Secret Lives of the Tsars (28 page)

But there would be no safe haven in the capital—not even in Alexander’s own home.

On the evening of February 5, 1880, a massive explosion rocked the Winter Palace just as the imperial family prepared to sit down to eat. The timing of the blast—detonated beneath the dining room by a terrorist who had infiltrated the palace posing as a resident carpenter—was synchronized to coincide precisely with the beginning of the dinner hour. Fortuitously enough, there was a slight delay in the usual schedule that evening due to the late arrival of several guests. Otherwise the entire room would have come crashing down around the family as they began to eat what might have been their last meal.

Instead, the emperor and the rest of the royal family were assembled in a gallery just outside the dining room when the explosion occurred. “The floor rose as if in an earthquake,” recalled Empress Maria’s brother, Prince Alexander of Hesse, who was one of the honored guests that night, “the gas lights in the gallery went out, there was total darkness, and the air was filled with the disgusting odor of gun powder or dynamite.”

The dining room was almost entirely destroyed. A gaping hole in the wall attested to the power of the bomb; the windows
were all blown out, and a thick layer of dust and debris covered everything. Grand Duchess Marie, the emperor’s daughter-in-law (married to his son Vladimir and known to the family as “Miechen”) recalled the horror after “the dining room vanished from our view, and we were plunged into impenetrable darkness.”

“A poisonous gas filled the room, suffocating us, as well as adding to our horror,” she told the painter Henry James Thaddeus. “How can I possibly describe the agony of mind we suffered, expecting as we did, at any moment, another explosion beneath us! It is impossible—impossible for me to tell or for you to conceive.

“The impending fear almost made our hearts stop beating as, silent and motionless, we awaited our doom. When the echoes of the explosion died away, a dead silence succeeded, which, united with the darkness prevailing, so dense as almost to be felt, conducted to render our helpless position still more painful and unendurable.”

The family was frozen in fear, the grand duchess continued in her vivid account. “We dared not to move. There was no escape from the peril which surrounded us.” It was then, she recalled, that “out of the darkness came the clear, calm voice of the Tsar,” who suggested a prayer. Alexander’s voice of authority “relieved the awful strain on our nerves, and brought comfort to our hearts.” Weeping, they fell to their knees in supplication. “How long we remained so, I really don’t know. It seemed an eternity of anguish before the guards appeared with candles little expecting to find us alive.

“Some of us were nearly demented when the welcome relief arrived, and our feelings were not calmed as we contemplated the awful nature of the destruction we had escaped. A few feet in front of the Tsar was a black chasm, where so short
a time before had been the brilliantly lit dining-room filled with servants. Not a trace of it or them remained! It really seemed as if the hand of Providence had delayed the Tsar’s arrival; otherwise we should have shared the same fate. The dim lights of the candles intensified the terrifying aspect of the scene before us, and we hastened to leave it for the comparative safety of our own apartments.

“The dread of further explosions haunted us like a hideous nightmare during that long and dreary night, whilst the fear of danger to the children nearly distracted me. Never, I pray, may I have to undergo such agony again.”

While Alexander II and his family were fortunate enough to escape the explosion unscathed, at least physically, there were others who suffered hideously. The amount of dynamite smuggled gradually into the palace by the resident assassin turned out to be insufficient to blow the royals to pieces but more than enough to decimate a large group of guards gathered in their quarters directly beneath the dining room. Hearing agonized screams, the emperor’s sons rushed to the source.

“When we ran in, we found a terrible scene,” recalled the future Alexander III: “the entire large guards room where people lived was blown up and everything had collapsed more than six feet deep, and in that pile of brick, plaster, slabs and huge mounds of vaults and walls lay more than fifty soldiers covered with a layer of dust and blood. It was a heartbreaking picture, and I will never forget that horror in my life!”

Meanwhile, the emperor had an urgent concern of his own: his mistress Katya, who for obvious reasons had not been invited to the dinner honoring her rival’s brother. After stumbling through the dark and smoky palace to her apartments on the third floor, he was relieved to find his beloved waiting for him in the doorway with a candle. As for the ailing Empress
Maria, she appeared to be less of a worry. Heavily sedated in her sickroom, she slept right through the explosion. Four months later she was dead.

As St. Petersburg reeled from this most audacious terrorist strike, the emperor managed to remain stoic in the face of yet another attempt on his life. “The tsar called me to his study [the day after the palace explosion],” the war minister, Milyutin, recorded in his journal. “As in the previous similar incidents, he maintained total presence of mind, seeing in this case a new manifestation of God’s finger saving him for the fifth time from villainous attack.”

Yet while Alexander II firmly believed that his life had been preserved through divine intervention, he nevertheless recognized that the extremists were gaining strength from their constant assaults. And in order to maintain something of the autocratic order in Russia, he concluded that he would have to cede a measure of his God-given power to the people who demanded it. Death intervened, however, before he could execute his plan.

Perhaps it was the emperor’s sense of his own mortality that prompted his hasty marriage to Katya just over a month after the death of his wife. It was an unseemly breach of mourning etiquette, but Alexander seemed not to care. He was determined to lap up whatever happiness he could in the time he had left. Much to the disgust of his family, who revered the late empress and considered Katya to be nothing but a scheming gold digger, he installed his new bride in his dead wife’s apartments, gave her the title of princess, and legitimized their three children with imperial titles as well. It was all too galling for the rest of the Romanovs.

“This marriage of the Tsar’s six weeks after the death of our dear Tsarina, is hard enough to bear in itself,” Grand Duchess
Marie, Miechen, vented in a letter to the late empress’s brother. “But that this woman, who for fourteen years has occupied such a very invidious position, should be introduced to us as a member of the family surrounded by her three children is more painful than I can find words to express.”

As his family continued to grumble, the emperor demanded that they put an end to their snubs and honor Katya properly. Some even believed he eventually planned to make her empress. Certainly he was smitten enough. Miechen, who longed for the day when “the Tsar’s eyes must at length be opened to the worthlessness of the creature who seems to have him bound as in a spell,” nevertheless noted ruefully, “Up to the present he is utterly and blissfully happy, looks very well, and years younger.”

Alas, the newlyweds had very little time left together before the assassins struck again.

Rather than placating the terrorists, word of the tsar’s planned concessions to the people only intensified their zeal. They were convinced that such limited measures would only diminish whatever revolutionary momentum existed in Russia. Thus, before he could ruin their movement with his reforms, a new way was quickly devised to kill Alexander II. The date for the deed was set for March 13, 1881, a Sunday, when the emperor made his usual weekly visit to the Mikhailovsky Manege to review the troops.

Alexander was known to take one of two routes on the way back from the review to the Winter Palace: either through Malaya Sadovaya Street or along the Catherine Canal. The assassins were prepared either way. They had rented a shop on Malaya Sadovaya, from the basement of which they burrowed
a tunnel and deposited a bomb directly below the street. If the tsar came that way, they would detonate the explosive just as his carriage passed over it. To ensure success in the event that the bomb failed or the explosion was ill-timed, three conspirators, each armed with dynamite, were positioned along the street to complete the job. If, alternatively, Alexander traveled along the Catherine Canal, the same men would have time to scurry over to that route and hurl their explosives there.

“Alexander II must die,” one of the assassins wrote in his last will and testament on the eve of the murder. “His days are numbered. He will die and we, his enemies, his killers, will die with him.… History will show that the luxuriant tree of freedom demands human sacrifices.… [F]ate has doomed me to an early death, and I will not see victory, I will not live a single day, a single hour in the radiant time of triumph.… But I believe that with my death I will have done everything I had to do, and no one in the entire world can demand more of me.”

Katya was filled with foreboding on Sunday morning as her husband of six months prepared to leave for the troop review. She tearfully begged Alexander not to go, but he didn’t heed her warning. Instead, he gave Katya what turned out to be quite the farewell. “Before leaving for the guards parade on March 1[3], the tsar toppled the princess onto the table and took her,” the journalist Alexis Suvorin recorded in his diary after a conversation with the imperial physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin. “She told this to Botkin herself.”

Meanwhile, the terrorists were making their final preparations, and by the time Alexander embarked on his return journey from the military review they were ready. The sudden withdrawal of the sentries posted along Malaya Sadovaya
Street indicated that the emperor had opted for the Catherine Canal route instead. Along the way, he popped into the Mikhailovsky Palace to visit his cousin, Catherine, reportedly in a vain attempt to persuade her to accept his new wife. This gave the bomb throwers more than enough time to take their places along the alternative route.

After about half an hour, the tsar left the palace and reentered his carriage, which immediately sped away. That’s when the first assassin approached with his weapon wrapped in a handkerchief. “After a moment’s hesitation, I threw the bomb,” the killer later testified. “I sent it under the horses’ hooves in the supposition that it would blow up under the carriage.… The explosion knocked me into the fence.”

It also killed or maimed a number of bystanders, but the emperor survived—dazed, but unharmed. The bomb had exploded just as the carriage passed over it, and as a result, only the back of the vehicle was damaged. Alexander emerged, shaking. “The tsar crossed himself,” recalled Colonel Adrian Dvorzhitsky; “he was a bit unsteady and understandably upset. When I asked him about his health, he replied, ‘Thank God, I am not wounded.’ ”

The would-be assassin was quickly apprehended and disarmed of a pistol and dagger. But Dvorzhitsky heard him shout to one of his accomplices and realized the tsar was still in grave danger. He urged Alexander to leave the scene at once, but the emperor disregarded him as he walked toward the man who had just tried to murder him. Someone asked how he fared, to which Alexander responded, “Thank God, I’m fine.” Then, pointing to the mass of dead and wounded, he said, “but look …” At this the assassin sneered, “Is it thanks to God?”

After confronting the bomb thrower, the emperor started
back to his ruined carriage. Again Dvorzhitsky pleaded with him to leave. Alexander stopped for a moment, then replied, “All right, but first show me the site of the explosion.” It was then that the second killer emerged and hurled his bomb at the emperor.

“I was deafened by the new explosion,” Dvorzhitsky recounted, “burned, wounded, and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s weak voice: ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the tsar. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking that he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him, but the tsar’s legs were shattered, and the blood poured out of them.

“Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay by the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others crawled, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them. Through the snow, debris, and blood you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabers, and bloody chunks of human flesh.”

In the midst of this nightmarish scene, Alexander was heard to mutter several times, “Cold, I’m cold.” Then, when his brother Michael arrived, the tsar said, “Take me home quickly!” With his life slowly draining away as the blood continued to pulse out of his ruined legs, he was placed on a sled and rushed to the Winter Palace. One of the men who helped move him was the third assassin, his unexploded bomb still on hand.

The emperor’s nephew, Grand Duke Alexander (“Sandro” to the family), hurried to the palace when he heard what had happened. “The big spots of black blood on the marble steps and then along the corridor showed us the way to the tsar’s study,” he recalled. “Father [Grand Duke Michael, the emperor’s
brother at the scene of his assassination] stood in the doorway, giving orders to the servants.… Emperor Alexander II lay on a couch by the desk. He was unconscious.… He looked horrible.… One eye was shut, the other stared ahead without expression.… Members of the Imperial Family came in one after the other. The room was overflowing.… The heir [soon to be Alexander III] came in and wept, saying, ‘This is what we have come to,’ and embraced the grand dukes, his brother, Vladimir Alexandrovich, and his uncle, Mikhail Nikolayevich.

“Princess Yuryevskaya [Katya], half-dressed, ran in. They said that some overzealous guard tried to stop her from entering. She fell on top of the tsar’s body, covering his hands with kisses and shouting, ‘Sasha! Sasha!’ It was unbearable.”

One witness to the bloody horror at the palace that Sunday was a young boy of thirteen, the future Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar—destined to die less than three decades later under similarly gruesome circumstances. Before that would happen, though, it was the boy’s father who emerged as the new emperor after Alexander II—hounded to the end—finally found peace.