Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  After their failure on Kamenny Bridge, Mikhailov decided to continue the general scheme: blow up the tsar on one of his habitual routes. The new team included Sofia Perovskaya and two very young men, both students, Ignati Grinevitsky and Nikola Rysakov. “Our team had to determine the time and the streets…the tsar used for his travels in the city,” according to Perovskaya.

  They learned that he traveled by carriage, surrounded by six riders from His Majesty’s Cossack Convoy. They traveled at great speed. The routes during the week changed frequently. But the Sunday route was inflexible. At noon, the tsar went to the Mikhailovsky Manege for the changing of the guard and parade. The time of his departure was fixed and he was always punctual. Then he returned to the Winter Palace, and there were only two ways: via Malaya Sadovaya Street and via the Catherine Canal.

  At a meeting in late November, the observers summed up the situation. The emperor could be killed easily on a Sunday during his regular return from the Manege. Sofia Perovskaya noted that when he used the Catherine Canal, the driver had to slow the racing horses down to a walk when they reached the turn. “That’s the best place. A bomb can be thrown accurately at that moment…. As for his return through Malaya Sadovaya Street [which was more frequent], that is in the center of town and there are many police agents about. It is better to mine the basement of one of the buildings on that street, and blow up the tsar’s carriage from there.”

  That was why Barannikov looked for a basement on this street. They decided to turn the rented basement into a cheese store, and to start digging under the street. The parts of the married owners of the store were played by a nobleman and former landowner in Pskov named Semyon Bogdanovich and another member of People’s Will, Anna Yakimova.

  Bogdanovich looked like a Russian merchant, with a reddish beard and broad red face. He called himself Evdokim Kobozev, a merchant from Voronezh, and he and his wife moved in to the flat on Malaya Sadovaya, where they started selling cheese.

  Settled in their store, the revolutionaries decided to start digging in January. That same month an event occurred that would have been of great interest to Dostoevsky. The heroes of his unwritten novel got a letter from the protagonist of a published novel: “The devil” Nechaev wrote a letter to the People’s Will. The letter was momentous and they debated it hotly.

  He had been resurrected from oblivion, buried in a solitary cell several years earlier. This amazing person had managed to influence the guards—the guards of the main prison citadel of Russia, the secret Alexeyevsky ravelin in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Through the tiny window of the cell door, Nechaev talked to the bored guards. The former teacher of religion knew how to speak to simple soldiers. He explained that he was a holy martyr, suffering for the people and obeying Christ’s commandment to serve the poor. He did not fail to instill belief in his mysterious power, either. He demonstrated it, when he slapped the chief of gendarmes, the adjutant general Alexander Potapov, who then kneeled before him. After that, Nechaev could tell the soldiers stories about his high protectors, that the heir himself was behind him, and that Nechaev belonged to the heir’s party and that was why he was being persecuted. He told them this was just a temporary setback and the party of the true, Orthodox tsarevich would soon vanquish the Antichrist Alexander II.

  The guards began referring to their prisoner as “our eagle.”

  Nechaev sent the soldiers to deliver his letter to the People’s Will. They believed that they were bringing it to associates of the crown prince’s party. It arrived in January, the last month of Dostoevsky’s life. “One crackling frosty night,” Vera Figner recalled, they read the letter in a secret apartment. Nechaev addressed it “as a revolutionary fallen from the ranks to comrades still at liberty.” Figner said, “Nechaev’s letter was very businesslike—simply and directly Nechaev raised the question of his liberation.”

  “Let’s free him!” everyone there cried with “extraordinary spiritual enthusiasm.” They discussed fantastic scenarios for his escape: through the sewers during outdoor recreation for prisoners or after the guards loyal to Nechaev kidnapped members of the royal family during services at the Cathedral of Peter and Paul near the graves of the Romanov dynasty. They wrote back to him with their plans. The “Alyosha Karamazovs” began corresponding with “The Devil.”

  When Nechaev learned that they were planning to kill the tsar, he wrote: “Forget about [my escape] for the time being and get on with your work, which I will watch from afar with the greatest interest.” Like the members of the People’s Will, he believed that the people would rise up after the death of the tsar.

  Vera Figner recalled, “That letter had an amazing impact: everything that had lain on Nechaev’s character like a dark spot…all the lies that enfolded Nechaev’s revolutionary image had vanished. [The lies were the death of the student Ivanov, his provocations with proclamations that sent many young people to prison, his use of compromising materials for blackmail, and so on.] What remained was his intelligence, undimmed by many years of isolation; his will remained, unbent by the weight of the punishment; his energy, unbroken by the misfortunes of his life.”

  They now saw him as a hero. Once they had been impossibly far from Nechaev, but now they had grown closer. They had been executing the program of his Catechism for some time. As he had dreamed, they created a terrorist organization, based on total subordination. As he had called for, they learned to kill the innocent along with the guilty, persuading the enemies of the revolution with dynamite, and as he had taught, they had penetrated “all institutions and even the Winter Palace.”

  Nechaev’s reasoning, “The worse life is for people, the better it is for the revolution,” had become their morality. That was why Loris-Melikov’s transformations frightened them, and why they were in a hurry to kill the tsar.

  On the eve of the death of the author of The Devils, the novel’s protagonist mocked its creator. The novel’s epigraph about demons that were cast out from people and into pigs now seemed like a joke. The devils had possessed Russia’s youth, and the Bolshevik revolution was not far off.

  On the morning of January 25, an icon of St. George and a votive light were displayed in the window of the cheese shop. The next window, of the shop owner’s apartment, was tightly shuttered.

  This was a significant morning—they were starting to tunnel under the street. Taking off the wooden cover, they exposed the brick and mortar wall. The revolutionaries picked up sledgehammers and went at it: Andrei Zhelyabov, Semyon Bogdanovich, and Alexander Barannikov, who came to do the honors. After breaking through the wall, Barannikov went to visit Fridenson, another member of the group. But Fridenson had been arrested the night before, and the police had set up a trap in his rooms.

  Barannikov was caught when he entered. Once they got his identification, the police searched his room, next door to Dostoevsky. They set up a trap there, as well.

  Dostoevsky, a man of nocturnal habit, was usually awake after midnight. The walls were not very thick in the cheap building, so he had to have heard the noise of the search. It was during the search on the other side of the wall that Dostoevsky’s pulmonary artery burst, causing the hemorrhage.

  The next day, January 26, as Dostoevsky suffered, the first victim was caught in the police trap next door—a People’s Will member named Nikolai Kolotkevich. There is a police report on his noisy arrest: “In house 5/2 on the corner of Yamskaya Street and Kuznechny Alley, apartment No. 11, on this date at 4 o’clock an unknown man arrived…. He was asked by officer Yakovlev to go to the police precinct…. After which the unknown man asked to be let go, offering money. At the precinct the unknown man refused to identify himself or his residence.”

  Kolotkevich’s being taken away in the police coach could be seen from Dostoevsky’s study. Dostoevsky’s severe hemorrhaging began just at that time.

  Thus, the first signs of Dostoevsky’s fatal illness appeared during the search of Barannikov’s apartment, and the main symptoms occurred right af
ter Kolotkevich was arrested. Are these things coincidental? Many theories are possible.

  One is that the search and arrest of the young revolutionaries were a vivid reminder of his own arrest in his youth. The impressionable and ailing Dostoevsky began to hemorrhage.

  There is another theory, very dark and even fantastic.

  Dostoevsky, who was planning a novel about a terrorist, knew about his neighbor. He met the People’s Will group even before Barannikov had moved in. The archives of the People’s Will have a residency permit issued by the police to another member of the Great EC, Alexandra Pavlovna Korba. It stipulates that she was issued a permit to live in building 5/2 in November 1879. The People’s Will beauty lived in Dostoevsky’s building a year before Barannikov moved in.

  It might be that Dostoevsky met the revolutionaries in 1879, through Korba, who had written to him years ago. There would not have been anything particularly unusual in this. The People’s Will members maintained amicable relations with some liberal writers. But could young radicals be friends with the author of The Devils?

  Even though they hated the novel, revolutionary young people always treated Dostoevsky with great trust. The writer E. P. Letkova-Sultanova, part of revolutionary and narodnik circles, explained that despite The Devils, radical youth perceived Dostoevsky as “a former revolutionary and convict, a humanist artist of genius, the defender of the humiliated and injured…. They acknowledged his right to be a teacher and to address society as its judge.” That was why the narodnik and future terrorist Korba wrote to him. Young radicals attempted to carry leg irons in Dostoevsky’s funeral procession, but the police confiscated them.

  But would the author of The Devils have dealt with the young madmen?

  Dostoevsky, who had almost paid with his life for his convictions, understood the tragedy of these noble young people. “Sacrificing yourself and everything for the truth is the national trait of this generation. May God bless it and send it an understanding of the TRUTH. For the question is exactly that: what is to be considered the truth.”

  He fought with them for their own sake, “for a correct understanding of the truth.” That was why he wrote The Devils, for which they came to hate him. That was why he wanted to write a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov, in which the story of Alyosha, whom they loved, would open their eyes. That was why he needed to know the heroes of his new book personally. And that was why the young radicals and the writer who planned to write about them were quite likely to meet. That may even be why Barannikov rented an apartment in Dostoevsky’s building.

  The handsome idealist turned terrorist who had fought in Montenegro’s war against the Turks (a war Dostoevsky considered holy)—how interesting Barannikov must have been for the writer. But once Dostoevsky got to know them, he might have accidentally learned their plans to blow up the Winter Palace. If that were the case, then his odd conversation with Suvorin becomes explicable. He had said, “Just imagine that we are standing in front of the windows of the Datsiaro [a store on Nevsky Prospect that sold art] 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?” He had answered his own question: “I would not.” And explained it this way: “The liberals would not forgive me. They would torment me and bring me to despair.”

  This is a very weak and unimaginative explanation for the mutinous Dostoevsky. He had gone against the current all his life and he never tired of fighting the liberals. He served “only Christ.” There may have been another reason that he did not dare give in: He could not send the young people who trusted him to their death. It would explain why he was tormented during his conversation with Suvorin and why he told him that he was going to write a novel about Alyosha Karamazov as a terrorist.

  If Dostoevsky had had some of the People’s Will literature in his study, for his research, the nighttime search in Barannikov’s apartment would have made him destroy it hastily. He would have moved heavy furniture, which might have brought on the hemorrhage. The arrest of Kolotkevich, too, would have shaken the former prisoner completely. The possibility of exposure of his ties to the terrorists would mean a new and final collapse of his life. It might have caused the fatal hemorrhage. Of course, all this is pure speculation, that the “devils” on the other side of the wall directed the death of their creator. What is indisputable is that Dostoevsky’s death was a prologue to a fateful turn in Russian history.

  During the frighteningly successful work of the Executive Committee, people kept wondering how they were getting away with it and why the police could not capture them. As Vera Figner recalled, the EC in fact had twenty-four members plus five hundred active party members. They were up against the famous Third Department with its huge staff, plus the army and the prison system.

  The most popular answer was that this was the first time that the tsarist police had to deal with professionals, instead of mere students. The professional revolutionaries proved the might and invulnerability of terrorism.

  But General Loris-Melikov apparently attributed the success of the terrorists to other causes. After studying the two sensational actions of the EC—the explosion on the railroad and the explosion in the Winter Palace—he correctly assessed the suspicious carelessness of the Third Department. He did not trust the Third Department and wanted to reform it. That is why he created a structure that duplicated the work of the Third Department.

  In the spring of 1880, the city governor was given the right to search and arrest people for political crimes in St. Petersburg on the same terms as the Third Department. Now the Third Department (and after its transformation. the Police Department) learned about searches and arrests post-factum.

  Suddenly, the “great conspirators” stopped succeeding. On July 24, 1880, officials captured the elusive Alexander Presnyakov, who participated in blowing up the royal train and had murdered an agent of the Third Department. Later the “poet of conspiracy,” the head of the party Alexander Mikhailov, was arrested. Mikhailov was the party’s historian. Here is how his lover, Alexandra Korba, described his failure. “He sought out pictures of everyone who died for the liberty and happiness of the people. He gathered material on them, he did not want them to remain unknown in the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia…. He was arrested when he went into a photographer’s shop to pick up the photos he had ordered of the arrested members of People’s Will Kvyatkovsky and Presnyakov. The shop was on Nevsky Prospect. Its owner was an agent of the secret police. When Alexander Mikhailov had come the day before to find out about the photos, the wife of the photographer and spy stood behind her husband’s chair, gave Mikhailov an anxious look and moved her hand across her neck, to let him know that he was in danger of being hanged…. That same day the Administrative Commission met and the members of the Commission were indignant and made him promise that he would not return to the dubious photography shop. He gave his word.” Yet he went. “He probably thought that not picking up the photos would be cowardly,” wrote Korba, who knew him well.

  He was arrested at the shop. The childish fecklessness of the Genius of Conspiracy is astonishing. But that strange fecklessness was typical of other “professionals” as well. Here is how Kibalchich, the chief dynamiter of the People’s Will, behaved: “During the organization of the explosion of the royal train, he was carrying the explosive in a worn suitcase. He was sleepy. While waiting for the train, he fell asleep on a bench in the waiting room…. Martial law was in effect, and in anticipation of the tsar’s return from Yalta, there were all kinds of officials at the train station; spies were everywhere, peering into people’s faces. Kibalchich was illegal then, and it was easy to recognize him from photographs, since he had already served time in prison. He lay there, face upward, noticeable because of his pose and his suitcase und
er his head…. That time, fortunately, nothing happened,” recounted a People’s Will member named Deich.

  They seemed strikingly unprofessional, those outstanding professionals from a secret organization. No sooner had Loris-Melikov created another institution doing the work of the Third Department than their “luck” went away. They were caught one after another, quite unprofessionally.

  The police set a trap in Fridenson’s apartment. The conspirators, it turned out, had no sign to warn of danger, a commonsense precaution. So the previously elusive EC member Barannikov showed up there and was arrested. They immediately set up a trap at Barannikov’s. There were no secret signals there, either. The next terrorist fell into the trap—also a member of the Great EC, Kolotkevich. This professional carelessly carried around secret documents. They confiscated the top secret bylaws of the People’s Will, the program of the Executive Committee, and his address book with notations on how to make explosives.

  Now there was a trap at Kolotkevich’s apartment, which also lacked danger signals.

  As Alexandra Korba wrote, “Our comrades had become lax about using warning signs. Neither Barannikov nor Kolotkevich had their signals in order, and that led to the loss of Kletochnikov.”

  The legendary Kletochnikov, the Guardian Angel of the People’s Will, was in danger. Kolotkevich, who had been arrested, was his contact. Kletochnikov gave him information from the Police Department. Kolotkevich had been arrested by the city governor’s agency, and the news of the arrest reached the Police Department only after the fact. The EC knew that Kletochnikov would not be aware of the arrest and would come to Kolotkevich’s apartment, only to be arrested.

  He had to be warned. Someone would have to go to the Police Department and wait for him to come out. Someone would have to hurry to his apartment, someone would have to wait for him along the way to the Kolotkevich’s place. Their invaluable Guardian Angel had to be protected. They had Alexandra Korba go to his house.