Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [32]
Although the police had raided an apartment and discovered both dynamite and a plan of the Winter Palace with an ‘X’ marking the dining room, with typical sloth the Palace’s commandant did nothing about it. He was a wounded general who had fought at Sebastopol, operating in a palace where there were too many doddery chiefs while most of the Indians were thieves. Below stairs, a carpenter called Stephen Khalturin who belonged to People’s Will had got himself on the Palace payroll, after performing well while repairing the tsar’s yacht. Khalturin shared a basement room with a police guard, who began to entertain the conceit that this respectable tradesman might make a worthy son-in-law. Khalturin was a strapping, cheery fellow, adept at affecting peasant stupidity by scratching his ear when anyone asked a question. He had the run of the palace, which he quickly realised was not a tight ship. Theft was so normative that even officers practised it, as Tolstoy amusingly described in the story of the officer with stolen food hidden under his helmet. On one occasion Khalturin found himself working in the tsar’s study. Surveying the back of the emperor’s bald head, Khalturin thought of smashing it with his hammer, but decided that this would be too mundane a fate for the purposes of People’s Will.
Instead, Khalturin collected dynamite, smuggled in by the Executive Committee, which he stored under his pillow. Since sleeping on nitroglycerine made his eyes stream and his skin turn the colour of clay, he bought a trunk, ostensibly to house the dowry of a future bride. Instead of petticoats and the like, this filled with dynamite, although Khalturin never got the 360 pounds he thought necessary to penetrate two floors. On the evening of 5 February 1880, Khalturin hosted an engagement party in a restaurant, coolly returning to the palace on some spurious pretext, so as to light the Rumford fuse to his bomb. Then he returned to the restaurant. It was snowing. The explosion tore through the floor above, killing or maiming fifty members of the Finland Regiment, but only shaking the floor of the Yellow Dining Room which the tsar and prince Alexander of Battenberg were about to enter. The room was a vision of dust and fallen plaster that lay upon the dishes and decorative table palms. The gas lights had been blown out, the chandeliers destroyed, and the cold howled in through the shattered windows. The tsar and his guests were unhurt.
In response to this attack so close to home, the tsar appointed a Supreme Commission under prince Michael Loris-Melikov with a remit to fight sedition. The choice bewildered conservatives. A subtle, liberal-minded and wily Armenian, who had fought 180 battles against Caucasian tribesmen and the Turks, Loris-Melikov abolished the hated Third Department, by transferring its secret police functions to the Interior Ministry, a move designed to appeal to liberal opinion. He had the unpopular education minister Tolstoy sacked. He pandered to the power of the press by asking editors for their opinions and advice. It was Loris-Melikov’s apparent reasonableness that made him a high-priority target for People’s Will terrorists. They tried to shoot him in February. The prospect that Loris-Melikov might succeed in introducing sufficiently meaningful reforms to appease the intelligentsia made it all the more urgent to press ahead with the tsar’s assassination. One plan involved sinking 250 pounds of dynamite within sealed rubber bags under the waters beneath the Kammeny Bridge. But when the royal carriage swept over the bridge in mid-August,