To Kill a Tsar (49 page)

Hadfield looked away for a moment. ‘It means so much to be able to call her by her name.’

Dobson waited until he had collected himself sufficiently to continue, then said: ‘I’ve arranged to see your old friend Barclay
tomorrow. He’s rising up the table of ranks – a colonel now. Not as clever as Dobrshinsky but a little more ruthless, which is, no doubt, why he’s still useful.’

‘But if you haven’t spoken to him yet, how do you know my daughter’s name?’

‘Because I’ve spoken to her mother.’

‘You’ve spoken to Anna? She’s here in the city?’ This time Hadfield could not contain himself and he jumped up, his chair crashing to the floor, his right hand pressed to his forehead, the room too small to pace. He stood above Dobson with an expression of bewilderment then hope on his face. ‘She escaped?’

‘Evidently. For God’s sake sit down and I’ll tell you the little I know.’

He told Hadfield of Anna’s visit the evening before, and that she was searching for their daughter with the help of friends – ‘the few still at liberty’ – but he did not mention her note.

‘I sense she is still committed to the revolution,’ he said disparagingly. ‘I know you’re infatuated with her – and she is good-looking enough, I grant you – but she doesn’t seem to have—’

‘To have? You may as well say it.’

‘She hasn’t changed, Frederick. She’s a dangerous fanatic.’

Hadfield shook his head crossly. ‘She is fighting for the freedom of the people. You’ve said yourself that things are even worse here . . .’

‘Since her friends murdered the last tsar, yes.’

‘It will be a long struggle.’

‘Don’t be their mouthpiece,’ Dobson snapped.

‘I’m not.’

They glared at each other for a few seconds, until Hadfield leant forward to touch his friend’s arm: ‘You’ve done so much. I’m grateful.’

The correspondent’s face softened a little. ‘As your friend, I
must tell you I think she is only capable of seeing her life and the world one way. You should have seen the certainty in her face. I tell you, Frederick, her mind runs on rails.’

‘I love her,’ said Hadfield simply. ‘Please do not speak ill of her.’ He rose again and walked over to the window. In the silence they could hear the sound of water slopping on the stone stairs and the grating of a mop bucket as the maid pushed it with her foot. And in the street below, a young man – a clerk perhaps – was moving out of the house opposite, loading the few sticks of furniture he possessed on to a cart.

‘Did she speak of me?’ Hadfield asked quietly.

‘She gave me a note for you.’ Dobson drew it from the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Here.’

Hadfield stared at his name written in her untidy hand on the envelope and he felt a surge of love and hope. He was in no hurry to open it for he knew Anna well enough to be sure her message would be short and to the point, even after a year and a half apart. But his friend was watching him and waiting, so he slit the envelope open with a table knife.

8.00 p.m. At the church.

Terse even by her standards, he thought, and offered the note to Dobson, who glanced at it then handed it back without a word.

When the correspondent had gone, Hadfield sat at the window waiting for the blue-grey hours to slip away. It snowed for a time in the afternoon, falling straight and wet, the temperature hovering just below freezing until dusk, when a frost began to form between the inner and outer panes. His thoughts were in constant motion, swirling as if carried on a wind to the future and back to the past then lifted up once again. Always her, always Anna and their daughter. He imagined them in his own reflection and in his breath on the glass, until his gaze slipped
beyond to the darkness of the city. She had suffered so much. The humiliation of the birth at the prison, the distress of separation, trial and sentence – a lifetime of penal servitude in the east. Her comrades in Switzerland had told him the little they knew from correspondence and, desperate always for word of her, he had scoured the papers every day for news, even when the little there was brought only pain and guilt. Baby Sophia was a year old already. At dark moments he wondered if he would ever find her and he was frightened that if he lost her he would lose Anna too.

At seven o’clock the maid brought him some bread and broth from the kitchen but he had no appetite. A short time later he left the house, racing down the stairs, eager to be in the freezing air and on the move. Walking fast, almost running, slipping on the icy pavements, he made his way to the Obvodny Canal, factory workers trudging home with their heads bent against the first flurries of another snowfall. The dead hand of winter creeping across the city until the corruption of its canals and streets and palaces was locked beneath a glittering white surface. But what did he care? It was a long way to the church and he must not be late. Run. Run faster. Run. And as he ran, he thought of the little room with its single mattress, of her finger pressed gently to his lips, of the silence and the stillness, the infinite stillness. He would help her escape from the shadow of the last years. Together. Together with Sophia. He held this feeling like a prayer, allowing it to fill his mind and body as he ran, careless of the snow and the curious glances he was drawing from passers-by. On past the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and on to the embankment of the Neva. ‘Hey, watch out there!’ a cabbie shouted from his box as he weaved his way across the street to the riverside walk.

The scaffolding had gone and rising complete was the Church of St Boris and St Gleb. The Romanesque arch at the west
front in pristine brick and stone and, crowning all, a lantern dome with figures of the apostles in its niches. The church built to commemorate the tsar’s miraculous escape from an assassin’s bullet had been finished at last, and yet empty and lifeless inside, it was of no more significance than a shattered colossus in a desert, boundless and bare. Hadfield stood panting at the bottom of the steps as a bell in one of the western towers chimed eight o’clock.

A market trader removes the planks from his makeshift stall in the square. In front of a pink warehouse opposite the church, night watchmen are gathering about a brazier. Workers from the textile mill and the brewery on the embankment trickle home, black and shapeless in their heavy coats. The gaslights seem softer and very yellow as the snow quickens and falls in thumbnail flakes. She is a little late but she will come. Small, upright, striding across the square, and he will drop from the steps to kiss her, squeezing her so tightly and perhaps she will release her pain and cry with happiness and new hope.

T
he plot and many of the characters in
To Kill a Tsar
are based on real people and events. The two years that pass in the book’s pages mark the rise and fall of the first important revolutionary terrorist group of modern times, the Narodnaya Volya or The People’s Will.

Terrorism is ‘the threat of violence and the use of fear to coerce, persuade, and gain public attention’ (
Report of the Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism
, Washington, DC, 1976). It is a form of armed propaganda in an age dominated by the mass media. We live at a time when terrorists can change the lives of millions, take countries to war, and command the respect and support of many by committing suicidal acts of violence. The seeds of this kind of ruthless direct action were sown in the second half of the nineteenth century in Imperial Russia. ‘To attract the attention of the entire world, is that not in itself a victory?’ the Russian revolutionary Georgi Plekhanov observed after the assassination of Alexander II.

Alexander’s reign began in 1855 with a liberal reform that earned him the sobriquet of ‘Tsar Liberator’. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 freed twenty-three million peasants from a system of slavery that bound them to the land and deprived them of rights enjoyed by his other subjects. But the tsar’s belief in his divine right to rule was unshakeable and attempts by nationalist and democratic movements to challenge it were ruthlessly suppressed across the empire. Minority languages such as Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Polish were restricted, newspapers, letters and literature were censored,
trial by jury suspended and those who called for reform were imprisoned and exiled to Siberia. One of the characters in this story – Nikolai Kibalchich – spent almost three years in prison on a charge of lending a dangerous book to a peasant. A short time after his release he became a committed revolutionary and a member of The People’s Will.

Most peasants were faithful subjects of the emperor but among the educated, in particular the young, there was active support for representative democracy and radical reform. The tsar’s secret Third Section was formed with the support of the police and Corps of Gendarmes, to protect the autocracy from dissent. Its notorious headquarters was at Number 16 on the Fontanka Embankment.

After the explosion at the Winter Palace in 1880, Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov (1826–88) became minister of the interior. Within a few months of taking office he had organised the police into a new department and replaced the Third Section with a secret investigative body known as the Okhrana. One of the first directors of the new Police Department and the Okhrana was Count Vyacheslav von Plehve (1846–1904) who appears as a character in the pages of this book. In 1902 Von Plehve became minister of the interior but was assassinated by a revolutionary on the streets of St Petersburg two years later. Another figure in this book, Anton Frankzevich Dobrshinsky (1844–97), served as head of chancellery in the Ministry of Justice with special responsibility for the investigation of criminal affairs. Dobrshinsky was responsible for questioning members of The People’s Will and earned a reputation as a formidable interrogator.

There had been active terrorist groups in the south of the Russian Empire and in the capital itself for a number of years before 1879. In 1866 a student called Dmitry Karakozov attempted to kill the tsar, and it was to mark his miraculous delivery from the hands of this assassin that the foundation
stone was laid for the Church of St Boris and St Gleb. In 1869 the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev wrote a manifesto that was to prove influential in the thinking of many young radicals. In
The Catechism of a Revolutionary
he declared,

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.

Ten years after this catechism The People’s Will insisted its members demonstrate the same single-minded commitment to the revolution.
To Kill a Tsar
opens with the first attempt on the life of the emperor by those who were instrumental in the formation of the group a short time afterwards, and it ends two years later with their imprisonment and execution
.
For those two years it managed, in the words of one of the tsar’s ministers, ‘to terrorise the entire administration’ with a series of well-planned and executed attacks on the emperor. The first of these attempts, by Alexander Soloviev – the attempt to shoot the tsar in front of the Winter Palace in April 1879 – was much as I describe it in
Chapter 1
. The would-be assassin had plotted his attack with Alexander Mikhailov, Grigory Goldenberg and two other prominent revolutionaries who appear briefly as characters in
To Kill a Tsar
: Alexander Kviatkovsky and Nikolai Morozov. These men were to play important roles in the formation of The People’s Will three months later. Among the first to join them in the new group were Andrei Zhelyabov, Sophia Perovskaya and Vera Figner.

The People’s Will was never large; its chief instrument, the
executive committee, was made up of only twenty members. Fewer than fifty people were actively involved in its day-to-day activities in the capital, with about five hundred more in the provinces. Another three to four thousand people were sympathisers who helped distribute the party’s propaganda, and from time to time concealed illegals wanted by the police. One such was the government official known to the party as ‘Bucephalus’. An account of his work as a concealer can be found in
Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life
by Sergei Kravchinski. The author was a friend of Alexander Mikhailov and a prominent revolutionary who, in 1878, stabbed to death a head of the Third Section in a St Petersburg street. Kravchinski fled to Britain where he wrote articles and books in support of his comrades in Russia. He was a useful source for the operational methods of the terrorists.

It was the contention of The People’s Will that by 1879 peaceful protest had demonstrably failed and that change was only possible through direct terrorist action. The party was socialist, but democratic in character, committed to an elected assembly, freedom of speech and religious worship. Its programme called for a political revolution and terrorist activity designed to remove leading government figures, protect the party from spies, and inculcate a fighting spirit in its members. But from the first, its time and money were spent planning the assassination of the tsar. In the person of the emperor its members saw the embodiment of autocracy, antipathy to democracy and the oppression of ordinary people.

The membership of The People’s Will was drawn from all classes of Russian society with the gentry and the educated especially well represented in its ranks, as too were women; Sophia Perovskaya and Vera Figner were particularly influential members of the group. One of their male comrades on the executive committee noted that ‘the girls are fiercer than our men’. A number of the female recruits to The People’s Will
became involved in revolutionary politics while studying medicine in Switzerland. One such was Vera Figner, whose gripping account of her life,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
, has been an important source for this story. Women like Figner and Perovskaya fell in love and had affairs with male comrades but not at the expense of their commitment to the party and revolution. ‘A man who admitted putting me above the cause, even in a moment of passion,’ the revolutionary Ekaterina Obukhova wrote to a friend in 1879, ‘would destroy everything that connected us’ (as quoted in Barbara Alpern Engel,
Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia
). Vera Figner was not the only revolutionary to leave her husband because he did not share her political views.