The eclipse of Russia

The misfortunes of Russia and the disillusions of the nations that trusted her promises and relied on her help are attributed to no one circumstance more markedly than the failu...

Ever since the dawn of her history Russia has vegetated, rather than lived, apart from the main European currents--social, religious, political, and scientific--untouched by the...

It is well to remember that the anarchist bias inherent in the Russian race has never been uprooted nor even systematically countered. The bulk of the people are hardly any bett...

Among all the odd freaks in the political domain, comparable, say, to the leaning tower of Pisa in the architectural sphere, the most amazing was the mighty Tsardom. For it was...

When I first went to Russia the Liberal movement that had been making headway ever since the death of Nicholas I. was in full swing, and in spite of such set-backs as the reacti...

"My ideas about a change of regime and the kindred proposals that have been the cause of so much hatred and bloodshed," said Pobiedonostseff, the Mentor of Alexander III., "are...

During the latter years of the tranquil reign of Alexander III. the drift of the Tsardom was manifestly in the direction of political change, but the course taken was mainly eco...

There never was a trustworthy intermediary between the isolated sovereign and his restive people. Many individuals there were whom he received and questioned from time to time,...

The men who first undertook the spade work and cleared the ground for the great upheaval were humane, moderate workers, mostly from the provinces, whose strivings were free from...

George Gapon began his public career by joining one of those amazing organisations which the bureaucracy in the last days of its decline created for its defence. It came of an a...

One of the most repulsive sides of the reaction of 1906-7 and of the autocratic regime that engendered it was laid bare in the course of the investigations which took place in t...

To the ignorant and almost illiterate peasant Rasputin is attributed a rôle akin to that of Samson in pulling down the pillars of the Russian Tsardom. His sinister influence on...

Between the principles underlying the foreign policy of the Tsardom and those that shaped the public and private conduct of its authorised trustees there was an unmistakable fam...

Those who still imagine that individuals rather than the character of the Tsarist State were responsible for those predatory habits and the uniform bad faith which so long rende...

No one will be surprised to learn that after these interesting exchanges of view on a burning topic, which were thus occasioned by an unavowable motive, the rulers of the Tsardo...

Of all the extravagant and, one might add, irrational acts of the weak-willed sovereign who at last gave the death-blow to the Tsarist State the secret treaty, consisting of fou...

Turning to me Witte said, "I had in my mind at the time, but I did not mention it to Bülow, a much more striking instance which had made very bad blood at the Tsar's court. It w...

Witte told me, as follows, the story of how he learned of the existence of the secret treaty and the means he devised for the purpose of invalidating it. "I did not know, neithe...

Tsarism, its own stock of vitality exhausted and with no outer sources to draw upon, languished and decayed rapidly. Time and its changes acted on the predatory State as potent...