ON the 15th day of May, 1896, Moscow was celebrating the Coronation of the Czar Nicholas II. of Russia. In the large courtyard inside the Kremlin, an immense crowd was gathered, awaiting the moment when the Sovereign together with his Consort would come out of the Cathedral of the Assumption, to make the customary round of the different shrines and churches, which according to the ancient custom, they had to visit after they had assumed the old Crown of the Russian Autocrats. Among this crowd, there were persons who remembered having witnessed the same kind of ceremony thirteen years before, when Alexander III. had been standing in his son’s place. What a splendid apparition it had been that of this Czar, gigantic in stature, whose quiet and strong features seemed in their placidity to be a true personification of the might of that Empire at the head of which he stood. One had hoped at that time, that he would preside over the destinies of his Realm for long years to come, and no one had given a thought to the possibility that he would so soon be lying in his coffin. Now it was with mixed feelings of pity, combined with a sympathy which already was no longer so strong as it had been when he had ascended the throne, that all were awaiting the new Monarch, who had become in his turn the chief of the old House of Romanoff, so that when the golden gates of the Assumption were thrown open to give passage to the procession which was escorting Nicholas II. all the heads of the numerous people gathered in honour of the occasion, under the shade of the ancient belfrey of Ivan Weliky, turned with an anxious curiosity towards the Sovereign about to show himself for the first time before his people, in the full pomp of his Imperial dignity.
What did one see? A young man thin and slim, who seemed to be entirely crushed under the weight of the massive crown which was reposing on his head, and of the heavy robe of cloth of gold, lined with ermine, which was thrown upon his shoulders. He was tottering as he walked along, and his pale, tired face, together with his uncertain steps, bore no resemblance whatever to the firm and superb countenance of his father thirteen years before. As he reached the door of the Church of the Holy Archangels, one noticed that he suddenly stopped, as if unable to proceed any further, completely worn out by the fatigue of the long ceremony that had come to an end a few moments before, and the hand which was holding the sceptre, enriched with precious stones, which the Metropolitan of Moscow had just handed to him, dropped down at his side, whilst the symbol of might and of power which it was holding, escaped from its grasp. Chamberlains and lords in waiting hastened to pick it up, and the crowd never noticed what had occurred, but those who had witnessed the incident, were deeply impressed by it, and different rumours began to circulate in regard to it, rumours which would have it that it was a bad omen, whilst persons well up in the study of history, and especially in that of foreign countries tried to find an analogy between it, and the remark made by Louis XVI. on the day of his Coronation at Rheims, when he had complained that his crown was hurting him, and felt too heavy for his head.
A few days later there happened another event, which reminded one of a similar coincidence between the life of the unfortunate King whose head was to fall on the scaffold of the Champs Elysées, and that of Nicholas II. It occurred during the popular feast which is always given in Moscow after the Coronation of a Czar. A crowd amounting to several thousands of men and women, some say three hundred thousand, had gathered together on a field known by the name of Khodinka Plain, in the immediate neighbourhood of the town, to be present at it, when suddenly a panic which was never accounted for nor explained, seized this multitude, and about twenty thousand human creatures were crushed to death in the short space of a few minutes. The emotion produced by this disaster among all the different classes of society was very deep and terrible. The only person who accepted it with calm and even with indifference, if the reader will forgive me for this expression, was the Czar himself, who, however, and this is a justice which I must render to him, only heard much later the whole extent of the disaster, but who at the same time, did not try to learn anything definite about it, on the day when it took place, and who, under the direct influence of his Consort, gave directions to reply to the French Ambassador, the Comte de Montebello, who had enquired whether he ought to postpone the ball he was giving that same night, that “he did not see any necessity for doing so.”
This answer became known at once, and it traced between the Monarch and his subjects one of these white lines which in a tennis ground marks the antagonistic camps, and out of two players makes two enemies ... and this line went on getting wider and wider as time went on. It still existed when Nicholas II. abdicated, but it had then become an abyss.
In general there is nothing sadder in the world than a misunderstanding between two people both possessed of good intentions towards each other. It is something worse than a discussion, worse than a quarrel, and even worse than hatred, because it is the only thing which sound reasoning cannot conquer, and which is bound to go on aggravating itself from day to day. How much worse therefore is a thing of the kind when it has established itself between a nation and those who rule it. The great, the supreme misfortune of Nicholas II. consisted in the fact that he never could understand his people or their wants, whilst Russia on the other hand was, through circumstances independent of its will, brought to distrust the real feelings harboured by the Czar in regard to its welfare, and to indulge in comparisons which certainly were not to his advantage, between him and the Sovereign to whom he had succeeded, who had possessed the full confidence of his subjects.
This fatality which has dogged all the footsteps of the Emperor who abdicated a year ago, from the very first moment that he had ascended his Throne, can be partly attributed to the defective education which he had received, together with the deplorable weakness of his character; and partly to the state of absolute subjection in which he had been kept first by his father, during the whole time of the latter’s life, and later on by his wife, together with the complete ignorance in which he remained in regard to the wants, the aspirations, needs and character of his people. He was a despot by temperament, perhaps because he had never seen anything else but despotism around him, and perhaps because he had got a mistaken idea in regard to the duties which devolved upon him. He had always been told that he ought to uphold intact the principle of autocracy, thanks to which his predecessors had maintained themselves upon the throne. He had seen Alexander III. adopt him with these principles with success, and he had forgotten, or rather he had never known, that in order to be a successful autocrat, one must neither prove oneself a tyrant, nor an oppressor of people’s consciences and opinions. His first steps as a Sovereign had hurt all the feelings of loyalty of his subjects. Among the many addresses of congratulation that had been presented to him on the occasion of his marriage and of his accession to the Throne, there had been one from the Zemstvo or local assembly of the government of Tver, a town which was known to be very liberal in its opinions, in which was expressed the hope that the Monarch would try to govern his people with the help and with the co-operation of these same Zemstvos or local assemblies, the aim of which was the improvement of the local conditions of existence of the population of the different governments or provinces of the Russian Empire. There was absolutely nothing that was revolutionary in this address. Unfortunately there happened to be in the vicinity of the young Empress a person whose influence had always been perniciously exercised, whenever it had manifested itself: the Princess Galitzyne, her Mistress of the Robes. Out of a feeling of personal dislike, or rather hatred, against one of the signatories of this document, which, on account of the consequences that followed upon its composition, became historical, Princess Galitzyne explained to the Sovereign at the head of whose household she stood, that this appeal in favour of a liberal system of government ought to be discouraged, if not crushed, at once. Alexandra Feodorovna was then beginning to acquire the absolute power over her consort’s mind, which she was never to lose in the future, and she spoke to him of the matter suggested by the Princess, on the very day that different deputations, coming from all parts of Russia to express their good wishes to the young Imperial couple, were about to be received by them in the Winter Palace.
Nicholas II. has never in his whole life had an opinion of his own, but he has shown himself enthusiastic for all those that have been suggested to him. He promised his wife “to say something,” which would put into their proper place the people daring enough to dream of anything likely to diminish his own power or prerogatives. He forgot, however, one thing, perhaps the most important one, and that was that these persons he was about to see, were not at all those who had signed the unlucky address, of which it would have been far better for everybody to forget the text as soon as possible. The result of this first intervention of the Empress in affairs of State which did not concern her is but too well known. The Czar instead of thanking the people who had come to lay at his feet the expression of their loyalty, declared to them that they ought never to “indulge in any senseless ‘dreams.’” The words were repeated everywhere, and ran from mouth to mouth in the whole of Russia. They inflicted on the young popularity of Nicholas II. a blow from the effects of which it never recovered.
This was the prologue of the tragedy which came to an end, if it has done so, with the signature of the Manifesto of Pskov. After this rise of the curtain was to begin a drama, all the different acts of which appear to us shrouded in bloody clouds.
One questions at present whether this drama could have had a different end from the one which we are witnessing, or whether the historical evolution that has been accomplished in the course of the last few months in Russia could have been avoided, or at least otherwise directed. Personally I believe it to have been unavoidable, but it could have unfurled itself with dignity, if the Crown had consented to concessions which would have taken nothing away from its greatness or importance, but which would on the contrary have lent to it a new lustre. In any case it would have been possible for autocracy to die, or better still, to live otherwise. No matter what reproaches could have been addressed to the Romanoffs in the past, no matter the injustices and the cruelties they had committed in the course of their family history, there is one thing which cannot be taken away from them, and that is that they have all of them been strong and courageous men, incapable of trembling before the attacks of any enemies, however powerful, or before the fury of a revolted mob. Nicholas II. was the first one among them who proved himself unable to inspire either love or hatred in his subjects, and for whom they held nothing but contempt, because they very quickly grasped the fact that he would never be able to give to himself or to others an account of the position he stood in, or to realise the tragedy of his own fate.
People who knew him well have wondered whether he ever understood what his duty really meant. I think, however, from the personal knowledge which I have of his character, that in a certain way he wished to do what was right, but I doubt whether he knew the responsibilities of his position, and the fact that he ought to put the interests of the State before those of his own family. For him his wife and children held the first place, and were the first objects of his consideration. This would have been a virtue in a private person, but it could easily assume the proportions of a crime in a sovereign.
Copyright, International Film Service, Inc. (Courtesy Seattle Times.)
THE FIRST BOLSHEVIKI CABINET
His father had left to him a splendid inheritance, which he might have kept intact with a little care, and very small trouble. Before the Japanese war it might have been still possible for him to rule his country autocratically, though not despotically; but after Moukhden and Tschousima, and especially after the revolution which followed upon these two catastrophes, and which would have been hardly possible, had they not occurred, the thing became more difficult, if not impossible, because the Russian nation had begun to wonder at the causes that had brought about these terrible disasters, the consequences of which had been the loss of Russian prestige in the Far East, and even in Europe. It would, however, still have been possible to save something out of the former form of government, if a serious and honest appeal had been made to the nation to help to consolidate its strength, and if an attempt had been made to modify it according to the exigencies of the times and of the moment. But after the famous day which saw rivers of blood flow in the streets of St. Petersburg, and the wholesale slaying of thousands of innocent workmen, whose only crime had consisted in wishing to lay their grievances before their Czar, every attempt to keep up the old order of things was bound to fail. Something else had to be tried to save the dynasty together with the country, but not the granting of a so-called Constitution, which it had been determined beforehand to leave a dead letter. If on the occasion I have just referred to, Nicholas II. had found sufficient courage to meet his people face to face, and to speak with them as his great grandfather had done on an occasion far more critical even than the ones which prevailed in 1905, it is likely that the divorce which finally separated him from his subjects would never have taken place. But he went to Tsarskoie Selo as soon as he heard there was likely to be trouble in his capital, forgetting everything else but his own personal safety, which, by the way, had never been seriously threatened. He proved himself to be a coward, and cowardice is the last thing which a nation forgives in those who rule it. The Czar lost in consequence of his conduct every prestige he had left. And he also lost the respect of Russia, owing to the shameless corruption which established itself everywhere during his reign, when at last everything under the sun could be bought or sold in the country, to begin with, a Court appointment, and to end with, the highest functions in the State. The Emperor was unable to refuse anything to those whom he liked, and he never grasped this essential fact, that when one gives too easily and without discernment, it inevitably follows that one also allows people to take what perhaps one would never have granted, had one thought about it.
Alexander III. had been just as generous as his son showed himself to be later on. But his generosity was only exercised in regard to what belonged to him personally, whilst no one was more careful than this sovereign of the public exchequer. He had seen what corruption meant during his own father’s reign, when abuses had also prevailed, which though in no way comparable to those that established themselves towards the close of the one which has come to an end a year ago, were still sufficiently grave and serious to cause anxiety to a Monarch eager and anxious for the welfare of his State. He therefore had applied himself to put an end to them, and knowing as he did, admirably well the character of the Russian nation, he took up morally the famous stick of Peter the Great, with which he dealt at times most severe blows to those whom he believed to be in need of them. The result of this system made itself felt within a very short time, and when Alexander III. died, the old custom of taking bribes, which had been formerly so prevalent in Russia, had nearly died out, or at least existed upon such a small scale that it could no longer do any harm. But under Nicholas II. the old evil was revived, and finding no obstacle in its path, it soon assumed most unheard of proportions, and became at last a regular institution. Soon everything in the vast Empire of the Czars was put up at public auction, everything could be purchased or sold, and everything became buyable, provided a sufficient price was offered for it. The Emperor knew nothing, and saw nothing, and no one dared to tell him anything, whilst many unscrupulous persons found it to their advantage to profit by the changes that had taken place to enrich themselves quickly and with very little trouble. The whole country was seized with a perfect fever of speculation, and with the frantic desire to win millions as rapidly as possible. When I say the whole country, this is not quite exact, because it was not the country, but only some people in it, who, thanks to the position which they occupied, or to their relations in influential circles, found themselves able to take a part in this general plundering. The Japanese war which was to have such a sad end, was entirely brought about through certain concessions being granted by the Russian government on the River Yalou which never belonged to the Russian State, to a number of persons who hoped to transform them into shareholders’ companies, and to make money out of them. They had bribed officials who persuaded the Emperor to sign the decree which was presented to him, of which he failed to see the importance or the meaning, or the strange light in which it put him, to distribute thus what he did not possess, and what had still to be taken away from the Japanese government before it could be disposed of. This war, one cannot sufficiently repeat it, was brought about willingly and knowingly, by people who saw in it an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of their fatherland, thanks to the ammunitions and provisions they would be able to deliver for the use of the army in the field, and which that army never got at all. The system of an organised plundering which in the present war has had such mournful and such tragical consequences, was then inaugurated with a success that went far beyond the most sanguine expectations of those who indulged in it. Huge fortunes were made in the space of a few months whilst our troops were in want of everything, and enduring cold, hunger and thirst. The Czar remained in utter ignorance of all that was being done in his name. He never suspected anything. But his people never forgave him for this indifference to its fate. One sees it to-day.
One wonders what was in the mind of this Sovereign, who having ascended the throne amidst so many sympathies, had contrived to lose them within the space of a few months! Did he ever realise the importance of the ocean of unpopularity which was submerging him slowly, and the waves of which were rising higher and higher, with each day that passed? One would like to know it now, when one tries to go back to the sources of the tragedy to which he has fallen a victim. Or was his character so shallow and so careless, that he only looked at the outside of things, and could not appreciate their real depth? He was of a very reticent nature and disposition, and rarely confided in any one, not even in his wife, whose inspiration and advice he was nevertheless to follow so blindly. And the tastes for solitude which he was to develop so strongly later on soon brought him to lead a kind of existence that can be compared only to that of the Mikado of Japan, before the reforms that were to change everything in that country.
That he was surrounded by flatterers goes without saying, but he could nevertheless have manifested some desire to learn the truth, and not have been so continually busy with the exclusive wish to maintain his own authority, which in spite of his efforts to the contrary, no one in the whole of Russia either respected or feared. All the concessions which politically were squeezed out of him, came too late, or else were accepted by him at the wrong time. Even when he seemed in the eyes of the public to be following the advice which was given to him by disinterested and honest persons, he tried in an underhand way to counteract the efficacy of the measures he had himself ordered to be taken, and whenever he resigned himself to the inevitable, he did not understand the reason why he was so doing.
With it all he was in some respects an intelligent man. He cared for good reading, for arts, for music, for all the things which help to make out of life a pleasant thing for irresponsible individuals. He was fond of study, very painstaking, but ignorant, and doing all that was required of him, in an almost automatic manner; kind, it is true, but incapable of coming to any serious resolution or determination of his own accord; devoid of political sense, occasionally most obstinate, and, unfortunately for him as well as for his country and dynasty, he had the misfortune in all the circumstances when a sacrifice of some fraction of his Imperial prerogatives came into question, not to be able to understand either his people or the times he was living in, and to have no thought for anything else but the safety of his own family, forgetting utterly that his country and its welfare ought to have come before them.
When he resigned himself to grant that shadow of a constitution, the advent of which was hailed with such enthusiasm by the whole of Russia, he might still, had he liked, have regained some part at least, of his lost popularity. His personal prestige, or rather that of the position he stood in, was still so great among the nation, that it would have felt gratitude toward him, for every favour he would have chosen to confer upon it, if only he had not taken back all that he had given, almost immediately after he had awarded it. It is quite certain that the first Duma committed many errors, but it should have been remembered that no human achievement can reach perfection at once; and the excitement and effervescence that had followed upon the opening of the first Russian Parliament ought to have been allowed to cool down, and been given sufficient time to make an honest trial of its rights and privileges. At the period I am referring to, and this notwithstanding all that was said to the contrary, a revolution like the one which took place the other day, would have been an impossible thing, because the Sovereign could still rely upon the army, and it would have been better for him had he always leant upon it rather than upon the low crowd of state functionaries with which he was exclusively surrounded and out of which his wife had picked her favourites. He might have checked the then rising tide of radicalism with which he found himself unable to cope later on, and in the strength of which he was to remain to the end mistaken, because he dreaded it when it was not dangerous, and imagined that he had subdued it, at the very moment when it had become, thanks to his own errors, and to his own faults, sufficiently strong to carry him away on its waves.
Such a thorough weakness of character was bound to bring about the most serious consequences, and these did not fail to produce themselves. If Nicholas II. had had beside him a wife able to lead him, to advise him, to open his eyes which perhaps he did not quite close, but which he was never to succeed in keeping sufficiently open, and to show him not only the perils which surrounded him (these she never forgot to point out to him in an exaggerated manner), but also to bring to his notice his duties towards his subjects, he might have become a Sovereign like any other, neither better nor worse, insignificant perhaps, but never really dangerous for his country or for his dynasty. Even if that wife he was so devoted to had wished not to identify herself with State affairs, had kept outside them, and not surrounded herself with people lost to every sense of shame, he might have come out of the numerous difficulties with which he found himself confronted, if not exactly to his honour and credit, at least without losing too much of his prestige. But Alexandra Feodorovna was the fatal and dissolving element which destroyed, thanks to her attitude and conduct, every scrap of respect for the Sovereign, and who inspired in the whole of the nation the desire to get rid of an authority in which it believed no longer, and in which it saw only an obstacle in the way of its development and of its historical evolution. The Empress understood even less than her husband the state of mind of his subjects; she raised between him and them a barrier which nothing could destroy, because it was made out of the contempt which they both inspired in the whole of Russia.
There is one curious thing contrasting with the facility with which Nicholas II. accepted the opinions of others, and with his total absence of personal initiative; and that is the persistence with which he maintained himself during the whole time that his reign lasted, in one line of conduct which never varied in regard to the determination to govern his country in a despotic sense, and which was the more singular that he never knew the meaning of real authority. He always kept listening to those who represented to him that the first duty of a Russian Emperor consisted in keeping up the prestige of the police before the mass of the citizens. Under no reign in Russia, if we except the dark period of the Opritschnikys under Ivan the Terrible, did the police play such an important part in public life, or become guilty of more abuses and of more malversations of every kind. I will not mention here the horrors which took place during and after the revolution of 1905, when no one felt secure against an anonymous denunciation, the consequences of which might be that one saw oneself exiled in Siberia, simply because one had not sufficiently bribed the police officer in charge of the district where one lived; but later on, even after things had calmed down, the might of what was called the Okhrana, remained just as formidable as it had been before. Literally no one could feel safe under this so-called liberal Czar, whilst under the reign of his father everybody possessed of a good and clear conscience could rest peacefully in the certitude that neither the security of his domicile or his personal safety would ever be threatened or infringed upon by the caprice of this secret power called by the vague name of “administration.”
But after all was he really liberal, this Czar who had so little known or understood how to endear himself to his subjects, or did he merely say that such was the case, in order to dissimulate despotic leanings which were the more dangerous that they exercised themselves without any judgment or without any justification for their explosion? A considerable number of persons have wondered about it, and have found themselves unable to solve this riddle. To hear him speak, one would have thought that such was the case, whilst it was hardly possible to talk with him for any length of time, without finding him a sympathetic, kind personality, curious mixture of totally different elements in a character that was chiefly remarkable for its weakness. One could like him, one could even admire some of the qualities which he undoubtedly possessed, but it was utterly impossible to respect in him the Monarch, or to esteem the man, so strange did his conduct sometimes appear, a conduct which finally dragged him into an abyss, together with his family and with his dynasty. Physically, he had a sad and kind face, affectionate and clear blue eyes, a charming voice, much affability in his manners; a wonderfully bright smile, reminding one of his mother’s, a most cordial manner of shaking hands that went straight to the heart and made one suspect a lot of things which in reality did not exist; a rapid and quick walk, a certain hesitation in his speech, and in the expression of his face at times; such was the man. Morally, he was possessed of honesty of purpose to such an extent that he could realise its absence in others; he had no will of any kind, but a good deal of obstinacy; principles which were always forgotten when they interposed themselves between his personal welfare and his duty; no sense of responsibility, but a very exalted opinion of his own rights, and especially of his might; the conviction that autocracy ought to be maintained at any cost, and simultaneously the sincere desire, during a short while, to govern according to the change of system to which he had been compelled to submit, more by the force of things and of events, than through his personal opinions; absolutely no consciousness of the great events with which he found himself mixed up, or of the wants of the country over which he ruled; no conception of the aims he ought to have had in view; no real sympathy for his people, but a vague wish to help them; an unacknowledged dread of finding himself thrown into any intimate contact with the mob, combined with the hope that this feeling would not be noticed by the public at large; far too much confidence in incapable advisers; an exaggerated mistrust of the persons courageous enough to tell him the truth, an absolute incapacity to resist bad influences; sometimes considerable dignity, and often useless haughtiness; a good deal of superstition combined with religion; a deep conviction that his own person was something so sacred that though it might come to be attacked and criticised, yet nobody would be daring enough to lay a sacrilegious hand upon it; a complete incapability of making any distinction between his friends and his foes, and such a persuasive manner that no one could ever contradict or resist him, so that the Revolution in which he lost his Crown must have surprised him to the extent of paralysing all his faculties of realising its importance and its extent; such was the Sovereign.