Part 16

This was also the feeling which the whole nation began to entertain for him. People had pitied him in the beginning, but as the details of his conduct at Pskow became known, contempt took the place of any commiseration which the tragedy of his fate might have provoked. This opinion was so general that a friend of mine happening to discuss with one of the Deputies of the Workmen in those Soviets which were being organized just then the conduct of the former Czar, asked if he thought it likely the life of the deposed ruler was in danger. He received this characteristic reply:

“In danger? No. He is not worth a shot.”

It is likely that the Empress, if she had been asked her opinion, would have agreed with this judgment. Though she had also thrown up her hands and renounced the game, she would not have given up her rights to the Crown that had been put upon her brow with such pomp and ceremony at Moscow twenty-one years before. She would have fought against the insolence of those who had come to demand it from her. Here I must say that, according to the words of one of the two Deputies sent by the Duma to interview Nicholas II. at Pskow, the prestige of the latter’s personality as the anointed Czar of All the Russias was still so great that if he had mustered sufficient energy to throw out of the railway carriage the men audacious enough to claim his abdication, this gesture of Imperial rage would have brought back to him the allegiance of the troops. He was living through a terrible drama, and he was accepting it like a comedy. After having disgraced himself, he was dishonoring by his attitude the misfortunes which had fallen on his country, on his dynasty, and on his race.

XXVI

A CROWN IS LOST

The Monarchy of the Romanoffs had fallen like a house of cards which crumbles on the ground at the slightest touch. It had been considered one of the strongest, one of the most powerful, in Europe; yet its collapse had come with an amazing promptitude and there had not been found in the whole vast Empire over which it had ruled one single man or woman willing to arrest its downward course toward the abyss into which it finally disappeared. What the tyranny of Nicholas I., the selfishness of Alexander II., and the iron rule of Alexander III. had failed to produce, the weakness, indecision, and incapacity of Nicholas II. had made easy. What a German Princess, Catherine II., had maintained, another German Princess compromised and lost forever.

Without wishing to add to the faults and mistakes of Alexandra Feodorowna, it is nevertheless quite impossible to acquit her of blame in the catastrophe which finally wrecked poor, unfortunate Russia. Without her it is likely that the Crown would have kept some prestige, at least in the eyes of those whose family traditions were linked with the fate of the Monarchy in their country. She destroyed this prestige by the singularity of her conduct, the want of balance of her mind, and her proud, haughty, and totally false conception of the Russian character. She firmly believed that nothing she could do would be criticized and that even those who disliked her, whose number was legion, as she knew very well, would never dare to question her right to do whatever she pleased, or to choose her friends no matter in what circles or among what kind of people.

This woman, whom misfortune associated with the fate of the House of Romanoff at the very time when the latter ought to have had the aid of an intelligent, well-intentioned, and unselfish Princess to help it face the dangers which were threatening it, had never known how to put herself at the level of the persons by whom she found herself surrounded. She lacked not only tact, but also generosity, and she never could hold broad views about anything or about anybody. She was as scathing as she was hasty in her judgments. From the very first day she was raised to the Throne of Russia she abused the privileges which her position conferred upon her, and either through stupidity--or willingly--because of her dislike for the nation whose Crown she wore, she applied herself to wound those whom she ought to have spared and to propitiate persons whom it would have been imperative for her to keep away as far as possible from her person and from that of her husband.

Of course she was in a certain sense a strong character, in so far, at least, as she never would yield to reason or accept any compromise. She had principles of her own, which, however, did not help her to win respect for herself or esteem for her conduct. Without ever allowing herself to be led by impulse, she failed to perceive that in most of her actions she was influenced by superstition of a most foolish kind. The fact that insanity existed in her family may excuse her to a certain point, but should not blind us to faults which might easily have been corrected had she only realized their existence.

She was a blameless wife; about this there cannot be any doubt. But she never loved her husband and she only cared for his position. She was a tender mother, at least to her son, whatever may have been her feelings in regard to her daughters, whom she most unjustly blamed for their sex, if we are to believe all that we have been told on the subject. But she lacked sympathy, which she never could give to others or win for herself. She was a cold, ambitious, stern creature, so convinced of her own perfection that she never could be brought to see good in anything with which she was not connected in some way or other. Her life certainly had tragedy entwined with its course. Perhaps the most cruel blow, until the final catastrophe that wrecked all her hopes, had been her unfortunate affection for the dashing officer, Colonel Orloff, who had died to save her honor and good name, whose post-mortem influence had been so cleverly made use of by unscrupulous adventurers in order to win her confidence. Alexandra had always at heart despised the weak man to whom she was married, but she had loved the high position which, thanks to her union with him, she had acquired; she would have liked to remain alone in control of it and to revenge her supposed wrongs at the hands of the Russian nation, by delivering it into the power of that German Fatherland of hers to which she had always remained attached. Her desire for peace was sincere (at least we must hope so), and everything we know about her and about her conduct during that momentous time when she kept working toward its conclusion points to the truth of this supposition. It had all along been a terrible trial for her to find the land of her birth at war with that of her adoption, and to this initial agony was added the superstitious terror which Raspoutine had inspired in her, thanks to the hypnotic practices in which he had induced her to participate--terror which ended by completely wrecking her already badly balanced mind.

But the supreme misfortune of the last Empress of Russia, a misfortune for which she was not responsible, was the fact of her having been married to a being who was too weak to lead her, too selfish to understand her, too cruelly inclined to sympathize with her; who at the same time did not acquire sufficient authority over her to inspire her with respect for his individuality as a man and for his position as a Sovereign. Had she been the wife of Alexander III., it is likely that she would have turned out entirely another woman from the one which she ultimately became; on the other hand, had Nicholas II. had for Consort a person different from the one to whom destiny had linked him, it is also probable that he would have contrived to avoid some of the mistakes into which he fell. He might have shown himself more plucky and more human in the different moments of crisis which made his reign such a sad and such an unfortunate one.

One of the most tragical things with which a student of history finds himself confronted when he analyzes any of the great catastrophes that come to change the fate of nations is the total insufficiency of the people who have to meet them or to handle them. There is no more pitiful spectacle than the vacillations of Louis XVI. during the first days of the great Revolution which sent him to the scaffold. Witness the want of character of the miserable Czar who is meditating at present in Tobolsk over the misfortunes that have landed him into exile; it is another of those sights one should have liked to see spared to posterity. During the twenty-two years he occupied the Russian Throne Nicholas II. constantly opposed himself to the wishes of his people, even the most reasonable ones, when he thought that they implied any diminution of his personal prerogatives or power. He sent hundreds of thousands of innocent people to the gallows or to horrible Siberian prisons under the slightest of pretexts. He had no hesitation at spilling the blood of his subjects either on the battle-field or on the scaffold. He allowed the detestable police system, which became, under his rule, stronger than it had ever been before, to interfere with private liberty and private opinions to an extent that had never been witnessed in his country even in the times of Nicholas I. or of Paul. While he reigned no one felt secure in his home or could go to bed with the consciousness that he would not be wakened in the middle of the night by an army of police agents come to search his drawers, or to arrest him under the most futile of pretexts or simply because he had refused to pay a bribe. And yet that man in whose name the most terrible injustices had been committed, who did not admit any resistance to his will, who believed in his unlimited power over one hundred and eighty millions of human beings--that man did not find sufficient courage to resist the only demand, among the many which were addressed to him during the course of his nefarious reign, that he ought never to have granted; and without one single thought of the future of his country or of his son he gave up without a murmur the Crown of which he was the bearer, when two determined men came to claim it from him, and he did so without even noticing that they were far more awed by the solemnity of the scene in which they found themselves unwilling actors than he was himself.

There never was a Throne relinquished with less dignity, there never was an act of abdication accomplished with less consciousness of the importance of its meaning. When one recapitulates all the details of the drama which was performed at Pskow, one can, when one is a Russian, feel but one passionate regret--that no one was found by the side of the last crowned Romanoff to drive a knife into his heart or put a bullet through his brain, and thus spare this haughty dynasty the shame of having been dragged into the gutter by its Head.

It is scarcely to be doubted that if Nicholas II. had only given more thought to the importance of the act he was invited to perform he might at least have saved his dynasty, if not himself. His brother, the Grand-Duke Michael, who could easily renounce the Crown for himself, would hardly have been able to refuse the Regency on behalf of his little nephew. A man with the slightest political knowledge would have put the interests of his country before his own selfish feelings of paternal affection, and the Czar ought to have abdicated in favor of his son, and not have put forward this stupid pretext of lacking the courage to part from him. This very remark proves how little he understood the situation in which he found himself. It also shows us how utterly helpless he was when confronted by any difficulties of an overpowering and potential character. When one considers his whole conduct during those eventful hours when he lost not only his own, but his posterity’s, Crown, it is impossible not to wonder as to whether or not there was any truth in the rumor that the Empress had been giving him drugs of some kind with the purpose of annihilating his will. It seems almost incredible that any man should have so quietly and so spontaneously lent a hand to his own degradation.

It is to be doubted, also, whether he regretted what he had done. Certainly he never imagined to what it would lead him. The idea that his people would have the courage to make him a prisoner does not seem to have crossed his mind, any more than did the fact that, once he had lost his position, he had become not only a useless, but an embarrassing factor in Russian politics. He went back to Mohilew, to the headquarters of that army of which he had been the Commander-in-chief as well as the Sovereign, quite naturally and in the same quiet manner he might have done in the days gone by. He did not even seem to yearn after his wife and children, and never once did he suggest the advisability of returning to Tsarskoye Selo. Of all the people assembled around him he appeared the most unconcerned. This indifference lasted even when he found himself faced with captivity and when the former Head of his Staff, General Aléxieieff, came to acquaint him with the decision of the Provisional Government to arrest him.

His wife, left alone in the Palace where she had spent so many happy days, did not perhaps share his indifference; she certainly displayed the same apathy. Alexandra Feodorowna, from the moment that she saw her schemes of personal grandeur frustrated, gave up the game; she gave it up with more dignity than her husband had ever shown--this much must be conceded to her. She never flinched before the insults that were poured down upon her; she never gave a sign that she was moved to anything else but disdain when General Korniloff read to her the orders of the Government in regard to her person, and acquainted her with the fact that she was a prisoner. She declared to the few people left with her that she considered herself only as a Sister of Charity in attendance on her sick children. The Empress had disappeared, outwardly at least, and perhaps it was just as well that she accepted the situation in this way, rather than attempt a useless resistance, which could only have added to her unpopularity.

But still the fact remained that the whole Russian Revolution had been conducted after the style of a comic opera of Offenbach. No one at first had recognized its serious character. No one had seemed to realize that it constituted the most portentous event of the last hundred years or so. Those who had carried it out had done it on the spur of the moment, without thinking of what would follow; and the Monarch who had bowed his head under its decrees also had not suspected that a morrow was there, waiting for the results of what was being done to-day. The historical stick that had been wielded by Peter the Great had been transformed into the ridiculous sword of the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.

XXVII

A PRISONER AFTER HAVING BEEN A QUEEN

A new life began for Alexandra Feodorowna. Until that fatal day when she was taken into captivity her existence had been one of ease and luxury. She had been the Empress of All the Russias, being revered by some as almost a divinity, the absolute mistress of all her surroundings, with servants in attendance on her, eager to execute any commands it might please her to lay upon them. She had not a wish which was not instantly gratified; the misfortunes that had assailed her (I am not speaking now of those that fell upon Russia) had always left her indifferent; they had existed more in her imagination than in reality. Suddenly without warning and, what was even worse, at the very moment when she had expected to reach even loftier heights than the one upon which she was placed, she had been hurled down into an abyss of sorrow, of misery, and of pain such as she had never imagined she could ever know. She was no longer a Sovereign; her courtiers, servants, attendants, had all vanished with the exception of a very few, and those she had never cared for much, in the days of her prosperity. Her children were sick and she could not even obtain for them a doctor’s help. Her friends had fled or were in prison; her Crown had been wrested from her; she was a prisoner, deprived of the means of communicating with her own people and relatives; the guards who surrounded her Palace were no longer placed there to protect her safety; they were intrusted with another mission, that of watching over every one of her movements and of preventing her from getting any news from the outside world. Instead of crowds gathered to cheer her, she saw assembled under her windows an angry multitude asking for her blood and calling out to her that she ought to be punished as a traitor. She had no friends, no money, no influence any longer. The dream had come to an end, and she found herself facing stern reality, a reality against which it was useless to struggle.

Her husband came back to her, a prisoner, likewise, but with perhaps less consciousness of the horror of their position than she had. They had to settle down to a new life entirely different from the previous one--a life of idleness, of inaction; an existence which made them realize with every step they took the awful change that had overtaken them. When they wished to go out they had to ask permission to do so from an officer who often refused it out of pure malice. They had to pass before sentinels who no longer presented arms to them, who only sneered in their faces as they saw them hurry through a room or a corridor, anxious to escape insult or outrage. No one was allowed to come near them. They were condemned to a solitude in which they were continually reminded of the days gone by forever.

A few faithful attendants had been left them, it is true, but these last friends were just as badly off as themselves, and could do but very little to alleviate the miseries of a position which was an illustration of the famous verses of Dante, that there is nothing more dreadful during days of misery than to remember the past joyful ones. Even religion, which for such a long period of years had consoled the Empress in many sad and troubled hours, had ceased to be a comfort to her; divine service, during which her name and that of her husband were carefully omitted from the liturgy, was only one new source of torment for her. It seemed to her as if the Church as well as the Russian nation repulsed her and treated her as a pariah and an outcast. Another woman, with higher, loftier views, would have looked with more philosophy on these small sides in a great tragedy, might perhaps even have failed to notice them. But for Alexandra Feodorowna they constituted something far more tangible and real than the fact that the House of Romanoff had lost its Throne.

She would most probably have wished to discuss with the Czar all the events which had brought about the catastrophe, but even this comfort was denied to her. The Provisional Government had issued orders that husband and wife should not be permitted to communicate with or see each other, except in presence of witnesses. Some people have said that this was an unnecessary cruelty, but it seems that there was some reason for this decision. A strong party at that time was clamoring for repressive measures in regard to the ex-Empress. Papers had been found in which her negotiations with the Kaiser had been revealed, and the question of bringing her to trial had been seriously discussed. But no one wished to see the former Czar mixed up with this business, as it was generally felt it would be a great political mistake to make a martyr out of him.

There was, however, ground to fear that if he were permitted to speak with his wife alone, she would contrive in some way or other to entangle him in her personal intrigues. This Mr. Miliukoff, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, wished to avoid, for reasons of a general political order, and Mr. Kerensky for other

ones of a purely personal character. It seems that this leader of the Socialist party in the Duma had, before events had transformed him into a Minister, spoken also with certain agents of the Kaiser who had contrived to remain in the Russian capital. Nicholas II. had friends who, knowing this fact, warned the radical chief that if any harm was done to the former Sovereign his own participation in eventual peace negotiations with the enemy would be exposed. Can one imagine that when Nicholas was told of this fact he only blamed those who had thus attempted to save him, saying that he did not like blackmail of any kind, even when it was performed for his advantage? That man who had been one of the most important political factors of his time was not even shrewd enough to see that it was only politics which could save his life after they had dispossessed him of his Throne.

The Provisional Government, so long as decent men composed it, would have been willing to spare any unnecessary humiliations to the former Czar and his family. Unfortunately, the military men who had been put in charge of the Palace of Tsarskoye Selo and of its inhabitants did not share this opinion, and there is no doubt but that the deposed Monarch was subjected to insult, as well as to all kinds of small and petty annoyances calculated to make him feel bitterly the change in his position. I do not believe personally in the tales which were put into circulation as to his having been hustled about by the soldiers on guard at the castle the day he had returned there a State prisoner from Mohilew, a few short weeks after he had left it a powerful Sovereign. For one thing, his devoted aide-de-camp, Prince Dolgoroukoff, was with him, and he would most certainly have interfered had any violence been used in regard to his master. But the unfortunate Nicholas was made in other ways to drink the cup of humiliation to the dregs. The troops were told not to salute him; the sentries were forbidden to present arms to him; he was addressed as Colonel Romanoff by his jailers; his letters were opened and his expenses controlled in a searching, insulting manner which must have been terribly bitter for him to bear. Every kind of newspaper containing insults addressed to him or to the Empress were sent to him or put in his way. When he went out in the park he was often accosted by people who upbraided him for all the misfortunes that had fallen upon Russia, for which they made him responsible. I do not mention insignificant daily worries, such as the shutting off of the electric light, or of the water-pipes, so that the unfortunate Imperial Family was left without baths, and other small unpleasantnesses of the same kind. These would perhaps not have been noticed if the other ones had not been there to remind the once powerful Czar of All the Russias that he was at the mercy of the subjects whose rights he had not respected and whose cries for freedom he had quenched in blood.

But Nicholas, in the midst of all these miseries, preserved the same impassibility he had displayed when the news of the disasters of Mukden and Tsu Shima had been brought to him, or when he had heard that Warsaw and the long line of fortresses that had defended the Russian frontier on the Niemen and the Vistula had fallen into German hands. He accepted everything with stoicism; he expressed no surprise at the blows which were being hurled at his head. He simply remained indifferent, perhaps because he was too much of a fatalist to rebel, but most probably because he had not yet grasped the real significance of all that was happening to him.