CHAPTER VI
A CASKET OF LETTERS
THE extent and character of the Tzarina's unhealthy influence over the last of the Romanovs may be judged from the tone of the letters to her husband while he was at the front. No serious historian of the Russian Revolution can afford to neglect the revelations contained in these astounding documents. For that matter, put your discerning investigator in possession of the intimate correspondence, memoirs, confidential confessions, and diaries of the chief actors in any great movement, and he will not need the State archives. Revolutions are made by men and women determining events. Men are swayed by powerful human emotions. Women create them. And the master passion, particularly in neurotic females, can be as elegantly indifferent to the realities of life and war as ever Montesquieu was to the existence of God.
The letters of the Tzarina, four hundred in number, preserved with pathetic fidelity in a small black casket of wood marked with the Tzar's initials, were carried about by him in his exile from place to place. Discovered by the Bolsheviki at Ekaterinburg after the official murder of the imperial family, they have been published, with an introduction by Sir Bernard Pares. All were written in English.
Perhaps never in recorded literature did a human soul strip itself so bare to posterity as did this ecstatic queen of forty-five years and mother of five children. "My well beloved"; "My only treasure"; "My sun"; " My soul." "The most tender kisses and caresses from your loving little wife." "I bless you, I embrace your dear face, your pretty neck, and your dear little hands." "Good-bye, dear Nicky—I embrace you again and again. I have slept poorly. All the time I embraced your cushion [pillow]."
"Good-bye, my angel, spouse of my heart. I envy my flowers that you took away with you. I embrace every dear little place of your body with tender love." And so on through four hundred epistles. One was sent each day, supplemented by frequent telegrams. Reverence for the inviolability of such personal communications and a decent respect for the sacredness of connubial relations would ordinarily safeguard such a correspondence. If it be permissible to lift the veil at all, it is not to dishonor the dead, but to indicate the subtle approach to political issues which the Tzarina made through the gateway of the Tzar's affections. Hers is a cry of frenzied love for her husband and fear for her child. But the moving finger that was writing Russia's destiny on the wall was that of Rasputin and the defeatists.
Note the finesse of the progressive attack on the Tzar's vacillating will:—
I cannot find words [declares the Empress] to express all I want to: my heart is far too full. I only long to hold you tight in my arms and to whisper words of immense love, courage, strength, and endless blessings. More than hard to let you go alone, so completely alone ! But God is very near to you, more near than ever. You have fought this great fight for your country and throne — alone and with bravery and decision. Never have they seen such firmness in you before, and it cannot remain without good fruit. . . . Lovey, I am here. Don't laugh at silly old wifey; but she has the " trousers " on unseen. . . . Your faith has been tried and you remained firm as a rock. For that you will be blessed. God anointed you at your coronation. He placed you where you stand and you have done your duty. . . . Our Friend's prayers arise night and day for you to Heaven, and God will hear them. . . . This is the beginning of the glory of your reign. He [Rasputin] said so and I absolutely believe it. . . . All is for the good. As our Friend says, the worst is over. . . . When you leave [I] shall wire to Friend to-night through Ania [the Tzarina's lady in waiting, one of Rasputin's devotees] and he will particularly think of you. Only get Nikolasha's nomination [his transference to the Caucasus] quicker done. No dawdling! It is bad for the cause and for Alexeiev [the Head of the General Staff] too. . . . I know what you feel; the meeting with N. [Nikolasha] won't be agreeable. You did trust him, and now you know what months ago our Friend said, that he was acting wrongly toward you and your country and wife. It 's not the people who would do harm to your people, but Nikolasha and his set, Gutchkov [a popular member of the Duma], Rodzianko [the Speaker of the Duma], Samarin [the Procurator of the Holy Synod who was responsible for the second dismissal of Rasputin]. . . . You see they are afraid of me. . . . They know I have a will of my own when I feel I am in the right. . . . You make them tremble before your courage and will. God is with you and our Friend for you. All is well; and later all will thank you for having saved the country. Don't doubt ! Believe and all will be well; and the Army is everything. A few strikes are nothing in comparison; as they can and shall be suppressed. . . .
In another letter she repeats this counsel:—
Our Friend [Rasputin] entreats you to be firm, to be master and not always give in to Trepov. You know much better the that man; and still you let him lead you. Why not our Friend, who leads through God ? Only believe more in our Friend instead of Trepov. He lives for you and Russia.
Would I write thus [she says in a letter dated December 13] did I not know you so very easily waver and change your mind, and what it costs me to keep you to stick to your opinions ?
[To make him firm she strikes the note to duty toward his son.] We must give a strong country to baby; we dare not be weak for his sake. Else he will have a yet harder reign, setting our faults right, and drawing the reins in tightly which you let loose. You have to suffer for faults in the reigns of your predecessors. And God knows what hardships are yours. Let our legacy be a light one for Alexei ! He has a strong will and mind of his own. Don't let things slip through your fingers and make him have to build up all again. Be firm. I, your wall, am behind you and won't give way. I know He [Rasputin] leads us right; and you listen to a false man like Trepov.
Only not a responsible Cabinet, which all are mad about. It's all getting calmer and better; only one wants to feel your hand. How long years people have told me the same: "Russia loves to feel the whip." It's their nature—tender love and then the iron hand to punish and guide. How I wish I could pour my will into your veins. The Virgin above you, with you. Remember the miracle, our Friend's vision.(1)
Darling, remember that it does not lie in the man Protopopov or X.Y.Z.; but it's the question of monarchy and your prestige now, which must not be shattered in the time of the Duma. Don't think they will stop at him. But they will make all others leave who are devoted to you, one by one. And then ourselves ! Remember last year your leaving for the Army, when also you were alone, with us two against everybody, who promised Revolution if you went. You stood up against all and God blessed your decision. . . . The Tzar rules and not the Duma. . . . Show to all that you are the master and that your will must be obeyed. The time of great indulgence and gentleness is over; now comes your reign of will and power. And they shall be made to bow down before you, to listen to your orders.
On December fourteenth she beseeches the Tzar:—
Disperse the Duma at once—when you told Trepov the 17th you did not know what they were up to. I should have quietly and with a clear conscience before the whole of Russia have sent Lvov to Siberia (one did so for far less grave acts), taken Samarin's rank away (he signed that paper from Moscow), Miliukov, Gutchkov and Polivanov also to Siberia. . . . I am but a woman but my soul and brain tell me it would be the saving of Russia—they sin far worse than anything the Sukhomlinovs ever did. Forbid Brusilov etc. when they come to touch any political subject, fool, who wants responsible cabinet, as Georgi writes.
Remember even Mr. Philippe said one dare not give constitution as it would be your and Russia's ruin and all true Russians say the same. . . I know I worry you—ah! would I not far, far rather only write letters of love, tenderness and caresses which my heart is so full—but my duty as wife and mother an Russia's mother oblige me to say all to you—blessed by our Friend. Sweetheart, Sunshine of my life, if in battle you had to meet the enemy, you would never waver and go forth like a lion—be it now in the battle against the small handfull of brutes and republicans—be the Master and all will bow down to you.
Two letters are particularly significant. Pobyedonostsev could not have counseled the Emperor worse.
Play the Emperor ! Remember you are the Autocrat. Speak to your Ministers as their Master. Do not be too good. Do not tell all the world that you bring disaster. Your angelic goodness, your forbearance, your patience, are well known, and everyone takes advantage of you. Make haste, my own darling; you little wife must always be behind you to spur you on.
Be like Peter the Great, John the Dread, the Emperor Paul. Crush them all. No, do not laugh, you naughty child. I so long to see you treat in this way those who try to govern you, when it is you who should govern them.
The answer of the Emperor to these Amazonian commands speaks volumes; the unsexing process is well-nigh complete as the Tzar inverts the order of Nature.
My Darling, Tender thanks for the severe reprimand in writing. I read it with a smile because you talk to me as to a child. It is disgusting to have to do with a man whom I do not like and whom I do not trust like Trepov. . . . God bless you, my soul, my Sunny. I kiss you tenderly, as well as the girls, and remain you " poor, little, weak husband "
Nicky
Could human folly have proposed a more destructive trio of tyrants as models to guide the feet of a monarch already stumbling to his ruin ? Peter the Great, John the Dread and the Emperor Paul !
Peter the Great—who first started the Russian State on the wrong path, the typical despot who forced men to wear their clothes and shave their beards in a certain style because he so preferred it; the scorner of religion and the Church; regarded as Antichrist by his own people; the murderer who slew his own son Alexis because that unfortunate prince dared to defend the rights of his oppressed countrymen ! Dimitri Merejkovsky, in his remarkable psychological novel, Peter and Alexis, has left a vivid picture of this incident.
Lenin regarded Peter the Great as the first Bolshevik and declared that he was his political ancestor. Constantine Aksakov, brilliant Russian idealist, ardent lover of his people, and dreamer of a golden age for Russia, has left a characteristic indictment of the compulsory enlightenment inaugurated by Peter:—
A man of genius and of bloodstained fame, you stand far off in the halo of terrible glory and armed with your axe. In the name of usefulness and science you have often dyed your hand in the blood of your people, and your swift thought told you that the seed of knowledge would swiftly grow when watered with blood. But wait! The spirit of the people has drawn back in the time of trouble, but it keeps its eternal right. It is waiting for the hour when a national voice will again call forth the waves of the people. You have despised all Russian life and in return a curse lies on your great work. You have discarded Moscow and, far from the people, you have built a solitary city which bears your name in a foreign tongue. But your feat is a wrong and the nation will rise again some day for ancient Moscow.
Prophetic words ! By 1923, two generations after Aksakov's death, Petrograd is a decaying, half-deserted city. Its very name has been changed to Leningrad, and the sceptre has returned to Moscow.
Ivan the Terrible—the Russian Nero, who instituted a reign of terror against his own subjects that has passed into a proverb ! "He abandoned the palace in the Kremlin," writes one historian, "and built himself and his satellites a whole new quarter in Moscow, summarily evicting the actual tenants; but he did not live much in the capital, preferring to direct his reign of terror from the forest of Alexandrov, which village he made his residence. Here he led the life of a lunatic, and forced his two sons, Ivan and Theodore, to do the same. The mornings were spent in bell-ringing and prostration, during dinner he read aloud the lives of the saints, in the afternoon he watched his victims being tortured, and in the evening he listened to soothsayers or got drunk. Everybody whom he suspected, he had murdered, tortured, or imprisoned; these included his cousin and all his family, and many of the boyars and their families. The Metropolitan of Moscow was outraged, imprisoned, and finally put to death for remonstrating with him. Not content with this, Ivan toured his unfortunate country, dealing death and destruction wherever he went. He literally devastated the prosperous city of Novgorod, and decimated its inhabitants, because it had dared to oppose his grandfather, and had rendered itself suspect of treachery. Finally, his suspicions fell on his own followers, and some of the chief oprichniki were executed. He made the people of Russia realize what it meant to invite a sovereign to come and rule upon his own terms. He did infinitely more material and moral harm to his country and to his subjects in twenty years than the Tatars had done in two hundred, and the irony of it was that he completely failed in his object."
Among his victims was his own son, Ivan, whom he killed in a fit of rage in the presence of the victim's young wife, crushing his head with the heavy iron staff studded with iron points which the father was in the habit of carrying.(2)
"Be like the Emperor Paul!" Now the Emperor Paul was known throughout Europe as the "crowned madman," whose despotism knew no bounds. So savage was his persecution, even of his own family, that a band of noblemen penetrated to his sleeping room on March 23, 1801, and murdered him. The Emperor had leaped from his bed at the sound of the approaching officers and hid behind some friendly curtain, but the leader of the band, touching the bedclothes, said, "The nest is warm—the bird cannot be far away." The members of the avenging group held the terrified despot, while one of them calmly strangled him with the sash of his uniform. Among the murderers was the great-great-grandfather of Isvolsky, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs under Nicholas II, a descendant of the murdered emperor.(3)
On November first the Grand Duke Nicholas Michailovich read a personal petition to the Tzar in which he begged the monarch to listen to the voice of his people:—
". . . If you could succeed in removing this perpetual interference, the renaissance of Russia would begin at once and you would recover the confidence of the vast majority of your subjects which is now lost. When the time is ripe—and it is at hand—you can yourself grant from the throne the desired responsibility [of government] to yourself and the legislature. This will come about naturally, easily, without any pressure from without and not in the same way as with the memorable act of October 17, 1905. I hesitated for a long time to tell you the truth, but made up my mind when your mother and your sisters persuaded me to do so. You are on the eve of new disturbances and, if I may say so, new attempts. Believe me, if I so strongly emphasize the necessity of your liberation from the existing fetters, I am doing so, not from personal motives, but only in the hopes of saving you, your crown and our beloved country from the irretrievable consequences of the gravest nature."
All in vain. Equally futile were the guarded diplomatic warnings conveyed by Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, and Maurice Paléologue, ambassador of France.
In early December 1916, the Grand Duke Alexander, favorite of the royal couple, was delegated by a group of near relatives of the Tzar to present to the Autocrat a final petition begging him to grant a Constitution—or at least cabinet responsible to the people—before it should be too late. The Grand Duke, on his return from the interview, reported the conversation:—
"There is a superb chance now at hand. In three days we shall celebrate the sixth of December, Saint Nicholas's Day. Announce a constitution for that day; dismiss Stürmer and Protopopov, and you will see with what enthusiasm and love your people will acclaim you."
The Emperor sat in pensive silence. He flicked the ashes from his cigarette with a bored gesture. The Empress shook her head negatively. Nicholas answered:—
"What you ask is impossible. On the day of my coronation I swore to preserve the autocracy. I must keep that oath intact for my son."
Even the thunderbolt which Professor Milyukov exploded in the Duma during November had not shaken the inert mass of bureaucracy and corruption. It was a classic example of oratory, suggestive, as one observer writes, of the of Hebrew Prophets or of Cicero's attacks on Catiline."
"Gentlemen: We have all heard of funeral orations—sad affairs, yet they serve some purpose. Let us analyze these purposes. First, we see such orations remind the relatives and friend of the deceased of some of his good qualities. Secondly, they may inspire a listener to imitation; and thirdly, they give the orator an opportunity to relieve his feelings, or, better still, practise oratorical power.
"But have you noticed, gentlemen, that, whatever the aim of the oration, it leaves the dead dead ? What would you, I wonder, think of an individual who should attempt an oration to resurrect the dead—to revive the spirit which has passed, and bring it back amongst the living? Mad? Yes, I agree; yet there are such occasions when such an endeavor would be permissible. Gentlemen, I am standing on this tribune with this mad desire upon me. Like a fire this desire has burned in my soul. I want to deliver an oration over the dead, to resurrect it, because we, the mighty Russian Empire, cannot think of leaving dead the most precious entity in the nation's possession. . . . This highest inheritance of a nation, its honor, must not be buried. Tarry with me, have patience with me. I am a sorrowful mourner. Honor has died in Russia, and before the world at large becomes aware of our dead we must bring it to life again."
Milyukov then launched upon an astounding revelation of the treason and defeatism of Premier Stürmer, whose appointment he qualified as madness. He charged him with negotiating for separate peace, betraying Russia, disarranging supplies for their sons and brothers in the trenches and doing it all " for German money."
" I have here a document which shows every mark which he received from Germany from July 1901 to July 1916. Let him come and deny it, and if I am allowed to live after this (though I will gladly die if honor lives) I will bring witnesses to prove the truth. . . . Rise, up, dead Honor ! Arise from thy coffin and let us see thee live! Come, face thy high position ! Accuse him in front of this Assembly ! Let thy voice thunder ! . . . Do you know who is crying ? Russia! The gallant Russia! The mother of us all, bad and good, is crying. . . . No, Berlin does not pay money for nothing ! Stürmer had to earn it, and he did. He pave the way for revolution as the means of separate peace."
Driven finally to desperation by the futility of their efforts to curb the invisible influences and the dark forces surrounding the Empress, a small band of men of high birth, some related to the royal family, resolved to take the law of life and death into their own hands. The first victim marked for death was Rasputin. An intercepted letter revealed the fact that the Empress herself would have been the next to be removed.
The versions of Rasputin's death differ somewhat in details, but substantially they all agree that the "prophet, on the night of December 30, 1916, was enticed to the house of Prince Felix Yousoupov on the Moika, in Petrograd, and there assassinated in cold blood. Besides the Prince, the conspirators included the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich and Pourishkevich, leader of the right wing of the Duma. The body was bundled into a blanket; a dog was killed to explain the pistol shot and account for the blood; the body finally was conveyed to the Neva in the automobile of a very high personage, and pushed under the ice.
When the news spread through Russia that Rasputin was no more, men breathed freely, and hope mounted in their breasts. Morta la bestia morto il veneno. ("The beast dead the poison dies.") But the hope was short-lived. The domineering will of the Empress was unbroken, and a period of depression ensued. The Prince and the other nobles implicated in the taking off of Rasputin were banished, some to their estates in Russia and one to distant Persia. Practically all the members, near and distant, of the royal family united in beseeching the Emperor and the Empress to profit by the manifestations of popular unrest. Seventeen members of the royal family signed this protest. But the Tzarina was unmoved and the Tzar was obliged to request his own mother, the Dowager Empress, to leave the city and retire to her estates in the Crimea. The Romanovs, like the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgot nothing. The Tzarina became more resentful, more bitter, more autocratic than ever.
Three weeks before the final debacle, in February 1917, a faint ray of hope flickered through the thickening gloom. But once more the invisible forces—or was it the Tzarina?—intervened. Rodzianko narrates the incident:—
The Duma was in session for nearly a week. I learned casually that the Emperor had summoned several of the ministers, including Golitsyn, and expressed his desire to discuss the question of responsible ministry. The conference ended in the Emperor's decision to go to the Duma next day and proclaim his will to grant responsible ministry. Prince Golitsyn was overjoyed and came home in high spirits. That same evening he was again summoned to the Palace, where the Emperor announced to him his intention to leave for the Stavka.
"How is that, Your Majesty ?" asked Golitsyn, amazed. "What about a responsible ministry ? You intended to go to the Duma to-morrow."
"I have changed my mind. . . . I am leaving for the Stavka to-night."
Russia was doomed. And the mainstay of her national existence, the army in the field, was melting away in demoralized despondency. One million, two hundred thousand embittered deserters had straggled back to their homes by January 1917, and the number was mounting daily. The casualties in battle had already reached four millions.
1. See Appendix VI.
2. See Appendix VII.
3. It was on the occasion of the murder of Paul I that a Russian nobleman wrote to a foreign friend, explaining that the Russian Magna Charta was "despotism tempered by assassination."