha, the heir to the throne.

  A fat leather-bound notebook with a metal lock contains the diary of the heir and his desperate notations of those years: “It’s horrible, these times!” “Lord, give us the means and teach us how to act! What are we to do!” “The most terrible and disgusting years that Russia has ever lived through!”

  Just as his father had been humiliated by his own fear during the Decembrist rebellion, Alexander was humiliated on Palace Square. To run like a hare (the empress’s words were quickly repeated to him) at the age of sixty-one in full view of his court! And on the eve of his birthday: “A fine present that was,” he said.

  He tried to stay calm. But the mysterious “they” continued their work. They announced their name: the Executive Committee. Chief of gendarmes Drenteln, the city governor of St. Petersburg, and several other officials received letters by mail with the same message. Each was stamped with the oval seal of “the Executive Committee of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party.” The center of the seal bore a pistol, axe, and dagger.

  “The Executive Committee has reason to think that Solovyov, arrested for his attempt on the life of Alexander II, might be subjected to torture and declares…that anyone who dares to stoop to that kind of interrogation method will be punished by death by the Executive Committee.”

  That was too much. He determined to be ruthless, to bring back the days of his father, which the court missed so much. The tsar decided to win by force. Barely finished with the war in the Balkans, he declared a new war in his own country. A war on terror. A ruthless war to complete victory.

  Almost all of European Russia was divided into six temporary general provinces (Kiev, Moscow, Kharkov, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Odessa). So that there was no doubt that this was war, martial law was declared in all the territories. Battle generals, who had distinguished themselves in the last war, were appointed as governor generals, including the victor on the Caucasus front, Count Loris-Melikov; the hero of Shipka, General Gurko; and the victor at Plevna, General Totleben.

  War Minister Dmitri Milyutin noted sadly in his diary: “All the cares of the highest government are now directed at increasing strictness, and all of Russia could be said to be in a state of siege.”

  The generals began with military precision: They exiled, they confiscated, they jailed. A new concept appeared in the public consciousness: “white terror.” This was Alexander’s determined attack on the determined young people.

  Their response was to attack officials. A new way of life began. “Around the palace, at every step, there are police precautions; convoys of Cossacks…. You sense that the earth is shifting, that the building is in danger of falling, in every stratum of society there is a vague dissatisfaction gripping everyone.”

  “Dissatisfaction gripping everyone!” That was written by Minister Valuyev in his diary. “The masters sense it,” he added. Naturally Alexander sensed it. Despite his reprisals, the tension in the country did not diminish. Moreover, there was anxiety in the air—something was coming.

  The constant nervous tension changed him, and the disintegration of the magnificent and handsome man continued. Valuyev also wrote in his diary, “I saw Their Imperial Majesties. The tsar looks tired and spoke with nervous irritation which he tries to hide. She is a semi-ruin. In an era when he needs strength, clearly, she cannot be counted on.”

  Alexander had to make another difficult decision that cost him a lot of “nervous irritation.”

  He was tormented by fear for Katya. He would see her with the children at her mansion or in his father’s study, where they were still brought secretly. And he would go down the inner stairs, which his father had used to go up to his mother, to see them. Every time she was transported to the palace, he was mad with worry. He could not give her Cossack bodyguards like the grand dukes had. It would have been excessively public. That meant that they could simply approach her carriage (as they had Drenteln’s) and shoot or take her and the children hostage. And who were they? How many were there? Like many people in the capital, the tsar asked himself the unanswerable questions. He was seen frequently sitting apathetically in his study and then angrily flinging a candlestick at the wall, or grimly walking through the endless enfilade of rooms instead of his morning walk. A prisoner in his own capital.

  A rumor spread through the city that during his “palace walk” he saw a guard at the entrance to the private apartments quickly hide something behind his back. The tsar shot him, only to discover it was a cigarette. This was the kind of rumor the court spread about him now. They did not like him—rather, they were no longer afraid of not liking him. And they hated Katya.

  But he made the decision to move Katya and the children to the third floor of the Winter Palace, where the chamberlains and ladies-in-waiting lived, far from the apartments of the empress, who lived on the second floor. There was nothing new in this. His grandfather Paul, his uncle Alexander I, and his father had kept their mistresses in the palace. It was not considered improper because no one dared discuss it. But now they had glasnost and the ruler’s life was on everyone’s lips. Instantly, the story became that Katya and the children were living directly above the empress, and the miserable, sick, and old empress had to listen to the patter of his illegitimate children’s feet over her head.

  For all the gossip, the princess’s presence in the palace was considered a secret. His minister of the court, Alexander Adlerberg (who had replaced his father in the post), had known the tsar all his life. Sasha Adlerberg and he grew up together. Only Adlerberg had the right to see the emperor without a report and to call him by name, something that even the grand dukes were not permitted. But the minister of the court, who was required to know everything that happened at the palace, had to pretend “out of modesty” that he knew nothing about Princess Dolgorukaya and her two children living in the palace.

  As Adlerberg later told War Minister Milyutin, “When the tsar decided to move Princess Dolgorukaya to the Winter Palace, he called in the commandant, Major General Delsal, and gave him all the orders directly, adding that he should say nothing to
me about it. It goes without saying that it could not be followed precisely (and the emperor knew that), but I was grateful to the tsar…. Out of some sense of decency, some refined tactfulness for all our, I may say, friendly relations since childhood, the tsar said nothing to me about that ticklish subject, and I pretended to know nothing.”

  The empress was now just skin and bones. Her illness advanced after the assassination attempt on April 2, 1879, and even more so after Katya was moved into the palace.

  Alexander told her about it himself. She said nothing. Now she lived in isolation, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, who had grown old along with her. She spent days in bed, and when they tried to amuse her, she would laugh bitterly and say, “Why this picnic at the bier?”

  She feared that they would bring up “that woman.” To prevent it, she told them about how of one the late empress’s favorite ladies-in-waiting hinted to her about the affair of Nicholas I with Nelidova. Her thin lips drawn into a smile, she added, “If I had heard a similar exposé, I would not have been able to see that lady-in-waiting again.”

  The words of the palace “saint” served as a lesson to them all.

  The emperor saw her less frequently. Her apartments consisted of the formal alcove with crimson fabric on the walls and marble maiden faces of the caryatids above the couch where her desiccated, weightless body lay in the daytime; the lettuce-green dining room, where he rarely came to take coffee now; and the golden parlor, where she took walks leaning on the arm of a lady-in-waiting. The candles burned, reflected in the golden walls. She forgave him, she always forgave him and never complained or accused. She would take her suffering and humiliation, as befits the wives of the impetuous Romanovs, to her grave.

  It was time to take stock. She had performed her duty, for which German princesses were brought to the beds of Russian tsars. She had borne him three sons, but her favorite had died. There was a curse of the Hesse line, and as part of it, the heir was her least favorite son, an awkward giant with a peasant, flattened nose. A joke of nature. The Russian tsars had married German princesses for a long time in order to come up with a pure Russian. Everything about Sasha was peasantlike—his slow mind, his inhuman strength, his revulsion for Europe.

  She was dying not of her disease but of the uselessness of her life. She had no one and nothing to live for. Upstairs, in the rooms of his mistress, there was noise, there was life. She was certain that they couldn’t wait for death to take her.

  Alexander managed to persuade Masha to listen to the physicians and go south for the winter. She was going “for a cure in San Remo” as the emperor put it, or “to die in San Remo,” as she did. She knew that he wanted to be able not to think about her. He wanted to go the Crimea with Katya.

  When the empress set out for San Remo, Tsarevich Sasha was on military maneuvers and came to the train station at Gatchina to bid her farewell. The imperial train arrived from St. Petersburg in deep twilight. “It was getting dark, and all the faces were grim, as if this were a funeral procession,” recalled Count Sheremetyev, the tsarevich’s adjutant.

  The train approached the station. The tsar, tall and slender, in his usual white cap with broad brim, was at the window, pale and thoughtful. (He seemed to grow younger on the eve of her departure.) The empress stared out the window, her thin face resembling an icon. The tsarevich went into the car but came out quickly. It was a brief farewell. The train left. Like everyone else who saw her off, the heir thought he would never see his mother again.

  Now Alexander could be with Katya every day. They set off for the Crimea, to Livadia. The tsarevich, tsarevna, and the grandchildren traveled with the tsar in his car. Katya and her children were in the other car.

  The emperor spent the day in the Livadia Palace with the royal family and the visiting ministers. But he left the palace every night. He rode on horseback through the warm twilight to his other family. The whir of cicadas, the scent of warm wormwood, and the sound of the sea surrounded him. He had been with Katya thirteen years, but circumstances kept them from becoming a bored married couple. They were always passionate lovers.

  Soon it was time to return to rainy, chilly St. Petersburg. The last days in the south were also filled with autumn rains. Sasha and his family left. Katya and the children moved into the palace for the last days in Livadia, and they could sleep together.

  It was getting more difficult for Alexander Adlerberg to pretend not to notice, but he tried to play the game. Minister Milyutin came to report on the state of martial law: It wasn’t working, and the assassination attempts continued.

  At bedtime, Alexander made notes in his memorandum book. “12 November: Rose at 1?4 past 8. Walked, damp, warm, drizzle all day. Coffee with K[atya] in room…. Worked. At 11 Milyutin and Adlerberg. Walked. Dinner at 7, to bed at 1?4 to 2.”

  The departure for St. Petersburg was set for November 17. There were two ways to travel—by sea to Odessa and then by railroad via Moscow, where he always stopped en route from Livadia. The other was by carriage to Simferopol and then by railroad through Moscow to St. Petersburg. He chose the second route. They arrived in Simferopol in the evening, where the imperial train awaited.

  When the train left, urgent telegrams were sent to Moscow and Odessa. The mysterious “they” were at work. The emperor did not know that this trip was supposed to be his last.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Mysterious and Great EC

  The events that were not known to the tsar and that were to contribute to his death occurred before his trip to Livadia, in the summer of 1879. Everything connected to those events, at the time absolutely secret, is still debated by historians. This account relies as much as possible on original sources—the accounts of the fathers of Russian terrorism. They described the events after they were arrested, and the few who lived until the revolution in Russia wrote about them in their memoirs.

  After Solovyov’s shooting, the divided Land and Freedom party saw that the proponents and foes of terror could not coexist anymore. Neither side could forget the hysterical scene between Popov, who was against terrorism, and Kvyatkovsky, who supported it, and the unexpected knock at the door that kept the argument from turning into a shoot-out. The hardliners formed a secret society inside Land and Freedom with the expressive name Liberty or Death.

  But the partisans, the terrorists and their supporters, did not stop at that. They demanded a congress to ratify terrorism officially as the party’s central activity or to disband. The site for the congress was the city of Voronezh. But the secret society wanted to have its own secret congress in Lipetsk to prepare.

  In June 1879, ten young men and a very beautiful young woman began arriving in the sleepy provincial town of Lipetsk, known for its medicinal mud. The spa was founded in the days of Alexander I, and its people were used to visitors, but the athletic young men bore little resemblance to invalids. Nevertheless they declared themselves patients when they checked into the hotel.

  They came from all corners of Russia, the eleven people who wanted to turn around Russian history. Several came from the south. Unlike the aristocratic Land and Freedom chapter in St. Petersburg, the southern branches had children of poverty among the nobles. They would all become famous Russian terrorists.

  From the southern port of Odessa, the Russian Marseille, came the peasant son Andrei Zhelyabov, a strong man with a dark beard. His father had been a serf, and Andrei was ten when Alexander II emancipated them. After high school he went to the law school at the university in Odessa. He was expelled and exiled from the city two years later for taking part in student riots. He went through many underground circles and student groups, prison and political trials. Eventually, he concluded that the only way to achieve his goals was terrorism.

  From Kiev came the ideologue of terrorism, the nobleman Kolotkevich; from Kharkov came the always agitated son of a Jewish merchant, Grigory Goldenberg, who had killed the governor general of Kharkov.

  Also from the south was Mikhail Frolenko, the so
n of a poor retired corporal. He had been accepted at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but he found it boring. Frolenko moved to Moscow to study at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy, where Nechaev murdered the student Ivanov. It was much more interesting in Moscow, where Frolenko joined the revolutionary bohemians, began publishing proclamations, and participated in all the student meetings. In the end, he dropped out of the academy and lived illegally. During the back to the people movement, he went to the Urals to seek out bearers of the Russian revolutionary spirit. He expected to find them among fugitives from Siberian prisons and members of sects persecuted by the Russian Orthodox Church. Frolenko believed that the Urals would be crawling with rebels. Dressed in peasant clothes, Frolenko traveled through the area, mostly on foot. After three months, he returned, never having run across a single sectarian or fugitive from a chain gang, and joined Land and Freedom. He made daring attacks on prisons to free revolutionary prisoners. He was highly valued in the organization. Among his comrades with refined aristocratic, or intellectual, or typically Jewish faces, Frolenko looked like the average working-class Russian. He was their man on the street.

  Another arrival was the aristocrat Stepan Shiryaev, a specialist in dynamite. He was a dandy in fashionable clothes. He had worked in Paris in the laboratory of Yablochkov, one of the inventors of the electric light bulb, and returned to Russia with expert knowledge in electricity. Shiryaev created an underground laboratory; with him worked a true genius, the future father of rocket engines Nikolai Kibalchich.

  When Kibalchich joined the organization, he swore: “I promise that all my time and all my efforts will serve the revolution through terrorism. I will study a science that will help me and the comrades apply their efforts in a manner that is the most profitable for the revolution.” With Shiryaev, they created the most advanced technology in Russia for making dynamite bombs. Prepared ahead of time for use in attacks, their bombs would spend long periods on the bottom of the Neva River and still work.