A good-looking married couple came to Lipetsk, Alexander Barannikov and his wife, Maria Oshanina. He was the Avenging Angel, with olive skin and raven hair, a worthy successor to the Jacobin aristocrats who killed their emperors. She, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, had ash-colored hair, dark eyes, and “a thirst for the blood of the oppressors.” After his killing of chief of gendarmes Mezentsov, Barannikov returned to the countryside to inspire revolutionary fervor in the peasants. After the daring, danger-filled life he led in St. Petersburg, enlightening the peasantry seemed unbearably dull. As Mikhail Frolenko said, laughing at their life in the country, “Their boredom was immense, and they accepted the invitation to Lipetsk like liberation from the Tatar yoke.” Thus, a beautiful young woman joined the ten men.
Nikolai Morozov, tall, thin, in spectacles, looked like a typical member of the intelligentsia. Orphaned young, he was the son of a landowner and a serf. His father’s butler, whose wife was taken by the master, blew up both of his parents with a powder keg. Nikolai Morozov learned about explosions in his infancy, and now he planned to devote his life to them.
Another interesting character was Lev Tikhomirov, the main intellectual and brains behind Land and Freedom. He was twenty-seven, but because of his mind and erudition and also his middle-aged appearance (by contrast with the majority of the arrivals, who were strong, healthy, and handsome), he was called The Old Man. It became his party pseudonym. “L. A. Tikhomirov is the best exponent of our ideas and goals,” Nikolai Morozov said. With time, this “best exponent” would become the staunchest foe of those same ideas and goals. But at first, as the terrorist Vera Figner put it, “Lev Tikhomirov was our acknowledged ideological representative, theoretician, and best writer.”
The main organizers of the congress came before the rest. They were the founders of Liberty or Death and the dismantlers of the former Land and Freedom—Alexander “Robespierre” Mikhailov and Alexander Kvyatkovsky. They were an odd couple: fat, round-faced and amiable-looking Mikhailov, and sleek, tall Kvyatkovsky who had a refined face framed by a well-tended beard.
The son of a Siberian gold prospector, Kvyatkovsky had studied (like Frolenko) at the Technological Institute, took part in student riots, quit, and went to the people. He worked as a sharecropper, smith, laborer, and peddler in villages. He came back convinced of the primacy of terror. Like many of the other arrivals, he was exceptionally strong and courageous. He had taken part in attacks on prison convoys and had twice rescued prisoners.
The young people spent their time peacefully in the hotel, went to take mud baths, and spent a lot of time boating on the unpleasantly named Antichrist Pond. “In Lipetsk…behind the spa’s gardens was a large pond or small lake with very clear water,” recalled Frolenko, “but surprisingly, there were no fish. We often took a boat and rowed there…. We asked the peasants and learned that the cause for the absence of fish was the weir built by the Antichrist. By Antichrist, they meant Peter I!”
During the reforms of Peter the Great, the people believed that Peter, who destroyed the Patriarchy in Russia and many ancient habits and customs, was the Antichrist, whose coming had been prophesied by church books. Many works appeared proving it through numerical calculations. Russia’s Great Transformer dealt with these authors handily, sending them to the stake or to dungeons.
The boat rides were not recreational. On Antichrist Pond, far from prying ears, “many preliminary questions were raised and discussed.” By mid-June, all eleven had arrived. On June 15 they went for their first historic meeting, in a very romantic spot.
Mikhail Frolenko wrote: “We found out from the bellmen that there was a forest outside town where people had picnics. We hired coaches, bought food, some wine, purified vodka, and set off.” The summer weather was perfect. The eleven (almost all of whom would end up hanged or dying in isolation cells) were merry.
“The road outside town was an unending series of meadows…. Far ahead lay the forest, where we were headed. Andrei Zhelyabov showed us his strength. Along the way, he bet someone that he could lift a droshky with its driver by the rear axle.” They saw a new carriage on the road. “Zhelyabov jumped down from our droshky, rushed over to the one approaching, grabbed its rear axle, and lifting it with the driver, stopped the trotting horse in its tracks.” That’s the kind of people they were.
They reached the spot, released the drivers, and “started looking for a place where we would not be readily seen from afar but from which we could see anyone approaching us. We found a place quickly. It was a group of trees and shrubs in a meadow, almost in the very center. Settling in that green island, we could see everything around us on the meadow, while we remained invisible and unheard…. We placed the bottles of wine, the food, and glasses on the grass, to make it look as if we had come to have a party, and immediately began our discussion.”
At this first meeting Kvyatkovsky and Mikhailov read the program and bylaws of the new party. They were accepted unanimously. This was the first time political terror was part of a party program.
Two more meetings were held in the cheerful green glade. At the last one, they defined the main goal of the coming terror. “At the third meeting…Alexander Mikhailov read a long list of charges against Emperor Alexander II…. ‘The emperor has destroyed in the second half of his reign,’ said Mikhailov, ‘almost all the good he permitted to be done by the progressive figures of the sixties.’”
“A vivid outline of the political persecutions of recent years ended that marvelous speech…. The listeners pictured long lines of young people sent to Siberian tundras for love of their homeland, the emaciated faces of prisoners, and the unknown graves of freedom fighters,” wrote Vera Figner.
After the obligatory revolutionary bathos, concrete questions were raised. Should the good works at the beginning of his reign pardon Alexander II for “all the evil that he has already done and will do in the future?” The answer was a resounding “No!”
In that cheerful glade eleven people condemned the emperor of an enormous empire to death. After that, they had a long discussion about how the eleven of them would overturn that great empire with its huge punitive apparatus. Outwardly, it seemed like a meeting of madmen, but there already existed new technology that made the murder of rulers quite possible despite all safeguards. Moreover, it allowed them to kill the guards along with the guarded, and to get away unscathed. The pistol and dagger, the main weapons of nineteenth-century conspirators, were becoming obsolete.
Now there was dynamite, an advanced technology invented by the Swede Alfred Nobel in 1867, the year after the first attempt on the Russian tsar’s life. Old Man Tikhomirov, the smartest of the lot, put it this way: “Terrorism is a very toxic idea, very terrible, which can create strength from impotence.” Dynamite was the terrible power of the powerless.
As Goldberg later testified, it was at Lipetsk that “we first spoke of using dynamite in the work of the revolution.” The idea of dynamite as a powerful weapon was already discussed by students in 1874. Europe was beleaguered by mysterious naval catastrophes that took many lives. They happened to old ships that exploded in the open sea once they left Dutch harbors. It turned out that shipowners were insuring old, useless ships and then blowing them up with newly invented dynamite and timing mechanisms.
Actually, besides the use of dynamite, another innovation arose in the Lipetsk meadow: a party of a new type. Robespierre Mikhailov was its creator. At the head was the Executive Committee. All the members gave their entire fortunes and lives to the committee. You could join it, but you couldn’t leave. The decisions of the Executive Committee (EC) were not subject to discussion but had to be executed unquestioningly by the rest of the party. The all-powerful EC had agents of various categories working for it. They were the “revolutionaries of the second rank” that Nechaev had written about in his Catechism for the Revolutionary.
“Agents of the Executive Committee,” recalled Maria Oshanina, “were appointed by the committee and had no righ
ts, only obligations.” They were the revolutionary capital to be spent by the EC. The eleven people in the meadow named themselves members of the EC: A. I. Barannikov, A. I. Zhelyabov, A. A. Kvyatkovsky, N. N. Kolotkevich, A. D. Mikhailov, N. A. Morozov, M. N. Oshanina, L. A. Tikhomirov, M. F. Frolenko, S. G. Shiryaev, and G. Goldenberg.
At the head of the EC stood the Administrative Commission. The members of the EC met and passed resolutions, and the commission supervised their execution. Between meetings, the commission had dictatorial powers and demanded absolute execution of its own decisions. It met almost daily. The Administrative Commission consisted of three people elected by the members of the EC from its members. At that time the three were Alexander Mikhailov, Lev Tikhomirov, and Alexander Kvyatkovsky.
An iron dictatorial discipline was maintained in the new party, from top to bottom. That is exactly how Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin would build his party.
The bylaws described terror as the main means and the main goal of the party. There were several departments subordinate to the EC. The Military Department was headed by Andrei Zhelyabov, who formulated the first rule of future terrorism: its relentlessness. “The meaning of terror and all the chances of its success lie in consistency and relentlessness of action…. Under the blows of systematic terror autocracy will start to crack. The Government is not able to withstand such pressure for long and it will make actual, instead of virtual, concessions. Any deceleration is disastrous for us; we must go by forced march, straining our abilities.” Ruthless, uninterrupted terror would blow up the existing order, as Nechaev had once dreamed. Nikolai Morozov and the chief ideologue Lev Tikhomirov were elected editors of their planned underground newspaper.
They moved on to a discussion of the first steps of the new party. It was decided to start with a bang—blowing up the tsar in a railroad car. It had to be done that very fall, when he was returning from his usual stay in Livadia. The Lipetsk congress was declared closed. The next day the participants left for Voronezh, two or three at a time, as they had arrived for this meeting.
The congress of Land and Freedom met in Voronezh and concluded with a schism. The former Land and Freedom was buried. Two months later, the terrorists of the Lipetsk congress announced the creation of their own organization. They called it the People’s Will, as it is usually translated, even though the Russian word volya means both freedom and will.
The Voronezh congress added new members to the EC, including Vera Figner and Sofia Perovskaya. Now there were twenty-five members of the EC. The most famous new member would be Sofia Perovskaya, who changed the course of Russian history.
Sofia, known as Sonechka, always wore the favorite outfit of the “progressive college girls,” a modest brown dress with snowy white starched collar. Her round face, shining blue eyes, and light brown hair made her look like a little girl. Only the too-large, sloping forehead spoiled the delicate girl’s face. With every year her forehead grew larger; it seemed to take over her face. Lenin had that kind of forehead.
The People’s Will members believed in Nechaev’s definition: “The revolutionary is a doomed person.” They forswore a personal life until the victory of revolution. But that vow was often broken, because youth was stronger than promises.
The rock-hard revolutionary Sonechka Perovskaya became Andrei Zhelyabov’s mistress. They were a strange match: the handsome heroic man and the little girl with the large forehead. He was the son of a serf and she was the great-great-granddaughter of the hetman of Ukraine, the great-granddaughter of a minister, the granddaughter of the governor of the Crimea, and the daughter of the governor of St. Petersburg. The scion of serfs joined with the scion of the most outstanding aristocrats.
Sonechka Perovskaya came from the line of the Razumovsky counts. Their distant ancestor was a simple Cossack and alcoholic. His son, Alexei Rozum, had a beautiful voice and was brought to St. Petersburg to sing. At the court church, the choirboy was seen by the future empress Elizabeth, and she fell in love with him. When she ascended the throne, Elizabeth gave her lover the title of count of the Roman Empire. The former choirboy became Count Alexei Razumovsky, whom the court jokingly called the Night Emperor.
Sober, he was good-natured and treated his title with self-deprecating humor. But drunken (his father’s blood!), he was combative and beat Elizabeth’s officials. The wives of these courtiers had services said in church when their husbands went to dine with the hospitable Count Razumovsky, praying that they would return without broken noses. Even Elizabeth felt his wrath, for he sometimes beat “his treasure,” the empress of Russia. When he sobered up he crawled abjectly on his knees before the locked door of his mistress. But the empress could not go long without his nocturnal services. The count stayed out of court intrigues, had no great opinion of his own intelligence, and read only one book, the Bible. Instead of intrigues, he took care of his family. He brought his mother and brother from the village.
They dressed his mother in a court dress and brought her to the palace to meet the empress. There were no mirrors in the village. When the Cossack woman saw herself in a mirror, she dropped to her knees to bow—she thought it was the empress she was seeing.
He also brought his brother, Kirill, who was herding cows when they came to take him to St. Petersburg. He climbed a tree to hide from what he thought were recruiters for the army. At fifteen, Kirill was illiterate. But not much later he graduated from Goetingen University and eventually came to head the Academy of Sciences. Unlike his brother, Kirill Razumovsky was involved in court intrigues and conspiracies. Under Catherine the Great, he was the last hetman of Ukraine. He was Sonechka’s great-great-grandfather.
His son, Count Alexei Razumovsky, minister of education under Alexander I, was married to one of the wealthiest brides in Russia, but did not live with her. He lived with his mistress and had ten children by her. They were all given the surname Perovsky, after the count’s estate, Perovo. They were all granted noble status and some had brilliant careers under Alexander II. One was a minister, another a general, a third an influential tutor of the heir to the throne. They helped Sonechka’s father, Lev Perovsky, become governor of St. Petersburg.
Following family tradition, Sonechka’s father lived openly with a mistress while his own family was in financial need. All the other Perovskys lived in luxury, and the little girl saw it when she was taken to visit her famous and influential relatives. After the first attempt on Alexander II, Lev Perovsky was forced to retire, reducing the family circumstances even more.
This might have been when the very proud girl developed her hatred of inequality and her thirst for justice. In high school, she befriended girls who became revolutionaries. At sixteen, Sonechka Perovskaya left her parents’ house; she participated in workers’ circles, was arrested, and spent time in the fortress. Her father went to see Peter Shuvalov, chief of gendarmes, and she was released. Sonechka was sent to the Crimea, where her grandfather was governor. There she studied medicine to become a paramedic and work for the people. Then she was one of the defendants in the Trial of 193 narodniki. She was exiled to the Olonetsk Province. While she was being transported there, she slipped a sleeping draught into the gendarmes’ tea and escaped. She began living without legal status. She took part in the armed attempt to free I. Myshkin, who gave the celebrated speech at their trial. They ambushed the wagon taking him to hard labor. They wounded the gendarme accompanying him, but Myshkin was in leg irons and could not jump down from the wagon.
She was iron-willed. Once she made up her mind to do something, she was implacable. Her comrades feared her. She did not forgive weakness. As Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, who assassinated Mezentsov, said about her, “That woman is capable of driving a party comrade to suicide over the slightest failure.”
Upon their return from Voronezh, the EC went into action. An agent was sent to Switzerland to buy dynamite, which was smuggled into Russia. Shiryaev and Kibalchich started making bombs.
In late August at a secret apartment in Lesnoi near St.
Petersburg, the EC had a meeting. The main point on the agenda was whether they should roll out numerous terrorist acts against top government officials or concentrate solely on killing the tsar.
The unanimous answer was to focus on killing the tsar. They formulated a pacifying theory of “the final killing” that would end the era of terror. They believed that the people would rise up in response, putting an end to the autocracy. Alexander Mikhailov, the de facto leader of People’s Will, kept a written history of its work. “26 August 1879, the Executive Committee passed a death sentence on the Emperor of All of Russia, Alexander II.”
At the time the forces of People’s Will in the capital consisted of only a few dozen people, but with the new technology, that was enough. The power of the powerless worked.
In the fall, when Alexander II left for Livadia, the EC had enough dynamite to destroy his imperial train. There were only two ways by which he could return to St. Petersburg, by sea through Odessa and then by train to Moscow and St. Petersburg, or by coach to Simferopol, and then by train. In either case he had to pass through the small town of Alexandrovsk. Thus the Odessa-Alexandrovsk-Moscow triangle covered all possibilities. Whichever way he traveled, he had to go through one of those places. The dynamite would be stored in all three, and his train would be blown up wherever he went.
The members of People’s Will went off to deliver their fatal presents for the tsar.
In September 1879, Vera Figner came to Odessa with the first portion of dynamite. Nikolai Kibalchich himself followed with explosives. Pretending to be a married couple, they rented an apartment on prestigious Ekaterininskaya Street.
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