Disaster at Kiev
A Tale by Guy Deschamps (alias DirtyCommie)
A Tale by Guy Deschamps (alias DirtyCommie)
Part One: Death and Subsidies
Kiev, Russian Empire
1911
The snow drifted softly onto the streets of Kiev, onto the just and unjust alike. Kiev was truly an ancient city, having ruled large swathes of the lands that would become Russia when Moscow was nothing more than a woodcutter’s hut by a gentle river. It became one of the mightiest bastions of Orthodox civilization when the great Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to the heathen Ottomans: just another setback in the eternal war between the forces of Christ and the pagans who opposed him. Now, the great Russian Empire was the only hope for those Christian nations still opposing the insidious spread of democracy and heathenism.
These were the thoughts of Dmitri Bogrov, Okhrana agent and informant on anarchist revolutionaries in Kiev. Bogrov had been born in 1887 to a Jewish merchant family—however, he was not Jewish himself, having converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1906. For many decades after his death, it will be unclear to the larger portion of the populace who Bogrov really is this night in Kiev. Okhrana agent carrying out a mission, or anarchist revolutionary attempting to destroy the Tsardom. I, being your omnipotent narrator, can say with certainty that Bogrov was given a mission by one of his higher-ups in the Okhrana (a higher-up who will forever remain anonymous to the populace, mostly due to his ignominious execution in early 1912) and he tried to carry it out.
Bogrov put out his cigarette and walked into the Kiev Opera House. Inside the glorious old building’s lobby, the lilting strains of Rimsky-Korsakov could be heard. Bogrov leaned against one of the great staircases, waiting for the second interval to begin. Moments later, the great doors at the head of the stairs were flung open and a crowd of Russian elites flowed out, chattering amiably. Bogrov spied Stolypin in the center of the crowd, with Tsar Nicholas himself! The would-be assassin grinned to himself: he would now be able to demonstrate his loyalty in front of the Tsar himself. As Stolypin walked by, Bogrov, moving quickly, pulled his pistol out and pulled the trigger, aiming at the former prime minister’s chest.
Unfortunately for our good assassin, the gun misfired. Stolypin, keen of mind and quick of reflex, seized the man’s shoulder with his left hand and with his weak, near-paralyzed right, attempted to knock the gun away. Bogrov, quickly shaking off his surprise, fired the gun again, grazing Stolypin’s right arm. A collective gasp went up from the crowd, but it was not noticed by the two fighters. Releasing the agent’s shoulder, Stolypin smacked him using his good hand, knocking him off balance. Turning, the prime minister called to the guards to arrest Bogrov, then stopped in shock: Nicholas was on the ground, gasping, his uniform covered in blood. Behind Stolypin, the guards tackled Bogrov and wrestled away his gun.
Falling to his knees next to his Tsar, Stolypin attempted to staunch the wound with his good hand, cursing his near-paralyzed right. Nicholas, however, took hold of Stolypin’s left hand and pushed it away, continuing to gasp. “Pyotr…Pyotr…return to your position…protect my family…I…I am gone.” Nicholas gasped one final time, then slumped back onto the floor. The man who in his life had been known as the Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Tauric Chersonesos, Tsar of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, was dead.
And Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin yet lived.
***
The funeral of Nicholas II was a tragic affair. Held in St. Petersburg on September 23, only five days after the killing, it was quite grand, with the coffin made out of solid, black-painted teak wood laid upon a massive funeral barge sailing down the river, surrounded by the noble mourners. On the banks of the freezing Neva River, poorer mourners wept and tore their clothes: some even swam out to the barge and hung on to it grimly as it proceeded down the river to St. Peter and Paul Cathedral on Zayachy Island. The coffin, shadowed by a train of stony-faced mourners and guarded by Cossacks handpicked by Empress Alexandra, was carried into the Cathedral, where Nicholas was interred next to his father, Alexander III. A service was held, blessing the Tsar’s spirit.
Two days later, the seven-year old Tsarevich, Alexei Nicholaevich Romanov, was crowned Tsar Alexei II and Empress Alexandra, along with her stepbrother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, formally became the young Tsar’s co-regent. Stricken with grief, Alexandra reappointed Stolypin Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and cloistered herself and her son in the Gatchina Palace near Lake Serabryannoe (Grand Duke Michael was quite uninterested in supreme power), effectively giving Stolypin supreme power over Russia. Now, Stolypin could finally enact his own political will on the nation. His first action was to have Dmitri Bogrov tortured, interrogated, and then hanged in Moscow on October 20. His second was to abolish the Okhrana, declaring that “…the service which should be protecting our nation is rotten and filled with traitors and parasites.”
The next day, October 24, the Imperial Cossack Guards arrested over three hundred Okhrana agents on information from Bogrov for treason and plots against the state: they were quickly hanged. Replacing the Okhrana was the Ministry of State Security, led by Stolypin ally and conservative reformer, the former prime minister Sergei Witte. Soon, the Ministry would become known as the Blue Archangels, due to both their blue uniforms and their resemblance in organization to the old state security service, the Third Section, also nicknamed thusly.
Whilst the government was still in chaos, Stolypin put together another package of reforms, this time aimed at increasing Siberian colonization and industrial output. Every non-noble family who moved to Siberia would be given 40 hectares of their own land, while every single male would be given half of that. A program of simple industrial subsidies was created to support new factories and encourage new businesses. More controversially, 20% of noble land throughout European Russia was to be taken from its noble owners and redistributed among the peasants.
The point of these reforms, of course, was the point behind all of Stolypin’s reforms: to create a large class of small-scale industrial barons and wealthy smallholders who had a vested interest in keeping the Tsarist regime afloat. These reforms had an immediate effect, with more than 10 million peasants having moved to Siberia by 1913.
The State Duma, filled with Stolypin’s Octoberist puppets and distracted by mounting tensions in Europe, mostly approved of all this. However, there were several dissenters, most notably Boris Stürmer, an archreactionary formerly favored by Nicholas II and Alexander Protopopov, a young, far-right deputy. Protopopov, Stürmer and their various satellites opposed both the new package of reforms and the abolition of the Okhrana, stating that the old security service had been doing very well at crushing revolutionaries in their own ranks—this latest event notwithstanding. Unfortunately for Stürmer, this lost him widespread support in the Duma and the populace, both of which were still mourning the late Tsar, and would cause his fall later in the year, while Protopopov was later assassinated by a former Okhrana agent turned would-be revolutionary.
Meanwhile, outside the Duma, opposition to Stolypin’s government was led by a number of figures all throughout the political spectrum. The most notable members of the extraparliamentary opposition were Alexander F. Kerensky, a young, socialist-leaning republican, Julius Martov, leader of the Menshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party, and Alexander Ivanovich Konovalov, leader of the Progressist party. Stolypin rightly saw the last as the greatest threat to his power. Konovalov, a wealthy industrialist, supported Stolypin’s reforms but constantly pushed for both more reforms and a stronger secret police to put down the far-left parties. Konovalov’s moderate platform and excellent oratory stole many supporters from Stolypin. Even worse, though he was not in the Duma himself, there were several Progressist deputies in the Duma, all of which were under his direct control. Martov, meanwhile, was the leader of the more powerful wing of the Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks, who wielded vast influence over the masses of poor peasants that had remained in European Russia. With his far-left, revolutionary aims, Martov was indeed a viable threat. Finally, Kerensky was the weakest of them all. Though he was a fantastic orator and his moderate views won support among the growing middle class, he could not appeal to the lower classes with his ideals: they were more inclined to radical leftism.
The Prime Minister quickly dealt with the second situation. On January 10, 1912, the illegalization of the Social Democratic Party was passed through parliament with a comfortable majority, and the Blue Archangels were sent to deal with it. While many of the SDP higher-ups escaped to miscellaneous European countries, many—most notably Martov himself, who was gunned down in a Smolensk bar while trying to escape—were killed or exiled. Two of the more notable escapees were Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (alias Joseph Stalin), a Georgian bank robber and Bolshevik, and Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (alias Leon Trotsky), a Jewish intellectual and Menshevik. The two would later become the leaders of, respectively, the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties in Swiss exile after Vladimir Ulyanov’s death in 1928.
The banning of the SPD caused waves throughout Russia, with Kerensky, Konovalov, and even Protopopov speaking out against the move. It also caused the arrest of nineteen of the Duma’s deputies, just before the elections of 1912...
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