To Kill A Tsar Part 38

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 gla.s.s, 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 appet.i.te. 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 pa.s.sers-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 a.s.sa.s.sin'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.

HISTORICAL NOTE AND SOURCES.

The plot and many of the characters in To Kill a Tsar are based on real people and events. The two years that pa.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sination of Alexander II.

Alexander's reign began in 1855 with a liberal reform that earned him the sobriquet of 'Tsar Liberator'. The emanc.i.p.ation 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 (182688) 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 (18461904) who appears as a character in the pages of this book. In 1902 Von Plehve became minister of the interior but was a.s.sa.s.sinated by a revolutionary on the streets of St Petersburg two years later. Another figure in this book, Anton Frankzevich Dobrshinsky (184497), 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 a.s.sembly, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sion,' 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.

More background on the revolutionaries of The People's Will and their world can be found on the website www.andrewwilliams.tv.

I drew on both primary sources and published histories for my account of the attempts on the Tsar's life and his final a.s.sa.s.sination. A number of the exchanges between the terrorists in the story are based on written records of the group's secret meetings left by those who were there. In her memoir Olga Liubatovich describes the party and seance that Frederick and Anna attend on New Year's Eve (Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar, edited and translated by Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford N. Rosenthal). I have drawn details of the printing press and descriptions of some of the leading terrorists from Praskovia Ivanovskaia's published account of her time in The People's Will. Both Figner and the revolutionary Katerina Breshkovskaia (in her memoir Hidden Springs of the Russian Revolution) left vivid accounts of interrogation and imprisonment in the House of Preliminary Detention and the St Peter and St Paul Fortress. I visited and photographed the streets and exteriors of the apartments in St Petersburg that were used by The People's Will between 1879 and 1881 as well as many of the other buildings mentioned in the story. Photographs, contemporary engravings and reports from British, French and Russian newspapers and periodicals were useful for descriptions of the terrorists, their attempts to kill the tsar, trials and executions. The newspapers were also able to provide more general information about life in the empire, the health of the tsar's subjects, winter sports and royal engagements. The Times's correspondent George Dobson was a particularly helpful source and an intelligent liberal commentator on the nihilists and the challenge they presented to imperial authority. Dobson was the newspaper's man in St Petersburg for more than twenty-five years, and only left the city with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 after a short spell of imprisonment in the St Peter and St Paul Fortress.

For the background and upbringing of my heroine Anna, I drew inspiration from the early life of the formidable socialist revolutionary Elizaveta Kovalskaia. Kovalskaia's father was a landowner in what is now the eastern Ukraine, her mother one of his serfs. Anna is very conscious of the village and her roots, and like another important revolutionary figure, Vera Zasulich, is inspired by a Kondraty Ryleev poem celebrating a Ukrainian uprising. At the end of To Kill a Tsar Anna is obliged to give birth in prison as the revolutionary Geisa Gelfman was forced to do in September 1881. Gelfman's baby was taken from her, marked 'parents unknown', and sent to an orphanage. Gelfman died in prison six months later. Anna is able to escape from custody on her journey east into exile. Elizaveta Kovalskaia managed to do the same in February 1882 but was later apprehended. A number of terrorists were more successful. In July 1878 Olga Liubatovich escaped from western Siberia by pretending to commit suicide.

Most of the revolutionaries mentioned in To Kill a Tsar spent many years in prison. Both Alexander Mikhailov and his spy inside the Third Section, Nikolai Kletochnikov, died in the cells of the St Peter and St Paul Fortress in 1883. Stepan Khalturin, the carpenter responsible for the explosion at the Winter Palace, was arrested and executed in 1882. As recounted in this book, Grigory Goldenberg committed suicide in prison when he realised that his testimony had led to the arrest of many of his former comrades. In my story I endeavour to reflect the appalling anti-Semitism in Russian society at this time. Rumours that the Jews were involved in the a.s.sa.s.sination of Alexander II were used as an excuse to launch pogroms in Kiev, Odessa and Warsaw.

Andrei Zhelyabov, Sophia Perovskaya and Nikolai Kibalchich were executed with two of the bombers on 3 April 1881. After their execution the 'Venus of the revolution', Vera Figner, became the leader of The People's Will until her arrest in 1883. She was imprisoned in the St Peter and St Paul then the Schlusselburg Fortresses and spent many years in solitary confinement. Finally released in 1905, she died in Moscow during the Second World War. Olga Liubatovich gave birth to a daughter in Switzerland whom she placed with foster parents. The baby died six months later while Olga was in Russia attempting to organise the escape from prison of her child's father, Nikolai Morozov. She was arrested in 1882 and banished without trial to eastern Siberia where she spent the next twenty years in exile.

In 1886 a young revolutionary called Alexander Illyich Ulyanov was inspired by the example of The People's Will to join a small group of terrorists. On 1 March 1887 six years to the day after the death of Alexander II Ulyanov and his comrades were arrested and charged with plotting to a.s.sa.s.sinate the new tsar. Two months later he was hanged at the Schlusselburg Fortress where many of The People's Will terrorists were imprisoned. Ulyanov was the older brother of the man who was to lead the Russian Revolution in 1917: Vladimir Lenin.

The hero of my story, Frederick Hadfield, is from a British community that played an important part in the life of St Petersburg and the empire. The British began to arrive in the city during the reign of its founder Peter the Great, and the first grand residential embankment built on the Neva came to be known as the English Embankment. Anglo-Russian trading dynasties established themselves here over the next two hundred years but there were prominent professionals too; in particular a number of medical men served the imperial court. Sir James Wylie (17681854) was the personal physician to three tsars and founded a hospital in St Petersburg. Another famous Scottish doctor at the court was Sir Alexander Crichton (17631856) who entered the service of Tsar Alexander I in 1803 as physician-in-ordinary, and six years later was appointed physician-general to the Russian medical department. Engineers and soldiers were also well represented in Anglo-Russian society. Hadfield's mother's family in To Kill a Tsar resembles the Griegs, who were prominent members of the British community for a hundred and fifty years. Admiral Sir Samuel Grieg was born in Scotland in 1736 and entered the service of the Russian navy. He was appointed the Empress Catherine's naval commander-in-chief in 1775. Admiral Grieg chose to marry a Scots woman, and like many Anglo-Russians sent his son Samuel to university in Britain. Three more generations of the family lived on the English Embankment and served the empire in both a military and civil capacity. General Samuel Grieg the third to bear the name was appointed the tsar's minister of finance in 1878, a post he held without distinction for two years.

The former British emba.s.sy in St Petersburg is now an academic inst.i.tute, but some of the rooms remain, including its extraordinary White Ballroom. The British amba.s.sador's wife, Lady Dufferin, kept a gossipy journal of her life in the city between 1879 and 1881, and I have drawn on this for much fine detail (Harriot Georgina Blackwood: My Russian and Turkish Journals). For the serious day-to-day business of the emba.s.sy I consulted the telegrams and amba.s.sador's reports at the National Archive in London. Diplomatic Reminiscences, the memoirs of Lord Augustus Loftus, British amba.s.sador to Russia (18719) were also a useful source. A third secretary, Lord Frederic Hamilton, wrote a lighthearted memoir of emba.s.sy life at this time, The Days Before Yesterday, in which he describes the theatricals he organised for Lord Dufferin. He was also a witness to the execution of the regicides. The Foreign Office Diplomatic List provided me with the names and backgrounds of key emba.s.sy staff including the military attache, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Gonne. Gonne's daughter, Maud, was the English-born Irish revolutionary whom the poet William Butler Yeats loved recklessly, and who inspired some of his finest work including 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', the lines I quote at the beginning of this book.

For ordinary Russian life in St Petersburg, its geography and history, I consulted many written sources. Particularly useful for the geography of the city were Baedeker's Russia 1914 and the online Encyclopedia of St Petersburg (www.encspb.ru/en). Although many of the city's buildings are much as they were in 1879, the Soviet era left its mark and some of the churches mentioned in the story have gone. St Boris and St Gleb Church was closed in 1934 and demolished in 1975. The names of some streets and prominent buildings were changed after the revolution. I have used anglicised spellings of the 1880 Russian names for streets and all but a few well-known buildings and districts such as the Winter Palace and the Haymarket, which are rendered in English. Of course, nowhere is the colour of St Petersburg at this time captured better than in the pages of Dostoevsky. One of his neighbours in the apartment building where he lived on Kuznechny Lane in 1880 was an important member of The People's Will. Dates quoted are according to the Julian Calendar then in use in the Russian Empire.

The historian Dr Sergei Podbolotov of the European University of St Petersburg was my guide to the city. I am grateful to him for his hospitality, good humour and the patience he showed in answering my many questions about nineteenth-century Russian customs and society. I discussed my idea for a book on The People's Will with my friend Kate Rea who also helped me with the initial research. I owe a great debt of grat.i.tude to family and friends for their support and enthusiasm when for one reason or another mine began to falter. My agent, Julian Alexander, provided helpful advice on the story outline, so too my editor at John Murray, Kate Parkin, whose judgement and criticism were invaluable in helping me to shape the narrative. Caroline Westmore of Murrays eased its pa.s.sage to publication. Responsibility for omissions deliberate or not and any mistakes there may be rests with me alone. I have taken liberties with the history but endeavoured to do justice to the spirit of the place and the times.

Also by Andrew Williams.

FICTION.

The Interrogator.

NON-FICTION.

The Battle of the Atlantic.

D-Day to Berlin.