Dismounting from his carriage to inspect the damage caused by a bomb which had missed him but landed among his Cossack escort, the Tsar became an easy target for a second assassin. A Polish student named Grinevitsky rushed out of the gathering crowd and threw his bomb between himself and the Tsar. Grinevitsky died immediately, but Alexander, his legs nearly severed from his body and his stomach ripped open, had just enough strength to mutter, “Take me to the Palace – to die there.”
His last wish was granted, in the presence of his son, the new Alexander III and his 13-year-old grandson, the future Nicholas II. Unknown to his subjects the dying Tsar’s last official act had been that morning to consent to the establishment of a national representative council to advise on legislation. The project died with him.474
Six years later, the People’s Will concocted a plot to assassinate his successor, Alexander III, with bombs made extra-lethal by lead pellets filled with strychnine. One member of the assassination team was Alexander Ulyanov, a university zoology student and Lenin’s elder brother. Also implicated were Bronislaw and Jozef Pilsudski – the latter destined much later to emerge at the head of a resurrected Polish state. To help pay for the dynamite, Ulyanov pawned a gold medal he had just won for his research on fresh-water Annelida (a variety of earthworm), but the plot went awry and the conspirators were brought to trial. When Ulyanov took the stand he tried to take complete responsibility for the fiasco and, it is said, “astonished his mother and the court with his volubility.”475 But his statement did no one any good. Bronislaw was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor on Sakhalin; Jozef was exiled to Eastern Siberia; Ulyanov himself and four others were hanged.
Most Russian dissidents weren’t terrorists, of course; and although politicals made up only about one percent of the exiled population, their plight attracted particular attention because many belonged to the educated classes, and had been sentenced for their political views. Moreover, the miserable conditions under which some of them were forced to live aroused widespread indignation. Easily the most thorough account of their plight was given by George F. Kennan, who had first come to Siberia during 1865-68 as part of a survey team in connection with a round-the-world telegraph scheme promoted by Western Union. In 1885 he returned to write a series of investigative articles about the exile system for the Century Magazine. Skeptical of the more shocking accounts reaching the West of political repression (he had already defended the system in an address before the American Geographical Society), Kennan set out as a “friendly observer” and found the Russian authorities eager to provide assistance for what they expected would be a positive report.
In the course of his travels, however, Kennan found that mental activity was “officially regarded as more dangerous to the state than moral depravity,” that every newspaper published in Siberia had been periodically suspended or suppressed, and that almost every foreign traveler who made a serious attempt to study local conditions in Siberia was liable to arrest – like one English cleric who was detained as a distributor of revolutionary pamphlets, even though his polylingual material consisted entirely of Scripture and religious tracts.476 Unfamiliar scientific investigations also aroused alarm. When the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt surveyed the Siberian countryside around Ishim in 1829, the local police chief wrote anxiously to the governor-generaclass="underline"
A few days ago there arrived here a German of shortish stature, insignificant appearance, fussy, and bearing a letter of introduction from your Excellency to me. I accordingly received him politely [But] I disliked him from the first. He talks too much and despises my hospitality. He pays no attention to the leading officials of the town and associates with Poles and other criminals. I take the liberty of informing your Excellency that his intercourse with political criminals does not escape my vigilance. On one occasion he proceeded with them to a hill overlooking the town. They took a box with them and got out of it a long tube which we all took for a gun. After fastening it to three feet they pointed it down on the town and one after another examined whether it was properly sighted. This was evidently a great danger for the town which is built entirely of wood; so I sent a detachment of troops with loaded rifles to watch the German on the hill. If the treacherous machinations of this man justify my suspicions, we shall be ready to give our lives for the Tsar and Holy Russia. I send this despatch to your Excellency by special messenger.477
Kennan comments wryly: “A letter more characteristic of the petty Russian police officer was never penned. The civilized world is to be congratulated that the brilliant career of the great von Humboldt was not cut short by a Cossack bullet or a police saber, while he was taking sights with a theodolite in that little Siberian town.”478
With his official clearance, Kennan was able to travel to numerous locales otherwise barred to visitors and met about five hundred political exiles, including a number of so-called “Nihilists,” living under police surveillance or in the penal settlements. He soon discovered that the term “Nihilist” (popularized by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons) was indiscriminately applied by the authorities to almost all dissidents, regardless of their views. Confronted with this official caricature, Kennan was led, by reaction, into a kind of naive enthusiasm and admiration for most of the political exiles he met. He never got over his amazement and (being an educated man himself) his horror at seeing “well-bred” individuals obliged to do common or menial work. That somewhat patrician bias aside, he produced a remarkably broad, statistically provocative, and powerfully felt portrait of the exile system. Indeed, as his views changed and his research grew in scope, he found himself in a constant cat-and-mouse game with the police. Accumulating important and compromising documents, he grew remarkably in girth, as he attempted to conceal them in a leather belt around his waist. Still others were bound into the covers of books, or sequestered in the hollow sides of boxes and trunks. Five years after safely returning to the United States, he published his monumental Siberia and the Exile System in two volumes (1891), the classic expose and indictment of the system.
Kennan broadly divided the political exiles into three classes: Liberals (“men of moderate opinions, who believe in the gradual extension of the principles of self-government”); Revolutionists (in favor of the overthrow of the autocracy by conspiracy and armed rebellion); and Terrorists, or “embittered revolutionists.”479 Although government propaganda had attempted to dismiss the terrorists of 1879-81 as nothing but “an insignificant gang of discharged telegraph operators, half-educated school-boys, miserable little Jews, and loose women,” Kennan considered most of them people of extraordinary ability and essentially noble nature, who had been gradually radicalized by the government’s arbitrary acts.480
Hard-labor politicals began arriving at Kara in significant numbers after 1879, as the revolutionary movement grew and the prisons of European Russia became crowded with political offenders. At Kara, they were imprisoned in buildings intended originally for common felons. Beginning in 1880, their situation grew more dire, as their privileges were increasingly curtailed, ending in the abolition of the free command. Half-shaven heads, chains, and leg-fetters became the lot of all.