History of the Russian Revolution Vol 1 Part 2

The Russian proletariat found its revolutionary audacity not only in itself. Its very posi-tion as minority of the nation suggests that it could not have given its struggle a suf.cient scope certainly not enough to take its place at the head of the state -if it had not found a mighty support in the thick of the people. Such a support was guaranteed to it by the agrarian problem.

The belated half-liberation of the peasants in 1861 had found agricultural industry al-most on the same level as two hundred years before. The preservation of the old area of communal land -somewhat .lched from during the reform together with the archaic methods of land culture, automatically sharpened a crisis caused by the rural excess popu-lation, which was at the same time a crisis in the three-fold system. The peasantry felt still more caught in a trap because the process was not taking place in the seventeenth but in the nineteenth century that is, in the conditions of an advanced money economy which made demands upon the wooden plough that could only be met by a tractor. Here too we see a drawing together of separate stages of the historic process, and as a result an extreme sharpening of contradictions. The learned agronomes and economists had been preaching that the old area with rational cultivation would be amply suf.cient that is to say, they proposed to the peasant to make a jump to a higher level of technique and culture without disturbing the landlord, the bailiff, or the tzar. But no economic r'egime, least of all an agricultural r'

egime, the most tardy of all, has ever disappeared before exhausting all its possibilities. Before feeling compelled to pa.s.s over to a more intensive economic culture, the peasant had to make a last attempt to broaden his three .elds. This could obviously be achieved only at the expense of non-peasant lands. Choking in the narrowness of his land area, under the smarting whip of the treasury and the market, the muzhik was inexorably forced to attempt to get rid of the landlord once for all.

On the eve of the .rst revolution the whole stretch of arable land within the limits of European Russia was estimated at 280 million dessiatins.[2] The communal allotments const.i.tuted about 140 million. The crown lands, above 5 million. Church and monastery lands, about 2.5 million. Of the privately owned land, 70 million dessiatins belonged to the 30,000 great landlords, each of whom owned above 500 dessiatins. This 70 million was about what would have belonged to 10 million peasant families. The land statistics const.i.tute the .nished programme of a peasant war.

The landlords were not settled with in the .rst revolution. Not all the peasants rose. The movement in the country did not coincide with that in the cities. The peasant army wavered, and .nally supplied suf.cient forces for putting down the workers. As soon as the s.e.m.e.novsky Guard regiment had settled with the Moscow insurrection, the monarchy abandoned all thought of cutting down the landed estates, as also its own autocratic rights.

However, the defeated revolution did not pa.s.s without leaving traces in the village. the government abolished the old land redemption payments and opened the way to a broader colonisation of Siberia. The frightened landlords not only made considerable concessions in the matter of rentals, but also began a large-scale selling of their landed estates. These fruits of the revolution were enjoyed by the better-off peasants, who were able to rent and buy the landlords' land.

However, the broadest gates were opened for the emerging of capitalist farmers from the peasant cla.s.s by the law of November 9, 1906, the chief reform introduced by the vic-torious counter-revolution. Giving the right even to a small minority of the peasants of the commune, against the will of the majority, to cut out from the communal land a section to be owned independently, the law of November 9 const.i.tuted an explosive capitalist sh.e.l.l directed against the commune. The president of the Council of Ministers, Stolypin, de-scribed the essence of this governmental policy towards the peasants as "banking on the strong ones." This meant: encourage the upper circles of the peasantry to get hold of the communal land by buying up these "liberated" sections, and convert these new capitalist farmers into a support for the existing r'

egime. It was easier to propose such a task, however, than to achieve it. In this attempt to subst.i.tute the kulak problem for the peasant problem, the counter-revolution was destined to break its neck.

By January 1, 1916, 2.5 million home-owners had made good their personal possession of 17 million dessiatins. Two more million home-owners were demanding the allotment to them of 14 million dessiatins. This looked like a colossal success for the reform. But the majority of the homesteads were completely incapable of sustaining life, and represented only material for natural selection. At that time when the more backward landlords and small peasants were selling on a large scale the former their estates, the latter their bits of land there emerged in the capacity of princ.i.p.al purchaser a new peasant bourgeoisie. Agriculture entered upon a state of indubitable capitalist boom. The export of agricultural products from Russia rose between 1908 and 1912 from 1 billion roubles to 1.5 billion. This meant that broad ma.s.ses of the peasantry had been proletarianised, and the upper circles of the villages were throwing on the market more and more grain.

To replace the compulsory communal ties of the peasantry, there developed very swiftly a voluntary co-operation, which succeeded in penetrating quite deeply into the peasant ma.s.ses in the course of a few years, and immediately became a subject of liberal and democratic idealisation. Real power in the co-operatives belonged, however, only to the rich peasants, whose interests in the last a.n.a.lysis they served. The Narodnik intelligentsia, by concentrating its chief forces in peasant co-operation, .nally succeeded in s.h.i.+fting its love for the people on to good solid bourgeois rails. In this way was prepared, partially at least, the political bloc of the "anti-capitalist" party of the Social Revolutionaries with the Kadets, the capitalist party par excellence.

Liberalism, although preserving the appearance of opposition to the agrarian policy of the reaction, nevertheless looked with great hopes upon this capitalist destruction of the communes. "In the country a very powerful petty bourgeoisie is arising," wrote the liberal Prince Troubetskoy, "in its whole make and essence alien alike to the ideals of the united n.o.bility and to the socialist dreams."

But this admirable medal had its other side. There was arising from the destroyed communes not only a "very powerful bourgeoisie," but also its ant.i.thesis. The number of peasants selling tracts of land they could not live on had risen by the beginning of the war to a million, which means no less than .ve million souls added to the proletarian population. A suf.ciently explosive material was also supplied by the millions of peasant-paupers to whom nothing remained but to hang on to their hungry allotments. In consequence those contradictions kept reproducing themselves among the peasants which had so early under-mined the development of bourgeois society as a whole in Russia. The new rural bour-geoisie which was to create a support for the old and more powerful proprietors, turned out to be as hostilely opposed to the fundamental ma.s.ses of the peasantry as the old propri-etors had been to the people as a whole. Before it could become a support to the existing order, this peasant bourgeoisie had need of some order of its own wherewith to cling to its conquered positions. In these circ.u.mstances it is no wonder that the agrarian problem continued a sharp one in all the State Dumas. Everyone felt that the last word had not yet been spoken. The peasant deputy Petrichenko once declared from the tribune of the Duma: "No matter how long you debate you won't create a new planet that means that you will have to give us the land." This peasant was neither a Bolshevik, nor a Social Revolutionary. On the contrary, he was a Right deputy, a monarchist.

The agrarian movement, having, like the strike movement of the workers, died down toward the end of 1907, partially revives in 1908, and grows stronger during the following years. The struggle, to be sure, is transferred to a considerable degree within the commune: that is just what the reaction had .gured on politically. There are not infrequent armed con.icts among peasants during the division of the communal land. But the struggle against the landlord also does not disappear. The peasants are more frequently setting .re to the landlord's manors, harvest, haystacks, seizing on the way also those individual tracts which had been cut off against the will of the communal peasants.

The war found the peasantry in this condition. The government carried away from the country about 10 million workers and about 2 million horses. The weak homesteads grew still weaker. The number of peasants who could not sow their .elds increased. But in the second year of the war the middle peasants also began to go under. Peasant hostility toward the war sharpened from month to month. In October 1916, the Petrograd Gendarme Administration reported that in the villages they had already ceased to believe in the success of the war the report being based on the words of insurance agents, teachers, traders, etc. "All are waiting and impatiently demanding: When will this cursed war .nally end?" And this is not all: "Political questions are being talked about everywhere and resolutions adopted directed against the landlords and merchants. Nuclei of various organisations are being formed....As yet there is no uniting centre, but there is no reason to suppose that the peasants will unite by way of the co-operatives which are daily growing throughout all Russia." There is some exaggeration here. In some things the gendarme has run ahead a little, but the fundamentals are indubitably correct.

The possessing cla.s.ses could not foresee that the village was going to present its bill. But they drove away these black thoughts, hoping to wriggle out of it somehow. On this theme the inquisitive French amba.s.sador Pal'

eologue had a chat during the war days with the former Minister of Agriculture Krivoshein, the former Premier Kokovtsev, the great landlord Count Bobrinsky, the President of the State Duma Rodzianko, the great indus-trialist Putilov, and other distinguished people. Here is what was unveiled before him in this conversation: In order to carry into action a radical land reform it would require the work of a standing army of 300,000 surveyors for no less than .fteen years; but during this time the number of homesteads would increase to 30 million, and consequently all these preliminary calculations by the time they were made would prove invalid. To introduce a land reform thus seemed in the eyes of these landlords, of.cials and bankers something like squaring the circle. It is hardly necessary to say that a like mathematical scrupulousness was completely alien to the peasants. He thought that .rst of all the thing to do was to smoke out the landlord, and then see.

If the village nevertheless remained comparatively peaceful during the war, that was because its active forces were at the front. The soldiers did not forget about the land whenever at least they were not thinking about death and in the trenches the muzhik's thoughts about the future were saturated with the smell of powder. But all the same the peasantry, even after learning to handle .rearms, could never of its own force have achieved the agrarian democratic revolution that is, its own revolution. It had to have leaders.h.i.+p. For the .rst time in world history the peasant was destined to .nd a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole difference between the Russian revolution and all those preceding it.

In England serfdom had disappeared in actual fact by the end of the fourteenth century that is, two centuries before it arose in Russia, and four and a half centuries before it was abolished. The expropriation of the landed property of the peasants dragged along in England through one Reformation and two revolutions to the nineteenth century. The capitalist development, not forced from the outside, thus had suf.cient time to liquidate the independent peasant long before the proletariat awoke to political life.

In France the struggle with royal absolutism, the aristocracy, and the princes of the church, compelled the bourgeoisie in various of its layers, and in several instalments, to achieve a radical agrarian revolution at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For long after that an independent peasantry const.i.tuted the support of the bourgeois order, and in 1871 it helped the bourgeoisie put down the Paris Commune.

In Germany the bourgeoisie proved incapable of a revolutionary solution of the agrarian problem, and in 1848 betrayed the peasants to the landlords, just as Luther some three centuries before in the peasant wars had betrayed them to the princes. On the other hand, the German proletariat was still too weak in the middle of the nineteenth century to take the leaders.h.i.+p of the peasantry. As a result the capitalist development of Germany got suf.cient time, although not so long a period as in England, to subordinate agriculture, as it emerged from the uncompleted bourgeois revolution, to its own interests.

The peasant reform of 1861 was carried out in Russia by an aristocratic and bureaucratic monarchy under pressure of the demands of a bourgeois society, but with the bourgeoisie completely powerless politically. The character of this peasant emanc.i.p.ation was such that the forced capitalistic transformation of the country inevitably converted the agrarian prob-lem into a problem of revolution. The Russian bourgeois dreamed of an agrarian evolution on the French plan, or the Danish, or the American anything you want, only not the Rus-sian. He neglected, however, to supply himself in good season with a French history or an American social structure. The democratic intelligentsia, notwithstanding its revolutionary past, took its stand in the decisive hour with the liberal bourgeoisie and the landlord, and not with the revolutionary village. In these circ.u.mstances only the working cla.s.s could stand at the head of the peasant revolution.

The law of combined development of backward countries in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors here rises before us in its most .nished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to com-pletely different historic species: a peasant war that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.

1. Narodnik is a general name for those non-Marxians who had originally hoped to accomplish the regeneration of Russia by "going to the people (narod)," and out of whom developed the Social Revolutionary party. The Mensheviks were the right, or so-called "moderate," wing of the Marxian or Social Democratic party, whom Lenin abandoned in 1903. [Trans.]

2. A dessiatin is 2.702 English acres. [Trans.]

CHAPTER 4.

THE TZAR AND THE TZARINA.

This book will concern itself least of all with those unrelated psychological researches which are now so often subst.i.tuted for social and historical a.n.a.lysis. Foremost in our .eld of vision will stand the great, moving forces of history, which are super-personal in character. Monarchy is one of them. But all these forces operate through people. And monarchy is by its very principle bound up with the personal. This in itself justi.es an interest in the personality of that monarch whom the process of social development brought face to face with a revolution. Moreover, we hope to show in what follows, partially at least, just where in a personality the strictly personal ends often much sooner than we think and how frequently the "distinguis.h.i.+ng traits" of a person are merely individual scratches made by a higher law of development.

Nicholas II inherited from his ancestors not only a giant empire, but also a revolution. And they did not bequeath him one quality which would have made him capable of gov-erning an empire or even a province or a county. To that historic .ood which was rolling its billows each one closer to the gates of his palace, the last Romanov opposed only a dumb indifference. It seemed as though between his consciousness and his epoch there stood some transparent but absolutely impenetrable medium.

People surrounding the tzar often recalled after the revolution that in the most tragic moments of his reigns at the time of the surrender of Port Arthur and the sinking of the .eet at Tsu-s.h.i.+ma, and ten years later at the time of the retreat of the Russian troops from Galicia, and then two years later during the days preceding his abdication when all those around him were depressed, alarmed, shaken Nicholas alone preserved his tranquillity. He would inquire as usual how many versts he had covered in his journeys about Russia, would recall episodes of hunting expeditions in the past, anecdotes of of.cial meetings, would interest himself generally in the little rubbish of the day's doings, while thunders roared over him and lightnings .ashed. "What is this?" asked one of his attendant generals, "a gigantic, almost unbelievable self-restraint, the product of breeding, of a belief in the divine predetermination of events? Or is it inadequate consciousness?" The answer is more than half included in the question. The so-called "breeding" of the tzar, his ability to control himself in the most extraordinary circ.u.mstances, cannot be explained by a mere external training; its essence was an inner indifference, a poverty of spiritual forces, a weakness of the impulses of the will. That mask of indifference which was called breeding in certain circles, was a natural part of Nicholas at birth.

The tzar's diary is the best of all testimony. From day to day and from year to year drags along upon its pages the depressing record of spiritual emptiness. "Walked long and killed two crows. Drank tea by daylight." Promenades on foot, rides in a boat. And then again crows, and again tea. All on the borderline of physiology. Recollections of church ceremonies are jotted down in the same tome as a drinking party.

In the days preceding the opening of the State Duma, when the whole country was shaking with convulsions, Nicholas wrote: "April 14. Took a walk in a thin s.h.i.+rt and took up paddling again. Had tea in a balcony. Stana dined and took a ride with us. Read." Not a word as to the subject of his reading. Some sentimental English romance? Or a report from the Police Department? "April 15: Accepted Witte's resignation. Marie and Dmitri to dinner. Drove them home to the palace."

On the day of the decision to dissolve the Duma, when the court as well as the liberal circles were going through a paroxysm of fright, the tzar wrote in his diary: "July 7. Friday. Very busy morning. Half hour late to breakfast with the of.cers....A storm came up and it was very muggy. We walked together. Received Goremykin. Signed a decree dissolving the Duma! Dined with Olga and Petia. Read all evening." An exclamation point after the coming dissolution of the Duma is the highest expression of his emotions. The deputies of the dispersed Duma summoned the people to refuse to pay taxes. A series of military uprisings followed: in Sveaborg, Kronstadt, on s.h.i.+ps, in army units. The revolutionary terror against high of.cials was renewed on an unheard-of scale. The tzar writes: "July 9. Sunday. It has happened! The Duma was closed today. At breakfast after Ma.s.s long faces were noticeable among many....The weather was .ne. On our walk we met Uncle Misha who came over yesterday from Gatchina. Was quietly busy until dinner and all evening. Went padding in a canoe." It was in a canoe he went paddling that is told. But with what he was busy all evening is not indicated. So it was always.

And further in those same fatal days: "July 14. Got dressed and rode a bicycle to the bathing beach and bathed enjoyably in the sea." "July 15. Bathed twice. It was very hot. Only us two at dinner. A storm pa.s.sed over." "July 19. Bathed in the morning. Received at the farm. Uncle Vladimir and Chagin lunched with us." An insurrection and explosions of dynamite are barely touched upon with a single phrase, "Pretty doings!" astonis.h.i.+ng in its imperturbable indifference, which never rose to conscious cynicism.

"At 9:30 in the morning we rode out to the Caspian regiment...walked for a long time. The weather was wonderful. Bathed in the sea. After tea received Lvov and Guchkov." Not a word of the fact that this unexpected reception of the two liberals was brought about by the attempt of Stolypin to include opposition leaders in his ministry. Prince Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government, said of that reception at the time: "I expected to see the sovereign stricken with grief, but instead of that there came out to meet me a jolly sprightly fellow in a raspberry-coloured s.h.i.+rt." The tzar's outlook was not broader than that of a minor police of.cial with this difference, that the latter would have a better knowledge of reality and be less burdened with superst.i.tions. The sole paper which Nicholas read for years, and from which he derived his ideas, was a weekly published on state revenue by Prince Meshchersky, a vile, bribed journalist of the reactionary bureaucratic clique, despised even in his own circle. The tzar kept his outlook unchanged through two wars and two revolutions. Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium indifference. Nicholas was called, not without foundation, a fatalist. It is only necessary to add that his fatalism was the exact opposite of an active belief in his "star." Nicholas indeed considered himself unlucky. His fatalism was only a form of pa.s.sive self-defence against historic evolution, and went hand in hand with an arbitrariness, trivial in psychological motivation, but monstrous in its consequences.

"I wish it and therefore it must be " writes Count Witte. "That motto appeared in all the activities of this weak ruler, who only through weakness did all the things which characterised his reign a wholesale shedding of more or less innocent blood, for the most part without aim."

Nicholas is sometimes compared with his half-crazy great-great-grandfather Paul, who was strangled by a camarilla acting in agreement with his own son, Alexander "the Blessed." These two Romanovs were actually alike in their distrust of everybody due to a distrust of themselves, their touchiness as of omnipotent n.o.bodies, their feeling of abnegation, their consciousness, as you might say, of being crowned pariahs. But Paul was incomparably more colourful; there was an element of fancy in his rantings, however irresponsible. In his descendant everything was dim; there was not one sharp trait.

Nicholas was not only unstable, but treacherous. Flatterers called him a charmer, be-witcher, because of his gentle way with the courtiers. But the tzar reserved his special caresses for just those of.cials whom he had decided to dismiss. Charmed beyond measure at a reception, the minister would go home and .nd a letter requesting his resignation. That was a kind of revenge on the tzar's part for his own nonent.i.ty.

Nicholas recoiled in hostility before everything gifted and signi.cant. He felt at ease only among completely mediocre and brainless people, saintly fakers, holy men, to whom he did not have to look up. He had his amour propre indeed it was rather keen. But it was not active, not possessed of a grain of initiative, enviously defensive. He selected his min-isters on a principle of continual deterioration. Men of brain and character he summoned only in extreme situations when there was no other way out, just as w call in a surgeon to save our lives. It was so with Witte, and afterwards with Stolypin. The tzar treated both with ill-concealed hostility. As soon as the crisis had pa.s.sed, he hastened to part with these counsellors who were too tall for him. This selection operated so systematically that the president of the last Duma, Rodzianko, on the 7th of January 1917, with the revolution already knocking at the doors, ventured to say to the tzar: "Your Majesty, there is not one reliable or honest man left around you; all the best men have been removed or have retired. There remain only those of ill repute."

All the efforts of the liberal bourgeoisie to .nd a common language with the court came to nothing. The tireless and noisy Rodzianko tried to shake up the tzar with his reports, but in vain. The latter gave no answer either to argument or to impudence, but quietly made ready to dissolve the Duma. Grand Duke Dmitri, a former favourite of the tzar, and future accomplice in the murder of Rasputin, complained to his colleague, Prince Yussupov, that the tzar at headquarters was becoming every day more indifferent to everything around him. In Dmitri's opinion the tzar was being fed some kind of dope which had a benumbing action upon his spiritual faculties. "Rumours went round," writes the liberal historian Miliukov, "that this condition of mental and moral apathy was sustained in the tzar by an increased use of alcohol." This was all fancy or exaggeration. The tzar had no need of narcotics: the fatal "dope" was in his blood. Its symptoms merely seemed especially striking on the background of those great events of war and domestic crisis which led up to the revolution. Rasputin, who was a psychologist, said brie.y of the tzar that he "lacked insides."

This dim, equable and "well-bred" man was cruel not with the active cruelty of Ivan the Terrible or of Peter, in the pursuit of historic aims What had Nicholas the Second in common with them? but with the cowardly cruelty of the late born, frightened at his own doom. At the very dawn of his reign Nicholas praised the Phanagoritsy regiment as ".ne fellows" for shooting down workers. He always "read with satisfaction" how they .ogged with whips the bob-haired girl-students, or cracked the heads of defenceless people during Jewish pogroms. This crowned black sheep gravitated with all his soul to the very dregs of society, the Black Hundred hooligans. He not only paid them generously from the state treasury, but loved to chat with them about their exploits, and would pardon them when they accidentally got mixed up in the murder of an opposition deputy. Witte, who stood at the head of the government during the putting down of the .rst revolution, has written in his memoirs: "When news of the useless cruel antics of the chiefs of those detachments reached the sovereign, they met with his approval, or in any case his defence." In answer to the demand of the governor-general of the Baltic States that he stop a certain lieutenant-captain, Richter, who was "executing on his own authority and without trial non-resistant persons," the tzar wrote on the report: "Ah, what a .ne fellow!" Such encouragements are innumerable. This "charmer," without will, without aim, without imagination, was more awful than all the tyrants of ancient and modern history.

The tzar was mightily under the in.uence of the tzarina, an in.uence which increased with the years and the dif.culties. Together they const.i.tuted a kind of unit and that combination shows already to what an extent the personal, under pressure of circ.u.mstances, is supplemented by the group. But .rst we must speak of the tzarina herself.

Maurice Palologue, the French amba.s.sador at Petrograd during the war, a re.ned psy-chologist for French academicians and janitresses, offers a meticulously licked portrait of the last tzarina: "Moral restlessness, a chronic sadness, in.nite longing, intermittent ups and downs of strength, anguis.h.i.+ng thoughts of the invisible other world, superst.i.tions are not all these traits, so clearly apparent in the personality of the empress, the characteristic traits of the Russian people?" Strange as it may seem, there is in this saccharine lie just a grain of truth. The Russian satirist Saltykov, with some justi.cation, called the ministers and governors from among the Baltic barons "Germans with a Russian soul." It is indu-bitable that aliens, in no way connected with the people, developed the most pure culture of the "genuine Russian" administrator.

But why did the people repay with such open hatred a tzarina who, in the words of Palo-logue, had so completely a.s.similated their soul? The answer is simple. In order to justify her new situation, this German woman adopted with a kind of cold fury all the traditions and nuances of Russian mediaevalism, the most meagre and crude of all mediaevalisms, in that very period when the people were making mighty efforts to free themselves from it. This Hessian princess was literally possessed by the demon of autocracy. Having risen from her rural corner to the heights of Byzantine despotism, she would not for anything take a step down. In the orthodox religion she found a mysticism and a magic adapted to her new lot. She believed the more in.exibly in her vocation, the more naked became the foulness of the old rgime. With a strong character and a gift for dry and hard exaltations, the tzarina supplemented the weak-willed tzar, ruling over him.

On March 17, 1916, a year before the revolution, when the tortured country was already writhing in the grip of defeat and ruin, the tzarina wrote to her husband at military head-quarters: "You must not give indulgences, a responsible ministry, etc....or anything that they want. This must be your war and your peace, and the honour yours and our fatherland's, and not by any means the Duma's. They have not the right to say a single word in these matters." This was at any rate a thoroughgoing programme. And it was in just this way that she always had the whip hand over the continually vacillating tzar.

After Nicholas' departure to the army in the capacity of .ct.i.tious commander-in-chief, the tzarina began openly to take charge of internal affairs. The ministers came to her with reports as to a regent. She entered into a conspiracy with a small camarilla against the Duma, against the ministers, against the staff-generals, against the whole world to some extent indeed against the tzar. On December 6, 1916, the tzarina wrote to the tzar: "...Once you have said that you want to keep Protopopov, how does he (Premier Trepov) go against you? Bring down your .rst on the table. Don't yield. Be the boss. Obey your .rm little wife and our Friend. Believe in us." Again three days late: "You know you are right. Carry your head high. Command Trepov to work with him....Strike your .st on the table." Those phrases sound as though they were made up, but they are taken from authentic letters. Besides, you cannot make up things like that.

On December 13 the tzarina suggest to the tzar: "Anything but this responsible ministry about which everybody has gone crazy. Everything is getting quiet and better, but people want to feel your hand. How long they have been saying to me, for whole years, the same thing: 'Russia loves to feel the whip.' That is their nature!" This orthodox Hessian, with a Windsor upbringing and a Byzantine crown on her head, not only "incarnates" the Russian soul, but also organically despises it. Their nature demands the whip writes the Russian tzarina to the Russian tzar about the Russian people, just two months and a half before the monarchy tips over into the abyss.

In contrast to her force of character, the intellectual force of the tzarina is not higher, but rather lower than her husband's. Even more than he, she craves the society of simpletons. The close and long-lasting friends.h.i.+p of the tzar and tzarina with their lady-in-waiting Vyrubova gives a measure of the spiritual stature of this autocratic pair. Vyrubova has described herself as a fool, and this is not modesty. Witte, to whom one cannot deny an accurate eye, characterised her as "a most commonplace, stupid, Petersburg young lady, homely as a bubble in the biscuit dough." In the society of this person, with whom elderly of.cials, amba.s.sadors and .nanciers obsequiously .irted, and who had just enough brains not to forget about her own pockets, the tzar and tzarina would pa.s.s many hours, consulting her about affairs, corresponding with her and about her. She was more in.uential than the State Duma, and even that the ministry.

But Vyrubova herself was only an instrument of "The Friend," whose authority super-seded all three. "...This is my private opinion," writes the tzarina to the tzar, "I will .nd out what our Friend thinks." The opinion of the "Friend" is not private, it decides. "...I am .rm," insists the tzarina a few weeks later, "but listen to me, i.e. this means our Friend, and trust in everything....I suffer for you as for a gentle soft-hearted child who needs guid-ance, but listens to bad counsellors, while a man sent by G.o.d is telling him what he should do."

The Friend sent by G.o.d was Gregory Rasputin.

....The prayers and the help of our Friend then all will be well."

"If we did not have Him, all would have been over long ago. I am absolutely convinced of that."

Throughout the whole reign of Nicholas and Alexandra soothsayers and hysterics were imported for the court not only from all over Russia, but from other countries. Special of.cial purveyors arose, who would gather around the momentary oracle, forming a pow-erful Upper Chamber attached to the monarch. There was no lack of bigoted old women with the t.i.tle of countess, nor of functionaries weary of doing nothing, nor of .nanciers who had entire ministries in their hire. With a jealous eye on the unchartered compet.i.tion of mesmerists and sorcerers, the high priesthood of the Orthodox Church would hasten to pry their way into the holy of holies of the intrigue. Witte called this ruling circle, against which he himself twice stubbed his toe, "the leprous court camarilla."

The more isolated the dynasty became, and the more unsheltered the autocrat felt, the more he needed some help from the other world. Certain savages, in order to bring good weather, wave in the air a s.h.i.+ngle on a string. The tzar and tzarina used s.h.i.+ngles for the greatest variety of purposes. In the tzar's train there was a whole chapel full of large and small images, and all sorts of fetiches, which were brought to bear, .rst against the j.a.panese, then against the German artillery.

The level of the court circle really had not changed much from generation to genera-tion. Under Alexander II, called the "Liberator," the grand dukes had sincerely believed in house spirits and witches. Under Alexander III it was no better, only quieter. The "leprous camarilla" had existed always, changed only its personnel and its method. Nicholas II did not create, but inherited from his ancestors, this court atmosphere of savage mediaevalism. But the country during these same decades had been changing, its problems growing more complex, its culture rising to a higher level. The court circle was thus left far behind.

Although the monarchy did under compulsion make concessions to the new forces, nev-ertheless inwardly it completely failed to become modernised. On the contrary it withdrew into itself. Its spirit of mediaevalism thickened under the pressure of hostility and fear, until it acquired the character of a disgusting nightmare overhanging the country.

Towards November 1905 that is, at the most critical moment of the .rst revolution the tzar writes in his diary: "We got acquainted with a man of G.o.d, Gregory, from the Tobolsk province." That was Rasputin a Siberian peasant with a bald scar on his head, the result of a beating for horse-stealing. Put forward at an appropriate moment, this "Man of G.o.d" soon found of.cial helpers or rather they found him and thus was formed a new ruling cla.s.s which got a .rm hold of the tzarina, and through her of the tzar.

From the winter of 1913-14 it was openly said in Petersburg society that all high ap-pointments, posts and contracts depended upon the Rasputin clique. The "Elder" himself gradually turned into a state inst.i.tution. He was carefully guarded, and no less carefully sought after by the competing ministers. Spies of the Police Department kept a diary of his life by hours, and did not fail to report how on a visit to his home village of Pokrovsky he got into a drunken and b.l.o.o.d.y .ght with his own father on the street. On the same day that this happened September 9, 1915 Rasputin sent two friendly telegrams, one to Tzarskoe Selo, to the tzarina, the other to headquarters to the tzar. In epic language the police spies registered from day to day the revels of the Friend. "He returned today 5 o'clock in the morning completely drunk." "On the night of the 25-26th the actress V. spent the night with Rasputin." "He arrived with Princess D. (the wife of a gentleman of the bed-chamber of the Tzar's court) at the Hotel Astoria."...And right beside this: "Came home from Tzarskoe Selo about 11 o'clock in the evening." "Rasputin came home with Princess Sh-very drunk and together they went out immediately." In the morning or evening of the following day a trip to Tzarskoe Selo. To a sympathetic question from the spy as to why the Elder was thoughtful, the answer came: "Can't decide whether to convoke the Duma or not." And then again: "He came home at 5 in the morning pretty drunk." Thus for months and years the melody was played on three keys: "Pretty drunk," "Very drunk," and "Completely drunk." These communications of state importance were brought together and countersigned by the general of gendarmes, Gorbachev.

The bloom of Raputin's in.uence lasted six years, the last years of the monarchy. "His life in Petrograd," says Prince Yussupov, who partic.i.p.ated to some extent in that life, and afterward killed Rasputin, "became a continual revel, the drunken debauch of a galley slave who had come into an unexpected fortune." "I had at my disposition," wrote the president of the Duma, Rodzianko, "a whole ma.s.s of letters from mothers whose daugh-ters had been dishonoured by this insolent rake." Nevertheless the Petrograd metropolitan, Pitirim, owed his position to Rasputin, as also the almost illiterate Archbishop Varnava. The Procuror of the Holy Synod, Sabler, was long sustained by Rasputin; and Premier Kokovtsev was removed at his wish, having refused to receive the "Elder." Rasputin ap-pointed Strmer President of the Council of Ministers, Protopopov Minister of the Interior, the new Procuror of the Synod, Raev, and many others. The amba.s.sador of the French republic, Palologue, sought an interview with Rasputin, embraced him and cried, "Voil, un vritable illumin' hoping in this way to win the heart of the tzarina to the cause of France. The Jew Simanovich, .nancial agent of the "Elder," himself under the eye of the Secret Police as a night club gambler and usurer introduced into the Ministry of Justice through Rasputin the completely dishonest creature Dobrovolsky.

"Keep by you the little list," writes the tzarina to the tzar, in regard to new appoint-ments. "Our friend has asked that you talk all this over with Protopopov." Two days later: "Our friend says that Strmer may remain a few days longer as President of the Council of Ministers." And again: "Protopopov venerates our friend and will be blessed."

On one of those days when the police spies were counting up the number of bottles and women, the tzarina grieved in a letter to the tzar: "They accuse Rasputin of kissing women, etc. Read the apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting." This reference to the apostles would hardly convince the police spies. In another letter the tzarina goes still farther. "During vespers I thought so much about our friend," she writes, "how the Scribes and Pharisees are persecuting Christ pretending that they are so perfect...yes, in truth no man is a prophet in his own country."

The comparison of Rasputin and Christ was customary in that circle, and by no means accidental. The alarm of the royal couple before the menacing forces of history was too sharp to be satis.ed with an impersonal G.o.d and the futile shadow of a Biblical Christ. They needed a second coming of "the Son of Man." In Rasputin the rejected and agonising monarchy found a Christ in its own image.

"If there had been no Rasputin," said Senator Tagantsev, a man of the old rgime, "it would have been necessary to invent one." There is a good deal more in these words than their author imagined. If by the word hooliganism we understand the extreme expression of those anti-social parasite elements at the bottom of society, we may de.ne Rasputinism as a crowned hooliganism at its very top.

CHAPTER 5.

THE IDEA OF A PALACE REVOLUTION.

Why did not the ruling cla.s.ses, who were trying to save themselves from a revolution, attempt to get rid of the tzar and his circle? They wanted to, but they did not dare. They lacked both resolution and belief in their cause. The idea of a palace revolution was in the air up to the very moment when it was swallowed up in a state revolution. We must pause upon this in order to get a clearer idea of the inter-relations, just before the explosion, of the monarchy, the upper circles of the n.o.bility, the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.

The possessing cla.s.ses were completely monarchist, by virtue of interests, habits and cowardice. But they wanted a monarchy without Rasputin. The monarchy answered them: Take me as I am. In response to demands for a decent ministry, the tzarina sent to the tzar at headquarters an apple from the hands of Rasputin, urging that he eat it in order to strengthen his will. "Remember," she adjured, "that even Monsieur Philippe (a French charlatan-hypnotist) said that you must not grant a const.i.tution, as that would mean ruin to you and Russia..." "Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Emperor Paul -crush them all under your feet!"

What a disgusting mixture of fright, superst.i.tion and malicious alienation from the coun-try! To be sure, it might seem that on the summits the tzar's family could not be quite alone. Rasputin indeed was always surrounded with a galaxy of grand ladies, and in gen-eral shamanism .ourishes in an aristocracy. But this mysticism of fear does not unite people, it divides them. Each saves himself in his own way. Many aristocratic houses have their competing saints. Even on the summits of Petrograd society the tzar's family was surrounded as though plague-stricken, with a quarantine of distrust and hostility. Lady-in-waiting Vyrubova remembers: "I was aware and felt deeply in all those around us a malice toward those whom I revered, and I felt that this malice would a.s.sume terrible dimensions."

Against the purple background of the war, with the roar of underground tremors clearly audible, the privileged did not for one moment renounce the joys of life; on the contrary, they devoured them greedily. Yet more and more often a skeleton would appear at their banquets and shake the little bones of his .ngers. It began to seem to them that all their misery lay in the disgusting character of "Alix," in the treacherous weakness of the tzar, in that greedy fool Vyrubova, and in the Siberian Christ with a scar on his skull. Waves of unendurable foreboding swept over the ruling cla.s.s, contracting it with spasms from the periphery to the centre, and more and more isolating the hated upper circle at Tzarskoe Selo. Vyrubova has pretty clearly expressed the feelings of the upper circle at that time in her, generally speaking, very lying reminiscences: "...For the hundredth time I asked myself what has happened to Petrograd society. Are they all spiritually sick, or have they contracted some epidemic which rages in war time? It is hard to understand, but the fact is, all were in an abnormally excited condition." To the number of those out of their heads belonged the whole copious family of the Romanovs, the whole greedy, insolent and uni-versally hated pack of grand dukes and grand d.u.c.h.esses. Frightened to death, they were trying to wriggle out of the ring narrowing around them. They kowtowed to the critical aris-tocracy, gossiped about the royal pair, and egged on both each other and all those around them. The august uncles addressed the tzar with letters of advice in which between the lines of respect was to be heard a snarl and a grinding of teeth.

Protopopov, some time after the October revolution, colourfully if not very learnedly characterised the mood of the upper circles: "Even the very highest cla.s.ses became fron-deurs before the revolution: in the grand salons and clubs the policy of the government received harsh and unfriendly criticism. The relations which had been formed in the tzar's family were a.n.a.lysed and talked over. Little anecdotes were pa.s.sed around about the head of the state. Verses were composed. Many grand dukes openly attended these meetings, and their presence gave a special authority in the eyes of the public to tales that were cari-catures and to malicious exaggerations. A sense of the danger of this sport did not awaken till the last moment."

These rumours about the court camarilla were especially sharpened by the accusation of Germanophilism and even of direct connections with the enemy. The noisy and not very deep Rodzianko de.nitely stated: "The connection and the a.n.a.logy of aspirations is so logically obvious that I at least have no doubt of the co-operation of the German Staff and the Rasputin circle: n.o.body can doubt it." The bare reference to a "logical" obvious-ness greatly weakens the categorical tone of this testimony. No evidence of a connection between the Rasputinists and the German Staff was discovered after the revolution. It was otherwise with the so-called "Germanophilism." This was not a question, of course, of the national sympathies and antipathies of the German tzarina, Premier Strmer, Countess Kleinmichel, Minister of the Court Count Frederiks, and other gentlemen with German names. The cynical memoirs of the old intriguante Kleinmichel demonstrate with remark-able clearness how a supernational character distinguished the aristocratic summits of all the countries of Europe, bound together as they were by ties of birth, inheritance, scorn for all those beneath them, and last but not least, cosmopolitan adultery in ancient castles, at fas.h.i.+onable watering places, and in the courts of Europe. Considerably more real were the organic antipathies of the court household to the obsequious lawyers of the French Repub-lic, and the sympathy of the reactionaries whether bearing Teuton or Slavic family names for the genuine Russian soul of the Berlin rgime which had so often impressed them with its waxed mustachios, its sergeant-major manner and self-con.dent stupidity.

But that was not the decisive factor. The danger arose from the very logic of the situ-ation, for the court could not help seeking salvation in a separate peace, and this the more insistently the more dangerous the situation became. Liberalism in the person of its leaders was trying, as we shall see, to reserve for itself the chance of making a separate peace in connection with the prospect of its own coming to power. But for just this reason it car-ried on a furious chauvinist agitation, deceiving the people and terrorising the court. The camarilla did not dare show its real face prematurely in so ticklish a matter, and was even compelled to counterfeit the general patriotic tone, at the same time feeling out the ground for a separate peace.

General Kurlov, a former chief of police belonging to the Rasputin camarilla, denies, of course, in his reminiscences any German connection or sympathies on the part of his protector, but immediately adds: "We cannot blame Strmer for his opinion that the war with Germany was the greatest possible misfortune for Russia and that it had no serious political justi.cation." It is hardly possible to forget that while holding this interesting opinion Strmer was the head of the government of a country waging war against Germany. The tzarist Minister of the Interior, Protopopov, just before he entered the government, had been conducting negotiations in Stockholm with the German diplomat Warburg and had reported them to the tzar. Rasputin himself, according to the same Kurlov, "considered the war with Germany a colossal misfortune for Russia." And .nally the empress wrote to the tzar on April 5, 1916: "...They dare not say that He has anything in common with the Germans. He is good and magnanimous toward all, like Christ. No matter to what religion a man may belong: that is the way a good Christian ought to be." To be sure, this good Christian who was almost always intoxicated might quite possibly have been made up to, not only by sharpers, usurers and aristocratic princesses, but by actual spies of the enemy. "Connections" of this kind are not inconceivable. But the oppositional patriots posed the matter more directly and broadly: they directly accused the tzarina of treason. In his memoirs, written considerably later, General Denikin testi.es: "In the army there was loud talk, unconstrained both in time and place, as to the insistent demands of the empress for a separate peace, her treachery in the matter of Field-Marshal Kitchener, of whose journey she was supposed to have told the Germans, etc....This circ.u.mstance played a colossal role in determining the mood of the army in its att.i.tude to the dynasty and the revolution." The same Denikin relates how after the revolution General Alexeiev, to a direct question about the treason of the empress, answered, "vaguely and reluctantly," that in going over the papers they had found in the possession of the tzarina a chart with a detailed designation of troops on the whole front, and that upon him, Alexeiev, this had produced a depressing effect. "Not another word," signi.cantly adds Denikin. "He changed the subject." Whether the tzarina had the mysterious chart or not, the luckless generals were obviously not unwilling to shoulder off upon her the responsibility for their own defeat. The accusation of treason against the court undoubtedly crept through the army chie.y from above downward starting with that incapable staff.

But if the tzarina herself, to whom the tzar submitted in everything, was betrayed to Wilhelm the military secrets and even the heads of the Allied chieftains, what remained but to make an end of the royal pair? And since the head of the army and of the anti-German party was the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, was he not as a matter of duty chosen for the role of supreme patron of a palace revolution? That was the reason why the tzar, upon the insistence of Rasputin and the tzarina, removed the grand duke and took the chief command into his own hands. But the tzarina was afraid even of a meeting between the nephew and the uncle in turning over the command. "Sweetheart, try to be cautious," she writes to the tzar at headquarters, "and don't let Nikolasha catch you in any kind of promises or anything else remember that Gregory saved you from him and from his bad people...remember in the name of Russia what they wanted you to do, oust you (this is not gossip Orloff had all the papers ready), and put me in a monastery."

The tzar's brother Michael said to Rodzianko: "The whole family knows how harmful Alexandra Feodorovna is. Nothing but traitors surround her and my brother. All honest people have left. But what's to be done in such a situation?" That is it exactly: what is to be done?

The Grand d.u.c.h.ess Maria Pavlovna insisted in the presence of her sons that Rodzianko should take the initiative in "removing the tzarina." Rodzianko suggested that they consider the conversation as not having taken place, as otherwise in loyalty to hi oath he should be obliged to report to the tzar that the grand d.u.c.h.ess had suggested to the President of the Duma that he destroy the tzarina. Thus the ready-witted Lord Chamberlain reduced the question of murdering the tzarina to a pleasantry of the drawing room.

At times the ministry itself came into sharp opposition to the tzar. As early as 1915, a year and a half before the revolution, at the sittings of the government, talk went on openly which even now seems unbelievable. The War Minister Polivanov: "Only a policy of con-ciliation toward society can save the situation. The present shaky d.y.k.es will not avert a catastrophe." The Minister of Marine Grigorovich: "It's no secret that the army does not trust us and is awaiting a change." The Minister of Foreign Affairs Sazonov: "The popu-larity of the tzar and his authority in the eyes of the popular ma.s.s is considerably shaken." The Minister of the Interior Prince Sherbatov: "All of us together are un.t for governing Russia in the situation that is forming...We must have either a dictators.h.i.+p or a conciliatory policy" (Session of August 21, 1915). Neither of these measures could now be of help; nei-ther was now attainable. The tzar could not make up his mind to a dictators.h.i.+p; he rejected a conciliatory policy, and did not accept the resignation of the ministers who considered themselves un.t. The high of.cial who kept the record makes a short commentary upon these ministerial speeches: evidently we shall have to hang from a lamp-post.

With such feelings prevailing it is no wonder that even in bureaucratic circles they talked of the necessity of a palace uprising as the sole means of preventing the advancing revolu-tion. "If I had shut my eyes," remembers one of the partic.i.p.ants of these conversations, "I might have thought that I was in the company of desperate revolutionists."

A colonel of gendarmes making a special investigation of the army in the south of Rus-sia painted a dark picture in his report: Thanks to propaganda chie.y relating to the Ger-manophilism of the empress and the tzar, the army is prepared for the idea of a palace revolution. "Conversations to this effect are openly carried on in of.cers' meetings and have not met the necessary opposition on the part of the high command." Protopopov on his part testi.es that "a considerable number of people in the high commanding staff sym-pathised with the idea of a coup d'tat: certain individuals were in touch with and under the in.uence of the chief leaders of the so-called Progressive Bloc."

The subsequently notorious Admiral Kolchak testi.ed before the Soviet Investigation Commission after his troops were routed by the Red Army that he had connections with many oppositional members of the Duma whose speeches he welcomed, since "his att.i.tude to the powers existing before the revolution was adverse." As to the plan for a palace revolution, however, Kolchak was not informed.

After the murder of Rasputin and the subsequent banishment of grand dukes, high so-ciety talked still louder of the necessity of a palace revolution. Prince Yussupov tells how when the Grand Duke Dmitry was arrested at the palace the of.cers of several regiments came up and proposed plans for decisive action, "to which he, of course, could not agree."

The Allied diplomats in any case, the British amba.s.sador were considered acces-sories to the plot. The latter, doubtless upon the initiative of the Russian liberals, made an attempt in January 1917 to in.uence Nicholas, having secured the preliminary sanction of his government. Nicholas attentively and politely listened to the amba.s.sador, thanked him, and spoke of other matters. Protopopov reported to Nicholas the relations between Buchanan and the chief leaders of the Progressive Bloc, and suggested that the British Am-ba.s.sador be placed under observation. Nicholas did not seem to approve of the proposal, .nding the watching of an amba.s.sador "inconsistent with international tradition." Mean-while Kurlov has no hesitation in stating that "the Intelligence Service remarks daily the relations between the leader of the Kadet Party Miliukov and the British Amba.s.sador." In-ternational traditions, then, had not stood in the way at all. But their transgression helped little: even so, a palace conspiracy was never discovered.

Did it in reality exist? There is nothing to prove this. It was a little too broad, that "conspiracy." It included too many and too various circles to be a conspiracy. It merely hung in the air as a mood of the upper circles of Petrograd society, as a confused idea of salvation, or a slogan of despair. But it did not thicken down to the point of becoming a practical plan.

The upper n.o.bility in the eighteenth century had more than once introduced practical corrections into the succession by imprisoning or strangling inconvenient emperors: this operation was carried out for the last time on Paul in 1801. It is impossible to say, therefore, that a palace revolution would have transgressed the traditions of the Russian monarchy. On the contrary, it had been a steady element in those traditions. But the aristocracy had long ceased to feel strong at heart. It surrendered the honour of strangling the tzar and tzarina to the bourgeoisie. But the leaders of the latter showed little more resolution.

Since the revolution references have been made more than once to the liberal capitalists Guchkov and Tereshchenko, and to General Krymov who was close to them, as the nu-cleus of the conspirators. Guchkov and Tereshchenko themselves have con.rmed this, but inde.nitely. The former volunteer in the army of the Boers against England, the duellist Guchkov, a liberal with spurs, must have seemed to "social opinion" in a general way the most suitable .gure for a conspiracy. Surely not the wordy Professor Miliukov! Guchkov undoubtedly recurred more than once in his thoughts to the short and sharp blow in which one regiment of the guard would replace and forestall the revolution. Witte in his memoirs had already told on Guchkov, whom he hated, as an admirer of the Young Turk methods of disposing of an inconvenient sultan. But Guchkov, having never succeeded in his youth in displaying his young Turkish audacity, had had time to grow much older. And more im-portant, this henchman of Stolypin could not help but see the difference between Russian conditions and the old Turkish conditions, could not fail to ask himself: Will not the palace revolution, instead of a means for preventing a real revolution, turn out to be the last jar that looses the avalanche? May not the cure prove more ruinous than the disease?

In the literature devoted to the February revolution the preparation of a palace revolution is spoken of as a .rmly established fact. Miliukov puts it thus: "Its realisation was already on the way in February." Denikin transfers its realisation to March. Both mention a "plan" to stop the tzar's train in transit, demand an abdication, and in case of refusal, which was considered inevitable, carry out a "physical removal" of the tzar. Miliukov adds that, foreseeing a possible revolution, the heads of the Progressive Bloc, who did not partic.i.p.ate in the plot, and were not "accurately" informed of its preparation, talked over in narrow circle how best to make use of the coup d'tat in case of success. Certain Marxian investigations of recent years also take on faith the story of the practical preparation of a coup d'tat. By that example we may learn how easily and .rmly legends win a place in historical science.

As chief evidence of the plot they not infrequently advance a certain colourful tale of Rodzianko, which testi.es to the very fact that there was no plot. In January 1917 General Krymov arrived from the front and complained before members of the Duma that things could not continue longer as they were: "If you decide upon this extreme measure (replace-ment of the tzar) we will support you." If you decide! The Octobrist s.h.i.+dlovsky angrily exclaimed: "There is no need to pity or spare him when he is ruining Russia." In the noisy argument these real or imaginary words of Brussilov are also reported: "If it is necessary to choose between the tzar and Russia, I side with Russia." If it is necessary! The young mil-lionaire Tereshchenko spoke as an in.exible tzaricide. The Kadet s.h.i.+ngarev spoke: "The General is right, an overturn is necessary...but who will resolve upon it?" That is just the question: who will resolve upon it? Such is the essence of the testimony of Rodzianko, who himself spoke against an overturn. In the course of the few following weeks the plan apparently did not move forward an inch. They conversed about stopping the tzar's train, but it is quite unknown who was to carry out that operation.

Russian liberalism, when it was younger, had supported the revolutionary terrorists with money and sympathy in the hope that they would drive the monarchy into its arms with their bombs. None of those respected gentlemen was accustomed to risk his own head. But all the same the chief role was played not by personal but by cla.s.s fear: Things are bad now they reasoned but they might get worse. In any case, if Guchkov, Tereshchenko and Krymov had seriously moved toward a coup d'tat that is, practically prepared it, mobilising the necessary forces and means that would have been established de.nitely and accurately after the revolution. For the partic.i.p.ants, especially the active young men of whom not a few would have been needed, would have had no reason to keep mum about the "almost" accomplished deed. After February this would only have a.s.sured them a career. However, there were no revelations. It is quite obvious that the affair never went any farther with Krymov and Guchkov than patriotic sighs over wine and cigars. The light-minded frondeurs of the aristocracy, like the heavyweight oppositionists of the plutocracy, could not .nd the heart to amend by action the course of an unpropitious providence.

In May 1917 one of the most eloquent and empty liberals, Maklakov, will cry out at a private conference of that Duma which the revolution will sweep away along with the monarchy: "If posterity curses this revolution they will curse us for having been unable to prevent it in time with a revolution from above!" Still later, when he is already in exile, Kerensky, following Maklakov will lament: "Yes, enfranchised Russia was too slow with its timely coup d'tat from above (of which they talked so much, and for which they prepared [?] so much) she was too slow to forestall the spontaneous explosion of the state."

These two exclamations complete the picture of how, even after the revolution had un-leashed its unconquerable forces, educated nincomp.o.o.ps continued to think that it could have been forestalled by a "timely" change of dynastic .gure-heads. * The determination was lacking for a "big" palace revolution. But out of it there arose a plan for a small one. The liberal conspirators did not dare to remove the chief actor of the monarchy, but the grand dukes decided to remove its prompter. In the murder of Rasputin they saw the last means of saving the dynasty.

Prince Yussupov, who was married to a Romanov, drew into the affair the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and the monarchist deputy Purishkevich. They also tried to involve the liberal Maklakov, obviously to give the murder an "all-national" character. The celebrated lawyer wisely declined, supplying the conspirators however with poison a rather stylistic distinction! The conspirators judged, not without foundation, that a Romanov automobile would facilitate the removal of the body after the murder. The grand ducal coat-of-arms had found its use at last. The rest was carried out in the manner of a moving picture scenario designed for people of bad taste. On the night of the 16-17th of December, Rasputin, coaxed in to a little party, was murdered in Yussopov's maisonette.

The ruling cla.s.ses, with the exception of a narrow camarilla and the mystic wors.h.i.+ppers, greeted the murder of Rasputin as an act of salvation. The grand duke, placed under house arrest, his hands, according to the tzar's expression, stained with the blood of a muzhik, although a Christ, still a muzhik! was visited with sympathy by all the memb