146 years ago, all of Russia was shocked by the news of the attempted assassination of the reformer Tsar Alexander II. In broad daylight on April 4, 1868, in the center of St. Petersburg, near the fence of the Summer Garden, a young man named Dmitry Karakozov, who had arrived from Moscow, shot at the walking emperor, but missed. As the investigation found out, Karakozov belonged to a group of young radicals who did not disdain criminality in the name of their lofty goals.
The six main characters in this essay have been friends since childhood, from the first years of study at the Penza provincial gymnasium. In front of these young men - Dmitry Yurasov, Nikolai Ishutin, Dmitry Karakozov, Maximilian Zagibalov, Pyotr Ermolov, Viktor Fedoseev - serf, noble-landowner Russia was defeated in the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Unable to withstand such a shame, Tsar Nicholas I, who had kept Russia "frozen" for all 30 years of his reign, passed away. Alexander II, who replaced him on the throne, began reforms in Russia, but unhurried and half-hearted: the peasants were given personal freedom, but without land, the townspeople were given local self-government, but not an independent parliament. Trade and industry revived in the country, but changes in agriculture were slow. Unrest was brewing on the western outskirts of the empire - on the lands of present-day Lithuania and Belarus.
Young Penza residents followed the changes in the country with impatience and, following the gymnasium fashion of those years, read the “samizdat” of that time - the works of Herzen and Ogarev, Polezhaev and Dostoevsky. Under the influence of their books, Penza gymnasium students, like many of their peers, by the age of 16-17 were determined to seek the liberation of Russia from autocracy and bureaucracy. The graduates linked their way to the implementation of these ideas with continuing their studies at universities. In the fall of 1860, one of them, Dmitry Karakozov, went to study at Kazan University, the other five friends continued their studies at Moscow University.
It was in Moscow that young provincials, whose recognized leader since childhood was Nikolai Ishutin, a lopsided book-lover, took part in turbulent political events for the first time. The government, fearing an influx of peasant children who had received personal freedom in 1861 into universities, introduced fees for higher education in the same year, cutting off the poor from it. Disgruntled students responded with massive demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Their ringleaders were expelled from universities and taken into custody, and their comrades interrupted their studies. Student unrest in Moscow lasted until October 12, 1861, when the thousandth youth demonstration came to the house of the Governor-General at 13 Tverskaya Street, where the capital's mayor's office is now located.
On that day, which went down in the history of Moscow as “the day of the battle near“Dresden”(named after the hotel on Tverskaya Square, near the walls of which the main events took place), the police and Cossacks, with the assistance of merchants and clerks from the neighboring Okhotny Ryad, entered into a massive brawl with students, which passed to the neighboring Dmitrovka and Bolshaya Nikitskaya streets. At that time, Ishutin and his comrades escaped with bruises and several days of arrest in the Tver police station. But for the first time they felt themselves to be revolutionaries, and at the beginning of 1862 they joined the secret organization "Land and Freedom" created then in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Mutual Aid Society
For greater conspiracy, the "landowners" did not gather in the famous quarter of the then student dormitories between Bolshaya and Malaya Bronnaya streets, where Ishutin and most of his fellow countrymen rented rooms. The "Crimea" tavern on Trubnaya Square became a favorite meeting place for young conspirators.
Probably the first Moscow student who settled there was Ivan Gavrilovich Pryzhov, the son of the doorman of the Moscow Mariinsky Hospital on Bozhedomka. After graduating from the First Moscow Gymnasium, Ivan Pryzhov attended Moscow University in 1848-1851, and then, without finishing it, took the lowest position in the office of the Moscow Court.
Pryzhov combined his studies and then service with the study of the folk life of Russia, focusing on the history and customs of Russian taverns. At the end of the 1860s. this hobby was embodied in a significant scientific work "History of taverns in Russia". But in the 1850s Ivan Pryzhov, a literate, joker and lover of feasts, only approached his main topic, at the same time reducing his acquaintance with the entire Moscow tavern and sharing his connections with other students who were hiding from the police. Fortunately, they were seriously interested in the way of life and the customs of the "slum people." Thus, the then spiritual leader of the revolutionary youth, one of the founders of the above-mentioned organization "Land and Freedom" Nikolai Chernyshevsky saw possible allies in the struggle against autocracy in vagabonds of sectarians and schismatics, in the semi-criminal artels of the Volga barge haulers and in other marginalized people.
The work of the Moscow organization "Lands and Freedom" lasted for several months, limiting itself to meetings in the basements of the "Crimea" tavern and issuing several handwritten proclamations. In July 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested in St. Petersburg on charges of inciting peasants to revolt and collaborating with political emigrants Herzen and Ogarev. His few associates in St. Petersburg also ended up behind bars or left Russia. The Moscow "zemlevoltsy" temporarily abandoned their conspiracy and switched to "propaganda by deed" of the social ideas of "socialized labor." Their author was the same indefatigable Chernyshevsky - fortunately, the regime of detention under investigation in the Peter and Paul Fortress did not prevent him in 1862-1864. to write and release a manuscript - the novel What Is to Be Done? known to all generations of Soviet schoolchildren.
In full accordance with the content of the novel, Moscow students and female students, among whom was Nikolai Ishutin and his comrades, in the fall of 1864 founded in Moscow the “Mutual Aid Society” with bookbinding shops, where they themselves worked in their free time. However, it was for study that there was less and less of him, because by the end of 1864, young revolutionaries, who had lost their former leaders, made acquaintance with new, even more "authoritative" mentors - the surviving separatist rebels from Poland and Lithuania, who had moved to Moscow. By the way, most of these "freedom fighters"
came from the local gentry-gentry. Seeking full sovereignty from Russia, in the event of victory, they were by no means going to share their land with their fellow peasants.
But minor inconsistencies in political views did not prevent the Moscow and Polish conspirators from jointly arranging a prison break for a native of Zhitomir, Yaroslav Dombrovsky. After the suppression of the uprising of 1863, the court-martial sentenced the 27-year-old captain of the Russian army Dombrovsky, who had betrayed his oath and went over to the side of the rebels, to be shot with 15 years of hard labor. On the way to Siberia, Dombrovsky was placed in the Moscow transit prison while awaiting a transfer.
Hell
On December 1, 1864, Yaroslav Dombrovsky went to the prison bathhouse, but lingered in the dressing room, where the merchants offered the "prisoners" rolls and sbiten. Throwing on a women's scarf and a short fur coat prepared ahead of time, Dombrovsky went out in a group of tradeswomen past the guards, who had grown dull from the heat of the bath and a couple of guards outside the prison gates. There, 19-year-old Moscow University volunteer Boleslav Shostakovich (the grandfather of the famous Soviet composer) was waiting for him, who took Dombrovsky to an overnight stay at the Hell tavern on Trubnaya Square.
The next night, the fugitive spent the night in a room that Nikolai Ishutin and Pyotr Ermolov rented at that time in Ipatov's house in Trekhprudny Lane. From Moscow, Dombrovsky safely fled to France, where he died in 1871 during the days of the Paris Commune, fighting on the barricades at the head of local revolutionaries.
Participation in Dombrowski's escape inspired Ishutin and his friends to new daring plans. As their then colleague in the bookbinding company Elena Kozlinina, who had worked as a chronicler of the Moscow District Court for more than half a century, recalled, "… Ishutin was an embittered misanthropist - perhaps because of his physical deformity. His closest friend Peter Nikolaev is a typical bully, unprincipled to the last degree. Other figures those around them, for the most part, represented green youth, very unbalanced and promoted to the last possible …"
In February 1865, Ishutin, who ousted the leadership of the "Society", which united more than 600 students and female students, its organizer Peter Sviridov, proposed turning the society into a "Political Organization". Not more than half of the Society's members agreed to participate in its work. But this did not bother the restless Ishutin - by the end of 1865 he created an even more secret society called Hell within the Organization. Its members, in addition to Ishutin himself, were his cousin Dmitry Karakozov (he moved to Moscow from Kazan after he was expelled from the local university and was treated for a long time for chronic stomach diseases and alcoholism), as well as their fellow countrymen Dmitry Yurasov and Pyotr Ermolov.
It is not known how long the activity of "Ada", whose members proudly called themselves "Mortus" ("suicide bombers"), would have lasted if on April 4, 1866 Karakozov had not been detained in St. Petersburg immediately after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Tsar - during the shots his hand accidentally pushed aside the artisan OI Komissarov who happened to be nearby.
When arrested, the shooter tried to take the poison, but he immediately vomited. At first the terrorist refused to identify himself, but on April 7 he was identified by the owner of the St. Petersburg hotel "Znamenskaya". envelopes, folded from scraps of addresses: "On Bolshaya Bronnaya House of Polyakov, Ishutina" and "Ermolova, Prechistenka."
On April 9, 1866, Ishutin's compatriots and roommates Maximilian Zagibalov and Dmitry Yurasov were arrested in their rented room of a tenement house, which belonged to the Moscow rich man Lazar Polyakov. Nikolai himself was taken on the night of April 9-10 at the Society's bookbinding workshop. By the end of April, 2,000 people were interviewed in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the case of an attempt on the life of the tsar. Investigators, whose actions were personally directed by the Governor-General of Moscow, Prince V. A. Dolgorukov, interrogated 60-100 people daily, working from 10 am to 1 am. As a result, 196 people were arrested for the duration of the investigation, and in August 1866 Karakozov, Ishutin and another 32 of their acquaintances from the Organization and Hell were put on trial.
As the investigation and the court managed to establish for certain, the plan of regicide arose in Karakozov and Ishutin in December 1865 and was introduced by them into the so-called "Charter". Yurasov, Ermolov and Zagibalov knew about this intention, but did not support it, considering the main task of the "Mortus" to strengthen ties with the revolutionary circles in the provinces, with the exiled Poles and organize an escape from the penal servitude of N. G. Chernyshevsky. However, the disputants were equally interested in finding money for their plans - and even persuaded one of the members of the "Society", 23-year-old Viktor Fedoseev, to poison his father, a Penza landowner, in order to then use his inheritance for the needs of the revolution. True, the conspirators did not have time to implement this plan - and Ishutin transferred the poison (strychnine) to Karakozov, who volunteered for regicide and death.
The indictment stated that Karakozov had acquired the pistol and bullets for the assassination of Tsar in March 1866 at the market in St. Petersburg with money secretly "borrowed" (or simply stolen) by Ishutin from the cash desk of the "Mutual Aid Society".
Only a few years after the trial and execution of Karakozov, the exiled "Ishutin" Ivan Khudyakov accidentally let slip that, on the eve of his departure from Moscow in February 1866, Karakozov spent part of the money on the purchase of a double-barreled revolver, from which he later shot at the tsar on Trubnaya Square. The second revolver on the day of the assassination attempt was in the possession of the terrorist-backup Peter Ermolov, who was afraid to shoot at the emperor. Immediately after the arrest of Karakozov, he fled to Moscow, but his role in the plan of regicide then remained undisclosed.
However, Ermolov and others involved in the activities of "Hell" were severely punished. Karakozov himself, who made the impression of an abnormal person on most of the people who knew him, was hanged in front of a large crowd of people on the Smolensk field in St. Petersburg on September 3, 1866. Also sentenced to death, but who submitted a petition for pardon, Ishutin learned about the "royal favor" - the replacement of the death penalty with indefinite hard labor - already standing under the noose on the scaffold. The shock he endured then led to a loss of reason and a long extinction in a convict hospital, from where he was taken to bury in 1879.
Most of the members of the "Hell" society - the same Penza residents Dmitry Yurasov, Pyotr Ermolov, Maximilian Zagibalov, who at that time were 20-22 years old - were sentenced to hard labor for a term of 12 to 20 years. True, in 1871, after five years in hard labor, they were all transferred to a settlement, and in 1884 they received a full pardon from Tsar Alexander III and permission to return to live in Russia.
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Source: “Interesting newspaper. Secrets of history"
