Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  It was just after six when the emperor, his sons, and their guest approached the Yellow Dining Room (named for the color of the walls). Suddenly, the floor began to rise beneath their feet, and there was a heavy, monstrous thud below. “The floor rose as if in an earthquake, the gas lights in the gallery went out, there was total darkness, and the air was filled with the disgusting odor of gunpowder or dynamite,” recalled the prince of Hesse.

  “We all ran to the Yellow Dining Room, from where the noise came, and found all the windows burst open, the walls showing cracks in several places, almost all the chandeliers out, and everything covered with a thick layer of dust and plaster,” the heir wrote in his diary.

  There was smoke in the dining room. The windows were blown open by the shock wave, but even the freezing wind could not dissipate the thick, sulfurous smoke. Only one chandelier was still lit, and at the table two barely visible footmen, covered in plaster, stood at attention. The table service was covered with plaster, the candelabras rising above it. The palms decorating the table were also white with plaster. This suddenly white space, with the immobile, ghostlike footmen and the devilish smell of sulfur, was like a vision from the Apocalypse.

  The heir’s diary records: “There was total darkness in the big courtyard, and terrible screams and noise came from there. Vladimir and I immediately ran to the main guard house, which was not easy, since all the lights were out and the smoke was so thick that it was hard to breathe.”

  Terrified servants ran around with candles in the dark. The palace was in a state of panic. They could not find the commandant. He was stuck between floors. Because of his leg injury, Delsal usually used the lift. He had entered it and was on his way up when the blast occurred. The lights went out and the lift stopped.

  “The poor general, not understanding the reason for the halt, hung in the air for twenty minutes, which must have seemed an eternity to him. He was surrounded by complete darkness on all sides,” recalled lady-in-waiting Tolstaya.

  The fire bell rang in the square and fire engines hurried to the palace.

  The firemen ran up the marble stairs to the corps de guards. As a newspaper described it, “It was hell in there. Ashes, smoke…impossible to breathe…flares barely showed through the smoke…the firemen’s helmets shone…. They brought more flares. Now the site of the catastrophe was illuminated. The granite floor, made of very heavy slabs, had been tossed up like a toy ball by the horrifying force of the explosion. A mound of broken slabs, rocks, plaster…. Beneath the ruins we heard moans…. Among the mounds in the smoke lay figures. It was impossible to walk—there were arms, legs, and other body parts strewn everywhere…. And in the light of the flares, we could see dark spots on the walls…. The wretched guards were literally blown apart. Wounded and dying men, groans and pleas for help that the firemen, crazed with horror and darkness, could not give. The only medic on duty that evening in the palace, and the nurse, rushed among the wounded.”

  Sasha and Vladimir entered the sentries’ space. “When we ran in, we found a terrible scene: the entire large guards room where people lived was blown up and everything had collapsed more than six feet deep, and in that pile of brick, plaster, slabs and huge mounds of vaults and walls lay more than fifty soldiers covered with a layer of dust and blood. It was a heartbreaking picture, and I will never forget that horror in my life!” wrote the heir.

  If not for the granite slabs, there would have been nothing left of the dining room or of the royal family. They were saved by the room full of murdered sentries.

  While his sons ran down to the sentry room and a footman came out of the darkness to lead the frightened prince of Hesse away, the emperor ran upstairs. All the gas lights in the corridors had gone out and the halls were plunged into darkness. What if they were in the palace? He ran through the black, smoke-filled space. An illuminated face floated out of the dark—a lackey with a candelabra. He grabbed it and ran to the third floor. Beyond the chamberlain’s rooms he saw a weak strip of light. She was in the doorway with a candle. She was waiting for him.

  The empress was the only person in all of St. Petersburg who knew nothing about it. She had slept through it. She slept almost all the time. The tsar would not permit her to be told.

  In the evening the church bells rang dutifully about yet another miraculous escape. This was the fifth attempt on his life. If there really had been a gypsy who told his fortune, he should have been counting.

  First they kept him from walking around his city, then from riding the train in his country, and now he could not live peacefully in his own house.

  The next day, as usual, he received the war minister Dmitri Milyutin.

  He tried to be calm, as usual.

  Milyutin wrote in his diary: “The tsar called me to his study. As in the previous similar incidents, he maintained total presence of mind, seeing in this case a new manifestation of God’s Finger saving him for the fifth time from villainous attack.”

  That was a lovely explanation. However, the minister, like the rest of Russia, could not get rid of this thought: “This incident was particularly amazing. Everyone has to think—where can one seek peace and safety, if villains can lay mines in the royal palace itself?!”

  The minister was right, where could one seek peace and safety? St. Petersburg was in even greater panic than before. As the newspaper Golos put it: “Dynamite in the Winter Palace! An attempt on the life of the Russian tsar in his own dwelling! This is like a nightmare. Where is the limit and when will there be an end to this barbarity?”

  Or, as Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich wrote in his diary, “Nerves are so taut that you expect to be blown up into the air at any moment. We are living through the Terror [of the French Revolution] with the difference that the Parisians could see their enemies face to face, while we not only do not see them or know them, we do not even have the slightest idea of their numbers.”

  Later, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich repeated the same sentiment: “It would be too weak a comparison for me to say that we lived in a besieged fortress. At war you know your friends and enemies. Here we did not know. The chamber footman serving morning coffee could be working for the nihilists…every chimney sweep who came in to work now looked like the bearer of an infernal machine.”

  Apparently, this was the consensus in the Romanov family and in St. Petersburg. A letter to the Third Department warned, “Beware your chimney sweeps, they’ve been ordered to put gunpowder into your chimneys. Avoid theaters, masquerade balls, because there will be an explosion soon in the theaters, in the Winter Palace, in the barracks.”

  Rumors were rife, as Alexandra Bogdanovich wrote in her diary: “They said that under the Small Church of the Winter Palace they found a hundred pounds of dynamite.”…“Now they check the cellars daily in St. Isaac’s Cathedral—you never know, they might put some dynamite there, too, since they do it so easily.”…“They threaten to blow up all of St. Petersburg on February 19.”…“Some say that they will ruin the water pipes in St. Petersburg and we will be left without water, others that printed leaflets were sent the barracks of the Preobrazhensky, Horse Guards, and 8th Fleet that they will be blown up; they say that there was another incident at the palace, that they are still finding dynamite.”

  Another writer feared death from the air. “At the time wild rumors spread in the city that the entire center was mined…. Balloons with dynamite would be sent at the city. Panic and fear spread like the plague through St. Petersburg.”

  The People’s Will discussed the incident in an illegal apartment. Khalturin was terribly depressed, not because he had killed and maimed fifty people, but because the tsar was not killed.

  “The news that the tsar was safe had an oppressive effect on Khalturin. He collapsed, and only tales of the enormous impression made by February 5 on Russia could console him a bit, although he never could accept his failure,” wrote Tikhomirov.

  The Great EC did express its regrets over the death of the sentries. Here i
s the Proclamation of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will dated February 7, 1880.

  “With deep sympathy we regard the death of the wretched soldiers of the tsar’s guard, those forced guardians of the divine villain. But as long as the army is a bastion of tsarist absolutism, until it realizes that in the interests of the homeland its sacred duty is to be with the people against the tsar, such tragic conflicts are inevitable.”

  So it was their own fault and a lesson for others.

  They concluded with a new threat. “We declare once more to Alexander II that we will continue this fight until he abdicates his power to the people, until he offers societal restructuring to a national Constituent Assembly.”

  The sentries were buried on February 7. The tsar was in the church for the funeral service. There were ten coffins on the catafalque and Alexander said, “It feels as if we are still at war, back in the trenches near Plevna.”

  After he returned to Russia and published The Devils, which was panned by the avant-garde critics, Dostoevsky turned to newspaper column writing. He started publishing Diary of a Writer, in which he told the reader, with frenzied frankness, everything that worried him about Russia right then. He wanted to be extremely sincere and he recognized no political correctness. His “biting thoughts” were often against everyone. His timely and topical diary was read eagerly even by those who disagreed with him. Only work on his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, interrupted the diary.

  In those years, the usually solitary writer had a few close friends—Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the journalist Alexei Suvorin, and other leaders of the retrograde party were his circle. But they should have been wary of him, too. No matter how conservative he was, he could never become officially affiliated. While he was against the nihilists, he was simultaneously against reprisals against them and executions. “I cannot consider moral the man who burns heretics. I have only one moral model and ideal—Christ. I ask: would he have burned heretics—no. That means that burning heretics is an immoral act,” he wrote in a letter to Professor K. Kavelin.

  It is why he had wanted an acquittal for Vera Zasulich. Fidelity to Christ was more important to him than fidelity to his convictions. If one day he was more retrograde than all the retrogrades, the next day he was suddenly more liberal than all the liberals. He wrote in his notebook, “Our conservative part of society is no less full of shit than any other. So many scoundrels have joined it.” In conversation he would call himself a Russian socialist.

  He was in constant debate with himself. This was a struggle between “Yes” and “No” that often sounded simultaneously in his soul.

  The Brothers Karamazov is a gigantic fresco depicting the battle between God and the Devil in the human heart. It is a testament imbued with forebodings of an apocalyptic catastrophe moving toward Russia. The Brothers Karamazov was printed in 1879–80 to the accompaniment of terrorist shots and bombs. The novel was enormously successful with readers.

  Naturally the most topical of Russian writers was stunned by February 5. Soon after the explosion in the Winter Palace, Dostoevsky had a curious conversation. He was visited on February 20 by Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, a man known to reading Russia. He was owner and editor of Novoye Vremya (New Times), the most influential (and a semiofficial) newspaper.

  Suvorin came in from the cold, tall and thin in his always unbuttoned beaver coat and ever-present walking stick. There was something vulpine and demonic about his face. Suvorin could easily have been a character in a Dostoevsky novel. He had made his way from grueling poverty to fame as a journalist whose feuilletons were read throughout Russia. He lived through a tragedy that almost cost him his mind: His wife was shot by her lover in a hotel room. Suvorin was brought there and she died in his arms. All this was newspaper fodder. But he rose from the ashes and concentrated on work. He bought Novoye Vremya, a failing newspaper, and soon made it famous.

  The paper’s basic line was patriotism for the nationalist party, hatred of liberalism, and anti-Semitism. “The motto of Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya,” wrote Russia’s greatest satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, “is to go inexorably forward, but through the anus.” Nevertheless, this brilliant and terrible man was the friend of two great writers, Dostoevsky and, later, Chekhov.

  Suvorin wrote a detailed account in his diary of his conversation with Dostoevsky. It is essential reading for an understanding of what was going on in Russia at the time. “Dostoevsky lived in a poor little flat. I found him at a round table in the living room, filling papirosy with tobacco.” He had just had an epileptic fit, and “his red face looked like the face of man fresh out of a steam bath.”

  They started to talk about what the whole country was discussing, February 5, the bomb in the Winter Palace. Dostoevsky offered Suvorin a scenario. “Just imagine that we are standing in front of the windows of the Datsiaro [a store on Nevsky Prospect that sold artworks] and looking at the paintings. Next to us is a man who is pretending to be looking. He is waiting for something and keeps looking around. Suddenly another man hurries up to him and says, ‘The Winter Palace will be blown up now. I set the mechanism.’ We hear it. What would we do? Would we go to the Winter Palace to warn them of the bomb or go to the police, to the constable on the beat, to have them arrest these people? Would you go?”

  In other words, Dostoevsky asked Suvorin: If you and I knew what would happen on February 5, would we have reported it? The editor of the semigovernmental newspaper replied, “No, I wouldn’t go.” And Dostoevsky, the author of The Devils, says, “Neither would I. But why? It’s horrible, it’s a crime. We might have been able to prevent it.” He explains why: “I was filling my papirosy and thinking, going over the reasons why it should be done: serious, important reasons of state significance and Christian duty. The reasons for not doing it were totally insignificant. Simply—the fear of being known as an informer. I pictured how I would arrive, how they would look at me, start questioning me, making me look at suspects, probably offering me a reward, or even suspecting me of being part of the conspiracy. They would publish: Dostoevsky fingered the criminals. Is that my business? It’s the business of the police. That’s what they’re for, that’s what they get paid to do. The liberals would not forgive me. They would torment me and bring me to despair. Is that normal? Everything is abnormal in our country.”

  Suvorin continued, “Dostoevsky talked on the theme for a long time, and he spoke animatedly.”

  The worst had happened: The liberal part of Russian society sympathized with the terrorists. They had become heroes, sacred cows that could not be touched. In the eyes of the progressive Russian intelligentsia, the killers had become fighters against the regime, which had once seduced the country with reforms and had now rejected reforms for ruthless repression. It was no accident that famous writers, journalists, and lawyers were friends of the terrorists. For example, the writer Gleb Uspensky was a close friend of Vera Figner; another EC member, the terrorist Nikolai Morozov, hid in 1879 in the apartment of the writer Vladimir Zotov. Vera Figner wrote then, “We are surrounded by the sympathy of the greater part of society.”

  As if to confirm this, Dostoevsky concluded his conversation with Suvorin by telling him that “he would write a novel in which Alyosha Karamazov would be the hero. He wanted to take him through a monastery. And make him a revolutionary. He would commit a political crime. He would be executed. He sought truth and the search would, naturally, make him a revolutionary,” noted Suvorin in his diary.

  The “political crime” punishable by execution was terrorism.

  Thus, Dostoevsky, who had censured “Russian nihilism” in The Devils, now declared that he would make his beloved character, the holy Alyosha Karamazov, a revolutionary terrorist (that is, a devil).

  Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich would later write in his memoirs that allegedly Dostoevsky told Suvorin that day a terrible prophetic thing: “Wait for the sequel. Alyosha will leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the tsar.” />
  It may seem incredible, but the existence of that apparently impossible plot line was published three months later in the Odessa newspaper Novorossiiskii Telegraf. On May 26, 1880, it reported rumors “in St. Petersburg literary circles on the further content of The Brothers Karamazov. In the continuation of the novel, Alexei Karamazov, under the influence of some special psychological processes in his soul, is brought to the idea of regicide.”

  This was the truth of life that Dostoevsky could not avoid: The Alyosha Karamazovs, the best young people, were becoming terrorists and regicides. That was the tragic result of the last decade of Alexander II’s reign. It was the revenge of the society seduced by his reforms. This suggests the frightening paradox that the tsar of all Russia was in some way the father of Russian terrorism.

  The writer’s fantasy and prophecies soon became the reality of his own life. Just a few months later, in November 1880, an amazing young man moved into the apartment on the same landing as Dostoevsky’s. He would walk up the same narrow staircase and go up to the same floor. Dostoevsky lived in apartment 10, his apartment was 11. He was on the other side of the wall. It would have been impossible for Dostoevsky not to notice him. He was tall and handsome, with the demeanor of a guardsman, olive skin and raven hair. It was Alexander Barannikov, participant in the murder of chief of gendarmes Mezentsov, member of the EC of the People’s Will, part of the plot to blow up the imperial train, the Avenging Angel.

  Next door to Dostoevsky, the truth-loving Alyosha-Karamazovs-turned-terrorist would meet. The people sought all over Russia, the leaders and members of the Great EC, met to plan regicide, the final attempt on Alexander II. They would all face what Dostoevsky planned for his unwritten sequel—regicide and death by execution or in a prison cell.