Certainly he never imagined to what it would lead him. The idea that
his people would have the courage to make him a prisoner does not seem
to have crossed his mind, any more than did the fact that, once he had
lost his position, he had become not only a useless, but an embarrassing
factor in Russian politics. He went back to Mohilew, to the headquarters
of that army of which he had been the Commander-in-chief as well as the
Sovereign, quite naturally and in the same quiet manner he might have
done in the days gone by. He did not even seem to yearn after his wife
and children, and never once did he suggest the advisability of
returning to Tsarskoye Selo. Of all the people assembled around him he
appeared the most unconcerned. This indifference lasted even when he
found himself faced with captivity and when the former Head of his
Staff, General Aléxieieff, came to acquaint him with the decision of the
Provisional Government to arrest him.
His wife, left alone in the Palace where she had spent so many happy
days, did not perhaps share his indifference; she certainly displayed
the same apathy. Alexandra Feodorowna, from the moment that she saw her
schemes of personal grandeur frustrated, gave up the game; she gave it
up with more dignity than her husband had ever shown--this much must be
conceded to her. She never flinched before the insults that were poured
down upon her; she never gave a sign that she was moved to anything
else but disdain when General Korniloff read to her the orders of the
Government in regard to her person, and acquainted her with the fact
that she was a prisoner. She declared to the few people left with her
that she considered herself only as a Sister of Charity in attendance on
her sick children. The Empress had disappeared, outwardly at least, and
perhaps it was just as well that she accepted the situation in this way,
rather than attempt a useless resistance, which could only have added to
her unpopularity.
But still the fact remained that the whole Russian Revolution had been
conducted after the style of a comic opera of Offenbach. No one at first
had recognized its serious character. No one had seemed to realize that
it constituted the most portentous event of the last hundred years or
so. Those who had carried it out had done it on the spur of the moment,
without thinking of what would follow; and the Monarch who had bowed his
head under its decrees also had not suspected that a morrow was there,
waiting for the results of what was being done to-day. The historical
stick that had been wielded by Peter the Great had been transformed into
the ridiculous sword of the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.
XXVII
A PRISONER AFTER HAVING BEEN A QUEEN
A new life began for Alexandra Feodorowna. Until that fatal day when she
was taken into captivity her existence had been one of ease and luxury.
She had been the Empress of All the Russias, being revered by some as
almost a divinity, the absolute mistress of all her surroundings, with
servants in attendance on her, eager to execute any commands it might
please her to lay upon them. She had not a wish which was not instantly
gratified; the misfortunes that had assailed her (I am not speaking now
of those that fell upon Russia) had always left her indifferent; they
had existed more in her imagination than in reality. Suddenly without
warning and, what was even worse, at the very moment when she had
expected to reach even loftier heights than the one upon which she was
placed, she had been hurled down into an abyss of sorrow, of misery, and
of pain such as she had never imagined she could ever know. She was no
longer a Sovereign; her courtiers, servants, attendants, had all
vanished with the exception of a very few, and those she had never cared
for much, in the days of her prosperity. Her children were sick and she
could not even obtain for them a doctor’s help. Her friends had fled or
were in prison; her Crown had been wrested from her; she was a prisoner,
deprived of the means of communicating with her own people and
relatives; the guards who surrounded her Palace were no longer placed
there to protect her safety; they were intrusted with another mission,
that of watching over every one of her movements and of preventing her
from getting any news from the outside world. Instead of crowds gathered
to cheer her, she saw assembled under her windows an angry multitude
asking for her blood and calling out to her that she ought to be
punished as a traitor. She had no friends, no money, no influence any
longer. The dream had come to an end, and she found herself facing stern
reality, a reality against which it was useless to struggle.
Her husband came back to her, a prisoner, likewise, but with perhaps
less consciousness of the horror of their position than she had. They
had to settle down to a new life entirely different from the previous
one--a life of idleness, of inaction; an existence which made them
realize with every step they took the awful change that had overtaken
them. When they wished to go out they had to ask permission to do so
from an officer who often refused it out of pure malice. They had to
pass before sentinels who no longer presented arms to them, who only
sneered in their faces as they saw them hurry through a room or a
corridor, anxious to escape insult or outrage. No one was allowed to
come near them. They were condemned to a solitude in which they were
continually reminded of the days gone by forever.
A few faithful attendants had been left them, it is true, but these last
friends were just as badly off as themselves, and could do but very
little to alleviate the miseries of a position which was an illustration
of the famous verses of Dante, that there is nothing more dreadful
during days of misery than to remember the past joyful ones. Even
religion, which for such a long period of years had consoled the Empress
in many sad and troubled hours, had ceased to be a comfort to her;
divine service, during which her name and that of her husband were
carefully omitted from the liturgy, was only one new source of torment
for her. It seemed to her as if the Church as well as the Russian nation
repulsed her and treated her as a pariah and an outcast. Another woman,
with higher, loftier views, would have looked with more philosophy on
these small sides in a great tragedy, might perhaps even have failed to
notice them. But for Alexandra Feodorowna they constituted something far
more tangible and real than the fact that the House of Romanoff had lost
its Throne.
She would most probably have wished to discuss with the Czar all the
events which had brought about the catastrophe, but even this comfort
was denied to her. The Provisional Government had issued orders that
husband and wife should not be permitted to communicate with or see each
other, except in presence of witnesses. Some people have said that this
was an unnecessary cruelty, but it seems that there was some reason for
this decision. A strong party at that time was clamoring for repressive
measures in regard to the ex-Empress. Papers had been found in which her
negotiations with the Kaiser had been revealed, and the question of
bringing her to trial had been seriously discussed. But no one wished to
see the former Czar mixed up with this business, as it was generally
felt it would be a great political mistake to make a martyr out of him.
There was, however, ground to fear that if he were permitted to speak
with his wife alone, she would contrive in some way or other to entangle
him in her personal intrigues. This Mr. Miliukoff, then Minister for
Foreign Affairs, wished to avoid, for reasons of a general political
order, and Mr. Kerensky for other
[Illustration: THE ROYAL FAMILY
Seated, from left to right: The Grand-Duchess Marie; the Czarina,
with the little Grand-Duke Alexis at her knee; the Czar; the
Grand-Duchess Anastasia, the youngest of the four girls. Standing,
from left to right: The Grand-Duchess Tatiana, and the
Grand-Duchess Olga immediately behind her father.
]
ones of a purely personal character. It seems that this leader of the
Socialist party in the Duma had, before events had transformed him into
a Minister, spoken also with certain agents of the Kaiser who had
contrived to remain in the Russian capital. Nicholas II. had friends
who, knowing this fact, warned the radical chief that if any harm was
done to the former Sovereign his own participation in eventual peace
negotiations with the enemy would be exposed. Can one imagine that when
Nicholas was told of this fact he only blamed those who had thus
attempted to save him, saying that he did not like blackmail of any
kind, even when it was performed for his advantage? That man who had
been one of the most important political factors of his time was not
even shrewd enough to see that it was only politics which could save his
life after they had dispossessed him of his Throne.
The Provisional Government, so long as decent men composed it, would
have been willing to spare any unnecessary humiliations to the former
Czar and his family. Unfortunately, the military men who had been put in
charge of the Palace of Tsarskoye Selo and of its inhabitants did not
share this opinion, and there is no doubt but that the deposed Monarch
was subjected to insult, as well as to all kinds of small and petty
annoyances calculated to make him feel bitterly the change in his
position. I do not believe personally in the tales which were put into
circulation as to his having been hustled about by the soldiers on guard
at the castle the day he had returned there a State prisoner from
Mohilew, a few short weeks after he had left it a powerful Sovereign.
For one thing, his devoted aide-de-camp, Prince Dolgoroukoff, was with
him, and he would most certainly have interfered had any violence been
used in regard to his master. But the unfortunate Nicholas was made in
other ways to drink the cup of humiliation to the dregs. The troops were
told not to salute him; the sentries were forbidden to present arms to
him; he was addressed as Colonel Romanoff by his jailers; his letters
were opened and his expenses controlled in a searching, insulting manner
which must have been terribly bitter for him to bear. Every kind of
newspaper containing insults addressed to him or to the Empress were
sent to him or put in his way. When he went out in the park he was often
accosted by people who upbraided him for all the misfortunes that had
fallen upon Russia, for which they made him responsible. I do not
mention insignificant daily worries, such as the shutting off of the
electric light, or of the water-pipes, so that the unfortunate Imperial
Family was left without baths, and other small unpleasantnesses of the
same kind. These would perhaps not have been noticed if the other ones
had not been there to remind the once powerful Czar of All the Russias
that he was at the mercy of the subjects whose rights he had not
respected and whose cries for freedom he had quenched in blood.
But Nicholas, in the midst of all these miseries, preserved the same
impassibility he had displayed when the news of the disasters of Mukden
and Tsu Shima had been brought to him, or when he had heard that Warsaw
and the long line of fortresses that had defended the Russian frontier
on the Niemen and the Vistula had fallen into German hands. He accepted
everything with stoicism; he expressed no surprise at the blows which
were being hurled at his head. He simply remained indifferent, perhaps
because he was too much of a fatalist to rebel, but most probably
because he had not yet grasped the real significance of all that was
happening to him.
The Empress was not so resigned, in spite of her apparent apathy. She
had more reasons to fear for her personal safety than her husband, and
she knew very well that in case of a rising of the anarchists in
Petrograd she would be the first victim they would claim. This dread led
her into another of the mistakes which she was continually perpetrating,
the mistake of trying to call to her rescue her German cousin.
According to people whom I have reason to believe exceptionally well
informed, she caused certain information to be carried to the Kaiser. In
return for this she implored him to try and save her, together with her
children. Of course this became known to the Provisional Government, but
the latter wished to spare her, partly because it feared that if her new
misdeeds were published nothing could save her from the wrath of the
public, and it did not wish the Revolution to be dishonored by the
murder of a defenseless woman, whatever that woman might have done. But
the question of the transfer of Nicholas II. and of his family to a
place where he could be guarded more closely than at Tsarskoye Selo was
discussed seriously. It is likely that this would have been executed
already during the first six weeks which followed upon his abdication if
other things had not interfered, and if in rapid succession the men who
had taken up the task he had been unable to fulfil had not in their turn
disappeared one after the other, making room for Ministers more advanced
in their opinions and more devoid of scruples as to the punishment which
they believed ought to be inflicted on the former Emperor.
Alexandra Feodorowna had been subjected to a strict examination of her
political activity by the military authorities in charge of the district
of Petrograd, and particularly by General Korniloff, who had a personal
grudge against her and who did not spare her in the scathing reproaches
which he addressed to her. But nothing could shake the equanimity of the
haughty Czarina. She sneered at the General, she scorned his threats,
and proudly declared to him that she would not reply to any of his
questions, as she did not recognize his right to address them to her.
While her husband showed no sign of impatience under the affronts which
were showered down upon him (on the contrary, he exhibited absolute
submission to the will of those who had taken him captive), the Empress
remembered the position which she had occupied a few days before, and
simply smiled at her persecutors with a disdain that had certainly
something exasperating about it if one considers the intellectual and
moral standard of the people to whom this proof of her contempt was
addressed.
Alexandra refused to show that she suffered from the change that had
taken place in her position, while her husband hardly knew whether he
was suffering from it or not. There lay the difference in their two
characters and in their way of meeting the catastrophe which had changed
their whole lives and destinies.
There came, however, a day when the composure of the Consort of Nicholas
II. failed, when she at last gave way to despair. It was during the
afternoon when her friend and the confidante of all her thoughts, Anna
Wyrubewa, was taken away from her, and carried off to the fortress of
SS. Peter and Paul in Petrograd. Until that day the Empress had not felt
quite alone in her misery. There was at least near her one person with
whom she could speak about all those dear dead ones whose memory she
either cherished or worshiped. So long as that friend was there the
miserable Empress could talk about Orloff, Raspoutine, and the
prayer-meetings during which the latter evoked for her the spirit of the
former. When Anna was taken away from her this last consolation came
also to an end. Henceforward the solitude of Alexandra Feodorowna was to
be complete; and nothing was left to her except her eyes to weep, and
her memory to remind her of those whom she had loved and lost. The
horrors which were to follow, the Siberian exile whither she was to be
sent, were to leave her unmoved. She had inwardly died in that terrible
hour when the last friend and the sharer of all the secrets of her life
had been snatched away from her arms.
XXVIII
THE EXILE
These days in Tsarskoye Selo which seemed so hard to bear were Paradise
compared with what awaited the previous masters of this Imperial place.
Soon there came one August morning when a man who a few months before
had been known only as one of the leaders of that Socialist party which
the Government of Nicholas II. had taken such trouble to suppress, and
whom the tide of events had transformed into one of the Ministers of the
new Russian Republic, Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, entered, uncalled
for and unannounced, into the private apartments of the former Czar, and
acquainted him with the new decision to which the Government of the day
had come in regard to his person and to the fate of his family. How he
did it, how he mustered the courage to inform the fallen Monarch that he
was about to be exiled to that distant Siberia, where so many people had
been sent during his reign and had gone cursing his name, no one knows.
None of the actors in this scene ever revealed its details.
It is probable, however, that Kerensky had experienced far more emotion
in signifying to the deposed Sovereign the horrible punishment to which
he had been condemned than the latter had displayed when receiving the
terrible news, the nature of which must have completely bewildered him.
Of all the things he had expected, this was certainly the last. The
possibility of a public trial, in imitation of the one of Louis XVI. in
France, had been discussed between the Emperor and the Empress, and they
had in a certain sense both schooled themselves for such a supreme
ordeal. But exile in cold, bleak Siberia, in that land of mystery and of
crime, of heroic deeds and ignoble deaths--this solution of the
difficulties of a position which was daily growing more threatening had
never presented itself to the mind of the last Russian Autocrat.
Tobolsk, too! This dreariest spot in a dreary country; this accursed
place from which all those who could do so fled away with alacrity! What
could have been more awful than to have chosen it as the future
residence of a Monarch who, if all was well considered, had by his own
act rendered himself impossible as a ruler in the future? No political
necessity required his being sent so far and there were many other
places where he might have been just as safe, and not quite so unhappy,
as in that small Siberian town. Can one wonder if despair took hold of
the souls of the unhappy Czar and of his wife? Can one wonder if he
exclaimed that he would have preferred to die rather than have to meet
such an atrocious fate?
There were his children, too; his innocent children, who had done no
harm and who were to share this miserable destiny to which he was
condemned. Kerensky had told him that the young Grand Duchesses and
their brother would be left free to follow their parents in that distant
land whither they were to depart, or to remain in Russia if they
preferred. But this was almost adding insult to an abominable injury,
because the children could hardly do anything else than decide to
accompany their father and mother. Verily nothing was to be spared to
Nicholas II., not even the knowledge that his daughters and his idolized
boy were about to be exposed to hardships which it was hardly likely
they could survive.
Nevertheless, he took the news bravely, and neither he nor Alexandra
Feodorowna murmured. The latter is credited with having remarked that
the new Government had evidently wanted to please her by sending them to
a place that could only be dear to her on account of its associations
with Raspoutine, who had been born there. Whether this is exact or not
I will not undertake to say. What is true, however, is that she left
with dry eyes the place where she had spent so many happy years, and
that not even during the religious service, which was celebrated in the
private chapel of the Palace, when the blessings of Heaven were invoked
in favor of people about to start on a long journey, did she shed a
tear. All the other assistants, including her daughters, sobbed
passionately and bitterly the whole time that it lasted.
Though the hour of the departure of Nicholas had been kept as secret as
possible, the whole town of Tsarskoye Selo knew that he was about to
leave it forever. The population for once was awed before the immensity
of the disaster. One was used in Russia to people being sent to Siberia;
one had seen a Menschikoff, a Biren, a Dolgorouky, and more recently a
Prince Troubetskoy, and a Mourawieff-Apostol, start on this dreaded
journey whence so few ever returned. But here was something different.
Here was a Romanoff about to go there where his ancestors and himself
had deported so many, so many, entirely innocent people. Here was the
dreaded Sovereign, whose name had been for such a long time mentioned
only with reverence and with fear, exiled like one of those persons whom
he had sent to Siberia with a mere stroke of his pen. Here was Nicholas
II., formerly Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, here was the
mighty Czar who had been crowned at Moscow, reduced to the condition of
a common criminal by the subjects whose rights he had violated, whose
consciences he had trampled upon, whose liberty he had taken away, and
whose lives he had in so many instances tried to destroy. Truly the
sight was appalling, and there were but few among those who in the early
twilight of a summer morning looked at that mournful train which was
carrying away toward the distant north so much dead grandeur and such
awful misfortune, there were but few who did not realize that they were
witnessing something more tragic and more solemn even than a funeral,
that they were looking upon the end of a great chapter in Russian
history, and that it was not only a Czar who lay buried under all these
ruins, but also something of the past glories of the country.
They had been, after all, together with the future of the Romanoff
dynasty, a great race that had produced great men and they deserved to
have, as their last crowned descendant, some one better than Nicholas
II. had proved to be. They had often been cruel, more frequently even
unjust; they had never respected what the world is used to venerate and
to esteem; they had shown themselves hard in regard to their subjects;
but they had made out of dark, ignorant Russia an immense Empire on
which even more immense hopes had been built. They had exercised on
several occasions a restraining influence over the exaggerations of
half-educated and half-instructed men with all the instincts of the
savage and but few of the qualities of the civilized being. They had led
their people through danger, through war, through many momentous days of
rejoicing as well as of anguish. They had been a part of the Russian
nation, and with their disgrace and fall something in that nation, too,
had been dishonored and had perished.
With the personal failure of Nicholas II. this book has nothing to do.
From the very first day that he had ascended the Throne of Russia it had
been evident to any person gifted with the talent of observation that
his reign was bound to end in disaster and in ruin; that all the work
performed by his late father, who, after all, when things are well
considered, had been a great man and a wise Sovereign, would very soon
be destroyed by his want of character and of principle and by his
abominable selfishness. People, however, had hoped that during the years
supreme power remained concentrated in his hands at least blood would
not flow. No one’s imagination had conceived the horrors of Mukden and
of Tsu Shima, nor the massacres which took place at Tannenberg and in
the Polish plains. No one had suspected that the rivers would be dyed
red while he went on living unconscious and unconcerned about all the
misery which would remain forever associated with his name. When destiny
was at last fulfilled in regard to him, it was discovered that it had
also been fulfilled in regard to Russia, and this was what the country
could not bring itself to forgive him; this is what his ancestors also
would not have pardoned him had they been able to arise out of their
graves, and to
Rend the gold brocade
Whereof their shroud was made[A]
[A] Longfellow, “The White Czar.”
in horror at all the evil perpetrated by their unworthy descendant.
Yes, in the past they had been a strong race, these Romanoffs, about
whom no one thinks any longer to-day in the vast realm that owned them
once as its masters and lords. But it would be useless to deny that
crimes without number were committed by them and that injustice
flourished during the centuries when they could dispose absolutely of
the fate of millions and millions of human creatures whom they killed
and tortured at their will and according to their fancies. Perhaps it
was a just punishment for the ruthless cruelty of some of them that the
glories of their race came to an end and perished, together with all
the traditions that had surrounded them for such a long time, because of
the follies, sins, mistakes, blunderings, iniquities, and indecisions of
a weak, characterless, and half-witted man and of a superstitious,
intriguing, and half-demented woman.
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
cemetery of Tsarkoye=> cemetery of Tsarskoye {pg 148}