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Witte foresaw an inevitable conflict between the tsar and the Duma, and he believed that, as always, in a moment of disaster, Nicholas would come running to him. Witte wrote mockingly:

“It has reached society’s consciousness that despite my strained relations with His Highness … despite my total disfavor, as soon as the situation becomes critical my name will immediately come up.” He added sternly: “But they are forgetting one thing: there is a limit to everything.”

This was a weighty statement: a powerful new figure had already appeared on the horizon.

Peter Arkadievich Stolypin, the new prime minister, was Witte’s direct opposite. From an old noble line, he was “one of them.” Considered a liberal, he was nevertheless a liberal-landowner. Stolypin knew and loved the muzhik, as well a landowner should. In the muzhik, he saw the country’s future. That was why he immediately appealed to the tsar. Stolypin could appreciate Nicholas’ long-held dream: “the people and the tsar.”

The First Duma was disbanded and a second elected, but to his astonishment Nicholas saw that nothing had changed. The calmest people, as soon as they stepped out on the dais, became rebels. Speaking before the Duma seemed to intoxicate them.

There was Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov, for example, an honorable man, a full state councilor, a councilor of the Petersburg Municipal Duma. Stolypin offered him a ministerial post, and not only did he refuse, but in the new Duma he reviled all the grand dukes at one fell swoop.

The assassinations continued: General Min, the subduer of Moscow, was shot.

A bomb exploded on Aptekarsky Island, at Stolypin’s dacha. It was a Saturday, Stolypin’s at-home day, and many visitors were waiting for him in the first-floor rooms. On the second floor of the dacha were the family’s rooms, where Stolypin’s children, a daughter and a son, were playing.

Three men dressed in military uniforms entered the house. The guard immediately noticed a defect in their uniforms and tried to restrain them, but with a shout—“Long live the revolution!”—one of them threw a bomb. Everyone in the room, including the terrorists themselves, died. The force of the explosion was such that trees on the Neva embankment were torn up by the roots. Stolypin himself was knocked to the ground by a shock wave but was not harmed. Injured people stirred under the fragments of the demolished house, bits of human flesh lay about. Among the fragments they found Stolypin’s injured daughter. Stolypin himself pulled his four-year-old son out from under a heap of rubble.

——

At the same time the Tsar of All the Russias was made a hostage in his own home. Nicholas learned that terrorists had turned up in Peterhof, where he spent the summers. “We sit here virtually locked up,” he informed his mother. “What a shame and disgrace to speak of this.… Those anarchist scoundrels came to Peterhof to hunt for me, Nikolasha, Trepov [Moscow police chief].… But you understand my feelings: not to be able to go horseback riding, not to go out beyond the gates anywhere at all. And this at my own home in ever peaceful Peterhof! I blush to write you of this.”

His life was under guard. No walks. In constant terror for the safety of Alix and the children. Like a rehearsal for a future life—twelve years hence.

“Sunshine,” “Baby,” “Little Man”—they had many pet names for their sick son. Nonetheless, Nicholas—father and tsar—could not protect him from a bomb in his own home. He underwent a sea change. He had to repay all the suffering and humiliation, and he had to preserve his rule—subdue the rebels, give the country peace. That is what his father’s shadow demanded; that is what Alix and his mother demanded. “The monsters must be exterminated!” the dowager empress wrote him.

So he tried to be merciless.

He could hardly have managed it, however, were it not for the powerful figure of Stolypin by his side. Stolypin, a firm, indomitable, power-loving man, had something in common with the