When the Executive Committee made the daring attempt to blow up the Winter Palace itself, Alexander II took a step which had no precedent. He created a sort of dictatorship, vesting unlimited powers in Loris-Melikov. This general was an Armenian, to whom Alexander II had once before given similar dictatorial powers, when the bubonic plague broke out on the Lower Volga, and Germany threatened to mobilize her troops and put Russia under quarantine if the plague were not stopped. Now that Alexander II saw that he could not have confidence in the vigilance of even the palace police, he gave dictatorial powers to Loris-Melikov, and as Melikov had the reputation of being a Liberal, this new move was interpreted as indicating that the convocation of a National Assembly would soon follow. As, however, no new attempts upon his life were made immediately after that explosion, the Tsar regained confidence, and a few months later, before Melikov had been allowed to do anything, he was dictator no longer, but simply minister of the interior. The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during which Alexander II reproached himself with the reactionary character that his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, bringing Melikov to despair. Then he would ask his minister, “When will your constitutional scheme be ready?” If, two days later, Melikov said that it was now ready, the Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. “Did I mention it?” he would ask. “What for? We had better leave it to my successor. That will be his gift to Russia.”
When rumors of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake something; but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. Every moment Melikov expected dismissal.
In February, 1881, Melikov reported that a new plot had been laid by the Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II decided that a sort of deliberative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI, he described this gathering as an Assemblée des Notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the council of state, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a final warning by Loris-Melikov, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Melikov not to go out to the parade that day, there being danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Hélène Pávlovna, who had been one of the leaders of the emancipation party in 1861), and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to the memory of the Empress Marie. He is said to have told her, “Je me suis décidé à convoquer une Assemblée des Notables.” However, this belated and halfhearted concession had not been announced, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his ironclad carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakov, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakov and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevétsky, the latter threw a bomb between himself and Alexander II, so that both of them should be killed. They both lived but a few hours.
There Alexander II lay upon the snow, profusely bleeding, abandoned by every one of his followers! All had disappeared. It was cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head with a cadet cap. And it was one of the terrorists, Yemelyanov, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality—that of a born autocrat, whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, of a man of strong
