The Staffordshire and Potteries Examiner. — 1881-04-30 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

HOW ALEXANDER 111. IS GUARDED.  The Daily Telegraph publishes the following from a correspondent :—" A few days after the fatal catastrophe of the 13th March the Russian Ministers resolved on begging the Emperor to reside in one el the numerous imperial palaces outside his capital. The explosion in the Winter Palace, the mine in the Malaia Sadovaia, many other attempts of which the public know nothing, and, above all, the tragic death of the late Czar, had proved to them beyond a doubt that in St. Petersburg neither the devotion of nine-tenths of the population, nor the increasing vigilance of Ministers, police, and 50,000 soldiers could guard their Imperial master from the murderous attacks of a small band of desperate men and women. The Emperor showed some reluctance at first to leave the Anitchkoff Palace? where he has spent so many happy days as Czarewitch, but consented when Loris Melikoff reminded him that he was surrounded on three sides by private houses, from the cellars of which, at that very moment Nihilist miscreants might be cutting their way to his palace in spite of the greatest watchfulness on the part of the police. As the Emperor has decided never to live in any of his father's favourite residences, the Winter Palace, Tsarskoe Selo, and Livadia, for reasons easily guessed, orders were sent to prepare the palace at Gatchino (a small town about thirty miles to the S.W. of St. ..Petersburg) for the Imperial Court. Several hundred artisans and mechanics, all soldiers of the Preobrajinsky regiment—the Russian soldier is thoroughly taught some trade, and allowed to earn money by it while off duty—were selected to wake the necessary alterations. At midnight they assembled in the church at Gatchino, and solemnly swore never to reveal the nature of the work they were about to undertake. Death or Siberia was the penalty if they broke the oath; a " krassny " (ten roubles, or twenty-one shillings) the reward if they were silent and industrious. The alterations v ,:cle in forty-eight hours, but secrecy was not longer. Vodka loosened the tongues o and soon all Gatchino was talking i ~he precautions taken to preserve th, ,;zar. A subterranean passage leads I. uroom to the stables, where a number of are kepi, s;pldled and bridled day and night. -,-,untinels are i (1 at in. tervals of twenty yards all round the i,„ ,;ing. , The Imperial bedroom, which has two v•cvs ' protected at night by massive iron shuttL,s, can only be reached from the outside by passing through three spacious ante-chambers, in which are posted eighty Cossacks armed to the teeth. They are allowed to speak and move in the two outer rooms, but in the hall adjoining the Czar's bedroom perfect silence is maintained all night. The General on service for the day sits in an easy ehair, his Cossacks on a divan, which runs round the whole room. At the General's right hand is the push of an electric apparatus, which rings a bell in every guard-house within the Palace grounds. When the Emperor is about to retire to rest, before shutting his door he removes the other handle, so that no entrance can be effected till he himself personally opens the door from the inside. Unlike his late father, he cannot endure the presence of an armed soldier in his bedchamber."