This was understood by the bewildered and frightened sovereign of a huge and powerful empire: “They are hunting me like a wild animal,” he would complain. “What for? I haven’t even done any personal good deed for them that they should hate me so!” Even their implacable foe, Dostoyevsky, had given the terrorist’s stubbornness its due: “We say outright: these are madmen, yet these madmen have their own logic, their teaching, their code, their God even, and it’s as deepset as it could be.”
On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was returning to the Winter Palace from a military parade accompanied by guards in a special armored coach built in Paris. When the carriage reached the deserted embankment of the Catherine Canal, a terrorist jumped out from behind a corner and tossed a bomb at the feet of the galloping horses. Once again the emperor leaped out unharmed from the shattered carriage, although two of the guards were wounded. Alexander went up to them. A crowd gathered. The attacker had been taken away.
“Glory to God, Your Majesty, that you are safe,” muttered one of the guards.
“Thank God,” replied the tsar.
“It’s too soon to thank God!” shouted a man in the crowd and threw a second bomb at Alexander. This time the emperor was mortally wounded, both legs torn off. After seven unsuccessful attempts, the eighth terrorist action had succeeded. Brought to the Winter Palace, the emperor died within a few minutes. Ironically, on his desk was the draft of the long-awaited constitutional reforms, which he had planned to sign that day.
Having won the battle, the revolutionaries lost the war. All the participants in the assassination of Alexander II were eventually arrested, tried, and hanged. Alexander III, Alexander’s thirty-five-year-old son, ascended to the throne. A huge man, decisive and stubborn, he was a confirmed conservative whose father’s death had only strengthened his conviction that Russia was not yet ready for liberal reform. The new emperor’s ideal was the autocratic rule of his grandfather Nicholas I; the Russian ship of state veered sharply to the right.
Public opinion helped Alexander III. Tchaikovsky’s reaction to the murder of the Tsar Liberator, expressed in a letter from Naples to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, was typical:
The news shocked me so that I almost fell ill. In such horrible moments of national catastrophe, during such incidents that shame Russia, it is hard to be abroad. I would like to fly to Russia, learn the details, be among my own people, take part in demonstrations of sympathy for the new Sovereign, and howl for revenge with the others. Will the vile ulcer of our political life not be uprooted completely this time? It is horrible to think that perhaps this recent catastrophe might not be the epilogue of the whole tragedy.49
Tchaikovsky even signed up for the Holy Brotherhood, a secret organization created by the Russian aristocracy to protect the new emperor and fight terrorism.50 Interestingly, this fact has never yet been mentioned in any Russian—or, for that matter, Western—biography of the composer. Even without the help of the Holy Brotherhood, however, the police crushed the remnants of the revolutionary cells in Petersburg and the rest of Russia, The ghost of the Martyr Tsar, as the late emperor was now called, rumored to appear at night at the Kazan Cathedral, could be pacified
Instead, the ghosts of the seemingly vanquished revolutionaries flooded Russian culture: prose (the novels and stories of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Vsevolod Garshin); poetry (the poems of Yakov Polonsky and Semyon Nadson); painting (the works of Repin, Vassily Vereshchagin and Vladimir Makovsky). The Wanderer Nikolai Yaroshenko went so far as to show his painting
The Lithuanian Castle was burned down during the February Revolution of 1917. The infamous prison was replaced by an ugly apartment house, which I saw every day for four years when I lived at the dormitory of the music school of the Leningrad Conservatory.
