The World That Never Was (37 page)

The 13,000 miles of railway track that had been laid in the preceding decade, financed for the tsar by loans from Western capitalists, must have appeared a terrible affront to the People’s Will, whose members
prided themselves on standing in the vanguard of science and enlightenment. A piece of autocratic sleight of hand, it stole their progressive thunder, dressing cold-hearted reaction in the stuff of forward-looking optimism. For despite representing a practical statement of control and confidence, the expanding railway network was experienced by the tsar’s subjects as a monumental act of generosity that embraced them all. By striking the tyrant down as he raced along these sleek new tracks, using state-of-the art explosives, the People’s Will could symbolically reclaim their rightful place as heirs to the future, while laying bare the tsar’s hubris and vulnerability. In expectation of the tsar’s return from the imperial family’s winter vacation at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, the decision was taken to mine the railway network simultaneously at three points, hundreds of miles apart, covering the most likely permutations in the tsar’s itinerary.

Targeting the first possible route, Vera Figner was dispatched to employ her female wiles to assist one of the radicals in securing a job with the railway company near Odessa. The sob story she told concerned a manservant in St Petersburg who was being sent south in search of fresh air for his consumptive wife. It was an approach fraught with risks, and Figner barely escaped an interview with her first mark, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, with her honour intact; as the governor of the region, the Baltic aristocrat had assumed that her approach implied recognition of his seigneurial rights. Dusting herself off, Figner next aimed lower, enthralling the local railway master with the sleek velvet and swaying peacock plumes of her outfit. Frolenko, the movement’s master of disguise, fresh from springing three revolutionaries from prison by posing as their gaoler, was chosen to take the part of the railway guard and plant the bombs.

Leading the second team, Zhelyabov posed as an industrialist looking to set up a tannery in Alexandrovsk, near the railway boom town of Kharkov. His target was a section of track on the Simferopol–St Petersburg line, the tsar’s most direct route home, along which police patrols passed every three or four hours. Nerves of steel and a high level of concentration were required, and the mere presence of the zealous, charismatic Zhelyabov helped maintain the group’s morale: ‘He was a man who compelled attention at first glance,’ wrote one of his colleagues; ‘he spoke quietly, in a low full bass, with determination and conviction, on the necessity of terror.’ Women succumbed readily to his charms, but in the heroine of the third team, Sofia Perovskaya, he met his match: while she tamed his philandering ways, he won her over from a distrust of men, rooted in hatred for her tyrannical father.

The third route seemed the least likely, as it would require the tsar to divert his journey to Moscow, but Perovskaya and her comrades were not deterred. From the small house they had purchased near the railway line, only a couple of miles out from the Moscow terminus, a fifty-yard-tunnel had to be dug before the middle of November. The men worked in shifts, arriving before daybreak and continuing until the early hours. For weeks on end they edged forward: the bookish Morozov, wilting under the physical effort; the conceited Grigori Goldenburg, at whose hand Dmitri Kropotkin had died, and who insisted on being at the forefront of any action; and Lev Hartmann, one of those freed from prison by Frolenko and since co-opted to the executive committee of the People’s Will. Four others helped too, taking their turn at digging. They advanced a scant four yards each day, inserting props that sagged under the weight of the earth overhead and continually bailing out the water that seeped in, threatening to flood the tunnel. The wet sandy soil they excavated while wedged into the tunnel on their hands and knees, with scarcely room to wield their tools, was scattered as discreetly as possible over the yard outside. Piles of it filled the rooms of the house and its outbuildings, which smelled like a grave. The possibility of collapse loomed large as the tunnel passed beneath a muddy track; even the reinforced props creaked and bowed whenever a laden water cart passed overhead, and the sappers carried poison to ensure a speedy death should they be entombed.

While the men tunnelled, Perovskaya sat cradling a pistol, ready to fire at a bottle of nitroglycerine and blow them all up should the alarm be rung on the upper floor to warn of approaching police. Incidental problems were resolved with a quick wit: clever procrastination when an old resident arrived to retrieve her possessions from the soil-filled shed; a superstitious rant to deter neighbours who came rushing to extinguish a fire; the invocation of a cat with an inexhaustible appetite to explain the quantities of provisions observed entering the house. When a gendarme and local surveyor arrived to assess a mortgage application made by the group to fund the purchase of a drill, Perovskaya’s sangfroid saw them through. And day by arduous day, the intermittent thunder and clack of train wheels sounded out the diggers’ growing proximity to the line, and the approaching moment when their work would be tested.

Then disaster struck. Dispatched to collect a case of dynamite and meet Kibalchich so that the scientist and bomb-making expert could advise him in its use, Goldenburg was arrested; after a mix-up over their
rendezvous, Kibalchich arrived just in time to see him dragged away. Fresh explosives were sourced, but then, at the last moment, the Moscow electricians who had promised to provide Hartmann with the battery needed to detonate the charge haggled over the price. Lacking access to ready cash, Hartmann handed over his engraved gold watch: lavish overpayment and an incriminating error that would nearly cost him dear.

At last, though, everything was set. The three groups waited in feverish anticipation to know which route the tsar would take. At the last minute news came through. Fearing seasickness in rough weather, the tsar had decided against the Odessa route. If Zhelyabov failed, it would be down to the Moscow unit.

It was the night of 19 November 1879. Reeling from lack of sleep, having for months been leading the double life of aspiring businessman and local personality by day and ruthless terrorist by night, Zhelyabov could do no more. Heavy rain had flooded the depression between the high railway embankment and the position from which he would stake out the passing train, leaving him and his collaborators drenched and shivering as they buried their bombs and laid the wires. But as he watched the first decoy train pass and awaited the arrival of the second, as advised by spies in Simferopol, he must have felt confident that his moment of glory was fast approaching. Calmly he counted: one, two, three carriages, then the fourth. Was that the tsar at the window? Timing it perfectly, he pressed the lever. Nothing, save the sound of the train rolling on, uninterrupted. The bomb had failed to detonate.

On the outskirts of Moscow, Hartmann had dismissed the rest of the team: he and Sofia Perovskaya would stay on alone, two respectable citizens in their home, to all appearances: she with the honour of giving the signal, he to fire the charge that would kill the tsar. ‘Price of flour two rubles, our price four’ read the coded telegram that had arrived earlier, locating their target. Deep into the evening they too waited, as Zhelyabov had done a few hours before, allowing the first train to pass. But this time, as the fourth carriage of the second train drew level, the detonator was triggered. A deafening explosion of earth and the wrenching of steel. Then sudden pandemonium. It was a ghastly scene. Amidst the wreckage of the fourth carriage, sticky red ooze covered everything; only after the initial shock subsided and the sweet smell of preserved fruit began to pervade the air did onlookers realise that it was merely a bloodbath of jam, being shipped from the Crimea to supply the pantries of the imperial palaces. The tsar had
changed trains just before his departure and had already arrived safely in Moscow.

Alexander II’s relief would be short-lived. In February, a devastating explosion tore through the Winter Palace, killing eleven soldiers who were standing guard and injuring fifty others. Only his decision to extend a meeting elsewhere in the building with Alexander of Battenberg, the new puppet king of Bulgaria, saved him. The dining hall in which they were to have met was destroyed by a blast from the kitchens below, where a lone People’s Will bomber had planted dynamite that he had brought in stick by stick over several weeks, under cover of his job as a carpenter. The terrorists’ deadly game could not be allowed to continue, but how to stop it?

Differences over security policy divided the Russian elite, drawing out latent suspicions and personal resentments among those closest to the tsar. To restore the people’s faith in the tsar as their friend and protector, liberal reforms were proposed most ardently by Alexander’s mistress, Catherine Dolgorukaya. Pregnant with the fourth of his illegitimate children, with secret apartments reserved for her use in the royal palaces, the failing health of the tsarina made Dolgorukaya’s position a strong one. But for the hardliners grouped around the tsarevitch and his mentor, Constantine Pobedonostsev, newly appointed as chief procurator of the Orthodox synod, the solution lay in ever more draconian repression to crush all seditious elements that threatened the status quo. And they were in do doubt about where the greatest danger lay.

After the Turkish War had ended ingloriously for Russia, and the terms of the Berlin Treaty had damaged her national interest, the novelist Dostoevsky had written of the British prime minister, Disraeli, as a tarantula who ‘used the Turks to crucify Slav brothers in the Balkans’. The military intervention he had ordered was not the self-interested act of a Great Power, but one facet of a greater Jewish conspiracy. Reflecting on the state of Russia in a letter to Dostoevsky, Pobedonostsev saw its tentacles closer to home too. ‘The Yids’, he ranted, ‘have invaded everything, but the spirit of the times works in their favour. They are at the root of the Social Democratic movement and tsaricide. They control the press and the stock market …They formulate the principles of contemporary science, which tends to dissociate itself from Christianity.’ Anti-Semitic measures should, both men clearly believed, be central to the tsar’s political agenda.

The chosen instrument of their hard-line policy was to be Count Loris-Melikov, whose capture of the city of Kars had been a rare high point in the recent war. Since succeeding the assassinated Dmitri Kropotkin as Governor General of Kharkov he had demonstrated a welcome ruthlessness, winning over even those who saw him as an Armenian parvenu. His advocates were stunned, however, when having been appointed chief of the Supreme Administrative Commission, he adopted a decidedly liberal slate of policies that aimed to tackle the causes of discontent as much as its consequences. It marked a major shift from the attitude that had prevailed previously, when members of the Kharkov
zemstvo
, the people’s representatives, were sent to Siberia for petitioning the tsar to ‘grant his own faithful servants what he had granted the Bulgars’: a constitutional settlement. Nor was Loris-Melikov deterred from pursuing the tsar’s new ‘civilising mission’ when, only days after his appointment, an assassin’s bullet glanced harmlessly off the cuirass he wore beneath his regular uniform, and lodged in the fur collar of his coat.

Initially, at least, the strategy appeared to bear fruit. The executive of the People’s Will promptly called off two bomb attacks against the tsar, including one for which a hundredweight of explosives had already been positioned in the Catherine Canal in St Petersburg, and indicated that a permanent ceasefire could be secured by concessions on constitutional reform. But whilst Loris-Melikov embarked on a series of consultations with interested parties, the People’s Will were offered no place in the dialogue, and their fragile faith in his good intentions began to break down. The high price of trusting the authorities was soon amply illustrated by the Third Section’s unscrupulous manipulation of the captured Goldenburg. Placed in a cell with a turncoat radical, to soften him up, he succumbed to his interrogators’ persuasive assurances that only the threat of continued violence was preventing reforms. Those comrades whose names he divulged were promptly rounded up. Realising he had been duped, Goldenburg committed suicide.

When the Trial of the Sixteen in October 1880 resulted in the execution of three members of the People’s Will for conspiracy, their friends resolved that it was no longer enough merely to have demonstrated the seriousness of their intent: they must achieve their threatened objective. The vote for the renewal of hostilities, pitilessly forced through by the group’s female members, came at a moment of heightened vulnerability for the tsar. Loris-Melikov’s bold initiative to disband the Third Section, and so bring an end to its counterproductive heavy-handedness, had inevitable consequences for the security of the tsar, while the secrecy
surrounding his relationship with his mistress compounded the problem. When the ageing Wilhelm Stieber had passed on advance intelligence about the Winter Palace bomb plot from his spies in Geneva, for example, it was concern that Catherine Dolgorukova’s residence in the Winter Palace should not be revealed that had led the tsar to refuse a search of his private quarters. After she became Alexander’s wife as the ‘Princess Yurievskaya’ within a month of the tsarina’s death in June 1880, she would attempt to safeguard his life, wheedling for him to take a winter holiday in Cairo, to be followed by his abdication; but her efforts were in vain.