6

1 March 1887

Although the new university regulations introduced in 1884 had forbidden all student organizations whatever, there continued to exist at the capital as many as twenty home-town clubs, embracing about fifteen hundred students. This club movement was perfectly innocuous in character, centring around questions of cuisine and mutual-aid funds. In view of the poverty of the overwhelming mass of students, such organizations were a vital necessity. However, the government was not wrong in fearing them. The revolutionaries would make use of any kind of association to recruit followers, and in a moment of political awakening the most peaceable of home-town clubs would mobilize the youth for the struggle. But after the shattering of the People’s Will, Petersburg had been considered entirely purged of revolutionaries; the few who survived were hiding in the provinces. The mood of the students seemed to the authorities so quiet that they closed their eyes to the home-town clubs. The vast majority of the students really had withdrawn from politics. More noticeable, against the grey university background, was a layer of young careerists, future government functionaries, who embodied, even in dress and haircut, the exact opposite of the nihilist type. The half-starving youth, stifled by the police regime, remained discontented, but did not go beyond surly inaction.

On the general tide of discouragement, however, there were still small ebbs and flows, and chiefly among these same students. Only in his third year at the university did Alexander become active in the student circles – biological, economic, and literary. But even here it was merely a question of elaborating scientific views, not of active politics. It was on this basis that he established closer ties with the radical elements of the hometown clubs. He began to devote more time to the study of social problems. In these circles the idea arose of marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Peasant Reform – 19 February 1861 – by a mass in the Volkovo Cemetery for the heroes of the ‘peasant liberation’. What a reappraisal of reputations! The great publicist Chernyshevsky had despised the peasant reform as robbery and deceit, and had paid cruelly for this bold and sober judgement, which lay at the basis of the revolutionary movement for the next twenty years. To the question of Alexander II: ‘Why did you shoot at me?’ Karakozov, by then in the hands of the police, had answered: ‘Because you promised the peasants freedom and land and you deceived them.’ The ‘nineteenth of February’ was appraised in the same way by Ippolit Myshkin and his comrades and by the adherents of People’s Will. But as the clouds of reaction grew darker, the ‘great reform’ of the preceding reign, celebrated by the liberal press, began to appear in a more favourable light even to the students. From behind the heavy back of Alexander III, the figure of Alexander II acquired an almost liberal outline.

To celebrate the peasant reform became gradually an act of opposition, and incurred police persecution. On this occasion the press was directed in advance to refrain from anniversary articles. Saying a mass over the official executors of the reform thus became an act of protest. The cemetery priest agreed, not without fear and trembling, to conduct the rites for the repose of the souls of the liberators – among them, of course, Alexander II, killed six years before by the elder brothers of those who were saying the mass. In this political move we see more clearly than in all the police persecutions the depth of social reaction that prevailed. To be sure, a number of the demonstrators thought of the mass as dedicated not to the bureaucrats, but to those writers who had fought for the liberation of the peasants. Nothing was clear; all dividing lines were blurred.

The Volkovo Cemetery figures as the setting for Alexander Ulyanov’s first public activity. He participated actively in preparing for this mass. The liberal circles, to whom the initiators appealed, responded as usual: not at all. Only the students came – about four hundred of them. The police could not make up their minds, it seems, to disturb an oppositional religious service – or perhaps they simply failed to notice it. The young people dispersed, at any rate, almost with a feeling of having won a victory. The more resolute decided that it was possible to go farther along the same path.

From then on, the leaders of the students drew closer together, and in the following months created a union of hometown clubs. Ulyanov took a place in the directing centre. But the activities of the union, extremely modest activities, were soon interrupted by the holidays, the last that Alexander was to spend on the Volga with his already fatherless family. In the autumn the activities of the circles and of the home-town clubs were revived. Their leaders, the same ones as before, hit upon the thought of using the approaching twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the famous critic Dobrolyubov, pupil and comrade in arms of Chernyshevsky, to celebrate a new mass. This time six hundred assembled – or, according to other sources, up to a thousand. But they found the gates of the cemetery closed; the police were not to be taken unawares. The request for a permit for a mass was refused by the burgomaster, Gresser. On their way back to the city, the student crowd was surrounded by the Cossacks and kept standing for two hours in the rain. Forty of them were subsequently exiled from Petersburg. This event, though insignificant in itself, nevertheless shook the initiators of the manifestation to the depths and transformed them, especially Ulyanov. It was a personal experience, his own, and it brought his whole store of previous observations and reflections to a quick focus in a burning demand for action.

How shall we answer the oppressors? There was no end of discussion, and of bold plans, for which only the strength was lacking. They drew up a proclamation addressed to ‘society’ – that is, to professors, zemstvo members, lawyers, and writers. Most of the envelopes containing the proclamation were taken from the mailboxes by the police and did not disturb the peaceful doze of the liberals. The excitement among the students gradually subsided. But these days of hot feeling served to sift out a group of the more resolute who drew from their own indignation and political impotence a conclusion already sanctified by the past: Terror!

Ulyanov still tried for a time to cling to his old position: one ought not to take up revolutionary activities without having worked out correct views. They answered him: while you sit with your books, violence triumphs and grows stronger. The argument was convincing because Alexander no longer wanted to resist it. For him there was no more retreat. One of the chief initiators of a demonstration for which others were suffering, author of a proclamation to 'society’ that had met no response, Alexander already stood under the sign of the terrorist imperative. After brief dispute in a narrow circle, he finally joined a small group with terrorist aims. Two or three of the conspirators had a bit of experience and a few modest contacts. Thus originated the affair of 1 March 1887.

The last period of his life Alexander divided between the university laboratory, where he was investigating Idothea entonon, a species of marine isopod, and a conspiratorial laboratory, where he was manufacturing dynamite bombs. Intending to give his life for the future of humanity, he nevertheless continued to investigate with passionate curiosity the visual capacity of worms. Science had a firm grip on him. He tore himself from science with pain, like a warrior from his beloved on the eve of his first and last battle. No less characteristic of this youth is the fact that on the very last days before the attempt, when all the fibres of his being must have been tensed with superhuman anxiety, he found the strength of spirit to set in type, with his inexperienced hands, the programme of the ‘Terrorist Faction’, of which he was also the author.

From saying a mass over the men of the peasant reform to saying a mass for a radical writer who had died young, and from this unsaid mass to a plan to assassinate the tsar – such was the road travelled in a few brief months by those who made this attempt. Subsequently, in court, the chief counsel for the defence described quite accurately the genesis of the plot: ‘Why, these people’, he said, ‘were not always terrorists; in August 1886 they were merely "malcontents”; in November, after the unsuccessful attempt to celebrate a mass at the grave of Dobrolyubov, they were “protesters”; and it was only in January that the terrorist tendency had ripened among them… ’ The liberal lawyer did not add that the leap from saying masses to throwing bombs had been possible only because under the heavy lid of the new reign no small amount of mute discontent had accumulated among the more democratic layers of the intelligentsia, to say nothing of the people. But that did not make any difference. This bold undertaking of an isolated circle was condemned in advance to failure. If the revolutionary offensive of the years 1860 to 1866 (from the first proclamation to the shot fired by Karakozov) had been, in the inner consistency of its stages, a kind of rough draft of the great movement of the intelligentsia from 1873 to 1881, the episode of 1886-7 was its belated and declining echo.

In the afternoon of 1 March, on the Nevsky Prospect, six young men were detained by police officers. One of them carried a thick book with raised letters on the cover reading ‘Medical Dictionary’. What was really involved was the political medicine of the terror. The supposed dictionary contained dynamite and bullets poisoned with strychnine. Two of the others carried bombs of cylindrical form. The bombs were intended for Alexander III. An unprecedented series of searches and arrests followed. The participants in this bold attempt on the all-powerful ruler of Russia were nothing more than young students. Only one of the intended bomb throwers had reached his twenty-sixth year; one of the organizers was twenty-three. The other five most closely involved were only twenty or twenty-one. The preparation of the bombs had been entrusted chiefly to a natural-science student who was still three months under age. The name of this technician was Alexander Ulyanov. His amateur preoccupation with chemistry in the kitchen in a wing of the house in Simbirsk had come in handy. The initiator of the whole undertaking was a sickly twenty-three-year-old student named Shevyryov. He had selected his men and divided the work among them. His own revolutionary experience was not, and could not have been, very significant. Between this Shevyryov, hasty and sanguine, and the more thoughtful Ulyanov, quarrels had arisen more than once about the question of bringing in relatively inexperienced people. However, there had been little to choose from. Two students accidentally involved in the plot subsequently betrayed Ulyanov. The organization had negligible technical and financial resources. In order to get nitric acid and 150 roubles for expenses, it had been necessary to go to Vilna; but the acid proved too weak and the money did not arrive immediately. In order to enable one of the organizers to escape abroad, Ulyanov pawned his high-school gold medal for one hundred roubles. A pistol supplied to the bomb thrower Generalov to enable him to cover his escape proved useless. Such was the level of their conspiratorial methods. The whole enterprise had hung by a thread.

Even in the preparations for 1 March 1881, an attempt made by incomparably more-hardened revolutionaries, the dreadful tension as the fatal hour approached turned into weariness and apathy. Could Ulyanov and the other youthful conspirators have helped but feel doubt tugging at their hearts? Rumours had arisen that the government already knew of the proposed attempt. Some member of the group proposed that they postpone the whole thing until autumn. But that meant new dangers. According to some reports, Alexander foresaw the failure of the attempt. More likely, the mood of the condemned handful wavered sharply between optimism and despair. But will overcame doubts. The preparations were not postponed; the bombs were made ready, the roles divided, the posts assigned. It remained only to kill and, whatever came, to die.

In reality, the government suspected nothing. After several years of calm, the police had ceased to think about terror. Without provocateurs, a police force is, in general, powerless to discover plots. There was no provocateur among the conspirators. But they managed to give themselves away – through their youth, naiveté, and the carelessness of one of them. Only after 1917, when the police archives were examined, did it become possible to discover the cause of their failure. The student Andreyushkin, designated as a bomb thrower, wrote a friendly letter to another student in Kharkov a month and a half before the event. In it was included a sort of hymn to Terror. The letter, which had an illegible signature, was intercepted by the police. The Kharkov addressee, summoned to the police station, betrayed his Petersburg correspondent. A correspondence between the two police departments dragged along for some time, the Kharkov people seeing no special reason for haste. Finally the Petersburg police secured the name and address of the writer, and put him under surveillance This happened on 28 February, the eve of the proposed attempt. Andreyushkin and others were seen on the Nevsky Prospect between noon and 5 o’clock in the afternoon with some heavy objects in their hands. It never occurred to the police that these might be bombs. They were seeking the author of the suspicious letter and nothing else. The next day, ‘the same persons, numbering six, were again seen on the Nevsky in the same circumstances.’ Only then were they arrested.

The surprise of the police when they stumbled upon a group of terrorists was unbounded. Alexander III was, of course, immediately informed of the discovery. The tsar wrote upon the report; ‘This time God saved us, but for how long?’ Not fully confident of God’s help, the tsar added a word of encouragement to his earthly guards: ‘Thanks to all officers and agents of the police that they do not slumber, but act with expedition.’ In reality the officers and agents hardly deserved his gratitude; a happy accident had come to his assistance. It is uncertain, however, how the attempt would have ended, without the interference of accident and the police. The question of the quality of the bombs remained unexplored to the end. The bomb hurler, Osipanov – when he was arrested, it never occurred to the police to take away his bomb – threw it in Police Headquarters, hoping to kill himself together with his police escort, but the bomb did not explode. There is no reason to think that the other bombs were any better. An artillery general, called in as an expert, testified that the ‘construction of the bombs was imperfect’. Everything in this tragic undertaking was imperfect: ideas, personnel, conspiracy, and manufacturing technique.

The social position of the culprits was described by the prosecutor as follows: nine university students, one candidate for the Theological Seminary, one student of pharmacy, one townsman, two midwives, one elementary-school teacher. The defendants reflected the lowest, most democratic layer of the intelligentsia, and only its younger generation at that. ‘Not all of the defendants were of age,' the prosecutor was compelled to acknowledge – which did not prevent him from considering them old enough for the gallows. The liberal lawyers did not differ much from the attorney general in the tone of their speeches. Being ‘one hundred per cent Russian’, they could not believe that such evil-doings had originated among Russian youth. They sought behind the backs of the defendants for ‘some foreign disrespect for Russia’s sacred institutions’.

The majority of the defendants did not know how to conduct themselves at the inquiry or the trial. Some were weak-hearted and gave the plot away. But the courageous, too, told more than necessary and thus helped the prosecution – both against themselves and against others. Among the defendants was Bronisław Piłsudski, son of a rich landowner, who had turned over his room to Ulyanov for the printing of the programme. Bronisław's brother, Józef Pilsudski, was taken to the courtroom from prison to serve as a witness, Bronisław demeaned himself, denied his sympathy with People’s Will, and pleaded lack of character and naivete. Józef gave his testimony with great caution, but was compelled to admit sending telegrams from Vilna in the ‘agreed-upon revolutionary jargon’. (Subsequently, as dictator of Poland, he managed to exchange ‘revolutionary jargon’ for the fascist kind.)

The trial exposed beyond a doubt the fact that, although Alexander Ulyanov was not the chief architect of the conspiracy, he was at any rate the most important figure in it. For in those trying days after the initiator and the organizer, in accordance with a previous plan, had fled from Petersburg, Ulyanov, in the correct testimony of the prosecutor, ‘took the place of both ringleaders of the conspiracy’. Having had no role in the final act on the streets either as bomb thrower or as scout, Ulyanov was arrested in the room of a student, Rancher, where he walked into a police trap. Only through Rancher, who gave away everything that he knew, was the actual role of Ulyanov discovered by the authorities. From that moment, the defendant Lukashevich, who collaborated in preparing the bombs, read in the eyes of Ulyanov ‘an irrevocable determination to die’. ‘If you have to, blame it on me! ’ whispered Ulyanov to Lukashevich in the courtroom. Another defendant, Ananyina, told her daughter many years later: ‘He was ready to be hanged twenty times over if that could ease the fate of the others.’

The conduct of Ulyanov during 'the investigation and the trial gives us the full measure of this young man. He wants to take upon himself as much as possible in order to ease the fate of his comrades; at the same time, he is afraid of proclaiming his real role as leader in so many words lest he impinge on the dignity of the others. He claims sole responsibility, but not sole credit. 'I fully believe’, said the prosecutor, ‘the testimony of the defendant Ulyanov, whose confession, if at all distorted, is so only in the sense that he takes upon himself even that which he really did not do.’ This tribute of respect from the prosecutor made Ulyanov’s execution all the more certain.

Those present at the trial, besides the judges, included the prosecutor, the lawyers for the defence, and the defendants. Plus one other participant, invisible but very real: the tsar. In a sense, the trial was a duel between two men: Alexander Romanov and Alexander Ulyanov. The tsar was at that time thirty-three years old. He was not accustomed to staring into a microscope or racking his brains over Karl Marx. He believed in icons and relics, and considered himself a ‘truly Russian’ tsar, although he was unable to compose a single literate sentence in Russian (or, for that matter, in any other language). On the programme written by Ulyanov the tsar wrote with his own hand: ‘This is the writing not even of a madman, but of a pure idiot.' Beneath the programme’s assertion that under the existing political regime any attempt to raise the level of the people was almost impossible, Romanov wrote: ‘That is reassuring,’ In the margin of the practical part of the programme, which included demands not only for democracy, but also for nationalization of the land, the factories, and all the means of production, the tsar made the notation: ‘A regular commune.’ And finally, the following words, spoken by Ulyanov on 21 March, received the tsar’s special attention: ‘As far as my moral and intellectual participation in this affair is concerned, it was complete – that is, all that my ability and the strength of my knowledge and convictions made possible.’ Opposite this the tsar wrote, ‘This frankness is quite touching!!!’ The tsar was not too deeply touched, however, to hang five defendants whose ages totalled barely one hundred and ten years.

The terrorists of the 1870s had passed through a preliminary school of propaganda and revolutionary organization, which explains their more advanced age and experience. Before mounting the scaffold, Zhelyabov, Kibalchich, and Perovskaya had become politically mature and hardened revolutionaries, Having arisen out of the effort to create a mass movement, People’s Will had set itself, at least on paper, the goal of mounting an insurrection, having first assured itself of the cooperation of the workers and the sympathy of a section of the armed forces. In reality, as we know, the Executive Committee found itself compelled to concentrate all of its forces on the assassination of the tsar.

The group of 1887 began straight off with the work upon which the Executive Committee of the seventies had broken its head. The disheartened mood of the intelligentsia had cut off in advance, so to speak, all roads leading to the masses. The plot of Shevyryov and Ulyanov did not even try to transcend the bounds of a small student circle. There was no attempt at propaganda, at the winning over of the workers, at the establishment of a press or the publication of journals. The initiators of this terrorist attempt counted neither on the help of the people nor the support of the liberals. They did not call themselves a party, but a faction – that is, a fragment of a no-longer-existing whole. They renounced centralization, having nothing and nobody to centralize. They chose to believe that there would be other groups in the country ready to act on their own initiative and that this would be sufficient to guarantee success.

In his speech in court, Ulyanov gave a very vivid explanation, if not of the terrorist struggle itself, then at least of the sources of his belief in its effectiveness: ‘We have not’, he said, ’any strongly united classes which might restrain the government…’ At the same time,‘our intelligentsia is so weak physically and so little organized that at present we cannot enter into an open struggle…’ From this pessimistic appraisal of the social forces, the natural inference would be a political hopelessness of the kind prevailing in the 1880s, but it is well enough known that extreme despair often becomes the source of unrealistic dreams. ‘The weak intelligentsia, very weakly imbued with the interests of the masses ,concluded Ulyanov, ‘can defend its right to think only with terrorism.' Such were the psychological sources of the affair of 1 March 1887, that startling attempt by ten young men and women to give a new direction to the political life of society.

Six persons took part in the drawing up of the programme of the group. Three of them, including Ulyanov, considered themselves adherents of People’s Will; three others were inclined to call themselves Social Democrats. The distinction between the former and the latter, however, was not at all clear-cut. The so-called Social Democrats were willing to recognize the relevance of Marxism, not only for the West, but also for Russia. On the question of ‘direct political struggle’, however, they were adamantly in favour of terror. If a mass revolutionary movement – the argument went – can arise only in connection with the further development of capitalism, then the revolutionary intelligentsia has nothing to do at present but to pick up the weapon that fell from the hands of the People’s Will. This thought united young people otherwise differing with each other. Terror as the central problem inevitably reduced all other questions to secondary importance. Little wonder that both these tendencies united under the name of ‘Terrorist Faction of People’s Will’. They were alike in looking not forward, but backward. Their thoughts were single-mindedly centred on the dazzling example of 1 March 1881. If the terror of the Executive Committee had not led to the desired goals, it was only because it had not been carried through to the end. ‘I do not believe in terror,’ said Alexander Ulyanov, who considered himself the adherent of a People's Will of a new type; ‘I believe in systematic terror.’

Alexander had diligently read Marx and other books on economics and sociology. There are no reasons to doubt that with his great abilities and perseverance he had, during the last year of his life, amassed no small amount of knowledge in this sphere so new to him. But it was only knowledge. He had not worked out a total world view or a method for himself. He had established no real connection between the theory of Marxism and Russian reality, and he himself acknowledged in a narrow circle of intimates that he remained an ignoramus on questions of the peasant commune and the evolution of capitalism. He wrote his programme to fit the already established fact of a terrorist plot. Hence his tendency to minimize the significance of disagreements that in the 1880s had already begun to split the revolutionary movement into what were to become two irreconcilable camps. The essence of that disagreement boiled down to the following alternatives: class struggle of the proletariat, or students with bombs. Ulyanov’s programme recognized, to be sure, the necessity of ‘organizing and educating the working class’, but this task was deferred indefinitely. It declared revolutionary activity among the masses ‘under the existing political regime almost impossible’. Such a formula simply evaded the essence of the dispute. Real Marxists, such as Plekhanov and his friends, saw in the development of the struggle of the working class the basic force for the overthrow of the autocracy. The terrorist faction, on the other hand, believed that the ‘physically weak’ intelligentsia ought first to overthrow the autocracy by means of terror, so that the working class could enter the political arena. Hence the inevitable conclusion that the creation of Social Democratic organizations was, at the very least, premature.

As a basis for judging the subjective attitude of the participants in this plot toward the Marxist point of view, we have a human document of unusual psychological interest. The student Andreyushkin, one of those designated as a bomb thrower, no doubt also adhered ‘on the whole and generally’ to the teachings of Marx; he wrote to his friend, in that same unfortunate letter which helped in the discovery of the whole plot: ‘I will not enumerate the merits and advantages of red terror, for I could not finish until the end of time, since that is my passion. And that is the source, I suppose, of my hatred for the Social Democrats, ’ The expansive Andreyushkin was right, in his way. If the hope of an immediate transition from communal agriculture to socialism might still, somehow, be assigned to the misty domain of ‘theory’, the dogma of ‘the independent importance of the intelligentsia’ was of immediate practical relevance. A revolutionary about to convert himself into an explosive missile could not entertain either a denial, or even the slightest doubt, of the irreplaceable and redeeming importance of dynamite.

Attempts by official Soviet historians to portray the ‘terrorist faction’ as something like a bridge between the old movement and the Social Democrats, in order to present Alexander Ulyanov as a link uniting Zhelyabov and Lenin, are wholly unjustified upon analysis of the facts and ideas involved. In the domain of theory, Ulyanov’s group adhered to eclectic views characteristic of the 1880s as a period of decline. In effect, this group must be considered a latter-day version of People’s Will, whose methods it reduced to the absurd. The undertaking of 1 March 1887 contained no seeds of the future; it represented, in essence, the last tragic convulsion of the already doomed claims of the ‘critically thinking personality’ to an independent historic role. That, in the final analysis, is the lesson of this costly event.