these icons enabled the survival of the Tsar. A special icon of the God's Grace on the 17th of October, made for the occasion, widely circulated in photographic copies. Moscow, the old shrine of Orthodoxy, was perceived as the source of the miracle; a contemporary pamphlet declared that the "power that Moscow had professed and that had exalted her revoked these laws [of Nature]". Investigation Immediately after the crash Chief Inspector of Railways, Baron Sherval, who had been travelling on the royal train and had broken his leg in the crash, summoned railway manager Sergei Witte and director of Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute Victor Kirpichev to lead the investigation on site. Anatoly Koni, an influential public lawyer, was dispatched from Saint Petersburg later. In the preceding years, Witte had been regularly involved in managing imperial train journeys across his railroad and was well known to the tsar. Two months before the crash Alexander, upset about Witte's insistence on reducing train speed limits, had publicly chastised him and his railway, referring to its owners' ethnicity: "Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one because it is a Jewish road". According to Witte, he had warned the government earlier of the deficiencies in train setup, notably using paired steam engines and faulty saloon cars. The three investigators disagreed on the direct cause of the crash. Witte insisted that it was caused by speeding, exonerating railroad management; Kirpichev blamed rotten wooden ties, whilst Koni shifted the blame onto the railroad, exonerating state officials. Witte, in particular, maneuvered between blaming state officials and exonerating Minister of Communications Konstantin Posyet. In the end, Alexander preferred to close the case quietly, allowed Sherval and Posyet to retire, and appointed Witte as the Director of Imperial Railways. Despite Witte's efforts, railroad management did not escape public attention. The contractor who built the Kursk-Kharkov line, Samuel Polyakov, who died two months before the crash, was posthumously linked to inferior construction quality of the railroad. The public particularly "credited" him with substandard gravel ballast pads that failed to cushion track vibrations as they were supposed to. See also List of Russian rail accidents References Sources External links Catastrophe of a Tsar's train near Kharkov "Historical pravda" (Ukrainian pravda) Derailments in Russia Railway accidents in 1888 1888 in the Russian Empire History of Kharkiv Oblast Disasters in the Russian Empire Derailments in Ukraine October 1888 events