This led to numerous performances of Glinka’s patriotic opera,
As soon as the Poles appeared on the stage, shouts began: ‘Down with the Poles!’ The choristers were confused and stopped singing, and the audience demanded the anthem, which was sung about twenty times. At the end the Sovereign’s portrait was brought out, and the ensuing madness cannot be described.45
Karakozov was hanged and terrorist acts stopped for a while. But in January 1878 the revolutionary Vera Zasulich shot and wounded severely the Petersburg city chief, Fyodor Trepov. This began a series of successful terrorist attacks. The revolutionaries did not merely take down the highest tsarist officials, but also explained their attacks to the public and even dared to announce them beforehand. Special warnings from the revolutionaries were delivered to the chief of the gendarmes, Mezentsov (as one of the terrorists recalled, “practically in person” ) and to the Petersburg city prefect, Zurov. After each ensuing attack, leaflets rationalizing and defending it would appear throughout the city.
Even though the underground revolutionary cells were small, their members were dedicated to the highest degree, energetic, and intelligent; each attempt was planned carefully. When they decided to kill Mezentsov, they made up a timetable of his walks. Learning that Mezentsov was always accompanied by an adjutant and that the chief wore a protective vest, the attackers ordered an especially heavy dagger, explaining to the sword maker that they needed it for hunting bear. The journalist Sergei Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, who had been chosen to execute the death sentence that had already been pronounced publicly, got the signal from his accomplice and, concealing the dagger inside a newspaper, approached the strolling Mezentsov in front of the tsar’s Mikhailovsky Palace. While another conspirator distracted the adjutant, Kravchinsky struck the gendarme with the dagger in the stomach below the vest, then leaped into a waiting carriage drawn by a prized trotter, which carried the terrorist down a planned escape route and off to safety.
The chief of the gendarmes died of the wound, and Kravchinsky described the assassination in an underground brochure called “A Death for a Death,” widely distributed in Petersburg and all of Russia. Such audacious attacks carried out in broad daylight left the capital in a state of shock as the revolutionaries announced, “those who decided questions of life and death with a single flourish of the pen now see with horror that they are also subject to the death penalty.” One of the leading nihilists explained the terrorist campaign, unprecedented in boldness, scope, and success, this way: “When they gag the mouth of a man who wants to speak they thereby untie his hands.”46
In Russia the gigantic pyramid of power was topped by the tsar. The emperor was not only a symbolic figure but also a real sovereign. Therefore the liberal Alexander II was inevitably held responsible for the actions of his most reactionary bureaucrats. “It was getting strange,” wrote Vera Figner, a leading terrorist, “to beat the servants for doing the bidding of their master and not touching the master.”47 The revolutionaries also wanted to shock Petersburg, so they decided at all costs to kill the tsar. Just a few dozen people with limited funds were in charge. But they were young and, most important, fanatically certain of the rightness of their cause. Alexander II could move the country along the path of reform as much as he wanted—he was doomed anyway.
In 1879 they shot once more at Alexander II, who had been told by a fortune teller that there would be seven attempts on his life. The emperor had been walking—alone as usual—on Palace Square. This time again the terrorist, like Karakozov before him, missed and was also hanged. So the revolutionaries decided to use a much more effective weapon than firearms: dynamite. But the sophisticated plan to blow up the tsar’s train did not work either. Then they placed the explosive in the cellar below the Winter Palace. Another failure. The powerful explosion that killed or wounded some seventy Finnish soldiers guarding Alexander II miraculously left the emperor untouched.
Nevertheless, the social and political fallout from that explosion was extensive, leaving the capital in a panic. “All Russia can be said to be under siege,”48 the minister of defense Dmitri Milyutin wrote in his diary. In Petersburg during the winter of 1878-1879 alone, over two thousand were arrested on suspicion of subversive activity. But for the unfettered nihilists, the hunt for Alexander, unprecedented in the annals of political terror, had turned into an obsession.
