Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Benois later commented that the attitude toward revolutionaries changed sharply after the murder of Alexander II. Previously, the nihilists were almost trendy, but after the assassination they were roundly condemned both by the general public and by intellectuals.

Photographs circulated throughout Russia of Alexander II, immediately known as the Martyr Tsar, in his coffin. The photograph hung both in the study of Benois’s father and in the maid’s room. When the impressionable boy looked at the photograph—the tsar was in uniform, covered below the waist—he shivered with horror at the thought that there were only stumps instead of the emperor’s legs.

But there were two men who, while condemning the regicide, still dared to appeal to the new emperor to give Christian forgiveness to the terrorists. They were Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov, a fashionable religious philosopher, twenty-seven years old.

In his lecture to an audience of over a thousand people, the tall, thin, and pale Solovyov (considered to be the prototype of Dostoevsky’s favorite character, Alyosha Karamazov) called on Alexander III to pardon the killers, adding that if the regime rejected the Christian ideal of mercy then society should reject the regime.

Pandemonium followed those “seditious” words. Someone shouted, “You should be executed first, you traitor!” But many of Solovyov’s listeners, especially women, wept.

Tolstoy wrote a letter to Alexander III saying that the way to combat terrorists was not with executions but in the spiritual sphere. “There is only one ideal that can be opposed to revolutionary beliefs … that is the ideal of love, forgiveness, and responding to evil with good.”² Tolstoy asked Pobedonostsev to hand his letter to the emperor, but the high procurator of the Holy Synod refused. “Having read your letter, I saw that your faith is one thing and my and the Church’s faith is another, and that our Christ is not your Christ.”³

In the end, Tolstoy’s letter was forwarded to Alexander III by his brother, Grand Duke Sergei. In response, the emperor said “that if the attack had been on him, he could have pardoned them, but he did not have the right to forgive the killers of his father.” Five terrorists were hanged.

Pobedonostsev, who in his role as spiritual mentor wrote letters to Alexander III almost daily, advised the emperor to lock every door behind him personally, including his bedroom, and to look under tables and bed to see if there were terrorists lurking.

Alexander III, by no means a coward, big and very strong (he could bend iron bars), was so worked up that he mistakenly shot and killed a personal bodyguard when he thought the man was hiding a weapon behind his back. It turned out the poor officer was trying to conceal a cigarette from the tsar, who had entered the room unexpectedly.

The authorities faced a new cultural phenomenon: the accelerating demystification of the traditional image of the omnipotent and invulnerable Father Tsar. No one had been prepared for it, including the imperial security service: the assassination of Alexander II could have been prevented by the use of elementary precautions, nowadays routinely employed to protect every mid-level Russian oligarch.

The “ideological security service” also needed urgent reconstruction, but the Romanovs did not have enough gifted people to implement it. Pobedonostsev and his comrade and rival, the leading conservative journalist of the era, Mikhail Katkov, were intelligent, educated, and energetic, but their program was defensive and protective rather than positive and forward-looking. In addition, neither Pobedonostsev, Katkov, nor their fellow thinker Prince Meshchersky were good writers. They could not compete with the radicals—Nikolai Dobroliubov, Dmitri Pisarev, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

Prince Meshchersky admitted as much, complaining in a secret 1882 memorandum to Alexander III, “Whoever has stronger colors and sounds influences the public. For now the colors and sounds of the seditious press are stronger. We have to make every effort to send the public strong conservative sounds and colors.”⁴

Meshchersky was asking Alexander for a major subsidy for “sending conservative sounds.” The emperor’s reaction? “Not a bad idea and I’m not against helping Meshchersky.”⁵ But the only great Russian writer who was willing to work with Meshchersky—Dostoevsky—was dead by then, and the prince had no other writers of that caliber at his side.

It is no wonder that Alexander III sighed nostalgically for the days when the monarchs were advised by people like the poet Zhukovsky, the tutor of Alexander II: “Such personalities were not rare then, but now they are enormously rare.”⁶

Nevertheless, Alexander III and his advisers were certain that a conservative cultural policy would restore order and return the former stability. This was wishful thinking. They thought themselves realists, but in the cultural realm they often behaved like true Romantics, longing for a lost past.