Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

On Monday, April 4, 1866, Emperor Alexander II took his customary stroll in St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden. He liked his daily constitutional, perhaps imitating his father, Nicholas I. Besides the obvious health benefits, it gave the forty-seven-year-old ruler, tall and stately, with mustache and lush sideburns and slightly bulging eyes with a gentle gaze, a sense of unity with his people. He was not accompanied by retinue or bodyguards.

After his walk, Alexander headed toward his waiting carriage at the Summer Garden entrance. A pistol shot rang out from the crowd of gawkers. The assailant was a young student, Dmitri Karakozov, who belonged to a secret revolutionary society. He missed (he had an ancient double-barreled pistol), but the bullet whizzed by so close that it burned the emperor’s military cap.

The terrorist was instantly captured. Alexander came up to him and asked, “Who are you?” The student replied, “I am a Russian.” Then, turning to the stunned people around him, he shouted, “Folks, I shot for you!”

Alexander immediately went to the Kazan Cathedral, where a service of thanksgiving for his miraculous salvation was held. Then he returned to the Winter Palace. The investigative machine was set in motion, to dig up the roots of this unprecedented act of terrorism in Russia.

It seemed incredible that a Russian could lift his hand against the monarch, anointed by God. The authorities and the public at first assumed that the conspiracy was headed by Poles, who were constantly rebelling and demanding separation from Russia. (The most recent uprising had been cruelly suppressed by Alexander II in 1863.) Hence Alexander’s question to the assailant.

The masses rejoiced that the tsar was unharmed and cursed the foreign Poles. At the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the scheduled ballet, The Pharaoh’s Daughter, was replaced by a special performance of Glinka’s 1836 classic opera, A Life for the Tsar, in which the peasant Ivan Susanin heroically saved the founder of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Mikhail, from the villainous Poles in 1613.

Tchaikovsky was at the Bolshoi that night and he wrote to his family,

I think the Moscow audience went beyond the bounds of sense in their outburst of enthusiasm. The opera was not really performed, for as soon as the Poles appeared onstage, the whole theater shouted, “Down with the Poles!” and so on. In the last scene of Act 4, when the Poles are supposed to kill Susanin, the actor playing him started fighting the chorus members who played Poles, and being very strong, knocked down several of them, while the rest of the extras, seeing that the audience approved this mockery of art, truth, and decency, fell down, and the triumphant Susanin left unharmed, brandishing his arms, to the deafening applause of the Muscovites.¹

In an attempt to maximize the propaganda windfall, the authorities decided to create a “new Susanin,” so as to promote loyalty to the tsar. They picked a young peasant, Osip Komissarov, who happened to have been near the terrorist attacking Alexander II. The police announced that Komissarov had pushed Karakozov’s elbow just when he pulled the trigger, thereby saving the tsar. The new myth benefited from the fact that Komissarov, like the legendary Susanin, came from Kostroma Province, thus creating a direct line between the two heroic promonarchist exploits, separated by two and a half centuries.

Komissarov was presented to Alexander II at the Winter Palace, and to the cries of “Hurrah!” from the staff he was embraced by the emperor and elevated to the nobility, becoming Komissarov-Kostromskoy. General Petr Cherevin, in charge of the Karakozov investigation, cynically noted in his diary, which was published posthumously, “I find it quite politic to invent such an exploit; it is a forgivable fabrication and one that influences the masses beneficially.”²

It is difficult to imagine the psychological shock Alexander II experienced after this totally unexpected attempt on his life. The emperor sincerely believed himself to be the people’s benefactor, and for good reason: five years earlier, on February 19, 1861, he signed the greatest progressive act in Russian history, the Manifesto of Emancipation of the serfs.

This historic decision, in a stroke of a pen moving Russia from a feudal state to the new era, was one toward which Alexander (later often accused of indecisiveness) had moved stubbornly from his accession to the throne in 1855, sweeping aside doubts, arguments, and even direct resistance from both the right and the left. His severe father, Nicholas I, never did take such a bold step.

The people hailed the manifesto at first. (The authorities feared that the tsar’s ukase would lead to drunkenness and then disorder in the villages, but that did not happen.) In gratitude, they called Alexander the Tsar Liberator. He considered the day of emancipation the best of his life: “I have the sense that I fulfilled a great duty.”