This they gained mainly from Bakunin. He had pointed the way to what seemed a practical policy, the ownership of the soil of Russia by the Mirs, the communes of her myriad villages. As to methods, he advocated a propaganda of violence. "Go among the people," he said, and convert them to your aims. The example of the Paris Communists in 1871 enforced his pleas; and in the subsequent years thousands of students, many of them of the highest families, quietly left their homes, donned the peasants' garb, smirched their faces, tarred their hands, and went into the villages or the factories in the hope of stirring up the thick sedimentary deposit of the Russian system[227]. In many cases their utmost efforts ended in failure, the tragi-comedy of which is finely set forth in Turgenieff's Virgin Soil. Still more frequently their goal proved to be--Siberia. But these young men and women did not toil for nought. Their efforts hastened the absorption of philosophic Nihilism in the creed of Prudhon and Bakunin. The Nihilist of Turgenieff's day had been a hedonist of the clubs, or a harmless weaver of scientific Utopias; the Nihilist of the new age was that most dangerous of men, a desperado girt with a fighting creed.
The fusing of these two diverse elements was powerfully helped on by the white heat of indignation that glowed throughout Russia when details of the official peculation and mismanagement of the war with Turkey became known. Everything combined to discredit the Government; and enthusiasts of all kinds felt that the days for scientific propaganda and stealthy agitation were past. Voltaire must give way to Marat. It was time for the bomb and the dagger to do their work.
The new Nihilists organised an executive committee for the removal of the most obnoxious officials. Its success was startling. To name only a few of their chief deeds: on August 15, 1878, a Chief of the Police was slain near one of the Imperial Palaces at the capital; and, in February 1879, the Governor of Kharkov was shot, the Nihilists succeeding in announcing his condemnation by placards mysteriously posted up in every large town. In vain did the Government intervene and substitute a military Commission in place of trial by jury. Exile and hanging only made the Nihilists more daring, and on more than one occasion the Czar nearly fell a victim to their desperadoes.
The most astounding of these attempts was the explosion of a mine under the banqueting-hall of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg on the evening of February 17, 1880, when the Imperial family escaped owing to a delay in the arrival of the Grand Duke of Hesse. Ten soldiers were killed and forty-eight wounded in and near the guard-room.
The Czar answered outrage by terrorism. A week after this outrage he issued a ukase suspending the few remaining rights of local self-government hitherto spared by the reaction, and vesting practically all executive powers in a special Commission, presided over by General Loris Melikoff. This man was an Armenian by descent, and had distinguished himself as commander in the recent war in Asia, the capture of Kars being largely due to his dispositions. To these warlike gifts, uncommon in the Armenians of to-day, he added administrative abilities of a high order. Enjoying in a peculiar degree the confidence of Alexander II., he was charged with the supervision of all political trials and a virtual control of all the Governors-General of the Empire. Thereupon the central committee of the Nihilists proclaimed war à outrance until the Czar conceded to a popularly elected National Assembly the right to reform the life of Russia.
Here was the strength of the Nihilist party. By violent means it sought to extort what a large proportion of the townsfolk wished for and found no means of demanding in a lawful manner. Loris Melikoff, gifted with the shrewdness of his race, saw that the Government would effect little by terrorism alone. Wholesale arrests, banishment, and hangings only added to the number of the disaffected, especially as the condemned went to their doom with a calm heroism that inspired the desire of imitation or revenge. Repression must clearly be accompanied by reforms that would bridge over the gulf ever widening between the Government and the thinking classes of the people. He began by persuading the Emperor to release several hundreds of suspects and to relax the severe measures adopted against the students of the Universities. Lastly, he sought to induce the Czar to establish representative institutions, for which even the nobles were beginning to petition. Little by little he familiarised him with the plan of extending the system of the Zemstvos, so that there should be elective councils for towns and provinces, as well as delegations from the provincial noblesse. He did not propose to democratise the central Government. In his scheme the deputies of nobles and representatives of provinces and towns were to send delegates to the Council of State, a purely consultative body which Alexander I. had founded in 1802.
Despite the tentative nature of these proposals, and the favourable reception accorded to them by the Council of State, the Czar for several days withheld his assent. On March 9 he signed the ukase, only to postpone its publication until March 12. Not until the morning of March 13 did he give the final order for its publication in the Messager Officiel. It was his last act as lawgiver. On that day (March 1, and Sunday, in the Russian calendar) he went to the usual military parade, despite the earnest warnings of the Czarevitch and Loris Melikoff as to a rumoured Nihilist plot. To their pleadings he returned the answer, "Only Providence can protect me, and when it ceases to do so, these Cossacks cannot possibly help." On his return, alongside of the Catharine Canal, a bomb was thrown under his carriage; the explosion tore the back off the carriage, injuring some of his Cossack escort, but leaving the Emperor unhurt. True to his usual feelings of compassion, he at once alighted to inquire after the wounded. This act cost him his life. Another Nihilist quickly approached and flung a bomb right at his feet. As soon as the smoke cleared away, Alexander was seen to be frightfully mangled and lying in his blood. He could only murmur, "Quick, home; carry to the Palace; there die." There, surrounded by his dearest ones, Alexander II. breathed his last.
In striking down the liberator of the serfs when on the point of recurring to earlier and better methods of rule, the Nihilists had dealt the death-blow to their own cause. As soon as the details of the outrage were known, the old love for the Czar welled forth: his imperfections in public and private life, the seeming weakness of his foreign policy, and his recent use of terrorism against the party of progress were forgotten; and to the sensitive Russian nature, ever prone to extremes, his figure stood forth as the friend of peace, and the would-be reformer, hindered in his efforts by unwise advisers and an untoward destiny.