Produced by David Thomas
[IMAGE: img000.jpg The Tsar Nicholas II]
THE ROMANCE
_of the_
ROMANOFFS
BY
JOSEPH McCABE
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1917
Copyright, 1917,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. Inc.
PREFACE
THE history of Russia has attracted many writers and inspired many
volumes during the last twenty years, yet its most romantic and most
interesting feature has not been fully appreciated.
Thirteen years ago, when the long struggle of the Russian democrats
culminated in a bloody revolution, I had occasion to translate into
English an essay written by a learned professor who belonged to what was
called “the Russophile School.” It was a silken apology for murder. The
Russian soul, the writer said, was oriental, not western. The true line
of separation of east and west was, not the great ridge of mountains
which raised its inert barrier from the Caspian Sea to the frozen ocean,
but the western limit of the land of the Slavs. In their character the
Slavs were an eastern race, fitted only for autocratic rule, indifferent
to those ideas of democracy and progress which stirred to its muddy
depths the life of western Europe. They loved the “Little Father.” They
clung, with all the fervour of their mild and peaceful souls, to their
old-world Church. They had the placid wisdom of the east, the health
that came of living close to mother-earth, the tranquillity of
ignorance. Was not the Tsar justified in protecting his people from the
feverish illusions which agitated western Europe and America?
Thus, in very graceful and impressive language, wrote the “sound”
professors, the clients of the aristocracy, the more learned of the
silk-draped priests. The Russia which they interpreted to us, the Russia
of the boundless horizon, could not read their works. It was almost
wholly illiterate. It could not belie them. Indeed, if one could have
interrogated some earth-bound peasant among those hundred and twenty
millions, he would have heard with dull astonishment that he had _any_
philosophy of life. His cattle lived by instinct: _his_ path was traced by
the priest and the official.
But the American onlooker found one fatal defect in the Russophile
theory. These agents of the autocracy contended that the soul of Russia
rejected western ideas; yet they were spending millions of roubles every
year, they were destroying hundreds of fine-minded men and women every
year, they were packing the large jails of Russia until they reeked with
typhus and other deadly maladies, in an effort to keep those ideas away
from the Russian soul. While Russophile professors were penning their
plausible theories of the Russian character, the autocracy which they
defended was being shaken by as brave and grim a revolution as
any that has upset thrones in modern Europe. Moscow, the shrine of this
supposed beautiful docility, was red with the blood of its children. In
the jails and police-cells of Russia about 200,000 men and women, boys
and girls, quivered under the lash or sank upon fever-beds, and almost
as many more dragged out a living death in the melancholy wastes of
Siberia. They wanted democracy and progress; and their introduction of
those ideas to the peasantry had awakened so ready and fervent a
response that it had been necessary to seal their lips with blood.
We looked back along the history of Russia, and we found that the
struggle was nearly a century old. The ghastly route to Siberia had been
opened eighty years before. Russia had felt the revolutionary wave which
swept over Europe during the thirties of the nineteenth century, and the
Tsar of those days had fought not less savagely than the rulers of
Austria, Spain, and Portugal for his autocracy. Every democratic advance
that has since been won in western Europe has provoked a corresponding
effort to advance in Russia, and that effort has always been truculently
suppressed. Nearly every other country in Europe has had the courage to
educate its people and enable them to study its institutions with open
mind. Russia remains illiterate to the extent of seventy-five per cent,
and its rulers have ever discouraged or restricted education. The
autocracy rested, not upon the affection, but upon the ignorance, of its
people.
When we regard the whole history of that autocracy we begin to
understand the tragedy of Russia. We dimly but surely perceive, in the
dawn of European history, that amongst the families which wandered
through the forests of Europe none were more democratic than, few were
as democratic as, the early Slavs. We find this great family spread over
an area so immense that it is further encouraged to cling to democratic,
even communistic, life, and avoid the making of princes or kings. We
then find the inevitable military chiefs, not born of the Slav people,
intruding and creating princedoms: we find an oriental autocracy
fastening itself, violently and parasitically, upon the helpless nation:
we find the evil example and the tincture of foreign blood continuing
the development until Princes of Moscow become Tsars of all the Russias,
and convert a title dipped in blood into a title to rule by the grace of
God and the affection of the people. And we find that Moscovite dynasty,
from which the Romanoffs issued, playing such pranks before high heaven
as few dynasties have played, until the old Slav spirit awakens at the
call of the world and makes an end of it.
That is the romance of the Romanoffs, of Russia and its rulers, which I
propose to tell. This is not a history of Russia, but the history of its
autocracy as an episode: of its real origin, its long-drawn brutality,
its picturesque corruption, its sordid machinery of government, its
selfish determination to keep Russia from the growing light, its
terrible final struggle and defeat. To a democratic people there can be
no more congenial study than this exposure of the crime and failure of
an autocracy. To any who find romance in such behaviour as kings and
nobles were permitted to flaunt in the eyes of their people in earlier
ages the story of the Romanoffs must be exceptionally attractive.
J. M.
CONTENTS
I The Primitive Democracy of the Slav
II The Descent to Autocracy
III The Moscovites Become Tsars
IV The Rise of the Romanoffs
V The Early Romanoffs
VI A Romanoff Princess
VII The Great Peter
VIII Catherine the Little
IX Romance Upon Romance
X The Gay and Pious Elizabeth
XI Catherine the Great
XII In the Days of Napoleon
XIII The Fight Against Liberalism
XIV The Tragedy of Alexander II
XV Enter Pobiedonostseff
XVI The Last of the Romanoffs
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Tsar Nicholas II
Vladimir, Grande Duke of Kieff, 980-1015 From an Ancient Banner
Tatars of the Mongol Period
Costume of Boyars in the Seventeenth Century
The Patriarch Philaret, father of Mikhail Romanoff, the first Tsar of
the New Dynasty. Seventeenth Century
Ivan the Terrible, by Antokolsky
View of Destroyed Tower of Nicholas, Arsenal, etc., in the Kremlin, A.D.
1812 From a Contemporary Drawing
Peter the Great
Room of the Tsar Mikhailovitch, Moscow
Paul the First
Catherine II
The Red Square, Church of St. Basil and Redeemer Gate, Moscow
Winter Palace, Petrograd
Cathedral Erected in Petrograd in Memory of Alexander II
Tauride Palace, Petrograd, Meeting Place of the Duma
Session Chamber of the Duma, Tauride Palace, Petrograd
The Tsarina Alexandra
THE ROMANCE OF THE
ROMANOFFS
CHAPTER I
THE PRIMITIVE DEMOCRACY OF THE SLAV
A LITTLE south of the centre of Europe rises the great curve of the
Carpathian mountains. The sprawling bulk of this long chain, rising in
places until its crown shines with snow and ice, formed a natural
barrier to the spread of Roman civilisation. It enfolded and protected
the plains of Hungary and the green valley of the Danube, and it seemed
to set a limit to every decent ambition. Beyond it men saw a vast and
dreary plain filled with wild peoples whom the Romans and Greeks called
“Scythians.” It was, in effect, in those days, almost the dividing line
of Europe and Asia. One branch of the great European race had gone down
into Greece and, becoming civilised, remained there. Another branch had
found the blue waters and sunny skies in Italy. A third, the vast horde
of the Teutons, was moving heavily and slowly southward in the west.
But about the eastern feet of the Carpathians was a little northern
people, the Slavs, which may one day fill the earth’s chronicle when
Teuton has followed Greek and Roman into the inevitable tomb of
warriors. Where these Slavs came from, and what was their precise
kinship to the other northerners and to the Asiatic peoples, we do not
confidently know. Some tens of thousands of years before the Christian
Era the last spell of the Ice-Age had locked the north of Europe. It
seems that a branch of the human family followed the retreating
ice-sheet and, in the bracing winds which blew off the frozen regions,
shed its weaklings and became the vigorous “northern race.” From this
came the successive waves of Greeks and Romans, Goths and Vandals,
English and Norman and German. From these northern forests seem also to
have come the Slavs, who split at the barrier of the Carpathians into
two great streams: Bohemians and Serbs to the west, and Russians (as
they were later called) to the east.
We have not much information about this people which settled across the
limit of civilisation. To the Romans they were part of the medley of
barbarism which got a rude living out of the bleak north. A few later
Greek writers had some acquaintance with them, and an early Russian
monk, Nestor, gathered their traditions, into a chronicle, and described
them as they were before the development of autocracy obliterated their
native features. From these sources we learn that the Slavs were
singularly democratic for a people at their stage of evolution.
We know to-day the real origin of kingships and princedoms, which was
hidden from our fathers by legends of “divine right.” The right of a man
to rule his fellows came of his possession of a stronger arm or a wiser
head, or a combination of the two: a plausible enough theory until kings
began to insist on leaving the power to their sons, whether or no they
left them the strong arm and the wise head. As a rule the hunt and the
battle gave the strong man his opportunity, and in every other nation at
the level of the Slavs we find chiefs, who dispense justice and direct
warfare, and exact a reward proportionate to their services.
It is a common and surprised observation of the early writers who notice
the Slavs that they had no chiefs. The monk Nestor, who wrote in their
midst at the beginning of the twelfth century, says that they had
“chiefs,” but would not tolerate “tyranny.” The primitive life of the
Slavs had then been modified, as we shall see, but the reports may be
reconciled. The Slavs had no hereditary families of chiefs, no rulers of
tribes who exacted tribute. Nestor gives a very different character to
the various tribes of the Slav family. Being a monk, he is unable to
give any of them a good character in their pagan days, but we may make a
genial allowance for this natural prejudice. Perhaps some of the tribes,
who were in closer touch with the fierce Finns and Scythians, had
chiefs. Warfare is the great king-maker. Clearly the primitive and
normal condition of a Slav community was exceptionally democratic.
The one definite institution of those early days that is known to us is
the village-council; the institution that, being most deeply rooted in
the heart of the Slav, has survived all autocracies by divine right and
is familiar to-day to the whole world as the _Mir_. In ancient Slavdom
the family was not the basis of the state. It was the state, or there
was no state. An enlarged family--for the Slavs were a social and
peaceful folk, and the young, founding a new family, clung to the home
until it grew too small and some must wander afield--with cousins and
children and grand-children, was the unit. The father had patriarchal
power in his little colony, and when he departed the next oldest and
wisest, a brother generally, took up the mild sway. Such families grew
into villages or settlements in a few generations: not too large, for
they lived on the land, yet compact, for there were plenty of human
wolves east of the Carpathians. The Finns and other Asiatic tribes then
filled, or roamed over, the vast area we now call Russia, and their code
did not forbid the plunder of peaceful argriculturists. New colonies
would be founded near the old and form villages. Out of this grew the
_Mir_, the council in which the heads of the various households met
to discuss and decide their common affairs.
No doubt some kind of chairman, some sage elder, would be chosen to
preside, but it is clear from later practice and early comment that the
council only acted upon a unanimous decision. That form of democracy had
inconveniences, and, when Russia begins to have chroniclers, we find
that unanimity was often secured, in a struggle, by pitching the
minority into the river. That, at all events, was the original Slav
custom. In theory even a majority could not tyrannise over a minority,
much less a minority over a majority.
There would be frequent calls for these village-councils, as the land,
on which most of them worked, was held in common. The head of a family
owned only his house and enclosure, and was entitled to the harvest of
his own labour. Then there were the rights of hunting in the forest and
fishing in the rivers, the constant need to send out new colonies into
the eastern wilderness, and especially the need to protect these new
colonies from the wandering Asiatics. Flanked by the Carpathians, up
which they could not spread, the tribes had to push steadily eastward,
and the land was full of Asiatics, for the most part swift and ruthless
horsemen. Co-operative defence was as necessary as co-operative counsel.
The elders of many neighbouring villages met together in a larger
council. There was a rough organisation of villages into a canton or
_Volost_. Again there would probably be a president, and some think that
a temporary chief or leader might be appointed in an emergency. But the
Slavs had no hereditary rulers, no heads of the various tribes.
It also helped to sustain their democratic and communistic life that
they had no priests. When priests later come upon the scene we shall
find them very easily becoming the instruments of autocracy. We shall
find, as is usual, the autocrat enriching the clergy, and the clergy
discovering very impressive legends upon which he may establish his
title to rule. In the pagan days of the Slavs there were no priests. The
religion was the kind of primitive interpretation of nature which we
always find at that level of mental development. The fire of the sun,
the roar of the storm, the mysterious fertility of the earth, and the
awful solemnity of the forest filled the child-like mind with wonder and
dread. These things were felt to have life, a greater life than the puny
and limited life of man; and the Slavs learned to bow down to the mighty
spirits of the sun and the river and the wind and the earth. In
particular they mourned the death of the sun, and celebrated joyously
its annual re-birth and restoration to full glory. But they had no
priests. The heads of the family or the village performed the
invocations and the sacrifices.
We must remember that even in these primitive and patriarchal
arrangements there was the germ of autocracy. The eldest male was an
autocrat. So absolute was his power that it is said that, when he died,
wife and servants and horse had to follow him into the nether world.
There seems here to be some confusion between different tribes, and
there is evidence that, as among the Teutons, woman was generally
respected; although there were ancient marriage-rites which suggest that
at one time brides were stolen, and there was some practice of polygamy.
However that may have been, the father of the household was an autocrat.
We may plead only that he does not seem to have had, as in ancient Rome,
power of life and death over his mate.
Such was the Slav people when we first discover them about the feet of
the Carpathians. We have next to see how they became the Russian people,
and how contact with civilisation and the growth of commerce modified
their primitive communism.
The towering masses of the mountains checked the western expansion of
the growing tribes. The Danube and the outposts of the Roman Empire--the
fathers of the Rumans--shut them from the south. They were, as their
number increased, bound to travel eastward, and their pioneers would
discover that the central part of this mighty waste of eastern Europe
was a particularly fertile region. From the foot of the Carpathians the
land spreads in one of the largest plains of the world until it begins
to rise toward the Ural mountains. Between the forests and bleak deserts
of the north and the arid prairies of the south there are about a
hundred and fifty million acres of “black earth,” as rich
and fertile as any to be found, and south of these a hundred and fifty
million acres of ordinary arable land. At the beginning of the Christian
Era this great area would be for the most part forest and morass,
chequered by vast spaces of grassy plain, furrowed by broad rivers. The
advancing colonies of the Slavs would discover the fertility of the soil
and clear the ground for their corn and flax. The rivers gave them
abundant fish. The forests swarmed with animals which afforded fur and
meat, and the innumerable wild bees gave them stores of honey and wax
for the long winters. Timber for the vapour-bath, which the Slav family
seems already to have held in affection, lay on every side.
We find the Slavs especially spreading over this fertile heart of Russia
about the eighth century of the present era. The land had long been held
by the Finns and other Asiatic tribes when, in the third century, the
Goths from the north fell upon them and drove them eastward. In the next
century began that more formidable invasion from Asia which flung the
Finns westward once more, and cast the Teutons upon the crumbling
barrier of the Roman Empire. In the seventh century a new semi-civilised
race, the Khazars, created an empire in south-eastern Russia, and drove
the Asiatic Finns definitely to the north. It was at the close of these
great movements that the Slavs moved rapidly over the fertile regions,
between the land of the Finns and the southern kingdom of the Khazars,
By the end of the eighth century the various Slav tribes had overrun the
central part of western Russia.
The chief change which this migration caused in the life of the Slavs
was the development of commerce. The great rivers of the land at once
became the highways. Fishers as well as tillers of the soil, the Slavs
would spread along the river-valleys, and the junctions of the rivers
would naturally become the chief stations for what intercourse there was
between the scattered villages. It is probable that in those days, when
four-fifths of Russia was marsh and forest, the rivers were deeper than
they are to-day. In our time they are for the most part shallow
throughout the summer. Only in the spring, when the melting snows and
rains flush the broad channels, can large boats ascend them; and in the
winter their frozen waters make good passage for the sledge. They became
the high-roads of the new commonwealth, as the site of the older cities
indicates when one glances at the map.
The Slavs had at that time probably little or no commerce. Some
exchange, in kind, of fish, fur, honey, or corn might take place, but
the resources were much the same for each village. In a short time after
the settlement, however, a busy commercial system was inaugurated.
Further north than the Finns were the Scandinavians, whose skill in
metal-working was early developed. The Slavs traded with them for swords
and spears and axes.
To the south, beyond the land of the Khazars, was the chief
representative of civilisation in the west, the Byzantine (or
Constantinopolitan) Empire. The northern tribes had now shattered Roman
civilisation. The solid roads, the ample schools, the courts of law and
municipal institutions established by the Romans in southern Europe were
in complete decay, and four-fifths of the city of Rome was a charred and
desolate wilderness. But the city which Constantine had founded on the
Bosphorus, on the site of ancient Byzantium, lay out of the path of most
of the barbarians, and the glory of Constantinople penetrated feebly
into the distant forests of Russia. Its soldiers give us our first
direct knowledge of the Slavs. Its merchants crossed the Black Sea,
ascended the rivers of Russia, and spread before the eager eyes of the
Slavs the silks and damasks and velvets, the shining metal-work and
imitation-jewels, of the great “Tsargrad,” or City of the Emperors. For
these the Slavs could offer choice furs, for an enormous variety of
fur-clad animals roamed their forests, as well as honey for the table
and wax for the myriad tapers of the Byzantine churches.
[IMAGE: img010.jpg Vladimir, Grande Duke of Kieff, 980-1015
From an Ancient Banner]
This busy commerce increased the importance of the settlements at the
junction of the rivers. The evenness of the Russian plains, the great
depth of soil or clay or glacial rubbish which uniformly covers the
level strata below, make stone scarce in the greater part of the country
then occupied by the Slavs. The ordinary village was a cluster of rude
huts made of timber, with roofs of straw and mud. The towns also were of
timber, and the accumulation of merchandise in them for traffic or fairs
attracted the Asiatic marauders and increased the need of defence. The
_Véché_, or democratic council of the district, grew in importance.
Stockades of timber were erected. The Slavs, preferring peace as an
agricultural people always does, were compelled to acquire some skill in
the art of war.
Up to this point, the ninth century, the democracy of the Slavs was
unaltered. The villagers were still free and independent men, while the
peasantry over the rest of Europe were slaves or serfs. They regulated
their own affairs in their _Mir_, recognised no central government, and
paid tribute to neither chiefs nor priests. There was plenty of timber
to heat their stoves during the long winter, and in the summer the song
and dance cheered the leisure from their labours. The plot of corn and
the nests of the wild bees fed them; the plot of flax clothed them; and
the winter harvest of furs, taken to the nearest town or fair, gave them
many a tawdry luxury from the great cities of the south. Even in the
towns they had still no money or currency. It was not until long
afterwards that they cut disks of leather to serve the purpose of
coinage. And even in the largest settlements or towns, such as Novgorod
in the north and Kieff in the south, the democratic council, with
unanimous decision, ruled their little affairs.
The defect of a primitive democracy of this nature soon became apparent.
When the less peaceful neighbours who surrounded them on every side made
an attack in force the isolated towns or communities could not defend
themselves. The Khazars of the south overspread the nearest Slav
districts and virtually enslaved them. The Scandinavian pirates of the
Baltic pushed southward from the coast and wrung tribute from them.
Either they must establish a compact military organisation, which their
loose social texture did not easily permit, or they must hire defenders.
They chose the latter course, not knowing, as we do, the ultimate price
of engaging military chiefs.
The Scandinavians or Norsemen were as little pacific as any people of
Europe, and their large frames and mighty weapons made of them
formidable warriors. The Slavs were well acquainted with them. Somehow
they had found the way across Russia to Constantinople, where their
services were richly paid. From the southern shores of the Baltic they
descended the northern rivers, and, crossing short stretches of country
from river to river, they sailed down the broad waterways to the Black
Sea. In the ninth century the Slavs were familiar with the tall,
blue-eyed, blond-haired giants, with heavy spears and formidable axes.
The Greeks of the south, who called them Varangians, clothed them in
rich armour and made of them a special imperial guard. The Slavs called
them _Rus_, or “sea-farers” (if not “pirates”), a name they seem to have
borrowed from the Finns.
This, at least, is what modern scholars make of the ancient legend,
given in Nestor, that the men of Rus were foreign warriors invited by
the Slavs to come and settle and undertake military service. The story
runs that the Slavs of the north, wearied by invasion and pillage,
invited these soldiers to defend them and share their goods. Some
historians suspect that the legend may be invented by the vanity of the
Slavs, who did not care to confess that the northerners had subdued
them, but it is not unlikely that they were invited to defend the Slavs
as they were invited to defend the Emperors of Constantinople. They had
already shown the Slavs that those who did not pay voluntarily might
have to pay involuntarily. As the democratic institutions of the Slavs
survived most strongly in the city where the Norsemen first settled,
Novgorod, it does not seem as if they settled in virtue of conquest. In
western Europe the northerners, wherever they settled, established the
feudal system, which never existed in Russia.
The story handed down in Russia--as the land of the Slavs soon came to
be called--was that three brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor, answered
the call of the Slavs, and, with their kinsmen and followers, settled on
the Baltic coast. This is assigned to the year 862. From those seats
they cannot have defended, or raised taxes from, much of Russia, but
when Sineus and Truvor died Rurik went to settle in Novgorod. That city,
about a hundred and twenty miles south of Petrograd, was the chief town
in the northern part of the route from north to south. Rurik seems to
have built a stone fort overlooking the timber settlement and been
content with a kind of tribute for his military services. Novgorod
remained until centuries afterwards a jealously democratic community.
The chief Slav town in the south was Kieff, and to this two of the
unruly officers of Rurik’s troop, Askold and Dir, led a company of the
northerners. As is well known, these northern barbarians, once their
barriers were broken down, wandered from end to end of Europe, and even
to Carthage and Alexandria, terrifying the natives everywhere with their
gigantic frames, their immense axes and swords, their guttural grunts,
and their infinite capacity for liquor. The Slavs of Kieff, voluntarily
or involuntarily, received the warriors, and a fresh colony of men of
Rus was planted. They seem to have infected even some of the Slavs with
their piratical spirit, for we read of them leading an expedition down
the river and across the Black Sea against Constantinople itself.
The next step was to unite the towns of Novgorod and Kieff, and bring
the remainder of the Slavs under the vague lordship of the Norsemen.
This was done by Rurik’s brother and successor, Oleg. The Teutonic rule
of hereditary succession came in with the northerners, and the men of
Novgorod seem to have had no further choice. Oleg assumed command, and
he marched his troop against the smaller body of his countrymen in the
south. Askold and Dir had, he said, acted without orders, and had
usurped a lordship which belonged to his brother. Kieff had no more
choice than Novgorod. Oleg found it a finer town than the settlement
among the marshes of the north. He set up there his court of brawling,
drunken warriors, and gradually induced all the tribes of the Slavs to
pay him tribute and furnish soldiers. He was so successful that one year
he embarked his men on two thousand boats, led them against the imperial
city, and forced the Greeks themselves to add to his treasury.
The land of Rus was in those days not the spacious Russia of our time.
It spread little eastward beyond Novgorod and Kieff, and it was bounded
by the Khazars to the south and the Finns and Lithuanians to the north.
But it was now Russia, a group of Slav tribes dominated by a military
caste. It was, however, not yet a nation, certainly not a monarchy.
Tax-gathering and defence were the sole duties of the military chief,
and as the Slavs had demanded the one they were not unprepared for the
other. But the germ of autocracy was now planted in the soil, and the
terrible events of the next few centuries would foster its baleful
development.