THE RULE OF NICHOLAS II.
There never was a trustworthy intermediary between the isolated
sovereign and his restive people. Many individuals there were whom
he received and questioned from time to time, some of whom spoke with
a directness, sincerity, and knowledge worthy of an ancient Hebrew
prophet, but the message they delivered was not only resented and
disregarded by the Tsar, but was also contradicted and neutralised by
equally impressive statements volunteered by interested politicians
or misinformed patriots. And Nicholas II., even if he had felt the
desire, lacked the means of sifting the true from the false. The
upshot was a gulf between the autocracy and the people nearly as
broad and deep as that which sundered the Dalai Lama from his pious
worshippers. An anecdote which, devoid of foundation in fact, is
superlatively true as a presentment of the paralysis of volition from
which he suffered, was current long before I ventured upon sketching
his portrait in the _Quarterly_ and _National Reviews_. One day, the
story ran, a nobleman of great experience and progressive tendencies
was received in audience by the Tsar. He made the most of his
opportunity, and laid before his sovereign the wretched state of the
peasantry, the general unrest it was occasioning, and the urgent
necessity of removing its proximate causes by modifying the political
machinery of government. During this unwelcome _exposé_ the Emperor,
whose urbanity and polish left nothing to be desired, nodded from
time to time approvingly and repeated often, "I know. Yes, yes. You
are right. Quite right." The nobleman when retiring felt morally
certain that the monarch was at one with him on the subject.
Immediately afterwards a great landowner, also a member of the
nobility, was ushered in, who unfolded a very different tale.
According to this authority things on the whole were progressing
satisfactorily, the only drawback being the weakness and indulgence
{121} of the authorities. "What is needed, sire, is an iron hand.
The peasants must be kept in their place by force, otherwise they
will usurp ours. To make way for them and treat them as though they
were the masters of the country is a crime." During this discourse
also Nicholas II. was attentive and appreciative, nodding and
uttering the stereotyped phrases, "Yes, I know. You are right.
Quite right." And the conservative, like the liberal, departed happy.
Then a side door opened and the empress entered looking grave. "You
really must not go on Like this, Niki," she exclaimed. "It is not
dignified. Remember you are an autocrat who should possess a will
strong enough to stiffen a nation of a hundred and fifty millions."
"But what is it that you find fault with, darling?" "Your want of
resolution and of courage to express it. I have been listening to
the conversations you have just had. Count X. whom you first
received pleaded the cause of the disaffected. You assented to
everything he advanced, telling him he was right, quite right. Then
M. Y. was introduced who gave you an account of things as they really
are, and you agreed with him in just the same way, saying, 'You are
right. Quite right.' Well now, that attitude does not befit an
autocrat. You must learn to have a will of your own and assert it."
"You are right, dear, quite right," was the answer.
Friends and acquaintances of mine, men of various walks in life and
divergent ways of thought, who had an opportunity of observing him,
all missed in his nature diffusive sympathy with the sorrows and joys
of men and women and the faculty of concentrating his intellect or
his will on any object but that towards which his whole being was
orientated. "I informed him of the lamentable state of the
district," one of them said to me, "and drew a harrowing picture of
men and women steeped in misery, racked with pain, but he only
answered, 'Yes, I know, I know,' and bowed me out." Those words,
"Yes, I know, I know," have figured as the _finis_ uttered by the
Tsar at the close of History's Chapters on the Finnish Constitution,
the Armenian Church and schools, the nationality of the Poles, {122}
the Liberty of Conscience denied to his own people. "I know, I
know!" If only he had realised what he claimed to know he might
still be on the throne. Men, like trees, fall on their leaning side,
and in the Tsar's case the leaning side was not an inclination to
assuage human suffering, otherwise there would have been less misery
during the great famine and far less bloodshed during his ill-starred
reign. The unaffectedly heartless way in which he spoke of the awful
catastrophe during his coronation, of the agonies of his people at
the time of the famine and during the Manchurian campaign, and of the
abortive revolution that followed it, seemed to indicate that he is
deficient in the sensibility which characterises the average human
being. A certain polish of kindliness marked his casual intercourse
with people, but it is to be feared that it resembled the glitter of
the gilt cross on the mouldering coffin.
And yet in his family relations he displayed qualities that would
have done credit to any private citizen. He was an uncommonly
dutiful son who interpreted filial respect as generously as the
followers of Confucius, having in the early days of his reign
frequently submitted not his will only but also his judgment to that
of his august mother. A model husband, he left little undone to
ensure the happiness of his imperial consort. A tender father, he
literally adored his children with almost maternal fervour, and often
magnanimously deprived himself of the keen pleasure which the
discharge of the clerical duties of kingship confers in order to
watch over his darling little grand duke and grand duchesses and to
see that sunshine brightened their lives. What, for instance, could
be more touching than the picture--which courtiers used to draw--of
the dread autocrat of all the Russias anxiously superintending the
details of the bathing of his little son, the Grand Duke Alexis, at
the height of the diplomatic storm raised by the North Sea incident?
What could be more idyllic than the pretty human weakness betokened
by the joyful exclamation with which the great potentate suddenly
interrupted Admiral Roshdjestvensky, who was making a report on the
Baltic Squadron, "But are {123} you aware that he weighs 14 lb.?"
"Who, your Majesty?" asked the admiral, his mind still entangled in
questions of displacement, quick-firing guns, and other kindred
matters.
"The heir to the throne," answered the happy father. Touches of
nature like this offer a refreshing contrast to the Byzantine
stiffness of the autocrat bending over his table and writing marginal
glosses.
Nicholas II. was a man of destiny in the fullest sense of the word.
Few monarchs known to history did more to transform the entire
structure, political and economic, of society than he by pushing the
conceptions underlying Tsarism to their extreme consequences. This,
it must be added, was due largely to the circumstance that the
reactions provoked by his qualities and defects among the
revolutionists harmonised admirably with the diseased condition of
the body politic. All the new solvent ideas fell upon grateful soil.
His weakness of will contrasted painfully with his craving for
strength and his endeavours to feign its attainment. Incapable of
perseverance in personal conduct or of system in public policy, he
was uncommonly obstinate in little things. Gradually, too, he lost
much of the power of voluntary attention in which at the outset he
had been nowise deficient. "Emotions which move the normal man
profoundly touch him but lightly, and for a brief while, so that
fitfulness is his substitute for steadiness, impulse for will, mood
for strength of character. He thinks with the ideas of others, acts
at their instigation or else by impulse, and likes them less for
their qualities than for their manifest disposition towards himself.
It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to affirm that he is constant
only in his inconstancy." Thus I wrote of him as long ago as May,
1905. "That ailment was aggravated by injudicious but well-meant
efforts to cure it. A soft feminine voice, uttering loving words and
bracing exhortations in the language of Shakespeare, stimulated him
to endeavours which took a wrong direction. Had he possessed average
intelligence even a Russian Agnes Sorel might, perhaps, have helped
him to co-ordinate the scattered elements of volition and get him
credit for political wisdom; without it {124} a Deianira could but
operate with that Fate which she fondly fancies she is
out-manœuvring."[1]
Like so many statesmen of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of
the twentieth centuries, Nicholas II. appeared to be cause-blind. He
failed to realise the nature of the nexus between cause and effect.
The law of causality entering his mind was seemingly always refracted
like a sunbeam striking the surface of the water. It changed its
direction. It was in consequence of that defect that, while moving
every lever to produce war, he was purblind to the approach of the
conflict and deaf to the warnings of those who could see. The
dispute with Japan was originally caused by his personal act of
seizing his neighbour's property and believing he could placate the
despoiled people by crying, "No offence intended!" Well-meaning at
bottom, but logic-proof and mystical, he instinctively followed the
example of the vampire which fans its victims while sucking their
life blood. Under his predecessors Russia had grown and "thriven" in
this way, and why should she not continue to grow in like manner
under him? It was the old spirit of the predatory Tsarist State
revived and embodied for the last time. So overweening was his
confidence in his own prophetic vision that he was impervious to the
arguments of the wisest of his responsible advisers, and risked the
welfare of his subjects on the slender chance of his being a Moses to
his people. And he resisted his ministers, not with the harmless
swagger of a vainglorious youth, but with the calm settled
presumption which medical psychologists describe as incurable. Like
those Chinese Boxers who, believing their lives were charmed,
smilingly stood up to the bullets of the Europeans, so Nicholas II.
cheerfully exposed, not himself or his imperial house, but his people
to a disaster which his second sight assured him could never come.
For he started with a curious view of the autocracy. He firmly held
that according to God's will he, the unique absolute ruler of modern
times, should be at once the arbiter of peace and war throughout the
globe and the keeper of the lives, the property, and the {125} souls
of his people at home. And he acted up to this belief, which marked
an advance on that of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Thus he
took it for granted that as no foreign power would dare to attack
Russia, peace depended on whether he would attack any foreign power.
And as he was resolved not to declare war, he reasoned that peace was
therefore secure during his lifetime. One difference between him and
the Boxer is, that the Boxer risked only his own life, whereas
Nicholas II. risked and lost those of hundreds of thousands of his
people. And even a capable autocrat, were he never so wise, ought
not to be invested with such tremendous power. The chasms between
Russia and progress, between the peasantry and well-being, between
the Empire and peace he never bridged nor attempted to bridge, but
contented himself with a pious hope, a shadowy velleity, a vague
irrational impulse. At bottom, however, the conception of the State
entertained by Nicholas II. was the logical development of that of
the founders of the Tsardom.
Over against him stood Witte, who was for long the power that bent
every force, public and private, to collective ends and overthrew
every obstacle in his way. He humoured the Tsar and his family only
in secondary matters, and not always in these, but his manner, which
he was incapable of adjusting to court exigencies, was resented by
the Emperor and loathed by his consort. One of the characteristics
of the imperial lady was a fatal predisposition to assimilate and
exaggerate the likes and dislikes of the person she loved and to push
them to extreme and sometimes perilous consequences. It was in
virtue of this bias that she grew more orthodox than the Metropolitan
Archbishop and more autocratic than her husband. To her religion was
policy and autocracy was religion. She could not bear to miss the
outward pomp and circumstance of either, and Witte's presence was
comparable to that of the skeleton at the banquet.
For a long time the Emperor was assisted in the government by what I
termed at the time a "boudoir council" consisting of his imperial
consort, a number of grand dukes, a spiritist or two, and the
favourite man of the moment. {126} Under Alexander III. the other
members of the imperial family had been kept in their places.
Nicholas II. allowed them a wide scope for activity, political,
military, and commercial. Colouring their plans in the hues of his
own dreams, presenting him with motives that appealed to his
prejudices, they exerted an influence over him that was pernicious.
Nor, until the disappearance of the minister Plehve, which created a
void around him, did they ever seriously exert themselves to change
his suicidal course. The Grand Duke Sergius, the governor-general of
Moscow,[2] who was for a long while the Tsar's expert on religious
matters, once proposed to abolish the Juridical Society of Moscow for
its liberal tendencies, and when it was objected that its members
were scrupulously observant of the laws, he answered, "That's exactly
my point--they are for that very reason all the more dangerous to the
State."
When Russia's unique statesman was dismissed, the Tsar hearkened to
the soft voice from the boudoir. "Show them that you are a real
monarch whose word is law. You have issued your commands, now see
that they are executed. They taunt you with a weak will. Let them
feel its force!" And Nicholas responded to the stimulus. For if he
lacked the sensitive conscience which wakes the sinner up, he
possessed certain of the virtues which lull to sleep, and foremost
among them that languid sweetness which enables a husband to spend
his life as though it were an endless honeymoon. And it is possibly
to the qualities underlying this soft passivity--which the son of
Priam combined with personal dash--that Nicholas owed his
predilection for the society of women, priests, charlatans, and
children, and his shyness of the society of strong honest men.
Whenever these conflicting influences clashed, the results were
unedifying.
One day a strike of students, professors, and public-school boys was
declared against the prevalent educational system. The dowager
empress on learning what had happened {127} counselled forbearance.
But the boudoir council decided to have recourse to coercion. The
minister sounded the rectors and deans, who told him that force would
only do harm. But the inspiriting voices insisted, "Show them that
you are a real monarch. People say you have no will. Let them feel
its force.... Have you forgotten your motto, 'Are you anvil? Be
enduring. Are you hammer? Smite with might'?" Then the autocrat
bade his ministers use sternness and repression. "Expel the
rebellious students; dismiss the mutinous professors; close the high
schools; stop the salaries." And the behest was executed. Witte, as
President of the Committee of Ministers, then recorded his opinion in
writing to the effect that, as force is no argument, the authorities
should be chary of using it. If the proposed measures were carried
out, all Russia would be moved to its depths. Let the government,
therefore, publicly sanction and adopt the professors' views. The
advice was frank, forcible, timely. The Tsar read it and bridled up
at the very first words. "It is a piece of bare-faced impudence," he
exclaimed, "to commit such views to paper." And before the angry
flash had gone from his cheeks, he had the whole question transferred
from the competence of the Committee of Ministers over which Witte
presided to the Council of the Ministers of which he made Count
Solsky vice-president under himself. Events, however, showed that
the minister was right and the boudoir council wrong. The students
finally scored a brilliant victory and the monarch suffered an
ignominious defeat.
In February, 1905, an unprecedented thing took place. The nation,
expecting a ukase to supplement and enlarge that of the preceding
December which had disillusioned all classes, was astonished to read
a manifesto which ran counter to their anticipations and announced
the vigorous continuation of the war. The ministers were indignant.
Witte told me that morning that he could not believe it was the work
of the Tsar, and before we separated I learned that it had been
inspired by the Tsaritsa and drafted by Prince Putyatin and
Shirinsky-Shikhmatoff--in a word, it was {128} a pronouncement of the
boudoir cabinet which the Emperor had been prevailed upon to sign.
According to the fundamental laws of the Empire, never departed from
since the eighteenth century, no imperial manifesto could be
promulgated without the foreknowledge of the Senate. But this
document was sent late at night to the official journal, the editor
of which refused to publish it because it had not been laid before
the Senate. He was bidden, however, to swallow his scruples and
publish the manifesto. A few days later he was publicly reprimanded
and privately thanked for having disobeyed the law.
The manifesto made short work of the Russian peoples' hopes at home
and abroad. It announced that the principal war-aim of the Emperor
was control of the Pacific, and it identified the liberty-loving
people with the "evil-minded ringleaders of the revolutionary
movement." Witte could hardly restrain himself that morning. When
explaining to me the heinousness of the act he shouted and struck the
table, vowed that he would vindicate the law and either have that
manifesto withdrawn or else himself withdraw from public life. He
then hurried to the railway station together with the other members
of the Council of Ministers and before they had reached Tsarskoye
Selo he had laid a plan for the realisation of his object.[3] He
succeeded in checkmating the Tsar and obtaining the rescript he
wanted. The Emperor, who had worded it insidiously in the belief
that the ministers would quarrel over it, but was disappointed
through Witte's tactics, signed it most reluctantly. "Never in my
life," one of them afterwards remarked, "even were I to live a
century, shall I forget that remarkable scene. It burned itself in
my memory; the sudden freezing of the features of the Tsar, the
convulsive quivering of the lips, the sickly smile alternating with
the frown, and then his last look when he handed back the paper, and,
as our peasants put it, 'with his eyes showed his teeth.'"
Thenceforth, a representative assembly was the only solution to the
State problems that had arisen. Witte had {129} all along warned the
Tsar frankly that unless certain concessions were made in time
representative government would become a necessity; and that the
representative principle, once officially recognised, the break up of
the autocracy would follow as a matter of course. His advice was
rejected, his prediction had come true, and on this occasion he
deliberately voted for the representative principle. And when a
colleague, in presence of the Tsar, remarked, "But, according to you,
this move is incompatible with autocracy?" he answered, "Yes, I know
it is, but it cannot be withheld any longer." What his Majesty
thought on hearing these words was not recorded, but what he did will
not soon be forgotten by those who witnessed it. That rescript,
courtiers openly asserted, was the result of a ministerial revolt, a
modern and humane substitute for a palace revolution. The Emperor
presumably took this view for he never convoked the council again.
That same Friday evening the document was printed and published and
people who, having read the reactionary manifesto in the morning,
perused the liberal rescript in the evening, asked themselves whether
the Empire was governed, like the Manichæan world, by a good
principle and a bad. For it was now manifest that Nicholas II. was
the nominal chief of two bodies moving in diametrically opposite
directions: of the Council of Ministers in an outer chamber and of
the boudoir council in an inner chamber; and that within the space of
twenty-four hours he had first sanctioned the views of the one and
then assented to the plans of the other. What was to be the outcome
of it all?
From that moment onwards the autocrat struggled to free himself from
the meshes of the net. Whether he felt humiliated by the successful
strategy of his ministers, or was stimulated by the maxims of the
boudoir council, is immaterial; important is the fact that he
repented having signed the rescript and resolved to undo as far as
possible what he had been constrained to do.
Thus the Emperor continually employed the governmental machine in
such a way that the centrifugal tendencies {130} were fast snapping
the links that kept class joined with class and nationality with
nationality. The liberty-loving elements of the Tsardom were struck
with the unsteadiness and irresolution of the government and the
weakness of the State, and were heartened thereby to more vigorous
efforts.
The Emperor's inability to govern might, perhaps, have passed
unnoticed if he had allowed any man of intellect and will-power in
his stead to grapple with the jarring elements. This, however, he
refused to permit, while allotting to obscure soldiers and seamen,
tricksters and money grabbers, an ever larger share of the supreme
power to the detriment of the nation. The mental and moral impotency
of this well-intentioned marplot, who cannot be said to have had even
experience, despite ten years of uniform failure, became one of the
commonplaces of conversation in town and country. Even the
rough-and-ready droshky drivers said of him that he had been thrust
among rulers like a pestle among spoons. Yet, apprised of his
impotence by the boudoir council, he wished to will and act, and took
velleity for the deed. No occurrence, no event, made a lasting
impression on his mind. Abroad Russia's armies might be scattered,
her ships sunk, her credit ruined; the Tsar was serene in spite of it
all. At home the whole framework of society might be going to
pieces, Nicholas sat still and fondly annotated State papers, a very
Narcissus of the inkpot. In the Tsardom, whenever the political
temperature grew too hot, the custom had for ages been to break the
thermometer, not on any account to let in the cool air. And the
Emperor kept to it religiously. The results now began to appear.
I wrote at the time, "The position is no longer endurable. The
crisis can now end in one way only--in the disappearance of that
system of absolutism the advantages of which I hoped--vainly hoped,
alas!--to see rescued for the sake of the nation. At present the one
question which to my thinking may still be profitably discussed is
whether, while there is yet time, the autocrat will voluntarily
dissociate the future of his dynasty from that of the autocracy.
Will he cast his semi-divine privileges overboard in the storm to
save his position in the Empire, and perhaps what he values even
{131} more than his position? That is a matter which primarily,
almost exclusively, concerns himself and his inspirers of the boudoir
council, who still fancy that windmills may be turned with a
hand-bellows. The other interested party, the nation, whose prisoner
Nicholas II. may be truly said to be, has already chosen its
route--the shortest road to the goal, and will travel along it
resolutely. It is for those who advise and wish well to Nicholas to
say whether he will desist from the policy of provocation now being
pursued in his name. When the nation has been fully aroused it will
be too late. And the time still left for reflection seems lamentably
short.
"Argument and suasion have unhappily proved fruitless. To the one he
is blind; he is deaf to the other. The belief is spreading that that
is his misfortune, not his crime. Minister after minister warned him
of the dangers fast gathering round him. "Yes, yes, I understand,"
was the evasive reply: and the well-meant intimation left as little
trace in heart or brain as a drop of rain water on the back of a
duck. His nobles petitioned him, his zemstvos memorialised him,
every class, every profession and element of the population, besought
him to reform the administration and admit the people to a share in
the government. For a moment he appeared to listen, and then turned
away. Almost every nation on the globe adjured him to put an end to
the unprecedented horrors of a wanton war. Again he seemed to pay
attention, but he soon moved aside and talked of something else. For
the whole world is wrong and Nicholas alone is right. The individual
who goes up to the clouds in an air-filled balloon does not see
himself ascending, but only his fellow-men sinking away in to
insignificance. This unnerved young man, completely shut off from
the world and with hardly a peep-hole to look through, knows better
what should and can be done there than the intellect of the people,
the wisdom of the world. For he is buoyed up by the encouragement
and admiration of the council of the boudoir. In his thirst for
approval he dismissed several advisers and chose others; but the new
ones repeated the warnings of their predecessors. He then appointed
a council of ministers {132} in order to escape from the importunity
of Witte, but his entire council as one man, not only offered him
wholesome advice, but took care that he should adopt it. And now he
convokes it no more. Who knows how far it might go? '_Ce n'est que
le premier pas qui coute_.' His own relatives, the political grand
dukes, have abandoned him. They suddenly stopped short in their
onward course, wheeled round, and bowing respectfully to the liberals
made their profession of faith. His own mother talked with him,
exhorted and implored him to see things as they are. Then she too
finally ranged herself on the side of the moderate reformers. This
distinguished lady is now in favour of representative government,
strongly sides with those who desire peace, and materially helped to
obtain at least one instalment of justice to the Finns. She also
sympathises with the down-trodden tribes of the Caucasus and regrets
the spoliation of the Church property of the Armenians. It was
largely due to her influence that Count Vorontseff Dashkoff has been
appointed viceroy there in succession to the madcap Prince Galitzin.
In a word she has made motherly love quite compatible with plain
speaking and a policy of common sense."[4]
Von Plehve's tenure of office was rich in amazing developments, for
there is no gainsaying the statesmanlike quality of his intellect,
his German a-morality, or his susceptibility to all sorts of new
impressions. The way in which he strove to solve the awkward
problems to which the labour movement was imparting actuality was
truly Machiavellian, and the unerring discrimination that revealed to
him the value of a human instrument like Father Gapon bespoke a fine
_flair_ and remarkable courage. But the conditions he found and had
to accept as data hampered him considerably. Instinctively he felt
that the State top must go on spinning to keep from falling, and he
accordingly encouraged the Tsar in the policy of conquest that
culminated in war with Japan. For Russia's whole ordering was
adjusted to expansion by force. It was largely this and his passion
for espionage that turned Witte against him and made them bitter
enemies. I well remember seeing him killed. I described the murder
{133} in the _Daily Telegraph_. On the historic day I was driving
over the badly paved streets of Petersburg to the landing-place for
steamers to meet a friend who was coming from Ireland to stay with
me. My droshky was in the street leading to the Warsaw railway
station when two men on bicycles glided past, followed by a closed
carriage, which I recognised as that of the all-powerful minister.
Suddenly the ground before me quivered, a tremendous sound as of
thunder deafened me, the windows of the houses on both sides of the
broad street rattled, and the glass of the panes was hurled on to the
stone pavement. A dead horse, a pool of blood, fragments of a
carriage, and a hole in the ground were parts of my rapid
impressions. My driver was on his knees devoutly praying and saying
that the end of the world had come. I got down from my seat and
moved towards the hole, but a police officer ordered me back, and to
my question replied that the minister Plehve had been blown to
fragments. The man who materially contributed to condemn him to
death, and who had the sentence thus effectively carried out, was the
favourite spy of the government and member of the Social
Revolutionary Council, Azeff. In truth it was a mad world.
Plehve's end was received with semi-public rejoicings. I met nobody
who regretted his assassination or condemned the authors. This
attitude towards crime, although by no means new, struck me as one of
the most sinister features of the situation, and I gave expression to
my apprehension of its consequences.[5] Far more surprising was the
attitude of the government towards its own agent, Azeff, who
conceived and concerted the misdeed and saw it carried out. This
monster was allowed to remain in the government service, and even
after he had the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergius, assassinated
he was kept on, and his services were deemed to be invaluable and
indispensable!
When Plehve had vanished, the Grand Duke Sergius {134} steered the
ship of State, standing harsh and defiant behind the professional man
at the wheel. He had just flung in the face of the people the
accusation which, though resented as a calumny, was, in a restricted
sense, true enough of many of the revolutionists, that they had sold
their Tsar for Japanese gold.[6] And a few weeks later Sergius, like
Plehve, was ruthlessly, criminally cut down in the height of his
triumphant activity, the nation again looking on without disapproval
and the government continuing to fee the chief assassin.
These deaths, which made a deep impression upon all Russia, left the
Tsar undisturbed. Living and working apart from the currents of the
time, he seemed impermeable to deep impressions. But the
disappearance of those two counsellors left him conspicuously alone.
They had no successors to share with him the moral burden. Skilful
flatterers he had many, but no helpful friend. From motives which it
would be impertinent to analyse, the few he had had left him for the
time or definitely forsook him. The grand dukes withdrew from the
partnership once so lucrative, now grown so dangerous, taking
elaborate precautions to advertise the fact, _urbi et orbi_. Some of
them pointed to the sickly figure of the Tsar and all but cried,
"_Ecce homo_." Almost the first to go was the Grand Duke Vladimir,
who after the massacre of Red Sunday defended himself in American and
English journals. The responsibility for the shooting, he explained,
was not his but that of Prince Vassilchikoff, who refused point-blank
to obey the humane grand-ducal order to cease firing on the people,
and refused with perfect impunity. Again, after the terrible death
of Sergius, a London newspaper informed all whom it might concern of
the political conversion of Vladimir, who "recognises that the
worship of the idol of absolutism is a worse foe of the monarchy than
anarchy itself."[7]
Next among the runaways from the sinking ship of autocracy was the
ambitious Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch. This personage was the
one nationalist member of the imperial family whose zeal burned for
genuine Russian civilisation untouched by the contagion of Western
culture. {135} He had just displayed his patriotic hatred of
foreigners by organising a raid against their mercantile shipping,
and showed his love of Russia by promoting the Yalu concession, which
was to have enriched himself and weakened Japan. The political
apostasy of this promising prince was perhaps the unkindest cut of
all. For he owed many of the best things he possessed to the Tsar,
while the Tsar was beholden to him only for some of the pernicious
counsels he had received and of the evil counsellors he had trusted.
Married to the sister of Nicholas II., the Grand Duke Alexander used
and abused his great but precarious influence to recommend
Bezobrazoff and Alexeyeff to his imperial brother-in-law who, caught
in the lime of flattery, allowed these adventurers to ride rough-shod
over Russia. He was the purveyor of political favourites to the
monarch, one of whom was Admiral Alexeyeff.
This grand duke possessed the open sesame to his brother-in-law's
affections and utilised it constantly. The Tsar was a frequent guest
in Alexander's palace, where he would amuse himself for hours on end
riding in a miniature train around one of the apartments. And in the
intervals of this innocent fun shared by the children, he would
assent to some important suggestion of the shrewd grand duke, who in
this casual way managed to have a new ministry created for his behoof
unknown to Witte, whom he hated undyingly. From the authorisation of
the Yalu concession, Alexander Mikhailovitch expected to add millions
to his annual income of 600,000 roubles. But after Plehve's death he
became a liberal and bruited his conversion abroad. Russian
newspapers were full of it, and even revolutionists were apprised of
it. Happily he had a press organ of his own,[8] through which he
pointed out to the world the fruits of his conversion.
Again, it was known that in his unregenerate days this illustrious
personage hated the Jews as Saul of Tarsus had hated the Christians.
But since the deaths of Plehve and Sergius he had his Damascus, and
the scales having fallen from his eyes he found salvation. He was no
longer a {136} militant anti-Semite. God having presumably made the
Jews, the grand duke was willing thenceforth to let them pass for men
of an inferior race.
But by far the most noteworthy sign of the times was the departure of
the dowager empress herself from the camp of the absolutists, if one
may describe thus clumsily her mild assent to counsels prompted by
common sense, and her gentle but persevering disapproval of measures
which, besides harming the nation, endangered the dynasty. Whether
solicitude for her son or pity for the people supplied the motive is
a matter of indifference to outsiders; the step was well warranted by
both. This distinguished lady, whose inborn tact and _savoir faire_
often stood her instead of political foresight, now sorrowfully
parted from her son and daughter-in-law at the first most critical
moment in their lives. Such a step cannot have been taken with a
light heart. Having journeyed together for more than a decade in the
pursuit of a political will-o'-the-wisp, the elder of the two
empresses, with experience to guide her, descried an abyss in front
and cried, "Halt." And yet that was the road which she herself had
so often exhorted her son never to swerve from! But her eyes had
been opened; she had lost faith in the policy of putting spokes in
the wheels of time. The beliefs on which the Tsardom reposed were
crumbling away, and she then began to realise the fact. She felt
that the institutions to which her son clung convulsively, as might a
scared seaman to the heavy anchor of a sinking ship, would drag him
down to the depths. And with the courage born of motherly love she
warned him of the danger. But Cassandra's prophecies were not more
vain or true. The siren's voice from the boudoir of the wife went
straight to the husband's heart. Unhappily, the wife's exhortations
were but the echoes of the son's neurotic visions. In her naïve
dreams there was no place for prosaic fears, and her fond ambition
was blind to obstacles and to consequences. It would be rash to
criticise without knowing the order of considerations that moved the
lady to turn a deaf ear to the voice of the dowager empress. But it
is not easy to imagine any rational grounds on which her own {137}
sister reasoning, advising, beseeching, should also have been put out
of court without a hearing. The widowed Grand Duchess Sergius, whose
vision long experience had sharpened, and whose motives had been
chastened by severe suffering, sought over and over again to impress
upon her crowned sister the fact that there are times when true
conjugal affection is more effectually shown by judicious hindrance
than by uncritical incentive.
Nicholas II., who rejected the promptings of reason, now began to be
regarded by his people as the principal cause of their sufferings,
the embodiment of a system that must at all costs be overthrown.
Pobiedonostseff, without formally retiring, had done his work, and it
remained only for history to label it. Witte, fretting and chafing
against his forced inaction, gave a loose rein to his criticisms,
ostentatiously connected his policy which had thus been baulked with
widely operating economic laws and began to be identified with the
aggressive desire of moderate liberals to work out the salvation of
the country in spite of its crowned head. The dowager empress saw
him occasionally and made praise-worthy attempts to bring her son and
him together, but finally discovered that they were as fire and
water. In one conversation she had with the statesman she admitted
frankly that the aversion of the Emperor for his most eminent subject
was invincible. Still his services were not wholly disdained.
Whenever there was a very difficult or a dangerous task to be
undertaken, Witte's name was invariably pronounced, and for his
Tsar's and country's sake he was exhorted to undertake it. It was
thus that he was chosen to carry on the negotiations with the
Kaiser's government which ended in the hated Russo-German commercial
treaty, to report on the needs of the peasants and recommend a series
of reforms, and to repair to Portsmouth to conclude peace with the
Japanese. Thus from time to time the two men worked together. For
Witte, driven by boundless ambition, was generally ready to snatch at
any chance of playing a prominent and useful part in the history of
his country. When I pointed out to him--as I sometimes did--the
difficulty I had to harmonise these acts of his with his {138} own
words, he would return this answer, "You seem to forget that we live
in Russia under an autocracy, and that I, who have so long been
minister, cannot refuse any request made by the Tsar for my services,
if I have reason to think that they would prove helpful to him or the
country. The unwritten law, the traditions in which I have been
brought up, and my conscience oblige me to respond to the call."
But Witte's counsel on political matters, although reinforced by
events, was almost invariably rejected. The Tsar had other advisers
who drew their political wisdom from the world of spirits, and to
them he hearkened submissively. Two princesses whom I had known in
their school-days, the French charlatan Philippe, and certain shadowy
figures that flitted across one's field of vision, most of them to
sink in oblivion immediately afterwards, were the intermediaries
between the Supreme Being and his vicar on earth. For the grim
realities around him he had no eyes. He ignored even the secret
council held in Paris some months before[9] in which it was decided
to unite a number of powerful Russian organisations and to get them
to bring pressure to bear jointly on himself,[10] and to make the
most of the indignation aroused in the land by the conduct of the
Manchurian campaign and the cruelties committed by the authorities in
dealing with the revolutionists. Congruously with this secret plan
professional congresses were being held everywhere, a medical
congress, a lawyers' congress, a congress of engineers, a teachers'
congress, a peasants' congress, a postal congress, and, most
important of all, a congress of railwaymen. These organisations
represented to my thinking the forces that would eventually transform
the political and economic ordering of the Tsardom. And I gave
public expression to that conviction. Events confirmed this view.
It was these leagues and the central league of leagues that brought
about the general strike which forced the hand of the Tsar. Trepoff
discerned the power and the future rôle of the leagues and prohibited
them.
[1] Cf. _National Review_, May, 1905.
[2] I was first introduced to him by Princess (Lison) Trubetskoy, the
friend of Gambetta. He offered me a high Russian order for the
services I was supposed to have rendered to Orthodoxy as personified
by the Metropolitan Archbishop. That was in the days of Alexander
III.
[3] The story was related in detail in my article "The End of the
Autocracy," _National Review_, May, 1905.
[4] Cf. _National Review_, May, 1905, pp. 440 fol.
[5] In the _National Review_, May, 1905, p. 420, I wrote: "In that
connivance at lawless violence lurks a danger the insidiousness of
which few people realise. Personally I fear that unless its progress
be speedily stayed it may lead to the moral paralysis of the nation."
Those words were penned thirteen years ago.
[6] The grand duke added "and English gold." In this he was mistaken.
[7] Cf. _Times_, 23rd March, 1905.
[8] Slovo.
[9] In October, 1904.
[10] The Finnish, Polish socialists and social revolutionaries
entered into this league. The social democrats condemned it as
preposterous.
{139}