Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [39]
That is how the police version of the event and official figures were created for the tsar. He recorded in his diary:
“9 January, 1905. A difficult day! In Petersburg there were serious disturbances … as a consequence of the workers’ desire to get to the Winter Palace. The troops had to fire, and in various places in the city many were killed and injured. Lord, it is so painful and hard!”
Later two dozen workers were brought to Tsarskoe Selo. They spoke loyal words to the tsar. Nicholas uttered a speech in response, promising to satisfy their needs and wants. He was very distressed over the two hundred victims on Palace Square.
He never did find out what happened.
In a single morning a new image of him was created: Nicholas the Bloody. From then on, that is what lovers of freedom would call him.
“Any child’s cap, or mitten, or woman’s scarf pitifully abandoned that day in the Petersburg snows became a reminder of the fact that the tsar must die, the tsar would die” (the poet Osip Mandelshtam).
Bloody Sunday was one of the chief causes for the future vengeance of the revolution, a prologue to the murder of the tsar’s family.
What had happened?
ONE VERSION
Vera Leonidovna:
“Everything in those days was mixed up with politics.… It was fashionable.… Everyone used to talk about how dissatisfied they were. I’ve had the thrill of recalling everything my freethinking friend who was close to Witte explained to me.… To understand Bloody Sunday you have to understand the situation.… Russia was on the verge. Everyone knew that.… And the ‘rights’ were nervous.… They’d tried to play the Japan card. It hadn’t worked out. The Jewish card got tossed in then, of course. They had always looked on the Jews as a pressure valve for popular tension, by organizing pogroms.… At our estate outside Kiev we had a servant.… She had come to us after a pogrom: the crowd had burst into her house and ripped open her master’s stomach, all the while laughing and joking.… They had tied his wife to his bloody corpse and heaped them with feathers. She recounted all this while crossing herself incessantly and muttering, ‘God will punish them!’ And He did: the stupid anti-Semitic policy not only was vile but also proved dangerous. The revolution was advancing. Only for a short period—under Alexander II—had Russian Jews felt like human beings.… Nicholas’s father had brought back state anti-Semitism. Jews had been driven into the Pale of Settlement and encouraged to emigrate. Tens of thousands of highly enterprising people had left Russia. My father had a brilliant physician’s assistant working for him who left for America, where he became a celebrity. But millions remained. My husband, the Jew Koltsov, used to say, ‘The non-suckling breasts of their own mother’—that is how they perceived their homeland. The Jews were a vast, underutilized store of intellect, energy, and obsessiveness. The revolutionary party took that reserve into their service. My sister was a terrible revolutionary, and we were daughters of a general. But her friend underground was the daughter of a poor Jewish tailor.… My friend used to say that Witte frequently tried to explain to Nicholas’s father the danger of the Jewish situation for the country’s future.”
(The matter was actually somewhat more subtle than this. Witte reports this interchange in his Memoirs:
“Are you right to stand up for the Jews?” asked Alexander III. In reply Witte asked permission to answer the question with a question: “Can we drown all the Russian Jews in the Black Sea? If we can, then I accept that resolution of the Jewish question. If not, the resolution of the Jewish question consists in giving them a chance to live. That is, in offering them equal rights and equal laws.”
But Witte was a brilliant courtier if he responded to the despot-tsar so boldly; it means he sensed that the tsar wanted to hear that kind of answer from