Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

5. How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plotting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov's Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse

149 5 How Terrorists Learned to Map Plotting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse   and   History is terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation which is changing. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror On 15 July 1904, an armored carriage trailed by two policemen on bicycles left St. Petersburg’s Aptekarsky Island and sped along Izmaylovsky Prospect toward the Baltic Train Station. There, the coach’s distinguished passenger, minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve (1846–1904), would catch the ten o’clock train to Petergof for his weekly audience with the tsar. As his horses trotted over Obvodny Canal, a young man dressed as a railway porter approached the coach and thrust a newspaper-covered parcel at the minister. When the smoke cleared, all that remained of this equipage was Plehve’s “mutilated corpse surrounded by fragments of his carriage”—at least this is how Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), who oversaw the attack for the Combat Organization (Boevaia Organizatsiia), the terrorist wing of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), described the scene in his 1909 memoir, Recollections of a Terrorist (Vospominaniia Terrorista).1 Plehve’s murder caused a sensation. For opponents of Russian autocracy and those who had suffered under the oppressive minister , the terrorists (boeviki ) became admired celebrities: congratulatory telegrams and donations poured into the PSR’s headquarters in Geneva, and the bombthrower , Egor Sazonov (1879–1910) was cheered as a hero.2 As the main propagandist of the attack, Savinkov was catapulted to fame, and his descriptions of the assassination, penned under the pseudonym Ropshin, were widely published throughout Europe and even appeared in a 1910 issue of The Strand Magazine alongside spy stories and the science fiction of H. G. Wells.3 Despite the celebrations, for many contemporaries the assassination brought a profound sense of foreboding. In the years preceding the 1905 Revolution , the imperial capital was beset by what was commonly referred to as an “epidemic of terrorism.”4 Although figures vary, between 1902 and 1911, 263 terrorist acts took place in Russia. Indeed, Plehve was one of three ministers of the interior to be assassinated in this period.5 Although from our present perspective Plehve’s death might seem a rather minor moment, for contemporary observers ranging from avant-garde intellectuals like Zinaida Gippius to imperial officials like Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, Plehve’s death marked a critical juncture—“the beginning of the end”—in the mounting assault on Russian autocracy.6 In her essay in this volume, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock notes that Bely was among those fin-de-siècle intelligents who viewed Alexander Blok’s death as the end of an era; but another key turning point that Bely identi fied in his recollections of Blok was Plehve’s murder, which he called a great “break” (rubezh), whereby Russia crossed over into the revolutionary age.7 Perhaps it was for this reason that Bely drew extensively on Plehve’s murder in crafting the terrorist conspiracy at the center of Petersburg. Early in the novel Bely transports his reader to the ominous metropolis by describing a similar carriage. This carriage clatters along Petersburg’s English Embankment carrying a dignitary who had been known to describe himself as “a man of the school of Plehve.”8 On the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya Street, another young man steps out of the fog brandishing a sinister bundle. He pauses, staring furiously at the gentleman in the coach. Transfixed by this stranger’s piercing gaze, the passenger, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov , covers his eyes in terror, his heart exploding in his chest. Fortunately for the senator, the Stranger, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, does not throw his bomb that day, but his eyes, “having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed,” communicate his murderous intentions to Ableukhov.9 Bely named his fictional senator “Apollon” precisely because the sound pl resembled an explosion . The figure of Ableukhov moves through Petersburg and Petersburg like a walking time bomb.10 Bely’s Petersburg and Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist draw on similar historical events and make use of some common images and tropes to construct 150   and   an explosive fin-de-siècle Petersburg, a city teeming with radicals and seething with revolutionary...