Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  Stepnyak-Kravchinsky wrote: “The enormous dynamite conspiracy organized by the Executive Committee in 1879 in expectation of the tsar’s return from the Crimea was perhaps the grandest affair ever undertaken and brought to a conclusion by conspiracy. The organization did not have the personnel to execute it and therefore we had to use the services of many outsiders selected from the populous world of sympathizers that always surrounds a popular organization like the one that the EC was running then. It is not surprising then that with so many participants the rumors of the coming attempts spread very quickly literally throughout Russia. Of course, people did not know where the explosion was to take place. But all students, lawyers, and writers with the exception of those on the police payroll, knew that the tsar’s train would be blown into the air during the trip from the Crimea to St. Petersburg. People talked about it, as they say, everywhere. In Odessa one rather well-known writer (I. I. Svedentsov) ran a subscription for the explosion almost openly, and the fifteen hundred rubles he raised were delivered to the EC. The police knew nothing.”

  Knew nothing? With its numerous agents and gigantic staff of informers? Why not? We will never know.

  The penultimate new year in Alexander’s life, 1880, arrived with no greater sense of security. He had to admit that the executions and martial law had not pacified the country. Everyone expected reprisals, yet the emperor called Kostya. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich later related joyfully, “The tsar told me that he would like to show Russia a sign of trust for the 25th anniversary of his reign [February 19, 1881] by taking a new and important step toward completing the transformations he had undertaken. He would like to give society more participation than presently in the discussion of the most important affairs.”

  Instantly rumors of a constitution began. Alexander had a conference, but when he announced his intention to continue reforms, the tsarevich’s eyes filled with horror. He saw the same horror in the eyes of the courtiers and the members of the extended Romanov family. They wanted a continuation of reprisals, not concessions.

  That evening he noted in his memo book: “29 January, conference with Kostya and others, we decided to do nothing.” And once again he would spend hours plunged in deep thought in his study.

  He suffered another humiliation. From the head of Russian foreign intelligence service came word that Lev Gartman had recently arrived by train in Paris, and he was the terrorist–con man Mr. Sukhorukov who was behind the bomb on the railroad. The Russian government demanded extradition.

  Minister of Foreign Affairs Gorchakov appealed to the president of France: “The question is not about a Russian nihilist, but the principle of punishment. We must ask ourselves: is it possible to struggle with these new barbarians under these conditions?” He went on to say that they must not be given the opportunity to make “conspiracies freely, without any personal risk. It is enough for them to create a plan, dig a tunnel, set the mechanism for a certain time or send an electric spark from a distance” and then “vanish to another country to wait the results of their destructive work…under cover of the right to refuge that guarantees them security and freedom.”

  The Russian government demanded the return of the “new barbarian.” But the French president’s chancellery was engulfed by letters from the public outraged by the “Russian monarchist frenzy.” The public campaign was headed by Victor Hugo, who sent an appeal to President Grévy. The French demanded Gartman be protected from “tsarist terror,” and French newspapers printed articles by famous Russian radical émigrés—Georgi Plekhanov, Petr Lavrov, and Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. The Russian ambassador, Prince Orlov, was informed by mail that a death sentence had been passed on him by the “Russian Socialist Committee in Paris.”

  The president of France refused to extradite Gartman, and the tsar could do nothing but recall his ambassador from France.

  Alexander decided to bring back the ailing empress, since the climate in Nice was not helping her. He thought she was afraid of dying alone in a strange land. It was winter. He sent Count Alexander Adlerberg to bring her back.

  The empress had read in the newspapers about the new attempt on the Moscow railroad. This was another blow for her. It turned out she did not want to return at all, especially now after the attempt on his life. She did not want to go to a country where the monarch was humiliated and where he in turn humiliated his empress.

  “No one asked my opinion. This is a cruel decision. I think they would treat a sick housemaid better,” she complained to her lady-in-waiting.

  In preparation for departure, she wept and said that in her condition she would not be able to take a long winter journey. In fact, she was so ill on the trip that her ladies-in-waiting thought several times that they would not get her home alive.

  Dr. Botkin explained to the tsar that it was important to keep her from being upset. So no one except a few family members was allowed to greet her at the station. She was brought to the Winter Palace, where she went to bed and did not get up again.

  Unbeknownst to almost everyone, there was an assassin in the Winter Palace. Even the members of the “Great EC” (as Russian revolutionaries would subsequently call the committee) did not know about him. It was kept top secret. Only the Administrative Commission—Alexander Mikhailov, Lev Tikhomirov, and Alexander Kvyatkovsky—knew about the agent of the People’s Will now in the home of the Alexander II.

  The core belief of the People’s Will, that once the tsar died, tsarism would fall, was becoming more popular in workers’ circles. The laborer Stepan Khalturin decided that the tsar must fall at the hand of a worker. “Let all tsars know that we workers are not so stupid and we can evaluate the ‘services’ tsars afford workers.” The thought that the tsar had betrayed the people and therefore must be killed by a worker became an idée fixe.

  Having committed to regicide, Khalturin started on his path to the Winter Palace. He was an excellent carpenter with a wide network in the St. Petersburg labor market. He soon got a job working on repairs of the tsar’s yacht. It was a good step, and he acquitted himself well enough to come to the attention of the palace administration. Stepan Khalturin got the position he wanted at the palace.

  Then he got in touch with the People’s Will. He offered to blow up the palace, with the entire royal family. He asked for cooperation from the EC, which would give him information, but most important, supply the dynamite.

  The proposal was discussed by the Administrative Commission and accepted, naturally, but only as a backup. The commission was planning the attacks on the railroad, and they had neither the time nor the dynamite for a palace job. They told Khalturin to take the job at the palace and bide his time. In October 1879, under the name of Batyshkov, he began to work at the Winter Palace and to wait.

  Khalturin was tall, with rosy cheeks, and the very sight of his always-happy young face was cheering. He became popular with the servants, especially the many females. The household services were on the first floor and in the vast cellars—kitchens, storerooms, workshops. Khalturin lived in the cellar with the other carpenters and his workshop was there, too. The royal family lived on the second floor. In the marvelous formal rooms, in the “reserve half,” the luxurious private apartments of the many Romanovs, and in the rooms of the lord chamberlains and ladies-in-waiting, something was always in need of repair or replacement. The calls on the very good handyman “Batyshkov” were frequent.

  Khalturin even made repairs in the Diamond Storeroom, which held the imperial regalia and treasures accumulated over the centuries of the Romanov dynasty. Famous diamonds were there, for only the monarchs of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary bought large precious stones in those days. Later when the Bolsheviks confiscated the tsar’s diamonds they found themselves in the position, as Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote, of robbers “who got the commodity and destroyed the only possible purchasers.”

  Khalturin learned the layout of the Winter Palace.

  The tsar was expected back from Livadia a
nd the palace was getting a general sprucing up. Khalturin worked from morning till night, primarily in the tsar’s rooms, renovating the valuable furniture. Portraying the peasant Batyshkov, Khalturin turned out to be a talented actor. He came up with a useful mask—the dull-witted, simple peasant. All the footmen laughed at his awkward manners and habit of scratching behind his ear while thinking. They tried to impress the unpolished country rube. Their boasting stories gave Khalturin a good picture of the palace schedule and the daily life. The fear that pervaded the reign of Nicholas I was long gone from the palace, as it was from Russian life. Only the oldest servants remembered the “reverent atmosphere, like church.”

  General Delsal, commandant of the palace, was in charge of security. The old general, wounded in Sevastopol, kept up the patriarchal, preterrorism mores. The lack of discipline and the lax habits of the innumerable staff amazed Khalturin. His coworkers had parties in the staff rooms, attended by dozens of their friends, who came and went at will.

  “At a time when even the most high-ranking people could not pass through the main entrances of the palace, the back doors were open at all hours of the day and night for any tavern acquaintance of the lowliest palace servant. Sometimes the visitors stayed the night in the palace,” Khalturin said.

  The debauchery in the servants’ quarters and the disorder in household management shocked Khalturin. There was widespread thievery, and Khalturin had to steal food in order not to seem suspicious.

  The revolutionary was not making this up. The same petty thievery was rampant even during the magnificent balls at the Winter Palace. The situation was so typical that Leo Tolstoy described it in his novel Anna Karenina. At a ball, a grand duchess asks one of the officers to show his new helmet to the Italian ambassador, who is interested in Russian army equipment. The cavalry guardsman begs off with some excuse. The grand duchess insists, and he takes it off. The grand duchess “turned over the helmet and—bam, a pear fell out, followed by two pounds of chocolates,” wrote Tolstoy. The officer had stolen it from the dinner tables.

  As soon as the Moscow bombing failed, Khalturin became the main player in the tsar’s murder. His connection with the EC was Kvyatkovsky. Now he met with Khalturin daily, to pass along some dynamite, which he brought into the palace in small portions.

  Kvyatkovsky’s apartment was turned into a dynamite laboratory. He kept detonators and other parts there. But the apartment had to appear to be an ordinary family home. Thus, Kvyatkovsky was given a “wife,” played by Vera Figner’s younger sister. The elegant Kvyatkovsky and his wife, a typical aristocrat with flawless manners, looked good together.

  At one point, Khalturin had an opportunity to get the deed done with one blow. He was called into the tsar’s study to polish the furniture. The tsar was there, with his back to him, by his desk. A blow to the head with his hammer, and the tsar would be dead. But he was not prepared to kill an unarmed old man from behind. When Kvyatkovsky learned of the lost chance, he cursed Khalturin roundly.

  But time was on the side of the EC. Khalturin figured out that the cellar where he and the other carpenters lived was right under the tsar’s dining room. He would kill them all there.

  Between the cellar and the second-floor dining room was the guards corps, where the sentries lived. A good fifty men, they were peasants beloved by the revolutionaries. They would be doomed by an explosion in the cellar. Khalturin said coolly to Kvyatkovsky: “It’ll kill fifty without doubt…so it’s better to put in more dynamite, so that they don’t die in vain, so that it definitely gets him.”

  In order to blast through the mighty granite vaults of the Winter Palace, Shiryaev and Kibalchich calculated that over 300 pounds of dynamite would be needed.

  Khalturin continued bringing it in to the palace. “Every morning,” Khalturin recounted, “after work, I went out [to meet Kvyatkovsky] and came back with a small portion of dynamite, which I hid under my pillow. I was afraid to bring in more, which would attract attention. There were frequent searches, but they were so superficial that no one ever thought to lift my pillow (my luck!), which would have destroyed me. Of course, I had instilled absolute confidence in me with my good behavior.”

  Sleeping on dynamite takes its toll. Nitroglycerine is highly volatile and highly toxic. Inhaling the vapors poisons the blood. It made Khalturin’s eyes strain out of their orbits, and his rosy complexion turned to clay. He had terrible headaches.

  He came up with a clever idea—he purchased a large trunk, which was delivered to the cellar. He told his roommates that he was getting married and was buying his bride’s dowry. He had gotten a bonus for good work, and he intended to keep the dowry in the trunk.

  Beneath the dresses and lingerie, he kept a large amount of dynamite. The explosives-filled trunk was to play the role of an infernal machine. Until November 24, that is, when Kvyatkovsky did not bring the next portion of dynamite and did not appear at their meeting place. He also failed to show up for the daily meeting on November 25.

  Unbeknownst to Khalturin, Kvyatkovsky was in a detention cell, arrested, and his apartment was being searched. The trusting sister of Vera Figner had given illegal literature to a friend, who showed it to her lover, who immediately reported it. The police came to the apartment.

  A strange turn of events ensued. The police found a green glass jar filled with nitroglycerine and magnesium, necessary components of dynamite. They found vessels with fulminate of mercury, used for detonators. These were all parts of destructive explosives.

  It became clear what they were to be used for. The police confiscated a paper that Kvyatkovsky vainly tried to burn. It was a building plan, with an X marking one of the rooms. The police determined that it was a plan of the Winter Palace and that the X marked the royal dining room.

  The palace should have been searched thoroughly, and all the staff should have been checked, particularly the new people. Someone from inside had given the terrorists the building plan.

  None of it was done. They settled for searching the rooms adjacent to the dining room. They also did perfunctory searches of workers returning from leave. They did not bother Khalturin, who had already brought 250 pounds of dynamite into the palace.

  He even continued adding to his stores, because now Andrei Zhelyabov brought it to him.

  Both of the great actions of the Great EC—the bomb on the railroad track and the bombing in the Winter Palace—could have, rather, should have, been averted. But the police were strangely inactive. The question arises again: why?

  The trunk now held close to 280 pounds of dynamite. Khalturin suggested blowing up the dining room. The Administrative Commission held a special meeting, asking their chief dynamiter to speak.

  “What would be the effect of exploding that charge?” they asked.

  “The tsar will be scared, but unharmed,” Nikolai Kibalchich replied firmly. “My calculations remain in effect—you need 320 pounds. Even better would be 360 pounds.” (Serpokryl, a member of People’s Will, later recounted this.)

  Khalturin was nervous. Free access had been limited, and residents of the palace had to wear a brass badge identifying them. Nonetheless, he continued to bring in the dynamite in small pieces, “Inventing various subterfuges to avoid being searched or to trick the vigilance of the searchers.”

  In other words, even after Kvyatkovsky’s arrest, there still was no mandatory search of everyone. The security check was clearly easy to foil, but Khalturin was tired and pushed for a quick move. Zhelyabov also wanted to use the dynamite as soon as possible. So the Administrative Commission, despite Kibalchich’s opinion, gave the order to set off the bomb.

  Now, Zhelyabov waited for Khalturin every evening on Palace Square. As he walked past, Khalturin would say, without stopping, “No.” The explosion was postponed.

  Khalturin wanted the whole family to be there, and he learned that on February 5, Alexander of Hesse, the empress’s beloved brother, would be visiting the Winter Palace. In honor of the occasion, a six o’clo
ck family dinner would be held. The tsar would attend with his sons, the heir Alexander and Vladimir. The empress, it was said, would not be able to join them, for she did not leave her bed.

  On February 3, agents of the EC lured a typesetter in their underground printing house, Zharkov, an informer, onto the ice of the Malaya Neva River. Stunned by a bludgeon, Zharkov fell. Young Presnyakov finished him off by stabbing him with a dagger.

  On February 5, Khalturin had to get the carpenters who lived with him out of the cellar by six o’clock. It was not difficult. He invited them to a restaurant to celebrate his engagement. The restaurant was not far from the palace, and just before six, he told them that he wanted them to meet his fiancée and would go get her. He left them in the restaurant and hurried back to the palace.

  The clock struck six. He could tell by the bustle among the staff that the prince had arrived. Khalturin went down to the cellar and connected the wires. He had fifteen minutes to get out of the palace.

  St. Petersburg was in a blizzard. For three days heavy snowflakes fell on the city. The bridges and buildings drowned in snow and the street lights could barely be seen. It was disquieting and lovely. The Egyptian sphinxes on the Neva lay under a blanket of snow. The lights of the Winter Palace merely flickered in the distance.

  Zhelyabov, covered in snow, waited for Khalturin on Palace Square. Khalturin appeared out of the swirling snow. “With amazing calm he greeted Zhelyabov and said, as if it were an ordinary conversation, ‘It’s ready,’” recalled Lev Tikhomirov. A few second later a thunderous explosion rang out in the square. The palace seemed to shudder, and the lights went out in the windows.

  The dark palace vanished in the white blizzard.

  The emperor had been waiting for Prince Alexander of Hesse. The blizzard had blocked the roads; even the horse-drawn trolley wasn’t working. He sent his sons, Sasha and Vladimir, to meet the train. It was delayed by snowdrifts, and the prince arrived just in time for dinner.