Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Alexander II was every bit the autocrat his father, Nicholas I, had been; he just lacked the same ferocity. Even when he tried to adopt the late emperor’s icy glare, he came off looking more absurd than scary. Still, the son surpassed his father in one significant way. While Nicholas I had pronounced serfdom “an evil, palpable and obvious to all,” Alexander II actually did something about it. On March 3, 1861—nearly two years before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation—the emperor signed the order freeing twenty million of his subjects from centuries of bondage to masters who could beat, rape, and kill them with impunity. And though the measure was more expedient than benevolent—“If we don’t give the peasants freedom from above, they will take it from below,” he had said—it nevertheless earned Alexander II the enduring sobriquet “Tsar-Liberator,” and launched major reforms in the courts and in the army, which had long forced serfs into its ranks to be slaughtered on countless battlefields.

  Yet ultimately the Tsar-Liberator’s efforts failed. Rather than quell dissention among his subjects as he intended, the reforms, and the easing of repression that accompanied them, left the people screaming for more. The most radical among them sought to destroy the monarchy itself. Alexander II became their target, terrorism their weapon. And for the next two decades they hunted him mercilessly. It would take at least seven attempts to kill the emperor—rendering him in the process what one contemporary called “a crowned semi-ruin”—before they finally succeeded in 1881.

  It was April 4, 1866, and Alexander II had just concluded his usual walk through Peter the Great’s Summer Garden. Just outside the park’s ornate wrought-iron fence, a crowd of people had gathered as usual to catch a glimpse of their handsome, bewhiskered sovereign with the benevolent blue eyes as he concluded his stroll. Then, just as the emperor was about to enter his coach, a loud shot suddenly rang out and a young man was seen running from the crowd toward a nearby bridge. His name was Dmitri Karakozov, the son of a nobleman and a member of an underground dissident group. The would-be assassin—his shot apparently deflected by a man standing next to him by the name of Komissarov—was quickly apprehended and brought before the uninjured emperor, who proceeded to interrogate him. “Fellows, I did this for you!” Karakozov reportedly shouted to the bystanders as he was led away.

  News of the tsar’s deliverance from the assassin’s bullet was greeted with patriotic acclaim across the capital, and Osip Komissarov, his savior, became an instant hero, feted as “the humble weapon of God’s providence.” The heir to the throne, the future Alexander III, recorded the celebratory mood of the city: “You can say without mistake that all of St. Petersburg came spilling out onto the street. Traffic, agitation was unimaginable. Running in all directions, primarily toward the Winter Palace, shouts, most of them with the words ‘Karakozov!’ ‘Komissarov!,’ threats and curses for the former, delighted exclamations for the latter. Groups of people, singing ‘God Save the Tsar.’ General delight and thunderous ‘Hurrahs.’ They brought in the man who saved him [Komissarov]. Papa kissed him and made him a nobleman.*1 Another terrific ‘Hurrah.’ ”

  On the day of the assassination attempt, the poet Apollon Maikov recalled fellow writer Fyodor Dostoevsky bursting into his apartment with the news. Maikov asked him if the tsar had been killed, and recorded the response: “No … saved him … he’s fine … But they shot, they shot, they shot!” This, Maikov wrote, “Dostoevsky kept repeating in despair and shock.”

  “The writer understood that, despite the miss, the shot had in fact been a hit,” explained Alexander II’s biographer, Edvard Radzinsky. “Before, the tsars had been killed in the palace, secretly, and they were said to have died peacefully of hemorrhoidal colic or stroke or something. Now, someone had taken a shot at the tsar in public, shattering the inviolable aura of the sacred person that is the tsar. Alexander understood this, too.”*2

  While the rest of Russia celebrated his deliverance, the emperor seethed. In the five years since he had liberated the serfs, youthful agitators had set fires in the streets, issued bloody proclamations, attacked his ministers, and now one of them had actually shot at him. So much for reform; the time had come for reprisal. And while Alexander may have been incapable of approximating his father’s fearsome glare, it appeared he was ready to adopt Nicholas I’s harshest tendencies. Liberals in the government were swept from their ministries. “They are all cosmopolites, adherents of European ideas,” declared General Michael Muravyev, known as “the Hangman” for his brutal suppression of rebellion in Poland. “Now real Russians must come to power!”

  St. Petersburg shuddered when the Hangman was appointed to head the investigation into the attempted murder of the tsar, and a massive corralling of almost everyone suspected of leftist tendencies ensued. As for the assassin and one of his accomplices, both were sentenced to death. After unsuccessfully pleading to the emperor for his life, Karakozov was publicly executed on Semenovsky Square. He fainted on his approach to the gallows and had to be dragged to the noose. His accomplice was just about to suffer the same end when he learned at the last second that his sentence had been commuted to life with hard labor. It was an act reminiscent of Nicholas I’s “benevolence” toward Dostoevsky on the same square almost sixteen years earlier.

  The shock of near assassination was mitigated somewhat by the fact that the emperor was in love—not with the empress, long afflicted with lung disease, but with an enchanting young beauty nearly three decades his junior named Catherine Dolgorukaya, or Katya, as she was called. The besotted monarch, pushing fifty, was often seen squiring his teenage sweetheart on long walks through the park and kissing her under the trees. Eventually he appointed her to the household of the ailing Empress Maria, whose bed he had long abandoned. But unlike the endless parade of other ladies-in-waiting who had been installed just to service the emperor, Katya remained chaste.

  The girl’s steadfast virginity drove the lusty emperor to near madness until finally, in July 1866, two months after the assassin’s bullet missed, she yielded at last. The forbidden fruit lost none of its flavor in the aftermath, as so often happens in such circumstances, and Alexander remained devoted. “When I saw you at a distance in the allée,” he wrote to Katya that August, “my heart beat so hard that I trembled all over and my knees grew weak, and I kept wanting to squeal with joy.” In another note several months later, the emperor further expressed his tender, adulterous sentiments: “Don’t forget that you are my whole life, angel of my soul, and its only goal is to see you happy, as happy as one can only be in this world.”

  The emperor swore to his young love that one day he would make her his wife. In the meantime, though, Katya had to endure all the scrutiny and gossip that inevitably came with her position as royal mistress, but which she found unbearable. Taking pity, Alexander sent her on an extended visit to her brother in Naples. Court watchers immediately assumed the tsar had grown tired of his latest paramour and dismissed her as he had so many before. They were wrong. Alexander’s ardor had only increased in Katya’s absence, so much so that he arranged a secret assignation with her in Paris. It was there, in the midst of that joyful reunion, that the emperor would confront his second assassin.

  The ostensible purpose of the imperial journey to Paris was to attend the opening of the World’s Fair with Europe’s other crowned heads and to lend Russia’s tacit support to France in the face of increasing Prussian aggression. But on the night of his arrival, the tsar slipped away after midnight (much to the consternation of his worried retinue) and indulged in the real reason for his visit. The only time he spent away from Katya thereafter was to perform his official duties—one of which nearly proved lethal.

  Alexander was traveling in an open carriage along the Bois de Boulogne, the French emperor Napoleon III seated beside him, when a man suddenly ran out from the crowd lining the route and fired twice at him. The shots were at dangerously close range, but the assassin had packed too much gunpowder into his pistol, which caused it to expl
ode and misfire. The emperors’ carriage raced off, and the would-be killer was immediately apprehended. It turned out that he was a young Polish émigré named Anton Berezovski, part of a disaffected generation whose homeland had long endured Russia’s brutal occupation. Alexander expected he would be sentenced to death for the heinous crime of attempted regicide, but public opinion in France was firmly with the assassin. Berezovski was given a life sentence, which few doubted would eventually be commuted. Outraged by this insult from the ungrateful French, the Russian emperor immediately switched his allegiance back to Prussia, the armies of which eventually crushed Napoleon III.

  It was while in Paris that Alexander II reportedly had his palm read by a fortune-teller who told him that seven attempts would be made on his life—and that the last one would be successful. If such a meeting did actually take place, the seer’s forecast was certainly accurate. Two attempts had already been made, and there were five more to come.

  A Russian sovereign had to always appear dignified in public to maintain the aura of semi-divinity and invincible majesty associated with the tsar. Yet on April 2, 1879, while fleeing from yet another potential killer, Alexander II appeared anything but regal. He was standing in the square outside the Winter Palace when a tall man approached. He was wearing a long black coat and a cap with a cockade similar to the ones worn by government officials. He saluted to the emperor, and then fired at him. The bullet whizzed just past the tsar, who began to run from his attacker. Another shot was fired by the pursuing assassin, after which Alexander pivoted and switched directions. Then three more shots came, with the proud Russian emperor zigzagging around the square after each one like a hare running for its life. Had it not been so perilous, the scene might actually have been comical. Alexander emerged from it humiliated but unharmed, and the next day celebrated his birthday. “A fine present that was,” he harrumphed.

  Terrorism was clearly taking a toll on the royal family. “I have seen their imperial majesties,” Interior Minister Peter Valuev recorded in his diary two months after the latest assassination attempt. “Around them everything is as it was before, but they are not as they were before. Both left me with painful feelings. The Tsar has a tired look and himself spoke of nervous tension, which he is trying to conceal. A crowned semi-ruin. In an era when strength is needed in him, obviously it can’t be counted on.… You can feel the ground tremble, the edifice about to tumble, but it is as if the residents don’t notice this. The master and the mistress of the house vaguely sense evil but hide their inner terror.”

  Despite the emperor’s efforts to maintain at least the appearance of normalcy, certain aspects of his life were inexorably altered. No longer was he able to roam freely in his own capital without an armed convoy to accompany him. “It’s painful to see that,” wrote Alexandra Bogdanovich, a St. Petersburg hostess. But for Empress Maria, the consequences were perhaps even more pronounced. Not only did she have to suffer a third attempt on her husband’s life—after which she pitifully wailed, “There’s no reason to live.… I can feel this killing me”—but she also had to accept the emperor’s decision to move his mistress, as well as their three children, into the Winter Palace, where he felt they would be safer. It was as if the empress had been officially demoted, and all of St. Petersburg sympathized. As Radzinsky wrote of the reaction in the capital, “Instantly, the story became that Katya and the children were living directly above the empress, and the miserable, sick, and old empress had to listen to the patter of his illegitimate children’s feet over her head.”

  Still, there was something far worse. The terrorists made it clear that their relentless hunt for the tsar would continue. Indeed, the day after the execution of their compatriot who had chased down the emperor in front of the Winter Palace, they issued the following proclamation: “We have picked up the glove thrown at us, we are not afraid of struggle and death, and in the end we will blow up the government, no matter how many may die on our side.” And in pursuit of their sinister agenda, the killers now had a fearsome new weapon.

  It was only a matter of time after Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866 that Russian revolutionaries would adopt it for their own malevolent purposes. Now, instead of shooting the tsar, they would blow him up. The attack was planned for the fall of 1879, when Alexander was to return by train from his annual sojourn in the Crimea.

  There was a routine in the way the emperor traveled by rail, and the terrorists learned just what it was: One train always carried the royal retinue, along with baggage and other supplies, and was followed at some distance by the imperial train—the fourth car of which Alexander always occupied. Armed with this information, along with their deadly new weapon, the assassins rented a home near the tracks in a small town just outside Moscow. From there, they dug a tunnel to a spot directly below the rail bed and planted the bomb.

  On November 19, after the first train of the procession rumbled past, the mine was detonated just as the second passed over it. With that tremendous blast, the fourth car of the imperial train—the tsar’s car—was tossed into the air and came crashing back to earth upside down. But Alexander wasn’t in it.

  “The imperial train usually travels a half hour behind the other one, usually called the retinue train,” explained War Minister Dmitri Milyutin. “This time it went ahead of the retinue train. It was due to mechanical problems with the retinue train. The tsar did not want to wait while they changed the locomotive, and the imperial train went first.”

  The emperor had arrived safely at the Moscow station, where the reverberations from the distant explosion could be heard. “The fourth car of the retinue train had been turned into marmalade,” he was later told. “There was nothing in it but fruit from the Crimea.” Though Alexander had survived the most ferocious attempt on his life yet, there was little comfort to be had. “Am I such a wild beast that they should hound me to death?” he exclaimed in despair.

  “The event of November 19 brought a grim color to our entire stay in Moscow,” Milyutin reported. “We were still under that terrible impression during the trip [back] to St. Petersburg. All measures were taken to protect the imperial train from new dangers. We did not let them know in St. Petersburg when the tsar would arrive. The troops of the imperial garrison, all the officers, officials, and even the imperial family waited for several hours in the streets and at the station, in extremely and unusually cold weather. All telegraph service was suspended. To make matters worse, there was a blizzard in the night. The emperor got to St. Petersburg only around three in the afternoon. He was sad and serious.”

  But there would be no safe haven in the capital—not even in Alexander’s own home.

  On the evening of February 5, 1880, a massive explosion rocked the Winter Palace just as the imperial family prepared to sit down to eat. The timing of the blast—detonated beneath the dining room by a terrorist who had infiltrated the palace posing as a resident carpenter—was synchronized to coincide precisely with the beginning of the dinner hour. Fortuitously enough, there was a slight delay in the usual schedule that evening due to the late arrival of several guests. Otherwise the entire room would have come crashing down around the family as they began to eat what might have been their last meal.

  Instead, the emperor and the rest of the royal family were assembled in a gallery just outside the dining room when the explosion occurred. “The floor rose as if in an earthquake,” recalled Empress Maria’s brother, Prince Alexander of Hesse, who was one of the honored guests that night, “the gas lights in the gallery went out, there was total darkness, and the air was filled with the disgusting odor of gun powder or dynamite.”

  The dining room was almost entirely destroyed. A gaping hole in the wall attested to the power of the bomb; the windows were all blown out, and a thick layer of dust and debris covered everything. Grand Duchess Marie, the emperor’s daughter-in-law (married to his son Vladimir and known to the family as “Miechen”) recalled the horror after “the dining room vanished from our view, a
nd we were plunged into impenetrable darkness.”

  “A poisonous gas filled the room, suffocating us, as well as adding to our horror,” she told the painter Henry James Thaddeus. “How can I possibly describe the agony of mind we suffered, expecting as we did, at any moment, another explosion beneath us! It is impossible—impossible for me to tell or for you to conceive.

  “The impending fear almost made our hearts stop beating as, silent and motionless, we awaited our doom. When the echoes of the explosion died away, a dead silence succeeded, which, united with the darkness prevailing, so dense as almost to be felt, conducted to render our helpless position still more painful and unendurable.”

  The family was frozen in fear, the grand duchess continued in her vivid account. “We dared not to move. There was no escape from the peril which surrounded us.” It was then, she recalled, that “out of the darkness came the clear, calm voice of the Tsar,” who suggested a prayer. Alexander’s voice of authority “relieved the awful strain on our nerves, and brought comfort to our hearts.” Weeping, they fell to their knees in supplication. “How long we remained so, I really don’t know. It seemed an eternity of anguish before the guards appeared with candles little expecting to find us alive.

  “Some of us were nearly demented when the welcome relief arrived, and our feelings were not calmed as we contemplated the awful nature of the destruction we had escaped. A few feet in front of the Tsar was a black chasm, where so short a time before had been the brilliantly lit dining-room filled with servants. Not a trace of it or them remained! It really seemed as if the hand of Providence had delayed the Tsar’s arrival; otherwise we should have shared the same fate. The dim lights of the candles intensified the terrifying aspect of the scene before us, and we hastened to leave it for the comparative safety of our own apartments.

  “The dread of further explosions haunted us like a hideous nightmare during that long and dreary night, whilst the fear of danger to the children nearly distracted me. Never, I pray, may I have to undergo such agony again.”