In his lecture to an audience of over a thousand people, the tall, thin, and pale Solovyov (considered to be the prototype of Dostoevsky’s favorite character, Alyosha Karamazov) called on Alexander III to pardon the killers, adding that if the regime rejected the Christian ideal of mercy then society should reject the regime.
Pandemonium followed those “seditious” words. Someone shouted, “You should be executed first, you traitor!” But many of Solovyov’s listeners, especially women, wept.
Tolstoy wrote a letter to Alexander III saying that the way to combat terrorists was not with executions but in the spiritual sphere. “There is only one ideal that can be opposed to revolutionary beliefs … that is the ideal of love, forgiveness, and responding to evil with good.”2 Tolstoy asked Pobedonostsev to hand his letter to the emperor, but the high procurator of the Holy Synod refused. “Having read your letter, I saw that your faith is one thing and my and the Church’s faith is another, and that our Christ is not your Christ.”3
In the end, Tolstoy’s letter was forwarded to Alexander III by his brother, Grand Duke Sergei. In response, the emperor said “that if the attack had been on him, he could have pardoned them, but he did not have the right to forgive the killers of his father.” Five terrorists were hanged.
Pobedonostsev, who in his role as spiritual mentor wrote letters to Alexander III almost daily, advised the emperor to lock every door behind him personally, including his bedroom, and to look under tables and bed to see if there were terrorists lurking.
Alexander III, by no means a coward, big and very strong (he could bend iron bars), was so worked up that he mistakenly shot and killed a personal bodyguard when he thought the man was hiding a weapon behind his back. It turned out the poor officer was trying to conceal a cigarette from the tsar, who had entered the room unexpectedly.
The authorities faced a new cultural phenomenon: the accelerating demystification of the traditional image of the omnipotent and invulnerable Father Tsar. No one had been prepared for it, including the imperial security service: the assassination of Alexander II could have been prevented by the use of elementary precautions, nowadays routinely employed to protect every mid-level Russian oligarch.
The “ideological security service” also needed urgent reconstruction, but the Romanovs did not have enough gifted people to implement it. Pobedonostsev and his comrade and rival, the leading conservative journalist of the era, Mikhail Katkov, were intelligent, educated, and energetic, but their program was defensive and protective rather than positive and forward-looking. In addition, neither Pobedonostsev, Katkov, nor their fellow thinker Prince Meshchersky were good writers. They could not compete with the radicals—Nikolai Dobroliubov, Dmitri Pisarev, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
Prince Meshchersky admitted as much, complaining in a secret 1882 memorandum to Alexander III, “Whoever has stronger colors and sounds influences the public. For now the colors and sounds of the seditious press are stronger. We have to make every effort to send the public strong conservative sounds and colors.”4
Meshchersky was asking Alexander for a major subsidy for “sending conservative sounds.” The emperor’s reaction? “Not a bad idea and I’m not against helping Meshchersky.”5 But the only great Russian writer who was willing to work with Meshchersky—Dostoevsky—was dead by then, and the prince had no other writers of that caliber at his side.
It is no wonder that Alexander III sighed nostalgically for the days when the monarchs were advised by people like the poet Zhukovsky, the tutor of Alexander II: “Such personalities were not rare then, but now they are enormously rare.”6
Nevertheless, Alexander III and his advisers were certain that a conservative cultural policy would restore order and return the former stability. This was wishful thinking. They thought themselves realists, but in the cultural realm they often behaved like true Romantics, longing for a lost past.
Alexander III and his entourage did a lot to attract cultural figures: they met with writers, composers, and painters, awarded them subsidies and state pensions, and commissioned music, sculptures, and paintings, as well as monumental frescoes in churches. A good example is the friendly, albeit inconsistent, policy Alexander had for the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, the members of the 1870 Association of Traveling Art Exhibits.
The roots of the movement go back to 1863, when fourteen of the most talented students of the Imperial Academy of Arts, led by Ivan Kramskoy, refused to take part in the diploma exam and created an independent Art Artel, which functioned as a quasi-socialist commune: the artists rented a large apartment in St. Petersburg and lived and worked there together.
Outrage was the authorities’ initial reaction to this bold step. The Academy of Arts was an official institution, under the supervision of the emperor, who personally decided which artists to encourage and which to punish. The rebellion against the academy was therefore seen as rebellion against the monarchy. The “communal” lifestyle also raised suspicions.
The young rebels proved their metier rather quickly, organizing art exhibits independent of the academy and government. The leading Wanderers—Kramskoy, Vassily Perov, Nikolai Ge, Ilya Repin, and Ivan Shishkin—became famous and commercially successful artists. Grand Duke Vladimir, vice-president and then president of the academy, used the carrot-and-stick approach: he would threaten them with official punishments and then try to lure them back into the academy fold.
Still, it was Grand Duke Vladimir, twenty-four years old, curly-haired, handsome, with gray-blue eyes, who commissioned twenty-six-year-old Repin to paint
The painting’s reception was a vivid illustration of the Wanderers’ position in Russian culture. According to Repin, the minister of transportation gave Repin a serious scolding for “showing Europe” the miserable wretches slaving under the broiling sun when “I have reduced that antediluvian method of transport to zero.”7
The liberals were also certain that Repin’s painting was hated “in the highest spheres” for its theme and “expose” character. But at the same time, the grand duke, in love with the painting, would sometimes act as museum guide for his guests, lovingly explaining the background and psychology of each character in the work.
For all their intuitive preference for order and hierarchy, Alexander III and his entourage gradually realized that the official Academy of Arts, with its outmoded classicist norms, was out of touch with Russian life. The Wanderers, on the other hand, exhibited vivid scenes from provincial life, like Repin’s
The Wanderers interpreted even traditional religious subjects in a new way. Ge’s painting
