Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. “In other countries,” they began to say, “men have the courage to resist. An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages. How can we tolerate them? Let us resist, arms in hands, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle.” At Odéssa, Koválsky and his friends met with revolver shots the gendarmes who came one night to arrest them.
The reply of Alexander II to this new move was the proclamation of a state of siege. Russia was divided into a number of districts, each of them under a governor-general, who received the order to hang offenders pitilessly. Koválsky and his friends—who, by the way, had killed no one by their shots—were executed. Hanging became the order of the day. Twenty-three persons perished in two years, including a boy of nineteen, who was caught posting a revolutionary proclamation at a railway station; this act—I say it deliberately—was the only charge against him. He was a boy, but he died like a man.
Then the watchword of the revolutionists became “self-defense:” self-defense against the spies who introduced themselves into the circles under the mask of friendship, and denounced members right and left, simply because they would not be paid if they did not accuse large numbers of persons; self-defense against those who ill-treated prisoners; self-defense against the omnipotent chiefs of the state police.
Three functionaries of mark and two or three small spies fell in that new phase of the struggle. General Mezentsov, who had induced the Tsar to double the sentences after the trial of the hundred and ninety-three, was killed in broad daylight at St. Petersburg; a gendarme colonel, guilty of something worse than that, had the same fate at Kiev; and the governor-general of Kharkov—my cousin, Dmitri Kropotkin—was shot as he was returning home from a theatre. The central prison, in which the first famine strike and artificial feeding took place, was under his orders. In reality he was not a bad man—I know that his personal feelings were somewhat favorable to the political prisoners; but he was a weak man and a courtier, and he hesitated to interfere. One word from him would have stopped the ill-treatment of the prisoners. Alexander II liked him so much, and his position at the court was so strong, that his interference very probably would have been approved. “Thank you; you have acted according to my own wishes,” the Tsar said to him, a couple of years before that date, when be came to St. Petersburg to report that he had taken a peaceful attitude in a riot of the poorer population of Kharkov, and had treated the rioters very leniently. But this time he gave his approval to the jailers, and the young men of Kharkov were so exasperated at the treatment of their friends that one of them shot him.
However, the personality of the Emperor was kept out of the struggle, and down to the year 1879 no attempt was made on his life. The person of the Liberator of the serfs was surrounded by an aureole which protected him infinitely better than the swarms of police officials. If Alexander II had shown at this juncture the least desire to improve the state of affairs in Russia; if he had only called in one or two of those men with whom he had collaborated during the reform period, and had ordered them to make an inquiry into the conditions of the country, or merely of the peasantry; if he had shown any intention of limiting the powers of the secret police, his steps would have been hailed with enthusiasm. A word would have made him “the Liberator” again, and once more the youth would have repeated Hérzen’s words: “Thou hast conquered, Galilean.” But just as during the Polish insurrection the despot awoke in him, and, inspired by Katkov, he resorted to hanging, so now again, following the advice of his evil genius, Katkov, he found nothing to do but to nominate special military governors—for hanging.
Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists—the Executive Committee—supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings, declared that war against absolutism which, after several attempts, ended in 1881 in the death of Alexander II.
Two men, I have said already, lived in Alexander II, and now the conflict between the two, which had grown during all his life, assumed a really tragic aspect. When he met Solovyov, who shot at him and missed the first shot, he had the presence of mind to run to the nearest door, not in a straight line, but in zigzags, while Solovyov continued to fire; and he thus escaped with but a slight tearing of his overcoat. On the day of his death, too, he gave a proof of his undoubted courage. In the face of real danger he was courageous; but he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination. Once he shot at an aide-de-camp, when the latter had made an abrupt movement, and Alexander thought he was going to attempt his life. Merely to save his life, he surrendered entirely all his imperial powers into the hands of those who cared nothing for him, but only for their lucrative positions.
He undoubtedly retained an attachment to the mother of his children, even though he was then with the Princess Yurievski-Dolgorúki, whom he married immediately after the death of the Empress. “Don’t speak to me of the Empress; it makes me suffer too much,” he more than once said to Loris-Melikov. And yet he entirely abandoned the Empress Marie, who had stood faithfully by his side while he was the Liberator; he let
