The World That Never Was (38 page)

The combat unit of the People’s Will had learned the lessons of its failed attacks on the tsar’s train, spread across locations several hundred miles apart, and now focused its attention on a shorter route: that of Alexander’s weekly Sunday excursion from the Winter Palace to his riding school at the Mikhaylovsky manege. A cheese shop was rented on the Malaya Sadovaya, and in the biting cold of early January 1881 a tight-knit team that included Zhelyabov, Vladimir Degaev and Alexander Barannikov set about digging a tunnel from its cellar in order to mine the road. A backup squad would wait by the roadside with hand-held grenades, and Zhelyabov would loiter alone with a concealed dagger, ready to deliver the
coup de grâce
if all else failed.

The tunnelling tested their resources to the limit. The frozen ground made it hard and heavy work, and the old problem of how to dispose of the soil was solved by filling empty cheese barrels. With scant funds to provide stock that would allow the ‘shopkeeper’ to play his role, the barrels at least filled out the storeroom; when a surprise police inspection noticed liquid from the melting earth seeping from between the staves, it was plausibly explained as spilled sour cream. But still they were edgy. When Barannikov was apprehended, the knowledge that they would all be exposed to immediate arrest if he broke under interrogation drove morale even lower.

Then, one day at the end of January 1881, a letter smuggled out of the Peter and Paul fortress was delivered to Vera Figner: a voice from the past that carried an almost mythic force. In the eight years since Sergei Nechaev’s capture and incarceration in the Alexeyevsky Ravelin, shackled in solitary confinement on the tsar’s express instructions, little had been heard of him. Some assumed that he had been left to die, after striking a police general who had visited Nechaev’s cell to recruit him as a spy. Now it was clear that not only had he survived but had retained enough of his guile to capture the sympathy of all the prison guards,
and establish communication through one of them with the outside world.

The first request Nechaev sent Figner to pass on to the executive committee of the People’s Will was that a team be assigned to break him out of prison. On learning that the resources committed to the assassination plot made this impossible, ‘The Eagle’, as he named himself, nimbly assumed a more selfless and flattering tone: though awed by their boldness, he would like to offer the benefit of his tactical expertise. Zhelyabov, he suggested, should assume the position of ‘Revolutionary Dictator’ once the established political order was overturned. But first, he said, they must ‘Kill the tsar!’

When Nechaev’s orchestration of the murder of his rival Ivanov had come to light back in 1870, many young radicals had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and exonerate his crime as a fine example of ruthless necessity in a greater cause. For those populists who had themselves now abandoned the moral scruples that had guided their action during the intervening years, something like their original assessment of Nechaev again pertained. ‘There remained only an intelligence that had retained its lucidity in spite of years of imprisonment, and a will that punishment had failed to break,’ Figner would later enthuse of her new correspondent. His smuggled approval was a decisive factor, perhaps, in light of the new shocks that the terrorists would face as the moment for action approached. For on Friday, 27 February (Old Style), only two days before the date scheduled for the attack, Zhelyabov was arrested, betrayed by a colleague who had turned informant to save his own life when awaiting trial the previous autumn.

With the entire project thrown into jeopardy, an emergency meeting of the core conspirators was called for three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. As Sofia Perovskaya minuted the meeting’s urgent resolutions, starting with the recovery of the bomb-making material from her lover Zhelyabov’s apartment, she must have known that success in their enterprise would surely now mean execution for him. The self-control she showed inspired the others to hold their nerve. In Vera Figner’s apartment, hours later, she and Kibalchich settled down to a long, tense night of bomb-making, while Perovskaya slept, emotionally exhausted.

It was hazardous work for tired eyes and shaky hands: cutting to size empty kerosene canisters, before filling them with nitroglycerine to create the impact grenades which Kibalchich had devoted his recent energies to perfecting. One slip and the entire building would have been rubble; wisely, Kibalchich set aside his trademark top hat, lest it fall disastrously
from his head. By daybreak, four neat canisters sat on the table, ready for delivery to the home of Gesia Gelfman, where the designated bomb-throwers had convened. When Figner got there, she was unimpressed to find Frolenko – who was to light the mine’s fuse – shovelling into his mouth a breakfast of bread and salami, washed down with wine. ‘To do what I have to do, I must be in complete control of my faculties,’ he retorted, continuing with what seemed likely to be his last meal. The diary of another accomplice, Grinevitsky, makes plain the bombers’ suicidal intent: ‘I or another will strike the decisive blow…He will die, and with him, us, his enemies and murderers.’

Ever since Goldenburg had named Zhelyabov as the prime mover of the assassination plots, he had topped the ‘Wanted’ lists. News of his arrest came as a great relief to the tsar, who had not spent consecutive nights in the same bed for many weeks, to confound the imminent attempts on his life that anonymous letters regularly threatened. Throughout that time Alexander II had shown courage of a kind for which few at the time gave him credit, determined as he was to fulfil his ‘civilising mission’ and redeem his legacy as the Saviour Tsar: ‘to see Russia set on her peaceful path of progress and prosperity’. With his nemesis now in custody, he had surely approached his crucial meeting with Loris-Melikov that Saturday with a new lightness of spirit. For once, he may even have allowed himself a reprieve from checking faces in the passing crowd against the police album containing photographs of those known to want him dead.

The following morning, when the tsar’s entourage pulled out of the palace and on to the icy streets of St Petersrbug, it took an unusual route, to the home of Grand Duchess Catherine. It was a courtesy visit, at which Alexander would explain to his elderly aunt the groundbreaking package of constitutional reforms that he had agreed with Loris-Melikov the day before, and whose announcement was imminent. The detour taken by the imperial party reduced, at a stroke, the intended three-pronged ambush by the People’s Will assassins to a single point.

Loitering on either side of the road that ran beside the Catherine Canal, the four appointed bomb-throwers must have felt that the bombs concealed beneath their coats rendered them agonisingly conspicuous. Yet by half-past one, when Sofia Perovskaya lifted her handkerchief in warning, and the first horses of the tsar’s Cossack bodyguard appeared, nobody had raised the alarm, nor even paid them the faintest attention.

Nicholas Rysakov was the first to step forward and launch his grenade;
a momentary glimpse of Alexander as he passed was burned into Rysakov’s retina by the blinding light of the explosion that followed a second later, catching the company of guards that followed. Undamaged, but for a few splinters, the imperial sleigh slowed to a halt a few dozen yards further on. From that moment, accounts differ. The loyalist press would later report how the tsar had stepped out and walked calmly back to survey the damage and offer what solace he could to those who lay injured on the road: soldiers with shrapnel wounds, some fatal, and a young boy who would not make it alive to hospital. If these accounts were accurate, it was a brave but disastrous decision.

Approaching the small group clustered around Alexander, Grinevitsky raised the second canister over his head and dashed it down between himself and his target. The blast consumed them both, and left the Tsar of all the Russias crumpled on the ground. His legs shattered, he tried to crawl, hands clawing the compacted snow as his entrails spilled out through a ragged hole ripped through dress uniform and stomach. So pathetic a sight did he present that one of the other assassins instinctively made to help him, only to be pushed back by guards.

His death, less than an hour later, was reported throughout the capitals of Europe before the end of the day. Almost as quickly, his planned programme of reforms was buried as the forces of reaction set about implementing long-cherished plans for repression. Whose purposes the rabid voice of the unseen Nechaev had best served is a matter of opinion: the nihilists may have finally made their point, but the result was to return the initiative to the reactionaries, with Pobedonostsev’s protégé in line to assume the throne as Alexander III. Either way, by the end of the following year Nechaev’s voice was silenced once and for all. The official record would state tuberculosis as the cause of death. However, the aptitude for dissimulation later shown by the reactionary cabal, and by its security chiefs above all, makes it is almost possible to imagine that the letter-writing Nechaev of 1881 never existed at all.

‘We trust that no personal bitterness will cause you to forget your duty or to cease to wish to know the truth,’ Lev Tikhomirov told the new tsar in the manifesto promptly published by the People’s Will. ‘We too have cause for bitterness. You have lost a father. We have lost fathers, brothers, wives, children, and our dearest friends. We are prepared to suppress our personal feelings if the good of Russia demands it; and we expect the same of you …’ It was a bold negotiating tactic, not to say impertinent, and one doomed to failure.

9
Inconvenient Guests

Paris, 1879–1881

The rumbustious political life of France had been temporarily muted by the trauma of the war of 1870 and the revolutionary Commune that followed in 1871. Any trace of the radical ideals out of which the Third Republic had been born, as the Prussian armies closed in on Paris, had been all but erased during the presidency of MacMahon in the years that followed. Even moderate republicans had been sidelined, or else, when electoral success forced their inclusion in government, the slightest challenge to Catholic or conservative interests had seen them dismissed. In early 1879, though, MacMahon retired from office short of his seven-year term, having staked his credibility on a failed campaign to bolster the conservative vote. Nine years after the Third Republic had first been declared, and four years since its legality had been confirmed, the leadership of France was finally delivered into genuinely republican hands.

Installed as prefect of police soon afterwards, the thirty-nine-year-old Louis Andrieux epitomised the hard-headed pragmatism of the incoming administration. A lawyer by training, as a young procurator in 1871 he had backed the suppression of the Lyons commune, and since his election as a republican deputy in 1875 had won influential allies, including Léon Gambetta, the aeronautical politician of the Siege of Paris, for his deft understanding of the need to ensure social stability in a period of political transition. By a remarkable effort of collective will, the country had long since paid off its war reparation, far ahead of schedule, and appeared set on a course of national renewal. Yet as Andrieux took stock of his new responsibilities in the field of law and order, he was all too aware of the dangers and challenges that bubbled away just below the surface.

Against the economic odds, French commerce was thriving, whilst the resumption of Haussmann’s vastly ambitious building plans for the
boulevards of Paris signalled a boom in the construction industry. The night-time streets of the capital glowed with gas lighting, electricity flowed increasingly freely, and the Post Office operated an efficient pneumatic mail system, propelling letters to their recipients within the hour; for those still more impatient to communicate a message, the telephone offered a somewhat limited alternative. In the eyes of the world, too, the Universal Exposition of 1878 had proved that France had regained her confidence and
joie de vivre
, with the Moorish flamboyance of the Trocadéro Palace providing a striking addition to a city more usually bound by strict neoclassical discipline.

With national pride restored, however, the ghosts of the past, stranded in the purgatory of New Caledonia or the French émigré colonies abroad, forced their way back on to the agenda. At the Exposition itself, visitors could clamber, forty at a time, inside one exhibit that seemed to offer a silent rebuke to the unjust treatment of the Communards: the giant iron head of the Statue of Liberty. Designed by the sculptor Bartholdi, engineered by Gustave Eiffel and financed by bold entrepreneurialism, the statue was to be donated to the American people on the centenary of their Declaration of Independence. But among the thousands who attended a benefit opera by Gounod or bought a miniature replica of the sculpture, or the millions who played the ‘Liberty’ lottery to help pay for the gift, a proportion must have marvelled at the irony of celebrating America’s revolutionaries, when France continued to deny its own their freedom.

Writing from Switzerland at the time, Henri Rochefort had coined the term ‘opportunism’ to disparage those timid republicans who procrastinated over the issue, fearful that if they were to address the question of an amnesty for the Communards, the monarchist parties might use their liberalism against them. ‘The Opportunist’, he argued, ‘is that sensible candidate who, deeply affected by the woes of the civil war and full of solicitude for the families which it deprived of support, declares that he is in favour of an amnesty, but that he shall refrain from voting for it until
the opportune time…At the opportune time
is a term of parliamentary slang which means Never!’

The reporter for the committee of deputies, it had been Louis Andrieux himself who finally signed off in 1879 on an agreement for the return of those guilty only of political rather than criminal acts, and so deemed less dangerous to the state. As a succession of ships – the
Creuze
, the
Var
, the
Picardie
, the
Calvados
and the
Loire –
carried the Communards home,
however, his new role as prefect of police seemed ever more a poisoned chalice. Walking among the crowds on the evening of the first Communards’ return from exile, and listening to the speeches delivered by the pitiful straggle of broken convicts, their self-justificatory message, which sought to revise the official version of history, made Andrieux profoundly uneasy. It had been murders by the Versaillais army that had sparked any retributive acts of violence that the Commune of 1871 might have performed, they insisted, and more vengeance was due.