A REVERY IN THE SUMMER PALACE
NICHOLAS is teaching his son Russian history. To while away the snail-like hours, the last of the Romanovs devotes much time to pedagogy, instructing Alexis, the Tzarevitch, 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 revery 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 ; to-day 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 sombre 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 Tsarskoe 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 moulded 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 Romanovs 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 Romanovs, particularly during the reforms of Peter the Great, as each succeeding Tzar 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 Tzars 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 Cossacks 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 knout in hand, massacring every man, woman, and child who presumed to question, much less to, oppose, the prikaz of the Tzar. 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 catalogued. 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 Ivans, both great and terrible, Boris Godunov, anarchy, the Romanovs, Rasputin, and last of all, closing her strange, eventful history, the Bolsheviki.
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, steeltipped 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 manceuvring 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 journeyings 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 Tzars 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-Orientalized 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 régime : 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 Ivans 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 kneedeep 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. Tzar 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 “Tzar’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 mouldered into dust in the imperial tombs on the Bosphorus or had been desecrated by the Moslem masters of Santa Sophia.
The bureaucracy which Peter established, and which every succeeding Tzar 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 campfollower 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 Romanovs 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 Tzarevitch. 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 Tzar 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 sceptre, 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 — Tzar, Sovereign of All the Russias, 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 Tsarskoe 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 Tsarskoe 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 sceptre 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 Tzar. 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.
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.