The Tsar's Gift

As Saint Petersburg molts its winter cloak; river ice flows, days grow longer and the night finds its latitude end. In the snow retreat tulips bloom, on the boulevard cherry trees pink scent the air and people celebrate the coming promise of a summer fair.

A premonition of impending doom raises the hair on the back of Gregor's neck; police instinct feels the energy of danger before they unmask the truth. He doesn't know it yet, but today's murder will change his life forever.

Secret Policemen, like Gregor and his father aren't crime fighters, they're political agents who use subterfuge, torture and lies to infiltrate and dismantle groups scheming against the empire. Exposed to justice, traitors are hanged or sent to a slow death in Siberian prisons. The Secret Police were created by the tsars to uncover internal threats to them and the nation: Their job, never-ending.

Noble women and educated men suffering under the tsar's autocratic rule turned to revolution to stop the cruel oppression. Equal to the task, they martyred themselves for the cause. In Russia's valiant and courageous history, military heroes are enshrined and boys who want to fight for a just cause find revolution against autocracy an easy brew. But the tsar, as the head of the Russian Orthodox church and the potentate ruler of the empire, is a formidable enemy to attempt to overthrow.

You don't join the Secret Police; you're chosen by them. Spies don't tell people what they do and become henchmen without moral boundaries thus enabling them to carry out the tsar's orders without legal repercussions. Secret Police work is secret, and the officers are eager to implement the tsar's royal command.

The Gulf of Finland's night freeze sparkles the city as the March wind slow gnaws it away. The sub-zero temperature cake-frosts the palaces and streets, Byzantine church turrets and basalt mansions alchemize the magical scene of white diamonds into ice.

Late for work as usual and always on Mondays, Gregor donned his wool great coat, stuffed his headache in a ushanka fur hat and clomped out the door. Kasha porridge and sweet tea warming his belly, fierce dedication rising in his soul. The Ministry of Internal Affairs office on the city's Fontanka River Embankment opened to the same underhanded skullduggery, no need to come in early, it's more of the same every day. But today was different, he felt something untoward happening in his guts. Secret policing is like that, invisible; until it faces danger and delivers traitors to justice. His normal activities in false identities and working outside the law take time to achieve full flavor but now's not the time now to savor credentials, he must put them into action without delay.

Gregor's daily customs to travel to the office, the omnibus-horsed carriage or walk from his father's palatial home on Nevsky Avenue near the Anichkov Bridge, a brisk, fifteen-minute stride. An intense brooding persona in a vigorous body, in good weather he enjoyed walking the palatial embankment, today is a walking day, the pungent spring air of life reborn to clear his vodka fog.

Serpentine rivers weave the Venice scene into a tapestry of majesty and mystery expressed by the omnipotent power of the tsars. Harbingers following the opulence of great empires teeter between dark days of turmoil and betrayal, inept leadership and the people losing faith in the future. Suffering, sacrifice, and love are not enough to stem the flow. The throes of final desperation, history in the making.

Gregor Ivanovich works for the Third Section Secret Police under his father's senior tutelage. As a captain in the Section, he's dedicated to the task, mind fixed on uncovering plots against the crown by whatever means necessary dominates his thinking. Anything less than his job well done could mean Siberia or death at the hands of the conspirators. As he walked, he thought, 'How can I infiltrate the underground groups to uncover their devious plans? Use informants or better still, join as one of them. I'm the same age, and with a rough-shod appearance, a change of clothes and nihilist rhetoric I might be invited to join. Working inside the group is my best option to defuse their nefarious schemes. I'm an unknown person, so there's no chance of exposure within the group. I follow my father's operative rule: "Use informants where you can't get in and in-person when you can."'

The two-kopek bus fare would normally put him in the door of the ministry in minutes. But following a weekend of carousing with his brother at the army barracks his associates in the art and science of internal espionage expected late arrival. His father, the most senior officer in the Third Section gave him leeway from the office staff but not from a stern father's reprimand for his miscreant behavior.

'My junior associate, Pasha's waiting to absorb the practiced and memorized RADIUS mantras of Undercover Police work: Rehearse your cover story until you become that person. Adopt an apathetic attitude to information of value. Detail your story with facts, hometown, local people. Informants network must be wide and varied by design. Information is the lifeblood of solid police work. Undercover, means tell no-one what you're doing. Sound advice must be offered on pertinent issues. Keep your hand in play.'

Drummed into his head by his Secret Police father, "RADIUS are the spokes of a central hub going in all directions and set the basic rules of the undercover spy game." His fellow officers, Pasha included, needed to take the rules into their hearts and make them theirs to survive.

'I need to clear my head from a weekend carousing with my older brother, Vasili. What a great time we had. His army barracks allow Seka gambling with a 36-card deck, and the vodka pours free. I won money playing cards and made it home alive. I should celebrate; it was a good night.'

Without notice, other than his earlier premonition, he was surprised by a panicked bustle of people hurrying down the sidewalk. A special edition of the newspaper clenched in their hands, headline screaming frontpage news. The event that would change his life shocked Russia's soul to the core and reverberated around the world: "The Tsar is Assassinated!"

The violent assault on Sunday, March 13, 1881 in front of the Winter Palace on an icy, late spring day dismembered bodies and splattered crimson on the fresh fallen snow. Tsarevitch Alexander, the son and inheritor of the crown witnessed his father's carriage-bomb attack while standing on the palace grounds waiting for his father's return.

The bomb's detonations, 'Boom! pause…Boom!' echoed bloodied death off the palace walls. The mayhem and shock of the bomb's aftermath left an indelible impression on the Tsarevich heir who stood next in the Romanov family line for the throne.

From this complete horror experience the dead tsar's son, Tsarevich Alexander, at thirty-six, would become the emperor of an Imperial empire: A paranoid, eccentric ruler, loved by the people he would become a nemesis to his enemies. Fearful of non-Christian religions reported to have planned the attack, he refused from that day forward to live in the Winter Palace to protect his family from harm. His family's safe home, the six-hundred room, Gatchina Palace, thirty miles to the southwest.

Gregor hurried into the office, files unstacked and people dashing everywhere. The police in an uproar to assess blame. The samovar of tea hot, cups filled, rumors expressed and revenge boiling over.

"Your father's one of the wounded Grisha. He's in the hospital and expected to recover." Revenge burns deep.

'How meaningless my unkempt beard and rough appearance spinning spider web lies to catch small flies after this horrendous murder of the tsar. I'm shocked and dismayed it happened on my watch without me seeing it coming.'

"Do we know who and why they did this, Pasha?"

"Yes Grisha, it was the Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will, they want to overthrow the crown and bring it to the hands of the people. Some are dead in the attack, some captured and the others have gone into hiding."

"Oh my God Pasha, that's a group I've been watching the past months, they work in cells so don't know the other member's plans. But my informant knows who they are and where they live. He said something was in the mix but the details were kept from him."

Gregor's father, Vladimir Vasilyevich Ivanovich is a high-ranking official of the Third Section Secret Police. A government department formed under the auspices of The Department of Protection for Public Safety in the Ministry of Internal Affairs has groomed him for this role. First, in the Third Section and later at its creation, under Tsar Alexander with the Okhrana (охрана) Secret Police. The word so feared by the population none dared challenge its power. Positioned to be a top official in the secretive organization, even at his young age he had the making of a trusted operative for the incoming tsar.

The Third Section, considered corrupt by Tsar Alexander, made him suspicious of his own police force. (His creation, the Okhrana, would become the incorruptible forerunner of the modern Secret Police.)

Gregor's father put his second son deep in the Okhrana, secret-police, internal spy game. Inheritance to his son, not money, but political intrigue, informants and a quiver of underhanded tactics. Keeping secrets and how to tell believable lies, cornerstones of the Russian, deep-Slav psyche, the enigmatic, secretive nature bred in Russian bones is there for reason: Survival. Three centuries of autocratic repression, social and national conflict, external wars and human suffering caused by those in positions of trust can make people suspicious of each other.

'Beyond our secretive side, we openly respect and are devoted to our native country and the icon saints of the Orthodox Church. We revere family but our culture and heritage bow to the divine authority of the Tsar.'

'The Imperial Empire of the old days is out-of-synch with modern industrial times. It wasn't always that way. The tsars and tsarinas of the past were fathers and mothers to their people, Mother Russia our home and heart. Anointed by God with divine right, the tsars ruled their empire with unforgiving hands in a country so large, it could stretch from Alaska on the Bering Sea across North America and the Atlantic Ocean to France. We span eleven time zones; the sun rises in our east as it sets in our west.'

'My father operates the Third Section with an iron hand. (Gregor's father, gravely wounded in the attack, made him the de facto head of the department.) His last official duty under my command will be arresting members of the gang. My informants will be tortured to identify the leaders of The People's Will to bring them to justice.'

"One informant in particular, a laborer who'd run afoul of the law and got caught, agreed to spy on his comrades for freedom from his charges. He said, he had to dig a tunnel under a roadway from a cheese shop by the river canal and knew no more."

"The bomb attack happened above ground in front of the Winter Palace, Grisha." Pasha offered support that his informant might not have been directly involved.

The informant alerted Gregor to a potential plan to murder the tsar, but nothing was done with the piecemeal information. He adopted a wait-and-see attitude as the modus operandi. Later, and after the murder, the Secret Police informant, Okladsky gave up the group's conspirators and hideout apartments to avoid the death penalty for participating in a regicide.

Sentenced to death by public hanging for murder of a tsar, the only capital crime in Russia, even murders aren't hung. Trying to, or succeeding at assassination of the tsar you're hanged, or if a lesser conspirator pardoned and sent to Siberia. A feather in Gregor's cap would be to lead their capture before they disappeared in the vast land, gone forever.

As a break from for his hangover and to calm his thinking from the confusion he went to his father's empty office to gather his mind and mulled on the thoughts he had before the incident, 'You know our greatest enemy is not the revolutionaries; it's vodka. Alcohol in its purest state, a hallmark of Russian life, kills more people than all the wars, bombs and revolutions combined. The taste of upending glasses filled with blotto leading to doom will be with us forever.'

'For men, drinking is a national pastime. A bottle of vodka for lunch with a chunk of bacon and a pickle does not make for good sense or sound reason. It guarantees obliteration of harsh reality in vodka hazed breath. Nothing can be done to stop it (no-one wants to), it's who we are and have always been. Our troubled times have no end and alcohol is fueling our demise.'

'I need to quit drinking to excess if I'm to be saved for a useful life.'

Back to the moment at hand, he went to Pasha's desk. "You know Pasha, twenty-three million serfs freed twenty years ago by Alexander's father are struggling to keep their heads above poverty's powerful undercurrent, threatening to drown them in misery. Their discontent is shaking the stability of the empire and causing the upwelling of revolutionary zeal."

"Individual freedom has left millions without work in the countryside, and by moving to the cities the assassination of their tsar only adds to their uneasiness. They'll be questioning their safety from an armed reprisal for the brutal act."

In the office, Gregor, the son of their wounded boss, was safe from recrimination from his fellow officers in the department. Pavel, (Pasha) was his friend and worked with him in their apprentice beginnings in the force. Never a word was spoken to his face for late arrival from an all-night gambling, drinking session with his oldest brother, Vasili and his fellow officers in the regiment.

Vasili, the eldest, was a decorated lieutenant in the Saint Petersburg Dragoon Regiment Cavalry. Through his brother's military friends housed in the city barracks, who loved to gamble paychecks as well as their lives, he found a group of like minds. Others with his nerve and verve to support his morally questionable behavior.

The Ivanovich family was more than a family. It was a dynasty founded in the past on blood of sacrifice and noble causes. Encouraged by his father who knew the importance of duty, social position and family loyalty in the 19th century Russian world gave him purpose and place.

His siblings led normal lives, all married with children. Dimitri, a wealthy merchant dealing in furs from the northeast and Nikolai, the youngest an Eastern Orthodox priest. His father had taken a second wife after his mother died in the cholera epidemic and married his aunt, his mother's youngest sister. They had two children, his step sister, Olga and much younger brother, Pyotr.

A dynasty passes family title and fortune with a core belief system to support subsequent generations; that's how dynasties survive. They adopt what works and adapt it to the times. The Ivanovich family succession plan was in place. His father didn't expect his errant, gambling, womanizing son, Gregor would amount to anything. But as 'éminence de grise' advisor to the emperor, Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov III, the Supreme Ruler of the Imperial Empire he would become one of the most powerful and wealthiest men in Russia.

Gregor had no women in his life he called friends. Secrecy, odd hours and his unkempt look as a supposed revolutionary, enough to scare any sensible woman away. Someone to love and build a family with had to wait. But the urges of a young man are not smothered by his job, Russian or not. He sought ladies of the night to ease his desires. There were false rumors from his associates, he begged abuse from his paramours as penance for his police sins. Self-recrimination finds devious ways to express.

'I had to lose my elegant formal-dressed appearance to become a university student studying philosophy, or an urban worker displaced from the farm would do as my made-up disguise.'

Dressed in shoddy clothes with an untrimmed beard to appear nihilist, where nothing in the world is of importance, his chances of finding a decent woman dropped from zero to non-existent.

'Considering I look like an unscrupulous, low-life, any interest in my secret life by a woman would be impossible for her to accept.'

Gregor's active mind and roiling thoughts move into overdrive.

'I must suffer my desire to have a family; to protect our sovereign nation and my tsar are my only goals in life. I'm not a monk; I have my needs satisfied but marriage is out of the picture in my current circumstance. The driving force of my life, to protect Mother Russia from the enemy within, and the Tsar from threats to his well-being. Bold steps must be taken and a straight and narrow path followed to protect the Empire from usurpers, implosion and collapse.'

"We need to capture the assassins soonest to stem the tide of public unrest against the monarchy. I know where to go, and who to ask. I'll bring them to justice and make my father proud."

'By following my Tsar's command, my duty is clear; catch the murderers to right the threats against the crown and bring them to justice.'

'Completion of a sovereign order by whatever unscrupulous methods it entails, will bring me recognition from my father and the beleaguered, grieving tsar. I know what must be done to avenge his father's murderous death and my father's grave wounding: Capture the bastards and watch them hang.'

'I make my prayer to our icon The Lady of Kazan, the mother of God, our palladium and spiritual protector. The blessed icon of mother and child who unites our homes and land in times of trouble and brings victory in times of war. I pray for forgiveness for my sins and ask for strength in your glory. "Revenge is mine" saith the Lord. Amen'