The Last Tsar (13 page)

Nicholas left to join his family at Tsarskoe Selo.

The night before the march they started to pass out bullets in the barracks. The route Gapon had devised made the march an extraordinarily
convenient target. First aid stations were readied, and Gapon gave his final speech to the workers. The police provocateur called on the workers to go to the palace.

Thus was readied Bloody Sunday.

In the morning, thousands of people set out for Palace Square. Portraits of the tsar floated over the crowd, which included many children. In the lead was Gapon. Troops waiting on the approaches to the square ordered the march to disperse. But the people did not believe them. Gapon had promised that the tsar was awaiting them. So they stepped onto the square. Shots rang out. More than a thousand were killed and two thousand wounded. Children’s corpses lay in the snow. In the afternoon sledges dispersed throughout the city with corpses tied down by ropes.

The night after the firing Gapon addressed the workers: “Blood brothers. Innocent blood has been shed! The bullets of the tsar’s soldiers … have riddled our portraits of the tsar and killed our faith in him. We must take revenge for our brothers on the tsar, cursed by the people, and on all his wicked breed, the ministers, and all the plunderers of the unhappy Russian land. Death to them….”

“The tsar, cursed by the people”—this is what the Police Department provocateur had written. Bullet-riddled portraits of the tsar.

At Tsarskoe Selo the police reported to Nicholas that he had been spared mortal danger, that the troops had had to fire in defense of the palace, as a result of which there had been casualties—two hundred people.

That is how the police version of the event and official figures were created for the tsar. He recorded in his diary:

“9 January, 1905. A difficult day! In Petersburg there were serious disturbances … as a consequence of the workers’ desire to get to the Winter Palace. The troops had to fire, and in various places in the city many were killed and injured. Lord, it is so painful and hard!”

Later two dozen workers were brought to Tsarskoe Selo. They spoke loyal words to the tsar. Nicholas uttered a speech in response, promising to satisfy their needs and wants. He was very distressed over the two hundred victims on Palace Square.

He never did find out what happened.

In a single morning a new image of him was created: Nicholas
the Bloody. From then on, that is what lovers of freedom would call him.

“Any child’s cap, or mitten, or woman’s scarf pitifully abandoned that day in the Petersburg snows became a reminder of the fact that the tsar must die, the tsar would die” (the poet Osip Mandelshtam).

Bloody Sunday was one of the chief causes for the future vengeance of the revolution, a prologue to the murder of the tsar’s family.

What had happened?

Vera Leonidovna:

“Everything in those days was mixed up with politics.… It was fashionable.… Everyone used to talk about how dissatisfied they were. I’ve had the thrill of recalling everything my freethinking friend who was close to Witte explained to me.… To understand Bloody Sunday you have to understand the situation.… Russia was on the verge. Everyone knew that.… And the ‘rights’ were nervous.… They’d tried to play the Japan card. It hadn’t worked out. The Jewish card got tossed in then, of course. They had always looked on the Jews as a pressure valve for popular tension, by organizing pogroms.… At our estate outside Kiev we had a servant.… She had come to us after a pogrom: the crowd had burst into her house and ripped open her master’s stomach, all the while laughing and joking.… They had tied his wife to his bloody corpse and heaped them with feathers. She recounted all this while crossing herself incessantly and muttering, ‘God will punish them!’ And He did: the stupid anti-Semitic policy not only was vile but also proved dangerous. The revolution was advancing. Only for a short period—under Alexander II—had Russian Jews felt like human beings.… Nicholas’s father had brought back state anti-Semitism. Jews had been driven into the Pale of Settlement and encouraged to emigrate. Tens of thousands of highly enterprising people had left Russia. My father had a brilliant physician’s assistant working for him who left for America, where he became a celebrity. But millions remained. My husband, the Jew Koltsov, used to say, ‘The non-suckling breasts of their own mother’—that is how they perceived their homeland. The Jews were a vast, underutilized store of intellect, energy, and obsessiveness. The revolutionary party took that reserve into their service. My sister was a terrible revolutionary, and we were daughters of a general. But her friend underground was the
daughter of a poor Jewish tailor.… My friend used to say that Witte frequently tried to explain to Nicholas’s father the danger of the Jewish situation for the country’s future.”

(The matter was actually somewhat more subtle than this. Witte reports this interchange in his
Memoirs:

“Are you right to stand up for the Jews?” asked Alexander III. In reply Witte asked permission to answer the question with a question: “Can we drown all the Russian Jews in the Black Sea? If we can, then I accept that resolution of the Jewish question. If not, the resolution of the Jewish question consists in giving them a chance to live. That is, in offering them equal rights and equal laws.”

But Witte was a brilliant courtier if he responded to the despot-tsar so boldly; it means he sensed that the tsar wanted to hear that kind of answer from him. Evidently, the zealous master Alexander III was considering how best to make use of the state’s four million Jews. But he never went beyond thinking, and Witte recorded the terrible result on the eve of the revolution: “From among the phenomenally cowardly people that nearly all Jews were thirty years ago, people have appeared who are sacrificing their lives for the revolution, who have made themselves over into bombers, assassins, and rioters. No one nation has given Russia such a percentage of revolutionaries as the Jewish nation.”)

Vera Leonidovna:

“So, in response to the actions of the Jewish revolutionaries, on the eve of the revolution, the camarilla decided to play the Jewish card a different way. In Europe the ‘Will and Testament’ of Peter I was going around. This was a forgery created, apparently, by the French during the time of Napoleon.… From this document it followed that Peter the Great, dying, left to the Russian tsars his will and testament: conquer the world. Following this model, the Russian secret police started to publish books, only instead of the words ‘Russian threat’ they substituted ‘Jewish threat.’ This is how the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
saw the light of day. The book was written like a mystery: the story of mankind as a series of calamities attributable to the Jews and the Masons, whom they controlled.… The charm of it lay in the fact that in Russia the most distinguished Russian families belonged to Freemasonry. In their day Field Marshal Kutuzov, Alexander I, and Tchaikovsky had all been Masons. Nicholas II’s friend Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and his older brother Nicholas Mikhailovich were Masons. I myself was interested in Freemasonry. My idols—Mozart and Goethe—were Masons. Masons were always liberals. There was a constant struggle in Russia between the liberals and the nobility, and the nobility was an
obstinate, dark force.… The camarilla was trying to discredit the liberal segment of the nobility by associating it with the Jews. By the way, my friend … he too was a Mason and belonged to a glorious noble family. He was incensed by the baldness of their intentions….

“The
Protocols
were presented to Nicholas. Everything had been calculated faultlessly: Nicholas had been raised since childhood in ‘state anti-Semitism.’ … ‘Those abominable Jews,’ ‘enemies of Christ’—that was the vocabulary of the court.… In his book, my husband Koltsov wrote a devastating portrait of Nicholas, but he didn’t understand him. I called the tsar a man from a Chinese play in which the evildoer lies to the good man—who for a moment believes. The intrigue builds on this. That is how they dealt with Nicholas. To the tsar, the pogroms organized by the police seemed like a holy outburst of popular indignation against the revolutionaries. A mob of coachmen and ignorant rabble, the Union of the Russian People was proclaimed a national movement—simple people defending their tsar. And he believed it. Childlike faith is an enchanting quality in an ordinary person—and a fatal quality in a ruler. What was even more amazing, the tsar didn’t believe in the
Protocols!
And that disappointed them greatly.”

The revolutionary Burtsev, who scarcely loved the tsar, confirmed this in his research on the
Protocols:

“If in the beginning, when the
Protocols
first appeared, Nicholas II regarded them in good faith and was even delighted over them, he quickly recognized them as an obvious provocation.”

Vera Leonidovna:

“In short, before the revolution they had done everything in their power to push the tsar to the right, and suddenly he started to dig in his heels. There was even talk of reforms. That was when they realized that the weak tsar could not withstand a revolution—and he had decided to abdicate. All this forced the camarilla to act. My friend felt that by the end of 1904 there was a secret plot at court—and Bloody Sunday was a part of it.”

(Indeed, Zubatov passed on to Witte the secret conclusions of the Department of Police: a storm was brewing in the country. Anticipating that storm, the rightists were indeed greatly annoyed with the tsar.)

Beginning in 1904, Nicholas began to change—suddenly and recklessly. After the death of the reactionary Plehve, he named as his new minister of internal affairs Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a landowner,
an aristocrat, and a liberal. During the final months of 1904, Svyatopolk-Mirsky persuaded the tsar to discuss measures for assuaging public opinion. Before when public opinion had been mentioned, Nicholas had answered just as the autocrat of all Russia would be expected to: “What do I care for public opinion?” Now he was taking the problem seriously. The events of the Japanese war had changed him. He understood the peril of the storm. Instead of trying to return to the ruthless ways of his father, as the camarilla had expected, he decided on something else. He liked this new minister, who instead of suppressing the people was proposing reconciliation. Accord was dear to Nicholas’s heart. At the end of the year Nicholas convened a broad meeting of all the leading statesmen of Russia. Both Witte and Pobedonostsev were there. Nicholas gave a speech about the revolutionary trend that kept intensifying each year in Russia. He posed what was for him a new question: Do we need to meet society’s demands?

The question was rhetorical, for he had already made his decision. As usual, however, he wanted others to force him to make it. One after another the officials rose and demanded concessions. Pobedonostsev was isolated. Now Nicholas was more or less compelled to agree and go against both his teacher and his father’s behests. A decision was made to work out a law “on designs and improvements for governmental procedure.” Everyone understood that this was the beginning of reforms. Perhaps a constitution. Witte was instructed to write the law—it was a total victory for the liberals. Everyone was moved: The minister for communications, Prince Khilkov, could not hold back tears. In the name of those present, the chairman of the State Council thanked Nicholas: Russia had been saved by peaceful means.

Then came the response of the rightists: on January 1, in protest against the policy of Svyatopolk-Mirsky, one of their leaders, Dmitry Feodorovich Trepov, the Moscow police chief, quit.

A week later this strange, bloody bacchanalia occurred: Bloody Sunday.

Let us assume that a camarilla plot did indeed exist. Then why this bloody slaughter? Perhaps they had gotten the idea of simply frightening the tsar to nudge him, at last, to the right, and at the same time put all society in its place.

Or was it all actually much more serious? A weak tsar, a lost war, an advancing revolution, and on top of it all the mirage of a detested constitution. Did they decide enough was enough? And in the best
traditions of the secret police use a bloody provocation to discredit the weak tsar at a single blow? And then? Then Bloody Sunday was a beginning that should have led to replacing Nicholas in the future.

Destabilization for the sake of future stabilization: the advent of a strong monarch?

As Vera Leonidovna suggested, one can find a strange link—an intrigue—through subsequent events.

Bloody Sunday bore its fruits: Svyatopolk-Mirsky stepped down. Nicholas conceded: on January 11 the reactionary Trepov was named governor-general of Petersburg.

But this was only a beginning. After Petersburg a blow against Moscow followed. In Moscow was Nicholas’s chief adviser and support—Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.

“A dreadful crime has been committed in Moscow: at the Nikolsky Gate Uncle Sergei, riding in his carriage, has been killed by a bomb and his driver mortally wounded.… Unhappy Ella! God bless and help her!…

“On February 4, on Senate Square in the Kremlin, the Socialist Revolutionary Kalyaev lay in wait for Sergei Alexandrovich. He hurled a bomb into the carriage.”

From prison, Kalyaev described it in his last letters:

“At me—I smelled smoke and fragments coming right at my face, my cap was ripped off.… Then about five paces away I saw shreds of the grand duke’s clothing and his naked body.”

The viceroy of Moscow (as he was called at court) had been blown up by a bomb: his head was gone; all that was left was a hand and part of a foot.

Ella ran out of the palace and threw herself on the bloody bits, crawling on her knees among the remnants of her husband. What the revolutionary Kalyaev did not know was that the bomb with which he had killed the grand duke had been prepared with the help of a workshop belonging to the Department of Police. The actual assassination had been organized by a secret agent of the department, head of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist group, the provocateur Azef.