Chapter VIII: The Rule of Nicholas II

There never was a trustworthy intermediary between the isolated sovereign and his restive people. Many individuals there were whom he received and questioned from time to time, some of whom spoke with a directness, sincerity, and knowledge worthy of an ancient Hebrew prophet, but the message they delivered was not only resented and disregarded by the Tsar, but was also contradicted and neutralised by equally impressive statements volunteered by interested politicians or misinformed patriots. And Nicholas II., even if he had felt the desire, lacked the means of sifting the true from the false. The upshot was a gulf between the autocracy and the people nearly as broad and deep as that which sundered the Dalai Lama from his pious worshippers. An anecdote which, devoid of foundation in fact, is superlatively true as a presentment of the paralysis of volition from which he suffered, was current long before I ventured upon sketching his portrait in the _Quarterly_ and _National Reviews_. One day, the story ran, a nobleman of great experience and progressive tendencies was received in audience by the Tsar. He made the most of his opportunity, and laid before his sovereign the wretched state of the peasantry, the general unrest it was occasioning, and the urgent necessity of removing its proximate causes by modifying the political machinery of government. During this unwelcome _exposé_ the Emperor, whose urbanity and polish left nothing to be desired, nodded from time to time approvingly and repeated often, "I know. Yes, yes. You are right. Quite right." The nobleman when retiring felt morally certain that the monarch was at one with him on the subject. Immediately afterwards a great landowner, also a member of the nobility, was ushered in, who unfolded a very different tale. According to this authority things on the whole were progressing satisfactorily, the only drawback being the weakness and indulgence {121} of the authorities. "What is needed, sire, is an iron hand. The peasants must be kept in their place by force, otherwise they will usurp ours. To make way for them and treat them as though they were the masters of the country is a crime." During this discourse also Nicholas II. was attentive and appreciative, nodding and uttering the stereotyped phrases, "Yes, I know. You are right. Quite right." And the conservative, like the liberal, departed happy.

Then a side door opened and the empress entered looking grave. "You really must not go on Like this, Niki," she exclaimed. "It is not dignified. Remember you are an autocrat who should possess a will strong enough to stiffen a nation of a hundred and fifty millions." "But what is it that you find fault with, darling?" "Your want of resolution and of courage to express it. I have been listening to the conversations you have just had. Count X. whom you first received pleaded the cause of the disaffected. You assented to everything he advanced, telling him he was right, quite right. Then M. Y. was introduced who gave you an account of things as they really are, and you agreed with him in just the same way, saying, 'You are right. Quite right.' Well now, that attitude does not befit an autocrat. You must learn to have a will of your own and assert it." "You are right, dear, quite right," was the answer.

Friends and acquaintances of mine, men of various walks in life and divergent ways of thought, who had an opportunity of observing him, all missed in his nature diffusive sympathy with the sorrows and joys of men and women and the faculty of concentrating his intellect or his will on any object but that towards which his whole being was orientated. "I informed him of the lamentable state of the district," one of them said to me, "and drew a harrowing picture of men and women steeped in misery, racked with pain, but he only answered, 'Yes, I know, I know,' and bowed me out." Those words, "Yes, I know, I know," have figured as the _finis_ uttered by the Tsar at the close of History's Chapters on the Finnish Constitution, the Armenian Church and schools, the nationality of the Poles, {122} the Liberty of Conscience denied to his own people. "I know, I know!" If only he had realised what he claimed to know he might still be on the throne. Men, like trees, fall on their leaning side, and in the Tsar's case the leaning side was not an inclination to assuage human suffering, otherwise there would have been less misery during the great famine and far less bloodshed during his ill-starred reign. The unaffectedly heartless way in which he spoke of the awful catastrophe during his coronation, of the agonies of his people at the time of the famine and during the Manchurian campaign, and of the abortive revolution that followed it, seemed to indicate that he is deficient in the sensibility which characterises the average human being. A certain polish of kindliness marked his casual intercourse with people, but it is to be feared that it resembled the glitter of the gilt cross on the mouldering coffin.

And yet in his family relations he displayed qualities that would have done credit to any private citizen. He was an uncommonly dutiful son who interpreted filial respect as generously as the followers of Confucius, having in the early days of his reign frequently submitted not his will only but also his judgment to that of his august mother. A model husband, he left little undone to ensure the happiness of his imperial consort. A tender father, he literally adored his children with almost maternal fervour, and often magnanimously deprived himself of the keen pleasure which the discharge of the clerical duties of kingship confers in order to watch over his darling little grand duke and grand duchesses and to see that sunshine brightened their lives. What, for instance, could be more touching than the picture--which courtiers used to draw--of the dread autocrat of all the Russias anxiously superintending the details of the bathing of his little son, the Grand Duke Alexis, at the height of the diplomatic storm raised by the North Sea incident? What could be more idyllic than the pretty human weakness betokened by the joyful exclamation with which the great potentate suddenly interrupted Admiral Roshdjestvensky, who was making a report on the Baltic Squadron, "But are {123} you aware that he weighs 14 lb.?" "Who, your Majesty?" asked the admiral, his mind still entangled in questions of displacement, quick-firing guns, and other kindred matters.

"The heir to the throne," answered the happy father. Touches of nature like this offer a refreshing contrast to the Byzantine stiffness of the autocrat bending over his table and writing marginal glosses.

Nicholas II. was a man of destiny in the fullest sense of the word. Few monarchs known to history did more to transform the entire structure, political and economic, of society than he by pushing the conceptions underlying Tsarism to their extreme consequences. This, it must be added, was due largely to the circumstance that the reactions provoked by his qualities and defects among the revolutionists harmonised admirably with the diseased condition of the body politic. All the new solvent ideas fell upon grateful soil. His weakness of will contrasted painfully with his craving for strength and his endeavours to feign its attainment. Incapable of perseverance in personal conduct or of system in public policy, he was uncommonly obstinate in little things. Gradually, too, he lost much of the power of voluntary attention in which at the outset he had been nowise deficient. "Emotions which move the normal man profoundly touch him but lightly, and for a brief while, so that fitfulness is his substitute for steadiness, impulse for will, mood for strength of character. He thinks with the ideas of others, acts at their instigation or else by impulse, and likes them less for their qualities than for their manifest disposition towards himself. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to affirm that he is constant only in his inconstancy." Thus I wrote of him as long ago as May, 1905. "That ailment was aggravated by injudicious but well-meant efforts to cure it. A soft feminine voice, uttering loving words and bracing exhortations in the language of Shakespeare, stimulated him to endeavours which took a wrong direction. Had he possessed average intelligence even a Russian Agnes Sorel might, perhaps, have helped him to co-ordinate the scattered elements of volition and get him credit for political wisdom; without it {124} a Deianira could but operate with that Fate which she fondly fancies she is out-manœuvring."[1]

Like so many statesmen of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Nicholas II. appeared to be cause-blind. He failed to realise the nature of the nexus between cause and effect. The law of causality entering his mind was seemingly always refracted like a sunbeam striking the surface of the water. It changed its direction. It was in consequence of that defect that, while moving every lever to produce war, he was purblind to the approach of the conflict and deaf to the warnings of those who could see. The dispute with Japan was originally caused by his personal act of seizing his neighbour's property and believing he could placate the despoiled people by crying, "No offence intended!" Well-meaning at bottom, but logic-proof and mystical, he instinctively followed the example of the vampire which fans its victims while sucking their life blood. Under his predecessors Russia had grown and "thriven" in this way, and why should she not continue to grow in like manner under him? It was the old spirit of the predatory Tsarist State revived and embodied for the last time. So overweening was his confidence in his own prophetic vision that he was impervious to the arguments of the wisest of his responsible advisers, and risked the welfare of his subjects on the slender chance of his being a Moses to his people. And he resisted his ministers, not with the harmless swagger of a vainglorious youth, but with the calm settled presumption which medical psychologists describe as incurable. Like those Chinese Boxers who, believing their lives were charmed, smilingly stood up to the bullets of the Europeans, so Nicholas II. cheerfully exposed, not himself or his imperial house, but his people to a disaster which his second sight assured him could never come. For he started with a curious view of the autocracy. He firmly held that according to God's will he, the unique absolute ruler of modern times, should be at once the arbiter of peace and war throughout the globe and the keeper of the lives, the property, and the {125} souls of his people at home. And he acted up to this belief, which marked an advance on that of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Thus he took it for granted that as no foreign power would dare to attack Russia, peace depended on whether he would attack any foreign power. And as he was resolved not to declare war, he reasoned that peace was therefore secure during his lifetime. One difference between him and the Boxer is, that the Boxer risked only his own life, whereas Nicholas II. risked and lost those of hundreds of thousands of his people. And even a capable autocrat, were he never so wise, ought not to be invested with such tremendous power. The chasms between Russia and progress, between the peasantry and well-being, between the Empire and peace he never bridged nor attempted to bridge, but contented himself with a pious hope, a shadowy velleity, a vague irrational impulse. At bottom, however, the conception of the State entertained by Nicholas II. was the logical development of that of the founders of the Tsardom.

Over against him stood Witte, who was for long the power that bent every force, public and private, to collective ends and overthrew every obstacle in his way. He humoured the Tsar and his family only in secondary matters, and not always in these, but his manner, which he was incapable of adjusting to court exigencies, was resented by the Emperor and loathed by his consort. One of the characteristics of the imperial lady was a fatal predisposition to assimilate and exaggerate the likes and dislikes of the person she loved and to push them to extreme and sometimes perilous consequences. It was in virtue of this bias that she grew more orthodox than the Metropolitan Archbishop and more autocratic than her husband. To her religion was policy and autocracy was religion. She could not bear to miss the outward pomp and circumstance of either, and Witte's presence was comparable to that of the skeleton at the banquet.

For a long time the Emperor was assisted in the government by what I termed at the time a "boudoir council" consisting of his imperial consort, a number of grand dukes, a spiritist or two, and the favourite man of the moment. {126} Under Alexander III. the other members of the imperial family had been kept in their places. Nicholas II. allowed them a wide scope for activity, political, military, and commercial. Colouring their plans in the hues of his own dreams, presenting him with motives that appealed to his prejudices, they exerted an influence over him that was pernicious. Nor, until the disappearance of the minister Plehve, which created a void around him, did they ever seriously exert themselves to change his suicidal course. The Grand Duke Sergius, the governor-general of Moscow,[2] who was for a long while the Tsar's expert on religious matters, once proposed to abolish the Juridical Society of Moscow for its liberal tendencies, and when it was objected that its members were scrupulously observant of the laws, he answered, "That's exactly my point--they are for that very reason all the more dangerous to the State."

When Russia's unique statesman was dismissed, the Tsar hearkened to the soft voice from the boudoir. "Show them that you are a real monarch whose word is law. You have issued your commands, now see that they are executed. They taunt you with a weak will. Let them feel its force!" And Nicholas responded to the stimulus. For if he lacked the sensitive conscience which wakes the sinner up, he possessed certain of the virtues which lull to sleep, and foremost among them that languid sweetness which enables a husband to spend his life as though it were an endless honeymoon. And it is possibly to the qualities underlying this soft passivity--which the son of Priam combined with personal dash--that Nicholas owed his predilection for the society of women, priests, charlatans, and children, and his shyness of the society of strong honest men. Whenever these conflicting influences clashed, the results were unedifying.

One day a strike of students, professors, and public-school boys was declared against the prevalent educational system. The dowager empress on learning what had happened {127} counselled forbearance. But the boudoir council decided to have recourse to coercion. The minister sounded the rectors and deans, who told him that force would only do harm. But the inspiriting voices insisted, "Show them that you are a real monarch. People say you have no will. Let them feel its force.... Have you forgotten your motto, 'Are you anvil? Be enduring. Are you hammer? Smite with might'?" Then the autocrat bade his ministers use sternness and repression. "Expel the rebellious students; dismiss the mutinous professors; close the high schools; stop the salaries." And the behest was executed. Witte, as President of the Committee of Ministers, then recorded his opinion in writing to the effect that, as force is no argument, the authorities should be chary of using it. If the proposed measures were carried out, all Russia would be moved to its depths. Let the government, therefore, publicly sanction and adopt the professors' views. The advice was frank, forcible, timely. The Tsar read it and bridled up at the very first words. "It is a piece of bare-faced impudence," he exclaimed, "to commit such views to paper." And before the angry flash had gone from his cheeks, he had the whole question transferred from the competence of the Committee of Ministers over which Witte presided to the Council of the Ministers of which he made Count Solsky vice-president under himself. Events, however, showed that the minister was right and the boudoir council wrong. The students finally scored a brilliant victory and the monarch suffered an ignominious defeat.

In February, 1905, an unprecedented thing took place. The nation, expecting a ukase to supplement and enlarge that of the preceding December which had disillusioned all classes, was astonished to read a manifesto which ran counter to their anticipations and announced the vigorous continuation of the war. The ministers were indignant. Witte told me that morning that he could not believe it was the work of the Tsar, and before we separated I learned that it had been inspired by the Tsaritsa and drafted by Prince Putyatin and Shirinsky-Shikhmatoff--in a word, it was {128} a pronouncement of the boudoir cabinet which the Emperor had been prevailed upon to sign.

According to the fundamental laws of the Empire, never departed from since the eighteenth century, no imperial manifesto could be promulgated without the foreknowledge of the Senate. But this document was sent late at night to the official journal, the editor of which refused to publish it because it had not been laid before the Senate. He was bidden, however, to swallow his scruples and publish the manifesto. A few days later he was publicly reprimanded and privately thanked for having disobeyed the law.

The manifesto made short work of the Russian peoples' hopes at home and abroad. It announced that the principal war-aim of the Emperor was control of the Pacific, and it identified the liberty-loving people with the "evil-minded ringleaders of the revolutionary movement." Witte could hardly restrain himself that morning. When explaining to me the heinousness of the act he shouted and struck the table, vowed that he would vindicate the law and either have that manifesto withdrawn or else himself withdraw from public life. He then hurried to the railway station together with the other members of the Council of Ministers and before they had reached Tsarskoye Selo he had laid a plan for the realisation of his object.[3] He succeeded in checkmating the Tsar and obtaining the rescript he wanted. The Emperor, who had worded it insidiously in the belief that the ministers would quarrel over it, but was disappointed through Witte's tactics, signed it most reluctantly. "Never in my life," one of them afterwards remarked, "even were I to live a century, shall I forget that remarkable scene. It burned itself in my memory; the sudden freezing of the features of the Tsar, the convulsive quivering of the lips, the sickly smile alternating with the frown, and then his last look when he handed back the paper, and, as our peasants put it, 'with his eyes showed his teeth.'"

Thenceforth, a representative assembly was the only solution to the State problems that had arisen. Witte had {129} all along warned the Tsar frankly that unless certain concessions were made in time representative government would become a necessity; and that the representative principle, once officially recognised, the break up of the autocracy would follow as a matter of course. His advice was rejected, his prediction had come true, and on this occasion he deliberately voted for the representative principle. And when a colleague, in presence of the Tsar, remarked, "But, according to you, this move is incompatible with autocracy?" he answered, "Yes, I know it is, but it cannot be withheld any longer." What his Majesty thought on hearing these words was not recorded, but what he did will not soon be forgotten by those who witnessed it. That rescript, courtiers openly asserted, was the result of a ministerial revolt, a modern and humane substitute for a palace revolution. The Emperor presumably took this view for he never convoked the council again.

That same Friday evening the document was printed and published and people who, having read the reactionary manifesto in the morning, perused the liberal rescript in the evening, asked themselves whether the Empire was governed, like the Manichæan world, by a good principle and a bad. For it was now manifest that Nicholas II. was the nominal chief of two bodies moving in diametrically opposite directions: of the Council of Ministers in an outer chamber and of the boudoir council in an inner chamber; and that within the space of twenty-four hours he had first sanctioned the views of the one and then assented to the plans of the other. What was to be the outcome of it all?

From that moment onwards the autocrat struggled to free himself from the meshes of the net. Whether he felt humiliated by the successful strategy of his ministers, or was stimulated by the maxims of the boudoir council, is immaterial; important is the fact that he repented having signed the rescript and resolved to undo as far as possible what he had been constrained to do.

Thus the Emperor continually employed the governmental machine in such a way that the centrifugal tendencies {130} were fast snapping the links that kept class joined with class and nationality with nationality. The liberty-loving elements of the Tsardom were struck with the unsteadiness and irresolution of the government and the weakness of the State, and were heartened thereby to more vigorous efforts.

The Emperor's inability to govern might, perhaps, have passed unnoticed if he had allowed any man of intellect and will-power in his stead to grapple with the jarring elements. This, however, he refused to permit, while allotting to obscure soldiers and seamen, tricksters and money grabbers, an ever larger share of the supreme power to the detriment of the nation. The mental and moral impotency of this well-intentioned marplot, who cannot be said to have had even experience, despite ten years of uniform failure, became one of the commonplaces of conversation in town and country. Even the rough-and-ready droshky drivers said of him that he had been thrust among rulers like a pestle among spoons. Yet, apprised of his impotence by the boudoir council, he wished to will and act, and took velleity for the deed. No occurrence, no event, made a lasting impression on his mind. Abroad Russia's armies might be scattered, her ships sunk, her credit ruined; the Tsar was serene in spite of it all. At home the whole framework of society might be going to pieces, Nicholas sat still and fondly annotated State papers, a very Narcissus of the inkpot. In the Tsardom, whenever the political temperature grew too hot, the custom had for ages been to break the thermometer, not on any account to let in the cool air. And the Emperor kept to it religiously. The results now began to appear.

I wrote at the time, "The position is no longer endurable. The crisis can now end in one way only--in the disappearance of that system of absolutism the advantages of which I hoped--vainly hoped, alas!--to see rescued for the sake of the nation. At present the one question which to my thinking may still be profitably discussed is whether, while there is yet time, the autocrat will voluntarily dissociate the future of his dynasty from that of the autocracy. Will he cast his semi-divine privileges overboard in the storm to save his position in the Empire, and perhaps what he values even {131} more than his position? That is a matter which primarily, almost exclusively, concerns himself and his inspirers of the boudoir council, who still fancy that windmills may be turned with a hand-bellows. The other interested party, the nation, whose prisoner Nicholas II. may be truly said to be, has already chosen its route--the shortest road to the goal, and will travel along it resolutely. It is for those who advise and wish well to Nicholas to say whether he will desist from the policy of provocation now being pursued in his name. When the nation has been fully aroused it will be too late. And the time still left for reflection seems lamentably short.

"Argument and suasion have unhappily proved fruitless. To the one he is blind; he is deaf to the other. The belief is spreading that that is his misfortune, not his crime. Minister after minister warned him of the dangers fast gathering round him. "Yes, yes, I understand," was the evasive reply: and the well-meant intimation left as little trace in heart or brain as a drop of rain water on the back of a duck. His nobles petitioned him, his zemstvos memorialised him, every class, every profession and element of the population, besought him to reform the administration and admit the people to a share in the government. For a moment he appeared to listen, and then turned away. Almost every nation on the globe adjured him to put an end to the unprecedented horrors of a wanton war. Again he seemed to pay attention, but he soon moved aside and talked of something else. For the whole world is wrong and Nicholas alone is right. The individual who goes up to the clouds in an air-filled balloon does not see himself ascending, but only his fellow-men sinking away in to insignificance. This unnerved young man, completely shut off from the world and with hardly a peep-hole to look through, knows better what should and can be done there than the intellect of the people, the wisdom of the world. For he is buoyed up by the encouragement and admiration of the council of the boudoir. In his thirst for approval he dismissed several advisers and chose others; but the new ones repeated the warnings of their predecessors. He then appointed a council of ministers {132} in order to escape from the importunity of Witte, but his entire council as one man, not only offered him wholesome advice, but took care that he should adopt it. And now he convokes it no more. Who knows how far it might go? '_Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_.' His own relatives, the political grand dukes, have abandoned him. They suddenly stopped short in their onward course, wheeled round, and bowing respectfully to the liberals made their profession of faith. His own mother talked with him, exhorted and implored him to see things as they are. Then she too finally ranged herself on the side of the moderate reformers. This distinguished lady is now in favour of representative government, strongly sides with those who desire peace, and materially helped to obtain at least one instalment of justice to the Finns. She also sympathises with the down-trodden tribes of the Caucasus and regrets the spoliation of the Church property of the Armenians. It was largely due to her influence that Count Vorontseff Dashkoff has been appointed viceroy there in succession to the madcap Prince Galitzin. In a word she has made motherly love quite compatible with plain speaking and a policy of common sense."[4]

Von Plehve's tenure of office was rich in amazing developments, for there is no gainsaying the statesmanlike quality of his intellect, his German a-morality, or his susceptibility to all sorts of new impressions. The way in which he strove to solve the awkward problems to which the labour movement was imparting actuality was truly Machiavellian, and the unerring discrimination that revealed to him the value of a human instrument like Father Gapon bespoke a fine _flair_ and remarkable courage. But the conditions he found and had to accept as data hampered him considerably. Instinctively he felt that the State top must go on spinning to keep from falling, and he accordingly encouraged the Tsar in the policy of conquest that culminated in war with Japan. For Russia's whole ordering was adjusted to expansion by force. It was largely this and his passion for espionage that turned Witte against him and made them bitter enemies. I well remember seeing him killed. I described the murder {133} in the _Daily Telegraph_. On the historic day I was driving over the badly paved streets of Petersburg to the landing-place for steamers to meet a friend who was coming from Ireland to stay with me. My droshky was in the street leading to the Warsaw railway station when two men on bicycles glided past, followed by a closed carriage, which I recognised as that of the all-powerful minister. Suddenly the ground before me quivered, a tremendous sound as of thunder deafened me, the windows of the houses on both sides of the broad street rattled, and the glass of the panes was hurled on to the stone pavement. A dead horse, a pool of blood, fragments of a carriage, and a hole in the ground were parts of my rapid impressions. My driver was on his knees devoutly praying and saying that the end of the world had come. I got down from my seat and moved towards the hole, but a police officer ordered me back, and to my question replied that the minister Plehve had been blown to fragments. The man who materially contributed to condemn him to death, and who had the sentence thus effectively carried out, was the favourite spy of the government and member of the Social Revolutionary Council, Azeff. In truth it was a mad world.

Plehve's end was received with semi-public rejoicings. I met nobody who regretted his assassination or condemned the authors. This attitude towards crime, although by no means new, struck me as one of the most sinister features of the situation, and I gave expression to my apprehension of its consequences.[5] Far more surprising was the attitude of the government towards its own agent, Azeff, who conceived and concerted the misdeed and saw it carried out. This monster was allowed to remain in the government service, and even after he had the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergius, assassinated he was kept on, and his services were deemed to be invaluable and indispensable!

When Plehve had vanished, the Grand Duke Sergius {134} steered the ship of State, standing harsh and defiant behind the professional man at the wheel. He had just flung in the face of the people the accusation which, though resented as a calumny, was, in a restricted sense, true enough of many of the revolutionists, that they had sold their Tsar for Japanese gold.[6] And a few weeks later Sergius, like Plehve, was ruthlessly, criminally cut down in the height of his triumphant activity, the nation again looking on without disapproval and the government continuing to fee the chief assassin.

These deaths, which made a deep impression upon all Russia, left the Tsar undisturbed. Living and working apart from the currents of the time, he seemed impermeable to deep impressions. But the disappearance of those two counsellors left him conspicuously alone. They had no successors to share with him the moral burden. Skilful flatterers he had many, but no helpful friend. From motives which it would be impertinent to analyse, the few he had had left him for the time or definitely forsook him. The grand dukes withdrew from the partnership once so lucrative, now grown so dangerous, taking elaborate precautions to advertise the fact, _urbi et orbi_. Some of them pointed to the sickly figure of the Tsar and all but cried, "_Ecce homo_." Almost the first to go was the Grand Duke Vladimir, who after the massacre of Red Sunday defended himself in American and English journals. The responsibility for the shooting, he explained, was not his but that of Prince Vassilchikoff, who refused point-blank to obey the humane grand-ducal order to cease firing on the people, and refused with perfect impunity. Again, after the terrible death of Sergius, a London newspaper informed all whom it might concern of the political conversion of Vladimir, who "recognises that the worship of the idol of absolutism is a worse foe of the monarchy than anarchy itself."[7]

Next among the runaways from the sinking ship of autocracy was the ambitious Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch. This personage was the one nationalist member of the imperial family whose zeal burned for genuine Russian civilisation untouched by the contagion of Western culture. {135} He had just displayed his patriotic hatred of foreigners by organising a raid against their mercantile shipping, and showed his love of Russia by promoting the Yalu concession, which was to have enriched himself and weakened Japan. The political apostasy of this promising prince was perhaps the unkindest cut of all. For he owed many of the best things he possessed to the Tsar, while the Tsar was beholden to him only for some of the pernicious counsels he had received and of the evil counsellors he had trusted. Married to the sister of Nicholas II., the Grand Duke Alexander used and abused his great but precarious influence to recommend Bezobrazoff and Alexeyeff to his imperial brother-in-law who, caught in the lime of flattery, allowed these adventurers to ride rough-shod over Russia. He was the purveyor of political favourites to the monarch, one of whom was Admiral Alexeyeff.

This grand duke possessed the open sesame to his brother-in-law's affections and utilised it constantly. The Tsar was a frequent guest in Alexander's palace, where he would amuse himself for hours on end riding in a miniature train around one of the apartments. And in the intervals of this innocent fun shared by the children, he would assent to some important suggestion of the shrewd grand duke, who in this casual way managed to have a new ministry created for his behoof unknown to Witte, whom he hated undyingly. From the authorisation of the Yalu concession, Alexander Mikhailovitch expected to add millions to his annual income of 600,000 roubles. But after Plehve's death he became a liberal and bruited his conversion abroad. Russian newspapers were full of it, and even revolutionists were apprised of it. Happily he had a press organ of his own,[8] through which he pointed out to the world the fruits of his conversion.

Again, it was known that in his unregenerate days this illustrious personage hated the Jews as Saul of Tarsus had hated the Christians. But since the deaths of Plehve and Sergius he had his Damascus, and the scales having fallen from his eyes he found salvation. He was no longer a {136} militant anti-Semite. God having presumably made the Jews, the grand duke was willing thenceforth to let them pass for men of an inferior race.

But by far the most noteworthy sign of the times was the departure of the dowager empress herself from the camp of the absolutists, if one may describe thus clumsily her mild assent to counsels prompted by common sense, and her gentle but persevering disapproval of measures which, besides harming the nation, endangered the dynasty. Whether solicitude for her son or pity for the people supplied the motive is a matter of indifference to outsiders; the step was well warranted by both. This distinguished lady, whose inborn tact and _savoir faire_ often stood her instead of political foresight, now sorrowfully parted from her son and daughter-in-law at the first most critical moment in their lives. Such a step cannot have been taken with a light heart. Having journeyed together for more than a decade in the pursuit of a political will-o'-the-wisp, the elder of the two empresses, with experience to guide her, descried an abyss in front and cried, "Halt." And yet that was the road which she herself had so often exhorted her son never to swerve from! But her eyes had been opened; she had lost faith in the policy of putting spokes in the wheels of time. The beliefs on which the Tsardom reposed were crumbling away, and she then began to realise the fact. She felt that the institutions to which her son clung convulsively, as might a scared seaman to the heavy anchor of a sinking ship, would drag him down to the depths. And with the courage born of motherly love she warned him of the danger. But Cassandra's prophecies were not more vain or true. The siren's voice from the boudoir of the wife went straight to the husband's heart. Unhappily, the wife's exhortations were but the echoes of the son's neurotic visions. In her naïve dreams there was no place for prosaic fears, and her fond ambition was blind to obstacles and to consequences. It would be rash to criticise without knowing the order of considerations that moved the lady to turn a deaf ear to the voice of the dowager empress. But it is not easy to imagine any rational grounds on which her own {137} sister reasoning, advising, beseeching, should also have been put out of court without a hearing. The widowed Grand Duchess Sergius, whose vision long experience had sharpened, and whose motives had been chastened by severe suffering, sought over and over again to impress upon her crowned sister the fact that there are times when true conjugal affection is more effectually shown by judicious hindrance than by uncritical incentive.

Nicholas II., who rejected the promptings of reason, now began to be regarded by his people as the principal cause of their sufferings, the embodiment of a system that must at all costs be overthrown. Pobiedonostseff, without formally retiring, had done his work, and it remained only for history to label it. Witte, fretting and chafing against his forced inaction, gave a loose rein to his criticisms, ostentatiously connected his policy which had thus been baulked with widely operating economic laws and began to be identified with the aggressive desire of moderate liberals to work out the salvation of the country in spite of its crowned head. The dowager empress saw him occasionally and made praise-worthy attempts to bring her son and him together, but finally discovered that they were as fire and water. In one conversation she had with the statesman she admitted frankly that the aversion of the Emperor for his most eminent subject was invincible. Still his services were not wholly disdained. Whenever there was a very difficult or a dangerous task to be undertaken, Witte's name was invariably pronounced, and for his Tsar's and country's sake he was exhorted to undertake it. It was thus that he was chosen to carry on the negotiations with the Kaiser's government which ended in the hated Russo-German commercial treaty, to report on the needs of the peasants and recommend a series of reforms, and to repair to Portsmouth to conclude peace with the Japanese. Thus from time to time the two men worked together. For Witte, driven by boundless ambition, was generally ready to snatch at any chance of playing a prominent and useful part in the history of his country. When I pointed out to him--as I sometimes did--the difficulty I had to harmonise these acts of his with his {138} own words, he would return this answer, "You seem to forget that we live in Russia under an autocracy, and that I, who have so long been minister, cannot refuse any request made by the Tsar for my services, if I have reason to think that they would prove helpful to him or the country. The unwritten law, the traditions in which I have been brought up, and my conscience oblige me to respond to the call."

But Witte's counsel on political matters, although reinforced by events, was almost invariably rejected. The Tsar had other advisers who drew their political wisdom from the world of spirits, and to them he hearkened submissively. Two princesses whom I had known in their school-days, the French charlatan Philippe, and certain shadowy figures that flitted across one's field of vision, most of them to sink in oblivion immediately afterwards, were the intermediaries between the Supreme Being and his vicar on earth. For the grim realities around him he had no eyes. He ignored even the secret council held in Paris some months before[9] in which it was decided to unite a number of powerful Russian organisations and to get them to bring pressure to bear jointly on himself,[10] and to make the most of the indignation aroused in the land by the conduct of the Manchurian campaign and the cruelties committed by the authorities in dealing with the revolutionists. Congruously with this secret plan professional congresses were being held everywhere, a medical congress, a lawyers' congress, a congress of engineers, a teachers' congress, a peasants' congress, a postal congress, and, most important of all, a congress of railwaymen. These organisations represented to my thinking the forces that would eventually transform the political and economic ordering of the Tsardom. And I gave public expression to that conviction. Events confirmed this view. It was these leagues and the central league of leagues that brought about the general strike which forced the hand of the Tsar. Trepoff discerned the power and the future rôle of the leagues and prohibited them.

[1] Cf. _National Review_, May, 1905.

[2] I was first introduced to him by Princess (Lison) Trubetskoy, the friend of Gambetta. He offered me a high Russian order for the services I was supposed to have rendered to Orthodoxy as personified by the Metropolitan Archbishop. That was in the days of Alexander III.

[3] The story was related in detail in my article "The End of the Autocracy," _National Review_, May, 1905.

[4] Cf. _National Review_, May, 1905, pp. 440 fol.

[5] In the _National Review_, May, 1905, p. 420, I wrote: "In that connivance at lawless violence lurks a danger the insidiousness of which few people realise. Personally I fear that unless its progress be speedily stayed it may lead to the moral paralysis of the nation." Those words were penned thirteen years ago.

[6] The grand duke added "and English gold." In this he was mistaken.

[7] Cf. _Times_, 23rd March, 1905.

[8] Slovo.

[9] In October, 1904.

[10] The Finnish, Polish socialists and social revolutionaries entered into this league. The social democrats condemned it as preposterous.

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