Chapter VII: The Advent of Nicholas II

During the latter years of the tranquil reign of Alexander III. the drift of the Tsardom was manifestly in the direction of political change, but the course taken was mainly economic. Witte succeeded in introducing the gold standard which so many of his colleagues had declared impossible. Railways were rapidly being constructed, trade enlivened, and industries created and protected. The problems of wages, housing, and hygiene were openly mooted if not practically dealt with, and the standard of living for that section of the peasants which eked out their incomes from the land with the wages paid at the factory was rising fast, and the resentment of the many who had no resources but those which they drew from the soil sought passionate utterance in vain. Literature and journalism continued to radiate subdued heat as well as light, and the conduct of the international affairs of the nation was the stock text for the discreet strictures aimed at the State fabric. Publicists--I myself was at that time one of the fraternity--laid hold on every pretext and used all the skill they had acquired in the difficult art of writing forcibly between the lines to scatter the seeds of rebellion. And the seeds sank into the receptive minds of their readers to germinate with all the wildness and colour of Bakunin's ideas. In all this there was no attempt at limitation, at self-discipline, at what might be termed conservative reform. Even the oneness of the political organism with itself came in for no consideration--the centrifugal forces were fostered and strengthened, whenever and wherever possible, irrespective of the consequences.

Alexander III. was a physically sane, ethically upright, mentally shallow-brained man who behaved well according to his lights, which unhappily were dim and flickering. {107} Conscious of his mental limitations, he was honestly desirous of substituting the farthest reaching intellectual lights he could find for his own. But he chose in the main so badly that the mental element in the social organism was as warped as the ethical. When the tidings of his illness were flashed over the wires one might have distinguished, amid the excitement and curiosity of the nation, the stir of expanding human life and of wide interests that had ever been inarticulate.

I travelled to the Crimea to be near him, having been privately informed that he was seized with his last illness. Among my fellow-travellers in the train was the celebrated Father John of Cronstadt, a priest whom the irreligious described as a hypocritical knave and the pious revered as a latter-day saint. In spite of certain idiosyncrasies he had never separated himself from the Orthodox Church and he had conferred upon it the embarrassing privilege of having a worker of miracles in its fold. I had met him before in private houses, whither he had gone to pray and if possible to heal. He sometimes announced a cure and sometimes hinted at an approaching dissolution, but never laid claim to superhuman powers. So eagerly was he sought after that a female impresario arranged the order of his visits weeks in advance, and precedence was generally accorded to those who made the largest donations--for works of charity.[1] The Emperor had a lively faith in the holiness of the priest and invited him to the Crimea. There was, however, nothing mystical in the relations between the two, as there afterwards was between Nicholas II. and Philippe. At one of the railway stations the passengers left the train for their midday repast when a curious ceremony attracted my attention. John of Cronstadt, who occupied the head of the table and was surrounded by God-fearing ladies, took his dish of soup, blessed it, raised a spoonful to his lips, partook of it as though it were the communion, and handed the dish on to his neighbour. She reverently crossed herself, absorbed a {108} spoonful, and passed on the vessel. When it came to a certain Crimean landowner who was a good acquaintance of mine,[2] he took the plate and handed it to a fellow-passenger, but without tasting the contents. At this there was a loud murmur of indignation.

A day or two later Father John delivered a sermon, in Yalta to a great multitude, of which I was a unit. He said, "The Tsar is necessary to Russia, to Europe, to the world. He is the peacemaker of the human race. Therefore fear not that he will die. It is God's will that he should live. Be of good heart." After this the monarch lived ten days or a fortnight. I next heard the wonder-worker preach after the Emperor's death, also in the open air, and this is what he said: "God has called his illustrious servant away because you lacked faith. Had you believed that he would live when I announced it, your great Emperor would have been living and working among you to-day. Ye are people of little faith." As a matter of fact, the bulk of the people, moved though they undoubtedly were by the passing away of their semi-mythical chief, who had led as lonely a life as that of Dejoces the Mede, regarded the event with curiosity as to its political consequences rather than with genuine grief.

A short time before his death, the Princess Alix of Hesse, who was about to wed his son, arrived in Yalta. The exact date of her disembarkment may not have been known in advance, it certainly was not prepared for. Taken somewhat by surprise, and unprovided with ladies to wait on the princess, the court officials had the choice of various expedients by which to extricate themselves from the difficulty. It is characteristic of the a-morality of thought, unrelieved even by a workaday sense of propriety, that of all issues open to them they chose or rather invented the worst. In a fit of coarse humour, which to many may seem to epitomise the court, the country, and the decadent epoch, Prince Y. went out into the city and invited young ladies of Mrs. Warren's profession to come to the palace and wait {109} upon the future empress until ordinary tirewomen could relieve them of their unwonted duties. And it was these courtesans who received, dressed, and waited upon the lady who was afterwards to exercise such a blighting influence upon the nation into which she was about to be adopted. I saw two of these improvised maids enjoying the court sweets they had received from Prince Y. and his friends and criticising the palace arrangements. Years after--in the spring of 1913--meeting the prince at lunch in Petersburg, I reminded him of these extravagant freaks of his unregenerate days, but he still took pleasure in the recollection and asked me questions to freshen his memory.

Altogether, the beginnings of the public career of the imperial couple were marked with what superstitious Russians term sinister omens, like those of Richard II. of England, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette of France, and they were bruited abroad freely and interpreted by young and old from Riga to Astrakhan.

At the outset of his reign the young Tsar, who was believed by some of those who knew him best to be wholly wanting in that fellow-feeling for others which the Buddha makes the groundwork of all morality, gave a striking proof of his inaccessibility to human sorrow. Among the festivities that marked his coronation was a popular fête in which a Muscovite custom of olden days was partly revived. Food and sweets, a pocket handkerchief and an enamelled goblet with the imperial arms were offered by the monarchs to all their subjects who should come at the time fixed. Merry-go-rounds, theatres, booths, various entertainments, and bands were provided on a generous scale. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, artisans, and mendicants from near and far flocked to the ancient capital to enjoy the national holiday. By nightfall on the eve the approaches were blocked to the vast field of Khodynka--the scene chosen by the authorities--and for miles the pressure of the throng was tremendous. In singing, shouting, jesting, and horseplay the cool May night was spent. At first waggon after waggon laden with food passed through the dense gathering, provoking screams, {110} yells, and hurrahs, the people surging and jostling each other in order to make way; now and again a Cossack or a gendarme came dashing along on horseback frightening, maiming, or killing some of the weary watchers, for the crowd grew denser and more compact as night wore into morning. By sunrise the pressure at the entrances was become formidable, but the gendarmes and Cossacks contrived to keep back the people until the early afternoon when the imperial couple took their places on the stand. The military band struck up the National Anthem and selections from the well-known opera, _Life for the Tsar_. While half a million voices acclaimed the young autocrat of Holy Russia and his consort the police threw open the entrances which were arranged to admit at the turnstiles one person after another. But the swaying and surging human sea swept away some of the barriers and burst into the enclosure, wave dashing against wave, breaking into bloody froth and foam, amid soul-searing shrieks, agonising cries, and the joyous strains of the military music. Soon the ground was strewn with several thousand mangled corpses. A battlefield it seemed to the elder officers, a pandemonium to the masses. The number of persons killed, crushed, trampled, smothered, never accurately ascertained, was variously estimated at three, five, seven thousand.[3] I was requested by the censor either to abstain from commenting on the "deplorable incident" or else to paraphrase the official account without additions. I did neither.

The Tsar was severely blamed in secret for allowing the festivities to continue in face of this disaster. But he seemed incapable of realising the depth and force of public opinion otherwise than by notional assent. Anyhow, the next day[4] he entertained 432 guests to dinner, and the day after the Grand Duke Sergius gave a gorgeous entertainment, which was followed on the 21st by the ball of the nobles and then by a dinner offered by the British ambassador, and so on {111} till the end of the programme. It is affirmed, on good authority, that when the review took place, exactly a week after this terrible mishap and on the same field, and the 'quality' foregathered for pigeon shooting, royalties, grand dukes, princes native and foreign, luminaries of diplomacy, and gallant warriors who had come to amuse themselves were pained and angered to note that the dead were still lying side by side along the barricades or were being carted away to improvised graves, and the odour emitted by the corpses could hardly be supported. As for the inarticulate masses, they went their own way, drawing from their stores of superstitious lore the standards by which to interpret these untoward occurrences. The heavy loss of human life they construed as an evil omen presaging a terrible end to a reign that had such a sinister beginning, and the shooting of the pigeons, a week later imparted to what after all might have been but a mere accident the character of a deliberately malignant crime. For few Russians have the heart and fewer still the sacrilegious daring to harm pigeons, many regarding them as sacred birds, while some have a vague belief that they are the souls of erring Christians. On this very occasion I heard two mooshiks and their women folk debate the whole subject with animation and pathos on lines recognised by the bulk of the nation, and one of them closed the discussion with this sweeping dictum: "Say what you like, those heathen devils slew their bodies last week and are trying to kill their souls to-day. The devils!"

To the diplomatic representative of one of the great powers the Tsar in the course of conversation mentioned the matter casually, but with an expression of regret, whereupon the ambassador, assuming that Nicholas II. was deeply moved by the disaster and might be tranquillised by historical comparisons, assured his imperial interlocutor that accidents of this painful nature are almost unavoidable at such national festivities especially if popular enthusiasm and loyalty are exceptionally fervid and run wild. "It was just the same," he blandly remarked, "during the festivities that accompanied the crowning of Louis XVI. Your Majesty {112} may remember the details. And as you know, the _contretemps_ was soon forgotten. The population idolised the young monarch, their joy was excessive, and in manifesting it a number of loyal people lost their lives. No importance attaches to such happenings. They are cloudlets that vanish almost before they are perceived. Who to-day even among historians dwells for a moment on that regrettable accident? Altogether there is a great resemblance between the opening days of Louis' reign and those of Nicholas II. In fact, ..." but Nicholas II. cut him short.

In the salons of the day, particularly in that of the accomplished Countess Levashoff, the solace offered by this Job's comforter was as much the subject of caustic comment as the shortsightedness of the authorities who were responsible for the accident that had elicited it. The countess, who knew the youthful Tsar intimately and saw him at close quarters during those strenuous days when amusement was become an irksome task, told me at the time that so far as she could judge he was more concerned about the effect which the narrative would have upon others than about the misery caused to the families of his ill-starred subjects.

The reign of Nicholas II. is largely the resultant of the clashing of two forces: one which had its origin in the new spirit of the age and was to some extent represented by Witte, who stood for steady progress of every kind compatible with the political system; and the other emanating from the historic past and personified by the men behind the Tsar, whose paltry expedients generally proceeded from bottomless ignorance and were often divorced from judgment and patriotism. Witte was a commanding spirit who made himself for a time--

"what Nature destined him,
The pause, the central point of thousand thousands."

He fascinated those who knew him intimately, and he fascinated them by his typically Russian qualities and defects, the fellow-feeling, the ready pity for suffering, the humane equalising touch, the union of contrasts, the suddenness with which his moods, and sometimes even his opinions, alternated, {113} touching one extreme at this moment and its opposite at the next. But he attracted and commanded still more through the medium of judgment by his lucidity of vision, by his capacity of surveying a subject all round, not only in the smallest details of its internal properties, but also in its external bearings. Above all he impressed those who had to do with him by a permanent substratum of tendency amid all the changes, by the existence of certain fixed points, by currents set in one and the same direction. He could be relied upon within certain definable limits. For instance, his striving to safeguard peace was a factor that never changed. This limited constancy is a trait he may have inherited from his Dutch ancestors.

Witte long had the feeling that the social and political molecules of which the Tsardom was composed, and which were ever forming and re-forming themselves into fleeting shapes, might be attracted and held permanently together by the central force of a grandiose economic transformation and the interests which that would create and foster, seconded by educational influences properly systematised. The resolution taken early in his ministerial career to effect this transfiguration offers a clue to his policy. He was one of the few originating statesmen ever possessed by Russia, and since Peter's day he was unquestionably the greatest.

From the first he was disliked by the shy, secretive, polished young man who, having inherited together with the Empire the administration appointed by his father, was willing to follow his mother's advice and retain it. But Nicholas II. could not for long hit it off with Witte, who when they disagreed upon really momentous issues was as unyielding as the granite. The minister's defects, it must be admitted, were exactly of the kind that must chafe and ruffle a man like the Tsar. When discussing a question that moved him, for example, the minister would sometimes allow emphasis to degenerate into vehemence, reinforce his arguments with resonant blows of his fist on the table, and raise his voice till it could be heard in the adjoining room--tactics that a man of the Emperor's temperament could not brook.

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While it would be a gross exaggeration to saddle Nicholas II. with the sole responsibility for the dissolution of the regime and the ruin of Russia, it is fair to say that no man contributed so materially to bring them about as this shallow, weak-willed, shifty creature. It was impossible to trust him either to redeem his word, to stand by the minister who acted on it, or even to refrain from intriguing against his own responsible agents for the purpose of undoing the work which he and they had undertaken and achieved conjointly. In affairs of State, as in private life, faithlessness was the trait that vitiated his best actions and aggravated his worst. As the crowned head of a parliamentary state like Belgium or Italy, Nicholas II. might have had his defects neutralised. But alone to preside over the destinies of a mighty Empire was impossible without revealing the fact that he was among the least fitted men in his dominions. What made matters worse was his complete unconsciousness of his unfitness. That it was which engendered the danger that always hung over Russia at home and over Russia's peaceful neighbours abroad. Deep-rooted faith in his own ability, which increased immeasurably towards the close of his reign, prompted him to shun the very few men whose statesmanship might have shielded his people from the worst consequences of his faults and moved him to choose officials or rank outsiders whose only qualification was their willingness to serve as passive tools in his unsteady hands. Consequently his selection of ministers and of favourites--for he employed them both--was deplorable.

And yet in spite of the scandalous way in which the country was misruled, Nicholas II. long escaped the harsh criticisms of which his father from the outset of his reign had been the butt. During the first ten years of his life a most flattering portrait of him was current in the non-Russian world. He was depicted as a prince of peace, a Slav Messiah sent for the salvation, not of his own people only, but of the whole human race. Passionate love of humanity and selfless devotion to the good and the true were among the qualities universally predicated of him. And so deep {115} rooted was this conviction throughout Europe and America that when I published my portrait of the Tsar in the _Quarterly Review_[5]--for which a Russian official of rank privately accepted responsibility in order to safeguard an eminent statesman and myself--it provoked an outburst of righteous wrath among respectable people of all classes of the population of Britain, but more especially among nationalists and conservatives there. It was set down as a gross caricature, untruthful, and politically mischievous.

When he ascended the throne Nicholas II. was still his mother's darling, passivity his predominant mental feature, and diffidence one of its transient symptoms. That phase of his career, however, was brief and the change from the chrysalis to the butterfly rapid. At the first audience he accorded the Council of the Empire, which met to do him homage, he exhibited his early manner. The assembly was composed of venerable dignitaries of the Empire, their bodies embellished with gorgeous uniforms and their faces wreathed in courtly smiles. They were eager to behold the imperial majesty that hedgeth kings encircling him whose father and grandfather many of them had served. What they actually observed was childish constraint, a shambling gait, a furtive glance, and spasmodic movements. An under-sized, pithless lad sidled into the apartment in which these hoary dignitaries were respectfully awaiting him. With downcast eyes and in a shrill falsetto voice he hastily blurted out a single sentence, "Gentlemen, in the name of my late father I thank you for your services," hesitated for a second, and then turning on his heels was gone. They looked at each other, some in amazement, many uttering a mental prayer for the weal of the country; and after an awkward pause, dispersed to their homes.

The nation's next vicarious meeting with the Tsar took place a few days later upon an occasion as solemn as the first; but in the interval he had been hypnotised by M. Pobiedonostseff, the lay-bishop of autocracy, who had the secret of spiritually anointing and intellectually equipping the chosen of the Lord. The keynote of the Emperor's {116} second appearance was haughtiness, the nearest approach he could make to dignity. All Russia had then gathered together in the persons of the representatives of the zemstvos--we may call them embryonic county councils--to do homage to his Majesty on his accession to the throne. Loyal addresses without number, some drawn up in the flowery language of oriental obsequiousness, others plain spoken and ominous, had been presented from all those institutions. One of these documents--and only one--had seemed to M. Pobiedonostseff to smack of liberalism. No less loyal in form or spirit than those of the other boards, the address drawn up by the council of Tver vaguely expressed the modest hope that his Majesty's confidence might not be wholly restricted to the bureaucracy, but would likewise be extended to the Russian people and to the zemstvos, whose devotion to the throne was proverbial. This was a reasonable wish; it could not seriously be dubbed a crime; and even if it bespoke a certain spirit of mild independence, it was after all the act of a single zemstvo, whereas the men who had come to do homage to the Emperor were the spokesmen, not of one zemstvo, but of all Russia. Yet the autocrat strutted pompously into the brilliantly lighted hall, and with knitted brows and tightly drawn lips turned wrathfully upon the chosen men of the nation, and stamping his little foot ordered them to put away such chimerical notions which he would never entertain.

Between those two public appearances of Nicholas II. lay that short period of suggestion during which the impressionable youth had been made not so much to believe as to feel that he was God's lieutenant, the earthly counterpart of his divine master. From that time forward he was filled with a spirit of self-exaltation which went on gaining strength in accordance with the psychological law that pride usurps as much space as servility is ready to yield. Nikolai Alexandrovitch soon began to look upon himself as the centre of the world, the peacemaker of mankind, the torch-bearer of civilisation among the "yellow" and other "barbarous" races, and the dispenser of almost every blessing to his own happy people. Taking seriously this his imaginary mission, {117} he meddled continuously and directly in many affairs of State, domestic and foreign, unwittingly thwarting the course of justice, undermining legality, impoverishing his subjects, boasting his fervent love of peace and plunging his tax-burdened people into the horrors of sanguinary and needless wars.

The dowager empress kept her imperial son in leading strings for a considerable time after the death of her consort and seconded the efforts of Pobiedonostseff to impress upon him the necessity of following in the footsteps of his "never-to-be-forgotten father." That phrase often and piously reiterated came to possess a sacramental virtue which he could not resist, and it is a pathological fact that he strove earnestly to copy Alexander III. until at last he believed he had succeeded. In truth the two men were as far asunder in moral character as in physique. Alexander, sincere, gloomy, mistrustful, and narrow-minded, felt his limitations and never ventured out beyond his depth. And he endeavoured honestly to secure the services of the best men among those who entered his narrow circle of acquaintances. Moreover, when he had chosen an adviser, he stuck to him, asked his advice, and never rejected it without good reason. Lastly, anything that smacked of perfidy, of disloyalty, of guile, was an abomination in his sight and he never forgave the guilty one. His word was better than a bond. And yet it is a curious characteristic of the country and the people that even he with his uprightness and probity violated the covenant of his house with Finland and broke his own promise in regard to Batoum. But Nicholas II. was the opposite to his father. Unsteady, self-complacent, callous, fickle, and polished, he changed his favourites and his principles with his fitful moods, lacked moral courage, intrigued against his chosen counsellors, mistook his own interests for those of the nation, and imagined himself the autocrat of a hundred and eighty millions.

In the year 1904 I was struck with his predilection for adventurers of the Cagliostro type, and I expressed regret that he should allow "a band of casual, obscure, and dangerous men to usurp the functions of his responsible ministers whose {118} recommendations are ignored and whose warnings are disregarded.... Every candidate for imperial favour whom the grand dukes present is a specialist who promises to realise the momentary desires of the Tsar. Thus M. Philippe, the spiritualist who appeared during the Emperor's illness in Yalta, promised him a son and heir and was therefore received with open arms. As time passed and the hopes which the adventurer raised were not fulfilled, the canonisation of St. Seraphim was suggested by a pious grand duke and a sceptical abbot because among the feats said to have been achieved by this holy man was the miraculous bestowal of children upon barren women."[6]

After the assassination of his second favourite, Sipyaghin, his choice fell upon Plehve for the post of Minister of the Interior. Plehve was the official whose self-possession on the assassination of Alexander II. had strongly impressed all who witnessed it. This man, probably the cleverest of all who were within the Emperor's reach, became virtual dictator of the Empire and one of the most efficient instruments of fate for pushing the autocracy into the abyss. Well-informed, conversant with the seamy side of human nature, cool-headed, and calculating, Plehve knew how to touch the right chords of sentiment, prejudice, or passion when moving large bodies of men, and could keep his head in the most alarming crisis. He was one of those successful bureaucrats whom it would be impossible to classify by nationality, genealogy, church, or even party. Of obscure parentage, of German blood with a Jewish strain, of uncertain religious denomination, his ethical worth had been weighed and found wanting by his own easy-going colleagues long before.

Soon after he had entered on the duties of his new office, a number of peasants of the Ukraine provinces of Kharkoff and Poltava showed signs of discontent with their miserable condition. Although spontaneous and local, the outburst was dealt with severely and the peasants flogged by the provincial authorities without instructions from the capital. Plehve visited the disaffected places, promptly rewarded {119} the Governor of Kharkoff for having the malcontents flogged at once,[7] and punished the Governor of Poltava for having them flogged only as an afterthought. The minister soon became the most powerful official in the Empire, a sort of grand vizier whose power was unlimited, but was held at the pleasure of an absolute and changeful master. He applied in the spirit of German method the principles propounded by Pobiedonostseff, and among the concrete results were pogroms of the Jews, the spoliation of Armenians, the persecution of Poles and Ruthenians, the exile of liberal-minded nobles, the flogging of peasants, the reorganisation of espionage with the notorious Azeff as its moving spirit.

These and other men turned the Tsar's head by their endless panegyrics. They invented for him a lofty mission and feigned to admire the masterly way in which he was fulfilling it. Being the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and therefore a Christian, he could not be deified without blasphemy, but between humanity and divinity he became a _tertium quid_. And they venerated him accordingly, anticipating his wishes, and colouring facts to suit his fancies, for while he could appreciate effects his faculty of discerning their relations to causes was almost atrophied. He operated with phantoms, fought against windmills, conversed with saints, and consulted the dead. He employed the vast power of which he was the repository to grind down over a hundred million men at home in order to obtain the means of killing or wounding hundreds of thousands abroad. Of the psychology of foreign nations and of his own he lacked rudimentary knowledge, and international politics was a region of darkness in which he groped his way to ruin. When Witte and two other ministers besought him to redeem his pledge, evacuate Manchuria and save the land from the horrors of war, he returned this answer: "I will keep peace and my own counsel as well." To one of the grand dukes who, on the day before the rupture with Japan, hinted at the possibility of war, the Emperor said: "Leave that to me. Japan will never fight. My reign will be an era of peace throughout."

[1] My friend Leskoff entertained the deepest contempt for John of Cronstadt and read me a tremendous attack on him wrapped up in literary form. Part of it appeared later in the _Messenger of Europe_.

[2] His name, Blaramberg, is well known throughout Russia for he was also a musical composer.

[3] The number has never been correctly announced. I was told at the time by the Moscow authorities--I was present at all the festivities--that it was a little over four thousand.

[4] 19th May.

[5] July, 1904. I continued the article in the _National Review_.

[6] _Quarterly Review_, July, 1904.

[7] Prince Obolensky, the governor, received a star from the Emperor for his energy. Some of the peasants he had flogged are said to have died in consequence of their punishment.

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