THE ADVENT OF NICHOLAS II.
During the latter years of the tranquil reign of Alexander III. the
drift of the Tsardom was manifestly in the direction of political
change, but the course taken was mainly economic. Witte succeeded in
introducing the gold standard which so many of his colleagues had
declared impossible. Railways were rapidly being constructed, trade
enlivened, and industries created and protected. The problems of
wages, housing, and hygiene were openly mooted if not practically
dealt with, and the standard of living for that section of the
peasants which eked out their incomes from the land with the wages
paid at the factory was rising fast, and the resentment of the many
who had no resources but those which they drew from the soil sought
passionate utterance in vain. Literature and journalism continued to
radiate subdued heat as well as light, and the conduct of the
international affairs of the nation was the stock text for the
discreet strictures aimed at the State fabric. Publicists--I myself
was at that time one of the fraternity--laid hold on every pretext
and used all the skill they had acquired in the difficult art of
writing forcibly between the lines to scatter the seeds of rebellion.
And the seeds sank into the receptive minds of their readers to
germinate with all the wildness and colour of Bakunin's ideas. In
all this there was no attempt at limitation, at self-discipline, at
what might be termed conservative reform. Even the oneness of the
political organism with itself came in for no consideration--the
centrifugal forces were fostered and strengthened, whenever and
wherever possible, irrespective of the consequences.
Alexander III. was a physically sane, ethically upright, mentally
shallow-brained man who behaved well according to his lights, which
unhappily were dim and flickering. {107} Conscious of his mental
limitations, he was honestly desirous of substituting the farthest
reaching intellectual lights he could find for his own. But he chose
in the main so badly that the mental element in the social organism
was as warped as the ethical. When the tidings of his illness were
flashed over the wires one might have distinguished, amid the
excitement and curiosity of the nation, the stir of expanding human
life and of wide interests that had ever been inarticulate.
I travelled to the Crimea to be near him, having been privately
informed that he was seized with his last illness. Among my
fellow-travellers in the train was the celebrated Father John of
Cronstadt, a priest whom the irreligious described as a hypocritical
knave and the pious revered as a latter-day saint. In spite of
certain idiosyncrasies he had never separated himself from the
Orthodox Church and he had conferred upon it the embarrassing
privilege of having a worker of miracles in its fold. I had met him
before in private houses, whither he had gone to pray and if possible
to heal. He sometimes announced a cure and sometimes hinted at an
approaching dissolution, but never laid claim to superhuman powers.
So eagerly was he sought after that a female impresario arranged the
order of his visits weeks in advance, and precedence was generally
accorded to those who made the largest donations--for works of
charity.[1] The Emperor had a lively faith in the holiness of the
priest and invited him to the Crimea. There was, however, nothing
mystical in the relations between the two, as there afterwards was
between Nicholas II. and Philippe. At one of the railway stations
the passengers left the train for their midday repast when a curious
ceremony attracted my attention. John of Cronstadt, who occupied the
head of the table and was surrounded by God-fearing ladies, took his
dish of soup, blessed it, raised a spoonful to his lips, partook of
it as though it were the communion, and handed the dish on to his
neighbour. She reverently crossed herself, absorbed a {108}
spoonful, and passed on the vessel. When it came to a certain
Crimean landowner who was a good acquaintance of mine,[2] he took the
plate and handed it to a fellow-passenger, but without tasting the
contents. At this there was a loud murmur of indignation.
A day or two later Father John delivered a sermon, in Yalta to a
great multitude, of which I was a unit. He said, "The Tsar is
necessary to Russia, to Europe, to the world. He is the peacemaker
of the human race. Therefore fear not that he will die. It is God's
will that he should live. Be of good heart." After this the monarch
lived ten days or a fortnight. I next heard the wonder-worker preach
after the Emperor's death, also in the open air, and this is what he
said: "God has called his illustrious servant away because you lacked
faith. Had you believed that he would live when I announced it, your
great Emperor would have been living and working among you to-day.
Ye are people of little faith." As a matter of fact, the bulk of the
people, moved though they undoubtedly were by the passing away of
their semi-mythical chief, who had led as lonely a life as that of
Dejoces the Mede, regarded the event with curiosity as to its
political consequences rather than with genuine grief.
A short time before his death, the Princess Alix of Hesse, who was
about to wed his son, arrived in Yalta. The exact date of her
disembarkment may not have been known in advance, it certainly was
not prepared for. Taken somewhat by surprise, and unprovided with
ladies to wait on the princess, the court officials had the choice of
various expedients by which to extricate themselves from the
difficulty. It is characteristic of the a-morality of thought,
unrelieved even by a workaday sense of propriety, that of all issues
open to them they chose or rather invented the worst. In a fit of
coarse humour, which to many may seem to epitomise the court, the
country, and the decadent epoch, Prince Y. went out into the city and
invited young ladies of Mrs. Warren's profession to come to the
palace and wait {109} upon the future empress until ordinary
tirewomen could relieve them of their unwonted duties. And it was
these courtesans who received, dressed, and waited upon the lady who
was afterwards to exercise such a blighting influence upon the nation
into which she was about to be adopted. I saw two of these
improvised maids enjoying the court sweets they had received from
Prince Y. and his friends and criticising the palace arrangements.
Years after--in the spring of 1913--meeting the prince at lunch in
Petersburg, I reminded him of these extravagant freaks of his
unregenerate days, but he still took pleasure in the recollection and
asked me questions to freshen his memory.
Altogether, the beginnings of the public career of the imperial
couple were marked with what superstitious Russians term sinister
omens, like those of Richard II. of England, Louis XVI. and Marie
Antoinette of France, and they were bruited abroad freely and
interpreted by young and old from Riga to Astrakhan.
At the outset of his reign the young Tsar, who was believed by some
of those who knew him best to be wholly wanting in that
fellow-feeling for others which the Buddha makes the groundwork of
all morality, gave a striking proof of his inaccessibility to human
sorrow. Among the festivities that marked his coronation was a
popular fête in which a Muscovite custom of olden days was partly
revived. Food and sweets, a pocket handkerchief and an enamelled
goblet with the imperial arms were offered by the monarchs to all
their subjects who should come at the time fixed. Merry-go-rounds,
theatres, booths, various entertainments, and bands were provided on
a generous scale. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, artisans, and
mendicants from near and far flocked to the ancient capital to enjoy
the national holiday. By nightfall on the eve the approaches were
blocked to the vast field of Khodynka--the scene chosen by the
authorities--and for miles the pressure of the throng was tremendous.
In singing, shouting, jesting, and horseplay the cool May night was
spent. At first waggon after waggon laden with food passed through
the dense gathering, provoking screams, {110} yells, and hurrahs, the
people surging and jostling each other in order to make way; now and
again a Cossack or a gendarme came dashing along on horseback
frightening, maiming, or killing some of the weary watchers, for the
crowd grew denser and more compact as night wore into morning. By
sunrise the pressure at the entrances was become formidable, but the
gendarmes and Cossacks contrived to keep back the people until the
early afternoon when the imperial couple took their places on the
stand. The military band struck up the National Anthem and
selections from the well-known opera, _Life for the Tsar_. While
half a million voices acclaimed the young autocrat of Holy Russia and
his consort the police threw open the entrances which were arranged
to admit at the turnstiles one person after another. But the swaying
and surging human sea swept away some of the barriers and burst into
the enclosure, wave dashing against wave, breaking into bloody froth
and foam, amid soul-searing shrieks, agonising cries, and the joyous
strains of the military music. Soon the ground was strewn with
several thousand mangled corpses. A battlefield it seemed to the
elder officers, a pandemonium to the masses. The number of persons
killed, crushed, trampled, smothered, never accurately ascertained,
was variously estimated at three, five, seven thousand.[3] I was
requested by the censor either to abstain from commenting on the
"deplorable incident" or else to paraphrase the official account
without additions. I did neither.
The Tsar was severely blamed in secret for allowing the festivities
to continue in face of this disaster. But he seemed incapable of
realising the depth and force of public opinion otherwise than by
notional assent. Anyhow, the next day[4] he entertained 432 guests
to dinner, and the day after the Grand Duke Sergius gave a gorgeous
entertainment, which was followed on the 21st by the ball of the
nobles and then by a dinner offered by the British ambassador, and so
on {111} till the end of the programme. It is affirmed, on good
authority, that when the review took place, exactly a week after this
terrible mishap and on the same field, and the 'quality' foregathered
for pigeon shooting, royalties, grand dukes, princes native and
foreign, luminaries of diplomacy, and gallant warriors who had come
to amuse themselves were pained and angered to note that the dead
were still lying side by side along the barricades or were being
carted away to improvised graves, and the odour emitted by the
corpses could hardly be supported. As for the inarticulate masses,
they went their own way, drawing from their stores of superstitious
lore the standards by which to interpret these untoward occurrences.
The heavy loss of human life they construed as an evil omen presaging
a terrible end to a reign that had such a sinister beginning, and the
shooting of the pigeons, a week later imparted to what after all
might have been but a mere accident the character of a deliberately
malignant crime. For few Russians have the heart and fewer still the
sacrilegious daring to harm pigeons, many regarding them as sacred
birds, while some have a vague belief that they are the souls of
erring Christians. On this very occasion I heard two mooshiks and
their women folk debate the whole subject with animation and pathos
on lines recognised by the bulk of the nation, and one of them closed
the discussion with this sweeping dictum: "Say what you like, those
heathen devils slew their bodies last week and are trying to kill
their souls to-day. The devils!"
To the diplomatic representative of one of the great powers the Tsar
in the course of conversation mentioned the matter casually, but with
an expression of regret, whereupon the ambassador, assuming that
Nicholas II. was deeply moved by the disaster and might be
tranquillised by historical comparisons, assured his imperial
interlocutor that accidents of this painful nature are almost
unavoidable at such national festivities especially if popular
enthusiasm and loyalty are exceptionally fervid and run wild. "It
was just the same," he blandly remarked, "during the festivities that
accompanied the crowning of Louis XVI. Your Majesty {112} may
remember the details. And as you know, the _contretemps_ was soon
forgotten. The population idolised the young monarch, their joy was
excessive, and in manifesting it a number of loyal people lost their
lives. No importance attaches to such happenings. They are
cloudlets that vanish almost before they are perceived. Who to-day
even among historians dwells for a moment on that regrettable
accident? Altogether there is a great resemblance between the
opening days of Louis' reign and those of Nicholas II. In fact, ..."
but Nicholas II. cut him short.
In the salons of the day, particularly in that of the accomplished
Countess Levashoff, the solace offered by this Job's comforter was as
much the subject of caustic comment as the shortsightedness of the
authorities who were responsible for the accident that had elicited
it. The countess, who knew the youthful Tsar intimately and saw him
at close quarters during those strenuous days when amusement was
become an irksome task, told me at the time that so far as she could
judge he was more concerned about the effect which the narrative
would have upon others than about the misery caused to the families
of his ill-starred subjects.
The reign of Nicholas II. is largely the resultant of the clashing of
two forces: one which had its origin in the new spirit of the age and
was to some extent represented by Witte, who stood for steady
progress of every kind compatible with the political system; and the
other emanating from the historic past and personified by the men
behind the Tsar, whose paltry expedients generally proceeded from
bottomless ignorance and were often divorced from judgment and
patriotism. Witte was a commanding spirit who made himself for a
time--
"what Nature destined him,
The pause, the central point of thousand thousands."
He fascinated those who knew him intimately, and he fascinated them
by his typically Russian qualities and defects, the fellow-feeling,
the ready pity for suffering, the humane equalising touch, the union
of contrasts, the suddenness with which his moods, and sometimes even
his opinions, alternated, {113} touching one extreme at this moment
and its opposite at the next. But he attracted and commanded still
more through the medium of judgment by his lucidity of vision, by his
capacity of surveying a subject all round, not only in the smallest
details of its internal properties, but also in its external
bearings. Above all he impressed those who had to do with him by a
permanent substratum of tendency amid all the changes, by the
existence of certain fixed points, by currents set in one and the
same direction. He could be relied upon within certain definable
limits. For instance, his striving to safeguard peace was a factor
that never changed. This limited constancy is a trait he may have
inherited from his Dutch ancestors.
Witte long had the feeling that the social and political molecules of
which the Tsardom was composed, and which were ever forming and
re-forming themselves into fleeting shapes, might be attracted and
held permanently together by the central force of a grandiose
economic transformation and the interests which that would create and
foster, seconded by educational influences properly systematised.
The resolution taken early in his ministerial career to effect this
transfiguration offers a clue to his policy. He was one of the few
originating statesmen ever possessed by Russia, and since Peter's day
he was unquestionably the greatest.
From the first he was disliked by the shy, secretive, polished young
man who, having inherited together with the Empire the administration
appointed by his father, was willing to follow his mother's advice
and retain it. But Nicholas II. could not for long hit it off with
Witte, who when they disagreed upon really momentous issues was as
unyielding as the granite. The minister's defects, it must be
admitted, were exactly of the kind that must chafe and ruffle a man
like the Tsar. When discussing a question that moved him, for
example, the minister would sometimes allow emphasis to degenerate
into vehemence, reinforce his arguments with resonant blows of his
fist on the table, and raise his voice till it could be heard in the
adjoining room--tactics that a man of the Emperor's temperament could
not brook.
{114}
While it would be a gross exaggeration to saddle Nicholas II. with
the sole responsibility for the dissolution of the regime and the
ruin of Russia, it is fair to say that no man contributed so
materially to bring them about as this shallow, weak-willed, shifty
creature. It was impossible to trust him either to redeem his word,
to stand by the minister who acted on it, or even to refrain from
intriguing against his own responsible agents for the purpose of
undoing the work which he and they had undertaken and achieved
conjointly. In affairs of State, as in private life, faithlessness
was the trait that vitiated his best actions and aggravated his
worst. As the crowned head of a parliamentary state like Belgium or
Italy, Nicholas II. might have had his defects neutralised. But
alone to preside over the destinies of a mighty Empire was impossible
without revealing the fact that he was among the least fitted men in
his dominions. What made matters worse was his complete
unconsciousness of his unfitness. That it was which engendered the
danger that always hung over Russia at home and over Russia's
peaceful neighbours abroad. Deep-rooted faith in his own ability,
which increased immeasurably towards the close of his reign, prompted
him to shun the very few men whose statesmanship might have shielded
his people from the worst consequences of his faults and moved him to
choose officials or rank outsiders whose only qualification was their
willingness to serve as passive tools in his unsteady hands.
Consequently his selection of ministers and of favourites--for he
employed them both--was deplorable.
And yet in spite of the scandalous way in which the country was
misruled, Nicholas II. long escaped the harsh criticisms of which his
father from the outset of his reign had been the butt. During the
first ten years of his life a most flattering portrait of him was
current in the non-Russian world. He was depicted as a prince of
peace, a Slav Messiah sent for the salvation, not of his own people
only, but of the whole human race. Passionate love of humanity and
selfless devotion to the good and the true were among the qualities
universally predicated of him. And so deep {115} rooted was this
conviction throughout Europe and America that when I published my
portrait of the Tsar in the _Quarterly Review_[5]--for which a
Russian official of rank privately accepted responsibility in order
to safeguard an eminent statesman and myself--it provoked an outburst
of righteous wrath among respectable people of all classes of the
population of Britain, but more especially among nationalists and
conservatives there. It was set down as a gross caricature,
untruthful, and politically mischievous.
When he ascended the throne Nicholas II. was still his mother's
darling, passivity his predominant mental feature, and diffidence one
of its transient symptoms. That phase of his career, however, was
brief and the change from the chrysalis to the butterfly rapid. At
the first audience he accorded the Council of the Empire, which met
to do him homage, he exhibited his early manner. The assembly was
composed of venerable dignitaries of the Empire, their bodies
embellished with gorgeous uniforms and their faces wreathed in
courtly smiles. They were eager to behold the imperial majesty that
hedgeth kings encircling him whose father and grandfather many of
them had served. What they actually observed was childish
constraint, a shambling gait, a furtive glance, and spasmodic
movements. An under-sized, pithless lad sidled into the apartment in
which these hoary dignitaries were respectfully awaiting him. With
downcast eyes and in a shrill falsetto voice he hastily blurted out a
single sentence, "Gentlemen, in the name of my late father I thank
you for your services," hesitated for a second, and then turning on
his heels was gone. They looked at each other, some in amazement,
many uttering a mental prayer for the weal of the country; and after
an awkward pause, dispersed to their homes.
The nation's next vicarious meeting with the Tsar took place a few
days later upon an occasion as solemn as the first; but in the
interval he had been hypnotised by M. Pobiedonostseff, the lay-bishop
of autocracy, who had the secret of spiritually anointing and
intellectually equipping the chosen of the Lord. The keynote of the
Emperor's {116} second appearance was haughtiness, the nearest
approach he could make to dignity. All Russia had then gathered
together in the persons of the representatives of the zemstvos--we
may call them embryonic county councils--to do homage to his Majesty
on his accession to the throne. Loyal addresses without number, some
drawn up in the flowery language of oriental obsequiousness, others
plain spoken and ominous, had been presented from all those
institutions. One of these documents--and only one--had seemed to M.
Pobiedonostseff to smack of liberalism. No less loyal in form or
spirit than those of the other boards, the address drawn up by the
council of Tver vaguely expressed the modest hope that his Majesty's
confidence might not be wholly restricted to the bureaucracy, but
would likewise be extended to the Russian people and to the zemstvos,
whose devotion to the throne was proverbial. This was a reasonable
wish; it could not seriously be dubbed a crime; and even if it
bespoke a certain spirit of mild independence, it was after all the
act of a single zemstvo, whereas the men who had come to do homage to
the Emperor were the spokesmen, not of one zemstvo, but of all
Russia. Yet the autocrat strutted pompously into the brilliantly
lighted hall, and with knitted brows and tightly drawn lips turned
wrathfully upon the chosen men of the nation, and stamping his little
foot ordered them to put away such chimerical notions which he would
never entertain.
Between those two public appearances of Nicholas II. lay that short
period of suggestion during which the impressionable youth had been
made not so much to believe as to feel that he was God's lieutenant,
the earthly counterpart of his divine master. From that time forward
he was filled with a spirit of self-exaltation which went on gaining
strength in accordance with the psychological law that pride usurps
as much space as servility is ready to yield. Nikolai Alexandrovitch
soon began to look upon himself as the centre of the world, the
peacemaker of mankind, the torch-bearer of civilisation among the
"yellow" and other "barbarous" races, and the dispenser of almost
every blessing to his own happy people. Taking seriously this his
imaginary mission, {117} he meddled continuously and directly in many
affairs of State, domestic and foreign, unwittingly thwarting the
course of justice, undermining legality, impoverishing his subjects,
boasting his fervent love of peace and plunging his tax-burdened
people into the horrors of sanguinary and needless wars.
The dowager empress kept her imperial son in leading strings for a
considerable time after the death of her consort and seconded the
efforts of Pobiedonostseff to impress upon him the necessity of
following in the footsteps of his "never-to-be-forgotten father."
That phrase often and piously reiterated came to possess a
sacramental virtue which he could not resist, and it is a
pathological fact that he strove earnestly to copy Alexander III.
until at last he believed he had succeeded. In truth the two men
were as far asunder in moral character as in physique. Alexander,
sincere, gloomy, mistrustful, and narrow-minded, felt his limitations
and never ventured out beyond his depth. And he endeavoured honestly
to secure the services of the best men among those who entered his
narrow circle of acquaintances. Moreover, when he had chosen an
adviser, he stuck to him, asked his advice, and never rejected it
without good reason. Lastly, anything that smacked of perfidy, of
disloyalty, of guile, was an abomination in his sight and he never
forgave the guilty one. His word was better than a bond. And yet it
is a curious characteristic of the country and the people that even
he with his uprightness and probity violated the covenant of his
house with Finland and broke his own promise in regard to Batoum.
But Nicholas II. was the opposite to his father. Unsteady,
self-complacent, callous, fickle, and polished, he changed his
favourites and his principles with his fitful moods, lacked moral
courage, intrigued against his chosen counsellors, mistook his own
interests for those of the nation, and imagined himself the autocrat
of a hundred and eighty millions.
In the year 1904 I was struck with his predilection for adventurers
of the Cagliostro type, and I expressed regret that he should allow
"a band of casual, obscure, and dangerous men to usurp the functions
of his responsible ministers whose {118} recommendations are ignored
and whose warnings are disregarded.... Every candidate for imperial
favour whom the grand dukes present is a specialist who promises to
realise the momentary desires of the Tsar. Thus M. Philippe, the
spiritualist who appeared during the Emperor's illness in Yalta,
promised him a son and heir and was therefore received with open
arms. As time passed and the hopes which the adventurer raised were
not fulfilled, the canonisation of St. Seraphim was suggested by a
pious grand duke and a sceptical abbot because among the feats said
to have been achieved by this holy man was the miraculous bestowal of
children upon barren women."[6]
After the assassination of his second favourite, Sipyaghin, his
choice fell upon Plehve for the post of Minister of the Interior.
Plehve was the official whose self-possession on the assassination of
Alexander II. had strongly impressed all who witnessed it. This man,
probably the cleverest of all who were within the Emperor's reach,
became virtual dictator of the Empire and one of the most efficient
instruments of fate for pushing the autocracy into the abyss.
Well-informed, conversant with the seamy side of human nature,
cool-headed, and calculating, Plehve knew how to touch the right
chords of sentiment, prejudice, or passion when moving large bodies
of men, and could keep his head in the most alarming crisis. He was
one of those successful bureaucrats whom it would be impossible to
classify by nationality, genealogy, church, or even party. Of
obscure parentage, of German blood with a Jewish strain, of uncertain
religious denomination, his ethical worth had been weighed and found
wanting by his own easy-going colleagues long before.
Soon after he had entered on the duties of his new office, a number
of peasants of the Ukraine provinces of Kharkoff and Poltava showed
signs of discontent with their miserable condition. Although
spontaneous and local, the outburst was dealt with severely and the
peasants flogged by the provincial authorities without instructions
from the capital. Plehve visited the disaffected places, promptly
rewarded {119} the Governor of Kharkoff for having the malcontents
flogged at once,[7] and punished the Governor of Poltava for having
them flogged only as an afterthought. The minister soon became the
most powerful official in the Empire, a sort of grand vizier whose
power was unlimited, but was held at the pleasure of an absolute and
changeful master. He applied in the spirit of German method the
principles propounded by Pobiedonostseff, and among the concrete
results were pogroms of the Jews, the spoliation of Armenians, the
persecution of Poles and Ruthenians, the exile of liberal-minded
nobles, the flogging of peasants, the reorganisation of espionage
with the notorious Azeff as its moving spirit.
These and other men turned the Tsar's head by their endless
panegyrics. They invented for him a lofty mission and feigned to
admire the masterly way in which he was fulfilling it. Being the
head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and therefore a Christian, he
could not be deified without blasphemy, but between humanity and
divinity he became a _tertium quid_. And they venerated him
accordingly, anticipating his wishes, and colouring facts to suit his
fancies, for while he could appreciate effects his faculty of
discerning their relations to causes was almost atrophied. He
operated with phantoms, fought against windmills, conversed with
saints, and consulted the dead. He employed the vast power of which
he was the repository to grind down over a hundred million men at
home in order to obtain the means of killing or wounding hundreds of
thousands abroad. Of the psychology of foreign nations and of his
own he lacked rudimentary knowledge, and international politics was a
region of darkness in which he groped his way to ruin. When Witte
and two other ministers besought him to redeem his pledge, evacuate
Manchuria and save the land from the horrors of war, he returned this
answer: "I will keep peace and my own counsel as well." To one of
the grand dukes who, on the day before the rupture with Japan, hinted
at the possibility of war, the Emperor said: "Leave that to me.
Japan will never fight. My reign will be an era of peace throughout."
[1] My friend Leskoff entertained the deepest contempt for John of
Cronstadt and read me a tremendous attack on him wrapped up in
literary form. Part of it appeared later in the _Messenger of
Europe_.
[2] His name, Blaramberg, is well known throughout Russia for he was
also a musical composer.
[3] The number has never been correctly announced. I was told at the
time by the Moscow authorities--I was present at all the
festivities--that it was a little over four thousand.
[4] 19th May.
[5] July, 1904. I continued the article in the _National Review_.
[6] _Quarterly Review_, July, 1904.
[7] Prince Obolensky, the governor, received a star from the Emperor
for his energy. Some of the peasants he had flogged are said to have
died in consequence of their punishment.
{120}