half-demented Czarina, and while carefully avoiding discussing or even
touching upon the subject of politics with her, he had contrived to
persuade her to trust those so-called statesmen of whom he was but the
instrument. As time went on she became more and more anxious to
communicate with these spirits of the other world, in whose existence
she had been led to believe as firmly as in that of the Divinity itself.
Raspoutine, whenever he prayed in her presence, pretended to get into
trances during which he told her things which he assured her he did not
remember later on, but which he persuaded her he had been inspired by
the celestial powers to tell. She was kept by him and by Anna Wyrubewa
in a state of semi-hypnotism, which went so far that sometimes she was
herself seized with attacks of convulsions bordering on epilepsy, during
the long prayers in which she used to spend half of her days and most of
her nights. The superstitious fears which had always haunted her were
played upon by these clever adventurers whom she had admitted into the
secret of her thoughts. She was finally convinced that her duty as a
Russian Empress required of her to sacrifice herself for the welfare of
her subjects, and to induce her husband to sign a peace that would put
an end to the useless and terrible slaughter that had transformed the
whole of Russia into one vast churchyard.
She still labored under the illusion that the dynasty was popular and
that every decision of the Czar would be received with respect and
gratitude by the nation. Though she knew that she was personally
disliked, she did not imagine that this dislike extended itself to the
Emperor, and she never supposed that, even in regard to her own person,
the hatred of which she was the object existed anywhere else than among
the aristocratic circles of Petrograd society. In one word, she believed
in the power of autocracy, and she worked as hard as she could to
consolidate it by getting Nicholas II. to appoint as his Ministers and
advisers men who shared her opinions on this point, and who were ready
to crush with the greatest vigor and the utmost severity every attempt
to shake the prestige and the authority of the Crown.
Of course, the fact that the country was at war made her path most
difficult; for this very reason she thought it was indispensable for the
safety of the dynasty and of her son that peace should be concluded. She
did not care in the least for the secret treaties or obligations Russia
had assumed. To her, honor was but a question of opportunism. She set
the existence of the Romanoffs before their self-respect. Her German
blood made her lose sight of the real interests of her husband and of
her children.
Here we must pause a moment and touch upon a point that has been as
much discussed as it has remained mysterious to this day. Was Raspoutine
a German agent directly employed by the Kaiser to persuade the
half-demented Czarina that it was her duty to put an end to the war? Or
was he simply the instrument of other people more in possession of the
secret of Germany’s schemes than himself? Personally I am inclined to
believe this second version of his activity. Raspoutine was far too
ignorant and uncouth to have been taken into the confidence of William
II., but Mr. Sturmer, Mr. Manassavitch-Maniuloff, and Mr. Protopopoff
undoubtedly were confidants of the Kaiser. They had been promised, most
likely, large sums of money for their co-operation in this vile
intrigue, which even after their fall was to be renewed and, as we have
unfortunately seen, renewed with success.
I shall not repeat here the story of Mr. Protopopoff’s famous journey to
Sweden, where he got into direct touch with agents of the German
Government. I shall not even return to the subject of the negotiations
begun by him and continued by Mr. Sturmer. All this is now a matter of
history, and what I am writing here only concerns the personal part
played by the Empress in this dark plot, directed against all the Allies
of Russia in the war as well as against Russia herself. I am only
concerned with Alexandra Feodorowna and her share in the catastrophe
which was to send her a captive and an exile to that distant Siberia
whither so many innocent people had been banished by her husband.
I wish to explain how it could have become possible for her to be
transformed into an active agent of German ambition on the Russian
Throne. She was, as we have seen, only half-responsible for her actions.
Her intelligence had never been properly balanced and self-control had
never been taught her. She had, however, principles, and very strong
ones, too, which had stood between her and temptation in the serious
sentimental crisis of her life. But this resistance to what perhaps had
been the one passion she had known, except her love for her son, had
helped to overthrow her mental balance. She had given to God,
represented by a Divinity of her own created by her imagination, all the
affection she had not been allowed to expend on earth, and full of a
spirit of self-sacrifice as stupid as it was devoid of any ground to
stand upon. She had fancied that she could work out her personal
salvation, together with that of her family and subjects, in restoring
to the country whose Empress she happened to be the blessings of a peace
that would stop the effusion of blood the thought of which robbed her of
sleep at night and repose by day.
She was living in a state which most certainly was bordering on
insanity, and she had entirely lost the faculty of discriminating
between what was reality and what was a dream. Raspoutine held her in a
kind of trance, which was further aggravated by the long fasts to which
he obliged her to submit. She was told that she was the victim chosen by
the Almighty to expiate all the sins of the Russian Empire, that it was
only through constant prayer, combined with all kinds of other
mortifications, that she could hope to see restored the peace of her
mind and the health of her son. It is probable that she suffered from
hallucinations during which she saw, as in a cloud, the rising shapes of
soldiers killed in battle, clamoring to her to stop the useless
massacres going on in the Polish plains where they had fallen. Is it a
wonder that, unconscious of aught else than this condition of
self-reproach to which she had been reduced, she tried to end her own
sufferings, as well as the misery which had fallen upon her country, by
disregarding all the advice she received from her real friends and
making the most frantic efforts to induce her husband to accept the
peace terms which the Kaiser had more than once caused to be secretly
conveyed to him?
Nicholas II. was also weary of the struggle, but he realized better than
his wife the impossibility which existed for him of acting independently
of his Allies. He had Ministers who, in spite of their respect for his
person and authority, would not have hesitated to point out to him the
grave consequences which a defection of Russia would mean for the whole
cause of the Allied nations, who, after all, had been entangled in this
disastrous war because they had rushed to his help and to that of his
people.
Sturmer, who had for a short time taken the conduct of Foreign Affairs
in his hands, had been compelled to resign, owing to the opposition
which he had encountered in the Duma, and especially owing to the
masterful speech in which Professor Miliukoff had exposed all the vices
and all the crimes of his administration. His retreat had not had for
consequence a diminution of his favor or of his influence; he still
remained the trusted adviser of both Czar and Czarina. Together with him
were working Protopopoff, who pretended that he would be strong enough,
with the help of the hundreds, nay thousands of police agents he had at
his disposal, to crush every attempt at a revolution; Madame Wyrubewa;
and, last but not least, the formidable Raspoutine, whose influence had
proved wide enough to cause the postponement of the trial for blackmail
of his confederate, Manassavitch-Maniuloff. A bank director from whom he
had tried to extort 25,000 rubles had denounced the latter to the
military authorities, and, in spite of the angry protest of Mr.
Sturmer, whose confidential adviser he had become, he had been
imprisoned and sent before a jury.
But even the efforts of these people combined could not move Nicholas
II. to act in accordance with their wishes, because, as I have said, he
still had Ministers unwilling to betray the country into the hands of
its enemies. The head of the Cabinet was Mr. Trepoff, an honest man
credited with liberal sympathies, who, at all events, would not lend
himself to anything that could be interpreted into the light of a
treason of Russia in regard to her Allies. Unfortunately, he could not
hold out against the attacks that were directed against him by all the
pro-German party, and after he had fallen the latter felt at last free
to act as it liked, because Prince Galitzyne, who had accepted the
difficult position of Prime Minister in a country already standing on
the brink of ruin, was far too timid a man to dare express an opinion of
his own, after the Sovereign had once spoken and signified his will to
him.
XXII
THE REMOVAL OF THE “PROPHET”
There is a well-known Latin proverb which says that the gods begin by
depriving of their reason those whom they mean to destroy.
Never was its truth more forcibly illustrated than in the tragedy which
brought about the fall of the autocratic system of government under
which Russia had been suffering for centuries. Its last representative
had incarnated in his person all the follies, the crimes, the mistakes,
and the ruthless cruelty of his predecessors. Unlike them, he had not
known how to temper them by personal authority or personal sympathy. He
was an effeminate, degenerate descendant of strong ancestors; the whole
atavism of a doomed race seemed to have become embodied in his weak
individuality. If outside catastrophes had not occurred in his reign, it
is still likely that he would have been compelled by a revolution of
some kind or other to step back into an obscurity out of which he ought
never to have emerged, because he was most certainly not able to bear
the rays of the “fierce light which beats upon a throne.” It is,
however, possible that none of those supreme calamities which destroy
the independence and self-respect of nations as well as of individuals
would have been connected with his name and history. But destiny
condemned him to remain forever, in the annals of the world, a living
proof of the degeneracy which threatens all royal houses who do not
possess sufficient energy to stand in perfect union with their people
whenever a trial of some kind comes to threaten their mutual existence.
It would have been hard enough to be branded by the centuries to come as
the last of the Romanoffs and as an unworthy Heir of Peter the Great. It
was worse than hard for Russia, even more than for Nicholas II., to have
to realize that, through stupidity, weakness of character, and an
exaggerated opinion of his own power and might, he had been the direct
cause of the ruin of his country and the means of plunging it into an
abyss of distress and of anarchy from which it will take the work of
several generations to redeem it.
His wife was the instrument of his destruction. About this last point
there cannot exist any doubt whatever. She had a character stronger than
his and she could speak to him in the name of the son to whom they were
both so completely devoted. She could also appeal to his religious and
superstitious feelings, which, though not as exaggerated as her own and
not quite so foolishly carried to extremes, were yet also devoid of
sound common sense. They were connected with the conviction that he had
a mission to perform in regard to the future of his subjects, and to
their welfare both in this world and in the next. Nicholas II. had in
his character something of the traits of Caligula and other Roman
emperors--a mixture of cruelty and theatrical sentimentality combined
with cowardice in presence of danger and indecision before immediate
peril. He never knew what it meant to play the game, and he perished
because he refused to fight it out on the day that he discovered his
adversary held all the trumps.
In the mean while the war was going on, claiming every day new victims.
The insufficiency of the Government to face its various problems became
more patent. Instead of applying himself to the task of coping with
them, the Czar became absorbed, thanks to the remonstrances of his wife,
in the one thought of how to consolidate his own authority, reduce to
silence the protestations of the country and those of its
representatives in the Duma, and conclude a peace with Germany which
would allow him to make an appeal to his troops to help him to crush
once more the Revolution which was hammering at his door, which he
imagined he could subdue as easily as he had annihilated the one that
had broken out after the Japanese campaign.
These were splendid plans indeed, and the Empress was already rejoicing
at their success, in ignorance of the revolt which was shaking public
opinion out of its previous apathy, a revolt which had extended itself
to her own family. Bad as were most of the Grand Dukes, dissolute as
their conduct had ever been, yet they had in their veins the blood of
Catherine the Great and of all the dead and gone Romanoffs. They rose in
rebellion against the gang of adventurers who were dishonoring the chief
of their race and of their dynasty.
By that time the name of the Empress was being dragged in the dirt
by every street boy, and open comments were made in public places
in regard to her friendship, not to call it by another name, for
Raspoutine--comments which were devoid of truth, because there was never
any immorality in their relations, but which were generally believed,
perhaps, because it would have been impossible for any one to guess that
it was through superstitious practices that the “Prophet” had contrived
to get absolute hold of her mind.
The Imperial Family felt the degradation to which this common peasant
had reduced it, and though they had no reason in the world to like
Nicholas II., yet they resented the humiliation which any slur upon the
reputation of his wife conferred upon him as well. After all, Alexandra
Feodorowna was the mother of the future Czar, and as such she ought to
inspire respect in the Russian nation. If she did not realize this fact
herself, others had to do it for her and rid her of a contact which was
a slur. Besides, there was the hope that if once the adventurer was
removed she could be brought to look upon the world from a more
reasonable point of view. The principal thing was to deliver her from
this evil adviser who was fast leading her, as well as the dynasty, to
inevitable destruction and ruin.
The story of Raspoutine’s assassination is too well known to be repeated
here. At any time it would have broken the heart of the poor, misguided
Czarina. But coming at the moment it took place, it did something
more--it deprived her of what she considered to be her only moral
support amid the troubles of her life, the possibility of communicating
with the spirit of the man whom she had loved, who she felt sure was
watching over her and over her child, from the heavens.
In the weeks preceding the murder of the “Prophet” he had subjected the
Empress almost every evening to the agony of these prayer-meetings
during which he communicated to her the so-called wishes of her dead
friend, who, as he said, advised her, through his medium, as to what
she ought to do to avert the dangers which were hovering over her head.
The miserable woman used to listen to these revelations with anxious
eagerness, and pray, pray, with a fervor she had never known before, for
the strength to obey the commandments of a spirit who in death, as well
as in life, had proved to be her best, and indeed her only, friend. Is
it a wonder that the last remnants of sanity which were still left to
her snapped under this terrible strain, and that at last she became the
mere shadow of her former self, a fit subject for a lunatic asylum,
where, indeed, she ought, for the good of everybody, to have been
confined?
Her conduct after she had been told of the murder of the creature whom
she revered as a Prophet of God was quite in accord with her character,
such as it had developed itself through all the years during which she
had allowed her mind to be invaded with superstitious notions, which
would have been laughable if they had not been so pathetic. Her only
thought was that of vengeance. She exercised it with a relentlessness
which set against her the few people left in Petrograd who might have
felt inclined to take her part and to pity her in this tragedy of her
life. She left no peace for the Czar until he had exiled the persons
whom she knew to have been the authors of the deed. When she was
implored to take pity on the young Grand-Duke Dmitry, and not have him
sent to the Persian front, where there existed so many epidemics that it
was hardly likely he would ever come back again, she had merely smiled
and coldly said:
“Why should I pity him? He did not pity others.”
And yet public feeling was so strong against her, and so entirely in
favor of those who had had the courage to rid Russia of a man who had
proved so fatal to it, that the schemes of revenge of Alexandra
Feodorowna suffered a collapse. Mighty and powerful as Nicholas II.
believed himself to be, yet he understood that the best thing he could
do would be to let silence and oblivion fall over a crime that was
eminently popular in the whole country. He had heard of the telegrams of
congratulation, and of the flowers which had been sent to both his
cousin Dmitry Pawlowitch and to the husband of his niece, young Prince
Youssoupoff, as well as the joy to which the population of Petrograd had
given way when it had become aware of the fate of the adventurer whose
name had been so prominently and so sadly associated with that of the
Empress of All the Russias. Perhaps at heart he was not so very sorry at
an event which had certainly rid him of a great incumbrance.
Nicholas II. had always practised dissimulation to a considerable
extent, and he had never allowed outsiders to guess what was going on in
his mind. During the days which followed upon the disappearance of
Raspoutine he certainly expressed great sympathy for the grief of his
wife, but at the same time he did not, as she expected, cause the
perpetrators of the murder of this low adventurer to be prosecuted
publicly for their daring action. This apathy exasperated Alexandra
Feodorowna.
During the last weeks of Raspoutine’s life he had been working,
conjointly with Sturmer and Protopopoff, toward convincing her to lend
herself to a Palace revolution which would have overturned her husband
and made little Alexis Czar under her own Regency. She had been told
over and over again that she possessed all the great talents of
Catherine II., that the Emperor was not a better man than Peter III. She
had been made acquainted with his unpopularity, but at the same time
persuaded that this unpopularity was a purely personal thing and that it
did not extend itself to the person of the Heir to the Throne, nor even
to her own. As Regent she could do any amount of good, and conclude
peace with Germany the more easily that she was not bound by the terms
of the agreement entered into by Mr. Sazonoff with the Entente, in the
name of Nicholas II.
The foolish woman believed absolutely all the nonsense which was being
constantly poured into her ears. Her ambition and lust for revenge over
her enemies also played a part in this whole tragedy. She therefore
began wondering whether, after all, she ought not to follow the advice
which she had received from Heaven, as she fondly imagined, through the
mouth of Raspoutine. She would have liked to be able to consult once
again the spirit of Colonel Orloff so as to relieve her perplexity,
because she had still sufficient scruples to hesitate before allowing
those whom she considered to be her friends to use her name for the
execution of a Palace revolution directed against her own husband, whom
she may not have loved, but whom she still respected as the Czar of All
the Russias.
It is at this juncture that a new incident occurred, the real details of
which have never yet transpired. Raspoutine, just before he had been
murdered, had introduced to the Empress a Tibetan doctor with whom he
was on terms of intimate friendship, telling her that he was a man of
great ability, devoted to occult sciences, had studied them in the
convents of his country, and who was quite able to perform miracles.
This man, whose name was Badmaieff, certainly saw Alexandra Feodorowna
several times, and it was reported that he gave her certain drugs which
he told her she ought to administer to the Emperor in secret, drugs
which would make him quite subservient to her will. Whether she used
them or not it is impossible to say. Young Prince Youssoupoff declared
immediately after the Revolution that she had done so, and that in
consequence of this experiment Nicholas II.’s will, which had always
been a weak one, had completely disappeared, until he had been reduced
to the condition of a puppet in the strong hands of his wife. But this
assertion, coming as it did from a personage who could not have nursed
kind feelings in regard to the Empress, must be accepted with caution.
It is a fact, however, that those in attendance on the Sovereign
remarked more than once that he seemed at times to have lost the real
consciousness of what was going on around him, that his eyes had
acquired a vague, dazed look they had never worn before.
It is out of this introduction of Badmaieff into the intimacy of the
Czarina that the rumor arose that Raspoutine, together with Anna
Wyrubewa, had tried to administer slow poison to the small Grand-Duke
Alexis. Such a thing had never taken place, and indeed it could never
have occurred if one considers the fact that the strongest trump in the
game played by the pro-German agents who were leading Russia to its ruin
was precisely the little Cesarewitsch, without whose existence it would
have been impossible for them to think of making out of Alexandra
Feodorowna a Regent of the Russian Empire. They had, therefore, the
greatest interest in keeping the child in as good a state of health as
possible, and he was far too delicate for them to try any experiment
upon him. On the other hand, the necessity of getting rid by natural
means of the Czar himself was so evident that it would not be surprising
if the superstitious mind of his Consort had been influenced so as to
persuade her to lend herself to what she had been told was nothing but a
religious practice, but which in reality was an attempt to accomplish by
this means what it would perhaps not have proved wise to try and bring
about in another way.
XXIII
ANNA COMES TO THE RESCUE
In the course of an interview which Anna Wyrubewa gave to a foreign
newspaper correspondent a short while after she had been released from
the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, where she was confined for about
three months following the outbreak of the Revolution, she said that the
Empress Alexandra had never been so near to insanity as during the weeks
which followed upon the murder of Raspoutine. What she failed to relate,
however, was the manner in which she succeeded in preventing the
half-balanced mind of the miserable woman from snapping altogether under
the strain put upon it by circumstances.