To Kill a Tsar

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 (1826–88) 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 (1846–1904) who appears as a character in the pages of this book. In 1902 Von Plehve became minister of the interior but was assassinated by a revolutionary on the streets of St Petersburg two years later. Another figure in this book, Anton Frankzevich Dobrshinsky (1844–97), 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 assassin 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 passion — 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 assassin 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 assembly, 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 assassination 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 classes 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 passion,’ 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 assassination. 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