A People's Tragedy (5 page)

some would even say a revolutionary one. Its celebrations were set against a backdrop of several decades of growing violence, human suffering and repression, which had set the Tsar's people against his regime. None of the wounds of the 1905 Revolution had yet healed; and some of them had festered and become worse. The great peasant problem remained unresolved, despite belated efforts at land reform; and in fact, if anything, the landed gentry had become even more opposed to the idea of concessions to the peasants since the 1905 Revolution, when crowds had attacked their estates.

There had also been a resurgence of industrial strikes, much more militant than their predecessors in the early 1900s, with the Bolsheviks steadily gaining ground at the expense of their more moderate rivals, the Mensheviks, among the labour organizations.

And as for the aspirations of the liberals, which had seemed so near in 1905, they were now becoming a more distant prospect as the court and its supporters blocked all the Duma's liberal reforms and (with the Beiliss trial of 1913, which even after the Dreyfus Affair shocked the whole of Europe with its medieval persecution of an innocent Jew on trumped-up charges of the ritual murder of a Christian boy) trampled on their fragile ideal of civil rights. There was, in short, a widening gulf of mistrust not just between the court and society — a gulf epitomized by the Rasputin scandal — but also between the court and many of its own traditional supporters in the Civil Service, the Church and the army, as the Tsar resisted their own demands for reform. Just as the Romanovs were honouring themselves and flattering themselves with the fantastic belief that they might rule for another three centuries, outside their own narrow court circles there was a growing sense of impending crisis and catastrophe. This sense of despair was best voiced by the poets of this so-called 'Silver Age' of Russian literature — Blok and Belyi above all — who depicted Russia as living on a volcano. In the words of Blok:

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.

How are we to explain the dynasty's collapse? Collapse is certainly the right word to use. For the Romanov regime fell under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown. As in all modern revolutions, the first cracks appeared at the top.

The revolution did not start with the labour movement — so long the preoccupation of left-wing historians in the West. Nor did it start with the breakaway of the nationalist movements on the periphery: as with the collapse of the Soviet Empire that was built on the ruins of the Romanovs', nationalist revolt was a consequence of the crisis in the centre rather than its cause. A more convincing case could be made for saying that it was all started by the peasant revolution on the land, which in some places began as early as 1902, three years before the 1905 Revolution, and indeed that it was bound to be in so far as Russia was overwhelmingly a peasant society. But while the peasant problem, like that of the workers and nationalities, introduced fundamental structural weaknesses into the social system of the old regime, it did not determine its politics; and it was with politics that the problem lay. There is no reason to suppose that the tsarist regime was doomed to collapse in the way that Marxist determinists once claimed from their narrow focus on its 'social contradictions'. It could have been saved by reform. But there is the rub. For Russia's last two tsars lacked the will for real reform. True, in 1905, when the Tsar was nearly toppled from his throne, he was forced reluctantly to concede reforms; but once that threat had passed he realigned himself with the supporters of reaction. This is the fatal weakness in the argument of those historians on the Right who paint a rosy image of the Tsarist Empire on the eve of the First World War. They claim that the tsarist system was being reformed, or 'modernized', along Western liberal lines.

But the last two tsars and their more reactionary supporters — in the gentry, the Church and Rightist political circles — were at best ambiguous towards the idea of

'modernization'. They knew, for example, that they needed a modern industrial economy in order to compete with the Western powers; yet at the same time they were deeply hostile to the political demands and social transformations of the urban industrial order.

Instead of embracing reform they adhered obstinately to their own archaic vision of autocracy. It was their tragedy that just as Russia was entering the twentieth century they were trying to return it to the seventeenth.

Here, then, were the roots of the revolution, in the growing conflict between a society rapidly becoming more educated, more urban and more complex, and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede its political demands. That conflict first became acute (indeed revolutionary) following the famine of 1891, as the government floundered in the crisis and liberal society became politicized as it launched its own relief campaign; and it is there that the narrative of Part Two commences. But before that we must look more closely at the main protagonists of the conflict, starting with the Tsar.

ii
The Miniaturist

Four years before the tercentenary the brilliant sculptor, Prince P. N. Trubetskoi, had completed an equestrian statue of the former Tsar Alexander III which stood in Znamenskaya Square opposite the Nikolaevsky Station in St Petersburg. It was such an ingenious and formidable representation of autocracy in human form that after the revolution the Bolsheviks decided to leave it in place as a fearful reminder of the old regime; and there it remained until the 1930s.* The huge bronze figure of Alexander sat rigidly astride a ponderous horse of massive architectural proportions, its four thick legs fixed like pillars to the ground. The rider and horse had been made to appear so heavy and solid that it seemed impossible for them to move. Many people took this to be a symbol of the autocracy's own inertia, and there was a perhaps not-altogether unintentional element of irony in this. Workers were quick to recognize the statue's funny side. They christened it the 'Hippopotamus' and recited the witty lines: Here stands a chest of drawers,

On the chest a hippopotamus

And on the hippopotamus sits an idiot.

Even the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, President of the Academy of Arts and the late Tsar's brother, denounced the statue as a caricature. It was certainly a cruel twist of fate that Trubetskoi had chosen to build the statue in equestrian form, since Alexander III had always been afraid of horses. His difficulties with them had grown in his final years as he put on weight. It became almost impossible to find a horse that he could be persuaded to mount.13

Nicholas was oblivious to such ironies. For him, the Trubetskoi statue symbolized the power and solidity of the autocracy during his father's reign. He

* After more than fifty years in storage the statue was returned to the city's streets in 1994. Ironically, the horse now stands in front of the former Lenin Museum, where it has taken the place of the armoured car which, in April 1917, brought Lenin from the Finland Station.

ordered an even larger statue of Alexander to be built for Moscow, his favoured capital, in time for the tercentenary. It took two years to construct the awesome monument, which Nicholas himself unveiled amidst great ceremony during the jubilee celebrations.

Unlike its Petersburg brother, which had combined a good representational likeness of the Tsar with a strong symbolic point, the new statue had no pretensions to artistic merit. The Tsar's giant figure was a mannequin without human expression, a monolithic incarnation of autocratic power. It sat straight-backed on its throne, hands on knees, encumbered with all the symbols of tsarist authority — the crown, the sceptre and orb, the imperial robe and full military dress — staring out towards the Kremlin, its back to the cathedral, in the manner of a pharaoh with nothing to think about except the source of his own illimitable power.14

Since Alexander's death, in 1894, Nicholas had developed an almost mystical reverence towards the memory of his father. He thought of him as the true autocrat. Alexander had ruled over Russia like a medieval lord over his private patrimony. He had centralized power in his hands and commanded his ministers like a general at war. He even looked like an autocrat should look — a giant of a man, six feet three inches tall, his stern face framed by an imposing black beard. This was a man who liked to amuse his drinking companions by crashing through locked doors and bending silver roubles in his 'vicelike imperial thumb'. Out of earshot in a private corner of his palace he played the trumpet with similar boisterousness. Legend has it that in 1888 he had even saved his family from certain death by supporting on his Herculean shoulders the collapsed steel roof of the dining carriage in the imperial train, which had been derailed by revolutionaries on its way to the Crimea. His only weakness, it seems, was his fatal addiction to liquor.

When he fell ill with kidney disease the Empress forbade him to drink. But he got round this by having a special pair of boots made with hidden compartments large enough to carry a flask of cognac. General P. A. Cherevin, one of his favourite companions, recalled, 'When the Tsaritsa was beside us, we sat quietly and played like good children.

But whenever she went off a little, we would exchange glances. And then — one, two, three! We'd pull out our flasks, take a swig and then it would be as if nothing had happened. He [Alexander] was greatly pleased with this amusement. It was like a game.

We named it "Necessity is the mother of invention." "One, two, three. Necessity, Cherevin?" — "Invention, Your Majesty." "One, two and three" — and we'd swig.'15

Nicholas grew up in the shadow of this boozy colossus, acutely aware of his own inferiority. Being naturally shy and juvenile in appearance, his parents continued to treat him like a little child ('Nicky' was his family name) long after he had outgrown his teenage years. Nicholas retained many of his childish tastes and pursuits. The diaries he wrote in his early twenties are full of silly

little notes about games and pranks. In 1894, at the age of twenty-six, for example, less than a month before his accession to the throne, he recorded an epic chestnut battle with Prince George of Greece in the royal park: 'We started in front of the house and ended up on the roof A few days later he wrote of another battle, this time with pine cones.

Alexander, who knew nothing of physical or emotional complexes, considered his son a weakling and something of an imbecile. He called him 'girlie' and thought there was little point in preparing him for the tasks of government. When Count Witte, his Minister of Finance, suggested that the time had come to instruct the heir to the throne in the affairs of state, Alexander seemed surprised. 'Tell me,' he asked the Minister,

'have you ever spoken to his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Tsarevich?' Witte admitted that he had. 'Then don't tell me you never noticed that the Grand Duke is a dunce!'16

Through his education Nicholas had all the talents and charms of an English public schoolboy. He danced gracefully, rode beautifully, was a very good shot and excelled in several other sports. He spoke English like an Oxford professor, and French and German well. His manners were, almost needless to say, impeccable. His cousin and boyhood friend, the Grand Duke Alexander, supposed him to be 'the most polite man in Europe'. But of the practical knowledge required to govern a country the size of Russia

— and a country, moreover, in a pre-revolutionary situation — Nicholas possessed almost nothing. His principal tutor, an English gentleman by the name of Mr Heath, painted well in water-colours, and was extremely fond of the outdoor life. But he lacked the advantage of a university education and knew nothing about Russia except for a few basic words of its language. From V O. Kliuchevsky, the distinguished historian, Nicholas learned something of the history of his country, but nothing of its contemporary problems. When Pobedonostsev tried to instruct him in the workings of the state, he became 'actively absorbed in picking his nose'. Politics bored Nicholas. He was always more at home in the company of officers and society women than ministers and politicians.17

Less than sanguine about his son's ability to learn the art of kingship from books, Alexander enrolled him in the officer corps of the Guards in the hope that the army would build up his character and teach him something of the world. Nicholas loved the military life. The comradely spirit of the officers' mess, more like a gentleman's club than a military barracks, would remain with him for the rest of his life as a fond memory of the days before he had been weighed down by the burdens of office. It was then that he had fallen in love with the ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaia. His rank of Colonel in the Preobrazhensky Guards, awarded to him by his father, remained a source of immense pride. He refused to take a higher rank, even during the First World War when he assumed the position of Supreme Commander. This damaged his prestige in the army, where he became known as 'Colonel Romanov'.

In 1890 Alexander sent his son on a grand tour of Siberia, Japan, Indo-China, Egypt and Greece. The journey was intended to broaden the heir's political education. But the nature of his travelling suite (the usual complement of dim and hedonistic Guards officers) largely precluded this. During the tour Nicholas filled his diary with the same banal and trivial entries with which he usually filled his diary at home: terse notes on the weather, the distances covered each day, the times of landfall and departure, the company at meals, and so on. It seems that nothing in his travels had encouraged him to broaden his outlook and observations on life. The one lasting effect of the tour was unfortunate. At Otsu in Japan he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by a deranged terrorist. The experience left him with an ingrained hatred of the Japanese (he called them 'monkeys',
makakt),
and it is often argued that this made him vulnerable to the influence of those at his court who promoted the disastrous war with Japan in 1904-5.

Had Alexander lived three score years and ten then the fate of the Russian Empire might have been very different. But as fortune would have it, he died from kidney disease in 1894 at the age of only forty-nine. As the crowd of relatives, physicians and courtiers gathered around the death-bed of the great autocrat, Nicholas burst into tears and exclaimed pathetically to his cousin, Alexander, 'What is going to happen to me and to all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.'18