In February, 1881, Melikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by
the Revolutionary Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered
by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II decided that a sort of
deliberative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called.
Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI, he described
this gathering as an assembly of notables, like the one convoked by Louis
XVI before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before
the Council of State, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning
of March 1 (13), 1881, after a final warning by Loris Melikoff, that he
ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This
was on Sunday, and he was asked by Melikoff not to go out to the parade
that day, there being danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless he
went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine, and to carry her the
welcome news. He is reported to have told her, "I have determined to
summon an assembly of notables." However, this belated and half-hearted
concession had not been made public, and on his way back to the Winter Palace
he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage
to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakoff, who
flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of
the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive
him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted upon alighting.
He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians,
to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish
war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster,
was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakoff and asked
him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevetsky,
the latter threw a bomb between himself and Alexander II, so that both of
them should be killed. They both lived but a few hours.
There Alexander II lay upon the snow, profusely bleeding, abandoned by every
one of his followers. All had disappeared. It was cadets, returning from
the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a
sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head
with a cadet cap. And it was one of the terrorists, Emelianoff, with a bomb
wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on
the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man.
Human nature is full of those contrasts.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II's life. People could not understand
how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have
met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance
of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander 11, and his gradual
deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, -- that
of a born autocrat whose violence was but partially mitigated by education,
of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the
statesman, of a man of strong passions and weak will, -- it seemed that
the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare's
dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard
him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after
he had ordered the first executions in Poland.