Forge of Empires by Michael Knox Beran

Author:Michael Knox Beran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Chapter 25

THE BLOODLETTING

Saint Petersburg, May-September 1866

THE GATES OF THE Fortress of Peter and Paul swung open, and a cart drove out. On it sat the culprit, Dmitri Karakozov, the revolutionist who had fired at the Tsar in the Summer Garden. He was a poor shot; Alexander had walked away unscathed.

A young officer of the Cuirassiers watched as the cart made its way down the rough escarpment of the fortress. A large crowd had gathered. Some of the onlookers groaned. Others made the sign of the Cross. “Lord, forgive his sins and save his soul.” The wagon jolted on the stones, and its occupant quivered, as though made of jelly. The Cuirassier wondered whether they were not “bringing out an India-rubber doll to be hanged.” The thought flashed in his mind that Karakozov was already dead, and that for the sake of appearances the authorities had resolved to hang a corpse.

In fact Karakozov was not dead, but he had, for many days, been in the hands of the Third Section. His head, his hands, his joints were entirely loose. “It was a terrible thing to see,” the Cuirassier said, “and to think what it meant.”

Two soldiers helped Karakozov to ascend the scaffold. Opinion was divided concerning the prisoner’s state of mind as he approached eternity. Some say that he had gone out of his mind and was now insane. Others say that he had, like the older brother of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, experienced redemption, and that his last hours had been passed “on his knees in passionate prayer.”

The period of reformation was coming to an end in Russia. The disenchantment that follows every revolutionary thrust was exacerbated by Karakozov’s pistol shot, and by the interval of reaction that followed. When, in the past, tsars had been assailed, the dark facts of treason and murder had been concealed from the masses. In the eyes of the people the monarchy continued to embody a remote and lofty perfection. When Karakozov fired at Alexander in broad daylight, a veil fell away.

The Tsar himself emerged from the line of fire shaken and suspicious. Perhaps some awful curse did hang over the Romanovs. In his terror he raised one of his old boon companions, Peter Shuvalov, to the most powerful place in the government. The young courtier became head of the Third Section. He was descended from a family that had risen high in the eighteenth century, and he possessed gifts of wit and repartee reminiscent of the courts of that vanished age. The Shuvalovs aspired to a French ideal of culture, and they had helped to import, into Russia, the ideals of the French Enlightenment. That a scion of the luminaries should now become a policeman and a torturer might at first seem an historical irony; but the inquisitorial vocation comes easily to those who have embraced Voltaire’s faith in the virtues of enlightened despotism. Count Shuvalov organized the White Terror that followed Karakozov’s attempt on the life of the Tsar. Reformers

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