To Kill a Tsar

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 assassination 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 assassinate 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 (1768–1854) 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 (1763–1856) 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 embassy in St Petersburg is now an academic institute, but some of the rooms remain, including its extraordinary White Ballroom. The British ambassador’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 embassy I consulted the telegrams and ambassador’s reports at the National Archive in London. Diplomatic Reminiscences, the memoirs of Lord Augustus Loftus, British ambassador to Russia (1871–9) were also a useful source. A third secretary, Lord Frederic Hamilton, wrote a lighthearted memoir of embassy 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 embassy 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 gratitude 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 passage 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

About the Author

After studying English at Oxford, Andrew Williams worked as a senior producer for the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight programmes, then wrote and directed history documentaries. He is the author of two bestselling non- fiction books, The Battle of the Atlantic and D-Day to Berlin. His acclaimed first novel, The Interrogator, is also published by John Murray.

Review

‘Williams contrives an appealing blend of Doctor Zhivago, Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Boris Akunin’s 19th-century crime fiction. His ability to bring a past world to life matches Furst’s.’

— John Dugdale, Sunday Times