Have I mentioned at all that Russia had been at war that year with Japan? It’s no wonder if I haven’t. It’s a war best forgotten. While Niki was building my house on Petersburg Island, he was also busy completing the Trans-Siberian Railway, shortening its planned route by laying track right across Manchuria, Chinese land that had obstructed the track’s direct route from Irkutsk to Vladivostok, Russia’s furthermost eastern outpost. The Chinese had been bribed with rubles and with the promises of an alliance with Russia against China’s enemies and respect for her sovereignty. But while his men were laying the track, Niki decided in violation of that agreement to annex Manchuria, to make it another of his Asiatic conquests, which the Chinese, despite their protestations, were too weak to prevent. Had Niki stopped there, all would have been well. But he did not stop there. He wanted to claim the forests of the Korean peninsula, as well, to become master of even more Russian lands. After all, was he not tsar? Unfortunately, the Japanese also wanted those Korean forests, and so, when Niki refused to sign an agreement with the yellow monkeys to contain his interests to Manchuria and to leave the Korean forests to them, the Japanese attacked. The yellow monkeys that we had laughed at—in the newspaper cartoons our Cossacks scooped the Japanese up by the dozens in their fur hats—not only bottled up the Russian fleet and sank our ships in the Straits of Tsushima, a disaster Vladimir’s son Kyril, a commander in the navy, barely survived, but also mowed down our men making their old-fashioned bayonet charges in Manchuria. It took seven months for the Baltic Fleet to sail around the world to reach Port Arthur to assist our men, endless days for supplies to travel the six-thousand-mile route by rail from the big cities of western Russia to the Manchurian-Korean border. Niki at one point sent his men a shipment of icons to aid them in battle—beautiful oval portraits of the Savior in gold chains—and at that, unpacking those boxes, a general had laughed, The Japanese are beating us with machine guns but never mind: we will beat them with icons. I suppose the war was the match to the tinder, and the shrapnel I held in my hand an artifact of an attempted assassination. The coming year would bring a wave of assassinations: Niki’s minister of the interior, Plevhe; his Russian governor-general of Finland, Bobrikov; his governor-general of Moscow, his very own uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich; and later, his prime minister, Stolypin. Yes, these men would all be killed, though not yet the tsar.
Now for the tinder.
Just three days later, on January 9, it exploded when Father Gapon, a priest who had been working with the poor peasants laboring in the factories, felt compelled to lead these suffering people to the Winter Palace to tell the tsar of their sorrows. Gapon wanted the tsar to hear of the poisonous fumes that filled the unventilated factories, of the typhus and cholera spawned from the industrial waste, of the peasant children working sixteen hours through the long Russian night, of the machinery that tore out an eye or severed a limb, after which the worker was paid a few rubles and fired, of the searches the workers endured at the factory gates, of the floggings they endured for violations, the pay docked for using the toilet, the piles of clothes used as bedding in the factory barracks or the cellars and stairways where the workers slept like serf beasts at the mercy of their factory boss squires. The irony of Gapon’s desire was that he was paid by the tsar’s police to sponsor unions expressly designed to keep the workers enduring these conditions, to keep them from joining the radical Socialist Democrats and their unions, which urged the workers to revolt rather than endure. At Gapon’s meetings, decorum reigned: the workers drank tea, recited the Lord’s Prayer, sang the national anthem. But I suppose Gapon’s pity for them ultimately overwhelmed his mission to subdue them, and so he dreamed up the idea to stage a great theatrical allée, to provoke a solution to their great enslavement. Their tsar would help them. It had been only because the tsar’s windows looked out onto the beauty of the river that he had missed their misery. Or perhaps the enfilades were too many rooms deep and word of the workers’ misery did not penetrate. Or perhaps the tsar had been too busy with the papers on his desk and the mighty worries of the war with Japan, his mind on matters far away, and so he did not see the suffering right there within a half verst of his study walls. But once he knew of the intolerable conditions under which the peasants toiled at his factories, their Tsar-Batiushka would surely hold out his hands and smooth everything over with the right strokes of his pen. For, after all, the tsar always says yes; it is his little dog that barks no. So with this hope pounding in his breast, Gapon and the workers gathered by the hundred thousand at six points in the city and proceeded on foot along the streets designed like the spokes of a wheel by the European architects of the beloved eighteenth century—Lambert, Trezzini, LeBlond—spokes that led to the Admiralty and to the Winter Palace, the hub of it all.
But Niki had no intention of hearing the pleas of the striking ironworkers and the workers of the electrical plants, had no intention of receiving this crowd. And why should he? Walking in the wilds of Sarov with his Rus peasants, his humble little brothers, he would allow them to touch his hands or kiss his shadow or tell him their troubles, but why should he have to receive angry rabble at the doors of the palace, especially rabble corrupted by socialists and intellectuals who cared nothing for the peasants and used them as tools for their own ends, ends the peasants knew nothing about?