The Russian Revolution

The Socialist-Revolutionary Combat Organization, which directed the party’s terrorist operations, had Plehve at the top of its list of intended victims. The minister took every conceivable precaution, but he felt confident of his ability to outwit the terrorists because he had achieved the seemingly impossible feat of placing one of his agents, Evno Azef, in the combat organization. Azef betrayed to the police an attempt on Plehve’s life, which led to the apprehension of G. A. Gershuni, the terrorist fanatic who had founded and led the group. At Gershuni’s request, Azef was named his successor. In 1903 and 1904 several more attempts were made on Plehve’s life, each of them failing for one reason or another. By then some SRs began to suspect Azef’s loyalty, and to salvage his reputation and very likely his life, Azef had to arrange for the assassination of Plehve. The operation, directed by Boris Savinkov, was successful: Plehve was blown to pieces on July 15, 1904, by a bomb thrown at his carriage.†

4. Remains of Plehve’s body after terrorist attack.

At the time of his death, Plehve was the object of universal hatred. Even liberals blamed his death not on the terrorists but on the government. Peter Struve, who at the time was editing in Germany the main liberal organ, spoke for a good deal of public opinion when he wrote immediately after the event:

The corpses of Bogolepov, Sipiagin, Bogdanovich, Bobrikov, Andreev, and von Plehve are not melodramatic whims or romantic accidents of Russian history. These corpses mark the logical development of a moribund autocracy. Russian autocracy, in the person of its last two emperors and their ministers, has stubbornly cut off and continues to cut off the country from all avenues of legal and gradual political development.… The terrible thing for the government is not the physical liquidation of the Sipiagins and von Plehves, but the public atmosphere of resentment and indignation which these bearers of authority create and which breeds in the ranks of Russian society one avenger after another.… [Plehve] thought that it was possible to have an autocracy which introduced the police into everything—an autocracy which transformed legislation, administration, scholarship, church, school, and family into police [organs]—that such an autocracy could dictate to a great nation the laws of its historical development. And the police of von Plehve were not even able to avert a bomb. What a pitiful fool!²⁶

Struve and other liberals would come to rue these incautious words, for it would soon become apparent that for the terrorists terrorism was a way of life, directed not only against the autocracy but also against the very “avenues of legal and gradual political development.” But in the excited atmosphere of the time, when politics turned into a spectator sport, the terrorists were widely admired as heroic champions of freedom.

Plehve’s death deeply affected Nicholas: the emotional diary entry on this event contrasts strikingly with the cold indifference with which he would record seven years later the murder of Stolypin, a statesman of incomparably greater caliber but one who happened to believe that Russia no longer could be run as an autocracy. He had lost to terrorist bombs two Ministers of the Interior in two years. Once again he stood between the alternatives of conciliation and repression. His personal inclinations always ran toward repression, and he might well have chosen another die-hard conservative were it not for the uninterrupted flow of bad news from the war front. On August 17, 1904, a numerically inferior Japanese force attacked the main Russian army near Liaoyang, forcing it to retreat to Mukden.

5. Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii.

This happened on August 24, and the very next day Nicholas offered the Ministry of the Interior to Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii. On the spectrum of bureaucratic politics, Mirskii stood at the opposite pole from Plehve: a man of utmost integrity and liberal temperament, he believed that Russia could be effectively governed only if state and society respected and trusted each other. The favorite word in his political vocabulary was doverie—“trust.” An officer of the General Staff who had served as governor in several provinces and as Deputy Minister of the Interior—that is, head of the police—he represented a type of enlightened bureaucrat more prevalent in late Imperial Russia than commonly thought. He completely rejected the police methods of Sipiagin and Plehve, and rather than serve under them in the Ministry of the Interior, had himself posted as governor-general to Vilno.