The revolution began with a mysterious event known as Bloody Sunday.
In 1881 the socialist Colonel Zubatov, shaken by the assassination of Alexander II, had rejected his socialist ideas and joined the police. During Nicholas’s coronation, Zubatov was already head of the Moscow secret police. The former socialist had devised a fantastic experiment: fight the socialists for influence over the workers with the aid of the police! So the police began to create workers’ unions.
Now during strikes the police tried to support the workers, and Zubatov forced the capitalists to make concessions, which they did. In 1902 thousands of workers filled the old squares of the Kremlin chorusing “God Save the Tsar.” They prayed for the health of their sovereign emperor—on their knees, in silence, heads bared. The governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, thanked the workers for their loyalty to the throne. The newspapers of Europe wrote in astonishment of the unprecedented spectacle—police socialism. As always in Russia, the reformer Zubatov was eventually dismissed. His organization, however, lived on.
In 1905, in Petersburg, in the midst of these Zubatov-inspired workers’ unions, Father Georgy Gapon appeared. During these difficult years of military defeats and shortages, Gapon called on the workers to take a petition to the tsar to tell him about the problems of the simple people and the oppressions of the factory owners.
A workers’ march was slated for January 9. Carrying banners, portraits of the tsar, and holy icons, thousands of loyal workers under Gapon’s leadership went to their tsar.
The very idea of this demonstration was the embodiment of Nicholas’s cherished dream—“the people and the tsar”—which had brought him to call upon Klopov. Now it had come true: the simple people themselves were seeking protection from the autocrat. It had come true!
And then suddenly, on the eve of the march, the tsar left the capital for Tsarskoe Selo.
An unsettling event had occurred just three days before the planned march. It was Epiphany. “Jordan” had been erected on the Palace Embankment as the site for the annual consecration of the water. Under an elegant canopy—blue with gold stars topped by a cross—Nicholas assisted the metropolitan in the ceremony, after which, according to tradition, the cannon of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, located directly opposite the “Jordan” on the other side of the Neva, was supposed to fire ceremonial blanks. To the horror of those gathered, the cannon turned out to be loaded with live ammunition. By a miracle the tsar was not hit, but a policeman was injured, and his name was Romanov!
The police, who would normally have exaggerated something like this, declared the incident an annoying accident. But someone’s intended effect had been achieved: Nicholas was reminded of his grandfather’s terrible end, and the policeman’s name resounded like an omen. The shot gave Nicholas a good scare.
The Department of Police was extremely well informed about the loyal inclinations of the march because Gapon, who had arranged the demonstration, was a department agent (he would be unmasked subsequently by the Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist group). The secret police was beginning to frighten the tsar. The police leaked dark rumors: during the demonstration there would be bloody riots prepared by the revolutionaries, perhaps a seizure of the palace. Grand Duke Vladimir, who commanded the Petersburg garrison, was talking about the beginning of the French Revolution.
Nicholas left to join his family at Tsarskoe Selo.
The night before the march they started to pass out bullets in the barracks. The route Gapon had devised made the march an extraordinarily convenient target. First aid stations were readied, and Gapon gave his final speech to the workers. The police provocateur called on the workers to go to the palace.
Thus was readied Bloody Sunday.
In the morning, thousands of people set out for Palace Square. Portraits of the tsar floated over the crowd, which included many children. In the lead was Gapon. Troops waiting on the approaches to the square ordered the march to disperse. But the people did not believe them. Gapon had promised that the tsar was awaiting them. So they stepped onto the square. Shots rang out. More than a thousand were killed and two thousand wounded. Children’s corpses lay in the snow. In the afternoon sledges dispersed throughout the city with corpses tied down by ropes.
The night after the firing Gapon addressed the workers: “Blood brothers. Innocent blood has been shed! The bullets of the tsar’s soldiers … have riddled our portraits of the tsar and killed our faith in him. We must take revenge for our brothers on the tsar, cursed by the people, and on all his wicked breed, the ministers, and all the plunderers of the unhappy Russian land. Death to them….”
“The tsar, cursed by the people”—this is what the Police Department provocateur had written. Bullet-riddled portraits of the tsar.
At Tsarskoe Selo the police reported to Nicholas that he had been spared mortal danger, that the troops had had to fire in defense of the palace, as a result of which there had been casualties—two hundred people.
That is how the police version of the event and official figures were created for the tsar. He recorded in his diary:
“9 January, 1905. A difficult day! In Petersburg there were serious disturbances … as a consequence of the workers’ desire to get to the Winter Palace. The troops had to fire, and in various places in the city many were killed and injured. Lord, it is so painful and hard!”
Later two dozen workers were brought to Tsarskoe Selo. They spoke loyal words to the tsar. Nicholas uttered a speech in response, promising to satisfy their needs and wants. He was very distressed over the two hundred victims on Palace Square.
He never did find out what happened.
In a single morning a new image of him was created: Nicholas the Bloody. From then on, that is what lovers of freedom would call him.
“Any child’s cap, or mitten, or woman’s scarf pitifully abandoned that day in the Petersburg snows became a reminder of the fact that the tsar must die, the tsar would die” (the poet Osip Mandelshtam).
Bloody Sunday was one of the chief causes for the future vengeance of the revolution, a prologue to the murder of the tsar’s family.
What had happened?
ONE VERSION
Vera Leonidovna:
“Everything in those days was mixed up with politics.… It was fashionable.… Everyone used to talk about how dissatisfied they were. I’ve had the thrill of recalling everything my freethinking friend who was close to Witte explained to me.… To understand Bloody Sunday you have to understand the situation.… Russia was on the verge. Everyone knew that.… And the ‘rights’ were nervous.… They’d tried to play the Japan card. It hadn’t worked out. The Jewish card got tossed in then, of course. They had always looked on the Jews as a pressure valve for popular tension, by organizing pogroms.… At our estate outside Kiev we had a servant.… She had come to us after a pogrom: the crowd had burst into her house and ripped open her master’s stomach, all the while laughing and joking.… They had tied his wife to his bloody corpse and heaped them with feathers. She recounted all this while crossing herself incessantly and muttering, ‘God will punish them!’ And He did: the stupid anti-Semitic policy not only was vile but also proved dangerous. The revolution was advancing. Only for a short period—under Alexander II—had Russian Jews felt like human beings.… Nicholas’s father had brought back state anti-Semitism. Jews had been driven into the Pale of Settlement and encouraged to emigrate. Tens of thousands of highly enterprising people had left Russia. My father had a brilliant physician’s assistant working for him who left for America, where he became a celebrity. But millions remained. My husband, the Jew Koltsov, used to say, ‘The non-suckling breasts of their own mother’—that is how they perceived their homeland. The Jews were a vast, underutilized store of intellect, energy, and obsessiveness. The revolutionary party took that reserve into their service. My sister was a terrible revolutionary, and we were daughters of a general. But her friend underground was the daughter of a poor Jewish tailor.… My friend used to say that Witte frequently tried to explain to Nicholas’s father the danger of the Jewish situation for the country’s future.”
(The matter was actually somewhat more subtle than this. Witte reports this interchange in his Memoirs:
“Are you right to stand up for the Jews?” asked Alexander III. In reply Witte asked permission to answer the question with a question: “Can we drown all the Russian Jews in the Black Sea? If we can, then I accept that resolution of the Jewish question. If not, the resolution of the Jewish question consists in giving them a chance to live. That is, in offering them equal rights and equal laws.”
But Witte was a brilliant courtier if he responded to the despot-tsar so boldly; it means he sensed that the tsar wanted to hear that kind of answer from him. Evidently, the zealous master Alexander III was considering how best to make use of the state’s four million Jews. But he never went beyond thinking, and Witte recorded the terrible result on the eve of the revolution: “From among the phenomenally cowardly people that nearly all Jews were thirty years ago, people have appeared who are sacrificing their lives for the revolution, who have made themselves over into bombers, assassins, and rioters. No one nation has given Russia such a percentage of revolutionaries as the Jewish nation.”)
Vera Leonidovna:
“So, in response to the actions of the Jewish revolutionaries, on the eve of the revolution, the camarilla decided to play the Jewish card a different way. In Europe the ‘Will and Testament’ of Peter I was going around. This was a forgery created, apparently, by the French during the time of Napoleon.… From this document it followed that Peter the Great, dying, left to the Russian tsars his will and testament: conquer the world. Following this model, the Russian secret police started to publish books, only instead of the words ‘Russian threat’ they substituted ‘Jewish threat.’ This is how the Protocols of the Elders of Zion saw the light of day. The book was written like a mystery: the story of mankind as a series of calamities attributable to the Jews and the Masons, whom they controlled.… The charm of it lay in the fact that in Russia the most distinguished Russian families belonged to Freemasonry. In their day Field Marshal Kutuzov, Alexander I, and Tchaikovsky had all been Masons. Nicholas II’s friend Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and his older brother Nicholas Mikhailovich were Masons. I myself was interested in Freemasonry. My idols—Mozart and Goethe—were Masons. Masons were always liberals. There was a constant struggle in Russia between the liberals and the nobility, and the nobility was an obstinate, dark force.… The camarilla was trying to discredit the liberal segment of the nobility by associating it with the Jews. By the way, my friend … he too was a Mason and belonged to a glorious noble family. He was incensed by the baldness of their intentions….
“The Protocols were presented to Nicholas. Everything had been calculated faultlessly: Nicholas had been raised since childhood in ‘state anti-Semitism.’ … ‘Those abominable Jews,’ ‘enemies of Christ’—that was the vocabulary of the court.… In his book, my husband Koltsov wrote a devastating portrait of Nicholas, but he didn’t understand him. I called the tsar a man from a Chinese play in which the evildoer lies to the good man—who for a moment believes. The intrigue builds on this. That is how they dealt with Nicholas. To the tsar, the pogroms organized by the police seemed like a holy outburst of popular indignation against the revolutionaries. A mob of coachmen and ignorant rabble, the Union of the Russian People was proclaimed a national movement—simple people defending their tsar. And he believed it. Childlike faith is an enchanting quality in an ordinary person—and a fatal quality in a ruler. What was even more amazing, the tsar didn’t believe in the Protocols! And that disappointed them greatly.”
The revolutionary Burtsev, who scarcely loved the tsar, confirmed this in his research on the Protocols:
“If in the beginning, when the Protocols first appeared, Nicholas II regarded them in good faith and was even delighted over them, he quickly recognized them as an obvious provocation.”
Vera Leonidovna:
“In short, before the revolution they had done everything in their power to push the tsar to the right, and suddenly he started to dig in his heels. There was even talk of reforms. That was when they realized that the weak tsar could not withstand a revolution—and he had decided to abdicate. All this forced the camarilla to act. My friend felt that by the end of 1904 there was a secret plot at court—and Bloody Sunday was a part of it.”
(Indeed, Zubatov passed on to Witte the secret conclusions of the Department of Police: a storm was brewing in the country. Anticipating that storm, the rightists were indeed greatly annoyed with the tsar.)
Beginning in 1904, Nicholas began to change—suddenly and recklessly. After the death of the reactionary Plehve, he named as his new minister of internal affairs Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a landowner, an aristocrat, and a liberal. During the final months of 1904, Svyatopolk-Mirsky persuaded the tsar to discuss measures for assuaging public opinion. Before when public opinion had been mentioned, Nicholas had answered just as the autocrat of all Russia would be expected to: “What do I care for public opinion?” Now he was taking the problem seriously. The events of the Japanese war had changed him. He understood the peril of the storm. Instead of trying to return to the ruthless ways of his father, as the camarilla had expected, he decided on something else. He liked this new minister, who instead of suppressing the people was proposing reconciliation. Accord was dear to Nicholas’s heart. At the end of the year Nicholas convened a broad meeting of all the leading statesmen of Russia. Both Witte and Pobedonostsev were there. Nicholas gave a speech about the revolutionary trend that kept intensifying each year in Russia. He posed what was for him a new question: Do we need to meet society’s demands?
The question was rhetorical, for he had already made his decision. As usual, however, he wanted others to force him to make it. One after another the officials rose and demanded concessions. Pobedonostsev was isolated. Now Nicholas was more or less compelled to agree and go against both his teacher and his father’s behests. A decision was made to work out a law “on designs and improvements for governmental procedure.” Everyone understood that this was the beginning of reforms. Perhaps a constitution. Witte was instructed to write the law—it was a total victory for the liberals. Everyone was moved: The minister for communications, Prince Khilkov, could not hold back tears. In the name of those present, the chairman of the State Council thanked Nicholas: Russia had been saved by peaceful means.
Then came the response of the rightists: on January 1, in protest against the policy of Svyatopolk-Mirsky, one of their leaders, Dmitry Feodorovich Trepov, the Moscow police chief, quit.
A week later this strange, bloody bacchanalia occurred: Bloody Sunday.
Let us assume that a camarilla plot did indeed exist. Then why this bloody slaughter? Perhaps they had gotten the idea of simply frightening the tsar to nudge him, at last, to the right, and at the same time put all society in its place.
Or was it all actually much more serious? A weak tsar, a lost war, an advancing revolution, and on top of it all the mirage of a detested constitution. Did they decide enough was enough? And in the best traditions of the secret police use a bloody provocation to discredit the weak tsar at a single blow? And then? Then Bloody Sunday was a beginning that should have led to replacing Nicholas in the future.
Destabilization for the sake of future stabilization: the advent of a strong monarch?
As Vera Leonidovna suggested, one can find a strange link—an intrigue—through subsequent events.
Bloody Sunday bore its fruits: Svyatopolk-Mirsky stepped down. Nicholas conceded: on January 11 the reactionary Trepov was named governor-general of Petersburg.
But this was only a beginning. After Petersburg a blow against Moscow followed. In Moscow was Nicholas’s chief adviser and support—Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.
“A dreadful crime has been committed in Moscow: at the Nikolsky Gate Uncle Sergei, riding in his carriage, has been killed by a bomb and his driver mortally wounded.… Unhappy Ella! God bless and help her!…
“On February 4, on Senate Square in the Kremlin, the Socialist Revolutionary Kalyaev lay in wait for Sergei Alexandrovich. He hurled a bomb into the carriage.”
From prison, Kalyaev described it in his last letters:
“At me—I smelled smoke and fragments coming right at my face, my cap was ripped off.… Then about five paces away I saw shreds of the grand duke’s clothing and his naked body.”
The viceroy of Moscow (as he was called at court) had been blown up by a bomb: his head was gone; all that was left was a hand and part of a foot.
Ella ran out of the palace and threw herself on the bloody bits, crawling on her knees among the remnants of her husband. What the revolutionary Kalyaev did not know was that the bomb with which he had killed the grand duke had been prepared with the help of a workshop belonging to the Department of Police. The actual assassination had been organized by a secret agent of the department, head of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist group, the provocateur Azef.
Again the shadow of the secret police behind the event?
——
From the diary of Konstantin Romanov, the poet K.R.:
“5 February.… Thunderstruck, for the first minute I could not think at all, only as I came around did I understand what I had been deprived of and begin to cry. I had to prepare my wife—she loved Sergei very much. Both she and I felt that I should go to Moscow to see my poor friend’s body, to see poor Ella, who has no family around her….
“9 February.… The sovereign and both empresses are inconsolable that they cannot pay their final respects to the deceased. It is too dangerous for them to leave Tsarskoe. All the grand dukes have been informed in writing that not only can they not go to Moscow, but they are forbidden to attend the funeral at Kazan and St. Isaac’s cathedrals [in St. Petersburg].”
Meanwhile in Moscow a majestic tragedy was being played out.
Ella spent all the days before the burial in ceaseless prayer. On her husband’s tombstone she wrote: “Father, release them: they know not what they do.”
She understood the words of the Gospels heart and soul, and on the eve of the funeral she demanded to be taken to the prison where Kalyaev was being held. Brought into his cell, she asked, “Why did you kill my husband?”
“I killed Sergei Alexandrovich because he was a weapon of tyranny. I was taking revenge for the people.”
“Do not listen to your pride. Repent … and I will beg the sovereign to give you your life. I will ask him for you. I myself have already forgiven you.”
On the eve of revolution she had found a way out: forgiveness! Forgive through the impossible pain and blood—and thereby stop it then, at the beginning, this bloody wheel. By her example, poor Ella appealed to society, calling upon the people to live in Christian faith.
“No!” replied Kalyaev. “I do not repent. I must die for my deed and I will.… My death will be more useful to my cause than Sergei Alexandrovich’s death.”
Kalyaev was sentenced to death. “I am pleased with your sentence,” he told the judges. “I hope you will carry it out just as openly and publicly as I carried out the sentence of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ party. Learn to look the advancing revolution right in the eye.”
Kalyaev met death fearlessly.
Nicholas had lost Moscow.
The camarilla knew what came next in their intrigue: Nicholas must soon be deprived of his chief adviser. The empress-mother was leaving for Denmark, where her father was mortally ill. Now one last figure remained by the tsar, Uncle Vladimir Alexandrovich. But the third blow was known. The Department of Police had been informed that the son of Vladimir Alexandrovich, Kirill, had broken up the marriage of the tsaritsa’s brother Ernie (that “fine couple”). Victoria Melita had divorced her husband, and now Kirill had decided to marry her and create an open family scandal. This would provoke harsh countermeasures; he would be punished, which meant that his father, Vladimir Alexandrovich, would have to step down as commander of the Petersburg garrison.
From a letter of Nicholas to his mother in Denmark:
“This week there was a drama in the family over Kirill’s unfortunate marriage. You certainly remember my conversations with him, as well as the consequences he would necessarily suffer: exclusion from the service, being forbidden to enter Russia, deprivation of all crown monies, and loss of the title of grand duke. Last week I learned that he has married.… I had a very unpleasant talk with his poor father, and no matter how he defended his son, I insisted. We left it that he would ask to leave the service. In the end, I agreed.
“At the same time I have been overtaken by doubt. Is it good to punish someone publicly several times in a row?… After long thought, which gave me a headache, I decided … to telegraph that I am returning Kirill his lost title.… Ugh! What tiresome, unpleasant days these have been. Now it is as if a mountain has fallen from my shoulders.”
WHO PULLED THE STRINGS?
If we suppose that the camarilla did intend to replace Nicholas with a strong tsar, then who would that have been? After all, by law, in the event of abdication, the minor Alexei would ascend to the throne. But Alexei was mortally ill; Alexei could be avoided. The next legal pretender was Michael. But he had no more the nature of a tsar than his brother.
The intriguers knew they could avoid Michael as well, for Michael was romantically involved and thinking about marrying, moreover marrying a certain Mrs. Wulfert, who was anything but of royal blood. Naturally, the Department of Police was informed of the affair. According to the law on succession, by marrying he would forfeit his title of grand duke.
“My dear mama!… Misha wrote that he is asking my permission to marry. That he can wait no longer. Naturally, I shall never consent to this marriage. I feel with all my being that our dear papa would have acted in the same way. I feel it is quite impossible to change the law in this one case during such a dangerous period. Help me, dear Mama, to restrain him. May the Lord protect you.”
For whom, then, was all this plotting?
Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich—Nikolasha, Nicholas the Long—who was so similar in build to his cousin the deceased emperor.
The young Romanovs called him the “terrible uncle.” Those who saw him in military parades could never forget him, so imposing was his presence.
Hussars on jet black horses wearing black helmets topped by a horsehair comb gallop toward the small mounted figure—toward the tsar, who is reviewing the parade. And amid this terrible avalanche is Nicholas the giant, who has merged with his horse.… Just a few steps from the emperor, the commander’s magnificent leonine roar: “Halt!” And in an instant the inexorable avalanche halts. There is only the heavy breathing of people and horses.
Yes, he had the look of a tsar. He was known for his right-wing views. Nicholas Nikolaevich was being led to their goal: he was replacing all the uncles. He, not the retired Vladimir, was now in command of the Petersburg garrison. Alix, who was linked by friendship to the wife of Nicholas Nikolaevich, was also favorably disposed toward him.
Did Nicholas Nikolaevich himself know? Or, as sometimes happens, did “he know but not know”? Just as his ancestor Alexander I “knew but did not know” that they wanted to kill his father Emperor Paul and put Alexander himself on the throne? In any event, Nicholas Nikolaevich served the tsar honestly during all these days of upheaval. It all went right past him.
This is a seductive version of Bloody Sunday, but dreadfully romantic. Russians love a good plot—camarillas, Masons, whatever—where in fact there is usually just plain sloppiness. Someone mistrusted someone else; someone failed to warn someone else. So someone decided to take out more insurance, called up the troops, and removed the tsar from Petersburg. Great and terrible events in Russia are usually due to someone’s stupidity or laziness.
“LEARN TO LOOK THE ADVANCING ENEMY RIGHT IN THE EYE”
From the very start, the wave raised by Bloody Sunday was more like a tsunami.
From the diary of K.R.:
“February 6, 1905.… I simply cannot believe how quickly we are moving toward unknown, exotic calamities. There is mischief everywhere, all are confused.… The government has yet to feel a strong hand. Not that there is one.”
All the elements would be there: barricades out of overturned trams, a general strike, mutiny in the army. In the Crimea an insurrectionist cruiser would approach the shores, and at their estates the horrified grand dukes would wait for the firing to begin. The red rooster of arson—the “light show”—would rampage through the landowners’ estates.
In Petersburg, in the noisy crowd at the World of Art exhibit, arms crossed haughtily, stood the famous terrorist Boris Savinkov. Openly. No one dared turn him in.
Vera Leonidovna:
“Absolutely everyone went on strike. It was like a holiday. At the Mariinsky Theater the ballet struck, and even the brother of his [Nicholas’s] mistress Mathilde, Iosif Kschessinski, struck.… I knew him well. By the way, after the revolution this participation in the strike became his indulgence, his safe conduct. Kschessinski even became an honored artist of the Russian Republic, this brother of the tsar’s mistress. The last time I saw him was on the eve of the war. He starved to death in blockaded Leningrad. A habitué of good restaurants, a gourmand who feasted on silver platters—he starved to death!”
“DEAR MAMA, YOU CANNOT IMAGINE HOW MUCH I HAVE SUFFERED”
By the fall of 1905, the tsar’s family, cut off by the general strike, was living in Peterhof, and their sole means of communication with Petersburg was by steamer. “Even if you have to swim to get here,” the tsar joked sadly. The issue of Nicholas’s fall seemed decided.
Returning from abroad, Witte, who reached the tsar by steamship, listened to Benckendorff, the sympathetic marshal of the court, about how difficult it was going to be for the tsar’s family, with the five children, to find a safe haven among their royal relatives in Europe. Still, Nicholas sailed the ship of state out of this storm.
In the summer of 1905, as the revolution gathered steam, the tsar, who outwardly clung to the rightists, had made an unexpected move. In June American President Theodore Roosevelt offered his services to help Russia and Japan reach an accord. To America the tsar sent the liberal Witte. At first the rightists were jubilant—Witte’s mission appeared hopeless. The Japanese had won too much; it was inconceivable that he would conclude a peace on honorable terms. But he did. And on the best possible terms, given the circumstances. Witte returned to Russia triumphant. Nicholas rewarded him with the title of count.
Two choices remained to the tsar: proclaim Nicholas Nikolaevich military dictator (and himself gradually withdraw, as, evidently, the camarilla intended) or decide in favor of what his father had instructed him to fight—reforms and a constitution.
The latter is what the returned Witte proposed to him: “Russia has outgrown its existing governmental forms. “There is still a chance—you must give the people their constitution, otherwise they will wrest one away.”
Nicholas possessed sufficient flexibility. He agreed to a constitution.
And hesitated. Behind Witte’s back, Nicholas continued to importune Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to become dictator. Witte was angry; he saw in this a pathetic spinelessness. Nicholas did not want to understand: the world had fallen apart. Like the prodigal son, Nicholas was ready to part with everything his forefathers had created. The great autocratic empire was to end with him.
Once again he wanted others to beg him to do what he himself had long since decided on.
It fell to Nicholas Nikolaevich to do the begging. Even if he knew about the intrigue, he could not have profited from its results. The army was at the front in Manchuria (everything was as it would be in 1917, when the army was fighting on the fronts of the world war). There was no one to crush a revolution. Agreeing to become dictator was tantamount to finishing off the dynasty.
On the day Nicholas signed the constitution, he had a terrible headache. He thought of the Japanese who had once sliced his brow. The minister of the court, Count Fredericks, told Witte when he arrived that the tsar had again asked Nicholas Nikolaevich to become dictator, whereupon Nikolasha had pulled out a gun and said: “Either I shoot myself right now, or you sign.”
Now Nicholas had the right: he signed.
“17 October [!].… Nikolasha and Stana had breakfast. We sat and talked, waiting for Witte to arrive. I signed the Manifesto at 5 o’clock. Since that day my head has been very heavy and my thoughts confused. Lord, save Russia, and bring her peace.”
On the returning steamer, Nicholas Nikolaevich embraced Witte triumphantly: “Today, October 17th, is an important date. Exactly seventeen years ago, also on the 17th at Borki, God saved the dynasty. I think that now the dynasty is being saved from a no lesser danger.”
He was right. The 17th was an important date for their family.
October 17: the train wreck at Borki, when by a miracle Nicholas survived.
January 17: Nicholas appeared for the first time, so disastrously, before the Russian public.
October 17, 1905: The end of the autocracy. That day Nicholas signed a manifesto granting the first Russian constitution.
December 17: The death of Rasputin.
And 1917: The end of Nicholas’s empire.
In the early morning hours of July 17: His own death and that of his family.
All this time Nicholas remained calm and silent, as always. In his letters to his mother, though …
“Peterhof. 19 October, 1905.… It feels as though I have not written you for a year, so many difficult and unprecedented events have we experienced. You of course remember those days we spent together at Tsarskoe in January.… But they are nothing compared with now. The railway strikes that began around Moscow overtook all of Russia immediately thereafter. Petersburg and Moscow have been left cut off from the inner provinces.… The only contact with the city is by sea—which is quite convenient at this time of year! After the railways the strike spread to factories and plants, and then even to municipal institutions.… Imagine the shame! We have just had news of strikes, of policemen, Cossacks, and soldiers slain, of riots, disorders, and upheavals.… The gentlemen ministers have been arguing like wet hens … instead of acting decisively. There have been ‘meetings’—a fashionable new word—where armed insurrection was openly debated and approved, which I learned about immediately.… The use of arms was prescribed in the event of troops being attacked. Quiet, ominous days set in. It was like the feeling you sometimes get in the summer before a powerful storm. Everyone’s nerves were stretched beyond the limit. Of course, this situation could not last very long. During those terrible days I saw Witte constantly. Our conversations began in the morning and ended in the evening in full darkness. It seemed we could choose one of two paths: either appoint an energetic military man and do everything in our power to suppress the sedition. Or else present the population with civil rights, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and unions, and so on.… That would also entail an obligation to pass all kinds of legislation through the State Duma.… This is for all intents and purposes a constitution. Witte insisted heatedly on this path. And everyone I turned to answered me exactly as Witte had. The Manifesto was written by him and Alexei Obolensky. We discussed it for two days, and eventually I said a prayer and signed it.… Dear Mama, you cannot imagine how much I have suffered. My only comfort is that such is God’s will, and that this difficult decision will lead my dear Russia out of this unbearable, chaotic state in which it finds itself for nearly a year.”
Pierre Gilliard, the grand duchesses’ tutor, saw the empress on the day the manifesto was signed. She was sitting like a sleepwalker, staring at one point. Her world had fallen apart. Her son had been snatched in his cradle. He would not be the autocrat. She decided to fight.
In November the second capital rebelled. Barricades went up in Moscow. Trams were overturned. Nicholas felt the anger of a man deceived. He had given them a constitution, he had outdone himself. And in response, it all continued!
His troops pacified Moscow.
At Christmas Nicholas wrote his mother a letter, his usual tender letter, but there was already bloodshed in it. He was growing more and more inured to blood.
“22 December. Dear sweet Mama! All my prayers for you will be especially fervent during this holiday.… It will be very sad around the tree without you. It has been so cozy at Gatchina upstairs….
“In Moscow, as you know, thank God, the uprising was crushed, thanks to the loyalty and steadfastness of our troops.… The revolutionaries losses were enormous, but it is hard to get precise information, since many of those killed burned up and the wounded were carried away and hidden.”
While the revolution was being put down, Alix instilled in Nicholas—with all her faith and passion—the idea of Witte’s evil intentions. The manifesto had led to nothing. The uprisings had continued anyway. Great shadows loomed behind him—his Romanov ancestors and his heavenly protector, Serafim of Sarov. With him, they had crushed the revolution, not the pathetic manifesto, which he had been forced to sign during a grave crisis.
Witte was Nicholas’s mother’s man. In struggling against him Alix was removing his mother from power. For good.
By then it was all clear. Nicholas had dealt with the Revolution. Having lived through that storm the rightists evidently gave up on the idea of replacing the monarch on the throne, but they were contemplating a change in the guard by the throne: the time had come to sweep away the liberals. As always: “Witte has done his deed.”
Not coincidentally, soon afterward Nicholas Nikolaevich joined forces with Alix. Yesterday he was embracing Witte and praising the manifesto; now he was its enemy. The tsar was avid to believe in this new stance. The fury of battle had changed him. A knight and his sword defending his God-given rights, a warrior for his people and his dynasty—Nicholas liked that image.
Now in his letters to his mother there was a pervasive martial tone:
“I want to see my regiments and shall begin, in turn, with the Semyonovsky.” “There was a review of my favorite Nizhegorodsky.” “A review of the officers of the Cavalry Guards.” “A review of the Marine of the Guard.”
Soon after Nicholas informed his mother:
“I have never seen a chameleon, someone who changes his convictions, the likes of [Witte]. Thanks to this quality of character, almost no one believes him anymore.”
In April 1906 Witte handed Nicholas his letter of resignation, and Nicholas replied with satisfaction:
“Count Sergei Yulievich! Yesterday morning I received your letter in which you asked to be relieved of all the positions you now hold. I hereby express my consent to your request. Nicholas.”
Vera Leonidovna:
“The revolution was dying.… Darkness and despair had set in. The intelligentsia had run into error, into anarchism.… Now, looking back, I understand: this was the despair of people who had looked revolution in the face for the first time. The intelligentsia had seen the bloody face of popular revolt and shuddered.… The revolution was not a celebration of freedom but a natural disaster, like a tornado.… The most terrifying part, though, was that we had a feeling, perhaps unconscious, but still: it would return.”
Witte was huge, corpulent. The tall Witte was replaced by the giant Peter Arkadievich Stolypin. Nicholas’s two most famous ministers were tall. Here lay his hidden complex: his large father had always been a reliable and strong defense. He had confidence in tall people.
Late in April in the Winter Palace throne room, Witte, now removed from affairs of state, observed the meeting between his own offspring—the State Duma—and the tsar. “Nicholas is pale,” Witte noted in his diary. “He gave a speech. ‘May my fervent hopes be fulfilled to see my people happy and to bequeath to my son a stronger, better, and more enlightened state.’”
Witte must have chuckled when he heard these words about the heir. The old minister understood everything.
A son robbed by a manifesto—this was Alix’s pathos. Nicholas declared to the uncomprehending Russian parliament that the heir would receive what belonged to him—the old autocracy without a constitution. In other words, Nicholas told the Duma that he intended to disband it.
Later the tsar received the first Russian parliamentarians: in black frock coats, like jackdaws, they jostled among the brilliant uniforms of the tsar’s suite.
Witte foresaw an inevitable conflict between the tsar and the Duma, and he believed that, as always, in a moment of disaster, Nicholas would come running to him. Witte wrote mockingly:
“It has reached society’s consciousness that despite my strained relations with His Highness … despite my total disfavor, as soon as the situation becomes critical my name will immediately come up.” He added sternly: “But they are forgetting one thing: there is a limit to everything.”
This was a weighty statement: a powerful new figure had already appeared on the horizon.
Peter Arkadievich Stolypin, the new prime minister, was Witte’s direct opposite. From an old noble line, he was “one of them.” Considered a liberal, he was nevertheless a liberal-landowner. Stolypin knew and loved the muzhik, as well a landowner should. In the muzhik, he saw the country’s future. That was why he immediately appealed to the tsar. Stolypin could appreciate Nicholas’ long-held dream: “the people and the tsar.”
The First Duma was disbanded and a second elected, but to his astonishment Nicholas saw that nothing had changed. The calmest people, as soon as they stepped out on the dais, became rebels. Speaking before the Duma seemed to intoxicate them.
There was Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov, for example, an honorable man, a full state councilor, a councilor of the Petersburg Municipal Duma. Stolypin offered him a ministerial post, and not only did he refuse, but in the new Duma he reviled all the grand dukes at one fell swoop.
The assassinations continued: General Min, the subduer of Moscow, was shot.
A bomb exploded on Aptekarsky Island, at Stolypin’s dacha. It was a Saturday, Stolypin’s at-home day, and many visitors were waiting for him in the first-floor rooms. On the second floor of the dacha were the family’s rooms, where Stolypin’s children, a daughter and a son, were playing.
Three men dressed in military uniforms entered the house. The guard immediately noticed a defect in their uniforms and tried to restrain them, but with a shout—“Long live the revolution!”—one of them threw a bomb. Everyone in the room, including the terrorists themselves, died. The force of the explosion was such that trees on the Neva embankment were torn up by the roots. Stolypin himself was knocked to the ground by a shock wave but was not harmed. Injured people stirred under the fragments of the demolished house, bits of human flesh lay about. Among the fragments they found Stolypin’s injured daughter. Stolypin himself pulled his four-year-old son out from under a heap of rubble.
——
At the same time the Tsar of All the Russias was made a hostage in his own home. Nicholas learned that terrorists had turned up in Peterhof, where he spent the summers. “We sit here virtually locked up,” he informed his mother. “What a shame and disgrace to speak of this.… Those anarchist scoundrels came to Peterhof to hunt for me, Nikolasha, Trepov [Moscow police chief].… But you understand my feelings: not to be able to go horseback riding, not to go out beyond the gates anywhere at all. And this at my own home in ever peaceful Peterhof! I blush to write you of this.”
His life was under guard. No walks. In constant terror for the safety of Alix and the children. Like a rehearsal for a future life—twelve years hence.
“Sunshine,” “Baby,” “Little Man”—they had many pet names for their sick son. Nonetheless, Nicholas—father and tsar—could not protect him from a bomb in his own home. He underwent a sea change. He had to repay all the suffering and humiliation, and he had to preserve his rule—subdue the rebels, give the country peace. That is what his father’s shadow demanded; that is what Alix and his mother demanded. “The monsters must be exterminated!” the dowager empress wrote him.
So he tried to be merciless.
He could hardly have managed it, however, were it not for the powerful figure of Stolypin by his side. Stolypin, a firm, indomitable, power-loving man, had something in common with the gentle Nicholas: he adored his family and was very dependent on his beloved wife. The suffering of their injured children had hardened both wife and husband. Now Stolypin was prepared to punish and to execute. “Stolypin’s tie”—that’s what the revolutionaries would call the nooses around their necks.
In June 1906 the Duma repealed the death penalty. But while Europe was sending congratulatory telegrams, Nicholas was passing a law on field courts-martial.
The hangman set about his work. Not since the time of Ivan the Terrible had Russia seen so many executions.
When Witte reminded the former liberal Stolypin of his previous views, the minister replied: “Yes, that was how I used to feel. Before the explosion on Aptekarsky Island.”
——
On August 26, 1907, the sovereign “royally saw fit to instruct that troop commanders be informed” that they must “see to it” that the tsar not receive any telegrams requesting pardons.
In the time of Nicholas’s father, Alexander Ulyanov had been hanged for attempting to assassinate the tsar. This punishment was instrumental in shaping the character of his brother, the future leader of the revolution, Vladimir Ulyanov: Lenin. Execution and blood infiltrated his subconscious.
Under Nicholas, brothers and sisters of the slain all across Russia swore their hatred for the tsar.
“I don’t want to die at all: at night they’re taken out into the back courtyard, even in the wet, in the rain. By the time they get there they’re soaked through, and that’s how they’re hanged, wet.… You get up in the morning and you’re as happy as a child to be alive, to have an entire day ahead of you to enjoy life”—these were the kinds of letters families were reading.
In blood he became heir, in blood he was tsar, this gentle man. Bloody Sunday. Bloody Khodynka. The blood of the First Revolution. Like an omen of what was to come: his unlucky son’s strength was draining away with his loss of blood.
The First Revolution ended. They had had a remarkable rehearsal for the future, for what would happen twelve years later. But the warning passed them right by.
He and Alix never did understand that the revolution had been subdued not by bullets but by the words on the paper that his minister had written and that Nicholas had signed. They imagined a different lesson for themselves instead: force is necessary.
Wise Witte realized then that this would be their ruin. Sitting in his study and contemplating the events of the era, the old man wrote these terrible words:
“Much blood may be shed, and you yourself could perish in that blood.… And it may kill your own firstborn, your pure infant, your son and heir.… God grant this not be so. In any event that I never see such horrors.”
God did: Witte died in January 1915. Before his death the old man wrote Nicholas a letter and instructed that it be given to the sovereign after his death. Thus Nicholas received Witte’s message from beyond the grave.
In his letter, Witte asked the tsar to give his title of count to his “most beloved grandson, L. K. Naryshkin. Let him be called Naryshkin, Count Witte.” But this was only a pretext. The most important part came after his request. It was a rundown of Nicholas’s greatest deeds, which also happened to be linked with the name of Witte. In first place stood the constitution: “This is your undying service to your people and to humanity.”
The dying old man had no intention of wounding Nicholas or reminding him of his own services by his mention of the constitution. Even then, in 1915, the great politician sensed the current situation’s uncanny similarity to the eve of the tragic year 1905. He realized the storm would soon break. So he decided to prompt the tsar once more with the chief lesson of 1905: know how to yield!
But that year Alix and Nicholas were caught up in another battle with the Duma. Nicholas was angered by this reminder of his “past sin” (as he now referred to the constitution). He did not grant his former minister’s small request: Naryshkin never did become Count Witte.
Vera Leonidovna:
“I don’t agree with Count Witte. The mysterious lesson of 1905 lay elsewhere. A certain church historian explained this to me: During the Time of Troubles, in the seventeenth century, when the ancient dynasty of tsars was broken and widespread troubles ensued, when the noble boyars handed Russia over to foreigners, it was the ecclesiastical authority—the patriarch—that preserved Russia. There is good reason why, under the first Romanovs, patriarchs bore the title Great Sovereign. Peter the Great, in an effort to strengthen secular authority, did away with the patriarchate. Two centuries without a patriarch weakened the church. Under Nicholas talks were initiated on reviving the patriarchy, but matters never progressed beyond talks. When the events of the First Revolution began, the tsar must have understood: he was weak. The Lord in his mercy had given him a warning that he had not understood. In the event of major new disasters, he must establish a second center—by bringing back the authority of the patriarch. Only a strong church could keep Holy Russia from eventual catastrophe. But he had not understood the warning.”