In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute
character. Several political trials had been brought before high
courts--the trial of ‘the hundred and ninety-three,’ of ‘the fifty,’
of ‘the Dolgúshin circle,’ and so on--and in all of them the same
thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory
workers, preaching socialism to them; socialist pamphlets, printed
abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt--in some
vague, indeterminate way--against the oppressive economical conditions.
In short, nothing was done that is not done in the socialist agitation
in every other country of the world. No traces of conspiracy against
the Tsar, nor even of preparations for revolutionary action, were
found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth
were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that
movement of the years 1870-78, I can confidently say that most of them
would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by
the side of the peasants and the factory-workers, to teach them, to
collaborate with them, either individually or as members of the local
self-government, in any of the thousand capacities in which an educated
and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I
knew the men and say so with full knowledge of them.
Yet the sentences were ferocious--stupidly ferocious, because the
movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too
deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labour for
six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia
for life, was a common sentence. There were such cases as that of a
girl who got nine years’ hard labour and life exile to Siberia, for
giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker: that was all her crime.
Another girl of fourteen, Miss Gukóvskaya, was transported for life to
a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klärchen,
to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Koválsky and his friends when
they were going to be hanged--an act the more natural in Russia, even
from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment
in our country for common-law crimes, and the application of the
death penalty to ‘politicals’ was then a novelty, a return to almost
forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon
drowned herself in the Yeniséi. Even those who were acquitted by the
courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and
North-east Russia, where they had to starve on the government allowance
of six shillings per month. There are no industries in such hamlets,
and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.
As if to exasperate the youth still more, their condemned friends were
not sent direct to Siberia. They were locked up first for a number of
years, in central prisons, which made them envy the convict’s life in
a Siberian mine. These prisons were awful indeed. In one of them--‘a
den of typhoid fever,’ as the priest of that particular gaol said in
a sermon--the mortality reached twenty per cent. in twelve months.
In the central prisons, in the hard labour prisons of Siberia, in
the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the strike of death,
the famine strike, to protect themselves from the brutality of the
warders, or to obtain conditions--some sort of work, or reading, in
their cells--that would save them from being driven into insanity in
a few months. The horror of such strikes, during which men and women
refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and
then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to
the gendarmes. At Khárkoff, the prostrated prisoners were tied up with
ropes and fed artificially, by force.
Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the
boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the
youth. There was a time when not a week passed without disclosing some
new infamy of that sort, or even worse.
Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. ‘In other countries,’
they began to say, ‘men have the courage to resist. An Englishman, a
Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages. How can we tolerate them?
Let us resist, arms in hand, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let
them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death
at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle.’ At
Odessa, Koválsky and his friends met with revolver shots the gendarmes
who came one night to arrest them.
The reply of Alexander II. to this new move was the proclamation of a
state of siege. Russia was divided into a number of districts, each of
them under a governor-general, who received the order to hang offenders
pitilessly. Koválsky and his friends--who, by the way, had killed no
one by their shots--were executed. Hanging became the order of the
day. Twenty-three persons perished in two years, including a boy of
nineteen, who was caught posting a revolutionary proclamation at a
railway station: this act was the only charge against him. He was a
boy, but he died like a man.
Then the watchword of the revolutionists became ‘self-defence:’
self-defence against the spies who introduced themselves into the
circles under the mask of friendship, and denounced members right and
left, simply because they would not be paid if they did not denounce
large numbers of persons; self-defence against those who ill-treated
prisoners; self-defence against the omnipotent chiefs of the state
police.
Three functionaries of mark and two or three small spies fell in
that new phase of the struggle. General Mézentsoff, who had induced
the Tsar to double the sentences after the trial of the hundred
and ninety-three, was killed in broad daylight at St. Petersburg;
a gendarme colonel, guilty of something worse than that, had the
same fate at Kíeff; and the Governor-General of Khárkoff--my cousin,
Dmítri Kropótkin--was shot as he was returning home from a theatre.
The central prison, in which the first famine strike and artificial
feeding took place, was under his orders. In reality, he was not a
bad man--I know that his personal feelings were somewhat favourable
to the political prisoners; but he was a weak man and a courtier,
and he hesitated to interfere. One word from him would have stopped
the ill-treatment of the prisoners. Alexander II. liked him so much,
and his position at the court was so strong, that his interference
very probably would have been approved. ‘Thank you; you have acted
according to my own wishes,’ the Tsar said to him, a couple of years
before that date, when he came to St. Petersburg to report that he
had taken a peaceful attitude in a riot of the poorer population of
Khárkoff, and had treated the rioters very leniently. But this time he
gave his approval to the gaolers, and the young men of Khárkoff were so
exasperated at the treatment of their friends that one of them shot him.
* * * * *
However, the personality of the Emperor was kept out of the struggle,
and down to the year 1879 no attempt was made on his life. The person
of the Liberator of the serfs was surrounded by an aureole which
protected him infinitely better than the swarms of police officials. If
Alexander II. had shown at this juncture the least desire to improve
the state of affairs in Russia; if he had only called in one or two of
those men with whom he had collaborated during the reform period, and
had ordered them to make an inquiry into the conditions of the country,
or merely of the peasantry; if he had shown any intention of limiting
the powers of the secret police, his steps would have been hailed with
enthusiasm. A word would have made him ‘the Liberator’ again, and
once more the youth would have repeated Hérzen’s words: ‘Thou hast
conquered, Galilean.’ But just as during the Polish insurrection the
despot awoke in him, and, inspired by Katkóff, he resorted to hanging,
so now again, following the advice of the same evil genius, Katkóff,
he found nothing to do but to nominate special military governors--for
hanging.
Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists--the Executive
Committee--supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the
educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings,
declared that war against absolutism which, after several attempts,
ended in 1881 in the death of Alexander II.
Two men, I have said already, lived in Alexander II., and now the
conflict between the two, which had grown during all his life, assumed
a really tragic aspect. When he met Solovióff, who shot at him and
missed the first shot, he had the presence of mind to run to the
nearest door, not in a straight line, but in zigzags, while Solovióff
continued to fire; and he thus escaped with but a slight tearing of
his overcoat. On the day of his death, too, he gave a proof of his
undoubted courage. In the face of real danger he was courageous; but
he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination.
Once he shot at an aide-de-camp, when the latter had made an abrupt
movement, and Alexander thought he was going to attempt his life.
Merely to save his life, he surrendered entirely all his imperial
powers into the hands of those who cared nothing for him, but only for
their lucrative positions.
He undoubtedly retained an attachment to the mother of his children,
even though he was then with the Princess Dolgorúki, whom he married
immediately after the death of the Empress. ‘Don’t speak to me of the
Empress; it makes me suffer too much,’he more than once said to Lóris
Mélikoff. And yet he entirely abandoned the Empress Marie, who had
stood faithfully by his side while he was the Liberator; he let her die
in the palace in complete neglect, having by her side only two ladies
entirely devoted to her, while he stayed himself in another palace, and
paid her only short official visits. A well-known Russian doctor, now
dead, told his friends that he, a stranger, felt shocked at the neglect
with which the Empress was treated during her last illness--deserted,
of course, by the ladies of the court, who reserved their courtesies
for the Princess Dolgorúki.
When the Executive Committee made the daring attempt to blow up the
Winter Palace itself, Alexander II. took a step which had no precedent.
He created a sort of dictatorship, vesting unlimited powers in Lóris
Mélikoff. This General was an Armenian, to whom Alexander II. had
once before given similar dictatorial powers, when the bubonic plague
broke out on the Lower Vólga, and Germany threatened to mobilize her
troops and put Russia under quarantine if the plague were not stopped.
Now, when he saw that he could not have confidence in the vigilance
even of the Palace police, Alexander II. gave dictatorial powers to
Lóris Mélikoff, and as Mélikoff had the reputation of being a Liberal,
this new move was interpreted in the sense that the convocation of a
National Assembly would soon follow. However, no new attempts against
his life having been made immediately after that explosion, he regained
confidence, and a few months later, before Mélikoff had been allowed to
do anything, the dictator became simply a Minister of the Interior.
The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during
which Alexander II. reproached himself with the reactionary character
his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of
tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, filling Mélikoff with despair.
Then he would ask his minister, ‘When will your constitutional scheme
be ready?’ But if, two days later, Mélikoff said that it was ready, the
Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Did I mention it?’ he
would ask. ‘What for? We had better leave it to my successor. That will
be his gift to Russia.’
When rumours of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake
something, in order to give satisfaction to the Executive Committee;
but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he
turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. At
any moment Mélikoff expected dismissal.
In February 1881 Mélikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by
the Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any
amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II. decided that a sort of
consultative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called.
Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI., he
described this gathering as an _Assemblée des Notables_, like the
one convoked by Louis XVI. before the National Assembly in 1789. The
scheme had to be laid before the council of state, but then again he
hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a
new warning by Lóris Mélikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before
the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was
asked by Mélikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being
immediate danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He
wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Hélène
Pávlovna, who had been one of the leaders of the reform party in 1861),
and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to
the memory of the Empress Marie. He is said to have told her, ‘_Je me
suis décidé à convoquer une Assemblée des Notables_.’ However, this
belated and half-hearted concession had not been announced, and on his
way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad
carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded.
Rysakóff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although
the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying
that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he
insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him
to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done
with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna,
doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête.
He approached Rysakóff and asked him something; and as he passed close
by another young man, Grinevétsky, who stood there with a bomb,
Grinevétsky threw the bomb between himself and the Tsar, so that both
of them should be killed. Both were fearfully wounded, and lived but a
few hours.
There Alexander II. lay upon the snow, abandoned by every one of his
followers! All had disappeared. It was some cadets, returning from the
parade, who lifted the dying Tsar and put him in a sledge, covering his
shivering body with a cadet mantle. And it was one of the terrorists,
Emeliánoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the
risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets
to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander the Second’s life. People could
not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much
for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists.
To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of
Alexander II. and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse
of his complex personality, and seen in him a born autocrat, whose
violence was but partially mitigated by education, a man possessed of
military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, a man
of strong passions and weak will--it seemed that the tragedy developed
with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last
act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address
us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had
ordered the first executions in Poland.