PART 4:THE FALL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Edmund A. Walsh
The Fall of the Russian Empire
CHAPTER VII

THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY

THE insane Protopopov, Minister of the Interior, seized upon the death of Rasputin to increase his influence and consolidate his position with the Tzarina. He announced that the spirit of the martyred prophet had descended upon him; he had visions and went into ecstasy in public; at times, when conversing with the Empress, he would suddenly pause and point dramatically to the empty space behind her, saying that Rasputin was there hovering over them. At other times he would see Christ blessing the Empress and confirming her political wisdom.

But this riot of fantasy, this coinage of a disordered brain, did not impair the exercise of a shrewd wit. It is said that he had his agents compose letters of a flattering nature and mail them from different parts of Russia to the Empress. In these forged epistles the writers, simulating the style and that common errors of peasants, praised the Empress for her devotion to a holy cause and exhorted her to stand fast in her policy.

The die was cast. In the Duma, Milyukov and his colleagues continued to denounce the impossible regime. Within three months from the death of Rasputin the red flag of revolt was seen in the streets of Petrograd. More ominous still, rioting began before the food shops. "An empty stomach has no ears," runs an ancient Russian proverb. An epidemic of madness descended upon the Government. Protopopov, in the final frenzy of reactionary bureaucracy, retaliated with all the apparatus of governmental suppression. Machine guns were mounted on the roofs and at the street corners of Petrograd. On March 8 there was a monster demonstration in the streets, and Protopopov's soldier fired into the crowd. The mobs, in reprisal, murdered every police official that fell into their hands. On March 11 that Emperor, absent at the General Headquarters of the army at Mohilev, attempted to dissolve the Duma. But the Duma refused to be dissolved. By this time the situation in Petrograd was so out of hand that Rodzianko, President of the Duma, wired the Emperor as follows:

The position is serious. There is anarchy in the capital. The Government is paralyzed. The transportation of fuel and food is completely disorganized. The general dissatisfaction grows. Disorderly firing takes place in the streets. A person trusted by the country must be charged immediately to form a ministry.

No answer from Mohilev. The letters of the Tzarina, with their scorn of the growing popular outcry against a corrupt and inefficient government, had blinded the judgment and paralyzed the will of her uxorious consort. One generous gesture might have saved Russia and changed the course of history. On March 12, Rodzianko sent a second telegram:

The position is getting worse. Measures must be taken at once, because tomorrow will be too late. The last hour has struck, and the fate of the fatherland and of the dynasty is being decided.

The same day, toward noon, the Tzar's only brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, telephoned from Petrograd that the formation of a new government meriting the confidence of the country was imperative and should be granted at once. By way of reply the Czar instructed General Alexeiev to thank the Grand Duke for his advice, but to say that he himself was quite capable of deciding what was to be done. On the heels of this fraternal warning a telegram arrived from Prince Golitsyn, President of the Council of Ministers, identical in tone with the message of the Grand Duke. The Emperor's reply took the form of an order to send fresh troops to Petrograd to stop the rioting.

Immediately after these significant events, and before definitely answering Prince Golitsyn, the Emperor spoke for more than one hour with someone over a private telephone. Now, there were two direct lines from General Headquarters, one connecting with Petrograd, the other with the Tzarina at Tsarskoe Selo. On finishing the protracted conversation with his unseen confidential counselor, Nicholas prepared a peremptory telegram in answer to Prince Golitsyn in which he informed the President of the Council that absolutely no modification could be made in the existing government. The telegram ended by ordering the immediate suppression—in the usual way—of all revolutionary movements and revolts among the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison. As this answer was sent by telegram to Petrograd, it is reasonably clear that the Emperor had not been speaking, just before, on the direct line to the capital. Otherwise the telegram was superfluous. The generals surrounding the Emperor concluded—and so must posterity—that Nicholas held that most important conversation, his last state council, with the Czarina.

But Nicholas soon began to show apprehension, which was aggravated by a telegram from the Empress, at Csarskoe Selo. She now wired that concessions were inevitable. For the first time she, too, began to see the end. Too late! The Czar, on March 13, attempted to reach Csarskoe Selo by train, but revolting troops sidetracked the imperial car and diverted it across country to Pskov. Late in the night March 14, Nicholas established telephonic communication with Rodzianko and began to speak of concessions. But Rodzianko at the other end of the line, with tumultuous shouts from the streets proclaiming the revolt of each successive regiment as it went over to the Revolution, replied: "It is too late to talk concessions; it is time to abdicate." By evening of the following day, March 15, two delegates of the Duma, Gutchkov and Shulgin, arrived at Pskov, and in the Emperor's private car announced to him the irrevocable will of the people. The Emperor, bowing his head, murmured, "I have been deceived," and signed the abdication.

The historic document was signed by the Czar in pencil, between eleven and twelve o'clock on the night of March 15, 1917.

When we had read and approved the formula [Shulgin testifies] it seems to me that we shook hands . . . but at that moment I was undoubtedly very much moved and I may be wrong. I remember that when I looked at my watch for the last time it was ten minutes before midnight. This scene of supreme importance, therefore, took place between eleven and twelve o'clock in the nigh of the 2/15 to the 3/16 March.(1)

We then took leave. It seemed to me that on neither side was there any ill feeling. For my part, I felt an immense pity for the man who had just bought back, with a single act, his past faults. The Czar was in full control of himself, friendly rather than cold.

We had agreed with General Russky that there should be two copies of the Act signed by the Emperor, for we feared lest, in the troubled times through which we were passing, the document we bore should be lost. One copy was kept by the General; we kept the other. As I have said, the signature of the Czar was in pencil while the Lord Chamberlain [Count Frederiks] countersigned in ink.

It is of importance to note that Nicholas named as successor to the throne, not his son, the Tzarevitch, but his own brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. It was, in point of fact, a double abdication.

That very day, before the arrival of the Duma delegates, he summoned into his presence Professor Feodorov, one of his personal physicians:—

"Tell me frankly, Serge Petrovich, is Alexis's malady incurable?"

Realizing the import of the question, Feodorov answered, "Science teaches us, sire, that it is an incurable disease. Yet those who are afflicted with it sometimes reach an advanced old age. Still, Alexis Nikolaievich is at the mercy of an accident."

The Czar hung his head and sadly murmured, "That is just what the Czarina told me. Well, if that is the case and Alexis can never serve his country as I should like him to do, we have the right to keep him ourselves."

He then composed the text, which ran as follows:

By the Grace of God, We, Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russia's, Czar of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc., etc., make known to all our loyal subjects:—

In the days of the great struggle with the external enemy who for the last three years has been striving to enslave our country, it has pleased God to send to Russia a new and painful trial. Internal troubles threaten to have a fatal effect on the outcome of this hard-fought war. The destinies of Russia, the honor of our heroic army, the happiness of the people, the whole future of our dear country demand that at any cost the war should be carried to a victorious close.

Our bitter enemy has shot his bolt and the moment is near when our valiant army, in concert with our glorious allies, will finally crush him.

In these days that mean so much for the life of Russia we have thought our conscience compelled us to make easy for our people a close union and organization of all its forces for the rapid realization of victory.

That is why, in full accord with the Duma of the Empire, we have judged it well to abdicate the Crown and put off the supreme power.

Not wishing to part from our beloved son, we bequeath the heritage to our brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. Blessing him on his accession to the throne, we adjure our brother to rule in affairs of State in full and unbroken harmony with the representatives of the people in the legislative institutions, on principles which they shall determine, and to take an inviolable oath to this effect, in the name of our dearly beloved country.

We call upon all faithful sons of the fatherland to fulfill the sacred duty to it by obeying the Czar in this grave time of national trial, and to help him, along with the representatives of the people to lead the Russian State on to the path of victory, prosperity, an glory.

May the Lord God help Russia.

(Signed) Nicholas

"The document was a fine and noble composition," says Shulgin, who received it from the Emperor's hand. "I was ashamed of the draft we had scribbled hastily on our way."

Milyukov had already announced the forthcoming abdication to throngs collected in the Tauride Palace. "The power will pass to the Regent. The despot who has brought Russia to complete ruin will either abdicate or be deposed. That power will be transferred to the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. Alexis will be the heir to the throne."

A shout went up: "It is the old dynasty !"

Sensing the popular mind, the leaders of the Revolution took steps to prevent the news of the Czar's abdication in favor of Michael from reaching the public. An all night session was held, Milyukov alone defending the succession of the Grand Duke; all others opposed. Shortly before dawn, Alexander Kerensky rang up the apartment of the Grand Duke on the telephone and begged him to make no decision or announcement until a deputation should wait on him.

At ten next morning Kerensky, Prince Lvov, Milyukov and Rodzianko waited on the Grand Duke to convey to him the opinion of the majority. Milyukov again dissented and delivered a lecture lasting over one hour. During his peroration, Shulgin and Gutchkov arrived from Pskov with full details of the abdication. Gutchkov supported Milyukov, and the cause of monarchy revived. But after a wearisome debate and signs of frayed nerves, the Grand Duke decided to decline the dangerous dignity. On March 16 he issued his manifesto:

A heavy burden has been laid on me by the will of my brother, who, in a time of unexampled strife and popular tumult, has transferred to me the imperial throne of Russia. Sharing with the people the thought that the good of the country should stand before everything else, I have firmly decided that I will accept power only if that is the will of our great people, who must by universal suffrage elect their representatives to a Constituent Assembly, in order to determine the form of government and draw up new fundamental laws for Russia. Therefore, calling for the blessing of God, I ask all citizens of Russia to obey the Provisional Government, which has arisen and been endowed with full authority on the initiative of the Imperial Duma, until such time as the Constituent Assembly, called at the earliest possible date and elected on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret suffrage, shall, by its decision as to the form of government, give expression to the will of the people.

It was the last official act of the Romanov's. The Grand Duke, imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, disappeared in June 1918, and it is generally supposed that he was murdered, somewhere in the vicinity of Perm.

What Mr. Kerensky calls the first act in the drama of the Revolution—meaning the period covering the disappearance of the old regime and the advent of the Provisional Government—lasted exactly one hundred hours.

The Czar attempted to recall his abdication in favor of Michael almost as soon as he had issued the document. Probably repenting of the juridical injury done his son in thus depriving him of the succession, and perhaps apprehensive the Czarina's reaction, he made an ineffectual attempt to set the Czarevitch on the throne. General Denikin, in his account of the incident, furnishes the following information:—

Late at night the imperial train left for Mohilev. Dead silence, lowered blinds, and heavy, heavy thoughts. No one will ever know what feelings wrestled in the breast of Nicholas II, of the monarch, the father, and the man, when on meeting Alexeiev at Mohilev, and looking straight at the latter with kindly, tired eyes, he said, irresolutely, "I have changed my mind. Please send the telegram to Petrograd." On a small sheet of paper, in a clear hand, the Czar had himself traced his consent to the immediate succession to the throne of his son Alexis.

Alexeiev took the telegram—and did not send it. It was too late; both manifesto's had already been made public to the army and to the country. For fear of "unsettling public opinion," Alexeiev made no mention of the telegram and kept it in his portfolio until he passed it on to me toward the end of May, when he resigned his post of Supreme Commander in Chief. The document, of vast importance to future biographers of the Czar, was afterward kept under seal at the Operations Department of General Head quarters.

Before signing the original abdication on small sheets of paper, which had as headings the word "Stavka" (Genera Headquarters) on the left, and "Chief of Staff " on the right, Nicholas bore proud and sonorous titles: "Nicholas II, by God's grace, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, Tzar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberia, the Tauric Chersonese, Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, Prince of Esthonia, Litvonia, Courland, and Semigallia, Samogitia, Bielostok, Karelia, Tver, Yougoria, Perm, Viatka . . . Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, Chernigov, Riazan, Polotsk Rostov, Yaroslav . . . Lord and Sovereign of the lands of Iberia . . . and the Provinces of Armenia . . . Sovereign of the Circassian and Mountaineer Princes . . . Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein . . . of Oldenburg, etc. etc."

When Shulgin and Gutchkov stepped down from the royal car and entered their own to hurry back to expectant Petrograd, they left him plain "Colonel Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov."

The Provisional Government was unusually meticulous in the matter of the Tzar's titles and saw to it that letters and newspapers reaching him in his prison should bear only the title "Colonel." The Czarina's name on her mail and newspapers was likewise corrected; the appellation "Her Majesty" was always scratched out and replaced by "Alexandra Feodorovna Romanov."

So, Louis XVI was called "Citizen Capet" by his jailers. One of the Czarina's ladies in waiting, Marfa Mouchanow who shared her imprisonment at Csarskoe Selo, tells us in her memoirs that this particular detail,the refusal of the Provisional Government to permit the Empress to retain her title,was of all her misfortunes that one that seemed most to have embittered her.

On March 16, the day following his abdication, Nicholas started, not to rejoin the Empress at Tsarskoe Selo, but for Mohilev, General Headquarters of the Russian army, to take leave of his troops. He remained there until the twenty-first, the day on which four representatives of that Provisional Government reached the camp and informed General Alexeiev that the ex-Czar was under arrest and should be transported to Tsarskoe Selo. Nicholas had previously expressed his desire to retire to the Crimea, there to end his days on his estate at Livadia. The Provisional Government was unable to acquiesce. The Emperor obeyed asking only one final privilege, to take leave of his army in last "Order of the Day," which he composed as follows:—

8(21) March, 1917. No. 371

I address my soldiers, who are dear to my heart, for the last time. Since I have renounced the throne of Russia for myself and my son, power has been taken over by the Provisional Government which has been formed on the initiative of the Duma of the Empire. May God help it to lead Russia into the path of glory and prosperity. May God help you, my glorious soldiers, to defend the Fatherland against a cruel enemy. For two and a half years you have endured the strain of hard service; much blood has been shed, great efforts have been made, and now the hour is at hand in which Russia and her glorious allies will break the enemy's last resistance in one common, mightier effort.

The unprecedented war must be carried through to final victory. Anyone who thinks of peace or desires it at this moment is a traitor to his country and would deliver her over to the foe. I know that every soldier worthy of the name thinks as I do.

Do your duty, protect our dear and glorious country, submit to the Provisional Government, obey your leaders, and remember that any failure in duty can only profit the enemy.

I am firmly convinced that the boundless love you bear our great country is not dead within you.

God bless you and may Saint George, the great martyr, lead you to victory.

Nicholas

The inexplicable mentality of the Provisional Government, its confused indecision which finally lost itself in the maze of oratory and hesitation that accelerated Bolshevism, forbade the publication of this touching farewell to the army. It was suppressed, despite the fact that it was obviously a sincere appeal to support the new authorities and probably would have strengthened their hand to a notable degree. Whether the decision to pigeonhole it was motivated by fear or exaggerated prudence or old resentments, it was the first injudicious step of a most injudicious regime.

A passing flash of pathos comes slanting across the somber scene at this juncture. As the clouds gathered over the head of the doomed monarch, while friends and erstwhile supporters were dropping away like banqueters from a Timon of Athens, as regiment after regiment went over to the revolutionists,—one of them led by the Czar's own kinsman, the Grand Duke Cyril,—there arrived from Kiev one whose loyalty never faltered and on whose bosom the weary, uncrowned head might rest as it had reposed there in complete confidence when an infant. The first of his family to take her place by Nicholas's side after his fall was his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria. She remained with him until the twenty-first, when he was conducted under arrest to Tsarskoe Selo.

They were never to meet again. The broken-hearted queen-mother found refuge in Denmark, her native land, whence she had departed as the lovely Princess Dagmar to wed Alexander III in 1866. During that half century she saw the political face of Europe transformed; saw dynasties flourish and fall; saw a resurgent Poland outlive the three mighty empires that had sinned the sin of the ages in partitioning that land and people among themselves as the spoils of war; finally, she saw that country over which she had ruled as joint sovereign descend into the very Valley of the Shadow. But, with the indomitable faith which seems to seize upon and sway the imagination of all who fall under the spell of Russia's mysticism, she clings imperiously to the vanished scepter, refuses to believe that her royal son is dead, and so forbids the customary prayers for his soul.

Though the name of Nicholas Romanov has been deleted from the Almanach de Gotha, the social register of nobility, to his exiled mother he is still Czar of All the Russia's and will one day return to resume the great Russian crown which the Bolshevik keep in the Gochrana, within the Kremlin and exhibit on occasions to privileged visitors. With the other crown jewels this dazzling accumulation of diamonds, pearls, and precious metals is preserved in a massive steel box. On its dome like top rests the blazing Peking ruby, big as a pigeon's egg, surmounted by a cross of rarest diamonds, aggregating in all twenty-eight hundred carats. The head that last wore it was desecrated by a fiendish executioner, who poured sulfuric acid over it, then smashed it into an unrecognizable pulp and burned the bones to ashes.

Beside this may be seen the Czarina's crown, described by one who saw it recently as 'an exquisite flower like creation, all a-shimmer with perfectly matched diamonds and pearls—a mass of iridescent fire. It was fashioned for Catherine the Great by Pauzier of Geneva, who was the Cellini of his day.' The last head that wore this sign of royalty was, as we shall shortly see, likewise beaten into fragments at Ekaterinburg. The aged Dowager Empress, brooding now over the mysteries of life in her retreat outside Copenhagen, had also worn it in the days of pomp and glory. It has been replaced on her brow by that other diadem which mothers so often inherit:

. . . A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

March 22 was a dark and dreary day, as March days can be in Russia. At eleven in the morning the Emperor, accompanied by Prince Dolgorúky, Marshal of the Court, arrived at Tsarskoe Selo and went straight to the Czarina, who was waiting in strained suspense. He was never to be separated from his family again, except for the brief moment at Tiumen during the transfer from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg.

In the meantime, before the arrival of Nicholas, General Kornilov, Commander of the Military District of Petrograd, had waited on the distracted Tzarina to inform her that she was under arrest. Witnesses of that extraordinary scene record that the silence which followed the General's laconic announcement was that of the tomb. It was revolution in its starkest reality. The Empress, having entered the audience chamber and seated herself with her accustomed formality and air of royalty, was stunned to hear Kornilov say "I must request you, madame, to stand up and listen with attention to the commands I am about to impose on you."

"Commands!" It was the first time in three hundred years that mortal had addressed this word to a Romanov.

But commands came with military directness. She was to consider herself under arrest; she was forbidden to send or receive letters without the permission of the officer in charge of the Palace; she was not to walk alone in the park or about the grounds; she was to execute immediately any further orders signified to her. Count Benckendorff, Master of the Palace, who was in attendance, showed by his countenance that he felt there was nothing left but for the earth to open and swallow them all. Little did he or the Empress seem to realize that in Petrograd, not more than fifteen miles away, an infuriated mob was parading through the streets of the capital bearing placards that called for the immediate trial and execution of the Empress as one guilty of high treason.

Three weeks later she learned how deep the resentment lay. During the night of Thursday, April 5, a company of soldiers exhumed the body of Rasputin from its resting place of honor in the garden of the Summer Palace and transported it to the forest of Pargolovo, fifteen versts north of Petrograd. A scaffolding of pine wood had been erected in a clearing; prying the body out of the elaborate coffin with sticks and rods,—no one dared to touch the oozy mass, as putrefaction was far advanced,—they hoisted high on the barrow, drenched it with gasoline, and set fire to the pile.

The flames roared for six hours before the carrion was wholly consumed. Dawn found the soldiers burying the ashes beneath a blanket of snow.

In April 1922, the writer of these lines made a trip to Petrograd and was permitted by the Soviet authorities to visit the spots where these revolutionary episodes were enacted.(2) If my memory and notes do not deceive me, on the wall of the Czarina's room in the Alexander Palace, in a corner near a window, hung a large tapestry, depicting in life-size proportions Marie Antoinette and her children. It is said to be after Madame Vigée Lebrun's famous painting and was presented by the French Government. The ill-fated queen of France, in all the classic beauty that Burke perpetuates in his vivid word-portrayal of her charms, sits in regal splendor with her children grouped around her, one on her knees. The Empress of all the Russia's, herself a foreign princess, as was the Austrian consort of Louis XVI, passed the latter years of her private life under the shadow of that mute warning. The fate of Marie Antoinette, though longer deferred and immeasurably more brutal when it came, was never far away from Alexandra Feodorovna.

Their careers were cast in almost identical molds. The daughter of Maria Theresa came as a young girl to France from a Teutonic court. Vienna of the latter eighteenth century was more a stronghold of the Hapsburg dynasty than the capital city of a distinct nationality. The Empress of Russia came from a German principality, too, though a far less brilliant one—that of Hesse. Marie Antoinette journeyed to Versailles to be bride to a Dauphin destined to rule a kingdom already in the throes of incipient revolution. His ancestors had made themselves absolute personal monarchs—and passed the final reckoning on to him. Alexandra came to Russia to assume a role particularly congenial to her character in the most autocratic court of Europe. Marie Antoinette never fully lost her foreign bearing and accent. Neither did Alexandra—French and English were her preferred tongues. It is said she never spoke Russian except when obliged to — and quaintly at that. Marie Antoinette was destined to follow her husband to the death of a common criminal. So was Alexandra.

Enmity and jealousy pursued the Autrichienne. She began her reign under a cloud; scores of Parisians were trampled to death during the coronation fetes. Alexandra, from the first day of her arrival, moved through a deepening atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Her first official appearance in Russia had been at the obsequies of Alexander III and the nuptials followed a few days later. Wedding bells mingling with a dirge ! In consequence she was to be known as the "funeral bride." The day of her coronation was marred by the tragic accident at the Khodinka field where thousands of innocent citizens were trodden to death in a sudden panic that ensued when the crowds of waiting spectators broke through the police lines. Foreign diplomats driving out to the field passed truck loads of mangled bodies being conveyed to the city. Within a few yards of the reviewing stand from which the pale and trembling monarch spoke his words of appreciation lay a heap of corpses, the arms and legs bulging grotesquely through the canvas coverings that had been thrown hastily over them. The customary state ball went on as usual that night, though there were death and mourning throughout Moscow. It was regarded as an evil omen.

Marie Antoinette cherished a passionate yearning for a son, but was long denied the bliss of motherhood and was bitterly disappointed when the first child was a girl. Alexandra lived in morbid anxiety until, after four daughters, a son and heir was born who proved to be at once her joy and her undoing. Marie Antoinette was publicly accused of treasonable traffic with the enemies of France. Alexandra's name was placarded in the streets of Petrograd as a traitor and accursed Germanophile. Marie Antoinette was the victim of domestic calumny and legends of debauchery circulated in the Paris coffee shops. Alexandra had Rasputin and a similar undeserved stigma. Marie Antoinette never fully understood—in fact, mildly disdained—her adopted people. Alexandra never quite fathomed the Russian masses or sympathized with them. She was paid back in like coin.

Marie Antoinette exercised a disastrous political influence during the five years that preceded the fall of the Bourbons. In her salon gathered the forces of intrigue and reactionary opposition to Parliament. The States-General she contemned. Her "New Order" was regarded as a despotic invasion of popular rights. The Czarina lent aid, comfort and counsel to the invisible influences and fell victim to the dark forces that ruined the Romanov's. Marie Antoinette put Necker in power: the court rose and chased him out. Alexandra sponsored Stürmer and Protopopov: Petrograd hoisted the red flag. Marie Antoinette was held hostage in the Tower. Alexandra passed sixteen months in an imprisonment that was mild and dignified at first, but which swept with furious crescendo to its hideous termination. Marie Antoinette worshiped her son, the Dauphin, with the entire devotion of her being. The Czarina would not permit herself to be separated from the Hope of the Throne even in their common death.

As Marie Antoinette mounted the steps of the guillotine shortly before noon on October 16, 1793, the advance of the rescuing counter-revolution was halted and routed at Maubeuge. As the emigres and Bourbon nobles retreated with the banners of monarchy, her head fell into the basket. Kolchak's White Army and the Czechoslovak troops were on the point of taking Ekaterinburg, as Alexandra Feodorovna sank to the floor of a cellar, riddled by the murderous fire of Lettish executioners.

There now followed five months of a relatively easy and mild imprisonment in the Summer Palace. The Czar spent his time mostly in physical exercise, digging in the garden, clearing away the snow, walking in the park, or sawing wood in the fields. The Czarina occupied herself in the care of her children. Three of the Grand Duchesses were ill and the Czarevitch was stricken with measles, complicated by a recurrence of his hereditary disease. In her free moments she worked unceasingly making garments and bandages for the Red Cross. The two ex-rulers were not allowed to meet or converse together, even at meals, without an officer of the guard at their elbow.

The Palace was guarded as a beleaguered fortress. On one occasion a sentry caused a wave of excitement by firing a shot to summon the Commandant in order to inform him that signals, with red and green lights, were being made from the Czar's apartments. Visions of secret code and possible rescue rose before the Commandant's mind. He rushed into the house and ordered an investigation. The mystery was soon explained. The Grand Duchess Anastasia and the Czar were sitting in the same room, the Emperor reading while his daughter, ensconced on the window ledge, was doing needlework. Her workbasket was on a table nearby. As she stooped to pick up the things she needed she was alternately covering and uncovering two different lamps, one with a green shade, the other with a red, by the light of which the Czar was reading.

The young Czarevitch, Alexis, played in the garden and received regular instruction from his private tutor, Pierre Gilliard, a Swiss professor who was permitted to remain with the family until very near the end. His testimony, extending through thirteen years and reaching to Ekaterinburg, furnishes source material of prime historical importance. No place else is it more clearly demonstrated how fatally the destiny of Russia was determined by such a pathetically human consideration as the health of the only son. In the person of that frail, winsome—but spoiled and over-petted—child you have the explanation of the Empress; you have the reason for Rasputin; you have the key for the abdication in favor of Michael and the subsequent attempted withdrawal by the Czar; you have one of the redeeming traits in both Czar and Czarina. They jeopardized an empire to save one delicate boy from the clutches of a congenital disease which she, all unwittingly, had transmitted to him. The Czarevitch in turn dominated not only his parents and sisters, but all Russia in them.

Mr. Kerensky, Procurator-General in the Provisional Government, visited the Palace frequently. On April 3, his first visit, after shaking hands with the royal family, he said to the Czarina, "The Queen of England asks for news of the ex-Czarina." Pierre Gilliard records that the Empress blushed violently. It was the first time that she had been addressed as "ex-Czarina."

The British Government from the outset manifested desire to assure the physical safety of the dethroned monarchs. An offer of asylum in England was made through Sir George Buchanan, British ambassador at Petrograd, and it was understood that the German Government had agreed to permit one English ship to pass through the submarine zone without attack to meet the imperial family at Port Romanov. The benevolent design proved abortive, and around the failure has grown up an acrimonious controversy. Princess Paley, widow of the murdered Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, accuses the British ambassador of having deliberately foiled the plan of King George to rescue his cousin. Sir George Buchanan defends himself vigorously in his published memoirs and blames the Provisional Government, who "were not masters in their own house."

This version is probably correct. In an interview with the author, Mr. Kerensky confirmed the report that such an offer had been made by the British Government, but so strong and hostile was the Soviet of Workmen at Petrograd that the Provisional Government did not dare to take the necessary steps. The Bolsheviks threatened to tear up the rails before the train should the Government attempt to move the imperial family. It might have been possible at a later date, but Mr. Kerensky left me under the impression that the ardor of the British Government seemed to cool. He intimated that Lloyd George's policy had changed.

In the course of the interview in question Mr. Kerensky was asked if he cared to comment on the following incident as currently reported in Russia.

During one of his visits to the Summer Palace on a tour of inspection, Mr. Kerensky was accosted by the young Tzarevitch:—

"Are you Mr. Kerensky ? "

"Yes." 

"You are Minister of Justice. Will you answer me a question ? "

"Yes."

"Did my father have the right to abdicate for himself and for me too ? "

 Kerensky paused, then replied, "As your father, he probably did not; as Emperor, I think he had the right."

The boy seemed satisfied with the hairsplitting and returned to his play.

On hearing my story, Mr. Kerensky laughingly tossed it off as a monarchist fabrication.

During the captivity day followed day with monotonous similarity. Nicholas adapted himself to the new conditions with an amazing ease and with an air of indifference that was in marked contrast to the sullen resentment of the Czarina. Her bitterness was directed as much against the Czar as against her fate. She could not soon forget that double abdication. "There must be a mistake!" she had cried out on first hearing the news. "It is impossible that Nicky has sacrificed our boy's claim!" Her rage became uncontrolled when at last the truth was inescapable, and she exclaimed "He might at least in his fright have remembered his son."

Her intuition, always sharper than that of Nicholas, seemed to realize the danger to their lives. "They will put us in the fortress," she confided one day to Marfa Mouchanow, "and then kill us as they did Louis XVI." To her youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, who was stunned and thrown into tears by the sudden reversal of fortune, Alexandra said, "It is too early to cry yet. Keep your sorrow for another occasion." In the words of an eye witness, the reprimand was given "in a hard voice." It was only the lapse of time and the growing hardship of their common misfortune that softened her animosity toward the husband whom she considered a weakling.

The Czar, for his part, seems to have abdicated in spirit and in truth. Though following with keenest and intelligent interest the progress of the war and the movements of the Russian army, he never attempted to exercise political influence or indulge in critical comment. He accepted obscurity with the same fatalistic confidence he had shown in clinging obstinately to his waning autocracy.

Chapter VIII

A REVELRY IN THE SUMMER PALACE

NICHOLAS is teaching his son Russian history.  To while away the snail-like hours, the last of the Romanov's devotes much time to pedagogy, instructing Alexis, the Czarevitch, in topics of fundamental importance for one born to be the future ruler of a vast empire.  The three hundred and four years of Romanov rule which had come to such an anticlimactic end would yield for his speculations an unfolding panorama of bewildering complexity, unending political tumult, and vast geographic expansion.

This king should make an excellent teacher.  The sinister voice of his own tutor, Pobyedonostsev, was stilled, hence no warning finger could be raised to suppress the truth or skillfully guide his prison thoughts ;  there are no military reviews to hold, no state balls to inaugurate ;  there are no frivolous courtiers about to distract, nor wassail to inebriate, only the measured tread of sentries outside his door and occasional noises at the changing of guards under his window.

One wonders if his lesson ever touched on certain reasons why Alexis was now surrounded by jailers, why his sisters wept so often, why his mother clasped him so strangely to her breast, or why Mr. Kerensky slept in the great bed of the emperors in the Winter Palace ?  I suppose not ;  the boy was too young for a philosophy of history.

But did Nicholas himself ever fall into revelry that was something more than vain regret ?  Did he ever seek to determine in his heart of hearts the historical responsibility for the processes that had culminated in this almost solitary confinement ?  But yesterday the word of a Romanov might have stood against the world ;  today there are only a handful of servants and a few aged courtiers to do him reverence.  The ease with which the monarchy fell, and the swift, utter, and callous abandonment of their monarch by friends and people alike, should have furnished grounds for salutary meditation.  Solitude divests flattery of its sham and unction.  Truths which in the warm glow of prosperity and security one is apt to consider as unpleasant annoyances, mere jeremiads of the hypercritical, become somber revelations in the cold, pitiless light of adversity.  Did Nicholas come to comprehend at last the inexorable realities which so many ardent patriots had sought in vain to make him understand ?

If he did not, — which is the probable case, — I can conceive of no more ironic figure, in the Greek sense, than this dethroned master of Csarskoe Selo, already marked to atone in blood for the sins and imbecilities of three hundred years of misrule.

The capital error committed by his ancestors who controlled Russia’s destiny and molded the forms of her political life lay in their failure to create in the minds of the people a consciousness of common destiny.  Historically, Russia evolved into two entities, distinct, antagonistic, and perpetually at odds with each other.  Government was not conceived as a delegation of power to be exercised for the common good by a responsible trustee, but as a vested dynastic right to be jealously safeguarded and exploited for the aggrandizement of a small, privileged minority.  Rulers and ruled, consequently, were never fused into a single unified community.

For a brief space following the period of anarchy, smutnoye vremia, the recognition by the Romanov's of a national assembly, zemsky sobor, and a boyars’ Duma reveals a hesitating tendency to return to the primitive democratic traditions of ancient Slav civilization, which historians picture as gay, boisterous, full of color, individualistic, and vociferously independent.  The autonomous republics of Pskov and Novgorod are outstanding types of municipal organization that gave free expression to popular sovereignty.  Novgorod, best type of old free Russia, was a city-state as jealous of its freedom as was ever Ghent or Florence.  Its “Court of Jaroslav” held popular assemblies, Veche, summoned for legislative deliberation by the clanging of the great bell in its tower, six hundred years before the Mayflower set sail ;  its Declaration of Independence was drawn up seven centuries before the Philadelphia document and was much shorter too :  “If the prince is bad, into the mud with him.”  And the people acted on it frequently, so frequently, in fact, that in the course of a single century the chronicles record how the free men of Novgorod drove out as many as thirty princes whose rule did not please them, an average of one every forty months.  Thus, in 1136, Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich was summarily deposed and expelled by the hard-headed burghers because he was “too fond of sport and too neglectful of his duty.”

But “Lord Novgorod the Great,” Gospodin Veliki Novgorod, succumbed ignominiously in 1471 to the growing might of the near-by Principality of Moscow, when Ivan the First, called Great, advancing upon the republican stronghold, slaughtered the freemen right and left, transported whole families in chains to Moscow, and brought the last free city under the yoke of Moscovite autocracy.  Finally, in 1570, Ivan the Fourth, known as the Terrible, repeated the chastisement of his grandfather and again devastated Novgorod with fire and sword, butchering sixty thousand inhabitants.1  The great bell which had summoned Novgorodians to the councils had already been dismantled, brought to Moscow, and there erected to mingle its tones with the victorious clamor from Ivan’s towers.  Cast for liberty, it ended in slavery, symbol of Russia’s own eventual destiny.  “An eagle, many-winged, with lion’s claws, has fallen upon me,” laments the Chronicler of Pskov, which had suffered the same fate ;  “he has robbed me of three Cedars of Lebanon — my beauty, my wealth, my children.  Our country is deserted, our city is in ruins, our markets are destroyed.  My brothers have been carried to a place where neither our fathers nor our grandfathers nor our forefathers have dwelt. . . .”

By the close of the sixteenth century, the democracy that flourished in that then unknown corner of Europe was obsolete and a haunting memory.  It must have been the ghost of that far-off, golden age of Russian freedom that President Wilson evoked when he said from the floor of Congress, on April 2, 1917 :  “Russia was known by those who know it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.  Autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not, in fact, Russian in origin, in character, or purpose ;  and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added, in all their native majesty and might, to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice and for peace.  Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.”

These native tendencies crop out sporadically in later generations, but were consistently suppressed during the reign of the Romanov's, particularly during the reforms of Peter the Great, as each succeeding Czar reverted to the belief that the Russian land and people were the private asset of the sovereign, his votchina.

The destruction of the primitive political and social forms which had characterized the first Russian republics may be attributed to definite causes.

In the first place, that great Russian plain to which we have already referred, stretching, as it did, without mountains or other natural barriers from the Danube and Dniester to the Yenisei, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Hindu Kush Mountains, encouraged the Princes of Moscow to embark upon that adventuresome enlargement of their domain which resulted, as imperialism always does, in the necessary creation of a ponderous administrative machinery and required a huge personnel.  Faced in each successive advance by fierce Asiatic nomads, the Russian Czars from Ivan the First, the “Coagulator of Russia,” regarded each completed wave of emigration as just so many outposts — military spearheads, as it were — to be utilized for supplying the sinews of war to the expanding state.  Step by step with the double-headed eagle, as it advanced into the northern forests, the southern steppes, and the Siberian wastes, went the tax collector and the recruiting sergeant.  Under Yermak, conqueror of Siberia, vanguards of Cossack's pushed ever forward, founding their fortified villages, stanitsas, until, in 1775, they had reached the Pacific and crossed Behring Straits to Alaska and the American continent.

Large grants of land were freely made to a favored caste on the sole condition of supplying men and money for Moscow.  As the size of the domain depended on the number of recruits the pomieschik could muster, each emigrant was viewed in the light of a potential soldier.  By a natural evolution, consequently, the military class became rulers of the newly conquered territories, absorbing not only all fiscal functions, but full civil and judicial powers as well, while the colonizers and peasant population were gradually reduced to economic serfdom and loaded with military obligations to their feudal overlords.  The consciousness of political right was smothered by the hosts of officialdom and the vision of common interest was dispelled by the tyrannous exaction of landholders, petty clerks, and military governors responding with tribal solidarity to the pressure from Moscow.  Thus the Russification and expansion policy operated, to a measurable degree, as an obstacle in the formation of a self-conscious, national state.

Had not Nicholas himself plunged Russia into a disastrous war with Japan in order to safeguard certain timber concessions on the Yalu River ?

At the very epoch when Western Europe was experiencing the renaissance of political theory and the rise of parliaments, Russia was crystallizing and hardening into a palace state, wherein the only political philosophy tolerated was that of the oprichniki, riding unchecked through the land, broom and dead dog’s head at the saddle bow, sword and knot in hand, massacring every man, woman, and child who presumed to question, much less to, oppose, the prikaz of the Czar.  And, with slight modification, Imperial Russia remained a palace state until her fall, political progress frozen, like her mighty rivers, into icy immobility.  It took.  the dynamite of universal indignation to split the glacier.

“Scratch a Russian and find a Tatar,” has been attributed to Napoleon.  As a qualified observer of Russian military prowess, he does assuredly command respect ;  still it was not so much Alexander I and his generals, as General Winter and his ally, Cold, that brought Bonaparte to grief, transformed the Grand Army into a demoralized mob, and sent it limping and freezing back to the Dniester and the eventual disasters at Leipzig and Waterloo.

Like most generalizations, the saying is a fallacious admixture of truth and falsehood.  Fraus latet in generalibus.  The falsity in this case lies in the assumption that there ever existed a single, all-inclusive type, a sort of universal Russian to be scratched, and his inner self thus easily cataloged. The raw materials of the Russian people were as varied ethnically and composite as were the geographic and racial sources from whence they came.  Napoleon’s scratching instrument might at one time have laid bare pure Slavic stock, at another brought Græco-Byzantine blood, or revealed Swedish, Teutonic, Finnish, or Livonian as well as a true Tatar strain, depending entirely on the region and particular subject of his experiment.  He would have needed a sizable collection of test tubes for his blood analysis of the races in the Caucasus.  But the truth of the jibe is not inconsiderable and has undeniable historical justification.

The Russian steppes, sprawling monotonously eastward and unrelieved by mountain chains, invited invasion westward from Asia as openly as later they tempted Russian adventurers to expand their frontiers eastward.  In the year 1224 these plains were suddenly alive with an Asiatic host from the great unknown regions beyond.  As the Russian chronicler tells us, “There came upon us for our sins unknown nations.  No one could tell their origin, whence they came, what religion they professed.  God alone knows who they were, or where they came from — God, and perhaps wise men learned in books.”  Like an avalanche, hordes of Tatars and Mongolians from the neighborhood of Lake Baikal and the Gobi Desert swept down on the scattered and disunited Russian principalities.  Taken by surprise and rent by internal discord, the Russian princes were enveloped and vanquished one after another by the unending swarms of Genghis Khan’s cavalry.  Russia of the thirteenth century resembled France of the early fifteenth.  Whereas modern France is a synonym for glowing patriotism and pride of nationality, five centuries ago there was, strictly speaking, no France, but an agglomeration of rival feudal chiefs and independent strongholds ;  there were no Frenchmen, but plenty of Parisians, Royalists, Burgundians, Armagnacs, Bretons, and Provençaux.  But France merited a Joan of Arc and salvation. Russia had neither.  Instead came the Ivan's, both great and terrible, Boris Godunov, anarchy, the Romanov's, Rasputin, and last of all, closing her strange, eventful history, the Bolsheviks.

The Russian annalist of the period records with consternation the appearance of those wild horsemen, sweeping like hawks upon the unsuspecting land, armed with long, steel tipped arrows, huge scimitars, pikes with villainous hooks, and supported by battering rams never before seen or heard of.  Fired with a dream of universal domination as a result of his success in mobilizing the Mongols and Tatars of Asia for the conquest of Europe, Genghis Khan rallied about him another formidable array of nomads and shepherd tribes inured to wandering and long marches, masters in the saddle, pitiless in warfare, perfectly at ease on uncultivated plains or in the depths of uninhabited forests.  Warfare for those barbarians was not an incident or an isolated event ;  it was the breath of their nostrils.  They could ride continuously for two days and sleep in the saddle while the horses grazed.  Marco Polo, who lived seventeen years in Tatary, is authority for the statement that when other food was lacking they drank blood from their chargers’ veins.

The surprised Russians fled to their cities before the irresistible maneuvering of the mobile Tatar cavalry.  With the exception of one pitched battle, and some trivial skirmishes, the war was one of sieges.  As with all plundering barbarians, fixed city ramparts were the chief obstacles in the way of their roving empire.  Hence they made war on walls.  Hannibal ad portas became “The Tatars are at the gates.”  The walls of Kiev, strongest of Russian fortresses, were breached in one day under the terrific pounding of the Mongol battering rams. Vladimir was infested and destroyed.  Moscow was burned ;  Riazan, Tver, Suzdal, Chernigov, all went down before the invincible horde.  The great tent of the conqueror, mounted on wheels and drawn by oxen, moved steadily westward as far as Poland and Hungary.  The Pope called for a united Europe.  The advance was stopped only by the Czechs and Bohemians.  Six hundred thousand Tatar warriors were seen at one time by Plano Carpini, the Minorite friar, sent as legate to the Tatar Khan Batu by Innocent III.

All Russia, except Novgorod the Great, bent its neck and bore the yoke for two hundred and fifty years.

But the galled jade will wince.  Two centuries and a half of vassalage under Eastern despots of the school of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane could not fail to modify enormously the social and political structure of the Slavic communities.  The Tatar master left his mark on Russia’s soul and his seed in Russia’s blood as definitely as he Norman invader left his imprint on Anglo-Saxon civilization.  The taint spread from the head downward, from prince to common folk.

It might have been different had the conquerors set themselves to absorb the conquered and transform Russia into a huge khanate.  The national will might have been stiffened under persecution, as was that of Poland, Ireland, and Belgium during foreign occupation.  A cause would have been created and a battle cry for freedom.  But the Khans were neither colonizers nor permanent governors.  They sent no Verres, no Pontius Pilate, no Cromwell, Pizarro, or Clyde, as vicegerent to govern judicially the subjugated provinces or incorporate them into the Tatar empire.  To be sure, they installed local representatives, baskaks, in the subject territories. But tribute, not government, was their mission. Provided, therefore, that the princes of Russia paid promptly the annual taxes, and tithes, and sent envoys to the Horde to perform acts of submission, such as holding the stirrup, or bending low to permit the Tatar horses to feed off their backs, they might rule, or misrule, their own people as they chose.  It was the easiest way for the Tatars, but ended in demoralization for the Russians.

Disunited before the advent of the Tatars, the Russian princes resorted to trickery and servility to conciliate the Khans and strengthen their individual positions.  It was Sauve qui peut — and the Tatar devil take the hindmost.  They accepted the odious function of tax collectors for their absentee landlords, conspired against each other, and oppressed their groaning subjects in order to retain Tatar favor.  The Khans, on their part, displayed an Oriental cunning, playing one prince against another.  No Russian could be invested with princely authority in his own patrimony unless by consent of the Khan.  Before his gorgeous throne in Mongolia bowed prince after prince of Russia, after journeying that took a year to complete, suing shamelessly for favor, or whispering damning insinuations against some rival countryman.  All Russia learned to crook the hinges of the knee.  Gifts, bribes, intrigue, and domestic terror became the accepted instrumentality for retaining power, with the common folk and peasants always the pawn, played by prince against prince, and by the slant-eyed Mongolian against the entire board.

Out of this slough of national humiliation rose Moscow to the ascendancy she has since maintained.  By virtue of his authority as principal tax collector for the Tatars, Ivan I, Grand Prince of Moscow, called Kalita, or “Money Bag,” first oppressed his own subjects and then attacked his most formidable domestic rivals, Tver, Novgorod, and Yaroslavl ;  he marched himself with the avenging Tatars against revolting cities, and by slow degrees, partly by his wealth, and largely by sycophantic subservience to the Khan, achieved for Moscow undisputed hegemony over the smaller principalities.  Novgorod, in particular, felt his fury.  Because of the northern latitude in which it lay, the old republic escaped the Tatar yoke ;  so Ivan Tatarized it himself.  And as it was Moscow that dominated Russia thereafter and determined her likeness, to this period must be attributed the beginning of the autocratic tradition that characterized the rule of the Czars long after the foreign yoke had been lifted.  Modes of thought, traits, and propensities accumulated through two and a half centuries cannot be easily shed.  The habits of sire become instincts in son and ingrained character in the son’s posterity.  A spirit of submissiveness and passivity was engendered in a cowed and semi-Orientalist people, rendered more and more fatalistic and accustomed by this time to frequent change of masters but not of treatment.  Here you have the answer to that oft-repeated question put in later days by critics of the present Bolshevist regime :  How is it possible that a small communist minority, probably less than a million persons, can hold a hundred and forty-six million people in such complete subjection ?

The Tatar suzerainty ceased on the fall of the Golden Horde in 1502.  Slavery ended, but the slave-driver remained.  It is not an accident that the Russian term nagaika, the knout, is one of the purely Tataric words still remaining in the Russian vocabulary.  Both the symbol and the thing symbolized persist in Russia to this day.

What the Tatars began, the Ivan's continued.  Peter the Great completed the transformation.

Around no ruler of Russia — until perhaps Nicholas Lenin — have such controversial currents raged.  One historical school, the Westernizers, will exalt this physical giant — Peter was six feet seven inches high — to a corresponding apotheosis of merit above all preceding and succeeding emperors.  Was it not the First Peter who picked up Russia bodily, carried her to the Finnish marsh, and set her down in a new, shining capital there, though he had to wade knee deep in water and drive down a wilderness of piles into the mud to do it ?  Did he not build St. Petersburg to serve as an “open window to Europe” and thus bring the Russian people within the orbit of Western European influence ?  He created a Russian navy, organized an efficient army, introduced German, French, English, and Italian culture and industrial methods, reformed the laws, improved civil administration, the Church, and the alphabet ;  he broke the power of the Turks, conquered the Ukraine, as well as Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, and Yarelia ;  he beat the Swedes,though by a slight margin, enlarged all boundaries, and increased the general prosperity of the State.

He issued the first textbook of social behavior, instructing Russians “to be amiable, modest, and respectful, to learn language, to look people in the face, take off their hats, not to dance in boots, or to spit on the floor, or sing too loud, put the finger in the nose, rub the lips with the hand, lean on the table, swing the legs, lick the fingers, gnaw a bone at dinner, scratch one’s head, talk with one’s mouth full and his assemblies or social gatherings, at which he made attendance compulsory, were the first crude school of European conventions.

“It was further ordained that every transgressor of the rules should be obliged instantly to empty the ‘great eagle,’ a large bottle full of brandy, a grotesque punishment, which exists also among the Chinese. This was not a very likely way to preserve the decencies of social intercourse ;  but these were little regarded by Peter.  He beat Metchnikov in a ballroom for dancing without having taken off his sword.”2

He bestrode Northern Europe like a Colossus and left Russia in a position to speak with authority in the family of nations.  He made a new, a mighty, a modern Russia.  Czar for forty-three years, he displayed an inexhaustible energy, and paused only to die.

But the rest of Russia, the Slavophils, regarded Peter from the beginning as half demon, Antichrist, and usurper.  Was he not driving Russia, under the knout, to new and strange paths, unsuited to her historic traditions ?  He had forsaken holy Moscow, than which there was nothing higher save God, to build himself an abomination, named in vainglorious egotism “Peter’s city,” among the bogs and fogs and marshes of an alien territory at the mouth of the Neva.  Did not a hundred thousand workmen perish in that fetid swamp ?  He spent his time abroad, among Turks and Germans, who were very much of the same kidney for a Russian.  He let loose swarms of officials, clerks, and other tchinovniki to batten on the substance of the people, rushed them into foreign wars and intrigues, drove his subjects to domestic rebellion by extravagant taxation, ordered men to defile the image of God by shaving off their beards, and even ordained the particular cut of their clothes.  He persecuted the Church of Christ by abolishing the Patriarchate, and convoked a farcical conclave during which an inveterate drunkard, Sotov, was proclaimed patriarch and made to ride through the streets astride a keg of brandy and followed by a hierarchy of buffoons.

Of a truth, he had opened a window to Europe, but opened it on to a swamp, exuding miasmic effluvia.  He exposed the pure soul of Orthodoxy to the blighting infection of the atheism and deism of France, and made poor Russia’s brain reel with the dizzying wisdom of Prussia.  It was a spurious civilization !

What, in the last analysis, was the influence of Peter’s reform on the final destiny of Russia ?  The Colossus was tumbling to pieces at that very moment in Petrograd, a scant fifteen miles away.

“Ruinous,” reply the Slavophils.  “Necessary and glorious,” maintain the Westernizers.

The truth lies somewhere between, but probably nearer the Slavophils.  We have Lenin’s authority for that, and he should know a destructive agency when he sees one.  In the first place, Peter hated Moscow and all it stood for ;  he never denied the charge.  Moscow meant stagnation, backwardness, and the stifling atmosphere of static Orientalism.  Flushed with his victory over the Swedes, and in possession of a new seaport opening into the Gulf of Finland, he ordered the great transfer.  The capitol was moved from the heart of ancient Muscovy — an act that was sure to offend — and not another stone house was to be built until the new buildings were well under way.  Thousands of peasants, and even the nobles, were compelled to slave in the unhealthy swamp, driving down the piles and transporting stones for the structures.  Over them towered Peter himself, his tremendous will power shirking neither personal labor nor the application of the lash to the shoulders of the others.3

It is not difficult to imagine the estrangement that ensued.  “With Peter the Great,” writes the Viscount de Vogue, “the moment arrived when commenced perhaps the most singular and unquestionably the most abnormal attempts for experimenting with the historic development of a people.  Continuing the above figure, imagine a ship in which the captain and his officers steer for the west and the crew set their sails for a wind that would carry them to the east.  . . . A few, carried away by the uplifting movement, detached themselves from the masses, but the bedrock of the nation remained rebellious, immovable, with minds firmly set toward the east like the naves of their churches, and the praying Tatars, their former masters.

“Forty years have passed, yet only the summits have caught the Western light ;  the vast valleys still lie plunged in the shadows of the past — with difficulty will they arise therefrom.”

In the Church, too, a correspondingly violent reform was effected.  In 1721 Peter abolished the supreme spiritual office of Patriarch and subjected the administration of ecclesiastical affairs to a Holy Synod composed of bishops acceptable to the Government, but presided over by a layman, the Ober-Procuror, intended by Peter to be the “Czar’s eye.”  This secularization of the Church and its subordination to the civil power marked the beginning of that unfortunate decrease of popular confidence which the Orthodox Church has admittedly suffered.

But such was and must ever be the fate of every church that forfeits, either by force or by voluntary surrender, the liberty of its spirit and subordinates its divine mission to political threat or human expedience.  The Orthodox Church of Peter’s day would have done better to perish fighting.  It is more probable that not the Church but Peter’s assault would have been ended.  The Church was the one institution that might have tempered domestic tyranny then — and afterward ;  but, instead, it fell victim to the environment and just missed a glorious destiny.

Russian Christianity, like all Christianity that came from Constantinople, seemed enervated in its origin by an oppressive Cæsarism and Erastianism that paralyzed initiative and encouraged obsequiousness.  The finer spirits of the Orthodox Church often longed for an opportunity to exercise the spiritual leadership and championship of the rights of the people so often manifested by the Western Church in its frequent conflicts with kings, emperors, robber-barons, and miscellaneous oppressors of the common folk.  But the Crown, working through the Holy Synod, had a genius for transferring to Siberia any Russian priest or bishop suspected of an inclination, or even a capacity, to assume the role of an Ambrose of Milan before a Theodosius, the royal murderer of Thessalonica, or the part of a Gregory before a Henry IV of Germany.  Had there been an occasional Canossa in Russian history, there might have been no Red Terror, there might have been no imprisonment in a Summer Palace.  But the dead hand of the Emperors of Byzantium ruled the Orthodox Church long after their bones had moldered into dust in the imperial tombs on the Bosporus or had been desecrated by the Muslim masters of Santa Sophia.

The bureaucracy which Peter established, and which every succeeding Czar preserved, completed the social cleavage and made internal cohesion impossible.  Under his imperious will, Russia for the first time assumed international importance, but it was achieved at the expense of internal stability.  He created a Colossus, yes — but its feet were of clay ;  the Allies learned that in 1917.4

If atavistic memories should arise to disturb the history lessons, Nicholas might well doubt if he was really a Romanov at all.  Versed in the family record of his line, he must have been familiar with the controversy regarding the paternity of his ancestor, Paul I, Romanov blood had been transmitted undiluted and unchanged as far as Peter the Great, but there the stream was mingled with German substitutes.  By marrying the buxom, illiterate, peasant camp follower Catherine Skavronsky, Peter had become a logical Westernizer of Russia’s reigning family as well as its social institutions.  The Empress Anna Petrova, daughter of that union, swung farther away from Romanov stock by espousing Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.  Their son, Peter III, took to wife Catherine, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, and the confusion becomes hopelessly confounded. Even before the death of her first husband, Peter III, whom she herself had deposed and then permitted to be killed in a drunken brawl by her lover Orlov, Catherine had embarked on a long list of lovers and amours.  If, as was commonly believed, Paul I, though her true son (and a lunatic), was not the child of her legitimate husband, Peter III, but of Serge Saltikov, then the Romanov succession thereafter was a dynastic fiction.

Not only was the succession of a line of true Romanov's to the throne extremely doubtful from that day onward, but every succeeding emperor introduced a foreign princess to Russia as his bride.  The poet Pushkin, in his sarcastic moments, was accustomed to entertain St. Petersburg society with an ocular demonstration to show how far his country’s rulers had been de-Russianized.  He would place a row of six empty wine glasses before him, then call for a bottle of red wine and a carafe of water.  The first glass he would fill to the brim with wine :  “There is our glorious Peter the Great — Russian blood, pure, undiluted.  See how it sparkles with rubies.”  The second glass he would fill half with water and half with wine ;  the third would receive but one fourth wine to three fourths water ;  the fourth glass but one eighth of wine and seven eighths of water, and so to the end, the wine decreasing in inverse proportion to the water.  The last glass in Pushkin’s day would stand for Alexander II, then Czarevitch.  The liquid was barely rose-colored, consisting of one part of wine to thirty-two parts of water.

If Nicholas II ever amused himself in the same fashion, his last glass, representing his own son, the future Czar Alexis, would show one drop of Russian blood to two hundred and fifty-six drops of foreign infiltration.  Imperceptible !  Rhine wine to Burgundy.5  And there on his statignery before him and emblazoned over his throne, as well as at every corner of the royal apartments, his eyes would rest on the emblem of Romanov dynasty, a double-headed eagle holding crown and scepter, surmounting a shield representing Saint George and the dragon.  This heraldic sign symbolized a double fact and another dubious legacy.

The earliest scutcheon of the princes of Moscow had borne Saint George alone, slaying his dragon. But on the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the death of the last Christian ruler, Constantine Palmologus, who died on its walls in ineffectual combat with the victorious armies of Mohammed, Byzantium bequeathed its political supremacy to Moscow as it had already imposed on Russia its Oriental Christianity.  Zoë, daughter of the last Byzantine emperor, found refuge, first in Rome, then in Moscow, where in 1472 she became wife to Ivan III, assuming the name of Sophia.  She brought as dowry not only the double-headed eagle, and set it above Saint George on the Russian coat of arms, but transplanted the proud customs and the ancient traditions of haughtiness, pomp, and ceremony which had exalted the court of her fathers.  More portentous still, she furnished inspiration and pretext for Ivan to assume titles never heard before in the mouth of Slavic princes — Czar, Sovereign of All the Russia's, Samoderzhets, Autocrat.  He proclaimed Holy Moscow the “Third Rome.”  The first had perished ; the second, Constantinople, had now fallen ;  “the third, Moscow, now stands, and a fourth there will not be.”

And here sat the inheritor of Byzantium’s splendor and Moscow’s might an actual prisoner in his favorite retreat, this well-intentioned and urbane, but woefully weak and indecisive monarch. Retribution was beginning in the very palace which popular imagination made a symbol of isolation and estrangement.  It was to Csarskoe Selo that Nicholas and the imperial family fled in 1905 when the thousands of petitioners, led by Gapon, marched to the Winter Palace to seek redress of wrongs from the “little Father” — and were massacred by his waiting Cossacks.  Only once in eight years did the royal family reside in Petrograd, and then for four days only, on the occasion of the Tercentenary.  They lived in virtual seclusion at Csarskoe Selo, the fifteen miles to the capital constituting a moral chasm between them and their people.

So had the Bourbons deserted Paris for Versailles.  Paris hated them for it, and waited a hundred years to welcome them back — to the guillotine.

Harassed and crushed by the weight of an inherited responsibility too heavy for his shoulders, wearily answering “Yes” or “No” to importunate counselors who knew how to play shrewdly on his fears, his prejudices, and his superstitions, Nicholas had lived, as it were, a phantom king in a haunted palace.  On the very day of his coronation he had succumbed publicly to exhaustion when entering the Cathedral of the Holy Archangels at Moscow. Fatigued by the weight of the ponderous crown, and staggering under the heavy ceremonial robe of cloth of gold fringed with ermine, he let the scepter he was carrying slip from his grasp to the ground.  In the impressionable minds of those who witnessed the incident, it remained an evil omen.  The court gossipers recalled the ill-fated Louis XVI complaining, during his coronation at Rheims, that the crown he wore was too heavy and was hurting his head.

E.J. Dillon, who knows Russians as well as any man alive, recounts an anecdote which may or may not be true, but which reproduces exactly the “paralysis of volition” which reduced Nicholas to clay in the hands of political potters.

One day, the story ran, a nobleman of great experience and progressive tendencies was received in audience by the Czar.  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 expose 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 afterward 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 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, Niky,” 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.

Never master of his own will, Nicholas spent his life awaiting the judgments of the Pobyedonostsevs, the Stürmers, and the Protopopovs who surrounded him, and of the Empress who ruled him.  Mr. Kerensky was to convey the next decision of Russia’s newest master, Monsieur le peuple.

On August 10, the Premier of the Provisional Government waited on the ex-Tzar and announced a momentous resolution.  The imperial family was to be transferred to Siberia.

To be continued....

Chapter 7

1. The double date was frequent in old Russian writings and represents the deference between the Gregorian calendar in use in Western Europe and the Julian calendar which Russia tenaciously observed. Russia was, in consequence, thirteen days behind the rest of the world, in a calendar sense. The complete adoption of the Gregorian calendar came in 1923, during our stay in Moscow. The change occasioned many embarrassments. Thirteen days thus disappeared mysteriously from one's life, as the calendar suddenly jumped thirteen days overnight ! Some of the employees in our relief stations inquired if they would be paid for the lost working days. Of course their fears were groundless. In point of fact, the next pay day—we paid off every fortnight—came within a day after the previous one. It was a bit complicated for the ordinary moujik and he simply marked it off as another Bolshevist trick.

2. Among other rooms, we visited the study of the Tzar, which has been preserved unchanged by the Soviets. Another American, Mr. Newman, who is at present giving entertaining travelogues on Russia, enjoyed a similar privilege within the past few months. Someone must have been "spoofing " Mr. Newman, as his remarks and photographs, published in a New York newspaper, depict " the desk at which the Tzar signed his abdication " and show the actual pen he used. This should not be mistaken for authentic history. The Tzar signed his abdication in a railway car at Pskov, some one hundred and fifty miles distant, and used a pencil.

Chapter 8

1 See Appendix VII.

2 See Appendix VIII.

3 See Appendix IX.

4 See Appendix X.

5 “ Who would take this miserable record as the history of a people ?  Not any serious historian.  Of the six immediate successors of Peter I, three are women, one a boy of twelve, one a babe of one, and one an idiot.  Through the barrack capital of St. Petersburg, situated outside Russian soil and cut off from the life of the Russian people, brainless or squalid adventurers succeeded each other.”—Sir Bernard Pares, History of Russia.