Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  He saw how his court had aged over the quarter century. The sagging powdered flesh of the ladies-in-waiting, draped in diamonds and pearls, the quivering fat jowls of the officials drooping onto their golden epaulets. The women were dry and comically tall, the gentlemen had slumped under the weight of their years. And all those old people could not forgive Katya’s youth or his youthful happiness.

  Preparations for a dynastic revolt continued apace. It was not a simple matter. Empresses were crowned when their husbands were crowned, with only one exception. The second wife of Peter the Great, Catherine (the cook of Pastor Gluck), was crowned separately. After the coronation, her children born before their marriage were legitimized and took on the rights of Peter’s legitimate children. Her daughter Elizabeth later became empress. This precedent and the ceremony were studied closely on Alexander’s command.

  Tertii Filippov, an acknowledged expert on Church history, was sent to Moscow to search in the archives for material on the coronation of Catherine I. He had to hurry, because court rumor put the coronation of Princess Yuryevskaya in August 1881.

  Alexandra Tolstaya, a lady-in-waiting, wrote: “Alexander II spent the last fourteen years of his life outside the laws of God and morality…. It was definitely known that the tsar was thinking of the coronation of Princess Yuryevskaya, the model and precedent for the coming event was the coronation of Catherine! The archives were rummaged in the search of promising documents…. Everyone kept silent, but in their hearts they all thought approximately the same way: what would happen to the tsarevich and his wife, whose position was already intolerable? Could they accept the humiliating role intended for them when even we, myself included, tried to avoid her, not knowing where to apply but determined not to put up with the offensive new order. The situation was more than tragic. It seemed hopeless—no way out or salvation ahead.”

  Pobedonostsev and the retrograde party, abandoned by the heir, watched events unfold in desperation. The heir may have been broken now, but he might return to them—in his heart he was with them. But now they saw that he might no longer be the heir. If these members of the great Byzantine autocracy wanted to continue to exist, they had to act fast.

  The sentiment that the princess was destroying the empire was repeated more and more frequently in society and especially in the St. Petersburg salons. The Armenian count Loris-Melikov, they said, was using her to push his destructive projects on the tsar in exchange for supporting the terrible idea of crowning her empress. The retrogrades saw nothing but the tsar’s weakness, his old man’s whining, his trembling hands, his continual sadness, and how his aides were managing him.

  But it was just the opposite. He had become powerful again. If the war had aged him, love had returned his youth. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich had commented that he behaved like an eighteen-year-old and that she had fallen in love with a handsome, cheerful, kind man. Pobedonostsev himself had said, “The tsar looked pleased and happy and was voluble.”

  To the retrogrades, their fears meant that it was time to change the ruler. Quickly.

  The old ladies-in-waiting were quitting en masse, rather than serve the “odalisque.” The poet Tyutchev had a third daughter, Daria, who also was a lady-in-waiting. She left “so as not to spit in the face of Princess Yuryevskaya,” who dared to settle into the rooms of the “sainted” late empress. When she was leaving the palace, she had a conversation with Alexandra Tolstaya, who also “suffered from hopelessness.” Daria Tyutcheva, sister of Pobedonostsev’s correspondent Ekaterina Tyutcheva, said something amazing to Tolstaya: “Remember what I tell you: I have an accurate premonition that everything will change. I don’t know what will happen, but you will see that in three or four months all the dirt will be swept out of the Winter Palace.”

  Since her enormous prophecy did take place, we can only wonder whether she had inside information. The information could have come from her sister, who had confidential letters from Pobedonostsev.

  The sudden death of Dostoevsky marked the rapidly advancing end of a great era. He had welcomed 1881 happily, and his health was markedly good in the first weeks of January. He had had no epileptic fits, and his wife, Anna Grigoryevna, was sure that the winter would pass well.

  Anna Grigoryevna was “the nicest and most rare of writers’ wives,” as a contemporary called her. The young woman had borne everything—the death of her first two children and their terrible financial situation. She was his secretary and stenographer, and she dealt with their creditors. “She followed him like a nanny, like the most caring mother. Their adoration was mutual,” a woman who knew them recorded. The dawn finally broke for them. The publication of The Brothers Karamazov brought him national fame, which reached its apogee with the Pushkin speech. Now his every appearance on stage for fundraisers or readings drew endless ovations. There was hope for material well-being. And then…

  On the night of January 25, as Anna Grigoryevna later related, Dostoevsky’s pen holder fell to the floor and rolled behind the bookcase. “He loved that pen holder not only because he wrote with that pen, but he also used the holder to fill his papirosy with tobacco…. To get it, he had to move the bookcase, which was very heavy. He had to strain, which caused the pulmonary artery to burst and blood poured out of his mouth.”

  It was over in three days. On January 26, they called the doctor, and the writer seemed to improve. But at 4:00 P.M., he hemorrhaged again severely and lost consciousness for the first time. When he came to, he said, “Anya, please get a priest immediately, I want to say Confession and take Communion.”

  His state improved again after Communion and the night passed quietly. On January 27, there was no bleeding. But on January 28, he woke his wife at dawn and said, “You know, Anya, I’ve been awake for three hours, thinking, and it’s become clear to me that I will die today.” Poor Anna Grigoryevna tried to calm him down, but he interrupted, “No, I know that I am to die today. Light a candle, Anya, and give me the New Testament.”

  This was the New Testament given to him by the wives of exiled Decembrists. He often used it for predictions. In the dark winter morning, she lit a candle and he let the book fall open. It was book three of Matthew: “But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.”

  Dostoevsky said very calmly to his wife: “Do you hear—‘suffer it to be so.’ That means I will die.”

  At eleven, the hemorrhage resumed, and he began to die. According to his daughter, he called her and his son Fedya at six. He handed them the New Testament and asked her to read the parable of the prodigal son. Afterward, he said, “Children, never forget what you just heard here. Keep your free faith in God and never despair of His forgiveness. I love you very much, but my love is nothing compared to the endless love of God for all people created by Him…. And remember, if you should ever commit a crime in your life, still do not lose hope in God. You are His children, be as humble before him as before your father, pray to Him for forgiveness, and He will rejoice in your repentance as He rejoiced in the return of the prodigal son.”

  At eight, the death agony began. He lay on the couch in his study, a dark, unattractive room. The church of St. Vladimir, where he was a parishioner, was visible through the window. The writer Boleslav Markevich, who was there for the last minutes of his life, wrote: “He lay fully dressed, with his head back on a pillow. The light from the lamp on a table near the divan fell directly on his forehead and cheeks, white as paper, and the dark-red spot of blood on his chin…. His breath came from his throat in a weak whistle through his feverishly open lips. His eyes were half-shut. He was totally unconscious. The doctor…suddenly bent over him, listened, then unbuttoned his shirt, slipped his hand beneath it and shook his head at me…. It was over…I looked at my watch: it was 8:36.”

  The news of his death traveled through St. Petersburg, and a pilgrimage began to his apartment. R
ussia’s most famous jurist, Koni, who had been chairman at the trial of Vera Zasulich, came to pay his respects. “In the dark, uninviting stairs of the house on the corner of Yamskaya and Kuznechny, where the deceased had lived on the third floor, there were quite a few people headed toward the door with an insulating covering of worn oilcloth. Fedor Mikhailovich lay on a low catafalque, so that his face was visible to all. What a face! It was unforgettable…. It was not the seal of death upon it, but the dawn of a new, better life…I could not tear myself away from contemplating that face, the expression of which seemed to say: ‘Well, yes! It is so—I had always said that it must be, and now I know that it is.’”

  His funeral was an unprecedented event in Russian history. A human sea, thirty thousand people, followed the coffin, seventy deputations carried wreaths, and fifteen choirs took part in the procession. His wife and other witnesses of his death recounted it in detail. But they did not recount the most mysterious aspects of his death.

  If we had followed Koni up the dark uninviting staircase of Dostoevsky’s house to the third floor and went not into the writer’s apartment but the one opposite, number 11, we would have learned about the amazing events that took place there the very same days that Dostoevsky was dying.

  Back in early November 1880, when Dostoevsky was thinking about a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov in which Alyosha Karamazov would become a terrorist, a new tenant had moved into apartment 11, a raven-haired, olive-skinned young man. In the large, seven-room flat, he chose the room that shared a wall with Dostoevsky’s apartment. He was one of the most dangerous Russian terrorists, Alexander Barannikov, the Avenging Angel.

  The EC had selected the apartment for a reason. Dostoevsky had many visitors—galleys were delivered, manuscripts were picked up for printing houses. The revolutionaries coming to see Barannikov were lost in the flow of people headed for the writer’s apartment.

  The author of The Devils now served as a smoke screen for the new “devils,” who were, in fact, the heroes of his next novel. The visitors to Barannikov’s apartment would have been of great interest for this book. The most frequent visitor was Alexander Mikhailov, the head of the People’s Will. He kept track of all the terrorist acts they committed. Another visitor was one of the great beauties of the organization, a tall brunette often dressed in an expensive fox-lined silk pelisse and white goose down and wool scarf, Alexandra Korba, the one who wrote a letter to Dostoevsky before heading to the Balkan war. Despite the general ban on romantic entanglements among members until the revolution, Korba started an affair with chubby Mikhailov, following the example of the passionate relationship between Perovskaya and Zhelyabov.

  And finally, the narrow staircase led the most mysterious member of the People’s Will, whom they called the Guardian Angel, to the apartment of the Avenging Angel. His name was Nikolai Kletochnikov. He was gaunt, with sunken cheeks, not tall, with a duckbill nose, thinning hair, and a muffled voice. To use an image of the times, he was a typical “chancellery rat,” or to use a contemporary one, a cubicle drone.

  “Kletochnikov came to St. Petersburg in late 1878 from Simferopol, where he held a second-rate position in the district court. Before leaving, Kletochnikov had suffered some personal drama. He never told anyone what it was. But his suffering was so bad that he wanted to commit suicide. However, the political events in St. Petersburg in 1878, Vera Zasulich’s shot and her acquittal by a jury, the assassination of the gendarme general Mezentsov—all this so agitated Kletochnikov that instead of suicide he decided to offer his services in a terrorist act to the revolutionaries,” recalled Alexandra Korba.

  Like the failure Mirsky, Kletochnikov was seduced by the fame of the terrorists. The office worker decided to change his life radically. Instead of “the sticks of the provinces and life among clerks who quarreled and drank,” he wanted the danger of an “interesting life.” What could be more interesting than hunting down people, especially in the name of the lofty ideal of the people’s happiness?

  He came to St. Petersburg where he knew two women from home who were enrolled at the higher courses for women at the liberal educational institution created for women when the universities admitted only men. Through them he met Alexander Mikhailov and Alexander Barannikov. “In his eyes they stood on an unattainable peak, and he worshipped them, hoping that they would be models of life and behavior for the rest of humanity…. He regarded Mikhailov and Barannikov as giants who could only be worshipped and whose influence had to be obeyed,” Korba continued.

  Chance sealed Kletochnikov’s fate. His landlady had a close relative who worked in the Third Department. The “giant” Mikhailov came up with a plan. But instead of asking him to fight dangerous battles, Mikhailov asked (rather, ordered) Kletochnikov to try to get a despised office job at the Third Department.

  This was the first mole, an agent of the revolutionaries, in the secret police. For two years (1879 and 1880), Kletochnikov worked in the chancellery of the Third Department—in the very important Third Expedition, which was in charge of political detection.

  When those functions were moved to the Police Department, Kletochnikov became a junior file clerk of that department in December 1880.

  He had a fine calligraphic hand and he was entrusted with the copying of secret papers, and he was put in charge of file cabinets with top secret documents. His coworkers teased him for his assiduousness, his readiness to stay after hours and to do work for his colleagues. Deep into the night, alone in the empty building, Kletochnikov familiarized himself with the files on the desks of his coworkers and in the file cabinets. Thus, the quiet office rat “knew all the political cases in St. Petersburg and all of Russia.”

  His hard work was noted. On April 20, 1880, he was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav. As a chevalier of the order, he told the People’s Will about the plan to send agents provocateurs into their ranks. Thanks to Kletochnikov, Presnyakov stabbed to death Alexander Zharkov, who had been recruited by the Third Department. Kletochnikov also warned them of the betrayal by the miserable terrorist Grigory Goldenberg. They took measures that kept the police from using “Goldenberg’s list.”

  Kletochnikov never took notes at the department. He did not need to. He carried home in his phenomenal memory dozens of names, numbers, and addresses every day, and he reported it all during his meetings with the revolutionaries. At those meetings, Kletochnikov wrote down his information, which Alexander Mikhailov immediately copied, destroying the originals. Kletochnikov visited the apartment of Barannikov, on the other side of Dostoevsky’s wall. There he relaxed after his office work.

  Such interesting people lived next door to Dostoevsky. In December, the heroes of his unwritten novel began preparing for the final act of the Russian drama of the nineteenth century—the murder of Tsar Alexander II.

  Every morning in December, Barannikov left his apartment. Like a dandy flaneur, he wandered around the center of St. Petersburg, looking for something. He found it on Malaya Sadovaya Street—the basement apartment in a building owned by Countess Megden was for rent. Every Sunday the tsar turned down this street—Malaya Sadovaya—toward the Winter Palace from the Mikhailovsky Manege, where he watched the guards parade.

  That fall rumors circulated about the constitution being prepared. Later, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, the killer of Mezentsov, wrote that the People’s Will had not known of the reform. This was his attempt to justify their action before European public opinion. Only he, who was living abroad, might not have known about it. The members of People’s Will living in St. Petersburg knew all about it. In fact, they feared it. This was the great paradox—two opposing forces were equally afraid of reform. The retrograde-nationalists feared the reform that would put an end to autocracy. The revolutionaries feared that Loris-Melikov’s reform would lead the country away from revolution.

  The interests of two hostile parties coincided. They both had to hurry.

  The Trial of the 16, all members of the People’s Will, took place in October 1880
. Five were sentenced to death. The explosions had stopped and the public seemed reconciled. The tsar should have pardoned all five, but Alexander pardoned only three. Two were condemned to the noose. They were Kvyatkovsky, who was involved in the deadly explosion at the Winter Palace, and Presnyakov, who killed the agent Zharkov. Presnyakov, in a shoot-out during his arrest, also killed a doorman, who was an innocent bystander.

  This was the first execution since Mlodetsky had been hanged. Mlodetsky, a terrorist who shot publicly, had been executed right after the monstrous explosion at the palace. But now with the attacks stopped, even those who had demanded blood were no longer furious. People got used to quieter times and forgot attacks and executions. This was a reminder. Kvyatkovsky and Presnyakov were executed publicly on Semenovsky Square.

  Several years earlier, Kvyatkovsky helped Presnyakov escape from prison, and then did not see him again. Now they met on the scaffold. “Both took Communion, both embraced, first with the priest, then, their hands tied, they kissed each other and bowed to the troops…. When Kvyatkovsky was hanged, Presnyakov had tears in his eyes. The same fate awaited him a minute later…. A horrible impression! I’m not very sympathetic to the nihilists, but such a punishment is terrible,” wrote Alexandra Bogdanovich, the general’s wife, in her diary.

  She was seconded by the mistress of another St. Petersburg salon. Elena Shtakenshneider, whose literary coterie included Dostoevsky, wrote, “A sad and bad impression comes from that execution, even for nonliberals.”

  The public execution was the signal the People’s Will was waiting for. The tsar would not play by the new rules, and that gave them the moral right to act. An eye for an eye! “I think we’ll finish him off now,” Alexander Mikhailov declared. The Great EC went into action.