Sasha was admitted to the University at St Petersburg to study the natural sciences. Anna was already in the city. It was in the capital that Sasha and she could speak openly and engage in conversations on religion, which had been almost impossible in the backwater they had recently left. They had become atheists together. Later, after tragedy befell the family, it became clear that the two had discussed many things together in secret, but nothing that had made her suspicious. They discussed their parents, their siblings, life in the capital, the room he had rented which was equipped with ‘silence, cosiness and the smell of an oil lamp’. He loved his academic work but kept aloof from student groups, telling his sister that ‘they jabber a lot, but study little.’ And for the first three years, Sasha did nothing but study. There was, in fact, very little else to do and since he was not addicted to either tavern life or brothels, he worked hard.
In 1884, the year Sasha reached the capital, the last radical Populist publication, Notes of the Fatherland, was banned. The following year the last issue of the old party’s journal, People’s Will, ceased to exist, following the example of the party that itself had been isolated and liquidated. The journal’s farewell commentary was bleak in the extreme, but the regime was leaving nothing to chance. The overall atmosphere was oppressive, intellectual life was stagnant, a blanket of tsarist repression swathed the city. Police spies scoured the taverns and cafés in search of non-existent terrorists.
A senior state bureaucrat sent a scathing description of the court and life in the highest circles to an out-of-favour colleague: ‘Everything there is dull-wittedness and idiocy, stupid routine and demoralisation. Nothing useful can be made from this rot and dirt.’ The intelligentsia, too, was demoralised and, as is common in times of defeat, turned inwards to a ‘life for ourselves’. They abandoned the peasantry, explaining that ‘our times are not times for big tasks.’ They abandoned the radical writers and artists, arguing that this was the time for ‘pure art’, drained of even the tiniest presence of reality.
The city was covered in snow in January 1887 when several hundred students gathered outside the Volkovo Cemetery to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dobrylubov’s death, carrying his portrait with the inscription ‘Our Diderot’. They found the cemetery gates sealed and guarded by a platoon of Cossacks on horseback, their hands tight on sabres and whips. For a moment the students remained motionless; then they started singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and began to move forward slowly. The mounted Cossacks attacked them with whips. There were scuffles. Forty-two students were arrested and exiled from St Petersburg; the others scampered in all directions.
Sasha Ulyanov participated in this demonstration and was radicalised by the Cossack assault on peaceful and unarmed students. News from home was bad. His father had died, his family was dependent on a state pension, funds were low. He was only too aware of his responsibilities. But this event, trivial in itself, had a huge impact on him and other participants. Personal experience, much more than books, is often the most effective agent for transforming political consciousness. Student circles began to discuss a response. They agreed on a proclamation that was to be addressed to ‘society’ (which meant the liberal intellectuals), but even this did not get through. It was the police, perfectly aware of what was going on, who emptied the letter boxes on this occasion. Many students returned to ‘normality’. Not Sasha and a few others. He agonised. Petitions were useless, they agreed. Others suggested that there was only one serious alternative: terrorism. Sasha insisted that careful thought must precede revolutionary action. His friends replied that reading and writing were not enough, that state violence was crushing them. The only response to state violence was revolutionary violence. The arguments were hardly original. They had dominated the 1860s and ’70s.
But in those decades, terrorism was understood by many as a necessity. In the ’80s, this was no longer the case. What Sasha and his fellow conspirators were plotting was a faint echo of distant thunder. The bomb and the revolver would achieve, or so they imagined, what demonstrations and café talk could not. Once they agreed that the only serious response to the situation was to assassinate the tsar, Sasha, though still unsure and suspecting that there were too many members in the group, did not falter and committed to writing a manifesto explaining the reasons for the action. A total of fifteen students were involved in the conspiracy, including two Poles (one of whom was Bronislaw Pilsudski, whose brother later became the dictator of Poland and a vigorous enemy of Sasha’s younger brother). They planned to kill the tsar on 1 March 1887, the anniversary of his father’s assassination.
The operation was doomed from the very start. Unlike their forebears responsible for the previous assassination, the students lacked any experience in assassination plots, a seriously considered plan of action and the necessary technical knowledge. Almost a month went by before Pilsudski managed to bring nitric acid from Vilna and the group succeeded in purchasing two secondhand revolvers. Their amateurism was further revealed when one of them wrote a lyrical letter to a comrade in Kharkov in praise of revolutionary terrorism. The letter included enough hints to alert the police, who began to follow the letter-writer and had soon tracked down all of the members of the group. Sasha’s instinct about the group’s scale was tragically vindicated when two students whose recruitment he had opposed betrayed him to the police. The group preparing to kill the tsar were picked up on the Nevsky Prospect. Meanwhile, the police arrived at Sasha’s apartment where an unwitting Anna had dropped in to see her brother. Both of them were arrested. Sasha decided to accept total responsibility, declaring in court:
I was one of the first who had the idea of forming a terrorist group and I played the most active part in its organisation … As to my moral and intellectual commitment in this affair – that has been complete. I have given to it all my ability, all my knowledge, and all the force of my convictions.
When the news reached Simbirsk, Sasha’s distraught mother asked a neighbour to look after the children and left immediately for the capital. For a whole month she pleaded, she fell on her knees, she did everything humanly possible to save her son. Sasha himself was not hopeful. When he finally met his mother on 30 March, he broke down and wept, asking for her forgiveness and explaining, ‘Apart from the duty to one’s family, one has a duty to one’s country … I wanted to kill a man – that means I may now be killed.’ The prosecutor, who had the evidence in front of him, was struck by the prisoner’s speech: ‘Ulyanov takes upon himself many deeds of which he is, in fact, not guilty.’ The police had mislaid the manifesto he had written. He rewrote it in the prison and handed it to them; it was immediately taken to the palace at the tsar’s request. Alexander III, aged thirty-three at the time, was widely regarded as a semi-literate boor. He read the manifesto and scribbled a comment: ‘This is the writing not even of a madman, but a pure idiot.’ Where the document said that any effort to raise the intellectual level of the population was impossible, the Father of All His People noted: ‘That is reassuring.’
Sasha had few illusions about his fate. In a letter to the tsar, his mother pleaded for mercy and for a commutation of the death sentence. She was turned down. Although she was very impressed by Sasha’s eloquent speech at the trial – it was a side of him that she had never seen before – she was weeping too much to sit through all of it and had to leave the court. Her son gave the court an erudite lecture on how other countries had developed and how tsarist Russia had built a roadblock to prevent any peaceful evolution of society. That is why the intelligentsia had to rise to the challenge. Terror was the tactic they used because open struggles for change were barred to them:
Terror is that form of struggle which has been created by the nineteenth century, the only form of self-defence in which a minority, strong only through its spiritual force and the awareness of its righteousness, can resort against the majority’s awareness of physical force … Of course terror is not the intelligentsia’s weapon in organised struggle. It is only a road that some individuals take spontaneously when their discontent reaches extremity. Thus viewed, terrorism is an expression of the popular struggle and will last as long as the nation’s needs are not satisfied … You will always find in the Russian nation a dozen people who are so devoted to their ideals and who feel their country’s misfortune so deeply that for them to die for their cause is not a sacrifice.
Alexander Ulyanov was hanged on 8 May 1887. He was nineteen years old. His mother was walking to the women’s prison in St Petersburg